Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  FAIRYLAND

  A Memoir of My Father

  ALYSIA ABBOTT

  Dedication

  for my mother and my father,

  and

  for Annabel, so she may some time

  know where her mother “was at.”

  Epigraph

  I wanted to show children these fishes shining

  In the blue wave, the golden fish that sing

  —ARTHUR RIMBAUD, “The Drunken Boat”

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  prologue

  PART I: Fairytales

  PART II: Motherless

  PART III: Borrowed Mothers

  PART IV: The Quake

  PART V: Departures

  PART VI: Return

  Epilogue

  List of Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  To write this book, I’ve relied on personal memory, interviews with family and friends, articles and history books, and, especially, the papers my father left. These include his journals, poetry, prose, and letters, from which I draw quotes. Informed by my father’s work, my own memories, and other research, I’ve sometimes re-created scenes and dialogue. These are mostly expanded from those described in my father’s papers; however, I’ve also invented dialogue and changed the names of a few individuals in the book, but only when doing so had no impact on the veracity and substance of the story.

  PROLOGUE

  IT’S A LATE summer afternoon. I’m watching my father’s hands manipulate the rubber-net-wrapped steering wheel of our 1972 Volkswagen bug as we move onto the Golden Gate Bridge. In between his first two fingers is a lit cigarette, its ash long and in need of flicking. He straightens the wheel, and the ash falls, as he tells me again the name of this place where we are going, a place I’ve never been before: Sausalito. When I hear the word I picture flying saucers taking off and landing and I imagine this party will be held in a flying saucer. I am five years old.

  We arrive at a large pink adobe house. Someone with curly hair answers the door wearing sunglasses and a flimsy pink and purple robe. He gives my father a big hug and ushers us into the house. As he leads us through the rooms, the tall man points out to me the items that I can break and the items that I can’t break because they are antique. Then he leads us out onto a large pool deck where a punch bowl, chips, and small sandwiches are laid out on wicker and glass tables. Music plays from speakers as tall as I am. There are no other kids.

  I don’t yet know how to swim, but I want to be in the water. Through the smooth surface I can see the shiny aqua-green tiles at the pool’s bottom sparkle as they reflect the sun. I beg my dad, so he takes off my clothes and sets me up on the second of the steps leading into the water and instructs me to keep still.

  From my concrete perch, I watch as my father’s friends cavort in various states of nakedness. Young men close-dance with other young men around the pool. As I stand there, taking in the scene around me, I feel surreptitiously with my right foot the step under the water next to where I am standing. I step down to it, then, reaching with my foot, find another step below. I float down to this new step where I can stand, my head and shoulders still safely clear of the water. My father, deeply engaged in conversation with the host, isn’t watching, so I find with my outstretched toes another step where I can float and stand. The warm water rises to meet my dry skin and I feel as if I’ve uncovered a secret pathway to a magic place, a mermaid sea.

  Lulled by the jets now pulsing in the pool, the thumping loud music, and the golden late afternoon light, I move myself deeper into the water, always finding a step to catch me. Then I reach out for another next step and find there is none, and, just like that, the pool’s warm water engulfs me, filling my mouth, my nose, my ears. Splashing frantically to keep myself afloat, I try to yell for help but, because I can’t keep my head above water long enough to formulate a cry, I can only call out, “Hell! Hell!”

  Peering at me from one of the deck chairs, a young woman calls out to my father, then points to me, “Steve, isn’t that your daughter bobbing up and down in the water?” My father yells, “Give me your arm!” then pulls me out onto the pool’s rough edge where I cough up water and the bitter taste of chlorine stings my nose and throat. It will be years before I learn to swim, and—like not learning to ride a bike until college and my father’s sexuality—this will be a source of secret shame.

  My father notes this day in his journal with the headline “Alysia’s Swimming Accident,” and beneath it a small scribbled drawing showing my thin arm flailing above wavy water. When I later find the journal entry, I smile with delight.

  I FOUND my father’s journals in our dining room closet four months after he died of AIDS-related complications. I’d always known Dad kept journals. Peering through the French doors separating my bedroom from the living room where he slept at night, I could see him perched on the edge of his sagging fold-up futon, legs crossed, foot dangling as he scribbled away on the spiral notebook balanced on his lap. When I was a girl, I used to wait until he left the apartment to sneak into his milk-crate bookshelves and pull out the two hardback black journals in which he’d recorded our life in the mid-1970s. Crouched on the floor, I sifted pages and pages of these books in search of the capital A, for Alysia, or my childhood nickname A-R, short for Alysia-Rebeccah. I delighted in the descriptions of myself as a toddler—how I inexplicably used to call Dad “my poor little Da-da,” or the time I peed in his bed. I took comfort in knowing that as young as I was I already had my own history, and that I had changed from the person I’d once been.

  I hadn’t read his journals in many years and I didn’t expect to find anything new when I decided to clear out our dining room closet that spring afternoon of 1993. At twenty-two years old, fresh off a year of nursing my father and then watching him take his last breath at the Maitri Hospice in the Castro, I thought nothing could hurt me anymore. What I most dreaded all my life, the death of my father and only parent, had already happened.

