ONLY CONNECT: Tracking a work in progress

I am a clutterer and a packrat and so is nearly everyone in my family. But probably the only time I have been grateful for this tendency was when my brother and I found our father’s files and correspondence after his death. My father was a wonderful ham and a great storyteller, but unaccountably, the tape recorder that he treasured somehow never got used to record him, a loss that I regret more than words can express. Lifelong drinking addled his wits and brought on dementia some ten years before his death, before we had the sense to ask him anything specific, and long before I thought of this project. So we had to rely on my mother’s (fortunately) excellent memory and on his papers for information about his family and earlier life. His correspondence included letters from his parents that have been my only way of knowing them, as well as many letters in German, from a particularly significant friend, that remain to be translated.

Having learned my lesson the hard way, in my mother’s case I became more proactive. I was aided and inspired by the example of my Uncle Jack (my mother’s younger brother), who recorded his own life story with the assistance of his stepdaughter, a professional oral historian. Using his tapes as a model, I interviewed my mother. (The two sets of tapes provide an interesting contrast, because there is an age gap of eight years and their memories are quite different.) When my mother died, I also found her correspondence, including letters from a love affair before her marriage. Although I was quite close with my mother, she hid a lot beneath a cheery exterior, and I felt I got to know her better through the things she had saved than I ever did by talking with her.

One of my mother’s oldest friends, Frances Lee Pearson, provided a valuable link between my mother and father, because she was also the widow of my father’s friend and acting colleague, the great black actor Canada Lee, who died prematurely in 1952. Fran was at work on his biography and set up a web page about him before her own death two years ago.

The idea of writing a book came to me after I attended my 30th reunion at the High School of Music & Art. Reconnecting with long-lost friends who were fellow anti-Vietnam War activists, I was reminded that many of us were “red-diaper babies,” offspring of leftist organizers and sympathizers who were veterans of earlier progressive struggles in the 30s, 40s and 50s. But for my brother Norris and myself, there were two major differences.

The first was that our parents were an interracial couple. The second was that my classmates, mostly children of Jewish intellectuals, were well aware as teenagers about their political heritage, of which their own activism was a natural extension. Our parents, on the other hand, though pretty thoroughly leftist (and supportive of my own activism), had never, so far as I knew, been overtly involved in any political activities. It was a standing joke among our family and fellow leftist friends that our phone was tapped by the CIA, because all that the faceless eavesdroppers would have overheard would have been teenage prattling or deliberately provocative nonsense. Yet I knew that my father’s mother had not only been a member of the Communist Party, but had lived for many years in the Soviet Union, as had my father’s two younger brothers, Uncle Charles and Uncle Neal. Till that point, in 1997, it had never really occurred to me to dig deeper and get the whole chronicle straight. And when I first set out to discover more about the earlier lives of my parents and their forebears, I really had no idea what I was getting into. What I discovered as I began to research was nothing less than a sort of historical goldmine.

And so I began this book project, part memoir, part family history, to tell the story of my biracial family back to its 17th century American origins, both slave and immigrant. This involves the social history not only of both the eastern and western U.S., but also pre-war Germany and the Soviet Union and WPA-era theater and radio. I hope eventually to finish it as a book and get it published, but that could take a long time at the rate I’ve been going! So posting excerpts in progress in the form of a blog seems the way to go for now, especially because a number of other people are doing related work which they have been graciously sharing with me, and I’d like to return the favor. Over the past year in particular, I have been blessed with communications from a number of people who are doing research related to the life and work of my paternal grandmother, Williana Jones Burroughs. She was among the most prominent of the characters whose fascinating lives made it incumbent on me to try to write this family history.

I set up this blog some months ago, and then, as usual, had no time to post anything to it. When I finished our belated taxes a few weeks ago, I was determined to finally launch the thing. Given its main theme, it seems fitting that I should finally do so the week after the joy and vast relief of Barack Obama's win.

The working title when I began this book some years ago was THE SURFEITED GROOMS. This was from line from MACBETH that my father, a Shakespearean actor, loved to
quote whenever my brother and I, coming pell-mell into the apartment, left the front door open. "Children," he would yell, "you left the door open... 'And the surfeited grooms do mock their charge with snores.' "

However, the title that I prefer now, because it seems to sum up the amazing (though so common) meld of cultures that our family represents, is ONLY CONNECT, from E.M. Forster's HOWARD'S END.


So here it is...

ONLY CONNECT: THE INTERTWINING OF TWO AMERICAN FAMILIES

PROLOGUE

In the year 1620, a ship careened at anchor in a fierce storm off the coast of Massachusetts. With a lurch of the ship, a fourteen-year old English servant boy, coming above decks on heaven knows what errand, was spun overboard and into the roiling sea. Fortunately for all concerned, the boy had quick reflexes and strong arms, and hung on for dear life to the dangling rigging, even as he was buffeted about underwater, until he was safely pulled back on board. [For “ ...it pleased God that he caught hold of the topsail halyards which hung overboard and ran out at length. Yet he held his hold (though he was sundry fathoms underwater) till he was hauled up by the same rope to the brim of the water, and then with a boat hook and other means got into the ship again and his life saved.” ~ William Bradford, Sometime Governor Thereof, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647.]

That boy grew and prospered and had ten healthy children, who in turn had many healthy children, all down the generations until they grew to such a multitude that the saying down East goes, “If the rope that pulled John Howland back onto the Mayflower had broken, half the people in Connecticut would be somebody else.”

The name of the Mayflower is well-known, mythic, and beloved currency, but what of le Néréide, le Duc du Maine, le Courier de Bourbon, or the Greyhound, the Commerce, the Castle Gally? These are just a handful of the ships that, within a few decades of the Mayflower landing, brought an utterly different kind of immigrant to the New World, much against their wills. At about the same time, or perhaps a generation or two later, that John Howland was flowering into a prosperous citizen of Plymouth Plantation, a nameless African of unknown gender was forcibly abducted from the interior or coast of western Africa, from what today would perhaps be Nigeria or Cameroon, and shipped out of one of the ports on the Bight of Biafra, along the Niger River Delta, across the sea to Virginia. This nameless captive also survived and bore children who born children down the centuries, until one of his or her male descendants met one of the many female descendants of John Howland. Those two were my mother and my father, and this is the story of the two sides of my family, each ultimately as American as could be, and how they came together.

OVERTURE AND BEGINNINGS

My mother and father met for the first time in the summer of 1936 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, backstage after the opening summer stock performance of the now-legendary WPA Federal Negro Theater Project’s “Voodoo” Macbeth, directed by “boy wonder” Orson Welles.



My mother, Melissa Broome, was there with friends from an amateur theater group affiliated with the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford’s major museum. My father, Eric Burroughs, was one of the actors in the production, playing the role of Hecate, a part which Welles had altered from one of head witch to that of a male voodoo priest, and had somewhat expanded to spotlight my father’s dramatic gifts. In June, the production had completed a triumphant run in New York, during which 75,000 people saw the show. Hartford was the second stop on a tour that would take the company to Project theaters in Dallas, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Syracuse.


Eric Burroughs, playing the role of Hecate, is second from the right, wearing the lion headress.

My brother, Norris Burroughs, has created a graphic novel called VOODOO MACBETH about the making of this production, which can be viewed at [LINK NOT ACTIVE FOR SOME REASON - COPY AND PASTE!]
http://www.enginecomics.co.uk/engineers/engineers.htm [top row, third thumbnail from the left]

After the show, the whole group went on to the cast party hosted by the NAACP, in which my mother was active, and the two of them struck up a conversation. What would they have seen in each other, these two? On the surface, my father appeared the more urbane. He was a mature-looking 24 year old, a nut-brown man of medium build, 5'11' tall, with wavy silken black hair and a trademark pencil-thin Ronald Coleman mustache. His Levantine features had earned him the nickname “A-rab.” My mother, if not as exotic, was beautiful in the style of Katherine Hepburn -- just 21, tall and willowy, with sea-blue eyes and dark auburn hair cut in a chin-length bob.

