Columnist Hale’s wife: ‘He’s still here’
WINEDALE — A cardinal flashing red against springgreen foliage flits past the gate as I pull into the Hales’ front yard on a sunny morning last week. Babette Fraser Hale, wearing a cardinal-red jacket of her own, waits beneath a venerable oak tree in the front yard, while Rosie, a 6-year-old yellow lab, greets me with a friendly bark at the fence.
Only in the past couple of days has her canine companion started to seem like her old self, Babette tells me. “I couldn’t get by without her,” she says. Once Rosie satisfies her curiosity about the visitor, she ambles into the bathroom for a morning nap in the tub. Babette
and I walk through the comfortably cluttered old house, a house filled with books stacked on the floor and in ceiling-high shelves. We settle in with cups of coffee on the enclosed back porch and look out on tall trees, green grass and a vegetable garden where onion shoots from last season are thriving despite the recent ice storm. We talk about
a long marriage and writing and the man she called Hale. “He always hated ‘Leon,’ ” Babette reminds me.
You don’t need to watch Ken Burns’ new documentary about Ernest Hemingway to know that writers, usually self-absorbed, can be hard to live with (or so I’ve been told). Hale wasn’t like that, Babette assures me. He was as easy to get along with as he was to read, she says.
I asked how they met. “I was looking for a voice,” she says. She had always been aware of Leon Hale, because her dad was a faithful reader of his column in the Houston Post. She was not, although she had seen the paper on the breakfast table every morning since age 8. His column just didn’t seem like it would interest her.
The year was 1980. She was writing a novel about Houston, set in River Oaks where she had grown up, and she was trying to capture the voice of an oilman. A Texas voice. She was frustrated. She just wasn’t hearing it in her head.
“I picked up the paper one day,” she recalled, “and I read the column, and I thought, ‘Oh! That’s the voice!’ ”
She sent him a note, and they agreed to meet at a Mexican restaurant they both knew in the Kirby Westheimer area. Walking into the dimly lit space at about 4 one afternoon, they sat down at a table, ordered a couple of beers and began talking. So engaged were they in conversation, they failed to notice that the Mexican restaurant some months earlier had become a gay bar. No matter. “They were nice to us,” she recalled.
In the parking lot afterward, he suggested they might go for a walk sometime, but for weeks she never heard from him. He told her later he thought she was younger than she was — she was 37, he 60 — but when they got outside he noticed a hint of silver in her dark hair. “He got scared,” Babette said. “He realized I might be a problem.”
Scared because he had endured a troubled marriage (two, in fact), as had Babette, so neither were inclined to rush into anything. They didn’t see each other, although they wrote letters. (Real letters in the early ’80s, not emails.)
For six months their relationship was strictly epistolary, until he suggested she ride with him over to Richmond to visit an old friend. During the visit, the two of them went for a walk through the woods along the Brazos, and, in Babette’s words, “I don’t know what happened, but it was a complete mind meld.” They realized that day they would be together, even though they fought it.
“He was 60. It sounded really old then,” she said, “although the thing about Hale, he was always 10 years younger than he really was, even as recently as a few months ago.”
They were both writers, but they were two different people, to be sure. Not only was she a fiction writer and he a newspaperman, but she was Kinkaid, River Oaks and London School of Economics. He was Lubbock, Texas Tech and Bryan. “I never felt like River Oaks,” she said last week, laughing, “but he just had an idea about that, and the idea didn’t jibe with himself.”
For 40 years they made it work — two writers living and working in the same house, living for each other. At Winedale, he worked on the front porch, she in a back bedroom, although a hallway functioned as a sound chute when they had something to say to each other.
“He was my first reader,” Babette said. “I read everything to him. He wouldn’t criticize. If there was anything weak, he would ask a question. He never criticized.”
She also was the first reader for his pieces, which he continued writing, although officially retired, until last November, when the colon cancer they thought he had beaten long ago returned. “We genuinely admired and respected each other’s work,” she said. “He supported me more than 100 percent, and I supported him.”
He was easy to be with, but in Babette’s words, “he was the most disciplined writer, the most disciplined person, I’ve ever been around. You think he’s easy-going? Uh-uh.”
He was up at 6:30 every morning without fail. He would feed the dog and let her out, then sit on the porch with his coffee, listening to the birds and watching the day arrive. Coffee finished, he would feed the birds, calling to them as if they were chickens. After a big bowl of cereal for breakfast, he would read the newspaper online, talk with Babette about the day and then sit down at his desk on the front porch. He would work until about 2. Every day.
“It’s hard to separate the man from the work,” Babette said. “Hale didn’t have an agenda. He made you feel what was there, what was in the situation, without telling you what you ought to feel. He was really an extraordinary person, but he considered himself perfectly ordinary.”
And now he’s gone, two months shy of his centennial birthday. “He said he didn’t have any interest in being 100,” Babette said. “All the attention would have made him uncomfortable.”
A few weeks ago, Babette published a collection of short stories called “A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers,” and she has other writing projects she’ll get to someday soon. Maybe she’ll stay in Winedale, where she has a community of friends in the area, or maybe she’ll move back to Houston, where she knows everybody. It’s too early to say. For now, though, she and Rosie are staying in the old house in the woods, the house she shared for 35 years with the man she called Hale.
“He’s still here,” she said, “and I don’t want to lose that yet.”