by Theasa Tuohy
The day went downhill from there. After all the exciting stories she’d written in the last week and what had felt like a warm office welcome, she was once again low on the assignment totem pole. Funny Indian expression—what made her think of that? Was she preparing herself for her heritage? Ah, nonsense.
She marched up to Barnes to ask for something better to do than a society luncheon, but he was in familiar form. “The Dow’s skyrocketing, the Yankees appear headed for disaster. Got no time for your bellyaching.” He looked over at the rewrite bank, which was frantically working a story on a collision between a passenger ship and an oil tanker off the coast of San Francisco. He nodded his head in their direction. “Go through the passenger list and see if any are local. Mor’n a hundred dead or missing.”
After that, she got one quick assignment to check out something, which boiled down to a cat up a tree. In the afternoon, she saw Cheesy rushing through the hall to answer what fellows in the office said was a grisly police call, but he didn’t even have time to wave to her.
CHAPTER FORTY
LABOR DAY WEEKEND
Riding home on the el, Laura noticed with a jolt the familiar passing scene on Sixth Avenue. It felt as though she had been away from home for such a long time. Frequently she rode past without noticing what was beyond the train’s windows, but just as often the images she was seeing were replaced in her mind by the familiarity of John Sloan paintings that hung on their own walls or those of her mother’s friends: the curve in the el at 3rd Street, Village rooftops, umbrellas and flowers in the rain. The colors and brushstrokes always streaking the landscape with a feeling of night. She blinked as she stared out, riding above the shops, realizing that the colors of twilight were real, the days getting shorter as the summer receded. Would Evelyn be home when she arrived? She had to find out if the Indian priest was her father. It was crazy, didn’t make any sense that she could have stumbled on it. Yet it all seemed to fit. The picture taken in St. Louis. The man identified as Father Bernard. According to Roy and John, that was the priest’s name. Dean Bernard, they had called him. With the Labor Day weekend beginning, Laura feared her mother might be spending the last warm days at Steepletop, Aunt Edna’s farm in Upstate New York.
She climbed down the wooden el stairs at her stop, her heart racing in anticipation of confronting her mother. As she turned the corner of Gay Street, she could see the light of a small lamp that sat near their front window. When Laura opened the door to the apartment, a recording of Al Jolson’s “Toot, Toot, Tootsie!” was coming from their small radio.
“The wanderer returns,” Evelyn said, looking up from her reading, an unusual and almost welcoming smile on her lips. “It’s been a bit quiet around here without your banging around.”
“Did you have an affair with a priest in St. Louis?” Laura demanded. She knew no other way to approach this. Evelyn would mop up the floor with her no matter what. Everything in the room was out of focus except her mother, as though the tiny lamp were a spotlight. Laura saw that Evelyn had on a new dress. She’d never before seen her wear red. The color seemed bright and shimmery in the small light that felt blinding. “Is it possible he could be my father? I thought he was my grandfather,” Laura faltered, her heart racing. She was so short of breath her next words came out as a whispered gasp. “I look like him.”
Laura had promised herself that she would stay calm enough to at least watch Evelyn’s first reactions, judge her by how she responded, not by what she said. As always, she had little hope that her mother would tell her the truth. But as Laura blurted out her stream of questions in her distress, she registered nothing more than the shimmering light and the blur of Evelyn’s changing facial expressions. What had they been? Fear, shock, horror, anger? Too late to ever know. Laura caught her breath, trying to collect herself—her mother’s face now seemed to show only disbelief. But the book Evelyn had been reading, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, was lying, binding up, on the floor. How had it gotten there? Laura had been so upset she hadn’t even seen it fall.
“Well?” Laura prodded.
“What are you talking about? You’re behaving as though you’ve gone nuts.” Evelyn appeared slightly mystified, but otherwise composed.
Laura was prepared. She snapped open her purse and pulled out the old sepia photo of Evelyn and Father Bernard. She thrust the picture at her mother. “So who’s this?”
