Dreaming : Hard Luck and Good Times in America (9780307807274)

by See, Carolyn

  They’d begin a sentence. Then begin again. Aunt Pete would begin to sweat an awful sweat. Uncle Pat might remark, “Wuh, wuh.” Molly and I would pipe up girlishly, “Oh, would you like another?”

  “Wuh.”

  When my father drove my mother and me home, he’d ask her what she could see in those people. They were so … not what he wanted to be. Mother would have one of her rip-roaring hangovers the next morning and sometimes my father might meanly tease her: “Oh, wouldn’t you want to take just a little glass of wine for your condition? I think I have some of it, maybe a vat of it out back.”

  But just the mention of any kind of alcohol would send her groaning to the bathroom, and he’d relent, hop down to the grocery for vanilla ice cream, open up a fresh bottle of Hill and Hill, because their weekend life was full of banter and teasing and acting silly. Acting silly against a wall of sorrow.

  —

  The truth was: every time my mother squeezed up a fresh batch of orange juice or ladled cod-liver oil into her daughter or did a batch of laundry in the washing machine, or cut a little posy of Cecile Brunner roses to put in a cut-glass Fostoria vase, she was reinventing the wheel of domestic civilization. We had no pictures of her family around the house because she hated her father, who had lived long enough to raise three grown children and then died drunk in a snowdrift. (I have never seen his picture: there are none, anywhere.)

  Mother’s mother was a second wife of three. (Aunt Helen came from the womb of some woman somewhere, but there were no pictures.) Mother’s mother married beneath her, some Irish dude, the man with no pictures, then quickly came down with TB. The husband seemed not to care, and my mother, little Kate Sullivan, learned housekeeping this way: you change your mother’s sheets every morning because of night sweats, and then you roll a series of funnels made of newspaper, twisting the end at the bottom, and line them up along your mother’s bed. During the day, you hold the newspaper for her as she coughs up sputum, then fold over the top and take it out and burn it. That way you control, to some extent, the germs that swarm through the house.

  Mother’s grandparents lived in upstate New York. Her grandfather was a hunting guide and according to the custom of the day drew most of his daily wages in whiskey, which added to his he-man reputation, but didn’t make the family fortune. Mother’s grandmother fed the family from the farm, and fifty or sixty years later my mother remembered a dish of new potatoes and fresh peas cooked up in fresh butter, with cream straight from the cow. “There’s no way you could get a dish like that now, ever.”

  At her own parents’ house, all was poverty and squalor. The Sullivan family moved from Saranac Lake (famous for curing TB) to Pasadena, California, and back again. Her father couldn’t hold a job, and for years at a time the family lived on tea and toast three times a day. An imaginative mother might have thought to buy some vegetables, but this mother was on her back, coughing and dying.

  Greatgrandmother Clara Moxley.

  Though Mother’s half sister had yet to come in and rescue her, Mother did have a full brother, close to her own age, Art. Art grew up lazy, selfish, sluggish, and insolent. He once announced to his mother that he was going out and didn’t know when he’d be back. She, weak and bedridden, propped up on pillows, said she didn’t think that would be a good idea. Art, who was about fourteen, raced across the room and slapped his mother across the face as hard as he could. My own mother, little Kate, stood watching. She ran, got on her bike, and raced to where her father was spending the afternoon. “Art’s hit Ma!” she announced breathlessly.

  “So?” her father answered. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  The tea-and-toast story, the Art-slapping-Mother story, the newspaper-as-sputum-cups story, were all anyone could ever get out of my mother about her childhood. By the time her mother had died and her feckless father married again (all unaware of his last drunken evening to come and the inviting snowdrift that would so easily usher him into the next world), my Aunt Helen, a smart, abrasive typist, would have moved in. When Helen realized that no one cared enough to buy Kate a dress for her high school graduation, Helen spent her own money to do it. (Kate was beautiful by now. Her high school sweetheart, Rohmer Grey, son of the novelist Zane Grey, would come over after school with jars of olives and adoringly watch Kate eat them. The family was still too poor for olives or anything else except the infernal tea and toast.)

