Auntie Prin & Little Prin

Aunt Prentice used to wear a bright purple scarf. She’d wrap it so tightly and so many times around her throat that she’d look like one of those tribal women that adorned their long necks in gold rings Her black pleather jacket pinched her waist together and cut off just above narrow hips. Mom always called her a stick whenever she visited. As she would unwind her scarf, I’d sit at the kitchen and hold back snickers while she mocked my mother behind her back. Just as Mom would turn around, Aunt Prin would begin nodding and promising to eat more carbs. Alone in my room, however, she’d assure me she ate more carbs than the fictitious Cthulhu and that Mom was only jealous because no one could tell. The drama!

I always loved when she stopped by. When I turned 8, her visits became much more frequent. Having moved back from New York City, there was nothing Auntie Prin could do that didn’t seem interesting. From the big bag she carried, to her wide-brimmed hat; she seemed too cool for our Dutch colonial, and anyone - even someone with kid eyes - could see it.

To be frank, Auntie Prin was different. Mom called her eccentric. Dad said she was the definition of free-spirited, and his mother - our Gram - labeled her a disappointment with wasted potential. But Auntie Prin simply described herself as a dying breed. She’d laughed one time and told me, “I’m just one of the last unicorns, kiddo.” Then she turned eerily thoughtful, adding with a tender, proud smile. “Actually…God, help you, baby. You’re probably the last.”

That was the only comment of hers that made me skeptical. For one thing, I wasn’t a mythical horse and neither was she, even if she did seem a little too magical for suburbia.

“You need to go to Europe,” she told me once, a few months after her move. Her visits to our house had evolved from yearly to weekly to biweekly dinners, much to my mother’s irritation. Aunt Prin sat our dining table, twirling her fork as she spoke. She had this way of angling her neck toward the ceiling, as if she were listening and channeling the words from some place high above our heads. “I’d accept Greece,” she went on, “but I’d also accept Egypt. Bottom line, kiddo, you gotta see more than this cul-de-sac.” After that remark, she’d swung her crossed leg onto the floor and carried her plate to the kitchen sink. I watched how she strutted in those high pleather boots - exactly how my sister would one day strut - and tried not to smile at my mother’s clear annoyance. Dad said Aunt Prin had walked like she was on a runway ever since she took her first steps, and maybe that’s why Mom couldn’t stand her. Natural grace was gifted to Aunt Prin, along with style and pizzazz, and dying breed or not - wasted potential or not - she had something invaluable to offer her brother’s kids.

After those dinners where she'd pay little attention to the children under the age of seven, Aunt Prin would watch TV or play hand games with my brother and sister. My parents would stay in the kitchen to argue about something - there was always something - Auntie had brought up at dinner that Mom interpreted as insulting or offensive. I’d listen for a few minutes at the top of the steps before taking my daily shower. After I was clean and in my green pajamas, I’d fly down the stairs and into the TV room where Auntie would either be throwing pillows at my siblings or trapping them in blankets so she could watch the news in peace.

“I’m ready!” I’d shout, and she would immediately abandon them, compounding the notion that I was the favorite. I’d run to kiss my parents goodnight then meet Auntie Prin in my room. She’d plop down on my bed with her bag made from recycled clothes while I’d plug in the Christmas lights Dad had helped me hang over my bed for year-round decorations. When she’d dump the bag’s contents on the floor, collections of Chekov, Kafka, Wolfe, Tolkien, Poe, Wright, Hemingway, Morrison and so on would scatter onto my fuzzy rug like dominos. She’d return Wright, Hemingway and Morrison to the bag, explaining every time until I could give the explanation myself, “When you’re 10 we’ll start Hemingway; when you’re 11 we’ll branch into Morrison; and when you’re 12 I’ll teach you how to handle Wright.” She put a few of the new books she’d brought on my already-cluttered bookshelf, making companions for Dickens, Chaucer, and Baldwin who had previously invaded my bedroom. She picked up Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and asked if I wanted to finish it or start something new.

