The Vanishing Point

Woody herman’s music is sweeping the nation,” my mother wrote in 1945, and Kansas City, where she and Dad went to college, was a jazz hub. One year before they had married, my parents—Max and Bobbie—were dating and caught up in a swirl of Kansas City activities: shopping, going to shows, dancing all night in clubs. Dad drove and they often bounced from town to town following the music and twisting to “the boogie.” Sometimes they stopped along the way for picnics where Dad cooked steaks over a wood fire. In a letter dated October 7, 1945, one of many she wrote to my grandmother throughout her life, my mother describes an all-nighter filled with excitement and music. It began with a trip to Topeka where Dad bought “a beautiful brown suit” and my mother purchased “a black slip and bra, good white scarf, and a black purse.” She was ready for a night on the town: “At last I have my outfit.”

They drove to Lawrence to pick up their friends, Neal and Shirley, at the bus station, and headed off for “KC,” arriving about six. “We stopped at the Interlude,” and “had steaks and listened to Joshua Johnson,” who played piano boogie.

The main event though was Woody Herman. “He’s Coming,” the newspaper clipping that fell out of the envelope of one of my mother’s letters announced, “The Country’s Greatest Dance Band.” Herman would be in Kansas City “for one night” in his “only Midwest appearance.” His orchestra included Frances Wayne, as the vocalist, and other “stars” of the jazz scene: Chubby Jackson, Flip Phillips, and Bill Harris.

My parents and their friends arrived at the municipal auditorium about eight thirty. “It is a huge building one block square,” my mother wrote, agog. They worked their way through the crowd to the front of the room, “right below the stage,” and were there when the musicians “took their places.” In 1945, Woody Herman’s star was on the rise. He and his orchestra, called “The Herd,” had just signed a contract with Columbia, recording hits like “Laura” and “Caldonia.” The next year Herman played Carnegie Hall and won awards from Billboard, Metronome, and Esquire as the top band in the country. My mother’s reaction was mixed. The musicians “were peculiar looking” and Herman’s style was too flashy for her taste. “Even on sweet and mellow pieces he always has to end it up with jump and jive.” She preferred the more conventional sound of Les Brown, but admitted that the musicians in Herman’s band “sure could play” and that the audience was “wild about it.”

The room was too crowded for dancing. “We stood there jammed against the stage for two hours,” my mother complained. “Finally Shirley & I could stand it no longer because our feet were killing us.” The two of them went to the balcony and watched from there until 12:45 am when the band stopped. By the time the concert was over, all of the restaurants in the city were “jammed with people” so they headed to Lawrence to drop off Neal and Shirley, eating in Ottawa, a town along the way, and talking until four thirty in the morning. “We had to talk fast and furious to keep awake.” Later they ate a breakfast in Wamego and reached Manhattan at eight o’clock where my dad dropped off my mother on his way to start work, without sleep, at nine.

“What happened to the woman I married?” my dad once asked. My stepmother mentioned the question while we were sorting old photos at her house in Kentucky last year. It was a conversation that she and my dad had when they first met in Saint Louis in 1959 or 1960, consoling each other for the messes that their marriages had become, and it’s a good question. My mother clearly was attracted to the excitement that my dad offered. She liked a pretty outfit with a black purse and fancy undergarments, danced the boogie-woogie, stayed up all night to hear jazz, ate steak dinners, “had more fun”—as in the phrase “we had more fun”—at the show “Anchors Aweigh,” clowned around with the “pepsters” in her sorority, ate “raw eggs” for the heck of it, and asked my dad out to the “gold-digger’s ball.”

Yes, that woman—what happened to her?

Before she married, my mother seemed carefree and fun loving, but after her wedding, anxiety darkened her days. She found herself trapped in a contest with my father, a gregarious, hard-driving and ambitious optimist who liked to live big and felt more like an adversary than a partner. On April 6, 1961, after fifteen years of marriage, she bought a .44 caliber pistol, drove into a park near our home in Deerfield, Illinois, and killed herself. But even in the second year of her marriage, my mother knew something was terribly wrong. She came to believe that the marriage was in trouble because she and my dad had irreconcilable differences.

Differences that I was born to reconcile.

