The Courtship of Eva Eldridge: A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage Mad Fifties
272
The Courtship of Eva Eldridge: A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage Mad Fifties
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Overview
Everyone got married in the 1950s, then moved to the suburbs to have the children of the soon-to-be-famous baby boom. For Americans who had survived the Great Depression and World War II, prosperous married life was a triumph. The unwed were objects of pity, scorn, even suspicion. And so in the 1950s, Eva Eldridge, no longer so young and marginally employed, was the perfect target for handsome Vick, who promised everything: storybook romance, marital respectability, and the lively social life she loved. When he disappeared not long after their honeymoon, she was devastated.
Eva hadn’t always been so vulnerable. Growing up pretty and popular in rural Oregon, she expected to marry young and live a life much like that of her parents, farming and rearing children. But then the United States threw its weight into World War II and as men headed to battle, the government started recruiting women to work in their places. Eva, like many other young women, found that life in the city with plenty of money, personal freedom, and lots of soldiers and sailors eager to pay court was more exhilarating than life down on the farm. After the war, she was ambivalent about getting married and settling down—at least until Vick arrived.
Refusing to believe her brand-new husband had abandoned her, Eva set about tracking down a man who, she now believed, was more damaged by wartime trauma than she had known. But instead of a wounded hero, she found a long string of women much like herself—hard-working, intelligent women who had loved and married Vick and now had no idea where—or even who—he was.
Drawing on a trove of some eight hundred letters and papers, Diane Simmons tells the story of Eva’s poignant struggle to get her dream husband back, as well as the stories of the women who had stood at the altar with Vick before and after her. Eva’s remarkable life illuminates women’s struggle for happiness at a time when marriage—and the perfect husband—meant everything.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384623 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Courtship of Eva Eldridge
A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage-Mad Fifties
By Diane Simmons
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-462-3
CHAPTER 1
MARCH 1958 Boise, Idaho
Three decades earlier, on December 20, 1930, the Hotel Boise had opened to tremendous fanfare. The white, art deco "skyscraper" was ten stories high, the upper floors set back in wedding cake style. Its luxury, the Idaho Statesman declared, was equal to that found in any great metropolitan hotel. All that day, thousands of Idahoans toured through, gaping at the Egyptian-style curlicues that topped the doorways and at the elegant lobby, which, according to Hotel News, resembled nothing so much as the lounge of a French luxury liner. That evening, five hundred leading citizens in evening attire — the ladies sparkling with jewels — attended a dinner-dance in the Crystal Ballroom. Don Keith's Spanish Ballroom Orchestra had been brought up from Salt Lake City, and the event was broadcast on a San Francisco radio station.
Now, on a March evening in 1958, the Hotel Boise is no longer in the headlines, though it's still the swank place in town. The Crystal Ballroom is still the largest in the city, and the hotel bar is the unofficial meeting place for the city's elite. During the legislative session, many of the lawmakers live in the hotel, walking back and forth to the capitol a few blocks away.
Boise goes to bed early, though, and by ten P.M. activity in the hotel is winding down. At the cigar stand just inside the grand entrance, a woman whose golden-red hair is done up in a sleek roll closes out her cash register. It's Eva; she's thirty-five, attractive and slim, several inches taller than average. Her Tareyton Long is balanced on a silver ashtray as she restocks the gum and packs of cigarettes that have been sold since she came on shift at three. Though she's working, she's attired as though for an elegant evening out, wearing one of the cinch-waist dresses in deep forest green that set off both her slim figure and her redhead's complexion. Her feet are long and thin, and she always wears open-toe, open-back high heels.
Besides being a classy looker, she's nice to everyone, merry and fun; she has a way of looking into your eyes as if the two of you are about to burst with some hilarious secret. As a result, she's popular around the hotel. The waitresses are always stopping by to yak, and the bellboys like to hang around the cigar stand, kidding about this and that. Their kidding though is just in fun, to pass the time between calls. Everyone knows she's married to Vick, the hotel's handsome new chef. The guests, of course, don't know about Vick; but Eva is wearing a diamond-studded wedding ring on her long slender finger, and if anybody starts to get cute, she makes sure not only that they see the ring but that they realize they've been shown it.
She's been married a year, almost exactly, and she is deeply, deeply in love. She's so in love that she's downright mushy. At every holiday, she gives Vick the gushiest greeting card she can find.
Eva is lucky to have landed tall, good-looking Vick, the waitresses think. But she's a sweetheart and she deserves it. Besides — she's had a tough time. Before Vick showed up, it was clear to the practiced female eye that under the merry exterior she was lonely, even a little frightened. And no wonder. As anyone who goes to the movies is constantly reminded, being single in the 1950s is a terrifying experience. Motion pictures are full of pathetic, often desperate single women. By now the jaunty career gals of an earlier time are pretty much gone. In 1940 Rosalind Russell was a fast-talking reporter who just couldn't trade the newspaper game for a husband and a bunch of kids. But by 1955 Russell is playing a woman so terrified of becoming a spinster school teacher that, swallowing tears and pride, she goes down on her knees, begging her reluctant gentleman friend to marry her.
