desert, as far away from industry as possible. Phoenix was where Hunter
lived, and he could come to help us. We found a cottage, and Hunter had
a seven-foot concrete wall put around the lot. Those four boxes that had
been built for storerooms, and which had been transported from Pasadena
to Monrovia, were now transported from Monrovia to Buckeye, and set down
in a row with an extra roof over them for coolness. One was to be my
workroom, and the others were to hold my stock of books. I still could
not get away from book orders.
Craig worked as she had always done, unsparing of her strength. In the
middle of the night she called to me, terrified--she could not breathe.
Lying down asleep, she had almost choked, and to get her breath she had
to sit up. There were two doctors in the town, and I called one. He told
us she had an enlarged heart, and it was due to overexertion: what she
had now was a “congestive” heart attack. The heart was no longer equal
to pumping the blood out of the lungs, and she had to sit up in order
that part of her lungs could be clear.
So there we were, in a strange place, both of us possessed by dread. A
specialist was brought from Phoenix, and he confirmed the diagnosis.
“The patient should be taken to a hospital.” She was taken to Phoenix
and treated for a couple of weeks, and she got a little better; but the
specialist gave us no hope.
She was brought back to our Buckeye home, and I had her sole care. I had
her care for the next seven years, and there were few days when we did
not confront the thought of her doom.
II
I came upon an article about a treatment for such heart conditions
advocated by Dr. Walter Kempner of Duke University, in Durham, North
Carolina. I wired asking for literature, and there came a copy of a
magazine published in Los Angeles called _G.P._, meaning “General
Practice.” It gave an account of Kempner’s treatment, and included x-ray
photographs of hearts before and after treatment. The difference was
striking, and I made up my mind that Craig was going to have Dr.
Kempner’s rice-and-fruit diet. (His belief is that the cause of the
heart enlargement is excess of salt in the blood, and rice is the
all-nourishing food that has the lowest quantity of salt).
It was out of the question to move Craig to North Carolina. I phoned to
a physician we knew in Riverside and asked if he would give the rice
diet according to Kempner’s specifications. He said, “I will do it if
you will take the responsibility.” Then he gave a little laugh and
added, “If you will take half.” I said, “I will take all.” I arranged
for a hospital plane to take us to Riverside next morning.
She didn’t want to go, but for once she was too weak to resist, and I
was in a position to have my way. We had to make an early start because
we had mountains to fly over, and when the sun was up the rising air
would make turbulence. At five o’clock in the morning Hunter was there,
and we carried Craig to our car and drove her to the little airfield of
the town, not much more than a cow pasture.
It was a four-hundred-mile trip, my first by air. We flew over the road
I had driven many times, and it was fascinating to see it from above. I
told Craig about the sights; but, alas, she hadn’t much interest. At the
airport there was an ambulance waiting, and soon she was in a hospital
bed.
I doubt if anybody in the hospital had ever heard of the rice diet, and
it was hard to get a large plate of well-cooked rice without gravy or
butter on it. In fact, it was hard to get anything that Craig wanted,
including quiet; but even so, the miracle began right away. She got well
and was able to breathe lying down. After a couple of weeks she was able
to walk a little.
My mind turned to that little cottage up in the Corona hills only seven
miles away. In that cottage there would be no nurses gossiping outside
her door at midnight. I would be the one to take care of her, and I
would move on tiptoe whenever she slept. I persuaded her to let me take
her there; the doctor consented, on condition that I bring her down
twice a week for the blood tests that were necessary--to make sure that
the supply of salt in her blood wasn’t below the minimum required. I
promised so to do.
So for half a year more we lived in that cottage. I was nurse, cook,
housemaid, chauffeur, and guardian angel. I cooked a pot and a half of
rice for Craig every day, and she was so well that it was a miracle.
Even the cautious doctor had to use extravagant language when he set the
newest x-ray photograph beside the earliest one. I said to him, “Don’t
you think that is remarkable?” His answer was, “I should say it is
spectacular.”
* * * * *
The results of the rice-and-fruit diet were so spectacular that I
decided to try it myself. I didn’t want to bother with blood tests, so I
added celery to the diet--it is a vegetable of which I happen to be
fond, and it gave me what I thought was the necessary bulk for safety. I
added a spoonful of dried-milk powder for a little more salt. We were
both having large quantities of fruit juice, mine being pineapple
because it is the sweetest. Both of us took vitamins.
Throughout most of my writing life, certainly for a half century of it,
I had been accustomed to say that I was never more than twenty-four
hours ahead of a headache. But from the time I adopted the diet of rice
and fruit, which I still follow, I ceased to have headaches, and I have
even forgotten, now, what a headache feels like. Nor have I had any
other ailment, not even a cold.
