A very limited selection of items found in a box labeled “Christine’s Correspondence, Juvenilia and Memorabilia”

• A postcard from my sister, Brigitte’s campaign for Trustee of the Portland Water District (she won)
• An invitation to Rip’s (first) wedding at Ear Inn, in which his and his bride’s faces are superimposed on a picture of two samurai warriors. Or are they meant to be Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?
• A color Xerox self-portrait of my late ex-husband in a dinner jacket, a velvet bow tie and naked from the waist down
• A letter from Alex from the hospital when he was paralyzed from the waist down, about his sadness after the death of Geoff and the AIDS discrimination lawsuit. (they would both be dead when the cases was won)
• Among several letters from a dear friend from grad school, Harold, one from 1988 saying that he had been in rehab, that his wife had left him and gone with their young son to live in NYC; then in a 1992 letter he wrote that he was going to remarry, and he said of his new wife: “there aren’t a lot of women who love the Lord and understand what makes Samuel Beckett funny”. I wish I had written that.
• 40 birthday cards my mother sent on the occasion of my 40th birthday, each one alluding to a high (or low) point of that calendar year
• An astrological chart made for me in 1994 by Lis’s astrologer friend, 4 pages of small print, full of symbols, planets, glyphs, aspects, houses. I don’t understand any of it.
• Numerous letters from Ruth, who for many years was my best correspondent; some were written on PLAYGIRL stationary, where she worked sometime in the 80’s; others on PACIFICA radio stationary, where she had a talk show. I haven’t heard from her in over 2 years now, and it is a terrible mystery.
• My grandmother’s Saigon carte d’identité for 1939-1940. By 1941 they were refugees, fleeing the Japanese invasion
• A 1990 letter from my mother describing Bonne-Maman’s memory loss symptoms, in painful detail
• The 1940 handbook for the Golf club de Saigon. I had no idea my grandfather played golf, if in fact he did.

Why am I doing this?

There is no other way of putting it: I am fearful lest I drop dead suddenly today, tomorrow, sometime soon and leave my children with the task of wrestling with boxes of papers and pictures. I want it all to be tidy.
Meanwhile, I could be losing my grip.

What to do in Cuttyhunk when it is not exactly raining, but overcast and cool, and also when it really is raining

• Learn to Moonwalk. (If I’ve got it right, this is the one where the late Michael Jackson appears to walk on a moving sidewalk. I think.) It turns out that my niece C has mastered this dance and she endeavors to teach H and me. We are diligent students but perhaps not yet ready for prime time.

• Drink champagne while C reads us our horoscopes and exclaim about the extent to which they are wrong and do not describe our salient characteristics in any way. Except when they do.

• Cajole, persuade, hector, coerce, inveigle and wheedle my cousin H into kayaking with me in Cuttyhunk harbor. Of course she enjoys it more than expected. We watch the cormorants on piers, and they ignore us. We admire sea lavender on the opposite shore.

• Go to the shortest Church Fair ever, from 2 PM to 2:30. Do not buy the excellent fax machine perfect for a slow phone system donated by my cousin, but do buy for 50 cents a mystery titled The Sting of the Honeybee. For obvious reasons.

• Think about honeybees on the island. I have heard rumors of a hive somewhere, but I have only seen bumblebees and sweat bees. Every year I come here and think what a lovely spot for honeybees this is – consider the sea lavender - and then I depart.

• This is neither the time nor the place for a
complete history of Cuttyhunk Island but it should be said that there are some who believe Cuttyhunk should bear the honor -and onus -of being the first landfall of the so-called Pilgrims, as Bartholomew Gosnold landed here in 1602 so that Shakespeare would have an island upon which to base Prospero’s island in The Tempest. Sadly, Gosnold's colony here did not last, unless you count the rabbits, and he died of malaria in 1607. Not on Cuttyhunk.

Who was she?

I assume everyone has a mysterious relative, someone to whom you are genetically linked but whose character and motivation and behavior is mysterious to you.
Mine is my paternal grandmother, Germaine Marie Jeanne Levêque Lehner.

She was born June 2, 1892 at 9:30 PM in Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue
I know the time exactly not from any family Bible, but from the horoscope that was drawn up for her in 1942 by Ethel Bret Harte who was very particular about the time of birth as it placed the sun in 12˚ Capricorn and the ruler, Mercury, in 0˚ Capricorn, both of which are brought into the 4th house. (I have no idea what any of that means.)
The discovery of the horoscope is what has prompted this writing.

I have a stack of Grumbacher sketchbooks filled with my grandmother’s watercolors. As in dozens. My siblings and cousins have dozens more. She painted hundreds of these abstract watercolors, so many that it is impossible not to wonder what compelled her. They are all similar in style, and each one is different.
I have a horsehair trunk full of her correspondence. I have a few leather notebooks with her poems. I haven’t read every single thing but I have read enough to be frustrated by the dreamy evasive quality of much of her poetry and by the generalities that fill the letters addressed to her.
Yet I know THINGS happened.
How soon after she married my grandfather did it become clear they were profoundly ill-suited for each other?
She was French, he was German.
She believed in Theosophy, astrology and numerology. She was a dancer, artist, probably a hypochondriac, a devotée of H.G. Wells, Annie Besant, Tagore and Rudolf Steiner.
He was a cotton trader, a brilliant businessman, and a patriarch.
OK – on the basis of those characteristics there is no reason to presume they were ill-suited. Great marriages have been forged from greater dissimilarities.
And yes, they were both Catholic but that only seems to have signified in the fact that they never actually divorced.

Having been frustrated in my attempts to learn more about my grandmother, I looked for information about Ethel Bret Harte (1875-1964). The youngest of Bret Harte’s five children (all equally neglected by their father) she appears exactly 10 scanty times in a recent Bret Harte biography (Bret Harte, Prince & Pauper, by Axel Nissen).
Her astrological bent is not mentioned. The fact that she was ill and destitute in 1905 (she was 30) is only obliquely alluded to, but Google found this:




So notable men did ante up for the poor offspring of the American writer. But of what ailed her I could not learn. And how well did she know Arthur Conan Doyle? He was a spiritualist and believed in the possibility of speaking with those gone over to the other side.
Am I being ignorant in lumping together spiritualism and astrology?
Ethel Bret Harte wrote one book:
What else do I know of Ethel Bret Harte? She knew my grandmother enough to write this last paragraph in her horoscope (7 single spaced typed pages on onionskin):
“Now I leave you to draw your own conclusion on the quoted readings of planetary aspects in your natal chart because, though I could elaborate on these (Which coincide exactly with my own findings) I prefer that you should understand that this is not my interpretation which might seem prejudiced by knowing you. Then, too, I feel you have not been very frank or explicit with me as to just what did happen at home, though I have been forced to draw my own conclusions from what I find as tendencies in the chart.”
What do I learn from this? That my grandmother’s story was as elusive to her astrologer as it is to her descendants? Scant consolation.