The worst marriage Kitty made was her last. Her son, Roy, was gone by this time—“Out in the world somewhere” Kitty told people who asked her what he was doing. The most recent news she had from him was that he was working as a merchant seaman on freighters carrying cargo between Europe and South America. Her daughter, Sally, was nine years old, so she had no choice but to go along with Kitty’s decisions regardless of how ill-conceived and self-destructive they might prove to be.
Kitty’s fifth husband was Reno Mott. His first name was really Melvin but very early in their relationship Kitty could not remember it at a dinner party when she attempted to introduce him to friends of hers, so she said it was Reno, because that was where he was from. She thought it was funny and he did not seem to mind; thereafter, she called him Reno, as did Sally. He owned a box manufacturing company in Reno, Illinois, where he lived with his teenaged daughter from a previous marriage, to which town Kitty and Sally moved from Chicago. Kitty did not tell Roy about her latest marriage. She wrote to him irregularly in care of a friend of his in London, England, where Roy stayed when he was not at sea, and informed him only that she and his sister had moved to Reno, Illinois, ninety miles northwest of Chicago.
It was not long after their arrival in Reno before Kitty began to realize that the marriage had not been a good idea, especially for Sally. Reno Mott’s daughter, Rowena, terrorized the younger girl. She resented Sally’s presence and her mother’s intrusion into Reno’s and her life. Rowena did everything she could to make Sally’s existence there intolerable. No matter how Kitty attempted to ameliorate the situation, Rowena’s cruelty toward her stepsister did not abate. In addition, her rudeness to and contempt for Kitty knew no limits. After six months Kitty told Mott that she and Sally were going back to Chicago. Reno Mott had made no attempt to mitigate his daughter’s hostility. Whenever Kitty brought the matter up to him, he just shrugged and suggested that she ignore Rowena’s nastiness, insisting that the girls would get along after they got to know each other better. This did not happen, so Rowena gladly agreed to leave and go to live with her mother, who also had remarried, in Akron, Ohio.
Rowena’s departure improved daily life for Sally, but Kitty was disappointed by her husband’s indifference to her complaints concerning financial matters—his box business was failing—and his refusal to properly include her in his social life, preferring to have Kitty stay at home with Sally while he went out with unidentified friends. This behavior did not sit well with Kitty. When she had met Mott in Chicago at a restaurant and agreed to have a date with him, he behaved graciously and was congenial to her friends. He told her then that he had a thriving business in Reno and that he was well-fixed for the future. “I’m a good catch for any woman,” he said.
Kitty stuck it out for a year and was again on the verge of leaving Mott when he came home one day and declared that they were going to move to Phoenix, Arizona, where he had agreed to take a job as manager of a Ford dealership. The house in Reno was being foreclosed upon and the box business was bankrupt. They had no choice but to go.
Kitty told him that she had no intention of moving to Arizona, where she didn’t know anybody, at which point Reno Mott became furious and left the house. That night, after getting drunk with a former girlfriend, Mott drove off a railroad bridge into a canal. The woman with him was pronounced dead at the scene from a broken neck, and Reno suffered two broken legs as well as a serious head injury that would most likely render him permanently incapable of caring for himself. Kitty wanted nothing more to do with Reno Mott. She took Sally to Chicago, where she rented an apartment, got a job as a receptionist in a private hospital, and filed for a divorce.
When Roy arrived in Chicago, his mother told him what had happened. He asked her where Reno Mott was now.
“He’s in a nursing home for disabled veterans in Reno,” she said. “He was in the air force during the war. He’s trying to get a government loan so he can afford to sue me for support. I’ll never get married again, Roy, I promise.”
Roy borrowed a friend’s car and drove to Reno, Illinois, where he confronted Mott in the nursing home.
“If you don’t leave my mother alone,” Roy told him, “I’ll kill you. Do you understand me?”
Kitty asked Roy if Reno Mott had said anything to him.
“Yes, he said he understood me and that I shouldn’t worry because he had a job waiting for him in Phoenix and that as soon as he could walk again he was going there to sell cars.”