From the beginning, the wedding was rocky. At the close of a semester in 1945, my mother was accepted into the nursing program at the University of Kansas Hospital, and sitting among friends at the college canteen, she broke some bad news to my dad. If she entered the program she would only have six weeks of vacation and the first vacation was only a week long. Dad grew sullen. “Six weeks, my God,” he grumbled several times as she and their friends tried to change the subject. He had plans to set up a veterinary practice in Dodge City, his hometown in the western part of the state, and hoped that she would drop out of school and marry him. “Bobbie,” he blurted out angrily, “one week wouldn’t give us time to get married.”

Her parents had been applying pressure from the other side when marriage seemed likely, urging my mother to complete college. They had always been protective of their only daughter and suspicious of this smooth talker who was as comfortable in boots as in a suit, liked jazz and cars and dancing and fat steaks, and didn’t seem to have established himself in his practice yet. In the end, they were probably glad for any plans that might slow down a wedding.

“I do want to please you,” she had written to them, feeling anxious about being left alone to dangle between these two choices. “It is such a hard decision and not a single person can help me.”

She also felt alone with the choice at the end of her life. By that time my dad was an executive with a pharmaceutical company located in Chicago and was often gone on long trips. I can see her in the living room twisting the rod on the venetian blinds closed and pouring herself a drink. She lifts an album from a stack and eases the record out of its slip, placing it on the changer while moving the heavy arm in position. It is late at night, after my bedtime, but I hear the whoosh of the needle against vinyl and sneak out of bed to watch her from the top of the stairs as the voice of Peggy Lee singing “Fever” fills the lonely room. That was the setting of her final decision and she was alone.

But the earlier choice of marrying my dad was not entirely hers to make. It only seemed that way. “Everything inside of me tells me this isn’t the thing to do,” Dad said in the canteen after his anger had subsided, referring to the delayed wedding plans. “There is only one thing in the world I want,” he added shrewdly, speaking directly to her at this table of friends, “and that is to be married to you—and if this is the only way it can be accomplished—there isn’t much I can say.” If my mother got the language right here, it comes across as a small speech, spoken in the presence of others, sounding a high note about marriage in the context of a grudging concession, but my father was only temporarily stymied. He may not have had much to say at the time, but he would have the last word.

The next semester my mother moved into the dormitory at the University of Kansas Hospital and signed up for her classes: Pharmacology, Surgical Nursing, Medical Nursing, Professional Adjustment, Nursing Arts II, and Diet Therapy. “Sounds like we’ll be busy, doesn’t it,” she wrote warily. She quickly made friends with the twelve other students in the program: “It is practically like living in a sorority except the girls are a lot friendlier.” The bonding became stronger as they studied late into the night for tests and did rounds on the cancer ward together. The patients, who were mainly older women and “pretty grouchy,” were very difficult. “They act like we’re machines to do their any whim no matter how busy we are,” she complained. The new nurses finished each shift exhausted: “Every one of us new students flops on the bed the minute we get back to our rooms after we’ve been on duty.”

She found that, despite the hardships, nursing was rewarding: “I’m so glad I came into training.” She called it a “self-satisfying profession” and said that she “always looked forward to going on the floor.” She surprised herself with the reservoir of kindness that she and the other nurses drew on to do their work. “It’s amazing how sweet and patient you can be.” Procedures, such as a “sitz bath” or the “ortho prep” done before surgery may have sounded daunting in class but they were actually simple in practice, and sometimes it was exciting to be part of such important work. “Guess what I just got through seeing,” she wrote after observing a delivery: “A Caesarian.” Even the depressing duty of working with terminal patients did not get her down: “The patients on 4b (the floor we are on) are mostly late cancer patients. The prognosis of my patient is unfavorable. She has cancer of the uterus and they have given her two transfusions this week.” Working amid so much hopelessness was sad, but it did not discourage her. “If this is the worst, I think I’ll be very happy because I really do enjoy my work on 4b.”

She changed beds, straightened up rooms, bathed patients, filled out charts, and gave enemas, all while wearing heels that made her feet “awfully tired,” but in the end she agreed with one of her fellow nurses in training who said, “There is no reason why I should like it, but I do.”

