In Pieces Read online

  Gladys was the most imposing of the sisters and the only one who made me nervous. She’d sit at the end of the dining room table, always in the same chair, playing solitaire or one-handed canasta while she soaked her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts after working all day at Bullock’s department store in Pasadena. I wanted her to like me the best, but no matter how hard I tried, Ricky was always Aunt Gladys’s favorite. Instead I had to content myself with being my grandmother’s favored child, and when I was little I always felt as though I’d been stuck with the shorter end of the stick. It has taken me a long time to see that it was my grandmother’s sturdy presence in my life—never full of tender touches or hugs and kisses, just a quiet, fierce devotion—that created a rock inside me, a safe spot I’ve always relied on but never knew I had. When I hear a house creaking under my feet, I’m instantly back there, in the safety of my grandmother’s world.

  Her name was Joy and that’s what I called her. Never Grandma or Grammy or Newnee, just Joy. Which is ironic, actually, because I don’t think I ever saw an ounce of it in her. Well, maybe tiny glimpses of glee, never joy. Like years later, when we’d come to visit and she’d be waiting on the sofa, watching out the window. Then she’d quickly move to the backyard as our car came up the driveway, ready for us to scramble out. When I’d say a simple “Hi, Joy,” she’d fling her hand over her face as if to hide the smidgen of delight seeping out. The only reason I knew she was smiling was because her big puffy cheeks elevated her glasses, the cheeks that got handed down to me, along with a smaller version of her cow eyes with long lashes—spider-leg lashes, I called them.

  Other than that, it was hard to read what was going on inside my grandmother. One time she caught Ricky and me playing in her “nasty, bug-infested” garage after she told us not to, and I don’t know if she was mad that we had disobeyed or scared that we’d get hurt, but for whatever reason, she chased us around the lemon tree with a switch, a switch she must have had waiting somewhere, ’cause there she was, instantly armed, red in the face and at a gallop. It was the only time in my life I saw tears rolling down my grandmother’s face, which was the most upsetting part of that whole event—those tears. Emotions, in general, were not encouraged, and if I got angry as a child, Joy would pucker her face and say, “Don’t be ugly.” So when she came at us in a blaze of fury and flowing tears, Ricky and I were totally befuddled, not knowing whether she was mad or sad, or what the hell was going on. Needless to say, we spent the rest of the day trying to make her laugh.

  All of the women in Joy’s house, even Perle (whom I knew the least), were linked together like they were playing a lifelong game of “Red Rover,” except they never called anyone else to come over. They’d cluster in the backyard, just the sisters and their mama, sharing the task of turning the crank on the wooden ice-cream maker filled with cream and peaches from Joy’s tree, while we all waited for my mother to come home from her day at the studio. I would lie on the quilt one of them had spread out over the grass and dreamily listen to that bubbling chatter, punctuated by the occasional slam of the screen door as Joy moved in and out of the kitchen. Taking turns, one would talk and then another as they pleasantly gabbed on about what needed to be fixed, or what to cook for Thanksgiving, or whether the cream had set, but never about themselves, never about their past, or even their present. I never learned anything about them from eavesdropping or any other way, and for some reason I never asked. It seemed as if there was nothing I needed to know. And clearly my mother had never asked, because these women had been the backbone of her life, and yet she didn’t know any more about them than I did. And I knew nothing.

  Many years later, long after Mimmie had passed away, just as all the sisters were heading toward the end of their lives, Joy slowly began to talk, revealing the memories that had been hidden for so long. It is Joy’s history, handed to her by Mimmie, her mother, but somehow a thread of that history got woven into my mother’s history and then into mine. I have always felt that, always thought that Joy’s story is somehow an important piece of this puzzle, the puzzle of me and my mother. Even though I’ve never really known why.

