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

by Paula Becker

  I looked out the west-facing bedroom window. The morning was warm and clear, the kind of Seattle weather that feels benign after so much chill rain. Below, Mike and his backhoe worked implacably, the steel arm swooping high and crashing through the flimsy old garage. He would be finished with that soon, I knew, anxious to turn the machine loose on the house I stood in.

  Dragging my knobs and windows, I retraced my steps. The darkness downstairs was impenetrable even with a headlamp, but on my last pass through I found the brick fireplace, the hearth of Betty’s home. It was intact, more whole than anything else in the entire house, and I wanted to salvage it—all of it or even just one brick—but it was much too solid. I snapped a picture, my flash briefly illuminating the dark, and then another. I tried to imagine the Bards’ fires in that hearth, all of them gathered round. They had been present once, but I was here now, all alone. I let that truth sink in, allowed myself to fully feel what I was witnessing instead of straining to hear echoes of the Bards, or feel their ghosts. This place that had mattered to them, that still mattered to me, was vanishing.

  The moment passed. I thanked Mike and left, unable to bear watching the backhoe. The house was whole in that last moment, still tangible. At dusk, I forced myself to drive by again. The house was a giant heap of kindling.

  Being the last person in the Anybody house felt sad, important, and deeply disconcerting. This house had been my touchstone. All those years, driving past it had felt like glimpsing Betty. Her words and my brief peek with Tanya allowed me in my imagination to float through that sturdy oak door, into the living room, upstairs, downstairs, across the kitchen. The house had been a testament to Betty, a vector, somehow, to the life she lived there. Now Betty’s words had become the only portal.

  I let my thoughts shift to the Vashon house, where Betty had written almost all of her books. There she’d described Chimacum, Firland, the places she’d lived as a child, and—most important to me—this house, the Anybody house. The Vashon house was still standing strong, and the woman who owned it—Abby, a writer—invited me to visit.

  When I saw it, I recognized much from Betty’s descriptions in her books and from the photographs in Life and the Saturday Evening Post. I could smell wood smoke from the fireplace and the warm, round scent of rich coffee and buttery pancakes.

  The dark wood floor entranced me. I pressed my palms against the highly polished surface. That floor was built from the same wood used for the decks of old sailing ships, Abby told me. Under my hands, it felt as solid as some magnificent, ancient tree. With this ship’s deck beneath her feet, I thought, Betty MacDonald launched her story.

  I had been looking for Betty MacDonald, off and on, for two decades. My children, who’d tried to spot Betty’s houses from their car seats, were grown, or nearly. I had been looking for Betty for so long that, as each answered question made her brighter in my mind, for others her actual legacy was fading. Many of Egg’s first readers were gone. Their children, who knew Betty MacDonald better as the author of the Piggle-Wiggle books, knew little of her impact on Washington, on the publishing industry, on the genres of humor and autobiography. It was time to stop looking for Betty MacDonald: it was time to find her.

  I knew that if I found her, I would write about her—tell her story, bring her back to readers, so they could know the stories she had told. I was convinced that Betty’s places—like the Anybody house—were clues.

  I started on the research trips—the pilgrimages—following the trail of breadcrumbs left by Betty’s books and my own research. I spent a week in Butte, staying in an apartment near the top of the old bank building where Dr. Moore, who’d taken care of the Bards and signed Sylvia’s and Darsie’s death certificates, had had his office. Each day I walked a few blocks to the Butte–Silver Bow Public Archives, where I searched for every trace of the family in old newspapers, city directories, and public records. The archive building is next door to the site of the long-gone hospital where Darsie died. I visited the Mount Moriah Cemetery and found Sylvia’s unmarked grave. I hiked up steep Montana Street, where the Bard children had gone sledding. I saw the old headframes and mine yards and the School of Mines building where Darsie taught. I found each house the Bards had lived in. I wandered repeatedly to the Granite Street house where they’d lived the longest, trying to picture the tiny, stubborn patch of grass where Betsy played with her dolls.

