Thea

CHAPTER ONE

“Up, Ma. Time to get up.”

Ma pulled the sheet over her head—as usual. “Five more minutes,” she managed to say before her voice trailed off. Mother hated mornings.

I shook her. “No, not even one more. It’s time to start breakfast. Get up.”

The breakfast my mother needed to start cooking wasn’t ours. I’d eat whatever I could grab from the kitchen quickest, and Ma would have coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. My mother was employed as a cook-housekeeper to a medical doctor, Dr. Hallam—Edward James Hallam III, according to the framed diploma propped carelessly against a pile of books in his office—and the breakfast she needed to get out of bed to cook was his.

“You start it,” Mother mumbled, head still under the sheet. “You can do that, can’t you? Please? You get it started, and I’ll be along in a minute.”

If this were a Saturday, Sunday, or a school holiday, I would have gotten it started. In fact, every Saturday, Sunday, and school holiday, I did get it started. Doing the cooking myself was much easier than getting my mother out of bed. But this was a school day.

“No,” I said firmly. “I’ve got school. Come on, now. Get up.”

I shook her arm and nagged until Ma finally roused enough to say irritably, “All right, all right,” and swing her thin legs over the side of the bed. “Stop trying to drag me. Do you think I can’t get to the toilet by myself?”

“Wash your face, too,” I answered.

“That’s what you think, isn’t it? That I can’t get to the toilet by myself.”

I started laying out Ma’s uniform: black dress and white apron. Only maids wore caps. I did our laundry (the doctor sent his out), and I was glad I didn’t have the extra work of starching and ironing a maid’s frilled bandeau. “I don’t think anything,” I said.

“Yes, you do. You’re always thinking bad things about me. My own daughter!”

I knew better than to rise to her bait. If I let on she’d gotten me in a tender spot, she’d escalate, repeating her “point” (in this case, that I was unjust) until she made me cry.

Instead, I glanced at the clock—an ornate walnut bracket model that, like my mother and me, had come down in the world. “If you can get to the toilet by yourself, then get to the toilet,” I said in an even tone. “And do it quick, or the doctor’s breakfast will be late.” I’d be late to school, too. I didn’t mention that part. I was fifteen, and my mother hated that I was determined to finish high school instead of getting a full-time job to support us. I was partway through sophomore year now, with two more to go. “How about if I go over to the house and start the coffee while you get dressed?” I offered. “That way, you can have coffee as soon as you get there. That’ll help.”

Still not moving, Ma said, “I didn’t, Thea.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t— do what you’re thinking. I didn’t. I swear before God I didn’t have a drop.”

I knew this was true. I’d have known if she’d been drinking. I always knew.

“Fine,” I said. “Get up, then. I have to leave in a minute.”

The promise of coffee worked. Ma finally shuffled off toward the bathroom. I waited, listening, until the sounds of her washing became more energetic, then hurried out.

The apartment where Ma and I lived was a single room plus bath above the garage of a house in a new neighborhood on the north side of Oklahoma City. Our apartment was only really big enough to accommodate one person, and had never been fully finished, but it was my seventh “home” in four years, and I wanted to keep it. I’d been the one to spot the doctor’s advertisement in the paper and the promise of a separate apartment was the thing that had made me insist Ma apply. I’d watched her lose job after job from being caught drunk and neglecting her duties. She only ever drank at home, so Prohibition notwithstanding, she’d never been arrested, but each job-loss meant starting over, broke, in a new place. I figured a separate apartment to hide her when she was in no condition to be seen greatly increased my chances of finishing a year at the same school I started in.

When I got to the doctor’s kitchen, I brought in the milk from the back porch and lit the burner under the percolator for Ma. Then I cut bread for toast, sliced bacon, and set eggs and butter within easy reach of the frying pan I’d left ready on the stove when I washed the dishes the night before, meanwhile stuffing my face with whatever came to hand. After that, I assembled and filled the coffee-making contraption the doctor referred to as a “cafetière,” because the doctor would not drink percolated coffee. Mother told me this was because he was “Old Money,” an expression I didn’t understand as meaning anything beyond that he was very particular about coffee.

The kitchen clock told me I’d miss the beginning of my first class, but luckily this was only geometry. I ranked a solid second in geometry at Central High School, and my teacher usually pretended not to notice if I was tardy.

The bacon was half-done, and I was about to begin frying eggs when my mother finally made her appearance. I’d really be late for class now. I didn’t complain about this, though, because Ma looked cheerful and was steady on her feet, which she wasn’t always. She felt so good, in fact, that she even offered me her cheek for a kiss.

