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In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
From “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It had been years since I last set foot in the Glastonbury Arms. It was built for its proximity to Chicago’s Union and North Western Stations, but it was too close to Skid Row to achieve the success its first owner had expected. He bore the improbable name of Launcelot Merlin MacArthur, and had taken the Arthurian legacy as his own. MacArthur, who had visited the town of Glastonbury in his youth, had been enthralled with the Arthurian legends, as well as the stories that the young Jesus had visited the site with his great uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, and that Joseph had returned after the Crucifixion with the Holy Grail, filled with Jesus’ blood.
Joseph, according to the legend, was a merchant who sailed to Cornwall to buy tin, but also visited the site of Glastonbury, then an island, which came to be known as Avalon. When he returned with the Grail, he thrust his staff into the ground, which became a thorn tree. In the High Middle Ages, the legends of Joseph and the Grail were comingled with those of the legendary King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
My name, officially, is John Chauncey Smith, but I’ve been writing and living under the name of Gershom Davies for so long that I do a double take when someone calls me Jack. I took the first name from Exodus 2:22: “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land,” back when I was in self-imposed exile in Venice Beach, California. Owen Davies, Bookseller, a shop in Old Town specializing in railroad memorabilia, gave me my surname—one I’d used before and in different circumstances. I’ve worked in newspapers for most of my adult life, but for the last year it’s been as a syndicated columnist after the Express folded in ’78.
When I first visited the Glastonbury Arms, I was a cub reporter, newly hired by the Express. In ’51, the hotel was still respectable. The coat of arms behind the front desk had just been repainted, and the thorn tree still grew in the center of the lobby, surrounded by a protective barrier. And old Launcelot MacArthur still owned the place.
In fact, I wouldn’t have had the assignment if the old man hadn’t insisted on an Episcopalian. Most Chicago reporters were Catholic, with a few Protestants, Jews, and atheists added to the mix, but there weren’t many Episcopalians.
“Smith,” said the city editor, “your bio says you’re an Episcopalian.”
“Not a very good one,” I replied.
“You know Launcelot Merlin MacArthur?”
“I think I’ve seen him. There’s a plaque with his name on it in Saints Peter and Paul Church.”
“He owns the Glastonbury Arms Hotel. He thinks he has the God damned Holy Grail, and he’ll only talk to an Episcopalian. You know the place?”
“Yeah. West Monroe, just down the street.”
It was a very warm and sunny afternoon in early October, so I didn’t need a raincoat. The walk was pleasant, even with the traffic. While I had been curious about the place, I had never stepped inside. There was no doorman at the entrance, but it didn’t seem shabby. The lobby was dominated by an immense tree. And there, above the keys and cubbyholes behind the front desk was the coat of arms—a bishop’s miter in the escutcheon, with two croziers, or bishop’s crooks, crossed behind it. Below it was the motto, "Floreat Ecclesia Anglicana." “May the Church of England Flourish,” I gleaned from my college Latin. The young woman behind the desk looked up from what appeared to be a volume of poetry. I saw the title, “Kubla Khan” as she closed it.
“How may I help you?” she said. She was probably a graduate student, with that white ruffled blouse, tweed skirt, and long, dark hair tied back. Very nice-looking. The horn-rimmed glasses framed a lovely oval face.
“Let me feed on honey-dew and drink the milk of Paradise,” I said.
She said nothing.
“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be forward. Paraphrasing end of the poem you were studying. I’m Jack Smith with the Express. Mr. MacArthur said he had something newsworthy.”
“Mr. MacArthur should be back shortly,” she said. “Oh, maybe I should just drop the formality. I’m Celia West, Lance MacArthur’s granddaughter. I don’t mind your being forward, especially by way of Coleridge. Grandfather’s got it into his head that he’s found the Holy Grail, and I don’t want him to be the laughingstock of the city. She stood up, moved a bell on the desk, and put a “Ring Bell for Service” sign by it. Let me show you.” She stood up, revealing herself to be just below my six feet, left her enclave, and led me to a door with a plaque bearing her grandfather’s name. Behind his tidy desk was a large green urn on a pedestal.
“Impressive,” I said. “Seems familiar, but I can’t see it as the Holy Grail.”
