The Constancy of the Moon

I was in the seventh grade when I fell deeply in love for the first time. Her name was Mrs. Fletcher and she was my science teacher. This was no small crush; I was really in love — losing sleep, my appetite, thinking about her all the time. She had graduated from Smith College several years before taking a teaching position at the small girls’ school in Manhattan I attended. She was newly married to her husband, Carl Fletcher, who was in his medical residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. My own mother had gone to Smith and my father was a physician; these similarities were not lost on me, even at the age of 13.

I was new to this school, and scared I would be as invisible there as I had been in my elementary school on 82nd and Madison called P.S. 6. That was where I learned the word shit as well as how question marks are inverted in Spanish. Mostly, I tried to stay away from being bullied (although in 1960, I think the word used to describe the cruel behavior of school kids was teasing), from being called on, and generally from being noticed. My parents could tell I was not getting a great academic education, so in the sixth grade, I got taken out of school many times to be tested for admission to several private schools nearby.

The afternoons touring these small, all-girls, college preparatory schools were more than intimidating. The classes were tiny; the buildings were elegant and spotless; some of them smelled of citrus or maybe it was just money. I felt the dread of disappointing my parents (who regarded private school as a measure of their success) if I were not to be accepted by any of them. The schools each administered tests for intelligence and achievement. I was a nerdy sixth-grader with the self-confidence of a lemming. The only thing I had going for me was my ability to talk to adults and my sense of humor. I was sure none of these schools would admit me based on these traits, but to my surprise, several of them did. The one my parents decided on was called The Lenox School, on 70th between Lexington and Third.

There were 20 girls in the seventh grade at Lenox. My class, the one that would graduate in 1966, the one that would splinter apart and not be invited to join the Alumnae Association for a reason too long to go into here, was made up of girls who were in previously formed cliques: the smart group, the group who liked boys, and the nerds. I fell into a valley. I was closest to the nerds, but was liked by the smart clique. I had no interest in boys; they were barely on my radar. As the new girl in the seventh-grade class, I relied on my humor as a way to be accepted. I had nothing else to offer. I did not excel academically when I entered the school; in fact, I was behind in almost every subject. These girls were on an intense track to elite colleges. And I had come from P.S. 6, learning swear words and odd forms Spanish punctuation. So I became the class clown, of sorts.

Making people laugh is not the same thing as making friends. So while I felt liked, I did not have friends to spend time with after school. Both my parents worked long hours and I longed to have someplace to go when the school day was over that was not the empty house I inhabited with my sister, my parents and the housekeeper who lived with us. One of the subjects we took in the seventh grade was biology. The lab was on the lowest level of the lovely turn-of-the-century school building. Biology became my favorite subject, perhaps because Mrs. Fletcher was the teacher. She was funny and open, enthusiastic and genuine. She adored science. I could tell. She was not doing this for any other reason than her passion for all living organisms, for their anatomy, their chemistry, how they affected our lives. I also liked English, though the teacher was older than my grandparents. We were made to take Latin — which I actually loved. The teacher’s name was Miss Latta, believe it or not, and she dressed as though she was peeled right off a Grecian urn.

So there, in the basement of the building was the science lab and Mrs. Martha Fletcher — young, beautiful, energetic and in love with atoms and cells, mitosis and muscles, and the double helix of a DNA molecule. And even more than science, she loved her students. Was I drawn to the subject or the teacher? Or were they the same: the study of life and being nurtured by a person? Whichever it was, it propelled me to the science lab every day after school. I fell in love with her enthusiasm, the way she paid attention to me, to her shapely legs and her long-fingered hands (if the truth be known) and I helped her with whatever she needed. I cleaned the chemistry glassware or collated study sheets — all the while talking with her about everything in my young little life. She seemed to understand in an uncanny way that I was unhappy at home; she got me to talk about my emotions, my perceptions of what was going on (and not going on) in my family; she helped me to open up the region of my heart that was beginning to shut down, protected by a sentry called my sense of humor. Being a class clown was the only adaptation I could muster in the face of the fear and loneliness that accompanied me most of the time. It was my insurance policy: I would always be useful, and maybe even desirable — after all, people need to laugh.

