26 MARIN ARTS & CULTURE
We got by. My brothers and I shuttled between St Thomas, my grandmother’s scruffy ranch, and weekends with my mother who always found a way to maximize our time with her. Despite our poverty, she always managed to keep us hopeful and optimistic. There was always the “Christmas miracle,” even in the worst of times, when I expected nothing but we still ended up with a beautiful tree and a dazzling abundance of brightly wrapped presents. To this day, I have no idea how she managed it. I always meant to ask her.
When we had nothing else, at least we had books. She was an avid reader and believed in the power of learning as well as the escapist balm of a good read. She had classic fiction and poetry, as well as the writings of Freud, Voltaire, and Aquinas, among others. Best of all, there was a set of the 1950 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the remnant of my father’s last stab at a conventional sales job.
Her first teaching job was in a one room schoolhouse in the middle of Nowhere, Montana, where she slept in a tiny alcove off the classroom, which also had a nominal kitchen. My brothers and I slept in a fold-up bed in the classroom. Water came from a hand-cranked pump. The toilets were of the classic “two-hole” species, a decent walk from the back door. Winter was a siege of record cold and snowfall, and at one point we were marooned there for weeks. She had her books, her boys, and the Big Sky, but it must have been a horribly bleak year for her. She took up painting that year, and seemed an awesome talent to us. Sometimes, in that miniscule kitchen, she would prepare something so unusual that we were certain we were the only people in Montana who were eating that dish that night. What couldn’t she do?
What she couldn’t seem to do was to land a man. It was a profound mystery to us. After all, what man wouldn’t want a woman who was beautiful, glamorous, innately sophisticated, brilliant, wellread, artistic? The answer, it seems, was that very few men of that era wanted the challenge of engaging a woman with those qualities on an equal footing. She was clearly intimidating to most.
Those who were bold enough to approach her were either ultimately put off by the boisterous instant family they would be taking on, or were simply the wrong kind of men—married men too often, men who were ultimately inaccessible for one reason or another. Though she seemed artsy and Bohemian to most, she clung to a kind of Victorian-romantic sensibility. She wanted to be thought of as virtuous and worthy of a classic wooing.
Early on there were short-lived romances. The jet fighter pilot from North Carolina who was stationed at the big Air Force base outside of Great Falls, but who went home to North Carolina, which might as well have been on Pluto. The handsome Norwegian war hero who ended up far away. The high school boyfriend who turned up in Portland after we moved there for her fourth year of teaching, who fancied himself a novelist but was mostly a linoleum salesman. What happened to all these men? What impact did they have on her life? What was she hoping for from each? I can only guess.
In the background, all this time, was the man she really loved. Father Bill, as we came to know him, was a Catholic priest who was attached to the hospital where my mother briefly worked in the early years of her marriage. Something ignited between them, but I’m not sure when or under what circumstances. I remember hearing bits and pieces about him. He had become a chaplain in the Air Force, an officer posted to exotic places all over the world—Spain, Germany, Morocco, Japan, and, ultimately, to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. There was the occasional letter with the exotic postmark and stamps, the infrequent gift from some strange place; a camel saddle from Tangier, silver and a bullfight poster from Seville, silk from Japan.
He was just an abstraction to me until we picked him up one night at the Portland airport where he had arrived for a brief visit. Seeing my mother rush out onto the tarmac, throw her arms around him and kiss him in a way that did justice to a scene from any movie of the day, was a revelation for which, at fifteen, I was woefully ill-prepared. She gave him her bedroom that night and made up a place for herself in the living room of our tiny cracker box house, but I was still awake when she went quickly tip-toeing back into the bedroom after lights-out.