There's good reason for this desperation, as the movies also show: single women can be alarmingly vulnerable, subject both to remarkable brutality and assumptions of criminality. Susan Hayward, for example, plays a young woman who likes to kick off her shoes and dance with sailors; her only real crime is that she's too good of a pal to a couple of low-life guys. She gets the electric chair all the same; and just to underline the point of what can happen to a girl, the movie shows her being strapped in for execution. The restraints force her legs apart, and the newsmen jostle to get the best view. Even a demure good girl, like Anne Baxter in Blue Gardenia, loses her invisible shield of protection when her fiancé dumps her. Now she's fair game for a heartless womanizer, and when she tries to defend herself, she too ends up facing a capital charge.
No, it's terrible to be single, especially as you head onto the downhill side of your thirties. You may feel "young and carefree," a recent magazine article warned unmarried women. But soon you'll be "middle-aged Sad Sacks," and it'll be too late to get "husband insurance." So, of course, everybody is glad to see Eva settled and so happy.
Since tonight is one of Vick's nights off — they can never get exactly the same schedule, though Eva has tried — she puts on her coat to walk the five blocks home. Before leaving, she visits the ladies' room to smooth her hair, touch up her lipstick and powder; she wants to look good for her man, who'll be waiting up, reading one of his magazines. They'll sit and smoke, have a cup of coffee. They'll put Perry Como on the hi-fi. Neither of them has to be at work until three the next afternoon.
One of the bellmen holds the door, and Eva steps out onto Eighth and Bannock. The night is chilly, and she walks briskly along the nearly empty streets, up to Jefferson, and then four blocks over to the little basement apartment that was Eva's before they got married and Vick moved in. It's small, just a bedroom, front room with three street-level windows, and a nook of a kitchen. Maybe they'll look around for a house eventually, but for now it's cozy, the perfect little love nest.
As Eva steps onto her block, she sees that the brand new '58 Mercury she and Vick recently bought on time — dark blue over robin's egg — isn't in its usual place in front of the house. She tries to remember: did he say something about taking it to the garage? She walks faster, clip-clipping along the dark sidewalk, and she is glad when she sees the lights shining from the apartment windows. She walks down the cement steps at the side of the house and taps on the door. She waits a minute, then, her toes too cold to wait for the big lug to unfold himself from the couch, lets herself in with her key.
It takes only a few seconds in the neat little apartment for Eva to see that though the lamps are on and everything looks perfectly normal, Vick is not there. She stands in the living room puzzled. She knows he likes to go out. Sometimes he gets antsy on his night off. But why didn't he pick her up after work and they could have gone somewhere? There aren't many places open this late in Boise, but there are a few. She goes to the phone to see if Vick has left a note on the pad or jotted something that would show what had come up, but nothing is there. She puts her hand on the phone, but that doesn't make it ring, doesn't put Vick on the other end explaining where he is and why. She thinks of calling the different places that might be open this late but doesn't want to come across as the nagging wife.
Now she begins to worry that she may have already nagged a little. She's thinking how Vick had been a bit moody in the last few days, quiet, and how she worried he was getting sick. She was afraid it was something about the lung problem he'd had for years. She'd urged him to see the doctor, but he hadn't wanted to and hadn't wanted to talk about it. Stop asking him if he was OK, he'd finally said. Not mad. Just telling her. And she had. But now she's worried. Could he be peeved that she tried to get him to go to the doctor? Tried to tell him what to do? Could he have just gone out alone to teach her not to nag? But he's never been peeved before, not even once. He's never done anything even the slightest bit thoughtless or inconsiderate.
She goes into the bedroom again and stops still; the framed wedding pictures are gone from the dresser. After a moment she steps to the closet and opens it to see her own collection of dark green and midnight blue dresses on the right; on the left is an empty space where Vick's slacks and jackets had hung. Back at the dresser she opens the drawers that held his underwear and socks and the one where she put his shirts as they came packaged from the laundry. The drawers are empty.
Her heart racing, she goes back to the closet. Vick's jackets and slacks are still not hanging on his side. All of his things are gone except for the soft green sweater she gave him for Christmas. It's on the closet shelf, folded neatly. There too is the shoe box where he keeps his check stubs and so forth. Also in the box are the greeting cards she has given him. She knows he kept them because she once peeked to see.
