Dragonholder

by Todd McCaffrey

  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 …

  The 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.

  Colonel McCaffrey in Sicily

  In Agrigento the Kernel’s “Sight” saved his life late one night as he was returning from a staff meeting. In daylight he and his driver had taken the same route they were retracing late at night when the Kernel had his premonition. Peremptorily ordering the driver to stop, the Kernel got out of the jeep in the pitch darkness and, walking to the front, discovered that the bridge had been blown out. He later ordered the bridge rebuilt by Army engineers and it was known as Ponto del Caffreo.

  Shortly after this incident a young reporter arrived to get some background color on the liberated Italians. He was directed to Agrigento and Colonel McCaffrey. He stayed on for a long while. During his stay, General Patton started an advance out of Agrigento and was enraged to discover that the road into Agrigento was used by the local water carts. Patton ordered that no more carts could use the road.

  Agrigento sits up above the sea, with a road leading in from the sea and road leading inland. All the water for Agrigento came up that one road. Without the water carts, the thirty thousand inhabitants of Agrigento would be forced to leave their town. It would be hard to convince people — particularly the public at home — that, having liberated the Sicilians, the US would force them to leave their homes.

  The Kernel made a hard decision. He countermanded General Patton’s order and ordered that the water carts continue their operations. When Patton heard about this he was furious. General Mark Clark agreed with the Kernel and so the Kernel’s counter-order remained in effect but the Colonel who countermanded a General’s orders remained a Colonel for the rest of his life.

  To placate Patton, the Kernel was removed from Agrigento. In his place a Navy captain took over and continued in the same tradition. Ultimately the captain arranged to get a bell to replace the town’s church bell which had been shattered by the allied artillery. The reporter — John Hersey — stayed on and later wrote A Bell for Adano — for which he won the Pulitzer Price. His Colonel Santori is a blend of the Kernel and the captain.

  Colonel McCaffrey near Naples

  While her father was leaving Agrigento, Anne was leaving Stuart Hall. The McCaffreys are not intimidated by authority and Anne was no exception. She finished high school back in New Jersey, being shunted from good neighbor to good neighbor, becoming as independent in bearing as she was in inclination.)

  The Kernel got his spirit of independence from his father, the Irish cop who was so honest that he arrested John “Honey Fitz” Francis Fitzgerald — John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s grandfather for electioneering. The Kernel went to Harvard with Joseph Kennedy — both majoring in government.

  So it was natural enough that when Anne went to Harvard’s sister college, Radcliff, she met Robert Kennedy and went to parties at the Hyannis Port compound. She was partial to him thereafter and his assassination in 1968 was a deep personal blow to her.

  Over some objections Anne majored in Slavonic languages and literature — “because the Dean of Women didn’t think I was smart enough.”

  She continued her stage tradition, performed at the college radio station but found plenty of time for “real life” — that is, hanging out with friends at various restaurants around Harvard.

  Hazen’s was the most popular hangout for Anne — it was on the way from her dorm to her classes. And while Anne sat with her group of friends, Bobby Kennedy sat with his group of friends — mostly members of the college football team.

  She was joined by her brothers after war ended for her last two years of college during which time they were known as “Big Mac”, “Mac”, and “Little Mac.”

  Anne (“Mac”), Kevie (“Little Mac”), and Hugh (“Big Mac”)

  As the war finished the Kernel found himself working on the details of the military government of Austria. He had interrupted a high-level briefing which General Mark Clark commanded, to report that the famous Lippazaner mares which had been moved to Czechoslovakia at the start of the War were now in danger of falling into Soviet hands. Mark Clark, himself a rider, recognized the importance at once and authorized the Kernel to dispatch an armored column to snatch the mares out of Czechoslovakia just in front of the advancing Soviets.

  Colonel McCaffrey is decorated by the Czechs

  The Kernel had managed to pull rank on the medical officers from Algiers, where he had his first coronary, and again in Sicily, London, and Vienna, but he couldn’t hide the diabetes that resulted from the years of intense work, inadequate food, and stress. A severe attack suggested he’d better resign.

  He returned to the States just before Anne’s graduation. The war had changed him so much that neither Anne nor Kevin recognized him. They rushed right by him while searching the crowd of returning soldiers.

  The Kernel was a man of high standards. Occasionally he overstepped himself. Anne’s graduation ceremony was one rare occasion where he earned the wrath of his wife. Seeing that Anne had earned her degree “cum laude” — with praise — he harrumphed and said, “It should have been magna.”

  Anne’s mother was incensed. “Who is this man?” She asked rhetorically. “I don’t know him.”

