She met a stranger on a bus. It was a cross-country bus. She got on in Illinois. I don’t know where he got on, but he was on his way to a government job in Tonopah, and wore an army uniform. He had a shy smile, dark wavy hair, and he was Jewish. She had never met a Jewish man before. They were both traveling to Nevada. It was February, 1949. She was twenty-three, going to Nevada for six weeks to divorce her first husband. Her five-year-old daughter was staying with her parents in Decatur, and her fiancé was waiting in Chicago. But instead of going all the way to Reno, she got off the bus with him at Tonopah. By the end of March, when her divorce came through, she was pregnant. She went to Chicago anyway, and married her fiancé. I was born in December. That was how it began.
My mother told me this story when I was nineteen. Because of that, and what followed, and many other things besides, I left the country. Then, when I finally came home after seven years, she said, “I conceived you in revenge for World War II.”
The confession that I was her revenge was said in anger. I was twenty-seven. She was still angry all these years later. We were sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee. She had dropped by after work, seemingly in a good mood. I don’t remember what set her off. Anything could set her off and it never seemed to have anything to do with me. I was tired. I’d been working all day too, and I wanted to relax. I asked her to leave. I said, “I’d like you to go now,” and “Please leave,” because the way she was carrying on about whatever it was, I could see that her mood wasn’t going to improve anytime soon.
I’d only recently started hanging up on her when she went into tirades over the phone, and that was only because my boyfriend told me I could. “You can just hang up on her,” he said. “You don’t have to listen to that.” And then he told me I could throw her out of my apartment too. At first I didn’t believe him. I thought I could never do that. But I didn’t want to listen to her venom. She always went on about the same things—how wronged she’d been, how badly she’d been treated by everyone.
“Alright, I’ll go,” she said angrily, haughtily. Her face was flushed, her features vivid. Her hair jutted out from her face in soft, frizzy black curls. She was fifty-two and a little overweight, but still attractive. I held the door open while she gathered up her things, and then she came and stood next to me. She was five-feet-two but looked taller in her high heels. I was amazed she was listening to me, that I could actually tell her to go and she would. I’d never felt this powerful with her before. Her dark hazel eyes bored through me, to some deep wound from long ago. I felt guilty. I always felt guilty somehow for her unhappiness.
And when she delivered her parting shot—“I conceived you in revenge for World War II,” I felt a wave of heat pass through me. It was like an electrical charge resonating in my gut. She left then, and I closed the door. The clack of her high heels echoed down the stairs. Revenge. It’s such a loaded word.
Ever since the night she told me about Tonopah, her eyes moist and bright, as if he had been the love of her life, I had thought of myself as a “love child.” I had dealt with the fact that Dad, the man I thought was my father, wasn’t by blood. Now I would have to deal with this too. But I just stood there for a while, leaning against the door. It seemed as if she was always giving me shock treatments.
Like my mother’s confessions, drawn out slowly over the years, my understanding has taken a long time to develop. It has taken me a long time to piece things together, longer perhaps, than it should have. In my early twenties I used to wish things had been different. I fantasized a marriage between my mother and this other father, imagining her happier, and by connection, myself happier too. But when I went to a psychic, which I did a lot in those days, and complained, “If only my mother had married my real father!” she said, “But my dear, you chose your parents! You chose everything to be exactly the way that it was.”
I didn’t know how to deal with that information. It has been like weaving a tapestry—the images don’t make sense until the entire rug is woven together. Yet it finally hit me, why she was so impatient with me when I was growing up. I was the least likely candidate to avenge anything.
Physically, I was inept. I didn’t crawl as a baby, and I didn’t learn to walk until I was nineteen months old. I could swim, but I didn’t like putting my head under water, and diving was impossible—every attempt a painful belly-flop. I didn’t learn how to ride a bicycle until I was fourteen, and later, when I learned how to drive a car, I failed the driving test three times. In games at school or at summer camp, no one wanted me on their team. I was so shy in grade school I lacked the courage to raise my hand to ask to use the bathroom. I always hoped I’d make it home in time before I had an accident, and I found that singing Happy Birthday To Me was both distracting and soothing, and got me safely home from P. S. 87 without any mishap. And if there was a kind of strength in self-distraction for coping with unmet needs, I was unaware of it—perhaps because to the outside world, and certainly to my mother, I seemed inept in so many other ways.
