June 25, 2018--Arthur MacArthur & Queen Hope

My friend Boyce Martin died two years ago and his wife and my great friend, Anne Ogden, knowing that I too am a history buff invited me to rummage through his shelves of books, thinking correctly that I might like to have a few of Boyce's books. After all, I wear his Kentucky hat every day.

As our reading interests are similar many of the books he had read were among those I had devoured. But I did find a few that I knew would interest me that I hadn't known about, including one devoted to the middle years of Winston Churchill's career (Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill) and the breathlessly titled, The Most Dangerous Man In America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur.

I had a peripheral connection to General MacArthur because his only child, Arthur MacArthur IV, was a college classmate and friend. A fellow literature major. We both sat and studied at the feet of the mesmerizing Lionel Trilling.

Though we were friends, Arthur was very private, which I understood, considering the endless controversies that swirled around his father, even years after he was fired by President Truman for insubordination during the Korean War, and his failed attempt in 1952 to secure the Republican nomination for president. Ironically, losing it to his former aide, General Dwight Eisenhower. 

And there was the relentless interest the media of the time had in all things MacArthur, including Arthur. There had even been a 1942 Life magazine cover story about him as a four-year-old that reported on his life with his parents in Brisbane, Australia, where they resided, having sought safety after escaping from the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. Life told about little Arthur's "curiously mixed-up accent," his kindergarten routine, and his new tricycle.

In contrast, at that time, in East Flatbush, I spoke Brooklynese and made a scooter out of an old orange crate and a disassembled roller-skate.

As an unlikely couple, we read and discussed Dostoevsky and Kafka and Conrad together, but during those years Arthur never said a word about his early life, though I did know he was born in the Philippines the same year I was in Brooklyn, and he and his parents had barely escaped with their lives when the Japanese overran the archipelago. 

I assumed from knowing a little about the military careers of generations of MacArthurs that there must have been unimanageable pressure on him, the general's only child, named for many heroic MacArthur "Arthurs," including his grandfather, to fulfill the family military destiny. But he was as unlike a warrior as anyone I knew and it must have taken a different kind of courage, psychological courage, to want to be at Columbia studying Proust, rather than at West Point immersed in Napoleon's campaigns.

Now, with The Most Dangerous Man In America in hand, enough new details about Arthur's life were included to have me searching the Internet to see what I could learn about him. Including, is he still alive!

He is and appears to have continued to lead a hermetic life, including evidence that he changed his name after his father was relieved of his command by President Truman as there were apparently threats on Arthur's life.

No one, though, knows the name he assumed nor where he lives. Most likely in Greenwich Village, where I too reside, though I suspect if we passed each other on the street, which we likely have, that neither one of us would recognize the other. But once back in the City I will be looking around more than usual as I would like to pick up our college discussions as well as belatedly get to know more about him and how he has been faring.

One additional curiosity--

From reading the little that is available about Arthur it appears that during the late 1960s he was considered, within certain elevated social circles, a very eligible bachelor. (I suspect this is not true since the Arthur I knew had no interest whatsoever in dating.) 

In fact, he had no inclination to date Hope Cooke, who, rejected by him, in 1963, married the crown prince of Sikkim and two years later, when he became king, became, as she was known in the tabloids, "Queen Hope." But before that, in spite of Arthur's lack of interest, she was apparently quite interested in him.

She never converted to Buddhism but, as Henry Kissinger noted, she was "more Buddhist than the population of Sikkim." 

As it turns out I knew Hope rather well as she was a classmate and close friend at Sarah Lawrence of my first wife's and, at the time, we found it more than amusing that by this marriage, the daughter of a San Francisco flight instructor, transformed herself into a Queen. 

Since Hope does not live as privately as Arthur (in 1975 her husband-king was deposed and five years later she divorced him and moved back to New York City), we do occasionally run into her. The last time on an escalator in Bloomingdale's. We were descending, she of course was going up.

July 4, 2106--A Year of Mourning

I am by nature skeptical. Especially about things that involve ritual or belief. I am more comfortable with evidence-based reality. Or, at least, my version of what constitutes "evidence" and "reality."

And so when my mother died a year ago Friday, at the time a close friend said it will take a full year of mourning to reach "closure" and for me to be able to fully "move on."

From what she said and how she said it it should be obvious that my friend is a therapist, a good one, but on occasion speaks psychobabble-tinctured English.

"And," she added, "though I know you are not a practicing Jew, in your tradition, an entire year is devoted to mourning. The rabbis," she winked, "determined that and as you know--as a believer or not--they could at times be wise in the ways of the world and the heart."

I chose just then to avoid a theological discussion, thanked her for her views but, as I said, I am skeptical about these kinds of matters.

As it turned out, she--and perhaps the rabbis--had it right.

Until this year I was naively oblivious to the annual procession of holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. Passover, for example, is a holiday that since early adulthood I did not practice. But this year, knowing that if my mother were still alive, she would have been observing it at the Passover seder at Forrest Trace where she lived the last 20 years of her life, I wanted to be there with her, reconnecting to the ancient prayers, chants, and songs. And of course the matzoh, three cups of wine, and the rest of the traditional meal.

On the first night of pesach this year, I surprised myself by unconsciously intoning the Four Questions, the Fir Kashes, as I used to do when I was the youngest male at the extended-family seder. Those words, likely mispronounced, taught to me by my mother when I was six, brought more tears than I was expecting even before I got to the second question.

Mah nishtanah, ha-laylah ha-zeh,mi-col ha-leylot 

Why is this night different than all others?

Theology aside, the answer this past year was that that night was different because it was the first one for me that did not include the living presence of my mother. And it came with the realization that it never will again.

Mah nishtanah: "Why," indeed.

Then this past Saturday, in the Pemaquid lighthouse keepers' cemetery, just up the road from us, Rona and I participated in digging a grave for our great friend, Boyce Martin's ashes.

When his wife, our beloved friend, Anne Ogden told us, "You do not have to participate. You can decline . . ." I cut in to say, "If it's still all right with you, we want to help."

"In the Jewish tradition . . ." I said and then interrupted myself, a bit confused, when I realized that after a year of my mother no longer being with us, more than ever, I find myself unexpectedly referring to things Jewish.

Still I persisted, "In the Jewish tradition there is the mitzvah system. A hierarchy of good deeds or mitzvahs, that Jews are expected to perform. For example, at a Jewish burial, family and friends are invited to help fill the grave. Doing that is a mitzvah of the highest order because it is one that the 'beneficiary,' having passed away, is unable to thank you for."

"I like that," Anne said--she has a strong spiritual and ecumenical core--"So in that case do that mitzvah for Boyce."

My mother would have agreed.

And so we did. Now I am the one feeling blessed.

Anne Ogden

Boyce Martin