THE WHITE SWAN MOTEL
Lucille Lang Day |
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MY FATHER LOVED TO TELL THE STORY OF THE WHITE SWAN MOTEL.
To be inspired, he needed at least several listeners, so he told it at family gatherings — a birthday, anniversary, Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Fourth of July party. He didn't tell it too often, maybe once every three or four years. No one ever complained about having heard it before. Maybe some were being polite or had forgotten it, but I believe that, like me, most of the people in our family enjoyed the story and didn't mind hearing it again. Dad usually told it when the conversation turned to ghosts, horror movies, or serial killers, but the last time, the subject was writing.
It was an Indian summer afternoon near the end of the millennium. We'd gathered at my Aunt Liz and Uncle Bob's house in Napa for their birthdays and anniversary, which we always celebrated as a single event because all three occasions occurred between August 31 and September 15. My dad, Uncle Bob, and I were sitting at the scarred redwood picnic table in the backyard — Uncle Bob and I in the sun, my dad across from us, shaded by the ranch-style house. Aunt Liz and Aunt Ethel, my mother's twin sister, were a few feet away in the lawn swing — a big swinging sofa whose plastic, floral-print upholstery was faded and ripped. My grown daughters, Liana and Tamarind, were there too, but my mother had been dead for two years. We were eating stuffed eggs and crackers and cheese and drinking mediocre white wine. Although my aunt and uncle lived in California's Napa Valley, famous for its wineries, they had never learned the difference between Chardonnay and cheap Chablis.
My father was past eighty and weakened by myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder that interferes with muscle contraction. He'd received the diagnosis when, at seventy-eight, he'd started falling, experiencing double vision, and having difficulty swallowing. He never complained about it: he just took his medicine and went on with his life. Many people with myasthenia end up in wheelchairs, but he didn't expect that to happen to him.
We'd been talking about the coming millennium — the Y2K problem, doomsday fanatics, etc. I don't remember how the conversation turned to writing, but my father said, "I have a story for you. If you want to be a successful writer, this is the story you should write."
As a young man, he'd hoped to be an actor or writer. Growing up in the 1920s, he'd met Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Coogan and other actors at a hotel in Pasadena where he and his parents often stayed. Chaplin said, "Yes, you can be an actor too." After graduating from high school, he drove to Hollywood and visited the studios, saying he was a friend of Charlie Chaplin's, but no one even offered him a screen test, let alone a part in a movie. Then he wrote some stories, including memoirs of his encounters with Chaplin and Coogan, and sent them to Reader's Digest , but he only got rejection slips. Ultimately, his form of creative expression became photography. It was a private passion. He took tens of thousands of 35mm slides over about forty years but never published or exhibited them. As far as writing was concerned, he was now ambitious for me, certain I could be a best-selling author and eager to offer some advice.
He launched into his story, hands in motion. Loss of muscle tone had begun to limit his facial expressions, and his skin was pale from avoiding sunlight, which interacted badly with his medications, but his blue eyes were lively, his voice animated. "This is a true story. It happened a long time ago, in the nineteen-forties, before you were born. Your mother and I had only been married a few years. I was still in my twenties. Your mother, Aunt Ethel, and I had been to Pasadena to visit my cousins, the MacQuiddys. Back then it took two days to drive from Los Angeles to Oakland. They hadn't built Highway 5 yet. You had to take 99 through the valley, which always smelled like an outhouse because of all the fertilizer the farmers used, or drive up the coast, which was more scenic and had some fresh air. It was slow, but I liked the coast route. Before we left Pasadena, I looked at a map and figured we could make it to San Luis Obispo before nightfall. We planned to spend the night there and continue on home to Oakland the next day."
I'd driven the coast route with him myself five times between the ages of eight and twenty-three, always on the way to Disneyland, which for my dad was second only to Reno as a favorite destination. We always drove south on the coast and came back home through the valley. Since my mother's death, he'd often said he'd like to visit Disneyland again, but neither of my daughters had children yet, and all of us had places where we'd rather go.
"We started out after lunch," he continued. "Almost right away, things started going wrong. First I had a flat tire. Then traffic got backed up because there was an accident. No sooner had it got going than we were stuck again, this time because of roadwork."
