Dear Reader, In some ways...
Dear Reader,
In some ways, the impetus behind A Field of Darkness is my own backstory. Like me, my protagonist Madeline Dare's "money is so old there's none left." Like me, she has a love-hate relationship with her WASP heritage: yearning for the trappings of that lost wealth-the shoes, the curtains, the crustless cucumber sandwiches-while remaining appalled by the dark legacy of cruelty and bloodshed that twines through her family's history.
Madeline's as haunted as I am by the dawn massacre of Connecticut's Pequot tribe, which was led by a forebear named Captain John Underhill. This has been called "the most gruesome act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by European colonizers on American soil," and all the details concerning the events of that morning in Field are historically accurate.
I grew up mostly in California, having moved there with my mother and sister in 1969. The band of gypsies we kept company with in the years that followed included Sufis, surfers, single moms, Black Panthers, Ansel Adams, draft dodgers, striking farmworkers, and Henry Miller's toughest Ping-Pong rival.
I wanted to believe that all the horrible things I knew my ancestors had perpetrated over the centuries had nothing to do with me. But I have always been aware that history—good and bad—leaves its mark on us all.
That knowledge was the driving force behind A Field of Darkness. I've made Madeline Dare my doppelganger in many senses, and I forced her to try navigating our shared legacy of angst and guilt.
Madeline doesn't emerge unscathed at the end of the story. She discovers, as I have, a hard truth I've best seen expressed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the opening pages of his book The Gulag Archipelago:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
I have a sneaking suspicion that Solzhenitsyn's piece of heart is the same one Janis Joplin was always singing about during the course of my hippie childhood.
Here are a few other things in the book that have at least some basis in reality:
1. My husband grew up on a farm outside Syracuse and used to design and build railgrinders. One day while we were having lunch at the farm, my father-in-law told me the story of two local girls who were last seen alive at a Field Days celebration outside the city in the company of two soldiers. Their bodies were found the following day in a field my father-in-law would lease for cultivation some twenty years later. The real victims were only fourteen years old, and the case has never been solved.
2. The character Lapthorne Townsend, Madeline Dare's favorite cousin, is named for a sailmaking company called Ratsey & Lapthorn. Colin Ratsey was my mother's godfather. He was a fine sailor, and crewed on the winning boat in the 1958 America's Cup, the Columbia. The company was founded in Cowes, England, and first made sails for the Royal Yacht Squadron. They also have a sail loft in New York, which has outfitted the majority of America's Cup champions since 1851.
I have a small blue duffel bag that was made in their New York loft around 1965. The zipper has been replaced three times but the canvas is still going strong. We have tremendous luggage loyalty in my family.
3. I really did "come out" at the Junior Assemblies in New York in the winter of 1981, wearing my mother's deb dress with the "pointy-atomic-boob darts," along with long, white, three-button kid gloves.
The buttons are a big pain to do and undo yourself, especially when you want to smoke. Mom showed me how to wad up the finger part and roll it up under the wrist of the glove to keep my hands free. I have a big lump of rolled glove on top of each hand in all the pictures.
The dress was totally shredded by the end of the evening, because the fabric was kind of rotting and people kept stepping on the hem.
4. Lester Lanin's orchestra played at the Assemblies. At parties, he always threw out cotton beanies with his name painted on them, (fifty thousand of them a year, supposedly).
5. I changed the name of a body of water outside Syracuse in the story—from Onondaga Lake to Lake Oncas. Onondaga Lake really is the most polluted body of water in the United States. The Allied Chemical and Dye Company dumped literally tons of mercury into it (estimates range from forty thousand to one hundred sixty-five thousand pounds). I changed the name of the company to Lapthorne, and had it run by Madeline's great-great grandfather. Uncas was the name of the Indian guide who helped lead Captain John Underhill to the Missituck (Mystic) fort of the Pequot tribe.
6. Madeline's great-grandmother Dodie is supposedly on the maiden voyage of an ocean liner that burns at sea. I named it the Glamis Castle, after a David Austin rose that is itself named for the British castle in which the Queen Mother grew up.
The real ship was the Morro Castle, which was built for a company run by my great-grandfather, Franklin Mooney. My grandmother—his daughter Ruth—christened it, but no one I'm related to was aboard when it burned at sea on September 8, 1934. This tragedy is still considered the worst domestic maritime disaster in American history.
7. Madeline's great-grandfather died in the fictional ship's fire. In his memory, his wife, Dodie, planted hundreds of old garden roses in the family cemetery on Centre Island. While there is an old family cemetery on Centre Island in Oyster Bay, New York, there are no roses planted in it.
There is, however, a gravestone on which is inscribed:
Behold and see as you pass by
As you are now so once was I
As I am now you soon must be
Prepare for death to follow me
8. There really was a Nazi gardener working for my mother's boyfriend on Centre Island. He used to reminisce about drinking linden blossom tea back when he was in the Hitler Youth.
9. Lapthorne drives a black 1984 Porsche Carrera with a whale tail. I briefly owned a guards red 1984 Porsche Carrera with a whale tail, which was my favorite car ever. Except for the repair bills.
After I sold it, I drove a very old Honda Civic hatchback, which was a whole lot less fun. Especially going uphill. The first morning I saw the Honda in the driveway instead of the Porsche, I said, "How the mighty have fallen." My daughter Grace replied, "But oh, how the tiny have risen."
On the bright side, the interior of the Honda did not fill up with water every time it rained, which was an improvement over the Porsche, because we do not have a garage.
10. I really do have a tattoo of a cent's sign just above my right ankle. So does my great college friend Candace, only hers is backwards because she made the tattoo lady redo the preliminary drawing at the last minute—accidentally in the wrong direction.
11. Candace nicknamed the way I prepare my coffee "light sweet crude."
12. Candace also came with me to a Halloween party on Centre Island one year, dressed in an old tuxedo as F. Scott Fitzgerald. She carried a small notebook and pencil with her that night, and all the overheard conversations at the costume party in Field were actual bits of dialogue she wrote down during the course of the party. The names of those speaking have been changed, however.
13. I worked for a weekly paper in Syracuse called the Syracuse New Times. My actual co-workers there were great people, and have all been very patient with the ways my fictional co-workers differed from their real-life inspirations. The guy on whom "Wilt" is loosely based would like to be played by Omar Sharif if there's ever a film version. I figure I owe him at least that much . . .
14. When I was a little kid, a family named the Angels—whose daughters used to babysit for us—brought over a box of children's books they'd outgrown. One of these was a very old copy of Struwwelpeter, in German. It scared the pants off me then, and has haunted me ever since.
Thank you so very much for taking the time to read my first novel, and I hope that you've found it to your liking.
Sincerely,
Cornelia Read
