That way, she would not be overly distressed by his sexual liaisons with others.
Chapter 9: The SCA and the Cruel Mother (1966–1967)
“Mother, dear mother, when we were thine, you never did dress us, coarse or fine.”
—The Cruel Mother, Child 20
In 1966, both my parents were going to school. Walter got his M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in June of 1966. He regarded it as being “as useful as a second hole in the head.”
Marion was also working on a Master’s at UC Berkeley between 1965 and 1967, but she stopped taking classes after my father failed his PhD orals; he accused the committee of homophobia. I do not know the details of why he failed, but if he presented any part of his research for Greek Love, it is completely understandable why they would not have wanted to approve a dissertation on such an unsavory and illegal topic. According to Marion, Walter had a nervous breakdown after he failed the oral examination.
However, as a consequence of her literary success, Marion was later awarded an honorary Master’s degree as well as six honorary doctorates.
Marion met Diana Paxson in 1966, and that year they founded the SCA, or the Society for Creative Anachronism, together. Diana was a graduate student in medieval studies at Mills College, which meant that she and my mother shared many interests. During their lifelong friendship, they “divided up” all the major mythologies and legends they wanted to write about, with Mother doing the Arthurian legends and Diana writing about the Norse gods.
Later, Diana married my mother’s adopted brother Don, in what was intended to be a sort of platonic “group marriage” with my mother’s youngest brother Paul Edwin Zimmer and my aunt Tracy. Before they got married, Paul got Diana pregnant with her firstborn son: my cousin Ian. Nobody blinked an eye or would admit to having the slightest difficulty with the situation even though it did create problems.
A family tree is not something one can take an eraser to. In what passed for my family, everyone would try to claim that it doesn’t matter who fathered a child. It is up to all of us to care for it. But parents still have parental feelings, even if our Berkeley ideology requires us to pretend that we do not: Of course it left Ian in a difficult position, forever having to explain the bad behavior of his parents, and it meant Tracy had a daily reminder that her new husband had many other sexual and emotional interests. This was the first time that Paul fathered a child whose mother he had not married, but not the last.
Paul and Tracy and Don and Diana and my grandmother all lived together in a huge house in the Berkeley Hills. The house was called Greyhaven, and it was at Greyhaven that the first SCA event was held. My aunt Diana still lives there, with her son Ian and an assortment of other people. Where in The Lord of the Rings, The Grey Havens was a place for elves to retire and injured Hobbits like Frodo Baggins to recover, in Berkeley Greyhaven was simply a center of creative activity. It was a writer’s colony of sorts and has provided a safe haven for many people. To this day, the walls are filled with proofs of book covers for the dozens and dozens of books that have been written there.
My mother loved The Society for Creative Anachronism. It is a fun place for the misfits of society to play. It is a wonderful, amazing organization where people can pretend to live as though they were living in the Middle Ages, with all the gallantry, pageantry, and beautiful costumes but none of the plagues, privies, or feudal atrocities which would have been involved in any actual reality.
The SCA is an openly idealized version of living history, never encouraging the factual aspects of the middle ages. Both men and women can achieve rank, even kingship, on the field of combat, and one is honored not for birth, pandering, or financial success, but for achievements of various kinds in the arts.
To become king, one first fights one’s way into becoming a knight through a series of tournaments. The final victor of a Crown tournament becomes king. Mostly men have earned the title, though a few women have also done so. Imagine this in the modern day, and boxers and wrestlers will run the government: a throne won with a gaudy belt and with a thrown chair to the head!
One problem with all this speculative medieval history is that it has allowed and encouraged historical revision. Modern paganism is not historical in the slightest but comes from speculation, wishful thinking, and outright falsification of history. In the milieu of the SCA, usually imagined to be in the 11th century, the Irish were imagined to be pagans instead of the deeply Catholic nation they have been since before the 5th century.
So instead of sacrificing one other at Stonehenge, as the archaeology indicates was the case, the Druids were reimagined as happy, free feminists, skipping naked through the trees, practicing Western free love, open marriages, and magically avoiding all normal consequences. After all, what fun would it be if all the Sixties-style bed-hopping and pot-smoking was met with era-appropriate Christian horror as well as the traditional legal and physiological consequences?
The SCA is a deeply political organization, with a great deal of infighting, internal schisms, and endless interpersonal wars, but that is what happens when people make clubs of any sort. However, it is also a comfortable place for pedophiles to hide, and where they can find access to vulnerable children, for much the same reasons as we saw in science-fiction fandom’s Breendoggle. Misfits are expected to be nice to other misfits, to be accepting of their idiosyncracies, and to give them the benefit of the doubt for even the most bizarre behavior. That being said, I am hopeful that some amount of housecleaning has taken place in the SCA since my experience with it, and that there is more safety for children now than there was then.