Dad fought back by proposing to my mother in December before she entered nurses’ training. The ring was beautiful, if modest. “Of course, it isn’t large, but it has a gorgeous setting,” and she immediately “had to dash back into the house to show all the girls.” The night that she said yes, my mother was happy. After dinner my newly engaged parents danced to Gene Krupa’s band. “I wasn’t really expecting to like his band,” Mother wrote, but when she heard Krupa play a few solos and then allow others in the band to take solos as well, she appreciated his modesty and generosity of spirit and, catching glimpses of her ring as she danced, left “completely sold” on the group—and on Dad.

After the proposal my mother set her mind to defending her marriage plans against the objections of my grandparents, who wanted her to go to nursing school and knew that a marriage would jeopardize that ambition. My grandmother also believed that my dad was a “gold digger,” marrying a doctor’s daughter for the money. My mother defended her future husband and assured her mother that she had not been putting on airs. “Only time will tell if Max thinks he is marrying me for my money,” she wrote in an uncharacteristically incoherent sentence, adding defensively that she had not acted in a way that would lead him to think she was wealthy. “Good heavens, I don’t have a fur coat, radio, or anything that would give that impression.”

In the end, my mother won this battle, which meant that my dad won as well. Not being married simply put too much strain on the relationship. Since Dad had just started his practice in Dodge City, which was three hundred miles from Lawrence, he always arrived late on Saturday, giving him and my mother little time together before her curfew. If they were married she would be able to get an apartment and see him for longer hours on his weekend visits. She also promised that she would finish school. She had made up her mind: “There comes a time when you’re ready to be married. If you pass up that time your wedding becomes an anti-climax and a big disappointment.”

The wedding was small, limited to family, and many on my dad’s side were not able to attend, but my mother called it “just perfect.” The service was held in the Methodist church in Glen Elder with a reception outdoors in my grandparents’ yard. In the wedding cake photo, my mother wears a white gown and veil with long white gloves and Dad has on a light-toned, double-breasted suit with a carnation boutonniere. The white tablecloth, the cake, and my mother’s gown glow in the photograph, shedding light in a nimbus against the dark cottonwoods behind her.

They honeymooned at The Elms, a grand limestone hotel in Excelsior Springs near Kansas City known for its mineral waters, large grounds, and horseback riding. The corner room with large windows was, like the wedding, “just perfect”: “The windows had white Venetian blinds and gorgeous light green drapes. The bedroom suite was of very light wood—with a gorgeous green bed spread.” Later in the letter my mother apologizes for using the word gorgeous too often, lamenting that her vocabulary was not equal to the grandeur of the hotel, but she certainly conveys her joy and excitement at being there and being married at last.

“We went riding for an hour. The road curved around the green, tree-covered hills that reminded me of the mountains in the East. We came to a white gate. A man was there so he opened it for us and we rode up the lane between two rows of trees.” At dinner they had their first taste of champagne. “When the waiter brought us the drink he made quite a procedure out of pouring it into the glass.” She drew a small picture of the champagne glass and wrote that the flutes were “very different” and “delicate” with a “stem that is hollow so the champagne flows clear to the bottom.” She admitted to some disappointment with the bland taste, but she was captivated by the drink anyway. “Champagne is so beautiful to look at. The bubbles keep rising to the top of the glass and form a miniature fountain.”

Two weeks later, she decided to quit the nursing program and join Dad in Dodge City.

By July of 1946, my mother was finished with school and had set up house in Dodge City. The house had air-conditioning, a rarity then, but summer temperatures often rose above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit: “I’m getting to be like a potted plant,” she groused, “when I go outside in the afternoon I practically wilt.” She had little experience as a housekeeper despite her nurse’s training. Dad taught her how to cook by showing her the way to make each dish the first time, and he helped choose the groceries at Peterson’s Market in town. Mother also had to clean house, apparently for the first time. “I’m enjoying cooking and keeping house at present,” she admitted, but added a telling reservation. “It won’t be so much fun when the new wears off.”

Still, the changes—the new marriage, a new town, and a house—brought excitement, and the new car, a cream-colored Nash Ambassador, thrilled her. They did not get to choose the color and were pleased when it arrived that it was not a “dirty green” shade. It had a “good-toned radio” and my mother was eager to take her parents for a ride in it when they visited. The most delightful and daunting surprise for her was the gift of Cricket, a black mare. “Last night we went out to see my horse,” she wrote. “She certainly is a beautiful thing.” Cricket was large—between sixteen and seventeen hands high—with a strong neck and shoulder and a deeply defined jugular groove. “She is coal black—not a white spot on her,” and “shines like a million dollars.” Every night that they did not have company, my mother and Dad had to drive to the stables and brush her to keep the glossy shine.

