No Regrets

Robert and Alain, Part 5: The End, and The Beginning

Part 1, Robert Meets Alain, is here
Part 2, Circles and Lines, is here
Part 3, Under the Bigtop, is here
Part 4, An Invitation to Tea, is here

San Francisco, 1982

The task of maintaining the Münchhausen-scale fantasy of The Center for the Unity of All Mankind now fell to just four people. The life-support medium was the journal All One: as long as the remaining micro-cultists were kept busy spinning about on tasks supporting the journal's self-publication, conversation could continue about Alain being at the epicenter of an expansion of human consciousness. That estate in the Napa Valley might yet materialize; world leaders, eager for guidance, could be queuing up in the wings. Artists-in-residence could still be visualized, obediently creating to The Center’s spiritual and aesthetic standards. Archimedes the goat, the Center’s planned mascot, might yet gambol in grassy pastures. And perhaps George Lucas might stop wasting his time on those silly Star Wars films to turn his attention to Alain’s movie-making ideas.

Or not.

After countless revisions, the premiere issue of All One—Alain’s thoughts about how mankind could expand its consciousness through an institute under his direction—was sent, gratis, to a carefully calibrated mailing list, mostly gleaned from Krishnamurti's organization. When interest did not ensue and it became apparent that cash contributions would not be forthcoming, All One sank quickly, pulling the chimerical Center for the Unity of All Mankind in with it as it went under. When the waters closed over the roiling mess, the micro-cult itself had vanished, too.

Blame for the failure of The Center for the Unity of All Mankind to manifest was subtly but surely apportioned during Sacrosanct Wednesdays, which Robert duly recorded in dismaying detail. The narrative was underscored by the high thin whine of knives being sharpened in the distance. Soon, each of the four remaining micro-cultists was summoned, in turn, to Alain's home. These were the unreconstructed loyalists, hard-shell true believers who had made Alain the singular focus of their inner lives for more than a decade. There was virtually nothing about them that he did not know through the roles he'd claimed over the years—guru, father figure, confessor, psychotherapist, physician, and sole, bottom-line authority on the correct interpretation of life’s mysteries. Now he called forth and laid bare the most intimate and profound of their past confidences, serving up their errors and shortcomings as proof of their lack of worth as he formally “gave up” on them.

In most irreparable relationship breaches—divorces, family feuds, business deals gone south—there is equal opportunity for bad behavior by both sides. Each party knows where the other is most vulnerable and can decide whether, and where, to attack. This was not the case with Alain's unilateral exit interviews. For many years, he had enforced full, intensely personal disclosure to him by setting himself up as the ultimate authority on everything. This flow of intimate information was entirely one-way; he exercised extraordinary caution to keep details about his own life secret. After 11 years none of us knew why Alain left Krishnamurti’s service, what happened to the concert career that began with such promise, why he was so squirrely about sex, or any other personal information as might generally be imparted over the course of 11 years of extended contact and hundreds of shared meals. He told us, over and over again, only what was consistent with the powers he'd assumed: that his was a deeper understanding of life, that he knew much more than we. That we should trust his superior wisdom over our own judgment. That we should trust him.

Some did, a few much more than the rest. Robert, of course, was in the latter cohort. The betrayals he and others described and discussed—endlessly—were specific and absolute: Kafkaesque nightmares in which one's parent, priest, teacher, shrink, and physician convene to pass biting, bitter judgments that one feels powerless to refute. Such a bizarre scenario could occur only because the individuals so judged had long ago ceded personal responsibility to a man whose measure of moral authority was, in the end, definitively revealed by his actions toward them.

There were—still are—many imponderables about why Alain chose such a bruising way to end the assiduously cultivated guru-devotee relationships. He was leaving San Francisco to set up shop as a homeopathic practitioner in another state, and the relationships could have been allowed to attenuate gradually, even gracefully, in the final few months before everyone moved on. There could have have been respect—if not for those who had trusted him so blindly, so implicitly, then for the intense experiences that he and they shared over many years. Perhaps a fresh perspective from inside normal emotional boundaries could have offered new insights  and connections. There could have been a nuanced legacy. There wasn't.

