WHEN I HAD last seen my mother, not six months before she died, it was not the possibility of her death that concerned me — all of us live to be very old. It was her drinking. I find this hard to say because nobody wants to admit that anybody close is a problem drinker. It is painful — part shame, part concern, part helplessness — to see someone one loves expose herself to the opinions of those whose opinions she would once have dismissed and on whose opinions she is now somehow dependent. Anybody who has an alcoholic parent, spouse or child will know what I mean. We wonder how much we ourselves have to do with their drinking.
Some years before this, my stepfather retired from the ranch in Montana that was just fifty miles over the Divide from my grandmother's ranch in Idaho. He and my mother moved to Missoula, Montana, a small city but big for Montana, one with a certain style because the university is located there. A professor in Harris tweed with patches at the elbows is as likely to be abroad in the sunny streets as a cowboy or sheepherder from the surrounding hills and valleys. Books are read and even written there.
They took an apartment on the top floor of the Wilma Building — the Skyscraper by the Bridge; eight storeys tall, it did not scrape much sky but it was a good address. It housed Mrs. King's Dress Salon where were pretty little chairs and mirrors that reflected the faces of those bent on purchase. Mrs. King herself sometimes served up coffee to those who were in no hurry to make up their minds. A woman need not even leave the building to have her hair or teeth repaired, for Miss Rose was ready and apt with her combs and curlers, and on the floor above, Doctor Murphy waited with his probes and drills. He was so expensive it was fashionable to approach his chair. Movies on the ground floor offered distraction from the real world. Once Barbara Stanwyck came there in person with her husband of the moment. They appeared in a revue called Tattle Tales. Miss Stanwyck granted an interview to a reporter from the university paper who found Miss Stanwyck “charming.”
I had not realized my mother had a problem. I felt I could not mention it to her, since I had not actually seen her drinking. I saw only the result of it, the vague but calculated guess at the distance from one piece of furniture to another, each of which she touched as if there she found sufficient courage to proceed to the next piece. I recognized almost nothing in the apartment; almost everything was new, and expensive. The old things were left behind at the ranch with my half sister and her husband. I wondered if the old things would have lent her greater courage. I think not.
I doubt if I would have spoken to her even had I seen her pour whiskey from a bottle, for I knew enough of alcoholics to know they simply deny what your eyes have seen — and then what do you say? Do you say they are not only drunks but liars? You do not. You grieve. I believe she knew that I knew, for in the blue-gray eyes was a timid apology where once there had been a pride that matched her superb carriage, a way of moving about a room that had so impressed my wife.
That she had a problem puzzled me. No one else in the family had a problem, and I watched my stepfather watching her with a certain coldness that I was afraid might erupt into anger. Before his anger, she would be quite defenseless. Before his anger she would only shake her head and smile that timid smile she hoped might shield her. My stepfather angry? He seldom was. So far as I knew he had never done anything wrong in his life except make people uneasy. It had been said of his father, who had had an astonishing resemblance to the late Kaiser, that “nobody liked him and everybody respected him.” Such a backhanded compliment is not unlike saying someone has “matured” which means he used to be a son of a bitch and is now somewhat less so. Perhaps the same could be said of my stepfather. Certainly everybody, including me, respected him. Who can but respect a man who pays his bills promptly and has the means to, who has never been seen without shoes or shirt, refuses to discuss personalities and will not be drawn into trivial conversation? As a child I never doubted he would be a good President of the United States, would deal easily with disarmament and the Japanese threat in the Pacific. He would lay keels for other carriers than the Lexington and the Saratoga. He held all the cards as one does who is not known to have sinned or erred like the rest of us, who has never lusted, gambled on the future nor waked to a hangover with frightful apprehensions, a man who has never been known to weep. I had both admired and feared him and — quite without his permission — I had as a child begun to call myself by his last name instead of my father's name. I tried to acquire his swift, precise handwriting. To this day I see something of him in my signature.
I felt I could count on him as I could not count on my father.
I saw my father when I was five, again when I was twelve, and not again until I was thirty and had two sons of my own. By the time I was eighteen I felt ghostly under the cloud of my assumed name, and I thought maybe being with my father might give me an identity, that my presence might even be a pleasure to him.
I telephoned him in California. Long Distance, in those days, was impressive. The words “Long Distance is calling” were as arresting as “This is Western Union.”
His voice on Long Distance was pleasant, carefully modulated as if he spoke from a stage, but guarded, and at last he told me gently that “the exchequer,” as he put it, would not allow my visit. So I knew he was poor as well as selfish and had so little pride he would admit poverty. On my mother's side of the family, to be poor was to be immoral. It was well known how easily the poor fall into sin.
I know now that my father was then living with a woman who later became one of my several stepmothers.
I now believe that my mother married my stepfather to give me the very security I thought I might find with my father. Why else would she have married a man of such frightening rectitude?
