It may be that I fell in love with her, reading that book. In any event, I knew I had met a genius, and that I had to know her better.
One thing led to another, and a year later she divorced her husband to go with me when I left the University of Illinois for a position with the US Treasury. Alma has recorded our time in Washington in her short story, “Strangers in Camelot,” from her book A Dooryard Full of Flowers. It is an almost literal description of our somewhat melodramatic experience in the nation’s capitol.
At the time I met her, Alma had come to a dead stop in her writing. She had tried everything: hiring a woman to watch the children one day each week so that she would be free to write, painting her study in her favorite apricot shades that should have stimulated her creativity, even agonizing over the problem with a headshrinker friend. Nothing worked.
She hoped the writer’s block would clear when she left domesticity behind and had no distractions, but still she remained stuck, even when we moved to Greenwich Village and the stresses of Secret Service surveillance lay behind us. I never lost faith in her genius, however, and decided that we could live on my salary alone, leaving her free to give all her time to writing.
She struggled with guilt – guilt at leaving her children, at her lack of product. Gradually she realized that she no longer could write about heterosexuals. But what to write about homosexuals? She devoured every lesbian book she could find, all of them either tragedies with the heroine committing suicide, or “happy endings” where the heroine finds a man who rescues her from her erroneous ways. She definitely had no wish to contribute to such a genre.
For a couple of years, she assuaged her conscience by making extensive records of her thoughts and our daily life in her journals, accumulating massive piles of observations, reassuring herself that future researcher would find the material valuable. But her tension built. Worried about the ethics of letting me support her when she had produced nothing, she began to talk about finding a job. She repeatedly told me about the phenomenon of a one-book author, a tragic figure in the literary world, and even I began to wonder if that explained her long hiatus.
At this crucial juncture, in 1964, more than two years after we had left Illinois, we set out on our annual vacation. Beginning a custom that we followed all the nine years of our partnership, we rented a car in September, late enough to avoid summer crowds but early enough that most tourist attractions were still open, and spontaneously explored various areas in the Northeast, guide book in hand. Because Alma loved American history, we visiting places like the colonial reconstructions at Sturbridge and the Plymouth colony, and manufacturing plants and gourmet restaurants to compensate me for putting up with sites that bored me rather quickly. This particular year, we focused on the Finger Lakes region, inevitably spending a day at the Cooperstown Museum Village.
I had grown thoroughly weary of hand-dipped candles and the art of blacksmithing by the time we entered a small gallery of American primitive art, mostly windvanes and embroidered samplers. Alma had graduated from college as an art major, and so believed in enjoying a work of art “for itself,” not on the basis of some curator’s evaluation. As a result, she tended to move through a gallery more rapidly than me. This worked out well, because then she could enjoy a cigarette outside while I plodded along, carefully reading placards alongside each exhibit. She had almost reached the exit when I came to a complete stop, immobilized by an astonishing paragraph commenting on a group of paintings by one Mary Ann Willson, a paragraph that I kept re-reading, disbelieving the evidence of my eyes. In a stage whisper, I called out to Alma, “Did you read this?”
Loftily, she replied, “Of course not.”
“You’d better come back,” I advised, still whispering. Thinking back now, it seems strange that I continued to whisper, since no one else was in the room at the time. But in those days, we never forgot the very real need to keep our sexual orientation secret, and my overwhelming interest in this particular painter certainly betrayed my preferences.
When Alma read the matter-of-fact assertion that Mary Ann Willson and “her famerette companion, Miss Brundidge” were “romantically attached,” she forgot herself, and spoke out loudly and enthusiastically.
“This is fantastic! However did they manage?”
Wild to know more, we spent the next hour going over reference books in the museum’s modest library, fruitlessly searching for detail on the lives of Miss Willson and Miss Brundidge. The few scraps that we found fired Alma’s imagination, and that very afternoon she began to talk about writing a novel based on their lives.
When we returned home, she began serious research on New England in the early 1800s, first reading novels based in that period but soon moving into original documents that she found at New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society. About a month later she felt we should try to unearth specific material about this provocative couple. We drove up to Green County on a weekday, so that we could hunt for Miss Brundidge and Miss Willson in land records. While we found numerous transactions involving Willsons and Brundidges, none could have been our elusive couple. We then searched the local cemetery, also in vain. At the Greenville library, we encountered the town historian, who knew enough about these two women to tell us that they had lived on Red Mill Road, and that their farm now belonged to Miss Howard. The next day we found Miss Howard, who knew little but cordially invited us to explore her land, including an area that she said was locally known as Brundidge Hill. We found no evidence that “the girls,” as Alma had begun to call them, had lived there. But at least she began to have a sense of what their environment might have been.
Working from these slender clues, Alma began to write, painfully and slowly. The idea of the pioneer lovers gripped her, but plot eluded her. We discussed possibilities endlessly, but always Alma was frustrated at the frugal amount of detail she had been able to unearth. “We don’t even know Miss Brundidge’s first name,” she would wail.
