by John Darnton
By now we had been living in Washington a year and a half and another Christmas was coming around. To me, that meant one thing: My brother would be coming home. I was aware that our situation had deteriorated seriously since his last visit, but I had no idea what could be done to arrest the slide. I didn’t believe he’d be able to make things better—that seemed beyond possibility—but I looked forward to feeling once again that rush of relief, the relinquishing of responsibility once he was in the house. I anticipated his homecoming by preparing the most impressive gift I could think of—a collection of paperback books about famous artists. The books discussed the artists’ distinctive qualities and were illustrated with their most famous works. I spent my purloined savings on them, purchasing them one at a time from a store on Western Avenue in Chevy Chase. I accumulated them over months, until finally I had twenty of them, a stack ten inches high. I put them in a shoe box and wrapped them carefully.
When Bob came home, he was distressed by what he found. I knew this not because we talked about it but because he seemed so preoccupied. He was uncommunicative. He rarely smiled, and he parried my questions about his life at Andover with half answers. I could hardly wait to give him the present, and on Christmas morning, when he barely acknowledged it, I was crushed. To this day, I don’t know exactly what I was trying to do—I don’t know whether the gift was intended to brighten his homecoming or whether it was an expression of love, since I missed him so much, or whether it was a bribe of sorts, intended to make him sit up and pay attention and figure a way out of the mess we were in. Once the holidays were over, he returned to Andover.
It was a late Sunday afternoon on a mid-January day in 1956. The sky had been a strange opal color all day and now it had begun to sleet. Slivers of ice slanted down from the leaden cloud like spears. The ice coated the streets and sidewalks and roofs with a glaze and crystallized around tree branches, bending them to the ground. I was upstairs in my room, perhaps doing homework—luckily, not listening to the drums and trumpets of the classical music that I loved to play at full volume.
I heard a scream from downstairs—an unearthly sound, unlike anything I had ever heard. It began as a low rumble, almost a moan, then ascended higher and higher, until it became a piercing cry. It was loud and wordless, the sound of a human throat opening up and giving vent to every bit of noise it was capable of.
I leapt up, tore around the banister, and ran to the stairs. Halfway down, I saw my mother sprawled in the center of the living room floor. She was thrashing about, her limbs flailing in all directions, her eyes wild. Her feet and hands pounded against the floor. She lay on her back, flopping up and down like a fish. There was another sound, a playful growling. I saw that our dog had grabbed the fringe of her nightgown. He was leaning back, his paws planted firmly on the floor, tugging at it. He let go, danced around, and then grabbed another piece. Had he attacked her? No, I knew he hadn’t. She was having some sort of convulsions. I ran to her and kicked the dog hard in the ribs. The dog yelped and retreated to another room. My mother was still thrashing about, her hair covering her eyes, saliva flecked around her mouth. I tried to hold her down, but she was too strong for me. Her jerky movements rocked us both into the air.
I jumped up and ran to the front door and fled outside. I almost toppled down the front steps, which were covered in ice, and lost traction on the sidewalk, slipping and sliding, my arms windmilling like a cartoon character’s. I made it to a neighbor’s house and pounded on the door. A man I did not know came to the door. I could see a woman behind him, sitting in an easy chair, her mouth open in surprise.
“Come. Please come. Come quick,” I pleaded. “My mother.”
That was all I said. The man took his time fetching his coat, which bothered me. He walked carefully along the slippery sidewalk, leaning first against a banister, then a tree trunk, then holding his arms to his sides, with his palms down, to brace against a fall. We came to our front stairs. I saw I had left the door open. I went first. When we got inside, Mom’s convulsions had stopped. She was still lying in the center of the floor. Her eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling. I knelt beside her and said over and over, “Mom. Mom. Mom.” She looked up at me, frowning in confusion. She opened her mouth as if to speak but said nothing. She kept looking at me, then away, then back at me. She was dazed.
“Where … where am I?” she asked. She looked at me again. “Who … who …” I could see she did not know who I was. I told her not to worry, that she had had some sort of fit but that she would feel better soon.
