Up the Hill Alone

They were two pewter candlesticks, a pewter bowl and a pewter vase—all with strongly and somewhat crudely rustic Norwegian designs. Oh, and a Russell Wright bowl which I had given her to match the Russell Wright vase, which she already had. So—six objects, and I was sobbing over them. That was all that was left of her.

It wasn’t, of course. It just felt that way, those six objects that had been taken out of my mother’s house a month ago and sent to New York. A renter has been found for the house in the woods where my mother had lived and where she had died, and so John and Jeanne had gone out and taken even more of the personal possessions out the house. And that meant that when I came into their apartment four days ago—I was greeted by the Norwegian chest that had been in the place she had designed for it all those years ago. (Note—I just added it up, and it’s over thirty years….)

It looked beautiful, it looked wrong. And I decided, it would be best to go around the apartment while I was along—examine every nook and cranny, and find everything from my mother’s house that was now living in my brother’s house.

Winnie the Pooh—the edition from 1946—was on the tea table. The blue and white ginger bowl was in the hall. There were some post Art Deco-ish vases of which my mother had been fond. And there was a whole raft of small pieces that we had to go through.

“The trouble was the coffee ladies,” I told John. “Every time a member of her coffee klatch went off somewhere, they had to bring something home, and then Franny had to put them somewhere and keep them there forever because who could offend the coffee ladies?”

She was like that….

So John and I went through the box, and soon made a game of it.

Marc (holding reproduction Egyptian cat): Barbara Shaw in the souks of Cairo!

John (moving his head sideways like an Egyptian, imitates native): 50 piasters.

Marc (imitating Barbara): 50! 25, and not a piaster less!

Life teaches you how to get through some moments—and no, no tears were shed over the chulerías that Franny had had forced on her all those years. But what to do about the stuff she had used, had liked, had admired? Such as the Russell Wright stuff, or the Norwegian pewter?

“The last thing we need is more stuff,” I said to Jeanne. “Who else do you know who has eight or ten china sets between them? Oh, and three sets of silver?”

But it also seemed like I had to have them—and what, beyond memories, do I have of my mother? And that’s when the thought hit—this is all that’s left of a woman who had laughed and loved and told stories and wept on the passing of her man. I had held her ashes in my hand and thrust them into the earth—and that I did dry-eyed.

I looked down at the six items on the floor and thought of her hands holding them, lifting them to her eyes. I saw the roadside flowers we had gathered that would go into the Wright vase that would end up on the Norwegian wood-burning stove. I thought of the time I had played cello at Herb Fritz’s barn in Spring Green. Fritz, a friend of my parents and a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, had long died; his widow, Eloise, was soldiering on. And on the grand piano was a beautiful plain blue vase, with sunflowers stuck into it.

“Our own van Gogh, as Herb used to say” said Eloise.

It was the last time I had played for my mother.

“How much stuff is still in the house?” I asked Jeanne.

Who may have taken it as criticism—“there was just no way we could get it all out in one weekend,” she said.

“It’s not that, I just want to know how much more of this I have to go through…”

The answer?

Some more.

There’s a house in the middle of the Wisconsin woods that, one day, will be another man’s or woman’s pride and problem—not John’s, who is waking up at 3AM to worry about it. There will be a long, graveled driveway wending through green woods in summer, gold in fall, and grey and black in winter—and that driveway, once so welcoming, once leading to arms yearning to hold me? That driveway will tell me ‘no, not today.’

‘She came and she went about her business, but she’s gone. And you should go, too. Go away—back to your life, back to the living. Let her molder here, if she wills, or slip through her woods on the back of the cold winter winds, of sit on the rocks you both sat on, when you were wailing. When she could wail. And now?’

‘She could be rough, that mother of yours. Remember how she told John, who was wailing for a lost child, that he had to suck it up, stop crying, get on with his life? And why? For Jeanne. So he squared his shoulders and did it. Now, let’s see you’

And I do it, of course. I square my shoulder and lift my chin and turn around and begin the trudge up the hill…

…alone.

