by Alice Arlen
Now at the Chagres dam her father kept pushing her to get up on the spillway, to pull herself up onto the ledge of concrete, teasing, prodding, and finally she did it. That’s my girl, he might have said. Or maybe nothing; he wasn’t really a cheerleader. Which was when she felt something tear inside her, or pull, or something. She kept quiet about it; complaints were not rewarded. The next day they left Panama, and then Haiti too, and came back home. Where she hurt for a while until she didn’t, and put it out of mind. It was there the letter from the lawyer reached her; she was finally divorced from Simpson, legally single instead of make-believe single. Also a letter from Jim Simpson: “Dearest Monkee, I’m awfully glad we can part with friendly feelings….If I’d been more mature I wouldn’t have given you such cause for complaints….For this I’m sorry, for everything else I’m glad, I wouldn’t have missed that year with you as my wife for anything.” She thought it a sweet letter, and kept it in a folder next to her Ledyard Smith correspondence.
· 21 ·
IN THE COURSE of her two-year, collapsed and mostly broken marriage, it would have been unlikely if Alicia hadn’t found an occasional friend, acquaintance, beguiling stranger with whom to pass some afternoon or night. But there’s no record of who that might have been; and had there been any real romance, she kept its identity deep in the vault, which was not the way she usually did things. She went out from time to time with Lt. Fred Becker, but these were mostly functions, formal evenings, such as the Aviators Ball, where Becker introduced her to flying aces Jimmy Doolittle and Billy Mitchell. She also left behind a scattering of letters from Philip Boyden, the handsome, savvy young Chicago lawyer who handled her divorce, suggesting a close personal relationship running along beside the legal one, though nothing necessarily more than that. But why wouldn’t they be friends, even friends with a dash of electricity in the friendship? She had that effect, that ability to get up close with people, male as well as female, all her life. And then there was Joe Brooks, Big Joe Brooks, who enters her life around this time, and who surely deserves a proper introduction to this narrative.
From All-American footballer to infantryman on the Western Front, “Big Joe” Brooks, holding barbed-wire cutters.
Big Joe Brooks because he was unusually large when men were on the whole much smaller than today, altitudinous in height, ample, as they say, in girth, and oversize too in what was even then an unusual degree of optimistic good nature. At six feet four and commensurate poundage, he had been a collegiate football star, a two-time All-American lineman, first at Colgate, then at Williams, this in the years before World War I, when professional sports didn’t exist and college athletes, especially football stars, were perhaps even more celebrated than today. He’d been an infantry captain on the Western Front, emerging like many others with medals on his chest and sad memories in his head. In the lightheaded atmosphere of the Roaring Twenties, when the new people were everywhere, speaking the new language of big bucks and fast money. Everybody still loved Joe Brooks and they always would. But he had trouble gaining traction in the world.
Miss Patterson, temporarily single again.
