Then Again. Diane Keaton
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 that I think about it, it helps me understand how Dad related, or didn’t relate, to Mom and us kids.
Once in a while he would try to inject himself into Dorothy’s inner circle: us. After all, he was our father. But how was it possible to fit in with his hard-to-understand children and his high-strung, sensitive wife? Every night Dad came home to his family, and every night we’d stop what we were doing as soon as he walked through the door and present a friendly if distant wall of silence. I’m sorry to say we never extended an invitation to join us. Dad seemed to accept it, just as he’d accepted it from his mother.
Three Stories
Dad told us kids exactly three stories about growing up, and no more. There was the story about how when he was little he had rickets so bad he had to wear braces. There was the story about how Grammy Hall made him play the clarinet in Colonel Parker’s marching band, even though he couldn’t stand the clarinet. And there was his favorite story: the story about meeting Mom at a Los Angeles Pacific College basketball game when they were nineteen, and how he knew right then and there that she was the only woman in the world for him. Dad’s ending was always the same: “Six months later your Mudd and I eloped in Las Vegas.” And that was it. Or, as Mary would say, the past schmast.
Three Memories
When I was nine, Dad taught me how to open a pomegranate. He took a knife, sliced around the circumference, laid his hands on either side, and popped it open. Inside was a chestful of garnets—my birthstone. I bit into the pomegranate. Fifty red gems came crashing into my mouth all at once. It was like biting into both heaven and earth.
There wasn’t a family excursion that didn’t lead to the ocean. It didn’t matter if we were camping in Guaymas, or Ensenada, or up the coast past Santa Barbara; every evening Dad would sit down and stare into his acquiescent friend, the Pacific Ocean. Evening was Dad’s designated few moments of peace. As I got older, I would join him with a glass of 7Up with ice. We would sit in silence. Then: “Your mother sure is a beauty.” “Your Mudd—God, do I love her or what?” “Di-annie, do me a favor and be sure to tell your mother what a delicious meal she made.” Compliments were Dad’s way to whitewash his guilt about Mom’s submissive role. He worried about Dorothy, just not enough to change the way he went about living with her. He never contemplated a different approach. As he stared into the ocean, he must have tossed a lifetime of apologies into its silence. Maybe he thought the tide would wash his troubles away.
I thought I was dying. I couldn’t breathe. Asthma was bad enough, but this whooping-cough thing was way worse. When Dad turned me upside down, I got my breath back almost instantaneously. It was like a miracle. Mom was so worried, she kept me out of school for two months of my fourth-grade year. Every day she spread Vicks VapoRub on my chest, and she gave me 7Up with ice hourly. Sometimes she’d even let me watch TV. One night Dad and I saw a drama about a really old lady whose Seeing Eye dog was run over by a truck. I asked Dad why God let a dog die for nothing. He told me not to be scared. That seemed weird, because I’d heard Mom tell Auntie Martha that Dad passed out when he got pricked by a rose earlier that afternoon. I never thought of Dad as a fraidy-cat. After all, he’d saved my life. And it seemed mean of God to let the really old lady on TV lose her dog when she was going to die soon enough anyway. So I asked Dad, “Why do old people have to die just because they’re old?” He put me on his lap and said, “Old people have already had long lives, so they’re prepared for death. Don’t worry, they’re fine, Di-annie.” He gave me a kiss, put me down, and told me to get ready for bed. That night I heard Mom and Dad talking behind closed doors. Maybe Dad felt safe with Mom, safe enough to tell her about scary things like roses that made him faint, or the story of a beloved dog dying from a stupid accident, or just being old.
Think Positive
Dad found his version of the Bible, well, two bibles, in Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I guess that’s why he talked in clichés peppered with catchphrases like “think positive.” As a girl, I repeated it over and over in hopes that I would learn to think and also be positive. When I asked Dad why it didn’t seem to do any good, he’d always say, “Try again.” But what was positive? And, even more important, what was think? I wanted to know. As usual he told me to keep asking, and as usual I followed his advice.
We moved into the beige board-and-batten tract home surrounded by acres and acres of orange groves at 905 North Wright Street, Santa Ana. It was 1957. The utopia Southern California held out to those of us who grew up in the fifties was irresistible. We believed happiness would come from owning a Buick station wagon, a speedboat, and a Doughboy swimming pool. It didn’t take long before the orange groves started disappearing in favor of more developments, with names like Sun Estate Homes. Leveling the Orange out of Orange County made me sad, and I told Dad. His response was concise. “That’s life, Diane, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” In my own misbegotten way, I bought into his belief of living out the American dream, but the loss of the orange trees lingered.
The move to Santa Ana was my prelude to adolescence. Not only was I going to be a young woman; Dad started telling me how pretty I’d be and how some boy would love me all up, and wouldn’t that be fun? I didn’t want any boy loving me, not at all, not for a second. I began to formulate how much better it would be if a lot of people loved me instead of one confusing, hard-to-understand boy. This barely realized notion, among others, unwittingly helped drive me toward acting. Many of Dad’s messages became justifications for seeking an audience in lieu of intimacy. Intimacy, like drinking and smoking, was