Midnight Harvest
Authors: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Tags: #Fiction, #Horror, #Fantasy, #Dark Fantasy
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Contents
Part One:
Doña Isabel Inez Vedancho y Nuñez
Part Two:
Rowena Saxon
Part Three:
Ferenc Ragoczy, le Comte de Saint-Germain
This one is for
Irene Kraas
agent extraordinaire
author’s note
The 1930s, although still in living memory, are as remote as the Civil War for many Americans, especially those born after 1960, whose contact with those times—if any exists at all—tends to be through grandparents; the combination of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression put the country into dire straits of a kind that has, fortunately, not been seen since. The impact of those privations touched every part of society, and the reforms undertaken by the government to address the appalling conditions that prevailed can still be seen in public buildings in almost all American cities to this day, and in the ongoing debate over Social Security.
The Roaring Twenties in America—themselves a frenetic reaction to the aftermath of World War I, or the Great War as it was then called—had come to a screeching halt with the Crash of 1929 and the catastrophic plummet of the stock market that led to the Great Depression. Europe had already endured financial hardship, most notably in Germany in the mid-Twenties, and the political instability that resulted from the disastrous inflation eventually led to the rise of the Nazi party, which used not only the vindictive terms imposed on Germany at the end of World War I to incite the populace, but the economic crisis as well. America may have lagged behind the Europeans in money problems, but eventually the same difficulties cropped up in the United States, and some of the same political unrest.
The wild card—and wild is the appropriate word here—in the American situation was the general air of lawlessness that developed during Prohibition. By making drinking alcohol illegal, the government created an environment that encouraged tolerance of lawbreakers as acceptable behavior in the general society more unobjectionable than had been the case since the great westward expansion of the nineteenth century. For many Americans, turning bootleggers was an irresistible temptation; and with others taking advantage of the situation, their daring and media exposure made them into mythic figures, like buccaneers or Robin Hoods, braving incompetent and unfair authorities on behalf of the common folk. In many ways this preoccupation with the exploits of criminal gangs engaged in circumventing the Volsted Act diverted the general social malaise into the single issue of booze and the escapades associated with it. By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, its impact had touched almost every aspect of daily life in America, and its impact was not only on issues of law enforcement: among the many victims of Prohibition were the American wine, beer, and distillery businesses, although a few distillers made a spectacular recovery at the end when the aged whiskeys they had made could finally be released for sale. Wine and beer producers did not generally fare so well, for only a handful had the financial resources to ride out the thirteen years of Prohibition, although few religious Orders continued to make sacramental wines, which were excluded from the terms of the law, but otherwise most of those industries suffered, many of them—already burdened with the flagging general economy—beyond remedy.
Yet a few industries prospered in these hard times, most notably in America the entertainment industry. As vaudeville breathed its last gasp, the 1930s saw the rise of major motion picture studios and expanded distribution of movies that in turn rode on technological advancements—many of which originated in Europe but moved across the Atlantic to escape the war-ruined economies and the political unrest that came with them. Radio became ubiquitous, in part because of an ambitious program of bringing electricity to all of the country, not just the cities. Thousands of theaters were refitted from stage to screen, for movies became the most popular form of escapist entertainment outside pulp magazines. Another industry that did well in the Twenties and Thirties in America was transportation: the burgeoning airline business, the ambitious expansions of roads and similar public works projects that were as much a means of creating jobs as opening the country to trucking, and the railroads all profited in the harsh financial climate that followed the Crash. By extension, the oil industry—although far more volatile than many other endeavors—expanded and, when it succeeded, succeeded handsomely; as more and more applications for petroleum products were developed, the greater the profits were in the oil business. All of this was not enough to offset the Depression, but as Will Rogers so succinctly put it, “All that money went somewhere”; these are some of the places it went. The free-falling downward monetary spiral of 1929 continued to wreak havoc in America right up to the first stages of World War II, when the demands of the arms industry finally got the American economy into high gear again.
In Europe, where conditions were harsher, the solutions tended to be more extreme: in Germany the Nazis came to power; in Italy and Spain, the Fascists rose, and the polarization of right-wing authoritarian governments (Nazis, Fascists) and left-wing authoritarian governments (Communists) became entrenched and the seeds of World War II—or more accurately, World War I, Part II—were sown. With the demands of economic and material recovery making such stringent demands on Europeans, the unilateral might of authoritarian governments was not only tolerated, it was generally welcomed by the various countries in which that authoritarianism flourished; those who did not support the regimes were pressured into silence or removed from society, reinforcing the hold of the governments in question. As German belligerence increased through the Thirties, it found echoes in many other countries, including Britain and America, although the general return to isolationism in America kept Nazism and other authoritarian systems from establishing more than a minor toehold. But that did not mean Americans were immune to the appeal of extreme politics.
