Copyright © 2019 by David Taylor Johannesen.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019904632

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-7960-2889-8

               Softcover     978-1-7960-2888-1

               eBook           978-1-7960-2887-4

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Rev. date: 04/23/2019

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CONTENTS

Immaculate Heart

Four Twins & A Wedding Dress

Blaine & Blaine

Orient Point

Pharisees at Stanford

Boston Casualty

Jacob’s Pillow

A Second Reading

Palimpsest

The Scotsman Hotel

—an eternal city its Commonwealth doth embrace unto a wond’rous saving, a hallowed place,

where none may come forward to disgrace

or put upon a preternatural face—

Foreword

I shall explain my reason for the title, Boston Casualty, and with it to express my lament at the demise of the fishing stocks in the waters by the great fleet of New Bedford, Massachusetts. While haddock remain plentiful, cod and flounder are badly depleted. Having grown up in Boston, and maintained a residence and sailboat in South Dartmouth, in Buzzards Bay, I am greatly grieved.

Descending down a narrow street from the State House we arrived at a small, recently re-furbished hotel with an old engraved stone at the entrance which read Boston Casualty. The structure had been occupied by an insurance company a century before. Ensuing events in the Commonwealth have prompted perhaps an ironic view of the title. And, as I presently live in Los Angeles, I shall allow myself a broad license in that direction Imagined.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot

About the Author

David Taylor Johannesen was born in Salt Lake City and grew up in Boston. His earlier published literary works are:

Tales of Love and Valor, Two Novellas (2018)

Falcons and Seagulls, a Utah Tale (2015)

Last One Close the Gate, Selected Stories (2012)

Vespers East & West, Selected Poems (2011)*

*Written at Oxford, 1996

Johannesen lives in Los Angeles with his life Linda and border collie Fallon. His ancestry is Scottish and Norwegian. He was educated at University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Oxford University, U.K.

Johannesen has two children: a son, Christian, a media executive in New York City; and a daughter, Helen, a restaurateur and sommelier in Los Angeles.

Immaculate Heart

When I came to California from life-long tributaries of New England, I immediately enrolled myself in a Catholic retreat house in Montecito beside the San Yisidro Creek at the foothills of the Los Padres National Forest. I had been pleasantly plagued with a dissociative condition in which, for extended swaths of time, I thought of and heard myself as two different people—a confusion, perhaps, of what my Boston psychiatrist dismissed as a ‘misalignment’ of my Alpha & Omega spheres of personality—as if I were trading places recklessly with what my twin sister saw as my male and female firmaments. At the retreat house, I fell into a space supplied and consecrated by the kind sisters, novitiates of an order I cannot recall, and I let my Quaker bones subside in their grace, for I had no other recourse for the missteps or even bald confusion I had found and abruptly and foolishly discarded: I foundered on my own petard as my grandfather once said.

It is five thirty; Centering Prayer in the library has just ended and the guests will soon gather at six for dinner downstairs in the Great Hall. I sat at a desk in front of a huge casement in one of the second-story rooms of the vast, mission-style house watching the dusk begin to apply a salmon brushstroke across the Channel Islands twenty miles out to sea from Santa Barbara. Once a private residence, its quarried sandstone walls are surrounded by twenty-six acres of giant live-oaks, avocado trees, orange groves, flowering acacias, eucalyptus and alders—drawing me into a new rewoven pattern in my life—new surroundings I could recognize and embrace within my old life.

This weekend was my third such retreat after coming to California to marry. The year before, I had begun to explore time at the Sanctuary—or, rather, to allow myself access to a vestibule of faith where past and future were separate spheres—their immanence pouring over the present as if it were an adopted child—not as ends of a linear cord upon which the present is the main dimension. In this way, I visited my mother before she died, when I was a child of five; gave my daughter in marriage six years hence; and listened to conversations with recent contemporary colleagues in other times in our thirty-year careers—: Othertimers, I called people I knew, or encountered in the same place, usually, but in a different time. Naturally, visions of time as existing in multiple spectrums were not new, and I pretended merely a glancing knowledge of physics—and knew that time travel, with or without the curve of light, had held the interest of science fiction writers and readers for a century, since H.G. Wells. Nor did I ever align my beliefs with auguries performed by ancient civilizations such as the Celts, who would sleep after eating the flesh of ritually sacrificed animals, and in their dreams seek knowledge about the future from their ancestors. The Vikings may have eaten each other for a glimpse of whatever they thought time represented for them: unlikely!

