Because I Come from a Crazy Family

by Edward M. Hallowell

  32.

  The summer of 1966 would see my life, and the lives of my entire extended family, change dramatically. Gammy Hallowell died.

  I was in an upstairs bedroom in the house on Old Harbor Road when, in the middle of an August afternoon, Mom called up to me, “Gammy Hallowell just died.”

  I called back down, “OK.” That’s all I had to say. But it was so not OK. I lay on my bed and stared at the white ceiling lit by the afternoon sun coming in through the windows. What happens now? I wondered. I felt my world go flat, as if going from color to black-and-white.

  Gammy had not only supplied the wealth and opulence, she’d been the matriarch. She ruled. She made things special. Truly a grande dame, she’d married James Mott Hallowell, a man nineteen years her senior, and had their three children, James, Nancy, and Benjamin, only to see her husband die when he was sixty-three and she was forty-four.

  Undaunted, she picked up and charged ahead, running the garden club, being a regular at the country club in Brookline, hosting duplicate bridge tournaments at her home, supporting the Faulkner Hospital and hosting an annual picnic for all the student nurses at her palatial home on the water in Wianno, on Cape Cod, active (her operative adjective was “active”) in all sorts of projects, causes, initiatives, rummage sales, and elections.

  For a number of years she carried on a romantic relationship with Charles Stetson, a distinguished Boston attorney who was big in the railroad business. He’d take a two-car train to the Cape from Boston to visit Gammy, his Louise. One car was for him, the other car for his hunting dogs. He loved to hunt black duck, which my dad loved to do as well. Gammy used to be famous for roasting the ducks he’d kill; she’d roast them in the oven for just one minute, so the blood would still spurt out of them.

  Having lost first her husband and then years later Mr. Stetson, Gammy made it the rest of the way without a significant man in her life. Her eight grandchildren became her focus, evidenced by the bracelet she wore with each of our names on it.

  Trips to Gammy’s house for Christmas and weekends in the summer were extra-special. She was wealthy enough to afford a huge house, beautiful grounds, a croquet court, a rose garden, a sailboat moored at her own dock, vegetable gardens, two cooks, a gardener named Manny who ate raw garlic and had a long gray beard, Luther, the chauffeur, and various part-time help for an assortment of chores.

  I was always allowed to order my breakfast as if I were in a restaurant. My favorite was scrambled eggs, because Girda, the Swedish cook, would make them not with milk but with cream.

  After dinner, we’d have finger bowls. The first time one of those was put down in front of me, I nudged Jamie, who was sitting next to me, and asked him if this were all we were having for dessert. “No,” Jamie said. “Just watch what Gammy does and you do the same.” As always, he looked out for me.

  She paid all our tuitions to the schools we attended, and left money to cover all future education, which in my case included medical school.

  After Gammy died, she’d provided for us financially, but what she couldn’t provide was someone else to be the matriarch, the convener, the arbiter of taste, the great lady that she’d been.

  I have a hunch Duckie and Nancy’s husband, Dick, were not all that upset to say goodbye to her, as she could be a fierce mother-in-law, but she remained loyal, no matter what.

  I pretty much lost touch with Nancy and her family after Gammy died because there was no longer anyone to gather us together. I’d no longer visit that magical house on the point in Wianno, where I’d see my dad, play croquet, learn how to fish and sail, play canasta, and eat scrambled eggs with cream.

  Decades later I went back to see the house. I wish I hadn’t. I should have known better. Rich people who buy and remodel old family homes have a special knack for surgically removing all the character, charm, beauty, and spirit the old place once had, replacing that with garish, grotesque displays. The people who bought Gammy’s estate butchered the place, of course. I am only glad she was not alive to see it.

  33.

  The summer of 1967 was one of the most magical periods of my life. Three unpredictable things happened that brought me great joy.

