Marcos and Franny stood silent.
She spoke other names—saying, as her mother had so often said, Esparaván—and moved slowly closer. Moved slowly because she found that, at least by her impression, she had no other choice than to thread herself ponderous through the Nambé air. Esparaván? Gavilán?
Marcos asked Franny, —Are you seeing this?
She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer.
Francisca neared them and could almost taste their fear.
—Franny? Do you see this?
Together they stood as Francisca hesitated midfield. She gazed at that whisper of moon, and she admired her familiar mountains and this oddly familiar boy. And as Marcos and his unknown girl saw her fully forming, unfurling like a chrysanthemum of mist, looking much as she had when she was as alive as anyone who ever walked these lands—she who presented herself to them as a kind of soft photographic negative, clearly and with all the dignity of life—Francisca de Peña heard Franny finally say to Marcos, —Yes. Yes, I do.
Buy Ariel’s Crossing Now!
A Biography of Bradford Morrow
Bradford Morrow is the award-winning author of six novels and numerous short stories, essays, poetry collections, and children’s books, as well as the founding editor of the celebrated literary journal Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Academy Award inLiterature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, as well as other honors.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951, Morrow grew up outside Denver in Littleton, Colorado, where his parents had settled after growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Oak Creek, Colorado, respectively. Morrow’s maternalgrandparents were farmers from Nebraskawho eventually migrated to Colorado after losing their farm during the Depression, and his paternalgrandfatherwas a doctor who came to Colorado to set up his practice on the frontier. His family instilled a spirit of adventure and curiosity in Morrow, traits that would be evident in his writing as well as his peripatetic travels and career choices.
Morrow left home at fifteen, traveling first to Honduras to participate in a summer program sponsored by the American Medical Association, where he worked as a medical assistant helping to inoculate thousands of impoverished, rural Hondurans. He then spent his senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Italy, earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and spent time in Paris. For over a decade after setting off on his own, Morrow lived an itinerant life, moving back and forth from Europe to the States. He then spent five years in California, where he met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and finally settled for good in New York City. Before becoming a fulltime writer and editor, Morrow worked as a bookseller, jazz musician, and translator, and attended graduate school at Yale. His first book-length work was a bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, published in 1978.
In 1981, Morrow launched the literary journal Conjunctions. His taste, passion, and editorial savvy quickly attracted a diverse slate of contributing writers and editors, including Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, and Joyce Carol Oates. The novelist Robert Coover has called the publication “without exception, America’s leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country.”
After years of contributing to anthologies and supporting the work of others in his role as editor, Morrow published his first novel, Come Sunday, in 1988. Morrow’s debut set the tone for his later works with its rich historical allusion, globe-spanning plotlines, lyrical prose, and illuminating philosophical exploration. Morrow’s second novel, The Almanac Branch (1991), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and highlighted the author’s interest in the complex interior lives of his characters. The tone of his work is often Gothic, especially in Giovanni’s Gift (1997), which was partly inspired by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Morrow meticulously researches his fiction: For his diptych consisting of Trinity Fields (1995) and Ariel’s Crossing (2002), the author interviewed special ops veterans from the U.S. engagement in Laos, students involved in the Columbia University riots, and Manhattan Project scientists, among others. He even lived for a time near Los Alamos—where atomic weapons were first tested—to better understand the characters in his sweeping historical sagas of American life in the atomic age.
Aside from his work as an editor and writer, Bradford Morrow has taught writing and literature throughout his career, which has included positions at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and the Naropa Institute. He currently lives in New York and is a professor of literature at Bard College, which sponsors Conjunctions.
“Lois Hoffman and Ernest Morrow, my parents-to-be, standing in front of the Luscombemy father flew them in on their first date in 1949. My father was a pilot and the owner of a Harley-Davidson that he regularly drove from Oak Creek, Colorado, over the continental divide to Denver, where Lois lived at the time, an all-day drive on his cycle.”
“Age one, striking something of an authorial pose with the forefinger to the cheek. I remember those curtains, very Western in theme with the cattle and other cowboy imagery.”
“Looking at this photograph, it’s really those narrative Western-themed curtains behind me that I find most interesting now. I remember staring at them and inventing stories in the drapery. This was in our house on Cove Way in Denver, Colorado.”
“The H.M.S. Pinafore outfit that I wore onone of my two youthful outings as a thespian (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan’s other workhorse operetta, The Mikado). My mother made the costume from scratch, right down to the epaulettes and medals. I still have this outfit in a box somewhere and the bookcase, too. Littleton, Colorado.”
