Vera Dawson

Spouse of Edwin Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Vera Dawson was born in 1945 in Alamo Heights, San Antonio, Texas, and lived sixty-seven years as a telephone operator and, by marriage, a member of the Proctor bloodline of the White Ledger. In 1971 she married the machinist Edwin Proctor, The Iron Otter, a vampire slayer, and they raised two sons, Timothy Proctor, who was not called, and Terrence Dawson Proctor, who was. Vera was not a hunter, belonged to no house of the Ledger, and carried no alias, archetype or craft. What she had was a headset, a perfect memory for voices and the steadiness to put a call through at three in the morning without asking why. For forty years she sat at a switchboard and then at a screen, and the family says that she was the one who always knew where everyone was. She died in 2012 in a car accident, aged sixty-seven. Alamo Heights in 1945 was a leafy, orderly suburb on the hills north of the downtown, with Broadway lined with new shops, a high school with a very good football team and a handful of old stone houses that looked down on the river. The Dawsons lived in a modest brick bungalow near the Olmos basin, and her father, who sold insurance, and her mother, who played the organ at a Methodist church, belonged to the kind of respectable, unexcitable family that the White Ledger would have found perfect, had it known of them. It did not. She was a tall, fair, rather solemn girl who liked arithmetic and the telephone, in that order, and who answered the telephone at the age of four with the formula that she had heard her mother use, which was a clear greeting and the family name, and which she kept for life. She went to the high school in the years of the space race, and was good at everything that involved counting. She counted the steps from the front door to the corner. She counted the seats at football games, and the hymns at church, and she knew, to within two, the number of people in any room she entered. She said that it kept her calm. At seventeen she took a summer job as an operator at the Southwestern Bell exchange downtown, a long room of women with headsets and plugs, a supervisor walking behind the chairs and a switchboard that lit up like a Christmas tree, and she stayed for good. She was one of the best of them. She had a low, even, friendly voice, and the knack of recognising a caller from three words. A few of the older operators said that she could tell a lie from the hum of the line. She met Edwin Proctor at HemisFair in the spring of 1968, in a queue at the Texas pavilion, where both of them were counting the heads in front of them. It was a hot Saturday, the grounds were packed with people who had come to see the new tower and the old river, and the city had torn down a neighbourhood to make room for them, which she thought showed a certain lack of proportion. Edwin was a thin, dark, quiet machinist of twenty-three, and she asked him how many he had got. He said four hundred and twelve. She said four hundred and fifteen. They went to find out which of them was right, over a cold beer at a stall under the tower, and discovered that they were each wrong by about the same number. They were married three years later, in April 1971, in the Methodist church in Alamo Heights, with her father giving her away and her mother at the organ, and with his mother in the second row, taking notes. She learned what the family was in the autumn of 1972. It happened in the same week as the calling, though not at the same hour. They had gone to Bandera for a long weekend, with Edwin's sister and her husband, and on the Sunday morning Edwin came back from the stable with the lantern in his hand and straw on his boots, put the lantern on the table and told her. She did not say anything for a minute. She did the thing that she did with every difficult call, which was to ask who was on the line. Then she asked whether the other operators of the family had any use for a good voice. He said that they would be glad of one. She said that it was not an offer. It was an observation. It turned out to be the most useful thing that she did for the Ledger. In a century of White Ledger work in San Antonio, the telephone had been the weakest link, a line that anyone could tap, a bill that anyone could read and an operator who could connect a call for the wrong reasons. She made it the strongest. She knew which of the other women at the exchange could be trusted and which of them talked, and she saw to it that when a cousin rang from a payphone at three in the morning, the call went to a certain circuit, in a certain order, and ended in her own kitchen. She never listened in. She was scrupulous about that. She said that an operator who listened would soon have nothing to say, and that her trade rested on discretion. But she kept a rule, which she explained to her husband in a single sentence, that no call from a Proctor, however short, was ever to be logged. The two boys came in the seventies, Timothy in 1973 and Terrence in 1974, to a house on the Southside with a garage lathe, a pecan tree and a telephone in every room. She taught them to answer it properly. She taught them to say the name and wait, and she was of the opinion that most of the trouble in the world came from people speaking before the other person had finished. Timothy, a placid and cheerful child, grew up to take her calm and her counting and had no need of the Ledger. Terrence, who was watchful, was called in his turn, and his mother, who had known from the cradle that he would be, sat up with him through the first night, with a pot of coffee and a notebook, and did not say a word. The oil bust of the eighties was hard on San Antonio, and on the exchange, which cut its night shift by half and then replaced it with a machine. She survived it, as she survived the next change, and the one after, and she became in time a supervisor of the training room, where she taught a generation of young women to hold a calm voice on a bad line. In the Vietnam years she had been the operator on whom half a barrio relied to put through a collect call from a soldier at a base overseas, and she is remembered by a good many households on the Westside for the number of times she sat on a line for an extra minute so that a mother could hear a boy's voice. After the attacks of September 2001, when the lines were jammed from coast to coast, she went in to work on her own day off, and stayed until the next morning. She retired in 2007, to a house on the Southside with a porch, a grandchild and an old rotary telephone that she kept in the hall, and she spent the last five years of her life on the porch, answering it. On a wet evening in the autumn of 2012, driving home from a church supper on the Loop in the rain, she was struck by a truck that had lost its brakes, and died at the scene, at sixty-seven. Edwin, who had been waiting for the call, picked up the receiver on the second ring. He said afterward that it was the one occasion on which her voice had not been on the line. Vera Dawson is remembered in the Proctor family as the operator who never logged a call and never lost one, the quiet wife who kept the lines open. In the Slayerverse she stands for the voices at the other end of the wire, the women of the switchboard who carried the Ledger's news through the night and who asked, as a matter of courtesy, no questions at all.