Bernie Huebner
Kennebec (Maine) Journal & Morning Sentinel
03/01/2009
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In its endless quest to honor its Dirigo motto, Maine will soon have a chance to become the first state to legislate marriage equality.
And so I've been thinking lately about the gay couple I've known the best and certainly the longest. Anna died in 1983 at age 90; Ruby, 12 years younger, passed on recently just short of 100. They had been together, in that confined way society permitted, since the 1920s.
I first got to know them in the 1940s as Anna's great-nephew. She was Anna Alcott Austin, the only member of a large Main Line Philadelphia family still living in her father's Victorian mansion, where 30-some of the 44 rooms were shut off -- you'll appreciate this -- to save on heat.
We went there holidays, or to visit her aging horse, and once I lived there for a whole month while my parents were off on business. Anna was a Victorian ditz: naïve but warm, her laugh giddy, her long frilly hair both unkempt and unkeepable, her love of children spontaneous.
Then there was Ruby. Though neither had gone to college, she was otherwise Anna's cultural opposite, the daughter of a Wyoming prospector, log-cabin born up the South Fork of the Shoshone River in the mountains southwest of Cody. She was bowlegged for good reason, and could stand up to any man.
Once when some "hippies" -- as she called them -- took to growing marijuana in the overgrown woods near the mansion, rather than calling the Bryn Mawr police, she ran them off with her Winchester.
As a child, of course, it never occurred to me that Anna and Ruby were lovers. Nor did I detect the linguistic gap between my "Aunt" Anna and her undefined long-term roommate. My mind would cue me to say "Aunt" Ruby, but everyone else just said "Ruby." She wasn't kin. This was the Main Line; don't ask, let alone tell. Besides, with all those rooms shut off and the furniture draped with sheets, it was only natural their bedrooms should adjoin.
Like a gay version of "The Virginian," Anna met Ruby on a local guest ranch in the 1920s. Anna was the privileged eastern dude; Ruby the rough-and-ready wrangler, a kind of Annie Oakley without the celebrity.
A cousin of mine quotes from his diary when he visited Ruby in Cody shortly before her death: "She grew nostalgic while she recalled that they thought nothing of walking together after dark up the rather long drive and stopping for conversation when they reached the main road." If that doesn't hint at romance, "proper" is spelled with three p's.
"Anna and Ruby" -- the couple that wasn't -- spent the rest of their lives together. Half the year they lived on the South Fork, where Anna's father must have bought her a small ranch (the A-bar-AA). They worked the ranch, including cutting hay for their horses, which they rode off into the Yellowstone wilderness for weeks at a time.
When the snow came, they returned by train to the mansion, where Ruby lived uneasily, still in bluejeans, surrounded by bluebloods.
The only time they separated was when Ruby headed west earlier in the spring. As she said, "There was work to be done."
Anna died in 1983. The day after the funeral, Ruby left for Cody, never to return east. Winters she lived in a trailer in town, summers in the log cabin she and her father had built long before on an acre of the A-bar-AA.
Two years later, my parents, who had honeymooned on horseback with Anna and Ruby in the 1930s, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in the empty mansion, which was hung up in probate court waiting -- with its frescoed music conservatory and Aeolian Skinner pipe organ, its elevator and decaying ornamental ceiling plaster -- to become the centerpiece of a 400-unit retirement community.
Which anniversary, in light of the marriage equality bill, is what got me reflecting. The celebration was an awkward affair. I'd come down from Maine with my one necktie, and all the relatives smiled and congratulated Mother and Dad.
There were vases of flowers, but no toasts, for my parents' marriage was not easy to celebrate, but for its dogged endurance; alcoholism can ruin even a match made in heaven.
Yet there we were in Anna and Ruby's old haunt, dormant now, but so ripe with memories: of the flighty debutante and the hard-bitten cowgirl; of the secret lovers who never touched in public; of two people who modeled commitment and caring, and actually made sense of family to a confused child.
A married couple in all but name.
Bernie Huebner is a retired schoolteacher who, in 1971, moved from Philadelphia and Boston to Maine because Wyoming was just too far away. All in all, it was a good choice. He can be reached at bhuebner@roadrunner.com.http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/view/columns/5998701.html
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