Mrs. Pollifax is My Hero

Starting Over When the World Thinks Your Story is Finished

I first met Mrs. Pollifax when I was a child, in a Reader's Digest Condensed Book. I was far too young to identify with an older widow whose children were grown and whose respectable suburban life had begun to feel unbearably empty. Yet I loved her immediately.

Maybe it was her almost childlike belief in herself. Not childishness, mind you. Mrs. Pollifax is never foolish in the ways people assume older women must be foolish. What she has is an openness to possibility that most adults gradually learn to suppress. She still believes that something surprising might happen. More importantly, she believes she might be capable of meeting it.

At the beginning of Dorothy Gilman's The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, published in 1966, Emily Pollifax is sixty-three and has reached the point where the world appears to have no particular use for her. She has raised her children. She has fulfilled the conventional duties expected of her. She keeps busy with respectable activities, she takes her geraniums to the roof of her apartment building to get some sun. But respectable busyness is not the same thing as purpose.

She is lonely, depressed and frighteningly close to believing that the meaningful part of her life is over.

Her doctor advises her to do something she has always wanted to do. When she tells him that she has always wanted to be a spy, he laughs.

That laugh could have ended the story.

It is the kind of laugh that tells a person to return to her assigned place. Be sensible. Be realistic. Understand that certain possibilities are no longer available to you, if they ever were. The world has already decided what sort of person you are, what you are qualified to attempt and how much of your story remains.

Mrs. Pollifax does not accept the verdict. She goes to Washington and presents herself to the CIA.

The Audacity of Taking Yourself Seriously

When people talk about starting over, the conversation is often framed in terms of confidence. Believe in yourself. Follow your dream. Reinvent your life.

Those phrases can become so polished by repetition that they lose their meaning. Mrs. Pollifax shows us what believing in yourself actually looks like when there is no cheering section, no evidence of likely success and no reason to expect that anyone else will understand.

She takes her own desire seriously even after someone else treats it as ridiculous.

That may be one of the most radical things a person can do, particularly a woman whose culture has taught her to make herself useful to everyone but herself.

Mrs. Pollifax does not ask whether becoming a spy is an age-appropriate goal. She does not conduct an informal survey of the garden club. She does not wait for her children to affirm that this is a sound next step for Mother. She does not require the world to recognize her potential before she acts on it.

She simply thinks: Why not?

And really, why not?

Sure, she didn’t have the conventional credentials of an intelligence operative, but she had decades of experience observing people, managing relationships, solving practical problems and adapting to other people's needs. She understood that what someone says and what someone means are not always the same thing. She knew how to appear harmless, an ability the CIA could never have taught her better than society already had.

She had also spent a lifetime developing qualities that rarely appear on a resume: patience, empathy, judgment, curiosity, endurance and the ability to improvise when the sensible plan falls apart.

The world saw an ordinary older woman.

Mrs. Pollifax understood that an ordinary older woman might be the perfect disguise.

So, eventually, did the CIA. The agency does not recruit her for her nerve. It recruits her for her invisibility. What Carstairs needs is a tourist, a pleasant nobody in a hat who can carry a package out of Mexico City without anyone bothering to look twice.

Optimism Is Not the Same as Innocence

Mrs. Pollifax is often described as naive, and in certain ways, she is. She steps into the world of espionage without comprehending how dangerous it can be. She expects people to behave better than they sometimes do. She retains a faith in human beings that experience might reasonably have beaten out of her.

But her optimism is not stupidity.

She pays attention. She learns. She notices connections other people miss because they are looking only for what they expect to see. Her mind does not travel along official channels. It takes side roads, makes unexpected associations and arrives at strategies that would never occur to someone with more training and less imagination.

When John Sebastian Farrell meets her, he finds this out the hard way. He is the professional in the partnership, the one with the cover identity, the operational experience, skilled in deception. For a while he treats her a bit like cargo. Then the assignment goes badly wrong, and it is Mrs. Pollifax who begins assembling a way out. Not through anything she was taught, but through the accumulated household competence of a woman who has spent decades working with whatever happened to be in the room. She notices what their guards want. She notices what is just lying around. When she proposes something, Farrell points out the flaw, she adjusts and proposes something better. His astonishment is one of the quiet pleasures of the book. It’s not that he’s surprised that a woman can think, it’s that her thinking does not resemble his, and that this turns out to be the advantage.

This quality fascinated me even when I was young. Mrs. Pollifax is creative under pressure. She does not merely endure what happens to her; she engages with it. Faced with a new experience, she responds with enthusiasm. Faced with a problem, she becomes curious. Faced with danger, she reaches for whatever intelligence, compassion, nerve or unlikely resource is available.

Her spirit is, for practical purposes, uncrushable, and Gilman tests it rather than merely asserting it. Mrs. Pollifax tends to what can be tended. She plays solitaire in her prison cell, because a person needs something to do with her hands while she thinks. Confined, frightened, responsible for an injured man and eventually face to face with an interrogator who has no particular reason to be merciful, she doesn’t collapse. She even tells the man to his face that cruelty is not impressive, but she doesn’t pretend she’s not scared or in pain. She is afraid when there is reason to be afraid. Courage does not require her to pretend otherwise, but fear does not become the only fact in the room.

That distinction matters.

Optimism is sometimes dismissed as a refusal to see reality. But the best optimists see reality clearly and refuse to grant it authority and control. They understand that circumstances are real without assuming they are final.

I recognize that tendency because I have what might be called a “terminal case of optimism”. I can see the problem perfectly well, but I simply cannot resist looking for a hidden door, an overlooked resource, or the one improbable development that might change everything.

