Wonder passes through each season, even on the Gulf coast of Texas, where the changes are subtle, a gradual dimming of the heat, birds in V-formation going home, sometimes the brighter leaves on the tips of ligustrum bushes. A year vanished like that, subtle and slow. My parents were divorced, and Pennsylvania was in the past. A year is long to a child. I loved Danforth Elementary School, I loved the immense sky overhead, and my first and best friend Danise was with me every day. I was getting happy.

Still, the relative calm didn’t make me stop missing my father, though I tried. I missed my mother, too, but the primary gift of time is understanding. I’ve lived long enough to understand how difficult it was to be divorced with children in 1957. She wasn’t married, but she had children, so she wasn’t single, and she was just out of a 12-year ordeal. She was unmarried in a married town and the sole support of two little girls, no option of a well-paying job. It’s not surprising she was preoccupied, worried, or both.

My home life improved beyond measure when we left my father, yet those times lingered in my mind, one episode in particular. I’m not sure where we were living, but I began having crazy, unknowable nightmares. I coped by refusing to sleep, which made me crabby and difficult. My mother wanted to escape her situation long before she managed it, and my nightmares coincided with the ruination of her first attempt. Could I have sensed her fresh despair? Because she was pregnant again. Years later she confided in me; she had secretly saved enough money, and she was about to buy two bus tickets out when her morning sickness began.

It broke my heart. She never knew the contentment of carrying a child with joy in her heart, and a good, hard-working man to share it. It was another unhappy pregnancy, though not so traumatic as the first, or maybe it was worse, because there was no hope. When she was big pregnant with Tish, we moved on. My father wrote bad checks all over San Antonio. She couldn’t waitress at the Chicken Shack now, so we headed north ahead of the law. I can spare a little compassion for my father. He had more demons than I can know, and he was desperate, too.

There came a time when my mother needed to talk about those days, and I did, too. Our conversations bounced from place to place, just as we did in the “old days.” I told her about the teacher who called me Mona Lisa, and asked why I was so sad, but I had no idea what she was talking about. Another teacher called me a Christmas present, because I arrived in December. I talked about a bridge in New Castle, and how I liked to stare down at the rushing water until it felt like the river was standing still, and I was moving. I didn’t know anything about relative motion, but I knew I was always moving.

Once we were safe in our tiny garage apartment back home in Texas, my mother tried not to say negative things about my father, but she cringed when she heard his name, and it pushed something inside me, a pin prick of pain. If I was half him, and she hated him, did she hate half of me? But I suspect the cringing had as much to do with loving him as hating him. So though the worst was over, my emotional state during that first year could be described as vulnerable, perhaps fragile.

It gets hazy now, because he came unannounced and without warning, on a happy day when I was minding my own business, walking home from school. I can’t paint this event into a whole picture. I can only construct it from snatches of half-memory flashing on my mental screen like those movie trailers, the ones that show scenes in bright succession, and you never quite know what it adds up to.

Some things I know. It was fifth grade, because my sister was at the babysitter, and not with me, as she would have been when I was in sixth. I was walking home with Danise. We always walked home together, laughing and talking. So it was on this day. Everything was normal. Danise and I jumped from square to square on the sidewalk. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” I became aware of a car on the street, but something was off. It was going too slow, trolling. It should have passed us. Why didn’t it pass us?

I looked over and locked eyes with the Bombardier.

He was in the driver’s seat of a black car. Remembering the moment seems like swimming. There’s a thick resistance, even to the memory. Seeing him sent me into emotional shock. How could he be here, driving down Fourth Avenue? This was Texas City, and he didn’t belong here. Shock seeks a way out, a way to change what’s happening. If we could get across Sixth Street, I thought, he would be gone, because it couldn’t be him. Yet it was.

And there was a woman in the car. Unfair, how strong emotions revisit in memory, love, hate, rage. I feel angry when I remember the woman. I overheard the ugliness in those dark nights when my father came home late and drunk. Among my parents’ many problems, there was the problem of other women. As my Aunt Jinx described him, “He liked the ladies, and the ladies liked him.” It didn’t matter that this was probably a brand new other woman.

