Re “Curt Massey, Through the Eyes of His Mother”
Part II
In the year since her son, Culver City police Lt. Curt Massey was killed in a freak pre-dawn freeway accident, Padric Davis has looked ever deeper inside herself to summon the strength to continue.
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“I had a childhood,” she said, “that was either very, very good or very, very volatile. I learned to cope with that.
“I got married very young. The reason, I think, was to escape the household where the matriarch was corporal.”
Always speaking softly, Ms. Davis looked away and then looked back.
“I hear there is one person in your life who thinks you are the greatest thing since sliced white bread, and that you can make it in the world,” she said. “I was the first grandchild, and I had a grandmother who thought the sun rose and set with me. She gave me my self-esteem, my values. Having someone like that makes a difference. My grandmother often came to my rescue.
“My mother, though, had a mean streak. And she had a drinking problem. I loved my dad. But he didn’t know what to do with her.
“He is still alive. He lives in the house I grew up in, on Princeton Street in Santa Monica.
“I married young, a man who was very controlling. So I went from the frying pan into the frying pan. He had affairs, and he fell in love with one of them and left me with a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old.”
[Brett, the younger Massey son, grew up to be a deputy sheriff in Alameda County. In his mother’s words: “Brett was a successful contractor in the San Francisco area. He was making more money than anyone in the family. But he said to me, ‘Mom, I am not making a difference in the world.’ So he followed his brother’s footstesp and went into law enforcement.”]
What made 65-year-old Padric Davis’s narrative the more dramatic was that her soft tones never changed, and a listener did not dare stray for fear of missing a crucial detail.
“I was single for 10 years,” she said. “I raised those boys by myself. I did just fine,” and her chin elevated. Or so it seemed.
Living in Pacific Palisades, she eventually met businessman John Davis, and their 26th wedding anniversary is coming up.
But in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, “I did not want to upset my boys’ lives. I didn’t need to find somebody. I was very fulfilled with being a mom. I dated. But nobody I would marry.
“All of a sudden — the boys were 15 and 13 when I started dating John. I had taught his kids. And it was our two sons, Curt and his son, Eric, who kind of said, ‘You know, Padric is single.’ ‘You’re kidding?’ ‘No, no.’
“Anyway, we started dating. The kids liked each other. My kids liked John. His kids liked me. And they got along great.
“We were having dinner on Wednesday nights, and the kids started saying, ‘Are you guys ever going to get married?’
“It was okay. We were very fortunate to blend four teenagers and a 9-year-old, in 1984, and have them all work to make it work. We were blessed.
“We moved into John’s house. The kids needed to be part of the process. All together, in workshirts, we stripped wallpaper from walls — his children and my children helped make it the house it became.”
Question: How did you make the dynamic of seven people coming together click?
Mrs. Davis exhaled and said, “We all liked each other. The love came eventually, with time.
“We would even have band practice in the living,” and she laughed. “Everybody compromised a bit.”
From among the hundreds of mourners, one of the chuckles at Lt. Massey’s grand funeral a year ago this week was when Mr. Davis, his stepfather, mentioned that he and Padric took their three teenage sons to Europe with them on their honeymoon.
Mrs. Massey, who soon was to become Mrs. Davis, wanted to wait to marry until her sons were in college. Meanwhile, Mr. Davis’s son, Eric, was to leave for school in the autumn, and he believed there was urgency. If we don’t put this family together before any of them goes away, he said, they never will feel like a family. His reasoning prevailed.
(To be concluded)
