The Houses of Women, part 1: Gwen

We began with Tillie, but she wasn’t the first. Gwen came first, then Viv. And Renate, whose German accent confounded me. Renate’s accent taught me that Colorado was not alone.

In the #inhabitation inventory of women, some are old or dead, some sick and some simply fled. But at one time, each of these women owned a house in which they lived alone and eventually left abandoned. Gwen, Viv, Tillie, Tresa, Joan, Linda, and Jane.

***

Gwen, whose full name was Gertrude Gwendolyn, grew old and died. She did not die in her house. She died in a nursing home. It strikes me as odd that nursing homes are called homes and not nursing houses. I’ve spent time in several and with few exceptions, the inhabitants of nursing homes rarely feel at home. I prefer graveyards. Maybe this is just my own fear of witnessing age and infirmity, but even so.

Gwen lived a rather spicy life for a poor farm girl from Missouri. She was a warm and loving albeit vain woman.

She worked as a hairstylist, though I think she would have preferred beautician or some other more profound title. Back when she shared her house with her second husband, Bill, they converted the garage of their home into a beauty parlor. I love this phrase, beauty parlor, with its aesthetic embodied elegance and promise of architectures of the sublime. Gwen’s beauty parlor was found in the one-car garage of a 1950′s ranch-style house, but the appointments made the fantasy work. Globe lights framing two huge mirrors reflected the full-sized, floor-mounted chairs complete with hair-drying hoods. Cut, color, set and dry…a week’s worth of beauty made in an hour of cushioned comfort by a hair artiste.

Gwen’s first husband, Tony, with whom she bore two sons, Dan and Frank, never provided. This accounts for Gwen having any profession at all. Gwen made number eleven of thirteen Missour’a children who grew up in poverty and needed to find their own provision in the middle of their teens. Some of her siblings did stay on to work the farm, but Gwen craved glamour and urbanity. She might have worked as a maid or farmhand, but she reached for beauty, the beauty available to young women in the mid-1930′s.

Okay, so unfortunately I do have to guess in places because the story gets a little fuzzy during and after the Tony period and where the few stories have been told, the details were thin to non-existent.

Gwen went to Chicago or Chicago came to Gwen as Tony, husband number one. This marriage and Tony, whose Italianate name always raised eyebrows in the few mentions I witnessed, failed. Gwen was left on her own with two small boys and a grasping attractor to beauty. She could not have been in calm or safe straits.

Like haunted houses, old women who live alone have a scary reputation. Young, divorced women in the 1940′s also had reputations… of a different tenor. Young, divorced women living alone had seductively bad reputations.  So all tolled, Gwen had two reputations, one for youth and one for age.

At some point in the duree that constituted bad reputation #1, Gwen met her second husband, Bill, another man from Chicago with a criminal reputation, whose alleged vocation was selling Hoovers door-to-door. Gwen was Bill’s third or fourth wife. Given his history, which included bootlegging in Chicago, questions about Bill’s youth rarely got asked. Gwen and Bill produced two children of their own, Colleen (pronounce cO’–lean) and Steven William, whose middle name apparently continued a nominal male legacy, a respectable family lineage, a masculine perpetuity, or a tracing return to William the Conqueror, perhaps. Bill’s youngest son, Steven William, gave the family ‘William’ to his sons, Bretland William and Adam William Henry, and Steven’s oldest son, Bretland, the only of his three offspring to procreate, gave the ‘William’ to his only son, Zachary William.

Between the births of Colleen and Steven William, Bill and Gwen pulled up stakes in the midwest and headed for the true west, a farm in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which for posterity would be referred to as “the ranch,” despite its rather limited geographic scope. Unlike Gwen and despite becoming a terrific fisherman and outdoorsman, Bill did not grow up farming or ranching, so while Colleen and Steven William, and Gwen’s sons, Frank and Dan, enjoyed a period of childhood bucolic bliss that rural Colorado Springs offered in the 1950′s, the family moved to Denver. Here Gwen’s beauty parlor would be founded, a mythic image of the early 1960′s stretching to a cracked fantasy through the 1970′s. As a child, I patronized the salon during its latter period and therefore have the benefit of keeping both the mythic and the phantasm together.

Bill died in the late 1970′s. Gwen must’ve known this would happen. He was 22 years older than she was. I’ve wondered if the age gap was the price she paid to get a second husband given her reputation. They loved each other when I knew them, so perhaps my surmise smacks of an ugly bit of feminist cynicism. At Bill’s funeral, Steven William sobbed violently. I had seen many of the violences by which Steven William could become possessed, but this was a first for crying.

At some point in the next few years, Gwen moved back to the midwest to Peoria, Illinois, where several of her sisters and brothers and her daughter, Colleen, then lived. She never left Peoria and never remarried. She lived in several houses. The last time I saw Gwen, she lived in a comfortable sterile duplex condominium. She was all done-up, as to be expected, but she fumbled for words. In fact, she viewed me rather distantly though she had known me since I was born. She called me Colleen many times, even with Colleen standing right next to me in the room. This was 1990, a stop on my drive, my big move from California to the glamour and urbanity of New York City. But the visit was not pleasant.

No visit to Peoria had ever been pleasant after a drunk driver plowed head-on into the Volkswagen Bug driven by the mother of a friend of Colleen’s two daughters, Julie and Jill. Julie and Jill, the mother and the daughter, were in the Bug, driving on an Illinois highway to or from something girl children do. The mother survived the crash with a broken leg. Julie, six-months my junior, spent two years in a hospital but to this day has never really recovered. The daughter and Jill died. They were 10 years old.

