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Lydia Frazota
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| Somehow
it happened that my father the philosopher and dreamer was the realist
in the family; my mother, hard-headed and practical, was also insane. |
| It
took the two of them, and their two wildly different yet strangely
complementary natures, to found a little secret nation of their own,
of which he could be the king. And she, my mother, Mary Rose—she
would be the queen, and her birthday would become a holiday. Nothing
less would have sufficed for Mary Rose. |
| The
rest of us, the politans, existed to satisfy those outrageous desires. |
| At
first it must have seemed so benign—indeed,
so rational, so wise. How else would one man have got twenty-three
other people—whole
families with children, grandparents, even single young adults—to
follow him and his vision, disappear from society, and give birth
to a hidden community that could survive, grow, and thrive undetected
in the mountains of California for eighty-nine years? |
| At
its peak the population of our nation-village never exceeded seventy-five.
That number may seem small to you on the outside, but to us it was
many. To us who had lived decades and never seen but three strangers
in all that time, and only two of them alive, seventy-five was as
large as a crowd could be. |
| My
father, Taylor Giles Frazota, is credited with being the founder and
first Philosopher-King of Synusia Dikaion. And it's true, he was the
first Philosopher-King. But the real founder was my mother, Mary Rose. |
| The
year was 1918. President Wilson had done his utmost to hold the United
States aloof from the bloody war in Europe, even after the Zimmermann
telegram of January 1917 had revealed the threat to bring the enemy
across the Mexican border and take possession of three southwestern
states. Ignoring American neutrality, German U-boats were sinking
American vessels in international waters, and they were stealing closer
to our shores. There were even murmured threats of an invasion of
the West Coast by Japan. Finally, in April of 1917, the United States
had entered the war. |
| Even
the quiet little academic community of Monte Sereno College, sequestered
in the shelter of the Santa Cruz mountains, felt the impact of the
war, as all the single young men in the student body except the theology
students had been required to register for the draft in 1917. One
of my father's best students, one of those who had formed the core
of his following, had been called up for active duty in the fall of
1917. The loss of one of his disciples affected Taylor nearly as strongly
as the loss of a relative. |
| In
fact my father had already been deeply touched by the war. Taylor
was the second of three brothers. His elder brother Joseph, born before
his parents moved from British Columbia to Washington state, had retained
his Canadian citizenship. When the war came in 1914 he enlisted in
Britain's Royal Flying Corps and trained as a pilot. His plane was
shot down over Germany in 1915. His death had a profound effect on
Taylor and his attitudes about war. |
| But
it was not the pacifist convictions of Taylor Frazota that tipped
the balance for the small and devoted band of colleagues and their
families. It was the terrors of Mary Rose. |
| She
was twenty-two years old. She was five and a half months pregnant
with her first child. And she had a morbid fear of germs. |
| Mary
Rose Foster was always a force to be reckoned with. She was hard-headed,
single-minded, and tough. Even as a young woman she had a fierce,
intense look about her. She was like a pile of logs set on a steep
slope. When someone pulled the retaining stake, you would not want
to be a toad on the downhill path. |
| Here
is a picture of the two of them on their wedding day, St. Valentine's
Day, 1914. This portrait in its gilt frame is one of the few personal
things they brought with them from their old home outside the polis.
He was 31, and she was just 18. With his bushy Teddy Roosevelt mustache
and his stylish black coat, he looks very dapper and self-possessed.
That high intellectual brow and those piercing dark eyes belong to
a man of great strength and personal power. And she seems very fragile,
holding a nosegay of pale rosebuds and sitting in that huge old mahogany
chair in her high-necked Edwardian gown of ivory lace, with her tiny
waist and her delicate wrist, and her light-brown hair done up in
a pompadour. Standing behind her with his hand resting on her shoulder,
my father looks protective and proprietary in that classic masculine
way. |
| But
look at her eyes. Is that a docile expression? Do those look like
the eyes of someone who regards her husband as her lord and master?
Or can you see right there in the eighteen-year-old Mary Rose the
face of a woman who was born to rule? The story of how she met and
married my father is evidence enough, but I'll save that one for another
time. |
| Mother
had that imperious gaze right up until the day she died at the age
of ninety-eight. I was there beside her, and in some part of my mind
I think I expected that look to outlast her final breath, just like
the grin of the Kashire Cat in a fanciful story my Aunt Prudence used
to tell us about a girl who went down a rabbit hole. |
| The
set square jaw that was so distinctive in Mother's mature years is
not so prominent in this picture, but if you look, you can see it.
