Beatrice
by Joe Palmer
[ fiction - august 06 ]
I grew up with antagonism, in double binds, damned if I did, damned if I didn't. Everybody around me depended unwillingly and resentfully on each other. Beatrice must have come from a similar home, I think, for she knew how to make the person she had to tolerate feel disliked. She married my father after my parents divorced, so she was my stepmother, Bea Snider. She really loved my dad, but she didn't think much of me. I don't know what I did to show her disrespect, to make her hate me. It surely came naturally to me, living as I did in a pack of co-dependent hyenas. Or maybe she was simply reflecting the dark side of my dad's real feelings towards me, the kid he had to support, the love child conceived in the back seat of a Model A Ford, his permanent link to my mom, the baby he owed a debt of honor. He was Walter Mitty, Beau Geste, Dillinger, Lindbergh, and Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier who never went to war.
My parents had always been splitting up, from the first. During the Depression my dad worked as a field hand and lived with his grandparents, so he had to bring my mom with me inside her to live with them. I was born in their bed. As soon as I was weaned, she took off, giving me to her sister to take care of. My dad then claimed me from Aunt Ruth with threats of violence, and gave me to his mother to keep. Then just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, my mom came back and they set up housekeeping, living across from the Piggly-Wiggly store on 7th St. My dad got a job cleaning vats at the Meadow Gold Creamery. I went to kindergarten. When my mom and dad quarreled I was sent to live with my grandmother. Then after a few years they split up for good, my dad moving out after he caught my mom in bed with Johnny Jordan.
My mom had several gentlemen friends. One used to bring me bottles of Mogen David wine, to shut me up, I suppose. Another gave me a job in his grocery store, stocking, sweeping, and delivering. I told my mom there was no future in married men, so when one of them got a divorce she married him.
Jim Kimmel sold his drug store and bought a brand new Oldsmobile right after he got over being blown off an oil tank. He owned part of an oil well that was pumping. You've seen them out in the fields with the pump jacks bobbing up and down next to the storage tanks. Jim had climbed up the side of the tank with the stub of a cigar in his mouth and opened the hatch to check how much crude oil there was. There was enough. He lost a lot of hair.
I stood up with my mom and Jim in the parsonage when they got hitched, and we took off in the new Oldsmobile down the old Dixie Bee Highway, bound for Miami. I was seventeen. My mom was thirty-five. Jim was an old fart with money.
After a summer in Hollywood Beach, they dropped me off at the teachers college in Terre Haute, good riddance. A teachers college is an orphanage for big kids. The State has to take you in if you have a high school diploma. Jim took a job at a Fisher Body plant in Hamilton, Ohio.
My mom got pregnant and Jim moved out and took up with the sister of the man who got him the job. They had met on the beach. My mom went to Indianapolis with a Greek who owned a restaurant, got an abortion, and then moved in with her father, Orlan Pearl Miley, who was retired there. OP was well off. He was a big handsome man who had married several old widows one at a time, and kept their real estate when they died. His other job was sharpening saws at the Cummings Diesel plant.
The next year I got a summer job helping the technicians at a US Agriculture station in Vincennes. I lived with my dad and Bea, riding my bicycle to work every day. Using a large-scale map of all the orchards in the area, they were testing pesticides on the apple trees.
They would spray certain poisons on certain trees, and then keep careful records of the weather. After periods of time they sent me up certain trees to pick certain apples without touching them. The apples we washed with solvents and made spectrometric records of the residues with a special machine.
It is a trick to pick an apple without touching it. First you hire a monkey, like me, who takes a sharp ten-penny finishing nail and jams it into the blossom end without touching the apple. Then, turning the nail breaks the stem, and you stick the head end of the nail into a hole in the side of a labeled rod, and carry it down a ladder and put it in a rack. I was lithe and limber at age eighteen and blind in one eye. How I did that work without stereoscopic vision I can imagine now. I had a ripe cataract in my right eye, the result of a dynamite cap exploding when I was playing with it on a farm where my cousin Margie was living the summer my parents divorced. I compensated for my lack of sight just as we all compensate for our deficiencies in intelligence, strength, beauty, grace, and mature senses of humor.