Hopelessness has always seemed to me like a premature conclusion.

Mrs. Pollifax understands this instinctively. She does not deny danger, grief or cruelty. She refuses to believe that any of them gets the last word just because they’re shouting.

The Strength of Delight

One of the things I love most about Mrs. Pollifax is that she doesn’t respond to her new life with grim determination alone. Although she went from boredom to constant peril, she can’t help herself. She enjoys it.

There is a buoyancy to her, a sense that the world has become large again. She meets people she would never have encountered in her former life. She travels to unfamiliar places. She encounters ideas and cultures she’s only read about, or seen in one of Miss Hartshorne’s post-vacation slideshows. Her adventures take her far beyond the borders of her comfortable routines. Even in circumstances that are frightening or absurd, some part of her remains astonished that this is happening to her.

She is alive to the experience.

We often imagine courage as something hard-faced and joyless. The courageous person clenches her jaw, suppresses her feelings and marches into danger without hesitation. But Mrs. Pollifax's courage comes partly from her willingness to remain emotionally awake. She can still be delighted. She can still be surprised. She can still care about the person beside her. Her joie de vivre is not decorative. It is one of her survival skills.

It also changes the people she encounters. Mrs. Pollifax forms relationships where a conventional operative might see only assets, obstacles or sources of information. She sees human beings. Her interest in them is sincere, and that sincerity gives her access to truths that suspicion alone could not uncover.

Which is why Carstairs and Bishop spend a good portion of the novel several steps behind their own courier. They hired a harmless woman and got one. What they slowly piece together, from fragments and long silences and reports that refuse to add up, is that the harmless woman has accomplished a great deal more than the job description called for. Part of it she engineered, but part of it (and Gilman plays this joke gently), she managed entirely by accident. Bishop's reaction is more or less the reader's. Carstairs is harder to impress and has to sit with the more uncomfortable realization: he did not realize who he was hiring.

She does not become effective by abandoning the qualities associated with her ordinary life. There is no makeover where she chops off her fluffy white hair and trades in her outrageous hat for a black knitted cap, no training montage where she learns to use a gun and a grenade launcher. She succeeds because of her ordinary life.

That may be the most satisfying part of her story. Mrs. Pollifax does not transform herself into someone younger, tougher, colder or more conventionally impressive. She does not discover that her previous life was wasted and that she must become an entirely different woman to matter.

She brings the woman she already is into a larger arena.

Reading Her at Sixty

When I first encountered Mrs. Pollifax, I saw an older woman having an extraordinary adventure. Now that I am close to her age, I see something more complicated, and more personal.

I understand how a life can gradually, quietly, become smaller.

It does not happen because of one terrible decision. Sometimes it happens through years of responsibility. You do what needs to be done. You build a career, raise a family, maintain a home, keep promises and solve the problem in front of you. Your life fills with useful work.

Then one day, a season ends.

The world may treat that ending as a conclusion. You may even be tempted to treat it that way yourself. The roles that once defined you have changed, and you have not yet discovered what will replace them.

Mrs. Pollifax reminds me that an ending can also create an opening.

Her story is not powerful because everyone should march into CIA headquarters and volunteer for covert operations. In real life, this would be inadvisable for several reasons, not least of which is that I doubt the CIA has a walk-in desk for restless widows.

Her example matters because she refuses to confuse unfamiliarity with impossibility.

Starting over does not mean erasing the life that came before. It means recognizing that everything you have lived through may have been preparing you for work you could not have imagined earlier. Age does not merely take things away. It accumulates material: knowledge, perspective, pattern recognition, scars, stories, humor and a much lower tolerance for nonsense.

We may arrive at sixty with fewer illusions, but we can also arrive with greater imaginative range. We know there is rarely only one way through a problem because we have already lived through situations that once appeared unsolvable. We have watched plans collapse and life continue. We have discovered that identity is more durable, and more flexible, than we thought.

Mrs. Pollifax is not heroic because she is secretly exceptional.

She is heroic because she recognizes the extraordinary usefulness of what the world has dismissed as ordinary.

The Sixth Act

Our society has historically tended to organize women's lives around socially approved milestones. Childhood. Education. Marriage. Children. Career. Retirement.

After that, the cultural imagination becomes distressingly vague.

But what if there is another act? What if the stage has not gone dark? What if the apparent conclusion was merely an intermission, long enough to change the scenery, reconsider the character and begin a different kind of story?

The later act does not have to be smaller than the ones that came before it. It may, in fact, be the first act in which a woman is able to ask what she wants without immediately translating the answer into what everyone else needs from her.

That freedom can be disorienting. It can also be exhilarating.

Mrs. Pollifax teaches me that there is no virtue in cooperating with other people's limited imagination of your life. There is no prize for becoming invisible on schedule. And there is nothing ridiculous about pursuing a desire simply because it has survived long enough to become unlikely.

Perhaps that stubborn streak in her is whimsy. Perhaps it is faith. I suspect it is both: faith that life still contains possibilities she cannot yet see, and whimsy enough to go looking for them.

Mrs. Pollifax does not wait until she feels completely prepared. She does not wait until the world agrees that she belongs in the story and gives her permission to move forward. She forges ahead with all the experience she has gathered, all the curiosity she has preserved and all the optimism she has been unwilling to surrender.

She was hired to be an extra. She turned out to be the plot.

The world thinks her story is finished.

She knows better.

If you have never met her, begin with The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. She is very good company when you’re contemplating an impossible thing.