Aunt Lois told me about her life:
this is what I remember of it.
Aunt Lois was born in San
Bernardino, California, in 1921. Her father, Ralph McConnell, was from a
Missouri family that had moved to California; her mother was Laura George
Knoles. Her father was six feet tall, her mother five feet tall; Lois, five
foot six, always wanted to be a bit smaller, like her mother—which was one
reason she loved her friend Barbara Warboys Redman so much, from childhood, because
she was smaller than Lois. She was friends with Barbara Warboys, and Barbara’s
future husband Paul Redman, from the first grade. That Lois was born at all
required an act of love and courage on the part of her mother. As I was told
the story, her mother’s older sister died in childbirth, and her mother was
brought in to say goodbye to her. Lois’ mother was terrified of having children
herself: she had Lois, but no more, which was why Lois was an only child.
Lois’ childhood sounded idyllic.
She was friends with a great-grandfather (McConnell, I believe) who had fought
for the Union army in the Civil War, who had a long, white beard, and was very
fond of Lois because she was the only one of his great-grandchildren who
wouldn’t pull his beard. She had an orange cat named Teddy-Cat who roamed the
neighborhood, hunting gophers. Her family was not well-off—and she was always
very conscious of that—but they lived decently, among neighbors who also lived
decently. There wasn’t much consciousness of people being different: there was
a Mexican neighborhood, and in the thirties there were Okies come to
California—although Aunt Lois said they would never have used the word “Okies,”
because it was disrespectful—but it just didn’t matter much. Nor religion, nor
ancestry: her own folks were a “duke’s mixture” of this-and-that, and not
particularly church-goers.
Lois loved California. She never
liked cold weather; she liked people in Boston, but never the climate, the
place. Sometimes they would take vacations up into the mountains not far from
San Bernardino; but I think when she came east to marry my uncle John in 1950,
it was the first time she had been out of the state.
The Great Depression hit hard. Her
dad was in construction—he was a smart man, a glasses-wearer, who never had the
chance for schooling—and work was hard to get in the 1930s. He was getting
older, and his back began to hurt; he went to a chiropractor during the 1930s,
and was very appreciative. Lois became a lifelong Democrat then—maybe the
family already was, but she always spoke of the Great Depression as having
formed her political sympathies—the tough times, and what FDR and the Democrats
did for people in those tough times.
Lois went to San Bernardino Valley
Junior College between 1939 and 1942, and got an Associate of Arts in 1943. She
worked at the San Bernardino Army Air Base between 1942 and 1945, I believe as
a clerk. I don’t think she had the money to go to a college farther away to
begin with, and then World War Two wasn’t the time to go to college. So she
didn’t get to University of California—Berkeley until 1946, when she was already
twenty-five, coming in as a junior. (She would graduate in 1948.) There she
fell in with a group of other women students, mostly younger than her, who made
her feel as young as they were. Lois and they became life-long friends—they
called themselves “the Birds.” Lois always loved the memory of Berkeley—both
the place, and the friends she made there.
Lois also met my uncle John there.
He had come to Berkeley as a graduate student in English, and I believe they
first met in an English class there—on Chaucer, maybe? I believe Lois liked
him, but didn’t really know him that well. I remember two different stories of
how they met, possibly the same story. They met on the street, and he had a
button loose on his shirt (or something like that), and Lois offered to sew it
for him. Then, when they came to the off-campus house she shared with the rest
of the Birds, he saw their piano—and John, entranced—he was an accomplished
piano player who hadn’t had a chance to play in California—went to it to play.
At some later point Lois’ parents asked if John was seeing her, and she said he
was certainly seeing her piano! But somehow the sewing and the piano led to
them dating, and eventually getting married in December 1950. Lois came east on
a train to get married in New York City.
Lois then followed John around to a
variety of English graduate schools and early professorial jobs—in Minneapolis
and New Haven, before arriving in Boston. I believe she had some sort of
editorial job in New Haven. They weren’t really settled in Boston—in Newton Upper
Falls—until about 1960.
I believe Lois got Hodgkin’s
lymphoma in the late 1950s. She was lucky to survive, and the treatment meant
she could never have children. She didn’t talk about this much, but I believe
it was a sadness in her life. I also believe that she loved John so much and so
fiercely not least because he had been a very good husband to her through her
illness.
