As much as I had enjoyed our experiences on the West Coast, I was glad to be going east again. After John backed the car out of our parking space and headed for the highway, I didn’t look back.
Chapter Nine
I
1963–1964
AFTER TWO THOUSAND MILES OF DRIVING, WE WERE FINALLY IN PITTSBURGH, with its hills, rivers, bridges, steel mills, and the tall Cathedral of Learning of the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh had none of the charm of Philadelphia, and we woke mornings to find our windowsills and breakfast table covered with soot from the steel mills. But Pittsburgh was in the East, and for me the East was home.
We rented a house in Edgewood, within walking distance of John Elder’s elementary school. He was six years old, and in the first grade. Almost as soon as he entered school, I began to get complaints from his teacher that he wouldn’t obey her instructions and was disruptive to the class. She wanted me to “do something with him.” I could do nothing except feel bad about doing nothing. I didn’t understand my son and felt like a failure as a mother.
The good thing was that almost immediately John Elder made friends with a neighbor named Lenny. They walked to school together, and many afternoons Lenny came over to play. Once they tied a rope to the handle of a battery-operated radio, turned it on, and lowered it down the laundry chute. I stood startled at the kitchen sink as loud music suddenly blared from the wall.
I was always glad that John Elder liked to spend much of his time playing contently by himself, and I never interpreted his inclination to do this as a sign that something was wrong with him. I, too, had enjoyed many hours of playing alone when I was a child. And like my son, I had spent much of that time drawing and reading.
By the time John Elder was in the second grade, he was making incredibly detailed drawings of sailing ships. I was amazed at their precision, and at his skill as a draftsman. He also began to put plastic models together. His first model was a submarine. After finishing it, he left it on the table and went outside. It felt odd that he’d said nothing and hadn’t even shown it to me. After a while I became concerned and went to see what he was doing.
I found him sitting on the front steps, crying.
I sat down beside him.
“What’s wrong, John Elder?”
He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I ruined my submarine,” he said.
“It looked fine to me,” I said hopefully. “Let’s go look at it again.”
We went inside together. John Elder stood looking at his model while tears welled up in his eyes again.
“See, it’s ruined,” he said, pointing to a drop of glue that had seeped from the seam on top.
“But you can hardly see that little drop. I don’t think that ruins your submarine at all,” I protested.
“It’s not perfect,” he responded with a tone of finality. Then he got a book from the bookcase, sat on the couch, and began to stare at it, though I could see that he was still thinking about his submarine.
Years later I saw that little gray submarine in a place of honor on top of a bookcase in his home after he’d grown up and married, with many interesting jobs already in his past and even more in his future. I was happy that he’d finally seen that his first model hadn’t been a failure but a triumph.
II
1965
John Elder was growing up. He was going to be eight years old in August, and I was already twenty-nine. I felt a longing in my heart for another baby. John too wanted another child, and we were happy when I got pregnant almost immediately. My brother Mercer had moved to Pittsburgh to be near us and had an office job in the city. Most days he came over to see us after work. More and more often John encouraged him to drink with him at a local tavern. One night, when John returned home, for no apparent reason he went into a rage, pulled all the drawers out of my bureau, and slung my clothes across the room. By the time I was several months pregnant I finally realized that John was an alcoholic.
He was afraid that the baby might be a girl. He told me again and again that we would have to give the baby up for adoption if it was a girl, as he refused to be father to a girl. I felt terrible about his attitude but could do nothing to change it. Because of it, I too became afraid that the baby might be a girl.
On the late afternoon when I began to have contractions, John came home from the university and insisted that I cook spaghetti for dinner. I didn’t feel like standing and cooking and suggested that we go out to dinner (knowing John, I also knew that the dirty dishes would be in the sink waiting for me when I returned from the hospital). Mercer was with us and supported me. We went out to dinner, but John was angry and silent.
After dinner Mercer stayed with John Elder while John took me to Magee-Womens Hospital. After having such a difficult labor and delivery with John Elder, I was determined not to repeat the experience. For months I’d spent time most nights practicing my special breathing exercises and reading about natural childbirth. When the time came, the labor progressed with ease. I felt pressure but no pain.
Magee was a teaching hospital, and many interns sat in the bleacherlike seating and watched. A large mirror hung from the ceiling and enabled me to watch the birth of our baby, thankfully a son. I’ll never forget the thrill of seeing his head emerging from my body, his mouth open in a howl even before the rest of him was born.
The doctor handed him to a nurse, who placed him on a table. As the nurses cleaned him, he lay looking at me, our eyes locked together in an unbreakable bond.
In our room, Chris lay in a clear plastic bassinet and slept, while I did drawing after drawing of him. I remember reading someplace that drawing is the next thing to touching, and I believe this is true. With my hand and eyes I traced every contour of his small body. When he cried, I was the one who fed him or changed his diaper. When he opened his eyes, I was the one he saw. I could not have been happier.