I also really liked science. I was fascinated with explanations of how the human body functions; and I loved looking at almost anything under a microscope. Sometimes after I helped with the upkeep of the lab, Mrs. Fletcher and I would do a science-related project together. One time she brought in all the bones of a chicken that she had roasted the night before. We rinsed all of the bones and then laid them out on large drying racks. For the next week or so, we used wire and glue and put together the skeleton of the chicken. I was entranced. Our sculptural chicken was a merger of science, art and love.

Hanging on a wall of the lab was a giant poster of the Milky Way with the heading Earth’s Galactic Home. I told Mrs. Fletcher that the idea of the cosmos and the existence of stars and planets made me feel hopeful. She taught me about the relationship between moons and planets and about the life cycle of stars. I remember thinking how interesting it was that the larger and brighter the star, the shorter its life. That is when I became a stargazer.

One day, Mrs. Fletcher brought in four jars of water: one from the tap and one each from a pond, river and ocean. We made four slides, one for each type of water, and viewed them under a microscope. I saw protozoa and amoebae, miniature crustaceans and all kinds of bacteria. She exclaimed: Gail, look at all that life! Interspersed between her enthusiasm and mine, we would talk about our lives. When she was five, her father died. Her mother told her that he had gone away on a trip and that it was not known when he would return. Mrs. Fletcher’s school years were filled with anxious anticipation, always hoping her dad would enter the house at the end of each day. When she was 15, she discovered his newspaper obituary in her mother’s desk drawer. She was crushed when she learned he would never be coming home and that she had been lied to her entire life. She retreated into her studies and became enamored with science, with its dependable methods of tracking what is real and factual.

Eventually, I met her husband. This happened one afternoon when I helped her carry a huge load of teaching materials to their apartment, a few blocks from the school. Carl Fletcher was as handsome and kind as I had fantasized him to be. I wanted her to have a wonderful husband. He welcomed me into their place and said how much he had been looking forward to meeting me. I thought I was in a dream: a man and a woman who loved one another and who were interested in me. He invited me to sit with them in their small living room, offering me a Coke. The three of us sat and talked until it started to get dark. I had to get home in time for dinner. They walked me to the bus stop and as I said goodbye to them, I felt a longing so strong that it actually hurt. As the bus pulled away, I watched them walking hand in hand and wished that they were my parents.

My actual mother and father were not even home yet. My mother worked in publishing, editing manuscripts and talking to authors until 6:00 or 7:00 at night. My father was a cardiologist and made evening house calls after his rounds in the hospital. So we rarely ate together and if we did, it was not until around 8:00 p.m. We had a maid who lived with us; she made all the meals except on her day off. She did the cleaning and the laundry and was always home when my sister and I returned from school. I felt sure she heard the yelling and fighting that often happened between my father and me. She would often say: your daddy’s under a lot of stress — all those people having heart attacks. I knew this was true, but I also felt his constant disappointment with me, his desperation for me to be a different person from the one I was becoming. Fortunately, I protested.

Over the next several months, my parents realized that I had become close to my science teacher. I must have talked about her nonstop — and about her husband and all the science experiments we were doing. When summer arrived, my mother suggested inviting the Fletchers over for dinner before my sister and I left for two months of summer camp in Pennsylvania. I was over the moon with my mother’s idea and looked forward to this evening more than I looked forward to getting out of New York City and away from my family for the summer.

The night arrived in mid-June. Carl and Martha Fletcher arrived at the house, looking vibrant and beautiful. They brought my parents a bottle of wine and some flowers and we all settled into the living room before dinner. My mother and Martha had their alma mater in common: they talked about dormitories, professors and Northampton, Massachusetts. I could feel my mother liking her. How could she not? Mrs. Fletcher was the nicest person I had ever met. Her warmth and interest were contagious. My father liked her, too — evidenced by his smiling ever so slightly as he listened to her. I sat watching this scene: my parents in our living room with Mrs. Fletcher and her husband. I wanted this evening to go on forever.