"Today I had an othertime experience walking my two dogs on the beach, I announced at the dinner table the second night of the retreat. A complement of eight guests was present at table and turned in hopeful tolerance towards me. You may have seen my black and white collies in the kennels out back. Well, I decided to give them a run on the beach near the See the Sea Motel—it’s a lovely, mile-long arc between two long breachways—down close to San Ysidro and the freeway. From the exact opposite end of the beach, two identical Border collies—one male and one female, like mine, one small and one good-sized with the same markings—came trotting toward me yards ahead of their owner, a man of my age and height also wearing rolled-up khaki pants, like mine!"

Perhaps the very ones you are wearing now, observed Sister Pat, one of the four nuns who cooked and joined us for dinner. I noticed they are wet at the cuffs—but no sand seems to have come into the House.

Oh, dear, I hope I didn’t bring any sand inside—yet you assure me, Sister Pat, bless you—I washed my feet or, to be truthful, I watched the other man on the beach wash his feet in the sea and put on tennis shoes before he took his dogs away—they trotted off, looking back as my own.

Where are your dogs now? Sister Pat continued, having rescued the others from the obligation to attend Solomon, not one of their own—not because he had not been before and they remembered him, but due to a distance he carried in his smile, his off-handed way, and tailored suit.

I believe, as I wonder, that they’re somewhere in the future.

Are they back in the kennel, behind the house? she probed.

Well, yes, they jumped out of the back of the Jeep in the same way they always do, but ran around through the orange trees. I called, but—

—they took a different path? she surmised penitently, aware with assurance I could not ignore.

Yes, sister Pat. But when I was opening the kennel door for them, I was immediately opening the door to the dining room, here! I simply stepped from one to the other, and here I am—no dogs, no kennel—

"I’m sure they’re somewhere around, and they’re fine. We’ll look for them after dinner—they could be chasing small animals, even coyotes up in the woods. You simply had a lapse in faith, or a moment of grace when you move through the Holy Spirit to the place you imagine where you belong." Sister Pat bent towards our meal of turkey loaf, boiled carrots and salad.

Coyotes? I gasped, thinking of them waiting in packs. A very pretty, Irish, sort of reddish-blonde woman sitting next to me took my hand under the frail lace tablecloth. We had only met briefly after Centering Prayer, and had chatted amiably as we walked together in the broad meadow encircling a large vegetable garden the sisters tended all year.

I’m Mary Beatrice, she told me as we left the table together. "I’ve been here many times, but I don’t remember you. Three years ago— it was the first time I came to Casa Maria—after my divorce, I was walking on the same beach and saw dogs just like yours. If we can take a walk after dinner, I’ll tell you about it. Bring a flashlight. I know you’re in one of the grand front rooms; you will find a flashlight—I am in one of the small, unheated alcoves at the back, no flashlights, only candles—Solomon."

The other residents at the retreat were couples, two Anglican clergy and their spouses who were seeking to enrich their ministries, or enliven their marriages—I was not able to decide even by sounds in the wall—and a middle-aged woman who painted in her room and was seen only at meals. The last was an elderly man who played the ancient piano in the drawing room, darkly hooded with worn tapestries floor-to-ceiling and draperies faded in decades from puce to taupe, even at sunset when the light fell across the old man’s hands withered into Schubert and Mozart. That made eight guests at a table for twelve including the four sisters.

Mary Beatrice, I marveled as we stepped outside and my flashlight sought the dim perimeter of the grounds. Both holy names.

Mary, I know, she blushed. Beatrice was my mother’s sister.

Beatrice? An angel of Dante and Shakespeare! I cried in the dark, as I gathered her tiny waist in my arm, feeling myself blessèd.

"I don’t know about that, but I’m sure you’ll teach me—about both."

Let’s walk around to where the kennels are supposed to be, I said as she took my hand from her waist and pressed it against her cheek. We found a small path, a serpentine around the great house I had not seen during my initial tramping over the vast property only yesterday—was it?

"Listen: I can hear your dogs