When Thanksgiving Becomes Real

Susan leaves the following comment on my post about Jack:

I'm surprised he didn't recognize that not supporting the Equal Rights Amendment because "all my kids are normal" is no different from not supporting the Civil Rights Act "because all my kids are white." No doubt given the public education that has occurred in the past 20 years about the normality of homosexuality, he would get it today. His photo is on my fridge anyway -- and I never had the privilege of meeting him. You couldn't know Fran without loving John.

Well, that same sense of fair play impels me to say—he did get it in the end. I know because Johnny told me what Jack had said to him, a few days before he died.

“He said that he and Mom had gone to Puerto Rico, and then he started talking about these two old guys in Mineral Point….” Johnny reported.

I knew, of course. Their names were Edgar G. Hellum and Robert M. Neal. And they had discovered a little town with molding old buildings and done something with it.

Town was called Mineral Point, and nobody was particularly impressed with those damn old houses. Tear ‘em down, and use the stones for patios or garden walls!

Instead, Mr. Edgar and Mr. Bob—that’s how they were known—created Pendarvis House, and then Shake Rag Alley. Then went around collecting old recipes. Started restoring more and more buildings.

Provided jobs when jobs were needed.

And were good, honest people. Employed Mr. Curtis—an expert mason—who had retired from Taliesin, perhaps because Wright was so fond of that “stick-out stuff”: the stones not flush but sticking out and then recessed. Bad for the mortar—frost got in it….

Mr. Curtis on Wright?

“Mr. Wright was good to me,” he said, “but, let’s see, I think I still have seventeen hundred dollars coming from him,” which he never got.¹

A familiar complaint from the townspeople around Spring Green.

No whisper of it regarding Mr. Neal and Mr. Bob.

I was perhaps twenty when we all went to Mineral Point.

“How is Mr. Edgar,” asked Jack.

Or perhaps it was Mr. Bob. Doesn’t really matter. The two were a unit, and take away one?

“He’s not been the same since Mr. Bob died,” was the answer.

“Of course,” said Jack.

‘Right,’ I thought. ‘It’s all well and good as long as you don’t make waves. Here are two gay guys and EVERYBODY knows they’re gay, and they turn the town around and put everybody to work, and start a restaurant that gains national fame, but nobody says a word! What crazy shit is this?”

I was just coming out. I was young, and harsh. I made judgments then that I think—I hope—I don’t make now.

Now, of course, I marvel that they had the gumption to do it.

Like E.M. Forster, Jack believed in an aristocracy of the plucky, and knew it when he saw it:

“I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke.”

And so, yeah—he had no respect for the married guys lurking in the shadows on the Capitol Square late at night, trying to figure out who was vice squad and who was legit—and available. Mr. Bob and Mr. Edgar he could get.

“I’m very sure that Jack would have expected you and Raf to get married, if you had the option,” said Franny, when we talked about him years later.

Was that why I spent a couple thousand bucks to travel to Massachusetts for “a piece of paper,” as guys who prefer not to make a commitment always say?

Or was it that I wanted to hear—and to say—words that Mr. Edgar and Mr. Bob would never have imagined two men would say in front of a judge?

“In sickness and in health….”

All of us owe a lot to people like the Messieurs Edgar / Bob.

As well, we owe a lot to the people who acknowledge, and celebrate the aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. The legislators who vote for marriage equality and then go home to explain to the constituents. The straight people who march with us. The people who speak up, when remaining silent is so much easier.

Thanksgiving, and the serial holidays that trail it, is not a good time for me. The days are short, my mood grows dark. And yesterday, I experienced a little moment of sadness. How many years had I battled depression? How many defeats had I brought on myself? Now I, more happy than I have ever been, had to wonder: what would my life have been, without this darkness?

The answer, of course, is that my life would have been different.

But I wouldn’t be who I am now. Some sort of writer who trots each morning to the beach, plunges into the water, returns home and begins his work.

Someone who broke through the barriers of biochemistry and habit, badthink and depression, sorrow and sabotage. Someone who matter-of-factly hears the steps of his husband coming up the stairs, and waits for him to greet the cat.

“What’s for dinner,” he will say.

Chicken.

‘I’m so happy,’ I will think.

Robert Neal, 1942, baking a Cornish pastry

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1. Material and quotes drawn from the book On the Shake Rag, published by The State Historical Society of Wisconsin and The Memorial Pendarvis Trust.