Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  He rummaged around and found a tuition scholarship for me. I’d have to work for lodging and necessities. That was nothing new.

  God bless Henry Noss.

  I walked back to the train station, rode back to Philadelphia and flew home.

  Once home I had no money to get back to New York.

  When I filled out scholarship forms my senior year in high school, our family’s annual income had been $2,000.00. With Dad gone it had plummeted. Women’s wages were half men’s wages. With both Mom and me working we could barely pull it together.

  Aunt Mimi taunted me and yelled at me. What would happen to Mother if I went to New York?

  By now Mother, feeling stronger, told me she wouldn’t hold it against me. I should go. Her life was over. Mine was beginning.

  “Your life’s not over.” I was shocked when she said that.

  “Without Butch it is.”

  “Mom, Dad would be upset if he heard you say that. Wherever he is, he wants you to be happy. Don’t give up.”

  “I haven’t given up. I just don’t think I’ll feel that way again.”

  “Maybe not, but you can still be happy. And you can still marry.”

  “Never.” Her lips clamped shut. “I’m not taking care of some old man.”

  I laughed. “Okay. I wouldn’t want to take care of one, either.”

  “Their parts drag the ground. Remember how Mother Brown’s boobs hung halfway below her belt?” She warmed up. “She could have lifted and separated, you know. Well, men’s parts are just as bad. I couldn’t bear to look at it.”

  Off and running, she treated me to a discourse on the shortcomings of the male member, on baldness and dentures. Convinced that women age better than men, she crowed about how many of her friends were widows, proof of our superior engineering.

  Jerry drove over. Mom gave him a beer and then proceeded to tell him that when he was old he’d pee all the time. Drink the beer now and enjoy it. Just as Jerry left, Roger Davis, another boyfriend, drove up. She regaled him with biological details also.

  It was some time before Roger returned.

  Jerry, accustomed to Mom, picked me up weeks later, on a sweltering August day. He had been hired to drive a car as far as Statesboro, Georgia. We’d have to make our way from there to New York. He was going up with me and then he’d return to Chapel Hill in time for school.

  Aunt Mimi wouldn’t say goodbye. Mom put my duffle bag in the trunk with one box of books. That was it. I didn’t have a winter coat or one sweater to my name. My net worth was $14.65.

  I had no place to live and no job.

  We dropped the car at Statesboro and stood on the road, thumbs up. I wouldn’t recommend this today. We zigzagged up the coast, finally landing in New York.

  We both knew Frank Aybar, who had been the music counselor at Camp Hiawatha. He lived in Forest Hills, a neighborhood in Queens, and Frank’s mother said I could stay there for a few weeks. She took me to Forest Hills to play tennis. We squeezed in a game before preparations for the U.S. Open. The stadium at Forest Hills, covered in ivy, exuded a quietness and charm no longer in existence in tennis. The locker rooms squeezed the skinniest, the clubhouse was small, the courts were grass and the members dressed beautifully on the courts and off. Watching a match at Forest Hills defied time. It was as it had always been: a visual ballet of two figures in pristine white set against rich green.

  Once big money entered the game, vulgarity became the rule, not the exception. In 1978 the U.S. Open moved from Forest Hills to Flushing Meadows, aptly named. The worst sin, though, was abandoning the grass surface three years earlier. The argument was that maintaining a sufficient number of grass courts for such a huge tournament was not feasible. The English do it and they have less money than we do.

  Real tennis is on grass. No amount of advertising and TV coverage can change that.

  Mrs. Aybar, petite, energetic, speaking with a hint of a Spanish accent, combined Latin charm with Yankee pragmatism. She and her husband, Francisco Sr., were driven out of the Dominican Republic during one of its bad times, I guess in the 1930s.

  Intelligent, sophisticated and not averse to work, the Aybars flourished in New York. In the few weeks I lived with Frank and his parents, I grew to appreciate the structure of their life. It was close enough to that of the South that I didn’t feel like a fish out of water; form counted for much. There was a certain way you did things. Period.

