Betty and Fred’s Story: Building a Life Together -- Late December
1943 — Early January 1944
The Ordinary Days After Christmas
The week between Christmas and New Year's had a particular quality
to it — a looseness, a sense of the calendar holding its breath. At
Rohr, the work continued without pause; the war observed no holidays
in its appetite for parts and materials and the careful tracking of
both. Fred was back at his desk the morning of the twenty-seventh,
the plant humming around him with its usual purposeful noise, and he
found he was glad for it. The work steadied him. It always had.
Betty, at home on Twin Oaks Avenue, fell into the rhythm that was
becoming her days, but thought often about her grandmother Della.
Randy at two months was a different creature than Randy at two
weeks — more present, somehow, more there. His eyes
tracked movement with real intention now. He had discovered that
certain sounds, made by his own mouth, produced interesting results
in the people around him, and he was conducting what appeared to be a
systematic investigation of this phenomenon. He could hold his head
up briefly when placed on his stomach, a development Betty noted in
the small journal she'd begun keeping, recording the ordinary
miracles as they arrived.
She sang to him in the mornings while she moved through the house
— not always real songs, sometimes just a running narration of what
she was doing set to a loose melody, which Randy appeared to find
acceptable. She took him on walks in the new baby buggy when the
weather allowed, down the quiet streets of Chula Vista in the pale
winter sunshine, and discovered that the motion settled him in a way
that nothing else quite matched. She met two other young mothers on
these walks — women in similar circumstances, husbands at work or
overseas, babies in buggies, the sidewalks of a wartime neighborhood
their common ground.
She wrote in her journal. She sketched — the sketchbook always
within reach, Randy's sleeping face recorded from half a dozen
angles, the light through the kitchen window on a January morning,
the Christmas tree before Fred took it down. She was an art teacher
between assignments, between school years, between one version of her
life and the next, and drawing kept her hand in and her eye sharp and
gave her something that was purely hers in the hours when everything
else was Randy's.
She was, she recognized, happy. Tired and sometimes lonely in the
specific way of women whose husbands work long hours, but genuinely,
substantively happy. She wrote that in her journal too, because it
seemed worth recording.
The Call from Fern Street
On the Friday before New Year's, Fred came home from Rohr at his
usual hour, and Betty met him at the door with her coat already on
and Randy bundled in her arms.
He read her face before she spoke.
"Della," he said.
"Mother called this afternoon. She's worse, Fred. She's —
they think it won't be long now." Betty's voice was steady with
the effort of keeping it steady. "I want to go over there."
"Of course," Fred said immediately. He hadn't even set
down his lunch pail. "Let me wash my hands. Five minutes."
They drove to Fern Street in the dark of a December evening, the
streets quiet, the last of the Christmas lights still burning in a
few windows along the way. Randy slept in Betty's arms, unaware,
wrapped in his blanket.
Lyle met them at the door. He looked, Betty thought, the way men
looked when they had been carrying something heavy for a long time
and could feel the end of the carrying coming — not relieved, not
grief-stricken, but something in between that had no clean name.
"She's been unconscious since this morning," he said
quietly. He looked at Fred. "Austin is with her. One of us go
over every hour to sit with her" A pause. "She hasn't been
in any pain. Dr. Paex came this afternoon and said she's — that
it's peaceful."
Emily appeared from the kitchen, drying her hands, and took Randy
from Betty without discussion. Georgianna was at the kitchen table
with a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, her hands wrapped around the
cup for warmth or comfort or both.
Lyle put his hand briefly on Betty's shoulder. "Come on,"
he said. "Come and sit with her."
The bedroom was as it had been at Christmas — warm, dim, the
lamp low on the side table. Austin was in the chair beside the bed.
He did not look up immediately. He was holding Della's hand, his
thumb moving slowly back and forth across her knuckles in the absent,
continuous way of a man who has been doing it for hours without
thinking.
He looked up when Betty came to stand beside him.
"Betty, girl," he said. His voice was rough but his eyes
were clear. "Sit down."
She sat on the edge of the bed, gently, and looked at Della.
In the low light, Della's face had a quality of simplification —
the years of expression, the sharp eyes and the occasional wry set of
the mouth — all of it quieted now, smoothed into something that was
both her and before her, something that went back past the Kansas
girlhood and the Wisconsin birth and reached toward whatever was
before all of it.
She was breathing. Slowly, with long pauses between that made
Betty count silently until the next one came.
Betty reached out and touched Della's free hand — the one Austin
wasn't holding — and held it lightly.