Alain left San Francisco more than a quarter century ago.  None of the former micro-cultists, save one, has seen him since. It took a while, but eventually we all stopped picking at our wounds, and as soon as we did, we healed.

Next: An unexpected encounter in an unlikely place.

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 50-something piano teacher were to suddenly announce that he is the boss of an imaginary institute dispensing spiritual wisdom to world leaders from an invisible estate in the Napa Valley, some sort of intervention would likely ensue. Inside the echo chamber of the micro-cult, this fantasy went unchallenged, although the stress of supporting the phantom Center for the Unity of All Mankind did ultimately precipitate crises of faith in even the most doctrinaire of Alain's few remaining true believers, none of whom was stupid.

The fantasy consumed terrific amounts of energy. The other couple in the micro-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 Journal for the Unity of All Mankind. 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 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.

If the pretend Center with its very real demands was intended to recapture the enthrallment that had been so easily commanded in the group's early years, the timing was just terrible. After a decade of protracted emotional adolescence, Alain’s acolytes were, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, growing up. We were all in our 30s. Individuals in the group were grappling with various adult concerns—raising children, earning a living, tenure, infertility, coming out. What we all had in common was the increasingly urgent imperative of being able to determine, on our own, which box to check on any form indicating personal identity or preference.

Citing the rigors of school nights, I dropped Sacrosanct Wednesdays at The Center, and was adamant about enforcing appropriate social and emotional boundaries around my children and myself. There were subtle signs that other members of the micro-cult appeared to be heading in the same direction, privately characterizing All One as "All Him" and, for the first time, questioning aloud (among themselves) Alain's judgment about such things as his plot to break up a young couple he 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 the men of the inner circle. 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...a lot of things? Nobody dared speak up, but it was increasingly apparent that the natives were restless, and the excitement expressed over The Center for the Unity of All Mankind had a dutiful, if not doubtful, cast to it.

I was the first in the group to be summoned 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 The Center for the Unity 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, unsheathed his blades, and got right down to business. “You were never really one of us,” he began, in the heightened British accent that signaled stress. This 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 interrupted by a swift recitation of  the reasons why I was never really one of the elect: 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 everyone else's. 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 of my limited understanding. Etcetera.

I bit back a giddy urge to giggle. What was the appropriate response to the adult equivalent of playground insults? Sticks and stones, etc? Fuck you?  Then the ante was abruptly upped with Alain's invocation of my most private fears and doubts, things I had confided only to my husband. Robert had reported them to Alain, who was now wielding them as weapons, suddenly cutting deep. The urge to laugh vanished.

His recall was amazing. Some of the issues he was attempting exhume had been resolved years ago. Others were dead-on, and deadly.

I was gobsmacked. The man saying these hurtful things to me had been a guest at my table hundreds of times, part of my family's life for years. Had he been planning this all along—amassing the most  intimate sort of intelligence over the course of a decade against some future need to inflict pain? If so, why? Why would anyone want to wound another person at such a profound level?  I had come when summoned that afternoon, stupidly supposing that despite everything I had witnessed when other people left his spiritual orbit, our relationship might be re-cast so we could meet as social friends, as he was with "civilians"— people he knew through his interests in music and homeopathy. Being so terribly wrong, so far off the mark, rendered me 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 resisting the urge 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 each one 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. Simple words to that effect. I mostly remember needing to get my kid and myself out of there, and quickly. Alain smiled smoothly and said that we would still friends, even if I was no longer part of the group. Friends. 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.
This is I do remember, precisely: It took me less than a heartbeat to pass through a haze of shock and fury to land on the solid ground of maternal resolve. This was a place of complete clarity and 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 with that, I left Alain’s house for the last time. It was that awful, and that easy.

Next: A launch, a crash, some private audiences and a move. Part 5 is here.

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.

Robert and Alain, Part 3: Under The Bigtop

Image courtesy of flintweisser.com
Part 1 is here
Part 2 is here

1981, San Francisco
Robert spent a sunny Saturday clearing blackberry brambles from the badly overgrown yard of Alain's new rental, a wee one-bedroom house at the crest of a short steep hill off Monterey Boulevard. He came home sweaty, scratched, and very excited. Something big was happening with Alain. He could not tell me what, because he'd been instructed not to. It was a secret.

