I Can’t Write a Memoir (Post 3 of 5)

(back to Post 2 of 5)

Stein Club linocut print by Katherine W. Linn

The day after the reunion was the 92nd anniversary of Lessie’s death. I walked along the Elizabeth River, in a posh Portsmouth neighborhood, noticing the big houses with private docks and expensive boats. As I was walking, I was also birdwatching. My mother’s bird obsession has rubbed off on me, so I always observe those around me.

In the water, there were ducks, egrets, geese, and herons. In the trees, there were big glossy crows, cardinals, and mockingbirds. One was making such a racket above me that I stopped and looked up to see what was going on.

I saw a small hawk. It looked quite pleased with itself, stabbing at its prey, strewing feathers below. The cries were from a nearby mockingbird. She couldn’t save her fledgling, but she refused to let the hawk have a peaceful meal.

I tried to help. I threw rocks towards the hawk to get it to stop, but I have terrible aim. Then I knocked a big stick against the tree, and that worked, although too late for the fledgling. The hawk flew away from the tree, leaving the ground below decorated with soft, tiny feathers. 

The hawk, the fledgling, the mockingbird. I know my mother would have told me to leave the hawk alone, to not interfere with nature. But the scene reminded me of the classic triad: abuser, victim, witness. 

***

After my walk, I set out to find Pinners Point, the place where my father grew up. But it has disappeared, as I discovered when I got lost in a desolate landscape of shipping containers. 

Driving around in circles, unable to find a way out, I imagined my father in that ramshackle place. I found just traces of him: train tracks, overgrown with grass, that would have led to the railyard where they lived without running water or electricity. Pinners Point was long gone, and I was not supposed to be where I was. I drove with increasing panic, trying to find the exit but hitting dead ends. I understood in my bones how we’ve always been from the wrong side of the tracks. 

Eventually someone official and bemused found me and escorted me to an exit.

***

I didn’t learn Lessie’s story until I was in my late thirties, when my father included it in his memoir, along with some of our other family tragedies. It would have helped me, a very sad teenager, to know the story of my great-aunt who was also a very sad teenager. I would have felt less alone and ashamed.

Lessie killed herself because she was despondent. Why was she so tired of life, at just eighteen? Part of her despondency was mourning. She’d lost two sisters, Alice and Alma, one brother Homer, and her father Daniel. Losing Daniel, who was cruel but whose salary housed and fed the family, was no doubt a complicated grief. 

At the time of her suicide, Lessie was getting a lot of attention for her singing. Attention for a young and unprotected talent can be dangerous. Maybe she fell in love with the wrong person. Maybe she was in trouble.

Nature and nurture were involved: she had rough family circumstances and a genetic vulnerability to depression. I think the heart of her despondency was the sexual abuse going on within the family. Daniel abused Lessie, and he also abused Ila. Looking at dates, Nova was constantly pregnant. No doubt he decided he had certain needs and paternal rights to his daughters’ bodies when his wife was unavailable. Many fathers make such decisions.

My father told me about Daniel’s sexual abuse of Ila and Lessie in the last year or so when we were still talking. He mentioned a letter that my grandmother wrote about that abuse. I don’t know where that letter is, but I can imagine its contents. He also told me about the sexual abuse he experienced at the hands of older boys and men in the family: another example of how intergenerational trauma works, how each generation wounds the next.

I’m grateful to my father that he didn’t sexually abuse me, considering our family history. He didn’t have any boundaries around his own promiscuity though, and I was over-exposed to his sexuality from a very young age. It was the 70s, and he was having a wild time in bohemian Atlanta, so I also had a wild time in bohemian Atlanta, just from a child’s POV. There were many one-night stands, girlfriends who came and went, and three more wives after my mom. He gave me a little brother, who I knew about, and a little sister, who I did not know about. My sister and I now joke about having great immune systems from spending our tender years at the Stein Club. My brother and I don’t speak, because he’s fine with me being the family scapegoat.

