by Pat Conroy
“Attagirl,” I would encourage her.
On one weekend, all the kids came down except Carol Ann, and we had one of our last great times as a family. Mom adored playing grande dame with her children and grandchildren, and she was getting stronger and more animated as each day passed. We were cooking burgers on a grill. The boys were sitting around in the blistering August heat when I heard my brother Jim say, “Where’s Tom? I haven’t seen him the last three times I’ve been down here.”
“Come to think of it,” Tim said, “neither have I.”
“I don’t see the downside,” Mike said. “It’s when you see Tom that the trouble begins.”
“Pat, you’ve been here all summer,” Jim said. “You laid eyes on him?”
I said, “At the beginning of the summer, a lot. But I’ve not seen him once in August.”
When we brought the cheeseburgers into the house to eat, brother Mike asked my mother a direct question. “Where’s Tom? None of us has seen him around much.”
“Oh, he met this very nice retired couple who’ve taken a real shine to him. Some of you don’t know this, but Tom can be a real charmer when he puts his mind to it,” she replied.
“I’ve never seen him be charming,” Jim said.
“Tommy’s a sweetie pie,” Mike’s wife, Jean, said.
“Tom hates Conroy males,” Terrye, Tim’s wife, said, adding another layer of tension to the night. “Just like everyone else.”
“You ever taken a look at your family, Terrye?” Jim lashed back. “Talk about fucked-up.”
“Mom doesn’t need this,” I warned them. “We’re here for her.”
“Oh, pious one,” the brothers sang out to me. Then Jim said, “Where’s Carol when we need her?”
During the last week before my return to Atlanta, I went over for a late-afternoon drink with Mom and John. Mom was looking healthier than she had since her ordeal had begun. Her complexion was coming back, and her whole body was turning pretty as ripe fruit. When we heard the front door open, we turned in our seats and saw Tom walking, nearly staggering, toward his room. We smelled him before we saw him, and it would not have surprised me if a flock of buzzards were circling above our house.
My mother put her hands on her face when she saw Tom’s pitiful condition. He smelled like roadkill left too long in the sun. Again I watched him stagger and I ran to him, put his arm around my shoulder, and helped him get to his bedroom. When I saw his face and arms, I was horrified. Several deer ticks were on his face, arms, and neck. Mosquitoes had ravaged the rest of his body, and it seemed my brother had lost at least fifteen pounds.
I pushed him into a hot shower and scrubbed his head with brushes and soap and washed his hair three times before I satisfied myself that he was clean enough to pass a Citadel inspection.
Then I took some tweezers to pull the ticks out of his skin, after which I dabbed a cotton ball of alcohol on each small wound. Some of the ticks I pulled out of Tom’s flesh must have been in residence for a time long enough to grow to disproportionate size.
“Ouch. Ouch. Ouch,” Tom would say every time a tick came out. “I’m gonna tell Mom on you.”
“Just bear with me, kid. One of these places gets infected and there’s no telling what might happen.”
Turning him over, I went for the ticks on his stomach, and he seemed to relax into the procedure until I reached his genitals.
“The dick’s off-limits,” he said, covering himself demurely.
“Who says so? Your dick’s probably got ticks around it,” I said.
“It’s sacred territory. I’ll do it when you leave.”
“Is that a promise?”
“There’s something kind of homosexual about this,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Yeah, I’m a gay man who gets my rocks off taking ticks off other guy’s dicks, you idiot.”
“The genitalia is my personal bailiwick!” he shouted, then began raving in one of those unknown tongues of the schizophrenic, untranslatable and violent. He was also foaming at the mouth.
Tossing him the tweezers, I walked out of the room and said, “I’m going to send Mom in for the final inspection.”
“Does it bother you that I hate your guts more than anyone in the world?” Tom said as I left to confront my mother.
Walking back into the distressed living room, I understood that Mom and John had heard every shouted word.
“Got anything interesting to fill me in on, Mom?” I asked, resuming my seat and noticing that Dr. Egan was checking out of the latest Conroy melodrama and retiring to his quarters upstairs.
