A Complex and Singular Person: Selected Writings

By Mary Helen Dohan

This book contains a selection of Mary Helens shorter writings, some published but many unpublished, which provide a window into her thoughts and ideas, her successes and frustrations, and her own and her familys history. Taken together, they paint a vivid portrait of this complex and singular person.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514473474

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COPYRIGHT © 2016 BY MARY HELEN DOHAN.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER:   2016903756

   ISBN:   HARDCOVER   978-1-5144-7349-8

                SOFTCOVER      978-1-5144-7348-1

                EBOOK               978-1-5144-7347-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/29/2016

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Why This Book

MEMORIES

Beginnings

All Houses Are Haunted

Brave Just To Live: A Memoir

Musings

Aunts Fanny And Irene In Cincinnati

It Was So Different

POEMS

Revolt

No Beauty

Wind

Vasco Nunez De Balboa

The Ancient Contract Fiend

Sea· Song

Unpublished Poems

A Boy's Song

In A Fairy Tale

Matthew

Omar Khayyam

Cheating

Untitled

Pages Still Uncut

To My Infant

When First You Walk

Housewife' S Lament

Untitled

To Mother

Reminder

The Pacifistic Islands

The Circus Parade

Poems About War

When All In Numbers

Troop Train

They're Singing A Song

Again The Laughter

At Forty Years

Being Eighty

ESSAYS

Fugitive From An Ivory Tower

Let's Quit Labeling Children

The Gingerbread Baker And The U.S.A.

The Trolloping Muse

At Henri-Chapelle

The Lizard And I

SHORT STORIES

Redbook Magazine

The Cat

A Yardful Of Violets

The Image

Volunteer Worker

The Young People

I Think Of Anna

The Music

WORDS AND LANGUAGE

A Lallapalooza Language's Roots Are Worldwide

The Gender Gap

Striking Fancies

Lone Star Lingo

The Great Word Bazaar

TEXAS BOOK FESTIVAL TALK ON MR. ROOSEVELT'S STEAMBOAT

Mr. Roosevelt's Steamboat

INTRODUCTION

By Kathleen Samsot Hawk

Our son David once described my mother as a complex and singular person -- and indeed she was.

She was keenly interested in the life of the mind. She was an imaginative child who loved books and poetry and fairy tales, and that probably set the course of her professional life. She graduated from high school at age 15, majored in English at Newcomb College, had a poem accepted by the prestigious Atlantic Monthly magazine while she was still in college, learned to read Chaucer in the original, went on for a Master's degree, wrote her Master's thesis on Charles Lamb as a Shakespearean critic, and then taught at Newcomb.

She was also an outstanding athlete. Her father, who had three daughters, had hoped for a boy to inherit his baseball talent, and she said that perhaps she was trying to fulfill his dreams. She won the loving cup as outstanding camper at Wabun Annung in the Texas Hill Country at age 15. She played baseball, basketball and hockey in college and was a member of the Athletic Council.

She was an excellent tennis player. My father liked to tell the story of a doubles match with two of his male friends, who began by lobbing easy serves to Mary Helen. When it was her turn to serve, she aced them twice, much to their chagrin. There were no more easy serves to her. She was also proud of the fact that she played tennis on her 70th birthday.

Given her many accomplishments and her strong intellect, a surprising facet of her personality is that she was often ill at ease socially. She worried about what other people would think of her, would agonize over whether her clothes or her hair looked all right, and often said that she did not like to be around too many people, people, people! However, once in a social situation, she was a lively conversationalist, and others obviously enjoyed her company. And she was comfortable as a public speaker, giving radio talks in her early years for the League of Women Voters, and later giving talks about her books.

The solitary life of a writer, and words and research, were her passions. She loved wandering through the library stacks to see what interesting things might turn up. She had hoped to teach and to write, and did indeed eventually write two books published by major publishers.

But that was later -- much later. When she told her Newcomb professors that she and my father were engaged, they told her they were sorry to lose her -- but married women could not teach in the university at that time. One of her professors spoke of the tragedy of the female scholar. New Orleans society also considered it embarrassing to a husband for a married woman to work -- so she stayed at home, which led to great frustration and disappointment. Later she said ruefully that she could hardly believe she embroidered tea towels to pass the time.

During World War II, as in so many other families, my father went to serve in the Pacific, and she was left at home with two small children. Despite the privations and separations of the war, she remembered the time as one of special closeness with my brother and me.