My mother was excited about the horse, but anxious as well. “I’m afraid she will throw me because I don’t know how to ride.” Dad had grown up in Dodge City, a western Kansas town where horses were common, but my mother, from Glen Elder to the east, had little experience with them. So she started slowly, sitting on Cricket while Dad led the mare around a pen. “She isn’t completely broken, but she is awfully gentle.” Within a month, my mother was riding every night and, in one picture taken by a family friend, she and Dad are both on horseback, my dad in an open-necked dress shirt and my mother wearing pleated riding pants, a short-sleeved white blouse, and gloves. Behind them, the bright Kansas sky is darkening and shadows under the horse barn have begun to lengthen.

It is hard to pinpoint where, exactly, the marriage began to sour, but during the first year in Dodge City my father’s world began to eclipse my mother’s as she accommodated herself to her role as the wife of a rural veterinarian, and that shift took a toll. Dad’s routine was to be up at five and he often did not finish at the animal hospital until nine or ten at night. It was a grueling schedule. During their first year, they used their home as the animal hospital, which provided its own set of challenges, in particular the annoying and incessant barking. “We have ten dogs downstairs,” my mother complained, “and would probably have about five more if we only had room for them.” Later, when they moved into an apartment separate from the hospital my mother was relieved. It was more “homey” than living above the hospital, and was located in town so that she could walk to the grocery. Above all, she and Dad got away from the noise: “It is wonderful not to hear the dogs barking all of the time. I told Max that I would have been thrilled to live in a tent if necessary to get away from those dogs.”

Mom helped Dad at first by keeping the books, and found that she liked the work. Her nurse’s training came in handy as she administered shots, gave medications to the cats and dogs, changed bandages, and removed stitches. “Max says it really helps him a lot and I love doing it. Guess I’m just a nurse at heart.” In the end, she seemed to thrive on the hard work and lively atmosphere of the hospital. “We haven’t done a thing all week but work—but you can’t get around it,” she mentioned while describing the routine of their twelve-to-fourteen-hour days.

Despite its intensity, though, work seemed more like a distraction from a growing emptiness than a real source of happiness and contentment. My mother often mentions how much she missed school and nurses’ training. When she sent a gift to a cousin who entered the nursing program at the university hospital, she got sentimental about school. “I still get a lump in my throat everytime I write to the kids in training.” Away from school, she worried about the lack of intellectual challenges. “Yes it is wonderful not having to study all the time, but I’m getting so lazy. I just have to push myself.” Above all, she missed home. While Dad was beginning to make contacts that would eventually take him away from the veterinary practice and Kansas, my mother was looking back. “As usual I’m pretty lonesome,” she wrote after a visit to her family in Glen Elder.

On the envelope of one of the letters from 1947, Dad made a line drawing of my mother. He was fond of drawing likenesses and this is clearly one of her. She looks young and pretty in the drawing, her hair pulled back from her face, exposing a pearl earring. The mouth appears soft and relaxed, but the jawline is firm and the eyes open wide with anxiety. In May of 1947, when Dodge City was preparing for a “big anniversary celebration” in which the town paid tribute to its colorful past, she could only think of home. “Someway I can’t get very excited,” she complained. “Guess I’m getting in a rut.”

She had been married one year.

After her first year of marriage, my mother was often gloomy and subject to mood swings. She worried about money and believed that my father was not telling her the truth about their finances. Cleaning house became the drudgery she had feared, and she often let it go, feeling guilty. In several letters she mentions the need to push past her doldrums and be more efficient in her housework, but staying upbeat was a struggle. During a week when she laid down new linoleum floors in her kitchen, she lost five pounds and found herself constantly tired, and, in the end, the whole project was nerve-racking. And always, after she visited her parents or they visited her, she wrote about being “lonesome.”

