She tells me that when she looks back on it, the reasons she left Clarence were not good enough reasons to leave a marriage, but she doesn’t think that she ever had a good enough reason to marry him in the first place. Mother says she married him because he was good-looking and rich—the youngest in a family of pretty undertakers—and because he had asked her to the eighth-grade dance. Five years later, she was his wife. Seven years later, she was divorced, living in a rooming house, and falling in love with a married man. Eight years later, I was born.
