In the Velvet of Universal Emptiness

By Dayton Lummis

This is the fifth volume of what is now known as The Notational Quintet, a collection of acerbic and penetrating views of our contemporary society. The author tends toward pessimism but there are occasional bright rays that engender some hope. In reading these pieces you may be disturbedoccasionally outragedbut not bored. Good for deck reading on SS Titanic

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491762615

Dayton Lummis

Dayton Lummis is now of that advanced age where there is a confusing amount to look back on, and a frightening current scenario to confront and evaluate. His education and experience (Yale University and various Museum directorships), plus informal degrees from “The University of North Beach” and “The Cripple Creek School of Hard Knocks,” have enabled him to navigate through “The Sea of Sorrow and Regret.” He lives in a casita in Santa Fe, NM, with his pet armadillo “Crusty.”

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Also by Dayton Lummis

Closets of Mercy

High Lonesome

Dust Devils

Captain Midnight and the California Dream

When Earl Was King Neptune

Casita Dreemz

Constructing Hornbeck

States of Mind

The Millennial Deer

Clippings From the Vine

Not Wanted

Vanishing Point

Martian Desert Afternoon

Spaceships and Liquor

Notes: The Psychic Dislocations of Dayton Lummis

Ramblin’ Bob

Poor Man’s Medicine

Fly Me To The Moon

Death By Device

In the Velvet of

UNIVERSAL

EMPTINESS

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DAYTON LUMMIS

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IN THE VELVET OF UNIVERSAL EMPTINESS

Copyright © 2015 Dayton Lummis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-6260-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6261-5 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 03/27/2015

CONTENTS

PART I

Introduction

1 ~ ‘Inna Eas’

2 ~ The Golden State

3 ~ Big Open

4 ~ Lonesome Ranch

5 ~ Stories

PART II

Introduction, Part II

1 ~ Addictive Inverse

2 ~ Angular Distance

3 ~ Apollonian Circles

4 ~ Argand Diagram

5 ~ Assimilation Illusion

6 ~ Axis of Symmetry

7 ~ Direct Injection

To Wilson K. Bear Kinkead, 1936-2014,

my Haverford School 1954 classmate,

fellow camper at Allagash in Maine, companion on European trip1958,

and old friend. Bear was one of the good guys.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

It is pretty evident that there is some obvious symbolism to both the cover and the title of this volume.

The cover photograph is of space, and the title is taken from a line from the Russian poet Pushkin, In the velvet of universal emptiness. Something that unavoidably awaits us all…

There are certain theoreticians (who may have too much time on their hands) who concern themselves with various studies of time—how to measure it, contain it, bend it or control it. Beyond the sorts of measurable time that we experience in the mundane world of our daily lives on Earth. When they venture into the realm of what we call space they encounter things unknowable, where there is neither time nor date, because you can neither capture time nor run out of it. Time runs out on you, and a vast sheet of darkness awaits…

As I write this in October 2014 the Ebola virus casts its shadow, mostly in West Africa but perhaps slowly spreading elsewhere. Meredith says that it is nothing to worry about, and I am hoping that she is right. In two weeks or so we will be in New York, and I think it advisable to stay away from Times Square.

We are now sliding through the fall toward winter, which The Farmer’s Almanac suggests will again be harsh in the East with above average snowfall. That I can deal with—if the power stays on.

There was an interesting article recently by a political historian of the Middle East titled The Long, Long Road to Nowhere. The theme is that any war or hostilities in the Middle East are unwinnable. This thinking seems to grow out of the very unwise decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein—which Hoffman and I vigorously opposed, but we were not consulted. Now we are on that old slippery slope, sliding downward into troubles with evidently no end in sight. Samuel Huntington was right in his Clash of Civilizations. But if you have not read that book you do not know what I am talking about.

People seem afraid to take proper steps for self-preservation, not wanting to appear non-liberal or something. Years ago I coined the phrase, or notion, There is such a thing as liberalizing yourself out of existence. And that seems to me to be just about what we are doing now. Good jazz tonight in the lounge of El Meson! Things could be worse, and perhaps will be…

Certain civil rights figures are now blaming racism for the death from Ebola of the Liberian man in Dallas, the inference being that he was initially sent home from the hospital because he was a black man with no insurance.

More riots in the St. Louis area because another black man has been shot by white police.

The President sitting in the White House holding his head in his hands, his wife berating him for getting her into a situation that she hates.

The State of California bone dry and burning. Hot winds whispering over Black Rock Desert, empty and silent now that the fools of Burning Man are gone. Somewhere in the hills of Western Oregon the smell of apple pie cooking, a soft breeze rippling the trees.

‘INNA EAS’

I was born in New York City on the 30th of October 1936 at the Gotham Hospital, which no longer exists. I don’t know what happened to it—just gone. Shortly after this event I was taken to the spacious two bedroom apartment of my parents at 310, East 75th Street. Not luxurious, but considering there was a depression it was more than comfortable. They even had a maid. Not bad for a mostly out of work actor. Let me back up and tell a bit about how all this came together.

My parents met while they were playing in summer stock in St. John, Nova Scotia, in the summer of 1935. My mother had graduated the year before from Smith College and had moved to Greenwich Village with the rather unsuitable notion of becoming a professional actress. She lived at the Rehearsal Club and took acting lessons, which her father did not think much of but paid for anyway. Anything for Dor his darling daughter.