The line of that dainty mouth is very firm. |
| Other
people yielded to the charismatic influence of Taylor Frazota. But
Taylor Frazota yielded to the will of Mary Rose. |
| The
letter from Illinois that set the chain of events in motion reached
my mother on March 18, 1918, an occurrence recorded in my father's
journal together with the letter itself. Here it is, brittle and faded
but still legible enough—a few simple words that turned lives
upside down. I'll tell you a secret: I'm not supposed to be able to
read these words because they're not written in Politan, but I can.
I could always do a lot of things my father never knew about. |
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It
grieves my heart to send you this sad news but the influenza
has reached us here in Elgin. The people are ill on all sides
and many has died. Of our own it was first our brother Thomas
late last week, whom mother nursed faithfully and could not
save him. Oh how we wept and cried. And then both Hannah and
Judith succumbed, our dear young sisters. Finally mother this
morning taken to the Lord. I pray the Almighty to give them
rest in heaven. Now only I am left together with my beloved
Will, and I fear the fever may come to us next. Our little
Sarah got taken early. There is no one left to run the farm.
Oh my dear, our family is eaten up and my heart is broke.
I am comforted only knowing you are safe so far away and pray
that this dread plague will never reach you. Think of me kindly
my dear, for I fear this is farewell.
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| I
was not a witness to her reaction when she read this message from
her younger sister. My birth was still four years in the future. But
I have seen Mary Rose in a frenzy. And so if I close my eyes I can
describe her as confidently as if I had been beside her in the parlor
of my parents' modest dwelling in Los Gatos, California. |
| Staggering
from the shock of the first words, she holds the letter in one trembling
hand while the other gropes for support and finds the back of a chair.
Her faces goes pale, her eyes bulge in horror, and a cry in her throat
begins as a whimper and mounts to a piercing shriek of anguish as
she reaches the end of the message. A howl of pain roars from her
chest and she crumples to the floor, the fateful letter clutched in
her grasp. Someone rushes to her side—Taylor,
no doubt, white with fright and even more alarmed at the sight of
her—and
tries to help her rise, but she is all grief and cannot stand. Now
she is uttering a great cry with every breath
— ahhh
— ahhhh
—
aahh
—and tears
are raining down. She presses her hands to her chest as though only
by force can she keep the flesh from ripping open on the shards of
her broken heart. |
| She
seems to dissolve, her body existing only as a vessel for her agony.
She is nothing but a weeping voice and has no other substance. The
sound of her pain fills her the way steam fills a whistling kettle.
And it goes on, it goes on, enough to drive you mad, until at last
it fades and fades into a weak, lost, desperate sigh. |
| A
dreadful silence follows. |
| And
then, when you think she is utterly exhausted and spent and you may
even fear she will die of the emptiness—then
Mary Rose rises up. She rises up in a fury of energy, a whirlwind
of motion. She is like a whirlwind on fire. Something must be done,
and whatever it is, Mary Rose will see to it. Woe to any who bars
her way or simply, haplessly stumbles across her path. |
| This
ferocious display of will is even more terrifying than her absolute
grief. She is a dynamo, spinning freely, converting emotion into power.
And now something will happen indeed. |
| I
saw her like this when the telegram came bringing word of the death
of my brother Julius. Beside herself in an ecstasy of sorrow, she
first collapsed and then, recovering suddenly, flung herself into
motion and began commanding explosions of vigorous activity on all
sides as if sheer exertion could numb the pain. |
| But
that day was twenty-six years off, and Julius was even then in her
womb. Mary Rose Frazota, née Foster, daughter of a dairy farmer
and a schoolteacher from Elgin, Illinois, and the eldest of six children,
was about to seize her destiny by the throat and bring it to submission. |
| The
means had already been supplied to her by my father, though that was
never his intent. Taylor Frazota was a philosopher and classical scholar
who taught Greek and Latin, philosophy, and ancient history at Monte
Sereno College in Los Gatos. To him ideas were playthings, to be tossed
and caught and batted about as liberally as if they were balls on
a court, and part of the pleasure in the exercise was to treat each
one with seriousness. Seriousness to Taylor was a form of entertainment.
He gave every notion its due gravity: conviction was the hallmark
of his performance. There was nothing insincere about it. It was just
what he did, in the same way that a storyteller's voice quakes or
roars or whispers or sings with the drama that she is animating in
her person. Caught up in delivery of a story, she lives it, and so
makes it live for others; yet a moment after it ends, she is back
to herself and can talk and laugh conversationally like everyone else.
