Rita Will_Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

by Rita Mae Brown

  “You, Mom, Laura and Toot were having lunch at the soda fountain. I think Ev Loss was there, too.” I skipped ahead to try to save time.

  “Did I get that far?”

  “Yes, Chin distracted you.”

  “Chin is fat.”

  “Go for longer walks.”

  “Who has the time?”

  I wanted to say, “If you’d stop hanging on the telephone half the day, you’d have a lot of time.” She used the phone to keep up with her various grandchildren and great-grandchildren for the express purpose of telling them how to live their lives, down to what kind of toilet paper to use. Instead I said, “Aunt Mimi, you just do too much for other people.”

  “That’s what the Good Book says.”

  Again I proved that I am a saint. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, we’d finished lunch and everyone had to go back to work but the day was so pretty I thought I’d walk with Toot and Juts to the railroad tracks and then turn back. I could just make it. We reached the railroad tracks and the ambulance was there, a motorized one. People who could were buying cars and the town had purchased this ambulance. They were putting a dead body, sheet over it, into the back of the ambulance. The sheet was a bloody mess. Naturally, we were curious. You know how my sister was.” A pause, waiting for the correct response.

  “Curious is a nice way to put it, Aunt Mimi.”

  “Juts lived in fear that she might miss something. Well, she didn’t miss it that day. Anyway, next to the track was a wicker basket and the bottom of that was seeping blood. Everybody knew everybody those days. Toot said to the driver, ‘Will, what’s going on?’

  “ ‘Guy run over by the train. Took his head off clean as a whistle.’

  “ ‘Who is it?’ I asked. After all, if this was a friend, we’d have to go prepare the family. Well, Will didn’t know.

  “So Toot goes over to the basket, reaches in and pulls up the head by the hair. Not a scratch on the face, mind you, just like normal except no body was attached to it. She looked at the face, then held it out to Juts and me and said, ‘Don’t know him.’

  “ ‘Me neither.’ Toot dropped the head right back in the basket.”

  “You girls had stomachs of iron.”

  “In my day you saw everything. Not like now, a little drop of blood and people pass out. Now you know that when my dear Ginny died, we prepared the body.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I add here that whenever Mother told the tale of the severed head, it varied from her older sister’s version but each time either one had recounted the grisly tale details shifted.

  “You know I always felt that you were one of the family. I knew you were going to be a big success.”

  Puh-lease. “Thank you, Aunt Mimi.”

  “I just could never stand Jack Young.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The Republican Party is bad enough, but you throw him in too and it’s ten times worse. I still think Adlai Stevenson should have been elected president and I can’t believe that my sister, whom I begged, voted for Eisenhower. Generals don’t make good presidents. Look at Ulysses S. Grant.”

  “George Washington.”

  She didn’t like being contradicted, but she had to consider. “Yes, but he was special. We’ll never see a great man like that in uniform again. I mean a man who can command as well as politick.”

  “I reckon.”

  “Then, too, President Washington was a Virginian and Virginians make good presidents. Much as I love Maryland and Pennsylvania, Virginians make good presidents.”

  “Think we’ll ever have a president from Florida?”

  “Only if you move back.”

  I laughed. “Thanks.”

  “Your daddy always said you could do it.”

  “Can’t. I’m gay.”

  “You know what I think about that? I think you ought to get married in the One True Church and have children. But you told the truth, indeed you did, and you haven’t done anything worse than those jackasses on Capitol Hill. I’d vote for you.”

  By now you could have knocked me over with a feather. “Thank you.”

  “I won’t live to see a woman president but you will.”

  “You know. Aunt Mimi, I’d like to say I hope so but I don’t much care if it’s a woman or a man as long as they have guts and brains.”

  “Short supply. What else do you want to know?”

  “When do you want to come visit? I’ll send you a ticket.”

  “I am not getting on an airplane. If God wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings.”

  “Mother flew.” Couldn’t resist.

