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BACK IN NEW YORK, in the grays and blacks of the Great Depression, the exotic and extravagant colors of India must have seemed out of place, anachronistic. Moreover, Liberty had been sold by the Tribune Company at a substantial loss, and with new owners and a new format it was no longer a market for Alicia’s intrepid-girl-adventure journalism; her notes and notebooks of pigsticking and tiger hunting in maharajaland were stuffed into a file folder and stayed there, out of sight if not entirely out of mind. She became friends with Neysa McMein, by all accounts an interesting “new woman,” a gifted illustrator and independent spirit; also with Heywood Broun and his wife, both journalists, strongly Left-leaning; all three of them members of the Algonquin Round Table group of smart, talky men and women “in the arts,” who were defining the 1930s media dynamic of Manhattan. And of course she was still married to Joe Brooks. How not to be? Joe Brooks wasn’t smart and talky, at least not in the way of the Algonquin wits; he told stories, jokes, some of them pretty good, but still they were those kind of stories, jokes, what people called “smoking-room humor”; and he wasn’t at all leftist, he wasn’t political, he would say. But the Algonquin intellectuals on West Forty-Fourth Street were happy to make room for Joe, as were the Racquet Club Republicans on Park Avenue and Fifty-Third Street. Everybody loved Joe Brooks, the former All-American; loved him too well to tell him to skip the last few rounds of drinks, loved him too well to refuse him a place at the backgammon and poker tables, which were less and less his friends.

And what of the third, perhaps one might call him the “shadow” element in the marriage: Joseph Patterson, Poppa, “Captain Patterson,” as Joe Brooks, a fellow soldier, called him, and as Patterson himself liked to be called, sometimes just “Captain.” The truth was that while the 1930s were unfolding unpropitiously for many people—for Joe Brooks, for example, and millions of others—for Joe Patterson the decade had begun with much promise. The former experimental farmer and experimental socialist, the “Renegade Heir” who’d once campaigned for Eugene Debs, had placed a couple of bets that more than proved out. First, back in the 1920s, he’d launched the Daily News, at the time decried and ridiculed by the journalistic establishment as well as by most upright people (many called it “the housemaid’s daily” and much worse, saying they wouldn’t let it into their homes), which was even now, despite the Depression, continuing to mint money for its parent, the Chicago Tribune, while providing an ample share for its editor. Then, in 1932 he’d placed a nervy bet on Franklin Roosevelt, bet with his own money, too, also with his paper’s editorials, and as a result he was a rare newspaper proprietor welcomed into FDR’s circle, maybe not into his closest circle, but close enough to get “Dear Joe” letters from the president from time to time, and enjoy a measured access to The White House.

As Mrs. Joseph Brooks, Alicia felt in a chronic state of being yanked about, whipsawed, as the saying went, in her complicated relationship with her father. Although she tried not to think about the details, she could never be entirely unaware of the extent to which he sustained her marriage, kept it and them afloat with financial help, both the kind you could see and couldn’t see. Joe was always a good sport about “your father’s help,” she knew it pained him to admit it, but how could it be otherwise? On her side she was aware that money things were strangely muddled; it pained her too that Joe—so sure, so smart, and even wise in everything to do with all the outdoor stuff that once seemed to matter so much—couldn’t seem to get any traction in the everyday world, couldn’t pay for the food, the rent, the cook and maid who worked for them, his secretary, her allowance. At the same time she knew she rather liked it, not entirely of course, not always, but mostly she rather liked it that her allowance came from Poppa. She even rather liked it when her father sent her one of his memos, no longer hand-scrawled but typed by Miss Josephson, suggesting this career opportunity, that person to look up, and so on. She rarely followed up because she knew the suggestions wouldn’t work, but she liked the connection; she knew he was thinking of her. She liked it too, and did follow up, when the Daily News book editor sent her a book to review; she handed in her reviews promptly, received praise from the editor, knew her father was somehow in the loop. What she really didn’t like, couldn’t stand in fact, was the whole Mary King business. It wasn’t that she felt much for her mother; her mother was a hard person to attach your feelings to; besides, she knew it was her mother’s obduracy that was still making a divorce impossible. But she just hated Mary King, the Catholic woman who had got her hooks into Poppa; she even hated little Jimmy, which she knew was wrong and made her feel bad, but still she hated him. And what made it all worse was that she knew she didn’t have to see Mary King, she was a grown-up, a married lady, who could do what she wanted. But if she and Joe wished to rent a house for the summer out on Sands Point, Long Island, as they did, then they needed to make a pilgrimage up to Ossining, mind their manners with Mrs. King, be nice to little Jimmy, and hope to get, if not her father’s blessing, at least his fiscal go-ahead in return.

Alicia Brooks, Sands Point, Long Island, where she and her husband, Joe Brooks, were living in 1934.