Dragonholder (4 page)

As with our dogs, our cats moved in and out of our lives. In our Windybush estate in
Wilmington, Delaware, we had Touché, Tallabar — named in part after the previous cat,
Cinnabar, and Silkie Blackington. Touché was a marvelous tortoise shell male who died very
young, Tallabar was a multi-colored tortoise who later sired a beautiful orange marmalade
male, “Maxwell Smart” — named for his great (lack of) intellectual prowess.

Silkie was almost all black but she had the softest fur and the sweetest disposition. She sired three or four litters before we finally had her spayed. She got immensely fat but lived to the great age of fourteen. While she was officially Gigi's cat, when we moved up to Sea Cliff, she split her nights equally between Gigi's bed on the third floor and Anne's in the back room on the first floor. Silkie had most of her litters in Anne's first floor room.

 

D
id I say a quick tour? There's more …

Anne was introduced to books as a young child. Her parents read to her every night. Rudyard
Kipling was a featured author — her father would read the kids “The Jungle Book” and
“Kim” and declaim “Barrackroom Ballads” from down the hall when they were sick and had to be
sheltered from bright lights. GH did not ignore Kipling's poetry and Anne had no problem
reciting “Gunga Din” from memory by the time she was in high school.

The Depression was not the major trauma to the McCaffreys that it was to so many others in
that era. Mrs. McCaffrey had “had a feeling” about the stock market a few days before the
crash and had pulled all her money out. For the next few days GH had chided her foolishness
— he got very quiet when the market crashed.

“Feelings” or “the Sight” are common to the McElroy-McCaffreys. Anne's grandfather McCaffrey
(the policeman) — a man of robust good health — called the priest for last rites
three days before his death. Anne's grandmother McElroy — the one who scolded Thomas
cat when he wouldn't eat — had a more alarming encounter.

When Grandmother McElroy's sister, Anne, passed away Grandmother McElroy became obsessed with worry about how her sister would find the afterlife - this Anne having never been very happy in life. The best grand aunt Anne ever says of anything was, “Oh, it's not bad.”

Grandmother McElroy prayed so hard to know if grand aunt Anne was all right that her sister's ghost appeared before her at the front of her bed, shawl tucked into her clasped hands. Shocked to silence by the manifestation, it was some time before Grandmother finally managed to ask the relevant question.

“Oh, it's not bad,” was the shade's diffident reply. At which point, grandmother McElroy was so overcome by her success that she banished the vision and never dared use her abilities again.

Anne and her mother were a team on “knowing” things. The first time Anne ever had the Sight
was in the summer of 1938 when Hugh was in summer camp and GH was on maneuvers at Fort Dix.
When the phone rang, Mrs. McCaffrey exclaimed, “Something's happened to GH.”

“No, it's Hugh,” Anne replied. It was. He'd been rushed to the hospital with a dangerously
inflamed appendix.

Between the Depression and the Second World War, a major family tragedy befell the McCaffreys. Anne's younger brother, Kevin, came down with an undiagnosed ailment. He began a long series of hospitalizations as doctors tried to diagnose the ailment. When they finally did, the news was the worst — it was osteomyelitis, an incurable infection of the bone marrow.

No one knew if Kevie was going to live or die. GH turned down an active duty commission as a colonel in the infantry as the US Army grew in preparation for war. Mrs. McCaffrey stayed with Kevin at the hospital and Anne was sent to Stuart Hall school for girls. It had been established in 1844 as the Virginia Female Institute but was renamed in 1907 in honor of Headmistress Flora Cooke Stuart — J.E.B. Stuart's widow. Stuart Hall was an excellent choice for the daughter of a military man.

Before that, Anne was to experience something that would stick in her memory forever and influence all her future writing. She recalls:

“Mother was a constant companion and nurse for him but the months when she didn't know what Keve had, had drained her of energy. One night she asked me to sit up with Keve so that she could have a full night's sleep. I was to wake her if Keve was too restless — the drugs sometimes had that affect.

“I couldn't have been more than thirteen for it was May. I was rather ‘puffed up' to think
that I could be allowed to help.

“It was a weird night … with Keve climbing endless mountains in his sleep with his hands, and throwing his head from side to side. His swollen leg was secured so that he couldn't injure it.

“Then, fighting sleep, I remember praying to keep awake. I was grateful when the early
morning light seeped through the curtains. The curtains stirred - and suddenly I felt a
'something' — and Keve stopped his restless movements and fell deeply asleep. So
deeply, at first, that I thought he had stopped breathing although I knew that he was all
right. The 'something' had reassured me about that.

“Later that day when the doctor came, he said that the crisis he had been waiting for had
passed and Keve would be all right now. But I knew already, the 'something' had told
me.”

The 'something' pervades her writing — never quite visible but always present. And
always her style lets us know that no matter what the dangers, 'something' will be watching
over the characters in Anne's books, and they'll always make it through to the end.

