Then Again - Diane Keaton [16]
Mary’s idea of motherhood was simple: If Jack misbehaved, she locked him in the closet and walked away. Nothing more. Nothing less. When her good-for-nothing card-shark brother Emmet was down on his luck, she made little Jackie share a room with him. She must have figured, what the hell, she could use the extra money. According to Dad, Emmet was immoral. Right before Dad enrolled at USC, Emmet cheated him out of a hundred dollars. They didn’t speak for two years, even though they continued to share the same room. Dad hated Emmet, but their forced alliance produced something positive. Jack Hall did not become a lying cheat like his stinky-cigar-smoking uncle.
Dad never knew his father’s first name. As with everyone else, he didn’t ask. Mary made sure no one mentioned a man called Chester. Aunt Sadie followed her marching orders and kept her mouth shut. Mom too. The last thing Dorothy wanted was a confrontation with her mother-in-law. Stirring it up with Mary Alice Hall was not worth it. The mystery remained unsolved until I discovered a newspaper article in Mom’s file cabinet.
Wife Hunts 9 Years for Husband;
Asks for Insurance.
Monday June 23, 1930. Positive He’s Dead,
She Declares; Husband Vanished Three Months
After Marriage.
Somewhat like Evangeline was Mrs. Mary Hall. Only she didn’t stick it out as long as the girl of the romantic verse. She searched from coast to coast, seeking Chester N. Hall, who nine years ago left her, when she was his bride in Omaha. She never heard from him and believed him dead. “Because if he were alive he would surely come back to me,” the woman said. “Our love was a great one.”
This is the story told in Mrs. Hall’s petition filed through Attorney Harry Hunt, wherein she is seeking to have Hall declared legally dead so that she may collect $1,000 in life insurance.
On July 26, 1921, three months after their marriage, Hall came home to her, melancholy and depressed. He had a good job, and the wife could not understand. “About 9 o’clock, said the wife, “he took up his hat and said he was going to a movie. He never came back.” Mrs. Hall came to California with their son, Jack, 4 years ago. She said she had made every effort to locate Hall.
Before Jack Newton Ignatius Hall grew up and became a civil engineer, he was Mary Hall’s little Jackie. One can only imagine what that was like. She had balls or, as my son, Duke, would say, “a big old nut sack.” Before Dad sliced and diced the land for housing developments in Orange County during the sixties and seventies, he was just a kid with his nose pressed against a window, watching his mother play poker until midnight in one of the gambling boats off Catalina. Before he spearheaded the design of curbs and gutters that kept water flowing safely to storm drains, he was also a high diver on the USC diving team. As an adult, Jack Hall took pride in severing the earth into blocks of mathematical reason.
Sometimes I wonder if Dad decided to become a civil engineer because it gave him the illusion that he could change something as big and unpredictable as the earth. As a boy he learned he would never be able to change his mother. Mary Hall was never going to hold him tight, or praise him, or wipe away his tears. Closeness wasn’t in the cards. Maybe that’s why he turned his efforts to that other mother, Mother Earth. Now