Making of a Writer (9780307820464) (5 page)

I reentered the house, and as I walked alone through the large, empty rooms, I couldn’t explain the eerie sensations I felt. A lost will … a death that could have been murder … If restless ghosts were looking for a place to prowl, this was the house. Maybe it was only my active imagination, but I was sure I could feel the years of sorrow from this unhappy marriage that had seeped into the corner shadows.

None of this bothered my parents, who bought the house because it was beautiful and because it was a great bargain.

After we had moved in, I discovered something curious. The downstairs hallway connected two large rooms at each side of the house. One my parents had designed as an informal den. The other contained a Ping-Pong table and my mother’s sewing machine. Two bathrooms, one off each room, were back to back, and in front of the bathrooms, in the center of the hallway, was a linen closet, about five feet deep, with two wide doors that swung closed to meet in the middle.

There was a lock on the outside of the linen closet, and, for no apparent reason, on the inside of the closet were
two
locks. One was a hook and eye and one was a snap lock, both of which could only be operated by someone
inside
the closet.

Borrowing my father’s measuring tape, I did some sleuthing. “There’s a space about seven or eight feet wide and at least ten feet deep behind the closet,” I pointed out.

“That’s where the plumbing from the bathrooms would be,” Daddy said.

“I allowed for the plumbing,” I told him. “Besides, how much space can a few pipes take? I think there’s a room hidden back there.”

Mother rolled her eyes. “There’s no reason for a hidden room.”

“There’s no reason for the closet to be locked on the inside,” I countered. I was eager to see this hidden room. “Just think,” I said, “the room might hold, at the least, a missing will. Or at the most … well, the neighbors weren’t sure what happened to Mrs. S.’s mother and sister. Why don’t we take out the shelves? Why don’t we find out if the back of the linen closet is false and there’s a room behind it?”

“Don’t be silly,” Mother said. She glanced nervously at the closet. “I’ve just finished unpacking the sheets and towels and tablecloths and filling all those shelves. I’m not taking everything out just because you have an overactive imagination.”

“I’ll do the work. I’ll take everything out myself, and I’ll put it all back,” I promised. “If there are ghosts, we should lay them to rest.”

“No,” Mother said. “And that’s final.” She began to look frantic. “I don’t want to hear one more word about secret rooms or dead bodies or ghosts.”

Later, I caught Daddy with the measuring tape, double-checking my figures. He seemed a little embarrassed as he looked up and saw me, but he said, “There does seem to be a good-sized empty space in there, but let’s not worry your mother about it. Okay?”

“Why?” I asked complainingly.

“Because,” Daddy said. “Just because.”

I was sure I knew why. Mother loved her new house, and she didn’t want it tainted with anything even the least bit mysterious.

Six years later, one of our near neighbors, the movie star and comedian W. C. Fields, died, and his sprawling mansion was listed for sale.

Mother returned from a walk in the neighborhood and said to us, “The realtor is holding an open house, but no potential buyers are on hand. Walk up the hill with me. We’ll tell the realtor we’re just nosy neighbors. I’d love to get a peek at the inside of that mansion.”

Equally curious, Pat and I went with Mother and met a realtor who was alone and bored. “Come in,” she said. “I can at least show you around the first floor.”

As we walked into the beautiful wood-paneled entry hall, she stopped us and said, “Let me show you something unusual.”

She pressed a button that was hidden within the paneling, and one panel slid open, revealing a room about eight feet by ten feet with a door at one side. “This house was built during Prohibition,” the realtor explained. “This hidden room was used to hide the liquor. That door leads to a stairway that exits the property on the street below. It was planned so that if the house was raided, the bootlegger could easily make his getaway.”

Our house had also been built in the twenties. Perhaps the mysterious space I had discovered was a similar room, once used for hiding liquor.