A couple of years after the accident and just before Gwen’s words and world started to jumble, Colleen’s husband and Julie and Jill’s father, Jim, the man for whom Colleen converted to Catholicism in order to be married, left her. Colleen found herself, like her mother, divorced and alone with two kids, Julie and William (of course), though he has always been called Billy. Another woman of reputation, though in the 1980′s I imagine that this stigma was more of an auto-affliction than a social one. To support herself and her children, Colleen worked for the Red Cross, as she had for some time. This past winter she retired, and after decades of raising some of her children and caring for her mother, Gwen, until death, she left Peoria to live in Wisconsin with a friend from High School, Ryder High in Denver. I wonder if Colleen’s friend remembers the beauty parlor in Colleen’s garage?

About a year ago, Colleen called me. After weeks of phone tag, I spoke to her for the first time since my visit in 1990. She was high-pitched, in many ways, and spun a bit unevenly. She told me of her impending departure from Peoria, from her long-inhabited home. She was packing and found herself incredibly burdened with too many boxes holding Gwen’s remains, the stuff of life. She could not take them to the small house she would share with her friend (“And no, despite what everybody thinks, I’m not a lesbian,” hmmm…. “Be happy, Colleen,” I offered), and she could not just throw her mother away. Did I want these things? “Some of it is just junk, you could throw it away.” Of course I wanted these signs of life, the affectively charged remains, traces, remnants, and tracks of inhabitation, the matter of the ephemera of Gwen. I offered to pay for the shipping.

Weeks and then months went by and nothing arrived. I stopped expecting Gwen to arrive in boxes delivered by UPS. Several days after the #ghostedhouse found and captured me, I arrived back at my house in Pittsburgh to find a single small box wedged between the door and the screen, return post marked “Colleen.” Inside on the top of barely wrapped objects lay a letter folded in half. Colleen’s words and world, jumbled, including a list of items that I should but would not find in the box. The haphazardly packed box was filled with shattered, broken and cracked china plates, teacups and teapots. Surviving the tempests of transfer were a blue teapot and cup and a little box, rattling with its contents. An odd assortment of real and costume jewelry.

I love the thought of Gwen ‘all done up’ wearing the paste diamonds or perhaps presenting herself respectably in her authentic plastic-coating-on-plastic pearls and their counterparts, the opal and gold ring or the tin and red plastic stone ring. The cufflinks summon Bill but could just as easily have been Jim’s. While my research is not precise, the pin, with its white cross insignia, initialed BLCC and underscored by the words “President’s Club” traces back to the Red Cross, Colleen’s life-long employer. Had Colleen forgotten what she was packing in the box? Had the traces of her and her mother’s life gotten jumbled together?

Nearly ten years after Gwen’s death, sending this box could not have been easy. Far more, caring for Gwen until death could not have been easy. The jumbling of Gwen’s words and world that I witnessed in 1990 signaled early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Gwen and Colleen both suffered different aspects of this illness for nearly ten years as the stricken and their caretakers do. Perhaps because of Jill’s death and the ongoing habits of caring for her broken, living children, Julie and Billy, Colleen ferociously tried to care for Gwen on her own. Only in the last couple of years did Gwen live in a nursing home specializing in assisted living. Like the questionable use of home in nursing home, the use of living in assisted living professes far more than it provides.

Gwen forgot everything. She forgot her grandchildren and her children long before she died. She forgot Tony and Bill. She forgot Peoria, her condo, the ranch-style home in Denver, the beauty parlor, the “ranch” in Colorado Springs, Chicago, and the farm she grew up on in Missour’a. And she forgot her own name, Gertrude Gwendolyn. She forgot she was dying.

I did not attend Gwen’s funeral because I did not learn of her death until weeks after it had happened, but I don’t trust my own memory here. This was nearly 10 years ago.

Gwen had a will, and I learned from Steven William that she had bequested to me a diamond ring given to her by her husband Bill–at least this is how it was supposedly described in the legal record. So much hearsay, filtered through the children, filtered through the pain of loss, and the staking of claims on the remnants of Gwen and of Gwen and Bill. Colleen reported that to her knowledge no such ring existed. She had yet to sort through all of Gwen’s lived belongings, material traces, and personal things, but she seemed certain the ring did not exist. Steven Wiliam suspected otherwise, but the guilt or perhaps the willing price paid for leaving the burden of his mother’s care entirely to his sister produced an unwillingness to contest Colleen’s assertion. I agreed.

A couple of years later, before my box arrived in the mail this past winter and after a failed experiment in which Steven William took in Colleen’s adult, substance-addicted son Billy, gave him work, and tried to ‘straighten him out,’ Steven William and his third wife, Cindy, traveled to Peoria to see a big motorcycle race and to visit Colleen. Colleen gave her little brother, Steven William, a small box offered with bits of flaked off and jumbled words intimating the box’s recent re-discovery. When I finally saw Steven Wiliam nearly a year later, he passed it on to me. Gwen’s diamond ring, given to her by Bill. I had forgotten, and the resurrection of this bit of metal and rock worn for years on Gwen’s living finger made me furious and sad and left me with a jagged mix of elation and burden.

I closed the box but was urged to ‘try it on’ by Steven William. I obeyed. Gwen’s fingers had been much rounder than mine. Despite many other resemblances, I did not inherit my grandmother’s fingers.

***

Gwen was the first, grew old, now dead. Jane is the last, grown sick and fled. Jane has Alzheimer’s too. She has disappeared. Perhaps Jane is cared for by a high school friend, or perhaps, without remembering, she walked out of her now abandoned house into the wilderness that surrounds it.

Advertisement

~ by spikenlilli on May 20, 2009.