August 2, 1914 – November 3, 1972. Elise's mother, Fred's maternal grandmother; James Monroe Clark's wife.
She was born in Joplin, Missouri, and arrived at New Orleans as a small child in 1918, off a ship from the Central American ports — a hint that the Williams family had business somewhere south. She took a degree at the University of Missouri and made Phi Beta Kappa. She married Jim Clark and raised two children, Elise and Harry, on the Monterey Peninsula. She and Jim divorced in 1969.
Three years later, in her own house in San Jose, she fell asleep smoking and the couch caught fire. She got out — and then went back in for the dog, and did not come out again. She was fifty-eight. Fred, who tells the story, sees in her the same depression that would later run through her son Harry: bright at the start, dark at the end, the academic honor and the fire bookending a life the records barely sketch.