  Born in Alabama in the late 1800s, Joy came from a long line of farming folk on both her mother’s and father’s sides. They were not the landowners, but worked on the land and were, for the most part, uneducated. When Joy’s father, Grover Bickley, suddenly died of malaria, her mother, Mimmie, was left penniless, with no means of support and four little girls to care for, my eight-year-old grandmother being the oldest. Immediately, Joy’s sisters Mae, age three, and Perle, not quite two, were sent to live in South Carolina on a farm with one of their father’s brothers, while Joy and five-year-old Gladys were sent to live nearby in the Epworth Children’s Home, where they stayed for almost ten years.

  What shadowy information Joy gave us about the children’s home was all very Dickensian: It was cold, many little children died, the education was all hellfire and damnation, men are the devil and sex is evil. She told us about picking bugs—weevils, I presume, and God knows what else—out of the oatmeal, and that Gladys was sickly, refusing to eat. Joy had to force food into her. Maybe she dramatized some of the details but, bless her heart, she lived there for a good chunk of her childhood, years that no doubt shaped who she was. So if there was some creative accounting on her part, that’s fine with me.

  Long after my grandmother had passed away, I began to research her life, eventually stumbling upon the 1910 U.S. Federal Census report for Columbia, South Carolina. I just sat there, staring at my computer. There they were, Joy and Gladys Bickley recorded as “inmates,” along with a list of other children. That same day, hours later, I found Mimmie, whose legal name was Redonia Ethel, living alone in a hotel located in another town. Her occupation was listed as “housekeeper,” which fits the story that Joy had told us: Her mother had worked cleaning houses during the day and as a seamstress at night, saving everything she could in an effort to reunite with her daughters.

  Nine and a half years after the sisters had entered Epworth, Mimmie somehow arranged to have fourteen-year-old Gladys, who had become deathly ill, moved to the farm where her two younger sisters had been living. But while Gladys was being welcomed by Mae and Perle, seventeen-year-old Joy was being sent to Texas to live with another one of her father’s brothers, where it seems she immediately lost her voice. She simply lost the ability to speak. And who could blame her? She was now separated not only from her mother but from her sister as well. One afternoon, while sitting on the front porch with a young man who’d come to call—conversation being pretty sparse, since she was still without her voice—a letter arrived with a check to cover the cost of a train trip to Chicago, requesting she arrive as soon as possible. It was signed, James L. Bynum, Your Father.

  This is where the story goes from one of plain ol’ hardship to something else altogether. Joy had always thought her father was Grover Bickley, the same as her sisters’. But he was not. When Mimmie was nineteen, she’d run off with the local schoolteacher. After she returned home, claiming she’d been married by a justice of the peace, it was then discovered that whatever had happened, legal hadn’t been a part of it. It was also discovered that several other young women in town had fallen under the spell of the dark-eyed devil, and as the story goes, the scallywag was then run out of town with a pack of yapping dogs on his heels. Who knows what truly happened, but what can’t be denied is the fact that my teenage great-grandmother was now pregnant and had no husband to show for it. As a result, Mimmie’s mother—who had by then given birth to eleven children—kicked her oldest daughter out of the house. And though Grover, a young farmhand who had always fancied Mimmie, swiftly married her, it wasn’t enough to erase the taint that now enveloped the jilted young woman. Mimmie never set eyes on her mother again.

  Before receiving Bynum’s letter, Joy had never wondered about her mama’s family or why she’d never met them, and maybe she never thought to ask. I can’t imagine the impact it must have
had on her when she finally put the pieces together. Not only had she grown up in an orphanage and felt the humiliation of that, but she was now shamed with the sudden knowledge that she was illegitimate. Be that as it may, she was still curious enough to take that train trip to Chicago (presumably with her voice) and meet the rascal of a man she would forever after refer to as her father. Joy would cover her face and actually giggle when she talked about him, always making sure I heard the fact that, though he had a mistress, her successful father—who had by then become an educated lawyer—never married.

  During that trip, Bynum invited his daughter to live with him. Joy declined the offer, choosing to travel back to Texas—a decision she would chew on for the rest of her life. But she never lost contact with him, visiting several more times. She did accept Bynum’s offer to pay for her tuition to secretarial school, and soon my grandmother was making enough money to bring Mimmie to Texas to live with her, along with her sisters Perle and, most especially, Gladys. It was there that Joy met and married my grandfather, Wallace Miller Morlan, and on May 10, 1922, it was there—in Houston, to be exact—that Margaret Joy Morlan entered the world with a full head of black hair and huge dark eyes that matched both her mother’s and her grandfather’s, the dark-eyed devil she would never meet.

