Ariel

I’ve posted this essay in various places but never with pictures of the real Sally Lou Ritz. Many thanks to Bert Weist for sending the photos and granting permission to publish them here.

Hello, I’d like to find out where you did your research for your book about Judge Crater? You see, the showgirl depicted in your book was actually my grandmother . . . .

So began an email that I received on May 16, 2014. There are certain moments that writers do not forget. Your first good review. Your first bad review. Finally holding the book you’ve labored over in your hands. But I am convinced there is nothing that will send you into total body failure so fast as receiving an email from someone who shouldn’t exist. Because that showgirl I wrote about, the one I’d researched and brought to life on the pages of my novel? The one whose granddaughter had just written me? I truly believed she had died in the fall of 1930. She shouldn’t have lived long enough to have children, much less grandchildren. But that email turned all my personal theories inside out.

My first introduction to Sally Lou Ritz (I would later find out her last name was Ritzi—the nickname I used for her in my novel) came ten years ago while reading an article about a missing New York State Supreme Court Judge. Though we’ve largely forgotten him, Joseph Crater was nothing short of legend for almost fifty years. He’d only been on the court four months when he got into a cab on August 6th, 1930, and vanished. His disappearance became the biggest missing person’s case of the twentieth century, thanks in no small part to his connections with Tammany Hall, infamous gangsters, and rumors of judicial corruption. It didn’t take long to discover that there were three interesting women in Judge Crater’s life: his jaded, socialite wife Stella; a devoted maid who was in their apartment in the days surrounding his disappearance; and a showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz, long suspected to be Crater’s lover. A wife. A maid. And a mistress. What if all three of them knew what happened to him but chose not to tell? Now I had a story.

But the difficulty in writing about historic figures is that you must treat them with respect. Their legacies and their families and their memories must be honored. Despite the fact that they felt like characters to me, they were real people. And there could be men and women wandering around the planet that knew and loved them. I don’t believe that writers must always paint their characters in a positive light—especially when history supports a gritty version of events—but I do believe they should be treated with dignity. And I was determined to be mindful of that responsibility.

Yet here’s the truth: in this particular situation I felt as though I’d gotten off easy. Joseph and Stella Crater never had children. The maid, known only as Amedia Christian (I changed her name for the novel) makes one appearance in one newspaper article and no one knows for sure if that was even her real name. And the showgirl vanished shortly after Judge Crater. She’s been listed as a missing person for the last eighty-four years. I stayed with the facts that could be verified. But beyond that, my imagination had room to play. Joseph Crater’s disappearance is still unsolved. No one knows what became of him. So I used these three women to tell a version of events that could have happened. And I was very pleased with how it turned out.

And then came that email in May.

Ritzi’s granddaughter went on to tell me that her grandmother had left New York City in fall of 1930. That she had changed her name. Married. Had a child. She had gone on with her life and never once mentioned that she was with Joseph Crater on the night that he disappeared. Or that she had been in any way connected to one of the most notorious missing persons cases in history. Her children and grandchildren knew her simply as a beautiful, talented, charming woman who shied away from personal questions. She died in 2000 after living a full, happy life.

It’s ironic, that.

Even though I sincerely believed that Ritzi had not made it out of New York City alive, I wrote her a different ending. A happy one. I gave her a family. A new name. I wanted those things for her. And I was brought to tears by the knowledge that she actually got them.

I spent several weeks this summer communicating with various members of Ritzi’s family. I’d gotten many things right. Her real name for instance: Sarah (she went by Sally). Some things I’d gotten wrong. She fled to California, not Iowa as I’d imagined. But the thing that humbled me most was that her son, granddaughter, and great-grandson had a few more answers than they did before. Much of what I wrote about her was total fiction. But I was able to point Ritzi’s family to the historical record of her time as a dancer on Broadway, to her connection with Judge Crater, and to testimony she’d given police about his disappearance.

Questions were answered. (For them and for me.) Gaps were filled. And a legacy was discovered. To me that is a better ending than anything I could have written.

“If you tell me this is a boy I’m going to cry,” I told the technician that day. It was August 2008 and I was five months pregnant and the results of this sonogram were rather crucial to my mental health. “It’s not your fault. And I’ll be okay. But we already have three boys and we’re really hoping for a girl. So if it’s another boy I need to get my crying done now so I’m not doing it in the delivery room.”

