Patience & Sarah (Little Sister's Classics) (29 page)

Over the next year, we acquired an option on the rights to the novel. I reworked the libretto with Paula and Doug Moser [director], Paula drafted a few scenes, and we connected with American Opera Projects. Lorie Phillips, Elaine Valby, and Laure Meloy were three of the five singers in the very first reading of four scenes in November, 1994. There is no substitute for the live experience, and feedback from the participants and audiences at AOP became an invaluable part of our creative process during the next few years. Arias and duets were tested and tossed. The libretto grew to four acts one summer out of fidelity to the novel, and shrank back to three out of dramatic necessity. Isabel Miller told us in one of our first meetings that she had intended to end her book exactly where we leave our pioneering women: on the Stratford boat dock, about to set sail for their new life together.

Now
Patience & Sarah
, the opera, sets sail from the Lincoln Center Festival. We are deeply grateful to American Opera Projects for bringing us this far, and also to our friends and families, opera lovers, and the gay and lesbian community for such generous, ongoing support. The donor list in this program is a testament of faith.

“Who knows what the future holds?” sings Patience at the end of the opera. The spirits of Mary Ann Willson and Miss Brundidge are in our hearts, and we look forward to seeing where our pioneering “artist maid” and “farmer maid” will journey next.

–
Wende Persons, librettist.

An excerpt from the libretto of
Patience & Sarah: A Pioneering Love Story

Music by Paula M. Kimper
Libretto by Wende Persons
Based on the novel by Isabel Miller

ACT II, Scene III: Patience, Sarah; Parson Peel

(Patience is alone in her room. Sarah dreams of Patience.)

An unpublished obituary by the poet Edward Field
Alma Routsong, November 26, 1924 – October 4, 1996

Alma Routsong, better know as Isabel Miller, the author of the now-classic lesbian novel,
Patience & Sarah
, died October 4, 1996, in Poughkeepsie, NY, after a long struggle with cancer.

My friend Neil and I first met her in 1963 at poet May Swenson’s apartment in Greenwich Village, with her partner Betty Deran. Alma had met May Swenson at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and when she and Betty moved to New York, they had looked May up.

Both Alma and Betty were voluminous, large-bottomed ladies whom we, terminally skinny as we are, were immediately drawn to. Alma, the larger of the two, was a soft, undisciplined, seemingly helpless creature who allowed Betty to solve the practical problems of her life, for Betty, dark and snapping eyed, was solid and sensible, but at the same time loony enough to contact Maynard Keynes on the Ouija board to ask him for solutions to economics problems at the financial institute where she worked. In spite of her feminism, and the gay-liberationist disapproval of “sex roles and stereotypes,” Alma continued to believe in the categories of “butch” and “femme.” With her sexual honesty, she sensed a basic difference in natures, at least in women of her generation and background.

Neil and I soon visited them in their Bleecker Street apartment and learned their remarkable story. After military service in the navy as a WAVE during World War II, Alma, who was without a clue that she was gay, got married to another ex-GI student. The prefab student housing they were forced to live in supplied the setting for her first novel,
A Gradual Joy
, which her writing teacher sent to a New York agent. It was published in 1953 by Houghton Mifflin, and the New York Times called it “light, airy, talky and … top-grade for its kind.” Ironically, for someone who was to become a militant lesbian, this work was often cited as a manual for successful marriage, heterosexual, of course.

With royalties from the book, she and her veterinarian husband were able to buy a house of their own, and while having four daughters, she somehow found time to write a second novel,
Round Shape
(1959). But this conventional life was exploded, when in 1962 she met Betty Deran in a Unitarian Church. The woman who introduced them said, “I know you two will just love each other.” They did, and Alma soon divorced her husband and moved to Washington where Betty, an economist, found a job in a government bureau. But two women living together without boyfriends in that era of witch hunts aroused suspicion, and Betty was fired from her job as a security risk.

By 1963 the couple were living in a more tolerant Greenwich Village. In their apartment on Bleecker Street they began exploring the occult, especially astrology. Skeptical about such parlor games as I was, I couldn’t help being drawn in as the two women analyzed our charts, each adding her own insights. We also had remarkable sessions on the Ouija board, though this was more successful when it was Betty’s fingers sharing the pointer with mine. When Alma and I were on the board together, we only got cries of “Mama, mama,” from infant spirits. But with Betty, who is a true medium, we spoke with figures as diverse as Edgar Cayce, JFK (“Are you at peace?” “No, killer roams free.”), Jack London (who turned out to be my “helper,” but was irritated with me), and Katherine Mansfield (who told us, paradoxically, that gay men ought to work at developing their feminine side!).

Alma wrote late into the night in her study, and, appropriately for her mystic side, by candlelight. Harry Koutoukis, playwright and actor with The Ridiculous Theatre Company, said that when he came home from the bars he used to look up and see the candles burning in her window as he passed her building.

Alma’s ancestors had come from Baden-Baden, and when Neil and I stopped off there on a trip to Europe, I collected a stone from a stream and brought it to her, thinking it would bring her vibrations of her people. But although she and her whole family had typically large Germanic peasant bodies, Alma had no interest in her ancestry. She was devoted to all things American: hymn singing around the harmonium, painting furniture with Shaker designs, and the like. She and Betty would spend vacations driving through rural towns, photographing Fourth of July parades. She liked homespun sayings that she repeated, e.g., when she was a little girl in rural Michigan, a neighbor child said to her, soberly, “There’s a sickness in our house.” Or when she and her husband moved into a house, he said, “I can’t wait until the dirt is our dirt.” Out in the country, large ladies like Alma were, and still are, the standard.

Even before feminism told women it was all right to be junoesque, Alma enjoyed her large, soft body. She believed in a science of physical types that described her as an endomorph, in which she came off very well, for according to this theory, endomorphs were the only type made for love, capable of endless snuggling and smooching. When she was tuned into a love partner, she said, she would start vibrating merely coming into her presence, and on touching breasts both went into orgasm. And this could go on and on. It sounded to me like one of those Indian saints who sits in permanent orgasm as her disciples worship her.

Much as James Merrill used a Ouija board as a stimulus for his poetry, their own Ouija board sessions led to Alma writing her next novel. While she and Betty Deran had been on vacation, they discovered in a small museum in Greene County, New York, the primitive paintings of pioneer Mary Ann Willson. On the wall was a card that said that Willson had settled with her friend, [Miss] Brudidge, on a farm in the area in the early 19th century. A light bulb went on. Two women homesteading together in early America? Was that possible?

Alma and Betty drove out to explore the ruins of the farmhouse they had lived in, and returning to New York contacted Willson on the Ouija board. Based on the information from these “conversations” with her subject, Alma plotted
A Place for Us
, the story of two women in early America falling in love and daring to set out by themselves to upstate New York and restore a ruined house.

Even in the let-it-all-hang-out sixties, no publisher would touch the book, and in 1969, she and Betty published it themselves in a small edition under the imprint of Bleecker Street Press using the pseudonym Isabel Miller. Though the book was only reviewed in the pioneer lesbian magazine,
The Ladder
, it quickly found an enthusiastic readership, which led McGraw-Hill to publish it in 1972 under the title
Patience & Sarah
.
The New York Times
compared it to the early lesbian classic,
The Well of Loneliness
. “The hope and fulfillment of
Patience & Sarah
is a more likely message for the sisterhood today…. Patience and Sarah remain alive long after the book is closed.”