My mother said, “I told you about that retired couple who’ve taken a liking to Tom. He’s been staying with them at their beach home most of the summer. They’ve really been good to Tom.”
“Yes, I can see that. What is the name of this wonderful couple, and where do they live on the beach?”
“I don’t know their names, Pat. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting them. But I’ve talked to her on the phone, and she told me that Tom and his friends play a rowdy game of volleyball on the beach. She says it gets rough sometimes.”
“I see. That explains everything. Tom is playing in a rowdy game of volleyball. He goes up for one kill shot after another. Guys are knocking the ball into one another’s faces. They dive to save the ball from hitting the sand, they jump, they leap—and Tom manages to pick up a few ticks in the process. This family is gonna drive me insane. I’ll go nuts. You can’t enable Tom on this, Mom. It’s much too serious and it’s gone way too far. Tom’s in trouble, Mom—in mental trouble. That was a half-dead kid I just cleaned up. We’ve got to figure out what’s wrong and get the best possible help for him.”
“Pat, I can’t deal with this now. Not in my condition. Not at this time of my life. And please remember, Tom’s my baby … he’s always been the sweetest—my most normal child. That means everything. Everything to me as a mother.”
I hugged her as she went silent, then said, “I’ll take care of it, Mom. Don’t think about it again. I’ll figure out what’s best to do. I’ll take action—and responsibility. But Tom’s not going to like it.”
“Don’t let anybody hurt or embarrass him,” Mom said. “He’s much prouder than my other children.”
For the next two days I called up every friend I had in South Carolina and Georgia to ask for their advice on how to handle Tom’s deteriorating situation. Everyone advised me against public mental hospitals, including my brothers Jim and Mike, who both worked at the state mental hospital in Columbia, known as Bull Street. Mike assured me that we could always use Bull Street as a homecoming of last resort, but he admitted that the mental hospital was more of a warehousing center than a place with state-of-the-art facilities and first-rate therapists.
Finally, I spoke with a psychiatrist at Peachford Hospital in Atlanta. He dealt with me in a deft, professional manner, telling me they could give me a solid evaluation of Tom within three months. The only problem was that the hospital charged a flat fee of seven thousand dollars a month. I considered my options and found I might have to do this. I told the doctor I would bring Tom to Peachford Hospital at least by Saturday night at seven. Demurring, the doctor said that Monday morning was a more convenient time for registry, when I exploded that I was talking about an emergency situation and that I could not even ensure that I could keep my brother alive until Monday.
I called Dad that same night to debrief him on what was going on in the dark heart of his former nuclear family. Dad could not take in any more news of insanity or psychosis and tried to make light comedy of it all. Mental illness was for my father what a whoopee cushion was for an unruly eight-year-old boy. It was an excuse for hilarity and a wanton denial of reality. If I brought up the subject of insanity in any discussion of Carol Ann or Tom, Dad countered with my lifelong habit of exaggeration—that he assured me was well known and discussed in the family.
“Dad,” I said, “I don’t have the time to argue with
you. Tom is far sicker than Carol Ann ever thought she was. He’s had a total psychotic breakdown. He’s not making sense when he talks. We’ve got to get him to start eating again. He was alone in the woods for a week, maybe two. He was catatonic. He dropped out of the cuckoo’s nest, Dad. You’ve got to help me on this. Mom can’t. She just can’t.”
“Why can’t your mother help?” Dad asked. “Tom lives with her.”
“Because Mom’s dying. She’s not going to be here this time next year.”
“My boy’s not one to look at the world with rose-colored glasses,” Dad teased, and I hung up in anger.
The following morning, Lenore went to Atlanta with the rest of the family while I stayed on Fripp and looked into making arrangements for getting Tom into Peachford. My mother kissed her grandchildren and Lenore farewell, but there was a bittersweet leavetaking for all. My daughter Megan, who was a dead ringer for Peggy, to my mother’s delight, had a hard time parting. The departure had the certain feel of last things to it.
