Sometime in 1969, my grandmother tried to decapitate her good friend Ella Winter. My father was there; I know that. I imagine him wearing the blue corduroy suit he wore at his wedding; I’m sure he didn’t. I imagine him humiliated.
Muriel Rukeyser, so my father says, was not an accomplished drinker. But for some reason, that evening in San Francisco, shortly past the Summer of Love, she was drinking heavily.
She was at a party, among friends. But she started getting agitated, my father says, when the subject turned to Carmel-by-the-Sea. She lurched toward the hatchet in the basket of kindling when Ella Winter started mentioning the Jeffers family, who had lived in Carmel for fifty years at that point. And she grabbed the hatchet—now I’m imagining the running, and the lunge—and charged across the long-pile shag carpet, hatchet held over her head, aiming for the neck, when Ella Winter said something about Donnan Jeffers.
When my father relayed this, he didn’t mention what Muriel did after she was pulled off Ella Winter, or what she did after the hatchet was taken from her hands. She might have been contrite, or shaking with rage. He did say that Muriel had to be “forcibly restrained.” He did mention that (“luckily, luckily”) the blow was never struck.
What’s for sure is that the reason his mother ran pell-mell toward Ella Winter in the middle of the boozy camaraderie, in the decline of the 1960s, was because she heard that Ella Winter was still being friendly with the man that had impregnated Muriel back in 1946: the man who had fathered my father.
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