No Regrets

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.

                                                                                                                                                           

At Home With the Tatros

Lydia,age 16; Howard,age 19; the infant Doris and their chums Irma and Jack in 1929

Part 1 is here
Part 2 is here
Lydia's labor produced not the son she was sure she was carrying but a suitably adorable and precocious baby girl: my mother, Doris Gene Tatro. Her middle name was given in honor of Howard’s favorite sister Lillian Jean, a teeny tiny gay woman known to all as Gene. Howard’s elder by a decade or so, Aunt Gene had been a dancer in Los Angeles before returning to settle down in Chicago at about the time the baby was born. She wore child-sized Capezio ballet slippers with trousers, or jodhpurs with tall leather boots, rakish in her wind-blown bob and frequently photographed holding a cigarette and/or riding crop.
Gene adored her brother, was kind to Lydia and crazy in love with the baby. She had a little De Vry camera with which she took most of the photographs documenting the young family’s early years.
Doris’ baby pictures show an endearingly big-headed bald baby held by a spindly-armed teenager with bee-stung lips,  spit curls, and modish low-waisted dresses. A family photo taken that July on the tiny back porch of the Vincennes Avenue apartment shows 20-year-old Howard, darkly handsome in rolled-up sleeves and a bow tie, holding their 5-month-old daughter, fists clenched, to face Aunt Gene’s camera.

                Big Howard, Doris, and Lydia, July 1929

Lydia looks a tad peaked in the heat. It’s around her 17th birthday, and this time, presumably, she knows what her morning sickness means.
Lydia gave birth to two more babies while still in her teens: Howard Ronald, born in 1930, and Gloria Lydia Mabel, born in 1931. Big Howard went from driving taxis to driving trucks around the city for a private delivery service, which gave his little family a secure income even as the bread lines and soup kitchens spawned by the Great Depression became fixtures of the national landscape. It also gave him a spiffy uniform with a tailored, cropped jacket, jodhpurs and a smart visored cap.
Aunt Gene's photos from these years show a series of babies, a new one each summer, posed on blankets spread on the grass at nearby Hamilton Park. There are also several of the three little kids, stripped down to sun suits, posed in a cart pulled by a patient, photogenic goat brought around by an itinerant photographer.

Little Howard, Gloria and Doris in 1933.

The young Tatros set about raising their kids in the working-class South Side neighborhood where Lydia and Howard had grown up, kind of, and gotten married. Lydia’s Aunt Em ran her boarding house nearby, and Howard’s parents lived around the corner. Aunt Gene was around a lot. She had a bit of discretionary income that she spent on small gifts for the kids, and she’d sew outfits for the girls on a cunning little electric sewing machine that fit into a custom leather case no larger than a purse.
 Lydia’s older sisters Della and Violet drifted in and out of the picture according to the exigencies of their own lives. It’s probable that the first signs of the serious problems that characterized their mature years—Del was an alcoholic, and Vi endured repeated hospitalizations for what used to be called manic depression—showed up in their early adulthoods, which might explain why it fell to Lyd, still a teenager herself, to provide a home for her younger sister Mabel when the girl announced that she was done with scrubbing floors at Aunt Em’s.
Mabel was 16 years old, commonly acknowledged as the prettiest of the sisters and frequently truant from the same high school from which Lydia had dropped out a few years earlier. It was thought that she might help Lydia with the kids, who were 1, 2, and 3 years old. And so she moved out of her shared room at the boardinghouse into Howard and Lydia’s two-bedroom apartment, where Lydia cleared out a couple of drawers for her little sister's stuff, and told her she was welcome to sleep on their sofa, which Mabel did, at first.

 

Lydia Finds Out How Babies Get Born

Part One is here.
Chicago, 1929

In the olden days, first-time mothers-to-be learned about childbirth from their own mothers and other female relatives, or from friends who’d already had babies. Sixteen-year-old Lydia did not have access to these sources of empirical wisdom: her mother was dead, her aunt was a spinster, her mother-in-law was remote and flinty, and her sisters had not yet married. Her peers were juniors in high school. Trying on her own to find out what she was in for, she enrolled in prenatal classes at the local public health clinic where nurses in starched white uniforms and jaunty little caps spent a lot of time stressing the importance of keeping Baby to a clockwork schedule and handed out pages of instructions for the hygienic mixing, decanting and dispensing of Baby’s formula. The mysterious mechanics of labor and delivery were dismissed with the promise that the modern Mother would be fast asleep when the stork arrived.