To all appearances a classic Connecticut Yankee, my mother, Melissa, had somehow already moved beyond the conventions of a rural New England upbringing to be working as secretary of the Hartford NAACP. In actuality, her maternal grandfather had been a sea captain plying the China trade, her father had run away from New Jersey at the age of 14 to become a cowboy, and a closer look at the sleepy Connecticut hamlet in which she’d been raised revealed a ferment of unexpectedly yeasty characters. This perhaps gave her a taste for the exotic – and for a well-bred young lady WASP, what could have been more exotic than a black New Yorker from a Communist family?

The conversation my future parents started spilled over into three days, but afterwards, they lost touch, and both ended up marrying other people. They were not to meet again for thirteen years.



PART TWO

MELISSA'S STORY

As children, my brother Norris and I heard about our parents’ earlier lives as stories they told us, from Fadder at the dinner table, and from Mudder (or Muv) as bedtime stories. What my mother told us of her past was like the fairy tales she read us: her own life as a fairy tale. She did speak of her experiences and feelings, but they were romanticized, idealized: how she’d met my father and lost him; how she had married her childhood friend Nils reluctantly, by default, and how hard it had become; how, miraculously, she had found my father again and eventually run away to be with him. Of her immediate life she said little about how she felt; perhaps it seemed all too obvious, since by that time my father’s drinking binges had become regular weekend events, characterized mainly by his screaming epithets at her. Leaving my father never ever seemed to be an option; the thought was unspoken but seemed loud and clear: she had made her bed, now she would lie in it. As time went on, she spoke less and less about her emotions.

Even more tantalizing to me than hearing about their long-ago romance were the stories Muv told us about the brother and sister we had in Connecticut, the children of her first husband, who was named Nils Mickelson. Their names were Peter and Jane, and there had also been another little baby, named Susan, who had died. Jane was five years older than me, and Peter two years older than that.

I was fascinated by the thought of Jane. Since I had a brother, the thought of Peter seemed more commonplace, but to have a mysterious sister somewhere, who might be like me – that was truly flabbergasting. I desperately wanted to know her, but even if I’d known how to contact her, I was fearful at the thought that she might not want to know me. I felt as if I would only have a single chance, and I might blow it. After all, our mother had left them and their father to be with our father and have us; perhaps she would hate me.

About their father, Nils, my mother said little, except that things had been difficult and that she had never really loved him. When he had asked her to marry him, she said, she had told him that, but he had replied that he loved her enough for both of them. Even at that tender age I knew that was no good basis for a marriage.

For years now I have thought that my mother’s reluctance to speak about true feelings was part of her New England, stiff-upper-lip upbringing. It was with complete astonishment then that I discovered a cache of letters in which she revealed the most intimate feelings about my father and other men she had loved. Perhaps it was easier for her, as it always has been for me, to talk about her feelings in writing than face to face. Or perhaps her later silence was more the product of the years of co-dependence, discouragement and disillusionment than of any native reticence.

The way she had told the story to us when we were young was that, as time went on, life with Nils had become unbearable, in particular because of Nils’ tyrannical mother, who lectured her about housekeeping and otherwise interfered in the way mothers-in-law are wont to do. The climax came when their third child was born with Down’s syndrome and a heart defect, and Mrs. Mickelson attributed the causative bad genes to my mother. Mother had named the little girl “Susan Melissa,” after her extremely Yankee paternal grandmother. Mrs. Mickelson, she told us, came and sat on the edge of the bed, gazed contemptuously at mother and infant, and sniffed “‘Susan Melissa..’ Humph! Nigger-name!” Little Susan died within a few weeks or months, and my mother became quite depressed. To add salt to the wounds, Mrs. Mickelson then urged her to have a hysterectomy, to prevent any future such unfortunate births.

This, then, was pretty much all I knew as a child about my mother’s first marriage. She had run away from it in 1949, at first taking four-year old Jane with her, but unable to properly care for her, had left her with a family friend to be returned to Nils. She first went to her mother, my grandmother Helen Connery Broome, in Florida, where she filed for divorce. Then she moved to New York, where, she told us, she somehow managed to get my father’s address and sent him a postcard saying simply “Here I am. Where are you?” He responded, they were reunited, were married once their respective divorces were final, and the rest was history: if they didn’t live ‘happily ever after,’ at least they were still together, and my brother Norris and I were the beneficent result.

But the letters I found tell a somewhat different story, one that is far more convoluted and intriguing. The letters were written over a period of years ranging from her marriage in to Nils all the way up to the 1960s. (Amazing to us in these days of ephemeral e-mail, she kept carbon copies or pencil drafts of her letters, for which I am profoundly thankful.) They are illuminating in that they describe in crystalline detail both her life with Nils, from several perspectives, and the feelings she cherished for my father beginning at their meeting in 1937. The story of Melissa’s reunion with Eric did indeed begin with that romantic postcard, but it wasn’t sent from New York, and it wasn’t after she had run away from Nils. Here is the story in her own words:

Nov. 19, 1948

It is quite a saga we owe one another, is it not, Where have you been...I’ve searched so long. I thought you were dead. The war came, and I remembered your continental background, and France, Germany and Russia tumbling about our heads, and you had seemed to disappear off the earth.

I even wrote to Orson Welles, asking for you. His office suggested Actor’s Equity of which I should have thought in the first place, but by that time it was too long because there was no recent record. I went to Maine with your voice still in my ears...Of course I couldn’t stay there. Nor marry the person I had expected to. My letters came back unanswered. Macbeth had exhausted its run. Maine was cold. So very cold. I’ve learned to love it now, but that year was the most miserable I ever lived, ever. My father kept writing from Santa Fe. Warm and sun. New Mexico is balm to any heart. Even in New Mexico I looked for you. Its country is like you, ageless, inscrutable. (Are you flattered?) Santa Fe is overflowing with artists, poets, writers, sculptors. I asked for you. In fact, if you ever do get to Santa Fe, you will find your press awaiting you...

O Eric, I searched the pages of Poetry, Theater Arts Monthly. Where have you been? ...Daddy died, New Mex lost its charm. I’ve never gone back. Once East again, I had no thought but to come to NYC and financially, that was impossible, Mother and Jack [her brother] in Conn. And nothing else in the world mattered.

For a while I was very ill. Materially it was appendicitis and good old vitamin deficiency, but this and tired and disillusioned...(still no trace of you) and most unwilling to run to Maine...I married a childhood friend. A Danish boy I had known when we were children...

When Nils-Peter arrived, and I had my first experience with Ether, I realized the fallacy of the whole thing. All I could cry was “Eric.” Fortunately, your name is Scandinavian enough for the old family doctor to attach no importance to my ravings. We lived in Brooklyn. Nils’ parents have been there for forty-odd years, since they emigrated here in 1900. They are very race conscious. Not exactly prejudiced, but sufficiently biased to prohibit my entering my old work of love, the NAACP. So I volunteered at the Lighthouse for the Blind, where one could work happily with all races, for to the Blind, there are no lines.

I used to go alone to New York, and look for “Bedard” Street, the Western Union address last given by you in New York...it must have been misspelled, for I never found it. Bedford Street, in the Village, was the closest
[this was actually correct], and I would go and sit in the Park at Washington Square, and day dream of walking the paths, coming upon you sitting in the sun...I would approach and quietly say “How now, Hecate - “ Were you ever in the Village then? Did your path and mine ever cross? The Village was like Santa Fe, too. Its artists and writers, even the smell of its streets after Spring rain, had the same acrid odor. Some of my friends from Santa Fe came East and I would greet them with such joy. Soler, and Varese [I believe this is Edgar Varese, the composer], etc.

The man I married is a scientist. An analytical physicist. Our hobby is astronomy. He also plays the violin masterfully, to my hesitant clarinet. The life we have built is ideally constructed...the best marriages are made without a heart, they say. Proof of it lives in this house.

