109 East Palace (5 page)

“I think she may have missed the independence that she had when she was in Santa Fe,” said Kevin. “It was a very creative community and kind of unusual in the way it operated. It had some real characters in it, and everyone went their own way. She felt right at home.”

When Dorothy arrived in Santa Fe, she found little had changed in the bustling little city at the base of the mountains. Many of the streets lacked paving, the old Spanish women still wore their traditional long black skirts over wide boots, and the familiar, pungent smell of piñon from all the small wood-burning fireplaces in the shops filled the air. Piñon wood heated the city, and she had not realized how much she had missed its smoky perfume. The Indians continued to hawk their wares every day on the sidewalk in the shade of the old Governors’ Palace as they had for centuries. The Woolworth’s was new, and there were more curio shops and dry-goods stores, two drugstores, and innumerable small cafés. In the Plaza, the oldest residents of the region mingled with the new European immigrants, the poorest of people with the wealthiest, the illiterate with the highly educated. The supporting cast consisted of the same oddball mix of artists, writers, consumptives, neurotics, speculators, adventurers, escapists, and dreamers of every description. It was the colorful crossroads she remembered so well, with everyone in his or her own way making a last stand for rugged individualism. Presiding over it all was the dignified bronze statue of Archbishop Lamy in front of St. Francis Cathedral, a dramatic Romanesque structure that always struck her as somewhat incongruous amid all the humble Pueblo architecture.

Despite its historic position as the terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, the city had stubbornly resisted growth, and even after the admission of New Mexico to the union in 1912, the city had consisted of only 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants. In the 1920s, the tourist trade had brought some development, and by the time she returned in 1932 the population hovered around 11,000. But since the Great Depression, business was down. The rich private collectors had all but disappeared, and many of the roughly one hundred artists living in town were in dire straits. The dry years had only compounded the problems. A sustained drought and particularly brutal winter had driven the local economy even further down, and many homesteaders in the middle Rio Grande area were fighting for survival. There were not a lot of good jobs to be had, but former patients had the advantage over the local residents because they were generally better educated, and Dorothy was no exception. She soon found work as a bookkeeper at the Spanish and Indian Trading Company. Kevin teased that sitting up at that high desk with her pencil and heavy ledger, she “looked like Scrooge.”

Over time, it became Dorothy’s job to balance the books while the two shop owners, Norman McGee and Jim McMillan, went on buying sprees around the state. They thought nothing of writing $10,000 checks for consignments of art treasures, but could never quite remember to pay the rent. They were far too much in demand to attend to such mundane matters and increasingly relied on Dorothy to keep the business end of the trading company functioning. It was the most noted store of its kind in New Mexico, or for that matter the entire Southwest, and Indians from the surrounding pueblos, Navajo reservations, and Hopi villages brought their finest blankets, pottery, and woven baskets to sell or barter. Spanish traders brought hand-carved furniture and the rarest of old santos (images of saints), bultos (carved wooden sculptures), and retablos (painted wood or tin altarpieces). The store was always busy and lively, and along the way Dorothy was receiving a first-class education in Spanish and Indian arts and crafts and developing an astute collector’s eye. She earned fifty cents an hour keeping “a very complicated set of books with 14 columns,” but the workday was flexible and allowed her time to look after her little boy. She had the small insurance pension her husband had left her, and in a small town like Santa Fe, the little money she earned went a long way. It was enough for them to live on.

Dorothy’s father, who had never ceased to admire his daughter’s spirit and courage, came out to visit several times. He had lost much of his fortune in the Depression, but he scraped together enough money to buy her a house. Instead of purchasing a home, however, Dorothy was intent on building one. She was inspired in part by her friend Katherine Stinson, who in the intervening years had married Miguel Otero, Jr., a New Mexican attorney and aviator who was the son of one of the state’s territorial governors. During her many years in Santa Fe, Stinson had become fascinated with the local architecture. No longer strong enough to fly, she had taken up her new hobby while at Sunmount, where she met John Gaw Meem, who had become a reknowned local architect and had offered to act as her mentor in what would become her new career. Stinson had built her own large adobe house in Meem’s Pueblo Revival style, and Dorothy asked her if she would design a modest home for her and Kevin on one and a half acres of piñon-studded land on the Old Santa Fe Trail road. The house was in a rural area on the outskirts of town, two miles down a dusty, red-dirt road, and many of her friends thought she was mad at the time. But the price was right—the land and construction came to $10,000—and Dorothy loved the view, which took in the blue Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the Sandia and Manzano ranges curving off to the south. On clear days, even Mt. Taylor, the legendary “Sentinel of the Navajo Land,” was visible, its snowcapped peak glittering in the winter sun.