In May of 1947, she had to put a tracer on a package that she sent to her mother. At the post office she described the package and its contents and filled out forms with addresses and other information—“a lot of red tape like that.” The next day, while cleaning her car, she found the package under boxes of medical supplies in the trunk. Dad had forgotten to send it. “Boy, right then and there I hit the ceiling,” she wrote. “I just don’t think there is any excuse at all for a man twenty-three years old forgetting to mail a package.” It upset her because my dad knew that the package was important to her and still he forgot to send it. The night did not go well. “Anyway, it ended up that I slept in the front room bed and he slept in the bed on the back porch.”

In the middle of March in 1948, she went through a particularly bad time. “I was so lazy and slow,” she complained, “that it took me all week to get my work done.” The snows had been heavy that year—“we certainly are having a winter”—and it had started snowing again, “and hard, too,” while she was writing the letter. She had stopped working with my dad at the hospital. “It gets me all upset, and makes me cranky and it isn’t worth it.” So instead of going to the hospital as she had in the past, she kept the books at the house, and the job that had brought her satisfaction before was now a source of tension. “Max says I’m not worth having around at the hospital,” she admitted, a sentiment that must have hurt.

In March, they went rattlesnake hunting on the ranch of their new friends, Buck and Wynona Adams. My mother liked the couple a great deal. Buck was wealthy—“but you would never know it,” she wrote, and Wynona “is just as interesting and fun as she can be,” but the snake hunt merely reinforced how much different my father and mother were. The Adamses had two viper pits and my mother went with them and my dad to check for snakes. “I was so scared I didn’t know what to do,” she explained. Fortunately the pits were empty, but the party did not want to go back empty-handed so they started shooting prairie dogs for entertainment, much to my mother’s dismay. “I hate to shoot any kind of animal or bird,” she wrote, though she admitted that the wildlife was not in danger from her. “I couldn’t hit any of them anyway.”

By their second anniversary in May of 1948 the differences between my mother and father, which had been there from the beginning, were becoming unbearable. They celebrated with friends on a weekend fishing trip to Lake Meade, about an hour and a half southwest of Dodge City, Kansas, where my dad had set up his veterinary practice. They arrived at the Meade Auto Park and Camping Grounds around eight thirty on Friday and were joined by several married couples, including their new friends Bill and Sue Zimmerman, as well as two single friends, Donnie and Ramona, who were being set up. “Who knows,” my mother wrote, “maybe we started a romance.”

The presence of Bill and Sue means that the trip was not all pleasure. My parents and Bill Zimmerman had met four months earlier, on a snowy weekend at the Hotel Kansan in Topeka. Bill took them out to dinner and a show as part of a campaign to convince my father to sell his veterinary practice in Dodge City and work for Lederle Labs, a subsidiary of the American Cyanamid Company in New York. The trip to the lake was probably a way to reciprocate, and the night before the drive to the camping grounds, my parents hosted the Zimmermans in Dodge City and “sat up and talked until two.” My mother does not say what they talked about, but since Bill was actively recruiting my dad and Sue was probably there to address my mother’s concerns and answer her questions, the conversation no doubt turned to the possibility of my father’s future with Cyanamid, an initiative which bore fruit two years later. Talking to Bill and Sue gave my mother a glimpse of her future.

At Lake Meade, everyone stayed at the cabins near the cool artesian lake in a Kansan oasis of whispering cottonwoods. The first night the men fished late without catching anything, and my mother had to fry enough chicken to feed everyone while Sue watched. Sue “is very definitely not the domestic type,” my mother wrote, but while my mother dipped the chicken breasts in seasoned flour and eased the pieces into the sizzling fat, Sue kept her company in the large kitchen. About my mother’s height, but a little thinner, Sue was a blue-eyed blond. Like my mother she had married a gregarious and talkative man and was, herself, quiet and soft-spoken, but in some ways she represented all that my mother had given up when she left college to marry Dad. “She has a good job and she said she would rather work all her life than do the housework.” Sue was “pretty quiet,” my mother observed, and the two of them may have felt a little awkward in this recruiting situation. Still, despite the contrast—which probably caused anxiety both ways—my mother felt a sympathy with Sue, who clearly fought off some of the same demons that had haunted her since her marriage to Dad. She is “very intelligent and nice to be with,” my mother explained, and in her reserved way she offered a relief from Bill. She was “exactly the opposite” of her talkative husband.

“I have just pretty well decided that opposites always marry,” my mother realized as she arranged the chicken in the skillet and talked with her blond doppelgänger, a rationalization, to be sure, but one that crystallized the problem in her marriage for the first time.