  Hugh, Anne D. McCaffrey, G.H. McCaffrey after the war

  Well, there now — that was a bit more than a whirlwind tour, wasn’t it? I hope now you know somewhat more of Anne as a child and young woman. Perhaps you’ve also a better insight into how she gets her ideas.

  So, where were we? Voice. That’s it. Back again.

  Again on voice — as a little girl, when Anne wasn’t going to be a writer, rider, or movie star, she was going to be a singer. As a child, she’d belt out songs when she was looking for attention. As she got older, her interests firmed.

  At Stuart Hall she was the Major General in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, at Radcliff it was Oscar Wilde, Sartre, and Chekov. Anne didn’t just sing and act, she tried to write an operetta based on the Irish The Dream of Angus and w
rote a whacky song of which only this fragment remains:

  “Chickory, chiggery chill

  there’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil!”

  Anne also added her voice to several radio plays on the local Radcliff radio network.

  After Anne graduated, she worked through a number of secretarial jobs in New York City until she secured a job at Liberty Music Shops — as an advertising copy layout artist. Anne roomed with a radio actress and commercial writer, Betty Wragge of Pepper Young’s Family, in an apartment catty-cornered from Carnegie Hall and dated a concert pianist. Customers at the Liberty Music Shops included Rita Hayworth, Raymond Massey, Merle Oberon, and Tallulah Bankhead.

  Tallulah was the most memorable. Anne was in the elevator with her and her boyfriend when the salesman mentioned that the new record players could play four and a half hours of music. Tallulah turned to her boyfriend with a twinkle in her eye and asked in sultry tones, “Dahling, do you think that will be long enough?”

  In the summer, Anne did more theatre work with the Lambertsville Music Theatre — the first of the many tent theatres that became popular in the early 1950’s. Anne worked with Wilbur ‘Wib’ Evans, helping him to scale down operettas for smaller casts and choruses so that there would be a minimum number of people on the stage. But a stage wage was not as steady as her regular work, so Anne wrote off thoughts of a career on Broadway.

  Wib and his wife, Susanna Foster, were some of the many people who were constantly introducing Anne to eligible bachelors. But it was still another elder couple who introduced her to the handsome journalist who also had a penchant for music, opera, and ballet. He loved the Beggar’s Opera and wooed her with it. When H. Wright Johnson proposed in September 1949, Anne accepted.

  Anne pregnant with Alec 1952

  For most of the next nine years, Anne’s singing and acting took backstage to her two children, her two science fiction stories, and her two moves. The second move brought the family to a new estate in Wilmington, Delaware where right next door was a friendly family with a teenager old enough to baby-sit.

  Alec Johnson, age 3

  Anne joined the Breck’s Mills Cronies and was the heroine’s crony in their production of The Vagabond King. And she joined the Concorde Presbyterian church choir, singing soprano and taking lessons from the choirmaster, Ted Huang.

  But best was when Anne met the opera stage director of the Lancaster Opera Society. She met him as they worked together on a production at the Wilmington Music School. They became fast friends, and he would often stop at her house for dinner after the long drive back to Delaware from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Years later, Frederic H. Robinson would become the mold from which MasterHarper Robinton was cast.

  The trip to Germany was a real wrench, as “Robie” had offered a plum role in a modern opera. Worse, in Germany Anne’s Canadian tenor, Ron Stewart, decided that she was a contralto and commenced to train her in that lower range. It was a mistake. Singing in the lower range, Anne had flaws in the E, F, and G notes in the middle voice. Her maestro never allowed her to sing anywhere except in his studio and so she never noticed the flaw herself. When he later told her about it, Anne’s devastation was traumatic.

  Years later Anne bequeathed her emotions to Killashandra Ree, of Crystal Singer: “I’ve repertoire! I’ve worked hard and now — now you tell me I’ve no voice!”

  Back to Anne’s parents. Bittersweet.

  After the war, the Kernel went unhappily back to his old job at the Commerce and Industry Association. He had reveled in the problems of wartime military government. When he was offered a chance to help the Japanese revamp their erratic tax structure he took it and was sent out as a fiscal authority. Anne’s mother followed shortly afterwards, and from 1950 until the outbreak of the Korean War in 1952, the two had been happily engrossed in the Japanese culture and its revitalization.

  The Kernel in Tokyo, 1951

  When the war in Korea broke out in 1952, the Kernel had finished restructuring of the Japanese taxation system. He waived his disabilities to volunteer his services to be chief of the Finance Division for UNCACK forces in Pusan. He enjoyed the job immensely and spared no efforts in doing the very best he could.

  But, as in World War II, it taxed him horribly. In 1953 Anne received the shocking news that the Kernel had been sent back to Hawaii for a prostate operation. So she constructed a cheering telegram:

  “PROUD PROGENY PLEASED PERFECT PAPA POSTOPERATIVELY PROSPERING. PLEASE PERPETUATE.”