In the late afternoon, I received a telephone call from Dr. Egan, who said, “Your mother received a phone call from her doctor, Dr. Steve Madden, Pat. You know the drill. She needs you now. Right now.”
I drove over to her house in an instant and raced to the couch she always chose to do her serious grieving on. She had been crying and kept it up as I held on as though riding the backdrafts of a storm, and I held her shoulders as they trembled. I didn’t know what had happened, but I was appalled at the timing of it.
“Steve called,” she told me. “I’ve gone out of remission again. It’s the last time. He may save me one last time, but then it’ll come again quickly and it’ll kill me. It’ll kill me for sure, son. There’s nothing that anyone in the world can do about it.”
“Then turn to God, Mama. You’ve always put your faith in him. Embrace him. When do you have to go back to the hospital?” I asked.
“Steve Madden wants to start the chemo as soon as possible. Next Tuesday at the latest,” she answered.
“Fine. I’ll get Tom settled, then get to you by Tuesday,” I said. “We’ll fight it again, Mama. We’ll do it together.”
“This time it’s going to be really rough,” she said. “This won’t be the time for sissies, son.”
“You’ll have a fucking warrior beside your bed, Mom, and that’s a promise,” I said, the bravado matching the sheer terror raging inside me.
The journey to Atlanta the next day marked one of the most surreal and anxiety-ridden of my life. Whatever psychotic state Tom found himself in still had a hammerlock on his mind. He spoke nonsense for the most part, then launched into rounds of pure lucidity, when I would try to comfort him and put him at ease.
I had asked my nine-year-old stepdaughter, Emily, to ride up with me and Tom. Lenore’s daughter Emily had a poisonous relationship with her whole family as well as the planet Earth. She had survived the accusations of sexual assault she made against her father, as well as what came across to me as her mother’s unadulterated hatred of her. During the past, I’d noticed that she and Tom not only got along really well, they also enjoyed spending time with each other. On the trip, Emily made clever use of Tom’s moments of lucidity, and it actually relaxed him to hear of Emily’s own animated and frequent bouts of insanity.
“You don’t seem crazy to me, Tom. I say crazy things all the time. I just can’t help it. Listen to what I said to Pat the other day: ‘I’d rather kill frogs than love you.’ ”
Tom laughed out loud when he heard that, so Emily said, “I’d rather bite the heads off snakes than love Pat.”
“I’d let it go at that, Emily,” I suggested.
“Yeah, Pat thinks I’m hilarious, but thinks I go too far,” Emily said.
“Look who’s talking,” Tom said, which got a laugh out of me.
Forty miles outside of Atlanta, Tom seemed to enter some homeland of composure, or maybe just recognition. He started to tell me about anxiety attacks that he couldn’t control or turn back, that they seemed to eat his flesh and suck his blood at the same time. He talked about stealing booze from Dr. Egan’s liquor cabinet, but even the alcohol could not control or slow the immense power and threat he felt with almost every drop of air he breathed. He thought his stomach was devouring itself, imploding inside his body softly, like some corrupted nectar.
One night he woke up calm for the first time in weeks, and voices were directing him, giving him soft orders, so he dressed in the dark and the voices directed him to the Fripp Island bridge. He thought they would order him to kill himself in the outgoing tides on a very stormy night, but their plans were different. They wanted him to live, but in an Arcadian place, a modern Eden, a place far away from the strife and anger that he had grown up around in the Conroy family. They took him into the deepest woods of Hunting Island and told him to lie down beside a log. He felt at home, protected. Rattlesnakes came up to lick his shoes. Deer would lick the salt from his sweaty stillborn face, though he didn’t know how long he lay there in silence and motionless, maybe more than a week. He had often heard of catatonia, but never about the peacefulness of catatonia. He could never remember being so happy.
