over an entire congregation’s. His fiery temper made you watch him as you would a volcano, awestruck by the intensity even as you wanted to get out of its way. You wanted to do everything you could to please him, and you drove yourself harder and harder to receive the nod that said he was impressed.
And I can imagine my mother as my father must have seen her. She was easy to fall in love with. She was a gifted homemaker who could resurrect a dining room table someone else had discarded on the street and serve up a delicious and healthy casserole concocted from a week’s worth of leftovers. When she ice-skated, her dance background showed in every elegant move of her wrist or smooth turn across the ice. When my parents danced together, my father’s movements became graceful, too, because she led him so well. She was refined, she was determined, and she was unfailingly loyal—though toward the wrong person.
I’d like to think they knew better. I’d like to think they tried to stop themselves. Eight years older and well aware of his influence, Walt took immediate advantage. Billie—old enough to know it was wrong yet youthful enough to let desire override her conscience—willingly pursued the affair. Walt convinced her that he was going to leave his wife, Marcia, as soon as the time was right. The problem, he told Billie, was that Marcia refused to grant him a divorce. He went so far as to keep a separate apartment for a while, to convince Billie he was trying to extricate himself from the marriage. But in truth, Walt had no intention of divorcing Marcia—or of letting Marcia ever divorce him.
Walt and Marcia’s history was long, and she was a very different woman from Billie. Marcia was quiet in nature and inclined to avoid conflict. She came from a small family with strong-willed yet devoted, loving parents. She was a few months older than Walt and had grown up with him in the small town of Greeley, Colorado, about fifty miles from Denver. They began to date when Marcia was just seventeen. Though Walt showed signs of aggression during their courtship, Marcia told me he never hurt her until after they were married.
Marcia had been reared with the values of her community, which had been founded as a sort of utopia, a place where all who breathed its air would shun alcohol, worship together, and raise strong families. She had every reason to believe her childhood sweetheart wanted just what she did, so when her father asked her on her wedding day if she really wanted to go through with it, she said yes.
By the time Walt and Billie began their relationship, however, Marcia had grown weary of Walt’s history of indiscretions. One day while tending to Walt’s dry cleaning, she found Billie’s ID in one of his jacket pockets. When she voiced her suspicions, she remembers they were met with a vile mix of aspersions, threats, and violence—all easily anticipated by Marcia and her three young children, Sam, Stacy, and Shawna. Another daughter, Shelly, had just been born. The family life Marcia envisioned had become a distant dream.
The affair continued into the following year, when Walt in his arrogance began to flaunt his relationship with Billie, not bothering to deny it and even orchestrating moments when Marcia would see it firsthand. Once when Marcia and Walt were out having dinner together, Billie came into the restaurant with some of her friends. She was eight years younger than Marcia, who recognized Billie from the ID in Walt’s jacket. “Hi, Walt,” Billie said coyly, smiling directly at Marcia as she passed by.
Soon after this incident, she told Walt for the first time she was going to leave him, and she tried to pursue a separation over the next several years. But Walt had an imperious drive when it came to the women in his life, and needed to make them feel trapped into staying under his control. Whenever Marcia showed her resolve to follow through with a divorce, his propensity for physical violence amplified. Marcia gave birth to another son, Shannon, just three months before Billie gave birth to my brother, Chris, in February 1968.
In a desperate attempt to protect her reputation, Billie scheduled a portrait sitting for her and Walt and sent the picture to the Iron Mountain newspaper as a post-wedding announcement. They appeared to be the perfect couple and Billie the epitome of success, a shining example of what was possible in a life outside the limitations of her small Michigan hometown. She went so far as to send pictures to her family of her and Walt on a trip together, claiming it had been their honeymoon. Of course the marriage could only exist in her mind, but she lied to herself enough until lying to others became second nature. She was learning from the master.
Walt acquired a home for his second family with Billie, a little beach-style bungalow on Walnut Avenue, and divided his time between the two residences. Marcia quietly struggled to find the means to follow through with a divorce, while Walt continued his oppressive reign over her life and her children. Shawna remembers being terrified of him during one such incident, when Shannon was just a year old. The tirade her dad unloaded onto her mom resulted in Marcia being left alone again to tend to her worried children and a new injury. A future visit to the doctor would confirm that Walt had fractured a vertebra in Marcia’s back.
I WAS BORN THREE YEARS AFTER CHRIS, in July of 1971. The stress in Billie’s life began to lift, with a progression of Walt’s promises seeming less hollow. He spent more time with us and paid more attention to Billie. She was also busier than she’d been before, because she now tended to two young children and their father and had started selling Jafra Cosmetics.
My father continued to tell Marcia all about my mom; Marcia says when he left her for two weeks out of every month, she was made to understand that he was staying with his second family. He was proud of having produced so many offspring and saw no reason to hide his other children from her. In fact, he envisioned us all eventually living together under one roof, and by way of convincing Marcia, pointed out that my mother made a fantastic pot roast—Marcia’s least successful culinary endeavor—but he said that Marcia’s spaghetti sauce was much better. Marcia remembers that in response, she quipped, “I didn’t know you were a Mormon fundamentalist, Walt.”
The two families wouldn’t come to live in the same house, but my father kept a special phone line in the office of his home with Marcia that no one was allowed to touch. All the older kids knew that phone line was for Billie.
Marcia wanted out and went back to teaching in order to save money. My dad showed up on payday and asked for her check. “It’s already in the bank,” Marcia explained as she continued making dinner for her children.
“In our account?” my father asked.
“No, in mine,” Marcia said in her understated way. Dad punished her, but she won the day—her money remained in her account, in her name.
My mother’s awareness of Marcia was much less clear, and it remains confusing to me how much she actually believed and how much she just chose to believe. I also don’t know if my dad’s violent and threatening behavior toward my mother began before or after Chris was born. My dad claimed to be working out of town for the two weeks out of every month he was living back with Marcia. But Dad’s secretary, Cathy, tired of her role in the charade; when my mother called the office one day about an order Cathy had placed with Jafra and mentioned Walt’s business trip, Cathy told her Walt was not out of town. When my mother told her she must be mistaken, Cathy replied that she was looking right at him. My father’s excuse for his latest deception was yet another false claim—he concocted a ridiculous story to appeal to my mother’s compassionate side, saying he couldn’t desert Marcia because she had terminal cancer.
There were repeated encounters like this between my father and both women, some that led to angry confrontation, others that were just shrugged off out of fear, frustration, or convenience. But for anyone who cared to see the truth, it was obvious: Walt was not leaving Marcia.
In time, the women in my father’s life reached a forced acceptance of the bigamous situation. Dad even dropped Chris off with Marcia while my mother was giving birth to me. Though the two women were rarely in the same place at the same time, all their children began to spend time together in varying combinations.
