My Mother and Amelia Earhart

By Jane Blue

A memoir of growing up in Berkeley California during the '40s and '50s as the fatherless daughter of a newspaperman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jane Blue
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311895240

Book preview

My Mother

and

Amelia Earhart

by

Jane Blue

Smashwords Edition

Trill Press

© 2016 Jane Blue

All rights reserved

Table of Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

about the author

ONE

On the last day of my mother’s life, a day in July, fog squeezes itself through the Golden Gate like toothpaste. It spreads silver and pewter shadows into San Francisco Bay, obliterating the blue of sky and water, circling gauze around the City. My mother can see this from the Berkeley hills, where she has lived for thirty years, since her own mother died––the mother who raised not only her and her siblings, but my twin, Paula, and me.

I am thinking of another July long ago, July 1937, when Amelia Earhart flew into the Pacific, into the sun, too close perhaps, like Icarus, with a drunk named Noonan. My mother, Jane Eshleman, had interviewed Earhart several years before when, in her early twenties, she was the women’s editor of the Oakland Post-Enquirer. And there she met a reporter, Paul Conant, who would seal her fate. In August of that year they were married in San Francisco.

I want to do it because I want to do it, Amelia Earhart wrote in Last Flight. George Putnam, the book mogul who was her husband, had published the title as a chronicle of Earhart’s fateful attempt to cross the Pacific. She disappeared after passing the Nukumanu Islands in the Pacific, heading about 100 miles NNW of Howland Island, her destination. She was never heard of again after July 2, 1937, and was officially declared dead on January 5, 1939, when Paula and I were six months old. She had not been thinking of her last journey when she wrote those words.

Putnam took pieces of her in-flight journals and diaries of previous flights, and patched them together, like fiction.

This is precisely how I have made up the account of my life, and the lives of my mother and father, because I don’t know the whole story and never will.

The little redwood house was not the house Paula and I grew up in; that was another house in North Berkeley that I always think of as my grandmother’s house.

My mother’s mother, Elizabeth Ledgett Eshleman, was a widow, the daughter of Irish immigrants, born in San Francisco in 1879. Her mother, Catherine Brady, whom my grandmother spoke of often and affectionately, was born in Monaghan County, Ireland, but I know little of Mr. Ledgett as I know little of all fathers. Nana, as we called my grandmother, married John M. Eshleman, a lawyer and a politician, who died in 1916 at the age of thirty-nine, of tuberculosis, hemorrhaging after getting off a train at the railway station in Indio, California. At that time he was lieutenant-governor of California, and was embarking on a fishing trip with the ebullient governor, Hiram Johnson, who was preparing himself for a run for the United States Senate. Even though, throughout his entire career from Assemblyman to Railroad Commissioner to Lieutenant Governor, my grandfather had always been precariously ill, he was expected to be a shoo-in for Governor.

At the time of his death, my grandmother was pregnant with her fourth child.

We were told the story of Eshleman, always in the middle of my mother’s cumbersome byline (Jane Eshleman Conant), who died when my mother was three, as though we were of her generation. As though we were immaculately conceived.

This is the atmosphere we grew up with, an atmosphere of grief and loss, the past of the generation before us a perfection that we could never achieve. My mother had told my father to leave when we were three, because he paid the bar bill before he paid the rent, and had moved into her mother’s house. We knew the stories of her childhood in that house, with her sister and brothers, better than we knew our own.

As though we were immaculately conceived.

Think of all that follows as fiction, even if you know who I am. If you know who I am, you will tell me that it didn’t happen this way, and you will be right. Even if you’re in this story, you are my own creation. Because time is compressed into fiction as surely as carbon is compressed into diamonds, over a very long period of time. If you know who I am, you may tell me, as you have always told me, that I live in my own world, and you will be right. That is how I have lived my life, an interior life, rearranging the furniture, as though in a prison or a castle tower.

***

In the early morning of the last day of her life, my mother goes out the front door into a concrete turnaround where a snow fence stretches across an asphalt drive keeps the dog, a black Labrador, from wandering. Think of the scene as fiction; I am inventing it from what I know and what I have been told. Think of it as present tense, because as Arden, my therapist says, your mother never dies.

Her house occupies a spot below the famous skyline drive where lovers park and watch the jeweled city of San Francisco sparkle across the slate-back expanse of the bay; or sometimes in the day, only the gray, undulating fog, with its brownish tints. As she walks out this July morning, she can smell the salt of ocean, the spice of eucalyptus.