“It gets more complicated,” she said, tucking back a strand of hair that had escaped. “It’s a replica of an 18th century urn from the Pavlovsk Palace outside of Leningrad. And I only know that because a friend is an expert. Grandfather won’t tell me how much he paid for it, but it can’t have been cheap.”
“Are you sure it’s a replica?”
“I think so. My friend said she wasn’t sure. The Germans took the palace, during the war, but most of the artifacts from it were hidden beforehand.”
At that moment the bell rang.
“I’ll need to get that. Take a seat. I’ll be right back.”
I sat down in a chair behind the desk and stared at the urn. A few seconds later, the door swung open, and as I was turning around, I was grabbed from behind, roped to the chair, gagged, and blindfolded. And the gag was wet. It took some struggling, but whatever was on the gag did its job. By the time I came to, somebody was untying me, and a cop was asking me questions.
“Is the girl OK?” was my first question.
I didn’t get an answer. “Did you see who hit you?”
“No,” I said. “What about Celia?”
“She’ll be O.K. The old man should be, too, but he’s in worse shape.”
After blinking my eyes a couple of times, I saw that the urn was gone. Not a surprise.
“You’re sure you didn’t see anyone?”
“By the time I started to turn around, somebody had a blindfold over my head. The only thing I heard was the bell.” I felt my pockets. My wallet and keys were still there. Along with my reporter’s notebook. I started to get up, but there were two strong hands on my shoulders.
“Chloroform is funny stuff. Too little, and you’ll just feel dizzy,” said the voice behind me. “Too much, and it can be your last breath. Stay in the chair for a little longer and take a few breaths of oxygen.” He placed an oxygen mask over my mouth. “I think you can walk out of here, but you’ll need to take it easy.”
After I breathed pure oxygen for a few minutes, the medic came around and listened to my heart and lungs with a stethoscope while checking my pulse. He then told me to get up slowly. I felt a little lightheaded, but I managed to move without stumbling. I made it out the door and saw Celia lying on a sofa in the lobby. A nurse was bending over her.
“How is she?” I asked.
Before the nurse could answer, Celia said, “Better than I look. But the honey-dew and milk of Paradise will have to wait. I’m here most Tuesdays and Thursdays. Stop by if you have time.”
“She’s not delirious,” I told the nurse. “A little inside joke.” I said to Celia, "You look better than you think. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’”
“’That is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,’” she responded.
The nurse looked puzzled.
“The last two lines of Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’” I said.
Celia held up a hand to me, and I took it in both of mine.
“I’ll definitely see you again,” I said. To the nurse, I said, “Do you know what happened to her grandfather?"
“The ambulance took him. I don’t know where.”
“St. Luke’s,” Celia said. “Only place he’d go.”
I gently let go of her hand and went into a phone booth, where I called the city editor, gave him the basics, and said I was headed to St. Luke’s.
“Take a cab,” he said. “We’ll cover it.”
He was right. Chicago was built on a grid, and St. Luke’s was at 14th and Michigan. There was no single bus or streetcar I could take from the West Loop. I flagged down a Checker in front of the hotel and was at St. Luke’s in a matter of minutes.
It took a few minutes to ascertain where he was in the big complex and a few more at the nurses’ station for permission to visit him. And then, “The chaplain is in with him right now. It shouldn’t be too long.”
I took the time to jot down everything I remembered from the afternoon. A young man in a Roman collar came out a door, leaving it slightly ajar. Naturally, MacArthur would only go to St. Luke’s. It was the only Episcopal hospital in town. I got up and knocked.
“Mr. MacArthur,” I said. It’s Jack Smith from the Express."
“Come in, young man! I’m glad you found me.”
“Your granddaughter said you’d be at St. Luke’s. She’s going to be fine, by the way.”
“Yes, she’s a bright girl. Working on her Master’s. She needs to be busy to keep up her spirits. Her husband is missing and presumed dead in Korea. That was over a year ago. But you didn’t come here to talk about her. I’ve been a fool. I made my confession to the chaplain, but I’ll tell you.”
He was in a hospital gown and recovering from being chloroformed, but he didn’t appear to be in bad health. He still had most of his hair. It was gray, of course, and he sported a little Thomas Dewey-style mustache. He was probably tall, but perhaps not so tall as his granddaughter.