In a month, she and Dad would be in counseling.

On Friday, June 18, 1948, my parents looked down the long road of their marriage and, terrified by what they saw, sought help. In the two years since they had gotten married, my mother had grown increasingly anxious and depressed and finally confronted Dad. She put it this way in a frank letter home: “Mother, as you know and Daddy probably you know, too, Max and I haven’t been getting along too well. Well, last Wednesday evening I gave Max quite a rude awakening to the situation.” It is not hard to see what led up to this confrontation: his demanding and exhausting job, his tendency to lie and smooth over difficulties, her gloominess, her sense of failure since she had quit nurses’ training and her regrets about that, her nostalgia for home coupled with the sense that she did not really feel at home in Dodge, and, above all, her sense that she and my dad were so different.

So the next day, on Thursday, he found Dr. Jackman and set up the appointment. In the ’40s marriage counseling was in its early stages. “He is an M.D.,” my mother wrote, “but he uses a lot of psychology along with it.” Dr. Jackman was a quiet and sensitive physician—“a little effeminate,” as my mother put it, which meant that my dad was probably on guard. Still, the doctor refused to take sides in their argument and seemed to care about each of them. “He is very interested in helping young people with their marriage difficulties.” He was a “good listener” who spoke with a calm authority that both my mother and my dad trusted: “Once he starts talking quietly and sincerely, you can’t help but listen.”

He spoke with each of them alone before seeing them together. When he was finished, he gave a frank appraisal of what he had heard. After listing the strengths in the marriage, he told both of them “frankly and in front of each other” that their “adjustment to marriage” was a “complete failure.” He admonished Dad about lying, which did not protect my mother and only hid problems and undermined trust. He prescribed medicine for my mother’s chronic sadness and suggested that she return to work at my dad’s animal hospital so that she could “be near” her husband and “really become acquainted with him.” He also insisted that they immediately take a week’s vacation away from home and the pressures of my dad’s work. “You must have a few days alone and together.” When my parents explained that a vacation at that time was “impossible because of finances,” Dr. Jackman remained adamant: “Sell something because your marriage is at stake.”

Implicit in Dr. Jackman’s recommendations, I think, is the idea that my parents had become sexually distant from each other. His suggestions that they “be near” each other and become “acquainted again” and that they find “a few days alone together” sound like a prescription for a couple that has found sexual intimacy to be a problem, and his final recommendation addressed the matter bluntly. “He also said he thought we should start our family,” my mother explained. When she and Dad told him that they both wanted children but felt they had to “postpone them because of finances,” Dr. Jackman, who knew how hard it would be for the parallel edges of their lives to meet, rejected the excuse again. Clearly he thought that my mother’s anxiety about “finances” was primarily a way to avoid facing the real problems of their marriage: “He said if we would work together instead of against each other our finances would improve.”

The therapy session seemed to help. Dad tried, with occasional slips, to walk the hard plank of telling the truth, though the old habit of obfuscation was hard to break: “Max is telling me all about the finances and making himself always tell me the truth. He stumbles once in a while but immediately corrects himself—he is trying very, very hard and I am too.” My mother attempted to shed her dark thoughts about their life together. “Max and I are happy for the first time since our marriage,” she announced triumphantly, and said that her friends could already tell a difference in her. She writes, cryptically, that the “marriage relationship has already been corrected,” probably a veiled way of indicating to her mother that she and my dad were having sex again. She ends the letter with a PS: “I love my husband very, very much and he also feels the same way. Oh! It is a happy day.”

These declarations of happiness, which fill the last two pages of the letter, sound brittle. They describe a fragile joy, an exhilaration too easily earned, and the thought that my parents had been unhappy since they had gotten married indicates the depth of the underlying sadness. Still, they took the trip—for two days instead of a week—to Manitou Springs and Pikes Peak, and my mother felt confident enough to make this announcement. “I have so much faith in our marriage and in Max now that we are trying to have a baby.”

