The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told

by Dikkon Eberhart

  At the same time A.L. was reeling from the financial blow, it became apparent that Lena was seriously ill. The word cancer was scarcely used around the household, and of course, never in front of the children. However, it was cancer—lung cancer (though my grandmother did not smoke)—and it weakened her inexorably during that dire summer of 1921. In the end, though, the truth could not be kept from the children, and A.L. took them to the apple orchard and laid it all out before them.

  According to Dad, “Apple Orchard,” a section of one of his longer poems, Burr Oaks, is an accurate rendition of the event. The beauty of the sun shining through the white-and-pink apple blossoms contrasts, both in the poem and in Dad’s telling, with the ache of what needed to be told.

  Dad was seventeen. Having just graduated from Austin High School, he decided to postpone his departure for the University of Minnesota to assist with his mother’s care and his sister’s comforting. My grandmother was a believer in the power of prayer, and my father, his father, and she spent many hours together, praying. Other times, Dad read to her from uplifting books. He nursed her with tender bites of food when she could eat, and with drinks of tea or lemonade. He also managed and monitored visitations from other ladies of the town. Sometimes Lena was simply too weak to accept a visit, and Dad acted as her secretary, politely offering apologies on her behalf.

  Eventually, there came a time when prayer and local doctoring were of no avail, and the family accompanied Lena to Chicago to have what was then a last-resort therapy employing dangerous radiation. For a time, Lena showed improvement, and the family returned to Austin. However, Lena’s recovery was short lived, and she died in November 1921.

  When Dad would tell this tale to my younger sister, Gretchen, and me, he would use a tone that lent the tale a sense of awe and of tragedy that endowed it with an almost Shakespearean aura—or at least it did for me. Of course, I was young, and I loved my dad. In reality, though the tale is colorful enough, it is really just an ordinary human tale of a business reversal coincident with a parental death.

  Dad’s journal entries from the period reflect the yearning he felt for her recovery and, more vaguely, for the recovery of his father’s fortunes. The entries are articulate beyond the ordinary, even for a time when youngsters were more carefully schooled in English composition than they are today. Emerging in Dad’s journal is a passionate voice. Dad was already a writer of poetry, but his journal marks the emergence of a powerful prose maker.

  Many times, to me and to interviewers, Dad explained his poetic determination in life as “my attempt to heal a bifurcated and an inexorably anguished soul.” His soul may have been bifurcated—cut in half—by the twin calamities which his family encountered, but there was another element in Dad’s poetic determination that was apparent to me. It was apparent to me because I shared it. He was a Romantic. He believed in emotion as the great doorway to intense aesthetic experience, such a high level of experience that it closely touched the level of the divine.

  1921. This is the time and these are the events that wounded my father, and he barely adjusted to it. Once, he told me it wasn’t until he was in his fifties that he finally began to recover from the death of his mother. That’s a long, long burn.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Now for the other side.

  My mother’s grandfather invented floor wax.

  When I was very young, it seemed odd to me that some person should have needed to invent floor wax in the first place. The stuff was ubiquitous; it was just around. It was as though someone’s great-grandfather had needed to invent the fork or the chair.

  Charles Butcher was an English immigrant and a finish carpenter. During the 1870s, he laid many of the parquet floors in the brownstones being built just then in the developing Back Bay section of Boston. The trouble was that the maids scrubbed his floors with soap and water, which made them whiten and splinter, or they rubbed them with beeswax, which made them sticky, particularly in hot weather. There had to be a better way.

  Butcher lived in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston, and he experimented in his barn. Eventually, he discovered that a combination of carnauba wax, beeswax, turpentine, and other ingredients produced a hard, shiny, durable, and inexpensive finish, perfect for the protection and beautification of his floors. He took to handing out a can of Butcher’s Boston Polish whenever he finished a floor job. In time, demand for his polish became so great that in 1880 he stopped doing floors and founded the Butcher Polish Company. During its next 120 years, the company existed as a private, family-controlled enterprise.

