Until I went to college, most of what I knew about my mother’s own life came from a 1951 Look magazine article I found in the periodicals section of the high school library; I’d been through all her books by then and was looking for her short stories. I hadn’t realized the extent of my mother’s celebrity until I opened the magazine to a full-page photograph of a dark-haired woman who looked a little like Aunt Cat, cigarette holder in one hand, achromatic eyes focused on some distant point. Inga Beart never talked about her childhood, but in between the photographs—Inga Beart in slacks and a feminine blouse, Inga Beart on New York City’s Seventh Avenue—I read about her brief career in Hollywood and her arrival in New York in 1943, at the age of twenty-four. I learned that the publication of her first novel in 1947 made my mother something of a sensation, and I read with special interest about the years that followed. In ’48 she returned to California to work on the film version and later spent some time at an artists’ colony in New Mexico. By the spring of 1950 she was back in New York, being seen in all the fashionable places. I remember wondering even then why there was no reference to my birth, which had clearly happened sometime in between.
My birth certificate has me born down in Santa Fe in 1949. Inga Beart’s biographers don’t have much to say about it. They mention it—me—a little bit, and there’s some speculation as to whether my father was an itinerant trumpet player or the Austrian film director who went on to become her third husband—and, of course, they all get around to certain bits of evidence that point to the possibility that maybe Inga Beart was raped and that’s the reason she never wanted the reminder of it nearby. For obvious reasons I prefer the former hypotheses, but Inga Beart never did tell.
I nodded to the sales clerk and left the bookshop. I walked on, feeling hungry; I hadn’t eaten anything since my breakfast in the park the day before. Church bells tolled in the distance, reminding me of the hours going by. I bought a sandwich, and when I passed a public garden I sat to eat it.
My pant cuffs had ridden up a little when I sat down and I was dusting the crumbs off my lap when I noticed that I had on a pair of Uncle Walt’s socks. They were some of his town socks, black with blue thread. They hadn’t been worn much and though he probably bought them upward of thirty years ago, they were still in fine shape. Which is what I must have been thinking when I took them out of his drawer. I smiled at myself to see them there on my feet, but it was the smile of a person who finds himself suddenly old. I imagine I am not the first to sit on a park bench with a dead man’s socks hanging loose around my ankles, watching the world go by.
I started to have a conversation with him in my head. “You like it there in Paris?” he said to me. “Sure I do,” I said. There was something I would have liked to ask him about, but I wanted an answer, and for that the Uncle Walt inside my head just wouldn’t do.
In all the time Walt and I lived together, when I was growing up and then in his last years when I moved back to the ranch, neither of us ever said much. In the evenings when I was a kid, after he’d gone out to move the sprinklers—because back then we’d drain the pipes and start the motor up by hand—I’d see him out by the pond, the one that never held water, just standing there. Having his think, Aunt Cat said. The sun would be going down and he’d still be there, standing, like he was waiting to catch the leak red-handed. But whatever water was left in the pond always stayed about the same while you were looking at it. After I moved back to the ranch and his leg started getting better I used to drive him down there in the old truck sometimes, and we’d sit, a couple of old guys having our think, not saying much. It was an amiable silence and when Walt passed I missed that silence quite a lot.
It was one of the reasons I finally got around to making the trip to Paris. The ranch took on a new kind of emptiness once Uncle Walt was gone. That, plus I’d gotten a nice note from the lady at the French National Archives saying she’d located the Labat-Poussin file Carter Bristol had looked at. Not that those things were reason enough in themselves. I’d talked myself out of going all the way to Paris plenty of times before; I might have done it again if it hadn’t been for what Walt said before he died.
I had a home nurse come out for those last few weeks, to help manage the dirty tricks death plays once it’s made up its mind. The nurse was a nice girl named Marla and though Walt had held his memory more or less together until the very last, just at the end he started getting confused about who she was. When the pain got bad he’d say, “Damn it, Cat, come along now,” and when Marla clicked his morphine drip a couple of times, he’d say, “That a girl, Cat-bird.” But in what I believe were his last conscious moments, when the two clicks hadn’t been enough and Marla looked over to me and I nodded and she gave him two more, then I nodded again and she gave him two more on top of that, Uncle Walt must have seen someone else entirely in Marla’s face, because he looked from her to me like he was glad to find us there together and said, “Now, Ricky, don’t be mad at her.”
“Mad at who?” I said. “Who are you talking about, Walt? This is Marla here.”
But he looked to Marla again and worked his mouth around the words. “You tell him how it was.”
“Shh,” Marla said.
“Go on and tell him,” he said to her.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You just lie back.”
But Walt was trying to pull himself up, holding on to Marla’s hand. “Go on,” he said to her.
“Shh, now,” Marla said. “I’ll tell him whatever you need. Of course I will.”
“Tell him what you said. You said you didn’t want to take him off to Paris.”
“I’ll tell him,” Marla said.