At dinner, Carl and my father talked medicine while Mrs. Fletcher and my mother conversed about my mother’s authors, the books she had edited, the people she knew. Every once in a while during the evening, Mrs. Fletcher looked at me with an expression of such understanding, of such empathy that I could barely breathe. She was experiencing what I had been telling her all year. She felt their charisma, their intelligence, their upward mobility — and their preoccupation with their work to the exclusion of almost anything or anyone else. At some point in the evening, Mrs. Fletcher exclaimed that she loved my enthusiasm and curiosity at school and was so glad to have me as a student. She said that my other teachers felt the same way. My father looked pleased to hear this, but I knew that I would soon hear that I must be a different person at school than I am at home.

I tucked this evening into my young psyche and went happily off to camp for the summer. When I returned home in late August, I was excited to see Mrs. Fletcher at school. I arrived a little early on my first day of eighth grade and rushed down to the lab. There she was working at her desk. Looking up as I entered, she smiled and said: Oh, I have been so looking forward to your being back in school! She stood up, her arms outstretched and walked toward me with a welcoming hug. I was finally home.

The year went well; no longer the new girl, I fit into the school more gracefully than I had the year before. We were given lots more homework in eighth grade in preparation for high school, and often I did it quietly in Mrs. Fletcher’s lab after the school day was done. Our conversations were not just about home and family; they grew to include my worries about friends, my nonexistent social life, my insecurities in school. I talked to her about how my father wanted me to study more, to eat less, to wear dresses, to wipe all kinds of expressions off my face. She listened well and seemed to never tire of my adolescent angst.

Everything was going well until the last three weeks of school that year. On a Wednesday, I came to the lab after school, as usual. Mrs. Fletcher said she had something to tell me: Carl had received a two-year fellowship from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and they were going to be moving to Texas at the end of June. I could not breathe. I heard my heart thumping inside chest; my face felt hot. I could not believe what she was saying: she was going to leave New York, Lenox, the lab, me. This could not be happening. She must have seen my changed pallor. She came over and put her arms around me. As I dissolved into sobs, she tried to reassure me that she and I would keep in touch and that perhaps they would move back to New York at the end of his fellowship. She said things that I knew even then were untrue — like I could come visit her in Texas, that two years would go by so fast, that we would stay in touch through my high school years.

From that moment on, until I left New York for college four years later, I carried around a grief with me heavier than I could manage. One thing she told me before she left was that if I could find the moon in the sky, I would know she was thinking of me — because she was looking at the same moon from wherever she was. It became the moon late at night that held me through what would develop into an adolescent depression so big, it would land me on a psychoanalyst’s couch my last year and a half of high school.

Mrs. Fletcher and I did stay in touch, though the frequency dwindled as time went on. She sent me several poetry books after I sent her piles of poems I wrote in the ninth grade. I channeled my loneliness into writing and it became my salvation for the rest of high school and beyond. My love for Martha Fletcher got sublimated into writing and this creative outlet swept me away from the sciences. My after-school life returned to what I had been able to avoid by spending time in Mrs. Fletcher’s lab. I would walk home from school most days instead of taking the bus. It was about 15 blocks, almost a mile, and it took up a decent amount of time. I passed fruit stands and bakeries, pharmacies and meat markets, delis and D’Agostino’s (the grocery store where my mother and our housekeeper shopped). I carried a bulky green book bag filled with homework assignments, loose-leaf notebooks and a few text books. I knew that once I got home, I would sequester myself in my room until dinnertime — which could be anywhere between 6:00 and 8:00. Changing out of my uniform, I would sit on the floor cross-legged and prop my mother’s Remington typewriter on its case in front of me. And then I would write one poem after another, a tsunami of grief and darkness; all the energy that had been held in all day at school would come pouring out.

Days morphed into weeks, and summers at camp flowed into the Septembers of ensuing school years. By the time I got to the end of my senior year of high school, with a decision to go to a wonderful college in Ohio, I was hearing from Mrs. Fletcher infrequently. She and Carl had two children by then; they would go on to have one more. They ended up staying in Houston, and she took a job at a private school there for several years, first teaching science and then becoming the principal of the school. Carl worked at Baylor after his fellowship and also consulted with the CDC in Atlanta. He was on his way to becoming a prominent physician and professor of geriatrics. At some point he wrote a seminal textbook that is still revised annually and used worldwide. They went to Haiti and Africa several times on medical missions.

