V
She wouldn’t let us call the doctor because he would order her to the hospital. But the time came when we had to call the doctor, and he called the ambulance, and poor Craig was carried away on her last ride. She was in the hospital for three weeks, and it cost us close to four thousand dollars. This seems an ungracious thing to mention, but I am thinking about what happens to the poor—how do they die? Perhaps they do it more quickly, and don’t have day and night nurses by their bedside. This sounds like irony, but I let it stand.
In addition to the nurses and the husband, there were Hunter and Sally, his wife, two nieces, and a sister who had come on from Alabama. What they saw was a hideously tormented human being. I pleaded with the doctor—surely there must be some ethical code that would give him the right to end such torment! But he said that stage had not yet been reached.
I won’t tell much about my own part in it. I would sit and gaze at the features of my beloved who no longer knew me; or if she did know me she was angry because I had let her be brought to the hospital. I would sit there blinded with my own tears, and then I would get up and try to get out of the hospital without making a spectacle of myself.
Why do I tell such a story? Well, it happened. It was life. It is our human fate. It happened to me, and it could happen to you. This universe is a mystery to me. How beauty, kindness, goodness, could have such an end visited upon it will keep me in agony of spirit for the rest of my days on this planet. I do not know what to make of it, and I can draw only this one moral from it: that nature has been, and can be, so cruel to us that surely we should busy ourselves not to commit cruelties against one another. I know that I had for half a century the love of one of the kindest, wisest, and dearest souls that ever lived upon this earth; why she should have died in such untellable horror is a question I ask of God in vain.
She died in St. Luke Hospital, Pasadena, on April 26, 1961. Her ashes were shipped to a brother in Greenwood, Mississippi, and were interred in a family plot in the cemetery in that town.
19
End and Beginning
The death of Craig left me with a sense of desolation beyond my power to describe. Hunter and his wife Sally went back to Arizona. The sister and nieces scattered to their homes, and I was in that lovely old house in which every single thing spoke of the woman who had bought it, arranged it, used it—and would never see it again. I had lived in a town for twenty years and never entered a single home; I had no one to speak to but the clerks in the post office, the market, the bank. In my early days I would not have minded that; I had camped alone all summer, in a tent on an island in the St. Lawrence, and again in an “open camp” on an Adirondack lake, and had been perfectly happy. But I no longer had the firm conviction that the future of mankind depended upon the words I was putting on paper; on the contrary, I was obsessed by memories of horror, inescapable, inexcusable. The house was haunted—but I had no other place to go.
For more than seven years, ever since her first heart attack, Craig had been insisting that I could not live alone. It had become a sort of theme song: “Oh, what will you do? What will become of you? You must find some woman to take care of you.” Then she would add, “Oh, don’t let some floozie get hold of you!” My answer was always the same: “I am going to take care of you and keep you alive.” But now she was gone, and I could say it no more.
We had friends, but they were mostly far away; elderly married couples who came to see us once or twice in a year: Sol Lesser, who had produced Thunder Over Mexico for us; Richard Otto, who had run the EPIC campaign for us; Harry Oppenheimer, New York businessman who had promised to come and run the state of California for me if I had had the misfortune to get elected. Now I spent several weeks wondering which of these good friends I should ask to help me find a wife.
For decades I had been a friend and supporter of the New Leader; and every week had read the gay verses of Richard Armour. He had sent me his books, beginning with It All Started with Columbus, and continuing with It All Started with Eve and It All Started with Marx. I was so pleased that I wrote him some lines in his own style; I recall the last two lines:
And if you find that I’m a charmer
You’ll know that I’ve been reading Armour.
He is dean of Scripps College, some twenty miles east of my home; but for many years we did not meet. It happened that Hunter Kimbrough was a classmate of Frederick Hard, president of the college, and Hunter was in the habit of stopping by on his way to and from Arizona. He and Dick Armour became friends, and several months after Craig’s death, Hunter invited Dick and his wife to my home for a picnic lunch. So it was that I met Kathleen Armour, gracious, kind of heart and with a laugh as merry as her husband’s verses.
After days and nights of thinking about it, I composed a letter to Kathleen, putting my plight before her. The unmarried women I knew could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and not one of the four was suitable. In a woman’s college Kathleen must know many; I didn’t mean a pupil, but a teacher, or member of such a family.
I received a cordial reply, and soon I was invited to Kathleen’s home. There I met the sister of Hunter’s friend, Fred Hard, president of the college. She was a widow, and her years were seventy-nine, appropriate to my eighty-three. She was twice a mother, once a grandmother, and three times a great-grandmother. She was of a kind disposition, with a laugh as happy as Kathleen’s and an abundance of good sense. She was born in South Carolina and had lived in several parts of the United States. She was well read and was part of a cultured environment. She was staying in the lovely home of the college president, keeping it during summer while he and his wife were in Europe. Her name was May, and Dick Armour had written her some verses:
For her, two cities vie and jockey:
First Claremont claims her, then Milwockey.
The West and Middle West both crave her,
To both she brings her special savor,
For in the one or in the other’n,
She’s still herself, completely Southern.
But here alone we can rejoice
With lifted hearts and lifted voice
And happily and smugly say:
When it is August, we have May.
I invited her to my home. The large downstairs rooms were dark, she said; and I pointed out to her that the long velvet curtains could be thrown back. In the living room are four double windows, from floor almost to ceiling, and in the dining room are five more of the same; the rooms are practically one, because the wide double doors roll back into the walls. But she said she would be lonely in that half acre of gardens surrounded by a high hedge of two hundred eugenia trees. She said she might marry me if I would come to live in Claremont; but I saw myself living in a town full of college boys and girls who would come to ask for interviews, and who would consider me snobbish if I put a fence around my house. I do my work outdoors, weather permitting—as it does most of the time in southern California.
So, back I went to my lonely existence. Hunter was disturbed, for to him the Hard family represented the best of culture, that of the South. Maybe the Armours had something to do with it—I did not ask—but I met May at their house again, and she was cordial. More time passed, and there came a birthday letter, telling me of her interest in my work and wishing me happiness. So I went to see her again; this time I did not stand on ceremony, but put my arms around her, and it was all settled in a few minutes.