I have wondered what to do with Nora's story since her recent death. It haunts me and she deserves to be remembered. Maybe I can piece some of it together here, from what I knew of her and from things she told me about her gothic southern past.
A small town in Virginia in the forties, a narrow-minded punitive father who kept her a prisoner in her room after she gave birth to an illegitimate child, a son her parents prevented her from seeing for years after she fled the area.
As Nora had feared, they brought him up as they had her: with strictness, not love. He was diagnozed as a schizophrenic and some time later she heard that he had been found hanged, an apparent suicide, in a Virginia jail.
Many years later, Nora still grieved for that lost boy. Images of him being hopelessly abused continued to haunt her recurring dreams.
Nora had once been beautiful, a model, but when I met her, in Provincetown in the early 60s, she was a pale, plump, somewhat neurotic but brilliantly witty alcoholic who hung out with writers. But she picked all the wrong husbands and lovers, raised her four sons through various catastrophes and got no good breaks.
Although Nora had long ago lost her looks to excess weight and drinking, she still had mannerisms when applying lipstick or lighting a cigarette in a long holder in which one could glimpse the alluring woman she had once been.
I remember her smiling savoir faire while peeing at outdoor cocktail parties or art openings. She never wore underpants and had perfected the tactic of peeing undetected when necessary underneath her long skirts without interrupting cocktails or conversation. I alone, having been told her intention, noticed the little stream of water flowing slowly across the lawn as she hummed mischievously to herself like Bette Davis in Jezebel, smiling her mysterious, self-satisfied little smile.
As I got to know her over the years I liked her more. She owned an old, dilapidated house which she shared with down-and-out hippies and others who needed refuge. It became a refuge for me when, newly divorced, I ended up in a very low paid job trying to make it through the winter in that tip-of-the-Cape town. I had only a bicycle, and in the icy wind that scoured the narrow spit of land in the winter and with the chronic bronchitis I had developed, I sometimes could not make it to the far end of town to the only store which would cash my Saturday paycheck. Nora's warmth and hospitality saved me.
She was a real earth mother. Somehow, on a welfare budget, with some contributions from housemates, she cooked great feasts of roast chicken, mashed potatoes and vegetables, down-home food prepared over long, easy afternoons of drinking whiskey sours and talking, telling funny stories, like the one about the Greenwich Village hotel where she could not pay her bill and ducked out wearing most of her clothes, leaving a suitcase which the owner threatened to hold until he was paid, only to discover that it held only all of her old suicide notes.
Nora's kitchen was a mess, as was her whole house -- dirty grey sheets and towels, old undrained water in a bathrub filled with rotting rubber toys, dust and crumbs everywhere. ``I used to be a fanatical housekeeper,'' she said with the sideways glint of glee in her eyes, ``until I had my nervous breakdown. Now I don't give a damn how it looks. It's much easier.''
Nobody else cared either. The warmth and welcome there were what was really important. And the talk was intelligent and defiantly unconventional. Joints were smoked, the police and government were mocked, censorable writings were typed and distributed.
Nora got in real trouble with the authorities when she and her live-in lover of nine years, father of two of her children, were active in fighting a proposal to deface the quaint old harborside with a giant motel. They were subsequently targeted by a cop who was related to the developer.
He invaded her house one night when she and her partner were sleeping, bearing a warrent which, a lawyer later admited, listed all the forbidded drugs in the drug code. None were found, and the frustrated cop later returned later with new warrants for ``lewd and lascivious behavior,'' the statute in the still-on-the-books old New England blue laws which prevented any unmarried couple from sleeping together, and arrested them. Nora, who could not afford the legal bills incurred for their defense, eventually lose her house as a result.
Nora loved men and sex. One night when I came back up to the Cape to visit and stayed in her house, Nora typically gave me her bed and slept on the couch. I heard her with her current lover who crept in that night to see her. They were trying to be quiet because of my presence up in the loft, but I heard her toward the end, coming with little high, sweet moans like a child in pain.
She had to put the guy out of her life two days later for stealing from her, and after closing the door behind him she doubled up in pain. ``I feel like a horse kicked me in the stomach,'' she said after he was gone.
I heard her voice like that again years later when she called and told me she was going to die. She had fought bravely against the odds through two kinds of cancer, but another variety had overcome her and toward the end she could barely speak.
When she told me she was going to die, I could think of nothing to say for comfort, knowing how fiercely atheistic she had always been. I couldn't give her false reassurances either. Nora respected blunt honesty.
I remember one of my last visits, when Nora, who was having trouble with her electric bill, surprised me by bringing a Maine lobster and a dozen bluepoint oysters because she knew that I loved those and couldn't get them in California.
``Oh Nora,'' I said on the telephone, after a long pause. ``Oh damn! I love you.''
``I love you too,'' she said quietly. I wrote her an immediate letter but she never saw it -- two days after that phone call she was dead.
I got an envelope from her in the mail afterward -- nothing in it but a cartoon torn from the newspaper. My name was scrawled on the envelope in her handwriting, but someone else must have addressed it and mailed it.
Pictured in it was a dumpy, late middle-aged woman sitting on a log in the woods leaning on her cane, and just beyond, a lecherous-looking cloven-hoofed Pan playing his pipes. The caption read, ``Play Misty for me.''