those lovely girls with their angelic reverent young voices chanting the hymns,” an experience that “makes one’s heart rise up to one’s throat.” After the christening, a few girls were invited to join the older boys in the headmistress’s sitting room, where she read Romanian and Irish folk stories aloud until the bedtime bell.
One spring evening when Archie was eating at the head table on a raised platform in the dining room, a senior asked the very pretty Ada Hitchcock to fill an empty seat. Eighteen-year-old Archie was immediately infatuated with Ada, but, after learning that he was writing her every day, his aunt tried to discourage the match. She thought he was too young to be in love, but there is another less benign interpretation. Ada was the daughter of a self-made merchant in Farmington, and Mary, according to family lore, wanted her nephew to marry a girl from a more prominent family, like Esther Cleveland, the daughter of a former President. The MacLeishes welcomed Ada warmly, however, and the pair planned to eventually marry after Archie’s graduation from Yale, where he was class poet. After his stint in the army and enrollment in Harvard Law School, a wedding date was set in June of 1916. Aunt Mary slowly came around, but in such a dominating way that Archie half resented her giving a dance for them, taking over the wedding rehearsal, and putting them up at Crossways the night before their honeymoon in Bermuda. (His sister, Ishbel, graduated from Westover that spring as president of her class and winner of the John H. Whittemore award for “Faithfulness, Justice, Truth, Humility,” then followed in her mother’s footsteps to Vassar.)
Miss Hillard thought her nephew would make a brilliant lawyer, perhaps fulfilling the promise of her beloved brother John, so she also opposed Archie’s growing interest in becoming a poet. When he turned down a partnership in a Boston law firm to move to Paris and write poetry, she furiously tried to talk him out of what she regarded as a bohemian way of life. During a bitter argument, she called him a Bolshevik and he responded by calling her a reactionary. Since she had always adored poetry and had introduced him to John Masefield, whom he regarded as the greatest living English poet, Aunt Mary was in a precarious position. “I do not think even she would argue that the law as a career is more desirable than letters,” Archie wrote to his mother. Again his parents backed him, and the young couple and their child moved to Paris.
It was one of the times when Mary Hillard was wrong about what was right for a young person. Many years later the Rev. John Dallas wrote about her tendency to be willful and wrongheaded. “There was a majesty and almost a fury in her love,” he observed. She “never knew or understood how she wounded,” but afterward would try “to put together again what she felt she had broken.” And, he went on, what often looked like possessiveness was her ability to see another’s potential. “It was not to superimpose her own will upon another that made her love seem a fury. Rather it was a desire deep within her intelligence and will … to compel the recognition of the vision which consumed her soul … Fire burns. The result often hurts.” Mary was well aware of this character flaw. “I too give pain without knowing I do when if I could exercise more imagination and restraint I would not do so for anything,” she admitted to her friend Harris Whittemore. In retrospect, it appears that much of the advice she gave her girls over the years was learned from her own excruciating experiences.
MacLeish’s anger deepened after his aunt wrote him in France that she disliked his poetry and so did the editors she showed it to. After she refused to read a published book of his poetry, Archie wrote his mother that “I have definitely, and, I am afraid, not very regretfully, broken with Aunt Mary.” He asked his aunt to stop writing and trying to see him. Nonetheless, his feelings remained ambivalent and while still abroad the couple named their newborn daughter Mary Hillard MacLeish. When they returned to the United States, Archie made a tenuous peace with his aunt, but his anger lingered. When she asked him to read his poetry at Westover the year before her unexpected death, he refused. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1933 a year later, he did give a reading at the school, and Ada gave a performance of French songs she had learned in Paris. He returned to Westover again a decade later when his daughter was unhappily enrolled, when he gave a dramatic and disturbing talk about his youthful falling out with the woman he later called his “intelligent and experienced and lovely” aunt. It gave him a feeling of release, but he still did not understand her devastating opposition to him as a young poet.
As a result of her love of poetry and the other arts, Mary Hillard also believed that a balanced life was a cultured life. Over the years, she invited a wide variety of excellent performers and lecturers to Middlebury to excite her students’ minds as well as to arouse their sensibilities and to train their tastes. Many of the visitors were men and women she had met or heard about during her travels and active social life. She was a member of many prestigious and exclusive clubs in America and abroad (including the Waterbury Club, the Chilton Club in Boston, the Colony Club and the Cosmopolitan Club in Manhattan, and the Ladies Imperial Club in London), where she enjoyed talking with interesting and informed people and associating with prominent ones. The year she turned fifty, for instance, she wrote her sister Emily from the Colony Club that she was glad to be meeting “so many people of distinction.”
Even earlier, while she was at St. Margaret’s School, she had drawn social worker Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago and Professor Woodrow Wilson of Princeton as speakers. During Westover’s first full year, she took pupils to hear African-American educator Booker T. Washington in Waterbury and then invited him to speak in the school chapel. The next spring of 1911 her friend Theodate brought a house guest at Hill-Stead, writer Henry James, to Middlebury to see her handsome school. The girls, waiting for the well-known novelist in Red Hall, applauded when he arrived, but when he was taken to the schoolroom to speak to them, he smiled and bowed but said very little. “My mind has been undermined,” was about all he could say, according to Helen LaMonte. “On he went from there felicitating us upon the felicity of dwelling so felicitously in this felicitous setting. More applause. Much waving of hand and hat as he departed, his last sentence unfinished, so great a vocabulary that the choice of the right word was too difficult.” The next year a Yale professor lectured about the pleasures of reading, a talk that interested Jessica Baylis so much that she quoted him in her diary as saying that “the happiest people are those that [sic] have the most interesting thoughts.”
Although Miss Hillard was not musical herself, she loved music and encouraged a great deal of it at Westover. Singing began in morning chapel and ended with evening vespers. Everyone was given a voice placement test on arrival at school so she could sing her part in all the hymns, ballads, and school songs. Besides offering instruction in singing, piano, and violin, the school had a superb Glee Club under the direction of Isaac Clark, who was at Westover for years. “You are a delightful girl to remember your old man coach,” he wrote to a former student. “Such a glee club. I don’t believe there ever was such an one anywhere—my heart aches as I think of the future, the standard is so high—how can it be kept up—Certainly we do not want it to fall below this year … When one has looked forward to beautiful things all his life and has found them as I have with my work at Westover—and only there—perhaps you can realize what it all means to me … It is the one shining spot in my life—You are one of the few that know it.”
Besides singing, there was a great deal of listening. Music of the highest quality was performed in Red Hall every year, where a grand piano was stored in a large closet behind the wide landing on the staircase. The Budapest String Quartet started its season there for many years; the Stradivarius Quartet also performed as did members of the New York, Philadelphia, and other symphony orchestras. The list of individual musicians is long: in the fall of 1909, for example, a pianist gave a talk on Bach and then performed the master’s music, in 1917 the Tuskegee Singers sang Negro spirituals, and in 1924 the renowned Wanda Landowska played the harpsichord.
Miss Hillard, whose older sister, Helen, a nurse who had worked at the Henry Street Settlement House in New York, also wanted to expose her students to problems in society. In her belief that privilege brings responsibility, she had the reformer Jacob Riis lecture about the terrible living and working conditions of immigrants in American cities; in fact, the year that Westover was founded, thousands of members of the