The cataract came after years of painful glaucoma all though my high school years, like a headache in the eye that wouldn't go away, a stone in my shoe in my eye, a crown of thorns. To make it worse I looked funny, with one bad eye a real gone guy was I. Gone from the normal healthy and happy rewards of ordinariness, I paid my attention only to music, books, and girls, in that order, but not that summer. Living with my dad and Bea, I picked apples all day and chased girls at night at the Teenage Canteen, a municipal attempt to keep kids from drinking and fooling around.
Bea should have been an old maid, as plain and mousy as my mom was beautiful and outgoing. She must have thought herself entirely fortunate to snare my dad, no slouch in the looks department himself. My mom was “the Jean Harlow of Knox County,” a tall blonde. Bea was wizened, rickety, and blank, an ignorant old girl from the prairies. Her name, Snider, suggests she was of German extraction, but her speech was Irish, I think. She said youse instead of you plural, and wrench instead of rinse. Her cooking came out of a can, she did not read the newspaper, and she had no magazines or books. Her greatest pleasure was watching the Chicago Cubs baseball games on Television, the “Cubbies.”
What my dad saw in her was his secret. She believed him to be a long-suffering hero of World War II. He told her about the Japanese prison camp, and we must never mention the fighting and how he contracted the recurring malaria that hit him from time to time. They were a pair.
I didn't see Bea very often after that summer. I went back to school, met a girl, got married, had kids, and lost my job and my eye. I got fired from my first teaching job, in upstate New York, for being a communist sympathizer. My bad eye became sick and they had to take it out. We decided to look for greener pastures, so we loaded up the old Ford and went to Detroit where I had an ex-Nazi named Fritz who wore a gold ring with a swastika on it to fit me with artificial eye made of plastic, a prosthesis, he called it.
Then we drove to Indianapolis with the babies to see my mother and grandfather on our way to Florida where they were advertising for teachers. My mom was secretary to and mistress of the director of a mental hospital then, Dick Condelaro PhD, a Sioux Indian. OP Miley, my grandfather, had a new old wife who rolled pills at Eli Lily. He sat around all day drinking moonshine and cursing Negroes. He kept a pack of hounds in the backyard with which he hunted rabbits. A dear man, he had given each of us a fifty-dollar bill when we got married.
Then we drove to Vincennes with the two babies, pulling our U-Haul with our clothes and books and things, to see my dad. I parked our Ford in front of the house on Thirteenth Street and knocked on the door. No one answered. Bea sat in the kitchen, visible from the front door, and refused.
So, we went downtown and found my dad at work. When you go there, home, they have to take you in. So on command Bea fried pork chops and opened a can of creamed corn while I had the oil changed in the car.
We hated the discomfort of Coconut Grove and Miami Beach - the mildew, the palmetto beetles, and the heat. At the beach where we rented an apartment, a poor abandoned woman tried to get us to take her blonde baby daughter to keep as our own, fitting right in with our pair of blond little boys. Her name was Heidi. Her mother said we had such nice teeth we must be good parents.
I couldn't find a job. My grandfather had told me we could live at his house in Indianapolis whenever we wanted to, so I hitched up a U-Haul and we headed north. In the Okeefenokee Swamp the engine of the Ford burned out. I had asked a guy at a gas station to service the car and change the oil and filter, and after I paid him a deputy came and arrested him for taking my money under false pretences. The owner had been watching him. He drained the old oil from the engine, and I paid for oil still in a can.