On the rare occasion when I received a letter from her, I would hold it to my chest, keep it in a special box and reread it dozens of times. While I was in college, my mother read in the Smith Alumnae magazine, that Mrs. Fletcher had taken a job as the head of the Houston Zoo. I wrote to her offering her congratulations, and she answered that her new endeavors were an exciting chapter in her life. She did not mention her children or how she felt about leaving teaching. She wrote with warmth and enthusiasm, but she was busy. And the truth was, I was busy, too. Finally away from my family and New York City, I was growing up, learning about dating and art history, protesting the Vietnam War, discovering the person I was becoming. At night, even in the midst of all the activity of college life, I would look for the moon in the sky; sometimes I would leave my dorm room to go outside to find it. It became a talisman of sorts, a stand-in for safety, home and love. A true transitional object.

Years passed. I got married and then three years later, divorced by the age of 25. I lived in Washington, D.C., for a year and then Grand Forks, North Dakota, for five. I took a variety of jobs, went to graduate school in psychology, and in 1975, I met the man I was to marry and spend the next 35 years with. All this time, I lost contact with Mrs. Fletcher, but her meaning to me was as preserved in my heart and memory as a bone is in a fossil. Every person I ever dated knew about her. I told all the close friends I made throughout my adult life about my relationship with Mrs. Fletcher. She was as essential to my life story as my blood relatives were.

In 1977, my husband and I moved to Minneapolis, leaving North Dakota for good. My parents could finally exhale: my living in Grand Forks for five years was as disturbing to them as it would have been had I disappeared into the West Siberian Plain of Russia. While it was not where they would have liked me to have settled, Minnesota became my real home; it is where I live to this day. We had two children during the time we lived in a sweet bungalow on the east side of Lake Harriet. I sent Mrs. Fletcher birth announcements and she mailed each child a copy of Goodnight Moon. This was, in my mind, the perfect gift: she had given me the actual moon as a locus of security after she left New York. Each time I read Goodnight Moon to my children, I thought of Mrs. Fletcher, of the safety she provided me during the tumultuous years of my adolescence.

I stayed busy and engaged parenting my children, working at various jobs, and focusing on the future. I spent little time thinking about my past other than when I was in my own therapy. When my parents forced me to go to a psychoanalyst when I was in high school, they thought of it as an exasperated kind of punishment, a last-ditch effort to pull me out of a morass of emotional misery. I was just too much for them to handle. Surprisingly, therapy was such a fascinating and helpful process that throughout my life I have allowed myself to tread into those murky waters of the unconscious to find clarity, understanding and solace. During my 30s and early 40s, Mrs. Fletcher was, for the most part, kept on a high shelf in my psyche’s library, rarely referenced, but always valued. I spoke to my husband about her now and then, but mostly my energy and time were spent on my kids, my husband, my job and my friends.

Yet there was never a time, not once in my life, that I was unaware of the moon. 

A few days before my 45th birthday, I decided that I would try to find out where Mrs. Fletcher was living and what her telephone number was. Connecting with her would be my birthday gift to myself. I was able to find her phone number and on the actual morning of my birthday, I dialed it and unbelievably, she answered. I was not even sure she would remember me. After all, she was also raising children, sending them to college, running a school, being the executive director of a zoo and several civic organizations. She was 57 and had been living, what I would learn while talking with her, a busy and involved life. When I met her at Lenox, she was 25. She was more than twice that now. On the morning I heard her voice on the other end of the phone, I began my 46th year.

Her voice was just as alive and warm as I remembered it to be, with more of a Southern lilt perhaps. The sound of her laugh alone took me back in time. I could have been a young teenager again, rather than the middle-aged adult that I was, How could this be? I was staring out my window in Minneapolis talking to the person I was in love with when I was 13. We talked for well over two hours. She was as familiar to me as my own hands and feet. We spoke of the time at Lenox, all the hours in that lab in the basement of the school. She told me about each of her children, now in college or graduate school. And she told me about Carl’s career as well as her own, about their time in Haiti and Africa. The conversation was the greatest gift I could have received for this or any other birthday. When I got off the phone, I could not believe that I had been talking to Mrs. Fletcher, whom I would, from then on, call Martha.