“Paris?” I said. “What’s that about Paris?” But Marla shook her head at me, and she helped him onto his side for the coughing. She turned down one of the monitors that was beeping, and told me I could take his other hand if I wanted, and we sat like that until the last breaths came, wracking and terrible, and then, as they say, he was gone.
In the weeks after Walt passed I thought a lot about it, wondering why he’d said the name of a city he didn’t have a thing to do with, except that his wife’s sister had gone there and lost her mind, and I realized that it must have been my mother that Walt was talking to as he slipped away. Marla said people say all sorts of things that don’t make sense at the very end, but I wondered if it might have been for my sake that Walt picked my mother for his final conversation. Maybe after all the years he felt she owed her son an explanation. Maybe he figured I had a right to know. Either way, I’m grateful to my Uncle Walt, who used his last words on this earth to give me the closest thing I’ve ever had to a confirmation that my mother really did come back to see us. You said you didn’t want to take him off to Paris, Walt said to her. So her visit had to have been before she made the trip, and she must have come to tell Aunt Cat and Uncle Walt that she was going away to France and leaving me behind.
I don’t think Walt ever gave much thought to the fact that his wife’s sister was a writer. My Uncle Walt was a star man, the way some people are horse men or Harley-Davidson men; I doubt he ever read two books of fiction in his life. Each year for Christmas my Aunt Cat got him a subscription to Sky and Telescope, with the first issue bought off the news rack in town and wrapped up in paper. He bought himself a little telescope, and sometimes when you thought he was out checking on the cows in the evenings he was really up on top of the water tower with it. The water tower was only ten or twelve feet high, but my Uncle Walt took what he could get, and when Aunt Cat said he’d better come down before he broke his neck, he said you never knew but there might be a star ten or twelve feet farther off out there in infinity, and he wasn’t going to miss it for lack of standing on the water tower.
Uncle Walt never said much about what he saw up there. But sometimes when I went out with him to do the irrigation he’d give me a little lesson in astronomy. I can picture us, rolling on boots turned to spheres by the mud, Uncle Walt with a shovel over his shoulde
r, me dragging mine along behind me, making a slick mud trail through the grass while the dogs chased the prairie dogs that had been flooded out of their holes.
Out in the field at dusk when maybe Jupiter was lighting up just past the hills or Mars was glowing behind a constellation of mosquitoes, Uncle Walt would get to talking about black holes and extinct stars, specks of light out there that took a billion years to make it to our eyes, and stopped existing in the meantime.
Uncle Walt would set his boot on the shovel and dig up a thick notch of mud and grass to block the irrigation channel and direct the water down along to the other field, telling me that every inch of sky was thick with galaxies hurtling away from each other into a void whose emptiness you had to bend your mind to get your head around. And I would listen to him with the eagerness particular to nephews kept on charity, doing my best to bend my brain, when the truth was, all I could imagine of the vastness of the Universe was a panel of light bulbs stuck onto a grid in front of the sky.
I’ve wondered recently why it was always only him and me who went out to do the irrigation. Pearl would have been helping Aunt Cat fix supper, but where was Eddie all those evenings? He might have been there too, for all I know, off a little way blocking one end of a prairie dog hole with his shovel while the dogs howled and dug around the other, while I listened to Uncle Walt’s musing on a supernova out there past Polaris that was bigger and hotter than a million suns and would one of these eons collapse in on itself and become a black hole the size of a pinprick with an appetite for all its neighbors. I would have been listening without understanding much, like a puppy so eager to sit and stay that it scootches forward on its haunches with the effort, while my Uncle Walt—who sold his cattle by the pound, his hay by the ton; who bought his gasoline by the gallon and endured those Sunday sermons by the minute; for whom volume, mass, and time were such earthly facts, alterable only by more rain, more fertilizer, or, in the case of church, by calving season—marveled at the suppleness of the universe.
But it’s possible that Eddie wasn’t there, that Uncle Walt took me alone out to do the irrigating. Eddie was going to get the farm—that is, if he had wanted it—Pearl would get the house, and they took turns getting the egg with the double yolk at breakfast. But I used to like to imagine that Uncle Walt wanted to give me something too, a head full of facts or a feeling of having been singled out for a bit of conversation.
Well, you can imagine my surprise when, not long after I’d had my lunch, I looked up and saw my Universe—or more precisely, I saw that panel of light bulbs. I had gotten lost again, having wandered away from the streets around my hotel and onto a big avenue filled with people and packages. I was going slower than the rest of the crowd, trying to find a good place to stop and take out my map. People kept bumping into me, making little snorts of impatience that needed no translation as they jabbed me with the corners of their shopping bags. At that point I hardly had the will to fight it, and the crowd carried me along, leading me straight for the entrance of a big department store.
Above the entrance was a marquee covered with rows and rows of light bulbs. Some of them were blinking, one or two had burned out. I stopped right there and looked at it, not caring that people were flowing all around me and stepping on my feet. It was not an approximation, but the exact image that always used to pop into my head when Uncle Walt started talking about astronomy. I tried to edge my way over to the side of the crowd to get a better look, but all those bodies kept pushing me along. One stream of people was funneling in through the doors of the department store, while the rest hurried along the sidewalk, and by the time I got my bearings and looked back up again, I must have turned a corner because the light bulb marquee was gone.
