Beloved Bother
August 07, 2025 at 03:30PM
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Hannah Engler | Longreads | August 2025 | 3,844 words (14 minutes)
Some of the clothes are still around. In the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are bright orange trousers, Technicolor ringer tees, and dress shoes stitched with rainbow flames; eBay searches yield a pink sequin dress and a Victorian-style nightgown that ties at the neck. Synthetic materials, ’70s polyester. The clothes will outlive everyone.
Then there are the drawings, the plans for things that did not or could not be made. To be a clothes designer is to have 1,000 imaginary friends. My great-uncle Ronald’s world was full of women with slicked boyish hair and ornate evening gowns; men with pompadours and cummerbunds over bare chests. In other boxes, in other rooms, the men wore no clothes at all, every ligament rendered by a steady hand in pen and ink.
When Ronald went into the hospital in the summer of 2010, he left all these designs behind in the shed he called his “studio.” Afterward, his brothers and sisters filed, shell-shocked, into the little room, trying not to disturb stacks of paper.
There had once been nine of them. Ronald was seven in birth order and only the second to die, after Two was shot in 1972. For weeks, the rest of the siblings lived among his cardboard boxes and garment bags. Five took a block-print cotton kimono that hangs in my closet now, missing its belt. Three’s son went to throw away the nudes. Six’s daughter rescued them. What the hell are you doing? It’s art!! Ronald left no children. When the San Antonio Express-News published his obituary, they made a typo: “beloved brother” became “beloved bother.” The family retrieved their copies from the ends of dusty driveways, flipped to DEATHS, and smiled.
Ronald was my mother’s uncle, a fashion designer who fled Texas for New York at 19. I met him only once. In my memory, we are sitting on the front porch, the hairs standing up on my arms as the sun wanes. His head is bent over a piece of paper, sketching my 7-year-old face. I remember squinting at the drawing through his fingers, glimpsing a girl who seemed older and prettier than me. When I brought this memory up to my mother a few months ago, she had no idea what I was talking about. We had so many people up during the summers, she said, but I believe you. Where do you think that picture is?
The strands that connected me to my great-uncle were tenuous, but I clung to them as I became an adult: art, Manhattan, and blood. The porch memory, which I knew was real, because I could still hear the drag of the pencil. I lived where he lived, and I wanted what he had. All through my 20s, every other Wednesday, my mother called to ask: Had she done something to make me hate her, that I wanted to live so far away? Every fourth Sunday my father would offer to send my résumé to a friend who ran an advertising agency, so at least I could have a job he understood.
I had pictured a glamorous life, unavailable to me elsewhere, one that could justify any cultural or geographic distance. Instead, I filed invoices in binders and unpacked boxes in the book storage room, which sometimes had a handwritten sign taped to the door that read CRYING AREA. I did cry there, and also at the Whole Foods hot bar, and among the suits of armor at the Met. I never wrote anything, and I was almost always alone.
The strands that connected me to my great-uncle were tenuous, but I clung to them as I became an adult: art, Manhattan, and blood.
I started thinking that if Uncle Ronald were still here, we could go to lunch, a place with tablecloths that I couldn’t afford on a publishing salary. Maybe he could tell me what to do, or at the very least, how to dress. I pictured him the way he was when I was 7: gray ponytail, ruddy cheeks, thick glasses to correct our genetic burden of miserable eyesight. But I could never get much further than that in my imagination. Would he offer advice, or just listen and wince? What would he order? What stories would he tell? I told my family that I wanted to write the story of his life. My real motivation was always the impossible lunch.
But people were getting old, memories were fading, boxes were rotting in storage. Corroboration was already impossible. Of the original nine siblings, only Three, Six, and Nine were still alive. If you want to talk to them, you should do it soon, just in case, said my mother, so I went.