“In late August,” he told me, “I received a letter from a dealer in London, saying he had something that would interest me. He said it was a replica of an urn in Russia, very high quality, but there some of the provenance connected it to Glastonbury. It was from a firm I didn’t know, but the connection to Glastonbury hooked me. I flew to London, something I shan’t do again. I think you saw the urn—it was exquisite—and the price he offered was far lower than what I was expecting. But what intrigued me was inside the base. It was a simple, pewter chalice, which, according to the provenance, had been added when the urn was owned by a gentleman in Glastonbury. And there was a letter stating that the chalice had been found during an 1892 excavation that found Glastonbury Village.”
I nodded.
“Too good to be true. I know,” he continued. I bought it and brought it back on the Media from Liverpool. Not the Queen Mary, I know, but a decent Cunard liner and a first-class cabin. Customs was a breeze, and I brought it home on the Broadway Limited. I was going to take it to a restorer who’d separate the pewter chalice from the urn. It seemed to have been soldered in.”
He went on for a bit longer until the nurse came in and shooed me out. I had enough for a story. Even though we were an afternoon paper, we’d have the scoop.
There was a northbound bus coming up to the stop as I left, so I took it and changed to a Madison streetcar in the Loop. When I got back to the office, just west of Union Station, the receptionist sent me to the city editor.
“We have to kill the story,” he said as soon as I entered his office. The FBI asked me, well, told me so. Sent an agent in person.”
“You’re sure he was legit? You know, the City News slogan.”
“Yeah, ’If your mother says she loves you, check it out.’ He had the uniform—the dark suit, white shirt, plain tie and he had the I.D., but yes, I called the Bureau office after he left. He’s legit.”
“It would have made a great story,” I said. I gave him the gist of my interview with MacArthur and said I suspected the urn wasn’t a reproduction.
“Keep your notes,” he said. “Maybe we can use it later.”
The next day was a busy one—Michael Moretti, a suspended state’s attorney policeman, was indicted for murder. The Chicago Transit Authority proposed selling a $1.25 weekly pass for riders in the downtown area. And three more Chicago boys were killed in Korea.
I was out of the office most of the day, phoning in my stories to the rewrite man. When I finally returned, the receptionist said I’d gotten more than one call from Celia West.
I called the number she gave me.
“Hello, this is Celia.”
“Jack Smith, returning your call.”
“Jack, I need to talk to you in person. Could we meet
someplace for dinner?”
“Certainly,” I said.
“Can you meet me at Elliott’s Open Kitchen on 55th, in, say, an hour?”
“I’ll be there.”
I put on my hat and trench coat and walked the three blocks to my apartment, where I freshened up and shaved. I was lucky with the Chicago Transit Authority. Still, Celia was waiting for me as I walked west from the 55th Street “L” station.
Nearly twenty years later, Jory Graham, the expert in all things Chicago, would write, “Elliott’s is housed in a once-white diner in a neighborhood that’s even more dilapidated. Ignore everything but the food, which is first-rate.” The place and the neighborhood were in slightly better shape then, but the food—barbecue and fried chicken—was excellent, along with the doughnut holes they gave you when you were waiting.
In the din of the restaurant, she made her confession. “I never thought it would come to this. The couple who talked me into doing this said nobody would be hurt, that Grandfather would have an exciting adventure, and that we could rescue an important artifact from the Reds. They couldn’t take it out of the UK without an incident, but nobody would bother Grandfather. I was foolish enough to believe them. And maybe they were right, but they didn’t count on Grandfather calling a reporter. When I found out he had called you, I called them to see if they could get the urn away. They did, but not the way I expected. Grandfather might not have made it through if the medics hadn’t arrived with oxygen as soon as they did. I didn’t even hesitate about showing it to you. I figured they’d have it before any story came out.”
“Quite a story,” I said.
“And I have a favor to ask you. We’re down here on the South Side because the couple who talked me into this are grad students at the University.” She was referring to the nearby University of Chicago. “I just want to talk to them about what happened, and I need some backup.”
She led me to a DeSoto coupe in the parking lot. We got in and she turned on the headlights and drove east on 55th to a block in the Hyde Park area, where she squeezed into a parking space. Ahead in the dark, I could see an ambulance double-parked.
She saw it too. "That's where we're going," she said.
When we got to the door, there was a cop showing his badge.
“We’re just here to see our friends,” Celia said.
“You can’t come in," said the cop. “Police investigation.”
“Are they all right?”
