Wartime Baby

The last post about Bob Cappa's dying soldier meshed today with a conversation with a friend about stateside childhood during World War II. I was born in 1942 just before my father left for his first navy duty protecting convoys crossing the North Atlantic to England. My mother stayed in Providence for a while; her diary shows she visited elderly relatives, worked when she could on books she was writing for T.Y Crowell and took care of me.

The entry for May 6 is shown above, northeast corner of the page. It was written a week before I was born: "More puttering. Eddie LaFarge dropped in to report on Ann. Her baby a beauty indeed. Corregidor falls." She had one eye on the war throughout the pages of this five-year diary, surely because of my father, but also because living alone with a baby is lonely, boring. She had written a biography of Leonardo da Vinci while she was pregnant with me. Before long she had a book contract with her editor and dear friend Liz Riley to write something that would put her fascination with the war to good use. She began writing books about nurses on active duty: Ann Bartlett, Navy Nurse, Nancy Naylor, Army Nurse, and there was Kate Russell, a spy (I read that one last year and it was damn good). She wrote so many of these books during that war that Crowell asked that she choose two noms de plume -- Martha Johnson and Margaret Irwin Simmons.

The war lingered and her worry about my father must have been searing. Several times he called from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to say that he had 24 hours of leave. She raced to New York City, once with me, and would meet him in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central. She told me once that they sat at the bar and drank Martinis, ate dozens of oysters and smooched as I played on the floor by their feet.

I remember being extremely proud of my father in his Navy uniform. He came to Cornwall twice to see us while we were living there with my grandmother. On the evening he left to go back to his ship, I was in my crib by the time she got home from driving him to the train. I remember this so clearly: She was crying. I stood up and wiped her face with my hands. She was wearing an old green quartz and silver ring which my grandmother had given her. I have the ring today, a memory of those days.

War is consuming for families, for the fighter and the ones left behind. Today many resources are brought to bear to help families. Sixty-odd years ago we waited, worried and wept. Thank God my father came back to us and lived to be 85.

The Spanish Soldier

George Will weighed in today with an opinion on the famous photograph taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War. It seems Wills, or his indefatigable research assistant, has discovered that the place Capa said he took the shot is forested not barren and rocky. The image of the man, arms wide and gun flung away, falling back, seems to be on a rocky hilltop. There's still no definitive answer and anyone who knew is dead.

My neighbor Ann, who lived across the street in Washington during the 60's, had been married to a Life magazine correspondent. The two of them were in Shanghai in 1946-47 when the chaos after the war was truly dangerous. That was when Henri Cartier Bresson took the image of the assault on the bank by crowds of people trying to get their savings out and back under the mattress. Capa and sometimes his brother Cornell were around in those days and also back in New York where Ann worked at the magazine.

Her version of the dying Spanish soldier is the simplest I've heard which is why it has the ring of truth. Capa was no soldier he was happy to tell her. Gunfire sent him running for cover and the work he did so bravely during the wars he covered was often from carefully chosen spots. He told Ann that on that day in Spain he had been hunkered down behind a rock formation. He heard running feet and a hail of fire so he thrust his camera up as high as he could and clicked the shutter. He pulled the camera back, advanced the film and took another shot.

Back in the developing room he saw the dying soldier for the first time, caught by perfect chance in that iconic pose of death. Anne said Capa was quite jolly about his absolute luck making those blind shots. She said it was hard to make out what either of the Capas meant in those days, when they were halfway between speaking Hungarian and English. Probably less than halfway according to Ann.

Taking photographs like that is an old news trick. If you can't make it through the crowd, you try for a lucky over-the-head shot. No one was ever as lucky as Bob Capa.

Saturday Night Massacre

I'm not always certain that I remember the way things were and how they happened, but the Saturday Night Massacre is as secure a memory as I have.

Milt and I had gone to the New York City Ballet performance at the Kennedy Center. Bardyl and Gail Tirana were great fans (Gail had danced nearly professionally) so they invited a bunch of friends to the ballet. It turned out to be a pastiche of Balanchine -- "Jewels," and a lot of shorter works which made it possible to have three intervals. Could it really have been three? It seemed as if we spent a lot of time talking in the lovely new halls of the Center. Glasses of champagne also figured.

