There were many instances of abuse in Lu Anne’s subsequent marriages. Mother never indicated to me that her relationship with Neal was violent, but there is the well-documented punch at her head which landed on the wall instead, and left his hand somewhat handicapped. The marriage to my father, Ray Murphy, lasted less than two years due to alcoholism and the frequent beatings he gave her. After the annulment with Neal, Mother married Murphy, my father, in a civil ceremony on April 14, 1949, in Denver. He arrived at the wedding drunk, meeting Gramps and Steve for the first time at the ceremony. Mother was extremely embarrassed but went through with the wedding anyway, though she should have been warned of things to come. During the next year, while she was pregnant with me, she went to catechism every day at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco, which was right across the street from our house on Stanyan. She converted to Catholicism for her Irish Catholic husband so that they could marry again in church before I was born. Their “official” Catholic wedding took place at St. Agnes Church on November 15, 1950. I was born December 18, 1950.
My father was a merchant marine when they met, but got into sales that first year. She said all went well for a while; but when this Irishman drank, his temper flared and even slight disagreements could escalate into violence. After he repeatedly put her in the hospital with a broken nose and bruises, she wanted out. The final straw was him holding me out an open window as a threat to try to make her stay.
Mother had originally converted to Catholicism to satisfy her husband, without much belief in it. The only churches she remembered from Colorado were the revival-meeting tents, where the preacher would terrify everyone with fire-and-brimstone sermons, which put her off from religion for quite a long time. But increasingly she went to Catholic church now for comfort, and her belief in the religion grew. The church became her safety net, and she spoke to her priest about Ray. Though he dutifully advised her on marriage laws—which demanded, in essence, that a wife stick with her husband through thick and thin, beatings or no beatings—he also, secretly, gave her enough money to escape by bus to friends in Clear Lake, California. She told me she left with only my clothes and a bag of oranges for us to eat. That summer, a single mother for the first time, she found a job waiting tables. She eventually came back to San Francisco and filed for divorce. I never met my father until I was 14 years old, and then there was no further contact with me for several years, though he did send cards to us once in a while. In later years, he and my mother would sometimes visit each other, and—with the old wounds finally healed—they seemed concerned about each other’s lives.
For the next few years, she and I lived alone in the city. She worked at various clubs in North Beach as a cocktail waitress and eventually met and married Sam Catechi, who owned the Little Bohemia nightclub. I was three years old when they married. The following year, they bought a house in Daly City, which is the house I grew up in. Mother kept it until about 1978. I really don’t know the reasons this marriage failed, though they stayed close friends for life, and I always called him Daddy. It was during this time that Mother started having serious medical problems.
She had always been bothered with stomach issues—a cluster of symptoms that are known collectively as irritable bowel syndrome. She had had a tube pregnancy while married to Sam and suffered greatly with gynecological issues after that. It was in 1957 that she became so ill we rented out our house and moved to Florida to stay with Gramps and Pappy (Steve). She was hospitalized many times during that year and, the last time, almost didn’t make it home. Upon her release, she wrote the letter to Neal telling him how important his love had been to her. Eventually she felt better and wanted to get back to San Francisco. She flew back to California ahead of me and got the house ready for us, and then I joined her, flying alone for the first time at eight years old. She and Sam picked me up at the airport with a new puppy named Coco for me.
Our home in Daly City was not the typical suburban house. At one point, we had chocolate-brown walls covered with primitive African oil paintings. Over the fireplace was a picture of two natives, a man and a woman, that scared me every time I looked at it. Their eyes always seemed to be watching me. Mother was not your typical PTA mom. Since she normally worked nights, she would sleep till at least noon most days. It would not be unusual for me to wake in the morning for school to a living room thick with cigarette smoke, full of people I’d never met before listening to jazz, or maybe having a deep philosophical discussion that involved Jack Kerouac, though at that time I did not know who he was.