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rug on the floor that covered the area linoleum no longer did. The rooms didn’t have doors, just curtains hanging on cut-off broom handles. The couple lived on Bowen’s pension and the money Grandma earned by cleaning the local bank at night .
—Grandma Bowen was fierce of heart but a praying woman who could recite the chapters of the Bible from memory and could forgive a husband’s unfaithfulness because she had married for life .
    When she was in Chicago, Mommy would take me to see my Grandpa Pittman in Williamsfield. It was really the sticks, way out in the country, but I loved going there. Grandpa Pittman owned the only restaurant in town, and, boy, was he a handsome devil with his dark hair and mustache .
    Fun times in Williamsfield were spent with Grandpa Pittman’s new family (I called them cousins, but they were actually my aunts and uncles) mostly down at Murphy’s Pond, which was just beyond the Santa Fe railroad tracks. Bruce Pittman, the eldest, was several years older than I and a real cutup. One day he got me into the small shed next to the tracks for a little show and tell, but what I didn’t know was that all the other kids were hiding to watch. They began hooting and hollering, and then they told my mother what had gone on. When we got back to Chicago, I was taken to the back bedroom. Mommy took off a belt and said,“Okay now, every time I hit the bed, you cry.” While Granny eavesdropped outside, Mommy whacked and whacked the bed, and I screamed and screamed. I was getting some practical experience in acting .
—Are you still in contact with those cousins?
    Yes. But no one ever mentions the incident. I’m the only one who remembers it .
And maybe not.
    And maybe not .
    My great-aunts and -uncle on my mother’s side were nothing if not colorful. Aunt Ruth was an amateur tap dancer. On her eighty-fifth birthday, still going strong, she made a tape of her tapping, which she sent to me at the abbey. Aunt Ruby collected all kinds of guns and was expert with every one of them. Aunt Vivian was the only Bowen relative who was fond of Daddy and, to Granny’s everlasting irritation, made her home available as a place he and I could spend time together when he was in Chicago. I adored Uncle Clyde. He had only two fingers on his left hand, the result of a childhood prank involving a firecracker. He always treated me as a little person, not a child, and he was so funny .
—When I became an actress he sent me a note: “I am your most loyal fan since you were a little girl. I have seen all your movies and the only thing I can’t understand is where in the world you picked up a name like Natalie Wood .”
    During those years, Daddy came back into my life sporadically, sometimes in Los Angeles, sometimes in Chicago. He never brought me presents, not even for my birthday or at Christmas. Well, except once—an oversize, glossy publicity photograph of himself .
    My father’s halfsisters—Gladys, Shirley and Virginia—were teenagers when I met them. Unlike Granny’s side of the family, which was church-living but not church-going, the Hicks girls went to church a lot. They took turns taking me to Sunday school—or schools, since each went to a different church. I think rather than confuse me, this gave me a sense that church was special .
    Once a year, for two weeks, Sister Dolores Marie would come to Chicago. I looked forward to each magical visit. Sister smelled of lavender and dressed with starched linen around her face, which was like an aging peach, fuzzy and full of color. The linen was stiff as a board; you could bounce a coin on it .
    Fred Kude, who never forgave his sister for “being taken in by the Church”, had not spoken a civil word to her for years. It was Esther who paid for Sister Dolores Marie’s annual trips out of her garter money so Fred could remain blissfully prejudiced.
    She would read to me—stories of the Creation, of Adam and Eve, of the saints and, my favorites,