  At the bottom of an old mildewed storage box—one of the various containers that were left with me—I found a crumbling leather diary of my mother’s, written in 1935, when she was only thirteen. By this time, she and her family, which included Mimmie, had been living in California for about six years. I know she wouldn’t have wanted me to read it, but I did (sorry, Mom).

  Besides a lot of little-girl chitchat, she writes about her daddy losing his job, writes about money worries again and again, always ending with the fear that they will have to move out of their home. The diary stops there, but I know that not long after the entry was written, everything changed when Joy was awarded a small inheritance from the last will and testament of James Bynum, her father. And that small allotment allowed my grandmother to purchase the cottage that still lives in my heart, Joy’s house.

  The day my grandmother passed away I was cowering in the corner of the hospital room where she had been taken three days before. I kept my eyes on the hypnotic bouncing line of the heart monitor, afraid to look death in the face as Joy hovered, not in this world and not eternally in the other. Now in her early nineties, she’d been hospitalized only once before, had stayed a week to regulate her heart rate and was released to my mother by the medical staff, who said that they wouldn’t keep my grandmother any longer, complaining that she spat on the floor and refused to be touched by any of the male nurses.

  A few months after her first episode, she was back in the ICU, disoriented and declining. It was late evening on that third day of waiting, of my mother and I whispering and pacing, frequently laughing at nothing, always trying to be respectful while Joy lay suspended, the beeping of the monitor getting slower and slower. Suddenly, without warning, my gentle mother moved close to Joy, leaned down to her face while boldly grabbing her arm. “Where are you, Joy?” she demanded in her ear. “Tell me where you are.” I couldn’t understand what my mother was doing, much less why. But when Joy’s eyes immediately fluttered, and she calmly replied, “I’m with Bynum,” we looked at each other, chilled. That night my grandmother stayed with her father, forever.

  I have never stopped thinking about that moment. At the time, I know we were both charmed by Joy’s response, felt that it was romantic to think that in death Joy had looked for her father to come and take her away. But right now, as I try to understand how all of this fits, I am struck… finally seeing the truth. This man, the “scallywag” who took what he wanted without any consequences and left my great-grandmother’s life irrevocably changed, had forever remained a dashing figure, a hero in his daughter’s eyes. Yet it was that woman, Joy’s mother, who had struggled her entire life to be beside her child. Who is the dashing figure in this scenario?

  I went back into my mother’s things, and in another box I found a short typewritten account of a conversation she’d had with Joy at some point. In it my grandmother tells how angry she stayed toward Mimmie. How as time went on, Mimmie had slowed her visits to the orphanage, eventually coming only once a year, saying it was too hard for her to witness the conditions in which her daughters were forced to live. And though, as a child, I never picked up on any of that, never perceived my grandmother’s complex feelings toward her mother, I can see in my memory how Mimmie was always hovering around the edges of her daughters’ lives, not completely ignored but never invited into their center. As I put it all together, I wonder if Mimmie spent her life seeking their forgiveness for the things they never talked about. And Mimmie must have felt no small amount of fury toward her own mother as well, the mother who abandoned her, who shut the door in her pregnant daughter’s face. All of them with wounds that wouldn’t heal because no one acknowledged they were bleeding, and yet each of them needing the other to be near. And that—I realize—is how this story fits into my life. These generations of women, weaving a pattern into a lifelong garment, unconsciously handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter to me.

  The women: Gladys, Joy and Mimmie are standing behind my mother as she proudly holds baby Ricky.

