The story begins
Our house on the 300 block of McLeod Avenue was small even by the standards of 1941. It was the kind of house that a young couple with a family could rent on the salary of a bank clerk. I haven’t seen the inside of this house since 1947, but it still stands where it always has. It says something about Missoula that there are still families that want—or can only afford—a simple, one-floor, two-bedroom, one-bath house, and that the block and the street on which it stands still has every house I remember from my earliest childhood and not one of them has been enlarged or even painted a different color. Down the street in the 200 block the garage next to Rollie Trenouth’s house has been turned into a bungalow, but that happened decades ago, when Rollie and I were in high school and no longer regularly broke the garage windows with my wild pitches on our two-man ball field squeezed in between Dr. Trenouth’s rose garden in left field, a tall stand of unforgiving spruce trees in right field—better not hit the ball into them—and the garage and its windows as our backstop.
McLeod was a good street in the University section of Missoula, walking distance to the campus and walking distance to downtown across the Clarks Fork River. Like most of Missoula at that time, just after the war, the neighborhood housed families with a broad range of incomes. In 1947, if you stood in front of our house facing it, Professor Clark and his wife lived in a two-tone green shingled house on the left; Professor Clark had taught Mom journalism at the U. On the right in a house not much bigger than ours Bill and Jean Campbell were starting a family. He was a vet just back from the service who owned a laundromat down near the Milwaukee depot where Jean gave dance classes in a big room next to the washing machines, where you could smell the wet clothes. Next to them on the right were the Whitneys, a retired couple. In the biggest house, all brick where all of the rest of the houses on our side of the street were wood, lived the McClays.
If you turned your back to our house, the house across the street was in the wrong place and wasn’t even a house. During my nearly six years on McLeod, on the whole street only that lot was still in evolution. When I was little, Rollie and Sam and Cecily and I played in the vacant lot’s weeds during the summer and built snow forts there in the winter. We once discovered open buckets of liquid tar thrown away in the weeds and we all showed up at home with most of our exposed skin and all of our clothes smeared with the black, sticky nearly unremovable stuff. Our moms spent hours scrubbing it off of us with turpentine, heaping imprecations variously on whoever had dumped the buckets and for us with playing with them. Right after the war a basement was excavated in the lot and the concrete foundations of a house were poured, but no walls were put up. A floor was put down on the foundation and covered with tarpaper to make it waterproof so that the basement could be lived in. A little hut with a door the size of an outhouse was put up to cover the basement stairwell. That and about two-feet of foundation wall pierced with a few windows were all that you could see from my front yard. A family moved into the basement and they lived there for years until they had enough money to build the rest of the house. There were basements being lived in all over Missoula for years after the war, mostly by vets who did not want rent money draining away from them. When Mom and I came back from Butte a few years later the house had been completed, but it never looked right on McLeod—it was too modern, a flat, fifties ranch-style house built with light-yellow-colored brick on a street where every other house was a prairie-style bungalow or a dutch colonial clapboard built before the war.
On the far left on the other side of the street was my favorite house with my favorite people, Mr. and Mrs Higgins and their beautiful daughter Colleen and their Irish setter Val. Colleen was a year older than Sammy, four years older than I. She always seemed to live in a world apart from the rest of us, one of those people comfortably at home in Missoula growing up but destined from the beginning to move away. For one thing, Colleen rode horses, not western saddle horses but show horses. Years after mom and I moved away from McLeod she went away to Wellesley College and later she married one of the Nicholson boys and lived in Washington D.C. where he had some kind of an important government job.
I was more or less in love with Colleen until I myself moved away from Missoula twelve years after the time I am writing about now. One of my first real jobs (I got a paycheck and I needed a social security number) was busing tables at the U. I must have been fourteen or fifteen. Colleen was back from Boston and taking summer school courses at the U. She would come into the Lodge, the University dining room in which I worked, to have coffee and to read and I would do anything possible while she was there to catch her attention so that she would look up and smile at me —sweep the floor near her table, fill sugar-shakers, wash tables. Even now--when I haven’t seen her for more than fifty years--if someone mentions that she and her husband have retired and are living up in the Swan Valley I feel like I ought to try to find her.
