Divining Women

OneI climbed aboard the Carolinian at Union Station on September 10, 1918, at seven o'clock in the morning, and within minutes we were out of the tunnel and moving southward in a level, determined rush. In fifteen hours, I would be in Elm City, North Carolina, where I was to be a sort of temporary lady's companion to my expectant aunt Maureen, a woman I had never met in the five years she had been married to my mother's half brother, Troop Ross. Their first child was due in November. I had never met my uncle, either, but I had heard about him all my life. My mother had been able to keep up a loose, tentative connection with him, as she was always merrily impervious to insult. Maureen had been only a figure in the background of the marriage, remembered fondly and greatly pitied. Troop's mother had been my grandfather Toby Greene's first wife. She had jerked the boy out of Washington when he was eight and taken him to her family's home in North Carolina, so angry and repulsed by her husband's new pet hobby, nudism, that she denied him any contact with his son and also dropped his name. From what my family gathered, she let people assume that he had died. She was locally admired for her well-bred, stoic refusal to go into any detail, and her sadistically critical and smothering child-rearing tactics were interpreted as the hectic attentiveness of a lonely widow, trying to do the best she could to raise her boy alone. Her tastefully concealed rage and obsession never abated. From her departure in 1875 to her death in 1911, she hounded and taunted my grandfather and his second wife, Leslie, through the mails, demanding that the two of them rot from some "fanny disease" she hoped they would catch while romping naked in the woods, demanding that they then die of the inborn selfishness that she believed had initially compelled Toby to go off on a tangent and humiliate her. But despite her morbid hopes and wishes for him and his new wife, which eventually expanded to include my mother, Martha, their only child, she let them know that she and Troop deserved and expected to be supplied with the best of everything in exchange for Toby's having flitted off and made a mockery of her honor and her marriage by joining the American Community of Nudists, among other "sinister organizations." She subscribed to the Washington morning and afternoon papers by post so that she could keep herself and her son educated about family activities, and would fire off commentary whenever anything about the Greenes appeared. Oftentimes, in the same letter that contained a bitter indictment of Toby and his family as freethinking freaks or idiots who had chosen to squander the excellent address and socially privileged position they so fortunately inherited, she would insist that Toby promptly finance a wild range of entitlements beyond the generous annuities, incomes, and trusts he had already settled upon her. After he married again in 1876, and when my mother was born a year later, when she married in 1895, and on the occasion of my birth, in 1896, the letters were more incredible than usual. She blistered the lot of us, including me, "that new infant who has no doubt been issued a massive silver spoon by her doting grandfather," in a crazed preface to her catalogue of insatiable demands for protracted stays in Europe, oceanfront suites at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Louis Vuitton trunks, and dresses from Doucet and Worth. My grandfather was ignorant with regard to the luggage and the dresses, but the women in the family were not. Despite their own frugality, one of their favorite pastimes was looking at the fashion magazines, and when they went to New York, they stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria and enjoyed watching the elegant ladies parading up and down Peacock Alley. After they explained the clothing request to my grandfather, how these dresses tended to be worn by the ultra-ultra set, how much they cost, he shoutedGibbons, Kaye is the author of 'Divining Women' with ISBN 9780399151606 and ISBN 0399151605.