I got back to my room just as it was being pungently sprayed, for the umpteenth time, for fleas. Usually they sprayed me too.
And now I’ll leave you with a couple of tiny glimpses which may stay with me longer than all the rest. One day while something medically important was happening in my crowded room, the I.V. acted up again and probably the most beautiful girl I’ve seen in years stepped forward to fix it. Her eyes were upraised, timing the drops by a tiny watch on her immaculate white-clad arm. I heard a whisper, coming from a young doctor leaning on my pillow: Doctor Aurelio Tlacuac Flores, the poet, was whispering just loud enough for her to hear. “Maria?”
Her lips never moved, nor her long eyelashes, but she breathed back with infinite distance, “Marie.”
Teasingly, almost too faint to hear, he tried again. “Marianne?”
The drops fell, her gaze never wavered, but there floated back the firm correction: “Marie.”
“Marie,” he echoed tenderly, and then in a voice so quiet I could barely make it out inches from my ear, he sang a little Spanish tune. “Marie, Oh I wonder what you are, I wonder what passes with you.”
Later, much later I shared my orange juice with Marie, the darling of his love whispers. She told me of the six children she had borne, four of whom had died. She was twenty-three and she gave me an exact clinical description of the cause of death of each one, including the twins.
My last memory of the Centro de Salud of Cozumel is also of a woman, a middle-aged lady of great efficacy named Isobel. On the thousand-year-old walls of Bonampak in southern Yucatan is a mural depicting a group of victorious noble Mayas watching the losers being tortured by having, among other things, their fingernails torn out with pliers. The painting is fresh and brilliant, and among the noble group is a lady of high rank, wearing a folded white robe and many ornaments. She gazes down impassively, satisfied, her beaked face and slant eyes a mask of alien antiquity. But that face lives today. With just those features and just that expression did Nurse Isobella Constantia fold her hands upon her snowy stomach and survey my saved life and my dirty bed.
—February 26, 1976
The First Domino
Dear Jeff,
Whew.
Mother died last week, leaving me with a new dark strange place in the heart, and flashes of a lively, beautiful, intelligent, adventurous red-haired young woman whom I had once known. We were close, even through those godawful years at the end after Father went, when I could barely stand to look upon the wreckage. “Close” in the sense of empathy; I respected and understood her generous heart and witty mind. And her vulnerability. To give you an idea, she left her instructions on the disposal of her body—cheap and fast—in a very funny light verse.
She left me also with the most horrendous practical problem of properly disposing of the ninety-four years of accumulated memorabilia of Africa, Old Chicago, assorted literary figures, endless treasures all mixed in with junk—letters from Carl Sandburg mixed in with grocery lists, blank stationery, birthday cards from once-eminences, lace panties, .38-caliber automatics, irreplaceable diaries of treks through Africa, irreplaceable diaries of her life as a war correspondent (all under her writing name), manuscripts, socks to be mended, mementoes of the visit of the French Navy to Douala in 1935, correspondence with heads of state, unpublished poetry, old curtains, two thousand African moleskins each as big as a postage stamp, unsent letters to me, interminable bequests and codicils, Japanese cloth of gold, more socks to be mended, grocery lists, blank stationery, saved envelopes with obsolete stamps—three rooms full of filing cabinets, one hall, and three storerooms (one “secret”)—in all twenty-six rooms of stuff. Oh, I forgot paintings. And in the middle of it all stands the figure of the Executor, an aged doddering Legal Eminence whom Mother regarded as a young man (he’s eighty-three) who has to be shown copies of every arrangement in writing in triplicate, and raises objections such as wanting the appraiser’s—one of the appraisers—curriculum vitae and credentials. Needless to say, said appraiser is out of town and has to be tracked down by long distance. In fact the whole thing is being conducted by long distance; I was on the phone four hours straight Friday—pause for writing confirming letters in triplicate—then another two hours dealing with financial matters. Luckily Mother died well, in her own home, among her things, independent to the last, but it was a close thing financially. That costs $30,000 a year, and has been going on. I figured that was what Father had accumulated the cash for, and she ran out just before her capital did. (Before Medicare it cost $50,000 a year for two years just to care for Father, without the ‘round-the-clock nursing Mother needed.) Yesterday was easy, only two hours on the phone, but this time with the secretary whose aim is to break me down by reading letters to me she has found going through Mother’s papers. I didn’t let her know she succeeded. Also notifying Mother’s old friends, who have to be told it all in excruciating detail; more breakdown. I now have two museums and two historical archives fighting over the spoils, all by long distance, plus innumerable friends going in to choose mementoes Mother left notes about, plus—oh, Jeff, it’s a lesson. Never be the last of a line, and never accumulate.
