Eleanor rose from her chair and strode toward me, weaving her arm through mine. “Just a night of music,” she said, but a coy smile lit her features, and I guessed that there was something she was not telling me.
As I entered the massive, bright interior of our city’s new concert hall, the Kennedy Center, I was stunned by the throngs who rose to applaud and greet me. Rows of beloved and familiar faces looked on from around a crowded theater decorated with fresh, fragrant flowers. Everyone was dressed in finery of silk and satin, tuxedoes and bow ties. As I gasped and took it all in, the players of the National Symphony Orchestra struck up a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and my children and grandchildren, friends and neighbors, sang to me.
When the lights finally dimmed, I was treated to an evening filled with Brahms and Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Beethoven. As I sat in my box with Dina, Adelaide, and Eleanor beside me, their husbands joining us along with my grandchildren, I breathed in the pleasing aroma of fresh flowers mixed with perfume. I listened to some of the best musicians in the world playing their lovely classical pieces. And I felt a flush of warmth that slowly filled my entire body. This, I believed, was peace.
I kissed my grandchildren and sons-in-law goodbye at the end of the concert and left the hall with my daughters. As we made our way through the early-spring night toward my waiting Cadillac limousine, Adelaide, at my side, asked, “Did you enjoy it, Mother?”
“Enjoy it?” I considered the question, choosing my words with care. “Why, there’s never been a birthday like it.”
My eldest daughter gave my arm a squeeze. “Mom, there’s never been a lady like you.”
We packed into the plush interior of my car. My daughters remained close, and I spread my arms wide, pulling all three girls into my embrace. The chauffeur, Frank, smiled back at us from behind the wheel. “Where to, Mrs. Post?”
“Home, Frank.”
Frank touched his cap and shifted gears, and the car began to glide forward through the pleasant Washington night, down the wide avenues, past the glowing monuments, and back through the park toward home. Back toward a place stocked with treasure—the treasure of all those beautiful memories and moments, each one a jewel to color a long life that was lived with purpose and intention, with warmth and passion. A life made ever richer by curiosity and generosity. A life in which I spent gladly of the riches of my heart. A life that has been a truly beautiful thing.
Epilogue
Palm Beach, Florida
Winter 1973
Five decades after hosting a fabulous Ziegfeld Follies gala to raise the funds for a new hospital near Palm Beach, Marjorie Merriweather Post found herself hospitalized in that very place, receiving treatment for pneumonia.
Following her stay at the Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach, Marjorie flew aboard the Merriweather one final time, bound for home. At Hillwood, Marjorie spent the final months of her life surrounded by family and friends.
Marjorie Merriweather Post passed away at Hillwood on September 12, 1973, at the age of eighty-six. Her ashes remain there today, surrounded by her beloved roses.
For Marya, friend and first reader
Author’s Note
“I can’t count all the things that she has done for this city… I’d take the odds she can’t even remember them.” Thus spoke reporter Roy Meacham about Marjorie Merriweather Post during a 1966 radio broadcast honoring the singular woman who serves as the subject of this novel. While Meacham was referring primarily to Post’s philanthropic work as it related to her then hometown of Washington, D.C., I was so struck when I encountered this quotation because the statement hit on the very sentiment that I myself had felt many times over while researching and then writing about Marjorie Merriweather Post and her extraordinary life. She did that? She lived through that? She met him? She befriended her? She was there? She built that? Marjorie Merriweather Post lived her long life to the fullest; hers was a grand and epic story from start to finish, and it is my great fortune to write fiction inspired by her.
Speaking of living life to the fullest, there is enough information on Marjorie Merriweather Post’s long, lavish, and layered life that one could write fifty novels about her, each with a different story arc and each stretching hundreds of pages. Marjorie lived and loved in such a way that her comings and goings （of which there were many） were noted to the day, sometimes to the hour. And unlike some of the long-deceased female figures about whom I’ve had the privilege of writing, Marjorie’s is a relatively recent life—her third daughter, Dina Merrill, passed away while I was researching this book—and because of that temporal proximity, much of Marjorie’s life is well documented and accessible.