The neighbor and I lifted her onto the couch. Now she was surprisingly light to carry, and docile. I got a blanket and covered her with it. The man didn’t seem to know what to do.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but she seems better.” He didn’t seem to think it strange—or if he did, he didn’t say so—that my mother didn’t recognize me. He said there was nothing more to do and he walked out the door and headed back to his house. I could see him out the window, carefully negotiating the icy sidewalk, in a hurry to get home.
Mom was still frowning and looking totally confused. She was regarding everything—the chairs, the drapes, the doors—as if she were trying to figure out where she was. That she didn’t know me, her own son, was deeply upsetting. I ran to the phone and looked up the number of her doctor and called her. The ring tones seemed slow. The doctor answered the phone herself.
“You must come, you must come,” I said, my voice breaking. “My mother is … She’s lost control of her muscles. She fell on the floor and her arms and legs were moving all over the place. And now she’s stopped, but she doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know who I am. You have to come. You have to send an ambulance.”
I heard the doctor’s voice, her tone sharp.
“Have you looked outside?” she asked.
I did, through a window that was just above the phone. I could see the ice still coming down in sheets.
“Nothing can get through,” she said. “Not even an ambulance. You’ll have to handle this on your own.”
I knew that her cold tone was intended to brace me up, but I hated her for it. She gave me instructions. If the seizure—for that’s what she called it—was to reoccur, I was to get a spoon and hold it in my mother’s mouth, pressing down her tongue so that she wouldn’t swallow it. That was very important. She mustn’t be allowed to swallow her tongue, for she could choke on it. Did I understand? I said I did. She said some more things, but I don’t remember them precisely. I was thinking of the spoon and how to manage it.
After the phone call, my mother seemed to come around. She knew who I was, but there was a remnant of confusion. She had no idea what had happened, and I decided not to tell her. I just said that she had been sick but now was okay. After that, I made her some soup, but once she had taken a few sips she didn’t feel like eating it. I made her a cup of tea. I fed the dog and felt his ribs—I was worried that I had broken one when I kicked him so hard—and he seemed okay.
I stayed close by Mom. Two hours later, we were sitting side by side on an upright couch, a love seat, in the small room between the living room and the kitchen. I had put on the television as a distraction. We were watching The Ed Sullivan Show. An act came on—jugglers, or maybe seals in an inflated rubber pool, bouncing balls on their noses—when I heard the sound again. It came from about one foot away and made me jump, that same low groaning. Then it rose up and up, an opening of the vocal cords, all playing at once. I heard the audience applauding on the television. The dog danced back and forth in a half circle around us, barking. I ran to the kitchen, found a large spoon, and ran back. Now Mom had slid down the couch, her body half on and half off. Her legs began to tremble on the floor, and so did her arms, which were on the couch. She arched her back. I threw myself on her arms, and when her mouth flew open, I thrust the spoon into it. I tried holding her tongue down, but her head was thrashing from side to side. I got behind her and put her head between my k
nees and held the spoon in place. Its handle was vibrating and I could feel her teeth clamping down. I held on like that. After some time—three minutes, five?—she stopped moving and then fell limp. I removed the spoon. She had frothed at the mouth and out of it ran rivulets of blood. Maybe I had pressed down too hard. But she was still breathing. I got her back on the couch. Now she looked up at me, again dazed and lost, with an almost childlike pleading. Again, she asked where she was, what had happened.
Later, when she recovered, she leaned against me and I got her upstairs and into her bed. She fell asleep. I stayed there, sitting by her bed for a few hours, the spoon on a bedside table. Then I took the spoon into my room, just across the hall. I lay down in bed with my clothes on and put the spoon on my dresser. I didn’t want to sleep. I had to stay awake in case she had another attack. I listened for that sound again, the unearthly scream. After another hour or two, it came. I ran into her room and shoved the spoon back into her mouth. We rode this one out more easily, it seemed. Then I gave her some water to drink and went back to my room. There was one other attack, around midnight. She then fell into a deep sleep, and I must have also.
