109 East Palace (4 page)

After investigating reputable sanitariums everywhere from Colorado Springs to the Sierra Madre, the Scarritts eventually settled on Sunmount as the ideal place for Dorothy to wile away those disappointing days. The high-desert plateau and crisp, clear air were regarded as therapeutic from a medical standpoint, and the stunning mountain vistas equally invigorating from a psychological one. Sunmount had first opened its doors to patients in 1903, but the lovely salmon-colored stucco compound on Camino del Monte Sol that greeted Dorothy on her arrival was built in 1914. It was designed so that the exterior took on the luscious contours of adobe and conformed to the Spanish Pueblo Revival style that was then coming into vogue. Under the guidance of its director, Dr. Frank Mera, Sunmount’s patients were prescribed a European-style regimen featuring rest, a nutritious diet, and plenty of fresh air. They enjoyed large, comfortable rooms with big, open windows and slept year-round on sun porches constructed to face southwest so as to capture the winter light. Dorothy quickly became practiced in the art of wrapping herself tightly in blankets to ward off the cold of the desert nights.

Sunmount advertised itself as a modern health resort rather than a hospital and, in contrast with the grim prisonlike isolation enforced by many sanitariums at the time, placed no serious restrictions on its patients’ activities or sociability. Mera was something of a Southwest aficionado, and together with his brother, Harry, a local archaeologist, made sure those in his care took full advantage of Santa Fe’s cultural attractions and saw to it that the hospital became closely integrated into the local community. Sunmount sponsored tours of the old town and Indian pueblos, organized educational events that celebrated the ancient culture of the Indians and the Spanish settlers who came in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and staged concerts, poetry readings, and dance recitals to help pass the time fruitfully. Whatever quaintness had originally characterized his efforts gave way to a busy and profitable service industry. There were classes available in everything from painting and pottery making to architecture, and the Pueblo Indians and area craftsmen were invited to sell their artwork to the rich and idle in residence.

To Santa Feans, TB was a respectable affliction, and they maintained a tolerant attitude toward the moneyed easterners who flocked there for the cure in the 1920s. Even then, Santa Fe was not the typical tourist town, and had a lively bohemian culture that qualified it as “the Paris of the Southwest.” The recent boom in archaeology, and growing government interest in preserving the ancient Indian ruins in nearby Frijoles Canyon, had served to greatly raise the town’s profile and importance, attracting academics, collectors, and affluent hobbyists. New Mexico was becoming part of the vast western vacationland, “the land of enchantment,” and the Harvey Houses company was running “Indian Detours” out of La Fonda, packaging trips for wealthy tourists eager to “rough it in style” and view a formerly dangerous land, still rugged and untamed enough to thrill.

Santa Fe and more particularly Taos, its smaller rival seventy miles to the north, had long been a destination for artists, dating back to 1883, when the popular Western painter Joseph Henry Sharpe first passed through the area on a sketching trip. His idyllic paintings of Native American life brought attention to the region and inspired other artists to travel west in search of the enchanted landscape and magical quality of the light. Because of its stunning vistas, Taos soon captured the imagination of such painters as Joseph Henry Cottons, Ernest Blumenschein, Bert Phillips, and living Couse, and in 1913 they joined together to form the Taos Society of Artists. Not long afterward, the heiress and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan took up residence in Taos, and her fabled hospitality drew many of the era’s great names in art, literature, philosophy, and psychology. On his first visit to Luhan’s ranch in 1922, the writer D.H. Lawrence was so moved by the bold colors and exotic scenery of New Mexico that, he wrote, the place changed him forever and liberated him for the “greatness of beauty.” He returned to recuperate from tuberculosis and remained until 1925, producing a series of paintings, in addition to turning out some of his finest poems, stories, and essays, and the novel
The Plumed Serpent
.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the Denver and Rio Grande railways opened the West to many more artists and collectors, and they came in droves in search of the unspoiled land and simplicity they could not find elsewhere. The new arrivals discovered Santa Fe, turning it into a thriving cultural center. The city’s first resident artist was Carlos Vierra, a photographer who came from California in 1904 seeking relief for his lung problems in the arid climate, and liked it so much he made it his home, opening up a studio on the Plaza. As Santa Fe’s reputation spread, Sunmount prospered, playing host to a stream of well-known figures: among them the New York painters Sheldon Parsons and Gerald Cassidy; the architect John Gaw Meem; and the poet Alice Corbin, who prior to her illness had been an associate editor of the highly influential magazine
Poetry
.

