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Ever After
William Wharton
William Wharton turns his microscopic gaze on his own life to narrate and scrutinize the untimely deaths of his daughter and her family. A moving story of one man’s rage against death, and spiritual renewal.On August 3rd 1988, field burning caused a 23-car pile-up that claimed the lives of seven people, including William Wharton’s daughter, Kate, her husband, and their two children. In EVER AFTER, William Wharton searches for meaning in this tragedy, and tries to put a stop to a dangerous agriculture practice.Written from the perspective of both father and daughter, EVER AFTER is inspiring and heart-breaking in equal measures.
WILLIAM WHARTON
Ever After
To Kate, Bill, Dayiel, and Mia. And to Margaret
who brought a beacon of light to the darkness
W.W.
Contents
Title Page (#ucaac8d0c-2b99-53a7-adee-16eaa55ed99b)
Dedication (#u9d6b07a8-86b4-55cf-827a-ad8168df861a)
Foreword (#u8ea1cd63-a4e9-54c5-81da-8fd624810d3c)
PART ONE: Kate (#u2f7dd380-d018-5e8d-af53-9b0b3281a02b)
Chapter 1 (#u35ed1038-0e7c-5ea1-a263-ef5916692e2b)
Chapter 2 (#u64f6c906-d931-5d63-9f68-6bdc5ff07500)
Chapter 3 (#ua4a70a48-ddc7-5a43-a880-0fa835a91728)
Chapter 4 (#u551e92dc-9773-57ee-829a-bd4e67b1b871)
Chapter 5 (#u310877ca-b6ba-513b-a930-de5e017ee04e)
PART TWO: Will (#uaca07b35-2ad7-56f9-8e5b-81d912882ff4)
Chapter 6 (#uaae5357d-fb3d-58f1-8be5-918c2ab41be3)
Chapter 7 (#u131c9cc9-3e24-525f-a602-f8b1c68ef57f)
Chapter 8 (#u4f5df89c-6c57-5dc3-92e4-edb704f161e9)
Chapter 9 (#u93cfc499-8c4e-5ebf-b98e-1ab748dc826f)
PART THREE: Settlement (#uf084f2a3-b535-50ef-a341-1a0e934754a4)
Chapter 10 (#u11375d5e-2a00-50e7-b3c7-e64aebf091b7)
Chapter 11 (#u88a61ffe-65a7-5f96-b310-bbe55d8a83e5)
Chapter 12 (#ub8afa035-4adf-5f04-b585-50199b768ee5)
Chapter 13 (#ueca4c4ff-a25a-54bc-9716-ed024ded4823)
Chapter 14 (#uf2a0d97e-7697-55c1-ac1f-5da5e6e933ca)
Chapter 15 (#u9a99ea53-5c7f-51a3-b427-048d16cb11c4)
Chapter 16 (#u3d92979e-bbc2-5137-a4a2-426411e5ff8f)
Chapter 17 (#u0a789566-c3b3-5f56-901a-672fface525c)
Chapter 18 (#u5bc8826a-327a-54f1-b9fd-0a25f63d69ef)
Chapter 19 (#ue1e43594-d0c4-5d7a-a943-ebac0a90badc)
Epilogue (#uba9b4dbc-21af-5dd5-ac5a-8a1dc185a29b)
Also by William Wharton (#uebf743b6-5673-5288-91d4-da1e054f3317)
Copyright (#u48f229f3-b436-58c4-b916-c9f8d0756fc3)
About the Publisher (#u19a111af-18ca-5d0c-9795-c43e49989f02)
Foreword
As a result of the experiences described in this work, I have come to the conclusion that everything coming through the mind of man or woman is fiction. So-called truth is a convenience and a comfort for which we all search. This search seems natural and necessary to humans.
In science, observation are established as truth by replication. A concept or observation is considered true when numerous repetitions of the same concepts, observations and conclusions have been completed and verified.
However, for a long time, scientific man was convinced the sun went around the earth. This phenomenon fulfilled all the requirements for truth in its day.
History considers an event to have been true when it has a significant volume of primary, secondary and tertiary evidence, enough to warrant a statement of validity. However, it is, in the long run, merely a consensus truth. That is, most people think it is true. And, typically, they only consider it true for a limited time.