“You’re so wishy-washy. Don’t you have any backbone? Why do you let that Sarah Johnson boss you around?” she said when I was six or seven. I didn’t feel bossed around. I loved Sarah and wanted to please her. But I loved my mother, and wanted to please her also. When she said, “All you read are those comics. Why don’t you read books for a change,” I brought home books from the library. It was a couple of years before she noticed that these were teen novels, and then she scoffed, “What are you reading that junk for? Why don’t you read real novels?” To please her I delved into the classics, but then she called me a bookworm and said why did I always have my nose stuck in a book. I was too pale—“Get your nose out of that book and get some sun!” she’d say in the park or at the beach. Then, when I was fourteen she handed me Anna Karenina. “Here,” she said. “It’s time you read this.” Later she would tell me that in Tonopah the only movie playing was Garbo in Anna Karenina, and that was the movie they saw together. So even if things didn’t make sense at the time, they became clear when all the facts were out.
Like when the atomic tests going on in the early Sixties, and my mother joined Women’s Strike For Peace and made us drink powdered milk because she read that cows were eating radiated grass. I thought we were against bombs and war. So in the lunchroom at junior high when the kids were having a food fight, I was bent over the table reading a book while I ate my sandwich, and I ignored the flying vegetables. Even when a spoonful of peas and carrots gently tapped the back of my blue sweater, I didn’t join in. I was proud of the way I handled myself, and told my mother about it when I got home. She was unimpressed with my pacifist nature. “You just sat there and did nothing? Why didn’t you throw something back at them? You should have thrown the food back!” I could fight with my sisters and brothers at home, but in public I could fight with no one. Unlike changing my reading habits, this behavior I didn’t seem able to change. In the Fifties, my sisters and I were told to be little ladies. Then came the Sixties, and junior high and food-fights, and my mother started sending me off to school with the exhortation to “be forceful!” I would nod, and kiss her good-bye. And then I would sigh, knowing that when I came home from school that afternoon she would ask, “Were you forceful today, dear?”
My mother was so forceful when we were young that it came as something of a shock to grow up and realize how short she was. And what was even more astonishing was noticing how gentle and soft-spoken she was in public—how unforceful she was at her jobs as saleswoman or receptionist. At work they loved her friendliness, her high spirits, her mid-western charm. Which is why we loved her at home too, even when we saw her other side. Because even though we were at various times afraid of her, or disgusted, or sad—or filled with pity, or hate—my mother was immensely lovable.
When she came home she would say, “Any calls, cards, telegrams or flowers?” We were all very young then, but I’ve never forgotten the expectation in her voice, her lesson in the possibilities, her joie de vivre. We were slapped and spanked, but sometimes she would only threaten, “I’m going to beat you bloody with a noodle,” which made us laugh. Even when she was unhappy, she could be funny. “Don’t do what I did; just use me as a horrible example,” she used to say. But all of us, my two brothers and two sisters and me, made a mess of our lives in our own way without doing what she did at all. Yet the beginning of our lives, like the beginning of hers, seemed to promise something entirely different from the events that occurred.
My mother was born in the spring of 1925, after the first World War and before the Depression, when the future seemed wide and bright as the mid-western sky. Her parents had met on a blind date and married young. They called one another Owl and Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh. Her father, Howard McCarthy, was a handsome Irishman who did a soft-shoe tap with a straw hat and cane, and worked as a mechanic on the Wabash Railroad in the glory days of train travel. Her mother, Helen Maxon, was English, and had been a school teacher before her marriage. The McCarthys had each lost a parent when they were children, which perhaps was why they made few demands on life. All they seemed to want of one another—and of life—was a pleasant predictability. They had their own house in Decatur, Illinois, and my mother was their only child. They named her Frances Ellen, after her English grandmother who had died young.
Frances was the kind of girl who named her tiny dog Tiny. But this wasn’t due to a lack of imagination; her imagination was in overdrive from an early age. As a child, The Travels of Marco Polo had been one of her favorite books. She dreamed of exotic destinations, or at least Chicago, which was exotic compared to Decatur. She wanted to escape from Decatur as soon as she was old enough.
Maybe her hunger for life was partly due to the attack of appendicitis that almost killed her when she was fourteen. She remembered leaving her body, looking down at herself from the ceiling, and coming back. She remembered the Depression as a time when people stuck together, but because her parents were so close, she often felt left out, and decided that when she got married she would have lots of children so they would never feel lonely or left out. She wanted to be different from her mother, a quiet woman who wouldn’t fly in a plane or learn to drive a car, and shied away from all forms of excitement.
My mother tap-danced and wore ringlets like Shirley Temple. She also liked to sing, but she was not given singing lessons because her father didn’t think them necessary. Her mother deemed party dresses essential, so Frances, who was very pretty at sixteen, had a closet full to wear to the many dances she was invited to.
The United States entered World War II the year she turned sixteen. Frances and her best friend June, awash in red lipstick, dated high school boys who had been transformed into dashing soldiers. June married her soldier first, and Frances was married the following year, before she finished high school. The brides produced babies, and the soldiers were shipped off to war. Frances and her daughter Kathleen, and June and her baby, lived on a base in Arizona while they waited for the war to end.
