No Regrets

Robert and Alain, Part 4: An Invitation to Tea

Part 1: Robert Meets Alain is here
Part 2: Circles and Lines is here
Part 3: Under the Bigtop is here

San Francisco, 1981-82
In most circles, if a piano teacher were to suddenly announce that he is the boss of an imaginary institute dispensing spiritual inspiration to world leaders from an invisible estate in the Napa Valley, some sort of intervention would likely ensue. Inside the sealed echo chamber of the micro-cult, this fantasy went unchallenged, although supporting a pretend Center for the Advancement of All Mankind did ultimately precipitate crises of faith in even the most slavish of Alain's remaining true believers, none of whom was actually stupid.
The fantasy consumed huge amounts of energy. The other couple in the cult picked up the rent on Alain’s house, which he insisted be referred to as The Center, and paid the printing costs for the first (and only) issue of All One. The single guy of the group was at Alain’s house every day. Robert, too, was expected to be available most afternoons and evenings, to take dictation and transcribe the content of All One, every word of which was handwritten by Alain. These demands on his time, on top of a full-time job and a family, were framed as preparation for even greater service to come; Alain emphasized repeatedly that Robert would need to be away from home for “weeks, sometimes months at a time” while those world leaders were being guided to new states of consciousness in the Napa Valley.
If the imaginary Center and its attendant demands were indeed part of a plan to recapture some of the enthrallment that had been so easily commanded of the group in its early years, the timing was just terrible. After a decade of protracted emotional adolescence, Alain’s acolytes were, in spite of the best efforts of everyone involved, growing up. We were all in our 30s. Members of the group were grappling with raising children, earning a living, tenure, infertility, and coming out of the closet. What we all had in common was the increasingly urgent imperative of being able to decide, on our own, which box to check on any form indicating personal identity or preference.

Citing the rigors of school nights, I stopped going to meetings, and was adamant about enforcing appropriate social and emotional boundaries around my children and myself. Other members of the micro-cult, each restless in his or her own way, appeared also to be heading in that direction, questioning for the first time the judgment behind such things as a special boys-only meeting about how to break up a young couple Alain had lately met. The man in question was in the process of dropping out of medical school, and the woman was urging him to reconsider. “What can we do to get her out of the picture?” Alain asked. You could see doubt moving through the group like a slow virus: if he was wrong about this, might he be wrong about that, too? About...many things?
I was the first to be invited to a private tea at Alain’s house. I brought my 3-year-old, kept home from preschool with the sniffles, who played quietly on the kitchen floor of Center for the Advancement of All Mankind while its founder and sole proprietor brought out Twinings Earl Grey loose-leaf and a set of metaphorical scalpels. He brewed the tea and unsheathed his blades. “You were never really one of us,” he began, in the heightened British accent that I had learned over the years was a signal of stress. I believe this was intended to hurt, but it was, in fact, one statement about which we were in complete agreement. “You’re right,” I said, and before I could say anything further was gob-smacked by a swift, smooth recitation of his perception of my sins: I was mired in materialism, shallow, and I lacked true intelligence. My priorities were terribly wrong, I was an impediment to my husband’s spiritual progress, and my own lack of spirituality left me wanting as a mother, which was most unfortunate for my children. My life was a shabby thing, quite ordinary, which was to be expected of  someone with my limited understanding.
Then the ante was abruptly upped with the naming of my deepest fears and doubts, secrets known only to my husband. Robert had reported them to Alain, who was now using my dark night of the soul as a weapon in his tea time evisceration.
His recall was amazing. Some of the issues he was attempting to incise into my flesh had been resolved years ago. Others were dead-on, and deadly. Had he been planning this all along—amassing an arsenal of intimate knowledge to use for harm? If so, why? Why would anyone want to wound another person at such a profound level? To what end?  I had come as summoned that afternoon, thinking that despite everything I witnessed when other people left his spiritual orbit, our relationship might be edited so we could meet as social friends, as he was with people he knew through his interests in music and homeopathy. Being so terribly wrong, so far off the mark, left me literally speechless. Well, that and the hideous betrayal.
My little girl broke the spell. She had been so quiet at my feet, so good, drawing with her crayons and trying hard not to pull the string on the talking baby doll that went with her everywhere. She hugged my leg and rested her head against me and I realized she was listening to every word. Even if she could not understand all of them, the overall meaning was clear enough. I scooped up her and Talking Baby and stood up myself.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” I said, or I think I said. Words to that effect. I mostly remember needing to get my kid and myself out of there, and quickly. Alain smiled pleasantly and said that we would still friends, even if I was no longer part of the group. Balancing my daughter on my hip, I gathered up her drawings and headed toward the door. “Of course, you understand that I will continue with {my son’s name},” Alain informed me in, smile gone.
It took me less than a heartbeat to pass through a haze of shock and fury and land on the solid ground of maternal resolve. This was a place of complete confidence. There was not even a remote possibility of negotiation on this point.
“ No, you won’t,” I assured him. “Don’t even try. I am his mother.” And on that true, high note, I left Alain’s house for the last time.