Meanwhile, as they say in bad novels, down at the Justice Department Attorney General Elliot Richardson, a liberal Massachusetts Republican, refused an order from the White House to fire Archibald Cox, the Special Prosecutor. Cox had demanded that the recently uncovered Oval Office tapes be handed over to investigators. Nixon refused and, just about the time "Jewels" was starting, he (probably it was Bob Haldeman) called Richardson and told him to fire Cox. Richardson refused.

The story this far was what we learned after someone in our group called his office at Justice -- called meant using the pay phone outside the restrooms at the Center; cell phones came later. The news spread like fire around the intermission; voices were raised in speculation and then it was time for the second act of the ballet.

The moment we were released from Act II, we learned that Bill Ruckleshaus, the deputy AG and now the acting AG, had been asked to fire Cox. Act III and back into the theater.

The next intermission was wild. People talked of the end of government, the final Nixon insult. Then we heard that Ruckleshaus was going to refuse to fire Cox. "Who's next in line?" Someone knew; it was the Solicitor General Robert Bork. By the time we left the Kennedy Center for good, we knew that Ruckleshaus had indeed refused to fire Cox and resigned himself.
Later in the evening Milt and I heard from a friend that Bork had fired Cox, who had calmly laid down his tools and was headed home to Massachusetts. Nixon didn't survive the massacre at Justice. The tapes were finally reviewed by Judge Sirica and the 18 empty minutes were discovered.

By then we were in France in a little family hotel in Mont Saxonnex, Savoie being asked by the curious French what the fuss was all about. "Nixon tried to steal the U.S. government," I explained in not-very-accurate French. A bit over the top perhaps, but it felt so good when he resigned in disgrace.

A wild time it was on October 20, 1973. I can't remember much about the ballets which is to be expected. The uproar (women were crying with fright) and the talk that the government would collapse were extraordinary. We all lived to see another day.

Once in a time when we were young...

This is the Cornwall Village gang in a photograph taken by a patient parent during the summer of 1951. I'm the one in the group on the right wearing a sweater, head tilted, making some kind of remark. Weesie McLeod (now Dunn) is the light-haired, younger girl on the left who's laughing. Her sisters Helen and Libby are in the back row with Billy, their brother. My sister Mary is in front of me, my sister Miss Lyd is to my left; My brother Robby is in the car looking out the window.

We were as free as birds then. Elements of this bunch roved the Village during the day, building forts, swimming in the farm brook, organizing green apple fights -- all without the supervision or knowledge of any of the adults in our lives. I suppose they watched as we surged through the backyards, but no adults were with us when we swam in the wonderful and heavily polluted farm brook. High points of the day were the noon siren, which I still hear up the hill at my house, and the ride to the lake. The first meant lunch could be had at home or somewhere else. The ride to the lake had to be negotiated with one of the parents using a little wheedling, never whining, and never the same parent two days in a row. If we could have reached the pedals we would have driven ourselves. Which would have been fine because we weren't supervised at the lake either.

The happiness of those days drew me back here as a grownup and I live among the colors and sounds of those child days. The Holstein milking herd is gone and the farm brook, once a beautiful brown and yellow color, runs clear. My brother Robby now owns the farm fields. When he brought a local herd of cows and a bull back into the fields, he had to fence them away from the brook and water them from a well dug for the purpose. He and Dan, who owns the herd, had received federal funds to re-stock the land and protecting the banks of small streams is in the federal wetlands regulations.

On closer examination, I wonder where I got that nice haircut? Usually, I went to a men's barber in Providence who just chopped it. It may have been that my dear grandmother, who loved clothes and parties, had taken me over to her hairdresser in Litchfield for a trim. She always hoped I would love to flirt as she did.