Religion takes its truth from revelation to individual humans, sometimes called prophets: superior or alien beings with special powers, who are generally not of this world. From these revelations, various versions of dogma evolve among humans which purport to be truth. Many people live their lives by these ‘truths,’ will kill or be killed for them.
I’ve gathered as much evidence, primary, secondary and tertiary, as I could. I pray the event herein described will not be replicated. I do not expect, or ask, belief from you, the reader, in the unique revelation with which I was blessed. It is reported only as part of the total experience, the holy horror of it all.
I am writing this work of biography-autobiography-fiction, concerning the event which changed our lives, in the form of a documentary novel. In the interest of the aesthetics involved in novel-writing, I have needed to employ certain novelistic devices.
There are conversations I did not hear, for example, between my daughter and her husband, which I create. They are, however, related to the unfolding events as I know them. I tell part of this tale from the point of view of my daughter, Kate, in her voice, as teenager and adult. It was necessary to use the novelist’s techniques of personal projection to do this. I hope it does not invalidate for the reader the sequence of events I wish to tell. It is not meant to.
I am a novelist. This along with painting is my mode of communication. I hope the reader will be able to enter into the events related and the emotions experienced with at least the ‘feeling of truth’ for truth.
To protect the privacy of those concerned with this tale I have changed all names except for some first names of my immediate family. To those, I’ve given my writer’s surname.
I don’t intend that this be a book of complaints except as it is necessary to explain certain events as I experienced them. I am the first to admit that bias enters all communication, even when an effort to represent truth is being made.
William Wharton
15 April 1993, Port Marly
PART ONE
1
Our neighborhood in Paris was what the French call a quartier populaire, a nice way of saying ‘slum.’ Actually it was an area where furniture was made, and most of the people were artisans – carpenters, upholsterers, window-makers, printers, that kind of thing. There were also artists – more and more of them the longer we lived there. But I was too young to appreciate a good thing; I wanted to live in the sixteenth arrondissement, or some other posh place like that.
That’s where Danny, my boyfriend from the American School, fits in. His father had been an ambassador and now worked for some top-secret international organization. Once an ambassador, always an ambassador; so his calling-card had his whole title written out. I was very impressed.
Danny wasn’t a very good student, but he was good-looking and really did live in the sixteenth arrondissement. He was the only student on campus to own an automobile. He was older than the other kids and had a French driving license. In France you need to be eighteen to drive.
We went together all during our last two years of school. I remember Christmas of our senior year especially.
We spent it down at the mill, an old, stone water-mill in the Morvan, a part of Burgundy, where our family goes for Christmas. It’s always cold and there’s nothing to do.
I was afraid I was pregnant, even though I wore a diaphragm – Mom and Dad insisted on it when I turned thirteen. On top of everything, Robert, my little brother, who was only about three or four, kept singing the Christmas song ‘Mary had a baby.’ Each time he did, Danny and I either moaned or giggled, depending on our mood. If we got to giggling, we couldn’t stop. I know it drove Mom crazy.
Later, Danny asked me to marry him, although I wasn’t pregnant. It was just before I graduated. When I told Dad and Mom, Dad looked at me a long time before he said anything.
‘Well, Kate, I think he’ll make a great first husband.’
I thought that was awfully cynical, but he turned out to be right. Danny did make a good first husband.
Right after high school, Danny and I went to California and studied at a junior college. We lived in a tiny apartment. Neither of us had paid enough attention in school to enter a real university. Also, as my parents were still California residents, I didn’t need to pay tuition. We lived together two years and then, when Danny transferred to UCLA, got married.
The wedding was in California, arranged by my Aunt Emmaline, Mom’s sister, but the real wedding was at the mill.
I’m not religious, but wanted a wedding in the little village church on top of the hill that looked down over the mill. Danny wasn’t even baptized. Dad took my baptismal certificate and used it to make one for Danny, hand-lettered in Dad’s usual crooked, artistic way, and then photocopied it. It looked better than mine. We then sent our certificates off to the bishop and I guess they wound up in the Vatican. I don’t know.
