1966. Easter.

My poor defeated family. Ill luck was a culprit but we have not been illustrious.

We lost Ann. We lost Joan. Ann died at 25, Joan at 50. Both losses were catastrophic and tragic.

Seeds needing a long time to germinate. I read that Sid Luft (husband of Judy Garland) wanted for years to write something about Garland. I read he didn’t know how to do it—didn’t know how to begin. And then he finally did it (he wrote something).

Approx. 3 years after Ann’s death I thought: I must write something about Ann. I thought that few would read it—I didn’t care at all, it was a thought I almost found bolstering. But I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to begin. Then it came to me. I was going to do it as a letter addressed to Ann. So as an epistolary novel possibly. I wrote: “Begin here. Annie. I am driving on outer Congress Street in Portland, moving at a good clip and you are with me. You are at my elbow. It is real. Not the memory of a memory of a memory.” How it was to have begun.

When Ann had been gone 20 years (in 2003), I had something like 3 typewritten pages.

Then, 23 years after Ann died, Joan died. I was clobbered—grief-stricken and badly depressed—again. Again I hyperventilated for approx. 2 years and 2 months. Joan and I were Irish twins (if you happen to know what that is). I suffered fiercely from depression in the aftermath of Joan’s death—until one day when I least suspected it it just lifted. It flew away. I recovered again.

And when I recovered I asked: Now what? What on earth? Do I write something memoir-ist about both of them?

Oscar Wilde would have said—something like: One tragic death is regrettable. Two tragic deaths sounds like frivolity. 

This piece is memoir—and actually I have no business writing memoir. I will leave it at that.

And oddly perhaps—I am not a writer. (I am a writer one day a month.) My sister Ann used to say, “We’re all writers.” I happened to say to Ann a few times when she lived with me in New York—of someone I worked with or someone who lived on the block or someone I knew: “He’s a writer.” Ann would always say, “We’re all writers. What else does he do?”

In relation to my mother—my father lucked out. He used to say it himself—often in mixed company. They were his exact words: he had “lucked out.” When my father was 80 and my mother almost 80 he would say it. When they were having a fight he would say it.


It never dissipated entirely. When he was 40 (and when he was 80) I would come upon him looking at my mother like an adolescent boy looking at the popular high school girl he knew was out of his league.


She was out of his league. My mother was as smart as they come. She had “more to offer” than he. I don’t get pleasure from saying it. It was the way it was. My father was a smart guy. My mother was smarter.


They were in many ways—the odd couple. My father was particularly fond of bimbos and my mother was the un-bimbo of all time. (For example.) At a certain point I was aware of my father’s second career. I was aware of his paramours, I knew who they were. In his second career my father was never again able to get a woman—of my mother’s “caliber.”


Across 3 decades, gradually, progressively, the caliber of woman (of girlfriend) kept going down—and down and down and down and down. I said all this to friends Honorine and Etiennette, friends from Saco Maine, in 1999 (we were discussing related things). And they responded. Etiennette: “That’s outrageous and in bad taste. I can’t believe you just said it.” I said: “Pipe down. Victor Hugo described the same phenomenon, said almost the same thing, used virtually the same words, in Nôtre Dame de Paris (English language title The Hunchback of Nôtre Dame), in 1831.”


Klickstein. My father’s friend Klickstein. His Portland friend. It was Klickstein who said, circa 1957, to a range of persons: marrying Lucia was the best thing Francis ever did. It was. It saved his life, Francis’ life, 100 times over.


Klickstein wrote a poem to my mother, also ca. 1957.


And it was Klickstein who said, in 1957, and not without a measure of sympathy I think, that Francis had a bad case of “the cunt horrors.” The phrase is U.S. vernacular—starting at around 1900. In general use (i.e. in general use in select milieux) in the United States until about 1950. Used by boxers (professional boxers) and other pugilistic types, hypermasculine types and types who wanted to be that, who wished they were that, in the United States particularly toward 1920.


We are sitting, hip couple Kevin and Dee and I, in a restaurant and bar on Hudson Street in Old Greenwich Village. 2001. Kevin and Dee are a married couple (well they are just like married). We are talking about Bill Clinton and “sexual addiction,” then sexual addiction more generally. Sexual addiction is a modern term. We are into it, our discussion, when I mention my father’s friend (it seemed relevant)—the friend’s having said in the 1950s my father suffered from “the cunt horrors.” Dee looks a bit put off by the phrase. She questions me.

    “You’re saying your father didn’t like sex?”

“No.”

“Your father was gay?”

“Um, no.”

Kevin is wide-eyed. The meaning of the phrase seemed rather obvious to me—first time I heard it. My hipster friends seem a bit less hip at this moment, less hip than the reputation that sometimes preceded them, and for perhaps the first time in my experience they seem, almost touchingly, like innocents. The phrase suggested to me first time I heard it—one’s being haunted, a veritable haunting.