John was miserable. Just as when John Elder was born, he was sick with jealousy. He felt burdened by having to take John Elder out for dinner or to cook frozen TV dinners for both of them. John Elder was quite competent when it came to bathing, dressing, and walking to school and back, but I knew John resented what little attention he required. Also, John had to do the laundry, a task he disliked intensely. He arrived every day full of complaints.
I was allowed only three visitors, and Pat King was one of them. I’d met Pat in a drawing class at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center, and she’d become my best friend in Pittsburgh and—ultimately—one of my best friends in life. She was welcomed not only by me but by my roommate and the nurses. We all needed her light, friendly spirit to balance John’s stormy temperament, which threatened to cast a dark spell on everyone.
Mercer was my other visitor. He assured me—truthfully or not—that John Elder was doing all right without me. He was upset by John’s attitude, but we didn’t focus on that. What mattered was that the new baby was healthy and content.
I brought Chris home on a glorious late-October day, gold leaves everywhere.
Mother hired a nurse to help me for two weeks after we came home, but I wanted to do everything for the baby myself. The nurse was a sensitive woman and quick to see that, so she worked hard cleaning the house, doing the laundry, and cooking dinner, while I gave my attention to Chris. “You’re as happy over that baby as I was over my new living room furniture,” she commented one day when she saw me standing and looking down at Chris as he slept.
John was upset about having anyone in the house except the family. It was difficult enough that the new baby took so much of my attention, but to have a stranger doing things I usually did was more than he could accept. The second day the nurse was there, he cursed loudly and flung the silver candlesticks across the dining room because he didn’t like something she’d cooked for dinner. After that, until the two weeks were over, she cooked an early dinner every day and rushed away before he got home.
I couldn’t stop looking at the new baby, and neither could John Elder. He
watched me feed him, dress him, change his diapers, and rock him. Sometimes he sat on the couch and held him. I’d had no idea John Elder could be so gentle or affectionate.
John must have paid at least a little attention to Chris, but I can’t remember those times. He spent more time at the university than he had before. And Mercer, after being notified that he was going to be drafted into the army, joined the navy and left. I missed him terribly. John continued to go to the local tavern most nights, though alone. More often than not he was drunk by the time he came to bed.
Before Chris was born I’d packed my oil paints and brushes away. I knew it would be too difficult to care for a baby while dealing with the mess of oil paints and turpentine, so I’d made up my mind to focus on drawing and painting with watercolors for the first four years of his life. Sometimes Pat King came over and painted with me. Chris often lay or sat in his playpen and watched us.
It was a time of going to faculty cocktail parties and art exhibits, taking classes at the Arts and Crafts Center, and visiting a neighbor who was also an artist. I was thrilled when a local art gallery took several of my paintings and actually sold two. Despite John and his drinking, it was a happy time for me.
III
1966–1968
John wasn’t content at the university. When his friend and colleague Bruce Aune accepted the position as head of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, John was glad to move with him. Both Bruce and his wife, Ilene, were friends of ours, and it felt good to be moving together.
We moved in August, before Chris’s first birthday in October.
I looked forward to living in Amherst, home of Emily Dickinson, and so was upset when John called me and announced that he’d rented a house on a dairy farm in Hadley.
The Hadley house stood on a hill overlooking a large pasture, acres of farmland, and beyond those, the Connecticut River. A Lyman from Northampton built the house in 1743. He’d lost his family in a fire and wanted to begin again in a place that wouldn’t remind him of his tragic past. I don’t know how long he lived in the new house before he disappeared. He was found later on the mountain behind the house with his throat slashed. No one seemed to know whether an Indian had killed him or he had committed suicide.
Summer and fall passed, and our first New England winter was bitter. Wind howled through the house, rattling the windows and shaking the attic door on its hinges. The first time I climbed the attic stairs, I was startled to find at the top an old-fashioned high chair with a life-sized baby doll wrapped in plastic sitting in it. The attic, with its old hand-hewn beams, was filled with thousands of dead wasps.
Out the kitchen window were large expanses of snow-covered pasture, the monotony broken by one bare tree, dark against the white. We were surrounded by snow on every side. Winter was very long.
John spent his days at the university, and John Elder went to the Hadley Elementary School, where his teacher complained about not being able to control him.
I stayed at home with Chris, who, when not napping, required a great deal of attention. Either he was climbing on things that he could fall from and get hurt, or he was putting things in his mouth. Once he tried to eat a handful of Johnson’s paste wax while I was waxing the dining room floor, and at Christmas he ate a Styrofoam Santa Claus and had to have his stomach pumped. Sometimes I would take him with me to visit Esther, the wife of John Barstow, the dairy farmer whose house was just yards from ours, but our visits were usually brief, for I had to work to keep Chris from banging on the organ in her living room.
As we sat eating dinner that Christmas, John’s parents called. When Carolyn began to speak, John placed the receiver in the sink and turned the disposal on. Then, without saying a word, he sat back down and continued to eat.
After school John Elder often played with the son of John Barstow’s brother and partner on the farm, who also lived near us. Once when sledding, the boys had a wreck and John Elder’s forehead was slashed open by a blade of his friend’s sled. In the summer the two boys climbed the mountain behind the house and got stuck on a rock ledge. The farmer had to climb up and rescue them.
