Chapter 4 - . . . Into . . . The Makings of a Carlotta

Summary

Act 3 takes place at half past six. When one comes home, one comes home to a stranger, and as a stranger one comes home. Outsiders have been drawn into the picture—a doctor, a second girl, McGuire, Mamie Burns, and Fat Violet. Who really matters in this house? Who can feel at home?

Much has been made by Stephen A. Black and others of Gene's dependent relationships and his search for a replacement of his mother, but less thoroughly explored is the story of how Carlotta came to need to be needed in that way, which has its own logic in family history and the culture of that time. She offered several versions of that story at various points in her life, and it is a crafted narrative, but some facts seem stable.

Hazel Neilson Tharsing was born in California on December 28, 1888, the daugh¬ter of Christian Neilson Tharsing and Nellie Gotchett. Carlotta, as Hazel would in her adulthood come to be known, later insisted on referring to the family name of her father (Taasinge) in its Danish form before he became a naturalized U.S. citizen because she felt it pointed to a higher class of origin, associated with land ownership. (There is an island called Taasinge, near Svendborg in Denmark.) Her father trave¬led from Denmark to East Asia at the age of 16 to learn the methods of Japanese and Chinese horticulture. He settled in the Central Valley of California and soon became the proprietor of a 160-acre orchard and eventually co-owner of a 2200-acre ranch with orchard. He was an innovator in the preparation of dried fruits and the railroad deliv¬ery of unripe fruit to distant markets. But his fortunes were mixed, and a broken levee in 1890 drowned out his investment—fish were eating his pear trees! He had a first wife who died in 1884, then he married Nellie Gotchett in 1886. She was 22 years his junior and had been pressured into marriage by her social-climbing mother.