Had his mother been the least bit welcoming, my mother might’ve found more than enough to fit into. She was, after all, likable—knew it about herself. The sister liked her—privately. The cousins did. My mother could make you laugh. She knew interesting things the nuns had taught her. Plus my father loved her. What could be wrong? No one was making great demands. It should’ve been better. She wasn’t a Catholic. But nothing was forthcoming.

So it became with her people—my mother’s and not his—that they forged a bond. She at least knew them. And there were attractions. They drank—illegally. Bennie smoked cigars, played golf, wore spectator shoes, hunted ducks with wealthy men, told jokes, knew women, lived it up to a certain extent—though was cautious not to inch above his station. He was an Arkie. They all three were. Knowing your place—who you were above, who below—was second nature. He called Essie “Mrs. Shelley” because in the hotels where they worked—at the Huckins in Oklahoma City, at the Muehlebach in KC, the Manning in Little Rock, the Arlington—that was the protocol, even if you were married.

They were her parents, but there was little difference in their ages—the four of them. 1895 was Essie. 1910, my mother. Bennie and my father were in the middle—1901, 1904. They all “went out” together in Hot Springs and Little Rock. Roistered. Arkansas had been a state less than a hundred years, and Little Rock was the center of things, the capital—a characterless, rowdy, self-important, minor river town. Neither south nor west, not quite middle west. More like Kansas City or Omaha than Memphis and Jackson. There were streetcars, new bridges, big department stores owned by Jews, restaurants, gambling on the sly, Main Street movies, new hotels. Booze, in spite of Prohibition.