Storms and Gardens

Doc and I sat on the porch and inhaled this storm, one of the many which have hammered the 14th colony over the past six weeks. Thanks, or no thanks, to the 'net, we can obsessively watch the weather as it slides into the Hudson Valley, pauses and then lunges across the river into Connecticut. Twice the storms rolled noisily out to sea, turned and came back as three-day nor'easters.


I think the storm above looks like the last act of Gotterdammerung, an explosion of darkness and thunder.




This is the rosebush behind our house, one of the original climbers, Dr. Van Fleet. Its root stock is so strong that it's used to propagate other types. It has a mind of its own, canes thick as baseball bat handles and thorns like dragon's teeth. The canes arch up and over and root in whatever they can find. No wonder it's a survivor.

In spite of all this rough and tumble, Dr. Van Fleet is a perfect, many-petaled, chunky blossom with a rich, spicy scent. The color is faint pink with deeper tints inside the bloom. And it goes and goes and goes. It's on its fourth week this year, because of the rain and the cool. In a hot July the blossoms arrive, sigh and faint away, littering the grass with petals as soft as baby's skin.

The bush is a safe haven in any season for birds and the chipmunk scouts who watch and wait along the stone wall. There is a bobcat in the neighborhood and all the smaller animals are on alert, staying close to the house where people are. The proximity of humans doesn't seem to bother this bobcat, however. One morning we found him drinking from the birdbath, 10 feet from our back door. We had to shout at him to make him leave. Rocky stays close, as cats in their later years usually do, unwilling to risk as he once did.

Autrement...

After that long post about Cordon Bleu the other day, I found the schedule of classes pasted in the back of my notebook. The mushroom soup lecture was the first class I went to; no wonder I was confused, so rattled that I forgot to write down the highpoint of that day's demonstration.

The recipe for beef stock which appeared so strangely in the middle of my mushroom soup notes had a wonderful coda. After we had sat appalled listening to the complications of making beef stock -- burning a sliced onion half over an open flame, such a problem for those of us with electric stoves -- Chef Narcesse, putting on his twinkly grandfather face, reached into his apron pocket and pulled out a silver-foil-wrapped object.

"Autrement," he said, drawing out the drama, "il y'a le cube."

We all whooped with relief!

A note about the kitchen apprentices who had made the stock; Chef, of course, did not lower himself to such basics. In the 1970's the French educational system did a big sorting out of the kids at the age of 14. Those with academic talent or aspirations went into the higher grades and the kids who had different talents went into the apprentice system. Chef Narcesse had three or four youngsters of different ages who were learning la cuisine.

Many of us were put off by the way these kids were treated. Chef roared at them and cuffed them. There were days when none of them could do anything correctly, starting from dirty fingernails at morning inspection. Several times parents were summoned by the horrible Mme Brassard for a family dressing down, the apprentice in the middle of a finger-jabbing mob of his elders. The Americans at the school were very sympathetic and tried to catch the boys' eyes to cheer them up. But the boys didn't want to be seen crying.

The pepper grinder episode was classic. One of the younger apprentices was standing by to help Chef as he went through the morning demonstration. He handed a pepper mill to Narcesse, who was in mid-sentence. Chef cranked, cranked again, and then swung the mill straight-armed toward the kid. It was empty. The kid raced into the kitchen and brought back another pepper grinder which Chef cranked, still growling. That mill was empty too.

"If I had done that when I was your age," Narcesse screamed, "I would have been fired and quite properly. Get out, get out, get out." The boy fled in tears. Some of us protested but Chef stopped us: "No. This is his work. He is training for the rest of his life. How can he leave here and embarrass L'Ecole Cordon Bleu?"

Autre temps, autre moeurs.

Porcelain

My grandmother, via my uninterested mother, gave me a set of 12 of everything in this rose porcelain. It dates from the period post-1911, the end of the Ching Dynasty, when a policy of improving exports suggested to the Chinese that honest labeling might be a good idea.

The cups and saucers are so thin they glow with backlighting. The painting is nicely executed, so I can guess the dishes were not real tourist trash.

At the old China Trade Museum we called this kind of pattern "bbfi" or "birds, butterflies, flowers and insects" The shorthand made filling out collection records much easier.