“Yes. You remember Bob, don’t you?”
Bob Thompson is a retired lawyer in Shelbina, a town that burned almost completely a few years back. His home is a local landmark, one of the houses where my mother used to imagine living. Betty always wanted to find herself in one of the mansions with columns, mostly haunted-looking and decaying now, that dot river towns such as Hannibal, Louisiana, Boonville, and of course St. Louis. In the city, Granny took us to walk by the huge old houses once owned by river merchants on the old gated streets—Portland and Westminster places. “Aren’t they grand?” Granny would ask my mother and me as we walked past the enormous mansions, under the oldest, greenest trees I will ever see.
. . .
“Who would anyone publish Jay Nixon’s book?” I ask in a little while. “I don’t think anyone would publish a book even by the governor himself.”
“Jay Nixon was the mayor of De Soto!” Betty is emphatic. “He had three children. One is the governor. One is a game warden, and one, Bob told me,” she says, her voice becoming almost a whisper, “is obese. Bob read the book. He read every word.”
Jay Nixon Sr., the father of the governor of Missouri, was my mother’s boyfriend before my father. This was revealed years back, after my dad’s death, when Betty—very excited—handed me an envelope that she would keep on the coffee table for a year, a blue invitation to the son’s inaugural in Jefferson City. Pressed for a reason why she was invited, she confessed, “I almost married the governor’s father.”
I tried to take this in, but she refused to elaborate. She did not wind up going to the inauguration, or the ball, though for weeks she considered and reconsidered it. I offered to fly home to take her, but she wouldn’t let me and didn’t have a ride. It was January and freezing. She didn’t complain, said it was hard to go out at night anymore, that she would be afraid to fall, that she couldn’t see well, that it was silly to even think of going. But when we spoke on the phone I could hear the hangers scratching on the pole as she looked through the dresses in her closet. She kept bringing it up and up and up. Every time I called she continued, though she kept saying she was not going and that was it.
“It’s crazy to think about it,” she claimed. “I’m an old woman. I’m not going unless there’s a radical change.”
“In what?” I asked.
“My hair for one thing,” she said.
The summer after the inauguration, when Betty could still walk easily, we were in St. Louis, staying at the Chase, and Betty asked me to take her somewhere. She had found the address of the governor’s father and wanted to see the apartment building where he lived on Lindell Boulevard, just across the street from the hotel. It was an exquisite old building and we looked in the glass of the front door, which was locked. The walls of the entry were marble or granite, and at the top there were scenes carved out of the stone, tableaux of what looked like Greek gods rising from what I took to be the Mississippi River. Inside, in the main lobby, coach lights flickered softly. It reminded me of New York, of places where I had hoped to live before my life became a disaster area.
“He wound up in a nice place, didn’t he?” she said.
. . .
“Mother,” I say this morning as I finish up the bed, “I wish you would have let me come take you to the inauguration. You could have seen him.”
“I didn’t want him to see how I look. I look like something the cat dragged in.”
“He said you were beautiful. Maybe he hoped you would read the book and know he remembers you. Fondly. You know. It was a little message. Would you like to see him?”
“I gave to the son’s campaign,” she says. “I sent a check. I guess I should have gone. In a way, I’d paid for the dinner, but I thought I’d be cold. My feet get cold even with my boots, and I couldn’t wear my boots to the ball. My feet look big enough anyway.”
“Why didn’t you marry the governor’s father?”
No response.
“What is the capital of Portugal?” she asks.
My cousin Mimi and her husband, before leaving for a vacation in Portugal, purchased a condominium in Scottsdale. Betty is trying to keep track of it all, but forgets where Mimi is traveling as well as the location of her new home. So she drills herself:
“What is the capital of Portugal?” she asks again.
“Lisbon,” she says in a minute or two, answering her own question. “You ask now.”
“What is that place where Mimi goes in the winter?”
“Scottsdale.”
“We went there one Christmas.”
“I told your father I thought it was overrated.”