That evening I hardly felt like sitting alone in my hotel room. My mind was sure to go around and around the thought of those light bulbs stuck against the sky, and I wasn’t sure quite where it would end up. So I took a shower and put on some fresh clothes.
Before I left for Paris I bought myself a rather expensive pair of white slacks, thinking that folks in cities dress differently than we do back home. They’re not the kind of thing I’d normally wear; in fact, the color was an accident. I’d taken them to the register, intending to ask if the same style came in brown or gray, when the salesgirl said, “Oh hi, Mr. Beart,” and I realized she’d been one of my students. Her name came to me as if I’d just taken roll. “Hi Ashleigh,” I said, and asked her how she was. We exchanged some small pleasantries, which for all I know she may have meant, but I was so flustered by the encounter—I had her in class the year my troubles with the school board began and I seem to remember her being friendly with the student the trouble was about. When she said, “Will these be all?” I forgot all about asking for the pants in brown or gray and handed her my credit card.
So, thinking that I might as well get some use out of them, I put them on, and a nice shirt too. I left my hotel key with the lady at the desk, who suggested I try the restaurant next door.
But I didn’t feel like eating. I got out my map and chose a direction I hadn’t gone in yet. I walked until I was thirsty and then sat down at one of the outside tables of a café. It was hardly busy, but even so the waiter took his time getting to me. I’d looked at the French phrases at the back of my dictionary, but it didn’t seem polite to make a mess of his language if I didn’t have to. “Do you speak English?” I asked him.
“Oui,” the waiter said, looking past me at the people on the sidewalk.
“I’d like a beer, please. Something French, if you have it,” I said, thinking it would be interesting to try something new. The waiter said something and when I didn’t understand, he tapped a laminated card stuck into a plastic stand advertising Kronenbourg 1664. You can buy that brand in the grocery stores back home, and it didn’t sound particularly French, but I told him, “That sounds fine.” The waiter may not have understood because he went off to take another order, then stood to the side chatting with a girl on a bicycle for longer than it should have taken to pour my beer. But it was a warm night, the café was on a busy street, and there was plenty to see.
In the time between beginning work on her first book in 1945 and her so-called exile to Paris in 1952, Inga Beart wrote six novels and published two collections of poetry and eighteen short stories—a staggering amount of work, especially considering that she also found the time to marry and divorce two more husbands, get herself addicted to barbiturates, and become a bona fide celebrity, all in the space of about seven years.
That she wrote so much so quickly has always puzzled scholars, especially now that we know that nearly all her characters recreate in detail the lives of chance acquaintances. Even the few critics who still overlook her literary contributions and put her somewhere between hack journalist and outright plagiarist have to admit that it would have required hundreds of hours of interviews to grasp so fully the inner lives of the people that she met. But Inga Beart didn’t leave behind any research notes. There are no transcripts of interviews, and many of the real people who appear in her novels recalled only brief conversations; some of them wondered if she’d even been listening.
People who don’t know anything about her assume she must have been a kind of genius: She sat with a page and the words just flowed. But the few friends who saw her work said it wasn’t like that. None of it came easily. She’d hurl the pages across the room, the typewriter would crash to the floor. She’d slip on a pair of red high heels and go out, surround herself with exiled Russian intellectuals, Europeans with arcane titles of nobility, dissident Chinese, and enough pills and alcohol to allow her to forget the small sad lives of her characters.
Things changed in 1952, when an article in the New York Post exposed the undeniable parallels between the life of a young elevator operator and the title character in her most recent novel. The young man claimed he ought to be compensated for the use of his story, and though nothing came of it, Inga Beart’s publisher dropped her and she couldn’t
seem to find another one; none of the big houses wanted the risk of a lawsuit. New exposés were coming out almost by the week, as former landladies, a Brooklyn chiropractor, even my mother’s own press agent stepped forward to claim this or that plotline as entirely their own, and Inga Beart found herself in disgrace, accused of exploiting her subjects and cheating her readers.
There was no such fuss in Europe, where Inga Beart’s books had sold well from the start, and I suppose Paris was a natural place for her to escape to. I wondered if the waiter might have been a little quicker with my beer if he knew that Marguerite Duras herself had personally extended an invitation to my mother. Inga Beart’s elegance, her inscrutable beauty and glittering lifestyle contrasted with the stubbled prairies and calloused hands that populate her novels in a way the French, I think, particularly appreciated. Like Sartre or Duras, she wrote about the half-shadows of modern existence, but she lived in the light.
So, like so many other American writers and artists, Inga Beart received a warm welcome when she arrived in Paris in the spring of 1952. An editorial in Les Temps modernes that month predicted that the intellectual ferment of the city would give Inga Beart a new lens through which to see her native land. Other commentators accepted her as the latest addition to a list that included Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the like, and set about anticipating a seminal work of open-sky Americana inspired by Paris’s narrow streets and dark cafés.
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