But not for long. Soon after settling in, Alain summoned the inner circle, now down to five people, including me. There was no outer circle. We gathered at his new house, where he unspooled a seamless, ornately detailed vision of something he called The Center For the Unity of All Mankind. Alain described* it as an epicenter for the expansion of human consciousness, a place where world leaders and thinkers would gather to learn for weeks at a time, where seminars would be conducted and publications produced. A creative nexus of musicians, writers and filmmakers would ply their arts under the guidance of the Center. It would be built on a substantial piece of land in the Napa Valley, and would include a well-appointed conference center, a performance venue, residential facilities, paths rambling through gardens, rustic outbuildings, and a goat named Archimedes.  Alain was at already at work on the maiden venture of The Center For the Unity of All Mankind:  a journal called All One, The Journal for the Unity of All Mankind.

In addition to being the founder and sole executive power of The Center For the Unity of All Mankind, Alain would also be editor of and sole contributor to All One. While there were no plans for a Board of Directors or other leadership positions, there would be plenty of work for all, and we were told to consider Wednesday evenings sacrosanct for meetings at the interim headquarters of The Center For the Advancement of All Mankind. That would be Alain's cottage, which we were directed to henceforth refer to as "The Center." Although the cosmos was clearly smiling upon this endeavor—an astrological chart had been cast for the date and time Alain conceived the idea, and it was reported that the planets could not be more positive—we were told not to talk about it until the publication of the first issue of All One.

It's quite possible that Alain was right, and that the world really was in desperate need of The Center For the Unity of All Mankind. That night, what I really needed, desperately, was a reality check. Wasn't this all just a bit...grandiose? I tried to make eye contact with my fellow micro-cultists, but all eyes were trained on Alain, who had moved on to a lamentation about how George Lucas was squandering his skills on the Star Wars movies, and was outlining his ideas about what George should do instead: "Now, see here, George..."

Of the myriad practical questions that lay buried in an avalanche of inventive detail (like the soundtrack for the movie Alain was going to have George Lucas make) two big, basic ones burst out and fairly demanded answers:

(A): Who was going to be guiding and teaching those world leaders, thinkers, artists et al at The Center For the Unity of All Mankind? 

(B) Where was the money going to come from for this substantial piece of land, to say nothing of the buildings and the goat?  In 1981, undeveloped land in the Napa Valley was selling for between $11,000 and $24,000 an acre.

I knew that the bracing blast of reality introduced by questioning any aspect of the plan would summon a killing freeze upon the querent. Why bother? What was one more evening sacrificed to keeping the peace? An impossibility, that's what. I’d just spent a couple of hours listening to a master piano teacher present an hallucinatory vision of spiritual and artistic world domination—a vision that would, not coincidentally, monopolize the attention of his aging, attenuated flock of followers and focus its energy under his complete control. It felt an awful lot like we were all being herded into a big bright tent pitched on the outskirts of Crazytown. I did not want to go there.

By the standards of the micro-cult, I had already moved beyond what Alain called "naughtiness" into outright sedition, and was corrupting my husband as well: "I know you're having sex," Alain had said accusatorily to Robert, just days before. I also refused to let Alain advance his learning curve about homeopathy on my children or me, and insisted that Robert not bring him to our house for dinner more than once a week. No more laundry or mending services, either, unless Robert wanted to add those chores to his list of duties for Alain. Well, in for a dime, in for a dollar. My hand fluttered up. “Has a source of funding been identified?” I asked, starting with the less combustible of the two questions.

Alain fixed me with a look that could have warped teak. When he spoke, his always-precise diction sharpened to an impossibly acute point, a symptom that signaled displeasure or stress. The answer sliced through the air like a hurled javelin: “ You. Need. Not. Concern. Yourself.”

P., resident astrologer and Alain's fellow amateur physician, vaulted gamely into the deep silence that followed: “Exciting things tend to happen around Alain,” he declared. He did not explain what those exciting things might be, and I knew better than to ask, just as I knew, all along, the answer to question (A).