Absent hard facts or a biology textbook, Lydia extrapolated a birth scenario based on wishful thinking,  the nurses' vague assurances, and what she’d observed in her body as her pregnancy progressed. A mysterious line, faint at first and gradually darkening, had appeared in the center of her lower abdomen, tracing a trail from her pubis to her comically distended belly button. This line looked a lot like the cutting guide on the paper dressmaking patterns she remembered her mother using long ago. She figured it must serve a similar function in human reproduction: cut here to get the baby out. Lydia went through her pregnancy convinced that modern medicine had rendered childbirth a painless surgical event. When her baby was ready to be born, she’d check into the hospital and be eased into a deep sleep. The baby would be extracted, and she’d wake up tucked in bed wearing her new cerise satin bed jacket. A nurse would bring in her infant son—she was sure she was carrying a boy—and place him in her arms as her husband looked on in supportive wonder. During her 10-day stay in the maternity ward her meals would be served on a tray in her bed, and the nurses would show her how to feed, burp and change the baby.

Lydia thought she was a thoroughly prepared mother-to-be when she went into labor on an iron-gray afternoon in late February. Returning from the market feeling cranky and cramp-ish, she dragged herself up the stairs to her apartment and felt a warm seep of liquid dribble down her legs as she fumbled for the keys. The cramps immediately increased in intensity. She made her way slowly back down the stairs to use the pay phone at the corner drugstore to call Howard’s shift boss at the cab company. Notified via radio that his baby was on the way, Howard hurried across town to take his wife to Woodlawn Hospital, where he was directed to the smoke-filled fathers’ waiting room while Lydia, seated in a wheelchair, was pushed through a series of swinging doors to what she assumed would be an operating room with doctors standing by to remove her baby. She was led instead to a large, brightly lit room with neat rows of high narrow cots lining the walls. These beds were filled with women, panting and writhing through an animal din of bleats and grunts. Looking at and listening to what was going on around her as she was wheeled to her own cot, Lydia realized, belatedly, what the word “labor” meant.

She also realized how far off the mark she’d in believing that childbirth was a passive surgical event. She watched incredulously as a woman in a nearby cot, her face livid and contorted, strained to pass the enormous heaving bulk in her belly out between her legs while lying on her back. She was not asleep. Extraordinary sounds issued from between the woman’s clenched teeth. Lydia saw a nurse with rolled-up sleeves and rubber gloves thrust her arm between the woman’s splayed-out legs. Stripping off the bloodied gloves, she pronounced the woman “ready to be taken to delivery.” Still pushing and grunting, the woman was wheeled out of the room, bed and all, by a couple of orderlies.

That was how babies got born? Lydia was terrified. She had questions, a lot of them, but they went unanswered as the attendant took away her  clothes and the little suitcase containing her pretty bed jacket, and helped her into an ugly hospital gown, pausing when the pains bent her in half. What kind of shape would she be in, down there, after forcing a whole baby through such a tiny little space?  What was that dark line for, anyway? And where was the goddamn ether?  She had been promised she would not have to encounter the stork face-to-face. “Not yet, Dear,” the nurses told her when she begged to be put to sleep, and when she began to thrash about they buckled sheepskin-lined straps around her wrists and ankles, put up the side rails of her bed and placed metal-framed screens with curtained insets between her and the other women. Alone and immobilized, flat on her back, she could no longer see her fellow modern Mothers, but she could hear them well enough. In those days, screaming and/or groaning until the ice-fumed ether was administered  moments before the baby was expelled were entirely acceptable options that many laboring women chose to exercise, Lydia included.

It Was a Teenage Wedding, and the Old Folks Wished Them Well

Lydia and Howard, husband and wife, ages 15 and 18. She looks a little like Bristol Palin in this picture—odd.

