JUNE 10, 2023 – Some of the people who visited Mother were as oddly brilliant as she was but with a severity altogether absent from Mother’s personality.
Christabelle Chase, for example. Christabelle lived on the other side of town and was the wealthy widow of a newspaperman who’d once been in the running for governor. Mother told me once that after Christabelle had become a widow, she took over the newspaper herself and made quite a go of it. She was a regular visitor at our house, and each time, she appeared in a different outfit—a sharp, woman’s business suit of one bright color or another and always including a hat that matched the outfit and a string of large beads around her neck. Aside from the attire, Christabelle was as hard as granite. Her countenance was the most severe I’d ever seen. She reminded me of a dark, woman Roma fortune-teller, and in my mind, I called her “Crystal Ball.” She talked like a very ornery, gravel-voiced (it sounded like a couple of the big beads from her necklace were hitting each other in the back of her throat) English teacher, only the subject wasn’t English or literature but hard-core, party politics. Her lips were thinner than Mother’s and her lipstick made them look like little guillotine blades after the kill. In the right light, I could see gray fuzz above the length of her upper lip. She could lay down the harshest criticism of every public official in the county, and though I couldn’t follow but a small fraction of her vocabulary, I was nearly as exhausted as Mother must have been by the time Crystal Ball got back into her ancient Mercedes and drove back to her side of town.
I’ll never forget Kay Jacobson, either. She took second place to Crystal Ball in the “severe” category. Kay was a good deal older than Mother, but not nearly as old as Crystal Ball, and she had rimless spectacles and wore her hair tied back tight in a bun. She barely opened her mouth when she talked, but that didn’t inhibit her from talking about—and criticizing—the entire world and everyone in it.
Kay and her husband, Earl, who was an engineer and Kay’s perfect match, lived on our side of town, just up the river. One evening we were invited to dinner at their imposing stone and plaster Tudor home, which was every bit as stolid as its owners. As a young kid in tow, I was amused by the couple’s severity and how it contrasted with my parents’ easy-going nature. For the first half of the evening, we got to hear Earl talk about the latest additions of Bach to his enormous classical record collection. During the second half, we got to hear Kay criticize people, except Earl and us, of course, though a lot of sentences started with “You should.”
I thought it odd that Mother would want to be friends with people as severe as Crystal Ball Chase and Kay Jacobson, because Mother wasn’t the least bit severe. I concluded that maybe it was the other way around; that they were drawn to Mother because she was their intellectual equal but with a much friendlier face, and all the other friendly faces in town were either not smart enough or not genuinely kind enough to tolerate conversations as harsh as Crystal Ball and Kay seemed to enjoy.
Aside from her frequent diatribe-filled visits at our house, Kay Jacobson played a minor role in one of my more bizarre experiences involving Mother. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
