The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  My impression is that she was more focused on the story than on how she felt about it, and this is primarily what made her style seem so different from that of her female contemporaries.

  I believe she identified femininity with vulnerability to men, which to her meant violent rape. Thus, she found it intolerable. In a 1988 interview, she spoke with annoyance and disdain about having to wear one’s hair a certain way or going along with any feminine stereotype. She did not want her characters to have a pair-bond as their ultimate goal, especially not a conventional male-female one. There was never any “happily ever after” for her or for her female characters; they were required to forge their own future from something other than love, or at least something other than blissful matrimony.

  Although Marion never affected the flannel shirt and khakis uniformly worn by the lesbians I grew up around in the Bay Area, it would have been difficult to imagine a less feminine woman than my mother. Her voice, her body language, her mannerisms, and her attitude all spoke of power and only power as the priority in dealing with other people. She was just as unfeminine in a dress as she was in pants. She never dressed to look nice, and she regarded doing so as a betrayal of feminism.

  She refused to value appearances and regarded doing so as selling out to the patriarchy. Feminine body language and behavior was considered to be repulsive and out of the question because it might attract men, and permitting men to be attracted by those things was wrong because it will teach them the wrong thing. She believed women were supposed to educate men to appreciate us only for our minds, and therefore it was a woman’s responsibility to absolutely reject any male appreciation which is the result of our appearance or femininity. Any man who dares to love our femininity is an evil oppressor and should not be provided with any sex, ever.

  In my mother’s imagination, for a woman to have sex with a masculine man was to risk her life as well as her sanity.

  Despite her intelligence, my mother never anticipated that men would quickly reason their way around this preposterous attitude. All a man needs to do to obtain sex from a feminist is to pretend to go along with these ideas in every way and insist that he only loves her for her mind. And if he will be deemed trustworthy even more quickly if he is willing to assume a parasitic role and permit her to pay for everything. The most important thing is that a man cannot express any opinion about thin women being more attractive than fat women. The more a man can tolerate, or better yet, pretend to desire fat women, the quicker he will be provided sex, the more female partners he will have access to, and the more his feminist partners will accept him having multiple partners.

  Apparently, we women are too dimwitted to figure out that rather than believing this feminist nonsense, men simply learned to tell us what we wanted to hear.

  After Marion graduated from high school, she attended the New York State College for Teachers, now known as University at Albany, SUNY from 1946 to 1948. Her goal was to become a teacher, but she dropped out, mostly because her father believed that “education on a woman was like lips on a chicken,” and he refused to support her. In response, she told him she would marry the first kind, decent, sober man who asked her, and that is exactly what she did.

  Marion married the fifty-year-old Robert Alden Bradley on October 26, 1949, when she was only nineteen. They had corresponded for three years but never met. She always called him “Brad.”

  Brad was a fellow science-fiction fan, and he was very supportive of her writing. Marion felt that Brad was a marvelous conversationalist and told me that the reason she stayed with Brad as long as she did despite their many differences was this: “He knew he could trust me with his money, and we never ran out of things to talk about.”

  She was grateful to Brad for teaching her to drive and for sending her to college at Hardin-Simmons. Marion graduated with three majors, in English, Spanish, and psychology. Her Spanish was good enough to permit her to write a credible translation of El Villano in su Rincon by Lope de Vega that was printed privately in 1971. She was also interested in parapsychology, though not religion. The only religion she consistently claimed in my hearing was Spiritualism, and she took Rosicrucianism very seriously. She also took voice lessons in college. She loved Gilbert and Sullivan and continued to sing throughout her life.

  Brad and Marion had one son, my late half-brother David Robert Bradley (1950–2008), but she desperately wanted more children, and Brad absolutely did not. When she became pregnant again after David was born, he obliged her to have an abortion. When Marion refused to have any more abortions, Brad simply declined to ever have sex with her again. She hated him for this and cited it as the primary reason she left him for my father after 16 years of marriage.

  Toward the end of her life she told me that Brad was a very strange man who reminded her of a space alien, although she couldn’t really explain any reason for it. She also told me that she never cried anymore and didn’t like crying because she did nothing but cry for over a year after she had first married, and it had never done her a “damned bit of good.” That being said, she did cry rather a lot while I was young. I can hardly blame her, between her absolutely appalling upbringing, the never-ending poverty she experienced, and the unhappy end of her first marriage.

  She was not one to put up with anyone else crying either, regardless of age or reason. After all, crying was a sign of weakness, and proof that a woman was not strong enough to solve her own problems.

  Not long after Marion left Brad, my grandmother unexpectedly left Leslie Sr. and moved to California with Paul and Don after catching Leslie Sr. in a compromising position with a cow. My mother told me this story with a combination of amusement and fury, upset that her mother had more concern for the morals and modesty of the cow than for her own daughter. The other factor contributing to my grandmother’s departure was a series of violent altercations between Leslie Jr. and Don, in which Leslie Jr. was the instigator and Don got the worst of it.