And I still haven’t dealt with her personal effects, clothes, furniture, etc. (twenty-six rooms full), all of which bother the hell out of me. They lived in that place—Father built the building and they took the whole top and made the first roof garden in Chicago—for sixty-four years. I was born in that fucking bed, the books (ten thousand) were my earliest companions, I know every chip on every chair leg and every ravel in every rug. And I have to go back and look before the movers roll in, because some of the fucking stuff is valuable. So you can see my head feels like the Bulgarian Tank Corps is holding maneuvers in it.
If you use this, it’ll help me by explaining why Tiptree isn’t writing anything any more for a while… maybe it’ll also be instructive, to somebody. You should keep in the money part; people should know what it costs to die in their own beds at age ninety-four. I intend to die alone on the VA wards, in case something overtakes me before I can get the trigger pulled. Leaving nothing.
Just as soon as the last essential paper is signed, I intend to take off—on the urgent advice of my doctor—for parts unreachable by mail. You know where. What is laughingly known as my other or real-life work can go screw it, I am not irreplaceable. I better not be.
If you have aging parents you will come to bless Medicare from the bottom of your heart. Jesus God, without it I shudder to think. And so will you.
Well, this is a weird letter.
Let me know how life goes with you, Jeff, old friend. Best to Ann.
As ever, yrs
Tip
—November 8, 1976
Everything but the Signature Is Me
The previous letter, as it says, was sent to me for publication, but I didn’t want to publish it. I thought it contained too much personal information, that it was a road map to a newspaper obituary. That it would blow Tiptree’s cover.
After writing this to Tip, and worrying over the problem for a while, I decided to look for the obituary myself. If I found it, no harm would be done. I wouldn’t tell anyone I found it; I just wouldn’t run the letter. If I couldn’t find it, it would be safe to publish. And what difference did it make what Tiptree’s real name was, anyway? I didn’t care. (I thought.)
In the library, the very first Chicago paper I pulled (the Tribune for October 28,1976) contained an obituary entitled “Explorer’s last right—no rites.” There were some discrepancies with the letter (the paper said she was ninety-two, and had died in a hospital), but there could be no doubt that Mary Hastings Bradley was James Tiptree’s mother.
Mary Hastings Bradley was survived by …. one daughter.
Some people had suggested that Tiptree might be a woman, but different people were suggesting that Tiptree was many different kinds of people. (It was mostly what if: What if Tiptree were a woman? What if Tiptree were a spy?) I don’t think many of Ti
ptree’s correspondents thought she was a woman, because we had to make our mental images of Tip—“Uncle” Tip, as he referred to himself—to use when reading the letters. (I still “hear” the male Tiptree voice when I reread the early letters, whereas you probably hear a female voice throughout.)
I was stunned.
To make matters worse, when I got home that evening, there was a postcard from a friend asking, “Is it true that James Tiptree is Alice Sheldon?” I didn’t know what to say.
So, despite my original intentions, I wrote to Tip and described everything I had done, and what I had found, and how bewildered I was. I ended: “This is
not a demand for information. A postcard saying merely later’ will not be the ending of a friendship. But one thing to definitely consider: I am going to be getting questions, and whatever you choose to disclose or withhold from me, please pass along the Party Line that I’m supposed to tell others.”
