Houston, 1963

These are my parents’ stories, told as close to the truth as I can get.

My mother came to Houston in the early summer of 1963. A KLM job in Indonesia had fallen through. Fate closed that door. The Dutch consulate in Houston needed a secretary. She spoke Dutch, English, and French, which she’d learned working as an au pair in Paris. She typed 120 words a minute. She had attended business college in Amsterdam because university, in her generation, was for men. Despite a fiancé in Amsterdam, she packed her bags and flew to Texas.

***

Houston in the summer had heat you could see. It came off the pavement in waves, and the air was wet enough to wear. The city sprawled without apology in every direction. Refineries burned off gas in orange flares. The harbour was brown, thick with industry, not quite something you wanted to be near. A new domed stadium was going up on the south side. The NASA complex sat nearby, and the men who worked there moved through the city as though the future was already decided.

She was twenty-four years old. She was six feet tall and had swum at a near-Olympic level for years, and it showed. She had a laugh that took over a room and an irreverence she made no effort to contain. She loved the sun the way some people love music, without analysis. Houston had it in quantities that Amsterdam could not have imagined. She was not complaining.

She moved into Holcomb Towers with a friend from the consulate. Fifteen floors, four hundred and twenty apartments, adults only, unfurnished. The building had an Olympic pool, twenty-four tennis courts, a track, a riding academy, commercial outlets, and a radio station. It was its own small city.

My father, in those early weeks, was living in Holcomb Towers, but not staying there full-time. He lived on the beach at Galveston, an hour from Houston, in a sleeping bag. He fished. He swam. He showered and brushed his teeth at a car wash on the way to work. He bought king shrimp from the harbour boats and brought them to restaurants, where they were turned into gumbo. Life was undemanding.

At the Towers, the pool was where people gathered. Young Republicans supporting Barry Goldwater for president congregated, wearing their buttons and trailing their motto: Flush the White House, John. The radio station broadcast poolside. The summer moved slowly in the heat, and there was nowhere better to be than horizontal beside the water.

My mother floated. The Texas sun did what it always did.

***

Two men came through the gate.

One was tall and dark-haired, my father. The other was shorter and blonde, his friend Carl. They were obviously known. Men moved toward them with handshakes. Women arranged themselves with the deliberate casualness of people who have thought about this more than they are admitting.

My father accepted a beer. He drank it. He walked to the edge of the pool, loosening his tie as he went, and dove in.

He was still wearing his suit. His shoes were still on his feet.

He surfaced close to where my mother was floating. He looked at her. She looked at him.

The rest was inevitable.

He had not met anyone like her. She was not performing anything. She was not arranging herself. She was simply and completely herself, in the water, in the heat, taking up exactly as much space as she required. He thought she was wild. He was right.

She let him come to her.

***

He was twenty-eight, from Shelburne, Ontario. He was working as a survey party chief for Gulf Bitulithic on highway construction at the NASA complex. He had been interviewed by the Harris County police chief and cleared to work in the United States. He had to leave by January 5 of the following year.

He had been on his way to Australia for the 1964 Summer Olympics. Houston changed his plans.

He was, at the time he met my mother, dating seven other women in the building.

His system was not complicated. When he was visiting a woman in her apartment, he left his pants on the outside doorknob. Notice to any other interested parties that the evening was spoken for.

At the pool, he had a different protocol. He arrived with his briefcase, selected his viewing location with care, and opened the case. Inside: glasses, ice cubes, and a half-gallon of Canadian Club. Texas was a dry state. No liquor served in bars, but you could bring your own bottle and purchase mixers and ice. He had worked this out. He poured, settled in, and received visitors. He had very white legs and a very tanned upper body and wore oxfords until he acquired appropriate footwear. None of this appeared to hurt his prospects.

***

My parents rode horses together in the evenings, watching the grass for rattlesnakes. They went to the Lifers’ Rodeo at Huntsville Prison, where Dizzy Dean threw baseballs to inmates in the yard. The Texas Longhorns were the nation’s top college football team that year, and their fans required constant singing and cheering in the streets and bars, which was either exciting or exhausting depending on your position. When a hurricane threatened, and other residents of Holcomb Towers boarded their windows, my father set up a table outside with a five-gallon cask of beer to watch. The hurricane did not fully arrive. They finished the cask anyway.

Five weeks after they met, my mother sent a telegram to the Netherlands, breaking off her engagement.

She knew almost nothing about him. Not where in Canada he had come from, not his family, not what his life looked like outside of a pool in Houston in the summer of 1963. She knew he made her laugh and that the room changed when he walked into it. She decided that was enough.

***

They were married a week later on October 4, 1963, by the Reverend John E. Fellers, at 5501 South Main Street, Houston, Texas. Ronald Grant Barrett, age twenty-eight. Miss Thea Van Emmerick, age twenty-four. Harris County. The gold seal of the State of Texas was pressed into the paper.

She wore heels.

My father was six feet four. But she would have worn them anyway, because she felt like it, and because she had never made herself smaller for anyone, and she was not about to start on her wedding day.

She invited the seven other women to the wedding. They all came.