Glass Mountain

By Julia Cooley Altrocchi

Astronomers all over the world study the universe with powerful telescopes situated on cold mountain summits where skies are clear. What is it like to live in such a faraway community for extended periods of time?
What are the consequences of romance, extra-marital love, unwanted pregnancy, attempted murder and a dangerous forest fire for such a group? Are the expected personal and social effects exaggerated or muted? What is the impact of a major external event, such as the onset of a world war?
Noted poet and author Julia Cooley Altrocchi portrays what life was like in a pre-television era for such an isolated cluster of fewer than forty people — academic stargazers, their families and support staff — during the months immediately before and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
It becomes clear that walls and houses on such an isolated mountain top are made of glass. Everybody knows everything. Secrets cannot be kept. Life's emotions and theatrics are intensified, more vivid, more vitally felt. The intriguing cast of characters is indeed living on a Glass Mountain in this dramatically gripping, linguistically captivating and thoroughly entertaining historical novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664153271

Julia Cooley Altrocchi

Julia Cooley Altrocchi (1893-1972) was a poet, historian and historical novelist including authorship of Snow Covered Wagons, Wolves Against the Moon and The Spectacular San Franciscans. During her lifelong writing career she was twice President of the California Writers Club and received many literary honors. Dr. Paul Altrocchi earned his AB and MD from Harvard and graduate degrees from Columbia, Berkeley and São Paulo, Brazil. A former Professor at Stanford, he has taught all over the world. Since retirement he has published 13 books and two dozen articles on 16th Century history.

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Copyright © 2021 by Paul Hemenway Altrocchi and Catherine Altrocchi Waidyatilleka.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 01/20/2021

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CONTENTS

Cast Of Characters

Chapter 1    NYC To Isolated Mountain

Chapter 2    Social Spark

Chapter 3    Basic Astronomy 101

Chapter 4    Conflagration

Chapter 5    A Poet Changed

Chapter 6    Romantic Scheming

Chapter 7    Meeting Common Folk

Chapter 8    Attempted Murder

Chapter 9    Snowy Rumors

Chapter 10    New Star

Chapter 11    Conjugal Debate

Chapter 12    Mystery Solved

Chapter 13    Dimming Stars

Chapter 14    Proposal In Paradise

Chapter 15    Update From Sacramento

Chapter 16    Plane Crash

Chapter 17    Nuptial Feast

Chapter 18    Andromeda’s Altar

Chapter 19    Runaway Star

Chapter 20    Mortal Coil

Afterword

Editors

Cast Of Characters

On Galileo Peak

Prof. John Liddicoat

Eulalia (Lally) Liddicoat — John’s wife

Prof. Potter Pollott

Gloriana Pollott — Potter’s wife, and 3 daughters, ages 7, 6, and 5

Thyrza Marsh — sister of Gloriana

Molly Bantry — Irish servant and Janitor husband, Terry

Prof. Karl Kessler

Lieta Kessler — Karl’s wife, and daughter, Florenz

On Observatory Peak

Prof. Alfred Stromley White — Director of the Observatory

Agnes White — Alfred’s wife

Julia White — Alfred’s blind mother

On Pleiad Peak

Prof. Cassius Cass Frawley

Eve Frawley — Cassius’s second wife

Alden Quayle — Eve’s visiting half-brother, a poet

Calliope Gribble — cook and her butler husband, Noah

Prof. Justus Deering and his wife, Edith

Prof. Daniel Rozynski

On East Peak

Matthew Giles — Electrical Engineer, and family

Philip de Castro — Instrument Maker, and family

Olaf Johnson — Carpenter, and family

Residents of the Dormitory

Instructor James Foss

Assistant Professor Sylvester McWhinny

Graduate Students of Astronomy

Madeleine Norden, the school teacher

Chapter 1

NYC TO ISOLATED MOUNTAIN

All the way from the cube towers of New York City her Cadillac had fled as if driving itself, with speed of transport seemingly its only goal and the landscape merely an external distraction of its rapid, restless journey. As the car entered the eucalyptus-bordered road out of San Jose, Eve Frawley stepped on the gas. She, whose travels had hitherto steered her towards the fashion parlors of Europe and South America, and whose exciting party-world had been experienced as a New York socialite, was increasingly appalled all the way across the continent by the unpeopled spaces of the prairies, the boring alkali flats and the dreary mountains of the west.

Now the final lonely, isolated mountain loomed ahead of her. Would she find this new chapter of her life more interesting and appealing than the tedious journey to it?