Dorothy and Katherine Stinson designed the house together, working every morning at the Oteros’ kitchen table. Dorothy had her heart set on an exact replica of an ancient Spanish-style farmhouse, laid out in a U shape with a traditional patio or interior courtyard, flat roof, thick walls, and a long sheltering portal. She insisted on incorporating into the architecture the old beams and other antique pieces she had collected, giving it the intentionally wobbly silhouette and rounded corners of time-worn adobes. She and Stinson went on shopping sprees while the construction was under way, scouring the countryside for distinctive elements. They salvaged the front portal from a crumbling rural farmhouse and found the rare, hand-carved corbels used to support it in the neighboring village of Agua Fria. A centuries-old door was bought for five dollars. To Dorothy’s delight, Stinson covered the living room floor with dark red bricks made by prisoners at the old penitentiary. The cozy 1,800-square-foot structure was completed in 1936, and Dorothy furnished it with native woven hangings and tinwork lamps she had acquired at the trading company. Thanks to the Depression, it was possible to find beautiful hand-woven Navajo and Chimayo rugs for three to five dollars at roadside gas stations on the outskirts of town, where the Indians sold them or traded them for fuel. She had one obsessive goal as she put in her garden and planted yellow Castilian roses on the border of her patio—that it be “a happy house.”

The adobe house was a rare luxury. On the last Saturday of every month, Dorothy would take Kevin to town and settle her accounts at all the shops where she had charged things. By the end of their rounds, there was usually just enough left over for them to buy Cokes at the Capital Pharmacy before heading home. “Money was tight,” said Kevin. “My father left her pretty well fixed-up in that she had some stock, and a little something put away, so we were comfortable. But it wasn’t much.”

In those days, there was only a small group of prominent “Anglos” in town, and as Dorothy already knew a number of them from Sunmount, she was quickly ushered into their tight-knit social world. She was close to John Meem, as well as his brother, both of whom lived in adjacent houses on the same street, only a short distance from her home. “She was never part of the ‘horsey’ set of well-to-do women from back east who kept ranches just outside town,” recalled Bill Hudgins, a boyhood friend of Kevin’s. “You could always tell those women by their tailored wool suits and mannish hats. Dorothy wasn’t like that at all. She was fun and informal and liked to wear bright Navajo skirts and fiesta blouses. She really knew the local culture and was part of it. I’d have sworn she was born in Santa Fe and lived here all her life, if I didn’t know better.”

Just when everything seemed to be falling into place for Dorothy, illness again threatened to destroy her world. In the summer of 1937, Kevin was diagnosed with rheumatic endocarditis, a potentially fatal cardiac disease. The doctor’s best recommendation for the ailing six-year-old was a year of bed rest. Too much exertion could kill him. There would be no going to school for him that fall. All they could do was wait and see. Dorothy shut her mind against the terrible possibilities. She put everything aside to tend to her little boy, rushing home for lunch every day and returning straight after work each afternoon. Kevin was bored and lonely, and she hated seeing him lying there looking so miserable. She spent hours a day sitting on his bed reading to him, playing games, and devising ways to keep him amused. It was a long, trying winter, made more so by the death of her father from pneumonia. The following summer, Dorothy took Kevin to Los Angeles Children’s Hospital to see if there had been any improvement. “We drove out to Los Angeles, accompanied by my grandmother and aunt, who followed in a LaSalle limousine with a liveried driver,” recalled Kevin. “It was quite a convoy.” Dorothy rented a tiny house near the shore in Long Beach, hoping the sun and sea air would do Kevin some good. The doctors’ verdict was that Kevin had been misdiagnosed. He was suffering from nothing worse than a bad case of tonsillitis. They removed the swollen glands and sent him home.