  It was the summer between my eleventh and twelfth grade years at Exeter. As part of a program called Crossroads Africa, I traveled to Togo, on the coast of West Africa, to build a schoolhouse in a little seaside town. The program was similar to the Peace Corps, only it lasted just the summer. Five college students, plus me, a rising high school senior, joined our leader, Father Frank Sullivan, the Catholic chaplain from Lehigh, to fly from Washington to Accra, the capital of Ghana, then to Lomé, the capital of the French-speaking Togo, and then get into a Land Rover to drive to our encampment on a modest military base next to the tiny village of Glidji.

  The first surprise was falling in love. Well, sort of. I’d been in love with love but had never kissed a girl, let alone made out or had sex. Sadly, as much as I wanted to, I didn’t do either of those things either that summer, but I did develop feelings for a woman which I had never felt before, so I called that falling in love. I so wanted to fall in love, well, why not call what I felt for this beautiful, smart, talented woman love? If it wasn’t true love—it was unrequited and not physical so I guess it can’t really be called true love—then it most definitely and assuredly was a deeply passionate crush.

  One of the five college students in our Crossroads Africa group was Susan. She was twenty-one. From day one, she captivated me. She had a full and open face, beautiful large brown eyes, and a smile that seemed to gather up and radiate all the warmth in the world. Not since age eight, when I’d had a crush on Tinka Perry, had I felt anything remotely similar.

  OK, so I was seventeen, and what could the romantic stirrings of a seventeen-year-old be other than lust? But then, Romeo wasn’t much older than seventeen, was he? Well, if this wasn’t true love, it was true lust for sure, as I was totally turned on by Susan. She was zaftig, to use the Yiddish term, not fat but curvaceous and welcoming. She played the guitar, had a beautiful singing voice, was deeply spiritual and liked to dance. I didn’t know how to dance, but for Susan I would try. She liked to talk about theology and religion, which I did as well. She liked to talk about life and politics and art. It didn’t matter to me what she talked about, I was ready to listen and join in.

  I would not have let my being seventeen and her being twenty-one hold me back, though, were it not for one other detail. She was engaged to be married. How I hated that guy. I pumped her about him, hoping to find or instill mixed feelings or some crack in the relationship. There was none and I was unable to create one. Susan would talk on and on about how much she loved this man, and I would listen. What a dope.

  I talked with Frank Sullivan about it. Frank was used to counseling young people, as this was part of his job as Catholic chaplain at Lehigh.

  “Have you been in love before?” he asked.

  “No. I really have almost no experience with girls.”

  “You better back off,” he said. “You’ll only end up getting hurt, and you will disrupt the group. You know we’re here to build a schoolhouse, not to practice falling in love.”

  Duly warned, I did back off as he advised, but I still rode the wings of love for the rest of the summer. I would think of Susan on my way to sleep every night.

  Unless I was thinking about the second surprise of that summer. Like my love for Susan, my love for the Red Sox was also frustrated love because the team never won. All of Boston lived by the cry “Wait ’til next year!”

  While I was in Togo, the team changed the face of Boston baseball forever. The summer of 1967 came to be called the Impossible Dream season, ushering in the decades of contending teams and sold-out games Fenway Park has boasted ever since. The Red Sox changed from a sleepy team no one wanted to see, except old geezers and little kids, to the hottest ticket in New England.

  And I had to be across the world while it happened! Each day in Togo I’d get rep
orts and shake my head, not knowing whether to kick the dirt or jump for joy. Is this for real? Like a true fan, I assumed it was my leaving the country and traveling to Africa that had triggered the Red Sox’s success. Maybe I should live in Togo for a few months more. Wouldn’t my returning home jinx them?

  That’s how sports fans think. Each of us, deep in our deranged brain, harbors superstitions we turn ourselves inside out trying to honor. A true sports fan has a socially acceptable mental illness, a chronic, unremitting psychosis. And they allow us to roam free in the streets.

  Then, as I was all tooled up and beside myself with passion over Susan and the Red Sox, the third surprise came in a letter from the United States.