My father came to acting through a more circuitous route, and I have to reach a way back to get started on this. He came from a wealthy and socially prominent family, was raised in a mansion in Summit, New Jersey, with winter quarters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan because his mother liked to be near the action. His father, an avid sportsman, probably would have been just as happy to remain in Summit year round. He owned a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, was a principal in the firm of Lummis & Day, and had been voted most popular man on the Exchange. There was one thing rather different about Charles A. Lummis. He was Catholic. Also, he had been born in 1849 and did not get married until 1900. Partly because there was a paucity of suitable Catholic girls in New York, and very much because he enjoyed being a bachelor. That he was Catholic was because his father had married a girl from the immensely rich but Irish Catholic O’Brien family. In 1900 Charles A., as he was known, took for a wife an attractive 21-year-old young woman of a wealthy French Catholic family, the Duhains. Marion and Charles A. were not especially suited to each other, but they maintained as was proper in those days. My father, born in 1903, and his older brother Charles Junior, born in 1901, attended a Catholic prep school in Summit, Carlton Academy. They were delivered each morning to this somewhat pretentious institution in a carriage driven by a English coachman. It seems that Charles A. was not much of a believer in the automobile. This antiquated means of conveyance gave the two brothers an early sense of being somewhat different. Their father died suddenly in 1918. Waiting for the estate to be settled mother and two sons lived on a small rented estate in East Hampton. Then Momma took the two boys and hustled off to a Grand Tour of Europe and North Africa. This would be about 1921, when Americans could live like kings over there (across the pond, as a certain generation past used to say). for pennies, or dimes. The stay in Europe lasted over two years, and served for my father as his college education. Needless to say, he remained rather English or Continental the rest of his life. Now, the plan had always been for Charles, Junior to take his father’s seat on the Stock Exchange, and for young Dayton to go into diplomatic service. The first thing that went wrong was that young Charlie met in London the daughter of the Peruvian Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, fell in love and schemed with the First National City Bank of New York to create a post for him in Lima. Which they did, and exit Charles, Junior from any thoughts of the New York Stock Exchange. As for Dayton, upon returning to the USA he was instructed to enroll in the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University. He did not last long there, but absconded to Southern California to study acting. His best friend out there was a young radio actor named John McIntire, who went on to quite a successful career. Unfortunately his pal Dayton did not. The two men traveled East in a Ford roadster in early 1935, headed to New York where Dayton would be best man in John’s marriage to an already quite successful actress, Jeanette Nolan. Meanwhile, Momma had married a Russian baron in Menton, France, one Baron Nikolai Korff, who seemed to have gotten out of Russia with a bit of money, some style—he had been a page at the Czar’s Court—and enough sly charm (as my father put it) to convince a wealthy American widow to marry him. My father said it was a marriage of extreme convenience—the baron got the money and widow Lummis got the title. They were both extremely satisfied. Later, in New York, where my mother and her husband’s mother became great pals, my mother said, Marion just loves being the Baroness!

O.K. I believe this is enough background to get us up to 310, East 75th Street in the late 1930s. I think that my mother realized rather early on that she may have made something of a mistake. Her husband was handsome, urbane, a good dresser—but he was aloof, withdrawn, given to secretiveness—with some good reason, as it turned out. As has been mentioned, he was mostly an out of work actor who did not seem to try too terribly hard to land roles in much of anything. Some radio work came his way, steered either by his pal John McIntire or his wife’s father, Paul Lewis, vice-president of NW Ayer. He was living well over his means and by 1939 things were getting quite dire. Running on empty, one might say. He did have one old ace in the hole that was going to save him, he thought. He had an elderly uncle, Benjamin Rush Lummis, who was a wealthy, debonair man about town. Uncle Ben belonged to the St. Nicholas Society and other clubs for prominent New Yorkers, kept a horse in the Seventh Regiment Armory for riding in Central Park, and generally cut quite a dashing figure. His business was a discreet real estate agency that catered to only the top people, very, very exclusive. Uncle Ben loved his nephew Dayton and simply adored his pretty young red haired wife and their small son. As mentioned, Uncle Ben was elderly, over eighty, and not altogether in good health. He could be reasonably expected to be moving on relatively soon, and it was not illogical for Dayton to expect then something of a financial resuscitation. He was wrong, most terribly wrong. Uncle Ben did pass on in the year of 1939, but when the estate was probated there was virtually nothing. He left my father only a few thousand dollars, which went to clear up some debts, quite a few of which had been engendered by my mother at Saks.

I remember a few things about New York between 1936 and 1940. The Third Avenue El, which was just down the block. I remember being perplexed that when I rode with Daddy (my mother had a Ford roadster that she zipped around Manhattan in. Could park right in front of Macy’s she said!) you could see into people’s apartments. In the summer, men in their undershirts. The Bronx Zoo. Sledding in Central Park. Once there was some kind of accident. A kid was hurt. I remember the blood on the snow. The big Con Ed power plant on the East River which we could see from the rear of the apartment. And, most of all, the World’s Fair, the exhibit of trains and the indoor World of Tomorrow, which I remember changing from day to night. Also the Payne Whitney Nursery School, which was supposed to get me an early start on the right path in life. If I had stayed on to grow up in New York, who knows?

