Sibling Secrets

My sister, Veronica Anne McCaffrey (aka V, Ronni and in The Claire Saga, “Bonnie”) and I have always been close. Putting aside those early years when she took advantage of her primogenitor size differential and gave all of her brothers a regular thumping, we have been close confidants. She listened to me go on about my early crushes, taught me how to dance, tried to help me avec le français and showed me how to pin up my hair in high school, and she never complained when I took her car on joy rides long before I had a license.

She also supported my occultish dabblings, even during my early years. Irish mysticism ran deep in our family’s veins. We all have our secrets. That was mine.

I used to like to hang around her upper class high school friends when they came over to the McCaffrey compound. After all, they were three years ahead of me on a physical development scale. And I always appreciated the female form. One in particular, I think her name was Barbara Hoffman, a tall and well proportioned brunette, was particularly pretty, and one of my early secret crushes. I think she went on to be an attorney as well. Another Vampire.

All of my sister’s friends were smart. I also found that very attractive. It made me step up my own intellectual game, to appear clever, although that was never reflected in my formal studies.

Of course I didn’t appreciate it when those same friends did things like cut off my eyebrows under the guise of trimming my bangs (I was distracted by their cleavage), or take advantage of my color blindness by talking me into painting my nails with pink tint – as opposed to promised clear – nail lacquer, when they gave me my first (and only) manicure. The toluene, dibutyl phthalate, and formaldehyde resin in the damn polish nearly poisoned me when Lenny later apprised me of my folly and I scraped it off with my teeth.

But I would put up with pretty much any kind of abuse just to hang around them, especially when they came by for sleepovers. They let their guard down around Ronni’s seemingly innocent younger brother. Cute teddys. Fun 45 records. I am very observant. Learned a lot.

Didn’t know it at the time, and maybe Veronica didn’t either, but my sister shared my same predilections when it came to her sexuality. She too appreciated the female form.

That kind of thing was probably more prevalent in the Irish culture than we knew back then. I mean, it could explain all of those single aunts, uncles and cousins that often buried themselves in the Mother Church. Hiding in plain sight.

Anyway, Veronica dated men off and on throughout college, so it kept my elders off her scent. But once Veronica graduated, she left the family compound for good and moved to West End Avenue and 70th Street on the upper west side of Manhattan. She shared her very cool apartment – it had a back door with a servant stairway – with an artsy and creative female friend from college, who was attending a writing MFA at Columbia, while Veronica rose through the ranks of elite academia among the posh and privileged.

I first suspected something was unusual when, during my late teens, I stopped by their apartment early one morning unannounced, and while heading to use the bathroom, nosily glanced through a crack in a slightly opened door and noticed that the two single beds in their one bedroom apartment were joined together in the center of the room under one set of blankets.

By then, I too was sexually active and could read a room and a blanket.

It took me a while to fully process it, but Veronica sensed I was onto her. So, one day, during another solo visit, she sat me down and “came out” with it.

I was surprisingly unsurprised. After all, I get lesbians. We drink from the same fountain.

Maybe that is why you can’t swing a cat in The Claire Saga without hitting a very interesting and charismatic lesbian character.

I did promise to keep Veronica’s secret from the family. Although it caused a few poorly suppressed snorts at the family Sunday meals whenever my mother would wonder aloud when Veronica was going to find a man and settle down.

Veronica and I never openly spoke about it again during that decade. It remained our secret.

In 1979, I was newly married, attending Lehman College, and thinking I might want to be a writer. I was taking a creative writing advanced tutorial with the brilliant and ruthlessly clever and demanding Professor Clement Dunbar III. He wanted me to try my hand at a play. So I hand wrote what turned out to be “Revelations.”

I didn’t want it to be too obvious, but I channeled some experiential therapy through those words that allowed me to try and fully appreciate what it must have been like for my sister to live among four ardently heterosexual brothers (indeed, The Ginger put me to shame), in an Irish family that expected the same from their eldest and only daughter, the only child that they could get to give away and walk down an aisle. I took the subject matter beyond the gay reference because I didn’t want to suggest I was outing Veronica. Renée Richards had made quite a splash in the media so I figured I would venture into the relatively untraveled Transsexual territory in the play’s story line.

Now, with the aid of gallons of “White Out,” I could get away with hunting and pecking my way through a normal college paper on my portable typewriter, but this one-act baby was handwritten and over fifty pages. So I went to my sister and asked her if she could type it for me.

Veronica openly wept as her fingers danced through it one Sunday afternoon, while her literary tribade roommate read each page coming out of the humming selectric with open approval.

Veronica knew she was the backstory.

I won the Jacob Hammer Memorial Prize for that play.

This all came back to me yesterday when I was writing my blog about that play. But, what triggered today’s blog was what relatedly arrived in yesterday’s mail.

I had just returned from dropping off the two VHS tapes of the only recorded performance of Revelations at UPS so that Legacy Box will hopefully convert them into a digital form that I can watch using modern technology. If it doesn’t suck I’ll find a way to share it.

There was a large white package in our roadside mailbox addressed in my sister’s handwriting.

It had come from overseas, where Veronica (and my other adored sister through marriage, b, who is the basis for “t” in TCS) are traveling.

That’s b and V. And yes, they lived for a long time in an exclusive section of London.

Side note, I officiated their US wedding in New York. Made me an apostate and an automatic excommunicant. I have my religious barrister, Pete “Buck” Sheridan, working diligently on my ecclesiastical appeal. Worse case scenario, I’ll be barred from Catholic heaven but be having posthumous fun at 24/7 parties with the other heathens off on Cloud Nine. (Hell is a transitory, seemingly unbearable experience on this human plain, not a final physical fiery repository for errant souls like mine. Fingers crossed.)

Inside the package was a wonderful and inscribed copy of a book on a topic very close to my own heart.

Upon its cover (notice the owl) was a yellow sticker, again in Veronica’s handwriting, from b & V,

And inside the cover it was inscribed by the authors.

It seems V remembers our childhood as well.

Synchronicity at its finest.

Sibling secrets no longer.

Thanks V & B, much appreciated.

Well, thank God – (put this reference in my appeal, Pete) – It’s Friday.

You fine, five readers walk through those doors at work with as much fanfare as you can muster, deliver whatever project you have been working on to the powers that be, and then sneak out to begin your weekend at the earliest opportunity. Nothing better than a Fall weekend.

I’m heading out to cuddle some kitties and make my rounds.

Then my friend Larry

at Mainstreet Car Care & Quick Lube

will see to the servicing of my Toyota (yes, from TCS), and hopefully my work week will end with a smile not a whimper.

Hope to get to thumb through my new book while I wait for the car.

Looking forward to a Halloween film or two this evening.

But, no matter what else we get up to, let us make today a great one.