  Not to be outdone, particularly when recuperating in a ward full of bored colonels and generals, the Kernel and his wardmates composed this reply:

  PATERNAL PARENT POSITIVELY PURRING PLEASURE PAST PERFORMANCE PROMPTED PAEN PRAISE PER PROGENY. PROSPECTS PROMISE PLUS PERADVENTURE. PRESENTLY PEEING PERFECTLY.

  His message was held up for three days because the Army censors thought it was a code.

  Back on the job, the Kernel continued to work long, hard hours — the least he felt he could do given what the soldiers on the front lines were going through. But a man of sixty-two, who had survived two world wars, multiple coronaries, and diabetes ran a severe risk trying to live as hard as twenty-year olds. The Kernel contracted tuberculosis in 1953.

  The family visits the Colonel in hospital

  He was sent back to the States, to Castletown Veterans’ Hospital in upstate New York. Anne went to visit him — and realized that he would never leave the hospital alive. He died quietly on January 25th, 1954 — before he had a chance to read that day’s Times.

  Soldier, citizen, patriot.

  Just after her return from Germany in the summer of 1963, Anne looked away from the depression of her musical letdown for a new horizon. She returned to science fiction — and discovered science fiction conventions. She had heard of them from the writers at Milford, of course, but had never been to one. There was a big one that year in Washington, DC — just a few hours down the road by car.

  A science fiction convention in those days was usually no more than a few hundred die-hard science fiction readers and writers who collected at a hotel for a weekend, sometimes a long weekend. There, the fans and the writers would talk about science fiction in the bar, or the fans would listen to various panels on science fiction by writers or other fans. And there, Anne could rub shoulders with writers she’d admired all her life: Isaac Asimov, James Blish, H. Beam Piper, Randall Garrett, and Keith Laumer.

  Isaac was a charming genius, great at puns, limericks, and ditties — in addition to writing some of the finest popular science and school textbooks this century — and a science fiction writer to boot. Even though he was a tenor — after her disaster in Germany, Anne would always say, “Never trust a tenor!” — he and Anne got along famously. Years later, a panel with Isaac and Anne on it would be the high point of many science fiction conventions and fans would be in stitches from their raucous displays of barbed good humor.

  But more than Isaac’s humor, Anne was overcome by James Blish’s simple words of encouragement. Anne found him and Evvie del Rey in the hotel bar where they were chatting between panels. The two greeted her warmly, though they had only known her casually before.

  Then Jim said, “Anne, what has happened? You’ve published two lovely stories. What’s happened? Why haven’t you written anything more?”

  “Well I’m trying to.”

  “Well, you should continue.”

  And all the way home in the car Anne kept thinking to herself, “Jim Blish says I can write. Jim Blish says I can write. Jim Blish says I can write!”

  And because Jim Blish said Anne could write, she did. Her next story, The Ship Who Mourned, was the first story of hers accepted by John Campbell at Analog. That would not happen for another three years.

  Unlike Killashandra Ree of Crystal Singer, Anne had sweet revenge. When she returned to the States she discovered that all that concentration on her lower range had actually shot her higher notes up to the E above high C — and she continued to sing as
a soprano — although the flaw in E, F, and G remained.

  Her vocal tutor, who had left Germany in search of a career in the States, one day came to her house when she was singing along with the radio and burst in, saying: “Who is that marvelous soprano?”

  “Me,” Anne told him. But she had had enough of him and went back to her friend, choral master Ted Huang at the Concord Presbyterian Church. And Robie.

  Anne with me

  Anne also returned to the Breck’s Mills Cronies for many more performances in various roles and positions. I remember the first time that I went to one of her performances. She was playing the wicked Queen Agravaine in Once Upon a Mattress. I must have been about eight at the time. She was so convincingly evil on stage — and it was a small theatre with an intimate stage — I was so terrified that she had to come out between acts to reassure me.

  Anne started something new upon her return from Germany. We had all become so spoiled by the lovely fresh bread the Germans made that the thought of store-bought bread was too much — so Anne started making her own. Very soon, we were the most popular house in the neighborhood — particularly when the smell of warm luscious fresh-baked bread wafted into the air. A good cook, Anne gained a divine reputation with her marvelous butter-basted loaves. We all got quite good at slicing thick warm bread and lathering it with butter and honey.

  But Anne’s famous home-baked bread became a thing of the past when the family teased her unmercifully after she tried to serve us from loaves she’d forgot to put yeast in. We called it “Lead Bread” and laughed at the idea of serving it to our neighbors and having them sink to the bottom of their bathtubs. Three decades wiser, I can only shake my head in memory — and wistfully recall the smell of that marvelous fresh bread.