Satisfying Reconciliations

By Paul Gray

Until his death in 1980, Cy Taillon was known to the initiated as the "World's Greatest Rodeo Announcer." Around the circuit, which could extend from Puyallup, Wash., to Baton Rouge, La., and into Madison Square Garden itself, no exhibition of bronco riding or calf roping seemed quite complete without Taillon's booming, animated commentary. He became something more than legendary to those who followed the sport. Said one admirer: "I don't know what God looks like, but I know what He sounds like." In 1977 his daughter, Cyra McFadden, created a literary stir with her first novel. The Serial, a wry look at some laid-back suburban lives in California's Marin County. There was not much in this book, frankly, to attract die-hard rodeo fans. On the other hand, it seems fair to assume that most of those who bought and enjoyed The Serial had never heard of Cy Taillon.

Rain or Shine should change all that. This funny, affecting memoir achieves a series of satisfying reconciliations. Author McFadden, 48, not only portrays and then patches up the quarrels and estrangements that raged between her and her father, she captures the tawdry colors of the Old West and mourns their fading. She looks back on her parents' tempestuous marriage and divorce, both of which baffled them and her as a child, with tolerance and wisdom. And her storytelling skills give Cy Taillon the posthumous gift that he would have most appreciated: the chance to appear in front of a new audience.

By the time Cyra was born in 1937, her parents had been knocking about the rodeo trail for six years. Her father was handsome (he later doubled for Robert Taylor in horse-riding scenes for the movie Billy the Kid). Her mother Pat was beautiful, a Southern belle who had left her hometown in Arkansas because she had "tired of grits" and had gone on to succeed as a chorus girl in St. Louis.

All the ingredients were here for a B-Western version of the saga of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Cyra's first home was the midnight blue 1937 Packard that carried her parents from one raucous engagement to the next: "By my third birthday, I had logged 150,000 miles, occasion for an AP wirephoto captioned: 'She Sees America.' " She also witnessed an endless string of saloons and her parents' behavior in them: "Pat was a two-fisted drinker. Cy was a drunk, charming and good-humored when sober, combative and cold-eyed when drunk." Liquor fueled fights between them, as did their constant lack of money. They also, Cyra recognized later, baited each other with flagrant infidelities: "Pat and Cy competed in sexual conquest as they competed in everything else."

One morning Cy and the Packard were gone, leaving Pat and Cyra in an abandoned trailer: "He'd 'gotten hitched.' Now he got unhitched." To their rescue came Roy Qualley, a stolid, balding man who had spent years following Cy around, getting him and his glamorous wife out of scrapes while worshiping her from afar. McFadden ponders the mystery of how two such different men could fall for the same woman and decides that her mother's "attraction for them must have been that she embodied no trace of girl-nextdoor, unless you happened to live next door to a burlesque house." As soon as the divorce papers were signed, Pat married Roy and settled down in Missoula, Mont., where her new husband replenished vending machines for a candy and tobacco company. The child missed her father and found it hard to adjust to the strange thing called normal life. When Cy came by to pick her up for visits, the old heady excitement returned. Everyone was agitated. "They were still in love with each other," the girl decided, watching Cy and Pat greet each other stiffly. "I had never heard of sex and I felt the tension between them. Roy felt it, and he had heard of sex."

It might seem a handicap to McFadden's narrative that her flashy father began fading out of her life when she was barely in school. But this absence renders her memories of him less frequent and more treasured. She was a distant observer when Cy remarried, gave up drinking and carousing, fathered two sons and started swelling with the puffery of his newspaper clippings. Conversely, McFadden had a front-row seat for the alarming changes in her mother: "Her second marriage turned the living fireball into a cowed creature," given to nervous breakdowns and aimless putterings about the house she rarely left. When the daughter broke out, at 18, into an ill-advised marriage, her father's two wives finally met at the wedding: "They looked at each other as if neither could believe her own eyes, two women thickening into middle age who had in common only that they had married the same man. When they weren't staring at each other, they stared at Cy, who was frozen with discomfort, as if searching for some clue to his inexplicable tastes."

Rain or Shine is filled with such sharp, poignant vignettes. McFadden has the rare skill of stripping away pretensions without making the people exposed seem ridiculous. "Why it takes so many years," she writes, "to forgive one's parents their failings and sympathize with their disappointments, I cannot explain." But her book provides a generous model of how children might remember their fathers and mothers, and hope to be remembered by their children in turn. Cy and Pat were not as grand as they hoped and pretended. In their daughter's eyes, they were better than they knew. --By Paul Gray