1—Lu Burke
The words “millionaire” and “copy editor” hardly ever occur in the same sentence, much less in the same person, but Lu Burke, who worked at this magazine from 1958 to 1990, when she retired to Southbury, Connecticut, was that rare thing: a copy editor who became a millionaire. A year after Lu died, in October, 2010, reportedly of leukemia, we heard that she had willed her entire estate, of more than a million dollars, to the Southbury Public Library. I hadn’t stopped to see her in years, because lunch at Friendly’s, with Lu hungry for gossip about the old crew, turned a three-and-half-hour drive from New York to Massachusetts into a daylong journey. I felt bad about that, and finding out that Lu had been sitting on a million dollars made me feel a little better, only because I realized that I couldn’t feel any worse.
Lu was the originator of the comma shaker. Among her duties were copy-editing the fiction and editing the cartoon captions and the newsbreaks, and she brought an industrial quality to the job, as if she were engaged in precision tooling. “Not everyone can read proof,” she used to say. Her desk faced a wall that James Thurber had drawn on in pencil (a self-portrait, a football player, a man slumped over a typewriter), in an office next to that of Eleanor Gould Packard, who was far more celebrated as a grammarian in her lifetime and beyond, a keeper of the flame of New Yorker house style. Lu, a proponent of common sense, provided a necessary counterbalance. Before coming to The New Yorker, she had worked at Life, counting picas in the photo captions, and at Simon & Schuster. Lu thought that elements of New Yorker style were ridiculous; for instance, our habit of putting points in I.B.M. when I.B.M. itself had long since done without them, and of sticking a comma in Time, Inc., as if oblivious of the publisher’s own practice (and of the pun on “ink”). Yet there was no more zealous enforcer.
Lu had always been protective of her privacy, so skilled at deflecting any personal questions that it was not until her will was probated, and a writer for Connecticut Magazine started calling up and asking questions, that we realized we didn’t know the first thing about her. We didn’t know where she was from, or where she went to school, or what her real first name was—Lu had to be short for something.
We knew she wore Earth shoes and bluejeans and jewel-neck sweaters and stud earrings. She had short gray hair and snappy blue eyes. She patrolled the halls like a prison warden—you could almost see the ring of keys at her side—and she terrorized anyone new in the copy department. “Are the glory years of The New Yorker gone forever?” This was the single typewritten line of a letter from a reader, seared in memory, sent in with a clipping from our pages, in which “chaise longue” was erroneously rendered “chaise lounge.” In her crisp, inimitable hand, Lu added her own comment—“They certainly are!”—and circulated the letter. (I never made that mistake again.)
We knew she liked Trollope and she loved jazz. She lived on Horatio Street, in Greenwich Village. She once dated J. D. Salinger. Back in the sixties, she had written letters to the Village Voice, tangling with Norman Mailer. She once told a co-worker that the happiest time of her life was the summer she spent at a camp where she was issued a bugle and charged with the duty of blowing Reveille every morning.
At Pomperaug Woods, an assisted-living center in Southbury where she finished up her days, Lu disdained to join the other residents in the dining room, preferring to carry her meals up to her apartment and dine alone. A story that made the rounds after her death was that once, while waiting for the elevator, she beckoned to a fellow-resident and asked, “Would you do me a favor?” And when the woman said yes, Lu told her, “Drop dead.”
2—The Library
Lu Burke is now the immortal patron of the Southbury Public Library. The library’s address, 100 Poverty Road, is by no means indicative of its condition. The sign at the foot of the driveway says “Since 1776,” meaning that the Town of Southbury has had some kind of library, and employed a librarian, ever since Colonial days, but the new Southbury Public Library, with Palladian windows, a portico, and a railed roof deck, on six acres that used to be a pumpkin patch, opened in 2006. It does not even smell like a library yet. Two board members, Shirley Michaels and Kenneth Keren, showed me around, and it was easy to see that Lu would have thought this was a good repository for her hard-earned cash, but also difficult to see what more was needed. All the appointments are in exquisite taste—there are Bill Blass reading lamps in the reference section, leather club chairs and a gas fireplace in a reading room, lots of large-print books and jigsaw puzzles for the geezers, a children’s library with two suits of armor, a dozen computers, free Wi-Fi, Kindles to borrow, a terrace, one of those stands that dispense plastic bags for wet umbrellas, and the ultimate luxury for a book-lover: shelves that are still empty.
The gift was announced in December, and the library’s board, made up of nine volunteers appointed by the selectmen, began searching for appropriate ways to honor Lu’s intent. “We are great strategic planners,” Shirley Michaels, the head of the library board, said. “Just to spend money frivolously is not our idea.” They decided to name the circulation desk for her—a magnificent thirty-four-foot-long dark cherrywood installation that would not be out of place in a cathedral—and to inaugurate a literary program, which they planned to kick off in May, with a New Yorker Fiction Night. It was cancelled, however, and the order for the granite plaque was put on hold, when Southbury’s newly elected First Selectman, Ed Edelson, no doubt attracted by the size of the Burke bequest, decided to look into the financial arrangement between the town and the library. He found that the town owns the library—not the other way around—and that the library’s funds, which, including Lu’s bequest, will amount to $1.8 million, belong in a town account. He said on the phone recently, “To have town accounts managed by volunteers seems to me not to be the appropriate way to go.” The board was insulted. “For fifty years, we’ve never had a first selectman try to grab the money,” Michaels said.