  Helen got her half sister an office job after she graduated from high school. They lived at home (not terribly welcome souvenirs from previous marriages) while they saved up money to get an apartment together. As they left home in the morning dressed for work, they’d see their brother, Art, unshaven, slovenly and hung over, slumping in a rocking chair on the front porch. When they came home at twilight, there he’d be, with a little more beard on his chin and a little more liquor in him. The girls made such cruel fun of their brother that fifty years later, as a retired Navy man in San Diego, old Uncle Art, unshaven and half drunk, seeing his sister Kate for the first time in decades, slunk out on the lawn to meet her, wouldn’t let her into the house, and kept two vicious dogs between them.

  That was how the girls addressed the world, to make pitiless fun of it, as my grandmother coughed her way into oblivion, and my grandfather (and mean, scarcely acknowledged uncle) drank their way to death and failure, respectively. The girls made mean fun of all that they saw. Helen got married, had a kid, dumped the kid and her husband, still laughing. Then Aunt Helen snagged Uncle Bob. Kate married the handsome, funny George. After a nightmare of drink and poverty and hard feelings, the younger sister’s luck might turn. George would take care of her, and he was funny. And he was cute!

  But to look in that direction was to find another family irrevocably bruised and hurt. Another grandfather so mysterious and disgraceful that his name was hardly ever mentioned. My father wrote down a family history in his late seventies, when he knew he was dying. He didn’t write it for me, but for another Bob, my half brother, his beloved baby boy, whom he’d had—with his fourth wife—when he was sixty-nine. It is full of brave paragraphs: “Your grandfather’s father, your great-grandfather, was named George Washington Laws. He was a wealthy young man and bought a great deal of fine farmland north of Dallas. He owned slaves, but so did every prosperous Southern family in those days …” Then he fast forwards to the very end of the nineteenth century, writing of his own father, Robert Headsperth Laws, and his cousin, Leander Beaumont Hughes: “They went to a party out in the country one night, and met a girl named Catherine (Katie) Bowlin. They were acting smart alecky, and having a good time with the country girls, and Katie Bowlin went home that night and told her mother ‘Tonight, I met the two biggest fools I have ever known.’ She ended up marrying both of them!”

  My paternal grandfather, Robert Headsperth Laws, Sr., b. 1860, d. 1922. This is his only surviving picture.

  Daddy clarifies this for my little brother: “She married Mr. Hughes first and had two girls by him, Lavinia and Ada.… After Mr. Hughes died, my mother married my father, and they had three children, Penelope (Nell), Robert H. Junior, and me, George N. Laws. Bob died in 1918, Nell in 1933 or 34. All this is in the Laws’ family Bible that Penny has.” Daddy ends his account, which he must have known would have been his last written message to his little son: “My grandfather Laws was wealthy and he left my father a lot of money which he failed to hold on to. But he left me a legacy of love and respect, a memory of courage and integrity.”

  “Little Georgie,” my dad, his older brother, Robert Headsperth, Jr., who would die at nineteen from typhoid, and their favorite sister, Nell, who died in her thirties from TB.

  Oh, Daddy! As always, as full of shit as a Christmas goose, but so kind. There is only one surviving picture of the man who lost the family money and left “a legacy of love and respect, a memory of courage and integrity.” He gambled the money away on riverboats; he killed a man in a gunfight. When his house burned down, he managed to save only the fami
ly Bible and a few drawers of clothes. He drank a lot, with very good reason, and smoked cigars, and when the doctor told him to give up drinking and smoking, he said he would rather die, and did. There’s no clipped obituary of him in the family Bible and the entry of his death shows only a month, not a date.

  I grew up on stories of little Georgie—my dad—growing up in Oakcliff, playing with his brother Bob and his older sister Nell in a modest home attached to a huge backyard. There were tire swings and a dirt fortress with tunnels. The Laws family had kinfolk for miles around and were city fathers of Dallas. There was a Laws Street in town, named for his grandpa and a Record Street named for the family of his grandma’s family, Martha Record.