  I also believed there were no surprises left. After my mother’s car accident when I was two, my father had raised me on his own and with few boundaries. After our nearly twenty years together as only parent and only child I felt I knew him—his warm cigarette-tinged scent, the twitch of his foot whenever he was deep in thought, his taste for hard candies and chocolate Kisses every time he tried to quit smoking—as well as I knew myself. In the shape of his hands and the length of his fingers I saw my own. Sitting quietly beside him in the solitude of his hospice bedroom in those final months felt as natural and comfortable as breathing.

  So I boldly dug into the journals, pulling out a dozen notebooks from beneath a box of dusty Billie Holiday and David Bowie records covered in yellowed newspapers. These journals spanned from 1971, when my father was still in graduate school, to 1991, when AIDS-related CMV retinitis began to strip him of his sight and his ability to write. I honed in on three notebooks dating from 1971 to 1973, which I’d never seen before. These journals recorded the brief time when my mother, father, and I formed a family, and they enthralled me. It was the first time I experienced my mother in that most exciting of verb tenses: the present.

  Paging through these entries, it struck me that I shouldn’t be reading my father’s journals, that I was invading his privacy. But after our last year together and without any family to help sort the fourteen-year accumulation of stuff in our apartment, I also felt it was my due. Besides, as I read on I learned that my dad had anticipated the possibility of my f
inding them:

  September 9, 1973: Want to start writing again, More than ever! But who will I write for? For John – that deposed dream? For myself I guess. Maybe for Alysia that she might sometime know where her parents were at.

  My father’s journals indeed revealed where my parents were at. The problem was, his version of our family story was different from the one I’d been carrying around my whole life. Here’s what I knew:

  My parents met as graduate students at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Stephen Eugene Abbott had resisted the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector and came to Emory to pursue a master’s in English literature. Barbara Louise Binder, a self-declared Marxist, was pursuing a master’s in psychology. They came together through a common passion for the antiwar movement and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). The following year they were married by a justice of the peace and nine months later, in December 1970, I was born. We lived happily until, one night late in the summer of 1973, my mother was out driving when her car was rear-ended. She flew into the street, was hit by a car, and was killed instantly.

  My version of this story highlighted the tragic. My photogenic mother, who graduated valedictorian from her high school in Kewanee, Illinois, who graduated with honors from Smith College, who loved dogs and lost causes and made a great chicken cacciatore, was only twenty-seven when she died. My father had been desperately in love with her and was so distraught over her sudden death that he turned gay and moved us to San Francisco. From then on he exclusively dated men, making the possibility of remarriage and siblings impossible. All of my hardships as a girl and teenager, from my difficulty fitting in, to my enduring loneliness, to my propensity for keeping secrets, could be traced back to that night in the car. It was an accident. No one was to blame.

  Then I read the journals. And another story emerged.

  Atlanta Trip. I go see lawyer. While waiting, lawyer talks about his writing. I’m nervous and smoke a heck of a lot. Get idea for a novel called “The Gypsy Man’s Daughter” about Alysia. Begins on my death bed – she remembers back how it was growing up with me, about my boyfriends – diaries, etc. come in. flash forwards & backwards.

  My father wrote this entry in his daily journal in 1975, two years after my mother died leaving him the single father of a needy toddler. Seventeen years later, I would sit by his bedside as he died. Thirty-five years later, I am finally telling this story, a story he envisioned, but in my own way.

  PART I

  Fairytales

  I sensed our excesses would lead to death, only I assumed I’d be the one to die.

  —STEVE ABBOTT

  1.

  WHENEVER MY FATHER described the two-room apartment he shared with my mother on Peachtree Street, he told me about the fish. When they first moved in together, they had little money to decorate. Curiously stained oriental rugs and once proud antique dressers and end tables were picked up at estate sales and hauled home in the back of a borrowed pickup truck. What money they did have, a gift from my mom’s parents, they put toward the tropical fish which they bought in a single day of romantic enthusiasm. In the entryway of their apartment stood a large, thick-glassed tank in which they kept angelfish. Past a curtain of clinking beads, in the den, were two more tanks. In one, kissing gouramis swam alongside tiny blue and green guppies, past plastic trees and a tiny figure of Neptune covered in algae. In the fish tank on the opposite wall swam South American piranhas, which my parents fed raw hamburger meat each night before bed.

  When my parents first met at an SDS party and my father told my mother he was bisexual, she answered, “That means you can love all of humanity instead of just half of it.” It was 1968 and everyone was talking about revolution. My father had just returned from a summer in Paris; the city was still roiling from the May riots when students had shouted, “Be reasonable! Demand the impossible!” Now, in the halls of American academia, antiwar students were shutting down campuses from UC Berkeley to Columbia.