It suggested to me—altho’ it’s a tad too histrionic—it suggested a man’s being pursued by the Furies (the Erinyes, the Eumenides) of Greek myth. (I cannot recall that the Furies ever pursued women, in Greek myth.) The Furies were very ancient female deities (3rd tier deities)—going back to early Bronze Age Greece (2,000 years before the Parthenon).


The phrase “has the [X, Y, whatever] horrors.” Seems unduly negative perhaps. A prior day’s way of saying obsessed by, or obsessed with. I don’t think obsessed by was used widely (in the anglophone world) ca. 1900.


I know it’s rare—Dad and Mum were not one of the great love stories of all time. I am able to boast: they never hated one another. When my father was decrepit my mother was his caregiver. She took care of him—sometimes good-naturedly and with humor.






Ann was offspring tailor made for her father. Ann was cute, cute as hell, perky, clever, fun-loving, gregarious. She was (as though she had been created by a computer) just the kind of gal my father was likely to have had much fondness for. Hold that thought.


When Ann got to be 13 or 14 it started to float into view that my father didn’t like Ann a lot. It was flummoxing to the small number of persons who saw it, who happened to notice it.


I have been critical of my father (above). I’ve also said a few things on the subject of my father that were approbatory and laudatory. Well—some of those approbatory statements were backhanded compliments.... But I’ve painted him (up to the present moment) as a jolly fellow, as a democratic fellow (lowercase d), as affable—as possessing an affable streak a mile wide.


Actually my father was for lack of a better word..... kind of twisted. Very affable with sociopathic aspect. (Something that’s common enough.) He liked me most of the time. I did well by him. Years ago my mother said to me a few times—that Ann, Ann as a teenager, reminded Frank of a few of his relatives—relatives he didn’t like. My mother thought that saying it softened things a bit—thought it made Frank and all the rest of us seem a bit less aberrant. But my father’s (rather late-arriving) dislike of Ann was a betrayal—a betrayal of Ann, of my mother, of me, of each of my siblings.


My father was over the top. He had friends and admirers. When he was young (under age 60) he had a kind of fan club. Also in that era he did things for which he cannot be forgiven (by sentient beings). Truer words never were spake. Great writer Kate Millett said something similar—pointing to chronic ill treatment of one member of her family by another family member—in one of her autobiographical volumes.


My friend Helen Wallace said to me (30 yrs. ago): “Sometimes a parent doesn’t cotton to his child.” Her exact words. She followed it with: “That’s OK, but the parent has to know how to handle it.”




When I lived in Westbrook full time (until the age of almost 18) I knew everyone in Westbrook—at least by sight. Westbrook’s population in that era (in the 1960s and into the 1970s) was right around 13,000—and was absolutely unchanging in that period. All the time I was growing up the population of Westbrook never budged. When after the age of 17 I would return to Westbrook, it was always a queer feeling I remember—colliding with persons (incl. members of my family) disscussing Westbrookians—and I didn’t know who they were talking about.


A paltry thing to remember from many years ago. I returned to Westbrook very often in the years just after 1971—and in that period I would listen, with a sliver of curiosity, to my siblings, and my parents—yakking, like nobody’s business, about someone named Bernie. An eccentric woman (perhaps) and a Westbrookian. Someone who had garnered their attention obviously. Her last name was one of the ultra-common French names you find in portions of the state of Maine.... In greater New York Bernie tends to be a masculine name. In the state of Maine Bernie is overwhelmingly a female name. (Lots and lots of Bernadette’s as well as Bernadine’s in the state of Maine—or there were.)


A peculiar thing to remember possibly but I used to hear/overhear my younger siblings’
saying: Bernie was a lousy driver. Bernie was a terrible driver. Bernie drove fast. When the light turned yellow she drove like a banshee—to escape the red light. (I was mildly interested.) Someone said to me once (about Bernie): “When the light turns yellow, ZOOOOOOOOOMMM!”


I knew Bernie very slightly. (I had seen her.) Bernie lived way over in Frenchtown—and I believe she stayed at home a lot. I imagined her a dizzy blonde, ca. 1973. (She was blonde.) My mother knew Bernie very slightly. They moved in different circles—but they had a friend in common. When I visited Westbrook in those years my mother would sometimes (not often) tell me a thing or two about Bernie. I listened. I was always interested.


Bernie was not entirely unschooled in sorrow. (She had frequent crying jags. Per the mutual friend.)  


Bernie was 5 to 10 years younger than my mother... Easily the thing Bernie loved most: her daughter. Her only child. The child was a sprite. She looked like a sprite. Small, cute, very cute, blonde, with pixie haircut.


