III
1958
When John Elder was old enough to stay awake and crawl around the floor and play with his toys, he finally stopped screaming during the day, but he still screamed every time I put him to bed, either for a nap or for the night. The pediatrician told me to let him cry himself to sleep; otherwise, he warned, I would spoil him. I tried to let him cry for fifteen agonizing minutes before I went into the bedroom to find him sweaty and exhausted. He and I were both so upset that I never did that again. Clearly he was too distressed to be left alone—this had nothing to do with spoiling or not spoiling him. For some reason my son had an intense discomfort that I could not understand, but I wasn’t going to make it worse by abandoning him.
Mother spent her entire life suffering guilt and remorse because, when I was a baby, she left me closed up in my room, crying for hours until I fell asleep from exhaustion. She treated me the way she was taught, never picking me up except to feed me, and feeding me on a prescribed schedule that had nothing to do with my hunger. Whether I remember my suffering or think I do because of Mother’s recounting it to me, I was as haunted by those experiences as she was. When, in middle age, I went to a hypnotherapist, I remembered—or thought I remembered—how cold Mother’s touch was, and how hungry, lost, and frantic I felt when closed in that room. I didn’t want to give my own baby such memories.
Early one morning John Elder woke crying. I did everything I could to get him back to sleep, but he continued to cry. Finally, he began to mutter what sounded like the word car. He was much too young to talk, so I thought I must have misinterpreted his sound. But after he repeated it several times, I wrapped him up in a blanket and took him out to the car. As soon as I put him inside he stopped crying.
Had he really said car?
He was only eight months old; the idea seemed ridiculous.
I took him into the apartment again.
He immediately began to cry. “Car car car,” he repeated.
I put him in the car again. Again he stopped crying.
But he was too young to be able to talk! I still couldn’t believe he was actually saying a word and knew what it meant. Once more I took him inside. He began to cry.
“Car,” he said with frantic determination. “Car.”
With equal determination, I picked up the car keys. This time I put him in, started the car, and began to drive. He fell asleep almost immediately, but I drove for a long time, wanting to be certain he was deeply asleep before I risked parking the car and taking him out. He was sleeping so soundly that I was able to put him into his crib and go back to bed myself.
John Elder had said his first word.
It wasn’t the expected Mama or Dada. He had said the word car, and meant it. He had finally told me exactly what he needed to comfort and calm him, and it wasn’t me—it was the car. So be it. At last I knew something I could do to ease his distress. At least sometimes. I don’t know how many miles I put on the car driving over the dirt and often muddy roads of Mudville, but drive I did. In a year of extreme struggle and frustration, and what often felt like failure on my part, there was this one shining moment of success—my son had spoken to me and I had understood.
IV
When John Elder was a year old, we moved to Philadelphia so John could study for his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Lucille Jones, a longtime friend of my Aunt Curtis, found us an inexpensive apartment in West Philadelphia. It was in an old red-brick row house on Spruce Street that had originally been a one-family home. Our apartment was on the first floor and was divided by the common entryway and the stairs to the apartments on the second and third floors. Our living room, to the left of the entryway and just before the stairs, was long and narrow. Our bedroom—what must have originally been the dining room—had enormous double sliding doors. Every time someone closed the front door, our bedroom doors glided open.
The only room that felt private was the kitchen, with its heavy oak table and sideboard and a marvelous old wooden wall clock that ticked loudly as its pendulum swung back and forth, marking the seconds, minutes, and hours of our new lives in that peculiar apartment.
Mrs. O’Donnell, an old woman with henna-dyed hair and a limp, lived on the second floor. Her only friend, our landlady, lived on the third floor but was rarely at home except nights, as she spent her days cleaning houses.
Mrs. O’Donnell kept her brandy hidden in the cabinet of her grandfather clock—a secret she shared with me—because the landlady didn’t approve of drinking. From what I could see, Mrs. O’Donnell had little else besides those stolen sips of brandy and an apartment with knickknacks on every available surface.
She was lonely.
Most mornings she knocked on my door shortly after she heard John leave for the university.
I don’t remember much about the monologues she delivered during those visits. I felt compassion for her in her loneliness, but I felt trapped as she talked on and on. Some days I was able to get John Elder and myself dressed so we could slip out of the house before she came down. Then we’d spend the morning in the public park several blocks down on Spruce and across Baltimore Avenue.
John Elder contented himself digging in the sand with a large cooking spoon, or playing with one or another of the little cars or trucks I had brought with us. I sat on a bench and read, or simply watched him and the many other people in the park. John Elder never played with any of the other children, and though I must have at least occasionally talked with another mother, time has erased memories of those encounters. What I do remember vividly are fall’s brightly colored leaves on the trees and winter’s bitter cold that Georgia’s mild climate had not prepared me for.
Sometimes Mrs. O’Donnell came downstairs to visit when she heard us return from the park, but it was usually time for lunch and John Elder’s nap, so her visits then were brief. Visits with the landlady were even briefer. I saw her when I paid the rent, and once when she chastised me for not cleaning John Elder’s handprints off the glass pane of the front door. I’d not noticed that he had sometimes touched the glass when I held him up so that we could watch John arriving home from his day at the university.
