Before Willa Cather’s work became Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in 1896 Willa had just graduated from college and moved to Pittsburg to become the editor of Home Monthly.
That year the jewelry store Richter & Phillips Co. opened in Cincinnati, Ohio, the beginning state of her narrative Death Comes for the Archbishop and my birthplace on the Ohio River.
Here is the history of the founding of my great-great-grandfather Charles Edward Richter’s Richter & Phillips Company jewelry store in downtown Cincinnati that was originally located in the Temple Bar Building on the corner of Court and Main Streets and opened in 1896, and their signature “Luzerne” brand watches designed and made in Switzerland in the early 1940s, as the story and watch were passed down to me when my father passed in 2019. The watch that I inherited came in its perfect condition original bright red and gold box with “Luzerne Geneva” in gold and is still keeping time. It has a “17 jewel movement and gold filled case with gold hands.” Its original price in 1940 was $55. This watch with packaging belonged to my great-grandfather, Charles Norbert, Charles Edward’s son.
In 1896 Charles Edward Richter (“George”) and three brothers named Phillips opened the store known as The Richter & Phillips Company with jewelry as their main line and with a showroom of jewelry, diamonds, and gifts. They had a nationwide mail order catalogue of jewelry, giftware, luggage, purses, trophies, plaques, clocks, electrical appliances, sporting goods, musical instruments, dolls, and toys. After the Great Depression the company was sold to Frederick W. Fehr. Frederick retired in 1972 at 90 years old leaving the business to his son. It remains a family-owned business.
After those same years of working as an editor in Pittsburg and teaching, Willa would soon move to Greenwich Village and become an editor of McClure’s Magazine. In December 1919 Willa wrote a story just for herself called “Coming, Aphrodite!” set on Washington Square Park. (My dad, a minister, would pass exactly 100 years later in 2019. His birthday also was on the 19th.) She chose to publish that story the following year. In it that neighborhood serves as a metaphorical Garden of Eden in the burgeoning art culture of the Village. That setting would be switched to uptown Manhattan for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But the magic of that story’s path would have it hearken back to its original setting in the path that would lead me to John Mayer in 2010. When I would return again to the Village in 2023, it was on this discovery of the miracles with author Willa Cather and this being the true neighborhood of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. As in her story, it was the opportunity of the artists’ recognition of the true identity of each other when I came to fall in love with John there. In December 2010, just a couple of blocks over from
her story John first sang “A Face to Call Home” at the Village Underground and that is the moment I knew that he loved me.
And so in these beginnings of the jewelry store and watch leading to these breakthroughs of the magnificent world-changing truths of Breakfast at Tiffany’s all along, and its provenance in Willa’s “Coming, Aphrodite!”, where I was born on the Ohio River in Cincinnati there was a park and vineyard on the river named the Garden of Eden (now Eden Park). The Ohio River, too, is where Huckleberry Finn was importantly headed to new freedom, where Willa would take that feminine literary river which would find me and carry me on.
I was born in Bethesda Hospital, which is no longer there. The Pool of Bethesda is where Jesus performed the miracle of John 5:1-18, “Get up, pick up your pallet and walk.” This is down from the Mount of Olives. (The Olive Tree Cafe is also in Greenwich Village.)
(Truman Capote even copied Willa’s Garden of Eden in France from her Pulitzer Award winning novel One of Ours for his In Cold Blood.) But like the Garden of Eden, Audrey Hepburn’s retreat in Switzerland, “La Pausible”, means “the Peaceful” and my name means “Place of Peace.”
In that sacred grove of the Hebrew Bible, the Garden of Eden, is where Asherah/Eve is expelled, just as Asherah’s name was removed from throughout the Hebrew Bible, and her altars burned as in 2 Kings 23:15.
But that is the extreme beauty of all this coming together and this heightening culmination as narcissism explodes as big, as loud, and as fearfully as it can in this moment on our planet, harming other humans, animals, and nature to have a sense of the power of the disturbed self, that what is broken open is about a planet restructured on the amazing life-giving, protecting, and affirming force of the feminine larger than its flawed structures overrun by out of control psyches of narcissism which even informs the destruction in the Hebrew Bible all these many years ago.