When the neighbors looked at our house they saw a creamy-yellow clapboard Cape-Cod with a red shingle roof. Now the shingles are asphalt, but in 1946 they were cedar stained red and drying out. They baked hot enough in the summer that if walked on with bare feet they would cause a burn, and in winter they froze brittle in temperatures as cold as twenty or thirty below and if walked on they could be shattered like thin sheets of ice.
The house was two rooms across from front to back. Like almost all of the houses on the street there was a small front porch—not the sitting-down-and-neighbor-watching kind of front porch, but more of an outdoor mudroom useful for storing boots in the winter and tricycles and baseball bats and an afternoon’s collection of rocks and worms and birds’ nests in the summer. From the porch the front door entered directly into the living room, which ran along the right, east side of the house. The back of the living room was the dining room, separated from the living room only by columns along the walls at both sides. At the back of this room a door entered into a narrow kitchen that ran almost the entire width of the house east to west, with a door leading to the basement at the far left, and a back door in the north wall, between the sink and the basement door.
From the living room--just in front of the column that created the illusion that the dining room was separated from the living room--a doorway led into a hall running a short distance south to mom and dad’s room and a short distance north to Sammy’s and my room. The bathroom was straight across from the door to the living room, between the two bedrooms. Mom and dad’s room had windows on two sides, but our room had windows just on the west, looking out toward the Clark’s Fork River, because the kitchen and the basement stairs took up the back wall on the north.
The house had wood floors: wall-to-wall carpeting was a luxury in 1946 and wood was cheap in Montana. The living-dining room had wood trim stained dark and the walls were light, although I don’t remember if they were painted or papered. Dad must have taken the dining room table when he moved out because mom and I did not have one—or a space large enough to hold one—for another six years. I remember parties around this dining room table when their friends gradually came back from the war and mom made barbequed spareribs, her specialty, and I was brought in from my crib in their room where I slept and the house was filled with cigarette smoke and the excited, laughing voices of people who had been drinking. These were mom’s childhood friends from Glasgow and mom and dad’s college friends, people who 18 years later would send modest, practical wedding presents—sheets and towels and ice buckets and copper ash trays--to Margaret’s home in Massachusetts and I would uncomfortably try to explain who these people were—already almost strangers to me, and distanced further by my embarrassment at how inelegant their gifts looked on a table loaded with sterling silver and porcelain and crystal, the gifts of the friends of Margaret’s parents.
The basement of our house was mostly dad’s domain, too dirty and too dangerous for children. The main thing I remember about the basement was its enormous coal furnace with its octopus hat of cold and hot air ducts, that filled up with clinkers and that reliably went out during blizzards and cold snaps and that was the source of enormous exasperation for my father. I knew even at five that every father behaved like dad did—sleepy, scowling, angry, cranky--when he had to pad in his pajamas and slippers to the basement at two A.M. to spend an hour coaxing a coal fire back to life when the temperature outside was twenty below and the temperature inside was forty and falling rapidly.
The “dangers” in the basement are less specific in my memory—dad’s tools for sure, I suppose guns--because he always owned guns later and I assume that he had them on McLeod too—sharp things and jars and bottles full of poisonous liquids and powders. And stairs that mom was afraid I would fall down--and I probably had a few times, although I don’t remember.
When I am telling someone—a patient friend, one of my children—about where I grew up, I tell them about Missoula but not about just one house or neighborhood—I lived in three Missoula neighborhoods and two other Montana places before I left for the East. I also do not tell them much about my family: I did not have a family in the conventional sense, at least not by the standards of Montana in the forties and fifties.
The geographic and emotional center of my childhood was Paxson Grade School, four blocks to the south and two blocks to the west from our house on McLeod. Sammy and Colleen and Cecily were in the third and fourth grades at Paxson when we moved away, and when we returned three years later, I lived right across Higgins Avenue from Paxson. In 1946, the children from the entire southeast section of Missoula--set off by the river to the north, the Pattee Canyon foothills to the south, Mount Sentinel to the east, and South Avenue to the west--went to Paxson, except for the few children who went to Catholic school at St. Anthony’s, most of whom I never knew. Most of the University faculty lived in the Paxson area. Decades later, at high school reunions with friends who were by then grandparents, I heard gentle complaints that our high school academic and social lives were dominated by kids who started school in the Paxson district. If it was true, I hadn’t noticed that growing up.
That start on McLeod meant that when we returned to Missoula, mom wanted to live close by, in the Paxson school area, close to my friend Rollie and the neighbors on McLeod with whom mom had stayed in touch.
The single event that most shaped the general direction my life has taken and separated me from all of the other kids I grew up with is tied up in the McLeod house. I have heard Sammy say that dad never got along well with mom’s mother and father, and that they were never very impressed with him. Part of this was that they insisted that she have help with the children, the laundry and the cooking, and they paid for it. A maid was well beyond the reach of dad on his small bank salary and Sam guessed that the fact that dad’s father-in-law expected a standard of living for his daughter that dad couldn’t support galled him. It may also have been beyond dad’s reach to rent a house on McLeod, even our little house—everyone else on our block owned their house, even though Bill Campbell was buying his on the GI plan—and all had more substantial incomes than dad.
It was in the McLeod house that on a late April day in 1946, when the Army surplus stake-body truck that served as a school bus for the University Kindergarten dropped me off in front of my house, I found my mom inside, in the dark, lying on a couch sobbing, her face covered with her hands. An hour or so earlier, dad had come home from work, told her that he wanted a divorce, gathered up his clothes, and left. He took Sammy with him. I never lived under the same roof with either of them again.
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