Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

by Paula Becker

  Young Bud Bishop, one of the Hesketts’ nearest neighbors, pitied Betty and helped her. Seven decades later, near the end of the life he’d spent farming the Chimacum property where he’d lived since birth, Bud gave his oral history to a Jefferson County Historical Society volunteer, who asked him about his now-famous former neighbor. Betty was usually left alone with her two little girls, Bud remembered. “I cut her wood and got bark and stuff off the stumps for her in the wintertime because her husband was a bum. He was either drunk or making moonshine, and she was up there with two little baby girls, and she couldn’t get wood so I went up there and got wood for her, to keep them from freezing.”22

  Bud Bishop’s memories are an important testament to the life Betty actually lived. The Egg and I, as summed up on its cover, recounted “life on a wilderness chicken ranch told with wit and high humor.” There was no helpful Bud; there were no over-hasty baby arrivals. And there were no Bards, although in truth Betty’s family was never far away. Like many of her other purposeful omissions, Betty’s decision to conceal the Bards’ presence in Chimacum when she described those years altered the story.23

  Among her siblings, Dede especially seems to have helped Betty and provided companionship, bringing her groceries and helping with Anne and Joan. As a young teenager, Dede was old enough to help but too young to intervene in what she saw. By contrast, if Mary had witnessed some moments of her sister’s deteriorating marriage, she almost certainly would not have permitted Betty to remain with Bob.

  But Mary was living in Seattle, and soon the rest of Betty’s family would do likewise. By fall 1930, Sydney, Cleve, Dede, and Alison had turned their backs permanently on rural living and headed again for Seattle, indoor plumbing, paved roads, and electricity.24 Gammy moved to Boulder, where she lived with her sisters for the rest of her life.25

  While the Bards were failing at dairy farming, losing all their property, and growing ever poorer, the rest of the country was speculating on stock and dancing the Charleston. As Sydney and her family packed their bags to move back to Seattle and to Mary, reverberations from the 1929 stock market crash signaled the beginning of the cruel decade of the Great Depression. The penury it brought to much of the rest of the country was already familiar to the Bards, who hadn’t had a dime to spare for years.

  With her family gone, Betty found that she could not remain with Bob. Leaving him permanently took at least two tries. The court records of Betty’s first attempt to extricate herself from her marriage reveal Mary’s helping hand: Betty’s attorney, almost certainly working pro bono, was Edward Bundy, the father of Mary’s old chum Margaret Bundy Callahan.26 In Blanche Hamilton’s account of the event, Mary drove to Chimacum and took Betty and her tiny daughters—Anne was two and a half, Joan eleven months—back to Seattle. When Betty initiated divorce proceedings in King County on June 27, 1930, she was staying in Mary’s apartment.

  Betty was twenty when she moved to the Chimacum chicken farm and twenty-three when she abandoned it. When she started writing The Egg and I, she was in her mid-thirties and newly married to her second husband. She focused the book on the outrageous foibles of her rural neighbors—including those who lived closest, to whom she gave the surname Kettle—because describing these was easier, safer, more palatable, and much funnier than describing the collapse of her marriage or her husband’s cruelty. She was not even trying to describe the real Bob, she later told her literary agent, but rather to endow her first husband with many of her second husband’s characteristics.

  Betty’s divorce petition reveals that she and Bob held no community property. The farm and its flock of seven hundred chickens belonged to Betty alone, since they were purchased with funds she inherited—via the Calkins lawsuit—from her father’s estate. Although Bob was able-bodied, Betty alleged, he had done nothing to support his family other than taking on a small amount of work on the farm.