Chicago, 1928
It’s an understandable assumption that a literal or figurative shotgun must be involved in the wedding of a 15-year-old-girl and an 18-year old boy. My grandma Lydia maintained, adamantly, that firearms played no role in her marriage to Howard, the grandfather I never met. She was backed up both by the calendar and by her grimly comic account of the shock of their wedding night —“You want to put it where?” she’d gasped in disbelief—which rang true in the telling 60 years later, over a pretty swell lunch on the terrace of Tra Vigne on a breezy blue day in the Napa Valley.
Lydia Emma Harrison was a sophomore in high school, deep in the throes of her first real romance, when her widowed father died of alcohol-related causes in early 1928. Her boyfriend was a 18-year-old taxicab driver, the beneficiary of a minor genetic windfall that gave him a weak strain of the slow-burn stare and swarthy good looks of the insanely popular Rudolph Valentino. The only surviving son in a family of much older sisters, Howard Albert Tatro had been born in his mother’s early forties after his father swore off gambling and girlfriends and converted to Christian Science. Howard took Lydia home to meet mom and dad: Oscar, dignified and devout, white-haired but instantly identifiable as the source of Howard’s matinee-idol looks; and Lily, a famously dour and taciturn woman who, family lore claimed, could cause the sun to cower behind a cloud by stepping outside for a breath of air.
The Tatro household was quiet and well-ordered. The bedroom of the Tatro’s eldest, Lloyd, was preserved intact years after an appalling accident at the railroad switchyard where both father and son worked; a promise made in the last moments of Lloyd’s life as Oscar held what was left of him in his arms, waiting for the irrelevant ambulance, transformed the older man from a philandering lapsed Catholic given to monumental displays of foul temper into a steadfast family man with a convert’s zeal for Christian Science.
Howard was charming and cheerful and paid a lot of attention to Lydia, qualities in a male that were unique in her experience. Oscar, having earned his gold watch and a full pension from the Wabash Railroad, rose early each morning, put on a suit and bow tie, and set out for the Christian Science Reading Room, returning at dinnertime with a rolled-up copy of the Christian Science Monitor tucked under his arm. Neither father nor son consumed beer by the bucket, another very attractive trait in a man.
  Although Lily had long ago exhausted her scant reserves of maternal instinct and affection, she was not unkind, and together she and Lydia would wash and dry the supper dishes in companionable silence while Howard and Oscar listened to the radio in the parlor. It was an environment which, if not exactly overflowing with warmth, was at least more conducive to a girl’s getting her homework done than the privacy-impaired crush at the boarding house where Lydia lived with her sisters and her auntie, or the sour and solitary apartment in which her father, drapes drawn and bed unmade, had set about drinking himself to death. Lydia spent so much time at the Tatro house that when she was orphaned there was a weird logic to her to moving in as Howard’s wife. The grown-ups arranged it all. Armed with a note of permission from Auntie Em and accompanied by Oscar, the teens were married before a judge at the Cook County Courthouse on April 15, 1928. Lydia dropped out of high school before the end of her sophomore year.

 Oscar, Lydia and Howard, April 15, 1928

Absent a mother (hers had died when she was 12) to take her aside and impart the basics of mammal biology and lacking the edifying gossip of high school harlots, Lydia was left to navigate the rocky shoals of human sexuality on her own. She must have recovered from her shock at Howard’s bizarre request and gotten the hang of it, because by early summer, Lydia had developed a brand-new set of great big bosoms and the distressing habit of vomiting her breakfast into the gutter as she waited for the bus to take her to her job at Woolworth’s in the Loop. If Lily, a woman of few words, noticed anything different about her daughter-in-law she kept it to herself.

One morning, a fellow commuter described by Lydia as a “nice older Negro lady” put her arm around the girl's heaving shoulders and helped her wipe her face. Lydia, grateful for the attention, leaned against her and wondered aloud whatever could be wrong with her—she was so tired all the time and couldn’t keep her breakfast down. Lydia’s new friend threw back her head and laughed, telling her, with a quick squeeze, “Baby, you gonna have a baby.”

A baby! This was thrilling news. Queasy but pleased, Lydia turned 16 during the first trimester of her pregnancy. During the next few months the young couple moved out of Howard’s folks’ place and into their own apartment on Vincennes Avenue. They bought a gorgeous wicker baby carriage, a crib, and a big deep kettle with racks to sterilize bottles for scientific baby feeding. The nice lady at the bus stop kept an eye on Lydia, asking after her health and complimenting her on the roses in her cheeks as her pregnancy progressed, until Lydia's belly blo0med out so big that she had to quit her job and stay home to await the birth of her baby.