I’ve wondered since if she remembers that day as clearly as I do. How she put that warm jelly on my swollen stomach, set the monitor against my skin, and immediately declared, “Penis!” True to my word I burst into tears.

I was still crying an hour later as my husband drove me home. We’d left the doctor’s office with three grainy black and white pictures of our son and the number of a good urologist.

I’d like to blame my emotional breakdown on hormones but the truth is that a part of me needed to grieve. This would be our last child. I would never have a daughter. I’d collected pretty names and pink clothes for years and now I would never get to use them. My world would always be filled with Legos and camouflage and that wet-puppy smell unique to little boys.

My husband was rather less emotional about the whole thing. “Don’t cry,” he said, patting my arm, “It’s not your fault.”

I snapped.

“My fault? My fault? This is your fault! You have no X chromosomes. You did this to me. And I’m getting a dog. And it’s going to be a girl dog. And I’m going to give her a girly name!” It was the only solution I could think of and everything I said after that came through sobs and gurgles and this high-pitched keening that I’ve never been able to reproduce. From what I remember he stopped talking to me after that. You can’t blame the man. He was terrified. By the time we got home I’d gone through an entire box of tissue.

The next morning I was calmer and quieter and he brought me coffee as he always does. He hugged me. He kissed me. He told me he loved me and that he was rather glad to be a father of all sons. It was a relief, he said, not to have a wedding to pay for. And then he added, “If you really want to get a dog we can get a dog.”

My poor husband. I looked at him like he’d grown another head. “That’s a terrible idea. I’m pregnant! Why on earth would we get a dog?” I believe I may have actually wagged a finger at him. And then I said words he’s never let me forget. “If we are supposed to have a dog, God will drop one on our doorstep.”

Now that I think about it that was the first and only time I’ve ever thrown down a gauntlet. And no wonder. Two hours later I went out to check the mail and found a black lab puppy on our doorstep. This is the part that people often find hardest to believe when I tell this story. But I swear it is true, point for point. At the time we lived in Texas, in a neighborhood tucked between two major thoroughfares, and for reasons I’ve never fully understood, people often abandoned animals at the end of our street. It was not uncommon to see some poor stray wandering around until someone took pity on it or called animal control. On that particular day, the puppy had followed the mailman around until getting tired and collapsing at our door.

“We have a dog.” I told my husband over the phone five minutes later. “But it’s a BOY!”

Perhaps he felt safe, with the phone between us as a buffer, because he laughed at me. I still remember that laugh. Part delight, part disbelief, and no small amount of triumph. We had a dog. The boys loved it immediately. And by the time he got home from work they were all romping happily in the back yard.

“You,” he said, after inspecting the puppy, “are not well versed in canine genitalia. It’s a girl.”

We’ve had Maggie for six years now. If we’re very lucky we’ll have another six years with her. She completes this wild, motley family of ours, and if I didn’t know better I would swear she’s part human. Maggie barks at us if we yell at the kids. She dances with my husband every evening when he comes home from work. She sleeps with one of his boots every night and she sits at my feet during the day while I write. Remember that fourth son of ours? He started Kindergarten in August. On his first day she sat at the door and waited until he got home. She didn’t eat. She didn’t move. But the moment he was through the door she went to his room and brought him his teddy bear. I think of them as belonging to each other. A dog and her boy. Sometimes it feels as though we got them on the same day, so linked are those memories.

I didn’t get a daughter. I wouldn’t change that now, not for anything. But I did get these boys and the unexpected, divine gift of a dog I don’t deserve.

**Warning: I’m going to use an old, tired analogy in this post. But I don’t care. I’ve been writing all week and I have soup for brains and this is all you get from me. The leftovers. Flotsam and jetsam. Ragged thoughts after a glass of port and today’s badly-written pages. (I have to grant myself permission to write badly or nothing will ever get done. I actually wrote myself a note this morning: “Ariel has permission to write badly today.” I would show it to you but even the handwriting is bad.)

Moving on. Where was I?