Evelyn’s eyes grew wide; she moved her head back first, and then seemed to sink her body backward into her chair, recoiling as if from a threatening object.
Laura walked to the radio and shut off “Tootsie.” The room went silent. Only the drip of the old icebox could be heard from the kitchen. Mother and daughter glared at each other, Evelyn still scrunched back in her chair, Laura standing over her, hands on hips.
“Well?”
“Did Vincent give that to you?” Evelyn’s tone was sharp, but her voice was shaky.
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She said I was supposed to ask you.”
“Why didn’t you?” Evelyn seemed to have gained her composure, her sarcasm was coming back. “What took you so long?”
“I’m asking you now.”
“You’re quite the reporter, just like John Reed, aren’t you? Digging up all that. John would have been impressed.”
“Don’t try to change the subject.”
“You were just a tyke when John went off to Russia.”
“Mother!” Laura was practically screeching. “Is this man my father? Or was he just one more of your many lovers before I was born? You’ve made me believe all my life that my father was unknown. How could you? Deprive me of at least knowing that there was someone, a real person who might have belonged to me? I was like Topsy, who just growed—out of nowhere, like a weed.” Laura was trembling. She had never confronted her mother like this. She had learned at a very young age that there was no point. But why could she never get any kind of response or answers from Evelyn? The woman seemed to revel in torturing her. Evelyn always made her feel as though she had done something wrong. Laura was beginning to guess that her sin was in having been born.
Another long silence ensued.
Evelyn looked down at her hands twisting in her lap, then up at Laura. She reached for her Nietzsche and placed it squarely on her lap as though for support. “Your father was a fine man,” she said. “Loved his religion, but our passion was too strong.”
“Oh my God! You loved him? Did you? He was the only person in your life, then?” Tears were streaming down Laura’s face, and she made no attempt to stop them. “Where is he now?”
“Dead. Died in Germany. There was a strong Freudian movement at the time in Munich. All sorts of brilliant minds, Otto Gross—”
“I don’t care about that! But did you really meet at a lecture on Freud?”
“William James was the lecturer. He was touring the country and came to St. Louis.” Evelyn’s imperious bearing was returning, the font of knowledge puffing up to impart wisdom. “He really was the one who introduced the concept of psychoanalysis to America, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. But tell me about my father, my real father. The one I always assumed was nothing more than a blob of all the men you ever knew.”
“What an utterly disgusting thing to say,” Evelyn snapped. “Wherever did you come up with that?”
“It says Father Unknown on my birth record. You’re the one who put it there.” Laura was finally remembering to watch closely for telltale expressions—Evelyn was frowning, squinting, as though not quite understanding what she was hearing. Now was the time to catch her off guard.
“Tell me about Germany,” Laura said in a soft voice.
The room was in shadow except for the weak front lamp. Neither mother nor daughter had bothered to switch on another light. Evelyn took on a dreamy look, and as though straining to read words written on the wall somewhere behind Laura, she began talking. Laura heard of side
walk cafés, and famous artists and thinkers, and of the vitality of an Old World intelligentsia. Evelyn made no direct reference to her companion of those years, but by listening closely, Laura decided that references to a “Mickey” must surely have been Father Bernard.
Laura was afraid to break the spell, but finally could restrain herself no longer. “Tell me more about Mickey,” she said.
Evelyn’s mood changed in a flash, the dreaminess was gone, her face sagged. It was the first time Laura noticed that her mother was aging. The skin was not quite so fresh, tiny lines showed around her eyes. The severity of her pulled-back hair now revealed a bit more than the sculptured structure of her still-beautiful face.
“He was my father.” Laura did not use a questioning tone. It was demanding, insistent.
“Yes,” Evelyn replied crisply. “He was short and dark, like you. What else do you want to know?”
“Everything.” Laura had trouble getting the word out, her voice cracking, nearly failing her.