Eva sits up smoking all night. She has no one she can call, not a living soul she can tell. For one thing, she can't bear for anyone to know. And anyway, she's sure that no one — none of their friends — would take it seriously. Everyone was always teasing them for being such lovebirds.
Whadja have, a fight? The girls would say. Don't worry, he'll cool off. He's out driving around. He didn't just leave. But they hadn't had a fight. They'd never had a fight or even an argument. There had never been a night when they didn't sleep in each other's arms.
She doesn't call her mother, Grace, who still lives on the farm in the eastern Oregon mountain valley where Eva grew up. She can't bear for her mother to know that something terrible has happened. Again. Eva knows she has put her mother through a lot since leaving the farm in 1943 to go to a war job. Though she and her mother are close, Eva is aware that she hasn't turned out at all as her mother had hoped. She knows Grace has worried and prayed over her so many times. Now it crosses Eva's mind that this new blow might be more than her mother can stand.
As the light breaks, she sleeps for a couple of hours, slumped on the couch, hugging the green sweater in her arms. Around ten she phones the manager at the hotel. She wants to ask if Vick, who is scheduled to work this evening, has called in. But when the manager answers, she hangs up. She waits until three when Vick would be starting his shift. Then she calls the kitchen and asks for him.
"He hasn't come in yet, Eva," one of the other cooks says, recognizing her voice. She hangs up and calls the assistant manager. Her mother is sick, she tells him. She and Vick have to drive over to eastern Oregon. He'll have to find someone to replace them both for a few days. The assistant manager doesn't like it; it's pretty short notice. She says she's sorry but it can't be helped.
Eva has to do something. She makes coffee and sits down at the little kitchen table with the only thing that's left her: Vick's shoebox of papers and other small articles. She takes each item out and studies it, looking for something, she doesn't know what.
The shoebox, too, has come to me in Eva's things. And as I open it, looking for clues, I begin, as I expect Eva would have, with the orderly, rational-looking book of check stubs on a Boise bank. It begins mid-December of 1956, the month Vick arrived in town, a few weeks before he got on at the hotel and the two of them met.
Vick has a messy, scribbly hand, and for some reason he always seems to be using a blurry pencil. But by now Eva can easily read his writing. And though she has not had occasion to look at his checkbook before, she sees that he fills out the stubs fully, giving check number, amount, date, and item, then subtracts the check amount to arrive at the new balance. In the first month he's in town, he's carrying a balance of about two hundred dollars, and most of his checks are for five or ten dollars, made out to a restaurant or bar, often a place called the Torch Café. Eva knows that when he first got to Boise he lived in a furnished room over on Idaho Street, and she assumes he was eating his meals in restaurants and paying with a check. Ten dollars is a lot for one person to spend in a Boise restaurant in 1956 with a steak dinner at about three bucks and beer thirty or forty cents. But he must have written the checks for more than the bill so he could get cash back and wouldn't have to bother standing in line at the bank.
She sees that he paid fifty-seven dollars a month rent for the furnished room where he lived when he first arrived. It seems like a lot. Eva's rent is only forty a month. But maybe at the house where Vick stayed, the lady was doing the cleaning, washing the sheets and towels, even doing his laundry.
Going on through the stubs, Eva sees that Vick paid fifteen dollars for a pair of shoes at C. C. Anderson's department store and made several fifteen-dollar trips to the doctor for his lung condition. She worries again that something could have worsened with his lungs and for some incomprehensible reason he couldn't tell her what he was planning to do about it. She feels sick to think he's somewhere suffering and can't let her know.
She keeps turning the little green stubs and comes to January 25, 1957. On this day he noted a ten-dollar check for "jewelry down payment." She sees another "jewelry" entry of $125 a week later. Eva knows this is her diamond wedding ring, and she puts down her head and sobs.
Eventually, however, there is nothing to do but light another cigarette and turn back to the check stubs and the scrawly handwriting that has become so dear. In March, after their marriage, there are no more checks written to the Torch Café. Instead, the checks are for the normal things a couple spends money on: $6.33 to the telephone company, $6.80 to Idaho Power, $11.05 for groceries at Albertson's. The everyday expenses hearten her a little. It's so clear that they were a happy married couple and that this is all some terrible misunderstanding.
She stops to rack her brains: is it possible he told her about something he had to go do and she simply forgot? But she can't think of anything, and the hotel hadn't been notified that he wouldn't be at work. She turns back to the stubs. Getting to July, she sees an entry in her own neat hand. Apparently she had grabbed his checkbook to pay fifteen dollars owed to Stewart Photography. Yes — the wedding pictures.