There was another kid in our building, a bit older than I, who had a vast collection of toys. I remember being impressed. Our neighborhood was not fancy—in fact, still isn’t, or that was my impression when I visited it a few years ago. It had a Hungarian population, and there were small stores where one could buy stuff like paprika, which my mother used in her cooking. And, of course, Cristede’s. It seemed a comfortable upper-middle class life. Baron Korff had died in France and the Baroness returned to New York. She took a rather sumptuous apartment on East 57th Street, with an Irish maid named Ellie. The apartment was decorated with Russian icons, and there was a bear rug and a tiger rug with which I as a child was quite fascinated. I called my grandmother the Baroness Bon Ma, probably at her instruction. The Baroness and my mother got on famously, and got together for tea at the St. Regis Hotel quite regularly. My mother had quite a few good friends in New York, and my father seemed to be increasingly absent from her socializing. She had a number of wealthy friends from Smith College, and I remember her saying that when she would have guests in to the apartment my father would excuse himself and go into the bedroom/office saying he had to work on his papers, mysterious to my mother as those were. He was just plain antisocial, and it bothered my mother. That is how things were at the end of the 1930s.

It all came to a very abrupt end. In early 1940 we were evicted from the apartment. Ever after that my father, being unable to accept that he had failed, would say, When the Jews put us out… My mother would get furious when she heard that he said that, and countered, He said that? Of course they put him out—he hadn’t paid the rent in three months!

I remember my grandmother’s grey, four-door 1939 Ford sedan waiting outside the apartment building to carry us and our meager possessions. (The furniture and everything else had to be sold to cover various debts.) I was too young to be depressed, but I am sure that my mother was crushed, even though she knew that the marriage was not working out. She loved New York! Over the Pulaski Skyway, across New Jersey and on to the wooded Philadelphia suburb of Strafford and my grandparents’ two-acre place called Shadowild. A new life was beginning.

One of my mother’s major mistakes had been dragging her husband over and over again down for weekends at her parents’ home. He never felt comfortable with people who were employed and successful in spite of the depression, and he was demeaned by hints that if he moved to Philadelphia his father-in-law would could get him a real job. But, when we relocated to Strafford he did move to Philadelphia and managed to get a job announcing for the radio station WCAU. He was promptly fired, however, for his manner of pronouncing European names with European pronunciation. To the Jewish owners of the station this was unpardonable, anti-Semitic, even. So he was out of a job when the war broke out. He managed to get a position as manager and news broadcaster of the city owned radio station across the river in Camden, New Jersey, which at that time was a perfectly respectable mostly white working class small city. It was run tightly and mostly for the benefit of a mobster, Mayor Bruno, and his cronies. The radio station was in the city hall, reaching only the immediate area of Camden, was pretty small potatoes but paid enough for a room at the working man’s Plaza Hotel and occasional trips by subway and train out to Strafford to see his son. My father had been approached by a Commander Dycke, a navy man, with something about Office of War Information but nothing ever came of it. At 39 he was too old for the draft and anyway he thought that as manager of WCAM he was in some way contributing to the war effort.

In Pennsylvania I was enrolled in the Booth School, a progressive private school, which I attended until 1945. My mother worked at a department store in Philadelphia, Oppenheim Collins, and volunteered one night a week as a hostess at the Stage Door Canteen, a place for servicemen. There she made friends with a young woman with twins whose husband had been an early war casualty. We all became fast friends, me especially with the female of the twins, Louise (whom I still think of with the greatest fondness). They were frequently out to Strafford, and occasionally I would stay overnight at their comfortable house on Chestnut Street in West Philadelphia, a large row house with a spacious porch and a striped canvas awning. It was a quiet (gas rationing) tree shaded street, where we played baseball followed by a visit to the corner store for sodas. It was a pretty good life for city kids back then. Not long ago I drove down that section of Chestnut Street and was utterly appalled by the decay that has taken place. I don’t care how poor people are, they do not have to let that sort of degradation take place. Rolando grew up poor in South Philadelphia as a kid. He said, We was all poor in that neighborhood, but we didn’t throw no mattresses in the street. Yes, poor but proud.

That pretty much sets the stage for everything that follows on these pages. Hopefully the pieces will fit together, or if they don’t they will at least make some sort of sense. Recently a chap I know out in San Francisco, a born and bred New Yorker, expressed amazement at my New York origins. He had always taken me as a sort of rough, eccentric West Coast sort of character, even though he knew that I had some early association with Pennsylvania and now spent considerable time there, or here.

As I put together these pieces I realize how much is left out. Almost nothing about my time at The Haverford School and Yale. There are great gaps from periods when I was living either on the West Coast or in Colorado. The mind picking around in the past is uniquely selective. Of the more contemporary pieces, well, I think that those mostly speak for themselves and render into something bordering almost philosophic meanderings. Some might say, psychotic—but I cannot be the judge of that. At least I am not dragging a lobster about on a pink ribbon as that Frenchman did. Gerard de Nerval, I think it was. And even he was not a nut. Not completely…