I don’t remember much about the next morning. I looked in on her and found her still asleep, then made my breakfast and went off to school. The weather was warm, so despite the ice storm of the previous day, the school was open. When I got home that afternoon, Mom was missing. I hadn’t been there more than ten minutes when the doorbell rang. Two women were there. I let them in. One went to sit down in an easy chair, but I stopped her just in time—the chair was broken, its back legs propped into place. The other woman went to sit in another chair, but I stopped her also—that chair was broken, too, in the same way. They were like booby traps. The women sat together on the couch and exchanged glances. I noticed the floor was filthy, with piles of dust in the corners. I suddenly saw the room from their perspective—how odd and dysfunctional it must have appeared. I blushed and was angry at them. The women said that my mother had been taken in an ambulance to recover in a hospital. They explained that they were from Alcoholics Anonymous, a group that helped people with drinking problems. It was then and there, sitting in that room on that long-ago afternoon, that I finally understood everything. I knew, as if the proverbial lightbulb had been switched on in my head, what the problem was, what had made Mom “groggy” all those years. She was a drunk.
The doctor telephoned and said I’d be staying with her for a few days. She picked me up in her car. I disliked her intensely, and her whole family. She had a son slightly older than I was, and I was pleased to see that he was afflicted with a bad stutter; it was nearly impossible to understand what he was trying to say. At least, I thought, I can talk properly. A week later, I went back to our house in time to prepare for Mom’s homecoming. When she arrived, a transformation had taken place. Her eyes were wide open—I hadn’t seen them that wide for years, it seemed—and they were once again animated. She told me where her bottles were and together we unearthed them—dozens of empty gin bottles stashed high up in cupboards and in the rear of closets. I carried them to a garbage can in the back alley. She didn’t ask me many questions about her convulsions. Two days before they occurred, she said, she had abruptly stopped drinking altogether—a forced withdrawal because she had run completely out of money. It was the sudden cutoff of alcohol to her system, she had been told, that had brought them on. She had been lucky: In some instances, convulsions like that proved fatal. In any case, she said, she was never going to take another drink as long as she lived.
And she was true to her word.
CHAPTER 12
After Mom came home from her week in the hospital, filled with dramatic tales about the bizarre mental patients she had encountered during her stay in the psychiatric ward (which is where they placed alcoholics in those days), she joined AA. She had tried the twelve-step program several times before, I was to learn, but the hook hadn’t caught. This time, it did, and the reason was clear: She had hit rock bottom. The realization had finally struck home that her life, and our future, hung by a narrow thread. That was the crucial first step on the road to recovery.
I didn’t tell Bob right away about her recovery—why, I’m not sure. We rarely talked on the phone, I never wrote letters, and I had stopped communicating with just about everyone. I hadn’t told anyone, other than her doctor during that one phone call, about the convulsions. I went to school, as if nothing had happened. Some two weeks later, Bob called from Andover. His voice was strained as he asked me how Mom was doing. He fired questions at me. I cut him off to tell him what had happened, saying that she had had these seizures but was better and that she had been magically transformed. It was a miracle! Our family would be restored; our lives would become sane again. I repeated these assurances over and over. Eventually, he sounded somewhat relieved, but I don’t think he believed me—his tone was still skeptical.
Fifty years later the two of us were sitting at a dining room table in my apartment in New York City when we began to discuss our childhood. We didn’t do this often, preferring instead to make one or two passing references to how deluded we’d been and let it go at that. But this time we talked about what had occurred on that icy evening in Washington. Several times over the years I had told him about the episode, but never in detail. Now I described it from start to finish. When I looked up, I saw he had tears in his eyes. He was silent for a while and then told me that his visit home had been a traumatic turning point for him. Shocked at how low Mom and I had sunk, at how the household had stopped functioning and was sliding into poverty, he realized that he alone could save us. So he came to a difficult resolution: He would quit school and stay home and make some money and get us back on our feet. He wrote Andover, informing the school of his decision; the dean wrote back, telling him he was making a big mistake and strongly urging him to return to complete his studies. After much soul-searching, he followed the dean’s advice. It was, he confessed, his eyes brimming with tears, a wrenching moment, perhaps the worst in his life. In his overheated adolescent mind, the decision not to quit high school constituted an abandonment of us to save himself. He was going to cut the cord. Figuratively speaking, he had packed his suitcase and was going to walk out the door into his own future, drawn inexorably toward self-preservation, like a protagonist in a coming-of-age novel or like Tom Wingfield, the young man in The Glass Menagerie, running off to sea to escape the suffocating home with the nagging mother and the lame sister, fleeing a life that would crush his dreams, only to be crushed by the burden of guilt. The discussion confirmed what I had often thought: that though Bob had managed to leave, he hadn’t gotten away unscathed.
