Afterword

I found this postcard advertising the 1935 novel, The Heavenly Sinner by T. Everett Harré, in my mother’s copy of Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson.

On gender and sexuality, I modeled my mother and received explicit lessons from my father. Here I am at age 10 or 11, practicing in my mother’s lingerie, heels, and junk jewelry, the bra of the nightgown stuffed with balls of toilet paper (circa 1961-62).

Louise Maude Stone (Steinberg), circa 1945

My father, who wanted so desperately to study as a young man, who fought my mother over her decision to go to university, worked hard to provide his children that opportunity. He gave me a gift upon my completion of the doctorate, the first (and only) in the family. It was a box of five hundred business cards printed on fine onion skin paper with the title “Anthropologist” under my name.

Louise Maude Waterston is buried in Section 30, single grave 054 of the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, 80 Commerce Street, Hawthorne, Westchester County, New York.