The Oilman's Daughter Read Free

her that he would take care of everything. He
called someone—she thought it was a lawyer maybe. He argued with
the man. It was
his
property, Wright shouted, and he could
dang well do what he pleased with it. She later remembered he hung
up the phone and told her not to worry. “Go ahead and get your
picture in the paper,” he said. He had business in Houston, had to
get out of town in a hurry. He wrote down some numbers and told her
to hold on to them.
    Something about it all made her feel cheap—“like a whore or
something,” she later said. So she tore up the numbers and threw
the scraps in the trash. The day he was supposed to leave they
fought again, and he stormed out of the hotel room, leaving her
crying and reaching after him. At the bottom of the stairs, just
above the marble floor of the Mayo Hotel lobby, he looked back at
her and told her that he’d never see her again. She knew in that
moment that he was speaking the truth.
    “So when he left you knew he was gone?” she was asked in a
deposition 40 years later.
A: I knew he was gone. You know, I knew that I had—I was in a
spot. I knew that I was in trouble because I would never ever see
him again.
Q: Then why did you go get your pictures made?
A: I didn’t.
Q: Well—
A: I did get my pictures made. I went down and got pictures
taken, taken and everything because I was so proud of what I had.
You know, I come from nothing, you know, and if you’ve got—maybe
I’m wrong but the way I felt personally myself, back then, if
you’ve got some nice clothes and you’ve got real jewelry—I’m not
talking about stuff that’s cheap. I’m talking about something
that’s real. A real set of pearls, a real diamond watch. You knew
it was real, real. You want to show it off, you know.
…
So I went ahead and had a picture taken of me and—but I
didn’t—and I thought about putting it in the paper but then when I
got to thinking about it, you know, and then putting it all
together, piecing it together, and then him telling me that—that he
would never be back. I’d never see him ever again. And I didn’t
know very much about him. He hadn’t told me who his family was, you
know. How can I put something in the paper, you know?
    So Louise gathered her things and her kids and moved home to
Baxter Springs. On January 30, 1956, she gave birth to a daughter
and named her Judith.
    Louise’s own mother was furious with her, cursed her and
humiliated her. Louise was still married, but her husband was
missing, so she gave the child her maiden name, Bryant. Not long
after, she divorced and then married a local man. They had a son
and daughter, but that didn’t last either. In 1960,
she married Charles Williams and took his last name to become Ethel
Louise Williams. By then she’d given Judith up for adoption. 

Five
    As Louise told her story, Judith
remembers trying to keep from laughing in her mother’s face. Look
at this sad poor woman, she thought, telling me that my father was
a big oilman down in Texas. It was a strange way to assuage her
guilt over giving her up for adoption. But now she at least knew
who her birth mother was. She also found out that she had seven
half-siblings and got in touch with one of them, Louise’s oldest
daughter, Diana Stiebens, who lived in Kansas.
    As the two were getting to know each other on the phone, Judith
brought up what her mother had told her. “Can you believe this
crazy story that my father was M. A. Wright?” she said. “How
ridiculous is this?”
    “It’s not ridiculous at all,” Diana told her. “That is your
father. I met him.”
    Stunned but still suspicious, Judith decided to do some research
of her own, just to find out if M. A. Wright was real. She started
with the library in Joplin, figuring that if the man had existed,
and he was as big as her mother had said, there would be some
record of him there. The librarian agreed to help her and a few
days later called back to say she’d found news