A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  When I asked if they thought Lucybelle was gay, the youngest of the bunch answered, “She sure wasn’t the type to go home to cook dinner for the hubby and kids.” Most said, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.” At least three said, “You should speak to Marge Gow.” Unfortunately, Marge Gow, who was married to one of the scientists, Tony Gow, did not answer my e-mails or phone calls. (Let me say now that neither Marge nor Tony figures as a character in this novel; my two scientists, Russell Woo and Peter Hauser, and their wives Amanda and Emily, are entirely fictional.)

  I read all the gay and lesbian history I could find. An essay by Estelle B. Freedman of Stanford University, “The Burning of Letters Continues,” published in her collection of essays, Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics, was exceedingly instrumental in helping me get to the heart of Lucybelle’s story. And I do mean “heart.” As I interviewed people, I felt more than a little sheepish being so interested in her intimate life, especially when talking with the scientists. It felt frivolous, as in, what does it matter whom she loved or if she was gay?

  But the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that nothing is more important than who and how we love. Why is that the part of history that gets dropped or trivialized? Most of us make a great number, maybe the majority or even all, of our decisions based on whom we love. Love may well move history forward with greater intensity and motivation than any other force (except, sadly, for hate). I wanted to tell a love story: mine for my aunt, my aunt’s for her lovers. I wanted to re-create the emotional fullness that might have existed in packets of burned letters. I wanted to give Lucybelle a love life that felt erased by my mother’s declaration that she “never acted on it.”

  However, I was also concerned with the possibility that I might be projecting my own wishes for Lucybelle onto her life, that I was letting the lens through which I look at the world color this story. Or perhaps I should say, color too deeply, because of course we can only see the world and interpret events through our own particular lenses.

  That’s where Estelle Freedman’s essay saved my project. She points out that many lesbians in the past did not keep their letters. They burned them. They spent their lives hiding the evidence. This means that when researching lesbians in history, so much has to be gleaned from conjecture and inference, and that this is valid. The hard evidence, in many cases, simply does not exist. In fact, its very absence is a clue.

  That essay gave me the confidence to make not just assumptions, but reasoning deductions: Would a woman who was very intelligent, said by all to be particularly warm and possessing a wicked sense of humor, seriously live her life without any intimate relationships? Couple that with her extreme independence, the fact that she shot off the farm in Arkansas at her first opportunity and headed straight for Greenwich Village, my sister’s memories of a companion, her coworkers’ coded (and in a couple of cases explicit) ways of telling me that her good friends at work were lesbians. Then too there is everyone’s assertion that she was extremely private about her personal life, meaning she kept secrets, a kind of pre-burning of letters. None of this is proof, I know that, but it adds up to pretty damn good evidence.

  How could my mother be so sure about Lucybelle’s intimate life? Neither she nor my father knew a single one of Lucybelle’s friends. They didn’t know she smoked, let alone chain-smoked. Freedman’s article gave me the courage to value my suspicions, based on evidence, and to keep digging.

  I headed off to New York, where I spent hours reading in the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Chicago, where I visited the Gerber Hart Archives. I read all the issues of the first lesbian newsletters, Vice Versa, published in the forties, and The Ladder, published by the Daughters of Bilitis in the fifties. I called up lesbian seniors in both cities, with introductions from friends, and asked them if they knew Lucybelle. I loved this part of the research. These lesbian octogenarians went right to work, publishing notices in their newsletters and calling their friends to see if anyone had heard of my aunt. Several made sure to tell me what I already knew: the vast majority of lesbians in the forties, fifties, and sixties did not go to bars, were not public about their intimate lives, usually had small groups of close friends and socialized privately at house parties. No one knew her.

  Then I talked again with Chet Langway, a scientist who worked closely with Henri Bader on the ice cores. He remembered going out to “some pond” a few times and having drinks with Lucybelle and the woman who lived at the pond. She was the first female scientist CRREL had hired, and while he remembered that she worked for the Photographic Interpretation Research Division, he couldn’t think of her name. A few days later he e-mailed me, “Her name just popped out of me last night: Vera Prescott.” This corroborated my sister’s memory of a companion named Vera.

  Off I went to New Hampshire to see the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, and also Lucybelle’s apartment, which had been rebuilt after the fire on top of the same garage in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Maps showed me that there were a number of ponds in the area, and I hoped to figure out which one was Vera’s. While I was in New Hampshire, I screwed up my courage and called a couple of people I’d already spoken with by phone. I made a lunch date with Lucybelle’s secretary, Donna Valliere, a character who does not figure in the preceding novel.

  What a difference interviewing in person makes! I suppose when you’re face to face with someone, it’s much easier to judge whether she, the interviewer, is reasonable, well-meaning, and trustworthy. My contacts opened up. Also, it had not occurred to me to come out to these contemporaries of Lucybelle’s when I wrote or called them. Maybe it just seemed silly to write, “By the way, I’m a lesbian.” But that was a big mistake. I now made a point of coming out to my interviewees, which in turn made it safe for them to tell me what they knew about Lucybelle’s homosexuality. In fact, when I talked about this with her secretary, Donna, she explained that they didn’t want to spill the beans about their friend and colleague to some stranger calling from California, even if she was her niece. That made perfect sense. They were protecting my aunt! I was touched.