  I am told that when my grandmother left and they carried the old piano out of the house, the only thing Leslie said to her was, “Babe, would you turn on the TV?”

  Armchair Psychology

  Marion’s mother is passive and does not protect her from her violent, sexually abusive father. Her father is the strongest personality in her house. In psychological theory, “introjecting the abuser” means we would take on traits of the strongest parent, instead of the weakest one, regardless of the parent’s sex. Marion learned that love was not available from either men or women and that the only way to obtain freedom was to get married and, eventually, to make her own money. She also learned that violence was acceptable and tended to coincide with power.

  Marion learned that although women were safer than men, they were not entirely safe either. She had relationships with women that were hysterical and highly dramatic. Her most stable love relationships were with men despite the drama she brought to them; Marion was married to Brad for sixteen years and to my father for thirty-four years. Even when she had been with Lisa for twenty years, Marion still described Walter as the love of her life.

  Marion learned that sex was fundamentally coercive and that she would either be forced, or she would force. One sees this again and again in the unequal relationships and in the unsatisfactory substitutes for conventional male-female relationships she created in her writing. The Renunciates or Free Amazons in her Darkover books gave up the right to marry, based on her idea that simply shacking up instead of getting married would magically create a superior relationship.

  It was Marion’s vision that living together without marriage vows would somehow sidestep the coercive, unequal situation she equated with marriage. But while reversing the power dynamic and vesting it with women might seem an obvious way to right the perceived wrongs of the marriage structure, it did not work. Marion held all the power in her family, and yet she was not only cruel and punitive but irrational and would punish others savagely on a whim. The matriarchy she created was not just and good;
it was oppressive and terrifying and left her children feeling like caged animals, wishing for escape or death and much too frightened to cry.

  Marion appeared to have fused femininity with helplessness and vulnerability in her mind. She wrote characters into her books ranging from the most oppressed to the least and seemed to handle those still in their figurative or literal chains with sensitivity and kindness. Invariably, her characters who escaped oppression did so by rejecting their femininity and taking on a more masculine persona, in an obvious echo of her own life’s path.

  Marion was given a model of educated, intelligent, and oppressed womanhood in her mother, and while she rejected the oppression to which she was subjected, she also rejected her own womanhood, becoming instead a female caricature of her violent father.

  Primarily due to her intelligence, Marion was able to attract two husbands although she was not happy with either of them. Her conflicted relationship with sex almost guaranteed she would end up pursuing relationships with men where sex was either problematic or nonexistent, as was the case in both of her marriages.

  Marion was fundamentally unable to trust other people. As a child, she went to her mother for help but was betrayed and sent back to her father to endure more abuse. Psychologists describe the basis of the “borderline conflict” as an abused child going back and forth between father and mother, looking for love and safety but not finding it in either one of them. As a result of her borderline conflict, Marion became a violent, masculinized woman, hating and mistrusting men and only able to tolerate those who were neither conventionally masculine nor feminine. Ironically, she ended up internalizing her father’s oppressive version of masculinity, and he lived on through her.

  In the end, Marion became the very oppressor she hated.

  Chapter 2: My Father’s Early Life (1928–1961)

  “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”

  —Ophelia, Hamlet Act 1, Scene 3

  I will be telling my father Walter’s story from his perspective since there is no way to verify or disprove any of his claims beyond his military service record. I have drawn from what Walter told me and from his own autobiography, as well as what his friends and my brothers have shared with me. I am not claiming that his account is true or untrue, only that it is what he believed. I cannot pretend to reconcile all the things he told me. All I can do is transmit what he said and leave it to you to figure out what happened.

  My father, the noted numismatic author Walter Henry Breen, was born in San Antonio, Texas, on September 5, 1930. He was orphaned as an infant, a foundling abandoned on the running board of a truck. He told me he was originally named James Douglas Headrick, and thought he might have been the illegitimate child of a famous young Juilliard pianist.

  He was adopted by Nellie Mehl Breen (Mary Helena Brown Mehl) and her husband Walter Breen, a traveling salesman. I never once heard my father say a single good word about his adoptive mother, although he dearly loved his mostly-absent father. Of his mother he had this to say: “She was about as fit to raise a kid like me as a chimpanzee would have been.” He had many complaints about her, the mildest of which was that she force-fed him peanut butter sandwiches, which made him sick. Apparently, she was both overbearing and violent as well as religious in a terrifying way, and believed that everything not strictly Catholic was a source of immediate and eternal damnation.

  My father had three birth certificates with different years and locations. He told me this was because his mother obtained the two fraudulent birth certificates, dated 1929 and 1928, respectively, because she wanted him to leave the house and start earning money with the Army Air Force. He also told me that his mother used the name “William Brown” on one of the birth certificates in an effort to hide him from his adoptive father after they divorced and she moved to West Virginia.

