When the Ghost Came to Sacramento Street

A REFLECTION ON BEING A WIDOW . . . WHO ONCE MARRIED A WIDOWER . . .

Google photo from several realtor sites

I had a tenuous relationship at best with the woman whose widower I happily married.

Judith Clancy was a hard act to follow. Before she died, of pancreatic cancer at just 56, she had been an artist’s model for Moses Soyer and other noted New York painters, briefly a ballet dancer, an illustrator for The New Yorker and for Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence. A celebrated artist in her own right, with exhibitions in San Francisco and Paris. 

She was tall and glamorous, a gourmet cook, widely admired teacher and raconteur. Fluent in several languages. Mensa, forheavenssakes. What can I say?

My beloved Bud had been her beloved for nearly two decades and her caregiver throughout an agonizing two years of relentless cancer. He was also her sole survivor and artistic executor, and the man redefined loyalty. Judith (whom I never met in real life) and I were born the same year. Had she not died young, I would never have reconnected with my long-ago romance and enjoyed an extraordinary, life-changing 26-year marriage. You’d think I could have been gracious about it all.

I was not. Moving to San Francisco where I knew exactly one person and he was in-house, I resisted, with a tight smile, the urge to punch out the lovely new friends who barely (though warmly!) greeted me before launching into a story about “our dear Judith.” 

Despite the fact that I got exactly the same amount of loyalty Bud steadfastly gave her — plus daily assurances that I was the most wonderful gorgeous extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him — I gritted my teeth at every “Judith-and-I” that slipped into conversations with dinner guests and random daily discourse. In short, I did not love my predecessor. But we managed to cohabit: Bud & I & the ghost of Judith Clancy.

In my defense, I eventually grew supportive to some teeny tiny degree. I threw parties for posthumous exhibitions of her work at galleries and museums. I pitched in with the monumental task of cataloguing her work. I sought out (and came to love) the two nieces who had been her only, and distant kin. At one point I read through stacks of her sketchbook/diaries before they were exhibited at the Fine Arts Museums of SF and became part of their archives. It was both enlightening and therapeutic; I learned she had been human after all. 

After more than a decade of tumultuous coexistence Judith and I reached a sort of peace. It followed several intense conversations at the oak-shaded gravesite where I would later spread half of our husband’s ashes. The book I wrote about it all remains unpublished, though I did have a story or two about the marrying-a-widower thing in national magazines. 

The time arrived, some years ago, that we needed to sell the lovely old Victorian that Bud had bought before their marriage, and resettle in a senior-living condo. Whether all three of us would make the move was an open question.

Downszing was not easy: four floors of wall-to-wall art and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves had to be condensed into 1600 square feet. You’ve heard those horror stories? They are true. I wound up with shingles. 

But our new apartment, filled with the familiar art and books and Stuff, quickly felt like home. Interestingly, though a few of her drawings are on the new walls and copies of her books made the move, I didn’t feel Judith had followed me into this new home.

Then — a week or so after Bud and I had resettled — more or less — into the new place I had an early morning phone call from my former across-the-street neighbor.

“You need to call your realtor,” she said. “Last night we noticed that all the lights in the house were on. It looks like they still are.”

I called my realtor. She had not yet put a lockbox on the door. She hadn’t been to the house in over a week. The last of the ‘staging’ contractors had long since finished up and moved on. I drove back to the house.

Every light was blazing. Those early-20th-century homes featured single bulbs in closets, and a few stray lights in weird spots like basement corners. They were all on. Two ceiling fixtures I would’ve sworn had long since burned out were proudly aglow.

I made my way carefully from the basement to the top floor and back down the stairs, my fingers tracing the carved wooden banister railings one last time. Sunlight now was streaming through the stained-glass panels that framed the sturdy front door, lending a warm familiarity to the transitioning interior.

Slowly I flipped the last switch, and closed the door of the stately old Victorian. Behind me I thought I heard a whispered goodbye.

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Thanks to Medium writer Double Rainbow for the inspiration for this remembrance