Marie Elverine Arana

Marie Elverine Clapp Arana, a longtime resident of Washington and mother of three prominent Washingtonians, died on Tuesday, October 18, of thyroid cancer. She was 97 years old. An American violinist married to a Peruvian engineer, she left behind a musical career in wartime Boston in the 1940s to live with her husband in sugar plantations near Trujillo, Peru. With her husband, Jorge Arana Cisneros, she raised two daughters and a son who would come to settle in Washington D.C. many years later and build different lives in the capital. Her eldest daughter is Victoria Arana, distinguished professor, author, and former chairman of the English department of Howard University. Her son, George Winston Arana, is an Assistant Deputy Undersecretary in the Veterans Health Administration. Her second daughter, Marie Arana, is a novelist, journalist, former books editor of the Washington Post, and author of 2001 National Book Award finalist “American Chica,” which described the family’s bicultural life between Peru and the United States.

She was born Marie Elverine Clapp in Washington, Kansas on November 2, 1913. The daughter of a dental surgeon, James Bayard Clapp, she was the descendant of Roger Clapp, who arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1630 on the Mary and John, and wrote one of the earliest accounts of life in the British-American colonies. Her mother, Erma Lolelia Brooks-Reed, was related to Abigail Brown Brooks, who married Charles Francis Adams, the son of president John Quincy Adams.

Clapp studied political science at the University of Washington in Seattle in the mid 1930s, before transferring to the Cornish College of the Arts, where she focused on the violin. An adventurous woman in an adventurous time, she founded and owned a beauty salon in San Francisco, learned how to fly an airplane, married, and traveled to Montreal to visit the family of her husband, a Canadian army officer Frank Campbell. Widowed by the war, she moved to Boston in the early 1940s, where she continued her violin studies at the Boston Conservatory of Music. It was there, during a time when the conservatory’s students shared a dining room with MIT, that she met and married a Peruvian graduate student at MIT, Jorge Arana Cisneros.

She studied the violin under Gaston Elcus, a soloist and member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Emanuel Ondriček a student of the great European violin master, Eugène Ysaÿe. She was a violinist in a day when women were not generally allowed into the ranks of symphony orchestras. (The Boston Symphony violin section did not admit a woman until 1969, when blind auditions were finally established.) As a result, she played only in rehearsals—and only sporadically—filling in for her teacher.

During World War II, she joined in the war effort by folding parachutes for the U.S. military. When her husband earned his Master’s in Engineering from MIT in the spring of 1944, the couple moved briefly to Schenectady, N.Y., where he designed and produced U.S. Army turbines at the headquarters of General Electric.

In early 1945, before the end of the war, she sailed with her husband to his native city of Lima, Peru on board an Argentine warship. She spent the next 15 years living on sugar plantations in Cartavio and Paramonga, where her husband built and directed sugar and paper production. They had three children, all of whom she home-schooled in the firm belief that they should learn English, understand her country, and be educated in a broad curriculum unavailable in the schoolhouses of remote Peru in the 1950s.

She was deeply interested in world religions and philosophy, read voraciously, studied Russian, and was active in the American Women’s Literary Club. When the family transferred to Lima in 1957, she taught Sunday School in the Union Church. When she and her husband returned to the United States with their three young children two years later, they took up residence in Summit, New Jersey so that their children could receive American educations. Although she taught piano and violin to private students, she never resumed her violin professionally. She was an active member of the League of Women Voters and, in her later years, became a skilled painter of porcelain.

She was a beautiful, elegant, mysterious, and absolutely ageless woman, who loved to laugh and enjoyed a good, bawdy joke. Affectionate and loyal to her family, she was fierce in their protection. “My children are my jewels,” she used to say. She doted on them, devoted her life to them; she also brooked no nonsense from them. She pushed them to “do something that matters in the world.”

She was very proud of her husband’s engineering brilliance and loved to hear him talk. Even his most intricate descriptions of physics or quantum mechanics could keep her in rapt attention. Nevertheless, what she loved and understood best was music, poetry, art. She valued the rare spark that intelligence and beauty can ignite; she appreciated a well-turned phrase; she respected people with strong ambitions and the will to forge their way. She was also deeply philosophical, enormously tolerant, and had a gift for seeing life through someone else’s eyes, no matter how unfamiliar their culture. She was highly spiritual and centered—a rock of strength. You could see a big soul in those sky blue eyes. You could also see steel.

Arana’s death quickly followed that of her husband’s in February (see obit, Jorge Enrique Arana, February 22, 2011). They had been married for 66 years. Aside from her three surviving children, she leaves six grandchildren, Hilary Walsh of London, England, Brandon Robinson of Derwood, Md., Isabel DuPree of Atlanta, Ga., Adam Ward of San Jose, Ca., and Julia Arana and Ashley Arana of Charleston, S.C. Her two great grandchildren, Aidan and Ryder Walsh, reside in London.

A memorial service for Marie Elverine Arana will be held at St. John's Episcopal Chuch on Lafayette Square in Washington D.C. on Friday, November 18, at 2:30 p.m. (http://www.stjohns-dc.org/). The family asks that no flowers be sent, as they cannot be accommodated.

Arrangements under the direction of Joseph Gawler's Sons Inc., Washington, DC.