John Elder was walking quite well, and saying many other words in addition to car by the time we lived in that apartment on Spruce Street. Though he had no idea what it meant, he loved saying the words “My father studies philosophy at the university.” His pronunciation was as clear as mine.
He still cried at nap- and bedtimes, but I’d discovered something that soothed him to sleep almost as easily as the car. It was a small canvas swing that I hung from the top molding of the doorway to the kitchen. He sat in it while I gave it an occasional push to keep it in motion until he tired of playing with its string of colored beads, closed his eyes, and dropped his head in sleep. I kept the swing swinging until I was certain he was sound asleep before taking him out and putting him to bed. Otherwise, he awoke screaming and I had to begin the entire process again.
Sometime during those early months in Philadelphia he gave up the swing in favor of my reading him to sleep. I’d read nursery rhymes to him since he was a baby, but until then he’d never gone to sleep while I was reading.
At the same time that he began to listen to me reading to him, he began to insist on keeping his shoes on with his pajamas. I had to wait until he was sleeping soundly in his crib before carefully removing them.
John Elder was already firmly entrenched in certain habits and preferences. For the entire second year of his life, he wanted me to read one book and one book only: The Little Engine That Could, the classic story of the little blue engine that accepted the almost impossible task of pulling a long train up a steep hill, when larger and stronger engines refused to undertake the task. It was the story of optimism, of faith in oneself to triumph over challenges. “I think I can—I think I can,” the little engine repeated as it chugged its way up the hill. “I thought I could!” it said after it had reached the top and started do
wn the other side. I read the book over and over until John Elder fell asleep. And though he never repeated the words aloud as I read, I feel certain that that chant, “I—think—I—can, I—think—I—can,” burned itself as deeply into his brain as it did into mine.
V
The first time John Elder and I visited Lucille Jones in her tall, thin row house, both of us were utterly fascinated. Its rooms were crammed full of more furniture, knickknacks, teacups, cut-glass bowls and vases, candlesticks, candy dishes, and decanters than any other house I’d ever seen. Most if not all of the furniture had been purchased at antiques shops or secondhand stores, each piece holding its stories silent forever in its old wood and upholstery. On the walls were the many oil paintings Mrs. Jones painted before she developed an allergy to turpentine.
Mrs. Jones was one of the most important people in my young life, and I adored her. I loved the imagination she had put into furnishing and decorating her house, and the fact that she valued the comfort of family and friends. “I would never have a coffee table people couldn’t prop their feet on if they wanted to,” she said. It mattered to me that she had been a painter and still played the piano.
She filled her life with art and music. And she filled mine. She introduced me to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, took me with her to exhibits at the Philadelphia Art Alliance and to concerts by the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Eugene Ormandy. And it was to her that I also talked most about my feelings and my marriage. With her I could express emotions that I was never permitted to express in my mother’s home, or at home with John. With her I felt free. As soon as I sat down on the living room sofa and began to talk with her, John Elder began to rush from one thing to another. He wanted to touch everything.
“Don’t touch!” I screamed as he reached out to feel the face of a plaster angel standing on a tall wooden pedestal. What if the angel were to come crashing to the floor, breaking its spread wings in the fall? “Don’t touch!”
Mrs. Jones leaned toward me and smiled. “If anything gets broken, it will be my fault, not yours.” Then she looked at John Elder touching the angel’s foot. “John Elder is more important to me than these old things,” she said.
I knew she meant it.
I never again told John Elder “Don’t touch!” or “Be careful!” when we were at Mrs. Jones’s house. And in all the years that we visited her, he never broke a single thing. But he touched everything he could reach and looked at everything he couldn’t. He touched vases, cups, and candy dishes. He ran his fingers across the bumpy cut glass of the decanter that Professor Jones poured his sherry from when he was downstairs rather than upstairs in his study preparing lectures for his classes or working on his book about Shelley.
Rows of colored glass bottles stood on shelves in the bay window in what had once been the dining room but now held a grand piano. Sunlight streaming through the window made it glow like stained glass. This was John Elder’s favorite room. His reason lay in the chest of drawers under the window. The bottom drawer was filled with a train engine, train cars and tracks, trucks, blocks, soldiers, and other toys left over from the childhoods of her two grown sons. “This,” Mrs. Jones announced, “will be John Elder’s special drawer.”
The drawer was heavy, with leaf-covered vines carved on its front, and large metal handles that John Elder tugged and tugged at until it slid open. Then he spent a long time simply holding the large Lionel engine and looking at it with awe. Sometimes he pushed the cars and trucks. Sometimes he lined the little soldiers up on the Oriental rug, worn thin from all the foot traffic to the kitchen through the years.
John Elder loved Mrs. Jones’s kitchen. He loved to sit at the old oak table and push its huge lazy Susan around, rattling the teaspoons standing in a mug on it. The table was round and had clawed feet. I sat at it and drank coffee with Mrs. Jones while John Elder ate cookies or ice cream and then went to the dining room where he played with the toys from the toy drawer.