Family life was very important to her. After the war, there were many good family times at home with picnics, barbecues, and swimming; and a number of memorable vacations including trips to Arkansas, California and Virginia. She was devoted to her children, and always supportive of our efforts to achieve.

She did later begin writing again, and had articles and short stories published in a number of magazines. Her story titled End of Innocence was selected by Redbook magazine as one of the best short stories of the year in 1966. She also taught a fourth grade class of rowdy little boys for one difficult and memorable year, and taught English to freshmen in a girls' high school for a couple of years.

And then finally, in 1976, my mother's first book, Our Own Words, was published by Alfred A. Knopf with an introduction by Alistair Cooke. That book, on changes in American English as new words entered the language with successive waves of pioneers, was followed by one on the first steamboat voyage down the Mississippi River.

Mr. Roosevelt's Steamboat was published in 1981 and re-published in 1990. That led eventually to two stints as guest lecturer on the Delta Queen and then the Mississippi Queen, and an invitation to speak at the Texas Book Festival.

At those venues, her strong voice stood her in good stead. She never developed a quaver in her voice, even when her health declined. In fact, she said jokingly that perhaps we should put on her tombstone, She sounded good.

My father died in 1981, and she stayed on in New Orleans until crime and deterioration made the city too dangerous and we persuaded her to move to Houston. She enjoyed her life in Houston, made good friends, and had a wonderful town house at Weslayan and Alabama.

She was also working on a third book, about the early history of steamboats in the United States, titled Aboard the Floating Palaces. She submitted queries and sample chapters to a variety of publishers, both academic and commercial, but without success. To her frustration, the trade publishers found her work too academic, and the academic publishers thought the style too popular. Moreover, the publishing business as a whole had changed. Authors were expected to be well known already, or able to travel and make media appearances to publicize their books, something she would no longer have been able to do.

Until her health began to decline, though, she kept at her writing. She was also invited to serve as a consultant for a maritime museum (this while in her eighties), and was delighted to be involved in this new venture. My brother commented once that one of the qualities he admired most about our mother was her willingness to throw herself into new challenges, whether those might be new writing projects, attempts to master new and unfamiliar computers, moving to a new city after more than sixty years in New Orleans, or taking a first (and only) ski lesson in her seventies.

But gradually her health declined, much to her annoyance and frustration. In the last years of her life, before she died at age 97, she would say in irritation I can't DO anything anymore. Given the number of broken bones, operations and other health problems she had, she was amazed that she outlived both of her sisters and a number of friends, many of whom had seemed in better health but died sooner.

She was a strong willed woman, not always easy for her children to persuade even to do things that we were sure would be in her own best interest. She remained a news junkie to the end. At her funeral, as the urn with her ashes was lowered into the ground, a sudden gust of wind blew a large double sheet of newspaper through the little group of mourners; I've always wondered if it was my mother, come to say goodbye.

One of the great blessings of her last years was that her mind remained strong, she was always able to read, and she loved a good political or philosophical discussion. When I think of her today, my most vivid memories are of her inquiring mind and her indomitable spirit.

WHY THIS BOOK

Mary Helen wrote constantly, beginning with poems at age five. By any measure she was a successful writer, with two published books and numerous published articles. But she always lamented that she had not achieved more, and I had not realized until going through her old files how much she wrote that went unpublished. There were numerous drafts of short stories, book proposals, essays, articles and poems. There were notes on an amazing variety of topics that she considered for future essays or articles. There were other stories no longer in her files. She told me once that in her early writing years, if she received a rejection letter, she usually threw out the story.

It was both sad and poignant to go through those files and to see all the effort that came to nothing. But I also realize that the writing served an important purpose in itself: it kept her intellectually involved and motivated, and encouraged her to pursue a wide variety of interests in a productive and focused way. She would have chafed at the typical housewife's life at the time, with its total focus on children and domestic tasks. The writing opened her horizons. It made her feel that she was accomplishing something, a project that could be completed. And it was fun. She loved wandering through library stacks to see what might be interesting. Her research work was done mostly before Google, but I suspect that she would have loved following electronic trails too.

Mary Helen did begin a memoir, Brave Just to Live, but it was never completed; although it gives much of the early history of her birth family, it ends rather abruptly with her entrance into college. She said ruefully later that she became sidetracked by the historical research she loved so much. But she also seemed reluctant to write about her college years, for reasons she never talked about or perhaps even understood herself. Given her orderly approach to writing, she was never willing to skip over the college years to move on to writing about the rest of her life.

However, many of her other writings add life and color to the picture she began of the family history and her own. There are poems, writing class assignments, notes for things she wanted to write about someday, and stories loosely based on incidents from her life or from history. I did not want them to be lost, as they surely would be if they continued to exist only as a pile of loose papers. There were too many to include all of them, but the book includes a sampling of the most interesting or those that best reflect her thinking and her history.

Also preserved here are a variety of other materials, some published and some unpublished. They include her one published short story; some unpublished stories and musings based on incidents from her own life or on historical characters; a number of her published articles on words (always her first love); and the guest lecture she gave at the Texas Book Festival.

Taken together, they help to preserve a slice of family history and a portrait of this complex and singular person.

Photo%201%20-%20Her%20grandparents%27%20home%20on%20Hackberry%20Street%20in%20Cincinnati%2c%20which%20features%20in%20many%20of%20her%20writings.jpg

Her grandparents' home on Hackberry Street in Cincinnati, which features in many of her writings

Photo%202%20-%20At%20age%203.jpg

At age 3

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At age 3

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Wirth Place house where she grew up

Untitled-1.jpg

Mary Helen at right, with sisters Louise and Anna Jane

Photo%205%20%20-%20High%20school%20class%20photo;%20Mary%20Helen%20is%203rd%20from%20left%2c%20middle%20row.jpg

High school class photo; Mary Helen is 3rd from left, middle row

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With camp trophy at age 15

MEMORIES

BEGINNINGS

Officially, I was never born. Interesting as my birth was presumably to my parents and as significant for me, the county clerk of Hamilton, Ohio, who recorded births occurring in the city of Cincinnati, took no notice. Like many of my contemporaries in what are now the olden days, I was born at home; and some doctors kept poor records.

For a week I existed, or non-existed, in limbo, officially nameless, city-less, country-less, until, in the ancient tradition of early baptism (founded in still earlier times on fear of infant death and consequent deprivation of salvation), my conscientious Catholic parents had me formally baptized. Certification of this baptism, combined with later census records, established my bona fides in such civil matters as passport and marriage license applications. I wonder now, though, after hearing a recent discourse on Presidential eligibility by a well-known lecturer, if I could successfully run for President. Might not my opponent, desperate to overcome my commanding lead, claim that I was not provably born on American soil and so could not be a valid candidate? Might not he or she assert that I could have been rushed, new-born, from an incoming foreign ship for the very purpose of having me take over the American Presidency? There go my plans.

My well-documented baptism took place at St. Francis de Sales Church in Walnut Hills, at that time a prosperous and predominantly German suburb of Cincinnati. Predominantly but not exclusively. Since before the turn of the century, the Irish had come up fast from the old No Irish Need Apply days that began in the 1850's, when famine-driven immigrants then entering were thought fit only for labor or domestic service and poorly for that. It happened that many of the long-settled and prosperous Germans were Catholic, however, as were the Irish; and, like it or not, the bond with the newcomers was there, just as it was for the equally dismayed American Jews when they saw their exotic East European relatives streaming in a half-century later.

Besides, after a generation or two, families like the Nolans and Sullivans and the Gilligans, who had the town's most fashionable funeral parlor, made a great deal of money and moved to Walnut Hills and sent their sons to Xavier or Notre Dame and their daughters to Sacred Heart and St. Mary's. Gradually, ethnic animosities were blurred by what was shared (although for years in separate churches), the uplifting glory of ancient Catholic rituals, the rock-like certainty of doctrines never questioned, and respect bordering on reverence for the clergy, many of whom were immigrants themselves.

My parents helped cement the alliance. My father was of pure Irish ancestry, although there was family rumor of Spanish blood dating from the sixteenth century, when some of the proud Armada's vanquished ships foundered on Ireland's shores and stranded Spaniards found their way to Irish villages and into Irish hearts. He was handsome and witty and had a bit too much of the Irish love of the bottle. My mother had the chestnut hair and hazel eyes that we don't think of as German but are so often, and an eagerness, a reaching out for life and learning that in her day was thought inappropriate to women and so was never satisfied. How my mother would have loved the new world that is women's today!

At the time that I was born, we lived in what Cincinnatians call a flat, one in a gray stone row that my maternal grandfather had built on Myrtle Avenue. Most new-marrieds of the family took up residence there until their families outgrew the limited space and moved to a regular house. The flats were down the street from Woodburn Avenue and another block over from St. Francis de Sales where I went to school; and I often used to think, as I walked back toward them in the afternoon, that they looked like a row of very narrow castles, all joined together. I could almost be a princess.