  Betty’s petition paints a stark picture of her three years with Bob: “That at all times since said marriage the defendant has treated the plaintiff in a cruel and inhuman manner and subjected her to such personal indignities as to render life burdensome; that the defendant has on numerous occasions violently beaten plaintiff and used towards her other personal violence; and defendant has on many occasions used towards plaintiff violent and abusive language, and subjected her to insults in the presence of members of her family and friends. That during all of said time defendant has been and now is an habitual drunkard.”27

  The judge issued Robert Heskett an order to appear in court, restraining him from disposing of any of the property—the farm and flock—set forth in Betty’s petition. The process server located Bob, but either it was already too late or Bob ignored the order, because he sold all of the chickens and what he could of their household goods. He turned over nearly all of the resulting sum of $450 to Betty’s attorney. Given Bob’s later actions, this seems miraculous. Bob also acknowledged Betty’s sole ownership of the property.28

  Betty was never sure what happened to her possessions after she fled the chicken ranch. Bob left Chimacum soon after. According to Betty’s later recollection, sometime during the next year, Bob drove her back to the ranch to retrieve books and some of their wedding presents. Other people were living in the house by then, using Betty and Bob’s things.29

  The legal record gives no account of the outcome of Betty’s June 1930 divorce petition. An undated biographical statement Betty prepared for her publisher, J. B. Lippincott, states, “In 1930 I moved back to Seattle with my family, was divorced from my husband, the chickens, and the Indians, and entered into a business career owned and operated by my older sister, Mary.”30 In July 1931, however, Betty filed for divorce a second time.31 “Said defendant has made plaintiff many promises to do better and relying on said promises, plaintiff has continued to live with said defendant although plaintiff’s life has been made very miserable and unhappy by said defendant from the very beginning of said marriage,” Betty’s second pleading reads.32 For a little while, and living who knows where, Betty must have gone back to him. No reason other than reconciliation would explain the need to file for divorce a second time.

  The Egg and I makes no mention of divorce, perhaps on the principle that it would be unpalatable to readers. Betty would wait five years after Egg was published before articulating the rupture in print, with stark brevity: “I hated chickens, I was lonely and I seemed to have married the wrong man.”33 A modern memoir could dwell on Bob Heskett’s complexities, but in 1945, describing them would have revealed more than society found acceptable and more than Betty could reveal without mortification. In leaving out the most difficult details of her marriage, Betty showed a discretion that aligned with the expectations of her time.

  By the time of her second divorce filing, Betty and her daughters were living with Sydney in Seattle, and Betty had embarked on the desperate series of short-term jobs described in her third memoir, Anybody Can Do Anything. Bob was in Seattle, selling insurance again.

  In 1931, America experienced just over 17 divorces for every 100 marriages. In Washington, the figure was 22 divorces for every 100 marriages.34 Many considered divorce shameful, a mark of personal failure, and divorce petitions were often rejected in court. At that time, no state recognized incompatibility as grounds for divorce, and no-fault divorce did not exist.35 In order to be granted a divorce in Betty’s day, one member of the couple had to show proof of being wronged by the other. Betty’s accusations, painful as they were, would not have been extraordinary for their time.

  Out of nine possible grounds for divorce recognized by Washington in 1931, only three could have applied to the Hesketts: adultery discovered within one year of the divorce filing; cruel treatment or personal indignities rendering life burdensome; and habitual drunkenness or the husband’s refusal to make suitable provision for his family. Betty did not allege adultery, but her description of the marriage was grim:

  Defendant Robert E. Heskett has been guilty of cruel treatmen
t of plaintiff and heaped upon plaintiff personal indignities rendering her life burdensome. Said defendant has struck and kicked plaintiff on a number of occasions and has threatened to shoot plaintiff and the children. At one time said defendant poured coal oil on the side of the house and set it afire and it was only by timely discovery by plaintiff and her younger sister that destruction of the house and injury to the family was prevented. Without justification or cause by plaintiff, said defendant has repeatedly called plaintiff vile names and has threatened to disfigure plaintiff so that no one else would ever care for her. Said defendant has become addicted to the use of intoxicating liquors and frequently during the said marriage has become drunken and abusive toward plaintiff and just before plaintiff’s first child was born defendant struck and kicked her. And during all of the said married life said defendant has been brutal with, and abusive of, plaintiff.36

  The estranged couple fought over the terms of Bob’s financial obligations to his wife and children. Bob claimed that during the marriage, he had continued to receive renewal commissions on insurance policies he had previously sold and that he had used that money for their support. Besides, “She and our children are living with her parents in Seattle and are well provided for.”37

  “Affiant’s father is dead and her mother a widow, without means of support,” Betty’s answering affidavit states. She and Mary, it continues, were the sole sources of support for her two infant children, her mother, her sisters ages sixteen and eleven, and themselves.