My birth may have distracted them from their problems for a while. “We’re having a wonderful two-day vacation,” my mother wrote on a postcard from Pikes Peak in Colorado. Following Dr. Jackman’s recommendation, they had gotten away from Dodge, at least briefly. The card is a colorized view of the mountains showing the parallel lines of a switchback road leading up to a snow-covered mountain and meeting at the top. White cumulus clouds glow in an azure sky with a hint of a yellow sunset at the horizon. “We’ve really kept busy seeing the sights,” Mom added. “We’re on the Peak now.”

By the end of October, my mother thought that she was pregnant. “I’m pretty sure now,” she wrote, and planned to see the doctor. “Keep your fingers crossed,” she added hopefully. In December my mother had a date: “Baby to be born around June 15. Mother feeling wonderful. Hasn’t been sick a day.” In January 1949, my mother went shopping in Meade for maternity dresses with her friend Eathel but couldn’t find anything to buy. “Eathel was kidding me that I didn’t like them because they made me look pregnant,” she joked. At her monthly checkup, Dr. Jackman mentioned that she would “be feeling movement anytime now.” While pregnant she seemed to have more energy and assured her mother that it was no chore to entertain houseguests. “I sometimes even forget I’m pregnant until I walk in front of a mirror.” I arrived early, on June 9, 1949. My grandparents stayed for the month of June, so there are no letters from that time, but by July tenth my mother reported that I was “doing fine” and, when she talked to me, I would smile.

Unfortunately this happy version of my birth as a way to reconcile opposites does not tell the whole story. The truth is far darker, and even the letters which brought joyous news are laced with black threads. “It’s so cloudy we can’t see a thing,” my mother wrote on that postcard from Pikes Peak in Colorado. “Also, lots of snow.” Although she and my dad did take Dr. Jackman’s advice to get away, they could not afford to spend an entire week, so they made it a long weekend instead, which violated the spirit of the trip, especially since they once again used finances as an excuse. Even with colorization, the scene in the postcard looks desolate, a broken road to nowhere vanishing on a mountaintop that took my mother even farther west from home.

In the third month of her pregnancy, a blizzard struck western Kansas and Dodge City. The newspaper reported eight hundred missing, many of them, including my dad, stranded in cars on the side of the road. He and a friend, Mac McAllister, were on a call near Fowler, a town about thirty-five miles away from home. It was snowing when they left at one o’clock, but no one suspected a blizzard. At 11:15 pm my mother finally called in a report, but she did not learn until 1:15 am that her husband was safe at a farmhouse. It was clearly a miserable night for the men.

In my mother’s letter are clippings from newspapers about hotel lobbies filling with the stranded who spent the night trapped. “As the long-awaited dawn cracked through the ghostly white atmosphere,” one paper reported, “tired faces turned gray in its light.” The storm disrupted communications and blocked roads throughout southwest Kansas. By the second day there were five known fatalities, including Maxine Laughlin, a thirty-year-old woman from Jetmore who tried to escape the blizzard by car with her seventy-five-year-old mother-in-law. When the car stalled, Maxine attempted to get help on foot, but after trudging a mile or so she collapsed and began crawling. It took the recovery team a day to locate her body, which was “found in a kneeling position” under a five-foot drift of snow, her legs bruised and bloody. She was eight months pregnant.

In the last days of 1948, six months from my birth, my parents’ neighbor, Wilson Lane, killed himself in his car, which was parked near the Ford County Lake. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning and police called the death a suicide. My mother learned this news from another neighbor before Dad got home from work, but could not bring herself to visit Lane’s wife, Rose, who was her friend. Later Dad went instead and offered to help, and at the funeral he served as a pallbearer. “I’ve heard so many, many rumors why he committed suicide that I wouldn’t know which, if any, were true,” my mother wrote anxiously. Outwardly, he had “everything to live for,” including a secure job at Combs Automotive Company and three sons. In the letter she speculates on her own mental state and her reluctance to help. “I was nervous and upset,” she admitted. Being “nervous” was her euphemism for attacks of anxiety, just as feeling “tired” was code for depression. Both were becoming more of a problem for her. “Usually I’m calm about such things, but since I’ve been pregnant I tire quicker and get nervous.”

After the new year, my mother’s friend Margaret had a miscarriage when she fell on the stairs. “She and Stan are practically sick with grief,” Mother wrote. “I said they shouldn’t feel too bad—surely they’ll have another if they could have one.” Still my dad cautioned that my mother had better not visit for a few days because Margaret was for the moment inconsolable: “When she sees a pregnant woman,” Dad explained, “she bursts into tears.”