  Charles Butcher, the inventor, had a son named Charles Howlett Butcher, who was my grandfather. This second Charles was brought in to the family business, and he lived in the little house right next to the factory, which was in the barn.

  Not long after that, my grandfather married my grandmother, Margareta Magdalena Theresa Carstensen Butcher. So she had five names! What other young fellow had a grandmother with so suggestively regal an appellation . . . and who was so slender and so elegant and who spoke German and could sit on her hair?

  Grandmother died two weeks short of her 102nd birthday. As we grandchildren were growing, and later when we were grown, Grandmother seemed, indeed, to be immortal. She scarcely seemed to change as the years went by. Unfailingly, she was generous of spirit toward her grandchildren, particularly with regard to birthday checks. As I noticed each of Grandmother’s many generosities of spirit to me—her first grandchild—I cast on more of the stitches that knit me to her in a sweater of deepest love.

  Grandfather handled the wax business and richly prospered; he was known in Cambridge business circles as the Polish King. He favored the Bull Moose Republicans, kept all of his workers employed even during the worst of the Depression, and refused to patent the Butcher’s formula—“If someone else wants to make a living with wax, why should I stand in his way?” And according to my mother, Grandfather was not a man to raise a ruckus with his wife.

  Butcher’s Polish Company continued to thrive, and it continued to use the barn as its factory. When Mom was a girl, the factory was a small, creaky place, and it was just the same when I was a boy too. My pals and I were allowed to pour the cherished mixture into the vats, to paste the labels on the cans (often not very straight), and even to ride up and down the belt conveyor that lifted the cans up to the carriage loft.

  The factory had another benefit for Mom. When she was a marriageable attraction around Cambridge, she used the factory as a way to weed out her beaux. Mom would bring some young Harvard Business School go-getter to see her family’s factory. The suitors were aware that the Butcher Polish Company generated substantial livings for Grandfather and for his brother and cofounder, Uncle Will. At business school, the suitors had also been exposed to case studies of Butcher’s competition. Butcher’s competition employed many, many workers and had huge factories. Mom would laugh with me about these visits. “Some of the men could see that it took real business sense to make our sort of success from a factory in a barn and a laboratory in the cellar closet. But others were embarrassed for us. I learned something useful this way about the perspicacity of my beaux.”

  Of course, as I was growing up, we used Butcher’s wax at our house. Those orange cans with their black lettering made me feel good. “Dikkon,” my mother used to tell me as she waxed and as I enjoyed the smell, “my grandfather invented this—so it’s yours, too.”

  I often made use of Butcher’s wax myself. I liked to go to the hardware store and see whole shelves of Butcher’s products on display. When I was a teenager, I would stand quietly in the wax department, with a finger on my chin, making myself a lure.

  Of course, a clerk would rise to my bait. “May I help you?”

  “I see you have a lot of Butcher’s.”

  “Well, it’s the best. Always has been. But I have some others down here too, if you are looking for something a little less costly.”

  “No, thanks,” I would say loftily. �
��I always prefer quality. Quality is the most important.” And then I would leave without buying anything, because after all, we had cases of quality at home.

  The biggest fish I ever caught, however, was not landed at some mere hardware store. I caught my biggest fish when I was fifteen. Our family was enjoying a private tour of the White House, along with Grandmother, who had become the titular head of Butcher’s after my grandfather died, although the company’s day-to-day management and expansion was the work of Uncle Charlie, her son (and the third Charles).

  Since it was a private tour, it must have been arranged by my father, who was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress just then and could do so.

  By the way, the current title of that job is Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and is commonly referred to as United States Poet Laureate. Dad’s two-year appointment spanned the end of the Eisenhower administration and the beginning of the Kennedy administration.

