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The end of the 1940s also brought a major health crisis for Iris. It is unclear exactly what brought her to the hospital in February of 1949. Perhaps, since she alludes to having had a curettage, it was a polyp removal or possibly an abortion, although the latter was unlikely at her age. She was 54. Iris later wrote Charles Abbott that she had had a hysterectomy.¹ Nonetheless, by her account, a routine check-up at Doctor’s Hospital seemed in order at the moment, so off I went with an armload of books and magazines, much looking forward to two or

It seems that no matter how far from her old environments Iris traveled, recollections of the past seemed to follow her. She was in Fayence when Dick Abbott died in a hotel in New York on the morning of February 5, 1952. He was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Milford, Delaware on February 9, 1952, his forty-fourth birthday.¹ Iris was notified of Abbott’s death via cable from his brother Charles. The notice came at the same time she heard from her son about her mother’s death. The line of support between Abbott and her mother ended with both

Iris was living alone as the war came to a close in 1945. Although Rockefeller and Whitney returned as board chairman and president, respectively, of the Museum,¹ the funding Abbott had found so plentiful during the government-contract war period was disappearing. Iris found herself confronted with a multitude of new challenges. Her marriage to Abbott had never been ideal. She frequently saw other men and even a person as proper as Margaret Barr believed her to “pick up men at Schraffts.”² “I know she had enough lovers,” Philip Johnson also recalled, “but they were all taxi drivers or kids in