  Spanish-speaking peoples exhibit a flair quite unlike their northern neighbors. They dress, walk and talk with vitality and style. They are their own works of art.

  The duplicity that Americans find in Hispanic culture is similar to what northerners dislike about the South. Your public face may not be your private face. Life is theater. The family comes first. (Yankees give lip service to this, but southerners know that for most Yankees, the job comes first.)

  I attended mass with Mrs. Aybar and was sure to write about that to Aunt Mimi, hoping she’d let up on me and stop bitching and moaning to Mother.

  I got a job as a waitress, found a one-room flat on Fifteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. I talked the landlord into waiving the security deposit, no small feat in the city. I had just enough in tips to pay my first month’s rent because I worked any hours I could get.

  One afternoon, coming off a shift, I walked up Hudson Street where Jane Street intersects it and saw two teenage girls coming in the opposite direction, sniffling and crying. They carried a wicker basket with a towel over it.

  Not yet accustomed to the ways of the city, I stopped to offer assistance.

  They flipped back the towel, exposing four tiger kittens about four weeks old. An animal shelter was three steps from where we stood and their mother was forcing them to give up the kittens.

  The mother cat was from Israel. That’s what the older girl said, although I don’t know why that was so important to her. They therefore were Jewish kittens.

  “Which one is your favorite?”

  She handed me a tiny gray tiger with an extra toe on each front paw. This extra toe was angled away from the other toes, giving the kitten the dexterity of a thumb.

  I carried the small bundle home in my shirt, bought milk and baby food. I warmed the milk and fed the kitten off my fingertip. She learned to drink out of a bowl in no time.

  I couldn’t think of a name for her. That evening she jumped from the tub to the sink and down to the edge of the toilet. Like many new creatures, she thought the surface of the water was hard. She put out a paw and tried to walk on water. Plunk. A furious howl greeted this attempt. I scooped her out, dried her off and named her Baby Jesus.

  We went everywhere together. She rode in my shirt or in the Greek cloth bag I carried. She couldn’t come to work with me, but she attended NYU. She slept. My professors didn’t notice. I got a better job at the university business library—I hated waitressing. I filed Standard and Poors, spending most of the time in the stacks.

  Baby Jesus showed an interest in business. My boss never did discover she was with me. As long as the books on the carts were filed, she didn’t much care what was cooking.

  I loved that cat the way I love tulips and fresh-cut hay. She was a natural wonder to me, like a melon moon rising in an August sky.

  I had little time to make friends. I had no money to spend. My rent took everything. I ate on five dollars a week and some of that went to the kitty. I would call Frank Aybar and his mom occasionally.

  The apartment was too expensive. I knew I’d have to move. I couldn’t find anything affordable and I still needed a winter coat. So I bought the coat, moved out and slept in an abandoned car on University Place. The university opened early in the morning, so I could use their bathrooms to clean up. I kept looking. After a week of this I found a fifth-floor cold-water flat over on East Fifth Street, between First and Second Avenues.

  Awful, but cheap. I moved in. No furniture. Just a duffle bag, a carton of books, a cup and plate, one set of utensils and B
aby Jesus. I found a sofa on the street and another student helped me move it up all those flights. I acquired bits and pieces of furniture because I found out what garbage day was in the various neighborhoods. Rich people throw the best stuff out. So I’d prowl Park Avenue and the East Sixties. I still have the sofa, two chairs and a chest of drawers from those days. They’re beautiful.

  Mother wrote three times a week, again surprising me. I wrote on Sundays. I made enough money to get a phone. I called on big days like her birthday and I sent home fifty dollars a month to help with the mortgage. Once I had to send her two hundred because the city dug up the sewer lines and made people pay for the lines in front of their house. That was a rough couple of months for me.

  My grades were good enough to keep my scholarship in full force. That first semester I thought these rich kids, many of them products of fine private schools, would flatten me, but I ran with them and generally ran up front. Then again, I had to.

  I took political science with Conor Cruise O’Brien and read Marx, all of it. What leaden tripe. How could that silliness dressed up in Germanic garb seduce Russia, China and Eastern Europe?

