"I never called my parents 'Mom and Dad,'" says Kevin. "They called each other 'Miss Madeline' and 'Mr. Brackett,' and so did everyone who knew them intimately. I think it was a throwback to antebellum days.
"I remember riding a city bus with my mother," he continues. "Another kid pointed out the window and said, 'Look, Mom!' I mimicked him and said, 'Look, Mom!' It was an inside joke."
Madeline Beam was born in 1918 in Oklahoma City, an only child. She loved her father dearly and called him Daddy-Man. Daddy-Man moved houses for a living - whole houses, not just their contents. He came to own 29 houses himself, but during the Depression he sold them off one by one.
Madeline did not get along with her mother. Kevin doesn't know why, but he knows it ran deep. When Walgreen's Drug Stores came to the Seattle area, Madeline would not set foot in one because it reminded her of going to Walgreen's in Oklahoma with her mother.
Kevin never met his grandmother, and Daddy-Man died when he was young, so he has no personal memories of them. They have their places in a long family history that goes back to 1649.
At some point during Madeline's upbringing, the Beams moved to Blackwell, where Madeline finished high school. Back then Blackwell was a separate town, but now it is a suburb engulfed by Oklahoma City.
Because so many Mexicans lived in Oklahoma, Madeline learned Spanish, at least conversationally. She had a pen pal who lived in Spain.
She went on to Northern Oklahoma College, where she studied stenography and shorthand for two years. Then she went to work.
First Madeline worked for a tire company. Being bilingual was immediately useful, as the tire company had her translate business documents into and from Spanish. (After his mother's death, Kevin found a book of Spanish shorthand.)
Kevin is unsure of jobs she held after that, but in the early 1940s she lived in California, where she met his father, E.L. (Edwin Lee) Brackett. They met at a party, and it was not long before he proposed. "But she refused to marry him until after the war," says Kevin. "She was adamant she wouldn't be left high and dry as a single mother."
Fortunately, Mr. Brackett served stateside during World War II, as a communications officer in the Army Air Corps, but after the war he was stationed in occupied Japan. When he returned and was discharged from the military, Mr. Brackett and Miss Madeline wed, in 1947. They were married in Walla Walla (again, Kevin does not know why) and moved to Seattle.
After her marriage, Miss Madeline became a full-time homemaker. "She thought it was a wife's duty to keep a clean and orderly house," says Kevin. Her maternal grandmother, who had once been a maid, taught her how to do that; apparently her mother was slovenly.
In 1948 the Bracketts' first child, Keith, was born, and Mr. Brackett bought an Executone distributorship, which he owned until 1976. Kevin was born in 1953.
The family moved to Magnolia in 1962, into the home where Miss Madeline and Mr. Brackett lived for the rest of their lives. To get out of the house, Miss Madeline took up several hobbies.
The first was millinery. Kevin has found a collection of hats she made, veiled pillboxes decorated with artificial flowers. Next came classical guitar. "She was never really good," laughs Kevin, "but she sure gave it a long shot!" Finally, in the 1970s, she began to learn graphology, the study of handwriting. Eventually she became a master graphologist, and employers used her expertise during the hiring process. They paid her to analyze job applicants' writing samples to discover their unstated attributes.
When Kevin was in college, he wrote letters home. Miss Madeline scolded him not for their content but for what subtle changes in his handwriting told her about him. She could detect depression, or could tell if he needed to focus more on details. "It sure made me conscious of how I crossed my Ts!" he says. "I'm the most analyzed person on Magnolia."
Graphology occupied Miss Madeline for many years after her sons grew up and moved away. Keith now lives in Bothell; Kevin, in Shoreline. Kevin is married and has two children in their 20s.
Since 1982, Kevin has worked in his parents' basement as a tobacco wholesaler, maneuvering pipe tobacco and cigars worldwide. The house smells faintly of pungent, unsmoked tobacco. "I had lunch with my parents, and then with Miss Madeline after my father died, almost every day," says Kevin.
Sometimes they discussed religion and politics. "Miss Madeline was first and foremost a Christian," says Kevin, "a fundamentalist Christian. Her grandmother converted her when she was very young." She attended many churches to see what they were about, "but if she didn't think they held to what she considered the basic tenets of Christianity," says Kevin, "she moved on. For example, with the Presbyterian Church, the last straw for her was when they gave money to Angela Davis' legal defense fund."
As for politics, "She was a big-time anti-Communist," says Kevin, "and she had no use for Democrats after Harry Truman. She and Mr. Brackett used to say that they switched parties when they grew up."
Mr. Brackett died of a heart attack in 1993, and Miss Madeline had heart problems of her own. Nonetheless, she walked two miles a day and went to yoga classes several times a week. "She was doing backbends in her 70s," says Kevin. "I used to kid her that she'd die if she stopped."
His words were prophetic.
A few months ago, she fell and had to curtail her walks and yoga.
On March 27, she had a fatal heart attack. She called 911 herself, but aid arrived too late.
"One of my pillars of support is gone," mourns Kevin.
A cursive sign on Miss Madeline's front gate reads, "The cat and its housekeeper live here." Sadly, the housekeeper is gone, but the cats are plural: Olive, an all-black female, and Chico, a male tabby. "Miss Mad-eline had cats all her life," says Kevin. "She loved cats." Perhaps, since the sign remains, so does the spirit of the housekeeper.
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