In Conyers, Georgia, he returned to the morbid nonsense of his incipient madness, and I braced myself for the task of getting my brother Tom into either Peachford Hospital or Bull Street. When I arrived at my house on Peachtree Circle, I realized that I had made a serious strategic error in my hour of arrival. The street was lined with distinguished automobiles and elegant couples of tuxedoed men and immaculately dressed women, making their slow passage down the driveway I shared with our inimitable neighbors, Knox and Carolyn Dobbins. Carolyn was a partner at King and Spaulding, the most prestigious law firm in Atlanta, and they had been planning their elegant soiree for many months. I was distracted as I moved my station wagon and joined the slow procession that led to the Dobbinses’ festooned backyard, with its open bars and its catered dinner with piles of smoked salmon, mounds of Beluga caviar, and a butcher carrying a rare roast beef for the lawyers and their spouses.
At the entranceway to the back garden a receiving line led by Carolyn and Knox formed that steered the forward motion and forced me to bring the car to a complete stop, with powerful lawyers and their attractive wives still flowing past my car and some of them rapping on the window, calling out my name in recognition.
Looking to my right, I saw that my brother Tom appeared ready to bolt. Emily opened the back door and parted her way through a sea of party dresses, entering the front door of our house. Her abandonment troubled Tom, who said that he wanted to do the same thing, that the crowd was making him crazy. Reaching over, I tried to massage the muscles of his shoulders, but both were as tight as coiled steel. Human touch could not soften them; nor could my voice calm the maelstrom raging inside him.
Finally, Knox Dobbins realized the dilemma and ran down the driveway to free me from the crowd so I could slide into my own small parking space.
“Thanks, Knox,” I said through the window. “You saved the day.”
“Sorry for the holdup, neighbor,” he said, running back to rejoin Carolyn in the reception line.
On my right, I heard a disturbing humming noise, half human and half bird of prey. It was the sound of a breakdown happening two feet away from me.
“Peachford will be nice for you, Tom,” I told him. “They’ll get you medicine to calm you down. You’ll sleep for a long time. It’ll be quiet there.”
Since I had not noticed he had removed his seat belt, he caught me by surprise when he leaped from the car running. So startled was I by the move that I struggled with my own seat belt before I came out of the car in a sprint. By the time I spotted Tom, he was pushing his way with uncommon rudeness and desperation through the beautifully dressed invitees to Knox and Carolyn’s Ansley Park party. I knew I would have to become like an out-of-shape linebacker and hustle my way through that crowd with the same indefensible brusqueness Tom had used. I couldn’t see myself tackling
Tom and rolling on the ground in a death grip, scuffing the tops of dress shoes and the delicate high heels of Atlanta women with such pretty feet. I stood paralyzed with inaction as Tom’s head disappeared from sight and seemed to turn north toward Peachtree Street. As I tried to make my way through the friendly crowd, lawyers I knew and admired accosted me, and they introduced me to friends of theirs at King and Spaulding I had never met. By the time I reached Peachtree Circle, I realized I had lost my brother Tom to all the fates and dangers of the city of Atlanta, with night coming in fast.
Before I called my father in full knowledge that I would face incoming rounds of his snarky Irish humor, I fixed myself a stiff drink and told Lenore the leading highlights of the day. Then I rang my father’s number and he answered on the first ring.
“Where’s Tom?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know. I lost him.”
“You lost him?” I could hear the fury in Dad’s voice, the sudden kind that rose up like a sandstorm. “He was your responsibility.”
I explained what happened and the confusion caused by Knox and Carolyn’s cocktail party and my surprise at the suddenness of Tom’s flight and his swiftness afoot as he weaved his way through the crowd.
Dad said, “I’m not interested about your report on a track meet. Just tell me where he is now.”
“The last time I saw him, Dad, he was heading in your direction. I’m hoping he just walks to your place and checks in for the night,” I said. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”
“He’s always preferred my pad to those fancy damn living quarters that you love to live in,” Dad said.
“This is going to be hard for you,” I said. “But Tom is a real danger to himself, and I think other people aren’t safe around him either. He’s so paranoid he could kill anyone who got in his way.”
“You’ve never been one to carry a happy tune,” Dad taunted.