My First Five Husbands (26 page)

Back on the old home front, Trish wrote that she was sending Sandy and Panther out, and when I went to the airport to pick them up, I discovered she’d also sent Grover and Gretl.

What? Gretl was
her
dog!

Oh now, this would really thrill Lette to pieces—two dogs and two cats. Gretl and the cats turned out to be no trouble at all, but Sandy had to be shut in my bedroom when I went to work. If I left her in the yard, she barked, and Lette slept very late every morning, getting up around eleven, feeling like hell warmed over, in no mood for Sandy’s serenade.

Mother and Melinda and Melinda’s friend, Caroline, arrived soon after, having traveled halfway across the country for three days in a van to bring Mark to L.A.—along with four other kids and Mark’s gerbils. All three women looked as if they’d spent those three days in a Cuisinart blender. At one point on the trip, they were pulled over, because one of the children had to pee, so Mother gave him an empty paper cup in which to relieve himself and, when she threw it out the window, it flew smack onto the windshield of a highway patrolman. Mother hadn’t noticed him behind them.

“I’ll handle this,” she said, stepping out of the car, and a minute or two later, she came back and said, “Let’s go.” What did she say to the officer? Who knows? That mother of ours had a way about her.

Also, during the trip, the gerbils kept escaping their box and scampering all over, exploring the van. After three days of this, Caroline was driving when one of the gerbils ran across her right foot on the accelerator. She didn’t even flinch. Just remarked, “Well, there goes another gerbil.”

I don’t know where we bedded all the folks down. Everyone remembers it differently. Mark recalls sleeping in his bedroom, with most of the others in the downstairs den. Melinda remembers that she and Mimi slept in Linda’s big bed until one night she and Mimi both felt a “presence” in the bedroom and took their bedclothes upstairs to the living room. We all remember that the kids spent most of their day in the pool and playing Ping-Pong on the deck. Good old Skipper Edelen came down from San Francisco and we had a dinner party, snapping goofy photos, laughing ourselves silly. Finally, everyone but Mark set out for home—minus the gerbils. Panther had dispatched them all, or they had packed their bags and taken a hike, we never discovered which.

Lette christened our humble abode “The Hen House” and initiated
The Hen House Herald,
a thick notebook to which we all contributed. It contained pages of gripes and laughs over the next nine months. Believe me, we had plenty of each. Lette wrote a lot about The Rooster, her name for Jack Quigley, the conductor she was ga-ga over for the next fifteen years. Even Mark contributed, and
The Hen House Herald
still exists, with copious deletions—primarily about The Rooster—that Lette excised before departing this earthly realm. To this day, I haven’t been brave enough to read it. One day, I’ll get out four boxes of Kleenex and give it a try, hopefully with Linda.

In October, Mother came back out for Mark’s fifteenth birthday, bringing—oh, goodie—more gerbils. She’d visited us only a month before, yet she felt the need to return. This was unusual. Knowing she’d be at The Hen House for only a week, we threw a party to which I invited many friends, including the only movie star I knew—the gorgeous John Saxon, one of those character actors who get a lot of the old “Oh! You’re
that
guy!” I thought she’d get a kick out of meeting him, and she did, but the whole time, she was strangely unlike her old ebullient self.

One day, Mother and Mark and I took Sandy and Gretl to the beach, and Mother looked at Gretl and said, “You know, Rue, I think that dog’s pregnant.”

“So that’s why Trish sent her! What a dirty trick!” I cried. “And you know how Lette feels about animals. She’ll really love this.”

“Why don’t I take Gretl with me and find homes for the puppies?” Mother suggested.

This was a huge relief to me, but I felt terrible loading such a task onto Mother when I could tell something was troubling her. The night before she left, she confided to Lette and me, “Some days I feel like wading out into Lake Ardmore and never coming back.”

This alarmed me. My dear darling mother, seriously depressed?

“When I was in Europe,” she told us, “I saw the Berlin Wall, and I sank into a bad feeling that hasn’t let up.”

“Mother, you need to drive up to Dallas or Oklahoma City once a week and talk to a therapist,” I urged, but she pooh-poohed such an unheard-of notion. Lette and I both told her therapy had made big changes in our lives and could help her understand what was going on. But she left for Ardmore the next day, sure she could handle it herself, which worried me.

O
ne crisp morning in October, a golden retriever trotted into our front yard. He had a collar but no ID. I checked the local paper and saw an ad that fit his description.

“Yup,” said the man who answered the phone. “Sounds like my dog.”

The fellow showed up within the hour, coming from a canyon several miles west of us. Toole saw Josh. Josh saw Toole and immediately ran and jumped onto his chest, licking him joyously. (You can surmise which was the guy and which the dog.) Josh had been missing for a week, and this happened to be the last day of the ad. How lucky!

And speaking of getting lucky…this guy was not bad-looking. Fancy that.

Do you smell another escapade? Are your loins girded? If not, gird up.

Toole and I chatted a bit, and while I was less demonstrative than Josh, I found Toole—oh, what did I find him? Awfully nice. Tall and slender with light brown hair, a country manner, easy to talk to, about ten years my senior. We took to each other, as they say, and exchanged phone numbers. (Just in case Josh should decide to fly the coop again, you see…
ahem
.) Soon, he called me. Would I like to see his place in the canyon?
Ooooh,
would I. I’m nuts about canyons! Nuts about goldenrod! Hay fever? Nuts about hay fever!