  “My sister had no sense. If it was new, she wanted to do it. If she were with us today, she’d have a computer. I heard you can play cards on the computer. Now you know what that means.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If she’d ever gone to Las Vegas, they would have thrown her out. She remembered everything. She remembered card hands she played before World War I.”

  This was true. Mom had an amazing capacity for numbers and cards. It was akin to her mastery of technical stuff. She would have made an excellent chess player except it would have bored her stiff. She needed the speed and color of cards. Then, too, money changing hands enlivened her. Naturally, I did not tell Aunt Mimi that plans were afoot for letting people go to the races via computer.

  “I would love to show you my place.”

  “Thank you, honey, but I’m too old to travel.”

  This was a flat-out lie. Aunt Mimi thought nothing of getting into her car—her latest was a white Chevy with a green interior, perfectly maintained—and driving all the way to Hanover and York to visit her cronies. She’d zoom right up I-95 not an hour and a half from my place and never stop in.

  Aunt Mimi liked me well enough but not well enough to trouble herself to visit. At least Uncle Claude would drop by occasionally. He and Jeun are the only family members to go out of their way. Claude was born in 1915 yet looks ten to fifteen years younger than he is and acts about thirty. He’s physically robust, a good athlete, and she’s in great shape, too. The difference is that Claude and Jeun are happy people. Aunt Mimi never was happy. If she felt a flash of happiness, she’d have to wreck it because it scared her so much.

  As for me, I was always the outsider. After Mom died Aunt Mimi didn’t keep up with me. I had to keep up with her. She did send me birthday cards, though, and I was touched by that.

  This phone conversation was going to cost as much as my mortgage payment because once she wound up she had to wind down. How anyone can talk that long with so few breaths is remarkable. I heard about her health; that subject was good for fifteen or twenty minutes. I heard about Julia Ellen, Russell, Kenny, Wade, Terry, the assorted wives and children. Then we moved on to the church ladies. Once that was exhausted she allowed as to how she was hungry, thanks for calling, bye.

  When I hung up the phone my ear throbbed.

  I was hungry, too. Time for tuna with capers. Here’s my only recipe. I dump a can of tuna in a bowl, throw in Hellmann’s real mayonnaise, some capers cut up fine, two sweet gherkins, sit down and eat it right out of the bowl. I have to share with the cats, of course.

  Finished that and back to the trunk, where I pulled out photo albums, finally reaching letters tied in red ribbons. Juts’s favorite color was red, red and more red. What a lot of envelopes. The handwriting wasn’t Daddy’s. He had big, bold, artistic handwriting, very masculine. This was pretty cursive script.

  Then I wondered if it was Mom’s first husband. The one I was never supposed to tell about but just did.

  I untied a red ribbon. These were letters from Juliann Young to Mom covering four decades. Mother always told me she hadn’t heard anything from Jule. Another Juts fact.

  I read the letters … chitchat. But Juliann felt a maternal bond with Mom and I guess Mom reciprocated. I never saw her letters but they would have been peppered with her escapades, the latest Aunt Mimi misery, etc.


  There wasn’t much about me. That didn’t surprise me.

  How could I ever get the Big Head? I’d been informed consistently as to my lowly status.

  I dug out Mom’s address book, a novel in itself, found Juliann’s number and called her up.

  “Hello, is Juliann there?”

  “This is Juliann.”

  “It’s Rita Mae Brown.”

  She launched right in. She was glad to hear my voice, which actually was quite a bit like her own. I told her I’d found her letters and we talked about her family now, her situation then. She’s a very nice woman and a bright one. She told me about a Thoroughbred she used to hunt. We talked a lot about horses and the fact that my half sisters were fine riders, an interesting fact on two levels … I didn’t know I had half sisters, apart from Patty.

  We talked about Mom, Mom and horses.