In the early 1960s, as John began
his career in Boston College, Lois got work as a copy editor and editor—first
at Horn Book magazine (for children),
then at Beacon Press and Houghton Mifflin. I believe she was very good, but
also somewhat fiery tempered in ways that impeded her career. I think she had
made the transition to editor at Beacon Press, but then got into a row with her
boss, and left for Houghton Mifflin, where she was largely a copy editor. She
was very happy doing that—and she was certainly happy she’d stuck to her guns
in that row—but I think she wouldn’t have minded being an editor. She was very
proud of having worked on The Pentagon
Papers, and I know she worked on academic works by Jürgen Habermas. She
specialized a bit in fiction, I think, and especially fantasy and young-adult
works. She worked with Isaac Asimov—she described him as “afraid of women”,
despite his bravado—and she very much enjoyed working with Loren D. Estleman
and Gerald Morris. She enjoyed her work so much that she continued as a
free-lance copy editor into her mid-eighties—I believe, although I am not
certain, that her last MS was done about 2005.
Lois went back to visit California
as often as possible—to see her parents, until they died in the 1980s, and to
see her family and friends. They also went very often to the Randall country
house in Peacham, Vermont, and she loved that place as well. California with a
pinch of Vermont would probably be her idea of heaven.
Lois and John lived at 9 Roundwood
Lane. Lois had quite a fine garden—she gave my mom some hostas, whose
descendants are still doing well in Riverside Park. She had stone cats at the
doorway, and (for as long as possible) cats indoors as well. They had books
everywhere in the house, piled high, along with New Yorker magazines, Japanese prints on the walls, and other
accumulations of the reading life. Also diet sodas in the kitchen—Polar Beer—and
John’s model trains from his boyhood. A large number of the books were ones she
had worked on; others ones she had read, or planned to read. Upstairs (at least
in the 1990s) she had a computer in her work room; she adapted well to the
machines.
John needed knee surgery around the
year 2000, and John and Lois needed to move from their house to an
assisted-living place. Lois spent the remaining years of John’s life taking
care of him very fiercely—making him walk, to recover his walking ability, and
then staying with him in the nursing home until the end. Their love for each
other was never more apparent than during these years.
After John died in 2006, Lois was
in one or another homes—nursing homes and Alzheimer’s residences. There was
less of her each year, and it was a release when she finally died. She inspired
love from her companions to the end—from Yolene Letang, who was with John and
her from about 2000, and from Lora Green, who was with Lois from about 2006.
I knew Lois and John from a very
young age—they came to New York every Thanksgiving and Christmas when I was
very young, staying at my family’s apartment, and I have a hazy memory of
walking with them in Riverside Park during cherry blossom season. I remember
going up to their house in Boston when I was four, and sliding down their
carpeted stairs on my stomach—as did my sister Ariane. I think Lois fed us hot
cross buns one Easter. When I think of them, though, I think of all the books
they gave me—collections of Peanuts comic
strips, a collection of humorous science fiction stories called Laughing Space, historical novels about
the Roman empire by Gillian Bradshaw—or books I read at their house, such as
Bill Mauldin’s comic strips. An awful lot of who I am and what I love comes
from books they gave me to read.
I got to see Aunt Lois and Uncle
John more often from 1990, when I started making trips by myself every summer
to see family and friends in Boston. I spent a lot of time talking with them,
and especially with aunt Lois—and they took me to places they loved, like the
Bakers Best café in Newton Highlands, a Chinese restaurant they liked, the
Newton Highlands public library. Aunt Lois was very kind: not only would she
drive me to train stations, but also she once invited a friend of mine to join
us at Bakers Best. She read and copy-edited my early stories and novels, and
gave me wonderful encouragement and professional advice, which made it possible
for me to get my first novel sold. I dedicated Chandlefort to her and uncle John, with good reason.
When Lois began to get Alzheimer’s,
I began to take care of her and uncle John. I spent even more time talking with
them; I have tried to talk with her by phone at least once a week for the last
eight years.
I’ve spent an awful lot of time
with her over the years, I love her very much, and I miss her.
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