Her Other Life

Teacher Melanie McCabe on how she unraveled her family secret and knitted it into a book

I will never forget the moment I was asked the question that changed everything. My students were working in groups on presentations when I received an email from a friend: “Did you know,” he asked, “that in one of Tennessee Williams’s last plays, there is actually a character named Terrence McCabe?”

I have known since I was 17 that my father knew Williams. After Dad died when I was a teenager, my mother revealed a secret he had kept from my sister and me. Dad had been married before to a woman named Hazel Kramer who had been Williams’s high-school girlfriend in St. Louis. When Williams learned Hazel had met and married my father while away at college, he was devastated. An account of his heartbreak and a subsequent meeting with Dad appears in Williams’s “Memoirs,” as well as the biography “Tom” by Lyle Leverich, and in a memoir by Williams’s brother, Dakin.

This personal connection to the playwright had been a story I shared with students every year as we began reading “A Streetcar Named Desire.” I’d tell the tale with a lot of drama, along with details of Williams’s life, to pique their interest in the play. But as far as I knew, there was no more to say. The story stopped there.  

Discovering that Williams had been affected enough by my father to name a character after him some 40 years later was shocking to me. I quickly got a copy of “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” and set off on a quest that would last years and consume all of my personal time. What I learned changed my life and my understanding of my father.

Writing this book affected not only my personal life, but also my teaching life. When I think about the years spent researching and writing, I can scarcely grasp how I fit it all into my busy career. Many nights I stayed up long past a sensible bedtime, chasing down facts about a key figure in the story. Many weekends I spent doing nothing but grading papers in a frantic effort to keep up.

No one was likely to be jealous of my answer to “So, what did you do this weekend?” Nonetheless, a Saturday spent deeply engrossed in one of the more than 40 family trees I had been researching on Ancestry.com seemed a fascinating expenditure of hours to me. Summers spent holed up in a writers’ residency program held more appeal than Cancun or Rome. In fact, my head was so full of this story that my enthusiasm often spilled over into updates I shared with my students. They knew I was working on a book and what it was about. They speculated with me about some of the mysterious people popping up in my research. They understood why I flew off to Chicago for two days to wade through court testimony that involved Hazel and my father. Their eyes grew round when I described scrolling through microfilm of old Mexican newspapers and spotting the story of Hazel’s untimely death in Mexico in 1951.

I like to think that my excitement in researching and writing my father’s story was not lost on them and that they could see how a deep dive into a subject could be energizing and absorbing. As my seniors began work on their own research projects, I urged them, “Find a topic that honestly intrigues you. Then the exploration won’t seem onerous. You’ll be eager to find out what you can.”

I also teach a creative writing elective and build into every year an assignment that depends on research to enrich it. From a brainstorm sheet, students choose one topic to learn as much about as they possibly can, and then use those details to add color and power to their fiction and poems. “Pick something you know very little about,” I say, “and see where it takes you.” I have read stories about strange cults and lost civilizations. I can recall poems about rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson, as well as the Black Dahlia and even Al Capone.  

It’s always a thrill to see these young writers eager to workshop their efforts. Sometimes I share with them brief excerpts from my own writing. They get the chance to see that I, too, am creating new material, and that these drafts are not yet polished but in very early stages.

One of the things I love most about my job is storytelling. As a teacher of literature, of course I share with my classes some of the world’s greatest works. But I have my own stories to tell. So do my students. Finding ways to get all of our stories out into the world is one of my job’s greatest joys—and a challenge I never regret setting for myself. 

—Melanie McCabe is an English teacher at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Va., and also the author of His Other Life: Searching for My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams [University of New Orleans Press].

Excerpt from His Other Life

My father and I only talked about Tennessee Williams once that I can remember. It was September 1973, a hot Virginia night where the only cool air to be found came from a box fan that whirred by the sofa where my father sat with his Manhattan and the evening paper. It was one of the last weeks that I had with him before he went into the hospital for what should have been a simple, straightforward operation, but did not turn out that way. In several months, he would be dead.

That particular evening, as always, he wanted to know what I was studying in school…I hurried through the math, Spanish, and history, and then added, “In English, we’re reading ‘The Glass Menagerie.’”

How hard must it have been for him to hear that and say nothing? To not take advantage of that moment to impress me by remarking casually, ‘Oh, yes, I knew Tom Williams.’ My father…must certainly have considered for a moment telling me at least a little of what he knew.

Instead, he said only, “That’s a good play. Do you like it?”

And so I never got to hear him tell me the story that was his to tell. That story was then locked in a steamer trunk in our basement, the contents of which not even my mother had seen. Indeed, she had vowed never to open it, a vow she would one day break.

Attendance Counts

Los Angeles program helps students stay in school

Since the days of the one-room schoolhouse, taking attendance has been a longstanding tradition. Over time, roll call has become more than just checking a student’s name on a list. Research indicates that students need to attend school daily to succeed academically. Yet, data from the U.S. Department of Education reveals that an estimated 5 to 7.5 million students are absent 18 or more days of the school year—or nearly an entire month or more in most districts.

Rafael Rubalcava, chair of the School Attendance Review Board (SARB) for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), describes these absences as chronic absenteeism. SARB is a district-level intervention coupled with community-based services that uses multiple resources to assist families with attendance, truancy, and behavior so students stay in school, attend school regularly, and graduate.

Each state measures chronic absenteeism differently. Georgia, for example, “defines truancy as five unexcused absences over the course of a school year,” says a New York Daily News report.  In California, that number holds true as well. “Plus, to promote proficiency in attendance and prevent patterns of chronic absences, LAUSD encourages students to attend school at a 96 percent or above attendance rate,” says Rubalcava, a member of the California Teachers Association, adding that chronic absenteeism can have “serious implications toward district funding.”

Methods to keep kids in school have taken, in some places, a punitive approach—with fines and even jail time for parents. In Delaware, parents can be fined between $25 and $300, imprisoned for up to 10 days, or both for first offenses. Rubalcava, wants educators, administrators, and parents to know there are other programs that are less punitive, like SARB.

“We don’t want families to think of this as court,” he says. “This is another level of intervention used to help families identify stumbling blocks.”

The School Attendance Review Board

Typically, schools work with families to help kids stay in school. When there’s no improvement, the next level of intervention for Los Angeles public schools is SARB.

“Kids referred to SARB have a long history of not attending school, and we have so little time to work with them and their parents to get them on the right track,” says Rubalcava, who works with elementary, middle, and high school students. 

SARB is a group effort among the district and other agencies, such as the department of probation, children and family services, and the city and district attorney’s office. Together, they determine the root causes of absenteeism and make recommendations: parenting classes, individual and family counseling, or volunteering at their child’s school.

The success of the program has been mixed. Some students improve without the help of parents while others—despite parental involvement—don’t. For students who improve, a SARB year-end celebration is organized. 

“The best part of my of my job is when a family and a student attend one of the SARB meetings, and at the end of it, I can see that ‘aha’ moment where they get it. It’s very brief but it’s very rewarding.”

—Brenda Álvarez