“I can’t say anything right now.”
I couldn’t see behind the cop. A second man, this one in a dark suit, came to the door. He took out his FBI badge. It looked genuine.
“We can’t comment right now,” he said. “This house is off limits.”
As we got back in the car, she got close to me and said, “Maybe I’m being forward this time, but I’m upset and tense. Most people would want a stiff drink. I need something else. I’ve liked you ever since you quoted from Keats. And I think you like me. How about checking in at the Shoreland and we can release some of this tension. I might just have that honey-dew and milk of Paradise.”
I didn’t have to think twice. A tall, beautiful, sophisticated woman wanted me! She had her mouth close to mine and we kissed.
When the kiss was over, she opened her purse and handed me a twenty. “The front desk clerks get suspicious when a woman checks in. And don’t use your real name, especially since it’s John Smith.”
I thought of the journalist and novelist Richard Harding Davis, and then my favorite bookshop, Owen Davies, and I checked in under the name of Richard Davies. The first name Gershom would come later, when I moved to Los Angeles. I knew I wasn’t the first to enjoy Celia’s charms after her presumed widowhood, but at the time, it didn’t seem to matter.
Celia’s friends were lucky. The ambulance took them to the University of Chicago Hospitals rather than the morgue, and they weren’t interested in talking about their experiences. The urn was gone, and they weren’t going to try to retrieve it.
Over the next two months, I’d get a call at the office every week or so, and I’d discover some new Chicago-area restaurant and experience some exquisite lovemaking in another grand hotel, interspersed with some Romantic poetry. I learned about life in an old-money Chicago family and growing up in the Prairie Avenue neighborhood after most of the old-money families had decamped to the North Side or the suburbs, and I gave her some stories about growing up in academia—in my case, Iowa City.
I got the last call from Celia on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Her husband, presumed dead, was alive, and was being repatriated just before Christmas. I wrote a story about their happy reunion and consigned our affair to the past.
And now it was 1979, nearly thirty years later, on another warm October day. The Glastonbury Arms had long since fallen into disrepair. Launcelot MacArthur had sold the place shortly after I first visited, and it had changed hands a few times since then. While it was never a Skid Row “Single Room Occupancy” place, it was just a step above them. It was now slated for demolition, along with many other buildings on or near West Madison Street. Gentrification, they called it, a term unknown back in 1951.
I had ridden the Lake Street “L” from Oak Park and then walked the down to the site to take a few pictures for a feature story about the hotel’s history. Maybe I’d even write about the urn, though I expected to leave Celia out of it.
And as I approached the place, there was someone else inspecting the ruins. As I approached, she turned around. She had aged, of course, and though I knew she had a few years on me, but she looked lovely.
“Celia West?” I said.
“Jack Smith! Or should I say, Gershom Davies? I remember you used that last name when we were seeing each other.”
We hugged. She was wearing the same scent I remembered from our affair.
“It’s Johnston now,” she said as we broke from the embrace. Edward had some demons I couldn’t exorcise. After his experience in North Korea, things just didn’t work out, and I think he suspected I hadn’t been exactly chaste while he was presumed dead. He found a sweet young brunette from Glen Ellyn, and as far as I know, they’re still together. I married the man I should have married back in college. The trouble was, he was married in ’51, or you and I might not have had our little fling. We’re living in New York now. I’m teaching at NYU, and my husband is a CPA. We have three great kids. In memory of Grandfather, I came out on the Broadway Limited, though he might not have appreciated Amtrak’s version of the train. David, my husband, is flying in this evening. We’ll spend the weekend here, and we’ll both go back on the Broadway.”
I filled her in on my life, much of which she knew from my column, which was carried in one of the New York papers. She was free for lunch, so we walked over to Café Bohemia, a place where we had dined back in the day. It specialized in exotic game, such as bison, beaver, and sometimes even lion. We enjoyed buffalo burgers, and we did some more catching up.
“Oh,” she said, as we were getting to the end of our meal, “I should tell you. David and I visited Leningrad a couple of years ago, and we made a side trip to the Pavlovsk Palace. That urn that brought us together—it’s there. Either that, or the replica was very, very good.”
We said our goodbyes, and I wrote my story about the Glastonbury
Arms. I even included some quotes from Celia about its glory days. But I didn’t
mention the urn. Some things are better left out of the story.
