Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  MY DAD’S SISTER, Elaine, arrived in Atlanta soon after the accident. She took the first plane she could catch from Lincoln, Nebraska. When she entered the house, I thought she was my mother.

  “Is that Mommy?”

  “No, Alysia,” my dad said. “Mommy’s not home.”

  Elaine remembers my mother’s fuzzy white bathrobe, which was still hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and the closet still full of her clothes. “He couldn’t put them away.”

  One night my dad planned an outing to the better Atlanta bars, even a drag show to shock his younger sister, who until this visit hadn’t known he was gay. “So that’s like two whammies that sent me into shock,” she told me. But Elaine hadn’t packed any “dress-up clothes,” so Dad went into my mother’s closet. “Take this,” he said, holding out a paisley pantsuit. It fit, so Elaine wore it, though she recalls feeling very strange. And then that night, when she came in and Dad paid the babysitter, she remembers me, a few months shy of three, waking up and asking again, “Is that Mommy? Is Mommy home?”

  “No, honey. Mommy’s not here.”

  Eventually, Dad tried to explain that Mommy wasn’t coming back. With toy cars, he acted out the accident. Reading the lines from my Babar book, he tried to explain the loss. “Babar’s mother was killed by a mean hunter. Babar cried.”

  But I still couldn’t get it. I spent every day thinking Mommy would walk through the door or that I’d wake up and she’d be there in bed next to Daddy. And then one day, as Dad was dressing me for day care, I broke down. Wringing my hands, I cried over and over, “I want Mommy! I want Mommy!”

  Dad calmed me, he held me, and again he explained to me, patiently pulling out the Babar book: “Babar’s mother was killed by a mean hunter. Babar cried.” Then he finished getting me dressed and drove me to the day care center, just like he did every morning. He wrote that I was okay after that day.

  She flew out the car window. At some point my father must have shared this detail of my mother’s accident with me because it’s always been an integral part of my family story. She flew out of the car. As a child I imagined her flying, already a ghost in a long white dress.

  MY MOTHER’S SISTER, Janet, was asleep in my grandparents’ spare room in Kewanee, Illinois, when they received my dad’s phone call. She was visiting from Evanston with her kids, Judson, five, and Jeremy, a day shy of three.

  “Should I take the kids home, Munca?” she asked my grandmother later that morning.

  “No, I like to look at them,” she said.

  Word of Barbara’s death spread quickly in her hometown, population 15,000. The next day, the local Star Courier ran an article about her accident and a small obituary. By nightfall, the asphalt driveway of my grandparents’ ranch-style home was full of cars. My uncle David, who was only eighteen and about to start his freshman year of college, recalls a constant traffic of people moving in and out of the house. They’d leave flowers and platters of homemade food on the table in the front room. They’d wash dishes and talk in hushed tones with Munca, who never took off her sunglasses.

  David remembers Munca’s close friend Daisy Gerwig arriving through the front door and making a beeline for Munca, who was sitting in a chair off the kitchen. With her arms outstretched, Daisy said only these words before embracing her: “Hostages! Hostages!”

  Only later did David learn that Daisy was referencing a quote from Sir Francis Bacon that would often come up in conversations about their kids: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”

  For two days, visitors and friends came to support and feed and mourn with the Binder household, but my grandfather, a distinguished radiologist who was never socially inclined, avoided the scene. Instead of greeting people in the front room or sitting with friends in the living room, he retreated to his bedroom in the back of the house. Behind a closed door, he sat on the end of the stiff sofa under the window, and read a book. He kept the shades closed.

  He remained there for hours, undisturbed by the many visitors, until on the afternoon of the second day Munca came in. David remembers seeing her kneeling on the floor in front of Grumpa and pounding the carpeted floor of the bedroom with her fists, crying, “Why didn’t they take me? Take me! Take me! Give me my daughter. I’ll go!” Barbara was the second daughter Munca had lost; her first child, a tall, dark-eyed girl named Rozanne, died of leukemia at age three.