“Go on,” she said. “I’ll take over.”

I poured her the coffee I’d promised, then ran back up to the apartment both to retrieve my schoolbooks and to ransack it, quickly but thoroughly, for any sign of a bottle or flask. There wasn’t one, and even better, my stash of carfare nickels was untouched. Ten nickels a week for the streetcar was my pocket money, and Ma usually left it alone, but if nickels stood between her and a drink she was determined to have, she’d help herself to anything she could find.

Then, schoolbooks under my arm, I ran for the streetcar stop two blocks away.

I saw Dr. Hallam at the window of the front room as I passed. He saw me, too, which was too bad. The doctor knew I existed, of course, but it was my policy to make myself as inconspicuous as possible to maintain the illusion that my mother was the one—the only one—who got his house clean and his food cooked.

I couldn’t entirely figure out the doctor. He was youngish, nice looking, and mannerly—things everybody wishes they were, but many aren’t. Since he was a doctor, I guessed he must also be very smart and educated. He owned more books than some libraries, and had a car, nice clothes, and a house, so obviously he had plenty of money. He let my mother buy what she needed for housekeeping and paid the bills without even looking at them. Taken altogether, in fact, Dr. Hallam had everything anybody could possibly want in life—and as far as I could see, he didn’t notice he had them or care. He didn’t seem to care about anything, in fact. He seldom talked, and I never saw him smile.

He didn’t have any sweethearts, though if he made half an effort, his looks and money would bring women around in droves, and though he’d lived in Oklahoma City for more than a year, his house was empty beyond a few sticks of dining room furniture, a bed for him to sleep in, and a desk and chair in the library. Aside from a dozen medical books and some stacks of medical magazines, the library’s two walls of shelves were empty. The books that should have been on them were still packed up in crates lining the hallway. Lamps in the doctor’s bedroom and the front room stood on the floor. The house was always going to be too big for him to live in alone. There was no helping that. It had been built for a large family who ended up not wanting it—there was a story there, but I didn’t know it—but I thought if Dr. Hallam brought in at least enough chairs and tables and sofas that he didn’t rattle around the rooms like a bean in a boxcar, he might be more comfortable.

The doctor didn’t try to be comfortable. He didn’t try to be happy. He just—lived. Worked and lived. That was all.

This annoyed me. Personally, I’d have liked to have seen a law passed that said people who had advantages—especially money—and didn’t appreciate them were obliged to share their advantages—especially money—with the rest of us. Ma and I quarreled about a lot of things, but we were always in perfect agreement about wanting more money.

At the Central High stop, I jumped off the streetcar before it stopped rolling and ran for school’s back door.

CHAPTER TWO

I was born in 1911 in a small town in southern Oklahoma when my parents were around forty years old and my brother Tom and sister Jane were almost grown. My arrival surprised everyone, apparently including my mother. She always said I was welcome, but I had my doubts. Ma’s family were only dirt farmers, but she bragged they were “good stock” and claimed she’d married beneath her. I had doubts about that, too. All Ma meant by “good stock” was literate for several generations back, possessors of a Bible and an almanac, and—most importantly in southern Oklahoma—incontestably White. It didn’t mean they had money or any likelihood of ever getting money.

Dad’s family, on the other hand, seemed to be climbing in the world. I didn’t remember my father well, but I knew he’d had an eighth-grade education and made enough working for the railroad for Ma to live in a nice house, wear pretty dresses, and pay for birthday parties and music lessons for Tom and Janie.

That is, he made almost enough money for those things. When Dad died suddenly—I was five years old at the time—it came out that he was in debt, mostly for things Mother’d bought on time payments. Every penny of his railroad life insurance (which was only $250 anyway), along with what my brother Tom raised by selling the piano and some of our furniture, went to settle my father’s estate.

With Dad gone, Ma expected Tom to stay on and take over the role of family breadwinner, but Tom had other ideas. He moved to Louisiana to live, and we didn’t hear from him much. My sister Jane stayed around for a couple years, but at the time Dad died she was already working at a drugstore in town, and it turned out she wanted to keep the money she made there to buy things for herself. When I was seven, she moved to Pauls Valley, and aside from a bare signature on a card at Christmas, we didn’t hear from her, either. Mother was shocked and disappointed by the way her children took care of themselves instead of her.

