In the summer of 2013, I was able to get my father and me some real answers. I had agreed to be part of a genealogy-based TV show calledWho Do You Think You Are?I was determined to find out the story of his early life, and specifically what had happened to LavinaShaw. She haunted me, just as she’d haunted my father. He could barely mention her without tears forming in his eyes, so this was an incredible opportunity to gain insight into who she was, and perhaps into whohewas, too.
The first thing I learned in New Jersey, where they had all lived, was that my grandmother’s name was indeed Lavina Victorine Shaw. She was the daughter of Ovid and Lavina Shaw, and she had a sister, Delilah. Quickly the plot thickened. With the wonderful help of a team of genealogists and historians in Trenton, New Jersey, we discovered that Lavina Victorine Shaw had never actually lived with my grandfather, Paul Applegate. In fact, they had separated before my father was even born, and Lavina had remained at her parents’ house.
Here’s where the story takes a darker turn.
In 1942, my beloved grandfather Paul was accused in court documents of treating Lavina “cruelly and brutally, accusing her of immoral acts, charging her that she was guilty of adultery, by reference calling her vile and indecent names, and on various dates struck and beat her.” Accordingly, Lavina left Paul, but “upon his promise to treat her properly,” she returned, only to face further mistreatment.
“On or about the 13th day of May 1942, [Paul Applegate did] pack most of complainant’s clothes and personal effects, and [told] her to get back to Trenton as soon as possible as the trains were still running, and why should he support her when he could get a half dozen women like her for twenty-five cents?”
When my grandmother asked Paul if he intended to provide for her and for their unborn child—my father—Paul reportedly replied, “Why should I support you or the baby? It don’t belong to me.”
The subsequent separation agreement nevertheless called for Paul to give Lavina fifteen dollars per week to support her and my father,but seemingly no payments were ever made. My grandmother was twenty-one years old; she had no work, and no support from my grandfather. By 1945, she and Paul were officially divorced, and full custody of my father was awarded to Lavina.
As the research deepened, I felt that sinking-pit feeling at the center of my heart. The whole thing was a damned mess and accounted for so much of my father’s retreat into stories that were forever shifting. Of course that’s what he did: it seemed from these documents that there had been endless turmoil at the start of his life, and when one is faced with not knowing even the basics of one’s own history, it makes sense to create a narrative to fill the gaps.
I had loved my grandfather Paul, but the evidence pointed to him being a terrible man—something about the phrases “Why should he support her when he could get a half dozen women like her for twenty-five cents?” and “Why should I support you or the baby? It don’t belong to me.” Even that chilling reference to the trains still running in Trenton. His words rang true in their specificity, and each statement was chilling in its own way, revealing cruelty and dismissal in equal measure. And to think that my grandfather had said to a court, stated clearly in the public record, that he was not my father’s real father… It was hard for me to even think about. How was I going to tell my father?
Lavina, my father’s mother, was not without blame either. A doctor’s note dated May 1945 was painful to read even almost seven decades later. In it, it was reported that when my father was still in his mother’s care, he was treated for both pneumonia and malnutrition. I couldn’t get this image out of my head: my poor father not just hungry, as I imagine many children were by war’s end, but hungry to the point of malnutrition? It was one thing to come out of a chaotic family; it was another to be the victim of what can only bedescribed as child abuse. Neither of my paternal grandparents came out of this research with much credit, and my poor father? I shuddered to think what else he’d been through as a child.
By later in 1945, Paul had further accused Lavina of adultery—which was still illegal at the time—and had both her and her supposed partner, Michael Constant, arrested. Paul and Lavina continued to accuse each other of drunkenness, too—clearly their union was beyond toxic and severely undermined by substance abuse.
With custody of my father awarded to Lavina, that’s where the paper trail, at least with regard to my father’s parents as a couple, ends. Lavina’s mother would help with raising my father, but she died in 1946, which was probably the reason my father was subsequently raised by hispaternalgrandmother.
Then in 1955 the story comes back online. According to documents we found, Lavina died at age thirty-three, “at home after a short illness.” By then she was LavinaWalton,and her death certificate listed her cause of death as “pulmonary tuberculosis with effusion, cirrhosis of the liver,” brought on by “acute alcoholism and nutritional anemia.” She was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Trenton.
Perhaps what Paul had accused her of had some validity. Perhaps her accusations about him had also been true. Either way, my father was born into an abject mess of a family, one in which his father was absent for much of his life. My dad would return to live with Paul Applegate when he was fourteen years old, though there is no record of how a man who denied his paternity treated him. My father’s birth mother had been an alcoholic who neglected to feed him. His stepmother had wanted nothing to do with him. His paternal grandmother had been flippant and cruel about his mother’s demise. What kind of life must this have been for Bob Applegate?
Did this unfolding and harrowing story of Paul and Lavina begin to explain a little of why my father had behaved the way he had with his own fledgling family? He was born into profound trauma; the scant stability he had known had been forged out of a dysfunctional, violent background, one dogged by abuse and alcohol. And then, out of seemingly nowhere and still at a young age, he found himself living in California, married, and a new father. What came next can never really be rationalized or explained away, and there are still times when the pain of what he did to me stops my breath. But knowing where he came from, at least, gave some meaningful context to the decisions he had made about my mother and me.
Perhaps worst of all, my father had been forced to create entire narratives from the few facts he had, stories about him not even knowing his mother, or about her being beaten to death outside a bar, or, as he says at the start of the documentary before we began the research, a story that his mother had died when he was “seven or eight years old.” The truth was, she’d actually helped raise him. She’d died much later, when he was fourteen, and there was no evidence of a violent death. Can you imagine being in so much pain, having suffered so much trauma, that you misremember the fundamental details of your mother’s, and your own, life? His hurt mind had scrubbed her from his past altogether. It’s extraordinary what pain will do to recollections. I bear this in mind as I write this book.