  Munca’s friend Millie Jensen heard her crying from the hallway and rushed in to comfort her. She bent down to the floor to hold her close. But Grumpa stopped her by lifting the palm of his hand. Millie moved back to the front room, leaving Munca to her keening grief.

  Barbara had died early on Tuesday. On Thursday her funeral was held outside Chicago. It took my grandparents, aunt, and uncle three hours to reach the Piser Funeral Home from Kewanee. They planned to bury my mother in a family plot at Westlawn, Chicago’s Jewish cemetery. By the time they arrived, my father was there. He brought me along, though I was not yet three years old. His journal:

  I cry when AR sings, “All the little children,” and “Happy Birthday to you Mommy.”

  Barbara’s sister Janet waters flowers. Barbara’s mother complains about her dry throat. Barbara’s brother asks how I like his shoes. The Rabbi asks if I’d like anything in particular said about Barbara. Later, I think I would have liked it if he said she gave her life helping others.

  The service is simple, dignified. The rabbi talks about psalms and about poetry. Sounds good but I can’t remember a word of it. Barbara’s mother says “impersonal” and thinks that’s good. They kept the sermon to ten minutes. Only the grandmothers cry, and Barbara’s mother when I meet her. We hug. During the service, while I cry my choked, silent cry, Barbara’s brother talks with his mother about waterhole golf. Riding to the cemetery Barbara’s father jokes about the funeral car being unwashed, how that’s rude, how he doesn’t think he’ll come back here again.

  Trying to fit in is such a strain. Some relatives want to joke and small talk. Then a new group comes in with the mask of grief. Uncle somebody squints as if sand had just been blown in his face.

  At home at last alone (A-R at daycare center) I read. I feel as if Barbara might walk in at any moment and fill the house with her buoyant presence, her smile, her energy. Does anyone at all know I wonder how I loved Barbara. How I needed & counted on her. I am now free, free of protection. But I loved her.

  A-R & I seem to relate as we never have before. A new awareness, a new discovery, a new companionship. We have only each other now.

  I’m told that within a few weeks of my mother’s death, my maternal great-grandmother asked my aunt Janet if she was going to adopt me. She said she could, if Steve was okay with it. If he had accepted my aunt’s offer, I would have grown up in the suburbs with a mother and father, two brothers, and a dog named Pokey. But my dad told my grandmother very clearly that he wanted to raise me, even if he had to do it on his own.

  BACK IN ATLANTA, Dad floundered. Wallowing in his grief, he sought the company and support of John Dale. But John was no longer interested in Dad’s intensity and was too young to sympathize with his anguish. John had also moved in with his girlfriend, Susan, and taken a job at Southern Bell. He met with Dad a couple of times, but answered only some of his letters and phone calls. With nothing left in Atlanta, my dad decided to move to the city that had been so hospitable to him only a year before, San Francisco.

  In August 1974, within a year of my mother’s death, my father drove us over the Golden Gate Bridge into the city that was to become our new home. His hands tightly gripped the wheel of our beige VW bug as a cigarette dangled from his mouth. In the backseat he’d stacked boxes and suitcases, our oriental rug, my favorite little blue chair, and the smallest of our fish tanks. On the rear bumper of the car, a sassy Minnie Mouse sashayed in a polka-dot dress. From the front seat I looked out the window at the wide expanse of water below us. It was my first time seeing the ocean.

  3.<
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  WHEN I REMEMBER Dad now, I mostly remember his innocence. His sweetness. His gentle manner. He wasn’t tough. None of the tragedy he’d known—losing his wife in a car accident, feeling rejected by family and lovers—had hardened him in any way that I could tell. His hands were soft. He had pale skin and freckles. He burned easily in the sun, so he generally avoided it.

  As a little girl, home from first grade and resigned to cozying up to the television for company as Dad worked on his poems and cartoons, I developed a crush on Mr. Rogers. He was so like my dad, with his slender shoulders, brown hair, and light eyes, the careful way he removed his loafers and laced his sneakers, his gentle manner of speaking and of inviting you into his life. Every day he sang me a song and every day I answered him: “Yes, I will. I will be your neighbor.”