The Baroness passed away in 1949, after a long period of being bed-ridden with most painful and crippling arthritis. I remember visiting her in that apartment on East 57th Street with my mother during the War. We would have ridden the train up from Philadelphia for the day. Occasionally my father would be present from Camden, and more often when after the war he had moved back to New York and was actually getting a few minor parts in Broadway productions, and better parts in summer stock in places like Cragmoor in the Catskills. When the Baroness died her funeral was held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, as she had given considerable sums to the Arch Diocese. I remember the funeral quite well, especially the black band my father wore on the left sleeve of his dark grey flannel suit. A Catholic thing, I think. Quakers, to which I had been mostly exposed, did not go in for that sort of thing. After the service my father took us all to an early dinner at Shraft’s, although I am sure my mother would have preferred the St. Regis. A year later, on money my father inherited from his mother, he moved west to Southern California and bought that place in the Malibu Mountains. He actually did achieve a modest amount of success in motion pictures and television as a competent character actor. A glance at the Internet confirms that. Uncle Charlie carted off a lot of valuable antiques to Lima, Peru, including quite a few semi-valuable icons. I have two, and several mementos of Baron Korff, including a small silver plated (shot) cup with a double Russian eagle, out of which I drank some brandy at dinner with Meredith last October at the Grand Hotel Pupp in Karlsbad, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, a place where if the Baron had not stayed he very well might have. I thought the gesture fitting. Meredith looks to the future—not the past…

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Dr. Steckbeck

Ah, it is a beautiful spring morning in Strafford, PA, in 1936. There are ominous rumbles from the other side, as Mr. Lewis puts it, unpleasant and troublesome events in Germany, but in this tranquil Philadelphia suburb things could not be more peaceful. There is very light traffic on Old Eagle School Road, a car every ten or so minutes. At Strafford Station, on the outbound side, Chris McCann stands by the rear door of his black taxi, dressed in a dark suit with matching cap. Mr. McCann, as everyone in Strafford calls him, prides himself in being a proper sort of Irishman, and touches his cap as one enters his taxi; whether he does this for his colored passengers is not known. He very well may do so. On this particularly fine day he is waiting for the 11:20 train from Philadelphia, one of the Paoli Locals. As the train pulls into the platform up the steps from the taxi stand Mr. McCann opens the rear door of his vehicle expectantly. He has been at this stand since 1930, when he purchased the concession from the previous driver, a very distinguished and handsome light-skinned colored man by the name of Enfield Warwick, who was married to a very pretty Creole woman. It is said around Strafford that Mr. Warwick was somehow related to the Earl of Warwick, and that when he and his wife were in England during the 1920s Mr. Warwick contacted His Lordship and introduced himself, with the result that Mr. and Mrs. Warwick were invited to Warwick Castle for dinner, an event which they enjoyed immensely and at which no mention or any sort of allusion was made to their dusky complexions. (This tale caused my mother to gaze upon Enfield Warwick with a sort of awe, which she did not transfer to Mr. McCann, proper though he was) As the Paoli Local departs to the west a few passengers descend the steps toward the waiting taxi. Among them is a tall, thin man in his fifties dressed in a dark suit and wearing a homburg. Seeing the taxi driver he says, Ah, good day, Mr. McCann, I do believe I’ll walk today. Mr. McCann touches his cap and says, smiling, As you wish, sir. Two ladies with shopping bags from Wanamaker’s are entering the taxi.

The tall, thin man is Doctor Steckbeck, Professor of Botany at the University of Pennsylvania. Mrs. Lewis has met the good Doctor Steckbeck at Morris Arboretum, and has prevailed upon him to come out to Strafford to advise the members of her Garden Club on their activities, and to give little inspirational talks. This he has been doing for several years in the spring and fall during the 1930s, and these visits to the pleasant suburbs provide him with the illusion that no Depression is taking place. During each visit to Mrs. Lewis’ comfortable home he is rewarded with a good meal prepared by the cook, Mabel Cox, but which does have to be eaten in the presence of the Garden Club members. Nice as they are, Mrs. Cabeen, Miss Exley, Miss Hammersly and the others can be just a trifle boring. The continuous talk is really a bit much for the contemplative professor, who is used to academic silence.

On this particular morning the good Doctor Steckbeck is feeling in very fine spirits indeed. He takes a good, deep breath of the clean Strafford air, soon to be heavy, he thinks, with blossoms of all sorts. Before long it will be June, the month of honeysuckle and the wild rose as he remembers from his long-ago student days for some reason. He starts up Old Eagle School Road, noticing that the Bailey estate to his left is somewhat neglected. Effects of the Depression? he wonders, thinking that old Mr. Bailey and his hired man are both quite on in years and probably don’t notice things much. Mrs. Lewis has told him that the hired man’s main duty these days is to patrol the grounds at night, tapping on the stone lions at the end of the driveway every hour on the hour so Mr. Bailey might know that all is well. Still, the Doctor thinks, it would do to have a crew of men in there to go over the entire five acres and put things in shape. Not his business, though! He turns left onto Homestead Road, walks down to the bridge over the small stream and sits for a moment. Not that he is at all tired, he just wants to savor the pleasure of this spring-time scene. Up a slight rise, beyond a small dirt road, and to the right is Shadowild, the two acre home of Mrs. Lewis. He knows the ladies will be waiting, and so will lunch, so he gets up and walks on, taking the diagonal path up through the woods to the house, admiring some of the wildflowers that are coming up through the leaves, the sort of natural woodland appearance that Mrs. Lewis has cultivated on his advice. Rather pleasant looking, he thinks, Pennsylvania woodland, that is what we are all about. He can hear the ladies chattering ahead, up on the porch where lunch will be served—he reflects that chattering is not complimentary, but serious conversation it cannot be called. Ah well, duty calls, he thinks, and straightening his tie up the hill and out of the bushes he strides. Good Doctor Steckbeck!