My mother had once drunk very well. As a child I had thought her drinking and smoking quite dashing, thoughts probably prompted by pictures of women so much like her that appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and Country Life. They are dressed pour le sport; airdales strain at the leashes they hold. Those were the days of bottled-in-bond whiskey, orange blossom cocktails and Fatimas — What a Whale of a Difference Just a Few Cents Make. I have a snapshot of my mother taken on a camping trip down the Salmon River — she was the first woman to shoot the rapids on that River of No Return. A bottle of whiskey is beside her. She is lovely even in riding pants and high laced boots. No, I couldn't understand it. And I was afraid that the minute I left the Wilma Building to fly back East, my stepfather would speak to her, and that would be that.
Except for what remained of her beauty, she held no cards at all.
Six months later she had an operation, and then another. Something had gone wrong with the first. She lay back in her hospital bed, her arms bruised with needles. An ugly tube in her exquisite nose fed her oxygen. It's too bad the beautiful can't be spared such indignities. A bubble in a gauge marked from one to ten showed how much oxygen she needed to keep her alive, some days more, some days less. Each evening in the apartment in the Wilma Building my stepfather, one or all of my aunts, sometimes my grandfather who was ninety-two at the time, and I would raise our drinks in a salute and my stepfather would say, “Well, here's to Beth.” Beyond his calm I sensed despair. I could imagine him as a stolid, frightened child. For whatever reason my mother had married him, I knew now he had married her because he loved and needed her. I was surprised to find that I liked him. We might have been friends, and I could understand how painful my presence must have been over the years, for I was a constant reminder that he had not been my mother's first husband. The stepson as well as the stepfather is the villain of the piece…
I said little prayers in the sterile elevator in the hospital as it rose and descended; I said little prayers in the long, clean halls off which doors opened on pain and death. In those days I half believed that God might save a woman whose death at sixty-seven could benefit nobody. I more than half believed. A few years earlier I had written a novel about God and a miracle in a church in Boston where were — and are — gathered together a mixed bag of Harvard professors, blacks, Cabots, reformed alcoholics, paupers, millionaires and jailbirds, artists and writers. A sentimental book, readers wept through it and a thousand wrote me, among them two admirals and a United States senator. It was my worst book and it made the most money because people need to believe in miracles. What but miracles can save them? Is there another answer? Love? You may have seen that book on television, but who now remembers old Studio One? Où sont les neiges d'antan?
I was an Episcopalian because the whole family was. They said they liked the dignity, but except for my aunt Roberta and her daughter Janet, who both liked singing in the choir, few in the family ever attended services in the little stone church in Salmon where my mother married my father and where I was baptized. You see, services began at eleven in the morning, and eleven was a little early on a Sunday for those of the family who lived in Salmon; they all enjoyed sleep, all liked to sleep late, never having outgrown their youthful ability to sleep late. They believed that one reason why everybody lived so long was that they got enough sleep — that, and not worrying. Worrying was a waste of time, so they didn't.
But as the daughter of a Civil War captain who went on to become the warden of a penitentiary, my grandmother the Sheep Queen had been taught that the sooner people rise in the morning, the better for everybody: Thomas Edison had required but two hours sleep and look what became of him. Sleep beyond six each morning was shameful except, of course, for Thomas Sweringen who was different from other men.
But the Sheep Queen could not be expected to journey the thirty miles from the ranch to church in Salmon even after the invention of the automobile. Each year, therefore, the rector of the church managed the journey from Salmon to the ranch even before the invention of the automobile. There he was invited to say grace over the boiled mutton, boiled navy beans and beet greens to the embarrassment of the hired men who were so out of touch with God that even the mention of His Name was painful and called into question their misspent lives, their boozing and whoring, their estranged fathers and heartbroken mothers. During grace my grandfather looked into the middle distance; he treasured his father's buckskin-bound Bible, not because it was perhaps inspired but because it had belonged to his father who had signed it whose father had signed it and whose father had signed it.
The Bishop of Idaho, too, stopped at the ranch on his yearly visitation to the parish and remembered to bring along old clothes because he was certain to be invited to walk across the frosty fields and look at sheep. He knew that my grandmother paid taxes second only to the railroad, and she did indeed give the church in Salmon a stained-glass window of Christ as the Shepherd of His Flock. The Bishop knew well that my grandmother's philosophy was summed up in Henley's “Invictus”:
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
She sometimes quoted the entire poem in a quiet, sepulchral voice — she had been trained in elocution. At the words, “My head is bloody but unbowed,” she inclined her own head slightly and then snapped it up on her spine. It must have struck the Bishop as an outlandishly unchristian philosophy with its gods and self-determination, but invited by one who believes her soul to be unconquerable, there was nothing for it but go out and look at sheep.
I see now that my belief was not in God or church but in the family and the family's traditions; this belief I hope to pass on to my sons and my daughter because I don't know what there is to believe in except Family.