  You could hear Nebraska whenever my father opened his mouth. His conversations were peppered with folksy sayings and examples of the dry wit he’d admired in his grandma Focht. Widowed young and never remarried, she cared for her two children on a schoolteacher’s salary and helped raise my father until my grandfather returned from the Second World War. “If ya burn yourself,” she used to tell him, “ya gotta sit on the blister.”

  I used to tease him—the way he pronounced café “cuh-FAY,” the way he called the remote control “the clicker,” or the way he called every pasta dish we ate “spaghetti” instead of differentiating between linguine, fettucine, and angel hair as I’d learned to do, a San Francisco sophisticate. When he said “Okey dokey!” and smiled his toothy grin, it sounded old-fashioned and silly. Sometimes his more literary friends made fun of him. They laughed when at a fancy dinner Dad told them a story about his childhood dog, Sparky. But the quirkiness of his speech, as much as I teased him for it, just made him more of the dad I loved.

  Dad’s sweetness and easy manner charmed people and animals. Whenever we were at a party or at someone’s house for dinner, whatever cat was around would inevitably end up on Dad’s lap, purring away while he stroked its fur absentmindedly. At many of these parties I was the cat, always drawn to his lap, always calmed by his breathing, his vibrating chest and soft voice. And on his lap he would also pet me with those gentle loving hands.

  I have pictures of him at age eight. His parents used to drive him and his younger sister from Lincoln to Denver, Colorado, every summer. In Estes Park you could feed chipmunks with peanuts sold by the bag at the park entrance. In one picture he’s crouched perfectly still, his hand balanced on a boulder, his fingers outstretched, clasping a peanut. At the end of that peanut, a tiny chipmunk nibbles away while my father looks content and serene. In the background, his younger sister, Elaine, is in bangs and pigtails, her mouth open in mid-complaint. No matter how much she tried to tempt the chipmunks with her swaying peanut, they were always drawn to Dad.

  As a child, I loved looking at pictures of my father’s boyhood in Lincoln. There he is riding a tricycle. There he is playing pony express and circus with the neighborhood kids. The scenes of my father captured so diligently by Grandpa Abbott looked to me right out of the shows that aired every afternoon on television: Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Grandpa Abbott scribbled titles on the photo backs: “Dancing Steve.” “First Communion.” “Taking time out for refreshments.” These titles unwittingly masked a quiet unhappiness I only understood after reading Dad’s journals.

  When some people age, you can see a history of disappointment in their face and posture. A smile is creased in the corner, as though it painfully swallowed an unpleasant truth. Sad eyes slant and sag. Cheeks grow pale. Shoulders slump as if weary from carrying the burden of grief, guilt, or unresolved hurt. But look at a photo of this same person as a child and you may see someone else entirely: someone full of lightness and joy and that peculiar, almost stupid hope that can only come from inexperience.

  Munca talked about that stupid hope. It was maybe for this reason she avoided looking at pictures of herself when she was young. I once asked about her wedding portrait, which we didn’t find until after she died. “I don’t know where it is,” she said. “I think I saw it once and thought, ‘That stupid girl. She doesn’t know what she’s in for.’”

  My father also didn’t know what he was in for as a grown-up, but that stupid hope came later. In pictures of him as an adult in San Francisco, with his arms slung around the neck of a young boyfriend or pulling me onto his lap in a cluttered apartment kitchen, he looks relaxed, almost giddy. Posed among a group of illustrious writers in the basement of City Lights bookstore, he appears content and proud. Standing on Haight Street in his beard, fedora, and 1940s topcoat, he looks in his element, like a king surveying his lands, unaware of the invaders at the gate.

  You find a different Steve in the Nebraska pictures. As a three-year-old he already looks uncertain. As a child of seven he’s often looking away from the camera, while his sister will be smiling and looking straight on. In another photograph, a close-up of him in an Indian headdress leaning against a tree, he sneers. In his eyes, there’s an aggressive snarl that seems deeper than the pretend play typical of children. In pictures with his parents, I rarely see affection. His body is stiff next to his mother in a parking lot somewhere in Colorado. Both of them are looking away, as though trying to find their real families. In the family album, I see, in fact, that no one in my father’s family hugs. They rarely touch. Hands are in laps or at sides, clenched into loose fists.