"Hello, Grandma Della," she said softly. "It's
Betty. I'm here."
The breathing continued its slow, tidal rhythm.
"Randy's here too," Betty said. "He's with Mother.
He's fine. He's wonderful." She paused. "You told me to
remember you. I will. I promise I will."
Austin looked at her over Della's still form with an expression
that had no category — too old for categories, worn past them.
They sat together in the warm dim room, the three of them, while
outside the last days of 1943 moved toward their end.
New Year's Day
Della Carringer died on the first day of January 1944 at 5:10 p.m.
Austin and Lyle and Emily were with her. Austin had not left the
room.
Emily telephoned Fred and Betty at six that night, her voice
careful and composed in the way it got when she was managing herself
through something difficult. Fred answered and listened and said yes
and I understand and we'll come soon,
and then he came to where Betty was feeding Randy in the rocking
chair and he told her that she died, and that they had called the
mortuary to take the body, and that Austin would stay with them for a
few days.
Betty was quiet for a moment. She looked down at Randy, who was
occupied and unconcerned.
"Eighty-one years," she said, finally. "She had
eighty-one years."
"She did," Fred said.
"She held Randy." Betty said it like it mattered, like
she was filing it somewhere permanent. "She held him at
Thanksgiving and she said he was a fine boy. She saw four
generations." A pause. "I'm glad she had that."
Fred put his hand on her shoulder and she reached up and covered
it with her own.
The Arrangements
On the third of January, Lyle drove Austin into San Diego to the
Benbough Funeral Parlors on First Avenue.
Austin was composed in the manner of a man who has had fifty-eight
years to learn the shape of his wife and has understood for some time
that this day would come and has made a private accommodation with
it, whatever that accommodation cost him. He sat in the passenger
seat and watched the city go by and said very little, and Lyle, who
understood silence, did not fill it.
At Benbough's, a soft-spoken man in a dark suit guided them
through the arrangements with a professional gentleness that Lyle
found genuinely kind rather than merely practiced. Austin answered
the necessary questions — Della A. Carringer, born in Waupun,
Wisconsin, eighty-one years old, wife of Henry Austin Carringer,
resident of San Diego for fifty-five years, member of the Neighbors
of Woodcraft.
Cremation, Austin said. That had been Della's wish, expressed
clearly and more than once. And inurnment at Cypress View Mausoleum,
where there was already a place for both of them – Della had
planned ahead.
The service would be held at Benbough's, Thursday the fifth of
January, two o'clock in the afternoon. The Neighbors of Woodcraft,
Della's lodge, would have a role in the service as was their custom.
The obituary ran in the San Diego Union on the fourth.
Betty read it at the kitchen table on Wednesday morning with her
coffee. It was brief — the Union's notices always were —
but it was accurate, and it named them all: Austin, her widower.
Lyle, her son. Mrs. F.W. Seaver Jr. and Randall Jeffery
Seaver of Chula Vista. Betty read her own name and her son's
name in the newspaper and felt the particular solemnity of being made
part of the official record of a life.
A great-grandson, the notice said. She touched the words
with her finger.
The Funeral
The fifth of January was overcast, the marine layer sitting low
over San Diego in the way it did in winter, a soft gray light over
everything.
Sally Lyons had offered immediately, when Betty called. "Of
course we'll come sit with him," And so it was Sally who arrived
at Twin Oaks Avenue at noon, and who settled herself in Betty's
rocking chair with Randy while Fred held Betty's coat and they said
their goodbyes to their son, who was in reasonable spirits and did
not appear concerned about their departure.
The service at Benbough's was what such services are — quiet,
measured, the right words said in the right order by people who meant
them. The room was not large and it was adequately filled. Edgar sat
with Austin in the front, and Austin sat straight-backed in his dark
suit with the stillness of a man exercising a lifelong discipline.
Emily sat beside Lyle and did not cry during the service, though
Betty, beside her, could feel what that cost. Neighbors and friends,
some from Austin’s work at Rockwell Field, were there.
The Neighbors of Woodcraft conducted their portion of the service
with the solemn ritual of a lodge that has done this for its members
many times and believes in the doing of it. There was something in
the formality that Betty found unexpectedly comforting — the sense
that Della was being seen off properly, with ceremony, by a community
that had known her.
Afterward, in the gray afternoon light outside the parlor, people
spoke to Austin in the way people do — the pressed hands, the few
words, the what-can-you-say that is still worth saying. Austin
received each person with a courteous gravity. He seemed, Betty
thought, to stand a little more alone in the air around him than he
had before, as though some specific warmth had been removed from his
immediate atmosphere.