When baby Jane, now four years old, arrived, I had learned the ability to cry with my mouth closed. Lips clenched until they bled, but not a word came out. Susan died. When Jane was tiny, we left New York. The country was the place for children, and this house ideal with wood-lot and garden and yard. Beside, here is more freedom. I now speak at Y meetings about race, receive my friends, and enjoy a few of the privileges of a matron. We belong to a circle of musical artists and townspeople who gather for string ensemble practice Friday nights. The neighbors are familiar with my inter-racial interests and accept them as they accept anyone’s peculiarities. Some are even converted...or at least to a certain extent. As Miss O.
[This was Ms. Ovington, my mother’s mentor, who first introduced her to the NAACP) said: “The most a young mother can do is bring her children up without prejudice, and do her best with the neighbor’s children. No one will believe a young woman’s story. You have to wait until you are old enough to command an audience.”

Recently, I wrote a poem to “Opp”...they haven’t sent a rejection slip as yet. It was on the doubtful theme of “Passing” on which subject you know my vehemence. If you have an ancestor, be proud of him, etc. Carl has done well however. He married a very charming French girl, has a small son who reflects none of his feared features. You were very correct, I would have been unhappy married to Carl deSuze. Our sympathies were simply not akin. If they ever become so...if he ever changes his mind and returns to his family and heritage, I might find I had a heart again. He was life itself to me, and the disillusion in which you discovered me, was almost too great to recover from.

You see, I was to go to Maine, the week after you left Hartford, 1937, with instructions from him to leave all interracial work forever, he had decided to “cast the die” and leave friends and family to enter a world that would always have its doubts about him, but would accept him, as long as they weren’t sure. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t what you believed either, remember, and if as you put it, I was being fickle, I wasn’t fickle about the thing I believed in. Hard to put in words...lets talk about it when you come, next week.
WHEN YOU COME, NEXT WEEK...Magic words. During this last paragraph, the clock passed ten, and I made the phone call. Weird about last nights phone bell ringing. Just about the time you might have called, after the performance, before turning in. Perhaps your thoughts rang the bell? Stranger things have happened. There was no one on the line when Nils answered. Just a blank wire, not even a hum. As tho someone had called, and changed his mind about talking...what one might do after a bottle of wine.

Come on any New Haven Line train...Call us as soon as you get to the station and in fifteen or twenty minutes we will be in town...we are six miles out. Our phone number is Stamford, 2-1300. I may be in Sunday School, for I have a class...Perhaps I can get out of teaching that week...but Nils will call for you, and you can help him start dinner...Fun. You will enjoy him I know. And he, you. Music is the thing you have most in common. We listen consistently to WQXR and he is familiar with all [word unclear]...especially Wagnerian opera. I seem to remember you found Germany pleasant, were you in Bayreuth? Oh, you will have a lot to tell us.
[Actually, my father didn’t much like classical music – he preferred jazz – and he detested Wagner!]

Your writing. Please bring what you can. It is tragic about your lost manuscripts. I wish with all my heart I still had those few pages you gave me. Carl made me destroy them, and for the sake of peace, I did so. No, I am unfair. He borrowed them to read and never returned them. Perhaps he just forgot. I know he didn’t like them. Neither did I, I was afraid of them. Do you still write such strange lines. You mention plays. There is, or seems to be, such [a] marvelous field for racial subjects now. Surely something should click.

There are so many folks I want to introduce you to. We must meet, you, Nils and I in New York soon and visit the Bocks. Dr. Bock is a rare individual, you will enjoy. Edgar Varese, Elena Longo, the young girl from the Avery Memorial in Hartford, is now librarian of films in the Mus. Mod. Art and she and I mentioned you just a short while ago. Oh Eric. I think of the feeling with which I mentioned you to her. She remembered your reading from Hamlet over the Hft
[Hartford] station. And were discussing Olivier’s Hamlet, when up popped your name.

Three days later, I discovered your name in the SPF
[Set My People Free] cast. Just a chance, for I had scanned every cast of every racial play and never found it before. There it stood burning so I could hardly touch the page.