He started a little business selling life insurance. He had a fishing camp up in the Adirondacks and rented it out in the summers to those of his Racquet Club friends who liked to fish, usually with himself as guide thrown in as part of the deal. That was another thing about Joe Brooks: He was probably better at fishing than anyone, fly casting, tying flies, knowing the river; he was unbelievable at anything to do with fishing. Which was perhaps the main reason Joe Patterson liked to be around him, liked to have Joe Brooks as his friend, although the truth was, Brooks was Patterson’s kind of man: a World War I brother in arms, a stand-up guy, who fished like an artist and could fly a plane. It was almost certainly as her father’s friend that Alicia first met him, probably in summertime, at his fishing camp in the woods of upstate New York, canvas tents beside the Ausable River. As her father’s daughter Alicia could fish a little, but Joe Brooks taught her to be really good, he had that unbelievable touch, also an equally extraordinary patience. At first, too, it doubtless made a kind of sense, seemed appropriate, that he was nearly twenty years older. He was her father’s friend, after all, the two men with so much shared background, context, the names of people and places she’d never heard of, that code of older men. The first summer she was with them at the camp, the summer before her divorce came through, he was just a friend; such a friend too, kind and careful. She could tell that her father, who had few men he looked up to, looked up to Joe Brooks when they were out together in the woods. Just when the friendship shifted into romance is hard to say, though most likely it was sometime after she was legally free. It’s also hard to say how much of a romance it was; they certainly shared a tent, at least on occasion; they found pet names for each other, actually they called each other by the same pet name, “Boojums.” Perhaps the main thing was that her father approved. Later on, when she tried to remember how things were at the time, what she remembered mainly was the fun, the warmth, she didn’t say tenderness maybe because she hadn’t known much tenderness and couldn’t rightly give a name to it. After they were back in New York her normally tightfisted father told her he was buying her a little plane, a two-seater biplane, with enough range, as he informed her, to easily make the trip to the Ausable. Then Joe Brooks let her know that he was finally going to divorce his wife, a piece of news she seems to have heard without really listening to. Of course she was thrilled by the plane, how wouldn’t she be? But then she reminded her father that what he’d promised her, as a reward for getting her transport license: that he’d stake her to an overseas assignment for his five-year-old magazine, Liberty. This was so; in one of his expansive or perhaps distracted moments, he’d indeed told her to “go anywhere,” and “just work it out and tell my office.” In September she made a pilgrimage back to Libertyville, where her mother was cooler than usual, sniffing betrayal in Alicia’s long sojourn in the enemy camp; while little Josephine, no longer quite so little, and happy to see her sibling, seemed surprised that her older sister could feel the slightest ambivalence toward Joe Brooks, whom she had met and naturally adored, and had heard such great things about from Poppa. On her return to New York, Alicia decided, not for the first or last time, to throw some distance between herself and her various problems, dilemmas, large, tender suitors, and plan an overseas assignment, getaway and grand adventure all in one.
· 22 ·
ALICIA SAID LATER that when she was pacing around her father’s empty apartment, trying to plan a trip, an imaginative destination for herself, she kept remembering a special evening some summers earlier at Joe Brooks’s hunting camp, late August, a new visitor at the campfire: “The Colonel” people called him, Col. Quentin Roosevelt, President Teddy’s nephew; wiry, tough, deceptively bespectacled, a seemingly much-esteemed outdoorsman, explorer, hunter, who had spoken so eloquently of the forests of Southeast Asia he’d just returned from, their wildness, beauty, inaccessibility, the amazing plants, the extraordinary animals, such as the Siamese tiger he’d tracked without success, also the immense, belligerent sladang, the Asian water buffalo, that he’d found but had not been able to bring down. Why not Southeast Asia? Why not get herself a Siamese tiger, thereby impressing Poppa as well as the readers of Liberty (which at the time was the second most widely read magazine in America, after the Saturday Evening Post)? She wasn’t sure if she should make an elaborate sales pitch to her father, who was just then enmeshed in a new preoccupation, building a strange modernist house for himself up on the Hudson; but in the end she decided to keep it simple, trust to his distractedness, an approach that seemed to work.
With Poppa’s okay and some Liberty travel and expense funds to draw on, she made her plans, such as plans were in those days, and also roped in an old Chicago friend as traveling companion, Libby Chase, another game girl, a superb horsewoman who sometimes moonlighted as a stunt rider for Zoltan’s Circus at state fairs around the Midwest
. With the result that, in late afternoon of September 12, 1930, the sun still high above the Golden Gate Bridge, they steamed slowly out of San Francisco Bay aboard the SS Carnarvon, an eighteen-thousand-ton, midsize, slow-motion workhorse of the Pacific & Orient line, headed southward across the vast Pacific, with eventual stops in Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, and finally Saigon, in what was then known as French Indochina. Alicia at the time was not quite twenty-four.
