Patty Hearst

The Last Time I Saw Mom, Before Detroit

I took the train up to Paso Robles in ‘75 to see my mom after I joined the International Socialists. She was the city librarian there, at a Carnegie-era circle-shaped library in the town’s main square. Paso, then, was almond orchards and cattle ranches. —Not the wine-tasting destination it is today.

Elizabeth lived in the town’s one apartment complex at the edge of town. She kept a snowy white elderly Persian cat named Pussums. He had huge yellow eyes and paws as big as bedroom slippers. When I talked to Mom sometimes, she’d turn and make a remark to him. I hadn’t seen her for two years. Now I was going to leave California on a Greyhound bus for Michigan and the heart of the labor movement.

I thought about how to bring it up. Sometimes we’d talk about what she was reading, her New Yorker issue. Elizabeth was as interested in politics and literature as ever. If she could expatriate us to Canada in 1970, infuriated by the War, surely she would glean why I wanted to move to Detroit, why I …