5. Mothers, I know, are not always good.
a. I have difficulty saying that my mother was bad. She was depressed, certainly, and, given what I have been able to extract from her surviving sisters, she was also in all likelihood suffering from some form of what is now described as bipolar disorder. My aunts, Cassandra and Helen, told me only last year about the way my mother fell into a prolonged depression when, although she was accepted to Smith, my grandmother refused to let her go, instead keeping her home to help look after their father. “Isidora was the brightest of the three of us,” Helen told me, “and no one deserved to go to college more than she did.” “Such a good student, always,” Cassandra said, “never missed a day of school. She even timed the chickenpox to occur over summer vacation between second and third grades.” But instead of going to college, as she should have done, preparing for a career in any of the subjects in which she had excelled as a girl, she stayed home and looked after her father, a New England patriarch who had inherited all his money, the baby of his own family, spoiled and moody and incapable of even making coffee for himself. My mother and grandmother took it in shifts to look after him, tending to illnesses that were never diagnosed but always excruciating: pains in his legs and feet, pains in his back, a persistent cough, a general malaise that kept him orbiting his bedroom and study for thirty years, moving from bed to couch to the bathroom down the hall, almost never changing out of pajamas and dressing gown and slippers. My mother and father met on the beach one summer, or at least that is the version I know from my father. My aunts have no idea how the two met: “Your father came to the house one day and asked for Isidora’s hand. Our parents were many things, stubborn, backward looking, but they were not inherently cruel. They could see that Chilton and Isidora were in love and our father gave his consent,” Helen explained, although Cassandra interrupted: “You could see it was somewhat grudging. Helen says they weren’t cruel, and perhaps that’s true in a way, cruelty was not the overriding character of their interactions with us, but they were certainly capable of cruelty. I felt the willow switch more than once, and when I brought home my first beau, who went on to be president of a bank and later a state senator, my father escorted him out the front door because his shoes weren’t shined.” My mother’s manic spells, my aunts told me, only came after the marriage, when my parents set up house in Portsmouth, my father driving to work in Durham while my mother tried to keep order in a house that needed constant attention; a house, I cannot help thinking, not so unlike the one Nathaniel and I now own: recently built, but already falling down. “It was the house that drove her mad,” Cassandra continued, “trying to keep up something that never should’ve been built in the first place, at least not where it was, in the middle of a swamp for heaven’s sake.” “It doesn’t work that way,” Helen interrupted, “mental illness, I mean. A place can’t make a person crazy. Crazy is in the blood, in the genes, I mean look at daddy, Cassandra. Crazy is a wind that blows through the generations, not just a momentary storm. Your mother had her first breakdown after you were born, Julia. Terrible post-partum blues, and then when you started walking, the manias returned. She was so worried you’d walk yourself into harm that she tied you down in the crib and flew round the house taping and retaping foam padding on every corner, sharp or dull. Your father was beside himself. He tried to talk sense into her, and managed to do so to a certain extent.” “The depressions just got worse, Helen,” Cassandra interrupted. “When the mania went it never came back, but Isidora kept sinking deeper and deeper into that swamp until she couldn’t see any way out of it except to hoist herself up by the only means she could find.” The image shocked me, not least because I had always thought of my mother’s suicide as an act of aggression against my father and me; I had only occasionally stopped to think that we might not have played a part in her actions except as extras to fill out the back of the stage in a crowd scene, powerless to revise the conclusion she wrote without ever consulting the two of us. Even before she died, I grew up without a mother. For the first six years of my life, there was a woman who lived in my house, who lifted me from my cot in the morning, washed me in the bath, brushed my hair, put me in immaculate dresses, fed me bland food, and tied me to chairs, put me in playpens and never allowed me to go outside unless I was with her, wrapped my head and arms in foam padding tied with elastic bandages, little bells glued to the backs of my shoes and slippers so she could always hear where I was if she lost track of me for a moment. Her name was Isidora Crutcher Lovelace. I survive her. And what she was, what she did to me, I think now, was no fault of her own.
