Yarns Without Threads 

Troop's mother had been my grandfather Toby Greene's first wife. She had jerked the boy out of Washington when he was eight and taken him to her family's home in North Carolina, so angry and repulsed by her husband's new pet hobby, nudism, that she denied him any contact with his son and also dropped his name. From what my family gathered, she let people assume that he had died. She was locally admired for her well-bred, stoic refusal to go into any detail, and her sadistically critical and smothering child-rearing tactics were interpreted as the hectic attentiveness of a lonely widow, trying to do the best she could to raise her boy alone.

Her tastefully concealed rage and obsession never abated. From her departure in 1875 to her death in 1911, she hounded and taunted my grandfather and his second wife, Leslie, through the mails, demanding that the two of them rot from some "fanny disease" she hoped they would catch while romping naked in the woods, demanding that they then die of the inborn selfishness that she believed had initially compelled Toby to go off on a tangent and humiliate her. But despite her morbid hopes and wishes for him and his new wife, which eventually expanded to include my mother, Martha, their only child, she let them know that she and Troop deserved and expected to be supplied with the best of everything in exchange for Toby's having flitted off and made a mockery of her honor and her marriage by joining the American Community of Nudists, among other "sinister organizations." She subscribed to the Washington morning and afternoon papers by post so that she could keep herself and her son educated about family activities, and would fire off commentary whenever anything about the Greenes appeared.

"... The woman was embarrassed by what little part of him she wasn't able to smother, and she demanded to leave. The way I see it, she was the very thing that drove him to take up with the nudists. No man in history has had such hell to pay for taking off his clothes."

... in 1913, my family sailed to England on the Lusitania to spend the summer with some of Grandmother Leslie's relatives. ... When we reached Devonshire, we found Grandmother's relatives were devout Luddites who, on a logic-defying level, invited hardships that my family would not have permitted in their lives for more than this summer. They lived without the simplest modern convenience, packed in a lean-to, cooking in a stone hearth and toting water from a creek. We settled into a nearby inn that featured narrow plank sleeping hammocks, raised off the floor on account of vermin, and a pond for washing clothes and bathing. Grandfather Toby sensed the presence of people in the area who might be friendly to the idea of nudism, and when he did find them, he would come back of an evening and swear he had been with Druids, although when he brought them to dinner once, they seemed more like aged, long-term alcoholics and dope fiends.

Later I received a letter from Mother by special post. The week before, her father had tripped over a branch in the backyard and then lain there insensible for hours, until Grandfather Leonard discovered him. Although nothing was determined broken, the fall had injured his confidence and his sense of authority. The doctor he trusted was away with the army in France, and the new man who examined him all but called him a crackpot and questioned the sanity of any method of life that would lead a man to be found naked in his yard in the middle of a weekday afternoon. The doctor had recognized him from a newspaper profile that had run a few weeks previously. Mother enclosed the clipping, in which Grandfather Toby had quite heartily admitted, "I was loathed by my first wife and my son for having mortified them with what she took to be a few tendencies toward recidivism in the area of moral turpitude, but I have always loved nature and like to be as close to it as possible. I thrive on the cool open air, blowing across all my human being."

Mother wrote, "He could've accepted being called eccentric. He's accustomed to it. But he could not bear the implication that his life was naively misspent or that he'd grown feeble-minded. ..."