It was a trick question. We always finished what we started before picking up something new. It was one of her unspoken rules. Another of her rules was to make oneself comfortable before settling in with a good book. I’d get into bed with my favorite yellow reading blanket, and she’d sit beside me, leaning against the headboard with one arm wrapped around me so that book’s letters were a breath from my face. Then she’d begin to whisper. Her soft voice would tickle my ear until the tickling it became a type of gentle massage, with the literary figures of classic novels kneading my brain until something would be too complicated for me to process. Whenever I got confused, Auntie would stop and speak at a normal volume to answer my questions. She’d throw in a question or two of her own, and we’d discuss whatever ideas the book was sparking in either of us for as long as they kept lighting. Bedtime stories were no brief activity for us.

“You’re only 8, babe,” she would inevitably say at one point or another, flicking to the next page. “You’re not supposed to understand everything. Hell, most kids in high school don’t understand.”

“Then why read this now?” was a question both I and my parents posed to her often. She had much more patience when answering me than she did them.

“Because you’re too smart and too special to settle for Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter,” was the usual answer. We had conquered Dr. Seuss when I was four and demolished Harry Potter in less than two weeks during a vacation to Orlando. My mom had been furious.

“I paid good money to take my kids to Disney World,” she’d said in the hotel room, “and they just want to sit inside so you can read to them!”

“Not kids,” Auntie replied calmly, holding me in her arms with Prisoner of Azkaban in my lap, “just the eldest. And we don’t have to stay inside. The pool area’s really nice.”

Naturally my dad had been no help. He just laughed at the situation until my mom, in retaliation, made him give up his golf game and take my ticket to the amusement park. He wasn’t laughing then, but he came back with a souvenir Micky Mouse hat and seemed pretty happy with how the day had gone.

My mom and aunt could argue about anything and everything. They usually did, so it was nothing to be alarmed about, until a firestorm erupted over Mom finding out Auntie Prin planned on reading me Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray. That argument had enough venom in it to take down a herd of elephants.

My mom’s statement that really got the fireball rolling: “I don’t want you reading my child that degenerate’s work!”

My aunt’s reply that didn’t help: “Who in this century even uses the word ‘degenerate’? God, are you really as ancient as you look?”

“He was gay!” my mom sputtered. Which led to words like “homophobe” and “conservative bitch,” and “baby killer” and “immoral slut” being flung through the vents of our house. Molly and I snuck down the steps to see the fight in action. Mom was fuming as she paced, and I could tell by the way her lips were puckering she wanted nothing more than to tell Auntie for the umpteenth time to move back to New York.

“Just because you have no values doesn’t mean you get to shove your bull shit at our children!” Mom hollered. Dad told her that was uncalled for, but it was Aunt Prin’s unoffended cackling, loud and reverberating and a salve against our mother’s abrasiveness, that kept us both from running into the room.

“I hate to break it to you, honey, but your fear of ‘bull shit’ doesn’t stop it from coming into your house. And your close-minded cowardice sure as hell won’t stop your children from becoming who they are.”

“Prinny,” Dad said, exasperated. “Jesus.”

“Prentice,” Mom snarled. “Do not read my child Oscar Wilde. Please.”

There was a silence for a beat, and we heard Dad let out a long, resigned sigh.

“Fine,” Auntie shrugged. “Baldwin’s better anyway. Or Wolfe.”

Dad called after her as she strutted for the front door, her heeled boots clacking. Molly and I tried to scurry out of sight back up the steps, but she saw us and we froze. She gave us the subtlest gesture to scram without slowing her pace and left our eavesdropping unknown. She slammed the front door behind her, sending a gust of chilly wind into the house to chase us up the stairs. When I made it back to my room, I hid everything by Baldwin and Wolfe under my bed, afraid my mom might take them while I slept like she’d done with my book of Whitman poems the year before.

That fight kept Auntie away for one month and my parents locked in screaming matches for two. My dad personally liked Dorian Gray and said reading it would keep me away from "self-destructive hedonism" for life, and narcissism. Mom was still against it, which made it a small obsession of mine. And, proving that I was her favorite, when Auntie Prin returned and I pressed her only slightly, she folded and read me Dorian Gray in secret. She called it an early 11th birthday present. The conversations we had as a result were a revelation, but I wouldn’t realize just how much until I got to my high school lit classes and could easily explain hedonism and nihilism and existentialism to my classmates - all concepts breached and devoured during Auntie Prin’s story times both within and beyond Oscar Wilde.