Often by the end of these short days, which comes about four o’clock, he will find himself quite tired, and will doze on the train to town. There is a certain strain in dealing with these good souls, particularly Mrs. Lewis, who seems very much in charge of everyone and everything, rather too much so, he thinks. But he admires the woman’s energy and intelligence, and certainly her grasp of botany. Now on the train toward town Doctor Steckbeck finds himself musing on his own life, and the phrase June, the month of honeysuckle and the wild rose keeps recurring to him; it seems to epitomize the cleanness and freshness of Pennsylvania, fair-haired, Germanic Pennsylvania girls in fields of rich clover. The Doctor finds himself musing on things that seem to be absent in his life, things that he has missed. He wonders what it would be like to live in a house like that of Mrs. Lewis, with a family, to be in business and have lots of money and go to New York, stay at the St. Regis Hotel, go to Broadway shows, eat at fine restaurants, things like that? It seems another, unreal world. He has met Mr. Lewis once, he had been home and had given him a ride to the station in a rainstorm. Seemed nice enough, a businessman, but they had talked of little during the short ride except of the respective small Pennsylvania towns they were from. At the station Mr. Lewis had said, Nice to meet you, Doctor in a sort of dismissive way, or so he thought, reflecting that he never felt comfortable with businessmen. Doctor Steckbeck had been raised on a farm in South-central Pennsylvania, indeed he still has five brothers who are farmers in that region. He had been a quiet, studious boy, fascinated in an abstract way by growing things. He was not cut out for the physical life of a farmer. His mother had told the Lutheran pastor, This one is going to get an education, be a professor of farming! And so he did, botany rather than farming. His family was quite proud of him, even his stern father who tended to not think much of professors. He had been an extremely studious young man, and had pursued his academic career with a single-mindedness to the exclusion of almost all other things. He had not had time for sports, girlfriends, or any of the other distractions usual for young men. His academic ability was rewarded by appointment to the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. His research and scholarly books and articles left no time for any sort of social life. So it is something of a welcome diversion to be invited out to Mrs. Lewis’s house. He finds himself looking forward to the occasions. A welcome relief from the small, cramped apartment he occupies near the University, from the routines of the study and teaching of botany in the professional sense. He looks forward to these trips to the suburbs as social occasions, but not ones to be overdone.

On a warm June afternoon in 1940, as Doctor Steckbeck is preparing to walk to the station to catch the 4:16 train to town, Mrs. Lewis suggests that he stay on for dinner, indeed prevails upon him, saying that some very interesting people from Pendle Hill will be here, Pendle Hill being a Quaker retreat that Mrs. Lewis sometimes attends. Doctor Steckbeck really has no desire to stay on, and tries to beg off, claiming tiredness and pressing academic duties, but Mrs. Lewis simply will not take no for an answer. So the Doctor reluctantly agrees, and sits quietly in the back yard, under the large tulip poplar trees by the little replica of a Valley Forge soldiers’ hut that the Lewises evidently have constructed, perhaps as a playhouse for their now grown children. He reads a copy of The New Yorker magazine, and occasionally dozes off in the warm late afternoon. Around six he notices voices from around to the front of the house, and the sounds of automobiles. Mrs. Lewis’s guests are arriving, and the Doctor fights off the urge to simply walk down through the woods and on to the railroad station. He decides to make the best of it, and walks up to the porch where a number of people are gathering. There seem to be about twelve or fifteen people, and a number of them appear to be European—refugees, he thinks, and this makes him nervous. He does not like to be taken for a German. Just a botanist is how he describes himself to the people that Mrs. Lewis introduces him to, as he feels a growing sense of unease. There are drinks on a sideboard, and the Doctor helps himself to a glass of sherry, and then a second. A languid dusk is beginning to descend over the house and gardens. He can hear a freight train rattling west on the other side of the Bailey estate. He muses on what Mrs. Lewis told him about old Mr. Bailey’s love of bagpipes, how on summer evenings when he had dinner guests he would hire a piper and have him start playing way up Woodland Road, so he could hear the pipe in the distance and growing closer as the man walked down the dirt road toward the Bailey house. The Doctor accepts a plate of creamed chicken over a waffle—a rather Pennsylvania sort of dish, he thinks—and stands on the terrace. A few fireflies flicker in the growing darkness. He worries about walking to the station in the darkness but deflects this by chatting with a few people about the University. Rather pleasant, really, he thinks of the evening. Earlier he had been introduced to Mrs. Lewis’s daughter, an attractive red-haired woman who evidently had majored in art history at Smith College—a subject he knows little about—and her husband, a rather dapper-looking fellow from New York, an actor he is told, who looks rather ill-at-ease for someone of that profession. This couple has a child, a troublesome, crying child of about three who had been earlier carrying on but is now put to bed in the house. The Doctor noticed Mr. Lewis earlier in the evening but not since, and he wonders if perhaps he has gone off to his club, or wherever it is that such people go when they wish to get away. He detaches himself from the guests and goes inside the house to use the bathroom, and upon emerging from this facility he is surprised to find Mr. Lewis seated quietly in the living room, smoking a cigar, a drink on a table, reading a book. Mr. Lewis looks up and says, pleasantly, Why good evening, Doctor, how are you? As he puts the book down the Doctor sees that it is Last Train from Berlin; he is rather surprised, thinking that business men don’t read, especially things like this. Mr. Lewis motions to a chair. Sit down, why don’t you Doctor? he says, And enjoy a respite from my wife’s gaggle of guests. I’ll drive you to the station shortly. I imagine you’ll want to be getting back to town. Doctor Steckbeck feels a certain warmth for this businessman who seems to grasp the situation, sitting here quietly detached, reading this current volume about events unfolding in far-off Europe. He sits down and watches Mr. Lewis, who seems to be in thought. Mr. Lewis takes a sip of his drink, puffs on the cigar and says, Doctor, you are of Pennsylvania Germanic stock, are you not? The Doctor simply nods, wondering where this line of conversation is leading. So am I, Mr. Lewis says, on my mother’s side. My ancestor Peter Erhardt settled on the banks of the Susquehanna River in 1702, having come to this continent seeking religious freedom. Perhaps your people did so too? Again the Doctor simply nods, preferring to remain silent, not knowing where Mr. Lewis is heading. So, Mr. Lewis says, We have something in common. And now the damned Germans are threatening all of Europe, indeed world peace itself. Our boys are going to be fighting over there very soon indeed—it’s the whole despicable thing all over again. Not a proud time for our German heritage, would you agree, Doctor? Doctor Steckbeck clears his throat and says, Mr. Lewis, you are certainly right, it is dangerous situation and we shall most likely be dragged into it as you say, but… Mr. Lewis suddenly rises, saying, Yes, yes, Doctor, dangerous times indeed. Now let’s get you down to the station, train comes along in about ten minutes…