It took them four long weeks to reach Sydney. The Carnarvon was British owned, and that should have counted for something, at least in the way of that reassuringly superior, apologetic British service, and perhaps in a certain level of shipshapeness or basic competence, whether on the part of first mates or waiters. But sadly the Carnarvon was no Cunarder; the cabins were small, cramped, metallic; the running water rarely ran and then ran discouragingly brown; bells that were supposed to summon people didn’t work, and when they did the people summoned seemed to have been just awoken from long sleeps, or drink- or drug-induced siestas, or who could tell? In theory the deck designated Promenade Deck promised better things: brisk walks around for exercise, stretching out on a deck chair with one of the many books that had been brought along for the purpose. But in fact the Promenade Deck was mostly obstructed by wooden crates, sometimes lashed together, sometimes not, and thus bumping about on their own whenever the sea got rough, which seemed to be much of the time after they crossed the equator. “There is no denying, the good ship Carnarvon has been claustrophobic,” Alicia wrote in the first of her Liberty articles, “which is one of the reasons Libby and I are looking forward to some shore leave in Sydney.”
According to the schedule the ship was supposed to spend three days in port, unloading and then reloading, before heading northward up the coast to its next landfall at Port Moresby. “But when Mr. Mukerji, our handsome Second Officer, told us it might be three days, or four, or five, whatever the Gods willed,” Alicia wrote, “Miss Chase and I decided to bet on more rather less of a layover, seeing that Mr. Mukerji’s gods were now involved, and have ourselves an adventure, at least a little holiday from the Carnarvon.” At first they thought they’d see the sights of Sydney, but Sydney then was little more than a colonial outpost and seemed to have no sights; the advertised beaches were off-limits on account of sharks. Alicia found an airfield, and there a two-engine Fokker aircraft calling itself Australian National Airlines, which flew them up the coast to Brisbane, even less cosmopolitan than Sydney, where they transferred to a rickety biplane, operated by another new entity called Qantas Airlines, which was about to make a once-a-week run hauling mail and supplies into sheep country. “Harry Soames, our pilot, said where we were flying to was ‘on the dry side right now, not much to look at,’ but added that it was full of kangaroos, and maybe we’d get to see a kangaroo hunt.” In the interests of journalism and keeping moving, Alicia and Libby signed on for the flight. “I had never seen real drought before,” Alicia wrote in Liberty, “but down below us, not far below either, the land was parched and dead as far as the eye could see, not even brown but a dead kind of grey. And everywhere as flat as an anvil, the dirt and dust barely moving even when a wind-gust came up, as if all the elements were too sunbaked to move.”
Charleville, the first sheep station they stopped at, was like all the others, not so much a town or even a village but a haphazard assembly of wooden outbuildings, shacks, a general store with little in it, weatherworn men and women moving slowly. Alicia noted: “Few sheep in sight, although kangaroos were everywhere but hard to get close to. Near sundown, we put down at another station in the middle of nowhere, Longreach. Mr. Soames disappeared for a while and we thought he’d abandoned us, but back he came in a borrowed Ford truck, and with a gun, told us to climb in and ‘we’d get us some roos.’ He drove that truck as fast as it would go, hell-bent over stony hills and ridges, down gullies, the kangaroos running, bounding all around us. Soames stopped and asked Libby to drive while he shot, but she wouldn’t. So he took some shots anyway, and missed, and then gave it up. We weren’t too sorry, they have such sweet faces.”
They spent three days and nights in the arid sheep-ranch country of northern Australia, dropping down onto bleak, heat-blistered settlements with little packets of letters and sacks of flour. They stayed wherever they could find a place to lie down, sometimes in the back of a general store; once at an actual, self-described “inn,” with rooms and beds, though the owner had auctioned off the mattresses and bedding. And then there was Birdum. “I wish there were words in the dictionary foul enough to describe that place,” wrote Alicia, who was usually no pale flower when it came to camping out. “It is a settlement of about twenty persons, nineteen of them men, and most of these drunk all the time. Mr. Soames, who by then was mostly drunk himself, found us not so much a room as a section of cement floor in back of the saloon, separated from the customers by a sheet. That night, there was a gargantuan rainstorm, which brought a tide of rainwater pouring in from outside, us lying in the middle of it, in a sea of muddy water, which in some ways was a relief from bedbugs and Singapore ants.” The day they left, Alicia noted, the heat was so bad that “birds were dropping dead from the trees.”