What was this Astronomy Observatory to which her new husband was bringing her? It isn’t far from San Francisco, he had assured her. She took a quick look at his profile — Roman nose, thin lips, gray eyes, and impeccable gray fedora meticulously placed on his graying head. Had he stretched the truth to gain a point … and a wife? He, a rather pompous Ph.D., was a master of all astronomical points of fact and most other Planet Earth subjects as well. His academic milieu was always about the truth, my dear. Let’s have the unexaggerated truth, nothing extraneous to the point at hand!

Many things he had said to her during that whirlwind courtship in Rio the year before, in the autumn of 1940, had now taken on a different meaning. Cassius Frawley, she had begun to think, was two men, the debonair man of the world and the evidence-oriented professor, less and less debonair as New York and Rio receded. Certainly Cassius had made at least one mis-statement. This place was a not a short distance from San Francisco. It was late afternoon and they’d been driving at a good clip ever since their lunch at the Mark Hopkins. How she would’ve liked to stay in exciting San Francisco for a week to savor its social whirlings!

Well, Alden! She turned her head towards her half-brother who was sitting alone in the back seat and who had come out to California with them to recover his health after a nervous breakdown. A wave of her hair escaped from Eve’s chic green hat and blew across her face. You ought to like this place, Alden. Just what the doctor ordered — peaceful and quiet enough for you to write a couple of poetry books before you go back to New York with renewed energy and insight.

I like the idea of being here, said Alden noncommittally.

Don’t you think you’ll like it, dear? asked Cassius, looking towards Eve.

I’m sure I shall, Cass. She caught sight of a road sign: 24 miles to Crystal Mountain Observatory. Something took a straight panicky dive between her heart and her throat, powered by the immensity of the imminent change in her lifestyle.

Alden Quayle was thinking how much the sunburned hills were like his own heart, tired and burnt out. Two images pursued him to this scorched edge of the country, that of his best friend, Tom Byrnes, dead under the car which Alden himself overturned on the Merritt Parkway the year before, and the image of Isabel Darwood’s face as she had told him, her longtime steady beau, of her sudden runaway marriage to someone else. Could he ever forget them, Tom and Isabel?

There it was again, a fuzzy image of horror suggesting death, in the black branches of a live oak tree, changing imperceptibly into Isabel’s dark hair spread out, tangled with gray moss, the great black eyes mocking him, the beautiful cruel mouth. All right, marry your rich damned corporation lawyer, you cat-clawed woman; yes, he would write biased poems all about women — treacherous, scratching cat women.

Bill Sayre, Editor of New Angles, publishers of poetry, had declined to publish that last book of his, Equations and Orchids, written when he’d been under the spell of Isabel. Even at his young age he hated the taste of failure, a very unpleasant sulfurous taste. Well, he’d write something up here on the mountain, something that would have the old literary acclaim of his first book, Purple Squares, published when he was just out of Yale five years ago, the book that had made him famous and had been equaled by his second, Brittle Dawn. Was ambition beginning to seep slowly back into him? Perhaps Isabel would read the new book he would write and regret leaving him for a money-hungry attorney with crass ethics and the ego-centric lifestyle of so many lawyers.

Step on it, Eve! Can’t you take these curves faster? Alden goaded.

See here, kid brother! I’ve been going more than sixty all the way across the country to please you! These curves aren’t banked, you know, like that old Raceway at Mineola. Sorry!

To please me? If there ever was a natural born speed demon, it’s you, Eve! Isn’t that so, Cassius?

From all available evidence, yes.

Eve smiled. This was one of Cassius’s favorite professorial phrases. It gave her an uncomfortable uxorial impression of being constantly balanced-on-the-scales of knowledge and truth, with her husband the Supreme Arbiter. She gave the car an extra swallow of gas and pushed on up the interminable foothill plateau. She’d always been afraid of heights. Now she was heading up to an altitude of 4200 feet.

It’s all right, of course, if you were up on the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf or the Rainbow Room of Rockefeller Center where you were in your proper niche. Keep dancing, keep talking and smiling, keep partying and drinking champagne. But what could there be up here on this forlorn Crystal Mountain twenty-four miles from the nearest little town? Eve had pictured a mound not much bigger than one of the elevations in Grand Central Park, conveniently positioned at the edge of San Francisco within easy walking distance to all the pleasure palaces of that relatively new but already exciting city.

She found herself paying uncharacteristic, anxious attention to the scenery. They had evidently left the last house far behind on the edge of some kind of fruit orchard. There was no cultivation any more, just yellow grass, strange trees with gray moss dripping from them like old men’s beards, a few desolate brown thistles, a yellow-flowered bush that reminded her of the funicular ride up to the lava pits of Vesuvius, and not a live animal anywhere except a hawk that seemed to be forever descending in an endless circle, never arriving at its prey. A sign at the right of the road read: HAZARD – FIRE AREA.