This way of Taylor's is part of what made him a stirring teacher,
and not only a teacher but a master, with disciples who came to sit
at his feet. |
| For
years Taylor had been talking about Plato's Republic, about
what it would mean to build a society based on the principles and
structures in the book. His philosophy students would get excited
about the idea, not all of them but some of them, and also some of
his classical languages students. Sometimes a group of students would
gather at my parents' home in the evening and stay late into the night
arguing about things like whether they would have to follow Plato
literally or whether it would be all right to improvise and interpret
according to more modern thinking. Henry Loveworth was one of those,
a slightly older student, and very zealous. |
| My
mother used to tell me about those evenings, and she described Henry
as one of the most vigorous defenders of a strict interpretation of
Plato. He was always tangling with Daniel Herman, a former student
of my father's who had joined the mathematics faculty at Monte Sereno
and still liked to come to those evening sessions. They were about
the same age, Henry and Daniel. Daniel was an intellectual and a true
believer, really devoted to my father's teachings, but he was convinced
that one ought to apply Plato's system of thought a bit more liberally
in light of the time and place, twentieth-century California, and
in view of our collective historical experience in the centuries since
Plato. He said it should not be practiced like a religion, and he
called Henry an ideologue. Henry said that once you began to bargain
and compromise the original principles and precepts, you were on your
way to corrupting them; you crossed that line from pure practice and
you were no longer true to the ideas. Soon enough you'd evolve just
the type of society that the Republic was meant to cure. |
| A
third party to the unremitting Loveworth-Herman debates was John Marshall
Goodwin, a promising scholar of classical languages, who took a middle
position and often served as arbiter between the two intellectual
rivals. His view was that the principles of the Platonic society—principles
of excellence and the good, of knowledge and above all of justice—could
be extracted and made the foundation of a perfect society without
taking the Republic itself as a prescription for how to implement
them; that one could be altogether faithful to the principles and
yet not seriously consider banishing defective children or treating
wives as community property. When Goodwin was called up for active
duty and shipped off to Europe in the fall of 1917, at the beginning
of his senior year, my father lost not only one of his best students
but also the principal peacekeeper of those evenings of verbal combat,
which thereafter became more boisterous and sometimes bitterly heated. |
| When
you think about it, it is amazing that both Henry Loveworth and Daniel
Herman agreed to leave their former lives behind and become founding
members of the polis. You would not expect the two of them to want
to be trapped together for the rest of their lives behind the gates
of a closed community, but their conviction was greater than their
differences. So they did come, with their young wives and their babies.
Both couples had an infant, and those two married when they grew up,
Albert Loveworth and Alice Herman. Alice is the oldest politan and
the only surviving member of the original community. She's 91 now,
and she was two when her parents signed the Synusia Compact on April
1, 1918. |
| By
then the Great War had been raging in Europe for nearly four years.
In 1915, the same year his older brother Joseph was killed, Taylor
concluded negotiations with the Nepomucene Abbey, which was a real
monastery at the time, to occupy in secret the uncharted land behind
the walls of their retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The only access
to the land was by way of the abbey, through their compound and across
a drawbridge over a deep, impassable ravine. Taylor promised the monks
the labors of his community to support the life of the monastery in
exchange for the abbey's safeguarding of their privacy. The abbey
was small and underfunded, having fallen on hard times because of
some theological differences with the Church. The abbot—this
was the old abbot, Father Novak—saw
that it was to their advantage to let a harmless band of independent
thinkers occupy their unused mountainside and supply the abbey with
agricultural produce and various man-made goods for their use and
for sale. All the abbey had to do in addition to furnishing some supplies
to the community was to serve as gatekeepers who promised to conceal
and deny their existence. |
| The
likelihood that any authorities would take an interest in what went
on behind the monastery wall, never mind on the secluded mountainside
behind its compound, was so remote that no one even thought about
it. |
| Taylor
began leading small, select groups of trusted students and colleagues
on two- and three-day expeditions to the land in order to clear it
for agriculture, construct housing, and extend the system of caves
tunneled in the sheer cliff that bounded one side. The original caves
were man-made enhancements of ancient natural tunnels in the rock,
but no one knew who had made them or when. Taylor's colleague Stanley
Abernathy, a professor of history at Monte Sereno, thought they were
prehistoric. |
| Taylor
believed that it was only a matter of time before the European war
reached American shores. He doubted the resiliency of the American
government to withstand the wrenching effects of war on a political
system that created kings without crowning them, and he mistrusted
the ability of our military powers to stave off invasion by the enemy
forces. The might and determination of the Germans seemed unstoppable.