  I went to Chimacum and walked the lonely land where Betty and Bob had lived and fought and raised their chickens. I met the Larson siblings who’d helped give tours of the place after The Egg and I made it famous. Aldena Bishop talked with me, and I thought about her late husband, Bud, whose kindness and pity impelled him to chop wood for Betty so she and her babies could stay warm. I found Bud’s oral history at the Jefferson County Historical Society, along with the school census records mentioning Dede and Alison. I tried to untangle the knot of the Bards’ property woes.

  I spent a day in Placerville, Idaho, population twenty, flying into Boise early in the morning and out that night. I stood in the old general store (now a museum) where Betsy and Mary could have bought penny candy.

  Admitted by workmen during its restoration, I wandered through the house Darsie and Sydney had rented during their first years in Seattle. Someone was polishing the brass push-button light switches, and I thought of Betsy’s fingertips punching the button to light the dim electric bulb in her bedroom.

  The current owners of the Bards’ Laurelhurst house let me visit. They knew their house had once belonged to the Bards. “We think of Betty often,” they told me. The parents read Betty’s books to their sons—perhaps reading Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle in Betty’s old bedroom. They’d found old shoeboxes inside an attic wall when they renovated, and we sifted through the contents, which included pamphlets about technical aspects of mineralogy: “Phosphate Rock in 1916” and “Salt, Bromine, and Calcium Chloride in 1916.” Stamped across them was the name D. C. Bard. We looked at a small, 1910s leather shoe, perhaps Dede’s, and a 1914 advertisement for an automobile, maybe treasured by little Cleve. There was an empty Chesterfield cigarette pack that could have been Sydney’s.

  In Boulder, sheer kismet and the homeowner’s generosity gave me the chance to visit Betty’s birthplace, to climb the stairs to what were once two small bedrooms facing Boulder’s iconic Flatiron rock formations. In one of these rooms, more than a century ago, on a frigid night less than a week after a massive snowstorm, Sydney gave birth. The two small rooms are now one. I stood, absorbing the place where Betty entered the flow of time. I felt the quietude of that moment long past—the common miracle of any baby safely born and the power of being present where this particular infant drew her first breath, uttered her first cry. If all events mark the locations where they happen—and I think they do—Betty’s birth is layered into 723 Spruce Street.

  Near Grand Central Station in New York, I found 521 5th Avenue and stood in front of what was once Lippincott’s Manhattan outpost. A few blocks south, I located 101 Park Avenue, home to Betty’s literary agency, Brandt & Brandt. I drew an imaginary line connecting Betty’s Vashon mailbox with Bernice Baumgarten’s in-basket and thought of Betty’s original manuscript of Egg making that journey.

  I spent two days reading the Universal-International Pictures records covering the film version of The Egg and I, tucked into a tiny room at the University of Southern California Film and Television Library in Los Angeles. In the drought-stricken Carmel Valley, I drove the winding Los Laureles Grade looking for Betty and Don’s property. The large barn and small house were barely visible from the road, and when I finally spotted them, I parked the car and picked my way along the edge of the narrow road, clutching my camera and hoping no one swerved. Betty’s niece Alison had once told Betty MacDonald fans that all the letters ever sent to Betty had been stored in the barn from 1955 until sometime in the late 1970s or early ’80s, when the place was sold.

  I’d thought for years about those letters. I’d heard they’d ended u
p in several California storage facilities and that after decades some of Betty’s grandchildren had recently transported them to Seattle. Not knowing what the letters might contain frustrated me. I’d looked in public archives for letters between Betty and Lippincott or Brandt & Brandt, but that sleuthing had uncovered nothing. Except for the handful of Bernice Baumgarten letters at the Lilly Library, the trail was cold.1

  So finally, I did what I knew I had to do: intrude into Betty’s family’s privacy. I held my breath and e-mailed Betty’s granddaughter Heidi, Joan’s daughter, who lived on Vashon. I was working on a biography of Betty, I told her, and having no luck locating anything that explained her relationship with her literary agent or her publisher. Did she by any chance have those papers the family saved? Were they accessible? Could there be anything in there from Lippincott or Brandt & Brandt?

