Hillbilly Gothic

by Adrienne Martini

  Despite my mother’s silence on the exact details, Nell’s death in 1965 is more clear to me than her birth. For years, the family had celebrated her birthday as November 3, 1913. Years later, when Nell referred to the official copy of her birth certificate, the one the county had on file, she realized that it read September 12, 1912. The confusion isn’t surprising. Her branch of the family—the Cains—is a mess to track. Nell’s mother Elizabeth disappeared when her kids were very young and the three of them were raised by an aunt, whose true relationship to the family is unclear. Randomly, Elizabeth would return to Parkersburg for brief visits, then vanish again. Nell’s father didn’t stick around, either, and was last known to be working as a firefighter in Wheeling.

  When news of Elizabeth’s death reached her daughter, Nell and family were in Colorado. Nell herself hadn’t been mentally well for quite some time. She was unable to keep her house marginally clean or her kids put together. The three girls learned quickly to take care of each other and their brother. Nell was better in the summer than winters, when she would stay stuck in the house during the dark days. Her presence was never intentionally toxic, and there were no harsh words or quick spankings, but it was a bleak atmosphere for her children. It wasn’t encouraging or nurturing.

  Her doctors had warned her not to have another baby after Linda, the youngest daughter, because with each pregnancy her moods grew less stable. Snooks can remember, as a kid, not being sure how long her mom would be in the hospital after each new baby. After Bill’s birth in Charleston in 1947, depression smothered Nell like a wool suit on a hot summer day. For the next few years, she would be shuttled back and forth from Harding Hospital—a chichi loony bin in nearby Columbus, Ohio. A room at Harding wasn’t cheap; nor were the shock treatments Nell received. Eventually, my grandfather ran out of cash to keep her there, after which, we think, my grandmother returned home to Parkersburg and Aunt Carrie acted as the family’s housekeeper. Other friends and family provided support when they could.

  After Nell returned to Parkersburg, she sank under the blackness, a chain-smoking zombie, made hollow by prescription drugs, electroshock, and depression. For a few years, she would follow her kids around the house, continually asking, “What are you gonna do now, honey?”

  What they did was leave. Snooks married at twenty-one and had two babies. Soon Snooks’s family would settle in South Carolina, where they lived in a gracious suburb with an enormous magnolia tree in their front yard. Snooks, for the record, strongly objects to my digging up nasty family laundry. As she told me at one point, “When you see shit, you flush it away.” For me, this is only a reasonable response if you know your sewage system is up to the challenge. I’m fairly certain that ours isn’t and I must deal with it in other ways.

  At seventeen, Linda had gotten pregnant and married. She and husband, Steve, lived in Morgantown, where they struggled through college and parenthood. Always the sanest and most self-sufficient of the siblings, Linda has been sure and confident at all stages of her life. Even when her two grown daughters developed their mental illnesses, Linda was a superhero, swooping in to help. It is what she does.

  On weekends, during Nell’s final decline from cancer, my mother and Linda would switch places. Mom would escape to a boyfriend at WVU; Linda would come home to nurse. “It was such a hard time,” my aunt recalls, welling up when she talks about it. The only child who was too young to get out was Bill. He would have remembered Nell’s madness best, I imagine, but I never knew him. He blew his brains out a year before I was born.

  All of this helps explain why it is so dang hard to piece together our maternal family history. Only since my daughter was born have I been able to make progress, mostly because my aunt’s and mother’s shock at seeing their own kids suffer from mental illnesses made them want to trace the source of that inclination, no matter how shameful it feels to expose. My father’s side of the family is equally secretive about the twisted trunk of the ol’ family tree, which is further complicated by immigration, language, and my paternal grandmother’s freakish compulsion to throw away everything.

  Slowly, though, it comes together. And as disturbing as the past can be, it is also reassuring in its explanation for how we got here.