Next: Lydia Finds Out How Babies Get Born

Bell-Shaped Curve

Gretchen, 1971
We’ve all had friends unlucky enough to be picked off early on the trek toward the steep slope of mortality’s bell-shaped curve—young people dead from improbable illnesses, or overdoses, or car crashes. The wrenching tragedy of early death carries with it a touch of the bizarre, being far enough out of the norm that we can place it in roughly the same category as spontaneously bursting into flames while walking down the street—something really awful that is most likely not going to happen to you.
As we rack up the years, we realize death is going to happen to us. Peer death becomes less uncommon, if still bizarrely random: the fit fifty-something athletes whose hearts give out in mid-stride at the gym (I’ve known three); the friends and friends of friends felled by malignancies, by aneurysms, by post-polio syndrome. Last week I knew five in that group; this week I know six.
Gretchen left the Bay Area in 2001. When it became apparent that her multiple sclerosis was progressing, her husband took an early retirement and they bought a big cushy RV, taking off cross-country while she still had mobility. We spent an evening with them before they left: drinks at our house in Sausalito and then dinner down on the Bay with more chums from the olden days, a gently festive gathering under the shadow of a threat to one of our own. Getting ready for bed that night, Answerjack, who’d just met Gretchen for the first time, said sadly, “Your friend is hosed,” which is guard-down doctor-speak for “The prognosis for your friend is poor.” Sometimes I wish I had married a plumber, or a poet.
After more than a year on the road, Gretchen and Glenn settled in Sandpoint, Idaho, and I lost touch with them during the stretch of time that Answer and I had 10 different addresses on either coast. Uncle Bill, the BMW-riding yenta of the group going back to the ‘60s, kept in touch with her and would report back to all. The news about her health was never good. Several months ago Gretchen got news that was very bad indeed: a diagnosis of laryngeal cancer. And then she was dead.
Now that my demographic has been assembled at the base camp of the steep section of that bell-shaped curve, the death of a peer has taken on a different meaning. It’s impossible not to have a heightened sense of our collective mortality. And collectively, my generation is responding to this increased awareness in a predictably self-absorbed way.  James Wolcott notes in his article Final-Exit Strategies that the growing canon of best-selling death-lit turns the demise of our peers into a teaching moment (Tuesdays with Morrie), motivational tool (The Last Lecture), and sales pitch  (those bucket-list books of things to do before you go)—all at a profit.
I’m committed to avoiding this part of the Zeitgeist, because there’s something vampiric (as well as colossally narcissistic) about grubbing for personal growth among the remains of someone else’s life. Because our friends do not die for our edification, and their last words should not be converted into downstream revenue dams. Because the job of the living is not to take from the dead, but to give witness, and remember. Because the Angel of Death is not a life coach.
So: Gretchen, I was glad to know you. I have some great memories and one or two sucky ones; all in all a good run. You could not have asked for truer friends or a better mate. You deserved better health and better luck, and, of course, more time. Safe journey, amiga.

That's all.

The Things That Went With Her

The cove at Point Diablo

One of the saddest things about funerals is that the person for whom the occasion would have been most meaningful is not around to enjoy it. This applies to even low-key non-funerals, like the simple ceremony we had for my mother when we scattered her ashes at sea under an uncertain sky on what would have been her 80th birthday.

Absent religious and social imperatives, memorial observances can pretty much be whatever the living want them to be. We wanted Doris’ to be simple—she’d been anti-funeral her entire life—and authentic. I’ve been to funerals that were used as vehicles to settle scores, rewrite history and assuage guilt. I’ve been to services presided over by officiants who, never having met the decedent in life, resorted to plug-and-play platitudes that could just as easily been applied to the loss of a pet. We wanted to do better for our mother, and we did.

In 1992, we scattered my father's ashes from the shore near Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge—an act which was then, as it is now, illegal, although in those days there was a tacit agreement that the statute was not enforced. Post 9/11, the entire area around the Golden Gate Bridge is closely monitored by Homeland Security, the Coast Guard and the National Park Service. You can’t get near the spot where we released Roman’s ashes. My mother did not know this when she stipulated, in her will, that her ashes be scattered in the same place.

So we compromised by chartering a sailboat large enough to carry our immediate family through the Golden Gate. Mum’s ashes had been flown from Florida, bearing special papers of transit but still subject to multiple x-rays. We had a tiny portion of my father’s ashes, saved 17 years ago to be mingled with hers when the time came. Boarding the boat, we also brought a basket of homegrown tulips planted in the weeks between her diagnosis and death last fall, along with a conch shell, my parents’ wedding rings, and, of course, our own specific sorrows.

From the boxes and boxes of mementi we found in her house, we pulled a few brittle love letters exchanged by our impossibly young parents (they married when she was 19 and he was 23.) These we tucked into the conch shell. We also found the gold ribbon that had been tied around the stems of the carnations we tossed into the Bay when we scattered my father’s ashes; we used it to knot together their wedding rings and put them inside the shell, too. My sister Chris figured out that if we put the shell in a bed of ice and tied it inside a square of silk, it would bob about for a bit before sinking.