  My dad’s mother made pies and set them out on the veranda, where armies of little boys out to play could come and snitch a slice. She’d save the bacon and biscuits from breakfast—“wraparound bacon,” Daddy called it, soft enough to wrap around your finger: everyone in the family detested crisp bacon. Shadowy in those stories were the stepchildren from that previous marriage to Leander Beaumont Hughes. Lavinia (the family pill) must have married early. Aunt Ada, Daddy’s half sister (rescuing half sister, it would turn out), told her own story of coming home from a date, kissing a beau on the front porch, and hearing her stepdad’s voice imploring my father—a toddler at the time—to “pee for Papa, Georgie. Come on, pee for Papa!” All seemed cozy, cheerful, pastoral.

  My dad had a second layer of stories: because of family setbacks, he went to work very early for cousins named Red and Ted Tedford. They ran a bootlegging establishment and hired little Georgie to walk bottles of hooch across town in a baby carriage under a pretty blanket. Later, at picnics, George and his brother and cousins would watch the pretty young ladies to see if they could catch them sneaking off into the bushes to relieve themselves. Some hardy young girls could last eight hours, giving rise to a phrase that survives in our family to this day: to have a “picnic bladder” is to pull a window seat in a flight from LA to Sydney or Frankfurt and never have to disturb the person between you and the aisle.

  At dances in the park, young couples whirled on summer nights on a raised bandstand and dance floor. Small boys, my father among them, would scramble in the dirt for change that fell through the cracks. You could divide the boys, Daddy said, between the ones who looked down for change, and the others, who looked up, because many proper young girls, on steamy nights, wore their voluminous skirts and petticoats, but left off their bloomers, because it was too damn hot.

  My dad loved the ladies. In high school, he and his pals would travel out to a local home for wayward girls. Drunk, they’d cry up into the darkness, “Oh, wayward girls! Why don’t you come on down? We’re so lonesome here!” Some of them did.

  My father played the ukulele, and when I was small, he’d play every single verse of “That Strawberry Roan,” or “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” or “Thousand-Mile Blues” or even “Give Me That Old-Time Religion.” He made sure I read the complete works of Mark Twain. He bought me a copy of The Jungle Book. Before I was ten I’d had James Branch Cabell quoted to me until he ran out my ears. And Daddy turned me on to C. S. Forester. “Read the Captain Horatio Hornblower books,” he told me, “and you’ll be ready for Moby-Dick.”

  So when, as a kid, I thought of my father, I thought he was the fun one, and he was the one who loved me. I knew to stay away from my mother; I thought that mothers hated their children and their lives, and dads had the stories and the fun.

  Here’s what really happened to my father. Some of this I found out when I was forty, working on assignment about my dad for Esquire, since he had decided, at the age of sixty-nine, to take up the writing of hard-core pornography. (He would publish seventy-three cheery volumes in about seven years and spend his last three in clinical depression.)

  “So, Dad!” I said on the phone, with my list of questions in my hand, “whatever happened to your Dad? I don’t seem to remember.”

  My father burst into tears. I’d seen him tear up sometimes (when he saw the Watts Towers he got tears in his eyes from what one man can accomplish with nothing but concrete, bits of pottery, and a vision), but I’d never heard or seen him really cry. He sobbed like a kid. He was seventy-one.

  “OK, well then, how about your sister? I know Mother met her once …” After ten minutes I had to get off the phone and hope that his fourth wife could get him back together.

  When my grandmother Kate married Robert Headsperth Laws, she had already been married and had those two daughters—the pill, Lavinia, and Ada, who would grow up wild. Katie had been saved at the age of twenty. She was a good Methodist, a young widow, and those years must have been hard. When she married Robert Headsperth, she was thirty, a little old for bearing children, and not exactly in the pink. Ten months later she had her first child, Nell, (the “Beth” of the family, the one everyone loved). Two years later they had Robert Headsperth Junior and three years after that, my dad, Little Georgie.

  Little Georgie grew up hearing his mother in the bedroom late at night screaming at her husband to leave her alone. (Later, my father refused to have children with his first wife, because he had learned—all too well—that sex after children was untenable and unbearable.)

  Nell, the beloved favorite sister, contracted TB early on. Lavinia jumped ship and got married. Ada began screwing around in an effort to emulate her rakehell dad instead of her devout, morose stepmother. The whole family contracted malaria. My father remembered that when the children were sick and the stench overpowering, his mother would roll up a great swatch of newspaper, light it, and run through the sickrooms, leaving a trail of smoke behind her to purify the air.