  My mother was intrigued by my father’s open approach to sexuality. She never got hung up on his boy crushes, like his other girlfriends had. She was only jealous of his relationships with women and, according to Dad, even liked the guys he was attracted to. On weekends they went to the Cove and to the other gay and mixed bars that dotted the outskirts of downtown Atlanta. There, my mother picked out the young men my father could never attract on his own—men who’d never consider a gay encounter but who’d be up for a drunken three-way. In those early years of the sexual revolution, it was hip for young people to try new combinations. Sometimes my mom would dress in men’s clothing when they went out. Dad said she made a cute boy.

  Other weekends, my parents hosted dinner parties, entertaining their antiwar and grad student friends with spaghetti, cheap red wine, and charades. Dad wrote about feeling satisfied at the close of these evenings, seeing himself and my mom as leaders of a salon of intellectually engaged students. As they cleaned up after one such party, my mom suggested they marry. “Landlords won’t hassle us so much,” she reasoned. “We’ll be able to stock the kitchen and house with wedding presents. My parents will give us more money. Other than that, our life won’t really change.” My father wrote about her furiously sweeping the worn linoleum, “as if all of the loose ends of our life could be gathered in a dustpan and tossed into the trash.”

  My parents married on February 20, 1969, at the office of a justice of the peace in downtown Atlanta. They invited no family to witness the occasion. They took no wedding pictures. At first they enjoyed the novelty of matrimony. “It was like a game, or a sitcom,” my father wrote. My parents used to joke that he was like a flannel-clad frontiersman, coming home from his long day at school to a gracious wife who cooked dinner and washed dishes while he turned to his serious work as a graduate student and aspiring writer. But only a few months after their wedding, their life did change. Grad student friends distanced themselves, deciding perhaps that because my parents were married they wanted to be alone. And my mom seemed to grow restless and bored with the gay scene, just as my dad was growing bored with the domestic scene at home.

  Four months into their marriage, my father learned about a disturbance in New York’s Greenwich Village. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, a crowd of gay men and transvestites fought off a routine police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-run gay bar on Christopher Street. The following nights of violent face-offs and demonstrations would mark what many consider the start of the modern gay rights movement.

  Inspired by this event and his discovery of the cultural journal Gay Sunshine, my father, then Emory’s student government president, wrote a column for the student paper publicly coming out, an experience he later wrote about:

  Because I had a wife no one could question my manhood. I obviously wasn’t gay just because I couldn’t relate to women sexually. No doubt this allowed me to “come out” much more publicly and aggressively than I would have otherwise. Even so I paid a price. I lost friends. What was hardest for Barb, so she said, was her straight friends’ “sympathy.” “How can you stand it?” they’d ask. They refused to accept that it didn’t bother her all that much.

  Over the next two years, he helped organize Atlanta’s Gay Liberation Front, one of hundreds being organized on American campuses in the wake of Stonewall. He was also named the gay lib editor at Atlanta’s alternative weekly, The Great Speckled Bird, all the while sharing a life and bed with his wife.

  The Great Speckled Bird, cover by Steve Abbott, June 28, 1971. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.

  Then, on a warm spring night in 1970, a year into their marriage, my mother entered the den where my father was sitting and sternly and needlessly rearranged chairs and straightened the piles of papers that cluttered his desk. I imagine her in a flouncy purple blouse and a brown corduroy miniskirt, which would ride up her bare legs every time she bent over to pick up a stray paper. My dad admired her compact frame, feminine and efficient in its
movements. Finally, after straightening a calendar hanging on the wall, she faced him.

  In his journal my father would recall how, lit by the gurgling blue-green light of the fish tanks that surrounded them, my mom appeared like a sea creature. With her black eyeliner and mascara accentuating her large eyes, he imagined her as a villainess in an underwater sea lair.

  “I’m pregnant,” she announced.

  “I thought you had an IUD.”

  “I took it out. Don’t you remember?”

  He didn’t remember. After a moment he asked, “Do you think we should keep the baby? I can’t really see us with a baby in this place.” He gestured to the apartment, which seemed to shrink as he sat there.

  “I want this baby.”

  “I don’t know if we’re ready . . . And then there’s the money. Even with your salary and my fellowship money, we’re barely able to support ourselves now. I mean . . . if you want to have an abortion, you know I’d be there for you.”

  “I want this baby.”

  My dad felt like Flash Gordon strapped to his chair in this underwater universe. The air felt suddenly heavy and suffocating. He scanned the room for a means of escape. But the serpentine siren flicked her tongue and repeated her demand:

  I want this baby.

  Five years earlier, in the winter of her freshman year, my mother had taken a leave of absence from Smith College and moved into Chandler House, a maternity home for pregnant girls in Evanston, Illinois, three hours’ drive northeast of her parents’ house. It was a difficult period. My grandparents worked hard to keep my mother’s pregnancy a secret as it would bring shame on the family in their small Midwestern town. My mother signed into the home using a fake name and didn’t return to her parents until after she gave birth to her baby. Records from the home indicate that my mother kept to herself, often reading or taking walks along the North Shore, no matter the weather. After the birth of her daughter in May 1965, she signed papers giving her away to people she’d never meet.