109 East Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

captivated by the romantic aura of the place, the artists in their bright smocks and blue jeans and the Santa Feans themselves in their cowboy clothes, silver belts, silk scarves, and fringed deerskins. She attended poetry recitals, lectures, political discussions, and amateur theatricals. “Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora Duncan, appeared in a sack cloth and shepherd’s crook and told of his experiences and hopes,” Dorothy wrote in an unpublished memoir. “People from Russia enlivened us with stories of their theatre and ballet. I fell in love with the place because of its beauty and the cultural and intellectual atmosphere.”
    Dorothy put her time at Sunmount to good use, hobnobbing with the most interesting patients, as well as with the healthy clientele in town, former “TBs” who were busy making a name for themselves in Santa Fe. One such friend was George Bloom, who would later become head of the First National Bank. Another was Katherine Stinson, who was already something of a celebrity when Dorothy met her at the sanitarium. In 1912, at the age of twenty-one, Stinson had become only the fourth woman in the country ever to receive a pilot’s license, and a year later she had founded her own company, Stinson Aviation. She proceeded to bust records of every kind in the ensuing decade: she was the first woman to fly at night; the first to fly to China; the first to perform skywriting, spelling “C-A-L” over Los Angeles. Toward the end of World War I, she contracted tuberculosis in France, and spent seven years on and off at Sunmount gradually regaining her health. Although Stinson’s barnstorming days were over, Dorothy admired her independence and fearlessness, even in confinement, and they would become lifelong friends.
    Dorothy spent eleven months at Sunmount and was pronounced “cured.” Joe McKibbin renewed his attentions to her, after being given permission to visit her toward the end of 1926, by which time her health had substantially improved. In the spring of 1927, he proposed again, and she accepted. When she compared herself with Katherine Stinson, Dorothy knew she had much to be grateful for. But she was also keenly aware of the time she had lost, and that all her schoolmates and cousins had married and moved on with their lives. It was only natural that a young woman, after watching her sisters die and then falling under the same shadow herself, and after having seen so many friends languish and fail, would come away with a certain mental toughness. What may have begun as a defensive posture in Dorothy became a deeply ingrained characteristic, and her stoicism and stubborn optimism would be her chief assets in the years ahead, always within reach, no matter how trying the circumstances.
    On October 5, 1927, Dorothy and Joe McKibbin were married in the garden of her parents’ home. She often joked that she had a small wedding owing to its belatedness and their advanced ages—she was nearly thirty, and he was thirty-four. The Kansas City society pages diplomatically covered the restrained celebration, observing that the bride demonstrated her “distinct individuality in her wedding gown … [and] chose a sapphire blue velvet dress and wore a small hat to match.” The couple honeymooned in Rio de Janeiro and then settled in St. Paul. Joe continued to manage the fur trade at McKibbin, Driscoll & Dorsey, while quietly reassuring his Princeton friends he would soon be joining their brokerage business. Those plans had to be postponed again when Dorothy discovered she was expecting a child. On December 6, 1930, they welcomed their son Kevin into the world.
    For Dorothy, it was a time of pure and unexpected joy. “None of this valley of the shadow of death but peaks of excitement of life,” she wrote days after his birth, putting her feelings to paper as she often did during fraught moments in her life:
    There is nothing personal about happiness. It is an aliveness. It is a oneness with