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43 C H a p t e r 4 To Be an Actor 1929–32 Carver wrote norma sometime after he arrived and received this response on December 30, 1929: I don’t know why I’m writing to you immediately after getting your letter. I should wait a month or so and torture you as you have tortured me the past few weeks. But I don’t believe I could hurt you—not like you have crushed me. You promised to write me a letter before you left Texas—and then you promised to wire me as soon as you arrived in California. I don’t hear from you for over four weeks. What was I to think?—that you had quietly walked out of my life for all time. Just when I was beginning to see light again after months of darkness—just as I was about to regain that self-respect that I’d completely lost—and you plunge me right back into darkness and self-disgust. That was cruel, Carver. Norma wanted him to know about her horrible holiday season. She described the dire impact of the October 1929 stock market crash on her relatives, “all in a terrible state financially unless the stocks rally soon. And Daddy continues to try to drown his worries in liquor, and is just about to drown Mother and me in sorrow.” The dry good store was doing very little business. She told Carver about someone they knew who had been caught embezzling $3,000 from the local bank, which had to close when too many depositors tried to withdraw their savings. Without access to her account, Norma was stuck at home—although she made a little money substitute teaching and had gone to the Palace Theater to moon over an actor who resembled Carver. By January 8, she had received three letters from Carver. Apparently he had done much to repair their rupture, although she recalled how t o b e a n a C t o r ( 1 9 2 9 – 3 2 ) 44 he laughed at her when she recited Elizabeth Barrett Browning to him. She quoted, “But love me for love’s sake, that evermore, / Thou mayst love on—through love’s eternity.” Did she also put herself in the poet’s place, wondering whether Carver would play the part of Robert Browning and come to her rescue? No longer angry, Norma now worried that she would lose her man: “Sweetheart, ever since you told me of being unfaithful to me before you left Austin, it has grieved me.” She did not blame him, though, her “mind was in such a turmoil then that I wasn’t really responsible.” What she said had driven him away. Now she wanted him to know that she loved him “heart, soul, and body” and hoped he would stay true to her. She quoted Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy”: Nothing in this world is single; All things by a law divine In one spirit mist and mingle. Why not I with thine? “It seems it might have been written for us,” her letter ended. She wanted him to write her every day. “That was one of our old conditions, wasn’t it?” she reminded him in letters that she sent every two or three days. He did not write that often but made up for lapses with long letters. When Carver arrived in Van Nuys, he found his mother presiding over the nicest house she had ever occupied, the first one with indoor plumbing and situated on an attractive corner lot. CF had rented the home for fifty-nine dollars a month. His ministry had begun well. He had the powerful support of a patron who had heard him preach and had persuaded the congregation to issue the “call” to CF. At the same time, CF’s former mistress followed him out to California. Wilton watched his sly mother go to work. Annis invited the woman to visit the Andrews home in Van Nuys, where the woman would have to see the family she had almost broken up. The kindly Annis then invited the woman to stay the night, insisting they sleep in the same bed. The woman left the next day and never returned. Wilton chuckled in admiration at his mother’s maneuvers. The cultural shock of the move West never wore off. Wilton described the family’s trek across the continent in a British-made Star motorcar as...

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