Extremist political groups sprouted up in all parts of America, from far right, racist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the notorious Black Legion, to the far left, such as the United Workers of the World, with every stripe and inclination in between, for although there was political unrest in the United States, it did not become fixated on one aspect of the country’s many problems—the issues of Prohibition notwithstanding, for those had been preempted by organized crime—and as a result the responses were more varied and diffuse than was the case in Europe, and never had the opportunity to become entrenched in the centers of political power as was the case elsewhere in the world. There was also—especially in rural areas—an upsurge in revivalist religion, some of which went big-time, anticipating the televangelists of the present. Such preachers as Aimee Semple McPherson, who in 1923 dedicated her 5,000-seat Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, set the tone for spectacular, theatrical histrionics, a kind of showmanship that has remained in popularized religion to this day. The Fundamentalist farmers of the Midwest, uprooted from the Dust Bowl, took their faith with them as they moved—usually westward—in search of a living. It was a dicey situation that could only deteriorate as the problems escalated.
The middle to late 1930s brought increased tensions to Europe as the buildup to war began to pick up speed. This increasing conflict was known in America, but for the most part deliberately ignored as part of the desire of America to remain aloof from what was hoped was just more European squabbling. Many Europeans shared that hope of American isolationism, leaving their homelands for America in anticipation of coming conflict. Starting early in the 1920s, a number of successful businessmen and academics came to the United States—and to South America as well—looking for an opportunity to avoid becoming caught up in the coming hostilities; most of them brought their families with them—parents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, all were included whenever possible. As hostilities worsened, more Europeans left the Old World for the New: North and South America both experienced an influx of immigration in the Thirties. Shortly before World War II broke out at the end of August 1939, what had been a trickle became a flood.
Not all Americans were pleased with this situation, for in an already damaged economy, there were many who saw these newcomers as economic spoilers, bent on taking what little employment there was away from the “real” Americans. This served to fuel the various hate groups that battened onto the old organizations or cropped up as new ones from one end of the country to the other, and although the European arrivals created as many jobs as they took, the perception of many longtime unemployed was that they were being shoved aside in favor of the newcomers.
* * *
Unlike several of the other books in this series, this one doesn’t lack for applicable information on the time and its events: there are newspapers, books, newsreels, radio broadcasts, magazines, and all manner of personal documents readily obtainable; in fact, the trick here is not to find out specific information, it is to winnow out the material essential to the story from all the data available. In that capacity, I have had the advantage of speaking to a dozen men and women who lived through these years as young adults, two in Europe, two on the East Coast, three in Chicago and the Midwest, and the rest in California. I am grateful to them for sharing their memories, diaries, and other material with me, for their personal reminiscences have provided me a wonderful window on the decade of the story. So: Anne, Claude, Durandarte, Elihu, Frank, Louise, Patti, Petronella, Renee, Silvain, Sol, and Yoshiko, thank you for all your time and generous conversation. If in making my selection I have left out some incident, person, or development that is your favorite, I apologize, and plead exigencies of narrative line for my omission, and I offer the same mea culpa to my readers whose view of that period may not be the same as the view of this novel. Also
California: The Guide to the Golden State,
published by the WPA in 1937 through 1938, proved extremely useful, particularly in details about roads and other travel conditions of the period.
There are also others who deserve a thank-you here: Elizabeth Miller, Stephanie Moss, and Sharon Russell of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula and the Lord Ruthven Assembly; to Mia Delancy, Jim Russ, and Jeanne Keagan, who read the manuscript for clarity, and to Anne, Sol, Yoshiko, and Claude, who read it for accuracy. To Lindig Harris for her newsletter
Yclept Yarbro
, available from [email protected]; to Wiley Saichek for all his tireless promotional work; to Tyrrell Morris for keeping my machines and Web site (
www.ChelseaQuinnYarbro.com
) running; to Robin Dubner, who continues to look after Saint-Germain’s legal interests; to Libba Campbell; to Maureen Kelly, Gaye Raymond, Alice Horst, Randall Behr, and the Luckes, just because. On the publishing end, thanks to the good people at Warner, including Larissa Rivera and Jamie Levine, who have taken Saint-Germain under their respective wings, and to Laurence J. Kirshbaum, Chairman of Warner Publishing, along with Stealth Press, for giving Saint-Germain such a splendid opportunity to rise from the grave of the out-of-print. And finally, thanks to my readers, new and longtime, for your continued support of this series.