Aunt Ethel, who was eighty-seven and had appeared to be snoozing in the lawn swing, opened her eyes, recognizing the story. Everyone was listening to Dad.
. . .
In 1935 my father is seventeen years old. His mother, Ada Peckham Lang, wants to inspire him and his brother, Bob, who's four years older. She isn't satisfied with her own accomplishments. She did oil paintings at her finishing school, Chamberlain Institute, but kept only one, a still life of decaying peach-colored roses. She doesn't particularly like it; it's too dark. She has already destroyed all of her other paintings because she didn't think they were good enough. Her husband insists that she keep this last one.
She was a schoolteacher in the San Joaquin Valley before her marriage. She has always wanted to do more with her life, maybe return to painting, maybe become a writer, but she hasn't been able to mobilize herself. In 1918 her eldest son, Billy, Jr., died at age eight in the great flu epidemic, and she has felt like a bug stuck in glue ever since. Ada herself would not attribute this to Billy's death, but to her own inadequacy. In her opinion, she is inferior to her mother, Miriam Jones Peckham, who was born in 1846 and became a political activist and feminist writer. It occurs to Ada that by writing a family history and telling her mother's story, she can inspire her sons. She writes: "My mother was the most ambitious woman I've ever known . . . All her life, she was a great worker both in public and private life. I often think how little I have accomplished compared with her great achievements"; "When she attended school, she won distinction by being the best essayist in her class and received prizes for her splendid work in literature. She wrote more or less during her entire life on various political and social problems of her day"; "I can best describe my mother as a 'new woman.' She advocated co-educational colleges, professions for women, and the ballot for the so-called 'weaker sex.' In other words, she wanted equal rights for men and women."
. . .
"It was already dark by the time we got to Santa Maria. We stopped there for dinner at a roadside café and talked about getting a room there for the night, but we decided to drive on to San Luis Obispo. I figured we could make it by nine o'clock.
"Then a heavy fog rolled in. I'd never seen anything like it. Thick as whipped cream. I couldn't see a thing. Your mother begged me to stop." His voice became high-pitched as he imitated a frightened woman: "'Dick, Dick! We can't go on. You can't see the road. We'll all be killed!' I said, 'I can't stop here, Evelyn. There's nowhere to stop. When I find a place to stop, I will. Someone will crash into us for sure if I stop here.'
"I thought things couldn't get worse, but instead of getting to San Luis Obispo, we came to a wooded area. Through the fog, you could barely make out the shapes of densely packed trees. It was as though I'd driven right out of California and into a fairy tale. At that point, I wouldn't of been surprised to see a witch's cauldron bubbling under one of the trees. I don't get scared easily, but by then I was scared, so you have to understand what great relief I felt when I thought I saw a sign ahead." He let out a deep sigh, as though he'd just spotted the sign. "Because of the fog, I couldn't read it until we were right up close. It was just a painted sign, no lights or anything. It said 'White Swan Motel' in large black letters. Above the lettering was a picture of a swan." As he spoke, he pointed in the air. "The driveway was gravel. This was no fancy motel, but we'd of taken anything then."
He spoke mostly to me, but he looked around periodically to make sure that the rest of the audience was with him. "It was a small place, just three cabins. One of them, the office, was on the right as you drove in. They put us in the cabin at the far left, the one furthest from the office," he said, showing the positions of the cabins with his hands. "There was a bedroom for your mother and me, a smaller adjoining room for Aunt Ethel, and a shared bathroom. The first thing I noticed was that everything was covered with dust. That seemed odd, but I just figured the White Swan Motel didn't get much business. Then I noticed there were no pictures on the walls — no flowers, no seashores, nothing. It was a queer place. Bleak.
"We were tired, so we didn't waste any time getting to bed, but we didn't get to sleep long. A little after midnight, noises started coming from the cabin next door." His voice became more ominous. He relished scaring us. "There was banging, sounds like furniture crashing, and the clattering and dragging of chains."
"Ghosts!" said Uncle Bob with a chortle. "What I want to know, Dick, is did you see any ghosts?" Although he'd heard the story before, he was playing along. He was four years older than my father, and his tone was that of a worldly twelve-year-old speaking to his superstitious eight-year-old brother.