Over the next few years, many of Dorothy’s Santa Fe friends tried to play matchmaker. She kept company with several gentlemen, including the painter Cady Wells, whom she almost married. But after burying her husband and nearly losing her son, Dorothy may have been inclined to take her happiness where she found it, without asking for more. “She had suitors,” said her friend Betty Lilienthal. “But I don’t think there was anyone in town who really interested her that way, who was really appropriate. She had a great many friends, and kept herself busy, and took care of Kevin. I think she was content.”

If Dorothy had once yearned for a more adventurous life, she had put those thoughts aside and reconciled herself to slow, sun-drenched days in the mesas and mountains of the high desert. Though she counted her blessings that both she and Kevin were doing well, she could not help feeling uneasy at times about the events taking place in Europe. She looked sadly back on those youthful sojourns abroad with her father and wondered if his generation’s sacrifices in the Great War had all been a waste. She read the increasingly alarmist newspaper reports about the rise of fascism and Hitler’s treaty-breaking demands; and when German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, she realized that the ideological tensions had finally erupted into a military conflict. As much as she, like most Americans, was determined that Europe would fight it out alone, and that this country would remain neutral and uninvolved, she understood that even in Santa Fe there would be no respite from worry and strife.

In her memoir, she recorded the morning in May 1940 when the harsh reality of war suddenly intruded on her peaceful world and wrenched her heart and filled her with foreboding. She and Cady Wells had accompanied their friends Eliot Porter, a well-known landscape photographer, and his wife, Aline, on a trip to the small Hopi village of Supai, located thirteen miles down, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and reachable only by foot or horseback. In this unhurried, isolated corner of the world, they sat lazily listening to the radio in a trader’s house, when a report crackled over the airwaves that the Nazis had marched into Holland:

There had been a moment of stunned disbelief. The sky was just as bright and deeply blue. The wild celery was just as green on the bank of the small stream which wandered over the rocks on its way to Havasupi Falls. The green backs of the frogs leaping in and out of the stream glistened as always with crystals of brook water. Everything was the same. But nothing would be the same again. There would never again be a piñon tree under which was eternal peace and everlasting happiness.

When war was declared on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dorothy’s first reaction was that at least she and Kevin “would be safe,” tucked away in a sleepy backwater such as Santa Fe. She had lost family in the Great War and felt no good had come from that or any other war. She had seen enough misery and death to last her a lifetime and had come out west in part to escape all that. Despite a strong sense of duty that tugged at her conscience, she turned her back on the drumbeat of patriotism and the colorful propaganda banners that filled the Plaza. But the war soon came home to Santa Fe in ways she could not ignore. The small city fell into an economic slump as all the able-bodied men enlisted and one business after another was liquidated. Not far from town, in Casa Solana, a large internment camp was built, and surrounded by barbed wire. Rumor had it that the prison held Japanese Americans and Japanese from Latin America who were deemed “dangerous persons,” and the U.S. government was holding them as bargaining chips for potential prisoner exchanges with Japan. By the beginning of 1943, Dorothy, whose travels had given her a lasting interest in foreign affairs, found it impossible not to feel “quite worked up about the world situation.” She followed the reports of fierce fighting in the Pacific, where America had mobilized almost half a million troops to prepare for General Douglas MacArthur’s offensive. In North Africa, Rommel’s panzer army had routed Allied forces at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, leaving nearly 1,000 dead. The war was not going well, and Dorothy kept her small kitchen radio tuned to the news.

By the time she met Robert Oppenheimer, Dorothy had been a widow for twelve years. At his request, she plunged herself into the clandestine wartime project. She did not have the slightest idea what he was doing in the high country, or what would be asked of her. She did not care, she wrote, “if he was digging trenches to put in a new road.” He was the most compelling man she had ever met, and she would have done anything to be associated with him and his work. Perhaps the desert had worked its cure on her a second time, and she was strong again. Her heart, like her scarred lungs, had healed. Maybe after so many years the town had become a bit too small, and she felt the stirrings of an old restlessness. It may also have been that her father’s spirit of adventure ran deeper in her than she knew, and she was ready to see what else life held in store for her. Oppenheimer asked her to start right away, and she agreed.