  Donna was nineteen years old when Lucybelle hired her. This was just six months before the fire. Donna’s boyfriend happened to live across the street from Lucybelle, and so she had some pertinent details about the fire. She told me that the office manager and secretary were “a known couple,” though “nothing was ever said out loud.” She said she’d heard that Lucybelle “had women in her life.”

  I took a deep breath, hating to be a bother, but there I was in New Hampshire, so I called Marge Gow again. She answered the phone. When I told her who I was, she said, “I’ve been expecting your call.” Several of my interviewees told me they’d talked among themselves about my being in town and doing this research. Later I would realize that Marge hadn’t been avoiding me; many older people simply don’t do e-mail (even if they have accounts) or even return long-distance phone calls. Marge suggested lunch at Applebee’s the following day.

  I was actually shaking as I sat waiting in the booth. In came Marge and her husband, Tony, and before she even sat down, she said, “I knew your aunt and her partner well. They were so kind to me when Tony was in the field.” The Gows, in turn, were so kind to me that afternoon, sharing everything they could remember about both Lucybelle and Vera. The Gows knew which pond, and I visited it that afternoon.

  Marge, who had lived next door to Lucybelle when the lab first moved to New Hampshire, before Lucybelle moved to the apartment over the garage at 9 Placid Square Street, also told me that all she did in her spare time was write. She said she could hear the typewriter going for hours. Marge sometimes asked how the novel was coming along and Lucybelle would say either well or not well. This fiction-writing pursuit was corroborated by my father’s story, by her degree in literature, and also by an interview I did with her best childhood friend, who now lives in a nursing home in New Mexico. When I asked the childhood friend, “Did she ever talk as a young girl about wha
t she was going to do when she grew up?” the answer came back, “Write. No question. Absolutely, she was going to write novels, that was all there was for her.” If she ever published a novel, perhaps under a pen name, I have not been able to find it.

  This childhood friend from so many years ago, who was in tears half the time we talked, also told me about the harshness of Lucybelle’s religious upbringing, her outsized sense of humor, and her pranks as a girl. In grammar school, Lucybelle apparently arranged what would now be considered flash-mob performances, in which she organized her classmates to stand up in the middle of lessons and spontaneously recite funny poems. My father, too, remembered these school-wide jokes that Lucybelle orchestrated.

  As I dug and dug, I came up with many “crucial facts joyfully uncovered” but was also “haunted by a looming absence: the shadowy mass of all that’s been lost, that can never be recovered,” to quote Emma Donoghue again. Thinking about the erasure of women’s lives from the historical record, and how I wanted to handle this erasure in writing this story, brought to mind a quote by Monique Wittig: “There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember. . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”

  And that is exactly what I’ve done with this book. I’ve made every possible effort to remember. I’ve asked dozens of others to also try to remember. Where memory has failed, I’ve invented.

  How much of the story is true and how much is invented? A lot of it is true. Nearly but not all of the characters existed, but for most of them I have only the smallest amount of information about their personalities. I extrapolated wildly from these bits. I’ve made up all the dialogue, and most of the emotional content of Lucybelle’s relationships.

  In the end, I used every scrap of information I had about Lucybelle’s life. I didn’t necessarily intend to use this flotsam and jetsam so thoroughly, but the bits kept finding their ways into the narrative. Joseph Wood Krutch was indeed her graduate school advisor; she was at Columbia during the time Allen Ginsberg was, although I have no evidence that they ever met or spoke; she did become fluent enough in Russian, presumably so that she could read what the Russians were doing in their ice research, to tell my father that reading Turgenev in his native tongue was easier than reading Tolstoy; Tiny Davis and Ruby Lucas, who both played in the famed International Sweethearts of Rhythm band and were a couple for forty years, did have a lesbian club, Tiny and Ruby’s Gay Spot, at 2711 South Wentworth Avenue in Chicago, which got torn down in 1958 to make way for a freeway; all the lesbian pulp novels and their authors are real; Mayor Daley did set off the air-raid sirens when the White Sox took the pennant in 1959, terrifying much of the city’s population who did indeed believe the Russians were invading; a contact at WGN provided me with the White Sox announcer’s exact wording for the baseball game broadcasts; Camp Century was a real place, existing in the location and with the amenities and for the purposes I describe in the novel; I have a photograph of Lucybelle accepting some award from military brass, although I have no idea what the award is for; the CRREL lab did cancel its opening-day party due to President Kennedy’s assassination the previous day; the CRREL scientists did make a baseball diamond in the field across the highway from the lab and Lucybelle loved baseball; she did send me a stuffed mountain lion, which I treasured; she was indeed extraordinarily buoyant in fresh water; all the fires in the novel did occur, including the one in Lucybelle’s kitchen wastepaper basket; the office manager and secretary at the lab were in fact a couple, according to several sources, though I know nothing more about their lives. This is just a bit of the factual detritus that found its way into my story.

