Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [4]
My mother hated the storm cellar too. I think it was one of the many things she disliked about what she called her “dull life.” Born Irene Toppass, she was a great beauty with Rochelle Hudson looks who hungered for more than Bosworth could offer. Our town of five hundred souls was so small that only Main Street had a name and there were no numbers on any of the houses. It had a barber’s shop, school, post office, drugstore, and doctor’s office. A railway line split Bosworth in two, but the trains generally sped through to someplace more interesting and few in town ventured beyond the boundary sign. My grandfather owned a Model T Ford, one of the only vehicles, but he walked to work each day, leaving it to gather dust in the garage.
My mother rebelled against the dullness of her daily existence any way she could. Twelve years younger than my father, she was one of the few women in town who wore makeup and the only one who smoked cigarettes. A couple of times a month she’d dress up nice and drag my father to the Gem Movie Theater. Transfixed, she’d stare up at movies such as San Francisco with Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald, or Movietone newsreels about the reelection of Roosevelt, or the execution of the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, or the death of King George V of England. What Mother most enjoyed, though, were musicals, such as The Great Ziegfeld or anything featuring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The glamour of Hollywood was her only diversion from housework, sewing bees, bridge parties, and church socials.
Devoted to her younger sisters, Mary and Fontaine, who’d lived with their servicemen husbands, Kelly and Bill, in Texas and Florida before settling in Wichita, Kansas, my mother was determined to join them. “Wil-lis,” she’d complain to my father. “We’ve got to get out of this place. There are better opportunities for us elsewhere.” Whenever my parents had one of their fights about it (or rather whenever Mother railed at my father), I’d jump on Pansy, my pony, and take a long bareback ride until the marital storm had passed. Once, during yet another heat wave that seemed to make my mother especially fractious (even though we’d all slept out under the trees), my sister and I escaped together. After trotting around the meadows behind our house, we rode Pansy right through the front door of the Metropole Ice Cream Parlor to order a soda, inadvertently creating the scandal of Bosworth.
My father was a pale man of few words. In all the years they were married, I never saw my parents kiss or cuddle. I sometimes wondered why he stayed with her—except that I think he must have loved her very much. In any event, nobody divorced in our town or family, and the stigma would have been too much. Amazing as it seemed to me, Father had left Bosworth once. During the First World War, he’d traveled to France and other European cities my mother could only dream of. When he returned home, he pulled on his butcher’s apron and never spoke about what he’d seen or done. It wasn’t until after he died that I was shocked to find a poem he’d written about Parisian women with their “bright red lips.”
Whenever my mother sat poring over her Harper’s Bazaar magazine, which came in the mail from New York, or listened to music that made her long for city life, my father would stare bleakly out of the window. Sometimes he’d bury his head in the family Bible and mouth a silent prayer. I’m sure she thought him weak and cold, and it’s true that he was never demonstrative or playful, but I think his quiet strength lay in staying with her for over sixty years.
To be fair, neither of my parents had an easy upbringing. Both from families of five or six children, they’d survived the Depression and then a war. We weren’t poor like the families scratching a living in the Dust Bowl, but we were broke. The only Sears, Roebuck catalogs we saw were old ones torn into strips for the outhouse. Our dolls and toys were made from offcuts of wood. Our clothes were run up on my grandmother’s Singer and