Neither had I. For years after that night in Washington, I had a recurrent nightmare. I was in the house on Roseville Road in Westport. The ground-floor rooms formed a long passage to the front door. Upstairs, the bedroom corridor ran parallel to the one downstairs, and the two floors met at an enclosed staircase next to the door. My mother, downstairs, had lost her mind. I was upstairs. Frantically, I called the doctor, and as I was pouring out my fear that my life was in danger, I heard something on the line—a click: My mother had picked up the extension. She told the doctor that she was fine, never better. But then her voice started to rise and got louder, until it hit an echo chamber and became deafening. I dropped the receiver and ran toward the staircase for the front door. It was a long way. She did the same—we were running toward each other. I knew I must beat her to reach the door and escape unharmed, because she was carrying an ax. As I bolted down the staircase and reached the bottom, I turned to look in her direction—that’s when I would wake up, sweating, my heart pounding.
Gradually, once Mom recovered, our lives began to improve. She obtained a job in New York City, doing PR work for a criminal justice organization. This meant that she would have to relocate there immediately, but I would stay in Washington to finish up my last year at Alice Deal Junior High School. Arrangements were made for me to move in with
a family—the third time in four years that I had been farmed out. I didn’t object; at this point, I think, I suspended all volition and just drifted along, following the current. I didn’t know the people I was to stay with, the Reynolds (which is not their real name; I’d rather not identify them). They were new acquaintances Mom had made through AA. Mrs. Reynold was a hard-driving lawyer, red-haired, with pale skin, outgoing and assertive. Mr. Reynold was a mild-mannered accountant. He drove a Henry J, was thin as a shadow, spoke in almost a whisper, and was self-effacing. He was the one who was the recovering alcoholic. The two were so different, it was hard to imagine what had brought them together in the first place, not to mention what kept the marriage alive. They had a one-year-old girl, whom I was encouraged to think of as a baby sister.
It was odd being a surrogate child, dropped into someone else’s family, a full-grown adolescent delivered overnight, the way cartoons of the time depicted a stork landing on the roof with a babe in diapers. I tried hard to fall into step with rules and rituals that circumscribed what had been an existence without boundaries. I would sleep in the guest bedroom unless guests were there, in which case I’d be given a cot in the study. I was to wake up every morning at 6:30, dress, and then cook myself a single egg in a metal poacher that formed it into a perfect circle. I was to receive a weekly allowance of five silver dollars for lunch money. After school, I was to do my homework, concentrating on math in order to raise my grade. Dinner was at 6:00 p.m. I was to show my math homework to Mr. Reynold, who would check it over, and then at 9:00 p.m., I was to file into their bedroom to kiss each of them good night. I found them, night after night, reading in their crisp pajamas, sitting up in beds on opposite walls, as far from each other as possible. The experience, I imagined, was like being drafted into the army, but it turned out that the routine, once I got used to it, wasn’t all that bad. I sensed that it helped keep dissolution at bay, for I knew that all was not well in this house. The place was eerily silent, lifeless, without affect. Even the baby seemed abnormally quiet. At dinners I tried to keep up a cheerful monologue; otherwise, a silence would descend, punctuated by the rhythmic clicking of Mr. Reynold’s false teeth. When he spoke, his wife often contradicted him or simply spoke over him. He and I formed an unspoken alliance, expressed through sympathetic glances. After he corrected my math homework, he took to patting me on the shoulder. I decided that in the divorce, I’d go with him.