Dad describes the wedding in a book he wrote called Tidings. An old war buddy of his played the music from Fiddler On The Roof. We passed out translations to the people in the church, most of whom were French and couldn’t understand a word. All of us cried when he played ‘Where Is That Little Girl I Carried?’ The recessional was ‘Sunrise, Sunset.’ It made for terrific marriage music.
The mill was fixed up, and there was lots of food and music. The men in the village shot shotguns in the air, and a couple of them built a fire in the garage under the grange where we were dancing. This was to add a little more excitement. Excitement we didn’t need.
Dad had his beard long, with his hair pulled back in a little pigtail tied with a ribbon. He didn’t have all that much hair so it looked a little strange. Mom was beautiful and graceful in her ‘butterfly dress’ made for her by a rich Arab lady, mother to one of the kids in her kindergarten. The woman designed dresses for Christian Dior. What a crazy mixture our lives were.
It was a great wedding. The people in the village kept showing up with string beans. It was late string-bean season. We accepted them all, even though we had to bury some of them down by the old water-wheel.
Danny and I spent our wedding night up at the hotel in Montigny next to the church.
We went back to California and I was miserable. I worked cleaning houses, then as a secretary for a refrigeration company. Finally I got a real job, working for Korean Airlines. Through all this, I talked to Mom and Dad. They wanted me to continue in school. They’re great believers in education. But I needed to earn enough to help Danny through school. His parents, with all their money, weren’t contributing much, if anything at all.
Mom came and found a terrific apartment for us near the miracle mile in Los Angeles. It wasn’t too far from where I worked, or from UCLA. It was also near the LA County Museum, where I spent any time I could get. I loved art. I liked things old-fashioned and traditional.
Then I got pregnant. The apartment was a great place for a couple, but with a baby we’d need more space, and, with Dad’s help, we found a nice little house in Venice, near the beach.
Mom came to help with the birth of Wills. We wanted a natural childbirth and I did all the lessons and exercises, but in the end, they had to do a Caesarean.
Dad also wrote about me in his book called Dad. He called me Marty and described finding the little house in Venice where Danny and I lived while I was pregnant. We lived there about four years.
Mom or Dad would visit sometimes, and we’d bicycle along the path right on the beach. It was idyllic.
It was during this time I began falling out of love with Danny. It wasn’t anything he was doing; it was more what he wasn’t. I kept asking myself what was wrong with me. I had so many friends who were having real trouble with their husbands: drinking, womanizing, drugs, and all. Danny worked hard every day and, except for smoking, didn’t do much of anything wrong. He found a good job as a salesman for a steel company, and he was wonderful with Wills. It would make me jealous sometimes watching them play together. I think, in a way, Danny never grew up. Maybe neither of us did.
The big trouble was Danny bored me. We couldn’t maintain a decent conversation. I came from a family where there was conversation all the time, maybe even a bit too much, at least for me. Sometimes I couldn’t keep up with my own family. They’d go on about things so fast.
But with Danny, life was only long evenings when he’d read the papers, watch TV, or go over his bills and orders from work, then go to sleep. He seemed to love playing with that little calculator of his, making up for the fact he couldn’t pass Algebra II, I think.
I got so desperate, I remember calling Dad long distance. I asked him, Just what was love anyway? I wanted to know if I loved Danny. He told me to hang up and he’d call me back later. In about half an hour he called.
‘Kate, I’ve thought about it. I’m no expert, ask your mother. But as far as I can see, love is a combination of admiration, respect, and passion. If you have one of those going, that’s about par for the course. If you have two, you aren’t quite world class but you’re close. If you have all three, then you don’t need to die; you’re already in heaven.’
At the time, it didn’t seem to help. But I continued thinking about what Dad said for the whole of the next month. That’s when I decided I definitely had a zero. I don’t really know what Danny thought, but don’t believe it was any different for him. He just wouldn’t admit it.
I wanted to move out of Venice. Wills was starting to grow up and we were in the middle of a big drug scene. The clinic where people would stand outside in the morning to get their ‘meth’ was only a block from our house.
Dad came up with the idea we might enjoy living in Idylwild. This is a place in the Los Angeles mountains above Palm Springs, more than a mile high. It’s well located for Danny’s ‘territory.’