  When the judge ordered Bob to pay child support, Bob demanded custody of Anne and Joan.38 “Defendant further avers that he is a fit and proper person and is willing, able, and anxious to assure the obligations and duties incident to such care, custody and control.” Betty, of course, denied this assertion.39 From then on, Bob paid child support irregularly and eventually refused to pay it at all. The judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest. Taken before the court commissioner, Bob was held in contempt and ordered to pay Betty what he owed her or else be committed to the King County Stockade. Soon after, Bob’s attorney withdrew counsel.

  Betty was granted an interlocutory decree on April 30, 1932, entitling her to an absolute divorce to be finalized by either party in six months. She received custody of Anne and Joan, subject to reasonable visitation by Bob. Bob was to pay Betty child support, to pay her attorney’s fees, and to pay court costs. When he failed to do so, he served a thirty-day jail sentence, which made the newspaper.40 About this time, Bob’s second attorney quit the case.

  On March 8, 1935, the divorce became final.41 Many years later, Joan (Heskett) MacDonald Keil was asked if she ever saw her father after her parents divorced. “I never saw him ever again,” Joan replied.42 Robert Heskett’s father and stepmother lived about a dozen blocks from Sydney’s house, but possibly Bob never asked to see his daughters, or else Betty prevented him from visiting.

  Nearly a decade after the divorce, Betty was still trying to extract the money Bob owed her. Bob was long gone from King County by then, but Betty, believing that he had left personal property with his sister, filed an affidavit for garnishment. King County Superior Court granted Betty a judgment against Bob, but Betty collected nothing. The affidavit of the service of Bob’s writ of garnishment is the final item in Betty and Bob’s extensive divorce case file.43

  Betty’s 1931 foray to Chimacum with Bob to reclaim belongings was her final visit to that area. After The Egg and I was published, the lonely farm property remained a silent witness, a painting upon whose canvas the real Betty and Bob flickered beneath the book’s coat of whitewash, a ghostly but insistent presence. Betty’s neighbors also remembered her real story, and when Betty next encountered the Bishop family, she would be facing their accusations of libel in a court of law.

  When she left Bob, Betty and her children joined Sydney, Mary, Dede, and Alison in a modest house in Seattle’s Roosevelt District.44 This would be their home for more than a decade. Four bedrooms held the seven of them and sometimes more. In the beginning, and periodically thereafter, Mary held the only job.

  Under that roof Betty would struggle to provide for her daughters, and she would slowly work through the trauma of her life with Bob. She would tell stories about the chickens, the moonshine, and her neighbors. She would immerse herself in her family, becoming once again fully a Bard, shedding her married name as she sloughed off the most harrowing details of her marriage. Under her mother’s roof, Betty again embraced her family’s disregard for social propriety, their sharp-tongued humor, their slavish adherence to the niceties of food and table, and their unconventional but united front against the world. Artistic and eccentric friends and strangers flowed in and out, with Sydney a placid constant, Mary the ringmaster. In this stimulating, financially precarious, and unguarded habitat Anne and Joan grew up. And from this idiosyncratic refuge, Betty Bard faced the 1930s.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Especially Betty

  THE house Sydney found on 15th Avenue Northeast in Seattle was modest but conveniently located: blocks from Roosevelt High School, in a neighborhood with the small amenities—butcher shop, grocery, cafes, shoe repair—that rural life had taught the Bards to appreciate. Betty’s memories of life in the unassuming dwelling never faded. She wrote:

  From two o’clock Saturday afternoon until two o’clock Monday morning, the house was filled with people. Mary, who was very popular, was being intellectual so her friends were mostly musicians, composers, writers, painters. . . . [T]hey sat on the floor and read aloud the poems of Baudelaire, John Donne, and Rupert Brooke, they put loud symphonies on the record player and talked over them, they discussed politics and the state of the world. . . . I loved the tight expectant feeling I had as I opened the front door and wondered who would be there. I loved Saturday’s dusk with the street lights as soft as breath in the fog or rain . . . the firm thudding comforting sound of front doors closing and shutting families in, the world out.1

