It’s All Relative
Surprises from an aunt’s house.
What do you do with a couple dozen photos of a beaming, in-his-prime Bill Clinton?
No, he’s not frolicking aboard the Lolita Express. He’s standing with my Aunt Jane at one of his nominating conventions, and her smile is even wider than his.
Jane, who died a year ago at the age of 89, was the family’s political activist. A teacher and guidance counselor, she was a heart-and-soul, down-the-line union gal, and among the leaders of the New York affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers.
Yes, I know: the AFT. But searching for that silver lining, teachers’ unions tend to be good on two important issues: anti–school consolidation and anti–longer school day. The rank and file, if not the sell-outs at the top, also look askance at shortened summer vacations. Not for them the Vivek Ramaswamy program of noses to the grindstone and to hell with sandlot baseball and sleepovers. And as awful as the current AFT president Randi Weingarten appears to be, I don’t think she’s ever made noises about invading Greenland, bombing Iran, or the virtue of hating one’s enemies.
We’re finding Clinton photos here, there, and everywhere in the house my grandfather built and that Jane lived in for many years. Lucine and I felt an obligation—a joyous obligation—to keep the house in the family, so with great sadness we bid goodbye to our 1830s Greek Revival with its sloping floors and Jacksonian-Era basement cobwebs and moved five miles south, one block from the baseball mecca of Dwyer Stadium.
Jane, who shunned the honorific “aunt” because it made her sound old, was among the family’s great characters. The first member of the clan to go to college (Buff State), she was an au courant ’60s chick who dressed to the nines, hung out with pro athletes, and bopped along to the Top 40 on WKBW. The kids in our neighborhood thought she was a movie star.
But she was not a type. She read voraciously. When going through her effects I discovered annotated Henry James novels. (I also recall finding and reading Portnoy’s Complaint in her attic when I was a kid—boy was that an eye-opener!)
When my brother and I were in elementary school, Jane had us write letters to our favorite ballplayers and teams, and in those pre-eBay, pre-autograph-selling days our mailbox was stuffed for weeks. I still have my signed photo of Minnesota Vikings kicker Fred Cox.
She introduced us to a wider world without forgetting that one’s homeplace is the securest and most meaningful anchorage. She was full of life, up for anything, and sure that all would end well. When my first book, the novel Every Man a King, came out in 1989, she urged the family to take “coping lessons” to deal with my impending fame. Thank God we avoided that! She took her great niece clothes shopping at every opportunity, so I deserve zero credit for our daughter’s selection as “Best Dressed” in her senior class yearbook.
We all kidded Jane about her politics. She never could understand why any person of goodwill would dissent from the AFT party line, and I’m sure she cheered lustily as a Clinton delegate to the 1992 and 1996 Democratic conventions. From her travels she’d bring back snapshots of her with the likes of Mario Cuomo, Richard Gephardt, my old boss Pat Moynihan, and of course Bill and Hillary.
When we moved into Jane’s house we found Clinton photos in every nook and cranny, rather as when we moved into our previous home 33 years ago we came across crystals lodged in the damnedest places by the charming New Age eccentric who had saved that house from demolition.
Jane once spent a day shepherding Hillary around Buffalo during the carpetbagger’s 2000 Senate campaign. I’ve known two other people who knew Hillary, certainly better than Jane did: Gore Vidal, with whom she stayed on a visit to Italy, and Carl Oglesby, onetime president of the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society and an early influence on young Hillary Rodham’s transmogrification from Goldwater Girl to Wellesley whatever.
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Neither Vidal nor Oglesby was a nanny-state liberal or a Bill Clinton cheerleader, but both spoke highly of Hillary, Vidal saying that contrary to appearances, she had an engaging sense of humor.
It just goes to show, I suppose, that you never can tell.
The photos of Bill and Hillary with Jane aren’t going anywhere, least of all the trashcan. It would take serious sleuthing by a visitor to find them, but they’re here. Blood is thicker than the political waters, and how Jane cast her meaningless vote matters much less than the life she lived and the love she gave.