Next: A slow virus and an invitation to tea. Part 4 is here

*Mnemosyne and the Minutes:
As Alain’s ipso facto secretary, Robert was responsible for taking detailed minutes of all meetings about The Center For the Unity of All Mankind. Alain impressed upon him the importance of getting the minutes exactly right, because they were historic records. Robert would type them up at work and bring them home for me to proofread before submitting them for Alain's approval. Alain would edit the record, often several times, each round requiring re-typing and re-proofing.
The words used to describe the plans for The Center For the Unity of All Mankind are exactly as was approved, but using quotation marks here made the post look like a Zagat review. So I dropped the marks, and you’ll just have to take my word.
A goat named Archimedes? I couldn't make this stuff up.

The former Center For the Unity of All Mankind today. Image from Google maps.

Robert and Alain, Part 2: Circles and Lines

Eyes wide shut: Alain at my family table in San Francisco, circa 1979. 

Part 1 is here

1972-1980, San Francisco

The modest claim Alain staked during San Francisco’s post-‘60s spiritual boom did not yield much return. Auditorium-scale interest never materialized, nor did the sort of flush and fervent supporters who could sponsor retreats, underwrite publications and enable a guy to be a full-time guru. But on Wednesday evenings, a small group of young people would arrive at Alain's apartment on Twin Peaks. We'd remove our shoes, turn our backs on the city shimmering beyond the terrace and arrange ourselves cross-legged on the floor facing a blank wall, against which stood the Danish modern armchair from which Alain delivered his lectures.
I can personally attest that one attendee truly tried his best to bring in the sheaves: Robert hectored old chums from the swami circuit about showing up, and a curious few did. None returned. When the weekly lectures fell away, circa 1974-75, what remained was a tiny, tight cadre of fiercely loyal followers who were in rapt attendance upon Alain's opinions about matters great —"What is the meaning of life?”— and small —“Should I wash my hair every day?"  Robert was deeply vested in moving to the forefront of this group, advancing his cause by ducking out out of work to spend afternoons taking and transcribing dictation at Alain's place before inviting him to our house for his dinner.

As his own mentor, Jiddu Krishnamurti, did before him, Alain declined to identify as "guru" the role he played in the lives of those whose fealty he commanded. But he did issue, and display withering disapproval if one did not adhere to, an astonishing array of instructions and strictures covering virtually every aspect of life: what one should eat, drink, and read; what kind of music to listen to, employment to seek, socks to wear; how to interpret one's astrological chart and groom one's hair. Who one could socialize with, of course. And sleep with: no one. Alain maintained that even married couples should be celibate, except for purposes of procreation. He declared homeopathic medicine the only acceptable response to all ailments. After finding all Bay Area practitioners wanting, Alain himself, an excellent pianist, started dispensing homeopathic doses to the inner circle.

No one surrendered the right to choose his or her own socks at gunpoint, of course. It wasn't a commune or a compound. Most of us had jobs, some of us were in school, and Robert and I had a family. But together, a handful of self-identified spiritual seekers in their 20s and one fifty-ish man with a constantly-invoked connection to a spiritual circuit superstar created an exclusive, inbred cult of personality. Coalesced around a father figure, the collective endowed him with superhuman powers and was pleased to be at his beck and call.
Being married to Alain's most devoted acolyte presented some daunting challenges, not the least of which was a chronically bitten tongue. Unlikely to be mistaken for a true believer, I did try to mind my manners, and got a pass on obeisance because of the complex bond between Robert and Alain. Subservience fosters dependency in its recipient, and Robert's keen deference to Alain might have been blunted by alienating the wife. So Alain, who could be quite charming, was often so to me, despite my being what he called "naughty," which seemed to mean maintaining a private interior life. He played the culture card hard, and I folded every time. I was wowed by his exquisite musicianship, his years in Europe, and the names he dropped from his time with Krishnamurti. A conversational tidbit like, "As Michaelangelo Antonioni said during dinner at Signora Scaravelli's villa..." could make me literally turn the other cheek (Alain was in the habit of pinching mine, and those of other putative adults).

Another possible explanation why my polite apostasy was tolerated while others who questioned, however obliquely, Alain's absolute authority within the inner circle were expelled from it is that I provided a domestic center of gravity. By the late 1970s, Alain, a never-partnered man in his 50s, was under my roof 4-5 evenings a week, enjoying not only regular home-cooked dinners and a place at the head of the table for holiday celebrations, but also laundry, tailoring, secretarial and airport limo services—in short, all the comforts of a family hearth that traditionally accrued to the paterfamilias, only free of responsibility.