  They were and are the thread weaving throughout our lives. It makes me wonder what’s in the genes. It also made me both furious and sad that I hadn’t learned to ride as a child. I might have been worth something, but trust the will of the gods. My purpose is not to be a show rider.

  “Can you tell me about Gordon?”

  “He loved music. We’d go to concerts and symphonies in Baltimore.”

  “He wouldn’t leave his wife?”

  “He almost did, but he was Catholic. His sister got hold of him. I don’t know really. I want you to know you were born in love. Don’t ever think that you weren’t. I think of you as the bird that fell out of the nest.”

  “Actually, winding up with Juts, it was more like falling into the army.”

  She laughed. We must have talked for forty-five minutes.

  Occasionally she writes me a letter or a note. I like her. I think I would have liked Gordon, too, but in my mind he was weak. Then again, I am not a married man with a son and a pregnant mistress. Who knows what one should do? Sometimes I think we would profit by dumping the word should from our vocabulary, and yet there are moral imperatives.

  Jule was eighteen. She knew little of the world. Gordon was handsome, accomplished and clearly charismatic. She probably believed what he told her. That Gordon violated the sacrament of marriage surely isn’t a good thing, but marriage is one of the more difficult goals humans have set for themselves.

  I hope he loved her. That’s worth something.

  You can laugh at me but I take the sacraments very seriously. Baptism, communion, marriage and the service for the dead are holy rites. Do your best by these rites. There is continuity and comfort within them.

  “Judge not lest ye be judged.”

  I have no right to judge my natural father, although I did. I have no right to judge Juliann. The one person I can judge morally is myself. The rest are God’s concern.

  You might wonder why I didn’t hop in the car and drive to see Juliann. She’s still alive now, only eighteen years older than I am. I’m fifty-two, so she’s seventy. Her birthday’s the same day as Jerry’s.

  It isn’t that I wouldn’t welcome the sight of her, but I have my pride. I didn’t dump her. She dumped me. She has to make the journey. And if she doesn’t make it, I’m not angry.

  What does she have to gain by knowing me? By seeing Gordon in me? I look somewhat like him, as best I can tell from the few photos of him that I have. It’s hard to tell when he aged, because the alcohol destroyed his liver and he blew up like a poisoned dog. At least in the young pictures, there’s a marked resemblance.

  I would think seeing an echo of the grand passion of your life might be intensely painful.

  If nothing else, we could enjoy the horses.

  As for me, I wouldn’t gain a mother. Juts was my mother and I will be loyal to her until my own death. What I might gain is a friend, a friend who knew all the people I knew but knew them as younger people. That’s always fun to hear.

  If you’re reading this and you, too, have been separated in some fashion from your blood mother or father, you recognize my ambivalence.

  If you’re reading this and you’ve been raised by the people who bore you, it may have some interest, especially if you seek to adopt children. One of the greatest gifts any human can give to another human is a home.

  People will say, “I used to hope I wasn’t related to my mother and father. I used to fantasize that I had another set of parents.” You hear this often when people learn you’re adopted; it’s their way of trying to connect.

  But if you are the one who fell or was pushed out of the nest, you must learn to cope with that rupture. When I was tiny I thought it was my fault. When you’re little you think the whole damn world revolves around you anyway, and this is just another manifestation of intense childhood narcissism, I guess. You reach adolescence and it’s all their fault. You’re a pure little daisy in a field of bullshit. After that, whether you mature and draw from experience is up to you. By the time I left college I knew life was a lot more complicated than I realized and that people are complicated as well.

  Even the Ten Commandments, which seem so simple, aren’t quite so simple. “Honor thy father and thy mother.” Why honor them if they’ve dishonored you?

  I’ve reached a point in my own life where I accept them. I accept Juliann and Gordon and Juts and even Mother Brown (that’s hard). I suppose, if the truth be told, I accept Billie Jean King and Nancy Lieberman. If they can’t see the good in me, if they can’t realize that the tensions were caused by circumstances as well as youth, then they aren’t growing.