At the bottom of the box, she finds Vick's green-on-olive master sergeant stripes. He'd shown Eva these with pride. Surely he would not willingly have left his stripes behind. Though she has seen the stripes before, Eva has not seen a postcard from the Veterans Administration, sent to Vick at an address in Washington, D.C. The postcard dated March 1953 notifies Vick that his VA records have been forwarded from the San Francisco office to the Washington, D.C., office. Though Eva had known Vick was from California, near San Francisco, she had not known he had ever lived in Washington, D.C. He's eight years older than she; at forty-three, a man like him has been around, of course. Still, she's surprised he wouldn't have mentioned living back East.
The military card gives Eva another idea, one that is frightening and at the same time a bit desperately hopeful. Could his moodiness and his disappearance have something to do with his experiences in the war? Eva doesn't know many details of his service, only that he'd been in a tank unit in Italy and had seen a lot of things. He'd hinted that he'd had to do things that he found distasteful but that he didn't want to talk about. It was all ancient history, he'd said.
Eva, as it happens, has had her own searing experience with what combat can do to a man. And now she is remembering a recent movie where a married man who loves his wife is haunted by flashbacks of wartime experiences that he cannot share with her. She remembers too another movie from a few years back where a shell-shocked vet believes he killed his wife and flees, even though he has no memory of the act and really did not commit the murder.
Could it be something like that? Could Vick be wandering around, lost and confused? Could he have forgotten his name and where he lived? But if he has the car, doesn't he have the registration with his name and address? If he has the wedding photographs, wouldn't he see the name of Stewart Photography in Boise stamped on the back? Couldn't he call up Stewart's, describe the photographs, and ask who had ordered them?
Knowing him, maybe he is just being too stubborn to follow these clues. Maybe he is too stubborn to go to the police or a hospital to ask for help. She could imagine that maybe. What she can't imagine is that he would knowingly frighten her so. He is so good and kind, so gentle and understanding. So very, very loving. But if he can't remember, then he doesn't know what she is going through. She finds a little comfort in the idea.
Putting the things back in the box, Eva notices two small scraps of paper that seem to have been torn from magazines. She sees now that they are both the same advertisement. Both have been torn out in the same careless way; the top and the left margin are missing. Still, she can make out that the ad is for discount diamonds and that you can send for a free catalog of diamonds "from $25 up to $5000."
It's not so much the words that hold Eva or the idea of discount diamonds; it's more the partial picture of a woman who appears at the top of the ad. Her face and arms gleam pale against a dark background, and she is embracing a man who is only seen from the back. Because the ad has been carelessly ripped, you don't see the top of the woman's face, but you see her thin, white fingers, one with a diamond wedding ring. The fingers are spread. One hand clutches the man's back, the other is in his smooth dark hair. You see the curve of her jaw and the beginning of her chin. You see that her head is thrown back and her lips are parted in an expression of ecstasy.
The woman, Eva thinks, looks like her. Not just the long fingers and the clean jaw line, but the expression as well. Did Vick think so too, that he would tear the same ad out twice?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Courtship of Eva Eldridge by Diane Simmons. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1 March 1958, Boise, Idaho Spring 1940, Wing Valley, Oregon Summer 1956, Boise 1940–1942, Wing Valley 1942, “If the Fair Sex Were to Replace Men” 1942–1943, War in Europe 1943, “One Woman Can Shorten This War” Winter 1956, Vick Hits Boise 1943, Shipbuilding Boomtown, Portland Spring 1957, Engaged, Wing Valley 1944, Swan Island, Portland 1957, A Wedding, Boise 1944–1946, Swan Island Shipyard and Fort George Wright Convalescent Hospital Spring 1958, Farewell Bend, Oregon 1944, “The Taste of Independence,” Swan Island 1957, Honeymoon, Nevada and California 1945, Sunday Punch 1946, Waiting for a Wedding, Wing Valley Part 2 Odette, March 1959 Joining the Search Odette and Leisa Marie and Susan, Modesto Tessa, Baltimore Why? Vick’s War, 1940–1951 The Vickers Family, Kansas, 1910–1930 Portland, 1960–1961 Mena and Janice, 1961 The Bigamist, 1953–1962 King County Jail, Seattle, 1962 Sanity Eva and Vick in Seattle, Spring 1962 “Ha! Ha! I Just Laugh and Tell Everyone a Different Story,” Seattle, Summer 1962 Psychoanalyzing Vick Wing Valley, August 1962 To Follow the Heart, 1943–2002 Epilogue Notes References IndexWhat People are Saying About This
“Diane Simmons has brilliantly used a collection of never-before-seen World War II letters to tell a story that has all the twists of a true crime novel. At its heart, this is a poignant, extraordinary tale of a woman who married a man with a secret and a troubling past.”
“The writing is vivid and tight, with a touch of American noir reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. Simmons's writing brings to life the dark side of a country trying to move on in the wake of war. She blends history and her won detective work to tell a story of betrayal and shattered dreams.”