A look of pain crossed Evelyn’s face, but she seemed to square her shoulders, resigned, and then began in rapid order to tick off information as though reading from a bio. She informed Laura that Father Bernard was fluent in German, French, and Latin, and that he loved The Katzenjammer Kids. He was a prolific writer for academic journals on Vatican murals and various aspects of church philosophy, and that his doctorate in existential philosophy had led to his early interest in Freud’s teachings. And yes, indeed, he was an Osage Indian who had gone on to the seminary from mission schools.
Evelyn paused, and for an instant the dreamy tone came back, and her voice caught as she said: “He’d never had a date before he met me. I was not quite sixteen.”
Laura gasped, her eyes blinking rapidly as she tried to take all this in.
Then abruptly, with no warning, Evelyn said: “Other than his interest in the Sunday comics, I don’t think he’d be too interested in your work for a tabloid.”
The brutal comment ended the discussion, and Laura climbed the stairs to her attic room. She sat on her windowsill overlooking the sunflowers and tomato plants winding down their summer growth in the yard below, crying over the father she had never known, and her first lover, whom she had known for only four days.
She wiped her tears and smiled ruefully at the thought that this was the scene of another parting. There had been icicles hanging from the trees and snow piled on the vegetable patch in the garden when Aunt Edna had given her the picture, and they had had their final parting as playmates. It was Laura’s fourteenth birthday, two years after Edna had given her the diary. Edna had paid a surprise visit in response to a note Laura had slipped under the door of Edna’s West 12th Street apartment. I thought we would be friends forever, she had written. I miss you.
Laura had included a stick drawing of a sad-faced clown, along with a line from one of Edna’s poems: I shall forget you presently, my dear.
Edna, wearing a purple silk dress with a bright yellow scarf beneath her drab winter coat, showed up the next day saying she’d come to celebrate Laura’s birthday, and found her home alone. Evelyn was out with friends. Edna was her usual ebullient self. “So let’s have a party and imagine that your mother is here. I’ve brought you a tea set that Bunny Wilson gave me.”
Laura smiled down at the garden, remembering. They had made tea, and climbed the steep stairs to come up here. Edna’d made a flourish of setting an empty chair then slyly placing on it the picture of Evelyn in the lacy hat, saying she’d brought it along in anticipation that Laura’s mother would be “out.”
“I have no money to buy you a present, so I’m giving you this. But hide it, and don’t ever tell your mother I gave it to you.” Edna toasted Laura for her birthday with one of the fragile bone china cups, remarking dryly, “I have too much family, and you don’t have enough.” Edna’s sister and mother were with her then, had come down from Maine to live with her. Evelyn remarked on it caustically many years later. “Look what all that cost Vincent. Not just in money, when no one had any, but in energy and emotional drain. Families are a burden—they drag you down, just as hers did.”
As they parted, Edna had said: “I’m sorry, don’t hate me. But my poetry is my passion. It’s my life.” And she was gone. They never played jacks again.
With a determined shrug, Laura came back to the present. Would her father really disapprove of her job? The heck with it; literary journals were boring. Besides, people smiled at her in the office today, finally! And where else could she find a job that allowed her to jump out of an airplane?
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
STOCKS SOAR WHILE A PLANE CRASHES
On the Tuesday after Labor Day, the newsroom was buzzing by midafternoon with stock market numbers: volume was high, prices were soaring. That seemed like old news to Laura, stocks just kept going up, and who cared anyway. She certainly didn’t know anyone rich enough to buy and sell, even though stories kept saying ordinary people were invested heavily in the market. She got excited, though, when Barnes called her over and pointed out a story off the wires that a TAT plane had gone missing en route from Albuquerque to Winslow, Arizona. There were eight people on board, three crew and five passengers.
“Just thought it might be some of your pals,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Laura responded, “none of them would be flying commercial.” But she jumped at what she saw as her chance. After these two days back in the office with boring assignments, she envisioned bleak days ahead. “But that’s a great story, boss. Send me. They’ll be searching for days. This is that train-to-plane, cross-country venture that Lindbergh set up, Transcontinental Air Transport.”
