Being only five when Dad left, it is hard to separate what I actually remember from what I was later told about him. He is one of those people in my life about whom other people’s experience counts for more than my own. Only when I had been away from Montana for years did I ask others about him, because I was eager to fill in the gaps in the unbalanced and sketchy stories of him I heard from Mom. For the most part she tried never to mention him.
For years after I left Missoula my story about my Dad was brief. “Mom and Dad were divorced when I was five. Dad lived in the same town—actually just a few blocks away on Central Avenue. My brother lived with him and I lived with my Mom. He is the Vice-president of the First National Bank. I only saw him a few times a year when I was growing up.”
What I remember of Dad before the divorce is just a few short scenes. Once he was angry with me when I had committed some infraction of his rules. I was assembling horse chestnuts that we had collected near the university on the floor of the living room When he came home, the chestnuts on the floor and my busy organization of them were the first thing he saw. He became red-faced and mad and made me stand in the corner with my finger on the wall, Dad’s next-to-most severe punishment, spanking being the most severe. I had to stand facing the wall with my right arm extended as high above my head as possible, with one finger on the wall, and that finger could not move down the wall no matter how long I was standing. I remember this nearly medieval torture well—as I was very wiggly and standing doing nothing for any length of time would have been enough punishment without having to keep my arm raised. I have no estimate of the deforming effect of this on my delicate little personality!
I remember that once he and Mom were going to a Hallowe’en Party and Dad, wearing a mask, came into their bedroom where I was going to sleep in my crib. He said something like “boo” and I was appropriately astonished, but I don’t think I was scared.
I must have spent 1500 other evenings with Dad, but these are my only memories from that time before he left.
For the rest, this is what I heard. Some is absolutely true and the rest—who knows? Dad’s family came to Montana from Missouri in the early part of the Century, maybe about 1920 when he would have been seven or eight. He grew up in Helena, the state capitol, and Gary Cooper was his high school classmate. He had two brothers, Lloyd and Clinton; I think that Dad was the youngest. Lloyd also lived in Missoula; Clinton, a geologist, lived in Colorado. I only saw him once or twice that I remember, but Uncle Lloyd was the man next to my grandfather that I saw most growing up.
Dad said that the Noels came to the United States at the time of the earliest Jamestown settlement at the beginning of the colonization of North American by the English. I later discovered that few of the original settlers at Jamestown survived and stayed, but it is possible that at some point the original Noel lived in that area in the early colonial era. A family tree researched by Clint’s wife Freddie late in her life showed Noels living in the southeast coastal states, Virginia and North Carolina, in the early 1800’s and then gradually moving west to Kentucky, and finally Missouri. Dad had a lot of Noel relatives around Clarence, St. Joseph, and Hannibal, Missouri. Why his gfather Elbert (Bert) Noel and his mother, Carrie Hanger Noel, moved the family to Montana and what Elbert did for a living I never heard. I knew Dad’s mother, who we called “Nana,” just a little, but when I attended her funeral in Helena when I was about 10, the pale, lifeless woman I stared down at in the open casket might as well have been a stranger to me.
I have a picture of Dad as a young man that we found in one of my mother’s photo albums, taken at the time of the earlier picture I mentioned. He is standing with his right foot up on the running board of that pre-war roadster, spiffily dressed in the light-colored suit, tightly cut, leaning forward with his right elbow propped on his right thigh, hands lightly clasped in front of him. He has wavy blonde hair. He looks like a college rake, too attractive for his own good. Bait. In the days after Mom died and we were free to talk about their brief marriage without violating the unspoken message of Mom that those subjects should never be discussed, Sammy and I speculated about when he was conceived. I don’t know if Sam ever discovered whether Mom was pregnant when they got married, and the stories we heard were silent on this delicate point. We knew that Mom was a year or two older than Dad, that she graduated from the University with a degree in journalism, and that Dad did not graduate but was working as a clerk in the First National Bank when Sammy was little and that he stayed with the bank all his life. When I was much older I heard Dad described as a “womanizer,” and it is easy to imagine that Mom was one of the women that Dad drew into his web and they married only because of Sammy’s existence. I could check the marriage certificate and the birth certificate and it would be clear, but it never mattered enough because by the time I became aware of such things the marriage was long-since over: whatever its reasons for starting, its reasons for ending were stronger.