We spoke again the following month. She mentioned her plan to attend a workshop in South Dakota during the summer and to my great delight and surprise, she would have a layover in Minneapolis. Perhaps I could extend the layover and we could have a visit. I would love that. What do you think? My heart might have stopped. I got off the phone and ran down the stairs two or three at a time. I raced to where my husband was, eyes popping out of their sockets: Mrs. Fletcher is coming here! Can you believe it? She’ll visit us. You’ll get to meet her. He held me, knowing this was as significant as any news I had brought to him, other than the two times I had told him I was pregnant.

I spent the next few weeks planning my time with Martha. She would be arriving at the airport at 9:40 a.m. and her flight to Rapid City was at 4:40 p.m. We would have about six hours together and I wanted them to be just right: she would meet my family and we would have lunch, just the two of us. I wanted to maximize the time we could talk. I wanted to give her something she could take with her, a gift, a symbol, of what she meant to me in the years when I was lost at sea, when she was my safe harbor. I found a striking silver pin that looked like an infinity symbol, but with a Japanese simplicity that was just right. I wrapped it carefully and could not wait to give it to her.

The day we spent together in Minneapolis went by at lightning speed, yet when I think back on it, I see it in slow motion:

In my back yard is Martha Fletcher, my husband and our two small children. We are raising our iced tea glasses as we talk and laugh. Martha is telling me about her daughter who is majoring in psychology. She would like me to meet her, since I have become a psychologist. She is asking my husband all about his work, his family, his life. I am wanting to know everything about how her life has unfolded. I am wanting to confess to her that she taught me what love is, but I am feeling the need to choose my words carefully. I am watching her face, still so beautiful. And when I look at her hands they are the same ones I watched adjusting the microscope in the science lab at Lenox. She is exactly the same as I remember. I can hear her say: Gail, look at all that life! Where has the time gone? I think to myself, I really did escape Manhattan. I want to tell her what she gave me when I was 13: the experience of being deeply cared for gave me the strength and ability to survive losing her at the beginning of high school. The sun is pouring onto the garden, as we walk around it. She is talking to my children who are playing in a sandbox; they ask her to join them. My husband tells her what a privilege it is to meet her. I might evaporate into the sultry summer air because the happiness I am feeling is giving me the sensation of floating. On this beautiful day I am with the people I love most in the world. Mrs. Fletcher is in my backyard in Minnesota, miles and lifetimes away from where I saw her last. 

********************* 

I did give her the pin at lunch and we did talk about how much she meant to me over the years. I reminded her about the moon and said that every time I look at it, I feel connected to something primitive and primary, safe and secure. She told me that the workshop she was attending in South Dakota was on the subject of codependency. She went on to say that her therapist suggested she go to it, since she was working through many dynamics from her childhood. I figured that the lie she was told about her father’s death and her resulting constant hope that he would return must have left lasting scars. I was glad she was getting help.

I drove her to the airport and we embraced. She said that she would call me when she got back to Houston after the workshop. She was wearing the pin on her dress over her heart and she put her hands on it as she told me what a wonderful day it had been for her. As she walked away from my car into the airport, I did not know this then, but it would be the last time I would see her.

We stayed in touch every few months or so, sometimes in writing, other times on the phone. In one letter to me, she said that she was sad to let me know that she and Carl were going to be getting a divorce. I was completely stunned. In my mind, they were frozen in time — that beautiful couple hand in hand as they walked me to the bus stop in 1962. I called her immediately. She said that they had been having difficulties for a while and that the true reason she went to the South Dakota codependency workshop had to do with her marriage, not her family of origin. She intimated that there had been years of abuse in their home and she could not take any more of it. I had a hard time computing this in my head. All my projections about Carl and their marriage shattered like glass. She sounded more relieved than heartbroken. She was freeing herself and I could hear the relief in her voice.

Almost a year later in 1993, she called to let me know she was planning to marry a man she had been dating for six months or so. He was someone she and Carl had known in their college years. She said he was a wonderful, kind person and that she was amazed to be so deeply in love. He was 57 and was hoping Martha would join him in retirement so that they could travel the world together. She was 58. She said they were hoping they would have 30 good years together. She talked about her husband-to-be with her characteristic animated enthusiasm. I sent her flowers on her wedding day and I got a call thanking me. Her voice was overflowing with happiness. She and her new husband were planning a trip to Greece for their honeymoon. She was excited to be taking three weeks off from her job as the CEO and president of the politically complicated Texas chapter of the Nature Conservancy.

