She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [53]
Later, Tracey would be unable to find family photos of herself in her mother’s arms, as if even that were a comfort she’d been denied. Most of the time, her care was left to the maid or her father. But he stopped holding Tracey by the time she reached ten, when Mickey falsely accused him of incest. “Even then, he never stood up to her,” says Tracey.
As an adult, she asked her father why he hadn’t stopped Mickey. Her father grew angry and told her that it wasn’t her place to question his actions. But she did. Perhaps it was harder because she truly loved him.
Her best times were spent with her brothers and father in the Texas wilderness, hunting and fishing. Her father taught her to shoot, and in the early 1970s he gifted her with a .20 gauge shotgun, a Franchi, lightweight and easy to shoot. For a few years she shot small animals, squirrels and rabbits. “But I didn’t like killing,” she says. “So I stopped and used it to shoot skeet.”
From early on, Tracey’s life revolved around animals. She had dogs and cats and adored them. They offered her the unconditional love she never received from her mother. “Tracey was dog crazy early on,” says Pat Brooks, a friend whose father was also in the law firm. “She lived and breathed for her animals.”
In many ways Tracey, despite the long brown hair she wore down to her waist, looked like her brothers, stocky and big boned. She idolized them. “They were there with me, I guess, in the trenches,” she says. Once, when she was about ten, she talked to them about taking things into their own hands, by hiring someone to kill her mother. “It was never serious,” she says. “Just one of those things you kick around when you’re with someone else who understands how truly awful it is.”
Tracey went to good schools, did well, and her summers were spent at Camp Longhorn on the Guadalupe River, a prestigious establishment whose campers have included the pampered scions of wealthy Texas families for generations. It was there that as children President George W. Bush and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison swam, played tennis, golfed, and earned “attawaytogos”—kudos for jobs well done. “It’s one of the top camps in the state,” says one ex-camper. “Campers have to have a legacy—a mother or father who attended—to go there.”
By adolescence, Tracey was an athletic tomboy, with shaggy brown hair. “From the beginning, she wasn’t what you would describe as feminine,” says Brooks. “She was always a burly girl.” She became a popular camper, and was asked to be a counselor. “Tracey loved the outdoors, and she was just fun to be around, enthusiastic and good to talk to,” says a former camper. “She loved books and animals, and treated people well. Tracey was the counselor you could count on to stand up for the kids who didn’t fit in.”
Looking back, Tracey would estimate that she took her first drink sometime before she turned fourteen. From that point on she drank nearly every day. It eased her feelings of being separate from the other girls. From early on she felt as if she didn’t belong, not at home and not with the girls who raved about boys and clothes. Later, she’d think about that and believe the other girls saw a masculinity about her that she didn’t yet realize. “I always felt out of place,” she says. “Drinking was a crutch. It took the edge off.”
In high school Tracey dated a football player. “It was what you were supposed to do,” she says. “But my heart was never in it. I never did the boy crazy thing.” That was the year she read Going Down with Janis, a book on Janis Joplin written by her woman lover. Tracey was fascinated with it, especially the love scenes. She read them over and over, until the pages were worn and dog-eared. Yet, she never thought about what that said about her or where her interests lay. “I didn’t see myself in it,” she says.
The “voice” first made its appearance in high school. When she drank, a man’s soft voice belittled her, inside her head. She never thought it was real,