Despite my adolescent revulsion at having to acknowledge my mother’s sexuality and romantic needs, and my (presumably Oedipal) turmoil at his presence in our lives, I came to regard him as the finest man I ever knew. He was a compassionate intellectual, a cosmopolitan man whose worldliness and breadth of knowledge were beacons to me. A complex man of powerful but fundamentally conflicting ideals, he had the wisdom to keep his conflicts off the table when he was with us. A few years later, when I was mired in an obsessive romance in college, we became collaborators and kindred spirits. This was a period when priests were not yet leaving the clergy, though this would begin in a significant way in just a few years. My mother begged him to change his life and come to her. He couldn’t find the wherewithal to make that move. Toward the end, he told me about the paralyzing fear of breaking with clerical life, with a kind of fatalistic sadness that shriveled me. “What would I ever do? This is the only thing I know how to do.”
They tormented each other with a love that promised everything, but mostly delivered frustration and anguish. Eventually, they gave up. A few years later the news leaked back to my mother: he had been posted to an air base in San Antonio and they found him in his car, far out in the Texas high desert, dead. He had drunk himself to death. She never spoke of him again. I never brought him up, though I was bursting with questions, as well as the sympathetic, compassionate things I wanted to say to her but for which I never found the voice.
Over the years there were a few others: the retired Coast Guard commander who ran a charter fishing boat, whose wife “wouldn’t give him” a divorce; the creepy little guy with the unlikely name of Johnny Fontana, who hit her once. I went looking for him. Luckily for both of us, I never found him. Then there was the cheery sales guy who was never without a cigarette, just like her. Presumably they had other things in common, but I never saw those. Did I mention that he was married and had some convoluted story about why he couldn’t get a divorce? He came back from a business trip one night and straight to my mother’s place instead of home, and died of a heart attack in her bed a few hours later. She wasn’t even allowed to attend his funeral.
In her last decade, it became clear that she would never have that man who would “make her complete” in her idealized, if painfully outdated notion of mating. By then, her talent for denial—that had always been central to her coping mechanism but was easily overlooked when her charms were in full bloom— was running high. Apple’s Steve Jobs was notoriously credited with having his own “reality distortion field” that enabled him to operate by his own set of rules. But my mother could have taught him a thing or two about reality distortion. It made those few opportunities for a real heart to heart discussion nearly impossible, though I made various eleventh-hour attempts. But by then her empathic powers had narrowed to a kind of self-awareness that marginalized her. What had seemed sophisticated and worldly to me as a child now seemed quaint and superficial; what had seemed brilliant and erudite a few decades before now appeared shallow and pedestrian.
The opportunity for closure, for the kind of connection that does justice to the bonds that nature provides between parent and child, from one generation to the next, was gone and irretrievable. And now I have to wonder—could my son be having similar thoughts about me? And if he is, how will I know? Do we ever learn? I think we’ll be alright, partly because we are both compulsive writers and we leave written trails for each other, even when our lives seem so widely divergent. I can only hope.
people in Montana who were eating that dish that night. What couldn’t she do?
What she couldn’t seem to do was to land a man. It was a profound mystery to us. After all, what man wouldn’t want a woman who was beautiful, glamorous, innately sophisticated, brilliant, wellread, artistic? The answer, it seems, was that very few men of that era wanted the challenge of engaging a woman with those qualities on an equal footing. She was clearly intimidating to most.
Those who were bold enough to approach her were either ultimately put off by the boisterous instant family they would be taking on, or were simply the wrong kind of men—married men too often, men who were ultimately inaccessible for one reason or another. Though she seemed artsy and Bohemian to most, she clung to a kind of Victorian-romantic sensibility. She wanted to be thought of as virtuous and worthy of a classic wooing.
Early on there were short-lived romances. The jet fighter pilot from North Carolina who was stationed at the big Air Force base outside of Great Falls, but who went home to North Carolina, which might as well have been on Pluto. The handsome Norwegian war hero who ended up far away. The high school boyfriend who turned up in Portland after we moved there for her fourth year of teaching, who fancied himself a novelist but was mostly a linoleum salesman. What happened to all these men? What impact did they have on her life? What was she hoping for from each? I can only guess.
In the background, all this time, was the man she really loved. Father Bill, as we came to know him, was a Catholic priest who was attached to the hospital where my mother briefly worked in the early years of her marriage. Something ignited between them, but I’m not sure when or under what circumstances. I remember hearing bits and pieces about him. He had become a chaplain in the Air Force, an officer posted to exotic places all over the world—Spain, Germany, Morocco, Japan, and, ultimately, to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. There was the occasional letter with the exotic postmark and stamps, the infrequent gift from some strange place; a camel saddle from Tangier, silver and a bullfight poster from Seville, silk from Japan.