Everyone has a signature story from childhood, something that will always be repeated no matter how much time has passed, and that is generally the best place to start. This is Ronald’s: At age 9, he attempted to achieve a plenary indulgence. A plenary indulgence is like a heavenly insurance policy: All your sins will be forgiven when you die. Ronald decided his plenary indulgence method would be Converting A Pagan. The pagan he chose was a neighborhood girl named Mary Rita, who was buxom and earthy and always wore pilling sweaters. The plan was for his little sister Eight to lure Mary Rita into the family garage, and Ronald would appear atop a pyramid made of bags of rock salt. He would be wearing robes and a veil. Eight was supposed to drop to her knees and exclaim, “The Blessed Virgin! She’s here!” And this would be the miracle.
Eight did as she was instructed. But Mary Rita was confused. “Ronald!” she said, blinking up at him. “What the hell are you doing up there?”
When Ronald would tell this story at Manhattan cocktail parties, someone would always ask why he didn’t ask Eight to play the Blessed Virgin. “That’s easy,” Ronald would say, “I was prettier.”
I asked Great-Aunt Six to start at the beginning, and she started with the conversion story. The call to adventure, she said, came from within and without. Without: As a student at Central Catholic High School, Ronald would hang out on the riverwalk and sketch costumes for the following year’s Fiesta Queen. Eventually, local brides began paying him for drawings of them in their wedding dresses. Within: He already knew enough about the kind of life he wanted to live to know that he might need a plenary indulgence. Without: Parsons accepted him and awarded him a scholarship. When Ronald went to tell his best friend Philip, Philip grinned and pulled out his own acceptance letter.
“Neither one of them had told the other they were applying,” said Great-Aunt Six. We were in her living room, sitting on one of several floral couches, underneath a framed print of Sargent’s Daughters of Edward Boit, and flanked by several life-size plaster geese. “Isn’t that wonderful? Everyone was so proud. There’s a great photo of them at the train station, they’re in suits, with their coats over their arms, so dashing. Everyone was so proud.”
But people were getting old, memories were fading, boxes were rotting in storage. Corroboration was already impossible. Of the original nine siblings, only Three, Six, and Nine were still alive.
Later, I repeated this to another relative. “Oh, sure they were,” she said, “except, do you know who actually drove them to the train station? My daddy. The brothers did not like that he was going, that he wanted to do fashion design, and they flat refused to see them off.”
But where was the photo, the suits in front of the train? No one could produce it.
I had practiced the hardball questions on my mother, whose feelings I could afford to ding. How did Grandma Five’s family feel about gay people? I asked her. “No idea, never talked about it,” said my mother. Fine, how did they feel about David Bowie? “You have to understand,” said my mother, “football weekends and school, that was my life.” David Bowie did not penetrate?
“I grew up a lot more cloistered than y’all, or stupid,” said my mother. “Everyone back then was a little more—well, the word we used to use was redneck. You know what I mean?”
When I got to Great-Aunt Six’s house, though, she had set out a spread of crackers, cream cheese, and pepper jelly, and I decided I didn’t really have it in me.
My mom and her cousin tried to help me out. Now, he went to Parsons straight from high school, right? my mother asked.“Yes, right out of high school,” said Great-Aunt Six, and then: “But he went to community college first.” He lived with Philip? “He and Philip were just good friends,” Six insisted, “They never lived together.” No, but, as roommates? “Oh,” said Six. “Maybe as roommates.” I sat there with my thumbs poised over my phone’s screen, and a blank Note open.
The road of trials began: While his wealthy classmates flew to Rio for long weekends, Ronald spent all his free time in the Parsons studios, hand-stitching linings into jackets. At some point, he bleached his dark hair Ken-doll blonde, which looked ridiculous. He was perpetually running out of money and taking out little loans from the Bank of Siblings. After graduating in 1966, he worked for the avant-garde furrier Jacques Kaplan. Kaplan was a visionary, credited with introducing fur to the counterculture, but by the time Ronald arrived, he was in existential crisis over the dwindling populations of exotic animals. In 1968, Kaplan created a public relations nightmare when he designed a jacket made of alley cats, and retired from the fur business shortly afterward.