Where my mother excelled at writing books, inventing new planets, and creating mythological societies, she was neither capable nor interested when it came to taking care of her children. At the best of times our house was full of ants and cockroaches, and we had irregular and absent meals. I remember being cold and hungry. My brother remembers finishing everyone else’s plates, even chewing the marrow from the chicken bones because he was so hungry. Mother obviously kept us alive, but not at a level which other people would have found acceptable.
Walter was financially irresponsible, and would hide the bills instead of paying them. He lost my mother’s Regent Street house that way, and Marion never forgave him for it—although she inexplicably kept trusting him to pay the bills for many more years. He did not buy groceries, he would not do even a scrap of housework or baby care, and he did not cook. I remember once when I was older, my mother asked my father to help around the house, and he screamed at her that it was the “thin end of the wedge!” Walter believed that she really wanted him to do all of it. Doing anything would result in him doing everything, so he did nothing.
Since Marion was so famous, no one suspected her of being a neglectful mother, much less a dangerous one. My mother took pains to make sure that nobody knew the truth about her, although she was not especially vigilant about her public image in other ways. When we were very little, she simply discouraged anyone from visiting our house unless we were throwing a party. That meant nobody saw the day-to-day chaos. In later years, she gave up altogether on looking good, and the house was overrun.
Although she managed to hide our filthy, vermin-filled, food-challenged house from people most of the time, she got sick once, and my father was completely unable to step into her shoes. This left us with no parents, rather than the half-parent she usually managed to be.
Bjo Trimble, a science fiction writer and colleague of my parents, came to visit our family in 1967 before we left Berkeley. Many years later, she saw me at an SCA event and told me what she saw at my mother’s house. The following passage is taken from a letter she wrote to me in response to my questions.
When did you first meet Marion and Walter, and under what circumstances?
I met Marion when she came to her first Worldcon: Denvention, 1959. She’d already been published, but she had no idea what to expect at the con. I was going to Denvention alo
ne, and asked if anyone wanted to room with me. The con-com put us together. I helped Marion put on makeup for her costume. It was several years before John met Marion. We met Walter at a LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society) meeting. Got to talking, found some similarities in interests.
How often did you see them?
They lived in the Bay Area, so we didn’t see them very often. Sometimes Walter would come to LA on coin business, and he stayed with us.
Did anything about them strike you as odd?
Marion was a fantasy writer, and Walter was a science fiction fan. We knew a lot of people like that, so they didn’t seem any odder than most fans.
Did you find anything about them to respect or to like?
We liked Marion’s willingness to help new young and new writers. She had worked in isolation for so long, she understood how other writers felt. Many of them could not even admit to a liking for “that Buck Rogers stuff.”
How did the people you know feel about them?
I don’t think we ever discussed either Marion or Walter very much with others. For one thing, we didn’t like the SCA people who clustered around Marion, and Walter didn’t seem to make friends easily.
When did you first suspect something was wrong with their self-care and their parenting?
Marion was overweight, so she dressed to disguise that. This made it difficult to know how well she took care of herself. Walter always looked like an unmade bed, but that was so in keeping with a lot of fans, we never noticed anything about it. He never smelled bad.
We didn’t know much about their parenting skills because we only met them at SCA events. The boy [David] was in his surly teens, so no one thought much about that. You were a cute, shy little girl. Again, nothing that aroused our suspicions. We only saw them and you kids very occasionally. The people who should know more is the local SCA people like Diana Paxton. I doubt you’ll get much from her. Very few people went to their house. They would visit others.
The one and only time I noticed anything wrong about their parenting was when I was visiting the Bay Area, and Walter invited me over to talk a bit. He didn’t mention that Marion was down with really bad flu and barfing all over the bedroom and bathroom. When I walked in the house, the smell was awful. Diapers had been just dumped in the middle of the kitchen floor, and the pile was about knee-high. Dirty dishes were cluttering the counter and the sink. There was sour milk in the refrigerator.
Walter seemed to be absolutely helpless to even wash dishes. I thought it was weird that a MENSA member had so little survival instinct. I mean, the mark of intelligence is to stay alive, right? One child was toddling around, the other one crying in its crib (sorry, I don’t recall which child was which). Both had dirty diapers. Marion was throwing up. Walter was just walking around looking confused. He did not pick up or comfort either child.
What did you do to help?
I couldn’t leave this situation. So I gathered the diapers in a couple of laundry baskets and sent Walter around the corner to a laundromat. I told him to just read the rules in large letters on the laundromat wall and he’d do fine. Just don’t cram all the diapers in one washer, and use the amount of soap suggested. I cleaned up the children, fed them some cereal, changed their bedding and washed the dishes. I swept and mopped everywhere I could, because the house was very dirty. I didn’t clean up the bathroom or their bedroom; I figured this was Walter’s job to mop up Marion’s vomit.