  The evening air carried that era’s aromas: wood smoke, wet asphalt pavement, the resinous coal-oil odor of the Seattle Light Company’s gasworks, and dinner cooking—the deeply enticing scent of crisping meat wafting on frosty air. A city streetcar line ran directly past the house, and with this convenience came the loss of quietude: streetcars regularly clanked and screeched along the rails.

  Sydney’s reason for choosing the house was purely practical: she could (just barely) afford it. The small house told of a family living in tight conditions, without a fallback. It offered a precarious respite, a thin cloth coat. The Bards were penniless, if still proud, and everyone knew it. Of course, the Bards were not the only Americans in 1930 who had slipped down the economic and social ladder. The crash of 1929 and the Great Depression lowered their neighbors’ boats to meet theirs: bobbing unsteadily, taking on water, more patch than hull.

  Sydney purchased the house from a Seattle matron, Vida Pixley, in Dede’s and Alison’s names, listing herself as guardian. This arrangement suggests that she financed the down payment using the girls’ portion of the Calkins settlement. Holding on to this house required the same sort of shell game Sydney had played with the Laurelhurst and Chimacum properties. Vida Pixley was carrying the mortgage, a common purchase arrangement at the time, but Sydney took out a second, third, and finally a fourth mortgage on the property.

  All this was serious but framed with humor in the retelling. Blanche Hamilton remembered hearing about a visit Betty and Mary made to a posh Seattle banker to try to obtain one of these mortgages. Asked for collateral, Mary was said to have told the banker, “All we have are our two white bodies to offer for that.”2

  Margaret Bundy Callahan recalled Vida Pixley’s irritation whenever Mary’s name was mentioned: “Mrs. Pixley had sold her house on 15th in the University District to the Bards and they’d never paid her any money because they were so poor, and Mrs. Pixley used to look at [artist Orre Noble] with a glare and snap, ‘your friend, Mary Bard!’ ”3

  Once the Bards moved to the
15th Avenue house, Mary took charge of the family’s finances. Relieved of personally paying for groceries and coal, Sydney kept house, cooked, gardened, tended children, painted occasional landscapes, and, as Betty later recounted, read a book a day. Over the next decade, Sydney’s elder daughters would share the daunting duty of providing for the household. Grateful as they were that their mother could conjure meals from next to nothing and provide a kind of equable stability, Sydney’s utter daffiness with things financial tested their patience.

  Mary was certain that if her mother and siblings simply bent to her formidable will, financial stability would follow. Margaret Bundy Callahan reflected on Mary’s vehement convictions: “Her decisiveness never failed her in a crisis. That decisiveness led her into all sorts of complications, but she never faltered. She enjoyed being decisive about other people’s lives as well.”4

  As Betty would later describe, Mary took on the Great Depression as a personal challenge, refusing to allow the economy to best her—or any Bard. After holding several secretarial positions, Mary settled into a career selling advertising. She then became a font of employment leads for others, especially for Betty. But once Mary had found a job for her, Betty still had to keep it, a difficult task during years when workplaces closed abruptly and bosses skipped town without paying, or simply gave up.

  In March 1931, Mary found Betty—who had dropped the Heskett, becoming once again Betty Bard—work as a secretary at the American Smelting and Engineering Company.5 When this job ended after only three months, Betty took a secretarial position at Lumber Research, Inc., in Seattle’s Alaska Building. The job ended a little more than a year later, when the office closed. She then embarked on a string of short-term jobs: raising rabbits, modeling furs, tinting photographs, selling direct-mail advertising. The sisters pooled their money, but it was, Betty wrote, “a losing game. Like climbing up a rock slide. We’d just get to the top and the front porch would sag, or the toilet would overflow or the downspouts would leak or Christmas would come and down we’d go to the bottom again.”6