  I sent away for Lucybelle’s death certificate and was shocked to see that it listed her marital status as “widowed.” I’m quite sure she never married. Why would she have married and kept the husband secret? An employee of New Hampshire’s Division of Vital Records Administration kindly dug through her file and was able to tell me that this information about her marital status came not from the family but from her employer, the Army Corps of Engineers. This bit led me to invent the McCarthy Era story of Henri Bader asking her to claim she was widowed.

  Lucybelle and Vera did have a dachshund named L’Forte. I don’t know where he was the night of the fire, but I saved him in this story because I couldn’t bear another loss. To the end of her long life, Vera continued to have dachshunds.

  As anyone who has done historical research knows, the process is far from scientific and the answers are at best approximations. I asked everyone what Lucybelle went by. I heard everything from, “Just Lucy, so far as I know,” to “Absolutely, always Lucybelle. I never heard it shortened.” So for the novel I chose to have most of her contemporaries refer to her as Lucy, but to have her think of herself as Lucybelle, as she was known by the family.

  As for accounts of her death, the factual record slides around even more. My father told me she died trying to get out a window. His story leaves me with a particularly anguishing image. The fire marshal’s report, written by someone who was not at the scene, said she died crouched under a table. Several of her coworkers told me that they’d heard, from the local firefighters who were at the scene, that Lucybelle had tried to get out of the apartment but the carbon monoxide had so poisoned her brain that she confusedly walked into the closet, rather than out the door, and died there. This last story is also the version told by the people who lived across the street from her.

  How much of this story is true? If forced into an answer, I’d say about fifty percent. I’d also say I’ve never written a truer story. I have changed the names of all the characters except for my aunt’s and Henri Bader’s. I’ve done this because what I’ve written is a novel based on a framework of facts, but it is not a factual account of anyone’s life, including my aunt’s. I’ve kept Bader’s name because of his historical importance, and while I did hear a few firsthand accounts of his personality and accomplishments, I know nothing about his nonscientific actions or conversations or marriage (though he did have a wife named Adele). I’ve invented dialogue, actions, and emotions for Henry Bader, as I have for all of the other characters. I have a bit more information about Vera, as described above and below, but nowhere near enough to call this a biography.

  To this day, I have only a handful of primary documents: Lucybelle’s death certificate, both the fire department’s and the fire marshal’s reports, the telegram my father sent to her upon my birth (though why this last was returned to my father and stored in my baby book, I don’t know), a couple of letters Vera wrote to her mother, and some photographs. There are no extant letters written by Lucybelle, not a single one that I know of, and no journals. From the telegram I learned her Evanston address and from the death certificate I learned her last New Hampshire address.

  For several years I’d been plagued by my inability to find an address for her in New York, where she lived from 1944 to 1956. I spent hours in the New York Public Library scrolling through microfiche of the telephone directories, year by year, finding nothing. Not everyone had a phone in those days; sometimes all the residents of a building shared one line. The phone could have been in a roommate’s name. I knew where she worked, at the Geological Society of America, which was housed in a building that has since been consumed by Columbia University, but the GSA no longer has records dating back to Lucybelle’s time. A friend of a friend who lives near Columbia showed me his apartment, and I considered putting her up there, near her job. But I wanted her to live in the Village, and so I spent about three afternoons wandering around, considering addresses for her. Because I’d named Willa Cather the godmother to this novel, I decided to put Lucybelle at 1 Bank Street, in the building that now stands in the same location of the building where Willa Cather had lived with Edith Lewis. I liked thinking of Lucybelle i
n Cather’s space.

  On a recent trip to New York that had nothing to do with this novel— I’d already begun writing and had completed a draft and a half—I found myself with a free afternoon on my hands. My partner, Pat, suggested we go back to the New York Public Library and look again for Lucybelle’s address. “We might find a really good librarian,” she said.

  We found two. First, Sarah, who worked in the basement of the Jefferson Market branch, sent us to the genealogy and local history room of what she called the Lions Library, the central one on Fifth Avenue. I’d already spent hours there squinting at microfiche, but she said to tell the librarian she’d sent us. So I told Mr. A. Rubenstein (as his nametag read) of the Milstein Division that Sarah had sent me, and I also told him what I was looking for. He searched a number of different ways, and eventually showed me a new historical database with a city directory.

  Gold. Lucybelle Bledsoe had lived at 277 West 12th Street, in the heart of the Village. What’s more, the address I had given her already, 1 Bank Street, is exactly one short block away. I sat there in front of the NYPL computer, next to Mr. Rubenstein, and wept.

  Throughout doing this research and writing this story, I’ve wanted to believe that Lucybelle had a good life. This crucial piece of the puzzle, that when she’d left the Arkansas farm she’d gone straight to Greenwich Village, told me she sure was trying, if not succeeding, at having a good time with her years.