My phone rang, as I drove home through the low hills of the Hoodoo Mountain Range. Route 95 passed through the Coeur D’Alene reservation, and I had stopped in Plummer for cheap gas and a pee. I knew I was about to lose reception, but I had been waiting to hear from this man for some time, although I hadn’t been persistent in reaching out. He was a historian, a friend of my uncle’s. I had contacted him in hopes that he could answer some questions about Dot, my great-grandmother, and her hospice work in Montreal.

Dot’s work was a footnote, a wormhole I had gone down while writing this larger essay. I came across the word “incurable” in the name of the home where she worked. Click image for full screen

St Margaret’s Home Ferns I got stuck on it, this permanent diagnosis, a term that may or may not have affected her philosophy of care. But this wasn’t the primary focus of my essay. I had begun to worry that adding another voice to the cacophony of narratives I had collected would only obscure the story I was trying to tell.

As I drove through the hills, the man’s voice cut in and out over the phone. I gathered that he had met Dot, only a few times, but that he had some respect for our family. His research focused on medical facilities in Montreal’s history, and he spoke about the home that Dot had worked at for some time.

It was half an hour before he asked me what had led me to his research. I told him I was writing about my cousin Gaëtane, who had been institutionalized as a child. I told him that she was a lesbian, and that she considered that a factor in her institutionalization. I had been wondering, I told him, how this idea of “incurability,” or its echoes in the 60’s, might have shaped Dot’s thinking. How this might have affected Gaëtane, whose condition was too uncomfortable for close scrutiny.

I didn’t know this man, and I made an effort to sound measured in my speculations. While there are no medical records to be found, I trust Gaëtane’s word, and letters from the time prove, at least, that she was a source of uneasiness for her otherwise decisive family. I told him: There is no knowing the labyrinth of emotion, of rationalization, that would have influenced their choice to institutionalize her. Here was a teenage girl who fell in love with women, who shaved her head and refused to wear shoes, who set animals free from their paddocks and cages. Here was a child that they couldn’t recognize, I told him. Not within the narrow frameworks of the Drummond family name – she wasn’t a dedicated student, or a glib socialite, or a public servant. She was a problem.

The man on the phone hemmed and hawed. But this was the late sixties, he told me. Times were changing. He asked: Do you know about Guy Drummond? About James Ross? These men, both gay, were accepted by your family. The Drummonds wouldn’t do that to a child. He said: they had a moral compass; they wanted to make the world better.

I’m not building a case that they were about to burn her at the stake, I told him, I’m saying they couldn’t face her, couldn’t stop trying to fix her. But he dug his heels in. No, no, I just can’t see it, he told me.

I was relieved when the call dropped. I had been rolling my eyes, glad to be invisible over the phone. His knee-jerk defense of my family frustrated me. Because there are facts of this story that aren’t up for debate: At 17, Gaëtane was sent to a psychiatric institution. The letters from the institution to Dot speak of Gaëtane’s increasingly feminine presentation as a victory. She was told she may be kept there for ten years. She ran away. And after this: She became a doctor. She learned acupuncture. She was capable, increasingly independent, not someone who needed institutional care. She built a home with her partner, grew vegetables, took in animals. She made art, an abundance of it.

But then, I could feel self-doubt in my frustration. When Gaëtane first told me her story, it felt like an uncomplicated injustice. Later that summer, I had happened upon a box of letters from the time, mostly between her and Dot, that had shed light on these troubling family dynamics. I tracked down her ex-husband, whom she had married in order to strip our family of legal control over her. The pieces of this story seemed to be finding me out, rather than the other way around.

Article about James Ross murder

With every new voice that I heard, though, the story got messier. There was more to consider: Gaëtane’s mother resented Dot, and their relationship was strained. Gaëtane’s aunt Nell, already a mother of four, was charged with Gaëtane’s care. Gaëtane’s brother Michael struggled increasingly with his own mental health, a concern for everyone who knew him. James Ross, the historian’s proof of our family’s tolerance, was murdered – a lover’s triangle turned violent. Great effort was made by our family to cover up the details to the public, and this would have been fresh in everyone’s memory – it had happened when Gaëtane was thirteen.

These details didn’t invalidate Gaëtane’s story, but the more I speculated on the motives of each person involved, the less I could tidily explain what had happened. It wasn’t a story of simple prejudice. As far as I could tell, it was a story of avoidance, of abandoned responsibility, and of misplaced trust. Whichever way I approached it, it felt impossible to tell this story honestly.

