She got pregnant again and followed him to India, surprising him with her arrival, by ship. There, she fell in love with an officer in the British Army. After Hazel left, she went to New York, where she worked as a model and artist before making her way to London. But Cynthia had adored her, and she filled in the blanks for me. Hazel had gotten pregnant with my grandmother as a teenager, and then left her in her crib in rural Iowa, so I had heard about Hazel mostly as an absence-as the selfish, abandoning mother. We’d read, write, and putter in the garden during the day, and cook and drink in the evenings, while Cynthia told me stories.Ĭynthia’s mother, Hazel, was my great-grandmother and the ancestor who most fascinated me. After college, I returned to Cynthia’s house for a couple months to soak it all in. It was a cross-generational friendship-a relief to see someone and be seen so clearly. There was nothing obligatory about our relationship. We liked-no, loved-each other immediately, with the kind of affinity that thrums in the blood and announces the soul’s recognition. Cynthia cracked open a beer, set a bottle of Blue Nun in front of me, and said, “Be your own policeman.” It was the first time I had ever seen Poetry magazine. My mother and I settled into the big kitchen with the blue-painted cabinets, smoke-stained ceilings, newspapers and books everywhere. A few mischievous kittens, an old black rescue dog, and a pickup truck that Cynthia had named the Silver Queen. Fresh garden flowers and alabaster lamps in the bedrooms. There were peacocks roaming around on the lawn. They raised chickens, grew their own produce and cooked delicious, elaborate meals. They chain-smoked, talked about literature, sent stories and poems to periodicals, and rented out rooms to boarders. We should go visit so you can meet her.”Ĭynthia lived with her partner in a manor house in Surry County, Virginia. Then my mother said, offhandedly, “My Aunt Cynthia writes. My straitlaced family didn’t quite know what to do with me. I wrote poems and plays, designed my own clothes, stopped eating meat, read incessantly, and did plein air paintings. I didn’t really know what an intellectual looked like. I had decided that I wanted to be a writer and insisted on wearing battered Chuck Taylors and a corduroy hat to all of my college interviews, thinking that this made me look like a beatnik intellectual. I didn’t meet my Aunt Cynthia until I was sixteen. They will do anything to perpetuate themselves. Bacteria replicate in straight lines, but viruses are eccentric survivors, she’d said. A week earlier when my mother had called her to talk about the pandemic, Cynthia had explained the wily, adaptive ways that viruses reproduce. She had declined to be intubated or put on a ventilator, so by the time I knew she had the virus, she had already been sedated and was floating in some liminal place between breath and non-breath.Ĭynthia had worked as a laboratory technician and understood what was happening. O ne Wednesday last month, I learned that my aunt Cynthia was dying from coronavirus.
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