  “Dear Little Fatty,” it began. That was the supposed term of endearment my cousin Lyn coined for me when I was a chubby little boy. That, and other pet epithets like “Neddy Spaghetti with the meatball eyes,” or “Neddy, Neddy, two-by-four, couldn’t fit through the bathroom door, so he did it on the floor, licked it up and did some more,” served to make me self-conscious about my weight my whole life. Nevertheless, that letter was the happiest, best, truest, and most prescient letter I’ve ever received.

  Lyn wrote me about a man she’d met while working in Washington, D.C., whom she’d fallen in love with. She was planning to marry him in December. I wish I still had the letter. I’d never read a letter from Lyn, or from anyone for that matter, that was so unguardedly happy. Lyn could be so caustic and cynical that when she wasn’t it brought you to a full stop. This letter didn’t have a cynical syllable in it. Just the opposite: The words practically glowed.

  Tom Bliss was the man’s name. He was a medical student at Georgetown. She’d met him through Kendall Wheeler, a friend of hers at the Washington School for Secretaries. (This was 1967, still the days when a female college graduate like Lyn, Phi Beta Kappa in English from Boston University, would be asked how fast she typed at job interviews.) Kendall’s boyfriend, Chandler Van Orman (the names seem straight out of Scott Fitzgerald), played on the same rugby team as Tom Bliss.

  Lyn wrote in her letter that she’d never felt like this before. She said it was the way it’s supposed to be, the way you dream it might be, the way she’d almost given up hope it ever would be, but now it truly was.

  Tom was a really good guy, she was sure I’d like him, but not to worry, we’d still be tight as ever. She couldn’t wait for me to get home so she could introduce us. Jamie had already met him and liked him a lot. She loved me and she knew I’d be happy for her.

  She was right. I folded up the letter and immediately wrote her a letter telling her, in huge, excessive, overstated caps how much I loved her and how happy I was for her.

  While I meant it, I was mighty scared, too. The last person who had told me a marriage wouldn’t change anything was my mother before she married Uncle Unger. I felt a bit of panic. I was not at all ready for life without Lyn. But I still had Jamie.

  When our group landed in Washington, we said our goodbyes and headed in different directions. I shook Frank’s hand and looked for Susan. She had her guitar across her back and was wearing one of the multicolored—red, orange, brown, yellow, green—native garments we’d all purchased.

  I was awkward and self-conscious as I tried to hug this woman who was wearing a guitar and an African dress. We did make eye contact long enough for me to see for sure that the soulful glow I had imagined lived within her really did live within her.

  And I was able to hug enough of her body to feel really jealous once again of the man she was going home to marry. But Frank had been right. Best to back off.

  I wouldn’t see Susan again for twenty years. She came into Cambridge and visited me in my condo when I was in my late thirties. The man she’d married—my rival, the mystery man I’d been so jealous of—turned out to be unbalanced. He was mean to her, so she’d finally divorced him, after having four children. It turned out that he had a mental illness, maybe borderline personality disorder, so there was a biological basis to his meanness, Susan told me. He took his own life a year after they divorced. We sat in my living room drinking something with alcohol in it and flirting. I still wanted to jump into bed with her but I still held back, sensing her vulnerability (and also not a hundred percent sure she’d want to), knowing that she’d be leaving town and not wanting to start more than we could finish. We spent the time reminiscing and catching up instead of making love, or maybe that was our version of making love, before we hugged each other and said goodbye once again.

  I had no more contact with Susan until we exchanged emails early in 2017. She said how I’d helped her feel like a desirable woman again during that brief Cambridge visit, that later she’d found a really good man whom she married in 1990, instantly making him the father of four. She sent me a photo of the brood of beautiful children she’d begotten with husband number one and the grandchildren they’d brought into the world along the way.

