My Father Before Me (4 page)

9

How hard it is even to know what is true, let alone to speak of it. And who says you should speak of it? What good would it do?

My father did not talk with his young wife about his past, about his parents. When she asked, he went silent—or responded brusquely, with tepid, near-meaningless words. Maybe he was too profoundly sad about his early years to be able to speak of them. Maybe he couldn't admit to himself how sad he was.

The young couple must have recognized themselves in each other. Even in their first days together, they might have sensed that they shared something deep and broken, something each desired to repair. Or to forget. In some ways, they had been living the same life already. Like her husband, with generations of Irish laborers behind him, Ange came from a family steeped in the ways of hardworking immigrants—in her case, Norwegians and Swedes. They were stolid and taciturn; when compelled to speak, they were often, like Ed, self-disparagingly wry. Like Ed, Ange had been raised among people who kept to themselves, who kept their secrets. And, like him, she didn't have much of a father.

Her mother, Esther, was raised by Norwegian immigrants in the rugged wintry flatlands of northwest Minnesota, in Lake Bronson, a village of only a hundred people. A photo taken when Esther was sev
enteen shows her wearing a mop of thick black hair that threatens to cover her eyes completely. She has unsubtle features: a strong nose, big dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a large jaw with a wide mouth. She is pretty but awkward, stoop-shouldered, as if dropped onto the earth and still in a daze about it. This is the year she fell for the handsome Ed Peterson. In rural Minnesota, where there couldn't have been many possibilities for romance, Esther might very well have taken him for dashing. Ed, four years older than she, son of Swedish immigrants, had the looks of a silent-movie star: he was square-jawed, like a young Gerald Ford, with a broad, big-dimpled grin and wavy blond hair parted down the middle.

Don't marry him, Ed's older brother warned Esther. He can't be trusted. Stay away, her friends said. He's a lady-killer.

She thanked them for the advice, then married him.

We live two lives; we have two selves—at least. There is the self within us that is always mute but never deserts us: the self we think we are, the one we yearn for others to understand, the one we struggle to protect. The other is the self defined by and exhibited in the roles we take on in the world: son, daughter, parent, student, pilot, accountant, actress, wife. The two selves, happily, occasionally overlap and sustain each other. Often they do not, and that is the world's fault, a dark joke at the root of human existence about which we can do nothing. Or the fault is ours: we make a choice out of fear or unwarranted hope or blind faith in the rightness of the customs of our tribe. We turn away then from the self within, which turns away, too, cringing.

Like my own mother after she met an Ed of her own, Esther had suddenly become a housewife. Her husband got work as a customs agent. That's why my mother was born, in 1931, not far from the Canadian border, in Noonan, North Dakota, a town of about four hundred whose primary claim to fame was its aversion to color: an ordinance required that all buildings be painted white.

If life in Noonan was monotonous, at least Esther had the movies. She was nuts for Janet Gaynor. While pregnant, Esther sat enthralled in the dark, watching Gaynor play a wronged woman who descends into addiction and degradation in a Shanghai opium den. If Esther's baby turned out to be a girl, she knew what she would call her: Angie, after this dissipated junkie.

The world my mother entered would offer little in the way of comfort or merriment. The Depression was on; she would spend her first five years in a series of tiny towns with few pleasant diversions; and her mother's mood was often grim and sad. Nonetheless, she was sprinkled at the start with fairy dust: with a name, accidentally misspelled though it might have been, pilfered from the silver screen—a reminder to Esther of a world of glamour and enchantment that she might yearn for but could never enter, not least because it wasn't real.

Esther couldn't help herself: she wrote a fan letter to her favorite actress, informing her of the tribute. My mother still has the photo Gaynor mailed in return inscribed to “Baby Ange.”

Within two years, Esther gave birth to twin girls, Janet (naturally) and Janice. Eventually, the family moved back to Lake Bronson. In photos from her infancy and childhood, my mother poses alone or with others in a landscape invariably bleak and forbidding. The twins appear like cute ghosts—blond, unsmiling, in identical outfits: cotton dresses that fall to mid-thigh; overalls over striped short-sleeved shirts.

Then their father got lucky: a better customs job opened up in the port of Seattle, at the airport. If he was willing to move fifteen hundred miles west, the position was his. Esther wasn't keen on the idea. She had never traveled so far from home, and her mother was ill; she couldn't imagine packing up their three little girls and moving to a new, strange city without even a place to live. She would prefer to stay, for a time, in Lake Bronson with the girls and tend to her mother. They would join Ed in Seattle later.