Alice Corbin Henderson was thirty-five when she traveled to Sunmount in 1916 accompanied by her husband and daughter, and she feared she would never leave the tuberculosis sanitarium, writing that she “had been thrown out in the desert to die, like a piece of old scrap iron.” Unexpectedly, she survived, and she ended up building a home nearby on Camino del Monte Sol and inviting colleagues such as Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and Witter Bynner to visit and give readings at the sanitarium. Bynner, who briefly stayed at Sunmount while recuperating from an illness, found life in Santa Fe so pleasant he remained for the rest of his life and, with Corbin, helped establish the writer’s colony. In 1917, Corbin, Bynner, and Sandburg helped publish a special issue of
Poetry
magazine inspired by the chants and spoken poems of the Pueblo Indians. Meanwhile, Corbin’s husband, the painter William Penhallow Henderson, went on to found the Canyon Road art colony and contributed significantly to local architecture and design, becoming a leading figure in town. The couple’s busy, productive life encouraged others. Many Sunmount patients stayed on for years, receiving aftercare treatment in town, ultimately choosing to settle permanently in the area, and, as in the case of John Gaw Meem, building large airy houses, carrying on extremely active careers, and using their well-heeled connections at the sanitarium to secure an abundance of commissions. “Sunmount was really a magical place,” explained Meem’s daughter, Nancy Wirth. “Its founder, Frank Mera, wanted much more for his patients than just a cure. He pushed them to do more, to get out and explore. Many patients, like my father, became imbued with passion for the place.”

The avant garde art scene lured a string of early Modernist painters from New York, most notably Robert Henri and John Sloan, members of the Ashcan school, who became frequent visitors to the city. In the 1920s, the penniless young Philadelphia painter Will Shuster founded the Santa Fe Art Colony with four other aspiring artists, known locally as the Los Cinco Pintores (“the five painters”), and developed a communal artists’ compound, where for five years they studied and showed their work together. Other young artists soon followed, including the watercolorist Cady Wells, as well as Charles Barrows and Jim Morris and the writers Mary Austin and her friend Willa Gather, who came and went, and whose novel
Death Comes for the Archbishop
, based on the life of Santa Fe archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, was published in 1927. By the end of the decade, when Georgia O’Keeffe spent her first summer in the area, eventually purchasing a seven-acre spread at Ghost Ranch in the village of Abiquiu, Santa Fe’s Roaring Twenties art scene had acquired international fame.

Like Corbin, Dorothy had come to Sunmount expecting to die and was greatly surprised to find herself enjoying her exile. She was captivated by the romantic aura of the place, the artists in their bright smocks and blue jeans and the Santa Feans themselves in their cowboy clothes, silver belts, silk scarves, and fringed deerskins. She attended poetry recitals, lectures, political discussions, and amateur theatricals. “Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora Duncan, appeared in a sack cloth and shepherd’s crook and told of his experiences and hopes,” Dorothy wrote in an unpublished memoir. “People from Russia enlivened us with stories of their theatre and ballet. I fell in love with the place because of its beauty and the cultural and intellectual atmosphere.”

Dorothy put her time at Sunmount to good use, hobnobbing with the most interesting patients, as well as with the healthy clientele in town, former “TBs” who were busy making a name for themselves in Santa Fe. One such friend was George Bloom, who would later become head of the First National Bank. Another was Katherine Stinson, who was already something of a celebrity when Dorothy met her at the sanitarium. In 1912, at the age of twenty-one, Stinson had become only the fourth woman in the country ever to receive a pilot’s license, and a year later she had founded her own company, Stinson Aviation. She proceeded to bust records of every kind in the ensuing decade: she was the first woman to fly at night; the first to fly to China; the first to perform skywriting, spelling “C-A-L” over Los Angeles. Toward the end of World War I, she contracted tuberculosis in France, and spent seven years on and off at Sunmount gradually regaining her health. Although Stinson’s barnstorming days were over, Dorothy admired her independence and fearlessness, even in confinement, and they would become lifelong friends.

