The family hadn’t known what to think when Dad didn’t hear from Ella within a couple of days of leaving Indy. He called long distance to the girlfriend she was supposed to visit in Worcester, Massachusetts. But she hadn’t heard from Ella in years and didn’t know anything about her coming to visit.
The Indianapolis police came over to talk with the family. They asked about Ella’s state of mind when she left on the train. Was she nervous or scared? No, Ella was looking forward to a vacation. The officer questioned Dorothy, the little sister who might know what the parents didn’t. Had Ella confided in her? Maybe she was running away? No, Ella had been fine as far as Dot knew.
Dad told the police to question the ex-husband because of the divorce. Or maybe she’d gone back to that hot-rodder Tony, the one she wanted to marry before Mother put the kibosh on it. Between Mother’s consumptive coughing spells, she suggested the woman Ella rented from. “Dad’s hand shook when he handed the police officer your picture, Ella,” Dorothy said.
Dad hardly slept during those days, dragging himself to work, while Dorothy sat beside Mother’s bed, praying the rosary, until the police called Dad to come downtown.
Sitting across the desk from Dad, the officer said they’d cleared all the people mentioned and checked at Holcomb’s but had not uncovered any leads or signs of Ella around Indy. So the search had started in Worcester. The Massachusetts police interviewed the girlfriend who was supposedly hosting Ella. His daughter hadn’t been to her house, nor to the city or state as far as the authorities could tell. Ella wasn’t in any of the nearby hotels or hospitals.
“She’s in New York,” Dad said, handing the officer a postcard. Dorothy had found it that same day, the hotel postcard from Ella in their mailbox. Dad told the officer that Ella must have stopped in New York along the way. She was having a time seeing New York and sent her love.
The police contacted the hotel, but Ella was gone. So, the New York City police opened a missing person’s report and began their own search. And there was something else: the police said since Ella’s train went from Indiana across Ohio and New York, her case was now considered an interstate concern. The FBI had been called in.
They confirmed that Ella’s train made all its scheduled stops without incident along the entire route. They would make further inquiries to see if anyone had seen her at those stops. But they were racing the clock, because Ella had been missing several days, which made it more unlikely they’d find her.
Dad said as her father, he had to do something. So he boarded the same train Ella had taken to New York to find her himself. When he arrived during rush hour, Grand Central Terminal and the madness of Forty-Second Street overwhelmed him. Though he knew nothing of huge cities, he made his way to the Times Square hotel from Ella’s postcard. But she wasn’t registered. He insisted the clerk check in the back office. Yes, she had been there, and the police already knew she’d checked out days ago. Paid her bill and disappeared out into the crowded street, like all their guests did every day. He roamed the streets, hoping to see her at some bus stop or restaurant, but didn’t.
He asked the NYPD to let him go with them door-to-door, showing Times Square shopkeepers Ella’s picture, but they couldn’t allow it. They checked hospitals and morgues but did not find any trace of Ella. Not her; not her body. When an NYPD detective sat Dad down and rifled through Ella’s file, he shook his head. The sad truth was that several hundred girls went missing in New York City every year, he said. They’re victims of rape, kidnapping, and murder. Some are forced into the sex trade or sold into white slavery. He looked Dad in the eye and said New York was no place for a well-brought-up girl to come alone. He was sorry, but the case was closed.
“We are declaring your daughter a victim of foul play,” the detective said. “That’s not murder, because no body was found. But we can’t do anything else, unless there’s new evidence.”
Dorothy’s story hurt to hear, as I imagined Mama’s father stumbling out of the precinct alone amid impossibly tall skyscrapers. His daughter disappeared into nothingness like the steam rising from the subway grates under his worn-out shoes. I hoped he had let out some feral cry.
Back home, Dorothy went on, Dad was met with hysteria. Dorothy and Mother spent their days rehashing the investigation. Was Ella really dead if there was no body? Where did they have white slavery? Was she taken out of this country? Couldn’t somebody check further? Dad contacted a private detective, but the price was out of the question—they already barely had enough to cover Mother’s medical expenses. There was nothing else they could do.