  I suspect the true beginning is lost in the seas of evolution. Somewhere, when the first apes were climbing out of trees, some mama ape went a little nutty after giving birth to a baby ape. The mama ape may or may not have survived, but the baby ape definitely did and the mutated bit of DNA was passed on to that baby ape’s offspring. Over time, this maternal madness (as well as the systems that evolved to cope with it), became the norm for a great many families, no matter how many generations it took before all of them could walk erect. It’s like the old Breck shampoo ads, where the one woman tells two friends, who tell two friends, and so on and so on. Except we’re dealing with something a bit more serious than squeaky-clean hair here.

  I am not an anthropologist. Nor am I a sociologist. I don’t even play one on TV.

  Journalist Andrew Solomon wrote an excellent study of almost every imaginable facet of depression called The Noonday Demon and is a much better researcher than I am. He writes:

  Is depression a derangement, like cancer, or can it be defensive, like nausea? Evolutionists argue that it occurs much too often to be a simple dysfunction. It seems likely that the capacity for depression entails mechanisms that at some stage served a reproductive advantage. Four possibilities can be adduced from this. Each is at least partially true. The first is that depression served a purpose in evolution’s prehuman times that it no longer serves. The second is that the stresses of modern life are incompatible with the brains we have evolved, and that depression is the consequence of our doing what we did not evolve to do. The third is that depression serves a useful function unto itself in human societies, that it’s sometimes a good thing for people to be depressed. The last is that the genes and consequent biological structures that are implicated in depression are also implicated in other, more useful behaviors or feelings—that depression is a secondary result of a useful variant in brain physiology.

  Of course, a discussion of the evolution of mental illness is only possible once you stop believing that madness is a curse sent by an angry God who wants to see you suffer simply because you made human choices. Or that it is a “choice” that you could resolve by taking vitamins and exercise, as a few “religious” leaders would claim through their actor mouthpieces. The evolutionary/biological components of depression have been recognized only in the last century, as medical advances have allowed us to look at the chemical/physiological origins of mental illnesses.

  I can trace my family’s evolution for only a couple of generations. On my father’s side of my genetic code, we have a batch of Italians. My great-grandmother Mama Lane was from Naples and moved to Pittsburgh around the 1900s. She worked as a seamstress, when she wasn’t raising four kids, two of whom were from her first marriage (which left her widowed at a young age), two of whom were from her second. Mama Lane, of course, wasn’t her given name, but a pet name bestowed upon her by my dad, who, as a young child, couldn’t pronounce “Magdalena.”

  For almost a hundred years, Pittsburgh’s mills were attractive to immigrants. Without them, most of the other industrial cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo wouldn’t exist, either. During the boom times, when the mills were pouring out millions of tons of steel, coke, and iron, these cities were the center of the industrial universe. Now, they are part of the Rust Belt, struggling to figure out what comes next. The manufacturing jobs have moved on to other countries where the labor is cheap and relatively naive. Pittsburgh can’t keep its blue-collar kids at home because there is nothing for them to do anymore, unless they want to work in a Starbucks and serve frothy drinks to college students and banking executives. The children of that immigrant base, whose lives were dedicated to making tangible, useful goods, are slipping away, moving to warmer climates and cities like Atlanta and Raleig
h, where populations are growing fast, although not because of manufacturing.

  Still, the rumors of Pittsburgh’s death are a bit premature. One of the country’s hidden treasures, it gave the world Andy Warhol, Mr. Rogers, and Billy Squier. The views of the city alone are enough to make you swoon. Most of the neighborhoods offer at least one high spot from which to view the Point, which is where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers converge to form the Ohio. The glass-and-stone skyscrapers rise majestically from the enormous (and, it must be noted, phallic and erupting) fountain on this pubiclike triangle of land. All pelvic references aside, one moment made me fall in love with the place. I was driving in from the airport after a few years of living in Tennessee. On one side of the mountains, it was gray and rainy, gloomy if typical weather. And then I drove into the tunnels and emerged on the other side, where the clouds had lifted. Bright sunshine was glinting off the steel buildings and metallic rivers. It was fall-to-your-

  knees gorgeous. It was Oz. Unfortunately, I still had to negotiate driving the bridges during rush hour, but the part of my brain that wasn’t freaking out about traffic was enthralled.