After all my years of not prying into Tiptree’s background, and trying to convince others not to, I was the one to force Alice Sheldon out of hiding. (Though obviously, as shown by the postcard, I wasn’t the first person who had found the death notice.)
Alii wrote to me, introducing herself, and asking that things be kept quiet for a while. She wrote to a number of her other correspondents, too, some of whom could keep secrets better than others. Soon, Tiptree’s identity was public knowledge.
“Everything but the Signature Is Me” was compiled from several letters to me, mostly from the first Alii Sheldon one and from a long one written in Yucatan specifically designed for publication. It was published in Khatru 7 (February 1978).
While preparing this book manuscript, I went through all the letters again and recompiled the article, and it’s a little bit longer. (This is like remastering an old record album for compact disc.) There’s nothing notable about the “new” material, but the article is now a little closer to the original letters.
The First Domino” was also in Khatru 7, embedded in my article ‘The Short, Happy Life of James Tiptree, Jr.”—which had first appeared in the Program Book of SunCon, the 35th World Science Fiction Convention, Labor Day Weekend 1977.
How great. At last it’s out, and you’re the first to know, as I promised long ago you would—although I didn’t expect it to happen through your own initiative. But at least you’re the first I can write to in my own persona. Bob Mills has an envelope in his safe “To Be Opened If Tiptree Dies” giving an outline of the facts, but he hasn’t opened it. (I’m morally sure.)
Yeah. Alice Sheldon. Five-feet-eight, sixty-one years, remains of a good-looking girl vaguely visible, grins a lot in a depressed way, very active in spurts. Also, Raccoona.
I live in a kind of big wooden box in the woods like an adult playpen, full of slightly mangy plants, fireplace, minimal old “modern teak” furniture strewn with papers, hobbies, unidentifiable and unfileable objects; the toolroom opens off the bedroom, there are six doors to the outside, and it’s colder than a brass monkey’s brains in winter, except when the sun comes out and shoots through all the glass skylights. We’ve added on porches (which turned into libraries), other excrescences—as somebody said, all it needs is a windmill on top. Not so ridiculous now. Ting (short for Huntington, my very nice more aged husband of thirty years who doesn’t read what I write but is happy I’m having fun) used to raise thousands of orchids before he retired and started traveling; he gave them to the nation, i.e., the National Botanic Gardens, who wanted hybrids. So now in the middle of the living room sticks this big untended greenhouse I am supposed to be growing things in. What I’m growing is mealy bugs—must get at it. We built the place very modestly in 1959, when it was all woods here. Now houses, subdivisions, are creeping toward us. No more stags on the lawn—real ones. But lots of raccoons. Still private enough so you can sneak out and get the mail or slip a cookie to a raccoon in the buff if you want to.
If you’d asked me any time from age three to twenty-six, I’d have told you, “I’m a painter.” (Note, not “artist”—painter. Snobbism there.) And I was. Oh my, did I draw, sketch, model, smear oils, build gesso, paint—paint—paint. (Age three I drew pictures of our bulldog, with lollipop legs.) I worked daily, whether I was supposed to be listening to lectures on Chateaubriand, whether my then-husband was shooting at me (he was a beautiful alcoholic poet), whether the sheriff was carrying our furniture out, whether Father was having a heart attack, whatever. And I wasn’t too bad; I illustrated a couple of books in my early teens, I had a one-man show at sixteen, I exhibited in the All-American then at the Corcoran—and the painting, which used me as model, sold. Somewhere my naked form is hanging in a bedroom in North Carolina, if it hasn’t been junked. I bought a shotgun, a Fox C-E double-barrel 12-gauge full choke, with the money. (Those were the three years when I was a crazy duck hunter, before I shot one too many cripples and gave it up never to kill another living thing, bugs excluded.) I believe the Fox is now far more valuable than anything I ever did.
