Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty by Kate Hennessy

Author:Kate Hennessy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Tamar could barely tear herself away from her garden—the marigolds, zinnias, and cosmos were in bloom—when she, Dorothy, and the eight children headed up to Vermont on a clear and cool, early-September morning. Dorothy drove a 1949 jeep station wagon, full of rattles and with no hand brake, while Becky, Tamar, and the new baby sat in the front, and the others filled up the back. They arrived at the farm late in the afternoon on the second day, and soon after David and two companions arrived in a rental truck. Tamar was devastated to discover that the truck was too small, and many things had to be left behind, including the mulberry seedlings and house plants.

The new house was a large, traditional, continuous New England farmhouse. Grapevines grew on the front of the house, and in the yard there were two butternuts and two maples, the sizes of which dwarfed the Staten Island trees. In back there were eighteen acres of hillside fields with an apple orchard full of ripe apples nestled in a serene, south-facing valley among gentle hills surrounded by nothing but hundreds of acres of woods. Dorothy felt suffocated by the trees and hills of Vermont. She preferred having a long view, growing up as she did in Chicago, surrounded by the prairie and Lake Michigan, and then living on Staten Island, where she could gaze out to Raritan Bay. Tamar, on the other hand, left behind trees wherever she lived—at Easton, Stotlers Crossroads, Staten Island, and her two homes in Vermont. There were never enough trees for her, not even in Vermont, where if you turn your back for a moment you will find oak, hickory, and maple seedlings uprooting your foundations.

The house on Cady Hill Road delighted them all. “The geographical cure,” Tamar later came to call it. She and David made plans while the older kids wandered about, dumb with amazement at the size of the house—it had nine bedrooms—and the younger ones raced from room to room. David unpacked his books in one room, while in another Tamar set up the loom, always the first thing she packed and unpacked in their moves. Her spinning wheel had been stolen from the Peter Maurin Farm, but she found a spindle and a box of raw washed wool in the house. Eric eyed the surrounding woods nervously for several days before he and Nicky finally headed out with two fishing rods they found in the barn.

Dorothy wasn’t aware that it was Tamar who made the decision to move, exhausted as she was by David’s hostility toward Dorothy and no longer able to shield Dorothy from it. Tamar rarely spoke of what happened to drive her away from all she loved—the Worker, her mother, the beach, and her small homestead filled with fruit trees, flowers, goats, and chickens—but once again she was in exile; once again, as she gave up her connection to the Worker, giving up her mother. And this time there was

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