My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (24 page)

My relationship with my mother was fraught and complicated—

plenty of love but interludes of poisonous acrimony as well. Her death

was both a sorrow and a relief, freeing me to remember her with a love

drained of hate and anger. Now something very strange had happened.

To put it bluntly, I’d finally gotten rid of my mother and now she had

come back as my brother.

In looking back through some old journals, I find a dream re-

corded. This is 2002, and I have been toying with the idea of writing a memoir about Mother, more precisely about her dying. In the dream,

I’m writing a novel. The “I” of the novel starts out as a woman, then

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turns into a man. While it’s from his point of view, he remembers his

son singing “Ave Maria” in a lovely soprano. He hums it, bringing it

down a chord, end of novel.

Many cultures believe in the transmigration of the soul, also called

gilgul,
reincarnation. Ovid has Pythagoras say “What we call death is when identity ceases.” But it never does if one accepts the Hindu, Bud-dhist, or Kabbalist view of one’s nonuniqueness in the chain of life.

I didn’t think my brother and I were close, or that he was in my

blood or my cells. I was so much older growing up, and we were so

different: he loved nature and hiking, I loved books and cities and ca-

fés; I was interested in art, he in everything else; when it came to food, I was both gourmand and gourmet (taking after our father), while

sadly, Chevey didn’t really enjoy, couldn’t enjoy food (mostly because

of a poor sense of taste, possibly attributable to the deviated septum, which the surgery had only partially ameliorated), and for him the

greatest restaurant was a waste; he was both smart and informed about

economics, while I couldn’t fathom a Verizon bill and went into a

nosedive of stress and dither over health- care choices, tax and insur-

ance forms, and paperwork in general. He was patient, I was impa-

tient.

But when I look back through family memorabilia, I find wonder-

ful letters from him spanning different stages in our lives: loving, teasing, calling me nicknames, making jokes about his frugality. And I

remember being with him on so many occasions— say, in a living room

drinking coffee, when we would just sit in silence, in contemplative

ease, with that special sense of being alone and not alone simultane-

ously. There was some kind of unspoken bond of blood or tempera-

ment; we knew without ever mentioning how alike we were in many

ways, not least in sitting just so without the need for conversation. We were alike in our values, our responses, the things that irritated,

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My Sister

amused, outraged, and delighted us, our reasoning in politics (mostly

centrist, with he veering to the right and me to the left), things that made sense and didn’t make sense.

I try to imagine a younger Ellen, twin sister to our mother, Mary

the belle. Would she have been a heartbreaker? To those who met her,

especially men, my mother had a siren- like allure. There was no single feature that leapt out at you. Blue eyes, but not startlingly so. Straight brown hair that drove her mad. In her flapper youth, curly hair was the rage. When the flu epidemic of 1918 caused the hair of some of the afflicted to spring into curls, my ten- year- old mother prayed to God to give her a case just serious enough to leave her with curly hair while

sparing her life. It was one of the things she envied about me, though

my frizzy, mousy hair could have been thought desirably “curly” only

in her maternal eyes.

“I was never a beauty,” she would say, and she almost had me con-

vinced. Indeed, sometimes it was almost true. Unsmiling, or in repose,

when her mouth turned downward, she could look ordinary, even old.

But when she smiled, or became engaged, the eyes danced, she was

bewitching.

“Mary has a fatal effect on men,” wrote my Aunt Sue when Mary

Clark came up from North Carolina to a Richmond ball and added

the heart of Sue’s brother to those of half the bachelors in town. She

loved to dance, would rather have danced than fall in love and marry.

But her charm never managed to blunt her analytic mind.

When she married my father (also magnetic, and catnip for

women), she embraced Richmond’s politically conservative and so-

cially gregarious life (and hoped her two children would, too). Yet her genetic heritage and parental influences were anything but conventional or straightforward, a DNA of warring impulses. Her father, a

New Yorker, had antagonized his very formal banking family by en-

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rolling in Columbia’s engineering school. He’d invented a process for

extracting turpentine from trees without killing them, had come

South with the patent and fallen in love— with the South, and with my

grandmother.

Granny, tall, an expert horsewoman and bridge player, was more

“handsome” than beautiful. She had gone to college and become a

Latin scholar (very unusual for her time, the 1890s, and place: Fayetteville, North Carolina), then decided education wasn’t for women and

raised her daughter as a belle.

“I didn’t want all those clothes,” Mother would say, with a little

rueful smile. This was the closest she would come to criticizing her

mother.

Her life became a whirlwind of beaux. Balls, tea dances, night

clubs in New York where she went to live and paint at the Art Stu-

dents League. Dancing and painting, painting and dancing, these

were her two passions. She didn’t want to marry. She was terrified of

sex, not to mention children and domesticity. But time was passing,

the red shoes were wearing thin. Her adored older brother Frank

warned her that she was at a dangerous age and shouldn’t become a

spinster. So instead of jumping off a cliff or in front of an onrushing train, she stopped like a sensible woman. There, standing in front of

her when she came to rest, was my father. She married him.