I wrote immediately, and tore up the page as being illogical. Not knowing how you felt, for after all you had stopped writing and not wishing to commit myself to a stone wall, I merely sent the card you received, not even daring to fix my married name, for fear it would lock the door... This is not a complete story. But there will be time. What a lot there is to hear you say.

You send love. I have no right to that. And you may find me very changed and not deserving of so high a compliment. I have lived thirty-three years discovering how great are my shortcomings. But I can echo your closing sentiment.

Yours always, Melissa.


The Carl DeSuze she mentioned remained a close friend; in fact, she soon wrote to tell him about finding my father again. But before this, there were more letters back and forth to my father, catching up on all the missing years since their first meeting. The following letter, which is undated but I believe follows the last one chronologically, has some sections crossed out, and a handwritten section at the end – since it’s a carbon, I think perhaps she retyped the whole letter after deciding to leave some parts out (Why? Too romantic, too personal at this stage, is my guess.) It is in this letter that it becomes clear that they must have gotten together a number of times following the party where they met, during the time he was in Hartford, and then corresponded for a little while before losing touch.

[undated]
Hello - -

Want some more history?

After you left - - After three vague telegrams and one long sad letter - - there seemed so many things I could do to make the memory of our conversations live again.

You had studied theater in Europe, and the best source of the Moscow Art Theater group was just then a new book…and in Portland, Maine, I joined the local players group and practiced a little [what] I had learned. Not much tho’. Amateur groups aren’t much interested in experimental work.

In Santa Fe there was more scope, but less incentive. It had been nearly a year (I left for Santa Fe at the end of summer, 1937) and you had never written.
An odd coincidence arose. In Maine of course, I had met Robert P. T. Coffin, the poet, and a friend of his, Alfred Morang, a buddy and close worker with Erskine Caldwell. In fact, they had “languished” in a Maine jail together after some illegal demonstration or other.

I was much impressed with Alfred Morang, and saved all his clippings, stories, etc. When I arrived in Santa Fe, who should be there but he – sick unto death with T.B. as are half of the artists and others that do live there – but then I really basked in the glow of his art. Chekhov was his Master, and the Russian influence and an aura of what you had opened my eyes to, glowed.

Once, remembering, I even attempted German. Gave it up as an entirely hopeless task and concentrated on Wagner as an easy medium to absorb some of the language. Did you ever see a presentation in Germany of Tristan und Isolde? Do you find Gotterdammerung tedious? I think if someone granted me a last wish before I died, it would be to see Gotterdammerung...the scene between Hagen and Mime was so reminiscent of your Hecate...

Psychologically, many of my likes and dislikes these years are traceable to little things you said and did those three unforgettable days.


[The next four paragraphs were crossed out:]

And now you tell me, you like jive! Oh, Man! It’s odd, for that night we met, with Harold Smith doing his rare best at the Johnson piano, you wouldn’t dance – didn’t like to – and we went out on the summer porch to talk. All this time I thought you just couldn’t dance.

And that was a slight sadness, for we enjoy so many things together, but that seemed a wall standing between. For I do love to dance... another story:

When my friends asked me what I wanted to do the weekend before I was to be engaged, altho I had forsworn dancing for ever and ever so long, I begged to be taken to the Savoy – we went, and stayed dancing till dawn. Drove home to Connecticut (one “t,” Eric) as the sun rose. I still have my program. Precious keepsake! I’ve never really danced since, to enjoy to the fullest the complete joy of it.

Once Dr. and Mrs. Bock (the folks in the Village I want to introduce you to) took us to the Café Society Downtown, but everyone was so uncomfortable, I hardly could enjoy the music, and came home with a deep sense of frustration.

Did you see the movie of Wuthering Heights?, or read the story? Do you remember the words of Cathy as she described her dream? Eric, read it: The middle of chapter nine. Oh, it is all so very, very true.

Your little nephew sounds so very cunning! He and Janey are just of an age. May I see your family someday? I would like so much to meet them.

It is unbelievable they exist. That you are a real person. An “Uncle Eric” to a darling little three year old. That you have “lived in the Bronx,” walked the same sidewalks hot in the summer sun, breathed the same city-laden air...

