Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

244 The Last Ten Years
and the Laughlins drove to Clinton, New York, for the commencement.
As Laughlin described the event:
Because they thought the academic procession might be too
long . . . they gave him a special entrance from the side . . . very
dramatic. There was a silence, and the audience began to get
restive, then Ezra entered, led by the master of ceremonies . . . with
his stave, and when the president introduced him with a graceful
little speech, saying that he had had his own Doctor of Letters
there thirty years before, there was a tremendous standing ovation
from the students. Ezra looked beautiful in his academic robes, and
sat on the platform beside me.
They drove back to Manhattan on Monday and settled in at the Laughlins’
Bank Street apartment in the Village. Ezra was up every morning at
seven o’clock, taking a hot bath and shampooing his hair without complaint.
‘‘Each day, Olga worked out some little project for him,’’ Laughlin
remembered. ‘‘When they were not invited out, I would have little dinner
parties for them at the Dorgene Restaurant opposite the White Horse
Tavern in the Village. Ezra barely spoke, but he followed conversations.’’
At another dinner party honoring Marian (Mrs. E. E.) Cummings, Robert
Lowell read from her husband’s works, and Lowell and the others went
back to Bank Street after. Valerie Eliot and Djuna Barnes came on Djuna’s
birthday, bringing champagne. Ezra was ‘‘stimulated and brilliant,’’ Olga
recalled; ‘‘[he] takes the ladies downstairs (in slippers).’’ They also called
on Marianne Moore, incapacitated and in a wheelchair, at her charming
but cluttered Brooklyn apartment.
Walter drove his grandparents to Germantown to visit Priscilla and
Esther Heacock, the Quaker sisters whose family, Ezra recalled, had
owned a floral business on Fernwood Avenue when he attended the Chelten
Hills Dames’ School. The sisters were long-standing friends of Olga’s
Aunt Lou and Uncle Harold Baynes, the naturalist; Esther herself had
become an accomplished photographer of birds. Surprised to see that Olga
had taken Dorothy’s place, they conceded that ‘‘she has evidently cared
for him for so many years.’’