Perspective

My friend Kim Moss and I have started going to the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe fairly regularly for breakfast. It is a wonderful place, rich with history; records suggest it sits on the oldest hotel corner in America. When the Spaniards founded Santa Fe in 1607, an inn, or fonda, was among the first businesses established at this exact location. Decades later, Hollywood took notice; the hotel featured prominently in Robert Montgomery’s gritty 1947 film noir, Ride the Pink Horse. Today, Kim and I always choose the little tables just outside the enclosed patio—the very spot where Montgomery sits with another actor having breakfast.

We don’t even have to be on vacation to enjoy it; we get to drive down the mountain whenever we want to pay it a visit.

But, truthfully, the real reason we go is because they make the very best brioche French toast you could ever hope to have.

It’s pretty addictive, to the degree that our once-a-month splurge has stretched into… well, I don’t want to get too specific about that. The historical part is just a great bonus.

And, as it turns out, Kim also has familial ties to the hotel. Sitting at that patio table, we think of Kim’s grandfather in 1926, perhaps sitting exactly where we are, alongside a lovely artist companion named Margaret “Peggy” Ruse.

I have only bits of this story to go on, taking some probable flights of fancy with the rest. His grandfather, Ezra Winter, was a well-known mural painter from the early 1920s through the 1940s. He executed massive projects during his career, including Radio City Music Hall, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, and Cornell University.

He worked from a studio on the upper floor of Grand Central Station, and today, his papers are kept in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.

In 1926, Ezra came to Santa Fe. Kim knows this because he found a list of notable arrivals to the La Fonda Hotel posted in the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper, dated January 4, 1926.

Imagine Santa Fe back then: Canyon Road was likely still a dirt wagon trail leading into the canyon, and packed dirt roads sat where today’s blacktopped highways run.

With its traditional, simple ways, quiet winding lanes and piñon smoke in the air, my heart aches with longing to have been there. Compared to the bustling New York City of the era, Santa Fe must have truly felt like the Wild West to Ezra.

The reason Kim knew to search for him in Santa Fe in 1926 is because of some letters that were found tied up with string in among Ezra’s belongings many years ago, after he was gone. There were several from Peggy Ruse, who had been an assistant to Ezra in New York for three years. She came to New Mexico in December of 1925, and Ezra arrived the next month, on January 4, 1926—seemingly following her. Peggy was 26 at the time and Ezra was just a couple of months shy of forty. It seems fairly certain that he came to see her.

We often don’t recognize small but important moments in our lives when we are living them. Significant events can pass us by with barely a notice, and it’s not until we look back that we truly understand. I’ve often said the greatest gift of aging is perspective. There comes a time when the sheer number of years we’ve lived teaches us important truths: that time really does mend broken hearts; that we don’t get to take back the things we do, so we’d better be careful in doing them; and that we should act when something draws us—a town, a way of life, a job, an opportunity to love.

Biographical sketches from a 1928 book, Women of the West, show that Peggy lived at 630 Canyon Road and eventually opened a restaurant and evening spot called the Apache Club at 117 Palace Avenue.

I have no idea what made Peggy leave New York for the West. Had she been having an affair with Ezra that came to an end so felt she needed to get away? Or did she arrive to try her artistic luck in Santa Fe? Perhaps both.

There is evidence they worked together on a project of watercolor designs from ancient and Native American patterns, now housed in the Clark Art Museum Library in Massachusetts. Some are signed by Ezra and some by Peggy. Did they make these watercolors when Ezra came to visit?

One has to wonder what it was about Peggy that touched Ezra enough for him to keep her letters throughout his extremely busy social and business life. And since Peggy eventually moved back to New York City to become an illustrator, I wonder: did they ever meet or work together again?

I was never able to learn the full truth of their relationship. But I like to think of the two of them spending a late winter week or two together within the spirit, light, and magic of New Mexico. For a man harried by stressful commissions and a passel of assistants, I want to believe this remarkable land, and Peggy, gave him some deep rest and a sense of peace. Maybe that’s the reason his family still has her letters all these decades later.

Some of us leave grand murals behind as witness to our having lived, or children, and then their children, ongoing throughout the span of time. Others, like Peggy—who never married and had no children—leave just a whisper: illustrations in a rare, collectible children’s book called The Little Old Woman Who Used Her Head, or her letters to Ezra, held together by a bit of string.

There’s little that is certain in this life except for birth and death. But what we do in between is wholly up to us. Do we wait wishing for a love that will never be, as it seems possible Peggy did, taking her own life in 1938? Or drive ourselves too hard as, perhaps, Ezra did, taking his own life in 1949? Were their lives forever colored by a love story that ended too soon? We’ll never know.

But when I look at the words, pen on paper, written by this vibrant, talented woman in Santa Fe back in 1926, it is hard to believe she no longer exists. And Ezra, for all of his majestic murals, gone also—both of them just ghosts of memory.

Then it comes so clear to me: life is not what we leave behind. That’s history. Life is the living of it. Whether we’re remembered by history, by family, or by no one at all, we are here now, in these moments when our hearts are beating in our chests and we experience the great beauties.

It is for us to breathe in all of this life, to laugh as much as possible, to soothe our wounds and the wounds of others, to find a truth and live it as much as we can bear, to love as truly as we can, and to recognize the small but important moments when we’re living them.

The point is to live them now. As Rilke says in his Letters to a Young Poet, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

 

Love to you all,

Jeane