Ruth Doan MacDougall

Laughing with Leonard

Charles Leonard Corbin and I became friends when we were so young we can’t remember doing so. We met in nursery school. I was extremely shy, but I’m sure he had me laughing immediately.

Our mothers were friends, and I do remember being invited to play at his house, probably in kindergarten, definitely in grammar school (as elementary school was called back then), and he came to my house to play and to my birthday parties. Recently, when I was wondering what year there was a fire in our Academy Street School, Leonard and I tried to figure out which years he went to another grammar school because his family had moved to another part of town. We didn’t succeed, but we did know that we were back together at Batchelder Street School for fifth and sixth grades. In particular, we remembered waltzing.

Zoe Head, our fifth-and-sixth-grade teacher, decided that her students should learn to dance. So down in the basement, with a record player, she taught us the box step. Beforehand, in class, Leonard always courteously asked me to be his partner. Together we learned the box step—and away we waltzed, one two three, one two three! Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” was very popular then, and ever since whenever I hear it played I’m back in the grammar-school basement waltzing with Leonard.

During the past several years, Leonard’s health has not been good. Because of my concern about this, and just in case, when I began writing A Born Maniac or Puddles’s Progress I told him that it was dedicated to him and asked him how he’d like his name arranged, because sometimes he spelled out “Charles” and sometimes just used a “C.” Full name, he decided. So I wrote: “To Charles Leonard Corbin, my inspiration for the character of Dudley Washburn, with many thanks for years of laughter.” I sent him the dedication page and then sent along the chapters as I finished them.

Readers of The Cheerleader and its sequels have told me how much they love Dudley. So do I.

Some of Dudley’s comments have come right out my high-school diaries, such as the time our chemistry teacher announced that he’d be showing a film about the mining and manufacturing of potash and Leonard/Dudley commented, “Won’t that be stimulating?”

In A Born Maniac Snowy recalls another of my favorite Leonard comments. During a senior English class, our teacher, James McBride, asked us about Shelley’s being expelled by Oxford authorities for his atheism. Leonard remarked, “They were Shelley-shocked.”

Unlike Snowy and Dudley who got confused, Leonard and I had the good sense to know that we loved each other but were simply the dearest of friends, and we never dated in high school. But many years later we did at last have a date. Don hates reunions, and I was shy about going on my own, so I hadn’t gone to a high-school reunion since my tenth. But in 1992, when the Class of 1957’s thirty-fifth reunion was announced, the idea dawned on me to ask Leonard to be my escort. He was separated or divorced at the time (he had an international flair for wives, one English, one Italian), so he was free, and he’d been to several reunions but none recently. Don thought it was a wonderful idea! So, thank heavens, did Leonard.

Thus on a Saturday evening in September, Leonard arrived to pick me up. Don took our picture like a parent of prom kids and then happily settled down to an evening of microwave lasagna and TV.

Tropical Storm Danielle was hovering. As Leonard and I drove off through the downpour, he said, “This must be the date we never had!” I reminded him that we had gone to the Sixth Grade Reception at Batchelder Street School together. (And waltzed.) Then we yakked and laughed all the way to Steele Hill Inn.

There, during the reunion greetings, the organizers informed Leonard that he was to be a master of ceremonies. So after the buffet he got up at the microphone, along with one of our pretty classmates who wore a dress “whose décolletage,” Leonard later said, “I kept looking down.” They read the Class Will from the school newspaper (“Leonard Corbin leaves his ghost to torture Mr. McBride”), while I remembered becoming editor of the newspaper my senior year and asking Leonard to be the sports columnist. He’d been a great one, though we joked about how I had to hound him about deadlines.

When the reunion ended, outdoors we encountered fog swirling thickly. We realized that we both were so hoarse from the clamor that we could hardly whisper, so during our cautious drive back we stopped at a McDonald’s where Leonard got us orange juices for our tired voices. Upon reaching home, we found Don sound asleep in bed. We sat up in the kitchen over tea and cookies and continued our own reunion, discussing the evening’s festivities and laughing, laughing.

Leonard died last month, on Sunday, January 23. He fell asleep watching a football game on TV and didn’t wake up. If he could have chosen a way to depart, I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded this way.