What did Ronald think about all this? It was his very first job, and there he was, subduing jaguars and wildebeests with a needle and thread.
What else? Six had the whole CV ready: He worked for Oscar de la Renta, who called him “Ronnie.” He worked for Geoffrey Beene. He designed costumes for Twiggy, Barbra Streisand, Raquel Welch—what a bitch she was, he said.
“Did you ever go visit him?” I asked.
“No, I never did,” said Six. “I always meant to.” She smiled. “He used to send me fall leaves from Central Park in the mail.”
My mother wanted me to remember that people didn’t travel back then, not the way they do now, and long-distance phone calls cost money, and postcards were only four inches by six. “Back then, New York would have seemed very far away,” she said. Right, I thought, back then. I met Ronald’s eyes across the imaginary lunch table, but he only shrugged.
I developed an image of Ronald as he was in the prime of his career, only a little older than I am now. The image came from his appearance in a 1975 short film called Screentest. In Ronald’s scene, he faces the camera, fit, compact, and very tanned, with a neat halo of curly dark hair. Unseen people dress and re-dress him in a parade of colorful silk shirts, then add several hats, then two wigs. The scene changes, and there he is in a shiny pink jumpsuit zipped halfway up his chest and sunglasses, dancing; and then there are four Ronalds, and his jumpsuit changes color to blue and orange and green, and then he disintegrates into four swirls of colored light. “Oooh, psychedelic,” someone says in the background. “Let the ’70s come through now and again.”
Philip is also in the film; at the beginning of his section, he surfaces from a pool, wearing a blue Speedo, to appreciative murmurs from the audio track.
I paid $100 for a DVD of Screentest on eBay, and I guarded it jealously. I had the idea that I was the only one capable of appreciating it, this campy, horny little project put together by Ronald and his friends. Then I wondered if I wasn’t giving my family enough credit. Still, I mentioned the film to no one; I didn’t want to find out.
Much of Screentest appeared to have been filmed on Fire Island, where the fashion world spent summer weekends: barbecuing, cutting each other’s hair by the pool, cruising in the stretch of woods between the Pines and Cherry Grove known as the Meat Rack. At night there were parties, always themed: Pink Parties, Red Parties, Star Wars Parties.
In 2020, Women’s Wear Daily published a slideshow of photos from Fire Island’s disco-fueled heyday that included an image of Ronald from 1976, lounging against a wooden fence with the supermodel Bethann Hardison in his lap. “When I look at the photographs of the men and the boys,” said Hardison in the attached article, “it’s so interesting, how beautiful they all were, really.”
“I don’t know anything about gays or bisexuals,” Great-Aunt Six said, almost to herself, in the middle of a story about something else. I looked up from my phone, startled. “Maybe he was a bisexual.”
Behind her, my mother was rolling her eyes.
The October 1983 fashion show for Ronald’s clothing line ended with a model in an extravagantly pleated wedding dress, escorted by a navy cadet, while the stereo played the soundtrack to the 1982 movie An Officer and a Gentleman. Six still had the dress; her daughter walked down the aisle in it later that year. “The line was extremely successful,” said Six. “But his business partners scammed him. He should have made a lot more money on it.”
I recognized in Six, then, the sensitivity to persecution that often develops in elderly Southerners, a sensitivity that reflects their genetic predisposition to paranoia and magical thinking. When I came into the world, my grandma Five placed a jar of dirt from her backyard under my mother’s hospital bed so that I could be born “on Texas soil.” So, when Six talked about the ways Ronald had been fleeced out of millions, I found myself inclined to believe her.
But maybe he was just bad with money. I am bad with money; it runs on that side.