Edelson said he was impressed by two things: Lu Burke’s generosity (actually, Lu was not known for that trait; a copy editor does not accrue a million dollars by being generous) and the fact that she hadn’t been involved in the library. As far as anyone knew, she didn’t even have a library card. Nobody at the library knew who she was, so how could they know what she would have wanted them to spend her money on? Edelson went to the probate office and found out that Lu Burke had left the money for the “general purposes of the library.” His first idea was “Well, can we use the money to buy books?” He proposed that the town stop using taxpayers’ money to buy books—the town has budgeted fifty thousand dollars annually for library books—and use Lu Burke’s money instead, spending down the bequest over twenty years. The response to that was “No way.” “It would be as if it never happened,” Michaels said.
3—The Family
The press surrounding Lu’s bequest flushed out her next of kin. Stephanie Blansett, who works as a school-nurse supervisor in Nashville, Tennessee, left a comment in response to an article about Lu in an online news outlet called the Southbury Patch. She identified herself as Lu Burke’s niece. Her father, John Seiter, was Lu’s half brother; he was nine years older than Lu. Stephanie divulged, shockingly, that Lu’s given name was Lulu. “Lu never was a Lulu,” Stephanie said, when I reached her by phone. “She never ever went by that name. I was never to come out with it in her presence.” Stephanie added that she had known she “was not going to benefit” from her aunt’s will. “In fact, it was funny. My father”—John Seiter died in 2000—“had told me one day, ‘Lu called me and she’s making a will.’ She needed my full name. If you are not going to bequeath to someone who is a blood relative, you have to say that.”
Lu was not much of a family person, Stephanie said. “She would be just as happy if people thought she was hatched.” Stephanie knew from family lore that, as a girl, Lu had been a handful. Her mother, Marguerite Burke—Stephanie’s grandmother—was a flamboyant socialite, who lived in Scarsdale in the late fifties, and held the occasional séance. Stephanie knew less about Lu’s father: Burke might have been named Charles, and he might have been a lawyer; she was pretty sure he wasn’t that nice of a guy. Lu probably spent her early childhood in New York. Farmed out to various boarding schools, where she did not fit in, she finally graduated from the House in the Pines (now defunct), in Norwood, Massachusetts. She did not go to college.
Stephanie had one specific childhood memory of Lu. “It was Christmas,” she said. “I had received a necklace. I was wearing it, and I wanted to take it off. Lu had unclasped it for me and handed it to me reclasped. ‘Always clasp your necklaces back,’ she said. ‘That way they will not get tangled up.’ To this day, anytime I take off a necklace I immediately clasp it back.” Lu the untangler: as with necklaces, so with sentences.
A paralegal had asked Stephanie if there was anything among Lu’s personal effects that she might like. Stephanie didn’t know, because she didn’t know what her aunt had had in the way of personal effects. She said she would be interested in any books or journals. A few months later, she received a package in the mail containing a broken picture frame (empty); a stack of photographs of the Connecticut countryside, probably dating from the time Lu was thinking of moving up there; and twenty-odd earring backs. As for what Lu might have wanted the library to do with her money, Stephanie believes that “the last thing she would have wanted was an expensive shindig to go on in her name.”
In Southbury, the standoff continues. The Board of Selectmen has got the library’s money. The library-board members are thinking of taking the town to court to get it back. A committee has been formed, made up of two library-board members, two selectmen, a finance-board representative, and the executor of Lu Burke’s will, to pound out an agreement on the library’s use of the money to protect the donor’s intent. Edelson has forbidden the library to consult an outside lawyer—he thinks it would be disgraceful for one town agency to sue another—but an organization called the Friends of the Southbury Public Library has started a Library Defense Fund. It’s all very contentious.
And yet the Southbury Public Library itself remains a haven. I spoke for a moment with the head librarian, Shirley Thorson. She was setting up for a flamenco program the next night. Thorson collects pencils—she has two hundred at home, unsharpened—and sums up her enthusiasms thus: “Nascar, Frank McCourt, Halloween.” Cool—a librarian who likes car crashes. Lu Burke would have liked that. Then I browsed among the books, noticing that the Dewey Decimal System puts manuals on copy editing (801-808) next to books on fishing and archery (799.22). Trollope is well represented in the library’s holdings. I picked out “The Prime Minister” and took it out on the terrace, where I read for a while on a bench in the sun. In its opening pages there is a description of a character called Ferdinand Lopez, which reminded me of Lu and made me want to read more: “He had been as though he had been created self-sufficient, independent of mother’s milk or father’s money.”
Photograph courtesy of Mary Norris.