She hugged him before they left.
"She loved you very much," she told him. "She told
me to remember you both. I will."
Austin put his hand on her cheek briefly — a gesture so
uncharacteristic of him that it startled her — and then he nodded
and turned to speak to someone else, and Betty went to find Fred.
They drove home through the gray afternoon, the heater running,
the city moving past the windows.
After a while Fred said, "Tell me about her. Tell me things I
don't know."
Betty looked at him.
"About Della," he said. "You know things. Tell me."
Betty was quiet for a moment, and then she began.
"She painted," Betty said. "Watercolors, mostly.
Landscapes — the Kansas plains from when she was a girl, and later
California things. The houses. The bay. Eucalyptus trees. She had a
particular way of doing light on water that I could never figure out,
and when I asked her how she did it she said you had to look at the
water longer than you thought you needed to and let your hand follow
your eye." Betty paused. "I've thought about that every
time I've painted since. Let your hand follow your eye. It works. It
works for drawing too."
Fred said: "Is that why you became an art teacher?"
"Partly," Betty said. "She made it seem like
something a woman did because she needed to, not just as an
accomplishment. She took it seriously." A pause. "She took
me seriously, when I drew. When I was eight years old and showed her
something I'd done, she looked at it the way she'd look at a real
painting. Not indulgently. Actually looked."
She watched the streets go by.
"She taught me piano," Betty said. "Wednesday
afternoons for about four years. I was not a gifted student — I had
the technical side but I was impatient, I wanted to play things
before I'd earned them — and she never let me skip the work, but
she also never made me feel stupid for wanting to run ahead. She'd
say: you have to know the rules before you can decide which ones
matter." Betty smiled faintly. "She said that about a
lot of things."
"She must have been something when she was young," Fred
said.
"She was from Waupun," Betty said. "Wisconsin. She
used to tell me about the winters there — the real winters, the
kind that have authority, she said. She met Austin at the ranch in
Wano, Kansas in 1885 when they both proved claims there. They acted
in plays together and they married there. She told me that they
honeymooned to San Diego in 1887 and she looked at the harbor and the
bay and said to Austin: this is where we're meant to be. And
he said: then we'll stay. And they did.
They stayed and they built their life here."
"From Wisconsin to San Diego," Fred said. "That's
some distance."
"It was a different kind of distance then," Betty said.
"Without the highways and the — it was a real journey. She
talked about it sometimes. The wagons to Iowa and Kansas and
Nebraska, and then the train through the desert to San Diego. Her
first sight of the Pacific." Betty paused. "She said the
Pacific was larger than she'd been prepared for. That Lake Michigan
you could imagine the other side of. The Pacific you couldn't."
Fred nodded slowly.
"She had family stories," Betty went on, settling into
it now, the stories coming up like things surfacing from deep water.
"From Kansas and Nebraska — Austin's family were in Colorado
when they met. There were homestead stories, hard-winter stories, the
kind where you understand that the people who came before had a
different relationship with difficulty than we do. She told them
without complaint, without drama. Just: this is what happened and
this is how it was managed." A pause. "I think that's where
my father gets it from," she said, glancing at Fred. "Where
Austin gets it from. That quality of — not being defeated by
things."
She looked out the window.
"When they built the house," she said. "The house
on Thirtieth Street, where they've been for forty-six years. She told
me about choosing the lot, and Austin building most of it himself,
and the first night they slept in it when it wasn't entirely finished
— she said she lay there listening to the sounds of a new house
settling and thought: mine. Just that. Mine. After
all the moving and the journeying and the building toward something."
Betty's voice had gotten quieter. "She said every woman needs a
place that's hers. That you can walk every room of in the dark."
The car moved through the streets of Chula Vista. Twin Oaks Avenue
appeared ahead of them.
"I want that," Betty said, quietly. "What she and
Austin had. Not the same — you and I aren't the same as them, we're
different people in a different time. But that length of it. That
knowing each other all the way through."
Fred pulled the car to the curb in front of the house. He turned
off the engine but didn't move to get out.
"You'll have it," he said. "We'll have it."
Betty looked at him in the gray afternoon light.
"Fifty-eight years," she said.
"At least," Fred said.
She took his hand. They sat for a moment in front of their house
on Twin Oaks Avenue, which was not yet the place Betty could walk in
the dark but would be, given time.
Then they went inside to be with their son, Della’s
great-grandson.
… to be continued
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