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Michael Dorris 481 Michael Dorris “The New York Hat” In 1997 Michael Dorris ended his too-short life alone in a motel room in New Hampshire, estranged from his wife and accused of indiscretions with his children. It was a sad conclusion for the talented writer, born in Louisville in 1945 and reared by his devoted mother and aunt. He graduated from St. Xavier High School in 1963, earned a degree in classical languages from Georgetown University in Washington , D.C., and studied anthropology at Yale in order to research his American Indian ancestors on his father’s side. While in Alaska in 1971, he was able to adopt an Indian boy—one of the first adoptions by a single male on record. Because of his mother’s prenatal consumption of alcohol, the boy suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome . In 1989 Dorris wrote The Broken Cord, a prizewinning account of his son’s problems with the disease. He married the author Louise Erdrich in 1981, and the couple coauthored several books. His works include a collection of short stories, Working Men (1993), and Paper Trail (1994), a collection of essays that includes “The New York Hat,” about a happier time in his life. h My maternal grandmother was a small, heavy woman, born in Henderson, Kentucky, who wore her gray hair coiled in a bun at the base of her neck and had fierce hazel eyes and thick black brows behind the lenses of her rimless glasses. She was queen of our house, demanding no less than total respect from the rest of the world. If any visitor was so foolish as to come to call without bringing some small token of homage for her—a cutting from a special flowering plant, a lace handkerchief, a straw fan—she refused to emerge from her bedroom. The rest of us made small talk with the offending guest, hoping that the slam of dresser drawers, the loud play of a radio, the prolonged sighs broadcast through the closed door, would go unnoticed. My grandmother had survived all but one of her eleven brothers and sisters and expected that now, in her late seventies, she was owed celebration, especially on formal occasions. Every Easter, my Aunt Marion’s friend Mrs. Shreck constructed from flour and icing a large lamb reclining in a field of spiky green meringue. With wool of shaved coconut, raisin eyes, a smiling maraschino mouth, and—the most realistic touch—a pink strawberry cake interior, the lamb was ceremoniously displayed in the center of the dining room table. 481 482 The Kentucky Anthology “It’s too pretty to cut,” my grandmother annually pronounced, and so the lamb remained, growing stale and stiff, then fragile, as we went about our lives around it. The weather warmed and the grass softened. Humidity caused the coconut to swell and drop like an aura. Finally, sometime around Decoration Day, gravity would prevail and, with an audible thud, the creature’s head would fall off. My grandmother expected and received an azalea for the 4th of July, a new dress for her birthday, lily of the valley scent in commemoration of her wedding anniversary, and cash onThanksgiving, but Christmas was the crowning feast, for on Christmas my Aunt Ginny took the train from New York and brought with her, among other things, a gift for my grandmother from Bonwit Teller. h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h I knew Aunt Ginny’s story by heart: In 1945, at the end of her third decade and shortly before I was born, my mother’s eldest sister, Virginia, took the train from Louisville to New York on a vacation with her friend, Linda Lee. They ate at automats in order to have enough money to stay at the Algonquin, locale of the round table they’d heard about on the radio. Out of curiosity they read the want ads in the Times, where Linda’s eye was caught one day by “Reputable Theatrical Firm Needs Secretaries.” Aunt Ginny had been a slave to the Louisville Little Theater for years, a star in its productions, a constant presence backstage, and so when Linda read her the ad she cried, “It’s fate!” and went to be interviewed. “I was so enthusiastic,” she always added when reporting this part of the tale. “I told them ‘I love the theater, I love it!’ Only after they’d hired me did the boss...

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