“Are you nuts?” he barked. “The wires’ll cover it. And what makes you think you’re the aviation reporter around here? If I was to send anyone, it’d be Mac. Go back to your desk and finish what you’re doing. We got a paper to get out.”
After a couple of false sightings and a few aborted starts, the search for the plane dragged on for days. It was reported that it had been seen at approximately the same time over both Black Rock, New Mexico, and Kingman, Arizona. The New York Times reported the plane had been struck by lightning and had crashed near Gallup.
The wires and the papers then settled down to stories of selfless pilots scouring for the missing plane across deserted areas of New Mexico. Laura bribed a copyboy with a nickel to give her anything new from the wires. Each time he would bring a story to Laura’s desk, she would wordlessly go dump it under Barnes’s nose. He ignored the silent protest so completely for two days that he not only never reprimanded the boy, but he wouldn’t even put his hands on the copy Laura dropped on him, allowing it to pile up in an untouched mound of paper on the left side of his desk. The tension grew. Lindbergh and his bride of three months, Anne Morrow, joined the search.
“I don’t know about that Lindbergh,” Joe Collins called over from the next desk, chewing his toothpick. “He puts his pants on like the rest of us, one leg at a time.”
“How original,” Laura replied, but in the interest of office harmony, she had softened her tone. Joe beamed, not catching the sarcasm. Laura grinned to herself. Maybe I’m getting the hang of how to deal with these bums.
The other New York tabloids were jumping into the fray with breathless bylined accounts, and Barnes had to relent enough to motion with a nod of his head for an assistant city editor to pick up the piled-up copy from his desk and assign a rewrite man to work the story.
“I think those Ford Trimotors carry two pilots and a steward,” Laura announced with authority to the room at large.
Finally, on Friday, wire stories were ecstatic with the report of a sighting. The pilot of a search plane had spotted four men waving white shirts on a high, flat mesa a hundred miles from Winslow. Rescuers on horseback had been dispatched to the scene. Laura breathed a secret sigh of relief. She would hate to see something like this set the public against flying. She had picked up Roy’s zeal about furthering aviation even while the t
hought of him made her heart ache and her pride hurt. She would never get over what a simpleton she had been. She had forgotten for those few days in Oklahoma the lessons learned through Evelyn not to let her guard down, to be wary: Love is no more than the wide blossom which the wind assails. She couldn’t forgive herself for behaving like such a lovesick idiot.
Then the lost plane story took another sharp turn—it was discovered that the guys on the mesa were Navajos from a nearby hogan who had never before seen a flyover and were waving their shirts in excitement at the spotter plane. Meanwhile, there were new reports of old sightings of a plane “in trouble” over both northern Mexico and southern Utah, well over a thousand miles apart. Search parties were sent to check out both. Laura thought of the Crosson woman who had been killed in the Powder Puff Derby. Marvel went missing on the second day of the race and never made it to Phoenix. Her crash site was found the next morning, though there were calls for the race to be cancelled. Laura worried that the notoriety over the loss of the TAT plane would set the naysayers to clamoring. She almost laughed out loud remembering the comments of the prominent oil man E.P. Halliburton after Marvel Crosson crashed: “Women have proven conclusively that they cannot fly.”
On Saturday, the fifth day of the story, the search area was widened, and Barnes finally relented. He allowed Laura to work the story by phone along with the rewrite man. It had gotten too big for one person to handle. Some wreckage was spotted on the largest volcanic mountain in New Mexico. The story was changing every few minutes. The backshop was replating Page One and getting updated papers on the street nearly every hour. Laura was working the phones, poring over the continual stream of wire stories rushed over by copyboys, typing new leads. Search teams on horseback and foot began the climb up the mountain, then had to make camp Saturday night at nine thousand feet. Laura ripped that last take out of her typewriter and handed it to the waiting kid. Only then did she realize she hadn’t gotten up from her chair in five hours.