The Parsons course catalogs from 1983 onward list him as the instructor for Fashion Illustration II and Sportswear Design. He loved teaching, everybody says. He loved the students, he was inspired by them, it was his real passion. Of this last, I am dubious. It is remarkable how many young creatives discover, around 40, that teaching was their calling all along.
I offered my mother my theory: In Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the turning point comes in a Supreme Ordeal. This is the final trial, from which the hero emerges transformed, and, battered and scarred, begins the long march home. For Ronald, surely, this was the 1980s, and AIDS, an explosion in the middle of his life and work, 6,500 deaths by the end of 1986.
“I’m not sure anyone will want to talk to you about that,” my mother said.
It didn’t matter. I started seeing what he saw. Three times a week, Ronald and I rode the 1 train down from the Upper West Side and climbed out at 14th Street, him on his way to teach, me on my way to learn. We turned down the same streets. I saw dead people’s belongings out on stoops, boxes of records, Persian rugs. I saw pink ACT-UP flyers pasted to telephone poles, and 30-year-old men who looked 80. In the windows of dry cleaners, garment racks teemed with plastic-wrapped funeral black.
We walked in silence, separated by six inches of sidewalk and 40 years. I snuck glances at his profile. Sometimes it flickered into faces I knew better (my grandmother, my mother, my sister; it was the nose), but returned, each time, to one impassive and unfamiliar. “How did this feel?” I wanted to ask. But what a stupid question; what a waste of a séance.
“Did it ever cross your mind,” I said, my face hot against the phone, “and maybe you don’t remember, but when you were in your 20s, do you ever recall thinking, ‘gosh, I have a gay uncle in New York right now,’ that this was, you know, scary?” My mother was quiet for a long time. “No,” she said finally, “I don’t remember that.” Silence again, then a sigh. “I must have thought about it,” she said. “I’m not trying to play myself up here, but I tend to—I tend to care.”
She didn’t get it, I thought. I probably didn’t either; how could I? “Life was surrounded by death,” wrote the activist Sarah Schulman in her oral history of ACT UP. “There was the systematic loss of the friends who were your support network and the witnesses to your life, the deaths of whom became the end of context and memory.”
“No one understood what was happening at first, this so-called gay cancer that was tearing into the fashion industry,” recalled the fashion editor André Leon Talley in his memoir The Chiffon Trenches. “Joe McDonald, a successful male model, was one of the first to die from AIDS. Peter Lester, of Interview, died. Fabrice Simon, a wonderful Haitian designer, died. Designer Ronald Kolodzie.”
We walked in silence, separated by six inches of sidewalk and 40 years.
I remember reading those three words in bed, two apartments ago. I still worked at Random House then. If I had been in the office, I thought at the time, I could go to the editor’s desk and demand they strike this from the reprint. Talley had taken photos of Ronald on Fire Island in the ’70s; they had known each other, maybe even well. Wrong, wrong, wrong, I chided Talley in my mind. Your friend Ronald lived for another 20 years.
Theories abound in my family about what prompted Ronald, in the twilight of the 1990s, to leave his home of 40 years and return to San Antonio. My mother thinks he ran out of money: four decades of steak dinners, keeping up with friends who became famous while the bills went unpaid. Great-Aunt Six said that he knew he was sick, that the illness that would kill him was beginning to unfurl in his blood, and he could feel it. He had spent a month in Mount Sinai in 1992; Philip had called home to get permission for a spinal tap. “Tylenol poisoning,” said Six, Reye’s syndrome, very rare. A what-the-fuck medical moment, that’ll do it. But I still think everyone is underestimating the Supreme Ordeal: the walks through downtown, the loss of the witnesses.
Whatever the reason, it has always been significant to me that Ronald returned to Texas near the end. Gee: Why would André Leon Talley think that Ronald died? Because he moved back to Texas. Texas doesn’t just swallow people, it digests them; the slow sweetness of everything makes them soft and mushy.