I watch the documentary now and I see how flummoxed my father was, so knocked sideways by what we learned about his mother. It was as if we were describing someone else’s life, as though the coordinates of his existence had been written down wrong from the very start. He believed these imagined narratives so fully that I’m sure he would have passed a lie detector test. How does one person get so unbridled from a basic truth?
We are all the products of stories we tell about ourselves, stories pieced together from what we know is true and often from stories we wish were true, and of course the ones we wish weren’t. Merely in the writing of this book, I have had to assess which parts of my life are factual and which are accretions of stories that have fossilized in my life to create something cogent, when in fact each moment we live does not necessarily cohere with the next. We are so used to believing that our life story is a narrative penned by a cosmic screenwriter who has storyboarded out an entire set of episodes, seven perfect seasons culminating in an incredible finale, when in fact our lives are often just a scatter of scenes that barely hold together.
Sometimes when I read back through my diaries I feel a concussion when contemporary facts, jotted down years ago with no agenda back then other than to put them to paper, barely line up with the stories I share with friends in my day-to-day recounting of my history. It’s not just a change in perspective; it’s actual facts that simply don’t resemble the arc of the story I tell myself. It’s as if halfway through the pilot a new character shows up who is forgotten by episode 2. I’m not sure anyone has a lock on their past; no one has an ironclad memory, let alone a willingness to always face the full truth of who they are and what they did. So why should my father be any different? If he was still alive, I might have sat with him, reading these pages. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear him say that what I wrote bore no resemblance to his truth whatsoever. But this is my truth, or what I’ve meticulously mapped from a lesion-ridden brain and a much more reliable written historical record. Our discontinuity might have been a problem I would have had to deal with; alas, that problem is no longer mine, nor his.
What I’m trying to say is, everything’s a story, everyone a tale told. My father is no different: he had taken what Wallace Stevenscalls the “flickings from finikin to fine finikin” of his life, the little hints and half-truths and bald lies and everything in between, and created an entire world out of what were, essentially, whispers. And then, when I came along, those small truths and half-truths and lies had somehow coalesced into a justification for him to flee his family and move to Big Sur and raise a completely different family with an entirely new wife.
But somehow, working with him on that documentary, and hearing the entire sordid tale of Paul and Lavina, only served to deepen the love and understanding I had for my father. I may have wanted him to be someone else, my mother may have wanted the same, and I may have felt great pain and frustration that he constantly seemed to want to tell the various tales he’d created about himself as I grew up. But given what he’d been through at such a young age, and putting aside as hard as I can the abandonment that I’d always felt lay at the heart of our relationship, it was nevertheless an extraordinary and beautiful effort of love for him to come back fully into my life when my daughter was born. He was the best possible grandfather to Sadie, even if he had been at times a distant figure to me. We can only make ourselves better than where we came from. When given the chance, we can only upgrade our love until it resembles something magical and beautiful. No one can really ask any more than that of anyone.
And that’s what my father was able to do with Sadie.
For all the pain my relationship with my father has caused me, the love and the need for him is undeniable. There, in my diary, right after my double mastectomy in 2008, thirty-six years after he left me, an innocent entry jumps out at me like a bright, loving light: “Went to the hospital, snuck in through the emergency room. I could feel the anxiety from everyone except me… Begged forsomething to calm me… then asked for the drugs again, and my dad.”
In the documentary, my father not unreasonably asked me if there was anygoodnews about his background, given that I’d just informed him of the sordid back-and-forth of his parents as documented in the deepest recesses of a New Jersey records office. And I found that I was able to say this, and mean every word:
“The beauty of this is that you can be incredibly proud that you broke the pattern and that you raised all of us to have strength and intelligence and talent and fight in us. And you did that with no help from anyone, Dad. And that’s pretty amazing.”
“That’s good enough for me,” he said, choking back tears. I had dropped all this information on him, a camera crew pointing their lenses directly at him. And he’d had the good grace to bear it all, and to respond with compassion to his own life after years of mythmaking.
Working on the documentary had brought back memories of wonderful times with my dad, too. We’d go camping in his white VW bus with the pop-top. Whenever he could pull over at a beach we’d do so, barbecuing and sleeping under the stars. And I loved the way he was always so proud of me.
We all might hope for some great coming to terms with those who’ve wronged us, in which the things we say and do heal forever the wounds we’ve inflicted, or the wounds we’ve endured. But in the end, it might just be recognizing that someone did something righteous and loving in spite of having scant modeling to draw upon that is enough. Perhaps after everything, that is the legacy and epitaph my father deserves. Born into a country coming out of a terrible war,to two people in a highly tempestuous relationship; born into poverty and anger, accusations and alcohol… given all that, the fact that I grieve him so deeply means something.
I sit on my bed and watch TV, or a friend comes over to visit, or my daughter comes home from school, or I get a text or see a funny Instagram reel, or I sit on my porch and hear the trilling house finches frantic in their attempts to raise a brood of their own, or I’m simply lighting a cigarette, and as the flame of the lighter erupts, there it is: the loss of him, as bright as the orange flame in my hand. It strikes like an earthquake, the building shaking, the flame held still, as though I can’t remember what to do with it, the cigarette slowly dropping to the floor, me holding on for dear life, unable for a second to breathe or think or cry or shout or do anything approaching a normal response, in agony at the loss of a man who shares my last name, who gave me the name the world knows me by, whose twinkling eyes I can see when I close my own.
At Riverview Cemetery we discovered that Lavina didn’t even have a headstone, but she had left something so much more tangible, so powerful it took my breath away: she had asked that her son be buried with her.
