Last week, I went into my usual barbershop in Somerville, MA, where the men’s haircuts are $12. It’s underground and the walls are painted with scenes of southern Italy. Tony, the barber, was talking with three customers. Everyone was using a mixture of Italian and English. The customer in the middle chair was the center of attention. Bobby never forgave her, it seemed. I gradually figured out that she was referring to Bobby Kennedy, and he never forgave her because she had been so strong for Stevenson in ’56. I managed to ask Tony who she was, and he said, “That’s Mrs. Schlesinger; she’s 100 years old.”

Well, it turns out that she is Marian Cannon Schlesinger, the first wife of Arthur Jr., who has just recently published her latest book, I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People (2011). Born to a distinguished Harvard professor and novelist mother, she studied Chinese painting in Beijing in the 1930s. She wrote and illustrated a classic children’s book about China; the New Yorker called the pictures “exceptional.” She married Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,  and followed him to Kennedy’s Washington but got divorced in 1970, later writing Snatched From Oblivion, a memoir of strong women, politics, and Harvard’s uneasy relations with Cambridge.

A big cold front was blowing in, with winds up to 40 miles an hour. Ms. Schlesinger had walked in on her own and happily walked back out. I guess she was speaking to the barber in Italian because she knows that language among many others. But she’s not really 100, only about 98 or 99.

It made me think–critically–of the famous lines by e. e. cummings about “Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls.” Perhaps e. e. should have been more attentive to some of the souls he met:

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church’s protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
…. the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy