Blue Pencil Bohemia

Ashcan School painter George B. Luks sketched dinner
at Maria's restaurant in Greenwich Village, 1890s.

In the 1890s, Maria’s restaurant on MacDougal Street drew quite a crowd.

Maria herself presided over the kitchen. While she cooked and served, men and women toasted each other, recited poetry, sang, teased, and argued as they milled around large tables.

At Maria’s, a meal of soup and spaghetti, roasted meat, salad, fruit, cheese, coffee, and Chianti could be had for fifty cents.

That’s where Ernest Jarrold – a newspaperman also known as Mickey Finn – often was goaded into singing “Slattery’s Baby.” Like much of Jarrold’s output, the song mocked Irish immigrants:

 Oh, I’m sorry to shtate I’m in trouble of late,

              From Slattery as well as the childer;

              He tries all the while me patience to rile

              An’ me poor broken heart to bewilder. . .

               

The scene at Maria’s restaurant, dubbed “Bohemian” by social observers and participants alike, rolled merrily along gathering artists and storytellers. Soon enough, it attracted uptown swells who hoped to be fashionably edgy. When Maria’s moved to Fourteenth Street, everyone followed. Intent on preserving their fun and exclusivity, the artists and writers established The Pleiades Club which met weekly at the restaurant.*

After a while, the lawyer and poet William E. S. Fales broke off to start The Blue Pencil Club. He located it in lower Manhattan near Newspaper Row, and invited the bawdy Mickey Finn and other journalists and illustrators to come along.

Among club members, the cartoonist R. F. Outcault was especially well-known. He had made his name with the inimitable character, the Yellow Kid. The bald urchin in an oversized yellow nightshirt emerged from a comic strip about street kids called “Hogan’s Alley,” which Outcault created for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Soon enough, William Randolph Hearst lured Outcault to his New York Journal. It is said that the term “yellow journalism” originated with the circulation battle that ensued between the two papers. **

The Yellow Kid is front and center in this panel
from R. F. Outcault's "Hogan's Alley."

The irony is that newspapermen like Finn and Fales were a long way from the down-and-out, unconventional style that took its name from the early-nineteenth century vie de Boheme of Paris’ Latin Quarter.

Still they persisted in identifying as Bohemians, even declaring Fales “the King of Bohemia.” There are many histories of Bohemianism in the United States, some of which mention the crowd at Maria’s and none of which mention the Blue Pencil Club, but I won’t split hairs.     

What’s interesting is that the newspaper offices where these men worked were spitting distance from the neighborhoods where Chinese, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants had settled since the 1880s. In this way, they were right on top of the cultural and social changes brought about by new demographics.  

One change was the proliferation of ethnic table d’hote restaurants in lower Manhattan. In those days, table d’hote referred to a small restaurant, often in a cellar, where the chef and his family lived, cooked, and served dinner to guests. For these boisterous fellows, a visit to a Hungarian, Spanish, French, German or Romanian joint constituted a Bohemian adventure. 

Something new and different, unsullied by crowds hoping to be cool.

Besides, by 1900, a spaghetti dinner could be had at one of many “Italian eating houses,” one writer would recall.

* The Pleiades Club continued into the 1930s.

** Since the cartoonist had not copyrighted “Hogan’s Alley” or its characters, the World was able to continue the strip by employing a different illustrator and retitling it. That illustrator was George B. Luks, who went on to become a member of the Ashcan School of painting. Later, Outcault created Buster Brown, a comic strip character as well as the mascot of the Brown Shoe Company of St Louis.

See posts: 1/25/17, 2/1/17, 2/14/17.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/02/blue-pencil-bohemia.html

 

Blue Pencil Boys

In 1899 when they started the Blue Pencil Club, the men were a bunch of rambunctious, though well-established, writers.

They rented some rooms on Spruce Street in lower Manhattan. Around the corner, the row of buildings that housed the city’s newspapers reached to the sky with a gold dome and towers.

The club was a mess, though:  The floor, when covered at all, was carpeted with sawdust. The ceiling decorations were mostly cobwebs. . .  The furnishings consisted of bare tables, tubs, beer kegs, a telephone and a bar.^*

From time to time, police busted the members for lack of a liquor license. But who had the heart to penalize such rollicking consumers of theater, literature, and Chinese culture?

Purveyors of wit that has, 117 years later, lost some of its luster, they joyously took down Tammany Hall, pompous publishers, and business titans.

But it should be noted they were rather smug themselves.

The point of the club was to have a good time, and to publish the Blue Pencil Magazine which they packed with doggerel, drawings, and tales ridiculous and fantastic.

Blue Pencil Magazine, cover of first issue

And the names of these men?

They were Billy Burgundy and Mickey Finn (pseudonyms) and Billy Fales.

And there was Forman, the pince nez’d scion of one of Brooklyn’s first families who got his start when the legendary Irish editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Thomas Kinsella, sent the lad to San Francisco in 1877 to cover an anti-immigrant uprising fomented by a labor leader named Denis Kearney.

Advertising card for cigarettes featuring Allan Forman

Forman ended up reporting on the Sand Lot riot, a three-night rampage during which four Chinese men were killed. He went on to write about theater, manners and the like. For 25 years, he edited The Journalist, the nation’s first magazine for writers and editors.

His essay, “How to Eat an Orange,” which appeared in Northwest Magazine in 1890, was well-received as they used to say.

As for Billy Burgundy!  Why would anyone named Oliver Victor Limerick need a pen name?

A Mississippi native who trained to be an allopath, Limerick was an incorrigible joker. He came to New York to edit a medical journal. After a while, he decided that he would rather write stories than practice medicine.

Limerick’s amusing advice column, “Billy Burgundy’s Balm for Burdened Bosoms,” and his books, such as Billy Burgundy’s Tales in Toothsome Slang, satirized romance:  

Percival was the confidential valve in the Borated Talcum Powder Trust, and drew down a voluptuous salary for his services in behalf of the Chafe-Allaying Industry. . .

Ernest Jarrold appeared on the frontispiece of
the February 1901 issue of Blue Pencil Magazine.

Then there was Mickey Finn, a.k.a. Ernest Jarrold, an Englishman who had been hanging around Newspaper Row for years, contributing short stories to The New York Evening Sun, Harper’s Weekly and other magazines. He often poked at Irish immigrants.

And there was Billy Fales – of whom his friends wrote:

Brave, brilliant Billy! No man or woman ever heard from his lips of the great grief that paralyzed his ambition and made a wreck of his career, for there was no yesterday on his calendar,

and

He often said that life was a joke and he generally appeared to make this epigram the maxim of his career.

A poet, essayist, diplomat, attorney, and adventurer, Fales bore the nickname “the Encyclopedia.” Married thrice, indifferent father of two sons, he caroused Manhattan, eating and drinking heavily.

Chow Chop Suey at Mong Sing Wah in Chinatown, the spaghetti at Maria Da Prato’s on MacDougal Street, the oyster stalls at Fulton Market, and the Lomo de Puerco con Platanos at Braguglia & Carreno on Broadway; Billy loved it all.

Artist's sketch of "Spaghetti Night" at Maria del Prato's

He steered the members of the Blue Pencil Club through the night, returning at dawn to his home on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights.

They called him, as many had been called before, “The King of Bohemia.”  

Through the Hourglass: Blue Pencil Boys

*See posts on William E. S. Fales, 2/1/17 + 1/25/17 & about his mother, Imogene C. Fales, 5/25/16; also post on Allan Forman, March 22, 2017.

‘My Wicked Vice’: William E. S. Fales in China

The British established five treaty ports, including Amoy, soon
after winning the First Opium War in 1842.  

On a beautiful fall day in 1890, the newly appointed emissaries William E. S. Fales and Edward Bedloe went off to China on the S. S. New York. 

I imagine them on deck, waving goodbye to no one because neither man had, at the moment, anyone special in his life.

Between them, Bedloe actually possessed qualifications, having served in the American Consular Service in Italy and Egypt. Fales’ fluency in Chinese would be an asset, as well. Both men were fascinated by Chinese culture: Bedloe with etiquette and weaponry; Fales with decorative art and food.

Messrs. Bedloe and Fales were heading to Xiamen, which Westerners called Amoy, a port city about 300 miles northeast of Hong Kong, along the Taiwan Strait.

They would arrive at a country stuck in time, except for a dramatic escalation of foreign intrusion.    

The Qing Dynasty, dating to 1644, continued its rule in the person of the Empress Dowager Cixi who had seized power in 1865. First she stood in for her son, Tongzhi, who died young of smallpox or venereal disease or both; then for Guangxu, her sickly nephew who advocated national modernization. (She had him poisoned.) 

During the Empress Dowager’s regency, the United Kingdom and increasingly the United States, Russia, and Japan expanded their control through treaty ports.

Treaty ports originally were established by the British after they defeated China in the First Opium War. The treaties governed trade on terms never favorable to China. They also created districts within each port city, inhabited exclusively by foreigners who answered to no one. Fales and Bedloe resided in such a neighborhood.

Parlor in the home of the U. S. Consul, Amoy;
late nineteenth century

Since Amoy was a treaty port, the men focused on American trade interests. They were pleased to find that Far East markets enthusiastically sought anything that came from the U.S.

But there was a problem with fraud:

. . . the filling of American flour bags with poor imitation British flour; filling canvas covers of Chicago ham and bacon with really unmarketable pork; putting up Siberian salmon in exact imitation of the best salmon canned in California and Oregon, and selling cheap imitations of Ames’ shovels, Collins’ axes, McCormick’s farming implements . . .

The Consul kept a special eye on arms and ammunition:

One example [of fraud] was an imitation Winchester rifle made in Belgium by an English firm of the lowest grade materials, which was liable to kill the man who fired it as the man or animal it was fired at.  

What else demanded the attention of Bedloe and Fales?

The promising tea crop of 1891,

silver curios and tea root carvings,

                             rituals of death and burial.

City of Amoy; scene with the famous tombs, 1890s

Like most Westerners, Fales and Bedloe were fascinated by the hillsides of Amoy. Across the centuries, the slopes had become packed with tombs. In some parts of the walled city, there were no boundaries between burial grounds and private property.

“Amoy proper and its suburbs have a living population of about one million, and a dead one of four and a half times as many,” Bedloe informed the U. S. Government.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association he affirmed Amoy’s “reputation as the dirtiest city on the face of the globe,” describing open cesspools and impassable roads.

Sketch of Fales from a newspaper profile
 that appeared during his years as Vice Consul

Despite the dirt, China intrigued and delighted the men.

Both were well-educated, sharp observers, and fine writers. They supplemented their annual salaries (Bedloe: $1,490; Fales: $354.19) by writing for various U. S. newspapers and magazines.

In an 1891 letter to the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, Bedloe wrote:

You have no idea, my dear Stoddart, what an inexhaustible supply of literary material this ancient civilization possesses . . . my daily life here is one mass of surprises and arrangements. They do everything that we do, but in exactly the opposite way.

             

After several examples involving concubines, burglars, and animals, Bedloe closed:

Now I have two pretty poems from the facile pen of my wicked Vice which I will bring on to you in January or February. You shall have the first bid on them. They are truly great and I hope you can afford to buy them.

It appears that editor Stoddart, who had previously published poems by Fales, decided to pass.

Fales’ stories fared better: “Chinese Armor,” “”Chinese Statuary and Figures,” “Driving out an Evil Spirit,” “Fortune Telling in China,” “The Pharmacist in the Far East,” “Chinese Little Devils,” and others appeared in American papers between 1891 and 1894.

In 1893 Fales took leave and returned to the United States, where he married a pioneering journalist and suffragist, Margherita Arlina Hamm. Together they returned to Amoy and traveled to the Philippines and elsewhere.*  

By mid-September, W. E. S. and Margherita had returned to Brooklyn. Fales reestablished himself in law and journalism and resumed his love affair with Chinatown while Hamm wrote books and lectured.

The New York Press Club – a rowdy bunch – welcomed back William with a dinner featuring Punch a la Chinois.  

The New York Press Club welcomed back
Fales at a dinner in September 1894 
(New York Public Library)

*Hamm claimed that she and Fales were in Korea when the Sino-Japanese War began August 1, 1894. She reported that she had witnessed attacks on the palace in Seoul and an assassination attempt on Queen Min of Korea. However, Fales and Hamm were back in the U. S. by September 22, 1894 . . . and sailing time would have been at least 80 days.

*See posts 1/25/17 + 2/14/17; also 5/25/16.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/02/my-wicked-vice-william-e-s-fales-in.html

Through the Hourglass: ‘My Wicked Vice’: William E. S. Fales in China

From Chinatown to China with William E. S. Fales

There once was a city where nothing stood still.

Brilliant and wild, William Fales inhabited that place. In 1880, he first ventured into the narrow streets of lower Manhattan. 

He would spend many hours of his life in Chinatown.

Now, when I climb the stairs at the Canal Street subway station, Billy – as his close friends called him – is hurrying by. He’s on his way to dine at Mong Sing Wah on Mott Street, where he’ll introduce a skeptical friend to “Chow Chop Suey” and drink cup after cup of rice liqueur.

Next he’s heading to Doyers Street to see a performance at the Chinese Theater, the audience a mix of neighborhood residents and “slummers.” Those are wealthy people who enjoy escaping the confines of their class.  

And finally, long after midnight, perhaps he’ll move along Pell Street, to an opium joint…

But that’s speculation.  

Pell Street, Chinatown, 1890s

A big man with a twirling mustache, William Edward Sanford Fales was born in New Bedford, Mass., in 1851 and grew up in Brooklyn where he attended Polytechnic Institute. He taught himself Chinese and French. Teachers and colleagues called him a genius.

None of his friends can ever forget Fales, the many-sided, with his massive head and blond curls. . .  

Like champagne, he was often effervescent, sparkling, and overflowing. Much that he emitted was like froth, but much, too, was substantial and weighty. . .

He would deliver a talk on the history of Satan, and follow it with a paper on the origin of obscene words. This, in turn, would be succeeded by a lugubrious poem on death, or on the final “wreck of matter and the crash of worlds.” * While exercising his skill in the realm of the imagination, he was addicted to mathematics and scientific research.

William descended from an early American family of Puritans, the Fales clan of Bristol, R.I. His father, Edward S. Fales, was born in Cuba in 1833 and came to the U.S. as a child. He studied law, edited a newspaper, and reportedly became fluent in nine languages.

Along the way, Edward married Imogene Franciscus of Baltimore. They had three children together but spent much of their marriage apart. Edward worked for a pharmaceuticals manufacturer in Rio de Janeiro.

Imogene outlived her husband by 27 years. She became a writer, suffragist, populist, prohibitionist, and sometime Theosophist.

Their eldest son, who used the pen name W. E. S. Fales, received an E.M. from the Columbia School of Mines in 1873.** Two years later, he earned a degree from Columbia Law School. 

Next, William joined the law firm of Colonel Benjamin Tracy, who served in the Civil War. Active in Republican politics, Tracy would become U. S. Secretary of the Navy.  

A young man named Wong Chin Foo, founder of a New York newspaper, The Chinese-American, joined Tracy, Catlin & Brodhead as an apprentice to Fales. He didn’t stay long, moving on to become a celebrated activist who publicly opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, lobbied for citizenship for Chinese immigrants, and wrote extensively about the Chinese experience in America (including an article about Chinese food in Cosmopolitan Magazine).

It’s impossible to know if Wong Chin Foo thought W. E. S. Fales was a great guy or just another slummer.

Wong Chin Foo, 1880s

On the one hand, Fales dove into Chinatown even though the tongs (gangs) were bloodthirsty and danger lurked on Ragpickers Row and Bandit’s Roost, filthy dark alleys off Mulberry Street.

Fearlessly, the jocular Brooklyn lawyer steamed ahead and got to know the proprietors of Chinese laundries, restaurants, and other businesses. He loved their stories and often went to bat for them – it was said – when cops and immigration officials came down hard.

On the other hand, as stated in a magazine article:

Fales speaks Chinese, and his chief delight is to pilot a party to his Mott Street yellow friends for a Chinese supper – there, he is in his glory. The Chinamen respect him . . .   

Was Fales, in fact, grimly tolerated by the Chinese?  

Either way, no one could argue with the man’s passion for Chinatown. He visited night after night, commuting by the Fulton Ferry and riding the Third Avenue El until the Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883. Then he traveled by carriage in a city still lit largely by gas.

Mong Sing Wah Restaurant,
newspaper illustration, 1890s

Around 1880, W. E. S. married Agnes, the first of his three wives. He never bothered much with her or their two sons, whose names were Harold Athelstan Fales and William Hereward Fales. Athelstan, known as the “first king of England," ruled during the tenth century. Hereward, known as “the last Englishman,” led a popular rebellion against William the Conqueror in the eleventh century.

So you can see where Fales was coming from.    

In the mid-1880s, he began to publish poetry. Dozens of his poems appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide: “The Modern Spirit,” about drinking; “Unto My Ladye,” about “her faire Haire and sweete Eyes”; “Sea Foam,” about a shipwreck, and so forth. The poetry was trite, but would improve slightly.

Also during these years, Fales left his beloved Brooklyn for Chinatown. There he lived for some time in a rented room, in the thick of things on Doyers Street.

A remarkable opportunity came his way in 1890.

Colonel Benjamin Tracy, now Navy Secretary under President Benjamin Harrison, arranged Fales’ appointment as Vice Consul in Amoy, China. To top it off, Dr. Edward Bedloe, best known as a founder of a dining club, the Clover Club of Philadelphia, became Consul.

Fales and Bedloe were old friends. They both liked to drink and were practical jokers, reported the Brooklyn Eagle. You can bet that they spent many an hour trying to top each other’s wit.

Off they went to Amoy, as Xiamen was known in the West.

19th century map of China

To be continued.

See posts on 2/1/17 + 2/14/17; also about Imogene Fales, 5/25/16.

*Recollections by Fales’ law school classmate and fellow mischief-maker, Frederick W. Hinrichs. “Wreck of matter” quotation is from Thomas Carlyle.

**The School of Mines of Columbia University, founded in 1864, is today The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/01/from-chinatown-to-china-with-william-e.html

Through the Hourglass: From Chinatown to China with William E. S. Fales

An Inauguration Story

Officials arrive at the Capitol for Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 inauguration
(Library of Congress)

T’was a sparkling day, the sky full of sun and wind, when Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office on March 4, 1905.

TR, the youngest man elected President of the United States (until 1960), was bursting with vision and promise. He always experienced great moments – particularly his own – on the highest plane of exhilaration. 

The new president -- formerly a vice president, governor, and assistant secretary of the navy among other things -- had helped steer the nation to its new position as a global power. “Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us,” he now declared.

Yet more important than international affairs, said he, were the relationships among Americans:  

Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. 

TR delivers his inaugural address
(Library of Congress)

I wonder if TR counted race relations among the challenges of modern life.  Four years earlier, he had invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.  Throughout his career, Roosevelt had made remarks that seemed sympathetic to Americans victimized by prejudice.

He probably did not realize that those who planned the 1905 inauguration found black Americans to be very much in the way. 

A former U.S. Army general, George H. Harries, served as chair of the 1905 Inaugural Committee. Harries appointed a Sub-Committee for Colored Visitors whose 42 members (all black) were told that there must be “absolute separation” between the races although “our colored visitors should enjoy the fullest protection and be accorded the kindest hospitality in the houses of the refined members of their own race in this city.”

Similar actions had occurred at earlier inaugurations, largely in deference to Southerners. 

It’s hard to imagine how the Sub-Committee maintained segregation at the inauguration. Blacks constituted one-third of the District population. Were they swept off the streets? Barred from certain areas?  The Inaugural Committee's report does not explain what was done.

Two weeks out, the Sub-Committee for Colored Visitors asked the Secretary of War to include a squadron of the Ninth Cavalry – black troops – in the parade. He agreed.

The program performed at the inaugural ball at the Pension Building included a ragtime march called “Black America, a Negro Oddity,” written by a Detroit record store owner, Harry Zickel. The Committee on Music tucked it in among Strauss, Rossini, and Sousa.

Less than ten years earlier, the Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson (“separate but equal”), had formally ushered in the Jim Crow Era.

In 1901, the number of lynchings nationwide dropped from triple to double digits, but the needle wouldn’t move again until the early 1920s.

In 1906, the Brownsville Raid occurred in Brownsville, Texas.  White residents falsely accused black soldiers stationed at a segregated unit nearby of murdering a white police officer and a white bartender.  In a case of grave injustice, TR ordered dishonorable discharges for all 167 soldiers.*  

The 1905 inauguration turned out to be an inauspicious start to Roosevelt's first full term of office.  While he was tone deaf on race, however, he acted as a progressive on several significant social issues.  Interpreting what that means makes the study of history interesting. 
   

1905 inaugural parade; TR invited six American Indian
chiefs to participate, including the Apache Geronimo
(Library of Congress)

*In 1972, the Army exonerated the soldiers and President Nixon pardoned them.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/01/an-inauguration-story.html

Through the Hourglass: An Inauguration Story

See post December 28, 2016.

Lost Notes, Just Found

Elena

Your grandmother Elena was extraordinarily beautiful. She had long brown hair and spent much of each morning putting it up in pin curls while seated before a three-way mirror. You’ll always remember those finger rolls.

By the time you knew her, she was a vain woman who wore too much make-up and fake nails. As a little girl, you once caught sight of her unmade and undone, and were quite terrified.  

In 1913, the first of several family scandals occurred when your grandfather, Victor, left Elena for his second wife without having secured a divorce.  The new wife’s name was Ellen.  

Grandfather Victor
1920s

Your own parents – Louis and Vivian – would divorce in 1942. Soon after, your mother returned home, bringing you with her to a grand estate in Greenwich, Connecticut which belonged to your other grandmother, Edith, and her second husband.

The two grandmothers were opposites. Elena raised chocolate poodles and entered them in shows. Edith threw liquor-soaked costume parties in the basement of the mansion.

Once each month your mother would put you on the train to New York City to spend the weekend with Elena, who lived on the Upper East Side. 

The daughter of a banker, Elena was stuck between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She and Victor met and courted in the old way. Nine months after they married, a little girl was born; then your father came along. But the daughter died young and the marriage never recovered.

Your father didn’t think much of his mother, and insultingly called her “the eggplant.”

Free of Elena and properly married, Victor went on to have three sons with Ellen. The family business came into their hands (and the hands of your father).

There was Otto, who was gay. He wanted to be an interior decorator.

Then came Karl and Alfred.

Your father believed he was the smartest of the four. He also wanted to be an interior decorator but did not trust his brothers to run the business.  

They all made fortunes. You and your mother never worried about money.

Your grandmother, Edith; 1920s
(passport photo)

But your mother was an alcoholic. Her sister was, too.  

Their father had died when they were ten and twelve -- a strange accident at Saranac Lake -- leaving them with Edith in a large apartment on Riverside Drive. Edith spent a decade trying to find another wealthy husband.

Their father died when they were
ten and twelve.

She took a lot out on her daughters – especially your mother, who simply could not get out from under. To the day she died, Vivian would call Edith and ask, “What should I wear?”

Vivian lost five pregnancies. When she conceived you in 1937, the family placed her at the LeRoy Sanatorium in New York City. That’s where you entered the world.

Many of the women who sought “private treatment” at LeRoy arrived pregnant. Occupying nine floors and the penthouse in an Art Deco building at 40 East 61^st Street, the sanatorium was founded by Alice Fuller LeRoy, a widow who needed to earn a living.

Now back to the Greenwich mansion, which everyone called “The Big House.”

A few snapshots: three-story entrance hall with a Cinderella staircase. Library cast in chintz where Edith held court. Vast stone terrace; green lawn that ran to the water. 

Everyone had to be dressed properly at all times.

At cocktail hour, the younger grandchildren were invited into the library to have toasted peanut butter and bacon canapés. Then they were sent to have dinner with the help. That changed when each turned twelve and was allowed in for dinner on the condition that she first stood up and gave a short speech.

Edith continually admonished everyone: That isn’t how it’s done, dear.

Your step-grandfather, a kindly man, tolerated Edith for reasons you can’t fathom. He drove you around in his woody station wagon looking for an imaginary goat.  

Drunk or not, your mother volunteered for the Red Cross, played canasta, and fell in love with a German fellow. Edith forbade her to marry him.

In 1960, your father moved out to California. When you visited, he unveiled a portrait of his second wife, known as “Sunny.” You blurted out: “It doesn’t look like her.”

“Go away till you have some brains,” your father replied. 

But he redeemed himself. He and Sunny loved objets, and they had good taste, too. They took you to Ojai to learn about pottery. Later, they came east and the three of you toured New Hampshire searching for antiques.

Your father wrote poetry. He died of cirrhosis in 1970.  

Now it is decades later and you’re an expert in dressage. You and your second husband live happily on a farm in New England. You have legally changed your name several times.

Very few people recall anything about your parents and grandparents although once upon a time they were in all the papers.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/01/lost-notes-just-found.html

Through the Hourglass: Lost Notes, Just Found