Homeward Bound

Dane came to Asheville at the height of an arts festival in which the new live drama theater was being launched. He came with a trumpet fanfare, striding in on a red carpet, as the guest stage director from Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore. Our mayor had seen a production of his in Baltimore and had begged him, histrionically, I’m sure, on bended knee to deign to deliver the first play in our new playhouse.

The great man of the American theater, Stanford Dane, arrived at the doorstep of the Swannanoa Boarding House for lodging during the preparation for this three-month festival running of his play. He hadn’t intended to board at the Swannanoa, and the flattery of my being the reason he did became part of the unnatural hold he eventually was to have over me. For the entirety of our relationship I lived under the misconception that somewhere under that controlling, consuming nature of his that he cared for me.

I didn’t notice him standing there, at the top of the stairs to the front porch as engrossed as I was in what I was furiously writing, trying to capture all that happened the previous night and the thoughts and emotions that it had evoked from me. It was Sunday. Mrs. Childress didn’t make us work the special services on Sunday, and she herself spent most of that day in prayer and praise up at the Baptist church at the top of the street. So, itching to try to capture—and to come to grips with the previous night’s event, I had taken my paper and pens to the front porch of the boarding house and was sitting at the table out there, deep in thought and in making a short, dramatic scene of it.