Until I went to college, most of what I knew about my mother’s own life came from a 1951 Look magazine article I found in the periodicals section of the high school library; I’d been through all her books by then and was looking for her short stories. I hadn’t realized the extent of my mother’s celebrity until I opened the magazine to a full-page photograph of a dark-haired woman who looked a little like Aunt Cat, cigarette holder in one hand, achromatic eyes focused on some distant point. Inga Beart never talked about her childhood, but in between the photographs—Inga Beart in slacks and a feminine blouse, Inga Beart on New York City’s Seventh Avenue—I read about her brief career in Hollywood and her arrival in New York in 1943, at the age of twenty-four. I learned that the publication of her first novel in 1947 made my mother something of a sensation, and I read with special interest about the years that followed. In ’48 she returned to California to work on the film version and later spent some time at an artists’ colony in New Mexico. By the spring of 1950 she was back in New York, being seen in all the fashionable places. I remember wondering even then why there was no reference to my birth, which had clearly happened sometime in between.
My birth certificate has me born down in Santa Fe in 1949. Inga Beart’s biographers don’t have much to say about it. They mention it—me—a little bit, and there’s some speculation as to whether my father was an itinerant trumpet player or the Austrian film director who went on to become her third husband—and, of course, they all get around to certain bits of evidence that point to the possibility that maybe Inga Beart was raped and that’s the reason she never wanted the reminder of it nearby. For obvious reasons I prefer the former hypotheses, but Inga Beart never did tell.
I nodded to the sales clerk and left the bookshop. I walked on, feeling hungry; I hadn’t eaten anything since my breakfast in the park the day before. Church bells tolled in the distance, reminding me of the hours going by. I bought a sandwich, and when I passed a public garden I sat to eat it.
My pant cuffs had ridden up a little when I sat down and I was dusting the crumbs off my lap when I noticed that I had on a pair of Uncle Walt’s socks. They were some of his town socks, black with blue thread. They hadn’t been worn much and though he probably bought them upward of thirty years ago, they were still in fine shape. Which is what I must have been thinking when I took them out of his drawer. I smiled at myself to see them there on my feet, but it was the smile of a person who finds himself suddenly old. I imagine I am not the first to sit on a park bench with a dead man’s socks hanging loose around my ankles, watching the world go by.
I started to have a conversation with him in my head. “You like it there in Paris?” he said to me. “Sure I do,” I said. There was something I would have liked to ask him about, but I wanted an answer, and for that the Uncle Walt inside my head just wouldn’t do.
In all the time Walt and I lived together, when I was growing up and then in his last years when I moved back to the ranch, neither of us ever said much. In the evenings when I was a kid, after he’d gone out to move the sprinklers—because back then we’d drain the pipes and start the motor up by hand—I’d see him out by the pond, the one that never held water, just standing there. Having his think, Aunt Cat said. The sun would be going down and he’d still be there, standing, like he was waiting to catch the leak red-handed. But whatever water was left in the pond always stayed about the same while you were looking at it. After I moved back to the ranch and his leg started getting better I used to drive him down there in the old truck sometimes, and we’d sit, a couple of old guys having our think, not saying much. It was an amiable silence and when Walt passed I missed that silence quite a lot.
It was one of the reasons I finally got around to making the trip to Paris. The ranch took on a new kind of emptiness once Uncle Walt was gone. That, plus I’d gotten a nice note from the lady at the French National Archives saying she’d located the Labat-Poussin file Carter Bristol had looked at. Not that those things were reason enough in themselves. I’d talked myself out of going all the way to Paris plenty of times before; I might have done it again if it hadn’t been for what Walt said before he died.
I had a home nurse come out for those last few weeks, to help manage the dirty tricks death plays once it’s made up its mind. The nurse was a nice girl named Marla and though Walt had held his memory more or less together until the very last, just at the end he started getting confused about who she was. When the pain got bad he’d say, “Damn it, Cat, come along now,” and when Marla clicked his morphine drip a couple of times, he’d say, “That a girl, Cat-bird.” But in what I believe were his last conscious moments, when the two clicks hadn’t been enough and Marla looked over to me and I nodded and she gave him two more, then I nodded again and she gave him two more on top of that, Uncle Walt must have seen someone else entirely in Marla’s face, because he looked from her to me like he was glad to find us there together and said, “Now, Ricky, don’t be mad at her.”
“Mad at who?” I said. “Who are you talking about, Walt? This is Marla here.”
But he looked to Marla again and worked his mouth around the words. “You tell him how it was.”
“Shh,” Marla said.
“Go on and tell him,” he said to her.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You just lie back.”
But Walt was trying to pull himself up, holding on to Marla’s hand. “Go on,” he said to her.
“Shh, now,” Marla said. “I’ll tell him whatever you need. Of course I will.”
“Tell him what you said. You said you didn’t want to take him off to Paris.”
“I’ll tell him,” Marla said.
“Paris?” I said. “What’s that about Paris?” But Marla shook her head at me, and she helped him onto his side for the coughing. She turned down one of the monitors that was beeping, and told me I could take his other hand if I wanted, and we sat like that until the last breaths came, wracking and terrible, and then, as they say, he was gone.
In the weeks after Walt passed I thought a lot about it, wondering why he’d said the name of a city he didn’t have a thing to do with, except that his wife’s sister had gone there and lost her mind, and I realized that it must have been my mother that Walt was talking to as he slipped away. Marla said people say all sorts of things that don’t make sense at the very end, but I wondered if it might have been for my sake that Walt picked my mother for his final conversation. Maybe after all the years he felt she owed her son an explanation. Maybe he figured I had a right to know. Either way, I’m grateful to my Uncle Walt, who used his last words on this earth to give me the closest thing I’ve ever had to a confirmation that my mother really did come back to see us. You said you didn’t want to take him off to Paris, Walt said to her. So her visit had to have been before she made the trip, and she must have come to tell Aunt Cat and Uncle Walt that she was going away to France and leaving me behind.