As a high school student the girl was “wild” (per Westbrook matrons).


Calling a kid wild—there may be elements of admiration in it. Usually not. Bernie thought her kid was AOK. Bernie was ever her daughter’s defendress.


It is neither here nor there—but Bernie’s much loved daughter was her adopted daughter. (“Adopted counts,” said Joan Rivers.)


Bernie’s daughter’s name was—I will call her Kim. I never met Kim. I saw a photo once. Kim was blonde (in the photo). And elfin. She looked a little like a young Anne Heche (possibly). Between 1972 and 1978 I heard/overheard that Kim was a “wild” girl—perhaps 60 times.


What “wild” generally points toward: partying, a love of partying, use of substances. It does not point to sexual excess in my experience but to the 3 items I’ve mentioned generally speaking.


In her short life my sister Ann was called “wild”—endlessly. A classmate of mine in the Westbrook public school system used to say to me, a few decades back: Ann was “the wild child of the Rocheleau family.” It wasn’t accurate. My two brothers, at periods in their lives, were as wild or wilder.


Ann’s buddy in New York Tom Mathison, philosophy student, brilliant fellow, used to say, when Ann was among us and after she left us, “She wasn’t that wild. She had conservative aspects. I mean...... she used to call home every week.” (Ann met Tom during her first week in New York, in September 1980. She was standing in front of my building, Tom happened to come by. They bonded, on the spot.)




Bernie would say, “There’s nothing wrong with her. SHE IS PERFECTLY FINE. WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?” When matrons whispered that there was “something wrong with” Bernie’s Kim.


Or (for example): “You’re going to get your ass slapped. There is nothing wrong with her. She is perfectly O.K. SHE IS PERFECTLY O.K. SHE IS PERFECTLY O.K.”


Bernie was ever on Kim’s side. Oh boy. Was she. I said it already. Bernie was little Kim’s passionate defendress.


At any rate. In 1980 or thereabout Bernie and her husband decided to divorce. The husband—he was called Finch I seem to remember—a Frenchman called Finch?—was moving to the west coast. Kim was asked. Did she want to go with Dad—or with Mum?


Long story short. Kim elected to go with her father. Bernie had a nervous breakdown. (Which did not a thing for her driving skills.) Time passed, Bernie recovered.


Kim elected to go—not with the parent who had (perhaps) sacrificed for her, who adored her—but with the parent with whom (she thought) she would in her new life have more fun.


And long story short. What I was leading toward. Westbrook matrons whispered (many years ago) there was “something wrong with” Ann.   



       

I wanted to write something about Ann. Ann has mythological status (in my head) now. I have to remind myself from time to time that Ann was actual and real. That she lived. Ann was a ball of fire—and it was real. There was nothing feigned in it. She was a spitfire—often paired with a depressive brother. And it occurred to me: Ann lived with me in New York for 3 years. I have hundreds of stories, funny stories, from those 3 years. It occurred to me after I started writing the piece: I should tell those stories. In a piece that centers on Ann I should tell those stories.


My piece on Ann was held up because I decided one night to create if I could a kind of Covid memoir. I found the events (the events of spring and summer 2020) so disturbing, so doggedly disturbing, that my sleep pattern was wrecked. Waking up night after night and saying to myself: What is going on? Agan and again and again: Is there something sinister going on?


I am a conspiracy theorist. Tho’ I am more a proto-conspiracy theorist. I am also an anti–conspiracy theorist. I look for: where conspiracies are not—spaces in which they just do not exist. I don’t think there are a lot of formal conspiracies out there. I think that there are vanishingly few. In general persons can barely do what they have to do—is my sense. Earn a living and sleep and feed and bathe themselves and so on. Persons don’t put together or enter conspiracies in general—because they don’t have the time and they’d be bad at it. But when you’ve got persons of vast wealth and (thus) influence who are philosophically aligned, huddled together, all leaning the same way (think: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum): those are proto-conspiracies (arguably). It is my feeling that there is a generous number of proto-conspiracies—out there.


Someone may ask: What is a proto-conspiracy? Proto- here means “becoming.” It is not a conspiracy today (January 3 2024). However 4 or 5 or 6 years from today: we will have a conspiracy.


I am an anti-vaχχer. (Persons are aggressively punished for saying that.) It is my understanding that intramuscular (IM) injection of vaccine substance bypasses “mucosal immunity,” bypasses the innate immune system—and that (therefore) nothing toward can ever come of it (the IM injection of vaccine substance) and that nothing toward ever has. Since the invention of the hypodermic needle (1840s).

The Divine Miss N     2    3    4    5  

Remember My Forgotten Women    page one

Coverage of the Covid Phenomenon by the large media companies has been Judy Agnew’s Diary Redux

He’s young. However. A good guy. A mensch. A favorite website.  

A favorite site.