home behind in Centralia to start a family of her own. I heard that Joe was a good provider, working at the local defense plant in South Bend, Indiana, an outwardly decent man with a good job and a bright future.

Not so apparent at the outset, to Eva or anyone else who knew them, was this hidden reserve of pent up anger in Joe just waiting below the surface to strike out at the nearest victim. If ever there was a victim ripe for the taking, it was naive, 19-year-old Eva.

Joe, in so many ways, was like Jesse Carl minus the drinking and lacking Jesse Carl's tender side. The son of Hungarian immigrants, he was already alien before he spoke his first words, which were no doubt Hungarian.

Joe insisted that he was right about everything — how to feed and bathe his son, how to pay the bills on time, that he and he alone drove the family car, that Bob would be raised Roman Catholic but would never speak a word of Hungarian, that Eva would only follow and keep her silence.

In those days it was not uncommon for a husband to take a dominant role. In public it must have seemed like the most normal of marriages. Only to Eva and a small

circle of acquaintances did Joe's dark side show itself. Eva was hardly a feminist, enough of a rarity back then, and so you have to know that only a threat to her life or her infant son's life would push her into the undiscovered territory of single parenthood.

To be endlessly wrong and shunted to the background, to take a back seat to raising her own son, to convert to a religion her father denounced as Satanic and surrender her infant son to it — all this was enough to raise doubts, but not enough to push her away. When Joe threatened her with a knife and slashed into every pillow on their bed, all this in an outburst over the proper way to bathe their son, she secretly made plans to leave.

There was no default divorce in those days. The process was painful and disruptive. My mother would have had a much more difficult time getting free had not Joe revealed the depth of his violent temper in court for the judge and clerks to see. She was so afraid of this man that she left the Midwest entirely, even after alimony and child support had been decreed, to make a new life for herself in the place she discovered seven years prior, as a runaway — California, the end of the rainbow for so many in those desperate times.