***

My father has been married five times. He first married Vicki, an actual oil heiress from Texas. They crossed paths in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, while she was going to library school at UNC. I met her once at her mansion outside LA, where we were served lunch by her assistant. She teased me about choosing the University of Texas for my library degree. She’d forgiven him for what happened between them, and they seemed fond of each other. 

My mother came next. She also met my dad in Chapel Hill. They spent a summer in Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation, where he was performing in Unto These Hills. Then they moved to Atlanta, where friends told him there was acting work. Their relationship was short and violent. It came to an end when my aunt Diane visited, saw him in drunken action, and told my mother that she had to leave him immediately. Diane always protected me, however and whenever she could. 

Number three was Nancy, who lasted a year, two at the most? I remember her as gentle and kind. She was obviously no match for my dad, who was mean when he was drinking, which was always. I knew this although I was only five.

Number four was Vivian Walker. She was gorgeous and sassy and young. She met my dad after he became a celebrity. She was a cool stepmother during the Dukes of Hazzard years. She taught me to play arcade games and took me to see R-rated movies. She managed his acting and then political careers, as well as their finances. Over time, she became more angry, entitled, and manipulative. Money and power can do that to a person.  

Vivian and my father fought like cats and dogs, over any and every little thing. It was constant and it was vicious. I intervened sometimes but mostly I just laid low. I have a vivid memory of  confronting them while holding my baby brother in my arms. They were apologetic and chastised for a few hours, then one of them said something wrong, and they were at it again. I remember how trapped I felt.

Vivian treated me as a side-kick, but this closeness evolved into something else. She used me as her marriage counselor, creating a tense triangle between her, me, and my dad. When she was angry, which was often, she told me things she shouldn’t have, to make me think less of him. She wanted me to have her back, but at the same time, she never had mine. 

By my senior year of high school, my relationship with my dad and Vivian was fraught. I did not want to spend another summer with them, but I had to, because of the custody agreement. My father was running for Congress. In his mind, the world revolved around him, and I needed to catch up with the world. Whenever I tried to assert myself, he would yell at me, “you have to put your family first!” Family meant him, his ambition and ego. 

***

When people find out who my father is, they make a lot of assumptions about me, for example, I’m rich, because of my Dukes of Hazzard trust fund money. HAHAHAHAHA. He has been married five times and has three children with three different mothers! Imagine the amount of alimony and child support and lawyer bills that all cost. And the money he spent on his multiple campaigns for Congress?

He paid for my college education. I’m very grateful. But that was pretty much it. His finances have always been a roller-coaster, and I learned a long time ago to not ask him for help. I started working when I was just a kid, taking care of other kids, and since then I’ve held many different jobs to earn my way: dishwasher, nanny, waitress, housecleaner, barista, bookstore clerk, personal assistant, receptionist, and for one smelly season, candlemaker at the Yankee Candle Company. My stepmother Alma (wife #5) told me that she was grateful I didn’t ask him for money. It was the nicest thing she ever said to me. She followed it up with an insult about my lowly vocation of librarianship, because who would want to do that? 

***

For years after the summer I wound up on a psych ward, even after my father had moved on to Alma, Vivian believed that I owed her an apology. My father would periodically tell me that I needed to apologize to her, even though he was the one who betrayed and abandoned her. I always refused. I was beyond tired of the both of them, these selfish people who ruined my birthday every year with their fighting, who bullied my mother, who begrudged me precious time with my grandmother Landyce and my aunt Diane. Who should apologize to who, and for what!?

More years passed. Vivian became less angry and more sad. She started to reach out to me by email, catching me up on my niece, which I appreciated. We would talk about Alma, and I’d make her laugh by saying mean things. I could tell she was still in love with my dad. She apologized to me out of the blue, about the summer of 1988, about the way she and my father had treated me. She also apologized that I didn’t grow up with my sister. It’s okay, I told her. No, it wasn’t, she told me. 

A few months later, she was dead. It wasn’t a good death. She died alone, and it was several days before anyone noticed. 

To be continued…