So I said my little prayers for my mother in the halls of the hospital and watched the bubble in the oxygen gauge, and she died, she who had moved from chair to chair six months before, who in 1908 had been presented at Court in Ottawa. She died at dawn, my beautiful mother. Outside, across from the hospital, a neon sign still flashed EATS EATS EATS.
She was buried from the little stone church in Salmon.
The word woman can possess strange overtones. Opposed to the word man it simply identifies sex; one imagines a skirt rather than pants, soap operas rather than baseball, jewelry rather than power tools. But the word woman taken alone can be threatening. It is not by chance that a witch was thought female. One hears little of wicked stepfathers.
It is the Jones woman who allegedly fell and injured her hip at the yard sale and caused the estate to be tied up in the courts. Her attorney sues for a hundred thousand dollars — the entire estate. It is the Smith woman who gives the damaging testimony and then vanishes. It is she who got mixed up with Richard Roe and caused him to leave wife and child destitute, and she who waits out there for the right moment to come forward and cause trouble, she who turns up in hat and veil when you thought all was settled and you dared to smile. She knocks on the door and takes up the telephone. She has a stalking patience and may be mad.
And now we had the Nofzinger woman.
“I flatter myself,” my wife said, “that I knew your mother well enough and she loved and trusted me enough so that she would have told me if anything like that had happened. That's how close we were, those times we'd walk up on the hill and build a sagebrush fire and sit and talk.
My aunt Polly wrote that she believed the woman should know there was no truth in what she believed or said she believed, and that I ought to write her.
I would indeed, and at once.
Dear Mrs. Nofzinger. Dear, indeed!
I wrote the woman that I couldn't imagine where she had gotten hold of my mother's name, and that as a novelist I was quite equipped to judge character and so knew that nothing in my mother's life or in any of her actions or tendencies could reasonably lead one to believe that she had had a child other than me and my half sister by a second marriage. I wrote that my mother's love for me and my half sister was certainly no greater than it would have been for another child — why should it be? I wrote that she would never have abandoned me in any conceivable circumstances and would never have abandoned an earlier child, let alone a little girl.
“You would be asking me to believe that my mother was unnatural,” I wrote. “Loyal is what she was. I think she never — ever — thought first of herself.”
And I wrote the woman that so explosive a secret could not have been kept for fifty years, that in fifty years such a secret would have surfaced, that someone who knew would have spoken out in anger, in drunkenness, in spite or in despair. I wrote that my mother was now dead and could no longer be damaged by any disclosure, and therefore if such a secret existed, it would now certainly come out. My mother was dead and out of reach of blackmail.
As I wrote the word “blackmail” it occurred to me that that's what the woman was up to — blackmail. If this woman Amy Nofzinger was innocent, it was a terrible accusation, but I let the word stand. I signed myself Very Sincerely, that coldest of closings, and sealed the envelope with my own spittle. And that was that.
“Maybe the woman's crazy,” my wife remarked. “Desperate. Anyone who tries to find parents who have abandoned her must know how dangerous it is.”
“I'm simply forgetting it,” I said. “And I think this would be a good day for a picnic.”
So in our wicker picnic hamper we took slices of cold steak, crackers and cheese, fruit and red wine down over the rocks to the sea and listened to what the sea had to say. What the sea had to say is that nothing has ever changed, and that all things pass. That's what they all come down to the sea to hear.
The woman had written my aunt Polly that she had been born in 1912, and her parents, according to the city records in Seattle, were living together in 1912 as man and wife.
Then fancy and romance took over the woman's story; the woman knew the works of the Brothers Grimm; it was absurd: she claimed to have been left on a doorstep. Had it not been so absurd, it would have been pathetic. The doorstep had been arranged by her adoptive mother — so she did not feel herself so abandoned as on a random doorstep or on a bench in Union Station. You see, her own mother had chosen that doorstep.
Yes. An adoptive cousin who worked as a student nurse in the hospital (what a coincidence!) had recognized her as the baby in the hospital who was the child of the beautiful woman who walked the corridors and kept a picture of a handsome man on the table. Since one infant looks very like another I could not credit the adoptive cousin's testimony. Except for name tags, I could not — honestly — have picked out any one of my children from the other babies in the nursery, although at the time I pretended I could. It was all wild romanticism, beautiful woman, handsome man, picture on table, illegitimate child. And if there was anything at all to the woman's story, the woman my father eventually married was not the woman who arranged for her little girl to be left on a doorstep at the age of two weeks.
“It's only a story,” my wife said. “And you said you were going to forget it. The world is full of crazy people. Remember, we read about the minister who said he was going to walk on water.”
“That was down South,” I said.
“But how about the woman who said she was given a thorough physical examination by some people from outer space who flew into New Hampshire?”
“They drink too much in New Hampshire. Highest per capita drinking in the United States, I understand.”
“Well then, why don't you write your father and ask him what he knows about it?”