I received a letter from her in the fall of 1995. She was vacationing with her husband in New Hampshire, having a lovely time away from Houston. It was of course, wonderful to see her handwriting on the envelope in my mailbox. Her letter was newsy, containing updates about her three children and about Carl, who had remarried earlier in the year. She was under heavy stress at work and dreamed of retiring, but felt committed to giving the Conservancy several more years. Between the lines, I felt a sadness, a sort of resigned sense of allegiance to her work — perhaps the same thing that kept her in her marriage to Carl for so long. I read her letter several times. She was the same Mrs. Fletcher I knew at Lenox except life seemed to be tiring her out with its curveballs and commitments. 

At that time, my husband and I were in the period of adulthood when parents (ours were on opposite coasts) are aging rapidly, teenage kids are needing parental presence and attention, and jobs are wanting more and more of everything. No matter what was happening in my life, Martha Fletcher was part of the foundation of who I had become. And every time I looked up in the sky to see the moon, I felt connected to her. I have held her in my heart and mind in two ways: there was Mrs. Fletcher, who provided an oasis in my childhood, without whom I might well have deteriorated, mired in the conflicts of my family. And then there was Martha, the woman I got to know when I was an adult. Her early life was built on a toxic secret and her adulthood was spent covering up the abusive behavior of her husband. It was Martha, approaching 60, who wanted to free herself and enjoy her older years with a kind and loving partner. Yet she was tethered by her sense of responsibility and duty.

Busy in our own lives, we lost touch again. One evening in 1999, after I had seen a beautiful crescent moon in the night sky, I decided to do a computer search to see if she had retired. As I put Houston Nature Conservancy into the Google search bar, I was hoping to see articles lauding her and celebrating her long career. In my mind I imagined calling her the following day to find out how she was liking retirement. But to my complete shock, what appeared was something so unthinkable that I actually had trouble reading it. My heart sank as I read that in 1998, on June 30 at 8:35 p.m., Martha Fletcher had taken her life by jumping off the 22nd floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Houston. I moaned No! No! as I wept, reading it over and over again. In the article, her husband claimed she had been under severe stress at work, that she was worried about an undiagnosed skin condition on her hands and legs, and that she had always been a master at masking her depression. She was only 62.

How could this be, this woman who taught me about love, this woman who looked through a microscope and exclaimed Gail, look at all that life!, this amazing human being who gave me the most permanent and lasting gift I would ever receive: the constancy of the moon — how could she have been so hopeless that she horrifically threw herself to her death? Her suffering must have been immeasurable. I felt my heart break, much the way it did when she left New York for Houston 37 years earlier. Even though we were not consistently in touch, I felt utterly alone when I knew she was dead.

For years after her death, I would go outside at night, find the moon, and then talk to her. I asked her why she ended her life. I asked her if it all stemmed from the lie she was told about her father’s death, if Carl’s abuse had worn her down. I asked if she had just used up all her matter, her energy, much the way a bright star explodes. I told her how much I loved her and how grateful I was to her for saving my life, for widening my narrow adolescent aperture, for inadvertently giving me the gift of writing. Without the bolus of grief that I felt when she moved away, I don’t know that I would have gravitated toward finding my mother’s typewriter and pouring my emotions and thoughts onto paper. As time went on, I spoke to her about my life, about my children leaving home, about my parents’ deaths, and about the prolonged illness and eventual death of my own husband. Still, to this day, when I feel unsteady, needing to be anchored, I go outside and look for the moon. I don’t need to talk out loud to her anymore. I just allow her to reconnect me to myself and to remind me that life is both amazing and treacherous, understandable and unknowable, magnificent and heartbreaking. I wish she could have found a safe refuge when she most needed it — the kind she had provided me. When the moon is full on a clear night, I look straight at it, as though it is her, and I am filled with reverence. Perhaps this is what prayer is: the sending of love into the Milky Way, to the souls who have both left us and who live inside us forever.