Try as I might, I was never particularly artistic. However, when Mom found a poorly drawn picture on my bedroom desk of Dorian Gray staring at his portrait, my rendering is accurate enough for her to know we’d gone against her direct orders. There was another argument, equally as bitter as the first, but my dad intervened this time with a useful suggestion. Auntie came into my room afterwards with a King James’ version of the holy bible. Having been raised in a Methodist church, I didn’t think anything of it, but when Auntie Prin smiled slyly as she closed my door, I knew this wasn’t going to be like the bible study classes Mom made us take in the summer.

“It’s been a while since I cracked this bad boy open,” she said as she sat by my side. “But I still know this book inside and out, and there’s a lot in it that’s top notch if you know how to read it.”

To this day, those bedtime bible stories taught me more about Christianity than any pastor or pious person ever has. Just to appease my mom, during every visit for two full months Aunt Prin read an Old Testament story and a New Testament story, then she would pull out a news article or ‘History of X’ book to show me how people had gotten the message wrong (or right in some cases) or botched the translation. She used the Bible as a segue to other ancient texts and we migrated to even older stories like the Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and even a version of the Enuma Elis, the latter of which tied up of our religion/myth phase in a neat little bow as we did side-by-side comparisons of the Babylonian creation myth with the first few verses of Genesis.

“It’s all poetry, kiddo,” Auntie Prin said when she was done. “Poetry matters to some people what prayer matters to others. So regardless of what you learn or what you hear, don’t turn your nose up at religion, okay? Everybody needs to believe in something.”

“Auntie?”

“Yes, babe.”

“What’s your religion?”

She flashed a soft, calculating smile then reached for her bag. “Art,” she said and took out a short-but-thick leather-bound photo album. We spent that night going through it. She had been to India, Egypt, Nigeria, Greece, France, Scotland, England, Switzerland, Italy, and on and on. There were pictures of mountains, pyramids, temples, castles, statues and the best looking pasta dishes I’d ever seen. She pulled another book from her bag, one with works by Rilke, and read a story about Michelangelo. As she read, I held the picture she’d taken of the David sculpture in Florence. Halfway through, she turned the page of the photo album so I could see the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. “Do as I say, not as I do,” she murmured. “You’re not supposed to take pics of it.”

When she was done, she drew in a heavy breath and told me, “The whole reason we read books that are ‘advanced for your age’ and have these ‘grown up’ conversations is because each one of these books has a message. And the message is important. But as time goes on, most of the messages are understood by fewer and fewer people. Do you know why that is?”

I distinctly remember shaking my head and vividly remember the brilliance of her smile as she answered.

“Because people are getting dumber, babe, and more disconnected.”

As if on cue, the air-conditioning vent in my room rattled, and my parents’ arguing voices come up through the floor. We both frowned at it, and she rubbed my arm distractedly.

“Dad says people are getting more connected because of the internet and stuff,” I told her.

“Eh,” she shrugged. She went to the vent and used her toes to toggle its handle and close it. The arguing became dimmer in sound but not temperament. “I more so mean internally disconnected, from ourselves and from others.” She returned to the bed but sat on the edge of it, putting herself between me and the vent and blocking the excess noise.

And that was the first time I realized just how often she was at the house, how much my parents had fought before she moved out of New York and how - for a time - they’d fought a smidge less right after she returned. They were back to their old level of fighting, and they couldn’t even pretend she or Gram or the mortgage or whatever other excuse was the cause anymore. There was always something to explode about.

“Hey,” she snapped her fingers at me a little, getting my attention. “Books - good books - are more than words on a page. They create this type of universe where everyone can find a piece of common ground to stand on. Everyone is one with books, if that makes sense. The author provides the same information to everybody, no discrimination. Once it’s printed, ya can’t fix it. Interpretations can vary, but the words don’t change. That’s why you want a good author,” she cupped my chin, “so you get a better message that’s clear and powerful. Even if the message is one most people don’t want to hear, they’ll hear it all the same. It meets them where they need it most, and it makes them think. Thinking prevents stupidity and usually leads to breakthroughs. So no matter what, keep reading. You’ll make more connections than you know.”

Something broke downstairs, its shattering came through the closed vent and the closed door. Auntie took my chin between her finger and thumb and put her forehead against mine.

“Do you have any idea how smart you are and will be, babe? Or how perfect you are just as you are? You’re Unicorn 2.0, kiddo.” She pecked my nose and picked another story to read.