A little more than a year after we first discovered Mary Ann, I was shopping for Christmas presents for my relatives and Alma’s children when my eye fell on a Ouija board, paradoxically for sale in a toy department. Immediately I knew that here lay the solution to Alma’s data problem, and took one home. Alma was puzzled, never having heard of a Ouija board. In contrast, all through my childhood I had watched the grownups asking it endless questions at family gatherings.
“We just rest our fingers lightly on the planchette,” I explained, “and mentally call someone to come to us.”
Dubiously, she complied. When, after several minutes the planchette moved, tentative and wandering, Alma asked the question paramount in her mind: “What is Miss Brundidge’s first name?” Briskly, the planchette spelled out “Florence.”
Alma protested that idea, thinking the name not appropriate to the period. But even as she demurred, the planchette continued to spell, though we had not asked a second question.
“I am,” it said, “Mary Ann.”
Chills raced up my back as I belatedly remembered the adults had always said one should call a specific person to the board, lest an unfriendly spirit take over. I never knew whether I believed in the Ouija board; even as a child, I often suspected my cousins of intentionally pushing to get amusing or shocking answers. But at this moment I knew I wasn’t deliberately forcing an answer, and I doubted that Alma was. Could this be an authentic communication with the Beyond?
I never came up with a solid answer to that question, and I see, reading Alma’s journals many years later (she insisted on keeping them private when we lived together), that neither did she. After we had been using the board for about a month, she noted in her journal:
I begin to wonder if this is what is meant by inspiration. Even if they are figures of our unconscious, does it matter? … It is as though my year of studying and imagining has been rewarded with this great breakthrough … I don’t know why any book I might be able to make of this might not be called divine revelation.
I, too, considered the possibility, even probability, that what appeared through the Ouija board might merely be a projection of my unconscious, which surely could move the planchette without any volitional intention from me. In fact, I held this view until Alma asked the girls how much they paid for their farm. The board came up with a number which I considered ridiculously wrong (I don’t now remember if it seemed too high or too low), but held fast when challenged. Several weeks later Alma finally came upon a document at the library giving the price per acre for land sold at that time in Greene County. We dug up the Ouija board figures, divided the total price by the number of acres, and came up with a number that corresponded exactly to the historical data.
That kind of information, I conceded, hardly could have come from the unconscious, either mine or Alma’s.
In any event, after that first evening, Alma relied heavily on sessions at the Ouija board to move her manuscript along. Before long, she developed a routine. We taped the sessions, having discovered that breaking off to make notes disrupted the flow of communication. Alma prepared lists of questions in advance, since our respondent (usually Mary Ann, but sometimes Florence) tended to grow impatient and leave if Alma paused too long. Alma asked most of the questions, but I threw in an occasional spontaneous inquiry when the sessions began to feel like friendly visits. Unless we consulted the board in daytime, we often worked by candlelight, which seemed to facilitate the speed of the initial appearance and the length of the session.
If Alma had her way, we would have used the board for hours every day. After a time, Mary Ann and Florence became completely real to us, so that a session with the Ouija board felt like a visit with a beloved friend, and afterwards Alma inevitably felt refreshed and vivified. I, on the other hand, almost always was drained of energy by the time we said goodbye to our visitor – peacefully drained, but nonetheless utterly fatigued. I never could decide whether this state of affairs represented a simple transfer of energy from my body to Alma’s, or whether it meant, as Alma was prone to conclude, that I acted as the “medium” in these exchanges. Whatever the case, I felt obliged to join her in these sessions as often, and as long, as my stamina permitted, since they obviously supported her writing effort, and neither Mary Ann nor Florence could be summoned when Alma tried using the board with a variety of other partners.
Looking back more than thirty years later, I see there could have been no better use of my time. Whether they came from two wonderful women who lived almost two centuries ago or merely from the unconscious levels of our minds, those communications from Mary Ann and Florence helped Alma create her most magnificent work. Who could ask for more?
First draft of the manuscript of A Place For Us, in the author’s hand
Second draft of the manuscript of A Place For Us, with corrections in the author’s hand
Cover of A Place For Us
Rejection letter from McGraw-Hill
Printing invoice for A Place For Us
Letter to customer from Alma Routsong
Order for A Place For Us
From The Village Voice, April 20, 1972
Frontierswomen in Love, by Bell Gail Chevigny
Patience & Sarah, the story of women in love – with each other – in America early last century, is a novel with a past. Unable to find a publisher for the book when it was completed in 1968, the author published it herself as “A Place for Us” in a “Bleecker Street Press” edition and sold 1,000 copies out of a shopping bag. Last year the American Library Association honored it with the First Annual Gay Book of the Year Award. I understand that it has been an underground classic in the Women’s Movement and that many young gay women cherish and find support in it. Its surfacing in bookstores now is welcome because the book was doubtless intended to move and delight a more general audience as well – and I’m sure it will.
The novel was inspired by a few facts about the life of Mary Ann Willson, an American primitive painter of the early 1800s, who settled with a “devoted female companion” in Greene County, New York. Miss Miller writes in her afterword: “We know about their ‘romantic attachment’ to each other, their quiet peaceful life, the respect and help of their neighbors, and their dooryard full of flowers, their plowing and haying, their cow, the improvised paints – berries and brick dust – the paintings sold for 25 cents to neighbors who carried them all over eastern North America, from Canada to Mobile. We are provoked to tender dreams by a hint. Any stone from their hill is a crystal ball.”