The only thing I remember my mother saying of that time was how the desert sun bleached the sheets and diapers hanging on the clothes line, and how fresh they smelled. But once her reminiscences traveled further back, to the soldier she was in love with first, and didn’t marry. This first soldier came from a background that was unacceptable to her parents—poverty had been the issue, I think, and then he died in basic training. My mother’s life seemed full of thwarted hopes. Yet the kind of safety net her parents wrapped around themselves did not appeal to her.
One story I never heard and wished I had, was how the tip of my mother’s little finger was cut off below the joint on her right hand. The stump was smooth and rounded, as if her finger was always meant to be that size, but it was still a stump, an abbreviated finger without a finger nail. She never wanted to talk about how it got to be that way.
“Never mind about that,” she would say. “It’s none of your business.” What could it have been, I wondered? A slip of the knife, or a pair of scissors? It was somehow made worse by this mystery.
My mother’s next disappointment came not long after the war ended. June’s soldier had come home, packed away his uniform and gone into business in Decatur. My mother’s husband, a lieutenant in the Air Force, had volunteered to stay in Japan for the occupation.
“Dear Frances,” he wrote, “bring the baby and come on over.” My mother could hardly wait. “I’m going to live in a foreign country!” she thought. But on a routine check-up she discovered the baby needed immediate surgery for a dislocated hip, and afterwards had to wear a plaster cast for a year. Travel was out of the question. She moved back to her parents’ house in Decatur while Kathleen had the hip operation, postponing travel—and her life, it seemed. Meanwhile, the lieutenant sent her a beautifully embroidered white silk kimono and a fan. She was photographed in the backyard wearing the kimono, squinting in the sun and holding the fan open delicately. Behind her, the tomatoes were ripening quickly on the vine.
It was another blow when the lieutenant wrote, “Honey, I’ve signed up for twenty more years.” Being a military wife was the last thing Frances wanted. In protest, she listened to Puccini at full volume, blasting it across North Monroe Street until the neighbors complained. She also ordered books from the Modern Library Club. Books and music kept her going for two years, but she felt life was passing her by. She read Ten Days That Shook The World, about the Bolshevik Revolution. Perhaps that was why she went to the Communist Labor Party meeting advertised in the newspaper. It could have been there she first met Frank Wait, though I also remember her saying they met at a cocktail party. But whether they met first at a cocktail party, and then went to a Communist meeting, or the Communist meeting itself was a cocktail party, cocktails and Communism were involved in their courtship. Frank was the president; she became his secretary. She laughed about her ignorance in thinking they would talk about overthrowing the American government—it was only a study group. They read books by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and the German idealists. They were very idealistic, especially Frank.
Frank was unlike any Decatur man she had ever met. He had been an actor in New York in the Twenties, and had traveled to Europe. During the Depression he couldn’t get a job in the theater and went back home to work in his father’s warehouse business. The Waits owned a theater in Decatur, and Frank put on plays—mostly those of Eugene O’Neill. He was also a writer; before the war he had published a newsletter of his own stories. But this was nothing compared to the fact that he was a Communist. In the Thirties, when he had been forced to guard his father’s warehouse with a shotgun, he had been receptive to the books of Marx and Lenin, and the idea that no one should have to go hungry. “I’m not a Communist, I’m a Socialist,” he would say, grinning. He said that Communism was an advanced form of Socialism, and the Soviet Union wasn’t even a Communist country yet. Yet however he defined himself, he belonged to a group thought subversive, anti-American and anti-God. “I’m not anti-American,” he protested. “In fact, I’m a true patriot because I believe in making this a better country to live in!” In Decatur he was thought of as a catch, despite his political leanings and the fact that he was already forty-two. The McCarthys encouraged the romance.
I have pictures of their courtship, eight-by-ten glossies snapped by restaurant photographers when he wined and dined her in Chicago. They don’t look as if they were talking about “dialectical materialism,” or “theories of the ruling class.” The photos look like movie stills. Though she wore a 1940s outfit, the large brimmed hat and tailored suit, with red nail polish and lipstick, she had the wide-eyed innocence of Judy Garland in Meet Me In St. Louis. Frank looked like Spencer Tracy. She smiled at the camera; he beamed at her adoringly. He was anxious to marry and start a family, though not in Decatur. They both wanted to leave Decatur. He got a job in the new industry of television in Chicago. Frances thought Chicago would be fine for now, but it was still only the mid-west. She dreamed of living in New York City some day.
They planned her divorce, and found that the quickest way meant she had to reside in Nevada for six weeks. Frank said, “While you’re in Nevada I’ll start my new job and find us a place to live with Kathleen. I want to adopt her.” Frances was relieved. She took the bus to Nevada, and when her divorce came through, married Frank in Chicago.
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