She was also, reportedly, an oil painter of genuine ability. This detail appears consistently in biographical accounts of Nicholson, and it matters for understanding the household’s atmosphere. A woman who runs a beauty salon and paints in oils is not a woman whose entire identity is organized around domestic limitation. She had outside-facing economic activity and inside-facing creative activity, both of them hers. The household she managed was managed by someone with her own investments in the world.
Jack has spoken about Ethel May with something that suggests he absorbed her quality of attention — her interest in the world around her, her investment in people, her independence of spirit. Whether any of that connection was shaded, in retrospect, by the knowledge of what she had done in raising him and in keeping that raising’s biological reality from him is something he has not stated explicitly. He has spoken about her with consistent warmth, which suggests that the revelation of 1974 did not, for him, retroactively convert his relationship with her into something other than what he had experienced it as.
The house itself — its specific address, its layout, its neighborhood — is not mapped in the available biographical record in a way that would allow detailed reconstruction. What is available is the general picture of a working household in a shore community, organized around a woman of unusual energy and purpose, into which a child was born in circumstances that required a particular arrangement, and in which that arrangement held for decades.