He was just an abstraction to me until we picked him up one night at the Portland airport where he had arrived for a brief visit. Seeing my mother rush out onto the tarmac, throw her arms around him and kiss him in a way that did justice to a scene from any movie of the day, was a revelation for which, at fifteen, I was woefully ill-prepared. She gave him her bedroom that night and made up a place for herself in the living room of our tiny cracker box house, but I was still awake when she went quickly tip-toeing back into the bedroom after lights-out.
Despite my adolescent revulsion at having to acknowledge my mother’s sexuality and romantic needs, and my (presumably Oedipal) turmoil at his presence in our lives, I came to regard him as the finest man I ever knew. He was a compassionate intellectual, a cosmopolitan man whose worldliness and breadth of knowledge were beacons to me. A complex man of powerful but fundamentally conflicting ideals, he had the wisdom to keep his conflicts off the table when he was with us. A few years later, when I was mired in an obsessive romance in college, we became collaborators and kindred spirits. This was a period when priests were not yet leaving the clergy, though this would begin in a significant way in just a few years. My mother begged him to change his life and come to her. He couldn’t find the wherewithal to make that move. Toward the end, he told me about the paralyzing fear of breaking with clerical life, with a kind of fatalistic sadness that shriveled me. “What would I ever do? This is the only thing I know how to do.”
They tormented each other with a love that promised everything, but mostly delivered frustration and anguish. Eventually, they gave up. A few years later the news leaked back to my mother: he had been posted to an air base in San Antonio and they found him in his car, far out in the Texas high desert, dead. He had drunk himself to death. She never spoke of him again. I never brought him up, though I was bursting with questions, as well as the sympathetic, compassionate things I wanted to say to her but for which I never found the voice.
Over the years there were a few others: the retired Coast Guard commander who ran a charter fishing boat, whose wife “wouldn’t give him” a divorce; the creepy little guy with the unlikely name of Johnny Fontana, who hit her once. I went looking for him. Luckily for both of us, I never found him. Then there was the cheery sales guy who was never without a cigarette, just like her. Presumably they had other things in common, but I never saw those. Did I mention that he was married and had some convoluted story about why he couldn’t get a divorce? He came back from a business trip one night and straight to my mother’s place instead of home, and died of a heart attack in her bed a few hours later. She wasn’t even allowed to attend his funeral.
In her last decade, it became clear that she would never have that man who would “make her complete” in her idealized, if painfully outdated notion of mating. By then, her talent for denial—that had always been central to her coping mechanism but was easily overlooked when her charms were in full bloom— was running high. Apple’s Steve Jobs was notoriously credited with having his own “reality distortion field” that enabled him to operate by his own set of rules. But my mother could have taught him a thing or two about reality distortion. It made those few opportunities for a real heart to heart discussion nearly impossible, though I made various eleventh-hour attempts. But by then her empathic powers had narrowed to a kind of self-awareness that marginalized her. What had seemed sophisticated and worldly to me as a child now seemed quaint and superficial; what had seemed brilliant and erudite a few decades before now appeared shallow and pedestrian.
The opportunity for closure, for the kind of connection that does justice to the bonds that nature provides between parent and child, from one generation to the next, was gone and irretrievable. And now I have to wonder—could my son be having similar thoughts about me? And if he is, how will I know? Do we ever learn? I think we’ll be alright, partly because we are both compulsive writers and we leave written trails for each other, even when our lives seem so widely divergent. I can only hope.
far away. The high school boyfriend who turned up in Portland after we moved there for her fourth year of teaching, who fancied himself a novelist but was mostly a linoleum salesman. What happened to all these men? What impact did they have on her life? What was she hoping for from each? I can only guess.