His father's involvement in state government in Olympia, Washington,
had given him a perspective on the workings of democracy that failed
to inspire his confidence. He also feared that the involvement of
Japan as an ally of Germany would bring the conflict perilously close
to the West Coast of the U.S. just as Germany was coaxing Mexico to
host an invasion of the U.S. and regain possession of the states that
bordered California to the south. So by 1918, a year after the formal
entry of the U.S. into the war, Taylor was strongly motivated to seek
refuge with his closest family and his like-minded followers. And
the heartbreaking loss of his student John Goodwin, who had fallen
in combat less than a month after his deployment, heightened his resolve. |
| What's
more, he was determined to disappear without a trace so that neither
he nor his children nor his children's children could ever be conscripted
to serve and die in a foreign land. |
| But
most of all he relished the prospect of putting his ideas to the test
by creating a miniature Republic on American soil and fulfilling the
Platonic ideal as its Philosopher-King. He saw that the war could
serve as the motivator necessary to gather a large enough number that
his cherished social experiment stood a chance of succeeding. |
| In
his vision, he saw a strong, united community based on a shared ideology
taking root in fertile ground, growing through care and nurturance,
and bearing the fruits of harmony, safety, and self-sufficiency for
himself and his posterity. |
| Yet
there were great unknowns. Had a community like this ever succeeded
before? Would not the influence of the outside world seep in and tear
away at its fabric? Would the loyalty of the community to the polis,
to one another, and to himself as their leader be strong enough to
see them through the inevitable difficult times? Could he teach them
all they must know and do to succeed? Even as he equivocated, weighing
the costs, wondering whether a bunch of teachers and theorizers could
actually survive on the land by their own labors, and considering
the strength of the bond that would be needed among his followers
to offset the pull of homes, extended families, professions, and the
relative comfort and convenience of modern civilization in the early
1900s, my mother supplied the deciding push. |
| In
March of 1918, news of an outbreak of virulent influenza alarmed the
nation. A deadly virus was spreading rapidly in several areas of the
United States, affecting humans and swine alike. Once infected, people
quickly succumbed. When Mary Rose received the letter from her sister
Cora back home in Illinois, she was already in a state of near panic
at the looming threat of war on American soil. Her lifelong horror
of contagion went beyond all natural limits and sent her out of control.
Determined as she was to protect her own and save her unborn child,
no force on earth could have compelled her to sit still and wait for
the plague to sweep over her. |
| Taylor's
plans had been ready for some time, and implementation waited only
upon his word. The deal with the abbey had been made, the residential
compound had been built, the structure of their new society had been
defined, and the prospective members of the community had all agreed
to sign a compact. Until then, in his innermost heart, he had never
dared to give himself utterly to the idea, although he had persuaded
his followers to do so. Even 66-year-old Stanley Abernathy was so
deeply committed that he and his wife Grace and all five of their
grown children, two of them with families of their own, had signed
on for the venture. |
| When
Mary Rose, hysterical with terror, began her relentless, driving demand
that they flee at once before the pestilence came any closer, it was
inevitable that Taylor would yield to her will. Knowing that he was
prepared to shut out the world and secure themselves against its horrors,
she would not rest until it was done, and there would be no peace
for Taylor. It took only three days from the arrival of the letter
for him to experience a mighty surge of inner conviction and send
out the long-awaited call. |
| If
in his heart Taylor ever doubted that a stronghold could be built
to withstand the world's corruption, he never gave it voice. Instead
he radiated the serene confidence of a higher calling, the certainty
of a sacred mission. And that alone, in those turbulent times, was
enough to attract and hold the allegiance of men and women. A rational
grasp of the world's realities is cold comfort indeed when madness
reigns. The security of following a leader whose conviction is unshakeable,
regardless of where he leads—that
is what gives emotional comfort. That is what a man can wrap around
his family and gather close to his heart. Not reason and doubt but
faith. Not intellect and principle but a captain of vulnerable flesh
and hot blood who has as much to lose as you and still raises his
sword to cry "Press on!" |
| They
followed my father across the drawbridge, the twenty-three, and never
looked back. The vow he made to them, of safety from all external
threats for themselves, their children, and their children's children:
he kept that vow. He kept it. |
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| Copyright © 2008 Meredy Amyx. |
