A heartfelt love story
Decades-spanning doc tells of enduring relationship
To paraphrase Tom Hanks: “There’s no crying in documentaries!” But good luck when watching this lovely tear-jerker that follows Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel, a lesbian couple in the seventh decade of their relationship.
Terry and Pat met in Moose Jaw, Sask., in the winter of 1947. Terry was spending her summers in Illinois, a catcher for the Peoria Redwings, part of the All-american Girls Professional Baseball League.
The league was founded in 1943 as a way to keep baseball popular while so many of the players were away fighting the Second World War. It’s a time that was fictionalized in the popular 1992 movie A League of Their Own, with Hanks as the gruff coach of a team that includes Geena Davis, Rosie O’donnell and Madonna.
It’s also a relatively minor part of their lives, which director Chris Bolan sketches out with great sympathy and grace. When we first meet the couple, they’ve been living in Chicago for decades. But Terry has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and her niece Diana is suggesting they move back to Canada. Pat, stronger but also more stubborn, wants to stay put.
The two women have been in the closet their whole adult lives, “roommates” who chose to live together for safety and to save money, or so they told their families. They only came out recently to Diana, even though she’s been like a daughter to Terry. But secrecy has a way of becoming second nature. While tidying their home before a possible move, Diana comes across a pile of love letters and poetry, heartfelt and beautifully written. But something’s amiss.
“How comes the bottoms are all ripped off?” she asks. Pat replies: “We didn’t want anyone to know that we’d written them.” It’s a heartbreaking moment — literally, a love that dare not speak its name — and it won’t be the last.
Bolan’s access to his subjects is predicated on his being Terry’s grandnephew, so he could afford to take time off at one point and return a year later, with Terry suddenly, visibly more frail. There’s also a scene of a discussion that turns heated and then tearful, and even given that he’s family it’s amazing that no one demanded the camera be turned off. Amazing but wonderful, for despite feeling like interlopers, audiences will learn much about the family dynamic here.
And thankfully the director doesn’t lean too heavily on Terry’s years as a ballplayer, fascinating though that chapter in her life may be. She remembers taking a bus from Saskatchewan to Chicago to try out for the team, and how she got a cut on her face from a “dirty bounce” while fielding. The organizers wanted her to get stitches. She told them: “Put a Band-aid on it. I’m going back out.”
Recalling that time today, she adds: “They wanted us to look like ladies and play like men. And that’s what we did.”