Although we learn little of Patience’s paintings, the idea of them infects and unifies this remarkably original book. The writing has the directness and whimsicality of primitive paintings – it is like spiked gingerbread or surprising samplers. The tone is sweetly bold. And the tale evokes many kinds of frontier at once. Although the women live in a churchly community in Connecticut where they feel restrictions, it also feels like the frontier. It is refreshing and wonderfully suggestive for a new women’s love literature to be announced from the pole of civilized history opposite decadence. And it is a witty pleasure to read a frontier tale where the explorers, the pathfinders, the hunters, the new builders are there, but metaphorically – as gay women!
As in other frontier stories, everything between these pioneer lovers is improvised and fluid. Experience is sometimes so new it precedes language – in loving, their bodies tell them what to do and they invent names for their sensations. And social custom is so young that public censure is fumbling. Patience decides their first kisses will not show: “Her face showed glory so bright I might have worried except I was sure no one else had any basis in experience for recognizing it.” Though Patience’s father beats her painfully when he knows, her mother and many sisters are moved by their love. Martha – caught in a marriage of murder by pregnancy to Patience’s brother Edward – discovers the unlaced lovers, wonders and envies a sweetness and eros she never knew. And their heat sometimes makes even righteous Edward glow.
All this makes me muse on Leslie Fiedler who, beginning with his essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” argued that men in the crucial 19th century American literature turned from heterosexuality toward each other to know their deepest selves. So here do women turn. But if those American writers were able to imagine only sexless, idealized women, Isabel Miller retroactively gives them the lie and creates women so strong and juicy no men or marriage will answer.
The love between the two women here would be mythic were it not for the reality of the lovers. As in a myth, Sarah’s first kiss brings immediate recognition to Patience: “I knew why she’d been afraid and wondered why I hadn’t been, why I had lured this mighty mystery and astonishment into the room, into our lives. I turned my head to save my life.” Then she turns it back, thinking, “Whatever this was, I would live it.”
True, there are retreats. There are moments of confusion as love defines itself. There are alternating initiatives – they take turns getting lost in the present, leaving the burden of their future to the other. Sarah, 21, raised by her father as a boy, is all honest impulse; she first wants to rush with her love to the wilderness, then seeing something of the world’s complexity, would drug herself with a life of secret Sundays in Patience’s room. Patience, 27, is intuitive and in many ways artful; she first fails her love in boldness, refusing her flight, then insists on it, arranging it so her brother will finance it. Strategic retreats, but no doubt about the love, after that first moment no fear of its nature, no pain given or got in it, no enduring loss felt for the exile it causes, almost no cost. Not mythic, it is love in its pastoral phase. The reader doesn’t really want it different, because the book has authority on its own terms, as does the wrought love of the women.
Some of the best adventures in the book yield bemusing commentary on women. When Patience’s nerve fails her, Sarah tries to go west alone, cutting her hair and calling herself Sam. But when her lack of beard makes people stop her for a runaway apprentice, Sarah concludes, “I began
to see how boys aren’t much better off than women. Men are the ones who get their way and run the world.”
She takes refuge in the wagon of an itinerant bookseller. A New York family man, a restless intellectual, the defrocked Parson Peel shares his dreams, his learning, his curiosity, his alphabet with Sarah. Believing her to be a boy, he eventually touches her knee, assuring her that “men have loved and embraced each other since the beginning of time.” With her unmasking he drops his pursuit and “differences came creeping in, like Parson started helping with the book boxes, and he never said another cuss word in my hearing, and I think a little at a time he stopped educating me. I mean, he seemed to stop saying whatever came into his head. There’d be little waits, it seemed to me, while he thought out what it was fitting or useful for a woman to know.”
Patience had been educated and finished and knew the secret merits of these things. When Sarah was being beaten by her father for trying to see her lover, Patience thought, “It is a sin to raise a girl to be a man, believing in strength and courage and candor. We can’t prevail that way.” When they are finally traveling together and a man accosts Sarah on a Hudson steamer because of her frank smile, Patience regretfully gives her lessons in being a lady. It’s not that Sarah hadn’t learned holds and throws when she was Sam on the road. But she can’t prevail that way and has to learn to gaze idly into space and not to hear men’s remarks. Patience sums up her method: “You are a very rich, very ill-tempered 50-year-old lady who has always had her own way in everything. You do as you please, and you walk like a lord, and you are deaf.”
It is the 19th century, after all, and ladies’ accomplishments were still more appropriate than karate. When she was born, Patience’s father, “wondering how someone with all that go could stand to be a woman,” said “he’d half hoped naming me Patience would help a little.” It did. One wonders what helped Isabel Miller and other writers like her stand the arcane, early American taboos of the publishing industry so long. Well now the territory is opened, and we can watch the settlers fill up the frontier.
Patience & Sarah Page 19