  My return from Togo did not doom the Red Sox, thank God. I was relieved that their success had not depended upon my absence. In a final few weeks that were as exciting as any finish in the history of major league baseball, the Red Sox would win the American League pennant by the narrowest of margins, one game, and do it on October 1, the last day of the 1967 season.

  The Red Sox luck ran out with that victory. They would lose the World Series in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals, extending the string to forty-nine years without a world championship. They would come close a couple of times but not actually win the World Series until 2004, eighty-six years after they last won the world championship in 1918.

  34.

  Senior year at Exeter, 1967–68, was the most transformative year of my life, largely due to the influence of one man: my English teacher, Fred Tremallo (Italian for “three evils,” as he, an etymology maven, liked to remind us).

  In September, I handed in a short story I wrote which he handed back to me the next day with these words, written in red pen at the end: “Why don’t you turn this into a novel?”

  As I looked at that comment, that intimidating question, I thought to myself, gee, I always knew Exeter was a tough school, but I never thought I’d have to write a novel.

  The more I thought about it, though, the more excited I became. Mr. Tremallo hadn’t challenged anyone else to write a novel, as far as I knew.

  What made him think I could turn the three-pager I’d handed in into a three-hundred-page novel? Why had he singled me out? I did want to be a writer. That was my number one career goal. Maybe Fred thought I had it in me. I started to mull it over more and more. In fact, I thought of little else.

  A couple of days later, I spoke with him after class and said I’d like to give the novel a try. “But how do I do it?” I asked. “How do you write a novel?”

  “Scene by scene,” Mr. T. replied without even pausing to think. “You know what you want to write about, you laid it out in the story. So just do what we’ve been discussing in class, focus on scenes, details, characters. Write what you know.”

  “But how do I organize it?”

  “Don’t worry about that now,” he said. “Just write. Trust your unconscious.” It was incredibly freeing advice. Just write. Organize later. And let your unconscious have a hand in doing that as well. “Once your unconscious catches on to the fact that you’re doing this,” Mr. T. went on, “it will starting working on it round the clock, twenty-four seven. That’s the beauty of the unconscious!”

  “OK, I’ll give it a try.”

  “One thing, though,” Mr. T. added. “You’ll have to do this on your own time. This will not be an assignment, so you’ll have to do all the assignments the rest of the class is doing. You won’t be excused from anything. You’re taking on additional work for which you’ll get no credit. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering what in the world I had gotten myself into.

  Each week I added pages, which Mr. T. would read and comment on. At one point he gave me a book by Wayne B
ooth called The Rhetoric of Fiction, which I read as carefully as a rabbi reads the Torah, only, unlike the rabbi, I didn’t understand a word of it. But Mr. T. had given it to me, which meant it must contain what he thought I needed to know about writing, so I read it with the utmost dedication, even though I couldn’t decipher its messages. Maybe my unconscious did!

  Evenings I would often go over to Mr. T.’s apartment—he lived in Wentworth, the dorm next to Bancroft, and we’d talk about life. These sessions meant the world to me. Sometimes other kids were there, sometimes just me. His wife, Ellie, would offer us juice and cookies, and we’d sometimes smoke cigarettes. (This was permitted in a faculty member’s apartment or in the designated common rooms.)

  We talked about everything under the sun. In French class we were reading Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, and I was very drawn to its main character, Meursault. The first lines of the novel were “Aujourd’hui maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas”—“Today my mother died. Or perhaps yesterday, I’m not sure.”

  In many ways, like Meursault, I attended life, watching, feeling on the outside looking in, not quite sure how to get to the inside, the meat, the main event.

  Mr. T. and I talked about existentialism at great length, so much so that I thought philosophy was existentialism, that Camus and Sartre defined philosophy. Never mind Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer. I’d barely even heard of them, let alone knew what they said. It was Camus, Sartre, and “l’absurdité de la vie.”

  In that same French class we read Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit), which I found incredibly bleak but also compelling. “Hell is other people.”