Intrepid Explorers

“We are going to The Octagon House!” my mother chirped one afternoon.
I was 4 years old; I think. If so, it was the summer of 1959. My father’s general law
practice of the mid-century allowed him to do trusts and estates, public offerings,
even a few criminal representations. But that general practice also allowed him to
represent the author Carl Carmer, too. And the Carmer’s invited the Dickinson’s to
dinner, all of us, in the fully amazing “Octagon House” a Victorian marvel of domed
ornament and material.

I now know the home is the 1860 “Armour-Stiner House”,renovated by others and put on the National Historic Register fifteen years later.So children 15, 10 and 4 we sat, beltless, of course, in the back of our new, used 1957 Fleetwood Cadillac, and we drove the ten minutes north from our house in Dobbs
Ferry to the Carmer house in Irvington. To a 4-year-old the architectural encounterwas quizzical: this home was a dome, a monument, a singularity. It was rough aroundthe edges, over-painted white with some grey bits, and visible patching and repairs.

We jumped out of the car and the three children ran into the open home, which, like
all the others around us, was not air conditioned in a sticky summer. That may be the
extent of my memory. But a friend who serves on a board with me was there, too. She
(a few years older) remembers that night, as her family also knew ours, and lived
locally – in fact that fact may be why my father was the author Carl Carmer’s lawyer.

But the rest of the evening, that is absent from my memory beyond the vision of a
unique home, is there for my friend. “Your mother was a bit nuts – she would say
whatever came out.” Her memory was that the kids, herself included, were a little nuts
too. And that the booze flowed. “Every adult was fully drunk by the night’s end.” She
remembered.

And my father drove home around 11pm. Three children asleep in the back seat I’d
guess, the triangular pivoting windows open to ventilate the Kent smoke thru the
night air.

My mother died over twenty years ago, and with her died the one thousand other
nights that I never knew, despite my presence. We in the wake of chaos, survived
amid unknown damage. Fifteen years becomes a short time in these older years, but it
was the time all of those adults at the dinner had after the end of World War 2, a level
of devastation now illuminated by the palest of its reference to the Covid19 plague,
where control had also been lost.

I saw, perhaps twenty-five years ago, exquisite pictures in a historic preservation
magazine of the Octagon House fully restored in its shimmering glory now seen on
the internet. A home completely reinvented to become what it once was. Ironic and
wonderful.

Architecture is a touchstone for the rest of life. Those images served to electrify the
bits of memory that survived so much time and alcohol. The chaos of children in full
rampage as their parents drank themselves into a state of rationalized incapacity is all
that remains in me.

But on January 1, 1960, Carl Carmer published a book, intended for “young adults”
celebrating the explorer Henry Hudson (I think). The timing,( I think), was perfect for
that dinner to have triggered a dedication of that book – as written in the front matter
of the thin volume to “The Intrepid Explorers, Susie, Win and Duo Dickinson”. He
saw us briefly in 1959 thru the haze of booze and smoke, but we are immortalized by
his printed words.