· 23 ·
THE TWO TRAVELERS reached Indochina around October 20; Saigon, with its wide, well-planted boulevards, its air of torpid, prosperous colonialism, its easy mingling of automobiles, horse-drawn carriages, bicycles, and rickshaws. Reassuringly their rooms were more or less waiting for them at the Hotel Continental; spacious chambers with heavy wood furniture, new overhead electric fans slowly stirring the sultry air, enormous bathtubs with water that looked like water, though not to be tasted. But at first there were problems, disappointments. For one, friend Libby could barely walk, her knee swollen from a fall she’d taken while climbing down a hill during their layover in Java. For another, Alicia’s hopes of getting up into hill country, there to roam around exploring, adventuring, tracking game in the spirit of Colonel Roosevelt—after all, the reason for her being there in the first place—seemed to have foundered on hard facts of politics and revolution. As the young Princetonian duty officer at the U.S. consulate explained, indigenous rebels were battling French troops in the highlands, and until one side or the other won, no guides would be taking Westerners into the backcountry, or much of anywhere outside the city. That was the low point of the whole trip, followed soon after by possibly an even lower one, when the doctor at the French hospital said that Libby’s knee needed medical care of a kind that he couldn’t provide, and she should get herself back to America.
Late the next morning, Alicia was sitting by herself in the hotel dining room (with Libby upstairs, stumbling around, getting packed), having some bitter coffee and a smoke or two, pondering her options, when, as she described it, “Into this near empty room, with its fans and sleeping waiters, marched the most splendidly uniformed Frenchman, who called my name aloud, came over, introduced himself as Capitaine someone, and would Mlle. Chase and I please follow him to the Bureau.” Once there, with Libby now at her side, seated together in a room garnished with symbols of the far-flung French empire, they waited for the arrival of the deputy high commissioner, a “portly gentleman in a white suit, also amazingly with a stiff celluloid collar and necktie, but very hospitable, who said that the uncle of Mademoiselle Chase, Mr. Howard Chase, a true friend of France, had written a letter to the Commissaire, and that the Bureau was prepared to assist in any way.” Soon one young officer appeared to assist Libby in getting on the next ship heading in the right direction, while another took Alicia to another part of the Colonial Office, filled with many French uniforms. When Alicia explained to an older officer in charge that she had come to hunt tigers and had been told it was impossible, he replied that, yes, it was a dangerous time; Vietminh rebels were ambushing French soldiers, there was indeed a petite guerre. But if Miss Patterson was looking for a hunting guide to take her into real tiger country, that of course was Laos, and if she was willing to go there, then
she could have more than one hunting guide. “If I heard him right, I believe he said I could have the whole French army to assist me,” she wrote afterward, “which seemed hyperbole but it was nearly true.”
Alicia on the trail in French Indochina, showing how to hold an umbrella and read a map at the same time.
After suitable preparations, though sooner than she expected, Alicia departed Saigon with a military escort of twelve soldiers, first heading up the Mekong River by motor launch for many days, “until the river narrowed, and we were met by Khmer tribesmen and transferred into dugout canoes.” As she wrote: “The Khmer were savage and inscrutable but paddled the lot of us, without difficulty, up the brown river, the water often completely covered over by trees.” The Khmer took the hunting party to a trailhead leading into the mountains, where most of the soldiers branched off, doubtless to more conventional duties, leaving Alicia in the care of a young lieutenant and his subordinate. From a campsite in the Annam Mountains, Alicia wrote her father, “I can’t believe that many white people have been here before, certainly few white women. It is all unimaginably wild and beautiful, though when it comes to vegetation too much of everything, including insects….The Khmer keep to themselves but I am lucky to have Lieutenant Thierry around to protect me, should I need it.” Lieutenant Thierry, unsurprisingly smitten by such proximity to this unusual American girl, wrote her romantic letters, mostly unanswered, for many years afterward, hoping to recall “the savage charm of the great forests that were our only world, our life, for many weeks.”