The trouble was, you see, I was just good enough to understand the difference between my talent and that rare thing, real ability. It was as though I had climbed the foothills high enough to see the snow-clad peaks beyond, which I could never scale. This doesn’t stop some people; it did me. What’s the use of adding to the world’s scrap heap? The reason people thought me innovative was that I was good enough to steal mannerisms and tricks they had never climbed high enough to study. But I knew where it was coming from.
And then came the dreadful steady unstoppable rise of Hitler—a great spreading black loin chop on the map—and I found out something else. There are painters who go on painting when a million voices are screaming in terminal agonies. And there are those who feel they have to Do Something about it, however little.
So I came back to Chicago—I’d been living in San Angel, near Mexico City, mucking around on the fringes of the Diego Rivera/Orozco/ Siqueres crowd—and took a job as the Chicago Sun’s first art editor, while waiting for the Army to open female enlistments. (I wasn’t one of the famous first group of female potential officers; for some reason it was important to me to go in as an ordinary G.I. with women officers.) Besides, I was having a great time discovering that Chicago was full of artists, who had to exhibit in NYC before they could sell to their Chicago neighbors. Chicago then had two art critics; one was a lethal, totally politicized Marxist (female), and the other was an elderly gent who knew art had died with Cezanne, and whose feet hurt. So when people sent works to Chicago shows they didn’t get reviewed—or it was worse when they did. Anyway, I rooted out about forty producing groups, started what was then a new thing, a New Yorker-type calendar, told people interesting things to look for in shows. (One Art Institute guard, coping with a host of people with my “guide” clipped out, demanding to know which was the east room, asked me, “Did you do this?” Nobody had asked him anything but “Where is the toilet?” for twenty years.)
But this was all waiting, while the paper shortage cut me from a page to a half and then to a quarter. And then the great day came, and I trotted down to U.S. Army Recruitment Station Number 27 in three-inch heels and my little chartreuse crepe-de-chine designer thing by Claire somebody, and my pale fox fur jacket, and found a drunken second lieutenant with his feet on the desk. And when I said I wished to enlist in the Army, he caught an imaginary fly and said, “Ah, hell, you don’t want to go in that goddamn thing.” And I said if it was all the same to him, I did. And so—but that’s another, five-year-long, fairly hilarious story.
People tell me I’ve had an exciting or glamorous or whatnot life; it didn’t feel like much but work and a few adventures. A few, ah oui… All I write is really from life, even that crazy duck-shooting boy breaking the ice naked at ten degrees below zero on the Apache reservation was me, once (“Her Smoke Rose Up Forever”).
As to science fiction: Well, you see, I had all these uncles, who are no relation at all, but merely stray or bereaved or otherwise unhappy bachelors who
m my parents adopted in the course of their wanderings. (That sort of thing happened much more in the old, old days. The fact that Father was an intensely lovable man of bewildering varied capabilities, and that Mother was a blazing-blue-eyed redhead of great literacy and gaiety didn’t hurt, of course; and in their odd way they were both secretly lonesome—having nothing but peculiar me for family.) This particular uncle was what used to be called a Boston Brahmin, dean of a major law school and author of a text on torts so densely horrible that I still meet lawyers who shudder at its name. In short, he was dignified and respectable to an extreme—on the surface, as it turned out.
The summer when I was nine we were up in the woods of Wisconsin as usual, and Uncle Harry returned from an expedition to the metropolis of one thousand souls thirty miles away with his usual collection of The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, etc. (There was a funny little bookshop-hole there that ordered things for you.) Out of his bundle slipped a seven-by-nine magazine with a wonderful cover depicting, if I recollect, a large green octopus removing a young lady’s golden brassiere. We all stared. The title was Weird Tales.
“Ah,” said Uncle Harry. “Oh. Oh yes. I, ah, picked this up for the child.”
“Uncle Harry,” I said, my eyes bulging, “I am the child. May I have it, please?”
Meet Me at Infinity Page 33