I almost remember being drawn closer to his dark brown eyes, the same as mine. I almost remember wanting to get in the car. I almost remember Danise holding on to the back of my red plaid school dress. If she didn’t know him, he was a stranger, and no getting in the car with strangers. I stood frozen and mute on the cracked curb. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell her who it was, wasn’t sure I knew.

Did we walk home with him following? I don’t know. I wonder to this day how long it took him to find me. How many afternoons did he lurk outside Roosevelt or Kohfeldt, staring intently at the children as they went along home? Or did he come first to Danforth?

The next thing I know for sure, he was walking into the living room of the garage apartment.

He cast a sneering eye at the second-hand furniture. “This is where you live?”

And he brought his girlfriend in with him. Was I conscious of the wrongness of that? He brought his girlfriend uninvited and intruding, into the haven my mother had made for us. My mother, the woman whose heart he broke, but not her spirit. It’s so long later, and the memory is still upsetting.

He whispered to the other woman, whose face and form is a blank, but I recall his words exactly. “She’s intelligent and sensitive.” He said it with pride, as I stood there trembling.

He asked about my sister, who wouldn’t be dropped off home until 5:30, and then he hugged me. I wanted to pull away, but he smelled like my father, and this had an effect which I loved and hated. My emotions ran up and down a scale I’ve seldom experienced.

“Remember Mountaintop, Speck?” he asked. “You swam in the pool every day.” He put his hand on my cheek. I see it: He’s sitting in a chair, and I’m standing.

Speck. A pet name, a play on Becky, given to me when I was small, and he said I was just a little speck when he looked down at me. And Mountaintop. How clever he was. Both names took me to a happy time, when I was old enough to know how things were, but not old enough to know how wrong they were.

He used the memory like ammunition. Mountaintop. I did love it. It was a fantasy place. I loved Mountaintop, and he knew it. Google Mountaintop Nightclub, and there’s a column on local history in the San Antonio Express-News (see Mountaintop Profile on blogroll at right):

Question: Do you have any information on the old Hilltop nightclub near Camp Bullis?

Answer: This sounds like the Mountaintop Dinner Club . . . “12 miles out Fredericksburg Road in 1940s newspaper advertisements. It operated . . . from about 1942 through 1952

. . . My father’s voice, very soothing, masculine. “You were in first or second grade. Remember old Cap Tallmadge? He sued the Texas Rangers!”

 . . .“Cap Tallmadge,” . . . a well-known impresario in San Antonio, having operated several nightclubs before establishing Mountaintop. . . Tallmadge tried to get an injunction against the Texas Rangers, some of whom had removed a loudspeaker . . . during a raid on the premises.

My father drew me back to that mesquite covered mountain. Cap Tallmadge, the top-ranking crazy in a crazy family. He lived on the property in a shack made of milk crates, the heavy kind used to deliver milk in glass bottles, six or eight to the crate. In my ramblings around the 45-acres of Mountaintop, I avoided his “home,” even though my mother said he was harmless.

“Do you remember, Speck? We could hear music in the summer, when the windows were open and the breeze was right.” I heard the music. Felt the breeze. My father laughed. “It closed for a while. When it reopened, Cap tried to call it a health resort and nightclub.

” The new “health resort” . . . would include . . . amusements and recreation . . . and a pool and a tennis court, but the two-story . . .restaurant and nightclub were . . . the most memorable.

Health resort? I combed the garbage dumps with Cap Tallmadge’s kids, Sheila and Freddy, and sometimes we threw empty tin cans at each other. A can hit me right above the eye, and I ran home bloody-faced and scared a good scolding out of my mother. I closed one eye when the blood got into it, and I seemed to be running at an angle. Remembering, I put a hand to my eyebrow. The scar was still there – is still there. My father took my hand away from my face, so tenderly.

“I know,” he said. “It bled, but it was superficial. We went swimming the same afternoon. We were allowed to use the pool. And Freddy Tallmadge tried to catch a tarantula on the tennis court. Remember our cottage with the colored tiles around the door?”

The Mountaintop Dinner Club . . . had “numerous small outbuildings” on the property, . . .built for members of Mrs. Tallmadge’s family, and . . . Tallmadge Jr. recalls . . . he and his sister Sheila grew up . . . in a house on the property and eating in the dining room, where “Jasper, the cook prepared all our meals.”

We lived in one of the “numerous small outbuildings,” my father out of work, doing odd jobs around the club. Cap’s wife Margo lived in a bigger “small outbuilding,” not with Cap in the milk crates. She had blond hair, and paid my mother to bleach it. She didn’t tell my father, and a new getaway fund was born, which would later buy three bus tickets.  

. . . and the nightclub provided big-name entertainment, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Joey Bishop, then a young comedian who served as master of ceremonies for floor shows that might include song-and-dance teams, magicians and even high-class strippers.  

Zorima the ecdysiast, queen of the strippers.

Once we were taken to see a show, but I don’t remember any “big-name” entertainment, and there was no ecdysiast. Laughter and innuendo among the grown-ups tipped me off. An ecdysiast probably wasn’t some kind of musician, but that’s what they said.

I did remember red-headed Barbara who lived on the property for a while, and drove a fabulous yellow Cadillac convertible. She walked around outside in her underpants and bra. Maybe she was an ecdysiast? I know for sure Mountaintop was a place out of time, like a post-prohibition speakeasy, and I ran wild there like the roadrunners and other country kids.

As my father talked, I fell under his spell, loving him again, like I did on Mountaintop. I don’t know how many times the phone rang before the spell was broken, but just when I became aware of it, it stopped. In the length of time it took to redial, it started again.

I called my mother when I got home from school, and if I forgot, she called me.

My father would have known who was calling. “Speck. You’d better answer that.”

“Hello,” I whispered.

“What’s wrong? Why didn’t you answer the phone? Were you in the bathroom?”

“No. I . . .” My emotions bubbled over, and I started to sob. My father took the phone.

“Hello, Hazel. This is Dick.” A pause. “Dick who? Dick Bagley, that’s Dick who!”

I hadn’t stopped crying, and yet I laughed, because life is like that. My mother had a busy social life, so busy she couldn’t be sure which Tom, Dick, or Harry might be calling. And I realized with glee that my father most certainly did not appreciate the humor.

My mental slide show of the past skips forward, and he gathers up his girlfriend and leaves. Before he got to the bottom step, he turned and said, “I love you, Speck. I have to see Tish. I’ll always love you girls. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

By the time my mother walked home as fast as she could from her office a few blocks away, and before the babysitter delivered my sister, Dick Bagley was gone, with a promise to come back. However, see the last line in the divorce announcement? The defendant is ordered to pay to plaintiff toward the support of said two minor children the sum of $100 per month . . . Defendant didn’t send it, not once; plaintiff knew he never would.

Everybody knew everybody in TC, and my mother had an acquaintance from way back with a law enforcement officer named Jim Bell (Senior). Maybe she called him, and he told her who to call, what to do. I have no knowledge of this, but what happened next happened fast, and she made it happen over the telephone. Texas gentlemen had (and still have) a soft spot for “widows” and their “fatherless” children, and before the sun came up again, the Butterfly had the Bombardier tracked down, arrested, and thrown in the pokey for failing to pay child support. He agreed to leave town forthwith, and was released with the (empty) promise to send the back child support.

Would I see him tomorrow? Would he see my sister? On graduation night my high school sweetheart, who was always a man, never a boy, asked if my father would show up, and what then? Would I hear from him when I married or when I had my first child, his first grandchild? Did he ever love me? Would anyone ever love me? Soon enough I knew in my head that I would be loved – that I was loved. It took longer to know in my heart.

Is it possible to have children and forget them like a catchy tune that fades with time? I don’t know, but I know when he got back in the car and drove away down the alley by the Catholic church, the Bombardier was gone.

I never saw him again.

NEXT: Danforth, an Ending and a Beginning