There were doubts on both sides. My mother loved painting, loved

her independence. A passionate letter from my father wonders in fact

if she isn’t too smart and independent for marriage. He writes that her allure is so powerful, men should be tied to the mast, like Odysseus, to avoid succumbing. When I read this, even more than the image, it was

the literary reference that surprised.

Moreover, my mother’s siren call to the opposite sex by no means

involved excluding friendships with women. She was not one of those

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My Sister

scheming beauties in Trollope of whom a rival might say, “She is one

of those girls whom only gentlemen like.” To which the wise old ma-

tron adds, “And whom they don’t like very long.”

Far from it. Not only was she a friend to other women, but a mis-

sionary on their behalf.

It strikes me now that my fascination with roles came from her,

from all the resistance she harbored. And from the strength that she

and all those other “steel magnolias” couldn’t quite conceal. I had as-

sumed that the inspiration for my first book, a historical- polemical

view of women’s roles in the movies, came from feminism— the wom-

en’s movement was such a huge catalyst and shaper of our lives in the

early seventies. But I now see the converse was the case. It was my in-

terest in roles that led me to feminism, which in turn led me to exam-

ine the subtext, the subconscious, to try to better understand the

women of the thirties and forties, my mother’s generation, so interest-

ing and mysterious, so closed off from giving expression to their own

ambivalences.

A lifelong cheerleader for women’s independence, she pushed me

toward self- reliance almost from the time I was born. When I was

hardly more than a toddler, she’d send me into Lamston’s ten- cent

store and wait in the car for me to make a purchase. And before a

school play, she’d have me stand across the room and shout my lines.

From then on, I would always appear confident as a speaker, even if I

was jelly inside.

When she spent summers in Quogue, she would urge the other

ladies to come with her across the street to the rental tennis courts,

and there she would teach them to play. Reversing the usual pattern,

she had switched from golf to tennis in her mature years, and like Saul on the Road to Damascus, she not only had a “conversion experience,”

she became a proselytizer.

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Around the same time as the tennis epiphany (she was about fifty),

this ultrarational woman began to believe in reincarnation. Over the

cocktail hour, which began early and ended— well, hardly ever— she’d

speculate on what form her next life might take. Would she be a dog?

An old man? And would we recognize each other? She imagined dif-

ferent future lives. In one eerily prophetic and politically astute hy-

pothesis, she was going to wind up in the Middle East, with a specific

place and mission in mind. “I’m going to Saudi Arabia,” she said, “and

teach the women to drive, and play tennis.”

Though deeply distrustful of the supernatural, I could appreciate

the generosity, even wisdom, of this impulse while smiling with the

superior wisdom of the unbeliever, little suspecting that it would al-

most come true.

After I was born, she kept trying to have another child, preferably a

boy. Or so she said and thought. But did she secretly want another girl she could bend and sculpt, coax like Silly Putty into something with

form and substance? After all, she was an artist— a painter— who gave

it up when she married my father. The paintings were hidden away,

her talent was the madwoman in the attic. We children were her raw

material. If a girl would provide more to work with, being both more

amenable and more of a challenge, might there have been a struggle in

the womb as the fetus, torn between male and female, emerged in a

murky afterbirth of gender confusion? After all, as to my own concep-

tion, recent scientific evidence suggests that that tomboys are “born

that way” due to the mother’s (high) testosterone level during preg-

nancy.

In Williamsburg, we arrive at the negotiation stage. “It’s
your
book,”

Ellen insists, and tells me I can say what I want to about her (yeah,

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My Sister

right!), but she requests the veto power over anything that might hurt

Beth or Eleanor. There’s something about secondary rights. I sign it.

Later, we talk about why she changed her mind about wanting me

to write the book. At the request of her therapist, she’s met a number

of would- be transsexuals and they’re all having a difficult time. Some simply don’t know how to make a transition; or they face rejection,

expulsion, estrangement from friends and family. She’s clearly been

moved by the depth of misery she finds. Many simply can’t afford sur-

gery, or even good makeup and clothes. Ellen has tried to do what she

could, encourage them, provide emotional support, even assist them

in buying the right cosmetics and women’s wear. One man, though

convinced he’s a she, refuses to do anything to alter her rough male

appearance. Then there’s the man in his forties who wanted desper-

ately to be accepted as a woman. Dealing with his urges was bad

enough, but he was struggling alone, his large family—

parents,

siblings— having completely abandoned him. At one point, there

seemed to be a thawing. His father called and invited him to a huge

family reunion in the Bahamas, and our guy- gal was beside himself

with joy. Acceptance at last, he thought, until his father called a week later and apologized, saying the trip had to be cancelled. A few months after that, he placed a call to his brother, only to be told by a secretary that her boss had gone on a family vacation in the Bahamas.

As heartbreaking as this story is, I’m grateful in that it has, I think, made the difference in Ellen’s decision to have her story told. When

Chevey told me in 2005 that as Ellen he’d still be the same person inside, and when Ellen told me the same thing, I accepted the truth of it, for

certainly much is the same: the character, the humor, the empathy. But

Ellen is not the same person. She’s more open, more available, more

trusting. The Chevey of 1994 and 2005 would never have let me write

this book.

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As it is, permission may be harder than prohibition. I shall feel her