I see the dog bouncing ahead, circling back, almost knocking her down.

Josephine!

She accents the first syllable affectionately, as one might chastise a child.

Near the eastern deck overlooking a Japanese garden a dwarf maple holds out its red leaves like the umbrella of a great flower. Is she thinking of her life? Or is she merely blank, meditating in her agnostic way, as she goes about her chores? She has had a shock recently.

Because of me, Paul has come back into her life. We have talked about him as two adults, as we never did before.

The garden needs weeding and watering. She wishes she could give it the care she did even two years ago, before the cancer, the surgery, the pneumonia. I wonder if her negligence of the garden hurt her the way she hurt when she handed the twins over to her mother so she could return to work. I wonder if she thinks of that now.

She told me once that self-reflection was dangerous.

She’s dressed in an old chenille robe over a thin satin nightgown. Although night in the hills can suddenly turn chilly, she never wears flannel. I sewed her a Mother Hubbard once, for a Christmas present; she never wore it. A nightgown made like a slip, spaghetti straps on her broad shoulders, like a movie star. That was how I saw her.

She doesn’t mind walking out into the garden in her gown and robe; she is too old to be proud. She goes back to the house, the dog rustling in the bushes below, and she hesitates for a moment by the neighbor’s fence, crowded with pots of geraniums and petunias, a redwood planter burgeoning with tomato vines, a small fig splayed against the low stake fence.

She has lived alone for a long time. The neighbor comes to the fence, retired, too. Perhaps she says something about the fog, how she remembers it as white, how things change. Inland, where I live, the fog curls brown fingers over the hills, when the vacuum of heat gives in to a breeze, pulling the cool moisture in from San Francisco Bay. The two neighbors natter together about the ills of the modern world. Natter is her word. She likes to paint pictures of herself that cloud the truth: A nattering old woman.

She says good-bye to the neighbor, shoos the dog into the house, shuts the door on her, and walks up the asphalt driveway to the mailbox at the street, a pretty good climb. Native wild lilac with dark sweet flowers––ceanothus––and the late flags of wild iris stolen from the north coast wave from narrow bands of earth that line the driveway. She was a newspaperman, but she has always been a gardener. She loves the Latin names of things.

It’s Sunday and there will be no mail, but the carrier stuffs the New York Times into the mailbox on a post near the skyline drive.

The east deck overlooking the Japanese garden is filled with native plants, seedlings crowded together in pots that she transplants and nourishes for the Native Plant Society.

I remember how she mourned that she couldn’t breast feed her twins; we were large for twins and our birth exhausted her. She would never have gone back to work if she didn’t have to, she once said––if her husband had not been such a miserable provider––and moved in with her stern Catholic mother. She would never have allowed us to be raised Catholic, but that was part of the bargain.

I think there is a kind of karma that rules any life. She was a damned fine newspaperman, as my father was supposed to have said. She was destined for the business.

When she goes back inside with the Times, she prepares a single serving of oatmeal on the electric range of the efficiency kitchen two stories above the back yard. The house has been built on stilts above a steep lot fashioned from the back ends of three other lots which face the ridge road, where the facades are Spanish or modern, large and stately, with gardener-groomed yards. From the kitchen and the west deck, she has a view of the City, with its necklaces of bridges; Angel Island, Alcatraz; Mt. Tamalpais––The Sleeping Lady––in Marin County, beyond.

My postage stamp property, she laughed when she bought the house while her mother lay dying.

She keeps a bag of dog biscuits among a clutter of miscellaneous books and containers on top of the refrigerator and now offers one to Josephine, who is waiting eagerly. Josephine is old and loyal, although my mother was an inconsistent dog owner. I realized after she died that her style with dogs was similar to her style with children: preoccupation and neglect followed by guilty phases of overprotection, accompanied sometimes by panic, as when the dog would get out into the street. She’d scream in a high-pitched voice, which couldn’t have soothed the dog, spiraling in fear that Josephine would immediately be hit by a car.

Josephine falls heavily onto a Persian rug smack between the kitchen and the dining table, thumping her tail and gnawing on the biscuit. She’s getting arthritis. They are growing old together. My mother has predicted that she will be a grizzled old woman with a dog, beach combing in the fog with her trousers rolled up. Echoes of T.S. Eliot from her subconscious, perhaps. She never paid much attention to poetry.

