Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2938

Penciling by Heath on two sheets of typing paper recounting, for unknown reasons, his meeting with his good friend of many years, Margot J. Luker, here called Margot Norman /sp?/

Undated

 

 

First met Margot

   March?

 

Attended a very affecting movie. It was one of the plays about a woman who, despite many high pretensions let her love for worldly possessions destroy all happiness for those about her as well as her own.

 

 At the end a woman in uniform sitting next to me smiled and I made some comment on the play to which she pleasantly replied.

 

 Observing that she was a WAC, I mentioned my youngest daughter having joined and liking it so much. She then gave me her name and introduced her companion, Margot Norman /sp?/, who she said had spent a year in the WACs but not reenlisted. As we passed out I suggested we sit down somewhere for refreshment and further conversation. We went to the Dickens /sp?/ Room nearby and after an hour or two I took them to their respective hotels, _________ and Parkside at Gramercy Square. Mrs. Norman specially interested me by her interest in music and poetry and what seemed to be a very spiritual and idealistic attitude toward life in general. I had been much alone and felt a need for that sort of thing. So in a few days I phoned Mrs. N and her WAC friend Miss Long to have supper with me and the three of us spent an evening of music, conversation and reading aloud in the Parkside /parlors?/ This was the beginning of a warm friendship with Mrs. N. We seemed to have extraordinarily similar tastes in music and poetry and spent many evenings together. It developed that she had spent some years as a teacher of music and drama and art and was practically assured of a very fine appointment of this kind at the Brooklyn Institute for the coming fall. Meantime she had temporary employment at Macy’s store which she found very hard. She had been terribly run down from her service in the WACs, so it seemed, and was taking treatments at the

N. Y. Hospital for a glandular disturbance.

 

 I saw her quite frequently first at her hotel, using the public rooms and piano there and later at my own apartment. She showed great interest in my own writings, especially an extensive work on Science and Society I had in preparation and did much reading and discussing of it with me.

 

 We naturally told each other much of our past, how we had been twice married and twice divorced — each of us. I told her immediately that my own experience of matrimony had been finished and I would never seriously consider it again.

 

 It was heartening to find that under a very quiet demeanor she was a woman of high ________ and emotional __________ and while I did not realize it at the time, subsequent events showed that she set about very subtly to change my negative stand in reference to any further marital adventure. Finding that I was Episcopalian /?/, she encouraged me to go to church and to take her with me.

 

 After two or three times she told me of marvelous spiritual and bodily benefits she had experienced through the “science of mind.” She induced me to read books on that subject and finally induced me to attend the Christian Science Church with her and to allow her to “treat” me for some minor ills and then with urgent implications /?/ that I should submit myself to “treatment” for the “old fears” that were still affecting my present and future happiness. I was somewhat more impressed by this kind of influence because of what seemed almost miraculous in my own mother’s late life under Christian Science influence and I did consider at times the vague possibility that if I should come to know her ___________ and understand her personal _________________________________________________ under ordinary prosaic circumstances, this woman of so much idealistic glamour might eventually ___________ for a great deal in my future work and happiness. But I could not think of being “high pressured” into any binding obligations. I made this perfectly plain to her. She accepted it but still continued with __________ of affection and of every concern for my spiritual and bodily welfare. — and all this did have a considerable appeal for me.