  The poet laureateship is a paid position without a job description. Here’s the money; do whatever you want. Since 1937, when the position began, there have been forty-nine poets laureate. I have known twenty-four of them, some quite well—they were the men and women who trooped through our houses and for whom, as a teenager, I needed to be prepared at any moment to recite my Shakespeare. (Gretchen needed to be prepared to play the piano.)

  Dad followed Frost. Frost had one year; Dad had two. The poet laureateship is the single paid position in the United States government honoring a person for mastery of any variety of art. The money for the position comes from a private foundation, not from taxpayers. What the laureate gets from the taxpayers is use of an office at the far end of an upper corridor in the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building—small, but with an inspiring view of the Capitol dome.

  As poet laureate, Dad devoted his time to helping widen the Library of Congress’s poetry collection, to bringing poets together for symposia, to hosting visiting poets from other countries, to answering poetry questions from schoolchildren and teachers, and to encouraging poetry curricula in schools.

  But I digress.

  Our tour of the White House included a stop in its vast, gleaming ballroom with its lovely hardwood floor. I was standing next to Grandmother, just inside the ballroom entrance, and we were all admiring the room’s elegance and—I was, anyway—imagining the important dancers who, at some later time, would be keeping step to the music.

  I turned to the tour guide and inquired, “How do you keep these floors so bright?”

  He looked at me, perhaps startled by what was an unusual question from a teenage boy. “We can’t endorse any product.”

  “Yes, of course. But what do you use to keep it bright, just out of curiosity?”

  “Well, to satisfy your curiosity, of course we use the best there is. It’s called Butcher’s.”

  With a sweeping gesture, I indicated my grandmother. “May I present Butcher’s chairman of the board?”

  We all had a good laugh.

  While the man who would become Dad’s father-in-law successfully confronted the Depression and secured his own company, his employees, and his family, my father hid out from it. Not that I am disparaging him. I probably would have done the same. As the Depression deepened, Dad made an effort to earn a doctorate at Harvard, but the money ran out, and his father, who had always seemed to him invincible, was unable to help.

  Regardless, nothing was going to get in the way of Dad’s poetry—nothing. Yet without a Harvard PhD, he felt he was at a standstill. While other writers of the time cast themselves on the roiling waters, sink or swim, Dad looked for a shore on which he could sit and contemplate the storm. And because he was Dad, he found one. Or rather, one found him.

  In 1932, St. Mark’s, a boys’ prep school in Southborough, Massachusetts, offered Dad a decent wage, room and board, and time to write, in exchange for teaching freshmen and sophomores about English literature.

  Among Dad’s students were Robert Lowell (forever known as Cal for his brilliant acting of the part of Caligula at St. Mark’s), who, like Dad, would go on to be United States Poet Laureate and would win the Pulitzer prize, our nation’s most prestigious literary award, twice to Dad’s once; and Ben Bradlee, future editor of the Washington Post, who gained international fame when he challenged the federal government over what he took to be the paper’s right to publish the “Pentagon Papers” (classified national security documents detailing secret enlargement of the scope of the Vietnam War by the government) and who later oversaw Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s articles burrowing into the Watergate scandal, the investigation of which led to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

  Of course, compared to many poets who were Dad’s contemporaries, Dad’s life in general and his choice of a way to work during the Depression were socially acceptable. Many poets of that time eschewed conventional life. They hated the idea of work, of personal responsibility, of monogamous marriage, and the like. They were bohemians. Appalled at what capitalism had wrought, they thundered their disapproval in magazines.

  For instance, W. H. Auden (who wrote, among other things, the oft-quoted poem “Funeral Blues,” made famous in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral), despite living off Dad’s goodwill at St. Mark’s for several months, when departing, roared in fury, “For God’s sake, Dick, get out!” Likewise, E. E. Cummings, the popular avant-garde poet and painter—who lived off his father, was drunk much of the time (Dad used to bring him bottles of milk to try to sober him up), and fathered a daughter with his best friend’s wife—rigorously advocated to Dad freedom for poets from such dreary, conventional work as teaching.