I arrived on June ninth, and was the center of attention. “People have been dropping in all week to see Steven,” Mother wrote, adding that “it has been awfully hard to get my naps in.” When I cried, my grandparents calmed me with long rides in their Chrysler, and my grandpa regaled me with faces and antics to get me to smile. It didn’t work.

“Steven smiles now,” my mother wrote two months after my birth. “Too bad he didn’t do that sooner when you folks were here.”

It was a failure, of course, this attempt to reconcile differences by having me. The differences which loomed large in 1949 only increased as the family grew and Dad became more successful. But I can say that my parents did try and for that effort, which led to my very existence, I am grateful. It is in my mother’s willingness to learn to ride the horse Cricket, though, that I see most clearly her attempt to bridge her differences with my father and save the marriage, an effort she made but could not sustain. “I’ve been riding Cricket every night,” she wrote on August 5, 1946, when her marriage was new. She and Dad could not yet afford a saddle, so she borrowed one from a friend, but she announced proudly that they had just bought a new bridle that morning. Still eager to demonstrate that she was adjusting to her new life, my mother learned to ride and spent time training her horse in order “to show off a little” when her parents visited. “I have ridden Cricket for three nights straight,” she explained, and added that she would probably have to continue that regimen for two or three weeks in order for her and her horse to become completely comfortable with each other. “She sure takes a lot of time, but she is worth it.”

A month later my mother felt confident enough for an all-day trip with my father. “We rode Cricket and Princess on a ten mile ride along the creek Sunday morning.” The terrain would have been irregular prairie land marked by low slopes and fractured, windblown bluffs of silt and sand and sandstone. As they made their way along the stream on horseback, they would have observed a landscape of grasses. In the south, buffalo grass colors the sandy plains with low-lying stretches of apple green and mingles with the purple shades of blue grama, a short grass with dark, eyelash-seed heads. North of town, the short grasses give way to taller mixed grasses of bluestem and side oats, especially along the stream beds, where stretches of light green are suffused with the darkening of the bluish stems. Mixed in with these prairie grasses my parents would have passed fields of winter wheat and milo planted in large sections. From horseback, the largely treeless plains would have appeared as a palette of subtle browns, greens, and blues.

By now my mother, who exercised her horse almost every evening, could ride well, and the all-day adventure suggests how accomplished she had become in a matter of months. “We rested our horses four times, and let them eat grass,” my mother wrote. “It was beautiful.”

The loneliness of my mother’s decision to marry my dad filled her with anxiety. “Not a single person can help me,” she complained, struggling with her choice. So it is a measure of the depth of her despair fourteen years later that she was able to make the loneliest decision of all. After dropping my father off at the train station, she found an isolated spot in a nearby park—followed by a suspicious policeman who trailed at a distance—stepped out of her car, and, even though she hated “to shoot any kind of animal or bird,” turned the gun on herself and pulled the trigger. By that time, after years of suffering and depression, it may not have been a difficult decision at all, but the inevitable conclusion of a piling on of events. The parallel paths of my parents’ lives met at the vanishing point. In my last memory of her, she is alone, looking into the record console late at night with her back to me as she listens to jazz, swaying to the sound of Peggy Lee, drink in hand. The song is “Fever,” with the refrain “what a lovely way to burn,” and she sings the line over and over, holding the notes out, trying to sound good. By then, I suspect, the choice had been made.

I like to imagine the time before she gave up, when she joined Dad for nightly rides across the prairie land around Dodge City as dusk settled over western Kansas. I picture them—young, newly married, and hopeful—trotting slowly through limestone rubble scattered along riverbanks and wooded ravines. From horseback they could look out on long stretches of ranchland interrupted here and there by windbreaks of ash, elm, cottonwood, and oak. In spring, wildflowers added streaks of blue and purple to the open fields where cattle gathered at wateringholes and deer hid among clumps of blooming barberry, mock orange, and privet. Crests of hills opened onto panoramic vistas of fields, prairie lands, and streams, geese flying overhead in formation, honking while seeking nightly shelter on ponds and creeks. “It’s stunning,” my mother wrote in letters home, looking out on a broad and desolate horizon, knowing that her words were inadequate. “Gorgeous.”