Did you ever go on summer nights to the Stadium Concerts? We went so often, and never once but that I scanned the crowd for your tall frame, your shock of unruly hair. Quoting Countee Cullen, “Crowned with dark rebellious hair,” from Heritage.

Once, at the Stadium concert, for the Tchaikovsky piano concerto, Hoffman playing, airplanes zooming over between chords, an electric storm came up. Flashes of lightning and thunder claps accented each crescendo. It was positively unholy. I cold see your hand weaving the magic rune you perfected for the Hecate part (can you still do it?) If you had appeared, silhouetted against the sky in a mirage, I would not have been surprised.

Oh, Eric, I’m sorry your mother is dead. She must have been a very wonderful person. Only two years ago. I might have met her, had I been more thorough in searching...Oh dear, it seems like so much time has been wasting. You must miss her. You are very young to lose her, it seems. Aren’t you a very lonely sort of person. I wish you weren’t. I wish you were married and had three children and a steady newspaper job or something to hold onto, and then this wouldn’t seem so smug of me to write so.

I’m not smug. I’m very very humble.....ah, well.....read your Wuthering Heights. It says words I cannot put to paper, better than I could ever say them.......and now,

Au revoir,


but she added in pen and ink script:

And very grateful for all those interesting years that our conversations opened so long ago. Saturday is ---- There are no words for Saturday. Last Sunday was to have been what Saturday is to be. And there was such a disappointment – tho’ just as well – with everyone under the weather.
Drop a penny p’card what train you’ll take – or phone if you wish – horrible waste of precious money – we don’t get home till lunchtime – so it is best we pick you up after the shopping and plan on a late lunch with us. Eric oh Eric – to hear your voice is worth a million dollars if we had it Eric oh Eric



[Undated]
Hello, Darling,

There isn’t much time today, before the bus to take me into town, (Women’s Club Lecture, at which I have hopes of meeting an old Santa Fe-an, Anya Seton..... [author of ] I’ll let you know all about it later.

Just note to say how wonderfully glowing and peaceful the world has seemed since you left Sunday. Whenever time rushes at me again I look over into the big chair and see you there, or if there is time, curl into the chair and just think.

For more than twelve years now, I have closed my eyes and seen yourself......in pain and trouble I’ve called on you and been able to stand almost anything......but never in my wildest dreams did you really return.......You had vanished so successfully, I even doubted your reality........and now I can put my fingers on the place where your head lay, touch doors you’ve touched, walk where you’ve walked, and the glory of it shines like a sun glow all around me, and life awakes again.

Do I want to see you again? Oh, Eric. The question is more, “Do you want to come back again?” Because if you do, I want to be sanctuary for you. This half-acre is yours, if you will call it so. I will make no demands on you. Just having you in sight is the greatest bliss. Husbands and wives [my father was married also at this point] and children between us...the world and all its strength between us. I wondered if it would be. I felt it, and tempted it when I touched your arm, and put my head for a moment there. But if you felt it too. That again is far beyond any dream. I never thought you two could feel so.

It was as I knew it would be. Everyone loved you. Nils admires you tremendously, and the children kept pre-fixing your name with “Uncle” all the next day. The Tulks were so enthusiastic; Ethel called me the next day and wanted to know how I had met you, all about you, want you to cpme to their studio next time you come.......The Grays were very sorry not to have seen you. They have tow young children that they want to have meet you. And I want all my “Sunday School” class to know you. Dear, do you know what it means to all these people to know someone like you. Instead of judging the race by the laundress. An intelligent equal,
Ah, you have done so much good just by one visit. Come back.......

Oh, my poor Eric. It’s strange, I rather thought there might be “a wife between us,” and only that stopped me from coming to New York and greeting you backstage the weekend after I read your name. That would have been Saturday, the 6th! Happy Birthday, Eric!

Don’t divorce her, darling. Isn’t that a rather expensive thing to do? I promise I won’t embarrass you. After all, I have a husband too. Nice big happy family, aren’t we?