An old couple living in a trailer in the swamp rescued us, Mrs Miller taking the babies, while Mr Miller took me to see Billy King at King Brothers Ford in Waycross, Georgia. They towed the car in and pronounced it dead. Now, you don't want to be a Yankee with a wife and babies in August in Georgia. He wouldn't sell us a car. We couldn't get a loan from anyone except the Ford Company, if we bought a new car. So we did. I phoned my dad and he sent me $500 to pay down on a Ford. That was 1957, when $500 was a lot of money, more like $5,000 today. I can imagine what Bea thought of that. My dad had started his own wholesale produce business then, selling to the remaining grocery stores not yet swallowed up by the supermarket chains. She was keeping his books.
After we got to Romeo, Michigan, where I found a teaching job, I discovered that Billy King had “packed the price” of the new Ford. He had inflated the loan by two thousand dollars. The Ford Motor Company repossessed the car and, I was told, shipped it back to Billy King at his expense.
One summer my dad asked us to meet them at Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, for a fishing vacation. By then we had another Ford, courtesy of my wife's father. We drove across Michigan, through Chicago, and met my dad and Bea at their cabin on a lake. Bea threw a fit and said she wouldn't cook for us, so we turned around and went home to Michigan, relieved not to have to stay with them.
I didn't see my dad and Bea for years. We lived then in Somalia, Thailand, and Egypt, where I was a presence for the US government and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
In 1976 my dad sold the assets of his company and retired, buying a little house in the best neighborhood in town, close to the municipal park and the horseshoe courts, in Burnet Heights. I visited him and Bea on occasion during the summers, and feeling unwelcome I would spend the evenings with the neighbors Bill and Mary Gladys Wheeler, watching television and drinking whiskey, avoiding my dad and his wife. Bill had had a stroke in a swimming pool in Acapulco when he was only thirty-five years old. He couldn't speak much or walk.
In 1989, after Bea buried my dad in his pajamas, she and I went to the bank and signed the papers, substituting my name for his to own $30,000.00 that we were supposed to divide between us, according to my dad's wishes. He didn't leave a will.
The next year, I needed some cash money, so I phoned Bea and asked her to send me my deal of the savings. She told me to go to hell, that she had always resented me making demands on my father, that he had resented me and my stuck-up ways, and that she had taken the money. The papers I had signed gave either of us right to all the money. Ha-ha. So I could go whistle up a rope, and all I ever did was come and get drunk with Bill and look down on her and my dad…
She must have enjoyed telling me off, for she went on for a couple of minutes before hanging up.
I wrote that one off. Live and learn, Jubilee! What the Hell? No skin off my nose. It was her money. She earned it, putting up with my demented dad all those years, skimping and saving, vacationing at horseshoe tournaments, camping in the back of a truck, counting pennies into a jar, fishing for fun and frying the fish. My dad must have thought that he owed me more than he ever gave me, so he left me half of what little he had saved out of a sense of guilt for not being a model father or a rich man.
I did not go home again. I became a Canadian and forgot about my stepmother. No more birthday cards or Christmas gifts for her, no more hypocrisy, no more politeness. It was a relief.
Then after sixteen years I got a letter from a woman with the power of attorney for Bea:
Joe,
My life expectancy has far exceeded my expectations. I thank the good Lord for this, but I am outliving my money and living on Social Security is not enough. I may need a second mortgage and wouldn't want to leave that debt to you, therefore, please sign the enclosed Quit Claim Deed papers.
Respectfully,
Norma J Collins POA
When Bea went to sell the house, she found that I owned half of it, that my perverse old dad had put my name on the deed. Bea and I were co-tenants with right of survival.
If Bea had been civil and written the truth, that she was old and poor and had had a stroke leaving her paralyzed, and was in a hospice, a nursing home, waiting to die, and the manager of the nursing home, Norma Collins, wanted Bea's money so that she could show a profit, I would have had some hesitation about refusing to sign away my birthright for one dollar. But I did not hesitate.
On good advice I got Cousin Jeff's lawyer to intercede and claim my portion of the proceeds from the sale of the house. The money is now in sequestration while the Canadian Government makes sure it is not drug money, like all large sums that cross the border today. When the money is released next week, I think I'll go see Bea in the nursing home.