  I read Edmund Burke, finding a kindred spirit. I read Thomas Paine, liking him less than Burke, but in his work there was a hope, an energy that my forebears obviously found irresistible. I read Carlyle on the French Revolution and I read Danton’s Death, which stayed with me. It was the beginning of modern history, and the guillotine casts a shadow even at night, even today.

  Irrationality frightens me even when it’s funny. That a nation as elegant, advanced and altogether extraordinary as France could devolve into mass executions, then lurch into a military dictatorship, alerted me to the harsh truth that no people, no nation, is immune from insanity. The English civil war, which drove my people here, was no picnic but it was nothing compared to the French Revolution.

  I drew the conclusion that no group can refashion culture, society, politics. You can have a cataclysm that changes the outward form of government and that kills millions of your own people but it will never work.

  The leaders of the French Revolution were, for the most part, brilliant men, intellectually astounding and dumb as a sack of hammers about people. They paid for it. But so did everyone else.

  My favorite person from that time is the Marquise de La Rochejaquelein, who led rebellious Vendeans against the revolutionary soldiers and lived to tell the tale. She knew bullshit when she saw it.

  Thanks to Conor Cruise O’Brien, I discovered the political framework that the Western world uses. The ideas of the revolution, the aftermath and the counterrevolution still operate today. Everyone acts them out in one form or another.

  The good professor drew different conclusions than I did, formed from his Irish background as well as his time in Africa.

  My political philosophy, simply put, is “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” This doesn’t preclude significant change; it means only that change must begin from within, then move outward.

  Change starts with you. If it is imposed on you from above, you may comply, but you will smolder. A time will come when enough people, like green hay, burn slowly inside. Soon the whole damn barn burns to bits.

  Undergraduate years were a grind, but I gained the polish I needed to move on to a larger arena.

  New York University, Washington Square College, may be a second-string Ivy League school, but in the Classics Department and English Department in the middle to late sixties it was first-string. Surrounded by excellent professors and ruthlessly competitive students, I learned more than I ever could have learned at the University of Florida at that time.

  My Latin improved to the point where I could think in the language nearly as effortlessly as I thought in English—I don’t mean Medieval Latin, but classical Latin. My Greek, at best, was perfunctory. It’s a difficult language, but also I never had the feel for it that I had for Latin, which sounded like frozen jazz to me: cool, elegant, many-layered.

  I studied Shakespeare with Professor Richard Harrier, a pure joy. I studied Chaucer with Professor Robert Raymo, not such a joy. He made fun of my jeans and white T-shirts and told the class he’d seen cotton pickers better dressed than I was. Humiliated, I fought back by reading Middle English with real rhythm and grace. He still didn’t like me and grudgingly gave me a B after some C’s to scare me. Although insensitive as a man, he was a good Chaucer scholar and I was fortunate to study with him.

  I progressed to honors English and two honors Latin classes. Larissa Bonfante, from Turin, spoke the most perfect Latin I have ever heard. She made chills run up and down my spine. Bluma Trell was good, too.

  Kenan Erin was my archeology professor. He led me to Iris Love, the flamboyant, funny and leonine archeologist in charge of the dig at Knidos. I’d hop the subway to catch the lectures which she occasionally gave to Frederica Waxberger’s classes at Brooklyn College.

  Nothing in my past prepared me for Iris, fluent in multiple languages, wearing clothes better than a model and fond of repartee. I melted each time I saw her.

  She treated me with respect, which was more than some others did. She didn’t mock my southern accent. I have yet to meet a southerner who doesn’t despise Yankees for this mockery, especially since our English is much closer to seventeenth-century English than the rest of America’s.

  That’s important since the English language reached its full power and depth at the end of the sixteenth century, flowering into the seventeenth. The stuff is more powerful than heroin if you live through your mind, as I do.

  Iris, in her early to middle thirties, spoke to me as though I had a brain in my head. She never commented on the fact that I always wore the same pair of sneakers, jeans and white T-shirt. I’d made enough for a pea jacket and one dress marine tunic from the army-navy store which got me through fall and then winter.