The two men ride in silence the short distance to the station in Mr. Lewis’s sleek Lincoln automobile. At the inbound station, a quaint Victorian gingerbread-style structure that has been moved out from Centennial Park in Philadelphia, Mr. Lewis gets out to stand beside the Doctor in the quiet and dark parking lot. He places his hand on his shoulder and gives him a pat, saying, You know, I studied Fine Arts at Penn after I graduated from West Chester, but I decided I had better make some money so I dropped it and went into business—advertising as I suppose you know…Well, I hear your train coming. Awfully nice of you to spend this time with my wife and her gardening pals. They respect you for it and so do I. Here’s your train now—plenty of time to get up those steps, no need to hurry. Good seeing you, Doctor.

On the train to town Dr. Steckbeck finds himself rather liking Mr. Lewis, wishing that he had anticipated, understood better, what was going through the man’s mind back there in the living room. Something about German heritage, something prompted by that book Mr. Lewis was reading, Last Train from Berlin. A thoughtful businessman, Mr. Lewis is, thinks Dr. Steckbeck, now wishing that they had had more time to talk, thinking Mr. Lewis a man who in different circumstances might be a friend, a needed friend, to whom he could unburden himself of the confused thoughts he has about his own German heritage and what is happening in Europe. This man Hitler, he had thought in the beginning that he might be right, but then came rumors, probably true, of unsettling and troubling events and policies. And now Germany seems intent on conquering all of Europe, the world even. It is madness! the Doctor thinks, blind, immoral madness! He would like to talk more with Mr. Lewis about all of this, but feels that somehow this will never come to pass. His visits to Shadowild will go on as before, luncheon with the ladies, small-talk, and helpful hints on how to make the gardens grow. Small distraction for an academic of sixty in a world that is coming to pieces…He dozes and wakes with a start at the conductor calling 30th Street Station. A short, quiet walk to his apartment. He is not used to getting home so late—his routine is upset!

We are now thrust into a sort of detached manner of viewing the good Doctor Steckbeck, his visits to Shadowild, indeed many of the goings on in that household. First, we see the Doctor through the eyes of a seven-year-old child who glimpses a tall, dark figure through the large window at the landing on the stairs, moving about in the garden with other darkly clad figures, conferring with Mrs. Lewis, pointing at things and talking amongst themselves. There is an Italian man, too, a workman, dark and wiry, in his thirties, perhaps, who is planting things, moving rocks around, and trundling a wheelbarrow full of tools. The small boy knows this man—he is Roland, the gardener, who works for Mrs. Lewis, his grandmother, on weekends. The dark figures moving about in the garden are unknown to him, and he asks his mother about them, watching them through the window. His mother tells him, The tall man is Doctor Steckbeck. He is a teacher from the University in Philadelphia. He is a friend of your grandmother, and comes out to help her with the garden. He teaches about gardens, about plants and growing things. The woman out there is Kate Birkenbine (another German?), and she is his assistant. She is what is called a landscape architect, which is someone who designs gardens and plants in parks. She is helping your grandmother with the arrangement of the upper terrace, where we like to sit in the evenings. And of course you know Roland, he is here all the time. He is helping them with the heavy work, lifting and so forth. They are all your friends. Why, Kate Birkenbine (English?) wrote a poem for you, she calls it Lullaby for Tony—it’s quite nice, she is a sensitive person and a good writer. The mother is distracted, trying to placate the child, who is worried and left alone a good deal of the time, to play in the yard or to explore in the woods. The boy is concerned, not sure why he and his mother left the apartment in New York so suddenly and came here to Grandmother’s to live. He likes Mabel, and the dog Taffy, a Welsh Terrier that his Grandfather has purchased, thinking that a boy should at least have a dog for company. But he wonders where his father is, why he only comes to visit once in a while. Where’s Daddy? he asks. The mother frowns and says, Daddy is living in Camden, you know, across the river from Philadelphia. He has a job there, at a radio station—remember, we heard him on the radio? And he has to live close to his job. She doesn’t sound convincing, but the boy’s attention has wandered again to the dark figures moving about outside the landing window. He thinks that Doctor Steckbeck looks like a scarecrow, and that Kate Birkenbine looks like a witch, shriveled and old-looking. He admires Roland, who is dark and strong, and who brought him an Italian sandwich one time, in a long roll.