Next: Each member of the group gets invited to tea; a fresh crop of 20-somethings (no girls need apply).

Wednesday Rotogravure: Jellyfish and Frosting

This week, Answerjack and I went to Nightlife at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Everyone whose digital camera has an "aquarium" setting takes a photo just like this one.

For all the exotic wildlife inside the Academy, the oddest creature was just outside the doors, waiting patiently for its master (or "companion human") and seemingly impervious to the crowd of pet papparazzi snapping away.

 

Sheep o' the Week, from the collection.

After Nightlife, we went to a big, noisy, Hong-Kong style restaurant that was lit up like a nuclear reactor. We ordered the weirdest dish ever: coffee pork ribs. Sweet, they tasted exactly like coffee with cream and two sugars, and were served with a big mound of that fluffy Crisco-based icing you see on supermarket birthday cakes. I'll stick to horse sashimi, thank you.

More fun with frosting, for my second birthday. I think my mother was aiming for a cake-as-skirt effect, but that doll looks like it's captive and sinking fast.

Making Natalia's second birthday cake, 1980. Forget the cake, get right down to the icing. OK, forget the clothes, too. You're only young once.

More evidence of my young father having fun in ways that were completely unknown in his mature years. I think he must have undergone selective memory removal; the first time I showed up on a motorcycle I got grounded.

The obligatory Aunt Gene shot. There are many many flirty poses of her on the beach; her girlfriend Miriam owned a cabin on Lake Zurich in Wisconsin.

The latest round of ammo in my ongoing battle with the deer was delivered moments ago. Supposedly odorless, I could smell the reek of coyote pee even before opening the box—outside.

I sure hope it works. This is the herd's ringleader, licking his chops in anticipation of some irresistible morsel, freshly purchased from the "deer resistant" section of the local garden center. Whatever that nasty growth is on his left foreleg does not slow him down. He's the Deer of the Week, the swine.

 

Wednesday Rotogravure: Owls, and Another Arrow Through the Head

Pulling into the driveway of my sister's house in Jacksonville, I saw this fellow sitting on the fence and snapped him with my iPhone.

Back home in the Bay Area, I found an antique print of a group of owls and cut out the best of the bunch to be framed for her birthday. These guys didn't make the cut, but they're still pretty cute. Maybe next birthday.

Even serial killers need sleep. Here Murphy naps under the watchful beak of a new sofa pillow. When I emailed this picture to my sister, she responded with a link to this droll etching:

Which had just been posted on the one of my favorite blogs, the scan-mad BibliOdyssey. It's early 17th Century, from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It looked familiar, because...

I own a similar print, a hand-colored plate from a 19th-Century French book. I love the dead rats around their necks. (See Murphy, above). It's a small world, or, as my sister says, "DNA magic."

Not all DNA is magical, however. This is my maternal great-grandmother in 1918, looking very Bertolt Brecht-ish, with my incipient grandfather behind her skirts. I call this "genetic terrorism." Actually, forget Brecht—she looks more like Helen Thomas. Apologies to both ladies.

