The Eighth Day (58 page)

“Are you happy, Connie?”

“I'm happy enough.”

“What are the three things that you want most in the world?”

She thought. “Can I ask for four?”

“Yes.”

“Papa to come back. To live near where you are. To go to school. And to know . . . ? to know hundreds and thousands of people everywhere.”

“Well, I'll tell you a secret.” Roger remembered that dolls and secrets played a large part in young girls' lives. He told her about the money from their father's inventions. That money would be used to send her and Anne Lansing to college. He would make sure that it would be a college near where he lived. He told her that those famous names Scolastica and Berwyn Ashley would surely bring word from their father. “Why do you want to know so many people?”

“I keep a list of the people I know. I know one hundred and four people. That doesn't include all the boarders. I have another list for them—the ones that I only say ‘good morning' to when I'm waiting on table and cleaning their rooms. I think about people—don't you?—and the more you know the better you think. Roger, can I ask you some questions?”

“Yes, Connie. Fire ahead.”

The questions! Are more people happy in a big city like Chicago than in Coaltown? Are most men happier than women? Are girls who don't get married ever happy? Does it hurt
a lot
when a person dies? Is it wrong—no, is it a bad thing to be born a girl?

“Listen, Connie. You write me every Thursday and put five questions in the letter. And I'll answer you on Sunday.”

“Can I ask you one more?”

“Yes.”

“Do people change any—while they're growing up?”

“Yes! I've changed—haven't I? And Lily's changed; you remember that she didn't notice anything. Today I learned that your best friend Anne Lansing has changed.”

“Has she?”

“I'm going to pay a call at the Lansing house. Would you like to come with me now?”

“Oh, Roger, yes.”

“Good! You go off somewhere and talk with Anne. I have to talk with her mother. And I'll tell you a secret: I think they've had some bad news today—almost as bad as we had when Papa—you know!”

They walked up to the door of “St. Kitts.” Suddenly Constance threw her arms about her brother and cried, “I love you! I love you! I love you!”

Roger lifted her up, and said, “We're going to love each other a long time.”

Félicité approached them from the shadows of the yew trees. She kissed Constance. To Roger she whispered: “George has gone. He told everything to Miss Doubkov. He's written out the whole story.”

“And your mother?”

“Now I know she's known for a long time.”

They entered the house.

“Connie,” said Roger, “give Mrs. Lansing the cookies.”

Eustacia came forward as though borne up on some extraordinary happiness. “Dear Roger! Dear Constance!”

Constance said, “Mama sent these and hopes that you'll have a very merry Christmas.”

Soon Roger was sitting beside Eustacia. She was explaining to him about the money from his father's inventions. She was explaining to him that her son George would never have run away from his father's trial. . . . ?

Hills beyond hills, plains and rivers.

Eustacia went to Los Angeles. She got a job as housekeeper in a house of correction for delinquent girls. She didn't fully enjoy the work and it was not in sight of the sea. There was a privately owned Boys' Ranch at San Pedro, then a small tuna-fishing port. She became housemother.

Hills and clouds. Rise high, rise higher.

Roger's and Félicité's Johnny has run away from his home in Washington for the third time. It is early 1917; a war is imminent and his father is burdened with work. Félicité has been sent to the hospital for a delivery that might prove difficult. The police of five states have been alerted to search for the child. The boy's best friend, his Grandmother Lansing, has been sent for. A week passed. Finally he was found in Baltimore asleep in a bed with two other boys of his own age. The family that harbored him read no newspapers; they assumed that he was a vagrant orphan of their own people. At one in the morning Eustacia knocked at their door and asked for a cup of tea. Johnny heard his grandmother's voice and climbed on her lap. He was now the dearest thing in the world to her. She scarcely touched him. To herself she said, “We only have what we give up.” His later story was a long lamentable self-destruction.

History is
one
tapestry. No eye can venture to compass more than a hand's-breadth. . . . ?

Constance suffered a series of strokes in her middle forties. She sat on the terrace of her house overlooking Nagasaki Harbor. The members of her family took turns reading aloud to her. Delegations from far places called on her. Calls of adulation were limited to five minutes; she pretended she was tired. But visitors who could tell her how “the work” was going were urged to stay an hour. On her birthdays, the Emperor sent a flower and a poem.

There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some

OVERVIEW

As noted in the biographical sketch in this volume, Thornton Wilder could spend as many as two hundred days a year away from his home in Hamden, Connecticut, seeking locations that “provided the stimulation and solitude he needed for his work.” One of the places where he worked well in the 1930s, and where he got to know and adore the vistas and striking profiles of mountains against desert and sky, was the area in and around Tucson, Arizona.

