finally receptive to the affections of Mr. Joseph Tines (“I do love him but not fasinated”), whom she will marry, after some hestiation and postponement, in 1868.
Rebecca worries when she doesn’t hear from Addie, whose letters must have appealed to the softer portions of her own nature, the ones she had to keep armored against all the hostility and danger in Royal Oak. Receiving and writing letters seems generally to have relaxed Rebecca, whether she was getting them from her students (“They are very amusing & in some respects contain very sensible expressions”) or writing them to Jim, the cat she loved backhome: “I know you can not be beaten in the whole U.S. Tis too bad poor Major & Kittie Smith had no Thanksgiving, and I don’t believe you gave them a very strong invitation to partake with you.” Rebecca returned to Hartford some time after the school she founded was renamed the Primus Institute. Back in Connecticut, she married, taught Sunday school and lived to be ninety-five. We know as much as we do of her early life, and of Addie Brown’s short one—Addie died at the age of twenty-eight, less than two years after her marriage to Mr. Tines—because Rebecca Primus stood her ground against Royal Oak’s “poor old secesh Post-master.” Late in 1866, he seemed bent on interfering with her mail, and to protect it she wrote to the man’s counterpart in Easton, asking that he “take charge of all my papers & letters hereafter.” Within three months, the Royal Oak postmaster and his wife appeared to learn a lesson; they became “very particular” about this complaining customer who’d taken her business elsewhere. “I suspect they feel the slight,” Rebecca reported to her family back home. “These white people want all the respect shown them by the col’d. people. I give what I rec. & no more.”
A CENTURY LATER , the kind of frustrated attraction that Addie felt toward Rebecca may have been what made Tennessee Williams find even his close male friendships “less deeply satisfying than those I have had with a few women.” Chief among these female friends was Maria Britneva St. Just, a Russian actress expatriated to England as a baby. Williams met her in 1948, in London, at a party hosted by John Gielgud. “He told me that Chekhov was his favorite playwright,” St. Just later recalled. “He’d never met a live Russian before.” For the next few decades, she and Williams developed the sort of friendship he preferred to call an
amitié
, a relationship “probably all the deeper because it exists outside and beyond the physical kind of devotion.”
St. Just once played Blanche DuBois in a New York revival of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and in a letter from 1954 about
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, one hears Williams telling her: “I think a lot of you has gone into the writing of it.” In times to come, St. Just would downplaythe comparison of herself and Maggie, but only after drawing attention to it. Over the years, Williams tried to find her work in the theatre; urged her away from self-pity; and reminded her that she at least had two lovely daughters to ease the pain of having been, like him, “so unlucky in love.” In advising her on the “condition” of her depressed, titled husband, Williams let out a typical cackle concerning his own state: “[Peter] is simply the victim of an overpowering mother who wants to make him a helpless dependent. Don’t believe that stuff about hereditary influences affecting the child. Insanity on all 4 sides of my family, and look at me! A model of mental stability if ever there was one.”
What St. Just does for Williams is listen to his troubles; these include the moods and, eventually, cancer of his lover Frank Merlo (“Must seal this letter at once as Frank is returning from the barber’s”), as well as Williams’s difficulties managing his own terrible glooms. “Of course I have been through periods somewhat like this before, when the sky
Rebecca worries when she doesn’t hear from Addie, whose letters must have appealed to the softer portions of her own nature, the ones she had to keep armored against all the hostility and danger in Royal Oak. Receiving and writing letters seems generally to have relaxed Rebecca, whether she was getting them from her students (“They are very amusing & in some respects contain very sensible expressions”) or writing them to Jim, the cat she loved backhome: “I know you can not be beaten in the whole U.S. Tis too bad poor Major & Kittie Smith had no Thanksgiving, and I don’t believe you gave them a very strong invitation to partake with you.” Rebecca returned to Hartford some time after the school she founded was renamed the Primus Institute. Back in Connecticut, she married, taught Sunday school and lived to be ninety-five. We know as much as we do of her early life, and of Addie Brown’s short one—Addie died at the age of twenty-eight, less than two years after her marriage to Mr. Tines—because Rebecca Primus stood her ground against Royal Oak’s “poor old secesh Post-master.” Late in 1866, he seemed bent on interfering with her mail, and to protect it she wrote to the man’s counterpart in Easton, asking that he “take charge of all my papers & letters hereafter.” Within three months, the Royal Oak postmaster and his wife appeared to learn a lesson; they became “very particular” about this complaining customer who’d taken her business elsewhere. “I suspect they feel the slight,” Rebecca reported to her family back home. “These white people want all the respect shown them by the col’d. people. I give what I rec. & no more.”
A CENTURY LATER , the kind of frustrated attraction that Addie felt toward Rebecca may have been what made Tennessee Williams find even his close male friendships “less deeply satisfying than those I have had with a few women.” Chief among these female friends was Maria Britneva St. Just, a Russian actress expatriated to England as a baby. Williams met her in 1948, in London, at a party hosted by John Gielgud. “He told me that Chekhov was his favorite playwright,” St. Just later recalled. “He’d never met a live Russian before.” For the next few decades, she and Williams developed the sort of friendship he preferred to call an
amitié
, a relationship “probably all the deeper because it exists outside and beyond the physical kind of devotion.”
St. Just once played Blanche DuBois in a New York revival of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and in a letter from 1954 about
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, one hears Williams telling her: “I think a lot of you has gone into the writing of it.” In times to come, St. Just would downplaythe comparison of herself and Maggie, but only after drawing attention to it. Over the years, Williams tried to find her work in the theatre; urged her away from self-pity; and reminded her that she at least had two lovely daughters to ease the pain of having been, like him, “so unlucky in love.” In advising her on the “condition” of her depressed, titled husband, Williams let out a typical cackle concerning his own state: “[Peter] is simply the victim of an overpowering mother who wants to make him a helpless dependent. Don’t believe that stuff about hereditary influences affecting the child. Insanity on all 4 sides of my family, and look at me! A model of mental stability if ever there was one.”
What St. Just does for Williams is listen to his troubles; these include the moods and, eventually, cancer of his lover Frank Merlo (“Must seal this letter at once as Frank is returning from the barber’s”), as well as Williams’s difficulties managing his own terrible glooms. “Of course I have been through periods somewhat like this before, when the sky
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