  But life at St. Mark’s—conventional as it may have been—nonetheless provided Dad with a roof over his head, some money in his pocket, and most important, time to meet and to nurture his muse.

  As it happens, it also provided him with a wife.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My sister, Gretchen, and I exist because of our Uncle Charlie.

  It was Charlie who introduced a bachelor English master at St. Mark’s School in Massachusetts to his sister in October 1939. That year was Charlie’s first as a math master at St. Mark’s, having just graduated from Harvard. Dick Eberhart, who was making something of a name for himself as a poet, was twelve years Charlie’s senior and had been teaching at St. Mark’s for several years.

  The two men struck up a friendship. When Charlie’s birthday was approaching, and he learned his family was giving a small dinner in his honor, he said to his pal, “Why not come to our place in Cambridge? My sister will be there. You’ll like her; she’s smart.” Then he wrote a note to his parents and to Heb (the family name for Helen Elizabeth Butcher—known to everyone else as Betty) saying he would be bringing a poet home for dinner.

  A poet? my mother remembers saying to herself. Some effete bohemian, no doubt. Not my type.

  Heb was twenty-five years old at the time, had graduated from Smith College, and had recently returned from Kentucky and the Frontier Nursing Service, where she had met, she used to laugh with me, the very type of the Hatfields and the McCoys—if not they themselves—while she rode through the mountains dispensing medicine and assisting in childbirths. Now she was back in Cambridge to take up a grade school teaching position and enroll at Simmons for a master’s in sociology. Heb was short, wiry, jolly, interested in everything, and determined to make something of the world around her.

  That was my mother in 1939. When she died in 1994, fifty-five years later, she was almost the same. Unhappily, she had deteriorated significantly, both mentally and physically, due to the epilepsy that manifested when she was in her forties. The condition, as well as the drugs she took to control it, wore her down. However, there were times when the flash of her spirit would break free, and I delighted once more to experience my mother as she had been.

  By the time Dad met Mom, he had already strung together an impressive collection of worldly credentials. He knew England, Ire
land, France, and Germany well, Italy less well, and he had worked his way on tramp steamers—westabout—from San Francisco to England. As an able seaman plying back and forth among various ports of the China Sea and the Southern Ocean, he had inhaled the gingered air of exotic anchorages. Beyond that, he had been awarded the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant, Commander (Third Class), by King Prajadhipok of Siam, for services duly rendered. The order, established in 1861 by King Ramah IV, was awarded for meritorious service to the crown. Dad’s honor—at the level of Commander of the Order—was the fourth highest among the levels. Having been awarded his ribbon, Dad knelt before the king, who then presented my father with the keys to the city of Bangkok.

  Now, there are other American poets who have won the professional honors my father won—and more besides—but certainly, as his friend and fellow United States Poet Laureate Daniel Hoffman pointed out, Dad is the only major American poet who possesses the keys to the city of Bangkok!

  This particular honor came to Dad after a successful stint as tutor to the prince of Siam. The tutoring assignment occurred at a vast estate north of New York City to which the king had repaired when it became clear that he needed to have a cataract removed. There was nowhere in his own country where such a thing could be done with the certainty of success due a king. So the king, the prince, and an entourage of more than one hundred courtiers descended on New York, where they remained for almost a year.

  My father, recently returned to the States from Cambridge University in England, was at the moment “on his uppers,” as he liked to tell me (which means broke)—though, as he chuckled, he looked grand, since he walked with a stick, wore spats, and smoked a meerschaum pipe. While broke, Dad’s fallback job was at the Brooklyn slaughterhouses—“a very vision of hell”—and so he sought tutoring gigs fiercely. He had just completed a job tutoring the daughters of a millionaire manufacturer in Palm Beach, where, he said, “the girls were covered with a glaze like honey, and were stingless in the sun”—so tutoring the prince of Siam would be a coup.