“FURIOUS NOT CONSULTED” Alicia cabled her father, also Brooks; a three-word message, which all things considered surely represented a bare minimum of her thoughts and feelings on the matter. She took the next train back to New York, where she learned that her father was away in Canada, inspecting newsprint timberlands with Uncle Bert. But waiting for her in the apartment was a lengthy, at least for him, overwrought letter from Joe Brooks: “Dearest Alicia, Things have been happening so fast lately….I know how proud you were of your little ship, and you trusted me with it, and then to lose it seems unbelievable….I took off Tuesday morning, fair skies but bucking a terrific headwind, 50 mph. Landed in Cleveland, then again South Bend. Next morning, on takeoff the motor cut out about 75 ft, straight ahead were houses, trees, etc. On my right was a small field which I tried for but didn’t make. Plane crashed through top of a tree, dove into the ground, landing on its back, caught fire on impact tho I managed to get away….” Brooks then concluded: “I can’t tell you how grand your father was about it all. Of course, when reporting it I had to say it was yr plane I was flying, which made him think it was right to announce our engagement. Most of my clothes were burned in the crash, but I’m arranging everything so don’t worry….Love, yr Boojums.”
Almost immediately a second letter arrived from Brooks, written after receiving her angry cable: “Dearest Boojums, I am so shocked by your cable. You are my entire life, and my only interest in living is because of my deep love for you….I am prepared to go on the block under any circumstances, but when you are mad at me I am the most unhappy person in the world….I know the way the accident happened was a tough break for both of us, but don’t forget the person who loves you most, next to me, is your dad who’s trying to protect your reputation, announcing what most people assumed anyway. I am counting the days till I can take my beloved in my arms.” And signed, inevitably, “Love, Boojums.”
The screwiness of the situation was surely inconceivable. And yet how, in what ways, inconceivable? Scarcely a couple of years earlier, it was her fierce, distant little mother who had roped her into a marriage with Jim Simpson, with her father (who was supposed to be her special friend) nodding his approval from the sidelines. This time around it was her father holding the lasso, her father with his Catholic mistress, and baby Jimmy, protecting her reputation by cornering her into marrying his old buddy Brooks. She wrote her mother in Chicago, hopeful that her mother’s growing fury, at her still-married husband’s domestication with his alternate or parallel family, would trump her usual impulses for correctness at any cost. But she was wrong. Her mother figuratively gave a little sigh by mail, and allowed that, given the obvious closeness of her daughter’s friendship with Mr. Brooks, as indicated by her letting him use her property, marriage was certainly the outcome to be wished for. Most disappointingly, sister Josephine, whom Alicia was lately accustomed to seeing as an ally, announced herself thrilled by the engagement, wished it was herself and Joe, and so on. And then of course Boojums himself, all six feet four of him, in his insurance salesman’s suit, with his Williams College tie, varyingly endearing, confident, abashed, and so apologetic for the crash, as if that was the problem between them (though come to think of it, she had really loved that plane), was pretty much instantly on her doorstep, at her arm so to speak, her escort, her more-or-less fiancé. And besides, in the flesh he was undeniably such a stolid presence, such a good guy, loving her so much, and of course everybody else loving him.
Her father came back from buying up timberland in Quebec, returning to the Daily News though not to the apartment; he was apparently now living up in Ossining, commuting in and out every day. She met him at a restaurant for lunch, determined to straighten out the engagement misunderstanding, debacle, whatever it was. But when she showed up, Joe Brooks was there too, both men so happy together, talking naturally about fishing, fishing in the great rivers of Quebec. Not a word about her amazing trip, flying around the sheep country of Australia, shooting a mighty sladang. Poppa (as she remembered it later) took her hand in his, as if he was about to say something personal, special, but what came out was about Canadian timberlands, his new favorite subject. Afterward Joe told her, in his big-guy-to-little-lady manner, that they should really come to a decision about a date. She said it was too soon. As it happened her mother was due to make one of her transatlantic trips, to inspect lacework and antiques on the Rive Droite in Paris, and Alicia tagged along. She also arranged for her Dutch friend from Java, Hans Hooft, to be at a nearby hotel. “We make a perfect match, mentally and physically,” Hooft wrote her on a card when he sent her flowers. They went out shopping together, and, both being dog lovers, he bought her three Irish setter puppies, which she took back with her on the boat, leaving him with the understanding, if not her promise, that she wouldn’t let herself be railroaded a second time into marriage. But with the Dutchman back in Holland, and she once more in New York, an aviatrix to be sure, a sportswoman, a hunter of big game in the forests of Southeast Asia, and oh, yes, a journalist too; but all the same only twenty-five years old, not very old, on her own, with an allowance from Poppa, and the use of his strange apartment, and with big, friendly, protective, faithful Boojums hovering, pressing, waiting….One afternoon she took what she knew to be the coward’s way out and wrote Brooks a letter, saying in effect that she was too confused, not yet ready to take the final step. Brooks wrote her back a long, rambling, miserable, obviously heartfelt scrawl in his boyish hand, saying that he was going to kill himself.
Alicia surrendered. Soon after, she wrote Hans Hooft, telling him of her decision to marry Brooks, asking him to wait one year for her to get free again, which was a variant of the same one-year plan she had tried when she married Simpson. But Hooft would have no part of one-year plans. “I can’t believe your father would interfere with your life a second time, and a second time you would allow it,” he wrote her angrily. “Have you thought what will happen in a year when you tell him you want a divorce? What if he threatens suicide again? What if you expect a child? What if he refuses you a divorce? And is it fair to Mr. Brooks that you marry him without his knowing all this…?” But Alicia didn’t answer Hooft for many months, and when she did she hadn’t much to say, not being one for looking backward or second-guessing. Besides, by then she was Mrs. Joseph W. Brooks.