“Me as a grinning Cub Scout in Littleton, Colorado. I would go on to become an Eagle Scout and must confess that the Boy Scouts at that time—in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where we went camping, sometimes in the dead of winter, and hiking through difficult terrain, learning the flora and fauna, as well as all sorts of real survival skills—is a part of my youth I now cherish.”
“I’m standing here with a group of beautiful young children somewhere in the mountains south of Comayagua, Honduras, in 1966, when I was serving as a medical assistant for Amigos de lasAméricas. This Peace-Corps-like experience in the second-poorest country in the hemisphere (after Haiti, at the time) absolutely changed my life. When this photo was taken, I had just finished inoculating the entire school body of this little village against smallpox and other diseases.”
“On the beach near Genoa, Italy, visiting the host family with whom I spentmy senior year in high school when I was a foreign exchange student living in Cuneo, not far from there. I lived with the Delpiano family: Minu and Aldo, my host parents, and Dario, Andrea, and the youngest brother, Davide, who’s sitting here beside me, in 1970 or so.”
“In Littleton, Colorado, visiting my parent’s house from the University of Colorado in Boulder. From the left: my beloved Grandfather Hoffman, who was a farmer in Red Cloud, Nebraska, until he lost everything in the Great Depression; my mother holding his hand; me in the middle with a pensive or else depressed look on my face (basically my mind must have been elsewhere); my equally beloved grandmother, Jenny Hoffman, to whom I attribute some of my storytelling skills; and my sister Deborah. Around 1972.”
“In my early twenties, camping somewhere in the Colorado mountains.”
“With the legendary James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, at a reception at the Gotham Book Mart in New York. The first issue of Conjunctions was a festschrift in honor of Laughlin, who published everyone from Ezra Pound to Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas to John Hawkes, Ferlinghetti and Rexroth, Patchen and Bowles, William Carlos Williams, and so many important modernists and post-modernists. 1981.”
“Bird-watching in the highlands of Scotland, on the North Sea. Late 1980s.”
“This is the barn on my uncle Henry and aunt Helen Rehder’s ranch near Steamboat Springs. The ranch served as the setting for Giovanni’s Gift,
and this photograph was taken by me when I went to visit them at the height of their being harassed in the middle of the night by people who were trying to get them to sell their ranch so that it could be developed. Mid-1990s.”
“Me standing next to a low-rider car with an absolutely superb flame paintjob in the small village of Chimayó, New Mexico, where some of Trinity Fields and Ariel’s Crossing is set. With one of my trusty Boorum & Pease journals under my arm. Mid-1990s.”
“Visiting the highly restricted site of the White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, where the world’s first nuclear bomb was detonated at 5:29:45 Mountain War Time, on July 16, 1945. The obelisk in the background stands on the precise spot where the world entered the nuclear age. Taken when I was working on Trinity Fields, 1994.”
“I write my books sitting at the kitchen table of my rural farmhouse in upstate New York. This was a photograph taken of my worktable while completing the manuscript of Trinity Fields in 1994.”
“Me in front of Franz Kafka’s house on Golden Lane in Prague. This was during my first research trip to the Czech Republic to work on my seventh novel, The Prague Sonata. Late 1990s.”
“Some of my brilliant Conjunctions staff in the New York office, where the journal is edited: Eimear Ryan, Jessica Loudis, J. W. McCormack, and Jedediah Berry (whose first novel, The Manual of Detection, came out to widespread critical praise in the past couple of years). Sitting with us is my dear friend and hero, Barney Rosset, founder and editor of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. Turtle, the Conjunctions cat, is wiggling out of my arm, meantime. Summer 2010.”
“A photograph of me walking with my all-time favorite cat, Woody, on the second to last day of his life, at my place upstate. Woody was like no other being, animal or person, I have ever met. I honestly feel that in many ways he was my spiritual superior. He’s buried now in the garden along with Grace, another magisterial feline whom it was my honor to hang out with. November 2004.”
Acknowledgments
Above all I owe a debt of gratitude to my parents for introducing me to New Mexico during our many summer expeditions away from home in Littleton, Colorado. I first set eyes on Pojoaque Valley when I was ten years old, thanks to them, and revisited the little church in Chimayó with them on Easter 1992.