There is a war, a big war called a World War, going on across the ocean, in Europe, and somewhere else against the Japs. The boy has seen newsreels of all this down at the Anthony Wayne Theatre in Wayne, and in the issues of Life magazine that come to the house. It is all rather exciting and frightening. His mother contributes to the war effort, first as a volunteer hostess at the Stage Door Canteen in Philadelphia, and then as one of a group of young women who give parties for wounded and maimed officers who are recuperating at the nearby Valley Forge Army Hospital. The boy understands very little of all this. His world goes on as if there is no war, and most of the time he doesn’t think about it at all, when he is hiking in the woods with Taffy, or playing down by the stream that flows into the Bailey pond, catching water striders. His mother’s attention is caught by Mabel, who has come through the hall doorway from the kitchen, something she rarely does. Miss Dorothy, she says excitedly, It’s on the radio. They done invaded that Europe. D-Day, the President call it. He say this is the beginning of how we beat the Germans, then the Japs, too. He say we gone to have peace next year. Do you think that be so, Miss Dorothy? The mother has turned to the concerned, excited black woman. I hope so, Mabel, I truly hope so, she says softly. The boy is aware that something maybe important has happened. Oh, praise the Lord, Mabel says quietly, turning back toward the kitchen. The mother goes out into the spring day to share the news with her mother and the others. The boy watches through the window, sees the dark figures nodding and smiling. Roland looks up from his work and smiles, too. They all seem pleased at what they are hearing. The boy goes into the kitchen to ask Mabel more about what all this is…

Now we see these figures on yellowed and curled photographs from a long time ago. How odd and old-fashioned they look. Only Roland seems to look much the same today as he did then, clad in workman’s rough clothing. The war is winding down, Germany has surrendered and the war in the Pacific is being drawn ever closer to the Japanese homeland. Roland has spent the war employed in the local bronze factory, a defense exemption, and he has prospered with a side-line in the black market. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis know nothing of this, of course, and are pleased that Roland can still come on Saturdays. Someday Roland will joke to the boy, then a young man, when he asks what Roland will do if there is another war: Same thing I did in the last one—make money in the black market, says Roland. It is a spring day, a Saturday, in 1945, and Doctor Steckbeck and Kate Birkenbine are at Shadowild, along with a few of the garden club ladies. Mrs. Lewis has been feeling somewhat down lately, and the mood of this particular day is rather quiet. Kate Birkenbine leaves before lunch, claiming pressing business in Philadelphia where she lives. The Doctor stays on for lunch, somewhat uneasily, and afterwards stands on the lawn with the ladies chatting. Mrs. Lewis has gone somewhat abruptly into the house and it is understood that she will not be reappearing. The Doctor glances at his watch, thinking that it is time to walk to the station. Mr. Lewis walks out of the house—he is dressed for golf—and says, Come, Doctor, I’ll give you a lift to the station. The Doctor bids the ladies goodbye and climbs into the Lincoln with Mr. Lewis. On the ride to the station Mr. Lewis says something about his wife not being at all well, about her going to a place in Massachusetts where she can rest for a while. The Doctor mumbles something about understanding. Then Mr. Lewis deposits him at the station, somewhat perfunctorily he thinks, and drives off with a wave of his hand. There is some sort of gulf between the two men. We don’t know what it is, and neither do they. Just a distance that grew somehow, like things that invade the very finest of gardens, thinks the Doctor. He climbs the stairs to the platform, and waits for the maroon train to approach from the west. He wonders if perhaps this might not be his last visit to Shadowild. Mrs. Lewis is certainly not herself these days, he thinks. Is this the way things come to an end? Abruptly, unplanned? Now the train is coming, and he feels in his pocket for his ticket. He thinks that he will be retiring from the University before too long, and wonders what he will do. He somehow thought that these visits to Shadowild would go on forever, there was such a sense of solidity and permanence about things there, but now he realizes that nothing is so. As the train nears Philadelphia the phrase June, the month of honeysuckle and the wild rose jumps into his mind. He suddenly misses the rich Pennsylvania farmlands of his youth, images of fair-haired Germanic, Pennsylvania girls standing in rich fields of clover. He wonders why he is thinking of these things. He wonders what thoughts Mr. Lewis has of the outcome of the war; they have never again since that time five or six years before discussed anything even remotely personal. It is as though Mr. Lewis had become suddenly mellow one night and then had forever-after thought better of it, and had pulled a shade down between them. He had been pleasant enough, but distant. Doctor Steckbeck wonders why? The man had told him that his father had been a blacksmith in an upstate coal town. Was that any different from a solid Pennsylvania farmer? It must be their different professions, the Doctor thinks, and the role I am forced to play at Shadowild by Mrs. Lewis, not quite a servant, but not quite an equal either. The Doctor muses on all this as the train pulls into 30th Street Station. He suddenly thinks that he will stay on to Suburban Station, walk around center city, perhaps buy a summer jacket at Wanamaker’s. The Doctor is thinking that he would like to go to New England this summer, Vermont, perhaps stay on a farm. Yes, a farm, something like that…