"There might have been ghosts there, but I didn't see them. This story isn't about ghosts," Dad said indignantly.
"What's it about then?" asked Tamarind, who was twenty-five and the youngest among us. I was curious too. Some of the past tellings had indeed been about ghosts or aliens, and it had seemed that the main point was to scare us.
He paused only a few seconds, stroking his chin, then said, looking at Tamarind and drawing out each word, "It's about saving your own life."
. . .
In 1936, the year my father graduates from high school, my grandmother starts having spells of weakness. Her legs grow rubbery and collapse beneath her, and she becomes reluctant to go out. It's difficult to swallow, so she subsists on milkshakes, juice, and soup. Her doctors say nothing is physically wrong with her, that she's suffering from depression. My father, who had planned to attend the University of California at Berkeley, puts his plans on hold and takes care of her for the next four years instead.
She stays home for the better part of sixteen years, growing progressively weaker, writing in her diary each day. By 1952 she is bedridden and can't even swallow liquids. Myasthenia gravis is not a genetic disease, but one can be genetically predisposed to it. Her doctors, however, have not thought of myasthenia. They recommend institutionalization and electroshock, the best treatment they know of for depression. Seventy-six years old, she's carried weeping from her home. The first treatment kills her.
. . .
Turning toward me again, Dad said, "Your mother was scared by the noises. She said, 'Dick, what's that?' I said, 'I don't know. Let's just try to get some sleep. We'll get out of here first thing in the morning.' I was scared, too, but I didn't want to show it."
"This is one of Dick's tall tales," announced Aunt Liz, who never wanted anyone to think she was gullible. I thought she was wrong, that the story was mostly true, but that Dad embellished it.
"This is no tall tale," Dad said. "This really happened."
"It sure did," Aunt Ethel concurred. "I was there." Her short-term memory was pretty much gone, but she was still very clear about the past.
. . .
It's 1957, and I am nine years old. My family is seated around the dining room table at Aunt Liz and Uncle Bob's house. If my cousin Jan, Aunt Ethel and Uncle Dick's daughter, were here, I'd have to sit with her in the kitchen, but she isn't, so I get to sit in the dining room with the adults. Aunt Liz, Uncle Bob, and Dad are discussing my grandmother's self-published family history, in which she claimed that her mother, Mariam Peckham, was descended from William Floyd, who signed the Declaration of Independence, and that her father, Henry Harrison Peckham, was descended from the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. My dad and Uncle Bob are very proud of these ancestors, so I've heard about them many times before: they are people I should live up to and sources of my "good genes." "How do we know these things are true?" I ask. "Grandma's book just says them. She doesn't show the family tree." "Your grandmother would never say anything that wasn't true," Uncle Bob assures me. "I guarantee you that you are a Mayflower descendant," my father adds.
My mother, who was born in Acushnet, Massachusetts, a town built on land that the Pilgrims purchased from Massasoit in 1639, says nothing. "Who were your ancestors?" I ask her. "I don't know and I don't care. What you do with your own life is all that matters."
. . .
"Tell us what happened next," said Liana. We all knew what happened next, but the story never lost its suspense.
"Your grandmother and I held each other close, listening to the awful sounds. It must have gone on for more than half an hour."
"How do you think I felt?" said Aunt Ethel. "I was all alone in the other room."
Dad took a deep breath, shaking his head and apparently looking off into a neighbor's yard, though in truth he must have been looking deeply inward. He continued, speaking more softly, as though we were at the White Swan Motel and he didn't want the people in the next room to hear him. "Then a woman screamed. It was a long, high-pitched, blood-curdling scream. I switched on the light to look for a phone to call the police, but there was no phone in that room." He was silent a moment. "There were two more screams." His voice, which had been nearly a whisper, rose to a loud wail. He screamed twice. "Ethel came running into our room and slipped on a throw rug in the hallway. 'I think there's something wet under the rug,' she said. The screaming and other noises had stopped. Everything was silent, spooky. Your mother said, 'Dick, I think someone just got killed over there.'
"I nodded, scarcely able to believe this was happening. Then I went to the hallway and picked up the rug where Ethel had slipped. The substance underneath it was red and moist, but starting to congeal. I thought, My God, someone's been killed in here too! I told the girls, 'Pack up fast as you can. We have to get out of here!'"