Boys definitely had more fun in those days. My father at about age 20, in 1946.

As near as I can tell, my father spent his youth roaming the streets of Chicago with his buddies, dressed to kill and smoking like chimneys until they were captured, domesticated, and made to engender offspring.

Fun with a baby head and some quail eggs.

Another dream-world Deer of the Week. In the real world, I am losing the battle, but have one metaphorical arrow left in my quiver: the pending arrival of a shipment of dried coyote pee. Take that, hoofed ungulates. More arrows through the head here.

Sheep o' The Week, with a wolf thrown in for good measure. From the collection.

Wednesday Rotogravure: Babies, Bug and Barbell

Last Sunday was Father's Day, and Megumi brought this useful book to the gathering, thinking Jonathan was going to be there. (Jonathan and Mandra are expecting their first baby.) Megumi comes from a culture in which gift-giving is considered an art form, one which she has clearly mastered.

Good advice.

Keep insects away from Baby, too.

Don't squish Baby's little cheeks, either. That's my Grandma Lydia holding me; she's 37 in this picture. I still have the little crocheted shoes I'm wearing in the picture, but what I'd really like is Lydia's ankle straps. That woman had style.

Natalia has style, too. Here she's holding Jessica, one day old, while Ravi gazes intently at the camera.

No kids, style to burn: one for the growing Aunt Gene fan base. From 1931.

My father Roman, a skinny kid embarking on a body-building program, circa 1942.

Apparently, it worked. 1946

Last week I had my first hot dog in decades, at Absinthe: housemade frank, bun, sauerkraut, even potato chips. Your basic 12-buck hot dog, and a damn good Sazerac to wash it down.

Here is one reason I generally don't eat hot dogs: an intense early experience with Little Oscar and his Wienermobile. The actor was also one of those creepy Lollipop Kids in the Wizard of Oz.

Deer of The Week. This is one of the young bucks who chomped the new landscaping to the ground.

Sheep o' The Week, from the collection.

Wednesday Rotogravure: Guns, Guts and Bathing Beauties

Why did the deer cross the road? To get to our yard, where I just installed $100 worth of "deer resistant" ground cover and grasses on a wee bit of turf I tried to claim for human use. The plants lasted about 12 hours.

Like many gardeners attempting to share space with deer, I've been driven to violence. This water gun will shoot 37 feet, an oddly specific range. I'm dressed to kick ass in my Gogol Bordello T-shirt. Thanks, Natalia!

I'm not the first person in my family to bear arms against wildlife. Here's my great aunt Gene, circa 1925.

Serial killer cat Murphy doesn't need a gun. He can't be bothered to eat the whole bird, just picks out the choice bits and leaves the rest.

A typical scene in Memphis: car carnage and an ad for the Cochran Firm. Even in death, Johnnie Cochran litigates; his image beams down from billboards about town, urging Memphisonians to sue. Wonder who got this case?

My father took the picture on the left when my sister Chris and I were about 9 and 11 years old. Thirty-some odd summers later, my mother staged and shot my daughters Natalia and Jessica in a similar fetching and oh-so-natural tableau.

Aunt Gene, 1931. She's pretty fetching, too.

Deer of The Week. PETA, save your protests until after you've clomped a mile in my gardening clogs.

Sheep o' The Week, from the collection.

Wed. Rot. on Thursday: Catch, and Eat

My father catches a ball in a vacant lot in Chicago by means of levitation.

Thirty-one years later, he staged this shot of his grandson trying to catch something in Dolores Park.

Farmer's market truck, Chicago 1944. That's my babcia hefting the cabbage.

Antique cabbage print from an Italian flea market.

My father rides a motorcycle in Texas, 1946.

Not as cool as this one, snapped last night in San Francisco.

Hanging fig, in our yard.


 
Hanging fig, from my archives.

Deer of The Week, part one: doe and fawn in our back yard in Marin County.

Deer of The Week, part 2: venison on our table in Memphis. No relation to the deer above; we got it at the local Whole Foods.

