At the same time, they do foreshadow the Gorey we know in their careful attention to costume—his fondness for patterns (plaids, checks, stripes) is already in evidence—and in their shading, where there’s no mistaking his preference for neatly parallel lines as opposed to smudged effects or solid blacks. There’s a naive charm to Gorey’s illustrations, offset by a self-assurance that’s remarkable in a twelve-year-old. “His things all had a common feel about them,” MacKenzie recalls, “and the instructor who was in charge”—Saunders—“said, ‘Well, [his drawings are] going to be the theme of the yearbook this year,’ and they were, and they were wonderful.”
* * *
No one seems to know exactly when Helen and Ed Gorey divorced, though just about everyone agrees it happened in 1937. Betty Caldwell, then Betty Burns, a friend Ted had made at the Linden Crest apartments, recalls the “sad day” when she had to tell him, “‘Ted, I can’t see you anymore. We’re going on a vacation; we’re going to be gone for two weeks.’ And he said, ‘Betty, it’s worse than that. My mother’s divorcing my father. We’re moving to Florida.’” On October 7, 1937, having graduated from eighth grade that June, Ted left for Florida with his mother.
Then and ever after, Gorey was silent on the subject of his parents’ divorce. Beyond a passing remark that he saw more of his parents after the divorce than before, he took the Fifth on the whole business, especially on any psychological fallout he experienced as a kid. “I don’t think I had even noticed they parted,” he claimed, preposterously, in a 1991 interview.41 In four years’ worth of diary entries, he doesn’t so much as mention his father, perhaps because they weren’t in touch, possibly because they’d never been that close, or maybe because Ed Gorey’s departure was clouded by scandal.
Corinna Mura in Casablanca (1942). (Warner Bros./Photofest, Inc.)
When he left Helen, sometime after June ’37, it was for another woman: Corinna Mura, a guitar-strumming singer of Spanish-flavored torch songs. She was thirty-five; Ed was thirty-nine. It seems likely they met at the Blackstone: Mura played the nightclub circuit when she was in town. In addition to her career as a nightclub chanteuse, she was an occasional movie actress. There she is, about a half hour into Casablanca: the raven-haired singer in Rick’s Café, strolling from table to table, troubadour-style, as she gives “Tango Delle Rose” her throbbing, emotion-choked all. And there she is again, a coloratura soprano amid the citoyens in the rousing scene where everyone belts out “La Marseillaise.”
On screen and on recordings such as “Carlotta” (from the original cast album of the 1944 Broadway musical Mexican Hayride), Mura’s persona was that of a glamorous Latina—a “Spanish songstress,” in the showbiz patter of the day, at a time when “Spanish” was a blanket term for anyone we’d now call Latinx.42
Truth to tell, Mura was born Corynne Constance Wall in Brownwood, Texas, to David and Lillian Wall (née Jones). (Mura is what muro, Spanish for “wall,” would be, presumably, if the noun were feminine.) Her Latina persona satisfied white America’s racial fantasy of a colorful yet unthreatening otherness—“a dignified American girl” who “has the gay manner of a Latin” (as a newspaper profile put it), “cultured” enough to sing opera yet still “Mex” enough to take audiences on a journey down Mexico way.43 That said, her passion for the musical traditions and cultures of Latin America was sincere. She toured South America, where “they absolutely loved her,” according to her daughter Yvonne “Kiki” Reynolds—testimony not only to her virtuosity but to her genuine rapport with her audiences as well, since she didn’t speak a word of Spanish. (She learned her Spanish-language songs phonetically.)
On July 2, 1937, Ed Gorey was in Austin, Texas, “getting married—quietly,” he told a friend in a letter.44 By October of that year, Ted and his mother were on their way to Florida. He plotted their road trip in green crayon on the map in his travel diary. As always, he confides next to nothing to his diary, despite being uprooted, yet again, from his home and friends and despite the emotional upheaval of his parents’ divorce and his grandfather’s death. (Benjamin St. John Garvey had died the day after Ted’s birthday in 1936, shortly after speaking to his grandson on the phone.)
Arriving in Miami in November of ’37, Ted and his mother moved in with Helen’s sister Ruth—then Ruth Garvey Reark—and her children, Joyce and John (called Jack). The Rearks were living in the house Gorey’s grandmother Mary Ellis Blocksom Garvey had bought after she and Benjamin divorced. The Goreys lived in the one-bedroom, one-bathroom “independent suite,” which had a screened porch of its own.45 (It’s worth noting that, for a boy on the cusp of puberty, sharing a bedroom with his mother may have been more than a little awkward.)
On first impression, Ted struck his Reark cousins as a cosseted creature—Little Lord Fauntleroy, if he’d been “raised in a high-rise in Chicago” and “doted on by females” is how Joyce puts it. “We picked on him some,” she allows, recalling that her aunt Helen was “rather appalled at my brother and me. My mother always thought [Ted’s mother] was overprotective.…Prue and Helen just doted on Ted. She didn’t think it was good—too much feminine influence. He needed to get away from Mama, maybe.” Joyce vividly remembers Aunt Helen solemnly instructing her niece and nephew that her little wonder’s IQ was 165. “I remember being a little resentful when we were told what his IQ was.…My first reaction was, ‘Well, I don’t think he’s that special!’”
Helen’s insistence that the Rearks regard her fair-haired prodigy with appropriate awe notwithstanding, Joyce has fond memories of Ted. “He was fun,” she says. “We played card games and we rode our bikes to school. Ted seemed to fit in [at Robert E. Lee Junior High].” He kept a baby alligator as a pet, which wasn’t unusual in Miami in those days, says Joyce. “They’re relatively harmless when they’re babies. You’d just put it in the canal when you were tired of it.”
Of Ted’s inner life during the five and a half months he lived in Miami we know next to nothing. Entering the hormone-addled years of adolescence, he showed no sign that his thoughts were turning to romance. As always, the objects of his affection were cats. His five-year diary reads like a case history of an obsession, with its “biographical sketch” of his cat Oscar and his breathless daily updates about Mrs. Reid’s newborn kittens.46 Cats, like books, were always there for Ted, offering uncomplicated affection and escape from the vexing complexities of human society.
But even cats could be a source of anxiety. The threat of euthanasia is ever present in his diary entries. He never knew if his kitten Goofy would have to be chloroformed because he couldn’t be housebroken or if Susie II, the cute little tiger cat who “would chase [a] ball like [a] dog and bring it back,” would have to be “put out of the way” after just four months because her “nervous system [was] broken down.”47 Diary entries solemnize the parade of little deaths. “One year ago today Bingo died,” writes Ted on March 21; a drawing of a cross on what appears to be a burial plot accompanies the entry. A year ago that day, “Bingo’s ear infection spread to brain, paralyzing front legs. Was put out of the way. Pretty broken up!”48
On April 18, 1938, having graduated from Robert E. Lee that March, Ted returned to Chicago. Helen rented rooms in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments in the city’s Old Town neighborhood, then moved, in the fall of ’39, to a high-rise