A Thin Bright Line
Page 38
The part of this story that haunted me in the beginning haunts me still. I could have known Vera. Once I had her full name (which, again, I’ve changed for this book), I found her obituaries. She died in 2002, thirty-six years after Lucybelle’s death and just six years before I started this research. I learned from her obituaries that she had been an environmental activist, had been very active in the Sierra Club, and that the Michigan chapter has named an award for her. She knew both David Brower and Ansel Adams. She also had indeed been a pilot, a fellow of the American Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Association of Women Geographers. She loved to travel and had been all over the world. From the obituaries I got the names of an arts organization and a Unitarian church in the foothills of Georgia’s Appalachian Mountains, where she spent her last years. I wrote the director of the arts organization and the pastor at the church. A wonderful woman, a member of the church’s small congregation, wrote me back.
Leah and her husband were good friends with Vera at the end of her life. They got to know her through the church that Vera founded with a small group of old lesbians. When Vera was dying, it was Leah and her husband who cared for her, helped her get her house and papers in order, and notified her family. Leah said that Vera was fairly private and didn’t talk openly about her relationships with women. When I asked Leah how she knew Vera was a lesbian, she answered, “It was sort of obvious.”
Vera did leave CRREL after Lucybelle’s death and taught in a couple of universities before she retired. She settled in Monterey, California, with a dachshund named Adam, where she lived for many years. I was a short couple of hours away in Oakland and Berkeley. I like to think it’s possible, although I realize highly unlikely, that Vera read some of my published work. If she had, wouldn’t she have contacted me? Not necessarily. In fact, probably not.
When she was seventy years old, Vera bought a small camper truck and set out, with another dachshund, Ulysses, to travel around the country for an undecided amount of time. According to her nephew, she said she’d let people know where she decided to live when she figured it out. Seven months later, she settled in the Georgia mountains.
Leah told me that Vera always wore Birkenstocks, with rag wool socks in the wintertime, and sweatshirts with “sayings” on them. She loved discussing philosophy and religion with Leah’s husband. Leah said that “if Lucybelle was anything like Vera, they would have been a tremendous pair.”
Vera’s family disapproved of her lifestyle and, according to Leah, she had a difficult relationship with them. When she was dying, Leah wrote to Vera’s brother and told him that he should come if he wanted to see her. He didn’t make it in time to say good-bye, but he and his son arrived in time for the funeral. The son, a seventeen-year-old boy, stood up at Vera’s service and announced that she would be going to hell. Presumably, according to Leah, because she was gay.
I wrote to this brother of Vera’s, asking for information about her and also about Lucybelle, and he did send me some letters Vera had written to their mother. These let me know that Vera wrote about Lucybelle, about her having a cold or her car being in the shop, in her letters home. Their dachshund, L’Forte, is mentioned often. I’m heartened that despite her family’s disapproval, Vera persisted in at least not erasing the everyday parts of her life with Lucybelle from the record.
Leah told me about another nephew, the son of Vera’s sister, who had spent significant time at Post Pond during at least two summers. She said that this nephew “was a real favorite.” I wrote him and he wrote back saying, “The letter I just received was somewhat of a heartthrob when I recognized the name on the return label.” He said Vera had been heart-broken at Lucybelle’s death. He also told me that Vera quit smoking as a result of the fire. The two women had been kind to him as a boy. Unfortunately, he found corresponding with me difficult, whether because of the content or his communication skills, I don’t know, but he did not want to continue. He said he’d been very young when he knew Lucybelle and Vera and that he’d told me everything he remembered.
It torments me that I didn’t find Vera before she died. I can only imagine the wealth of information about my namesake I could have had. I try to find comfort in realizing that while it wouldn’t have been impossible to find her, it was nearly so. Until Routledge published the article about Lucybelle in The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science in 2000, I had no clues for beginning a search. Even after finding the article, it took me a few years to follow the trail, put together the hints and evidence, which eventually led me to Vera.
This story about one decade in my aunt’s life covers a vital period in American history, including the McCarthy Era and the Cold War. It was a time of foment, the launching decade of great change. In May 1966, just a few months before Lucybelle’s death, Stokely Carmichael rose to power and the Black Panther Movement was formed. In June of that same year, the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women convened. Twenty or so women met in Betty Friedan’s hotel room and again over lunch the last day of the conference. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was conceived. National conversations about racism and sexism were in full bloom.
However, conversations about the history of climate, and the future of climate, not to mention the related weather disasters, were still decades away from public purview. The important stories found in the ice cores would not reach a widespread audience for another fifty years. But the work of Henri Bader, his scientists, and Lucybelle was vibrant and present in their day. They knew they were seeing something vitally important. Such is the pace of societal consciousness.
I wrote this book to give Lucybelle love; but I also wrote it to express my gratitude for those women, especially her, who wrote the true books that didn’t get published, who did the science without getting a scrap of credit, who lived independently and loved freely, who dreamed about the Arctic and the Antarctic, who, in short, made my world and all the things I care most about possible. My namesake Lucybelle and I share so much: writing fiction, loving women, polar dreams.