Dorothy spent eleven months at Sunmount and was pronounced “cured.” Joe McKibbin renewed his attentions to her, after being given permission to visit her toward the end of 1926, by which time her health had substantially improved. In the spring of 1927, he proposed again, and she accepted. When she compared herself with Katherine Stinson, Dorothy knew she had much to be grateful for. But she was also keenly aware of the time she had lost, and that all her schoolmates and cousins had married and moved on with their lives. It was only natural that a young woman, after watching her sisters die and then falling under the same shadow herself, and after having seen so many friends languish and fail, would come away with a certain mental toughness. What may have begun as a defensive posture in Dorothy became a deeply ingrained characteristic, and her stoicism and stubborn optimism would be her chief assets in the years ahead, always within reach, no matter how trying the circumstances.

On October 5, 1927, Dorothy and Joe McKibbin were married in the garden of her parents’ home. She often joked that she had a small wedding owing to its belatedness and their advanced ages—she was nearly thirty, and he was thirty-four. The Kansas City society pages diplomatically covered the restrained celebration, observing that the bride demonstrated her “distinct individuality in her wedding gown … [and] chose a sapphire blue velvet dress and wore a small hat to match.” The couple honeymooned in Rio de Janeiro and then settled in St. Paul. Joe continued to manage the fur trade at McKibbin, Driscoll & Dorsey, while quietly reassuring his Princeton friends he would soon be joining their brokerage business. Those plans had to be postponed again when Dorothy discovered she was expecting a child. On December 6, 1930, they welcomed their son Kevin into the world.

For Dorothy, it was a time of pure and unexpected joy. “None of this valley of the shadow of death but peaks of excitement of life,” she wrote days after his birth, putting her feelings to paper as she often did during fraught moments in her life:

There is nothing personal about happiness. It is an aliveness. It is a oneness with nature and humanity. It is a deep knowledge of suffering and desolation. It is an intenseness of feeling, of understanding good and evil. Compassion. Vital awareness of being a part of the universe in all its manifestations. Harmony. Acute knowledge of kinship with all the peoples of the earth. Recognition of true values. Preoccupation with truth.

But even as she wrote those lines, Dorothy knew that she had not escaped the “shadow of death” for long. She had already had a harbinger of the dark days that lay ahead. A year and a half into their marriage, Joe McKibbin was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a progressive cancer of the lymph system. Unlike tuberculosis, it was then considered incurable. His condition was hopeless from the start, though neither Dorothy nor his doctor ever told him of his terminal illness. His death, when it finally came, was hard and long. Dorothy endeavored to be as strong and steadfast in her husband’s sickness as he had been in hers, and she nursed him over the last painful year to the end. He died on October 27, 1931.

Before her husband became bedridden, she had taken him on a trip across Colorado to New Mexico, hoping it would improve his health. He had taken to the luminous landscape as quickly as she had and, with his strength already faltering, had agreed that “someday they would settle there where they could have horses and dogs and raise their family under the incredible blue skies and golden sun.” This had always been more her dream than his, and now it was hers alone. “I was ten months old, and she was suddenly on her own,” Kevin reflected years later. “She folded up everything in St. Paul and went down to Kansas City to her parents’ house. She stayed a couple of months, but she couldn’t stand it. In April of 1932, she loaded me up in the little Model A coupe she had and we drove out to Santa Fe.” The trip took almost a month. Although he was too little to understand, Dorothy told Kevin they were going away to a place “where they would sit under a piñon tree and spend all their days in peace and happiness.”

Dorothy was drawn to Santa Fe as a refuge, and by the memories of her days at Sunmount and of the interesting people she had met there. She had fraternized with a very different sort than she had known in her Kansas City milieu, and those experiences and friendships had awakened a fascination with the region’s unique culture and redemptive climate. Something in the atmosphere, in the strangely beautiful windswept landscape and extravagant purple twilights, encouraged a sense of well-being and possibility. In Santa Fe, there was a ready-made community to welcome her, people who were no strangers to pain and loss, who had gone there to recover and had remained because they had discovered a new way of life. She had felt more alive there, more aware of every breath she took and the feel of the sun on her back, than she ever had been before. “She saw staying in Kansas City as being trapped,” said her nephew Jim Scarritt. “Getting away was liberating.” She seemed to feel as O’Keeffe did when the artist observed of New Mexico, “The world is wide here.” Eager to escape the pitying faces of family, and the suffocating loss of freedom she experienced at being back under her parents’ roof again, Dorothy headed west.