She sits down at the table in a dining niche as small as the kitchen, beside it, with the spectacular view behind her, and opens the Times to the crossword puzzle. Something startles her. She pushes her chair back slightly from the table. And then she sits. She sits for a day and a night and her face grows as white as the cap of her hair.

She is my mother and she is simply, suddenly, dead.

I never saw her body there. I didn’t see the scene except as Paula described it––Mother peaceful, unmarked, slumped in the chair at the table, the dog asleep at her feet; the women from the Native Plant Society wringing their hands in the background. It was Sunday when she died. My mother had missed her Monday of volunteer work at the nursery in Tilden Park. Tilden Park was established in 1933, the year my mother graduated from U.C. Berkeley at the age of 20. It is the city’s watershed. At the beginning it was 2,000 acres and has grown into the 100,000 mile East Bay Regional Park system. For Paula and me, it has always been there, with its carousel, its petting zoo, and miles of pristine hills. It was my mother’s refuge in her days of retirement.

A fire engine squeezed down the driveway, the firemen suited up and ready for anything. My sister unlocked the door; later, after the fire crew left, the doctor came and signed the death certificate (because she was under a doctor’s care for heart problems, there was no autopsy), the van or the station wagon from the Neptune Society bounced down the drive with the pine box. By the time I saw her, she was ashes in a container smaller than a bread box. I carried her from the Society’s offices near Jack London Square on the waterfront in Oakland, near where she was born nearly nearly 79 years before, the body reduced, almost weightless, cradled in my arms.

The last time I saw her, about a month before, she had been 130 or 140 pounds, down from 160 or 170, shrunken from her original height of 5’8", and I was alarmed. She had been undergoing radiation treatment for throat and neck cancer––the disease of a smoker and drinker, a man’s disease. But she said she lost the weight because she wanted to, simply by giving up ice cream. I think she wanted to be thin again when she died. She had a tremendous will.

My mother hoped for her death to be just as it happened, alone at home, suddenly, and private, alone long enough that no one would try to resuscitate her, take her to a hospital and plug her into a wall. She didn’t want to be a vegetable. She didn’t want to have to be cared for. She had a kind of faith that it would happen this way. She told me once she never considered suicide.

I have. I have even halfheartedly planned the ways, but I didn’t want my children to find me, irrevocably lost to them, with all the secrets locked inside, as my father had been lost to me. The idea of sweet oblivion was tempting, and yet with so much missing already in my life, I wasn’t sure I wanted to move from one void to another. I had once worked in the typing pool of a hospital, and had been assigned to every department. I learned in Physical Rehabilitation that suicides often survived, with their larynxes broken, or blind, from trying to hang themselves or drinking lye, with their limbs severed from throwing themselves in front of trains, or brain-damaged instead of dead from the bullet. Also, I wanted to remember, so that one day I might fit all the parts of my memory into a whole, like the puzzles we were always doing, my mother with her jigsaw puzzles out on a card table, the crossword puzzles and the anacrostics.

My mother dealt only in facts, writing the news as it fell in front of her. I became a solitary poet at an early age. But even in my poems, I became a writer of fiction; I saw the world only through my own eyes, and wrote, like Emily Dickinson, in an upstairs room; after awhile I showed my words to no one.

I was reading recently about Virginia Woolf, how she lay placidly in the nursery listening to the rhythm and melody of the ocean, and how that influenced her whole life as a writer. Suddenly, a picture came to me that I choose to call memory. French doors opening onto a garden. Red curtains hang on them. Inside the house circles of light dance on hardwood floors.

Maroon tile. A hand trotting a horse on it. It is a painted horse of plaster or wood, maybe a souvenir from Mexico. The tile shines and the grouting is very white. The rim of a bassinet looms out from the frame of the picture and an infant, outstretched hand waves in the periphery. It is my hand. I am gurgling with pleasure. The grownup hand animating the horse belongs to Daddy. I don’t have a name for him yet, or any words. Later we will refer to him in hushed tones as Our Father. We will be told to think of him as dead.

There are memories not bound by chronology. I think of them as dreams, which are a kind of fiction. There are things about myself I have been told. My mother has told me who I am. Amusing. Uncoordinated. The second twin, the smaller one, I slipped into the world like a watermelon seed, and Paula did all the work. We are branded by words at birth.