  Most folks who haven’t been there conjure visions of a grimy, industrial center where thick-necked men drink cheap beer after their shifts. Pockets of this culture may still exist, but it is certainly a dated view. Thanks to many of the early industrialists who made Pittsburgh a steel powerhouse, most of whom came to believe in giving back to the folks whose sweat built their empires, Pittsburgh has a thriving intellectual community. Andrew Carnegie (the accent is on the middle syllable, contrary to what New Yorkers will claim) bequeathed the city a world-class library system, which has always been open to all residents, whether they labor in the mills, at a desk, or in a home. The Heinz and Frick families pumped millions into the cultural scene and their legacy continues to create benefits. Two major colleges—the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon—are pioneering medical and robotic research. Pittsburgh encourages its residents to work hard and to be smart. It’s hard to imagine that other cities currently being abused by wealthy industrialists will fare so well a hundred years from now.

  But Pittsburgh, like most of Appalachia, is a place that you really have to want to be in, despite its many charms. For me, there are always obstacles to a happy relationship with the city, no matter how much I may wax rhapsodic about it. For each positive, I have a negative. The winters can be brutal and gray. The city’s topography—it evolved around three rivers and an imposing chunk of the Appalachians—makes it a pain to navigate through. Most denizens who learned to drive up the city’s narrow streets and across its many bridges gave up on learning cardinal directions well before their seventeenth birthdays. You drive by feel here. By knowing which river should be on which side of your car, you know where you should be on any given hill. Once you stop wanting it to make sense, the way always becomes clear. Yet, even after twenty-some years of driving downtown from my grandmother’s house, I always wind up in Dormont, an outlying suburb. This is equivalent to winding up in Seattle while trying to drive to L.A. from San Francisco. I have no explanation for this.

  The geography of Pittsburgh has ensured that most of the neighborhoods stayed ethnically monolithic well into the late twentieth century; it was too bewildering to wander far from the set of streets that you knew well. Some would argue that these pocket communities still are remarkably homogenous for a city of its size. In my grandmother’s day everyone in her neighborhood, Brushton, spoke Italian and came from the same region of the boot, more or less. If you crossed over the hill, you’d fall into an enclave of “hunkies,” an ethnic slur for Hungarians, and “Bohemians,” a label for those who emigrated from the Eastern European countries whose borders were constantly in flux, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Albania. At that time, most of the people who came to the Steel City were white, with waves of Romanians, Ukrainians, Scots, Germans, and the Irish making themselves at home. The African-American population was, for many years clustered in the Hill District, where nine of Pultizer prize–winning playwright August Wilson’s dramas have been set. During the Jazz Age, greats like Billy Eckstine played on the Strip downtown.

  In my great-grandmother’s day, immigrants could live most of their lives without ever having to learn English or assimilate, especially if they had moved to the city when they were adults. By my grandmother’s generation, this had changed, especially at the start of WWII. My grandmother tells me that businesses started hanging NO ITALIANS signs shortly after the U.S. joined the fray. Even though kids from different ethnic neighborhoods went to the same schools and so were forced to mingle, there was still a stigma to being Italian. My grandmother’s experience was typical of many immigrants. One language was spoken at home, another at school. Her friends all ate peanut butter while she ate macaroni and gravy. At a time of life when fitting in is the sole focus of a child’s existence, she, like so many kids who are different, was an Other, trapped on the outside of the glass peering in.

  One of the first things that Pittsburghers do when first meeting each other is ask what neighborhood they grew up in. Knowing that someone is from Bloomfield, say, or Sewickely, is a clue to what her history could be. It can tell another ’burgher who their grandparents might have been or whether they’ll have pierogi for dinner. Just as a stranger holding forth on the finer points of grits identifies him as having lived in the South, a stranger who talks about jumbo or city chicken has steel city in his blood.