This family's hearth included an adorable, intelligent, and impressionable young boy. As my son grew, so did Alain's expressed interest in him—much less so in the new baby girl. He took to dispensing, through Robert, edicts on child rearing that clearly reflected key facts about his life: childless, lived alone, had no adult experience living in a family, had never spent 24 hours alone with a child.

There was no way to view this incursion into amateur parenting as anything other than what it was. Surveying the wreckage of this and countless other boundaries violated over the years, I had to consider what could motivate a grown man to demand that a child's new toy be taken away because he did not like the look of it, or to hand his hostess a basket of laundry before sitting down to Christmas dinner. I also had to acknowledge my complicity—and moral cowardice—in enabling an increasingly bizarre social dynamic: sitting silently at my own table while someone wearing a $15,000 Patek Phillipe watch held forth on the evils of consumerism; actually washing those dirty clothes before serving the Bûche de Noël. Turning the other cheek.  I was pushing 30, sound of mind and body, the mother of two children. What was I thinking?

Well, I was thinking that third-party opinions about 18th-Century medical theories and Edwardian child-rearing practices were irrelevant. I was thinking that it was my responsibility to raise my kids and live my life according to my own principles, despite my partner's devotion to the dispenser of those opinions. This thinking was terribly naive. My children were paying the price for their parents' failure to insist upon appropriate personal and social boundaries, or even a reasonable family dinner hour (Alain liked to eat late, and simply refused to show up before 8 o'clock).

I finally snapped to when Alain dosed my happy, very healthy 9-year-old with something that caused the skin on his face to peel off in sheets and crust over into huge scabs. He did not seek, or have, my permission to provide health care for my child. My son's teachers and parents of his friends called me, alarmed. My own alarm was, literally, laughed at—within the micro-cult, this disfigurement was declared a terrific success, a homeopathic "proving," or something.

It was all the proof I needed. I took the kid out for a café au lait—coffee is said to neutralize homeopathic substances—and then to be checked by a real physician. Trained in homeopathy, this doctor, too, was horrified. Reporting this to Robert precipitated a hideous row. I drew a new, hard line around the children and stepped inside it to join them. Robert and I bellowed at each other from either side, both of us aware that this line, this boundary—any boundary—would be viewed by his guru not as merely naughty, but truly seditious: evidence of independent intent, which was known to be an unforgivable offense.

 

Alain took a dislike this toy, and when he came to Christmas dinner that year took Robert aside and demanded that it be confiscated. He also told Robert to take away the dollhouse in the background, which Santa I spent a month building for my 3-year-old daughter.

Next: A tent gets pitched on the outskirts of Crazytown; a javelin pierces the air. Part 3: Under The Big Top is here