"At that point, I pulled back the curtain enough to peek out the window. My heart was already hammering, but when I looked out, it became a percussion band: a pickup truck was parked behind me, perpendicular to my car. Another car was parked to the left. I didn't know if I could get out. Still, I ordered, 'Ethel, Evelyn, get your clothes on now and throw your stuff into the suitcases. Don't waste a minute!'
"Ethel looked under the rug herself. She gasped, turning pale, and looked like she was going to scream. I didn't often tell the twins what to do, but I said, 'Ethel, don't scream. It's not going to help us.'"
"I knew not to scream," she said. "I thought Evelyn was going to scream."
"Outside the fog was thick as ever. We got into my '36 Ford, and I started the engine. That truck didn't have to park behind me: someone had deliberately tried to block me. I backed into it, then pulled forward, and as I angled out, I also hit the car next to me." His hands gripped and turned an imaginary steering wheel, and he looked over his shoulder as he described backing up. "The truck was blocking the driveway, and to get around it, I had to drive under the trees. When I made it to the road, I drove as fast as I dared in that fog."
"It was just a few miles to San Luis Obispo. I considered looking for the police station, but I had no idea where to find it. I didn't dare stop at a phone booth. Everything was in darkness, and I was afraid that someone from the White Swan Motel might be following us. I just kept driving. I told the girls to get some sleep, but they were too scared. I was still scared too. I would of been scared even if we hadn't been at the White Swan Motel, because the whole coast was enveloped in that fog, all the way to Monterey. At Monterey I headed inland toward Salinas, and only then did we get away from it. It was well past dawn when we reached San Jose, but even then I didn't stop. I kept driving, all the way to Oakland.
"It was late morning when we got home. Your mother and Ethel went straight to bed, but tired as I was, I couldn't sleep. I knew I was lucky. I saw we were in danger and I got us out of there. But the trouble is, there are a lot of White Swan Motels in this life, and sometimes you're at the White Swan Motel and don't know it. I'm not just talking about vacations."
I wondered if he was also talking about gambling. Throughout his life, he'd enjoyed and indulged in all types, including poker, keno, slot machines, black jack, and horse races. His specialty was low ball, which he'd played several nights a week at the Key and Oaks Clubs in Emeryville while I was growing up. And how about his mother and her illness that was never properly diagnosed? Not to mention the jobs in banking that he'd worked at unenthusiastically for more than thirty years. Then there were bad marriages and ill-conceived affairs, which he had not experienced as far as I knew, but I was well acquainted with. Maybe those, too, were White Swan motels.
Aunt Liz said, "We can go inside now."
"That's not the end of the story," Dad said, annoyed by the interruption. "Let me finish."
"Make it quick," Aunt Liz said. "I don't believe a word of this."
"I wanted to call the White Swan Motel to report what had happened to the manager or owner, but the operator said it wasn't listed. So I called the San Luis Obispo Police Department and gave them the basic information. They told me to put everything I could remember into writing and send it to them. I also wrote to the local newspaper, the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce, and the Better Business Bureau. I covered all the bases. I thought someone had been killed that night and I might be a key witness."
Because I knew what was coming, the skin was already rising all along my arms, even though I was sitting in the sun.
. . .
I look for my father's Mayflower ancestors, but I can't find any. Perhaps they don't exist. Mariam Peckham's great aunt was married to William Floyd, so she was not his descendant after all. John Peckham, her husband's earliest known ancestor in America, was a British nobleman and religious dissenter who joined the Anne Hutchinson party in 1639 and became one of the earliest settlers in Rhode Island. I learn that the only certifiable Mayflower descendants in my family are my mother and Aunt Ethel.
. . .
"About a week later I started getting replies. Everyone but the newspaper answered, and they all said the same thing: 'Dear Mr. Lang, Thank you for your letter. We have looked into your claims but have been unable to take any action, because there is no White Swan Motel.'
"God as my witness," he said, as the believers and nonbelievers among us thought about where he and my mom and Aunt Ethel might have been that night and what could have happened there. "They all said, 'There is no White Swan Motel,' so you see, you have to figure it out if you're stuck there and get out on your own."
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