  His arrest records and military records use the 1928 birthdate, but he always insisted to me that the 1930 birthdate was correct. I see no reason to dispute that a child knows exactly how old he is: When we are young, our age is the center of our identity.

  One small anecdote about Walter’s feelings regarding his age: Marion was born in June of 1930, whereas he was born in September of the same year. One day, she said, “Now that we’re both fifty–” and he stopped her abruptly, saying, “Speak for yourself,” as though it was offensive to him to be considered fifty when he would still be 49 for another few months. Walter always regarded Marion as being the older of the two of them and would not accept any claim to the contrary.

  I am going to quote from Walter’s autobiography here in order to permit him to describe his childhood in his own words:

  1933: I learned to read and write on my own, well before I was 3 years old. When I was 4, I wanted to know more about how the human body worked, so I made friends with a neighbor who was a medical student, and I borrowed his copy of Gray’s ANATOMY, managing to understand a fair amount of it with his help. I also remember reading a dictionary, which meant that the way I talked made me a green monkey among the pink monkeys in the orphanage in later years. The Walter Damrosch radio programs—which I heard infrequently, but loved — turned me on to classical music for which I was starved from then on.

  In 1937, when Walter was six, his adoptive mother returned to Catholicism and divorced his adoptive father. She retained custody of Walter, then moved to West Virginia and changed his name to William Brown so that his adoptive father could not find him. Walter later expressed regret that he had not been able to see his adoptive father more often after the divorce. Since divorce is forbidden by the Catholic Church, it seems an extremely odd thing to do as the result of returning to it. Was there some kind of abuse of her or of my father? If so, my father was either completely unaware of it or did not speak about it at all.

  After the divorce, my father and his adoptive mother moved to Wheeling, West Virginia, as the 1940 census reflects. She put him into a Catholic orphanage, where she got a job as a janitor. He later compared the orphanage to a concentration camp. He told me that he was expected to believe that God delighted in their sufferings, and he told me stories of the overwhelming brutality that took place in the orphanage, including beatings with coat hangers and electrical cords.

  Walter’s mother put clothespins on his member if she caught him touching it. He spoke with fury of being required to sleep with his hands outside the bed so that he would not touch himself. He claimed that the only “love” he ever experienced was with a priest at the orphanage but he gave no details, other than regarding it as a transformative experience. This is the point at which Walter began to confuse sex with love in his mind.

  Despite these unusual circumstances, he completed grade school in only 22 months.

  In 1941, his mother decided that Walter had a vocation for the priesthood and put him into the Trinitarians monastery in Hyattsville, Maryland. He had to obtain a special dispensation from the Apostolic Delegate because he was only eleven years old. He never gave any details beyond “It didn’t work out” to explain what became of his supposed priestly vocation.

  After that, Walter returned to the orphanage where his mother worked and went to high school. He graduated from Central Catholic High School in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1943 a few months before he turned 14. He was the youngest and smallest kid in his class. He referred to his classmates as “walking Polish jokes” and thought they hated him because he was into books and music instead of sports, cars, and girl-chasing. Even then, he objected strenuously to the idea of having to prove his masculinity.

  After completing high school at 13, my father had nothing to do but hang around at the rectory at the Catholic orphanage where his mother still worked. He must have been absolutely miserable there because despite his hatred of traditional masculinity, he decided to enlist in the military and get mixed up with the most traditionally masculine situation on the planet.

  He enlisted in the Army Air Force at the age of sixteen on October 3, 1946, using the false birth certifi
cate with the 1928 birthdate his mother had gotten him. He was sent to the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center (subsequently renamed Lackland Air Force Base) for training. His military identification number was 18 324 478, and he listed his mother as a dependent. His other specifications included the following: Height: six feet, one inch; Eye color: hazel; Hair color: brown; IQ: 144; Vision: 20/20–20/15.

  An IQ of 144 is very high, being 12 points more than is required to join Mensa, the high IQ association, and puts an individual in the top 0.02 percent of the population. Only one in 596 people has an IQ that high.

  Nevertheless, Walter Breen had one of the shortest military careers in history. On December 3rd, 1946, he was beaten up and left for dead by his fellow soldiers. He later told me they attacked him because they found out he was homosexual.

  The beating caused a severe head injury with memory loss. He was taken to the station hospital with total amnesia about his life. The hospital staff contacted his mother, and she immediately came out to see him. She was not helpful at all, but scared him half to death. He said in his autobiography that his mother “…sent a priest to reinstruct me in the Catholic religion, complete with threats of hellfire for what I know now to have been relatively minor doubts and questionings.” Imagine being in the hospital, and all your mother will do is send a priest to make sure you are a good Catholic after scaring you to death!

  My father remained in the hospital for some time after that, diagnosed not only with the head injury but with paranoid schizophrenia and homosexuality. This was, of course, decades prior to the 1987 decision of the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder.