Fried & True (3 page)

September 2003

NOBODY ASKED, NOBODY TOLD

I don't know how many deviled eggs or Ritz crackers with saga blue cheese I nibbled or how many cocktails I sipped while getting to know Anyda and Muriel. Since Bonnie and I met them in 1994, there's been a lot of scotch and water under the bridge. We cheered the day when we were invited to stop by anytime, not just for Saturday evenings on the front porch.

Whether on the porch with a crowd, or just the two of us visiting in the ladies' back sunroom, it was always a learning experience. We could tell from the living room, with its crammed bookshelves, baby grand piano, twenty year old stereo components and furniture representing several eras, this was a home well-lived and well enjoyed.

As for that juicy part about how A&M met, Anyda insists she just looked out the window of her office one day, spotted Muriel crossing the street, and it was love at first sight. She remembers saying to herself, “That's it.” But she couldn't exactly figure out what ‘it' was.

At age 38, she had never had any kind of intimate relationship, although she had plenty of unrequited crushes on female teachers and friends. “Besides, there was no way to even picture a life where you would settle down with another woman. It was unheard of. At least to me, in my experience.”

“But you knew that lesbians existed, didn't you?” I asked.

“Well, I knew of historical characters, I knew this kind of attraction existed, but absolutely no one talked about it.” At the time, over a half century ago, most gay men and lesbians were deeply closeted, feeling shame and furtively making contacts with those like themselves. Forget about books on the subject—the most heralded lesbian tale was
The Well of Loneliness
, and you know how that banned-in-Boston book came out (You don't? Read it, if only to see how great it is to have zillions of lesbian novels and books to choose from these
days—ones that don't end in self-recriminations, suicide, murder and despair).

It was Anyda's beloved Virginia Woolf who gave her reason to hope. Woolf's quote, “only women stir my imagination,” became her inspiration, and she showed me a book where she had underlined those words. Then she looked at me and said “I read it and I wondered if some kind of life with a woman might be achievable—although it seemed a rather remote possibility. But at some point I realized that it was what I wanted.”

At the end of World War II, when Anyda returned to the U.S. from Brazil, she went to work for an attorney in New York City and then received an offer to join the large Washington, D.C. law firm headed by former Secretary Of State Dean Acheson. There, she was one of four female attorneys on a staff of 75 and Muriel was a crackerjack executive secretary. Amid manual typewriters, secretarial stenography, and carbon paper, workplace intrigue came to life.

            
Muriel had been clandestinely “seeing” another one of the female attorneys. Office romances are always tricky, but I imagine that a same sex liaison in those post-war days was absolutely perilous.

Anyda and Muriel began to enjoy an innocent lunchtime friendship at work as they got to know each other. Soon, Muriel suspected that Anyda's attention was more than just friendly, and Anyda realized that there could be no one for her but Muriel.

But how would she know if Muriel was “that way” also?

“I didn't make it easy,” Muriel admits. She had been in the relationship with the other female attorney, on and off, for more than five years. “And I was even dating a man then, because it was the thing to do. Besides, I was told by the woman I was involved with that women could not be together permanently. It was a very confusing time for me. But Anyda was there to lean on.”

Sorry to say, I don't know much more information straight from the mares mouths about what happened next. But it's not
for lack of prying! But both Anyda and Muriel quickly clam up when discussing their initial attraction and decision to be together.

“But it was the best decision we ever made,” says Muriel, smiling.

One clue came from their appropriation of Thanksgiving as their own private holiday; one they always celebrated quietly with each other and later took as an anniversary. Shortly after Thanksgiving 1948, Muriel asked Anyda, who was living in a rooming house at the time, to move into the house she shared with her aunt. Muriel was taking care of her elderly relative and Anyda joined her.

Muriel always says how “very circumspect we had to be. We didn't go to bars. We didn't do anything that would shatter the illusion we were just friends.” Actually, it may have been easier to disguise the nature of their relationship at that time—there was a terrible post-war housing shortage and lots of women wound up sharing lodging because of the crunch.

If others suspected, they certainly didn't talk about it. “But if they didn't know, they were stupid,” says Anyda, stealing a glance at Muriel, who blushed bright pink.

September 2003

SUNNY DAYS, PARTY NIGHTS AT CARPENTER BEACH

The phrase “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” might have been coined in 1992, but the policy was alive and well in Rehoboth Beach as far back as the 1930s.

Talking to folks who've been in Rehoboth for twenty years or more, you begin to learn just how far back our gay history goes. People who started coming here in the late 1970s learned from their elders of a gay mecca—“although we weren't called gay then. We were still homosexuals,” jokes one Rehoboth senior.

Lore has it that the Dupont property, which sat ocean front at Rehoboth's Silver Lake, was where it all began. According to old timers, Louisa Dupont Carpenter, while married to a prominent businessman, was a flamboyant and very independent woman, perhaps even, as Muriel would say, “a shush.”

An aviatrix and adventurer, Carpenter was a great friend of the Broadway and Hollywood star Tallulah Bankhead—whose family lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland off Chesapeake Bay. Louisa, Tallulah, singer Libby Holman and many of their male friends gathered in Rehoboth in the late 1930s and 40s at the family estate.

A large field on the periphery of town doubled as a small airfield to allow celebrities to swoop in and out for private gay weekends. According to reports from those who were there, it was a very cultured, very sophisticated scene and the tradition continued for years. Hundreds of older men would gather at what became known as Carpenter Beach to relax on the sand, set up chess and backgammon boards and play volleyball.

In the 1950s, and well into the 60s and early 70s, since there were no specifically gay bars to frequent, gay life moved exclusively between the beach and private house parties. Even if there was a welcoming bar, liquor laws prevented anyone,
gay or straight, from walking around carrying a drink. Under those circumstances, even if gays gathered at a gay-tolerant establishment “it was almost impossible to meet anyone other than the fellow sitting right beside you” says one veteran.

As Rehoboth honed its reputation as the Nation's Summer Capitol, with Washington D.C. legislators and government workers vacationing here with their families, so too were the hundreds of gay government employees seeking anonymity on a beach vacation.

With the hideous threat of exposure that could mean loss of jobs and even prison time, most of the gay people kept strictly to their area of the beach and partied only at their closest friends' homes.

The traditions continued almost unchanged through the early 1970s. Louisa Dupont Carpenter was a fixture here during much of that time, until she flew her plane into a local airport field, with a fatal result, in the early 1970s.

Rehoboth's early gay life was rich and famous.

Muriel, her aunt, and Anyda often came to the beach for weekends. “But if there was gay life here, we certainly didn't know about it,” Anyda says.

Anyda handed me a square black and white photo with scalloped white edges. It was a picture of the couple, maybe in their early 40s, standing on the sand at the edge of the water.

“We'd stay at the Dinner Bell Inn and have breakfast at The Robin Hood Restaurant at 3 or 4 in the morning with local fishermen,” Anyda remembered.

“It's still there, isn't it, Bouddie?” Muriel asked, addressing Anyda with one of the pet names, origin unknown, she had for her partner.

“Oh, yes, it's still right in the same place.”

In those days, the ladies spent mornings on the beach, afternoons fishing off the old bridge over the Indian River inlet and evenings strolling the boardwalk, soaking up the freedom they felt here. I loved to hear their stories.

And as wonderful as it must have been to be in quiet mid-1950s
Rehoboth Beach, it's also sad that the couple had to hide their great love for each other.

But being in the closet didn't mean they kept to themselves. They found full acceptance with their families and neighbors all without saying a word about their relationship. “There was an old style of society, where people just accepted things,” says Muriel. “Anyda's mother called me ‘Muriel-my-love.' It didn't make a difference. There wasn't the kind of religious bigotry we see today.”

            
On another afternoon with the ladies, while Bonnie was out spraying the backyard roses, I was talking with Anyda about the need to prune the tree on the side of the sprawling single story cottage. I learned that it was under that full-canopied tree that the first of the cocktail salons began.

“Before we had the porch built,” Anyda said. “We'd put out some chairs, and the neighbors would spy us and walk up to say hello. We'd offer cocktails and it turned into a lovely tradition. That's how we met Betsy.”

They bought their current house in 1965. It was their second Rehoboth cottage, the first being a tiny weekend place on the outskirts of town, surrounded by farmland—where today there are McMansions. When Anyda and Muriel bought that first house in the 1950s, their real estate agent was the mayor's wife and one of Rehoboth's first female agents—which thrilled fervent feminist Anyda.

It was not so thrilling that the local bank refused to grant the two women a loan despite their stellar professional credentials. Muriel, still annoyed, remembers that the bank worried that the women “weren't connected in any way,” and it was shocking for two females to purchase a home.

“They thought women were a bad risk even if we had careers. We might have gotten pregnant, you know,” Anyda explained, with a wink.

So the couple went to a more progressive bank in town, got their mortgage and headed east to their weekend retreat.

In 1965, still commuting from Washington on weekends,
Anyda and Muriel sold their little home and bought their present in-town cottage. But it took a while to come up with the $32,000 price tag. “It was a leap for us at the time,” Anyda says, of a property that's worth millions today.

IF THEY ASKED ME I COULD WRITE A….

Now, more than thirty years later, Anyda, dressed in brown corduroy pants and a blue plaid flannel shirt, with green slippers on her feet, is standing on her porch, a box of crackers in her hand asking me, somewhat impatiently, if I've thought any more about her next publishing project.

With her last novel released a whole six months before, and negotiations with lesbian author Ann Allen Shockley about her new manuscript still in the talking stages, Anyda had to have a new project. Time for some new challenge for the 92 year old. Never mind that she already had me busy writing promotional brochures and press packets, running to the post office and helping with A&M Books distribution. Of course, I loved being part of our local publishing empire. But a book under my byline?

“Tell me again exactly what you had in mind?” I asked.

“A book of your columns. We will publish it. You'll have to get them all together. Just do it.” She sounded like a Nike commercial.

“But I have a column due tomorrow, and…well, press releases for your book and…”

            
“You can do it,” she said and turned around to arrange a vase of flowers plucked from her own garden.

Anyda had spoken. There would be a book of my essays. But my deadline for
Letters
was only 18 hours away. First priority would be finishing
that
column. And with our discussion of the threat of imprisonment for the rich, famous and bureaucratic homosexual crowd back in the 1940s Rehoboth, I find it ironic that we haven't come all that far today. In fact, Delaware is going backward. To wit, my next column….