  Come to my house and we can look through them together, Heidi replied.

  The papers were stored in ancient banker’s boxes in Heidi’s immaculate garage. We carried them into her dining room, where huge clerestory windows bathed them in clear natural light. I pried open the first box, holding my breath. “Brandt & Brandt Correspondence, 1944–1946,” I read.

  Here’s the thing about looking for Betty MacDonald: Betty herself helped me to find her. She was a former secretary, trained to save everything. Incoming mail was stapled or pinned to carbon copies of her replies: correspondence with Lippincott and with Brandt & Brandt; letters to and from fans, friends, and family; and her date books. And Betty’s family saved it all after she died.

  Engaging with this compelling treasure trove of Betty’s life at Heidi’s house was vastly different from using organized materials in an archive, where all those pieces of paper have been transformed from heaps of possibility and chaos into something finite. In archives, one reads a finding aid—a menu, basically, to the materials—then orders up whichever boxes of papers sound promising. The boxes are filled with numbered folders, and a researcher peruses one folder at a time, paging through it, keeping the sheets in order. There are surprises, but archival research is laboratory work. Heidi’s materials were research in the wild. I touched and decided what to do with everything.

  I opened each faded manila folder as if unwrapping a gift and tried to balance the need for haste—I was monopolizing Heidi’s dining- room table—with the engulfing personal mandate to miss nothing. Betty’s letters were wonderful. If I had ever asked myself how much her books owed to Bernice Baumgarten’s direct intervention, the letters testified to Betty’s innate skill as a writer. She was there, unedited.

  Betty’s books describe a universe peopled with outrageous characters. I learned from tunneling through her letters that this was not an invention. She saw the world as outrageous, and so she wrote it that way. Exaggeration was as reflexive to Betty as breathing. I could never really have understood that trait without finding her letters, her extensive day books, her lists of worries and menus and obligations, her observations on family matters, what pressed on her, and how she responded to being pressed.

  Heidi’s support allowed me to absorb these materials. She nurtured me, prepared us lunches. I was moved to be fed by a woman who had herself been fed, many times, as a beloved grandchild, by Betty.

  We worked for weeks, a day here, a day there. The ferry carried me to Vashon. I drove up the steep hill, past the house where Betty and Don and Anne and Joan and Sydney had lived. Most of the correspondence had originally been mailed to or from that house. After a summer of work, Heidi sent me to her brother Tim, who had just as many Betty materials. Tim was as encouraging as Heidi, and letter by letter, day book by day book, Betty appeared.

  I also reached out to Betty’s daughter Anne—Heidi and Tim’s aunt—who was the last living witness to every chapter of Betty’s story, from Chimacum to her final moments in Maynard Hospital. I did so with trepidation, knowing that the demands of Betty’s readers over the years must have been a burden. But Anne was kind and gracious. We spoke repeatedly, and between our calls I kept a running list of questions only she could answer. Anne values Betty’s legacy, which she has worked to further for more than half a century. I asked her if she had minded being turned into a character in her mother’s books, something I’d long wondered. No, she replied, she didn’t mind at all.

  The children in Betty’s life, now with children and grandchildren of their own, remember her as complex but often magical. One nephew recalled that Betty had him convinced that the clay hill behind the Vashon house was salted with diamonds. He and his brother spent happy hours digging to find them. Tim remembered combing the Vashon beach when the tide was out with a long line of his relatives—Betty, Alison, Joan—shoulder to shoulder, looking for agates. Heidi remembered Betty reading to her, curled on the bed in front of the crackling Franklin stove, while angry waves crashed outside.

  Family gatherings ultimately swelled to forty or fifty people. The Bard sisters were all wonderful cooks, and they prepared elaborate potluck dishes. There was laughter and singing—Dede could play the piano by ear. There were beach parties, contests to see who could dig the most clams, huge pots of chowder, and, always, coffee. The Vashon house was redolent, Betty’s family members recall, with the aromas of fresh coffee, frying bacon, wood fires, leather, cigarette smoke, Scotch. One of Betty’s nephews told me that the way Betty wrote was the way the Bard family talked: sharp, fast, and breathtakingly funny.