* * * * *
But to return to my story. With the good doctor’s permission I took
Craig back to our Monrovia home, and we got some apparatus that was
supposed to take the smog out of our bedrooms. We lived there in peace
and happiness for a while; but then Craig discovered that she could no
longer bear to eat any more rice. She began trying all other kinds of
health foods, in particular bread stuffs that were supposed to be low in
salt. Also, she could no longer stand the blood tests, because the
nurses couldn’t find the vein in one wrist, and the other wrist had
become sore from too much puncturing.
So all the heart troubles came back; and there was something worse,
called fibrillation--an endless quivering of the heart that was most
distressing and kept her awake at night. I had gotten an oxygen tank;
she would call me, and I would get up and put the little cap over her
nose and turn on the valve and wait until she had had enough, and then
turn off the valve and go back to bed and sleep, if I could, until she
called again. Neither of us wanted a stranger in the house, so I had her
sole care. I cooked her food, served it, and cleaned up afterward.
Every day I took her outdoors. I took care of her flower beds, and she
would gaze at them with rapture--her poppies, her big red rosebush, her
camellia bush that bloomed every April, and a wonderful golden oleander
that bloomed all summer.
Every night I put her to sleep with prayers. “Dear God, make her well,”
was what I wanted to say over and over again, but Craig insisted it must
be, “Dear God, make _us_ well.” I didn’t need any help so far as I could
see, but I said it her way; when the fibrillations got bad, I would say
it over a hundred times, or maybe two hundred, until at last she went
to sleep. I could never tell when she was asleep; so I would let my
voice die away softly, and wait and see if she spoke.
That was our life for several years. Every now and then I would try to
persuade her to have some rice, just a little at a time; and that
little, alas, was not enough. She was tired of it and forbade me to
mention it. Month after month her condition got worse, her pain harder
to endure. The kind doctor would try pills with some new outlandish
name, and I would get the prescription filled and do my best to learn
which was which.
III
It was during this period of long-drawn-out pain and struggle that Craig
wrote the beautiful book, _Southern Belle_. She wrote about herself and
her lovely childhood and girlhood, all because I pleaded with her to do
it. She wrote about her life with me, because she wanted to set me
straight with the world. Sometimes I would sit by the bed, and write to
her dictation; but most of the time she would write lying in bed with
her head propped forward, holding a pad with one hand and a pencil with
the other.
It was a tiring position, and after she had been doing it for months,
she developed a pain near the base of the spine. I knew from the
beginning that it was a question of posture and tried to persuade her of
that, but in vain. I would take her to specialists, and they would
examine her and give their verdicts--and no two verdicts were the same.
I am quite sure that none of these doctors had ever had a patient who
had treated her spine in that fashion. Craig wouldn’t let me tell them;
I wasn’t a specialist--only a husband--and I must not influence their
judgment.
How many of these dreadful details shall I put into a book? Of course,
anyone may skip them; but I had no way to skip them. Craig had stood by
me through my ordeals, and she was all I had in this world--apart from
the books I had written and the one I was writing. The only other person
who could help us was Hunter, and he would arrive from Phoenix eight
hours after I telephoned. He was there when Craig became delirious from
pain or from the injections that the doctors had given her. He would
comfort me when I, too, was on the verge of becoming delirious at the
sight of her suffering. She would say that she was suffering from cold
and would have me pile every blanket in the house on top of her; then
she would say that she was suffocating and would throw them all off. I
remember a night of that, and then I could not sleep in the day. We had
to have her taken to a hospital; and she hated hospitals, each one had
been worse than the last.
IV
I cannot bring myself to tell much about the end. I do not think that
many could bear to read it. At times she became delirious, and wasn’t
herself any more; I had to make up my mind to that. Then suddenly she
_would_ be herself--her beautiful self, her dear, kind, loving self, her
darling self, agonizing about me and what I was going to do, and how I
could manage to survive in a dreadful world where everybody would be
trying to rob me, to trap me, to take away the money that she had worked
so desperately to keep me from spending.
Three times during that long ordeal I found her lying on the hard
plastone floor of the upstairs kitchen that we had made for her. The
first two times we were alone in the house, and since I could not lift
her, I had to call the ambulance to get her back in bed. The second time
she was unconscious, and I called the doctor again. He thought these
were “light strokes,” and later on the autopsy confirmed the opinion;
but she had not been told.
The third time was less than a month before the end. Her nephew,
Leftwich Kimbrough, was with us, so we two carried her to bed. I sat by,
keeping watch, and presently I heard her murmuring; I listened, and soon
went and got a writing pad and pen. They were fragments of a poem she
was composing while half-conscious, and I wrote what I heard:
Stay in their hearts, dear Jesus,
Stay and make them kind.
And then, after an interval:
Oh, the poor lonely nigger,
Bring love to his soul.
