A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [64]
“This highly distinctive voice yelled back, ‘Put the kettle on and make tea.’” Kennedy told me. “There was a profusion of tea, I made the right one, I think it was lapsang souchong. That day, Alice said, ‘Why don’t you move in?’ The basis for her household was very clear: She liked to live with people, she didn’t want to be a landlady, she didn’t charge us rent. She liked to be fed, she liked to have company, she liked to have a household that ticked over. There was always going to be someone who was there, so she could have dogs and not be worrying about traveling. It seemed to me on the one hand quite eccentric and on the other hand utterly sensible.”
Ann became a regular visitor and occasional short-term denizen of Dewey’s house in Mānoa. At any time, there were five or six people in residence and others dropping by to talk to Dewey or stay for dinner. An anthropologist in transit might be camped on a mattress on the floor. In several periods during the 1970s, Ann and Maya—and even, on one occasion, Lolo—occupied a second-floor bedroom overlooking a breadfruit tree at the northwest corner of the house. Kadi Warner recalled long discussions between Dewey and Ann on, say, the impact on Java of the introduction of Bahasa Indonesia, the national language, gradually supplanting the more status-attuned language, Javanese. For a book of anecdotes put together on the occasion of Dewey’s retirement in October 2007, Maya reminisced in writing about “the wonderful labyrinth” of the house, with the secret staircases and “oversized flora” she knew as a child. She remembered being awakened by the cat, Kretek (the Indonesian word for clove cigarettes), sitting on her chest. Dewey introduced her, Maya wrote, to Alfred Hitchcock and good British mysteries. There were long meals followed by Javanese coffee, clove cigarettes, and fine storytelling.
“I remember feeling quite proud when one day Alice said that I was the most tolerable child she knew,” Maya wrote.
Ann loved to talk. If she got interested in a topic, she seemed able to remember everything she had ever heard about it. “She could remember conversations almost verbatim,” said Benji Bennington, who shared Ann’s interest in Indonesia and the arts. “If you were reading, say, about a particular textile technique and talking to Ann, she seemed almost to be playing back a mental tape recording of some conversation she’d had with the source of the information.” Garrett Solyom, who met her when they were graduate students, found that once he started talking with Ann, everything else seemed to disappear. “There was a certain amount of fencing,” he said. “She was smart. We have all these stupid words in English that don’t say anything. Well, she would stick you. She would say, ‘I wouldn’t put it that way.’ Or, ‘No, I don’t think so. Wouldn’t it be this?’ There would be a flash of the eye; and then you realized it was a flash of the brain.” In a box of Ann’s papers, I happened on a comment in her handwriting