  But family feuds—what Betty often called little hurts and slights—could burn. Children are tender, and Betty sometimes was not. The quicksilver element in Betty that was her genius, inspiring her devilish wit, could jolt those she loved, intentionally or unintentionally. For the children in the family, Betty’s company could be as thrilling as riding a fast carousel, more fun than anything, until the spinning made them too dizzy. Some of these nieces, nephews, and grandchildren best remember the colorful whirl. Some ruefully recall its queasy aftermath.

  Talking with Betty’s family members, touching the letters she’d signed with her fountain pen and the folders she had labeled in brown ink, was exhilarating and exhausting. It felt visceral. The letters brought her to life for me. I saw her typing in the pine-paneled house on Vashon and the Howe Street house overlooking Lake Union. I felt our proximity, unrestrained by temporal limits—Betty, Mary, me in my little house, all of us typing away, all of us authing. After each day of working with the letters, I felt the slap, the shock of Betty’s death anew.

  But Betty was there. She was in the letters and in Anne’s answers to my questions. She was in the memories of the family members who’d known her as children. She was in the stories Blanche Hamilton Hutchings Caffiere told me as I perched on the edge of her single bed in the assisted living center, stories that made fourteen-year-old Betsy Bard completely real to me. She was in Margaret Bundy Callahan’s memoir. She was in the old newspapers and in all those boxes at Heidi’s house, and at Tim’s.

  She was in her own books, lying so still in bed at The Pines in The Plague and I. She was scrambling onto the yellow-orange 15th Avenue streetcar on damply chill mornings in Anybody Can Do Anything. She was in Onions in the Stew, frying clam fritters and balancing her typewriter on the kitchen drain board. She was on the screen in the movie of The Egg and I, her desperate young mother’s face hovering beside Claudette Colbert’s perfectly arched eyebrows, a study in contrast.

  She was in the houses in Boulder, Butte, Seattle, Vashon, Carmel Valley, and in the public records and city directories that led me to those homes. I had held fragments of Betty’s story for so many years. Now I pasted them down in layers, overlapping, showing me—finally—Betty.

  Why use Betty MacDonald as a portal to the past? Why did I fall so hard for someone else’s family story? I had a grandmother who had tuberculosis in the 1920s, and who—like Betty—improved after treatment in a sanatorium. She married a much older man, as Betty married Robert Heskett. Like Bob, my grandmother’s husband was an alcoholic. He died when my mother was eleven
years old, a little younger than Betsy Bard was when Darsie died. My mother’s grandmother helped raise her, like Betty’s Gammy.

  So there are echoes of my own family story in Betty MacDonald’s life, places where certain lines intersect. On some level, I am looking for those points of connection, trying to touch those places in myself. Trying, as we all try, to dowse my past, to dip my fingers into stories that glisten just below the surface. Why do some moments in history, some people’s stories, resonate for us more than others? Maybe because on some level, our own histories are deeply listening for them. Listening to the quiet voice saying, Find me.

  THE BARD/MacDONALD FAMILY

  ANNE ELIZABETH CAMPBELL BARD [Gammy] (1850–1936): Betty’s paternal grandmother.

  JAMES BARD(E) (1846–1921): Betty’s paternal grandfather.

  MARY TEN EYCK CLEVELAND COX SANDERSON (1851–1934): Betty’s maternal grandmother.

  SYDNEY A. SANDERSON (1847–1924): Betty’s maternal grandfather.

  ELSIE THALIMER SANDERSON BARD [Sydney to friends and family, Margar or Grandmother to her grandchildren] (1878–1957): Betty’s mother.

  DARSIE CLEVELAND BARD (1878–1920): Betty’s father.

  MARY TEN EYCK BARD JENSEN (1904–70): Eldest child of Darsie and Sydney Bard. Married Clyde Reynolds Jensen [Jens] (1899–1988). Their daughters were Mari, Salli, and Heidi.