After a few months, Esther and the girls boarded a train west. When they pulled in to the Seattle station, Ed was there, standing on the platform, ready to greet them as they descended from the car.

Standing a little farther off, at a discreet distance, was his new girlfriend.

Betty was only twenty, nine years younger than Ed. “I'd like you to meet my friend,” he said to his wife and daughters. The next part of the story, my mother believes, may be apocryphal, but it's part of the tale as Esther remembered it: standing at the station, only moments after greeting her, he handed her divorce papers. “How could you do this?” she demanded. “What am I going to do?”

What, indeed, could Esther do—a woman with a high school diploma but no particular marketable skills? It was 1936. Seventeen percent of Americans were out of work. Even finding a home could be difficult, since divorce was frowned upon, and some landlords weren't interested in renting to a single mother.

She and her daughters spent the rest of the decade, nearly penniless, moving from home to home, in Seattle, Lake Bronson, Minneapolis, and Chicago, usually rooming with relatives or friends. Sometimes quarters were so cramped that the whole family shared one double bed, the three girls sleeping side by side, their mother wedged in horizontally at their feet.

At least Ed was sending her fifty dollars a month. The gallant Ed. It was his money, mainly, that the family lived on. Intent on divorcing Esther, he chose the grounds of cruelty. Later, Esther told her children that the grounds were desertion: Ed had gone west without her and their daughters and, when they followed him there, turned his back on them. His grounds, her grounds, and the truth somewhere in between, or nowhere to be found.

Ed married Betty, the young woman who had accompanied him to the train station. Two years later, Esther had a mystifying surprise for
her daughters: she decided it would be best for the three of them to live for an entire school year with their father and his new wife. Ange was almost ten and her twin sisters eight when, at the end of August 1941, Esther packed a few suitcases, telling her girls that there was just no place for all four of them to live together. With war having broken out in Europe, shipyards and airplane factories in Seattle were in a frenzy of activity, and workers were streaming into the city. Every room in town, it seems—every bed—was filled. Esther would come for her girls when she found a place where they could all be together. I know, I know, she said, I'll miss you, too, horribly. But there's no choice, as you can see. No choice. Really.

10

September passed, then October, then Thanksgiving. Esther stayed away. Even on Ange's birthday, even at Christmas, she did not appear. Betty was kind to the girls, but their father was distant and dictatorial, ordering Ange to shine his shoes and roll his cigarettes.

From her weekly allowance of ten cents, Ange would use a nickel to call her mother. “Mom, why can't we see you?” she'd say. “We miss you. Let us visit.” The situation didn't make sense; they lived in the same city, after all. She understood that Esther was busy, working long hours at the dime store and spending any extra time searching for an apartment big enough for the four of them. Still, couldn't she visit with her daughters for an hour or two?

“I know, sweetheart. I miss you, too,” Esther would say. “But it's impossible—I've explained that. Keep being a good girl, now.”

Finally, a reunion was arranged for Mother's Day. The girls saw their mother for the first time in nine months at the home of Esther's brother and his wife, across Lake Washington from Seattle. Ange, Janet, and Janice were thrilled to see their mom again and thrilled as well to be free of their steely, autocratic father. The reunion was permanent. Esther had found, at last, a place for them to live together, although the new quarters would be like most places they had stayed in: tiny and temporary. They would move to Bremerton, across the
waters of Puget Sound, and stay in the small apartment of Esther's oldest sister and her husband.

This story has a long-delayed coda. Six decades after that reunion of the Peterson girls with their mother, Esther had been in a long second marriage—over fifty years—and given birth to two more children, another daughter and a son. Now she lay dying in a Seattle hospital bed, and she was in distress, in despair. She would not, she lamented, be able to see her twin boys. “Twin girls,” someone corrected her. She'd had twin daughters. Weeks earlier, probably sensing that she would not be alive much longer, Esther had stammered to my mother, “I have a terrible secret, and I'm taking it to my grave.”

And so she did.

Not long after Esther's death, her son received a phone call from a man he had never heard of: his older brother. That brother revealed to him that he had yet another brother: his twin. In 1941, when Esther had dropped her little daughters off at their father's home to live, she was three months pregnant. During all of those months when her children begged to see her, she couldn't bear the thought of exactly that: their seeing her, seeing her swelling belly. She hid it from Ed and Betty, too. The man who had impregnated her was someone Esther had known in high school in Minnesota. Tommy. My mother remembers him. Yes, Tommy came to visit once. During her pregnancy, Esther lived in a small apartment with a girlfriend and often visited one of her brothers and his wife. These three people, apparently, were the only ones in whom she confided her condition. Maybe she didn't even tell Tommy. In March, two months before she reunited with her daughters, she did what Ange, years later, surprised by her own pregnancy, would not do: she took an eastbound bus over the Cascade Mountains to Yakima, gave birth, offered the baby boys up for adoption, took a bus back, then kept her mouth shut about it. She was thirty years old.