Without the help of retired air force pilot Lieutenant Colonel Roger Daisley of Fox Island, Washington, Kip might not have discovered the Steve Canyon program and Brice might never have noticed the convergences of Los Alamos and Long Tieng. I thank him for answering hundreds of questions about his experiences as head Raven during years of covert operations inside Laos, for sharing personal memories with me and opening to me the hermetic world of spookdom, not to mention the eccentricities of FAC pilotry. Thanks, too, to his wife, Alyse, and family, for putting me up in their home in August 1993. I am also grateful to another of the surviving Ravens, who prefers to remain anonymous, for helping me with details about Kip’s experiences in Laos and refugee camps in Thailand during and after the Vietnam war; and to his Vietnamese-born Lao wife, who was so gracious in receiving me at their home.
Hedy Dunn, director of the Los Alamos Historical Museum, not only gave me access to very useful tape recordings and documents during my visits to the Hill, but spent many hours going over the manuscript with me. Also helpful during my research days at Fuller Lodge were archivist Theresa Strottman, curator Rebecca Collinsworth, and intern Eric Alexander.
Native Chimayóan Raymond Bal, who runs the Potrero Trading Post next to the Santuario, and Chimayó historian and artist Elizabeth Kay were most helpful with remembrances of Chimayó in the fifties and since. Sister Antonette Ahles, pastoral assistant to pilgrims, answered my sometimes very secular questions (such as how to go about breaking into the church in 1959) with patience and charm.
I am grateful to Robert Friedman, who edited the Spectator at Columbia University during the stormy late sixties, for walking me so vividly through his experiences of antiwar activism during that period.
Jennette Montalvo, faithful research assistant from the summer of 1992 to completion in October 1993, looked up arcana, ran down references, followed fragile threads, was hardworking on the novel’s behalf throughout. Ariel Kaminer, namesake of both Wills’ daughter, excavated considerable data for me in 1992. Beth Herstein helped me with legal research. This Trinity would not have come into being without that trinity.
Books of particular value to me were Jane Hamilton-Merritt’s Tragic Mountains—hers is my source for the rodeo scene in Long Tieng; Christopher Robbins’s The Ravens; Marta Weigle and Peter White’s The Lore of New Mexico; Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb; and Peggy Pond Church’s The House at Otowi Bridge, in which the story of Edith Warner is told. The Los Alamos Historical Society has published valuable books and pamphlets about the history of the Pajarito Plateau and surrounding area too numerous to list.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Richard Tuttle loaned me their house during my first research trip to New Mexico, April 1992, and kindly put me up again the following year. The idea of writing about Los Alamos hatched five months before that, during a sleepless night in Janet Rodney and Nathaniel Tarn’s abode out on the desert, from whose windows I could see the lights of the Hill thirty miles toward the west. Anne and Patrick Lannan opened their home to me in Santa Fe last August—what eerie pleasure was to be had when I looked out the window of their balcony and could see both Mei-mei and Richard’s old adobe at the foot of Cerro Gordo, across the river, where the book was begun, and Los Alamos once more far in the distance. I can’t thank them enough for their hospitality.
Among others who were particularly supportive: Allen Peacock, Paul West, Dr. Bruce Fader, M. Mark, Jeanie Kim, Donald McKinney, Peter Straub, Nomi Eve, Deborah Eisenberg, Kate Norment, Anthony and Annabel McCall. But for Dr. John Daly and Dr. Mark Wallack I wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale. Martine Bellen read the book as it was being written and I want to thank her for crucial encouragement.
Lynn Nesbit, my friend and agent, I thank for believing in this novel from the beginning. I am grateful to everyone at Janklow & Nesbit for their kindnesses and hard work, especially Lydia Wills and Cynthia Cannell.
Nan Graham, like an inspired santa, presided over the editing of this book with constant vitality, grace, and intelligence. Others at Viking—Paul Slovak, Courtney Hodell, and Barbara Grossman in particular—have worked persistently and astutely on behalf of this project, and I thank them. Elizabeth Ruge and Arnulf Conradi of Berlin Verlag contributed a number of important editorial suggestions, and my British editor, Jonathan Warner, whose tragic death prevented him from seeing this book into print, motivated me in my further investigations of Ariel and of Nambé pueblo.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works: “Thank God for You” by Sawyer Brown. © 1993 by Mark A. Miller, Travelin’ Zoo Music, Mac McAnally, Beginner Music. “Howl” from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 1956 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. “Mr. Housman’s Message” from Personae by Ezra Pound. Copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
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yright © 1995 by Bradford Morrow
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1203-5
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Trinity Fields Page 44
