The Puck Corbell letters, 1952–53

The album holds two boys named for the same man. The elder is Robert Lawrence Corbell III, born at St. Luke’s Hospital in Richmond in January 1940 (Book 2, p174). The younger, born 13 November 1944, was christened Pickens Walker Corbell for his maternal grandfather James Pickens Walker Sr. — known as “Puck.” The grandson took the nickname too; to distinguish them, the household called the older man “Big Puck.” On a sheet of notebook paper with a printed tabby cat at the upper corner, preserved at Book 2, p217, the boy wrote his grandfather a letter in pencil, words within each phrase run together: “Did you stop to think that I made the honor roll, and all I am thinking of is a doller. — from your grandson, Puck.” The hand is a child of six or seven; the letter dates to 1951 or 1952. It is the last picture of him before the diagnosis.

Puck was the middle child of Emma Dee Walker Corbell — “Dee” — the compiler’s middle daughter, who had married Dr. Robert Lawrence Corbell Jr. of Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1938. There were three Corbell children: Robert III (“Bob”), Puck, and a younger sister Ilu. A spring 1953 snapshot at Book 2, p227 shows them on the brick porch steps at 303 Norman Road in Greenacres, Dr. Corbell behind a wrought-iron railing. The lower print on the same page shows Puck alone, astride a low oak branch among leafless winter twigs. By that spring he was already ill.

The diagnosis and the move to New York

A second snapshot at Book 2, p216 shows him on the back lawn at Portsmouth, left leg in a cast below the knee, on crutches. The diagnosis was osteosarcoma — bone cancer of the leg. In 1953 paediatric oncology in its modern form did not yet exist; combination chemotherapy was a decade off. The standard of care at the leading American cancer centre — Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases in Manhattan, the institution that would become Memorial Sloan Kettering — was deep X-ray treatment followed by amputation. The typical outcome was metastasis to the lungs within roughly nine months. The physicians told Dee Corbell this in plain words.

She took Puck to New York. Norman Road continued to receive the family’s airmail (Book 2, p218), but for several weeks Dee lived in Manhattan near the hospital — first at the Westbury Hotel, then in the Greenwich Village apartment of her cousin Ellen Milliken FitzSimons, retired Charleston Library Society librarian; see Book 2, p221. Dr. Corbell flew up from Portsmouth on weekends.

Margaret Baumeister’s letters

A New York friend of the FitzSimons connection — Margaret Baumeister (Mrs. Theodore Baumeister), of 4711 Iselin Avenue — appointed herself the family’s eyes in Manhattan. She wrote long letters in blue fountain-pen cursive to “Minnie,” the compiler’s sister Mary Annie FitzSimons Allston, reporting each visit and conversation. The album holds four sheets of 20 April 1953 (Book 2, p219 through p222), four of 24 April (p223 through p226), and an autumn deathbed cluster at Book 3, p12 through p016. Amy circulated them through the family — a pencilled note in her hand bleeding through onto p219 reads: “Dear Mother — said to send this on to you so that you and Mary Ann could see it. My love — Aunt Amy.”

The April letters are the record of a mother holding herself together. Margaret writes that Dee “renews your faith in human beings, she is so fine, so noble, so brave,” and that taxi drivers, hotel clerks, and hospital employees had all shown her kindness. Puck was settling: a ward with three other boys, meals in the big play room, not lonesome despite restricted visiting. Dee spoke frankly about the prognosis — “It seems almost a shame to put the child through the pain of the operation, but there is a chance, and we must take it. The doctor has told us though, that it is very likely that the lungs will become affected in about nine months. But perhaps they won’t.” She was planning a pony. “Are you situated to take care of a pony?” “No, but we’re going to have a pony if he has to stay in my bedroom.”

The letter of 24 April is the cluster’s emotional centre. Margaret and Dee met at a bookshop and walked up Fifth Avenue in the spring sun, Dee in a pink hat and pink blouse. They lunched at a French restaurant in Radio City on the level of the skating rink. Puck, Dee reported, had stopped being nauseated by the X-rays and had stopped running a fever; he had made friends, put on his outdoor clothes, and gone out to play on the children’s terrace. Then, on p224, the exchange that closes the visit:

“What in the world will you be so busy about, that you cannot spare a few minutes for your mother?” Dee asked him.

“We have got to make our costumes today,” Puck replied.

“Costumes?” said Dee.

“Yes,” the boy replied, “You know that big Circus that is in town? Well part of that Circus is coming to our hospital. We are going to have a performance. And we are all going to have costumes on. We are going to kind of be in the Circus too. So you see, I won’t have time to talk to you today.”

Margaret writes that tears of joy were in Dee’s eyes as she told her this.

The schedule

The third sheet, at Book 2, p225, turns to the operative schedule. Puck was to move into a private room on Sunday; the amputation was scheduled for Monday morning. Dee would be allowed to stay the night and to remain with him until he was off the critical list. She told Margaret several times that the amputation was a simple surgical operation, not so trying as appendicitis, and that Puck would have plenty of narcotic. Dr. Corbell would arrive Saturday on the night plane. Margaret closed at p226 with the sentence that reads, in retrospect, as the keynote of the cluster: “The real sorrow — if it must come — is months away.”

The autumn letters

It did come. The next group is in Dee’s own hand, written from Portsmouth to her parents the following autumn, after Puck had come home and the lungs had begun to fail. The opening sheet at Book 3, p12 is dated only “Tuesday.” Dee writes in the family-letter register her parents would have expected under any other circumstances — bright, dry, faintly self-mocking — and reports that Puck has fixated on wanting “one of Gam’s drinks,” the cocktail his grandmother makes. She has worked out a recipe (p016): a cheese glass, half a small jigger of bourbon, one piece of ice, a dash of water “for melted ice,” and flat ginger ale, flat doubly underlined. The family doctor, Tom Dast, has told her that Puck “is going purely on will power — that he can’t see where he…” The sentence runs onto the final sheet at p014: “…has anything left to breathe with at all. So it looks as though my prayers will be answered — coma and not hemorrhage. He is rousing up now and wants to try to stack money from Bob’s pig. So I’ll say good-night and I love you both — Dee.”

The obituary is pasted at the foot of Book 2, p227 with a date label, “Wednesday, December 2, 1953.” Pickens Walker Corbell, 9, son of Dr. and Mrs. Robert Lawrence Corbell, Jr., died at his home yesterday. Services for the family will be held at the graveside. The notice asks that flowers be sent instead to the American Cancer Society or to the Trinity Church parish house building fund. He was three weeks past his ninth birthday.

Amy FitzSimons Walker kept every page — Margaret’s eight sheets, the envelope, the snapshot of the boy on crutches, the autumn letter, the obituary. She wrote no connecting essay. The cluster is the document.