Until her death at eighty-eight, she kept her silence—she did,
indeed, take a terrible secret into the earth with her. But what secret, exactly, is the one that haunted her? What made her feel the deepest shame and remorse? The secret that she had gotten pregnant out of wedlock? The secret that she had given up her babies? Or the secret that for months, then years, then decades—her whole life—she had lived alone with those original secrets? She had told no one, not even her second husband. A few years before she died, Esther received a phone call from an agency that reunited adopted children with their birth parents. Her twin boys were searching for her. They didn't know her identity, and the agency wouldn't tell them her name if Esther preferred that it not. Would she be interested in meeting her two middle-aged sons? No, she said. No. Never. Her husband didn't know about them. No one knew about them. “Please,” she pleaded, “don't call me again.”

11

Only weeks after reuniting with her daughters, Esther found a job with Boeing, which had become central to the war effort, already rolling out sixty B-17 Flying Fortresses a month. Almost immediately, among the tens of thousands of workers in the massive plant, a lean, genial bachelor a year younger than she, a machinist named Lee, caught her eye, or she—with her big eyes, high cheekbones, and dark wavy hair—caught his. She brought Lee to Bremerton to see what her daughters thought of him.

They loved him. Unlike most of the adults they had known, Lee had a relaxed way about him; he laughed easily and was open and unstinting in his affections. Lee was not sour on life or distrustful of it; he was an enthusiast of it, especially of the simple things that gave him pleasure: an easy-handling car, polished to a gleam; a smooth Scotch; a brisk autumn afternoon in the bleachers at a college football game; and jazz. He would spend his pocket money on evening trips downtown to the opulent Trianon Ballroom, with its vast polished floor that could hold five thousand dancers, swinging to a big band. He would stand toward the side and tap his wing tips, take a spin or three, or edge as close as he could to the bandstand, where, between numbers, he might shout out some words of admiration to the clarinetist. Lee loved the music that had first made his teenage heart leap: snappy syncopated
beats, a band in the groove, and virtuoso solos that rose organically out of that sound, set your mind swirling, then settled back naturally into the arrangement. He was devoted to Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, and Pee Wee Russell. Decades later, not long before he died, he bequeathed to me one of his treasured possessions: a well-thumbed, massive encyclopedia of big bands, page after page marked with his hand-scribbled annotations. With little arrows, he had drawn attention to blurred figures in back rows of posed portraits of bands, important players he remembered—Bennie Bonacio, Doc Ryker, Miff Mole.

One day not long after meeting Lee, Ange took a walk with a friend of hers and burst out, “I hope they get married! I hope they get married!” Marriage would mean that, overnight, everything might be fixed: Esther, no longer struggling by herself to raise three young girls, would be happier; her daughters would have a new father, a loving and kind one this time; and they all might finally have a house of their own.

Esther and Lee did get married, and quickly: within two months of meeting each other. Esther was by natural inclination intractable, undemonstrative, and befuddled by the unfamiliar; Lee's unforced good cheer was a tonic for her—although eventually it began to grate, if it didn't from the start. In retrospect, my mother understands that the marriage was mainly one of convenience. What better choice did Esther have? Marriage would mean stability and security. She could stop working and devote herself to raising her children. She could stop moving from place to place, relying on the generosity of friends and family members for a bed to sleep in.

And, for Lee, what did this marriage mean? Joy, maybe.

In a wedding photo, he turns sideways to the camera and gazes at his new bride, embracing her waist with one arm and her shoulders with the other. He wears a barely suppressed, big-chinned grin.
Esther's smile is directed not at Lee but at the camera. She does not hug him back; her hands, lowered before her, are gripping her white dress gloves and small black purse.

Ange was right about the house. The wedding was in August, and only weeks later Lee moved his new family into a recently built two-bedroom home, with polished wood floors, a fireplace, a driveway, and a trim front lawn, in northeast Seattle—in Wedgwood, a neighborhood that three years before had consisted only of trees and that had been christened (why not?) after the British makers of elegant bone china. For Ange, for a moment, anything might have seemed possible. You just had to name it.