My tired analogy: writing is like running. It sucks if you haven’t done it in a while. Hell, it can suck if you’ve been doing it every day for years. Do it anyway.

It’s been a while since I drafted a novel. Revised? Yes. Edited? Yes. Promoted? Yes. The first draft has always been and will always be my achilles heel. But I’m writing again. And I’d forgotten how hard it is. There is no feeling so dread-inducing as the blinking cursor on the first page of a new book. Truly, not for the faint of heart.

And there is no feeling so miserable as that first, sharp stitch in your side when you haven’t run consistently in months years. It’s the curse of the over-achiever. The misguided belief that you can pick up right where you left off without putting in the hard work to build endurance. And it’s always accompanied but the hard shock of reality.

Mental conditioning. Physical conditioning. It’s all the same. And the first time back always leaves you sucking wind.

It takes a while to go from lacing up the old running shoes to crossing the finish line of a marathon. It takes sweat and tears and pain and this really awful anti-chafing cream that I probably shouldn’t talk about in public.

It takes a while to go from typing the title page to celebrating the release of a new novel. There are no shortcuts. It’s a butt-in-chair every day for months on end commitment. Which, if I’m totally honest, creates the “If I’m going to keep writing I need to get back into running” mobius strip that I find myself on right now. Because now that I’m a bit older I find that there is a physical nature to the writing as well. A certain stamina that’s needed–and not just mental. All that sitting is hard on the body. Better to be in shape. Better to be at the top of your game.

So this post is for me. It’s a reminder to be kind. To be gentle. To have mercy and compassion and to celebrate every tiny little bit of progress. This is me giving myself permission to write badly. This is me giving myself permission to run-a-song/walk-a-song.

It’s been a while since you wrote a book, Ariel. It’s been a while since you ran distance of any type, much less a marathon. Be kind to yourself. No one else can do that for you.

You’ve done it before. You can do it again. And though you might feel like the process will kill you, it won’t. You’ll just be totally spent once you cross you finish line.

My mother read to me by the light of a kerosene lantern. Most people don’t believe me when I tell them this but it’s true. I grew up in a small hippie town in northern New Mexico, in a home with no running water or electricity. My parents, descendants in a long line of cattle ranchers and cotton farmers chose to abandon the great state of Texas and forge their own path in the turbulent 70′s. We’re nostalgic about it now, my siblings and I; the wood burning stove and the cistern, the chickens and the outhouse. The way light hits the mesa at four o’clock in the afternoon. Running barefoot through the sagebrush. Picking Indian Paintbrush. Monsoons in summer. Blizzards in winter. We once found a cannon ball buried in the front yard–a relic from the old stagecoach road that passed in front of our house–and lost it again within a fortnight. It’s quaint and fascinating but it’s the sort of childhood you remember fondly because it’s in the distant past. Because it makes an interesting conversation starter. Because the hard, hard moments stack up evenly with the magical ones. Most people don’t know how to respond when they learn that I was raised so far off the grid that I actually fell off. So poor that the “dirt floor” analogy actually applied. And that’s OK. Because in life (as in fiction) the best stories are found on the outskirts, those bare, ragged edges of society. Or in my case, down a six-mile dirt road on the other side of the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge.

In the absence of a television I discovered C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. L.M. Montgomery and Agatha Christie. I cried myself to sleep after reading WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS. It’s the first book I ever threw against a wall. Later I had a brief but passionate literary love affair with Piers Anthony and his magical Xanth. I believed for years that these authors and their stories were mine, and I felt an irrational rage when I learned that other children loved them as well. I wanted to yank those books out of their hands and stomp away screaming, “Mine, mine, mine!”

I’ve become more generous in the years since I left the mesa. Instead of hoarding beautiful stories to myself, I now try to share them any chance I get. My mother no longer reads to me by the light of a kerosene lantern, though I’d jump at the chance if she offered. And I’m ever on the lookout for a novel that makes me feel the way I did as a child, curled up in a patch of sunlight, lost in the magic of story.

Here’s the truth: I wouldn’t change a moment of it even if I could. Those little bits, the flotsam and jetsam of my life, made me who I am today. My off-kilter childhood made me a relentless reader. It made me a storyteller. It made me a writer.