In the Fullness of Time
By Vincent Nicolosi
Introduction “In the Fullness of Time” is as deeply rooted in Marion, Ohio as the life of President Warren G. Harding. Without Marion of another, earlier time, there may have been no Harding Administration in the American past, and there certainly would have been no “In the Fullness of Time.” Marion in the full vigor of its collective ambitions, in its influences, concerns and motivations, drive the plot and story of this novel, just as so very much in Warren Harding’s life likewise found roots in Marion’s fertile earth and culture. I grew up on West Columbia Street hearing of “Mr. Harding” from people who knew him not all that long before, and who knew and recollected Mrs. Harding as well. Between 1957 and 1963, as a paperboy, I delivered The Marion Star on Route #1, the downtown route. Only a few decades separated me from the days of Warren Harding and his tenure as founder, editor, and owner of the Star. Perhaps as a child, my imagination was overly wrought by Marion and by Mr. Harding and the stories I heard. I sometimes thought of him when I picked up my bundled newspapers in the Courthouse and as I went about my route, delivering the Star, walking the sidewalks he walked along Main and Center, and State and Church Streets – that central block of “downtown” Marion, comprising most of the customers on my paper route. Sixty years on, more than forty years after my life carried me to various elsewheres, I believe I could still walk the streets of downtown Marion and know precisely the location and names of many of the long-vanished businesses, apartment dwellers and buildings I once visited six days a week, Monday through Saturday, over the course of several boyhood years in the late fifties and early sixties. Hence, Marion was a seminal source of my background and life, encompassing other vital sources, and from those years, from the people and places I knew, from the stories, rumors, and lore, “In the Fullness of Time” became engendered and woven into fruition.
On the afternoon of 25 November 1963, the supremely quiet day of President Kennedy’s burial at Arlington, my next-door neighbor and I peddled our bicycles from West Columbia Street through Marion’s funereal stillness and out to the Harding Memorial. The Prologue, as it appears below, recollects that precise day and place, though the central character of the novel, Tristan Hamilton – far from being anything like the Marion boy I was – shares on the surface little in common either with my modest background, or with me, other than his deep roots in Marion; though Tristan Hamilton shares with me his own visit to the tomb on that very same bright Monday afternoon, culminating four momentous days of tragedy and history, and thereby also progressing his own long look back at his life and times in Marion, Ohio, and the fulfillment of his new life to come.
- Vincent Nicolosi
PROLOGUE
MONDAY AFTERNOON
25 NOVEMBER 1963
TIOGA
MARION, OHIO
A Visit to the Tomb
I RETURNED To President Harding’s tomb today, my first visit since three or four weeks ago when I went there to assure myself that all evidence of some recent desecrations had been cleaned away, and that all was respectable once again.
Today I drove out there for an altogether different reason. It is a crisp and beautiful autumnal day, a day utterly belying the immense sorrow that lies across the land. I attended church yesterday, but other than that, I have scarcely stirred from the television set since Friday, an hour or so after lunch, when Mrs. Christian’s daughter telephoned from Columbus to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.
I am not ashamed to say that over these past four days I have shed my share of tears, most especially when little John-John saluted his father’s coffin as it emerged from St. Matthew’s, and to think that today is the poor little fellow’s third birthday. Now on every birthday through all the years before him he will hear, somewhere in his thoughts, the cadence of muffled drums.
I sat here late this morning transfixed and, as I watched the gun carriage drawn by the seven white steeds bearing the flag-draped coffin on its slow and stately journey towards Arlington, something stirred within me, a far-off resonance from the sound of those clattering hooves, a distant reflection from that exact same gleaming gun carriage, which forty years and four months ago bore the coffin of my friend and neighbor, President Warren G. Harding. Without forethought I found myself rising from my chair, adjusting my black tie and coat in the mirror, and drawing on my overcoat and adjusting my hat. I paused briefly by the panel of windows overlooking the backyard and the Old Forest filled with sunlight, now that the buckeye, maple, and sycamore trees, and most of the ancient oaks, have shed their leaves. For a moment I thought again of that long-ago summer afternoon when the President and First Lady visited this very room, having graciously called at Tioga to thank my father, who at that time lay slowly dying in the bed in the corner. Then, without turning off the television (for it seemed disrespectful to do so), I proceeded down the back stairs, out across the yard to the carriage house, and to my car. And so I made my own slow and stately way around the bend of Mt. Vernon Avenue and along the Boulevard, towards the Harding Memorial.
It was strange beyond words, but not once on the winding, mile-long drive to the tomb did I see a single other automobile, not even at the usually busy four corners. Nor for that matter did I see a single human being anywhere, not even some restless child at play in a yard with his dog. Everyone, the entire world it seemed, was accompanying our young President on his celestial journey. Indeed, I felt more than one pang of guilt for having moved from the television set, but I knew I would not be long at the President’s tomb.
I hope you will forgive an old man’s pride when I say that I consider the Harding Memorial to be the greatest achievement of my life, and it goes without saying that it will be my most lasting. Indeed, no matter what opinions you may hold of President Harding, I think one fact is utterly inarguable—that his tomb is quite simply one of the finest monuments built since antiquity; in the modern world, it is rivaled only by the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. This late morning when I pulled into the little parking area, I sat for a long moment simply gazing at the monument in the distance, glowing in the tall trees like a vision from the classical world. Then, with hat in hand, I walked through the clear, cold sunlight and made my way up the long promenade.
It pleases me no end to think that strangers coming upon the Harding Memorial must find it a most astonishing sight. If by some rare chance you are a student of heroic architecture, or classical structures in America, then no doubt you are already quite familiar with the tomb. The tomb is a vast and soaring marble edifice of Hellenic style and Promethean size and splendor. It is circular, what the Greeks called a “tholos,” with broad flights of white marble stairs ascending to a continuous colonnade of massive columns encircling an inner cella, or chamber, which is open to the sun and winds. A willow tree grows within the cloister and a hanging garden lines the entablature. At the center of the cella rest two enormous cenotaphic sarcophagi of black granite, surrounded by a thick bed of myrtle, and far beneath these markers, locked deep within the hermetically sealed concrete vault, lay the remains of President and Mrs. Harding. In spite of its superhuman air, the monument is as peaceful as a grotto in the woods. In all, the Memorial is everything I intended it to be when I first proposed its creation nearly four decades ago. I am confident that the structure will endure for five thousand years. Down through the ages the Memorial will remind people of President Harding, and the character of his little hometown, which built it.
Of course today as I stood there, I was thinking not of the monument’s beauty, or for that matter of my own pride. Instead, the sadness and unreality of the day seemed to affect me in unaccountable ways. The assassination of President Kennedy has made me feel once again as if I am passing through history and history is passing through me. I stood before the cella for nearly twenty minutes before I was aware that even a single moment had passed. . . .
As I stood there, a deepening chill stirred me from my thoughts, and I realized that gray wintry clouds were fast approaching from the northwest and that the sun had gone in. I felt a sudden loneliness in that beautiful, desolate place, for I seemed to be the only person alive in the entire world. I adjusted the collar of my overcoat; a glance at my watch indicated that I had now been gone from Tioga for more than three quarters of an hour. From my imperfect memories of Washington, I estimated that the President’s coffin would soon be crossing the Potomac and ascending the broad rise to Arlington—if it had not done so already. Thus with a little bow to President and Mrs. Harding’s graves, I took my leave of them and hastened home for President Kennedy’s burial.
Born and raised in Marion, Ohio, Vincent Nicolosi has lived for many years in New York City and northern Vermont.