In the background, all this time, was the man she really loved. Father Bill, as we came to know him, was a Catholic priest who was attached to the hospital where my mother briefly worked in the early years of her marriage. Something ignited between them, but I’m not sure when or under what circumstances. I remember hearing bits and pieces about him. He had become a chaplain in the Air Force, an officer posted to exotic places all over the world—Spain, Germany, Morocco, Japan, and, ultimately, to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. There was the occasional letter with the exotic postmark and stamps, the infrequent gift from some strange place; a camel saddle from Tangier, silver and a bullfight poster from Seville, and silk from Japan.
He was just an abstraction to me until we picked him up one night at the Portland airport where he had arrived for a brief visit. Seeing my mother rush out onto the tarmac, throw her arms around him and kiss him in a way that did justice to a scene from any movie of the day, was a revelation for which, at fifteen, I was woefully ill-prepared. She gave him her bedroom that night and made up a place for herself in the living room of our tiny cracker box house, but I was still awake when she went quickly tip-toeing back into the bedroom after lights-out.
Despite my adolescent revulsion at having to acknowledge my mother’s sexuality and romantic needs, and my (presumably Oedipal) turmoil at his presence in our lives, I came to regard him as the finest man I ever knew. He was a compassionate intellectual, a cosmopolitan man whose worldliness and breadth of knowledge were beacons to me. A complex man of powerful but fundamentally conflicting ideals, he had the wisdom to keep his conflicts off the table when he was with us. A few years later, when I was mired in an obsessive romance in college, we became collaborators and kindred spirits. This was a period when priests were not yet leaving the clergy, though this would begin in a significant way in just a few years. My mother begged him to change his life and come to her. He couldn’t find the wherewithal to make that move. Toward the end, he told me about the paralyzing fear of breaking with clerical life, with a kind of fatalistic sadness that shriveled me. “What would I ever do? This is the only thing I know how to do.”
They tormented each other with a love that promised everything, but mostly delivered frustration and anguish. Eventually, they gave up. A few years later the news leaked back to my mother: he had been posted to an air base in San Antonio and they found him in his car, far out in the Texas high desert, dead. He had drunk himself to death. She never spoke of him again. I never brought him up, though I was bursting with questions, as well as the sympathetic, compassionate things I wanted to say to her but for which I never found the voice.
Over the years there were a few others: the retired Coast Guard commander who ran a charter fishing boat, whose wife “wouldn’t give him” a divorce; the creepy little guy with the unlikely name of Johnny Fontana, who hit her once. I went looking for him. Luckily for both of us, I never found him. Then there was the cheery sales guy who was never without a cigarette, just like her. Presumably they had other things in common, but I never saw those. Did I mention that he was married and had some convoluted story about why he couldn’t get a divorce? He came back from a business trip one night and straight to my mother’s place instead of home, and died of a heart attack in her bed a few hours later. She wasn’t even allowed to attend his funeral.
In her last decade, it became clear that she would never have that man who would “make her complete” in her idealized, if painfully outdated notion of mating. By then, her talent for denial—that had always been central to her coping mechanism but was easily overlooked when her charms were in full bloom— was running high. Apple’s Steve Jobs was notoriously credited with having his own “reality distortion field” that enabled him to operate by his own set of rules. But my mother could have taught him a thing or two about reality distortion. It made those few opportunities for a real heart to heart discussion nearly impossible, though I made various eleventh-hour attempts. But by then her empathic powers had narrowed to a kind of self-awareness that marginalized her. What had seemed sophisticated and worldly to me as a child now seemed quaint and superficial; what had seemed brilliant and erudite a few decades before now appeared shallow and pedestrian.
The opportunity for closure, for the kind of connection that does justice to the bonds that nature provides between parent and child, from one generation to the next, was gone and irretrievable. And now I have to wonder—could my son be having similar thoughts about me? And if he is, how will I know? Do we ever learn? I think we’ll be alright, partly because we are both compulsive writers and we leave written trails for each other, even when our lives seem so widely divergent. I can only hope.
“When we had nothing else, at least we had books.”
“After all, who wouldn’t want a woman who was beautiful, glamourous, innately sophisticated, brilliant, wellread, artistic?”