Friday, November 6, 1998

Memories of a meeting with play's inspiration

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — Rose Williams gave many gifts. She was the inspiration for her younger brother Tom, who, as Tennessee Williams, called her Laura and wrote about her in The Glass Menagerie.

And she was the little lady who gave me my first makeup compact, when I visited her at her sanitarium near Tarrytown, N.Y. It may sound dramatic today but, at the time, my meeting with Rose Williams was tinged with a tedium thats still with me.

Only Rose herself made it worthwhile. I was 15, a high school student in western Massachusetts who was allowed to spend weekends in New York City but only if I stayed with my grandmothers old friend, the ferocious Jo Healy.

Still, it was New York. So I stayed with Jo in Chelsea, and I put up with her bossiness.

During one visit, she asked if Id like to go along to take Tennessees sister to dinner he sent her a check every month, and Jo kept her eye on Rose for him.

It was fine with me, although the idea of spending too much time with too many friends of Grandmother seemed tiresome.

I knew Tennessee vaguely, from the times Id seen him at boozy parties in her Manhattan apartment, before she retired and moved to the desert in California. But he never said much, just mumbled as he sat in a corner, deep in his cups, as they said.

At the appointed time, a limousine arrived at Jos. Dressed up, we sat in it stiffly, looking out the windows as the city gave way to upstate.

We arrived at Miss Williams rooms in the big, red-brick home, and I was surprised that it didnt seem like a place for a sick person.

I didnt know what was wrong with Rose I had heard whispering about something called a lobotomy, and Id looked it up. Seems she had been intractably mentally ill, and that part of her brain had been mushed up in an experimental treatment to get rid of her demons.

And it did. She was tiny, warm, fragrant with a floral scent.

Her rooms were bright and cluttered with colorful things books, lamps, chintzy chairs, a parakeet in a cage, fluttering and ringing its bell. We hugged, we giggled girls together. Whatever was wrong with Rose, I liked it because she was sweet and fun.

We bundled into the limo an amazingly swank touch, and the only one Ive ever ridden in.

We went to dinner at a fancy, dark restaurant in Tarrytown, where Rose and I ate chicken.

Then we took Rose home, and we were best friends. Jo was, as always, stern and forbidding. But Rose was fun, girlish and quick to laugh and tell stories.

To me, she looked about as old as Gram and Jo, but she radiated a coziness and intimacy that made her seem ageless we clicked.

I hated to say goodbye; she was sad, too. So she invited me back, soon, though I never saw her again.

And she gave me a gift, too, the first grownup thing I ever had. It was one of her compacts, partly empty but with some powder and fragrance still in its tray.

It had a pretty rose pattern on the outside; inside it had a flaw that made it dearer to me because I knew it had been used such a lot, and loved by her. The compact had a broken mirror.