Power is fragile, people are fragile, but ideas are strong. That’s what I gleaned from V for Vendetta at age 12 - the only picture book Auntie let me read. True, its moral is a little more complex than that, but not by much. Of all the things Aunt Prentice did for me, she made a nerd. But she knew how socially damning her advanced lessons were for kids and told me to save all literary talk for grownups - unless I wanted to talk about Harry Potter. I got by in elementary school because I was a fast runner and could beat anyone in a race. I raced a lot. I got by in middle school because my English teacher gave us monthly tests on Edgar Allen Poe, so I could answer any questions my track friends had on the subject. When we had to write a paper on Flowers for Algernon - a story Auntie read to me at age 8 - I was the go-to person for clarity. High school English was a cakewalk, and I had integrated myself so well into the student body that I won the vote for class president senior year. Molly was voted Best Dressed in her class, and Jacob got Biggest Jokester, which didn’t exactly please my parents but Auntie Prin took him to dinner for it. And all three of us received scholarships for something or other. At my college graduation, with degrees earned in both English and Philosophy, and a minor in religion, Aunt Prin gave me a copy of Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, with two tickets to Barcelona inside the cover.

“Take that friend of yours,” she winked. My parents thought the gift was too generous, but Auntie claimed it was long overdue. She wrapped her arm in mine as we walked to the car, leisurely trailing my parents and siblings with her heels clacking through the parking lot. “So go to Spain. See if they’ve finally finished the Sagrada Familia. Jump over to France, visit a few cafes, meet a few like-minded creatives - For the love of your mother, please visit Disneyland Paris! See the David while you’re there. Italy’s not too far…”

She stopped walking, gripped my shoulder to stop me, too, and pulled a copy of A Picture of Dorian Gray from her purse, beaming conspiratorially as the late spring breeze ruffled her hair and the brim of her hat. Despite the fact that I hadn’t officially come out by that point, Aunt Prin knew. My mom was still forcefully unaware of the signs and fighting my dad on them every chance she could, but he and Auntie had always known. Her rich brown eyes, nearly identical to mine, told me so. Her gesture of paying for "my friend’s” flight to Europe told me so. Hell, her effort to get LGBTQ authors onto my bookshelves had practically screamed the message.

“We live in different times now, babe,” she said. “If you’re doomed to disappoint your mother like me, at least make Wilde proud.”

“I mean, Baldwin’s better,” I said, taking the book. Her grin widened. “But yeah, I could live with making a couple of ghosts happy.”

“God, I love you.” She pulled me hugged and held me tightly. “Just because your schooling’s done doesn’t mean you can’t still learn some things, yeah? Always keep learning, baby.”

I told her she was always my favorite teacher. She told me I was her favorite out of her brother’s children but that she would deny it if I ever repeated it. It wasn’t a hard secret to keep when everything she’d ever told me somehow came to feel like a treasured little piece of gold, tucked away for decades beneath the layman’s world. Those iconic and ancient authors buried their words on bound pages, and her voice with my enthusiasm alone had acted as the shovels needed to unearth them.

By the autumn after my graduation her ovarian cancer would be back. That winter we’d take a trip to New York to visit her old stomping grounds and read Langston Hughes in Riverside Park. By the following spring I’d read her Dorian Gray in her hospital bed, whispering each line to her as she had done for me throughout my childhood, as I now do with my niece, Prinny, Jacob’s daughter.

And when Little Prin asks what Auntie Prin was like, I tell her she was different, that Gram would call her eccentric to be kind, and Pop would call her free-spirited. “But regardless of what you call her,” I tell my niece, “she was a lot like you. You’re both a rare breed.” And as I whisper Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales - one with a moral that’s relevant to an 8 year old (which does exist if you know how to find it) - I think of Europe and the all the art Auntie liked. I think of all the books we read and the conversations we had, and how it feels like I’m unearthing those little treasures again, even though Prinny’s patience is much more like Jacob’s than mine. Short.

“All of this is gonna make beautiful sense one day, kiddo,” I tell her when she asks her questions. “It’s just foggy now because you’re 8.” And when she asks why we’re not waiting until she’s older, we say the answer together because she knows it so well: “You’re too smart and too special.” Then she’ll put her fist to her forehead and stick out her pointer finger.

“Because I’m one of the last unicorns!” she laughs. Giggles. Then she leans back against me, and I continue to read.