There, in 1934, he completed his fourth novel,
Heaven's My Destination
, and four years later, in 1938, did significant work on his major drama,
The Merchant of Yonkers
(later revised and known as
The Matchmaker
). So it is perhaps no surprise that by the late 1940s, when he began to dream about the place in the United States where he could hide out for a longer period of time than his usual sojourn of a few weeks to a few months, Wilder focused more and more on Arizona. By the early 1960s, the dream had become all but an obsession, although reported amusingly in an April 1960 letter to his friend, Richard Goldstone, who had written to congratulate Wilder on his sixty-third birthday:

A year later, Thornton Wilder, heavily honored American playwright and novelist, announced a major lifestyle change in a mighty public way: In an AP story headlined
THORNTON WILDER PLANS BUM'S LIFE IN DESERT
, datelined March 2 from Frankfurt, Germany, he was quoted as saying, in part: “I'm headed out into that Arizona desert to be a bum for two years. . . . ? As soon as I get back to the states it's going to be two years without neckties, without cultivated conversation.” He added that he “had wanted to ‘slip away to the wild beauty of that desert' for the past thirty years but had only recently decided to take the step.”

The story had predictable results: Eager to snare a big catch for their community, realtors and chambers of commerce inundated Wilder's Hamden, Connecticut, mailbox with a small avalanche of promotional material, especially from the Patagonia, Arizona area, which he had made the mistake of mentioning more than once as his destination. (He had selected it because he liked the name and not-too-close proximity to Tucson.)

Wilder did not end up in Patagonia; for a man determined to hide, it was now his last-place choice. Therefore, when he left his home in his blue T-bird convertible on May 20, 1962, he had only somewhere in Arizona in mind. As she had for years, Isabel Wilder (1900–1995), his sister and first deputy, remained at her post in the family home in Hamden, Connecticut, protecting her brother by typing the epigraph above in scores of letters.

After a ten-day trip that brought Wilder from Texas into Arizona along Highway 80, he came to ground on May 28 in the U.S.- Mexican border town of Douglas, Arizona (population 12,820 in 1960), 120 miles southeast of Tucson. In 1962, Douglas was in a golden age in its history as a Phelps Dodge Company Company Town (all capitalizations deserved), a status symbolized by that firm's Copper Queen smelter located two miles outside Douglas, one of the world's great copper smelters. Wilder, in short, had landed in the middle of a mining town in a boom period of its history. Here he stayed for nearly twenty months—the first several in the landmark Gadsden Hotel, and after August 1962, in an efficiency apartment he rented at 757 12th Street, about a six-minute walk from the Gadsden and a mile from the border with Agua Prieta, Mexico.

With the prospective birth of
The Eighth Day
in mind, we must imagine Wilder's small three-room second-floor apartment, with no telephone or television. Each day he worked at his card table desk, read, napped, and listened to music on a record player he bought at the end of 1962. While he purchased no dog or cat and left his beloved
Finnegans Wake
material behind in Connecticut, he did take up the culinary arts and learned to make his own lunches, with nutritionally challenging results, as these two reports to Isabel Wilder attest:

At night, he would dine out in Douglas and then often close out the evening at the Gadsden Hotel bar or other watering holes on either side of the border. Because he loved the thrill of the desert and the local restaurants left something to be desired, he often roamed further. To close friends Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon he wrote in September, “Every other evening I drive to Tombstone or Sierra Vista or Bisbee and have a real meal (devouring other guests too . . . ?) unspeakable grandeur of the ride, an hour in the book of Genesis.”

Wherever he went, it is clear from his letters that Wilder was moving among a sea of mining and civil engineers and the world they inhabited; this included daily encounters with Spanish, one of the languages he knew well. But above all, he was delighted to report, he was living among people who did not read many books, had no interest in “arrrrt,” and did not treat him as a celebrity—and he could not have been happier. His situation allowed him to do what he wanted and needed to do: listen. “I've got one big talent,” he wrote to his family; “I
listen
to what's said to me. It's ra-a-a-re.” He practiced this trade in Douglas, along the way learning a vast amount about mining in general, copper mining in particular, and life in good times and bad times in a Company Town. In December 1962, he put the whole business on a higher plain in this letter to his nephew:

Wilder did not imprison himself in Douglas and its surrounding area: For banking, books in the university library, phonograph records he enjoyed, and still better food, he made periodic trips to Tucson, a two-hour drive away, and occasionally even to Phoenix, four hours away. He spent Christmas 1963 in Santa Fe and Taos, and early in his stay, spent ten days visiting an old friend in Guaymas, Mexico. Once he slipped back East for a week. But wherever he went, he attempted to remain incognito, and more often than not he succeeded. When the painter Georgia O'Keefe got wind of his presence in Taos and invited him to stop by, he declined. “So now you have evidence that I really am of a retiring nature,” he wrote to his niece, Catharine.

Wilder, Inc., meanwhile, was a busy enterprise in the early 1960s. As needed, he called his sister Isabel from a public phone to discuss production or publication matters, even the idea for a musical based on
The Matchmaker
(crazy, he thought). And once a week, with the delight of a born letter writer, he would write his sister a “duty” letter about the life and times of the “hermit of Arizona.”