Leaving Montana--Chapter one, continued

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.

Leaving Montana--Chapter One: The Story Begins

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.

Leaving Montana--Prologue

My father may have been a romantic. I have a picture of him around the time I was born, or maybe just before the War, leaning casually on one elbow on the open window of a Ford Roadster. He was wearing a tight white suit. He was lean, his hair was blonde and wavy, he must have been about 21 or 22. I can understand why my mother fell in love with him--if that is what happened. Or perhaps they got married because she was pregnant by him and marriage was what a man and a pregnant woman settled for at that time: walking away or abortion were not options.

I have always speculated that he was a romantic because he claimed that our family, the Noel's of Hannibal, Missouri--or was it Clarence, Missouri: those names were always thrown around when Dad talked about his family, but I never went to any of those towns or met any of the Missouri Noels--because he claimed that we were descended from Lord Byron, and that I was named for Lord Byron.

This didn't mean much to me when I was in the sixth grade and started reading seriously. At that time serious reading meant novels about the War or memoirs of submarine service or Hardy Boy mysteries or Jack London adventures. But when I got to high school, my home room teacher, Dan Low, was also my English teacher and my French teacher. He had been in the War and it was rumored that he abandoned his famous Massachusetts family to find peace and a simple life in Montana. With his New England upbringing and his Amherst degree he knew that Lord Byron had a complicated life and a complicated name, George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron. So it was Mr. Low who confirmed that I had been named after my Dad's claimed ancestor. I read a few of Byron's poems, but I was not yet ready at age 14 for the heroic mode, and I moved on to other literature.

I only saw Dad a few times a year, and I never asked him for evidence that the Noel's I came from were the Noels that gave Byron his middle name. Some years later I was avoiding writing my senior thesis on a renaissance poem called The Faerie Queen by prowling in the stacks of Widener Library and came across a biography of Byron. What I learned did not do anything to make me believe Dad's claim. It appears that Byron took his unhappy wife's family name in exchange for their settling a 1000 pounds a year on him so that he could keep up his family estate and look like an appropriate British Lord, which he was not. So perhaps we were descended from his wife's Nottingham family. And had we been descended from him directly it would have been no great distinction, since it was (and is) widely believed that he fathered three hundred illegitimate children.

Whether Dad knew the Byron story from family conversations or made it up himself after reading about Byron I never knew. I did not admire Dad for much, but I was impressed that he discovered the possibility of any connection with the famous British rake and poet. And I thought it was a sign of a romantic mind that Dad took it as a good thing to elevate himself by claiming a nobel ancestor in a place like Montana where no gave a damn.

All of which is a lengthy explanation of the name of this Blog, Pilgrimage, which is another, even longer story I won't tell you right now but has to do with one of Byron's most famous poems, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which I don't much care for, and the fabulous viola concerto that Berlioz wrote based on the poem, Harold in Italy, which I love.

Faced with a short time and the need to name a blog if I were about to write one, those were the connections that occurred over about two minutes that led to a title meant to suggest my long trip, from Montana in 1941, to now, that could have been called a pilgrimage if I had had any idea of where I was going when I left Montana, as I did not.