For a couple of years after that, Ma was able to keep the two of us afloat by selling off most of the rest of our household goods, except for the walnut bracket-clock, which for some reason she loved. After each sale, we lived fine for a while, with new clothes, plenty of food, and bus rides across the border to a town in Texas that had moving picture shows. Each time, as the money ran out, we stayed home more and more and had soda crackers crumbled in milk for dinner, and eventually, just the crackers. Then Ma would sell a few more things, and the good times would come back, although I didn’t recognize this as a pattern until much later.

Finally, when there was nothing left to sell but the house itself, Ma wrote begging letters to Tom and Jane. Tom didn’t answer, but Janie sent five dollars and offered to take me in. She didn’t invite Ma, so I didn’t go.

After that, Ma and I moved from one place to another, staying in cheap lodgings or with relatives of Dad’s who didn’t want us. We ended up in Oklahoma City, where with the very last of the money from the house sale, Ma paid for a business course for herself. Our fortunes had turned, she told me. “Business girls” made good money. We lived in a single room in a boarding house that I entered and left by a window that opened onto an alley to save the money the landlady would have charged for a second tenant, and ate what Ma could smuggle from the table for me.

Ma soon abandoned the business course. She couldn’t get the hang of shorthand, she said, and the clacking of a roomful of typewriter keys gave her a headache. We had no family who wanted anything to do with us, and we didn’t know a soul in town.

Life after that was just Ma, me, and Ma’s faithful friend, liquor. Of the three of us, Mother loved liquor the best, because although it kept her bone-thin and paper-skinned and couldn’t solve any of her problems, it reliably, though only briefly, made her troubles seem less.

My comfort was school. I loved it, and I was good at it. I never had real friends. Moving from place to place (not to mention Ma’s drinking), made friendships impossible. Books were my companions, and my teachers’ praise—not soda crackers—were the meat and drink that fed me. From the time I was ten, my highest ambition in life was to get a high school diploma, and after that the kind of nice job a diploma could get me. Now I was fifteen and resigned to the fact that this meant another three years of keeping my mother employed and reasonably sober.

As I’d anticipated, I was late to geometry class. Although my teacher, Mr. Brody, pretended not to notice me slipping in at the back, some of the students turned around and stared pointedly on purpose to draw his attention to me. Sometimes it seemed like everyone in the class hated me except Homer Escoe, the boy who was always in first place in geometry to my second. Homer was the only student who didn’t seem to mind the fact that, though a girl, I was better at math than most boys. He was always very nice to me, in fact.

When geometry was dismissed, I went on to my next class, literature.

Literature was a new subject at Central. Until 1924, the school only offered regular English classes, which had some reading to them, but were mostly grammar drills and diagramming sentences from things like Poor Richard’s Almanack and the Bible. I didn’t have anything against the Bible (or Poor Richard), but I didn’t like diagramming sentences.

Our literature books, on the other hand, were brand-new and full of modern stories and poetry, so of course every meeting of the school board ended in fights and demands for a re-vote on whether literature classes were tools of the Devil. Oklahoma was Baptist country (my mother was a Baptist), and Baptists were always on the alert for tools of the Devil. I liked literature class, and I liked my teacher, who was young, pretty, and what passed for stylish in Oklahoma City. Sometimes I suspected the real “tools of the Devil” the Baptists were afraid of were young, pretty, stylish female teachers.

After literature came economics—one long hymn of praise to the free-market system—and then civics, where we learned that the fact that Oklahoma’s governors kept getting impeached for corruption meant our justice system was working perfectly, but the fact that corrupt men kept getting elected to the Oklahoma governorship definitely did not mean our political system was in any way flawed. I took notes lightly in pencil so that when the notebook was full I could write over them in ink for another class because notebooks cost money.

Then I went to French class. French at Central was taught by an elderly German man with a strong accent—not a French accent—and an annoying denture-whistle. Monsieur Baumann also taught Latin, but the only language he spoke well was German, which he was not allowed to teach. During the Great War, the teaching of German had been banned at Central, and nobody’d bothered to change the rule back since. Monsieur Baumann was funny—sometimes unintentionally—and he never assigned homework. I liked him.

My school day ended with Physical Education, which I dreaded because our P.E. uniform was laced soft shoes, bloomers, and a middy blouse, and mine were all several years old and too small for me. My teacher, a “sporty” kind of woman with a loud voice and a very short bob, told me almost daily that I “looked like the rag-picker’s daughter”—which was probably true, but I didn’t love her for saying so.