When I was ready to leave, I would call to John Elder: “Come here, it’s time to go.” I would pick up my pocketbook and walk through the kitchen, dining room, and living room to the front door. “John Elder!” I would call.
“Just a minute, Mama.”
“Hurry!” I always responded. But my heart wasn’t in the word. I loved being at Mrs. Jones’s house as much as he did. And I must have often stood at the front door a full ten minutes more, talking with her before John Elder came to go home with me.
VI
One afternoon our upstairs neighbor Mrs. O’Donnell asked me to pin the hem of a dress she had sewn for herself. John Elder had never seen her apartment and, standing next to me, looked around with great interest as I knelt before Mrs. O’Donnell and began to pin the hem.
Suddenly something captured his attention and he started to walk across the room.
Just as suddenly Mrs. O’Donnell grabbed him and held him against her with a firm grip. Startled and frightened, John Elder bit her arm. She let out a little cry and dropped him to the floor. Picking him up, I mumbled a halfhearted apology and told her that I guessed I wouldn’t be able to pin her hem that day. I felt embarrassed that John Elder had bitten her—the skin wasn’t broken—but I couldn’t blame him.
After dinner that night, our landlady called for me to come up to Mrs. O’Donnell’s apartment. I left John Elder with John and climbed the stairs reluctantly. I found the two women in the kitchen. Mrs. O’Donnell was seated silently at the table. The landlady was standing by the stove with her feet far apart and her arms crossed over her chest. As I entered the room, she began to scream at me. “How dare you let that son of yours bite my friend! What kind of mother are you?”
Before I could respond to her accusations, she picked up a large iron skillet from the stove and began to chase me around the table with fierce determination. “How dare you!” she screamed as she chased me. “How dare you!”
We circled the table several times before I was able to run out the door and down the stairs to my apartment.
John and John Elder were in the kitchen.
“We’re moving, John,” I announced. After John Elder was asleep I told John the whole story. He supported my decision, as I knew he would.
I spent most of the night packing.
The next day I called a real estate agent and told him what we were looking for. There was a vacant apartment in a building on the corner of Forty-fifth and Pine. After looking at it, I signed a year’s lease.
We moved the next day. John left a check for the rent on a table in the entryway. I never heard from or saw the landlady or Mrs. O’Donnell again, though I sometimes thought of Mrs. O’Donnell alone with her things and her brandy.
1961
VII
John Elder was almost four and Doug was three when they first met in the park. Doug was John Elder’s first friend. They played in the dirt while Doug’s mother, Jean, and I talked. Sometimes playing with each other was difficult for the boys.
I never watched daytime TV and only let John Elder watch Happy the Clown in the morning. But somehow one day he watched The Three Stooges. After seeing the way the men hit one another, he began hitting Doug. He ignored all my attempts to make him stop. I never understood why he hit Doug, but Doug remained his friend no matter what John Elder did. The friendship only ended when Doug’s father finished the courses he’d been taking at the university and moved the family back to Billings, Montana.
John Elder never mentioned Doug to me again.
I had no address for Jean, and it was a very long time before I heard from her. When I finally received a letter from her over a year later she told me she’d given birth to a baby girl. But the news about Doug was shocking—he had drowned in an irrigation ditch near their home.
I felt devastated. What could I possibly write in response? Again and again I began letters to Jean only to tear each up and begin another. Days became weeks, weeks became months, and months became years. Still I mailed no letter to Jean. But I thought about
Doug and his death a great deal. I wrote nothing to Jean and heard nothing from her.
What remained for me was a painful, guilt-filled silence.
John Elder began attending nursery school, where he hit other children until he finally realized that hitting wasn’t conducive to keeping them as friends. He no longer talked about The Three Stooges and continued to say nothing about Doug.
VIII
I was feeling as bad as I’d ever felt. John was having an affair with a secretary in the German department at the university. I don’t know what made him go to the German department the first time, but he came home that day talking excitedly about a secretary who sat at her desk holding one of her breasts in her hand. He was fascinated by her. Shortly after meeting her, he took his wedding ring off, saying that it was no longer comfortable to wear. He also began to come home later than usual. He wouldn’t admit that he was having an affair, but the fact was undeniable and I’d reached the limits of my endurance. I’d begun to vomit much of the food I tried to eat, and my weight dropped rapidly from 145 pounds to 118.
Whenever I tried to talk with John about my feelings, he’d collapse in the bed and mumble nonsensical phrases. I would struggle to make him communicate with me, then finally give up. Either he was split down the middle in a terribly frightening way, or he was a hell of a good actor. In the twenty-five years I was with him, I was never able to say for certain which he was. Perhaps he was both.
“I’m going to Georgia,” I finally told him. “You can make up your mind whether you want your marriage or your girlfriend, but I can’t take this.”
“If you go south, you’ll be abandoning me. If you leave, I will have an affair,” he yelled.
“You’re already having an affair, John.”
I packed John Elder’s and my suitcases and arranged for our flight.
My mother-in-law, Carolyn, met us at the Atlanta airport. I planned on staying for a while in Lawrenceville, about two hundred miles from my parents in Cairo.
The Long Journey Home Page 10