  She moved in rarefied circles to which I was not privy, but from time to time she invited me to functions filled with glittering lesbians, one of whom, Jo Carstairs, even owned her own island. Jo Carstairs’s grandfather had been John D. Rockefeller’s secretary. He looked, listened, invested in Standard Oil, and got rich. Iris took special pains to introduce me to the others, most of whom accepted me at face value. Louisa Carpenter, then in her early seventies, was inadvertently amusing when she said to me, “If only you could have seen the good that Mussolini did for the Albanian orphans.”

  I guess there’s good in everyone, even the man who destroyed large chunks of Italy, that most seductive of countries.

  In those days, no one admitted to being a lesbian. Iris, bold, never said she was, but then she never said she wasn’t. That may not seem like much now, but it sent a powerful message then.

  I loved Iris for her spontaneous generosity, and my good fortune remains in enjoying her friendship. She is still teaching me what it means to be descended from the Greeks and Romans culturally and metaphorically.

  Larissa Bonfante, my classics professor, endured my schoolgirl crush with good grace, as did her irrepressible daughter, Alexandra. Why Larissa didn’t slap me in the face and toss me in the snow I don’t know, except to say that the world is filled with people who are wise enough to understand when you don’t know much.

  Another person I met at this time who would enrich my life like a gorgeous cheetah was Liz Smith. Florence and Aileen, two middle-aged ladies who gave me a room in their Bridgehampton, Long Island, house, would take me to the restaurants and dance palaces at night. I put down the brick around their pool and did yard work on the summer weekends. These two were the original Laverne and Shirley. Florence, a bundle of nervous energy and snappy one-liners, cooked for us and mothered and scolded me and anyone else within earshot. Aileen, calmer, given to ripostes concerning the eternal foolishness of politicians, ran a magazine in the city. How I accomplished anything on those weekends I don’t know, because they kept me laughing constantly.

  One evening they took me to Pat Chez (pronounced “Patches”)
. Filled with the wealthy, the beautiful and the accomplished, this was the place to be in the Hamptons. An Arabic theme dominated the bar, with huge pillows on tiers for seats in the dance section. Swooping fabrics hung from the ceiling like a tent.

  As I observed this from a top tier, a blond, tanned, lean lady with a smile as big as Texas walked into the room with a handsome fellow on one arm and a good-looking lady on the other. Aileen introduced me to Liz Smith, who upon hearing my accent (fading, but still there) turned on her full-wattage Fort Worth charm. I’ve loved and lusted after her ever since.

  Each time I see Liz it’s as though I’m seeing her for the first time. She never disappoints. Her sharp humor deflates the pompous. Her many kindnesses to others will never be reported since she performs most of them quietly. She swims in a small pool filled with barracudas yet doesn’t lower herself to their standards. People in publishing, film and TV suck up to her because of the power of her column. It doesn’t turn her head.

  Liz never looked down her nose at me for my poverty. She concentrated on what I could offer, which was humor and good conversation.

  Another good friend of mine from those days, Susan Suitman, would take me to dinner because she knew I couldn’t afford a full meal.

  My senior year at NYU I became involved in Columbia University’s first gay student group. This was the first such group in the country. Stephen Donaldson (that was the pseudonym he used), a Columbia student, approached the school chaplain, John D. Cannon, who agreed to advise the group. That took guts. At the initial meeting there were fewer than ten of us. I was the only woman. I knew they could have cared less about gay women, but I’d gained a reputation as a pragmatic political operator and a prankster based on one incident at NYU.

  All schools have a job day for seniors when DuPont, Corning, United States Steel, etc., send representatives to certain key schools. The CIA had come to NYU to recruit students into the agency.

  The Vietnam War was just nudging into the nation’s consciousness in 1967. A few of us were alert to its ruinous possibilities. Unfortunately, we were young. No one else seemed a bit interested in the fact that we could get dragged into a ground war in Asia.