Lore.2: Many Mansions

 

Lore was born in the mid 1920's in Badenhausen,  Swabia, the youngest child in a wealthy family of merchants.  Her father and uncle were tobacco dealers.  Her father's Iron Cross from The Great War was displayed proudly in a Bidermeir cabinet in the formal dining room.  There was a Bechstein in the drawing room, where Lore learned to play piano.  She had a nanny.  There was a cook, a gardener, a chauffeur, chickens and a cow.  It was the house of  the very wealthy man Tevye  dreamed of in Fiddler on the Roof.

Lore learned that she was Jewish when the Lutheran servants could not longer work for her family and she could no longer attend school.  Because her family had money for bribes, they were able to get the older children to the United States before the trains came for them.  Lore was only able to get to England under the Kinderhostel program.  She was classified as a friendly enemy alien and put to work in the kitchen at the American air base in Leicester.  Her parents remained behind  to send the family treasures to a boat leaving Italy.  The boat was sunk.  They took cyanide rather than go on the train journey.

In Leister, not only did Loe learn to cook, but she was able to continue her music lessons under the tutelage of the organist at the Roman Catholic Catholic.  After the end of the war in Europe, her brother paid for her passage to New York, where he took her first to the 21 Club.  She was shocked by the flagrant luxuries of America after the austerities of wartime England.  Nylon stockings instead of woolen socks.   Butter.  New York was rather overwhelming, but she didn't stay long there.  Her siblings had actually taken residency in Colorado. where she started a third life, and where she met her husband, Per, an anthropologist who was also a member of a local mountaineering club.  He became the director of the International Folk Art Museum.  Her fourth life began, and she loved Santa Fe.  Per, however, took a job in New York, beginning Lore's fifth live, one she left, divorcing Per and moving back to Santa Fe in a Volkswagen with her dachshund.  Thus began her sixth life.  Back in Santa Fe, she worked first as a librarian, then earned a degree in nursing from the College of Santa Fe.  She continued to extend her collection of friends, whom she valued intensely, and whom she liked to shower with gifts.  On on of the cleaning sessions, I uncovered a dresser drawer full of soap.  It was old and crumbling.  She had bought all of the soap as gifts for a friend who liked soap, but hadn't managed to give it to him, probably because the dresser was buried in other treasures.  His name, I believe, was Steven, and he had been dead for years.

Considering her early losses, it is easy to understand why Lore resisted letting go of things.  But mostly she clung to things in order to be able to give hem away.  I quickly learned not to admire anything Lore had, because she would want to give it to me, or to admire anything if we were shopping together, because she would want to buy it for me. Once introduced me to another friend as the person who didn't want anything, which wasn't strictly true, but I could see by looking at her house what happened if one collected ever wonderful thing one could.

The photograph above was taken at Christ in the Desert Monastery on the day of Lore's baptism.  (A story for another night.)  When she died, we had an estate sale at which people could choose either St. Bede's Episcopal Church or the Monastery as the recipient of their purchases.  The tall monk on the right had by that time become a hermit, and he was one of Lore's and my favourite folks there, so I sent the check to him. He was rather flabbergasted by the amount brought in by Lore's motley treasures.

I presided at her funeral, and the gospel was from John:  'In my father's house are many mansions.'  We usually think  this passage refers to some sort of heavenly mansions, but for Lore there had been many mansions in this life.