Maybe Ronald felt differently. It was a new millennium, and he was coming home. Was it comfort to him to see gangly boys in army fatigues and women wearing hoop earrings and Spurs T-shirts? Did he forget, while he was up North, that men down here really do chew toothpicks, and rest their hands on their belt buckles, and that some of them say “darlin’” and all of them say “ma’am”? After so much time away, did the mountain cedar make him sneeze?
A list of late-in-life projects: a mural of mariachis in the main dining room of the Rio Rio Cantina, decorations for a ’60s-themed fundraiser hosted by the San Antonio AIDS Foundation, costumes for the Fiesta Queen’s coronation, and costumes for Cornyation, its drag parody version. Teaching, teaching, at St. Mary’s, the University of the Incarnate Word, the Southwest School of Art. Maybe he did love it.
“It seemed to go quick,” my mother had said of Ronald’s illness, “but for all we know, it could have been years.” I couldn’t wrap my head around that. But, as I’m often reminded, I am a child of a different time.
Six had medical power of attorney. She had asked Ronald, during those first dire days, if he wanted to live. He told her, weakly, that he did. (My favorite quote from Angels in America: “Bless me anyway. I want more life.”) The doctor pulled Six aside. If he was going to have even a whisper of a chance, they would have to break his chest cavity, pry the ribs open, and try to jumpstart the heart with their hands. It would be awful, and besides, it probably wouldn’t work. Six looked at Ronald, whose eyes were closed, and at the mauve walls of the room and the crucifix above the door. It didn’t matter what he wanted, she realized then. He wasn’t going to live.
Beloved bother. An accident, but a brilliant turn of phrase nonetheless. My mother became defensive the longer we spoke. “He was not snubbed, he was not,” she kept saying. “He was loved.” Those are not the only options, I wanted to say, but I didn’t.
I had arrived at the end and felt mostly sadness. “I think you should say something about the creative life,” my sister suggested. “What does it mean to live one, especially if there’s no big payout? There’s your tension.”
Okay, here goes: A ceramicist I know described returning to her wheel after a break. She said: “I thought to myself, oh, there you are!” That is how it feels to me, too.
“Do you know that feeling?” I would have asked Ronald across the lunch table. I do, he’d say. “How do I explain to them that it’s worth it?” I would ask. Ronald would think, fold his napkin into the shape of a swan. He swore like a sailor, my mother had said, every other word was the f-bomb. I imagine him looking at me through his big glasses, handing me the swan. “No idea,” he’d say, even in this dream, “I have no fucking clue.”
A stranger came to Ronald’s funeral. She was young, maybe 20, and very nervous; when Six spotted her hovering in the vestibule, she had balled up the program she was holding in her fist. “I’m sorry,” said the stranger, “I hope it’s okay that I’m here.” It turned out the girl was a student. She had loved Ronald, she said, he was a wonderful teacher, though, of course, she hadn’t known him very well. Was it okay to be there, even though she hadn’t known him very well?
She had access to such a tiny part of the whole. It didn’t feel like enough to claim him. When you think about it, isn’t that what mourning is—claiming, co-opting, demonstrating a connection to someone who cannot verify the strength of it? What if the version of him she had loved was mostly imagined, composed of fleeting interactions, basic information, and hope? Weren’t we, all of us, unknowable, and some more than others due to poor recordkeeping? Wasn’t it a sin, or at least bad manners, to take ghosts to lunch, to conjure versions of the dead to solve the problems of the living? Could it be that she was even, she wondered, fetishizing the lack of connection—turning an ordinary man into a mystery to be solved, a new outlet for her big artistic feelings?
Six told her not to be ridiculous, and, taking her hand, dragged the girl through the heavy wooden doors into the church.
Hannah Engler is a writer currently pursuing an M.A. in journalism at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She lives in Manhattan.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/07/1970s-fashion-designer-ronald-kolodzie/
via IFTTT
Watch