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really knew the local culture and was part of it. I’d have sworn she was born in Santa Fe and lived here all her life, if I didn’t know better.”
    Just when everything seemed to be falling into place for Dorothy, illness again threatened to destroy her world. In the summer of 1937, Kevin was diagnosed with rheumatic endocarditis, a potentially fatal cardiac disease. The doctor’s best recommendation for the ailing six-year-old was a year of bed rest. Too much exertion could kill him. There would be no going to school for him that fall. All they could do was wait and see. Dorothy shut her mind against the terrible possibilities. She put everything aside to tend to her little boy, rushing home for lunch every day and returning straight after work each afternoon. Kevin was bored and lonely, and she hated seeing him lying there looking so miserable. She spent hours a day sitting on his bed reading to him, playing games, and devising ways to keep him amused. It was a long, trying winter, made more so by the death of her father from pneumonia. The following summer, Dorothy took Kevin to Los Angeles Children’s Hospital to see if there had been any improvement. “We drove out to Los Angeles, accompanied by my grandmother and aunt, who followed in a LaSalle limousine with a liveried driver,” recalled Kevin. “It was quite a convoy.” Dorothy rented a tiny house near the shore in Long Beach, hoping the sun and sea air would do Kevin some good. The doctors’ verdict was that Kevin had been misdiagnosed. He was suffering from nothing worse than a bad case of tonsillitis. They removed the swollen glands and sent him home.
    Over the next few years, many of Dorothy’s Santa Fe friends tried to play matchmaker. She kept company with several gentlemen, including the painter Cady Wells, whom she almost married. But after burying her husband and nearly losing her son, Dorothy may have been inclined to take her happiness where she found it, without asking for more. “She had suitors,” said her friend Betty Lilienthal. “But I don’t think there was anyone in town who really interested her that way, who was really appropriate. She had a great many friends, and kept herself busy, and took care of Kevin. I think she was content.”
    If Dorothy had once yearned for a more adventurous life, she had put those thoughts aside and reconciled herself to slow, sun-drenched days in the mesas and mountains of the high desert. Though she counted her blessings that both she and Kevin were doing well, she could not help feeling uneasy at times about the events taking place in Europe. She looked sadly back on those youthful sojourns abroad with her father and wondered if his generation’s sacrifices in the Great War had all been a waste. She read the increasingly alarmist newspaper reports about the rise of fascism and Hitler’s treaty-breaking demands; and when German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, she realized that the ideological tensions had finally erupted into a military conflict. As much as she, like most Americans, was determined that Europe would fight it out alone, and that this country would remain neutral and uninvolved, she understood that even in Santa Fe there would be no respite from worry and strife.
    In her memoir, she recorded the morning in May 1940 when the harsh reality of war suddenly intruded on her peaceful world and wrenched her heart and filled her with foreboding. She and Cady Wells had accompanied their friends Eliot Porter, a well-known landscape photographer, and his wife, Aline, on a trip to the small Hopi village of Supai, located thirteen miles down, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and reachable only by foot or horseback. In this unhurried, isolated corner of the world, they sat lazily listening to the radio in a trader’s house, when a report crackled over the airwaves that the Nazis had marched into Holland:
    There had been a moment of stunned disbelief. The sky was just as bright and