Childhood is for all of us our native land. We may wander the world as émigrés, disown what was, change name and the pattern of our lives; we still speak in the accents of that land and carry in our being the mark of place. Old scars there formed throb with remembered pain at a random word; a teasing fragrance or the echo of a song stops our breath with sudden longing; a sound, a touch, fills us with vague uneasiness. Why is it that at dusk, when there is a special fragrance to the grass and I hear a child's laughter, I am transported back to Myrtle Avenue and the feel of a summer evening when lightning bugs dart and float in the soft, still air? With the other children who have come spilling out of their doorways after supper, I run about on the grass chasing the tiny flashes of light. We put them in jars with holes in the lids and see who can capture the most. Grown-up Anna next door protests: it's cruel to trap them that way! (Ah, there is a story -- Anna and Uncle Mike); but we children argue that the lightning bugs aren't hurt a bit and we always let them go before night.

Other fragrances. Other sounds. So many memories -- of joy, pain, loss, laughter. The stuff of life, of novels . . .

###

ALL HOUSES ARE HAUNTED

All houses are haunted. Some of them, even some long gone, are haunted by the living, by the ghosts of our earlier selves. A word, a sound, a fragment of a dream stirs memories programmed long ago into the incredible computer of our minds; and we wander disembodied through remembered rooms, climb stairs whose every step we know, hear echoes of voices and laughter from another time.

Why, when I hear a cat call in the night beneath my window do I grow rigid even now in remembered fear, become once again a seven-year-old haunted by the strange cat that had trailed me from the grape arbor in back of my grandparents' house and that I was sure would follow me forever? It waited now, waited in a corner of my room with its green eyes staring, waited for me to make the wrong move, saying I am watching, watching .... I have told you, do not move! Do -- not --move. Do --not. ...

I had been reading stories that summer, gripping, dreadful, wonderful stories about enchantments, about witches and ghosts and cats that wore boots, about ways to become invisible, about all sorts of strange, strange things. One told of a little girl named Sophie -- could one think evil of a little girl with that soft, silky name? Sophie could change herself into whatever animal she wished; usually she made herself into a cat and simply appeared and did scary, terrible things. Even now, I feel that there is more to cats than cat.

But in the small, shaded orchard, where the grape arbor was, lovely things too could happen. There was no pattern to the orchard; it was so called for the few fruit trees that grew between the grassy terrace that sloped down gently from the back of the house and the flowering hollyhocks that stood proud against the fence below. At the foot of the terrace, my favorite spot, two peach trees companionably touched branches; and sunlight drew flickering shadows through their leaves, dappling the ground beneath. The hum of insects mingled with the muted chirpings of birds carrying on lazy summer converse, and the scent of ripening fruit and juicy windfalls perfumed the soft, still air.

Here I had made for myself a fantasy kingdom, a place of magic. Who knew what things might be? In the heart of one of those round, perfect peaches an enchanted princess might be held captive by a sorceress. Such things have been written of. Thumbelina, after all, was small enough to fit into a walnut shell. The pebbles in the grass, those lovely pink ones so smooth to the touch--were they really just pebbles? How sly it would be for some mischievous gnome to disguise rare jewels in such form, even to hide within them a magic talisman to make oneself invisible. Who would ever guess? The ants, scurrying along with bundles on their backs, could have been watching the gnome at his work; but they couldn't tell me. Birds, though--I read once of a boy whose pet bird taught him bird language. How wonderful that would be!

Yes, magic was there in the orchard, and within the walls of the old gray house as well. The house is gone now, fallen before rampaging bulldozers. In its place stands a splendid brick school, where heedless students see only the material walls that hem them in (and intruders out, in these scary days!) and pass unaware through the ghost walls that surround them. Where they play basketball and scuff fashionable sneakers across a concrete yard, remembrance keeps green the velvety lawn with its proud, tall trees where squirrels scamper toward the children who reach out toward them with hazelnuts.