Kevin was very brave throughout his ordeal. Once, when he was being moved to a different hospital, the ambulance men hustled him back inside because a hearse was driving by. Kevin — who couldn't have been more than twelve — told them, “Never mind, I'll be there soon enough.”

Years later, Anne was to honor his bravery in
The Smallest Dragonboy
— a story that has become her most published short story.

Anne's stint at Stuart Hall was set in motion on December 7th, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. She had been out riding — her mother had gifted her with the use of a horse for the whole month — and passing motorists had shouted out the news of the attack. She rushed home to find her father and mother listening grim-faced to the radio reports of the attack. GH immediately phoned Army Headquarters in New York and told them that he would serve in any capacity for which they felt him qualified.

The Army accepted and in January he was posted to Moultrie Advanced Air Force Base in Georgia as the base's quartermaster at his reserve rank of lieutenant colonel. Before he left, he paid a visit to Kevin at the hospital. At the time Kevin was in a full body cast in an attempt to treat the illness through immobilization. When her father left the hospital, Anne was shocked to see him in tears.

Gruff, stern, and insistent were the qualities most remembered by his children. GH or the
“Kernel”, as he was now signing his letters, was a disciplinarian of the old school. He was
a precise, neat man who hated confusion and disorder. He had a dry sense of humor. He tended
to be choleric but usually with cause. He had a graduated series of expletives — “Damn
it”, “Goddammit”, and “Goddamitall to hellingone” — the severity of which indicated
when the children should make themselves scarce.

The “Kernel” was
never
seen crying. Except now — leaving a son he might never
see alive again.

 

S
tuart Hall and Anne McCaffrey were not a good fit. A Northerner in a Southern school was a problem in itself, a headstrong Northerner who was also a Catholic was a sure recipe for trouble with the Dean of Women. While Anne was allowed to attend Mass she was also required to attend the Episcopalian services in school. She learned more from the Padre than she had ever from a priest or a nun and that, coupled with her crisis of faith in a God who would allow small children the horror of total war and incurable disease, started her break with Catholicism.

Stuart Hall was completely shocked when Anne insisted that she wanted to see the movie
“Tarzan” in the nearby town. No chaperone could be found but her wish marked her even more
as a “rebel.” (The movie did not live up to the books.)

However, Anne was an honor's pupil, allowed to wear the school seal, and performed in the
choir and the theatre, taking the role of the Major General in “The Pirates of Penzance.”
And, thanks to her Aunt Gladdie, Anne had a year of piano lessons.

Anne had written her first story, “Flame, Chief of herd and track” when she was nine and her
second in Latin class, “Eleutheria the Dancing Slavegirl.” At Stuart Hall she wrote poetry.
Lots of it. Anne would spend hours pondering on the perfect pen name and sent several poems
in to the magazines but none were ever published.

At Stuart Hall that Anne had an experience that haunted her then, and profoundly shaped her future. The Kernel had been sent from Moultrie AFB to the Military Governor's course at the University of Virginia. In May 1943, he disappeared — shipped overseas.

Lessa woke, cold.

Anne recalls,

“I woke abruptly — at about 3 a.m. — and terribly worried. Sick worried. I was so sick with worry that I wandered the halls, trying to keep from being seen by the night watchman because I shouldn't have been out of my little room. There was no way I could reach my mother, and I just didn't know what was wrong but something very much was.

“At about 4:30, I was overcome with sleep and just made it back to my room.

“The next morning the Dean sent for me. There was a call from my mother. The whole school knew that the Kernel had been sent overseas.

“‘Anne, did anything happen to you last night?' my mother asked. ‘Kevin's all right but
something is very, very wrong. I'm told that Hugh is well.'

“I said, ‘It's probably Dad then. I woke up at 3 and couldn't get back to sleep.'

“‘That's when I woke up,' mother told me.

“‘Then at about 4:30 I fell asleep again.'

“‘Then it has to be your father … ' her voice trailed off. There was no way she could
find out where the Kernel was.

“I tried to cheer her up, ‘Well, the feeling went away, didn't it? So whatever it was is
over.'

“‘Yes, yes, that's it. He's all right now,' mother agreed and hung up.

“Six months later we found out that German U-boats had attacked the convoy which took the Kernel to Algiers. He and the other top brass had spent an hour and a half in lifeboats — at exactly the same time of early morning that time my mother and I had been so worried.”

Cold with more than the chill of the everlastingly clammy walls. Cold with the prescience of a danger …

 

T
he Kernel survived his lifeboat experience, ordered a medical officer not to report his heart attack in Morocco, and was the first man off his landing craft in Licata, Sicily. The sight of him calmly walking up and down the jetty smoking a cigarette was an inspiration to the green GIs — he was awarded a Beachhead medal. His first assignment was military governor of the town of Agrigento, Sicily.