  My paternal grandmother, Catherine “Katie” Laws, who shot herself, with Baby Nell.

  It was a disorderly household. When Bob was sixteen and my dad thirteen the boys were fooling around, roughhousing with guns. Bob shot my father just above the heart. “They sat me in a rocking chair and stood in a circle and cried,” my father said. “I was fixin’ to die. I’d never known a man to get shot in the chest and live.” But he did live, and carried the bullet in his chest until his death. Nell’s TB got worse. My grandfather drank more and more. Some people said he was a monster. But the one who got the monstrous last word was my grandmother Kate, who, at 5:45 A.M. on 18 July 1916, after a hellish night with her husband, went into the bathroom and blew her head into a million pieces with one of the family shotguns. She left a blistering note indicting her husband for unmentionable sexual practices (though it may have been no more than forgivable desire to sleep with his wife). It fell to my father to discover what was left of the body. George was fourteen. His mother, who had threatened to “cut it off” if she ever caught him masturbating (this, the kind of single, disturbing phrase that might slip out between endless accounts of church picnics and the correct way to make cold fried chicken), had disposed of her own head instead.

  The family stayed together, shakily. There was no money for anybody to go to college. On the Monday after Bob graduated from high school, he went to work in the Sanitation Department (a fancy way to say he would work in the sewers of Dallas). On his first day underground he cut his finger. Three weeks later he died of typhoid. Nell was sent down to the border, to El Paso, to the nearest TB sanitorium. After George graduated from high school, he went down to be with her. My grandfather was left to consider a life that from absolutely every point of view had turned out to be a failure. His stepchildren detested him. His own children viewed him with alarm. His wife had despised him with all her heart and mind and soul. Weeping, he would record her death in the family Bible: “So sweet so good God took her for his own—she was to [sic] pure for this earth any longer—” But he defended himself, too: “a sad, caring loving husband.” Then he died.

  My dad, George Laws (far right) posing with the staff of a small Southern Californian newspaper. Note the laundry behind them.

  Consider then, what happened in LA in the early thirties
, when George Laws, a darling, hard-drinking newspaperman with one unpublicized marriage already under his belt and a ukulele under his arm, came out to California and met two cute and zany office girls, half sisters named Helen and Kate, who, drunk on freedom and sometimes bad whiskey, typed all day and partied all night.

  George already had a friend out in LA who’d gone stone blind from bad alcohol. George worked city-side on the night shift of the Daily News: he’d seen the seamy side of life. He saw a man who’d been making love to his vacuum cleaner and gotten caught. Wretched and naked, the guy sat on the side of the pulldown bed in his one-room apartment, every physical part of him shivering and shrinking, except for the one part that counted. At first George huddled with the other news guys and made silly remarks, but then he couldn’t stand it anymore, picked up a blanket and slung it across the guy’s lap.

  George courted Helen. Who can say if they had sex? But I think of my father and I think of my Aunt Helen. If one thing is true about both of them, it was that they didn’t hold back when they were older, so why should they have held back when they were younger? They were both tough customers in their way, and that one night, Aunt Helen stood George up. He came to the apartment and Helen had already gone out with someone else. Kate, eleven years younger, barely out of high school, answered the door. Then … she asked him in, and he, with his hat on his head (probably with a press pass in the band) and a newspaper folded around a bottle of scotch, came on in.

  No one could have warned my mother. She was smitten, bamboozled, knocked silly with love. The only men in her life so far had been her father—an unemployed and unemployable drunk, her brother, also an unemployed and unemployable drunk—and Rohmer Grey, who watched her eat olives and asked her over to the Zane Grey mansion on Catalina Island, but he was out of her league: part of a regular family who not only fished and hunted but did things like sit down to dinner together. Here was this … George, whose one supreme talent in life was to make silly jokes, to turn the lead of daily life into gold, and what if it was fool’s gold? You had to take a chance sometime. My mother fell, she jumped, she dove into love. The poor kid didn’t know any better.