Paulina Juárez, who, from all reports, loved being a maid at the Hotel Jerome, would not live to see her one and only Paulino become a movie star. One winter night in Aspen, in 1957, after almost no one had noticed Paul Goode in The Wrong Car, his mother slipped on the ice and fell. She hit her head on the stone stairs leading to the back door of her duplex apartment, dying of hypothermia after lying unconscious in the freezing cold. Her neighbor found her in the morning, when there were no vital signs. Paulina Juárez was only forty-eight when she left her thirty-one-year-old son behind. “My mom loved her job—when she came home from work at the Jerome, she couldn’t stop being a cleaning woman,” Paul Goode would later say in interviews. “She never went to bed at night before taking out the garbage.” When the more aggressive interviewers asked him to comment on the alcohol—cited as a factor in his mother’s hypothermia—Paul Goode kept his cool. He answered, without any edginess, “My mom liked to have a nightcap or two before her bedtime—I never saw any harm in it.”

Naturally, I remembered asking my mother about the shy, childlike hotel maid—the Mexican-looking woman among my ghosts. “Oh, I didn’t know she died—I think she was Italian,” Little Ray had said, although she later admitted she knew the boy she slept with had a mom who worked as a maid at the Jerome. “I just didn’t know which maid she was, sweetie,” my mother said.

“Whatever you think of your dad’s writing, you shouldn’t blame him for the noir—he came by his darkness naturally,” the little English teacher told me.

Em echoed this theme in her first letter to me. What we both called overkill noir or über-noir in my father’s writing wasn’t overkill or über to Paul Goode. The noir was just the way things were for the little kindergarten man and his creator. And Paul Goode had gotten better as a writer—“the way writers do, by writing,” Em wrote me. After The Wrong Car, when the acting jobs didn’t exactly pour in, Paulino Juárez came home to Aspen, where he wrote and wrote. He lived in the duplex apartment he’d grown up in with his mother; he worked at the Hotel Jerome, and on the ski mountain. The rest of the time, he did a lot of writing. When The Kindergarten Man made him famous when he was forty-seven, Paul Goode had written a lot of unmade movies—“a lot of unread screenplays, I’ll bet,” Em wrote me.

Okay, “he came by his darkness naturally,” as the snowshoer said—whatever I think of my dad’s writing, I’ll give him that.