Walter didn’t come back for a long time, and when he did, he had only half of the diapers. The rest were stuck in a washer that had overflowed the laundromat with soap. Leaving Marion with the kids, I walked Walter back to the laundromat where we untangled the diapers, apologized to the owner for the soapy mess, and washed all the diapers again. I left Walter to watch the diapers in the dryer, and walked back to the house. Marion was asleep and the kids were screaming their heads off. I can’t blame Marion; she was exhausted from throwing up all day.
At this point, I was completely exhausted. Finally Walter came back with the clean diapers, after using up far more coins than needed. He asked about dinner, obviously expecting me to produce a hot dinner on the spot. I told him he could order in. We had Chinese food that night.
Were they grateful? Or worried about the law intervening?
Were they grateful? Not much. Walter got upset when I decided to leave. He seemed to think I’d accept his invitation to stay the night, but I wasn’t putting myself in the position of being housekeeper any longer. I may not be smart enough to be in MENSA, but I danged well know when and how to get out of a bad situation! There was no question about the law, because it never occurred to me to call in the law. Back then, there were no agencies to call in, so it would have been a police matter.
How did your friendship with them survive over time?
I’d not call it a friendship at any time. After the diaper adventure, Marion acted as if I’d invaded their house just to make them look bad (who was I going to tell?). Her memory of that day was entirely different from mine; I had barged in, intimidating Walter and the kids. I’m not sure why I’d have done that! Walter didn’t want to admit I’d done them a major favor. So I was done. John was not enthused about Walter, and he didn’t know Marion. So we lost nothing by dropping this relationship.
Any other thoughts?
Only that I wish someone had known how dysfunctional your family was. Had anyone noticed and spoken up about their suspicions, you kids might have been spared a great deal of trauma and harm. This was something that local people should have done. We lived too far away to judge the situation. The diaper adventure was my only time in their house, so aside from Walter having no housekeeping skills, nothing spoke to me about a deeper problem. I’m sorry for that.
I note a few things about Bjo’s letter. First, my mother was angry that someone had found out what was really happening in our house, because her reputation was more important to her than caring for three hungry children living in filth. She reacted with suspicion and resentment instead of relief and gratitude. Walter was virtually a non-entity, completely incapable of helping and unwilling to even try when Marion was sick. We children might as well have been pots and pans for all the concern either of our parents displayed.
Bjo’s response to our plight was both normal and humane; she went above and beyond the call of duty to help us, and in return was met with nothing but obliviousness and resentment from our parents.
Chapter 10: The Nurse and the Lunatic (1967–1972)
“Not want Mommy, want Marie.”
—Moira, age 2
We moved to New York in late 1967 because Lester Merkin had promised my father a job. We drove cross-country in the snow, and I got sick. I remember only one thing from that trip: I remember my father going out in the snow when we were in a motel to buy me orange juice. That is my earliest memory. I remember the cold coming in the door of our ground-floor motel room when he opened it. I remember he was wearing dark clothing, and he was all wet and snowy carrying me my orange juice.
The job from Lester Merkin did not materialize, and we lived on unemployment for a while as a result. Nevertheless, my mother lost no time in founding the East Kingdom of the SCA, which spread all over the East Coast and Canada.
Over time my father’s fame in coin circles grew. He was hailed as the foremost expert on coins in his day. As he modestly told me, he was “God to a quarter of a million coin collectors.” He was often called upon to be an expert witness in legal cases regarding the authentication of rare coins.
In 1968 when I was two, we lived in a house which seemed enormous to me at the time: 2 Swaim Avenue in Staten Island. For that matter my bed was gigantic, but I was very small. My brother Patrick and I shared a room. We had two tall beds next to each other and would sit between them and play. Our room had large square windows in four panes, and the roof in our room wasn’t flat but steepled or gabled. The house was beautiful, though my mother later described it as “grubby.”
; Outside, there were a lot of trees and some construction. It snowed in the winter. Our street was rocks and dirt with some asphalt, and my mother drove a huge station wagon. I liked to sit on the back deck—except once, when I got sick to my stomach and Mother yelled at me a lot for wanting to sit in one of the seats.
I had a babysitter named Marie. She was black and large and comforting. I loved her very much. Eventually, my mother became jealous and made her leave. She told me with great anger that I used to cling to Marie and push her away. and say, “Not want Mommy, want Marie.” My mother seemed to think that I should apologize to her for this and that I should be embarrassed for my past disloyalty to her.
I remember Marie as a warm presence, and it is probable that she is the main reason I did not become psychotic. I could not bond with my mother any more than I could have bonded with a block of ice. I bonded very quickly to Marie, however, and the house was a much sadder place once she left. When Lisa told me that she had died, many years later, I cried as if my heart was going to break even though I could barely remember anything about her. I just knew she held me and loved me and didn’t make loud, scary noises or leave me cold and hungry like my own mother did.
It may well have been that my mother was unable to regulate her emotions; she was incapable of restraining herself when she got angry or upset and became brutal. It was during this period that I began to understand that my mother was not safe and that I was afraid of her.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 10