Tentatively, I brought up the idea, but Mother was quick to squelch it. “That’s nonsense,” she said. “First you thought there were dead bodies, then ghosts, and now
you’re talking about bootleggers. We do
not
have a hidden room in our house, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

I realized I’d made a big mistake in the beginning by blurting out my guesses about dead bodies or ghosts. If I had pointed out only the space itself, Mother might have allowed Daddy and me to investigate it. Now I’d never know whether there was a secret room or what might be inside it.

I had gathered some of the elements of a good mystery: measurements that didn’t add up, suspicious characters who had lived in the house, and a missing will. But my motivation was nothing more than curiosity—not strong enough for any story—and the adversary who stood in the way of my investigation was my very own mother.

I consoled myself with the hope that at some time in the future, another owner might remodel the house and discover the secret room and its mysterious contents. I might have been denied the right to solve the mystery, but at least I hadn’t lost the element of suspense.

My childhood was generally
a happy time. I studied, I played, and I read more books than would be possible to count.

Books were like popcorn, and I gobbled them. Each week Mother took us to our branch library, and I checked out the maximum number allowed, even adding some to Mother’s list.

There were books I had never read that beckoned me, teased me, tempted me. I scooped up armfuls, reading every chance I got. Even when Mother said, “You absolutely must stop reading and go outside and get some fresh air!” I’d sneak a book outside and keep reading. And at night I read under the covers with a flashlight.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had plenty of company. I have never met an author who didn’t love to read.

After we moved across the city, we had a new branch library to visit—the Hollywood library on Ivar Street. When I entered it I walked across the aisle from the children’s room into the adult room.

Often I’m asked what young adult books I read when I was a teenager. My answer is none. There weren’t any. No one thought of writing or publishing books with teen characters and issues that would appeal to teenage readers, until Nat Hentoff wrote
Jazz Country
and S. E. Hinton wrote
The Outsiders
in the 1960s.

I read the mystery novels written by Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. I read Raymond Chandler’s mysteries because they were set in my own Los Angeles. I read humor and biographies and California history. And sometimes, in my eagerness to know why the world was in such a horrible state, I read nonfiction about the world situation.

“Are you sure your mother will want you to read this book?” the librarian asked as I checked out Jan Valtin’s
Out of the Night
, which dealt with Nazi atrocities.

“Oh, yes. She wants me to broaden my mind,” I answered.

The librarian sighed as she stamped the due date on the card at the back of the book. “If I were you, I wouldn’t read it,” she said.

Was she right? The book contained such horrifying descriptions, I soon wished I hadn’t read it. Yet I knew I needed to better understand why our country had to go to war to stop the terrible things the Nazis were doing. It was important for as many people as possible—including me—to know the facts.

I knew that reading is the major key to learning, but I also used reading to fulfill my needs for fun and romance and mystery and excitement and deep satisfaction. Even with the precollege course I was taking, I managed to read my own choice of books as well. Classic and contemporary, fiction and nonfiction—they made a good mix. I saturated myself with my favorite authors’ various styles and techniques, learning from the very best.

Dora was Nanny’s fifth
cousin and lived with her husband, Ed, in nearby Huntington Park. Overly round and rouged, Dora was pleasant and friendly with an ever-ready smile and a halo of short, permanently waved gray curls. Best of all, Dora had a talent none of the rest of us had. Dora could communicate with the dead.

Ed, on the other hand, was a gruff, meat-and-potatoes, no-nonsense person, muscular and sun-weathered as dark as my second-best brown oxfords.

Dora and Ed eagerly accepted every invitation to our family’s big Sunday dinners because Nanny was a truly great cook.

Each Sunday afternoon’s feast began with a Jell-O fruit salad and relish dishes full of sliced celery, carrots, and
olives. These were followed by a large roast of beef with browned potatoes and gravy, string beans, fresh corn cut from the cob, sliced tomatoes, and sometimes creamed pearl onions, a favorite of my father’s. There were always fresh yeast rolls, set to rise that morning after eight o’clock Mass, and at least three of Nanny’s special fruit pies—peach, cherry, apple, or strawberry-rhubarb, depending on the season. We always had Sunday visitors, and Nanny enjoyed that. Her talent lay in cooking, and she loved an appreciative audience, invariably urging them to “have a second piece of pie.”