These desiccated critters were found in my mother's house and yard in Florida; my sister Chris sent them to me. She knows what I like.

She also sent the three little sheep, this week's featured ovines.

Wednesday Rotogravure: Suburban Archeology & More Drinking Grandparents

A rare picture of my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born. He usually looks stern and stuffed in photos; I like this one because he looks like he's having fun.

My father and a chum, pre-marriage, pre-paternity. His buddy looks like a monster, lurching down the street, sucking on a stogie.

Working in the yard, I've uncovered some interesting artifacts left behind by the previous owners. I'm sure any 10-year-old could tell me the name of this pinheaded monster.

Another monster. Godzilla?

Cleaned up, this buried pewter candlestick fits right in on the mantel.

This wasn't buried in the backyard; it was found on the top shelf of the master bedroom closet. Not the original artifact; stock photo.

There must be a million of these things around the property; Murphy, the serial killer cat, brings them to me daily, mostly dead and sort of pretty.

Deer of The Week, I wish. They've exfoliated a huge jade plant and are munching ground cover that just started to fill in.

Sheep o' The Week, from the collection.

Gloria and Gene FXN

 

Part 1 is here
Part 2 is here
Part 3 is here
Part 4 is here

Chicago, 1937
In multiple-kid families, you can see a range of shared and specific variations on the theme of the parents’ DNA. All four of Lydia and Howard’s offspring inherited their father’s prominent, pointy chin; the younger three also got his dark wavy hair and deep brown eyes. A pair of recessive genes, one from each of her parents, made the eldest, Doris Gene, the only blue-eyed  blonde within memory on either side of the family. In the third child, Gloria, a different pair of recessive genes was expressed as a mutation in gene FXN residing on chromosome 9. This couldn't be seen, and its effects took several years to emerge.

The little Tatros were urban kids who did most of their running around in Hamilton Park, where their mother accompanied them daily, pushing the current baby in the worn wicker pram purchased back in the days before Lydia figured out how babies get born. At about the time that the youngest, Jackie, was getting old enough to clamber out of the carriage and start toddling to the park under her own steam, Gloria was suddenly,  unaccountably clumsy, lagging during the 3-block walk and sometimes tripping over her feet when Lydia gave the OK for the kids to tear across the grass to the playground.

At first, Lydia thought it might a weird phase, some temporary glitch in the so-far seamless development of the children that delighted and exhausted her in equal measure. But it wasn’t temporary. Gloria was pale, and she tired easily. Smart, sweet and heretofore healthy, she was not a kid who complained, but something was clearly wrong. When she had a nasty fall and cut her scalp, Lydia took her to the hospital to get stitched up and talked to the doctors about her concerns. Gloria was hospitalized for days of tests. When Howard and Lydia were summoned for the results, they were told that their daughter was suffering from a disease that neither of them had even heard of. It had someone else's name, but Gloria had inherited it from them. There was no cure.

Friedreich’s ataxia is a wasting neurological disorder that results in the inability to coordinate voluntary muscle movements—that’s the ataxia part, caused by degeneration of nerve tissue in the spinal cord and the nerves extending to the arms and legs. Mental capacity is undiminished. Gloria’s mind would continue to develop, but her body would grow weaker and weaker. She would lose the ability to walk as her muscles deteriorated.
Of the host of medical problems associated with the disorder, heart disease is the worst. At age 5, Gloria's heart was already damaged, said the doctors. Her parents were told not to expect her to live to adulthood. Hearing these words, terrible beyond telling, Lydia reached out for Howard. Although his body could still be seen in the chair next to hers, the rest of him was in fact far away and would not be coming back, ever. Howard was already gone, for good; what remained for him now was refining the details of how to leave his wife and children, as soon as possible, before things got really tough.

Two Sisters and a Husband

     Howard and Lydia's children, the year their Auntie Mabel moved in.

