Chapter 16 Who Do I Think I Am?
SIXTEEN
WHO DO I THINK I AM?
AFTER SADIE’S BIRTH I stumbled upon something that would forever change my perspective about my dad.
During my trips to the East Coast, in addition to seeing my mother’s family, we’d also head deeper into New Jersey to stay with Paul and his wife, Olive.
Olive was not my father’s mother—my actual grandmother had died mysteriously early in my father’s life.
Olive, whose special-needs brother lived with her and Paul, never wanted my dad around, so Bob Applegate was raised by Paul’s mother, his paternal grandmother.
One day, when my father was seven or eight years old (as he remembers it), Paul’s mother just nonchalantly announced over the breakfast table that my father’s mother had died.
As I grew older, it pained me to learn that my father hated his father: I loved Paul so.
I never really understood what had happened to cause such a rift.
I had heard various stories about my paternal grandmother but could never get the same story twice.
My father’s childhood had clearly been toxic and complicated—the casual nature of how he found out about his own mother’s death was an indication of the neglect he suffered—and he had spent so much of his life in pain.
He would make up memories of his early life to cope, to the point that I don’t think he ever really knew who he was—not really.
He used to say he’d never even met his biological mother.
This was not true strictly speaking, but perhaps it was better than the reality.
His grandmother told him that his mother had died in the street, beaten to death outside a bar.
My father didn’t even know his own mother’s name. In 2011, my half sister would eventually get ahold of a copy of my dad’s birth certificate and was able to tell him that his mother’s name had been Lavina Shaw. Beyond that we didn’t really know anything.
And then, as was so often the case throughout my life, a TV show changed everything.
In the summer of 2013, I was able to get my father and me some real answers.
I had agreed to be part of a genealogy-based TV show called Who Do You Think You Are?
I was determined to find out the story of his early life, and specifically what had happened to Lavina Shaw.
She haunted me, just as she’d haunted my father.
He could barely mention her without tears forming in his eyes, so this was an incredible opportunity to gain insight into who she was, and perhaps into who he was, too.
The first thing I learned in New Jersey, where they had all lived, was that my grandmother’s name was indeed Lavina Victorine Shaw.
She was the daughter of Ovid and Lavina Shaw, and she had a sister, Delilah.
Quickly the plot thickened. With the wonderful help of a team of genealogists and historians in Trenton, New Jersey, we discovered that Lavina Victorine Shaw had never actually lived with my grandfather, Paul Applegate.
In fact, they had separated before my father was even born, and Lavina had remained at her parents’ house.
Here’s where the story takes a darker turn.
In 1942, my beloved grandfather Paul was accused in court documents of treating Lavina “cruelly and brutally, accusing her of immoral acts, charging her that she was guilty of adultery, by reference calling her vile and indecent names, and on various dates struck and beat her.” Accordingly, Lavina left Paul, but “upon his promise to treat her properly,” she returned, only to face further mistreatment.
“On or about the 13th day of May 1942, [Paul Applegate did] pack most of complainant’s clothes and personal effects, and [told] her to get back to Trenton as soon as possible as the trains were still running, and why should he support her when he could get a half dozen women like her for twenty-five cents? ”
When my grandmother asked Paul if he intended to provide for her and for their unborn child—my father—Paul reportedly replied, “Why should I support you or the baby? It don’t belong to me.”
The subsequent separation agreement nevertheless called for Paul to give Lavina fifteen dollars per week to support her and my father, but seemingly no payments were ever made.
My grandmother was twenty-one years old; she had no work, and no support from my grandfather.
By 1945, she and Paul were officially divorced, and full custody of my father was awarded to Lavina.
As the research deepened, I felt that sinking-pit feeling at the center of my heart.
The whole thing was a damned mess and accounted for so much of my father’s retreat into stories that were forever shifting.
Of course that’s what he did: it seemed from these documents that there had been endless turmoil at the start of his life, and when one is faced with not knowing even the basics of one’s own history, it makes sense to create a narrative to fill the gaps.
I had loved my grandfather Paul, but the evidence pointed to him being a terrible man—something about the phrases “Why should he support her when he could get a half dozen women like her for twenty-five cents?” and “Why should I support you or the baby? It don’t belong to me.
” Even that chilling reference to the trains still running in Trenton.
His words rang true in their specificity, and each statement was chilling in its own way, revealing cruelty and dismissal in equal measure.
And to think that my grandfather had said to a court, stated clearly in the public record, that he was not my father’s real father…
It was hard for me to even think about. How was I going to tell my father?
Lavina, my father’s mother, was not without blame either.
A doctor’s note dated May 1945 was painful to read even almost seven decades later.
In it, it was reported that when my father was still in his mother’s care, he was treated for both pneumonia and malnutrition.
I couldn’t get this image out of my head: my poor father not just hungry, as I imagine many children were by war’s end, but hungry to the point of malnutrition?
It was one thing to come out of a chaotic family; it was another to be the victim of what can only be described as child abuse.
Neither of my paternal grandparents came out of this research with much credit, and my poor father?
I shuddered to think what else he’d been through as a child.
By later in 1945, Paul had further accused Lavina of adultery—which was still illegal at the time—and had both her and her supposed partner, Michael Constant, arrested.
Paul and Lavina continued to accuse each other of drunkenness, too—clearly their union was beyond toxic and severely undermined by substance abuse.
With custody of my father awarded to Lavina, that’s where the paper trail, at least with regard to my father’s parents as a couple, ends.
Lavina’s mother would help with raising my father, but she died in 1946, which was probably the reason my father was subsequently raised by his paternal grandmother.
Then in 1955 the story comes back online.
According to documents we found, Lavina died at age thirty-three, “at home after a short illness.” By then she was Lavina Walton, and her death certificate listed her cause of death as “pulmonary tuberculosis with effusion, cirrhosis of the liver,” brought on by “acute alcoholism and nutritional anemia.” She was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Trenton.
Perhaps what Paul had accused her of had some validity.
Perhaps her accusations about him had also been true.
Either way, my father was born into an abject mess of a family, one in which his father was absent for much of his life.
My dad would return to live with Paul Applegate when he was fourteen years old, though there is no record of how a man who denied his paternity treated him.
My father’s birth mother had been an alcoholic who neglected to feed him.
His stepmother had wanted nothing to do with him.
His paternal grandmother had been flippant and cruel about his mother’s demise.
What kind of life must this have been for Bob Applegate?
Did this unfolding and harrowing story of Paul and Lavina begin to explain a little of why my father had behaved the way he had with his own fledgling family?
He was born into profound trauma; the scant stability he had known had been forged out of a dysfunctional, violent background, one dogged by abuse and alcohol.
And then, out of seemingly nowhere and still at a young age, he found himself living in California, married, and a new father.
What came next can never really be rationalized or explained away, and there are still times when the pain of what he did to me stops my breath.
But knowing where he came from, at least, gave some meaningful context to the decisions he had made about my mother and me.
Perhaps worst of all, my father had been forced to create entire narratives from the few facts he had, stories about him not even knowing his mother, or about her being beaten to death outside a bar, or, as he says at the start of the documentary before we began the research, a story that his mother had died when he was “seven or eight years old.” The truth was, she’d actually helped raise him.
She’d died much later, when he was fourteen, and there was no evidence of a violent death.
Can you imagine being in so much pain, having suffered so much trauma, that you misremember the fundamental details of your mother’s, and your own, life?
His hurt mind had scrubbed her from his past altogether.
It’s extraordinary what pain will do to recollections.
I bear this in mind as I write this book.