When I was very young, what had happened before I became a direct observer of the lives of our neighbors was a fabric of loosely woven and apparently unrelated strands that never did become whole. One of my earliest memories is hearing three or four times from an adult or Sammy that there had been some kind of tragedy in the Higgins family that I never understood and that was spoken of in a few words and in a way which signaled that I was to ask no questions. There had been another child Sammy’s age, a boy I think, who had died. People said that Mrs. Higgins never recovered from losing him. One of the strands that make up this memory is that he died in an accident, that he ran out into the street and was hit by a car; Sammy would know but now Sammy is dead and unless I meet up with Colleen again I will never know, although I have thought of this unseen boy many times and have imagined an awful scene down on the corner where there would have been the squeal of brakes and the sound of house doors slamming and neighbors running, and frightened voices. But maybe none of that ever happened, maybe it was just something that I imagined. I think about this boy because Mrs. Higgins and I were pals. She kind of adopted me and I hung around in her house a lot, especially after mom had to go to work. I sometimes played in her sand box—I suppose it was really Colleen and perhaps the dead boy’s sand box—and I thought of Val as my dog. People said that Mrs. Higgins and I became pals because she lost her real boy. I don't know, but I still think about that house, remember its rooms, remember the sandbox.
Mr. Higgins—George Higgins—was a lawyer, pleasant-faced and nearly always silent around me. I always supposed that his father must have been a lawyer too, or a successful merchant, because his family name and the name of the main street in Missoula—Higgins Street—were the same, and there was a Higgins Bridge and a Higgins block downtown and a Higgins building.
So there we were, all together in one block in 1946: a professor at the U, a bank cashier—my father—with a wife and two small children, a veteran who ran a laundromat and his wife who taught dancing, a retired couple, and a family that was about as much “old Missoula” as any I ever knew. There was one other house on the other side of the street, on the corner across from the 200 block. The house was a duplex and Sammy used to say that the daughters of the family who lived in half the house used to be our babysitters when I was first born, but I could not conjure up their faces even when I was five.
My view of the neighborhood was not very extensive in those days, but it did extend one block to the west and across McLeod to 235, where Dr. Trenouth and his wife and Cecily and my best friend forever Rollie lived (his name was really Roland, but I did not call him that until we went to college or medical school and he became Roland and I became Gordon). I think that Mrs. Trenouth might have been named Ruth, but in those days I often knew the fathers’ whole names, because their names were on mail and mailboxes, but their wive’s names were not: Dr. and Mrs. Stanley Stewart Trenouth; Mr. and Mrs. Pat Wilcox; Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Brown; Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Noel. By the time I was old enough to read the mail that came to my house it was just Mrs.Leah Noel, and I can’t ever remember seeing my Mom and Dad’s name linked up in the usual way, Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Noel—or rather, mail with that address went to a different house and was meant for another Mrs. Noel. Christmas cards were always sent “Dr. and Mrs. Clem Svore and Family,” but ours, by the time I could read, came to Mrs. Leah Noel and Gordie. (Dr. Svore was the doctor who delivered me and years later failed his assignment to teach me about sex, there being no father around to do it; his wife and Mom had been best friends at the U—but Mom had a lot of best friends).
I was probably a teenager before I learned to say hello to Rollie’s father correctly. I always called him “Mr. Trenouth” even though I knew he was a doctor. But 99% of men were “Mr. Something” and I had to be paying attention to what I was saying more than I usually did to remember to say “hello, Dr. Trenouth.” I rarely saw Dr. Trenouth when Rollie and I were not either running through his house or talking, usually both, and Dr. Trenouth never seemed to mind that I didn’t get his name quiet right. He was a slender man of ordinary height with a small moustache and at some point he became partially bald and that is how I remember him. Years later when Rollie and I were feeling the first tremors of puberty we would hide ourselves away with Dr. Tremouth’s old dermatology textbook in a basement room that Rollie used for his hobbies and that for a few years housed a large collection of parakeets when Mrs. Trenouth decided to become a breeder. Among the gross photos of decaying skin (we gagged and shuddered) we would find a few pictures of what appeared to be more or less normal breasts which we would covertly admire, surrounded by chirping birds and the sprawling wires of Rollie’s latest short-wave radio kit.
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