seldom objected, even gently, to anything her husband said or did, not even after they returned from their honeymoon and he informed her that of course she would forsake her Roman Catholic faith and join the fundamentalist Christian sect to which he belonged. When she accepted his proposal of marriage, she’d taken for granted they would live in the small desert town of Dunbar, where the Moser mine was; but she’d also assumed they’d take vacations from time to time, if not in New England—which her husband confessed to loathing—then maybe California, except it turned out he had no use for that coast, either. He was a firm believer—as he explained it to her—in “learning to love what you have,” by which he seemed to mean Dunbar and himself.
To Trudy, everything about Dunbar and the man she’d married felt foreign, at least at first. The town itself, hot and flat and dusty, was unapologetically segregated, whites on one side of literal railroad tracks and “Mexicans,” as they were called, even those who’d resided there legally for over a century, on the other. Though it was, to her way of thinking, a nothing town, Dunbar seemed to have everything W. A. (Dub-Yay, to his friends) Moser required: the house they lived in, the church they attended, the shabby little country club where he played golf. At home he ruled the roost, his word law. Her parents had discussed things, so she was surprised to learn that her own marriage would operate on a different model altogether. They’d been married for several years before Lincoln came along, so it was possible they had argued occasionally about how things would play out—his father gradually bending Trudy to his will—but Lincoln’s impression was that while his mother might’ve been surprised by her new life, she accepted it from the moment she set foot in Dunbar. The first time he remembered her digging in her heels was when it came time for him to apply to colleges. Dub-Yay meant for him to attend the University of Arizona, his own alma mater, but Trudy, who’d gone to live in Tucson with a maiden aunt after her parents died and finished her degree there as well, was determined that their son would be educated back East. And not at a big state university, either, but a small liberal arts college like Minerva, the school she’d dropped out of a semester shy of her degree.
The argument began at the dinner table with his father proclaiming in his high, whiny voice, “You know, do you not, that for any such thing to happen, I would have to be dead?” A statement that was clearly designed to end this conversation, so Lincoln was surprised to see on his mother’s face an unfamiliar expression that suggested she’d contemplated her husband’s mortality with equanimity and was undeterred. “Nevertheless,” she said, and this in fact did end the discussion, at least for the time being. It resumed later in his parents’ bedroom. Though they kept their voices down, Lincoln heard them going at it in there through the thin wall that separated his room from theirs, and it continued long after his father, who always went to the mine early, was usually asleep. It was still ongoing when Lincoln himself finally drifted off.
The next morning, after his father, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and unaccustomed domestic discord, headed off to work, Lincoln lay in bed mulling things over. What on earth had come over his mother? Why was she waging this particular battle? As far as he was concerned, the University of Arizona was perfectly fine. His father had gone there and several of his classmates were heading there, too, so he’d know people. After tiny Dunbar he was looking forward to life in Tucson, a big city. And if he got homesick, he could easily make the short journey back to Dunbar for the weekend. A couple other classmates would attend colleges in California, but nobody he knew was moving to the East. Did his mother imagine he wanted to be on the other side of the country, where he didn’t know anybody? And going to classes with kids who’d all graduated from fancy prep schools? Well, what did it matter? At some point after Lincoln fell asleep, his mother had no doubt come to her senses and realized the futility of openly opposing his father on this or any related subject of significance. Order, by now, had surely been restored.