Part One is here
Part Two is here
Part Three is here

Chicago, 1933-34
Five years of marriage and motherhood notwithstanding, Lydia, at 21, was a young woman with remarkably limited knowledge of the world beyond the neighborhood where she’d lived all her life. Her formal education had ended after fewer than two years of high school, and her career as a shop girl ended with her first pregnancy. She had her hands full with three kids under the age of four years living a small apartment in the days before preschool, play groups or daycare, with no helpful grannies to pick up the slack. When her younger sister Mabel joined her household, Lydia was expected to function in loco parentis to a girl who’d entered adolescence with even less attention and affection than she herself had known.

Lack of life experience is one possible explanation why Lydia did not think it odd when, a few weeks after Mabel’s arrival, Howard invited her sister to sleep with them in their bed (the sofa was so narrow and lumpy); other possibilities would have to include stunning stupidity or simply exhausted distraction.

The kids slept in one bedroom. The three (sort of) adults shared a double bed in the other. Lydia’s place on the crowded mattress was in the middle, an inconvenient spot from which to respond to the nighttime needs of little children. If the kids were fussy or sick she’d curl up on Doris’ bed in the nursery, which was a lot more convenient than climbing over the sleeping bodies of her husband or sister again and again.

Maybe Mabel, at 16, was as ignorant of human sexuality as her older sister had been at about that age, or maybe, unmoored and un-mothered, she simply responded to sorely needed physical affection. Howard’s age and far greater experience—he was an adult, married, and the father of three children—gave him a lot more to answer for. If deflowering his orphaned underage sister-in-law in the marital bed while his wife tended to their children in the next room might possibly be seen as an act of spontaneous sexual combustion, keeping the ensuing affair at a steady burn definitely required ongoing thought and a certain amount of effort.
Mabel now cut classes to ride along on Howard’s delivery routes, sitting on the jump seat in the front of the van and chatting with her smartly uniformed lover while the truant officer pounded on the door of the Vincennes Avenue apartment, demanding from the harried Mrs. Tatro an explanation as to why her sister wasn’t at school—again.

At home in the apartment, Mabel was increasingly cheeky, stealing her sister’s lipstick and rolling her eyes when Lydia yelled about her playing hooky. She yelled right back while Lydia lined up the kids and fed them their dinners, gave them their baths and buttoned them into their jammies.  Howard, declining to support his wife’s admittedly shaky advocacy of a high school education, took to nipping down to the corner social club for a boilermaker or two, waiting until the shrieking died down before venturing back, very late, to slip into the bed he shared with both girls. Variations of this scene were repeated nightly, for months, without the true source of tension in the household being unidentified.

Howard was apparently so confident of Lydia’s continuing cluelessness about his affair with her sister that he scarcely bothered with a credible excuse when he asked for her wedding ring. “I’m going to take it to the jeweler’s for cleaning,” he said, and sure enough she pulled off the narrow gold band and handed it to him without question.

But the outer limits of Lydia’s vast naïveté were finally breached when Mabel returned to the apartment one evening soon after, wearing the ring on the third finger of her left hand. The younger girl’s face was ashen, her gait wobbly, and she was bleeding heavily into thick cotton wadding packed between her legs.

In 1932, medical termination of pregnancy was legally sanctioned if the mother’s life was in danger—or, more loosely, if the birth of a baby was a matter of life and death. In an era when orphanages were filled with kids whose parents could not provide for them, practical application of the law reflected the indisputable truth that if a pregnant married woman stated that she could not feed another mouth, it was indeed a matter of life and death. Sympathetic doctors would provide these women with relatively safe medical abortions for a relatively modest fee. The salient modifier here is "married." The harsh realities of life in the Great Depression may have turned married women with unwelcome pregnancies into figures deemed worthy of discreet sympathy and affordable medical terminations, but unmarried pregnant women were still, as ever, simply sluts for whom the risk of back-alley abortions was but one of the just wages of sin.

