Fried & True (2 page)

Clearly this was a mistake. After all, 92 year old Anyda, known to the world as lesbian novelist Sarah Aldridge, was far too literary, too erudite to think my columns worthy. Her own novel, her 14th,
O, Mistress Mine
had just been released. We needed to work on publicizing it. What was in the vodka she was serving? Or the scotch she was drinking?

Anyda and Muriel, her partner of 55 years, (yes, 55; somebody please call the American Family Association) just smiled and told me to get to work putting the book together because they wanted it published by spring. And then the conversation turned to politics, squirrels getting into the bird feeder and if anyone wanted another cracker with Double Gloucester cheese.

FLASHBACK

On a Saturday morning back in 1994, I made my way into the cramped quarters of Rehoboth's Lambda Rising bookstore. It wasn't the big place it is now, but its tiny precursor at the rear of the 39 Baltimore Avenue courtyard.

I was there for a reading by Leslie Feinberg, author of
Stone Butch Blues
, one of the first novels ever to address transgender issues. This was a big event for little Rehoboth Beach.

As I squeezed into the minuscule bookshop and listened to the author read, I became aware of somebody setting up two folding chairs just to my left and then two elderly women being seated at my side.

“Do you know who that is?” whispered a woman to my right. “That's Sarah Aldridge.”

The name sounded familiar, but rang no particular bell.

“I'll show you her books later.”

Following the reading I smiled at the ladies as they rose to leave. One woman was tall, with a long gray pony tail and a somewhat remote, regal lookâdespite her casual corduroy dyke wear. She nodded to me. The other woman, shorter, stockier and relying on a cane, had twinkling eyes and responded to me with a pixie grin.

Later, I stood before the bookstore's fiction shelves as my friend pointed out a dozen novels by Sarah Aldridge. I saw the imprint of the feminist publishing house Naiad Press on the book spines. Naiad was one of the nation's first and arguably most successful lesbian publishers in this country, and probably the world.

Not much of a fiction reader, I bought the Aldridge book
Misfortune's Friend
for Bonnie to read and wound up getting into it myself. The writer had an old-fashioned romantic style, an impressive grasp of historical detail and a passion for lesbian romance. I enjoyed the book and wanted to get to know the elderly author and her partner, our local celebrities.

After asking around, I realized I had known of the ladies, if not their names. They had actually been founders of Naiad Press. I also learned that Anyda Marchant and Muriel Crawford, both in their 80s had been together almost half a century and that during the past twenty five years Anyda wrote over a dozen novels. Muriel, a former executive secretary, transcribed them and partnered with the author by providing serious scrutiny and feedback for their fine-tuning.

Anyda was a member of the illustrious Virginia Woolf Society, Muriel liked popular mystery writers, and they both liked Dewars Scotch, growing roses, and talking politics.

I asked
Letters
editor Steve Elkins for an introduction and he told me about the Saturday evening “salons” on the ladies' front porch, where everyone is welcome. The following weekend, Steve and his partner Murray took me and Bonnie to meet the ladies. It was one of the most important days of my life.

A LITTLE HISTORYâ¦

What can I tell you about Anyda and Muriel? They have been in Rehoboth almost half their long lives.

Not part of Rehoboth's gay community. Not until relatively recently. Anyda and Muriel spent a majority of their lives deeply closeted and silent about their relationship. In fact, Muriel couldn't even say the word lesbianâshe coined a new one. When they would see a female couple walking down the street Muriel would say, “Shhhhâ¦” Eventually, they began to call their own kind Shushes.

Over many years, long before I came along to partake, the ladies hosted their front porch cocktail hour with a crowd as diverse as Rehoboth Beach itselfâneighbors, clergymen, writers, artists, and politicians. And shushes and gay guys. They loved the boys' attention and the boys loved to come to visit, flowers or homemade goodies in hand.

They were Rehoboth's Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, serving scotch instead of marijuana brownies. On that expansive front veranda there might be a dozen people, four conversations in progress and visitors coming and going throughout cocktail hour, which started promptly at 5 p.m. and ended pretty much an hour and a half later.

When winter came, the ladies packed up whatever great big sedan they had at the time, Muriel at the wheel, and drove themselves to Florida for the winter months. The writing collaboration continued.

Following our introduction to those wonderful porch gatherings, Bonnie and I became regulars. We heard lots of rich history, including Anyda expounding on the virtues of the suffragettes. I had to remind myself that she was old enough to remember them.

“Oh yes, I saw them taken away in handcuffs from the front of the White House,” she'd tell me. Anyda also had plenty to say about the failings of both Herbert Hoover and Tricky Dick Nixon.

Local politics didn't escape scrutiny either, nor did the
deplorable condition of a garden down the street. “They should really be spraying those roses,” both ladies agreed, with an unspoken tsk, tsk.

And there's no telling what subject from the past might come up to bring perspective to today's conversations. The female cats, a gray tabby and an all-black beauty, would scamper around the guests' legs and often completely interrupt weighty topics with their trapeze acts atop Muriel's walker.

We'd be on the porch, listening to stories as Anyda and Muriel sat together, facing the street, on a well-worn couch, its sides doubling as scratching posts for the cats. We'd be across from the ladies, in wicker chairs or seated on a weather-beaten yellow vinyl glider, backs to the neighbors and all eyes on the storytellers. Anyda generally sat bolt upright; Muriel sank into the sofa, her feet not touching the floor.

Anyda loved talking about growing up in the Nation's Capitol. “Washington was a one-horse town,” Anyda said. “My family lived in the second apartment building ever built in D.C., and I remember going to a tree planting to honor Teddy Roosevelt's son, who had been killed in the war.” That would be the first World War.

“My father was a scholar who had been educated by French Jesuits. Books were very, very important. I read my way through the children's section of the D.C. public library and then wanted to start with the adult books. My mother fought with the librarian and won, so I could read the grown-up books.”

From what I gathered, young Anyda was a handful. “Oh yes, I was quite pugnacious at the time,” she admits, describing how she had to protect her little brother from bullies, and that she herself got into a fistfight or two. “We were odd, we came here from Brazil, you know, speaking a jumble of languages.” That jumbleâEnglish, French, Spanish, Portugueseâmust have served her well, because she eventually graduated first in her college class of 100.

All Bonnie and I wanted to do was soak up this living history.
We heard how Anyda received a scholarship from the newborn Women's Bar Association, and it was on to law school in 1930 as one of four women in a class of over 300.

Graduating in the heart of the depression, Anyda took any job she could getâfirst as a law clerk, then working in the political science department of Johns Hopkins University, and in 1938, a job with the Library of Congress. “I was assigned the magnificent salary of $1,800 a year,” she says.

In the meantime, her brother secured a job with the State Department back in Rio. Anyda joined him and their mother in Brazil for two years, just prior to the Japanese surrender in World War II.

“Anyone dry?” Muriel interrupted, holding up her empty glass. That was a cue for Charlie and Betsy, porch regulars and great friends of the hostesses to collect the empties and tend bar.

Anyda looked at me and said “I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a writer. I'd been writing since I was a child and finished my first novel at 17. But I got a scholarship for law school, so I went.

“Who had the vodka and cranberry?” Charlie asked, returning from the kitchen. From there, the conversation turned to other things as guests filtered in and out. Dammit, I had a feeling we were just about to get to the juicy part of the storyâhow Anyda and Muriel found each other and fell in love. Fortunately that afternoon would not be our last salon with the ladies of Laurel Streetâ¦.

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