A Boston Brahmin In New Mexico
It was in the early spring of the summer of 1970 that I made my third trans-continental crossing of the United States, originating in Boston and, as they would say in bygone days, “go west young man”. My first trip was in 67’ as I hitch-hiked 3000 miles from the East Coast to the Pacific Ocean. By 1970 I had become a rather seasoned traveller along life’s highways, and this particular journey had an even more specific intention attached to it.
The preceding year, while I was living in Cambridge Massachusetts, where I kept a small studio apartment in the garret of a large Victorian at the bottom of Plympton Street near Harvard Square, I had become aware of a woman living in New Mexico who, as both an artist and story-teller, had established a puppet theatre in collaboration with the Pueblo Indians who lived in her area. That area was that stretch of territory between Albuquerque, Santa Fe and up to Taos.
As best as I can recall it was in an issue of the Tulane Drama Review or TDR as it was generally known, that I read the story of Elsie Thetford who lived in Abiquiu New Mexico and who had founded this unique theatre. The article spoke of her unusual work as well her life among the Pueblo Indians, both of which fascinated me.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to back up yet another year to 1968 when I was living in New Haven Connecticut and had become friends with a Yale Drama School student, Jim Metzner, where I had the opportunity to develop a growing interest in various forms of theatre. Besides participating in an original play written by Jim that was performed in a local coffee house over some few weekends, I also got a small part in a Yale University production that was put on by the Yale Repertory Theatre, a professional theatre company, and included a number of drama students and at least one non-student. The play was Euripides’ Bacchae, and the wild chorus was nearly all students, with my friend Jim making a memorable impression as one of the devotees of Dionysus. My bit part was that of a Roman soldier who represented law and order, and the antithesis to rights of the god. I must admit, although it was never my intention, that I rather stole the show on opening night and had to be forcibly removed from the stage. Prior to the curtain going up I did ingest a certain substance that had the overwhelming effect of awakening that Dionysian spirit in me. Somewhere in the middle of a fierce stand-off between the followers of Dionysus and the Roman Guard I removed my clothing, except of course, my excellent Roman helmet and upright stanchion that I had adorned with a flower given to me by a most lovely girl who was a member of the bacchanal. Needless to say that was my last performance at Yale and the end of my acting career. A couple of members of the New Haven Police, who for some mysterious reason were in attendance, did not, fortunately, press formal charges, although the actor who played the lead, endlessly stating how he had appeared so many times On as well as Off Broadway, was driven to fury!
But now it is one year later and I am back living in Cambridge, which would have been in late 1969, and having made contact with Ms. Thetford by writing her a letter, was to my delight invited to come and visit her if I should ever be passing by that way. And so it was that in the early spring of 1970, with a cold New England winter behind me that I set out on my odyssey.
At some point I moved off the Interstate highway and began my way along smaller back roads, having more than once stopped to ask anyone who I saw if they could direct me to the Thetford Place. It was late afternoon but the sun was still high up in the huge New Mexico sky. I stood in front of a ‘rammed earth’ house, known as tapia in Spanish, but most commonly as pisé de terre. The front door of this modest home was wide open and only a weather beaten screen door was in place to keep the various crawling or slithering creatures that were everywhere to be found, from coming right on in. I called out: “Hello there”, and was in very short order standing in front of an elderly woman (she was in fact 87) who said; “You must be Robert.”
Elsie Thetford was born in 1883 into an old Boston Brahmin family and in 1901, at the age of 18 was presented into society at a Newport Rhode Island summer ball. Her family were friends of the famous Newport artist John La Farge, who married Margaret Mason Perry, from the even more famous family of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, born in Kingston Rhode Island, and his most renowned younger brother, Commodore Mathew Calbraith Perry of Newport, who, in 1853, sailed into Tokyo Bay and negotiated the first US - Japanese trade agreement. In Boston Elsie’s parents were occasional guest at the home of Isabella Stewart Gardner in the Fenway, that is when Isabella was not in her lovely house in Venice - that I did visit many years later and was actually let in by saying Robert Luongo from Boston. [That visit I made to Venice is another story altogether and concerns Henry James, who in his youth lived in Newport , and later in life was a frequent guest at the Stewart Gardner’s Palazzo Barbaro just off the Grand Canal.] Ms. Gardner, 1840-1924, is most remembered as one of the most prodigious American art collectors and, of course, by John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of her.
And there I was, being welcomed into this charming home in the middle of the New Mexico scrub land of cacti and rattlesnakes, and the biggest sky you have ever seen. “Well how do you do Robert?” is what she said as she showed me into her modest parlour. There was an original Georgia O’Keeffe on the wall, which had been, she said, a gift, in exchange for a particular puppet Georgia loved, and seeing as they were friends and nearly neighbours, neighbours, that is, according to the American south-west where distances are thought of in a far different way.
Mid way between Abiquiu and Taos was a very small town called San Cristobal Taos where in the early 1920’s D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent, on two separate occasions separated by a return trip to England, a couple of years at a small homestead now known as the D.H. Lawrence Ranch. As an exchange for a Lawrence manuscript the house was deeded to Frieda and was the only property either of them ever owned. Elsie and her husband - I’ve not mentioned him yet - were once invited to meet the English couple and Elsie told me how Lawrence was then not very well and was ostensibly in New Mexico to rest and, as always, write. As he was tubercular the dry heat of summer was hoped to be beneficial.
Elsie was married in Boston in 1905 to a civil engineer and land surveyor from a prominent New England family. The territory of New Mexico, Arizona and most of Texas was pretty much unchartered Indian land and the US Government was offering a job to someone who would go there and map the area as well as build storm water drains and aqueducts to combat the raging waters from flash-flooding that could come on so quickly that a dry gulch one minute was a terrifying torrent capable of carrying away anything, from a large vehicle to cattle, in it’s rapids. And so a year or two after the couple married they set off for New Mexico where Elsie and her husband, with the help of local Pueblo Indians, built their home. In 1914 Europe was at war and in 1917 Lieutenant Thetford sailed for England as part of the US war effort to combat the ‘Evil Hun’ as Germany was referred to in the American press, quite possibly originating in any one of the many William Randolph Hearst newspapers. That I don’t really know for sure.
Elsie had been a widow now for quite some years and while she could have gone ‘back east’ decided to stay on in Abiquiu after her husband passed away. I stayed only two days, sleeping on a day bed in a small guest room. Elsie cooked for us and had no regular help, except if there were serious storms and then she said men from the Pueblo would check on her and make sure she was alright. We talked and also walked. Our walks are the most memorable things for me. Elsie carried a walking stick which, due to her age, I assumed was a needed support. As we moved along across the scrub land with cacti and sagebrush scattered out as far as you could see, with the San Cristobal Mountains rising up in the distance in the most vivid purple colour, I heard a sound I had only ever heard about. There was before us a rattler, about four foot long, and Elsie and I just stopped. She proceeded to put the walking stick out in front of her as far as her arm could reach. Faster than you can imagine, that deadly rattlesnake wrapped itself around the stick. With a strong movement of her arm Elsie flung the snake some several feet off to the side. She carried on walking and continued what she had been saying prior to our visitor coming up upon us. She smiled her wry smile, for she knew that this city boy had never seen that before.
The next morning after breakfast I thanked my host so much for her kindness and how easily she trusted me and welcomed me into her home, never once taking exception to this twenty year old fellow wearing his hair long, carrying only a knap-sack from the Army & Navy Store in which there was nothing but a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, James Joyce’s Ulysses and a comb I’d bought at the Five and Dime.
Robert Luongo
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