So Mabel became “Mrs. Howard Tatro” for one unforgettable day. A doctor listened as the young couple—and the missus did look awfully young, twisting her wedding ring and weeping as the husband held his arm around her shoulders in stoic support—explained they already had three young ones, and could not afford to support another. The doctor agreed that it was a matter of life and death, and Mabel’s pregnancy was terminated in his office that afternoon. Afterward, Howard drove her back to the apartment in his delivery van and disappeared, leaving his wife to care for her sister, who was badly shaken, bleeding, and in a lot of pain.  As Lydia belatedly connected the dots and choked out her outrage, Mabel became hysterical. She refused to take off Lydia’s wedding ring: she was Howard’s true wife, she said. Howard loves me, not you, she told Lydia defiantly. She would get pregnant again and Howard would divorce Lydia and marry her. Just wait and see.

Lydia, galvanized into action at long last, didn’t wait to see anything. She threw Mabel out of the apartment. Mabel, pounding on the door with diminishing vigor, continued sobbing about Howard, but Lydia, her frightened babies bawling and gripping the hem of her skirt like sucker fish, stood fast. Pretty soon the neighbors started pounding on walls, too, and Mabel left, making her way to Aunt Ems’ boarding house, where she collapsed and refused to talk about what had happened. Howard stayed away for several days; Lydia didn’t know if he would ever come back.

In stark legal fact, 24-year-old Howard’s seduction and subsequent impregnation of a 16-year old girl were criminal acts under the statutory rape laws of the state of Illinois. In most families, the fact that the girl was his orphaned sister-in-law seeking shelter in his home would mean at the very least he’d have some explaining to do. The way it played out on Vincennes Avenue, where selected members of the extended family gathered to deal with the crisis, a minority share of responsibility for the affair was apportioned to Lydia, whose husband might not have strayed if she’d been more attentive to his needs. The bulk of the blame was placed on 16-year-old Mabel, whose pregnancy, terminated or not, was incontrovertible evidence of flagrant immorality. The identity of the father was not really the point. If before she was simply out of control, now she was tainted by illicit sex. It was feared that, unchecked, she might continue sleeping her way into full-fledged sluthood, and her life would be irrevocably ruined.

Therefore, Aunt Em, Mabel’s legal guardian, filled out the forms that consigned her to a facility whose straightforward, descriptive name said it all: The Home For Wayward Girls. Mabel was incarcerated there until her eighteenth birthday. Her sisters, Lydia included, visited her at the Home on weekends and holidays. Sometimes Lydia brought the kids along, too. Howard, as per his agreement with his wife, stayed away.

At the time, Howard pretty much got a pass on his enormous betrayal of his family, the logic being that men are slaves to their needs, and anyway he had three children and a wife to support. Would good would legal consequences serve? Better to at least try to forgive, even if forgetting seemed highly unlikely.

Not surprisingly, the women could do neither.  The brief Howard-Lydia-Mabel triangle would shape a volatile, endlessly re-igniting dynamic between the sisters that was characterized by bitter, fierce affection and operatic acts of revenge; they carried their pain and anger over Howard intact to their graves. But in the immediate aftermath of the affair, Mabel was out of the picture and Lydia and Howard’s marriage was patched up with promises and pressure from the family. Within a year Lydia bore her fourth child: Jacqueline Lee, held here by Howard's father Oscar.

                                                                                                                                                           

Wednesday Rotogravure: Another Teenage Wedding

I come from a long line of women who marry young. It was a great evolutionary leap forward when both my daughters waited to wed until they were old enough to legally drink (and then some.) Here is my paternal grandmother, Julia, 19, at her wedding to Antony, 22.

One of the striking things about old photographs is how dressed up people were. Answerjack is 3 years old here; he looks like he's being raised by gangsters.

Another dapper fellow, posed on a coveted status symbol in occupied Japan: his own car. This is Takagi, friend and mentor to Jack when he lived in Tokyo as a military brat in the '50s.

They're still friends. This photo was taken last year at Takagi-san's house in Yokohama.

Accessories make the man. John at Ravi and Megumi's.

Mommy drinks while Natalia texts.

Favorite new cocktail, made with Calvados and St. Germain—I'll post the recipe next week.

This might explain the apparently inexhaustible supply of doofus bugs in the house.

Deer of The Week.

Sheep o' The Week, from the collection.