Mother was a reporter. She thought she was unbiased. I was told many times that I looked like her, and her response was always, Poor Janie, although people thought she was handsome and even beautiful. I knew, however, and she knew, that parts of me, the necessarily secret parts, resembled my father. The punctuation of my thick dark eyebrows, now they were not hidden! They caused the people in my family to look away. A cousin who didn’t know any better asked, Where did you get those eyebrows?

I didn’t know.

My mother told me once that she would never have written a word without the pressure of deadlines. I don’t know if that was true. How can we know what we would become if we had not become what we were? I, on the other hand, began to write obsessively at the age of eight. From that time I was interested in reporting––recording the world––not for the world, but for me. I hoped not to forget anything. I was gathering evidence.

I construct the memories like fiction. Who can say what is true? History, with its omissions and simplistic explanations, is always fiction.

My mother is working in the garden, digging with a trowel. She wears trousers to her ankles, wide on her long, slender legs. My father is inside, behind French doors, smoking a pipe.

Later I will understand that there were no French doors, and probably no red curtains. We skew memory as we skew dreams, interpreting them in the act of waking. In this dreamlike memory, I am also in the garden, watching. I am always watching. I see more than they know, remember more than they imagine. Because the scenes have no words, I think later that I have forgotten them, but they have only gone underground, in dreams and those fleeting hallucinative pictures at the edge of sleep or in the empty parts of a day.

My father comes out onto the stepping stones in the small garden and pulls my mother to her feet. Both of them are lanky and tall. My mother’s white socks peek out above brown moccasins with fringes at the instep. She laughs as she loses her balance against him. They go behind red curtains that hang at the sides of the open windows, billowing a little in a breeze. They don’t think I see, or they have momentarily forgotten my existence. Or perhaps I don’t yet exist and am deciding whether I will choose them for my parents.

They fall onto the bed together and their hands disappear, their limbs are confused. In my mind I can smell my father’s whiskey breath and the sweet, pungent aroma of a chocolatey tobacco. My mother gets up and draws the curtains. What happens next, I don’t know. I’m alone in the garden, excluded from their love, their tangled flesh.

My father disappeared more completely than Amelia Earhart, and more than my grandfather, who had died a famous man so many, many years before. A building was named for him at the University of California at Berkeley, which housed the journalism department where my mother studied: Eshleman Hall. It was torn down and a new one went up, and I am known, vaguely, to have a famous grandfather who is a building. Photographs of my father were thrown away or thrust into boxes on the dirt floor of the cellar of 1972 Los Angeles Avenue, Berkeley, my grandmother’s house, but Amelia Earhart stood across from Mother under the wing of her plane, legendary, throughout our lives.

I ceased to think of my father as Daddy. He became a distant person named Paul.

In the photograph I have of my mother and Amelia Earhart from the Post-Enquirer before my parents were married, Earhart has just arrived at the Oakland airport on her way to Honolulu. She wears overalls; Mother, a raccoon coat and pumps with three-inch heels. In those shoes she is nearly six feet tall, taller than Amelia Earhart in her pilot’s boots; the same height as Paul. She is twenty-two years old. A beret sits on her large head, her fine, bobbed hair. Amelia Earhart is describing something with her hands, as though saying, It’s this big. My mother is writing it all down.

After my mother died I found a scrap of newsprint from a pad, typed in uneven black letters on an Underwood typewriter, the assignment:

You’re to cover Amelia Sunday: Get down early and

figure to spend most of the day with her… Get it all

written tomorrow night and put originals in Campbell’s

basket, the dupes on the hook. I’ll see you get plenty of

time off to make up for it. For the love of Mike hit this

hard as I know you can.

My mother talked this way, after she went back to work across the bay, at the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, after Paula and I were born and Paul was gone. For the love of Mike. She hit all the stories hard.

Amelia Earhart never changed. She was five feet eight and 120 pounds forever. Weight never crept onto her long bones. Although she was fifteen years older than my mother, Amelia Earhart stayed forever in her prime. Her hair never went silver, her face wasn’t a net of wrinkles, she never lost part of her jaw to the cancer that came from those glamorous cigarettes. (Amelia Earhart didn’t smoke or drink. She was addicted instead to risk.)

Earhart with her famous prenuptial agreement and her strong will married a man callously, some have said, because he could provide her with airplanes. My mother married for love. What good would a prenuptial agreement have done her? My father was sophisticated and handsome, he was a writer, always working on a novel, but he never had any money left for the rent after he paid his bar tab.