Early in my research, I read a book called “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.” In it, Jenn Shapland writes about McCullers’ queerness, and reckons with the messy nature of research itself. A year ago, I copied this passage into my notes:

It is strange to apply the expectations of discovery and evidence to a person’s life, let alone a person’s love life. As I read and researched Carson, I learned that evidence itself is slippery, and discoveries are never final. They shift as more voices, more sources are added to the mix. They shift according to the mood of the biographer or the critic, and according to my own mood, and according to the weather on the day I’m reading. (40-41)

Click image for full screen

My great-great-great-grandfather in a tailcoat I have to remind myself to hear Gaëtane’s voice above the others - she is at the heart of this essay, no matter what else I may learn. But then, it’s also my story. As I write it, I hold my family in mind. I consider so many things, from the way my grandmother used to whistle, to a staged photo of my great-great-great-grandfather in a tailcoat, to Gaëtane’s penmanship, to the way my parents reacted when my first girlfriend spent the night at our house. They didn’t like it, they said, and in that I heard them tell me they didn’t like her, and they didn’t like that she was a woman, and in that moment it didn’t matter what was true – maybe they worried that we smoked too much weed, or maybe they didn’t want to buy extra breakfast food, or maybe they just didn’t like her as a person, because she wore ridiculous pants and wrote bad poetry – because what I felt was that my parents did not believe me when I showed them who I was.

Of course, I am trying to understand Gaëtane, and what happened, as a way to understand myself. The more I try to pin it down, the more it spirals. I have written before that I like a simple machine, a clean story. I want two characters; I want a hard ending. This story has offered me anything but that.

In an effort to understand Carson McCullers’ complex, by all accounts romantic relationship with her therapist Mary Mercer, Shapland writes about coming across an archive of letters between the two women. Reluctant to read them, she writes: “What if they somehow destroyed what I was working on? What if, in my desire to offer a version of Carson that I understood, in an effort to feel my own experience validated, I had manufactured the whole love story?” (224)

I once had a dream that my grandmother called me, and I put down the phone and forgot her, left her waiting on the call for hours, and when I returned, she was parched, exhausted, held hostage by the receiver and my own carelessness. Maybe I felt like I was letting her down somehow, or maybe I had seen a phone and an elderly woman in a TV show the day before. In life, she was never this sentimental and was far more likely to hang up on me than to wait an irrationally long time for the chance of a chat.

But this essay could become that kind of careless betrayal. I may hand Gaëtane my final product, and she may reject it. I worry that my cousin, now in her seventies, who invited me into her home and told me, in great pain, the pieces of this story that she could bear to revisit, will not recognize herself in my writing. That I will have been too hard on our family, or too easy on them, that I will have failed her in my translation of these events. Or that I will have, somewhere along the way, manufactured my own, incomprehensible version of the truth.

Shapland writes: “The stories of women are paved over by others’ narratives so often that we rarely get to hear about how things went from their perspectives, from the inside. Constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces.” (49-50). I go back through my writing. The historian denied my conclusions for lack of proof, but what if there is none?

A few weeks after I spoke to the historian, I was back on route 95, this time headed North, away from home. It was foggy, and dark out, and there was snow on the hills. I was talking to my parents on the phone – one on each receiver at their home on the coast. My mother brought up the essay, I think. There is a segment where I describe my grandmother. It was funny, she told me, but she couldn’t stop thinking about one thing. I recount a memory of her dropping an egg on the floor, then scooping it up and frying it anyway. It feels like it crosses the line into making fun of her, she tells me. I don’t like it.

I was always proud of my grandmother’s idiosyncrasies. They came as a part of my pride in the whole family – we were a bit deluded, a bit resourceful. Half-aristocrat, half-MacGyver. It was that or the time she fed us boiled shark with peanut butter, I thought. I asked my mother to read the whole essay, when it was done, and see if it felt different. I told her I would consider removing it, but I couldn’t tell, yet, if I meant it.

When I found Dot’s shoebox full of letters, most of the pages had been written by others to her. Dot’s personality, reflected in her meticulous collection of correspondence, was otherwise difficult for me to parse. One letter, however, included a draft of her response. Gaëtane, then 18, had written: “I would like to know what your expectations of me are, and what you are going to do to me if I don’t live up to them.”
Gaëtane to Gran 4

Dot replied: “You are no longer a child and must work out for yourself what you most want your future life to be. Whatever you decide will not make me love you any less.”

The exchange stands out to me. It betrays Gaëtane’s uncertainty and Dot’s affection, although I don’t know what language she ultimately chose in her response. Any number of things could be inferred from it, or maybe nothing should be. Gaëtane, married then, could have feared reaching the breaking point of Dot’s love. Just as likely, she could have wanted Dot to invite her home, to express that she was wanted after she had been sent away so many times. Dot could have drafted two letters, maybe more, for fear of saying the wrong thing, pushing Gaëtane away again.

I can’t know, but I continue to reinvent it, each time I read it. I want to wield it as proof, of both the effort and the discord, which are both worth our consideration. Maybe I include this excerpt to say to my family: our shortcomings belong in this story – and they will not make me love you any less.