Dora always ate with a healthy appetite, so it was hard for me to believe that she had been quite ill a few years before—so ill that her doctors didn’t know how to help her.

However, as Nanny had told me, a friend brought a spiritualist to pray over Dora, and she was cured. Dora was so fascinated with the man’s religion, which was called “spiritualism,” that she studied it and became a spiritualist herself.

Any type of fortune-telling, psychic reading, or public visitation with the dead, unless it was in conjunction with a church service, was against the law at that time in California. So Dora opened her own church in Huntington Park; she became a spiritualist minister, and her church thrived. She loved to go into trances and believed that a messenger from the next world inhabited her body and could speak through her.

Ed obviously loved Dora, but he had little patience for her so-called dealings with spirits. He enjoyed repeating his story about an incident during a severe earthquake that took place in Los Angeles on March 10, 1933.

According to Ed, Dora had spent the two previous
Sundays preaching about the next world and how she looked forward to entering it. “I’m not afraid of death,” she had told her congregation. “I welcome death.”

But at 5:54 P.M., when the first and strongest jolt hit, Dora raced out of her house and dropped to her knees in the middle of the street. Raising her arms to the heavens, she shouted, “I didn’t mean it, God! I didn’t mean it!”

When Dora and Ed visited us after her church service on Sundays, Dora was often on a roll. That meant we might have a few extra guests no one but Dora could see. Although this made my mother very nervous, it didn’t bother me. I thoroughly enjoyed everything Dora told us. I was a sophisticated graduate of soap opera’s Psychology 101, and I was fascinated by unusual people.

One Sunday afternoon, soon after we had moved to Laughlin Park, Dora and Ed arrived to have dinner with us. I came downstairs to greet Dora, who was seated on the sofa chatting with Mother.

Mother had begun to tell Dora about one of my activities at school when Dora suddenly raised a hand and said, “Hush, Margaret. Your aunt Gussie is with us.”

Mother stiffened and paled and gripped her fingers so tightly her knuckles turned white.

In a soft, breathy voice Dora said, “Gussie is standing behind Joan. Her hands are on Joan’s shoulders. She is telling us that Joan will become a writer.”

I already knew I would be a writer, and my parents always showed a great deal of support for my writing, but I thought it was kind of Aunt Gussie to show up and offer her encouragement, too.

Writers welcome support, no matter where it comes from. My parents and grandparents were proud of the
poems and stories I wrote, but what Dora had said gave me a special confidence in the direction I was taking. It was exciting to have Mother’s aunt Gussie, someone outside my immediate family, give her honest, unbiased opinion. Besides, I was well aware that this support came from someone who ought to have a better-than-human chance of predicting the future.

On that day I moved one step closer to becoming a writer.

On the first day
of the fall semester at LeConte Junior High School, I walked onto campus with a feeling of dread. I knew no one. I was miles away from the friends with whom I’d grown up. I wished we hadn’t moved. I wished I were home in bed.

Then I met Mary Lou Weghorst. As a new student, too, she was probably as lost and scared as I was, but her smile never wavered. We introduced ourselves, we talked until the first bell rang, and we arranged to meet for lunch. Mary Lou became my best friend forever.

Starting a new school and making new friends is always difficult, but it was especially so during the worldwide turmoil of 1940. Germany’s military forces were plundering Europe, and everyone was afraid it would be only a matter
of time until the United States would be involved in war. Large defense factories had opened in the Los Angeles area, and people were moving to the city in droves to help build planes, tanks, and armaments.

When I enrolled in ninth grade at LeConte, which included grades seven through nine, I found myself in a homeroom composed entirely of newcomers. The administration, for some reason, had lumped us all together, in essence keeping us apart from the other ninth graders. We were treated like outsiders not only by the kids who had gone to school together from their days in kindergarten, but also by a few of the teachers. However, all of us newcomers were going through the pangs of trying to turn strangers into friends, so in a way being segregated made it easier to make the adjustment to this new school.