When I try to imagine things as they must have appeared to her as she sat in Aunt Cat’s kitchen in 1951 or ’52, I can see how my mother might have come up with a life for Verna that ended up being similar, in some ways, to Aunt Cat’s. She would only have had to look out the window at the sloping pastures that were always hard to irrigate, the weeds just waiting for an opportunity along the edges of the field, to figure that, with the price of beef falling as the big cattle operations got bigger, the ranch wasn’t going to be able to support the five of us for long—the natural conclusion being that Aunt Cat, like her neighbors, like Verna, would have to get a job in town. In my mother’s book there’s a mention of Verna having found work at a dental surgery; my Aunt Cat began cleaning teeth for Dr. Braun in Walsenburg around the time I was finishing junior high. But there’s nothing too odd about that; dental assistant was one of the few professions open to women of that era. When you take into account their shared manual dexterity, it seems logical enough that both the fictional Verna and my Aunt Cat wound up with their steady fingers effectively, if not always gently, scraping and polishing away the residue of so many Sunday candied hams, black coffee, chewing tobacco, and other enemies of rural tooth enamel. In any event, it’s ridiculous to think of my Aunt Cat even subconsciously mimicking the life choices of a character in an Inga Beart novel; as far as I know, she never read a single published word her sister wrote.
But Bristol brushes these sorts of particulars aside and spends the rest of his book analyzing my mother’s interviews, her relationships with men, even the things her teachers wrote about her in grade school, to come up with the idea that she had a near-complete inability to feel emotions of empathy, which run from pity all the way to love. She was unable to imagine the emotional lives of her characters, and so she borrowed—some say stole—the most intimate experiences of the people around her. It never troubled her that those details had been given in confidence; even the act of betrayal left her numb. And Carter Bristol knows all this because he has a Ph.D. in literature and another in abnormal psychology, because in her wedding pictures Inga Beart’s eyes are looking just beyond each husband’s head, because none of those husbands could even speak English very well, which, Bristol says, helped her put off a little longer their discovery that she could not feel, just like some people have no ear for music and others can’t tell the difference between red and green.
He also dissects in a very scientific way Inga Beart’s supposed lesbianism, and at the same time her penchant for men from far off places. He makes various guesses at my own paternity, and goes into all the other nasty details that keep a book like his on the bestseller list. He’s even done some interviews on the morning television talk shows, and he always gives the same rueful chuckle, as if he wished it were not his duty to inform the public of the most shocking aspects of my mother’s private life, then launches into the kind of head-shrink mumbo jumbo that puts one off one’s breakfast.
Unfortunately, people watch those shows, and Bristol’s book really has changed the way the world sees Inga Beart. I suppose I shouldn’t mind so much, because her book sales have actually increased since his biography was published, and I get a one-eighth share. It comes to quite a sum now that it seems everybody wants to reread her novels, looking for signs of a sociopathic personality.
But I do mind. For all she wasn’t, Inga Beart was my mother. I might be able to dismiss Carter Bristol’s interpretation of her life as just another fad the professor types have to make up to keep themselves relevant, if he hadn’t been so smug and short with me the time we spoke. Bristol never once tried to contact me himself, which is surprising, considering that his book mentions me more than any of the other biographies. But unlike the other recent biographers, who called me up for at least a cursory spell check of Aunt Cat’s married name and so on, I didn’t even know Bristol was writing the book until I saw it on the New Arrivals shelf at our local library. And by then of course it was too late.
It wasn’t the scandalous bits I objected to. For what it’s worth, I think Bristol may be right when he says it’s time to do away with the cult that sprang up around Inga Beart after she ended the way she did. And while most of us would prefer that the more intimate details of our mothers’ private lives not be splashed around like that, I can understand and even appreciate the public’s curiosity. After all, Inga Beart wasn’t always considered a hallowed figure by the literary world. During her lifetime she was just another public personality, whose exploits were more often than not discussed in the tabloids in unflattering terms. No matter how I feel about it personally, I can accept that it is time to make her human once again.
What I cannot accept is inaccuracies, particularly where I am concerned. I played only a small role in Inga Beart’s life, and no one, least of all me, is trying to deny that. But I was there. Why else would she have come back to see me, however briefly, before she went to France? Whatever was on her mind when she walked out of that Santa Fe hospital where I was born, she did not intend to leave me altogether, and this is crucial to disproving Bristol’s theory that my mother lacked the normal spectrum of emotion, that she felt none of the shades of love, regret, and loneliness so familiar to her characters.
But when I called Bristol up to tell him the short list of what his book got wrong, he wouldn’t even talk to me. I tried to be reasonable. I told him, “You know best about the New York years, and you know best about Paris. I’m no psychologist,” I said, “but I thought you’d like to know that she did visit me once, so it’s not like you said.”
I wanted to tell him about the shoes, how I remember them, but he cut me off with something like, “Well, you’re on your own on that one.” And then, as if he were trying to spare my feelings, he said, “She never went back to Colorado, alright? She never set foot there again. It’s a fact.”
“You’re a shrink,” I said. “What do you know about facts?”
“I know this is hard for you,” he said.
“What about Verna and the needlework ribbon?” I said. “My aunt, Catherine Hurley, really won one of those, did you know that?—Huerfano County Fair Grand Champion, 1939—and my mother left home in ’36. She must have seen it when she visited—how else could she have known?” I would have told him about the smoothness of my Aunt Cat’s hands, how her fingers were delicate and cool, like Verna’s.
“I’m not interested in arguing with you,” Bristol said. “I think I’ve made it clear that there are some unanswered questions. No denying that. But Inga never went back to see the family—your aunt said so herself in her interview with the PEN Foundation. I believe you’ll find the exact citation in my book.”
I tried again to tell him. “Her red shoes,” I said. “I saw them, I promise you, when I was just a kid. She came to visit, it must have been in ’51 or ’52, before she went to Paris. I was under the table, I saw them right up close. They had a double strap that fastened at the ankle, a second crease on the strap at the third hole.” The call was costing me a fortune, he’s off in England after all, but I hardly cared. “How could I remember those shoes if she hadn’t come to see me?”