What else did I hear about Dad when he and Mom belonged to the same family? That he liked to fish and hunt. That he and Mom and Sammy and I sometimes went off with friends and their children for a day of fishing and picnicking on any one of the dozen or so trout streams around Missoula. I remember eating a duck that Dad had shot, sitting in our tiny kitchen, Mom warning Sammy and me to be careful not to break a tooth on the bird shot that she might have missed. That every year they invited friends over to set up a Christmas tree after Sammy and I were in our beds, and that they drank Tom and Jerries and opened presents from each other and decorated the tree and that Dick Snider, when he was back from the war, broke out in an itchy rash from finishing off the tree with angel hair that was made of spun glass.
Dad’s religion was foggy to me even when he died. I think whichever church he belonged to was mostly a matter of convenience to him. I have Dad’s confirmation bible. He gave it to me for some reason known only to him after I had gone off to the East: “The Holy Bible, containing the old and new testaments, presented to Robert Noel, September 11th, 1927 for regular attendance at Christian Church Bible School.”
There is one more memory I have of Dad, stirred up into consciousness by trying to remember him: near our house on McLeod, just a block away on University Avenue, I attended Sunday School at the Congregational Church. When I was four I was supposed to be a part of a children’s service on Christmas Eve but I couldn’t learn my part—I did not yet read, so it had to be memorized. Dad rehearsed me right up to the time we were supposed to leave with growing exasperation. Finally he left me at home and went to church and read the part himself, his adult voice thick among the tiny, piping voices of the little children.
Later, after he remarried, he belonged to the Episcopalian Church to which Marj’s family belonged. Since I didn’t go to church again after the divorce until I was sixteen and trying to find answers to looming existential questions, I don’t know if Dad actually attended the Church of the Holy Spirit on Sunday morning or whether he stayed at home with shades drawn like other non-attenders in those years when what you did and did not do was noticed and commented on by your neighbors. As a divorced man who had left his family for another woman, he might not have been welcome, but I never thought about it until long after I moved away. His funeral was at the Church of the Holy Spirit, so in some sense he still belonged. His wife at that time was a Catholic and wanted him buried in a Catholic Cemetery, but the Church was not flexible enough to figure out in what place on earth or in heaven Dad belonged and he ended up alone in unconsecrated ground, buried with none of his three wives.
Did Dad ride a bicycle in the streets of Helena when he was 11? Did he have summer jobs mowing and watering lawns or bagging groceries or toting bales of hay? Were there girlfriends before Mom (hard to imagine that there were not)? Did he have a life-dream that marriage and family obstructed? Was he an artist or poet who never could free himself of the conventions of work and obligation? Were Sammy and I born because Mom and Dad were trying to build something together, or did we simply happen and then had to be adjusted to? I never heard Dad talk about any of these things or about any part of his childhood or about his dreams or frustrations. I don’t think that there is anyone now alive who I could ask, and he may never have talked to anyone when he was alive, introspection and confession not being his nature.
More stories about Dad: that he drank a lot, that he frequently drank excessively, that he liked to party, that he had a hot temper and exerted strong and angry discipline. Another story conflicts with this: Mom once said that she hated going out with Dad on Saturday nights because he always had to be home early to start pancake batter which needed to stand overnight. Mom drank and smoked in the forties when those behaviors still were not considered “lady-like”, even in Montana, and what I observed in later years suggested that she too liked to party, to sing, to stop by bars, to have a good time.
I never heard Dad utter a word of complaint about Mom in my presence, so I have no idea whether he was driven away or wandered off on his own. Mom’s friends who owed Dad nothing may have said that he married Marj because she was the daughter of the president of the First National Bank and that she had money, that the marriage guaranteed him a future as an officer at the bank. He may have resented Mom’s parents and their expectations about what kind of life they expected him to provide for her. Since I unquestioningly loved my grandparents and their European accents I would not have imagined that Dad did not like being married to the daughter of parents who were by religion and culture very different than his Montana and Missouri roots.
Mom probably knew whether he walked away to get a better deal, or was driven away, or was thrown out because he was a mean drunk or unfaithful—Mom probably knew this, but she never told me and Dad never said a word.