The house sagged with grief. Dad said there would be no funeral if there was no body. There was no more listening to favorite radio stories. No more playing with the dog. No more outside jobs to supplement their income. No more light in Dad’s eyes.
Dorothy woke up about 5:00 AM that first Christmas to the sound of Dad sobbing and moaning such as she’d never thought was in any man. She waited a while, hoping he’d stop. But when she finally went to her parents’ room, Dad asked over and over, incoherently, what happened to his wonderful girl. Mother sat wrapped in her wool blankets in the side chair, coughing up thick yellow phlegm in that room where the shades were never raised. They stayed in that tomb the entire day, not knowing if Ella was dead on this, her favorite day, or living in shame in some God forsaken place. Dad never got up. Not for coffee, not to open presents, not to eat dinner. By six o’clock that night, Dorothy said, she’d gone back to bed, relieved to make Christmas go away.
Mama’s eyes were fixed on her lap. “I feel so small knowing how I hurt you.”
I was hollowed out, too. The anguish Mama had put them through was the pile of hurt Luther warned me I’d set off when I went looking for them. It made me ashamed too. We sat at the Boehles’ kitchen table writhing, each in our own way, from the wound Mama had made and the scab I’d torn off it. Yet I wondered if she had ever worried about how her family would be devastated when she disappeared.
Like some saint, Dorothy answered, “Ella, God answered my prayer and sent you back. I love you no matter what.”
The sisters petted each other for several minutes, Mama repeating her humble contrition while Dorothy lovingly pardoned her. How could my aunt be so forgiving? Her response was so foreign to the acting out and arguing David, Daddy, and I would have done if this kind of drama were happening in Buffalo. That’s what I had feared would go on here. But we weren’t in Buffalo. Here there was no carrying on, no raised voices, and no accusations.
Hearing the Indianapolis side of the story and the world Mama had erased put my mother in a new light. She had been a reckless young woman joy riding on the back of a motorcycle in the 1920s and ’30s until her mother put a stop to it. Then she was a Catholic divorcee in the 1930s and the runaway wife of a Negro in the ’40s, when it was a social abomination. But had she ever considered the consequences for the rest of us? Had she ever considered the long view? Had she gone into my father’s black arms because she was naively color-blind? Did she ever see the hurt that would come to her family as a result?
“And what about your kids’ lives, Mama?” I wanted to say. What about the sort-of race her reinvented life left my brothers and me to figure out? David tried to be the blackest of race advocates while Charles Nathan was on the white side of town where his porcelain skin could pass. And I straddled the racial divide, studying and practicing white ways to be accepted in white corporations while dying to rip off the mask and be black me. We three kids were caught in the middle of two races, although our parents had assigned our lives wholly to the black one. Mama had always thought race shouldn’t matter. Yet we siblings were fossilized in the amber of our parents’ decision to mix races and hide at a time when 96 percent of Americans were against it.
Yet I loved Mama dearly, something that would never change. As she and Dorothy leaned into their embrace, I realized Mama never had any idea of what she was getting into when she married Daddy. By coming to Indy, I stumbled into my younger mother, the one I never knew existed.
In our bedroom, Mama took off her wig and slipped on her nightgown. I asked if, during all those years, she’d ever thought about contacting Dorothy. After the antimiscegenation laws were changed by the Supreme Court, had she thought of trying to get in touch with her family or bringing us all together?
“Not at all,” she said. “I’d been married to your father twenty-five years when they changed those laws, and we had you kids. I closed that door and learned to live with it. Do you think I could just turn up in Indy with a black man and three colored children?”
The next morning both sisters came in the kitchen looking as if their mother had dressed them alike, in floral sweaters and pastel pants. Dorothy poured rich-smelling coffee in the mugs waiting on the plastic placemats and brought out a box of old-fashioned cake donuts—plain, heavy ones. She and Mama each took one and, at the same time, broke them in half and dunked an end into the coffee, the same way Mama had done for years in Buffalo. Before the second bite, they touched their donut halves together like a champagne toast and dunked again.
Mama looked out over the back field, like she didn’t want to face Dorothy when she asked how Mother and Dad had died. Of course, she knew consumption killed Mother and a heart attack took Dad, before either of them turned fifty. But, did they suffer much?