  Lincoln, year unknown

  My father never officially came out to his parents. Helen and Gene Abbott learned their son was gay by reading a letter Dad had written to his brother David, which had been left out on the table. But they had long been suspicious.

  Dad wasn’t able to be himself, his true self, his naked and profane self, until he left Lincoln for Atlanta and then San Francisco. Once he came out, he was fully out. He could never go back in.

  PART II

  Motherless

  I knew if I wanted to keep Alysia I’d have to stop being crazy. I didn’t know if I could but I had to try. Alysia was all I had left in the world and I was all she had too.

  —STEVE ABBOTT, 1976

  4.

  I CALLED HIM EDDIE BODY. At four years old, language was my playground. “Eddie Body’s not anybody! Eddie Body’s not anybody!” I’d repeat, relishing the near symmetry of the sounds. Eddie Body was Dad’s new boyfriend, his first serious relationship after our move to San Francisco in 1974. There’d been different men—good-looking men, funny-looking men, almost always tall and skinny and young—that I found in Dad’s bed in the mornings. But it was different with Ed. He was the only one with whom I became close. He is the only one I can remember. We spent six months living with Eddie Body. I loved him.

  A twenty-two-year-old kid from upstate New York, Eddie Body had moved to San Francisco to get away from his pregnant wife, Mary Ann. He’d made a pass at my dad one afternoon over a game of chess in the Panhandle Park. Soon after, Ed moved into our apartment, a four-bedroom Victorian located a few blocks from Haight Street.

  Haight-Ashbury’s “Summer of Love” had ended in 1968 with the arrival of heroin and petty crime. For years the neighborhood was dominated by bars, liquor stores, and boarded-up storefronts. But rent was cheap and soon my father, along with scores of other like-minded searchers, moved in, setting up haphazard households in the dilapidated Victorian flats that lined Oak and Page streets. Many of these new residents, if not hippies themselves, shared an ethos of experimentation and free expression. Many also happened to be gay.

  By 1974, the Castro was emerging as the political and commercial center of gay San Francisco, with future supervisor Harvey Milk already running campaigns out of his camera shop at 18th and Castro. The post-hippie Haight was a gay-friendly alternative. Unlike the Castro, where gay men put their sexual identities front and center, the Haight’s gay residents fit into a larger bohemian mosaic. They got checkups at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, shopped for crafts at Far Out Fabrics, joined the Food Co
nspiracy co-op, and patronized Mommy Fortuna’s, a restaurant which hosted cross-dressing musicals featuring members of the psychedelic, nationally renowned theater troupe the Cockettes and their offshoot, the Angels of Light. This diverse community, which favored aesthetics over activism, gave my father a sense of belonging he hadn’t experienced in Nebraska, or even in post-Stonewall Atlanta. It was in this world that Dad and Eddie Body met and fell in love.

  In his journal Dad described Ed as “a joy, a help, a comfort and often-times frustrating as hell.” When Eddie Body first moved in, he had ambitions of musical stardom. He played guitar beautifully and wrote songs, including a tender ballad for my father. Ed had a job downtown selling high-end pots and pans. But after a few months in our apartment, he’d quit the job and dedicated his waking hours to getting stoned, strumming on his guitar, and halfheartedly watering ferns around the apartment. By early 1975, Eddie Body mostly lived off Dad and the Social Security checks we received after my mother’s death.

  Dad, Eddie Body, and I lived with two roommates, Johnny and Paulette, on Oak Street. Johnny had spent two years in a Buddhist monastery before moving to San Francisco. After smoking several joints, Dad and Johnny would listen to Tibetan bell music and engage in lengthy conversations about the afterlife. But while spiritually enlightened, Johnny showed little interest in the material aspects of the house. Dad alone scoured neighborhood stoop sales and thrift shops for the mirrors, rugs, plants, and Indian fabrics that decorated the apartment. Dad also picked out colors—Indian earth brown and imperial jade green—and painted all the rooms himself.