We all drove up there, and I loved it right away. We lucked out and found just the kind of house I always wanted. Dad had made money writing Birdy and lent us some so we could buy the place.
Danny and I were getting along better. Wills loved it up there. There were rocks to climb, the smell of pines, snow in the winter, and beautiful, clear, star-filled nights. Blue jays and raccoons, pine cones and acorns were everywhere. Wills adored his little nursery school and I sometimes worked there. Danny didn’t have any more driving to do than he did in Venice. His territory was huge. Idylwild was in the middle of it. The only trouble was the long drive up through the hills. But he was terrific about it.
Then, Danny was offered a chance to work for Honeywell Bull. Dad had helped Danny write his application and résumé, and we were happy because it was much more money, with better prospects, than selling steel. The trouble was we had to move to Phoenix, Arizona, where Danny was put into a training program.
It meant selling the house of my dreams. In a certain way, that was when the dream really ended. We sold the Idylwild house for a profit, paid back Dad, and bought a place in Phoenix. It was a new house, sitting in a bare space surrounded by other houses just like it, without even a lawn. I couldn’t get accustomed to living in an oasis surrounded by desert. I’d never lived like that. I couldn’t believe it was me living in this house, with Danny off to work most of the time.
I did everything I could to make it a real home but I hated to look out the windows. Everything was so barren. I’d been spoiled by Idylwild, and even by Venice, but especially by living with my parents in Europe most of my childhood. At least there was always something interesting to see. Here there was nothing. It was so hot. Practically no one walked in the streets.
Wills started school, and I announced to Danny I wanted a divorce. There were no other men in my life but I knew there would be soon and I just wanted out. Danny was broken up about the whole thing and we were up night after night, talking it all over. God, it was hell. Looking back, I can see I must have seemed a real bitch to him. Maybe I was.
Dad and Mom couldn’t understand at all. Dad sat down with me for a quiet talk the way he did when things seemed to be getting out of hand. Most of the time he kept out of my private life, wanting me to work things out for myself, but once in a while he couldn’t hold himself back. It was the same when I started smoking. Then, again, when I first started having sex. It was the same with drugs. He’d explain his ideas and it was hard to argue with him.
On the smoking thing, he talked very quietly to me in my bedroom, first asking if I smoked. There was no lying about it. I smelled of cigarettes all the time, I was getting up to a pack a day, and the teachers had told Mom I was spending time between classes in the smoking area. He was quiet.
‘Listen, Kate. I know it’s your life, but in a certain way your life is ours, too. We’ve spent a hell of a lot of time and effort getting you this far along, clearing up diaper rashes, pumping your stomach out when you drank Chlorodane, getting you through fevers when the doctor thought you had polio, keeping you from being run over, nursing you through chicken-pox, measles, mumps; the whole thing. We fed you vitamins, made sure you had all the shots to keep you from getting the worst diseases. You know you never had any other milk to drink except your mother’s milk or goat’s milk until you were four years old. I pulled milk from the teats of our goats every morning and evening.
‘It really makes us unhappy seeing you do this to yourself. Do you know why you smoke?’
God, he could be so hard and mean in his quiet, tension-filled voice. I promised I’d stop but I didn’t. He knew I wouldn’t but he’d done what he felt he had to do. That’s the way Dad is.
Then, with sex, he told me to be careful for health reasons, make sure the guy wears a condom. But he had to go on.
‘More than anything else, Kate, sex is one of the greatest joys on earth, like Christmas. But it can be the same as having Christmas every day in the year if one becomes promiscuous. There won’t be any thrill left.’ He tried to talk to me about the difference between romance and sex, that when sex came in the door, too often romance went out the window, cornball things like that.
I didn’t know what the word promiscuous meant. When I told some of my friends what he’d said, they thought it was cute, and awfully funny.
With the drug thing, they were having a big crackdown at school: even the president of the Board of Trustees’ and the Headmaster’s kids got busted. Sometimes I think there was more pot than cigarettes in the smoking area. This was the early seventies and we were all trying to catch up to the sixties. Dad cornered me in my room again. He pulled out a small bottle with about three ounces in it.
‘Look, Kate, do you know what this is?’