Later, I wrote underneath, for the record: “Craig’s murmured singing
after bad fall. I mentioned to her, it was Good Friday Eve, 1961.”
You will recall my account of the visit of Judge Tom Brady, founder of
the citizens’ councils all through the Deep South. From earliest
childhood little Mary Craig Kimbrough had wrestled with that race
problem of her homeland. She heard and saw both sides; the fears of the
whites, for which they had reason, and the pitiful helplessness of the
ignorant blacks. Now, in her last hours, she was pleading, in the first
couplet for the whites whom she loved and in the second for the blacks,
whom she also loved.
One day she would eat nothing but soft-boiled eggs, and the next day she
would eat nothing but gelatine. So the icebox was full of eggs and then
of gelatine. One elderly doctor told her that the best remedy for
fibrillation was whisky; so here was I, a lifelong teetotaler who had
made hatred of whisky a part of his religion, going out to buy it by the
quart. Craig insisted that I should never buy it in Monrovia where I was
known; I must drive out on one of the boulevards and stop in some
strange place and pay for a bottle with some imbecile name that I
forgot. That went on for quite a while, and the time came when Craig was
so weak that I couldn’t manage to hold her up while she tried to walk
the length of the room.
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.
II
We were to be married in the Episcopal Church, and the rector was called
in to hear my story. I had obtained a divorce half a century before, I
being the innocent party in the suit. I had been remarried by an
Episcopal clergyman, on the banks of the Rappahannock River--with
jonquils blooming on the riverbank and behind me the heights on which
twenty thousand Union soldiers had given their lives. The rector in
Claremont said that if the church had given its sanction once, it would
not refuse it again; so all was well.
We wanted the wedding as quiet as possible. All my life I have sought
publicity--but for books and causes, not for myself, and if we could
have had our way, no one but the family would have known. But the law in
California requires that both parties appear at the county office
building and sign an application for a license--and this two days before
the marriage can take place. The license is valid anywhere in the state;
so I had an idea: “Let’s go into another county, where there’s less
chance of our being known.” We motored to San Bernardino, where two kind
ladies gave us the blanks and instructions, and gave no sign that there
was anything unusual about us. But soon after we got back to Claremont,
the telephone calls began, and we knew that all the cats were out of the
bag. Later we learned that courthouse reporters make it a practice to
inspect the lists daily before closing time.
The clergyman had agreed that only members of the family and half a
dozen invited friends were to be admitted: the Armours, of course, and
the Sol Lessers, and the Richard Ottos of the far-off EPIC campaign. Dr.
Hard gave his sister away, and the bride’s granddaughter, Barbara Sabin,
was matron of honor. Hunter acted as my “best man.” The doors were
guarded, and the morning ceremony was performed with the customary
age-old dignity. But when the bride and groom emerged from a side door,
there was what appeared to be a mob. A flood of questions was poured
out, and cameras before our eyes were making little clicking noises.
There was a crony of the far-off EPIC days, Hans Rutzebeck, a sailor who
had written a grand book about his life, _The Mad Sea_. He had had
plenty of time to talk to the reporters, and when I greeted him his
claims of friendship were confirmed.
So the story was lively, and it appeared in all the evening papers. More
detailed stories with photographs were in the morning papers all over
the world. I do not exaggerate; friends, and strangers too, cut them out
and sent them to us from half a dozen capitals of Europe, and from
Brazil, Tokyo, India, Australia. College president’s sister, aged 79,
marries muckrake man, aged 83--you can see how it was, and May was
amused. She even got an album in which to keep the clippings for her
great-grandchildren.
So this story has a happy ending. We both enjoy good health, and age
does not bother us. We live with our books and papers in a wonderful
fireproof house that a rich banker built, got tired of, and sold cheaply
some twenty years ago. There is a half acre of land, completely
surrounded by the hedge of eugenia trees. There are twenty-one kinds of
fruit trees, and instead of lawns there are lantana and sweet alyssum,
which do not have to be mowed. There is a camellia bush, and a golden
oleander as big as a cottage; there are rosebushes, an iris bed, poppy
beds that are a dream--and when I get tired of hammering on a
typewriter, I go out and pull weeds from the poppies.
Now the house is fixed up May’s way; the velvet curtains are drawn back,
and there are bright curtains and new paint in spots and everything is
gay. Her friends come and carry her off to luncheons and musicales and
exhibitions of paintings; in the evenings we read some of the fifty
magazines that I take, or play the word game called Scrabble, which she
has taught me. She is ahead one day, and I the next.
III
Ordinarily I do not attend luncheons or dinners--my diet of rice and
fruit cuts down my social life. But as I write, my wife and I have just
returned from a trip to the East that was one long round of luncheons
and dinners. (I kept to my diet--and probably left a trail of puzzled
waiters behind me.)