And sports were involved on February 4, when Don and I left on that Friday afternoon to drive to Laconia for the visiting hours. We’d heard that there were traffic jams in Meredith because of the New England Pond Hockey Classic games being held there on the ice of Lake Winnipesaukee. So we took a back-roads detour, and these back roads were narrower than ever thanks to another of our multitude of snowstorms. Leonard would’ve been highly amused.

At the venerable Wilkinson-Beane Funeral Home, as I sat and talked with Leonard’s lovely mother I realized once again where his wit came from.

As she said, “Where there was Leonard, there was laughter.”

Then I got reacquainted with other members of the family. His brother Tom (who is still Tommy in my mind) had phoned me with the news of Leonard’s death. His brother Merrill was a child when I last saw him. I’d last seen Leonard’s English ex-wife, Maggie, in the early 1970s when she and Leonard and their children, Amber and David, had visited us after moving to America. I hadn’t seen Amber since then, a toddler, and here she was, a delightful young woman. I had seen David, who looks a lot like Leonard, and his son Alex approximately fifteen years ago when they came with Leonard to a book-signing I was doing in Rochester; Leonard was living in that area of New Hampshire then. Alex had looked just like the Leonard I remembered from kindergarten. Recently Leonard told me that Alex was now six-three, but still I was bowled over, by this and by the strong family resemblance.

Leonard’s Italian ex-wife, Esilda, had fallen and broken her leg the day before, so obviously she couldn’t attend. But her daughter Alessia was there, with husband and baby.

I did have to use my handkerchief during the hour we visited with the family and friends, but there was laughter here too. As Don commented when we left, the only thing missing in the get-together was the sound of Leonard’s distinctive voice.

Pond hockey continued on Saturday, so that morning we once more took the back route around the Meredith Bay congestion to go to Laconia. There was a bit of sunshine, but more snow was in the forecast. This time we were heading for the Grace Presbyterian Church. The obituary had said that the church was on Province Street, a street near my old neighborhood to which I used to walk to play at the house of friend Carol S.V.—in the winter we played Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on such snowbanks as this winter’s. I could not, however, remember a church on that street, and neither could Don. Now, when we drove along it and finally spotted the sign for the church, we discovered why: The church is comparatively new, set almost out of sight at the end of a long driveway.

As we turned up the driveway, Don started laughing. He said, “You know where this is? It’s where the sandpit used to be!”

The sandpit! Where he and I would go parking when we didn’t drive out to Gilford to the Cat Path!

So we both were laughing as we went in to Leonard’s funeral.

After Tommy had phoned me about Leonard’s death, I’d e-mailed and written classmates, who in turn got in touch with other classmates. Sally lives in South Carolina, and others were in Florida for the winter, but those of us stalwart souls still here in the frozen north made up a representation of the Laconia High School Class of 1957—Becky, Carol G., Carol S.V., Marge, Helen, Carole and Skip, Bob L., and Bob J. (who is still Bobby in my mind). Don and I sat between the Carols and their husbands, and during the service I saw that the Carols were gripping handkerchiefs, and so was I, mopping tears streaming down my face. My dearest Leonard.

After the service, during the refreshments in the fellowship hall, some of us gathered into a mini-reunion, telling Leonard stories. It wasn’t all laughs, of course. Marge, his debate partner, remembered that he considered it his fault that they had lost a debate state championship because of a timing technicality; he’d carried that remorse throughout his life. We spoke of his diabetes, his failing eyesight and unreliable limbs.

And we caught up on each other’s doings, laughing again.

When Don and I drove home, we decided to brave the Meredith traffic problems to see the goings-on. One part of the bay contained the usual winter scene, a busy village of bob houses and ice-fishermen. Then came the hockey games, with on the shore an ominous ambulance parked, just in case.

We reached Sandwich about a half hour before the snow began.

Becky phoned me that evening and told me that her husband, a detached observer who hadn’t known the Gang in high school, had remarked that while watching us sitting there chatting away over sandwiches and brownies, he realized we were no longer seventy-year-olds but high-school girls again.

Leonard didn’t often talk about his health problems. He had a somewhat cavalier attitude toward them, and I think that family and friends worried more than he did. But when he did mention them to me during a phone call recently, he concluded, “I have had a very charmed existence.”

Obituary (Search on "Corbin" and choose "Leonard Corbin.")

© 2011 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved
Photo by Don MacDougall © 1992