  2

  Dick

  MY FATHER LIVED down the hill from Joy’s cottage in a beige stucco house identical to all the other beige stucco houses lining Foothill Boulevard, homes that sprang up quickly after the war to accommodate the returning servicemen and their families. If I close my eyes and dig down, I can conjure up his house again, can put my little-girl self in that living room and feel how still it is. My father’s house isn’t breathing, not like Joy’s. It isn’t alive. All I can hear is the muffled voice of Vin Scully saying, “Easy, to the inside. That’s strike two,” and from the mantel, above the unused fireplace, comes the crisp ticking of a travel clock, louder than you’d think possible for such a small device.

  This is where I was born—well, not literally in the house. I was born at Huntington Memorial Hospital, not far away. But when my mother carried me home to meet my toddler brother, she brought me to this house, where we lived with my father until I was about three. I remember it as being sparsely furnished, with a feeling of randomness, as if it held nothing cherished, a place to stop but not to live. Maybe it wasn’t always that way, but by the time my brain could hold any images of the place, my mother had already left, taking me and Ricky and every bit of life out of it.

  My father grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, with his very Catholic family and didn’t migrate to California until right before the U.S. entered World War II. He was drafted into the army in November of 1941, receiving notice to report to the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Warren at 8:30 a.m. on December 1—six days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And yet it’s recorded that he enlisted in Riverside, California, on January 16, 1942, when he was twenty-eight years old—over a month later. I’m guessing that by the time he received his draft notice, he was already living in California, where he was working as a pharmaceutical salesman. His paternal grandmother had been living in Pasadena for many years, so perhaps my father went to California to be near her, or even to live with her. None of his three older siblings had left home yet, so maybe he was a young man with a bit of adventure in him.

  My mother and father met during that same year, 1942, when my grandfather invited several young men in uniform to dinner at Joy’s house, saying he knew what it was like to be away from home and preparing to go to war. Three months later, Margaret Morlan and Private Richard Field married and immediately moved to Texas, where he had been accepted into Officer Candidate School at Camp Barkeley. Upon graduating in December, he became Captain Richard Field. Exactly one year later, my father kissed his newly pregnant wife goodbye and was shipped off to Europe, serving for three years as a medical registrar for First General Hospital in London and then outside Paris.

 
My mother and father before I was born.

  Perhaps my father changed during his time away or perhaps when he returned he was expecting things to be as they had been before he’d left. I don’t know. But when he got back, early in 1946, he found that the young housewife he’d left behind was now an independent working actress, plus the mother of a rambunctious baby boy. And, as the story goes, the army captain took one look at his new son, Richard Field Jr., and flat-out didn’t like him. Then when I was born, in November of that year, he completely adored me but still didn’t care for little Ricky. Or that’s what the women who lived in Joy’s house always told us.

  I never felt any of it, how he delighted in me and rejected my brother. But it was the story that Ricky and I grew up hearing. Even after we stopped believing that we’d dry up and blow away if we didn’t eat enough, or that swallowed watermelon seeds would sprout in our stomachs, we continued to accept the tale of our father’s preferences. And the idea that I was his chosen one was like being accused of a crime I didn’t commit. I worried that I’d somehow wronged everyone, was a traitor to the female tribe up the hill. No matter if it was accurate or not, the story hurt my big brother and it was my fault.

  I never knew if it was true. I never knew anything about my father, never asked him a single question about who he was, or what he was feeling, never relaxed around him long enough to be curious. Even at four, maybe before, I felt guarded, afraid to allow him into my heart for fear that his need to be comforted or to feel important or successful or even loved would suffocate me. One of my first memories—one that stays on the tip of my mind—is of my father sitting on the edge of his big bed (the bed that would never hold my mother again) with his head in his hands. My eyes can barely see over the mattress as I stand beside him, my face so close to his weeping bent body I can smell the heavy odor of his Brylcreemed hair. “Have I lost my little girl?” he sobs through his fingers. “Will I never see my little girl again?” I’m not sure if I’m the little girl he’s weeping about or if it’s my absent mother, but his anguish is terrifying. I want to run or cry myself, but instead I put my arm around his neck as best I can, and pat him the way Mimmie pats me when we’re in Joy’s chair. “It’s okay, I won’t leave, don’t worry. I’m here, Dick.”