And where would you go from here? That doesn’t make sense. We’ll talk about it.

And now about next week-end. I’m not even sure we will come. The children will probably decide to have measles or something, if I plan. But Nils will drop me off, about 2: any place you say, and we can talk for a couple of hours...how about the Museum of Modern Art. Now there is a nice quiet surrounding, if the art of it doesn’t grate too much. Heavens, I don’t even know if you like Picasso! Never mind, there are two weeks in which to talk about it. I can’t think when else, what with family and all, I can come. Even then, I must leave at 4: to meet the Mickelsons in Brooklyn.

Call me when you can. I don’t dare call you now. Tell me when I may. The hours between 12:30 and 2: are ideal. After 2: Janey wakes up, and the day gets busy again.

Again, a million thanks for coming last week. Come again soon, my dear.....my dear, when I would call you every cherished name in every language......querido, amado,......I even learned some Russian ones once, and whispered them to the wind......

It was a wonderful day. I’m sorry we felt constraint. The world is so glorious now. Anything is possible.



To Carl DeSuze:

June 7, 1948

Mi Querido Amigo,

Can you forgive typewriting today? I am so relaxed, even the thought of going for the pen seems unnecessary exertion.
[Therein speaks a fast typist!]


The company has gone. Suddenly the house seems very quiet, peaceful. Was it ever heard of that ten days after an operation, a person should have a houseful of guests on her hands! Well, yes, I suppose so, and people have lived thru it. I did. But I’m quite strong now, tho I did resent that the short time for listening to you, or even writing you was denied this week.

A week ago Friday night Nils’ brother, Teddy, came. A character straight from “The Iceman Cometh” incidently, I realize since reading the play – salt of the earth, one of Nature’s noblemen with a Brooklyn “beejesus” accent. Very sweet and tolerant to anyone who is not a) Catholic, b) Polish, c) Negro, d) Jewish e) why go on? – but very sweet and tolerant to me, of course. Yes, Teddy came, to get his car out of our garage where it has been for a long time, but the ornery thing wouldn’t start, so he had to stay and work on it, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Bejezuz, but I got tired of Bejezuz!

Saturday morning Smith Hempstone Oliver came. Fellow Sports Car Club and scion of old family Boston and Newport (his mother is an X’n Scientist leader and writes poetry for the monitor under the name of Mary H. Oliver. Poetry like my “Spring Fog,” so there’s still hope for me!) Came “Hempie” as we call him, in his MG, with Christine, (of all people) and her Fluffy Cat. “Thought you’d like to see little Christine, so I brought her along”... Yes, I remember, long ago we had said, next time you drive up from Washington (he is curator of transportation at the Smithsonian) be sure to bring Christine. So he picked Memorial Day weekend, and me still eating off the mantelpiece!

That was Saturday. Fortunately before shopping time. So we filled the house with food and settled down.

Sunday everyone slept late, but the cook. I got up and made breakfast, dinner, and a picnic supper. Oh, of course Christine helped. She is a great help. She made the beds and washed the dishes, every other word accented with M’gawd. M’gawd, but I am tired of M’gawd!

And everyone got tight on Bourbon...which only aggravated my recuperation but I couldn’t stay sober and have no fun. And the Cat, being strictly a house cat, scratched and piddled in every corner, which because I’m supposed to be a tolerant hostess, I laughed off and endured. Cats! They smell! Oh, well.

Monday, the house shrieked with Indianapolis Speedway Race broadcasts. Oh, Carl, I’m so sick of Sports Cars! And so lonely for one good playwright, one quiet little sculptor...one, just one, small artiste of some kind.

Christine enjoys the artistic side, but she is now concentrating on Hempie, so she is also concentrating on his hobby of Sports Cars. At least her change of heart relieves the tension. Nils, and his violin obligato to her piano, is no longer the object of her affection, which helps, as you can imagine. But suddenly, I discover, it doesn’t really matter. Oh Carly, I’ve grown so cold, cold, cold.


More to come - there are many more letters - when I have time to transcribe them...

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