  What happens when you become famous is that people cling to you in bizarre ways. Being the opponent of Henry Kissinger when he played soccer as a child becomes defining. You were important enough to block his attempt on goal. These incidents confirm your sense of self. Think about it: If you blocked Joe Blow’s goal, you might remember, but then again you might not. To run afoul of Mr. Kissinger somewhere in your lifetime must make you a big bug.

  Perhaps some people are hanging on to a time they were on opposite sides of the fence from me. Get over it!

  I’ve learned I can’t change anyone. I can’t overcome homophobia. I can’t overcome misunderstandings if the other people aren’t willing to learn and reach out, too. I can only forgive, hope for the best and keep going.

  I decided a long time ago to emulate the best of Juts and Ralph. If there’s good in life, I’m going to find it. If there isn’t good, then I’ll look for a party.

  I was about to find both.

  76

  Lovestruck

  I first saw Elizabeth Bryant at a fund-raiser in Denver. The Museum of Western Art, across from the Brown Palace, was packed with people, and I was speaking for some worthy cause.

  In the back of the room stood a tall, slender, smoky-looking woman. She talked to me for a few moments after my speech, then was gone.

  On the road again—I must have been on yet another book tour—I called Nancy Severson, an old rugby friend from Denver.

  “Nance, I saw the girl of your dreams. Call her up.”

  “Nah.”

  “Come on. Just call her up. If I lived in Denver, I’d call her up.”

  I gave her Beth’s number. A couple of months later I called Nancy. Yes, she’d gone to a party at Beth’s house but she thought Beth had some running around to do; Beth was in her late twenties.

  Time passed. I’d think about Beth occasionally, then forget about her. Muffin Spencer-Devlin was playing in the Dinah Shore tournament that year and she asked me to come on out.

  I was working with James Coburn on an adaptation of The Mists of Avalon, so I was running back and forth between coasts anyway. I asked Jim if he wanted to go to the tournament. His girlfriend at the time, Lisa Alexander, young and bright, wanted to go, so off we trundled into the desert.

  Jim endures a special kind of arthritis; I don’t know what you call it. He doesn’t complain, doesn’t get cross, but I could see him relax more in the desert because the dry heat must have lessened the pain.

  We worked on the script the firs
t day, when they held the Pro-Am. He and I sat up that night watching an interview with ex-presidents Carter and Ford that excited us so much we couldn’t go to sleep. We talked long into the night about how good people become ground up and ground down by our political process. Freed from the necessities of appealing to special-interest groups, of courting voters, both ex-presidents could speak directly about our problems.

  Jim Coburn possesses the sturdy self-reliance and wondrous common sense of Nebraskans. As an actor he can do anything. Typecast young, he played roles that were more alike than different. Now that he’s older he is able to create a fabulous body of work. He’s doing his best work as an actor right now.

  The next day we all arrived at the first tee, ready to follow Muffin. Jim, tall among men, towered over the women. Many recognized him but were far too polite to bother him.

  We all started walking as Muffin played. I’d met Dinah Shore in passing a few years earlier. She was warm, great-looking even in old age, and full of energy. She was also a good Tennessee girl, so for me, she was easy to be around. She loved golf the way I love horses. She could play the game, too.

  The other thing that was special about her was that she displayed no prejudices. Either she had no prejudices to begin with, or she weeded them out. Here she was, surrounded by thousands of lesbians, and she couldn’t have cared less. She took you as an individual.

  Jim is the same way. This isn’t because they are theater and film people. I know plenty of the same who are shot through with prejudice.

  Halfway through the course you reach that point where the tenth hole looks like it’s in Abyssinia. We were hungry, tired and thirsty. We bought a few things at a little snack place and hurried back to Muffin, who was hitting off the tee like Superwoman.

  By the time we reached the eighteenth hole we were more tired than Muffin. Also, the sun had burned off some of the spectators’ diffidence about approaching Jim. The girls were edging closer.