My father finally did write novels, three of them, one hardback titled Dr. Gatskill’s Blue Shoes, written under his own name, Paul Conant, and two pulp fiction paperbacks under the pseudonym Gene Paul. Dr. Gatskill’s Blue Shoes went into a mass-marketed Dell paperback, with a cover by Carl Bobertz, a well-known pulp artist of the time––a scantily dressed woman with long blonde hair held back by a red headband, sitting provocatively on a table swinging her shapely legs in red stiletto heels surrounded by the boldface words Can a woman make a man forget… murder? Dr. Gatskill's Blue Shoes was also produced as a television play in 1952. I’m sure I didn’t see it. By 1952 I had almost forgotten Paul Conant; he had gone underground. By 1968 he was dead. I wouldn’t find out how he died for twenty-three years.

***

It is an icy winter in the Sacramento Valley, with little precipitation of any kind. I see Arden, a semi-retired psychotherapist who now volunteers in a cramped office at the back of a church south of town, and she listens, small as a gnome, her face a seine of age. I have come to her wanting to know who I am. I want to find my father somehow, as an adoptee craves some knowledge of their biological parents. It will not be easy. A wall made of the lifelong inertia of secrets bars research.

We sit facing each other, I in a black vinyl-covered chair, its seams hammered with silver-colored studs; Arden, opposite me in a padded chair that swivels away from the desk. Her feet, crossed at the ankles, barely touch the floor. In our sessions, she puts me in a benign trance to explore memory, or a fragment of a dream. Perhaps the way light streams in through old yellowed blinds on the high window of the western wall triggers something in me.

There is a child. I am a child, crouched in a closet, light curling under a door. I am hiding from the loudness of the voices. It could be that I am under a table. Being a twin means that I have the ability to corroborate memories, although no two versions of anything are alike, as eyewitness testimony proves. However, Paula tells me later that she remembers something too, that happened in the kitchen.

My mother holds a knife in front of her with both hands, her mouth a thin, whitened line. She backs against the kitchen cupboards, cornered, snarling. Paul steps backward, against the table. I see his shoes catch the light.

TWO

I waited in the dark to be born, the second twin, knowing I would grow up in the shadow of my mother, knowing I would always adore her, but that we would trouble each other. Knowing I would look at her from Paul Conant’s eyes, but she would never mention that. I knew also that my twin did all the work at birth, and would learn to swim, to ride a bicycle and to drive, all effortlessly, while I would struggle with the simplest mechanical tasks. Nevertheless, I would choose to be born.

Still, Paula always felt that she was invisible, and that she wasn’t smart. Our grandmother saw Paul in her; she called her a bad seed. My mother, on the other hand, thought that Paula needed protection, and would favor her. We were twins, but early we were set against each other.

For the first three years of our lives we lived with Paul and Jane and a dog named Shadow in the little house in the woods, high in the Berkeley hills. Paul’s voice filled the house. He sang in the shower, he sang at the table. He pretended to play the banjo, strumming Oh Susanna. Mother played the piano and they harmonized, there were the songs in a little book from the Riverside Mission Inn, where they spent their honeymoon.

Sometimes he was gone, and we had to go find him. My mother would bundle us into her Ford coupe and we would retrieve him from a bar. Later, all we would be told about him was that he was a writer, a very good one, a brilliant alcoholic, and that he had perfect pitch.

The piano, the dog and Paul all disappeared in a flash.

I waited in the stilled sound of his voice to hear it again. The memory of my father and his music is quilted from fragments of words, of songs heard later with a sense of longing and nostalgia. His name is fiction for me now, a name that always made me perk up my ears. Paul Avery at Thousand Oaks Elementary School vowed to beat up our friend and neighbor Billy Peterson. I watched the fight on Billy Peterson’s lawn agog and horrified; I didn’t like Paul, he was a bully and a fighter, Billy was smaller and younger, and yet Paul had a certain glamour; he shared my father’s name.

Go on, Arden says. I think of her as a gnome, a leprechaun, as someone who has perhaps come from another world. She nods and smiles. She accepts everything. She has a way of folding her hands in her lap as though she is warming a frozen bird.

Around the time she retired, my mother was interviewed by a young member of the Prytanaean Society for an oral history of early members at the University of California, Berkeley (which was called simply Cal then). It was unusual for her, always the prompting voice in the background, the interviewer, to expose herself in this way. She had told Paul to leave right around Pearl Harbor, she said, when the whole world fell apart.

Everyone felt that the whole world had fallen apart, with a second world war, after the horrific first one, which was to be the