What does that mean, Cassius? Why fire area?

We have a lot of fires in this area of California. Forests and whole towns are sometimes destroyed. There’s a ranger station on Smith’s Creek a little farther on and a small reservoir and pumping apparatus on top of the mountain. This dry grass area is very dangerous. Anyone throwing a cigarette stub out of a car could easily set the whole mountain on fire.

Eve had a vision of sitting up there on the top of the mountain watching unstoppable flames licking towards her from all directions, Brunhilda on her pyre in the German heroic legend of the 1200s. Or simply the less magnificent vision of Eve burning to a crisp. Solitude and boring scenery — with the constant threat of death-dealing fire!

My! What’s this? A country club?

The car had turned into one of the sudden creek-bed valleys, full of unexpectedly green bushes, a bit of grass, scrub willows, myrtle, laurel, madrone and live oaks. Fifty white-faced red-brown cattle grazed along the banks of a drying creek.

No, Eve, this is where they train the cows that jump over the moon! joked Alden.

Eve smiled; the moon was Cass’s specialty. Or have we already reached the Milky Way? she suggested.

She stole a look at Cass who was not reacting very well. His thin lips, sucked in with disapproval, had almost disappeared. Evidently his blessed astronomy was not to be trifled with or laughed about. Eve laid a quick green-gloved hand on Cassius’s knee and deposited a pat or two of affection.

Better attend to your driving! Cassius said without a smile.

Eve chose silence and concentrated on the steering wheel. A moment later, she asked another question. A flock of sheep appeared on the hill slope across the creek and, in a newly opened little valley, a farm house with an upper balcony on all four of its sides like the loggia of an Italian house and a pergola below heavy with grapes, bringing another quick memory of Italy.

Whose house? she asked, forgetting the marital coolness.

Cassius waited until they were long past the house, in fact until they had reached the Smith Creek Rangers’ Station, before answering. It belongs to an Italian family, the Adimaris. I doubt if you’ll consider them worthy of your social acquaintanceship but you might find them useful. They supply the mountain residents with butter, milk, cheese, fruit, vegetables and a few herbs. The first Mrs. Frawley found their cheeses particularly fine.

At the mention of his previous wife, Eve felt a little dagger-thrust, a tactic which Cassius was quite good at, but she answered with a quick smile. I’m sure I’ll find them useful and pleasant, too. The more people the merrier. Do I go down to buy things from them or do they come up the mountain?

Both.

They were in the foothills again. High on the last spur in the distance flashed the mica-bright astronomy domes. There was nothing visible on the summit except three domes and three houses.

Woman with Silver Breasts, whispered Alden to himself. Possible title for my next book.

Oh, the Observatory! Eve swallowed her trepidation. How high the domes are! How remote against the sky! Over a nearer slope another hawk floated in its ceaseless spiral. There was worry in her heart. Are there only three houses, Cassius? she asked, imagining a kind of socially isolated doom.

No, there are eleven altogether, seven belonging to professors, three to members of the working staff, and a dormitory for a few graduate students. Our house is on another spur of the ridge beyond, on Pleiad Peak.

Oh, our destiny is Pleiad Peak.

It’s actually rather gorgeous, Eve. I think I can write up here, put in Alden.

I hope you can, Alden, on your well-earned sabbatical, said Cassius.

Oh, look! There are deer up here! said Eve. A doe and a fawn had paused and were staring at the ascending car from one of the many animal trails that terraced the final slope.

Yes, the whole mountain is a game preserve, replied Cassius. There are cougars, too, and mountain lions.

Oh, God, not really! Eve exclaimed. I don’t recall many of those in Central Park!

A moment later they were driving past the branch of road which, as Cassius explained, led to the houses of Professors Kessler, Liddicoat and Pollott. Then they were on the summit, passing the two main domes, the dormitory on the right and Director Stromley White’s big house on the left, and were approaching the three houses at the end of the roadway that bumped into Pleiad Peak. Eve had time to note four aspects of the place — bleak flowerless yards, conspicuous fire hydrants, great piles of wood everywhere suggesting Arctic winters, and the impressive wind that blew her hat straight back into Alden’s lap.

Here we are! announced Cassius. Welcome to our new home, Eve, he said and patted her shoulder reassuringly.

Eve’s two black servants, who had been sent ahead to prepare the house, were already in the front yard, bobbing with excitement. After jubilant greetings, Noah Gribble helped unload the car. His wife Calliope took her mistress by the arm. Ain’t it purty up here, Miss Eve? Look a’ here.

Eve felt the questioning anxiety in Calliope’s voice and blessed her for it. She hadn’t wanted to look but Calliope held her