Notes from No-Man's Land

. D R A F T Notes from No-man’s Land An Autobiographical Essay 7/2/15 – My Lord God….I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. --Thomas Merton (1915-1968) I was born (March 14, 1933) in New York City in Lying In Hospital, the city’s obstetric facility, on Manhattan’s East Side, although my parents lived in Jackson Heights out on Long Island, then a moderately up-scale “co-op” (to- day’s condo) apartment neighborhood for bright young marrieds. They were mid-westerners, themselves, but had settled in New York after marriage, as many professional-class young couples did back then. Much about their early married life is mysterious to me, starting with the marriage itself. My mother (b. 1896) came from Winfield, a small south-central Kansas town; that side of the family set foot to ground (or rock, if one wants to believe the now-debunked legend) in 1620 (my nine-times-great-grandparents were the John Alden and Priscilla Mullen of Mayflower and “speak for yourself, John” fame) and followed the frontier west in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies. Dad’s earliest American ancestors arrived, also from England, ten years or so later, but further south, in Maryland, and eventually followed a parallel course, ending up in Missouri. Dad (b. 1894) first saw daylight in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up for the most part in Kansas City. He died in midlife (in 1954 at age 59), just as I was beginning to get to know him on an adult level (I was just barely 21); and my mother was for whatever reason very closed-mouthed about those years, as she was about a number of things. 1 Dad had served in World War I in France, fortunately for himself and me avoiding combat; since he had a bachelor’s degree in architecture, he was posted to the Corps of Engineers and deployed behind the lines. After the war he finished his master’s (both degrees from Washington University in St. Louis) and then with an architect friend, returned to Europe, where they bought a flimsy three-wheeled motorcycle with a sidecar and did a sort of great circle tour of architectural landmarks, fraught with breakdowns and various adven- tures, but eventually ending up in Paris. My mother, meanwhile, had started col- lege in the little Methodist institution in Winfield, and then transferred to North- western University, in the Chicago suburbs. She would never tell me when, where or how they happened to meet; but I have seen a clipping from the social page (such as it was) of the Winfield newspaper announcing a visit from my pa- ternal grandparents to my maternal ones sometime just after the war. In any case, when she graduated from Northwestern, she went (as nicely raised young ladies then did) on a grand tour of Europe with a group of sorority sisters. They passed through Paris on their way to the boat home. Apparently by pre-ar- rangement, she left the group, and the she and my father were married in the American Cathedral in Paris in 1922, with my father’s friend as sole witness. I asked her several times in later years why there? why then? was it an elopement? She firmly denied the elopement, but would not answer a word to the other two questions. The eerie thing is that decades later my father’s sister left me a packet of letters he had written to her and their parents in Kansas City narrating his travels around Europe with the motorcycle. They were full of inci- dent and local color, funny stories of the bike’s many breakdowns and the trou- bles of getting it fixed, of meeting people and seeing the sights, right up to a short time before getting back to Paris…and contained not one single word about my mother, any expectation of seeing her, any sense that he missed her or had had any communication from her. He had to have been keeping the immi- nent marriage from his family….but why? And why was my mother so reticent about it, right up to her death almost three-quarters of a century later? I never discerned any great signs of cordiality between the two families, and their social (and no doubt economic) circumstances differed, certainly: Grandfather Simp- son taught mechanical arts in the Kansas City secondary school system, and Grandfather Light was the president of the local bank, a major frog in Winfield’s small puddle. Was that it? Was it pure snobbery? Or something else? Well, in those days a lot was kept away from children’s ears. In any case, the newly-weds took up residence for most of a year in Paris – in the Place des Vosges, the gorgeous seventeenth-century square built for Henri IV and his wife, Marie dei Medici. It had become in the 1920s almost a ghetto, easily affordable even to the penniless student. (My parents’ apartment 2 was next door to one occupied not all that long before by Victor Hugo.) That quartier has since been gentrified, and a few years ago I noted with pleasure that “their” apartment was sold for several millions of Euros. Eventually they returned to the States, and as up-and-coming young professionals frequently did then, elected to settle in the Big City. The 1920s were good times for them: my father was beginning to forge an excellent career, and a second career/avocation as a highly-skilled artist in wa- ter-colors. My mother, as was the usual thing then, did not work. They made friends with a number of young couples in similar circumstances, at least one of which remained close to them for life, and proved also to be very good to me, as time was to show. What I was given to understand (again, my mother’s reticence came into play) was that their successful and happy young married life was suddenly inter- rupted by the stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression that began in October of 1929 and went on into the Second World War. Architects get little work in depressions, and though my folks tried pretty successfully to keep the facts from me, during those years there were times when we were close to being broke. I believe my dad at one point had to borrow some money from his parents to keep us afloat; that is not something that would have been easy for him -- nor for mom. My obstetric costs were in fact paid for in a way by public funds: in 1932, Robert Moses, who was the incoming Parks Commissioner for the city in the ad- ministration of the newly-elected and later famous mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, an- nounced a competition for the design of a city park to be built on a long-disused dump-site immediately behind the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. My dad‘s design won the competition (and has remained essentially unchanged to this day) and a prize of $300, then a considerable sum, which more than paid my hospital costs and probably kept us afloat for some time. Bryant Park, as it is called, and one other major building in the city, are the last- remaining physical evidences of my dad’s architectural career. In retrospect, I can see that the depression must have had a tremendous emotional impact on him. His sister, my aunt, who lived to be 98, told me in later years that he had been quite different as a younger man; much merrier, more care-free, and less compulsive about being in control of things. I can remember even in the ‘40s and ‘50s, long after he had found the very good position that he deserved and that seemed to assure our well-being, his obsession with niggling little expenses: my leaving a light on in my room if I left for more than a moment, for example. Even though they tried to keep it from me, he and my mother ar- gued about finances (i.e., expenditures) on occasion, sometimes very bitterly. I tended to take her side, tacitly, and it may well have showed. That would have 3 been hard for him, though I certainly didn’t think of such things at the time. My mother had been raised in much more affluent circumstances than he, after all; and while roughing it as young marrieds no doubt had had a certain charm for her, that must have worn off over time. For the first 5 years of my life, we followed the job market, such as it was. Fortunately, I guess, there were only the three mouths to feed: despite the eleven years between my parents’ marriage and my arrival (this delay another occasion of my mother’s reticence) I had no older siblings, and my delivery was difficult for her at age 37, so there would be no more children.

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