How do you change shame into inheritance? How do you change secrets into living history? My heroine dies and so this is a tragedy. I don’t believe the saying that “everything happens for a reason.” Sometimes a great tear happens in a life, a ripping apart, a random violence to the spirit. Lucybelle Bledsoe—like Lorraine Hansberry, like Rachel Carson, and so many others—died far too early. And yet she came a very long way from the farm in Pocahontas, Arkansas, to Greenwich Village to Chicago and finally to Lebanon, New Hampshire. I hope she found at least as much love as I’ve granted her in this novel.
Vera’s ashes are spread in Lake Superior’s Isle Royale National Park, where they have enriched the soil trod by an abundance of wolves and moose, far from civilization. Lucybelle is buried in Pocahontas, Arkansas.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the extraordinary librarians and archivists who spent hours of their valuable time helping me uncover Lucybelle’s story: Jocelyn K. Wilk at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University; Jeanette Hammann, director of publications at the Geological Society of America; Patrick Leary at the Wilmette Historical Museum; Steve Bailey and Sean Fleming at the Lebanon Public Library; CRREL librarian Elisabeth Smallidge; CRREL public affairs specialist Marie Darling; George Pappas of WGN-TV, who offered not only some crucial details about the history of television and baseball but also provided me with the exact audio for the television broadcast of the 1959 American League pennant game between the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians; and especially Asa Rubenstein of the Milstein Division of the New York Public Library, who found Lucybelle’s Greenwich Village address, a detail that confirmed a hunch I held dear. Joan Nestle, one of my heroines, is the genius behind the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn; her work has rescued thousands of remarkable women from obscurity. She also helped me personally in pointing out a wealth of research directions for this project. Deb Teddy and Dee Johnson, also of the Lesbian H
erstory Archives, were helpful as well. I am also grateful for the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago.
Thank you to many stellar historians. Without the groundbreaking work of Marilyn Ogilvie and Joy Harvey, who researched and published The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century, I would not have begun this project. John D’Emilio, a University of Illinois at Chicago post–WWII historian, with special expertise in women’s and gender studies, was generous with his time, and his books were essential to my understanding of the era. Estelle Freedman, trailblazing historian of Stanford University, generously read the entire manuscript. And, as described in my postscript, her published work on lesbian history opened doors for this project and gave me the courage to continue researching.
Thank you to Lucybelle’s contemporaries and coworkers who talked to me on the phone, via e-mail, and in person, in some cases many times: Lisa Davis, Marie Kuda, Sarah Huber, Mark Baden, Lark Hutto, Wynne Ewing, Chet Langway, David Minsk, Willy Weeks, Jerry Brown, Herbert Ueda, Jim Bender (posthumously through his revelatory obituary), Steve Bowen, Sandy Smith, Donna Valliere, Marge and Tony Gow. Their memories and stories are the heart of my novel.
Thank you to friends who read early drafts of A Thin Bright Line: Pat Mullan, Martha Garcia, Suzanne Case, Robin Ellett, Dorothy Hearst, Elizabeth Stark, Alison Bechdel, and Carol Seajay, who prompted me to Google my aunt in the first place. Thank you as well to WOMBA, Word of Mouth Bay Area, an extraordinary group of women writers who provide a backbone of daily support.
Thank you to friends who pointed me in the direction of crucial tidbits: Barb Johnson, Jim Van Buskirk, Lance Brady, Francisca Goldsmith, Don Weise, and Ian River Hoffmann. Guy Guthridge, formerly of the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers program, is a font of knowledge about people in ice research. Anne Laughlin, a novelist and real estate broker, managed to get me interior pictures of Lucybelle’s Evanston apartment, which in turn helped me to imagine her life there.
A number of government officials provided records that shed light on my aunt’s life: the New Hampshire State Fire Marshal’s Office, which is part of the State of New Hampshire Department of Safety; Christian A. Simon of the Lebanon Fire Department; and Yvette, certification supervisor at the New Hampshire Department of State, Division of Vital Records Administration.
My extraordinary agent, Reiko Davis, has worked brilliantly and tirelessly on behalf of my work. I cannot thank her enough.
My parents, John Perry Bledsoe and Helen W. Bledsoe, welcomed Lucybelle into our home when I was a child and later told me everything they could remember about her. My father loved hearing my discoveries about his sister in the last few years of his life.
I’m thrilled to be working once again with the University of Wisconsin Press and want to thank Dennis Lloyd, Amber Rose, Andrea Christofferson, Sheila Leary, Carla Marolt, Adam Mehring, and especially Raphael Kadushin, who for so many years has been a leading light in publishing LGBT stories.
Thank you, most of all, to my partner, Pat Mullan, who understands better than anyone how much this book means to me. Thank you for listening to every detail, multiple times, for so many years.