I drove out the next afternoon, finally locating his secluded acreage. He was living in a trailer near the spot where his hand-built house had recently burned down. Seems he’d bought this acreage and built a house, then gone back to Oregon, where he had an apple orchard, which provided his income, and during his absence the house had caught fire. He suspected arson. It was all very intriguing. I liked Toole, but I was nervous. This was such a different sort of man from any I’d ever met. Very sexy, in a low-key sort of way. Quietly masculine. Quietly unlettered. Of the land.

We climbed down to the creek and up to the hill where his house had been, and after about an hour, he asked if I’d like a cup of tea. Yes, I would. We had it inside his trailer. The tea was nice. Toole was nicer. Definitely an A+. Oh, yes. A+. Definitely. He and his wife were virgins when they got married and had found sex easy and natural. He’d been with no woman but her. I was his
second
? Wow! I looked at him like he was a unicorn. He never inquired about my experiences, being not the least bit curious. I seemed to suit him fine.

Need I say we saw each other rather frequently? Usually at his place out there in the canyon, beautiful in a dry California kind of way, with all that shoulder-high, incessantly waving, godforsaken goldenrod. I sneezed, my nose ran, I sneezed, my nose ran. Luckily, Toole had a lot of handkerchiefs. In fact, he usually wore a checkered one tied around his forehead, like a hippie. A hippie farmer. He looked cute and terribly sexy.

One weekend, Toole took Mark and me up to the Mojave Desert for an overnight camping trip under the stars. The desert was blanketed with tiny flowers of all description, and the light changed every second, coloring the bluffs and buttes with reds and golds and purples. I had no idea the desert could be so breathtaking.

We drove to the top of a mountain to “Burro” Schmidt’s Tunnel. According to local legend, this guy Schmidt had been told he would die from tuberculosis unless he moved to the desert, so he did, spending the next thirty years in that forsaken place. He’d hand-laid tracks half a mile long, digging through the mountain with just a burro and a small wagon all summer, tending sheep for ranchers in the winter. It was an inspirational story. Mark and Toole and I explored the tunnel with lanterns, coming out high over the desert. Back in the ramshackle house, I bought four kerosene lanterns from the roughshod woman who ran the place. She was quite fascinating herself, telling us how she dug the water well and once fought a mountain lion on her own. Mark still has those lanterns, and they still work! That night, Mark and Toole and I slept on army cots under the stars, more stars than I’d seen since the 1950s in Oklahoma.

The second season of
Maude
debuted to great reviews. It wasn’t as popular as
All in the Family,
but it was solid. I was having a marvelous time in the show. And I was having a pretty marvelous time with Toole. He was so…
bucolic
. So unfailingly, easily, sexy. Meanwhile, Mark was happy at Newbridge, a progressive private school. He was drawing and painting like crazy and learning to play guitar with a teacher who judged him inordinately talented. Mother had bought him a guitar that summer in Ardmore, and I now bought him a better one. He practiced for hours every afternoon after school and all weekend.

We had a party at The Hen House practically every weekend, with Mark and Lette jamming on piano and guitar and Lette and Linda singing well into the night. (I must have heard “Cabaret” 460 times.) Lette had a brief affair with a Greek realtor before she met Jack Quigley, the “rooster” who would become the love of her life. Linda was in a new series, and as I recall, sleeping with the lighting man.

Oh, let me promise you,
The Hen House Herald
was full of news.

For one thing, the new batch of gerbils immediately moved to Timbuktu.

N
ews from Mother in Ardmore in early October. Gretl had her puppies.

Six days later, on October 15, Mother had a heart attack.

She was ordered by her doctor to stay in bed four weeks and not lift a finger, so her sister Irene, who had helped raise me, came from West Texas to care for her, staying for over three weeks. Melinda drove up from Louisiana and took Gretl and her brood home, finding homes for the pups. (Then she had the good sense to have Gretl spayed, and I’m happy to say that Gretl lived with Melinda to the end of her days, and they got along swimmingly. That Gretl was one of the best dogs I ever knew. You couldn’t help but love her.) As soon as Irene left, the second week of November, Mother got up and started doing things and had another heart attack, which put her in the Ardmore hospital.

Maude
was on a week’s hiatus just then, and I was in the middle of a large role on a TV special about mothers and daughters. Torn whether to complete the week’s work or go visit Mother right away with nobody to take over my role, I decided to finish the work, then ask to be let out of
Maude
for a week. On November 16, the day the TV job wrapped, I got home to The Hen House, walked into the living room, and put down my purse.

The phone rang.

My uncle Billy Joe, Mother’s brother, said, “Well, Eddi-Rue, we lost her.”

The bottom dropped out. I fell into a chair. He said she had had a third heart attack at the hospital and died immediately. In the mail that day was a letter from Mother written November 12, saying she wasn’t satisfied with the care in Ardmore and thought she’d go see an Oklahoma City specialist at the end of the week—the very day she died.

I told Mark, who took it well. I didn’t take it well at all. I was in shock, glassy-eyed. I booked us a flight to Dallas. Billy Joe drove us to Ardmore for the funeral. Everyone in the family seemed to be taking it in stride. Only I and my father, who’d been out of town when he heard, were clearly devastated. Relatives stayed at the house, sleeping all over the place. Nine-year-old Mimi and I shared the pull-out sofa in the living room. As we lay in bed the night before the funeral, she asked me, “Aunt Rue, what if an elephant falls through the ceiling on us?”