Before Mother died, she was bone thin and bedridden. Dorothy quit college to tend her in the bedroom, kept roasting hot against her chills. Mother couldn’t take even baby spoons of puree or bouillon. Rather, all her thin energy was used struggling for breath. Each time she tried to suck in air, a mass of phlegm that sounded thick as sludge pulled up through Mother’s chest. It traveled a half inch or so, then dropped back down in her upper cavity. Settling in. Thickening. Clogging her airways.
“You should know what her last words were,” Dorothy told Mama. “She said, ‘I wanted to see Ella before I went.’”
Mama’s mouth fell open. “She said that? Why, I didn’t think she loved me.”
“Oh, she surely did, Ella,” Dorothy said. “Mother did love you.”
The confounded look on Mama’s face bore out her belief that her stepmother only loved Dorothy, her natural born daughter, not Ella, her obligation. Had there been so many miscues between stepmother and stepdaughter that they had misspent their lives together? So many that Mama had yoked herself to an unfounded resentment for sixty-some years? Believed she and Daddy could never make peace with Mother because she didn’t know Mother loved her?
After Mother died, Dad moved in with Dorothy and Tony. He piddled around on little electrical projects occasionally, only perking up a bit around Antoinette, a toddler at the time. He survived the loss of both wives and Ella for only two more years before he too passed away.
Dad was dressed in his good suit and laid out in the casket when Dorothy put a rosary in each of the side pockets of his jacket. One was Mother’s and the other was Ella’s. The family gathered for a private viewing at the undertaker’s, saying prayers with the parish priest before others came to pay respects.
All the while people were coming with garden bouquets and kind words, Dorothy listened above the din for Ella’s voice. But she didn’t hear it. Once the place emptied out, she went to check the guest register for Ella’s name. It wasn’t there.
Dorothy asked Tony to take Antoinette home and let her have time alone with her dad. She put a folding chair at the head of the casket for herself and an empty one at its foot. She waited in silence several hours into the night, having made it safe for Ella to come when nobody else was there. That way, she wouldn’t have to explain herself to anybody. Ella had been Dad’s favorite, so Dorothy expected her sister to show up if she was still alive. But she never came.
“I thought we’d sit, the two of us alone with Dad,” Dorothy said, reaching for Mama’s hand, “before he was gone forever.”
Dorothy went back in the morning, to check the guest book again to see if Ella had slipped in. But neither Ella’s name nor any other name in Ella’s handwriting was listed.
At Dad’s gravesite that morning, Dorothy took the first fistful of dirt and threw it on the casket down in the grave. Then she threw a second. That was her good-bye to both Dad and Ella. “I knew you must be dead. It wasn’t possible you were alive and hadn’t come for Dad,” Dorothy said.
Mama broke down into mourner’s tears like he’d just been lowered into the grave. By the way she buckled over in her chair, she must have felt both grief and shame. My own eyes misted for the grandfather I never met, and for Mama’s anguish, soaking into the wet tissues she squeezed with fingers bent from arthritis.
“I’m glad I didn’t know he died back then,” Mama said. “It would have been miserable not being able to come home. He stayed healthy in my mind all these years, thank God.”
“Would you like to go to the cemetery and see them?” Dorothy asked.
In a half hour we were in the car, looking for a florist. Mama bought a fresh bouquet tied with a white ribbon, and Dorothy drove straight to the place where their parents were buried. Mildred and Henry Lewis lay side by side in a grassy double plot marked with a joint grey marble headstone. The air was thick with the smell of freshly mowed grass. A nearby tree blew gently in the bright morning sun, casting shade over Mama’s stony face. She laid the flowers midway across the two graves.
“Will you pray with me?” she asked.
We stood on either side of her, reciting the Our Father and the Hail Mary for the parents who raised my mother. My white people.
As Mama prayed, my quickened heartbeat confused me. I hadn’t expected to feel anything for these dead people. They’d only been names to me. “Idiot,” I thought, understanding my white ancestors had been good people, parents devastated over losing their precious daughter. Their pull from the grave brought a growing sense of connection. The mutual love we shared for my mother came over me. That bond was undeniable. I owed these white grandparents my honor.