From the front gate that was, a gravel driveway sweeps in a great curve toward the wide, welcoming porch; and the door opens still into the high-ceilinged rooms of the house that was. In memory, I am again the child of those magical summers as I step into the quiet hallway. It opens its arms to me, and the house takes me in at once as one of its own. Inside the big door, I pass by the tall, antlered coat rack that waits patiently as before for snow-dusted coats and glossy fur capes, for light summer wraps, for hats and scarves and lacy shawls and gentlemen's canes. At the far end of the hall, facing me, the oval-framed portrait of a dark-eyed young woman in a rose-colored gown takes up much of the wall; and a low mahogany table beneath holds cards in a silver bowl. I turn aside to enter the cool dimness of the parlor, where the wine-red carpet is shaded from the sun by shuttered windows and where one walks softly. The dark, polished piano stands against one wall; beneath its ivory keys lie echoes of music once played in merry gatherings or in dreamy solitude; I hear far off the lilting sound made by quick, running fingers across the keys, the singing.

Slowly I make my round of this favorite room, touching a satiny chair with timid fingers, loving the rich, smooth feel of it that is one with soft light that enters through the shuttered windows. On the long mantel above the fireplace, a bisque cavalier at one end bows to the shepherdess who curtsies to him from the other, showing the white lace of her petticoat beneath her pale pink gown. Between them, the pendulum clock under its crystal dome chimes an accompanying note in soft bell tones; and all are reflected in the gold-framed mirror behind them.

There appears too in the mirror the child that was I, tiptoeing softly toward the lady and her suitor to see if they have moved at all since the last time. It does not seem reasonable that only toy soldiers and dolls come alive in the night, as some stories tell us they do.

I cross the entrance hall and enter the library. Here I walk less timidly, for in this place the spirit of the house is not so hushed and speaks in more familiar tones. Big, comfortable chairs with green plush covering rise from the darker green of the carpet as though they were never placed in their positions but grew; and I am in a deep, inviting forest of rugs and chairs and lamps and books, books of all colors that stand row on row behind the clear glass doors of the cases that line the walls. I know that if I open one particular door I can take out tall black books with gold writing on their covers and find inside beautifully colored pictures of birds with long trailing feathers and fish swimming in silver splendor through ocean caves and great curling serpents hanging from the branches of giant trees. They are my favorite books to look at, and I am allowed to take them out one at a time and lay them on the carpet by my grandfather's chair, where I like to lie on my stomach and read. Not now, though. In this drowsy time of day when grown-ups nap or are busy with quiet things, the house is most there for me; so I wander into the dining-room, where rose-colored drapes are tied back with lovely tasseled loops; and the long table and high-backed chairs wait expectantly for the nightly gathering that is the reason for their being.

In the silence of the afternoon, memories of other gatherings, of parties past, of long-ago dinners, fill the room with a gentle murmuring of sweet ghostly laughter and conversation, of tinkling crystal and the clink of silver on china, the rustle of silk. Against the wall a glass-fronted cabinet holds its treasures of fragile, petaled cups and saucers that were wedding gifts to radiant young couples now old or gone, of flowered service plates and patterned crystal on tall fluted stems. On a nearby sideboard a silver punch bowl sits amid filigreed silver cups. There are muted sounds from the kitchen now, and I am tempted to join my mother and aunts, who will be kitchen-busy for awhile and will ply me with lemonade and delicious, hard-frosted rusks.

I start toward the pantry, which is always nice to pass through for its high, round, stained-glass window that makes everything rosy; but no--I hesitate and then turn back to walk through the dining-room and into the hallway again. This time I move to the wing by the stairs, where the glass-topped music box stands on its walnut table. In its sweet lilting melodies the spirit of the house speaks most invitingly. The tunes it plays have danced through the heads of other children grown and gone; they too have watched the prickly golden roller turn against the teeth of a golden wheel and wondered how the fairy tones came out. I pull the handle back and forth and press the secret key, and softly in the silence the music box plays its gossamer songs for me.

As the child that was I stands before it, gazing down at the golden wheel, she hears the voice of the spirit of the house and is caught in its magic spell. And as long as we who there were children and wander in memory through the loved rooms, hear the loved songs, that spell will endure. The old gray house, untouched by what we call the real, by brick walls and fine schools, will continue to stand, proud and welcoming, among the shadowing trees.

BRAVE JUST TO LIVE: A MEMOIR

I exercise faithfully, here in my bedroom with the pictures around, with the memories, where I still sleep in the double bed I and my love bought together some sixty years ago. A plain double bed, old-fashioned, four-posted. My children and their spouses, who claim strangulation in any bed less than king-size, shake their heads in wonder. I don't mind. We managed very nicely. Oh, very.

I take vitamins and lecithin, gingko too, with all the talk about it. Lecithin, I have heard, helps brain function, does something for the neurons--or is it the synapses? I wonder if it sharpens the memories that hide among them. Does it hold bright the images of all that was? Keep alive those laughing,