(See Cover)
In the house on Grindstone Hill, outside Weston, Conn., deep in suburbia, the phone rings. It could scarcely have chosen a less convenient moment. The call catches Charles Hayden in the tub, where he has just supplanted his wife; they are getting ready, on this late spring afternoon, for a drive to New York City. His wife, still not quite dry, hastily flinging a wrap around her, pads barefoot to the phone.
"Hello," says Phyllis McGinley Hayden. A pause. "Yes, this is she." Another pause. "Well, I just got out of the bathtub and I haven't any clothes on . . . Oh!" With this exclamation, in which delight and dismay mingle, she cups her hand over the speaker and shouts into the hall:
"Guess who's calling, dear!"
"Who?"
"The White House!"
"No!"
She returns to the phone. "You know I never do. I have this iron rule. But I guess I could break it for the President. What time of day is it going to be, Mr. Goldman?* Like how early? June 14?"
Her husband, now out of the tub, reminds her: "Remember your honorary degree at St. John's on the 13th."
"Oh, dear," says Phyllis McGinley to Goldman. "I'm getting an honorary degree at St. John's University on Long Island on the 13th. I don't know whether I could get to Washington on time. On the other hand—"
"We have only one President," prompts her eavesdropping spouse.
"—we have only one President," his wife obediently repeats into the receiver. "I'll tell you. I'm not very strong. I've had this very severe fracture, and I'm convalescent . . . I'll have to fly down very late . . ." In the end, a bit reluctantly, she accepts the invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts.
"Oh dear, I don't want to go," she tells her husband after ringing off. "I never do that kind of thing!"
"But this is President Johnson! Your President, dear. You voted for him." Seizing the opportunity for husbandly mischief, he adds: "It isn't as if it were my favorite President, Warren Gamaliel Harding."
"Oh, I don't like to live like this!" wails Phyllis McGinley Hayden. "I like to live quietly and peacefully!"
Diversity. Not many suburban housewives get invited to the White House. Nor, for that matter, do many poets. This week, when Phyllis McGinley, a pleasant matron of 60 who could pass for 45 and does not try to, a woman who just misses being pretty and does not care, presents herself at the White House, she will find herself on a program that includes only one other poet —Mark Van Doren. Asked to recite one of her own poems, she chose In Praise of Diversity, originally written for a Columbia commencement, which ends:
Praise what conforms and what is odd,
Remembering, if the weather worsens Along the way, that even God
Is said to be three separate Persons. Then upright or upon the knee, Praise Him that by His Courtesy, For all our prejudice and pains, Diverse His Creature still remains.
And just for the occasion, she added another six lines:
Applaud both dream and commonsense.
Born equal; then with all our power, Let us, for once, praise