The Way-Back Machine: High School (Reunion) Confidential

Lord but I loathed high school, that ghastly hothouse hormone-itorium regimented by primate-hierarchy enforcement rituals...I did my time in the mid-sixties, when—you may take this to the bank, people—the times were not yet a-changing in Park Forest, Illinois, and the distant rumble of social upheaval, rapidly gathering critical mass on both the left and right coasts, was heard by only a prescient and/or desperate few in the heartland. I spent a lot of time refining an exit strategy, which was successfully implemented even before graduation. That was many years ago, and I never looked back.
Until now. Like most people in the  21st Century, I have several email addresses, one of which has been with me since the Jurassic era of the Internet. In those lawless frontier days it never occurred to anyone that the online form filled out in the thrall of wonderment about how ways of communicating were changing right under our fingertips might dog one's days until the end of time. At least it never occurred to me. And that was how it came to pass that, long after I yanked my "free" registration at Classmates.com, my contact information was still floating about in cyberspace, and when it came time for my 40th(!) high school reunion, why, I was right there on the list of former detainees cordially invited to reminisce about their adolescent incarceration at Rich East Township High School.
Stranger still that I nearly attended, backing out at the last minute because my mother underwent a triple coronary bypass in Florida a couple of weeks before the festivities, and there were some home fires threatening to blaze out of control if I didn't hie back across the continent and tend to them, pronto.
Turns out that, thanks to the marvels of technology, there was scant need to actually attend the reunion. The entire weekend—country-club soirée, field trips to Chicago for deep-dish pizza, breakaway parties in rooms at the Tinley Park Holiday Inn, hungover breakfasts in the hotel coffee shop and pink-knee jogs in the late-October dawn—was lavishly documented in a manner that those long-ago "candid" photographers, lurking with hot-shoe flash attachments to shoot unwary teenagers rutting in dim corners of the gym during prom festivities, could only dream of. Everyone has a digital camera nowadays, and everyone generously shared their best and their worst shots with the entire class—indeed, all of cyber-space. Thank you! These pictures tell a Kurosawa-worthy tale of what happens when battle-seasoned fellow survivors gather, after many years, to have a few drinks and burnish the legends of their vanished youth.
My email box is stuffed with a surfeit of memory-snagging photographs, and it's been compulsively fascinating to process its contents. One of the attendees thoughtfully provided a Rosetta Stone of names to decipher the pictures; without it, I would not have recognized many of the subjects. For aficianadas of the subtly veiled back story—and I will take my place near the head of the pack here—this bounty of images, particularly when viewed with an awareness of who shot whom so early and so often, provides an embarrassment of riches.
OK, let's dispense with the obvious dish: those boys who were unconscionably confined to the closet in 1967 were in due time manumitted, and some of them migrated to my adopted home town of San Francisco. A few of this cohort share, along with certain prom-court princesses, early-adopter status as consumers of assorted cosmeceutical injectables, implants, and surgical interventions, with varying degrees of success.
Some of the most gifted teenaged jocks are now among the most brutally ravaged by time's metabolic rigors—peaking so young, they yielded their genetic advantages early and now appear to be short-listed for myocardial infarctions, or perhaps gastric bypasses.
At the other end of the continuum are the archetypal awkward adolescents who matured into their big brains to quietly—or splashily—lay claim to impressive accomplishments in fields that did not exist back when we had to declare our majors on university campuses that were barely de-militarized zones in the late-'60s culture wars.

Given the times, it's surprising that no one in the Class of 1967 was sacrificed to Viet Nam, although one classmate portrayed a defining character in one of the more disturbing movies to emerge from the era: Tom Berenger, née Moore, played Staff Sergeant Robert Barnes in Oliver Stone's career-making film Platoon. Tom didn't attend the reunion, either.
So these are the broad strokes of my class reunion pictures, and perhaps you can relate to them,too, no matter what year you left high school.
Moving on to the fine strokes, we have the surpassing strangeness of sitting down to one's computer of a morning to find complicated subtexts ripe for personal decoding: that first grade-school boyfriend, jamming on guitar with fellow former sock-hop superstars on a bright morning in a Holiday Inn coffee shop. Those two former girls, purveyors of Byzantine gossip and promulgators of a twin-set-and-circle-pin dress code, still with their heads together, smiling out of the corners of their mouths. The group that cupped cigarettes (if caught smoking, punishment was swift and sure) outside the gym at mixers?  Still puffing away outside the restaurant, and from the looks of them they've been punished every day for years. The biggest surprise is how few surprises there are.

A couple of shots resonate very deeply for me. Here, eerily impervious to the march of time, is Coach George Egofske—in the '60s a strutting, spittle-spewing, pocket-sized megalomaniac with a buzz cut who, when I snapped my ACL playing soccer my sophomore year, dashed across the field to give me a demerit for wearing a boy's varsity sweatshirt, shrieking down at me as I lay gasping on the turf, going into shock. Perhaps he developed better prioritizing skills during his life's journey. Maybe not.

One morning I find the first boy I boinked splashed across the screen, inexplicably aged well past the half-century mark—how could this be?—and leaning against a lamppost in front of his family's long-ago home. Sgt. Pepper has turned into Colonel Mustard, and this, too, is part of the answer to an as-yet unasked question that will one day be posed by my as-yet unborn grandchildren. When they do ask, I will tell them honestly: high school sucks, but those are years to savor the infinite possibilities that life will present. Be open to just about everything, and try to regret nothing. I don't.