Free The Oilman's Daughter by Evan Ratliff Page A

the door, a small woman with graying brown hair opened
it. “You look just like your father,” she said.
    Judith followed Williams inside. “I’ve got something for you,”
Williams said, “and I’ve been holding on to it for a long time.”
She handed her daughter a clutch of papers. “A lot of people want
this transcript, but I told them that nobody gets it but you.” It
looked like a typed letter, and contained in its pages, Williams
said, was the story of Judith’s birth. Then she proceeded to tell
it herself.
    “Your father is a very important man,” she began. His name was
M. A. Wright, and he was an oilman in Texas—not just any oilman but
a wealthy and prominent one who had run Humble Oil and Exxon, two
of the most powerful companies in the world. And he was still
alive, down in Houston.
    Judith stared at the papers. Though she didn’t yet realize it,
the woman in front of her had forever divided her daughter’s life
into two parts: the time before she knew, and everything that would
come after. 

Two
    Five years ago, I was visiting New York
City from out of town and sat down for lunch with my literary
agent. Or at least he was an agent who generously allowed me to
think of him as my agent, despite the fact that it had been years
since I had sold a book to a publisher, a book that was purchased
by only a few thousand people. But this agent had been loyal in the
way you’d hope agents would be but most probably aren’t. He always
made time for me amid his successful clients.
    One of them, as it happened, was Dominick Dunne, the well-known
writer of sordid crime stories. It was because of this fact that
the agent had recently received a phone call, out of the blue, from
a woman who introduced herself as Judith Wright Patterson. She was
from Missouri or Kansas—the agent wasn’t sure. The story of her
life, she’d insisted, was the kind of tale that Dunne should write
for
Vanity Fair
magazine. Her story seemed rather
convoluted, but as far as the agent could make it out, the woman
had discovered in midlife that she was the daughter of a wealthy
oilman in Texas who’d quickly disowned her. Now she was trying to
prove it, but the oilman was dead and her mother’s family had
turned against her.
    At the time, Dominick Dunne was working on a novel, and my agent
thought he was probably too busy to tell her story. Dominick Dunne
probably heard a dozen stories as crazy-sounding as this one, every
day. But the agent took down Judith’s number anyway. Over lunch, he
recounted the story to me. “Actually, that sounds kind of
interesting,” I said.
    “Well,” he said, “maybe you should call her then.”
    A few days after I got home from New York, I dialed Carthage,
Missouri. Judith picked up after the first ring—she is without
question the fastest phone answerer I’ve ever met—and I introduced
myself as a reporter. I told her that I’d only heard the outlines
of her story but that it sounded remarkable.
    “Evan, I’m going through a living hell,” she said. “I need your
help.”
    She then spoke for a half-hour, maybe. I interjected rarely,
typing notes as she talked; she spoke slowly and carefully, so it
wasn’t hard to get everything down. Later, when I met her in
Missouri, I found that this deliberateness carried over in person.
She was a natural storyteller, a presenter of the highest order.
Her hair was always permed, her eyelashes curled, and her makeup
touched up before I arrived. She walked gingerly due to lingering
back problems from her scoliosis, which only served to enhance her
sense of purposefulness. She had almond eyes and a
can-you-believe-I’m-telling-you-this smile that exposed a set of
prominent canines.
    Five years after that first call, I am faced with hundreds of
pages of notes describing dozens of hours’ worth of conversations
with Judith Wright Patterson, in which I have dutifully recorded
her telling and retelling a story as complex as it is strange. For
most of