  The Brushton neighborhood has morphed from an Italian enclave to a quasislum, yet the work of the Martini side of my clan is still evident. My father’s father, along with his three brothers, were the core of Martini Brothers Construction, who also built the family house on South Wheeler Street. Each brother had his own specialty—carpentry, stonework, or plaster. My grandfather was a stone mason, and during World War II built runways for American planes on the island of Sabu. He died when my father was barely a teenager and, shortly after, my grandmother, father, and his younger brother moved out to Penn Hills, a western suburban.

  Technically, I can’t claim Pittsburgh as my hometown. Once he graduated from Pitt and worked for DuPont as a chemical engineer, Dad was transferred every couple years. I was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and then moved to Atlanta and Chicago, then back to Pittsburgh, all before I started first grade. After my parents divorced when I was eleven, Mom and I moved out to West View, a turn-of-the-century getaway for city dwellers that had then featured a trolley park and a roller coaster. A blue-collar enclave in an industrial city, West View in the eighties was waking up to the fact that it needed to redefine itself. Every third business was a pizza joint or a bar, and the bakery specialized in both pizzelles, an Italian wafer cookie, and chrusciki, a Polish fried dough cookie. By the time I lived there, the amusement park had been replaced by a Giant Eagle supermarket, a Kmart, and fast food. The city proper was a fifteen-minute bus ride away.

  West View will always remind me of suicides. Self-destruction was in the air in those days. In my mind’s macabre slideshow of memories, the first slide is of a walk home with a girlfriend. On the main drag, just in front of the dance studio where another friend taught, a car was parked, a late-model gas-guzzling something or other. Its windows were shattered and there was blood all over the driver’s side. We stopped for a minute but a cop, stationed next to it, hurried us along, offering no details. On the evening news, we learned that the estranged husband of a nearby office worker had waited outside for her shift to end. When she left the building, he screamed obscenities at her to get her attention, then popped back into the car and shot himself.

  Second slide is a junior high winter. A big, bumbling, greasy-haired kid who Mom and I knew, who was so massively insecure in his own skin that physical mayhem followed him everywhere, went out to shovel the walk. He took a handgun with him. When his dad got home from work, his only child was dead in the snow from a self-inflicted bullet to the head. White snow. Red blood. Dark skies.

  The
third and last slide is of R. Budd Dwyer, a Republican who had served terms in both the Pennsylvania House and Senate and was the state treasurer in 1987. Convicted of agreeing to accept kickbacks from a tax overpayment by state employees, Dwyer called a press conference the day before he was to be sentenced, presumably to resign. At the time this was such a huge case that all of the media was covering it live. Dwyer spoke for a bit, again protesting his innocence, then handed out three envelopes to three of his staffers; one contained a letter for his wife, another his organ donor card, and the third a letter for Gov. Bob Casey. Dwyer then opened a fourth envelope, pulled out a .357 Magnum, warned the assembled that the next bit might be upsetting, and blew his brains all over the curtain behind him. I would keep coming across R. Budd while in journalism school, since his messy death was always used as a talking point about media responsibility in the pre-9/11 world.

  My own flirtations with death were minor. I’d stick pins into the tips of my fingers to see how far I could push them before I felt something. I spent a summer trying to starve myself, to see if anyone would notice. For three months I ate only 380 calories per day, which amounts to six saltines or a small bag of M&Ms, the number gleaned from a teen magazine that my best friend/next-door neighbor and I had bought to ogle pictures of Duran Duran. Despite the number of compliments I received on my new, skinny self, I eventually got hungry for real food again. My short attention span is a good thing, sometimes.

  Yet on its surface, West View was no more depressing than anywhere else. The workers’ kids went to North Hills High School. The township closest to it was Ross, which was exponentially more upscale than West View and also fed into the same school. You could usually pick which side of town each kid was from. Those with jean jackets and big hair were from West View. Those with Izod shirts and designer jeans were from Ross. You could almost hear the music from West Side Story as you walked through the halls. West View kids always knew they were destined for manual labor and sad, old houses stacked almost on top of each other on the city’s hills. Ross kids could count on college and yards big enough to play soccer in.