A Son’s Search for a Mourned Parent and Her Era

Nineteen sixty-two was a traumatic year for Fergus Bordewich, but not on account of the event that had most of the world on tenterhooks, the Cuban Missile Crisis. For Bordewich, then 14, 1962 was the year in which he saw his mother killed by a fall from a horse. Vacationing in Vermont, Fergus and his mother had been out riding, when her horse began galloping out of control. As Fergus watched in astonishment, his mother, an experienced rider, seemed to be doing something no experienced rider would do: She jumped off the horse and spilled onto the ground into the direct path of the horse he was riding in pursuit of her.

LaVerne Madigan Bordewich was 49 at the time of her death: a vibrant, idealistic woman who worked as executive director for the Assn. on American Indian Affairs. She was also the principal figure in her son’s life: When she died, the center fell out for Fergus and his father, a quiet, undemonstrative man who installed heating and air conditioning systems. “When my father and I sat down, alone together for Christmas the first time,” Bordewich recalls, “neither of us knew what to say.” For the young boy, “real life increasingly took on a temporary quality, like the atmosphere of a bus station or airport. I felt disembodied, as if I had no existence of my own beyond what had already happened in the past and could never be repeated. . . . Her death made the past magical. The present seemed like an anticlimax to real life and living people only impostors for the one person who really mattered.”

As a young man, Fergus Bordewich drifted from place to place: Alaska, Phoenix, Winnipeg, Kabul, New Delhi, Kerala, Tehran, Cairo. Eventually, he began to find his way as a journalist and nonfiction author. Strangely, although he treasured every memory he had of his mother, for a long time he felt afraid to find out more about her. “Memory, which had always appeared to be my only link with my mother, had in fact been a wall: Through it I could see nothing of the woman whose real life lay on the other side. . . . When I tried now to look at her with the same kind of objectivity that I would apply to any subject I was preparing to investigate--the plight of the Kurds, say, or German reunification . . . I was appalled at how much was mere sentiment disguised as fact.”

Bordewich’s beautifully written memoir seamlessly combines a number of differently textured strands: the tenacious gossamer of his memories; a spare, plain-spoken account of his difficult life after her death; and the richly colorful story of all that he learned about her life from his later research. For, although this is first and foremost a book about a son’s search for his mother, it is also a valuable piece of social history.

An exceptional student, imbued with a love of literature and a passion for justice, LaVerne Madigan was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of NYU. She first worked in the classics department, writing sonnets in her spare time. During the Depression, she briefly joined the Communist Party, although she soon saw through them. During World War II, she worked for the War Relocation Authority, doing her best to help Japanese-Americans, whom she felt had been unfairly uprooted and interned. After the war, she traveled all over the country for the Assn. on American Indian Affairs, a privately funded organization set up to advise--and, often, admonish--the federal government about its treatment of Native Americans.

“She was deeply though quietly patriotic . . . and she never lost her fundamental confidence in American institutions, though it was sorely tested in those years [of McCarthyism],” reflects her son. “She had a clarity of political values, an uprightness that seems almost antiquated today in this era of slack convictions and airbrushed ethics.” Poring over her poetry, examining her evolving political perspective, describing her visits to isolated tribes in Alaska, Florida, the Great Plains and Mississippi, and showing how adroitly she worked to influence policy and empower the powerless, Bordewich pieces together a fascinating portrait of an engagingly complex and admirable woman.