The Beart girls grew up on a dairy farm outside Rye, Colorado, on land better suited to beef. My grandfather broke his health putting in the railroad down around Santa Fe and they moved up to the Front Range with the idea that the Rocky Mountains would catch the good life and funnel it on down. But my grandfather didn’t know much about the dairy business, and neither did my grandmother, whose family had run a grocery back east, and in the early thirties when things were just starting to go bad for other folks, the Bearts were already deep in debt. The cows were always getting sick, or else they were being sold off, and after what customers they had were taken care of there was never more than a bit of the skim for the family—or so Eddie, Pearl, and I were told most mealtimes, as Aunt Cat filled our jelly glasses to the bottom lip and waited while we drank them down.
The Beart sisters had the same dark hair and fine features, though only Inga took after Great Aunt Effie, a spinster who, it was said, never left the house because of eyes so light she couldn’t stand the sun. Aunt Cat’s eyes were bottle-blue, and to hear her tell it, growing up it had been Cat who was considered the prettier of the two. But it was Inga who got married first, at the age of seventeen, to a Hungarian by the name of Laszlo Karpati, a foreigner who was just passing through town. “God knows what she saw in him,” Aunt Cat always said. “The man could hardly put two English words together in a way that made any sense.” Inga Beart’s biographers tell it somewhat differently—the classic escape from a weathered gray house and a neurasthenic mother who wouldn’t allow anyone to mention the fact that the high Colorado air had done nothing to change the rattle in her husband’s cough.
It was 1936 and the Karpatis were headed for California, but I don’t know if they made it there together; a divorce was granted in Nevada later on that year. No one knows much about that period, but Inga Beart apparently took back her own name and found her way to Hollywood, where she was credited for bit parts in several of the “movie musicals” they were making then.
I’ve seen those films. In one, Inga Beart and a crowd of other young things are made up to look like Egyptians. In another, she dances the cancan. It’s terrible stuff, but to my mind it’s no coincidence she found her way into the movie business. Whatever it was that got those Hollywood types to give an anonymous girl from the heartland a spot in the chorus was what the literary set discovered some years later: a spark of glamor, a hint of the exotic that was heightened by the unmistakable sense—even when she was just one of the girls doing kicks—that Inga Beart was already far away.
My Aunt Cat, on the other hand, stayed home. She took care of things while my grandfather died of the tuberculosis no one, not even the doctor, was allowed to call by name. She was the one to look after my grandmother in the slow withering that followed her husband’s death. The day Grandma Beart passed, Aunt Cat walked out of the gray house forever. She married the Hurley boy from down the road, the one who used to put cherries in his mother’s empty milk bottles for the Beart girls to find when they washed and filled them up again.
The war started. My Uncle Walt got his ring finger shot off during the assault on Okinawa and, if one can believe such stories, crawled through the mud to find it so as not to lose the wedding band. “Damn fool thing for a scrap of metal,” Aunt Cat liked to say. She spent the war working as a welder in an aviation plant in Colorado Springs, sealing up the bellies of bombers, not knowing or caring that her little sister had made her way to New York City and had just bought a pair of red high heels with the fifteen-dollar second-place prize she’d won for a short story about, as all the biographers point out, a young girl who dreams of going blind.
It was after noon by then, somewhere around four A.M. back home, and I needed a nap. I tossed the empty milk carton in a garbage can and looked around for my lopsided tower. When I saw it sticking up over the rooftops I headed back in that direction, and this time I had no trouble finding my hotel. My room was now available, the lady said, and after some confusion about the key I carried Aunt Cat’s suitcase up four flights of stairs, then down a hall and up one flight more. I unlocked my door, set the suitcase on the floor, and lay down in bed without even bothering to shut the blinds.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again it was to watch the sun come up. I’d slept into the evening and straight on through the night. The window of my room looked out over clusters of chimneys. They reminded me of the tin cans stuck on sticks Eddie and I used to shoot at when we were kids, and the sun broke apart when it hit their wet metal tops, which meant I must have slept more soundly than I had in years, because I hadn’t heard the rain.
I shaved with the door shut so the steam would take the wrinkles out of the pants I’d worn on the plane. When I cut myself on the chin I stuck some toilet paper on it and tried to remember not to forget to take it off. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d gone out only to notice in a shop window the reflection of a person with a softer jaw than I remembered and a square of tissue stuck to his face.
After I’d finished getting dressed I made the bed, then made it again, this time with the pillows on the outside. I cleaned around the sink to save the maid the trouble and then I watched the sun light up the tin-can chimney tops.
The fact is, I was nervous, and a little afraid to go out into the day. Aside from the meeting I’d set up with the lady at the French National Archives, I didn’t have much of an idea of where to begin. The archivist had written to me to say that the “Fonds Labat-Poussin” Carter Bristol referred to in his book was one of the private collections donated to the National Archives by historically relevant individuals—in this case the Comtesse Lucette Labat-Poussin, whose name Bristol connects so intimately with my mother’s. But the archivist hadn’t been able to confirm whether any of what Bristol claims to have found in the comtesse’s papers was actually there—including the photographs of my mother and some personal correspondence of a very private nature. I’d have to look for those things myself.