b. For a portrait of truly bad mothering, one need look no further than Nathaniel’s mother. When I first met Ruth and Arthur Noailles, neither said anything to me directly, and up until our wedding day Nathaniel’s father never spoke to me; even since then we speak only telegraphically, yes or no questions, brief greetings and farewells. I know the man is evil and I will have him nowhere near my child. I encourage Nathaniel not to see them, and finally decided Copley would never see them again, not until he is old enough to defend himself, by which time Arthur, I hope, will be dead. All real communication has always been through Nathaniel’s mother, who dismissed me on first sight as “a backwoods tomboy,” and suggested he could do better just by throwing his hand inside any of the sorority houses on campus and grabbing the first plaid skirt that presented itself. Apart from the many horrors Nathaniel himself has told me about his mother’s behavior, there is one story I have heard only from his brother, Matthew, and which, at Matthew’s request, I have not discussed with Nathaniel. Matthew confided in me in the hope that it would help me appreciate things about Nathaniel that perhaps even he himself does not understand. I am still of two minds about whether it would help him to know the story, or do him more irreparable harm. He knows his mother subjected him to analytical interrogation recorded on a daily basis from the moment he was old enough to hold a coherent conversation, and that these “sessions” fed directly into her published research. What he does not seem to remember is that in his earliest years she all but used him as a subject of psychological experimentation, while Matthew looked on, bewildered. The experiments were a variation on others, undertaken earlier in the century, in which children were exposed to adults beating up an inflatable doll and then themselves given the chance to play with the same doll. “In our mother’s case,” Matthew explained to me, “she experimented only on Nathaniel. Although I suppose it’s possible she did the same thing to me when I was very small and I have no memory of it, or have merged the memory of my own experience with the memories of watching Nathaniel make his way through these set-ups. In mom’s version, she and Nathaniel, who was three at the time, made a doll together, the size of an adult man. They stuffed newspaper into panty hose to make legs, which were then placed inside a pair of my father’s cast-off khaki slacks. They filled one of dad’s old thermal underwear shirts with more newspaper to make a torso and arms, then clothed it in one of dad’s cast-off dress shirts. This was all pretty straightforward, nothing very sinister, and they were doing it around Halloween, ‘making a scarecrow’ for the front porch, as my mother put it. It was with the making of the head that things turned weird. They inflated a pink balloon and covered it with papier-mâché, which was allowed to harden and dry before being painted a sickly flesh color, and carefully pasted on a photocopied image of dad’s face, taken from a recent academic portrait, so the scarecrow was explicitly an effigy of our father. In this whole process, I wasn’t allowed to participate. They did it on the back porch and I was locked in the kitchen, told to do my homework, even though I was too young to have any. When the scarecrow was finished, my mother sat the figure upright in a lawn chair and looked at it for a long time, while Nathaniel also looked, and then she said to him, ‘Sometimes I get so angry with your father. And you know what I do when I get angry? I want to hit him.’ There was a baseball bat on the porch and she suddenly picked it up. ‘I’m feeling angry with h
im now,’ she said, and she took a swing at the scarecrow’s head, which was attached to a broomstick that had been shoved into the torso. The papier-mâché head, brittle as it was after drying, cracked open like a piñata. She hit it again and again until it was in shreds, and then she started to punch the stuffed body, tearing it apart and strewing the newspaper all over the porch while Nathaniel watched. Our mother was in a frenzy and Nathaniel looked like he didn’t know what to think. When she was finished, she smoothed back her hair and said, ‘Oh dear, it looks like we’ll have to start all over.’ So they began the process from the beginning, but unbeknownst to Nathaniel there was a second head already prepared, which she brought out from a box in the corner of the porch. When the second scarecrow effigy was complete, seated in the lawn chair, she excused herself, leaving Nathaniel alone with the simulacrum of his father and the baseball bat, which was too big and too heavy for him to handle. He tried to pick it up but couldn’t swing it, and then he noticed a smaller bat, a toy plastic one, on the other side of the porch. He went for the plastic bat and ran at the scarecrow, walloping its head with the pasted-on image of our father’s face until it began to crack apart. When it failed to break in the same way as the first one, he dropped the bat and pulled the scarecrow onto the floor and began stomping all over it while my mother watched from the kitchen, taking notes the whole time. As I remember it, this happened once a week, usually on Friday afternoons, for more than six months. When it got too cold to do it on the porch, she relocated to the basement, and the scarecrow turned into Santa Claus, and then the Easter Bunny, and finally Uncle Sam. Sometimes the figure had my father’s face, but sometimes it had mom’s, or even mine, and with each subsequent iteration of the game, my mother’s beatings and Nathaniel’s abuse of the dolls became more violent, until, by the end of it, they burned two effigies of dad in the garden on the Fourth of July, while he was at an academic conference in New York. When the fires burned out, smoking fragments of material were strewn around the lawn and my brother, who hadn’t even turned four, was sobbing uncontrollably.” After Matthew told me about these “experiments,” I went looking through Ruth’s publications for any indication that she might have used her findings, such as they were, and came across a long article she published in the early 1980s, in which she claimed to have undertaken a similar study on a group of thirty children.