The war is over. V-J Day! It’s on the radio, Miss Dorothy (Mabel always has her radio on in her room off the kitchen; listening to her stories is the most important thing each afternoon.) Mabel has come out of the back door from the kitchen, and she is directing her voice up to the terrace where Mrs. Lewis is sitting silently with her daughter. The war’s over Miss Dorothy, President Truman say the Japs have surrendered. Mr. Ralsten be comin’ home (Ralsten is Miss Dorothy’s younger brother, in the Far East, India). Dorothy explains to her mother that the war is over, the Japs have surrendered. Mrs. Lewis receives the news expressionlessly. She has a light blanket drawn over her legs in spite of the rather warm August day. The boy is at a camp in Northern Pennsylvania, Camp Windermere on Lake Como, a far cry from either England or Italy, but a place to stash the energetic boy for the summer so not to disturb his grandmother. Now that driving will no longer be restricted, the mother will drive to northern Pennsylvania, collect the boy and drive on to visit her friends and neighbors in Strafford, the Reeds, at their place on Martha’s Vineyard. The boy will be starting a new school this fall—he will enter the fourth grade at The Haverford School, where his uncle went. Things are entering a new phase, although we don’t quite know what it is or where it will lead. The Depression, the War, these unpleasant things are past. Gone! And the dark clothed figures will no longer be seen creeping about the gardens of Shadowild—they seem to belong to another era, one that is past. Something has happened. They just suddenly stop coming. We don’t know why. Has Doctor Steckbeck died suddenly in his solitary apartment? Has he retired from the University, moved to South central Pennsylvania to be amongst his Germanic relatives? And Kate Birkenbine, what of her? Nothing! To remember her we have only a faded and folded typed piece of verse, Lullaby for Tony. Have there been cards to Mrs. Lewis that she has quietly slipped into the waste basket unanswered? We don’t know. Mrs. Lewis has withdrawn into a sort of psychic shell. She emerges from time to time, only to return after a period of perhaps six months. Roland stays on—he understands Mrs. Lewis and has been there for so many years that he cannot think of not being there. He makes his presence known early on summer Saturday mornings with the sound of the hand-pushed lawnmower on the front lawn, the smell of freshly-cut grass floating up to the sleeping porch where the boy still lies abed watching the great trees beyond the screens of the porch. Mr. Lewis is reading the paper and having coffee at the table in the dining room, and Mrs. Lewis may or may not appear. No matter, Roland knows what to do before he walks home at five o’clock with his black lunch pail. On winter evenings his last task is to lay a fire in the living room. The boy’s mother wonders if Roland thinks this odd, having never sat in front of a fire in his life. Well, his job does not include questioning the habits of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. Mr. Lewis will be spending the day playing golf with his daughter, and the boy may amuse himself by riding his bicycle in the fields and woodlands over toward Valley Forge.

Events at Shadowild slide quietly into the fall of 1945. Ralsten comes home from the war, from the Far East, none the worse for wear. A quiet sort of chap, he does not talk much of his experiences overseas, and moves into the small apartment in the garage at the foot of the small hill below the house, through the woods where Doctor Steckbeck sat quietly reading The New Yorker next to the small playhouse replica of a the soldiers’ hut in Valley Forge that August afternoon some six years earlier while waiting for Mrs. Lewis’s dinner party to unfold. The boy starts fourth grade at The Haverford School. His mother continues to, with other young women, entertain the wounded officers from Valley Forge Army Hospital, and Mrs. Lewis occasionally, when she is feeling up to it, invites people to Shadowild from Pendle Hill. Doctor Steckbeck and Kate Birkenbine never again appear at Shadowild. If there is an explanation for their absence, it is not made known. Mrs. Cabeen, Miss Exley, Miss Hammersly and others of the Garden Club still visit occasionally, when Mrs. Lewis is feeling well. Once when these ladies are visiting, sitting with Mrs. Lewis in wicker chairs on the lawn, the boy leans too hard against a screen in the sleeping porch while trying to see who is there, and the screen falls out, narrowly missing Mrs. Cabeen. An accident! Roland is sent to fasten the screens more securely. A faithful man, Roland stays on. He and the boy get to be friends when the boy is grown into young manhood. Sometimes they stop by The Little Paddock, a working man’s bar down on Lancaster Avenue. Roland says that Mr. Lewis is the richest man in Strafford, seemingly proud of his employment by such a prominent personage. The boy knows this is far from true—he can think of at least three other families in Strafford that are wealthier—but if this is what Roland wants to think, then he can see no reason to disillusion him. Mabel retires after thirty-seven years of service, and goes to live with a black family in Exton who will take care of her. She has a Social Security pension, because Mr. Lewis has paid her tax every year since the program was instituted. She is replaced at the house by Frances, who has lived down the hill from Strafford all her life, and who went to school with Roland. She is tolerant of his tapping Mr. Lewis’s whiskey supply, something Mabel never would have stood for. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis are quite on in years—a Golden Wedding celebration is held one August in the gardens of Shadowild. A surprising number of people attend. Mr. Lewis is quite fond of his next-door neighbor, an up-and-coming young business man who has an attractive wife and four children. The younger man often comes over on summer nights to have a drink with Mr. Lewis and talk of business matters, or life in Strafford. It is a great blow to Mr. Lewis when the younger man is killed in