John got drunk most nights and insisted on having sex, though he knew I hated to have sex with him when he was drunk. He also knew that I’d eventually give in out of exhaustion. He had long since ceased discussing philosophy with me, a thing I’d loved. And he was cross with John Elder, criticizing him endlessly. One night, before I could stop him, he slammed John Elder against the dining room wall. I made an appointment for our family with a therapist, but after several meetings I realized he wasn’t doing any good at all and we stopped going. I found another therapist, and then another, but no one could help us. John displayed none of his negative behavior in front of the therapists, and John Elder wasn’t willing to talk at all.
I spent much of my time lonely and depressed.
Bruce and Ilene came out for dinner occasionally, and we went to their home, but I never talked about my concerns with them.
I was always glad when Mercer, stationed in Newport, Rhode Island, drove up for the weekend, which he did often. Seeing how much John was drinking and how often he slipped into muttering his nonsensical phrases, Mercer understood why I was eager to have company.
Summer arrived and we were given a generous portion of the garden space next to the garage. John loved to garden and spent every moment he could spare from his academic responsibilities working there. We planted corn, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, onions, lettuce, beets, and bell peppers. What we didn’t eat, I froze or canned. And once the apples on the apple tree in the backyard ripened and fell on the grass, I gathered them and made many apple pies for the freezer as well.
John continued to drink heavily, utter his nonsensical phrases, and force his unwelcome sex on me, but we had the garden, and with it came times of gladness between us together and separately.
Jack and Carolyn drove up for a short visit that summer. It was during their time with us that I noticed a red, scaly patch of skin on John’s forehead. That was the beginning of the psoriatic rheumatoid arthritis that was to torment him to one degree or another for the rest of his life. Shortly after the skin condition started, his left knee began to collect fluid that had to be drained every week. His pain was acute. He mixed barbiturates with alcohol and often stumbled when he walked and slurred his speech when he talked. I was afraid he would hurt or kill himself. His condition grew progressively worse. His rheumatologist told him he would be in a wheelchair by the time he was forty.
On a cold night in February, Mother called to tell me that Daddy had died. I’d just talked with him an hour before, telling him I wouldn’t be coming to visit as I’d planned because we’d just bought a house and I needed to stay and pick out tiles for the bathrooms and linoleum for the kitchen floor. Mother told me that he was happy for me and had paced out the dimensions of our half-acre lot on their two-acre yard before going to Bubba’s, and then The Old Home Place, where he died of a heart attack. I’d told Daddy I wasn’t going to visit him, and he’d died within the hour. It would take years and writing an entire book of poetry before I was able to deal with my grief and guilt.
Daddy was dead.
Sobbing, I leaned against John, but he was so drunk he could barely hold himself upright. He too was crying. We pulled away from each other, and he made reservations for Chris and me to fly south for the funeral. John Elder always found Mother cold and uncaring and didn’t want to go to Cairo with us. I went to the basement and put a load of clothes into the washing machine. Then I leaned against the old stone wall and continued to sob for a while longer before going upstairs to pack.
The next morning the deep snow in the yard was so hard and icy we had difficulty walking from the house to the car without falling. But within hours Chris and I were in Cairo, where everyone was wearing short sleeves, azaleas were in full bloom, and Daddy’s body lay in a casket in the funeral home. Everything felt surreal. I couldn’t stop crying.<
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The house was filled with people. After noticing that many of the guests were holding cups of coffee, Chris picked up an imaginary coffeepot and went around the room refilling the cups. Some people thanked him, while others asked for more. He had a wonderful time.
I was grateful that my broad-brimmed corduroy hat covered my face when I bent my head down during the service. I’d never cried so hard in my life. I heard the minister say that Daddy had loved his children. Then someone sang “The Old Rugged Cross,” Daddy’s favorite hymn, and everyone filed out of the funeral-home chapel to the cars waiting to take us to the cemetery.
Bubba drove the car I was in, with his wife, Anne, in the front seat beside him and Mother and Mercer in the backseat with me. Mother looked a little uncomfortable when Bubba, Mercer, and I each lit a cigarette as soon as we were seated. As the car filled with smoke, she said: “Well, if anyone would understand, your father would.”
Beyond the drive, I don’t have a single memory until that night, when Mother showed me all the new clothes she’d sewn to wear when she taught school. She was proud of her fine work. There was so much that she wanted to share with me, and I knew she needed me to be with her after the shock of Daddy’s death, but I had to fly home the next day to drive John to a Boston hospital for experimental treatment for his arthritis. There was no time for grief.
IV
I drove John to Boston the day after I returned from Daddy’s funeral. He was to be one of the first patients to have the drug methotrexate injected directly into a joint. After several days I drove back to Boston and brought him home. The medication was effective. His knee no longer collected fluid, and he suffered less pain, though he was unable to walk without the use of a cane. One day he was even strong enough to walk with me along the property line of our new house.
The Long Journey Home Page 13