Past the Golden Gate, at Diablo Cove, we tossed the shell in its shroud off the starboard. A pod of harbor seals watched with us as it floated, a ghostly golden jellyfish with tendrils of whisper-weight silk. We each took our turn going to the bow with a handful of ashes and a tulip: fine gray particulate and scarlet, yellow, and royal purple flowers.

Answerjack read aloud a poem from the back page of my parents’ wedding album, old school irony-free and perfectly appropriate:

“Now the rite is duly done,
Now the word is spoken,
And the spell has made us one
Which may ne’er be broken;
Rest we, dearest, in our home,
Roam we o’er the heather;
We shall rest and we shall roam,
Shall we not, together.

"From this hour the summer rose
Sweeter breathes to charm us;
From this hour the winter snows
Lighter fall to harm us.
Fair or foul—on land or sea—
Came the wind or weather,
Best and worst, what e’er they be
We shall share together.”     

—Winthrop Praed

We could not satisfy, to the letter, our mother's wish to be at our father’s site. Fort Point is at the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge and sailors are loath to tempt the South Tower Demon of rocks and capricious winds. But my brother Dave scattered the rest of her ashes, mingled with our father’s, from the stern as we passed back beneath the center of the bridge. The conch shell drifted to the bottom of an alien ocean, the seals resumed their play, and the kids poured and passed Prosecco. We wiped our eyes and drank a toast to Doris, our mother and grandmother, who did enjoy a nice glass of bubbly on special occasions.

Red Purse

Shortly before leaving Florida for Jessica and John’s wedding in September, my mother bought a new purse, bright red faux leather with a little gold-plated plaque stitched to the outside: “Strada,” which on the planet of handbags rhymes with—well, you know. She was pleased with her purchase and its vague designer connotations, and showed it off at a family dinner before the big event. Red was definitely her color.
When she was hospitalized  in Jacksonville a couple of weeks later, the red purse became my responsibility. I’d take it with me when I left her bedside for the night and bring it back when I returned the next morning, early enough to catch her doctors on their rounds. She didn’t really need it at the hospital, but a purse is a key female accoutrement, decorative and functional, and it was filled with her important stuff: insurance information and credit cards and an eyebrow pencil and medical appointment reminders filed neatly in her wallet. A picture of her with my father, dead these 16 years.
After she was discharged, the red purse stayed on her nightstand at home. She’d reach into it to hand me the keys to her Buick as I headed out the door to pick up prescriptions or dog food or Cherry Garcia ice cream. My sister Chris rigged a woven basket to our mother’s walker; in went the red purse when Mom left the house for outpatient tests and procedures. The stuff inside was still important: Medicare ID, her checkbook, a hair pick to fluff up her ‘do, Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow lipstick. She took the purse with her into the lawyer’s office when she signed the papers finalizing her will the day before Thanksgiving.
Less than 48 hours later, the purse and its contents were artifacts of a vanished life. Little bits inside in the purse had brief half-lives of waning relevance: credit cards that needed to be canceled, the phone numbers on reminder cards for appointments she could not keep. Then it all meant nothing at all.
I felt like a little kid playing in her mommy’s purse as I went through all the formerly important stuff inside. I twirled up the lipstick, its tip worn to the shape of her lips, and sniffed its familiar scent. I noted the coins and the five-dollar bill in her wallet. The keys to the Buick went on a hook shaped like a mermaid near the door to her garage, handy to grab if any of us needed to run errands as we started the process of sorting through her things and preparing her house for sale. Emptied, the red purse went up on the high shelf in her closet, ready to be given away with her clothing when we can bear to make the call.

The really important stuff, which has nothing to do with her purse or any other thing, I took with me back to California. I get to keep it, forever.
Here is a picture of my mother Doris on our deck in Marin County at Jessica and John's wedding, September 20, 2008. She died peacefully at home in Florida on November 28. She was a few months shy of her 80th birthday. Safe journey, Mum.

"...There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've gone, it's good."

—Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish Part I

 

Shelter: Repurposed Spaces

"Urban Amaryllis" Cynthia Romanov 2007
Answerjack and I had dinner at Quince, a lovely restaurant surrounded by attractive and insanely expensive Victorians in what is now identified as Lower Pacific Heights. Quince occupies a space that used to be a laundromat, where long, long ago I had all my underwear stolen by that kinky bogeyman of urban legend, The Panty Thief. I lived around the corner on Bush (no wisecracks, please), between Octavia and Laguna, which in those days was a slum, albeit a well-kept one—it was considered part of Japantown then, and those tiny women in mama-san aprons sweeping the sidewalks in front of their low-rent flats guilt-tripped everyone else into doing so, too.
Robert and I rented a crumbling, classic pre-earthquake two-flat across the street from the Go Club, one of three proximate structures that formerly housed the San Francisco Zen Center. Our flatmates were fellow students of  J. Donald Walters, AKA Swami Kriyananda, who was about to claim his 15 minutes 40 years of fame by energetically boinking an 18-year-old devotee in an ashram loo while a crowd of about-to-be-ex followers stood on the other side of the rattling door, desperately hoping to be stricken deaf. Six of us shared the rambling full-floor flats, keeping the nicest room free for Kriyananda's use when he was in town; Robert and I slept in the front parlor of the lower flat, which had a bay window on Bush framing a procession of preternaturally intense old men in long coats and fedoras, go masters who came and went at at all hours.
Beneath our room, in the unfinished basement, a boy left behind by the Zen people lived in a squat that was as close to a burrow in the ground that one could inhabit without having claws and a spatulate snout. Accessed through a narrow space under the sagging back porch, it had a sloped, bare earth floor and a single high window. No plumbing. Through an arrangement brokered by the departing Zen Center-ites, he used the bathroom in a flat next door. He was nocturnal and extremely skittish, but said to be harmless. I told the Zen people I’d keep an eye on him, but I never once saw his face, only his shadow as he moved between the buildings late at night.
One night, or perhaps during the day, he hanged himself from the rafters beneath our bedroom, finishing the job he’d started by slashing his wrists. I opened our door just past midnight to the Kabuki-pale Zen Center acolyte who had discovered the boy's body and was going into shock. I sat him down and bundled him in blankets, then called for help. There was no 911 in those days; I dialed the operator and asked for the police.

Neighbors we'd never met were rousted out of their beds by the sirens and stood stunned and shivering in the fog: Japanese murmuring Buddhist and Shinto prayers; Catholics crossing themselves; my quasi-Hindu house mates chanting in bad Sanskrit; the go masters silent and impassive. The boy’s body was cut down, wrapped in a canvas shroud, buckled onto a gurney and loaded into an ambulance, which drove away quietly. It was over in an hour, but the crowd on the sidewalk lingered, invoking the names of various deities long into the night. Inside, I dragged our mattress to the other side of the room, away from the joists where the corpse had hung a foot or so beneath our heads, but I did not sleep that night, or for many nights afterward.

Within a month everyone in our two flats moved away. Robert and I rented a tiny bungalow in the Excelsior, and a few months later I was pregnant with our first child. We had been witnesses to a terrible thing, but we were young, with our lives still ahead of us, and, in time, we forgot about it.
Thirty-seven years later, buoyed by an extravagant meal, Answerjack and I stroll down Bush Street between Octavia and Laguna. He always has a hard time believing me when I insist that once upon a time, it was possible for regular people, young people, even poor people to make their homes in San Francisco, and on this evening, eying the block of perfect photo-op houses, the distant, affordable past seems like a dubious rumor to me, too.
We pause in front of 1814 and 1816 Bush. After massive infusions of cash and good taste, the building is undeniably beautiful. Zillow.com values each flat at $1.8 million—I looked it up. There is something new: a basement apartment, accessed through a cute little front patio. It’s got bay windows that match the originals upstairs. A wreath of dried flowers hangs on the door, which is flanked by boxwood topiaries. Lights glow through the curtains. It looks warm and inviting. It looks like a home. At that moment, in "Lower Pacific Heights," I understand just how thoroughly a neighborhood obliterates all traces of its previous identities—and its former inhabitants—as it evolves.The hovel with ominous dark stains on its bare-earth floor becomes an elegant garden apartment, the funky neighborhood fills with tony shops and restaurants, and the flats that rented for $112 a month morph into TIC units worth millions of dollars. The mama-sans, go masters, seekers, squatters and charlatans all move on, taking their memories with them, and a crazy sad boy's death falls through the cracks, as did his life. And one evening, after a meal that cost twice the monthly rent of those long-ago flats, I pause to retrieve, however briefly, the memory of him and as I dust him off he reminds me, quite insistently, how very much my world has changed. Only the fog is the same.