Dreams Of Forest Lodge

I must have fallen in Love with Mary…when I was 5…

She had golden, silken ringlets cascading down her Ever ever  so so White face..

her Deep Galacial Blue eyes….  lightening bolts that  hit me with such intensity…..

As THAT  day…

When  she and her mother..Baroness  Levy   were dragged by the Nazi soldiers out of their house …..Baroness  L…was a Jew…which made Mary a Jew …even though  her father was a Lutheran…from Chicago…

Eliot Devineshare…was a carpet baron…with untold wealth..

On his Lakeshore property he  had 3 different sized trains…

one could ride in   ..with its  own dining car and bar…. with a piano player that softy crooned out Cole Porter’s latest…you could nuzzle with your sweetie and just enjoy the moment…or use the handcar to pump through  the fields under a Full Moon….

or you could sit on the top of the second  gauge..

and ride around through the 2000 acres of Forest and woodland with the small people and trolls living under the bridges that somehow seemed scary…

the last…smallest size of the trains…. were for the kids in their strollers that could watch them pass by on a Lake Forest humid day….as their nannies fanned themselves and chatted…..

So many complications back then that I did NOT understand ….I mean WHAT does one know at 5….

The Baroness had a title …and that was about it…except for her Beauty…her cascading Golden ringlets (like her daughter)….and her ample bosom that wanted to Explode out of its corset….

and ….her ability to do the Charleston and the Blackbottom…much frowned on in High Austrian Society….alot of “tch tch”.and ..”Nein Gut’s”…..!!!!

Her father Dr Levy ..of course wanted her to marry well and in hindsight get out of their home town of Alt Ausse (Austria)…before the Nazis arrived……

But what NO ONE knew was that Mary was born on the “Wrong Side” of the blanket….

conceived out of wedlock when her her mother  was visiting Eliot Devineshare in the United States…..

and his Extremely handsome chauffeur Sumner  drove them WAY out to South Dakota….

Being born “on the otherside of the blanket”…well it was JUST not acceptable…in polite  society….

But as I have said….at 5 years old…how do you know what WHAT is supposed to be….

I can still hear Mary’s screams as the Nazi’s dragged her and Frau Levy out…..often wonder if that FAT Nazi’s scull and cross boned ring had not snagged on one of her ringlets

55 years later I still have  nightmares….

(to be continued)