c. Nathaniel and I came together, in part, as survivors of our childhoods. We described ourselves to each other in those terms. And in leaving Boston we are both, in our ways, fleeing from our parents. I believe that I am a good mother. I believe that I am neither like my depressive mother nor my abusive mother-in-law. I believe that I am nurturing and fair, and that the ways I have involved Copley in my work are not exploitative. He enjoys recording the lexicon and we discuss the meanings of words that are new to him. As a result, his vocabulary is far beyond what is normal for his age, as though there is anything truly “normal” in this world of constant and subtle and highly individualized variation. Yet I wonder if I have bewitched myself into believing that I am good. Perhaps I work too hard, perhaps I should stay home instead of trying to have a career, although the idea fills me with dread. I would die if I gave up my work. I wonder if the ways I have involved him in the production of my research, ways that I tell myself are merely temporary, because his voice will be replaced in time with the voice of someone else, a professional, someone paid to express words in a neutral, natural way, are in fact forms of exploitation no less serious if less disturbing than what Nathaniel’s mother did to him. I hear noises and I ask the machine to confirm what I believe I hear; I fail to trust my own senses, and, on some occasions, the machine is unable to confirm what I think I have heard, or even that there was anything to hear: “I can hear you breathing,” it says in Copley’s fragmented voice. “But can you hear anything else? Can you hear any noise that I am not making?” I ask. It thinks for a moment, looking at my hands, my body, I even stand up in front of it so it can have a clear view of my entire person, and know I am not making a noise under the counter, and then it says, “No, I cannot hear any other noise.” I check its sound sensors and, holding my breath and keeping my body completely still, confirm that they register nothing. If I am hearing noises that do not exist, then there must be something amiss in the way my own brain is firing, even if it is not mental illness as such. I hear noises, I see moving shadows, and I have no way to confirm these phenomena are “real” in the sense of their occurring in a way that others would be able to verify, and not just manifested by my mind. When I sleep do I sleep soundly, or do I rise from the bed and fly through the house, putting my hands to mischief I never remember when I wake? No. I would leave behind evidence for my waking self. I have to believe that if I were the agent of our distress, there would be a sign: a trail of crumbs leading me back to my own guilt. There is no such trail, at least not one pointing in my direction.
6. I fear my husband and I fear for Copley. Nearly a week has passed since I began this document, the night when I believed I woke to find myself alone in bed, when I went in search of answers and found only the dark shape at the bottom of the stairs. When I spoke to Nathaniel about it the next morning, he flew into a rage: “You’re accusing me of rape,” he said. “I am accusing you of nothing. I am asking you if we had sex last night.” “I was working. And no, we didn’t have sex. I wouldn’t—you have to believe I would never violate you, Julia.” I wish I could believe him. After that morning, when everything was in order, the house calm for a brief period, the incursions have now resumed. Nathaniel looks at me as if I were the guilty party, while I look at him in the same way, more convinced with each passing day that I must be right. The changes I now find each morning have turned from the dramatic to the subtle, so that I wonder even if they are intentional. A brush that I am sure I left next to the sink in the bathroom I find lying on top of a stack of my sweaters in the walk-in closet the next morning. The long-missing window keys suddenly appeared in a drawer, and windows that have been closed end up open, rain flashing in through the screens to soak the floors. Doors I am sure I have locked are unlocked in the morning—not open, but susceptible to opening. We all come home one day, the four of us having gone out together to a movie, to find the back door unlocked and a candle burning in the living room next to a framed photo of Copley. I do not remember lighting the candle, nor do I remember the candle being next to his photograph, but Nathaniel assures me it was just an oversight, forgetfulness, because he and I are both so busy. (Later I ask Louise and she shrugs, looks concerned, says she does not remember the candle even being in the living room. During the movie, I recall, Nathaniel excused himself to buy more popcorn. He was gone for almost half an hour and then returned empty-handed, saying he’d been to the restroom.) On the weekends, there are endless phone calls from numbers I do not recognize. Whenever one of us answers, there is a brief pause before the caller hangs up. I have checked the numbers and they all belong to payphones, scattered across the western half of the city, none of them more than a mile from our door. I feel my gut contract every time the phone rings, and threaten to have it disconnected. I know that Nathaniel cannot be making such calls, but perhaps, I think, it is unrelated to the other “events.” All of them, it seems clear to me, he could have done, and not only that, given the other factors, he must have done. What I do know, and what I cannot ignore, is that it is my duty to protect Copley from a father who, not an hour ago, hissed into my ear, “I hate that kid. I’m gonna kill him.”
Fallen Land Page 33