To us, that’s all death was – a brief midsummer stillness and then a sandwich.
Real death didn’t exist yet. It certainly hadn’t happened to anyone we knew; our grandparents were alive, our parents, even the family dog. Of course, we’d heard stories about Heaven during our few visits to Sunday School, but Heaven sounded like a cartoon – angel wings, halos, and harps and a bunch of other silly shit even we little ones didn’t buy. Still, the grown-ups seemed convinced and from their description Heaven was basically an existential do-over.
Death, too, was a cartoon. When you fell off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote, you didn’t die – you became accordion-shaped. Even on the grown-up’s TV programs, death was a pratfall. Shoot the bad guy on Sunday night’s Bonanza and there was no blood, just a crumple to the ground followed by Bonanza’s theme song and the credits rolling by.
We never gave Death or Heaven a second thought, but those ending credits on Bonanza? They were horrifying. Because Sunday was a school night, school nights meant bedtime, and to little boys bedtime was in fact Death.
Bedtime was the sudden, unexpected, and horrifying end of all things. Even though it came at precisely the same time every night, even though we received count-down warnings as the dreaded hour approached, when it arrived we never failed to be both shocked and aghast. (“WHAT?? But we’re not even tired!!”) Bedtime was so much like death we went through the same Kübler-Ross stages of acceptance.
Denial – “It CAN’T be bedtime.”
Anger – “Why do we even HAVE bedtime?”
Bargaining – “If you let us stay up, we’ll go to bed tomorrow after lunch.”
Depression – “This is the worst thing that has happened since the dinosaurs.”
And finally, acceptance.
Bedtime was indeed death. Even the rituals were the same: the preparing of the body (the solemn washing of teeth, the funereal donning of pajamas), the readings, the occasional prayer, and finally the inevitable darkness. All that was missing were Hallmark sympathy cards arriving in the mail:
Our thoughts are with you during this difficult hour, when “Bonanza” is over at 8 pm Central Standard Time, and 9 pm Eastern.
Aside from the nightly horror of bedtime, the days of the early 1960s brought little that was truly life-threatening. There was no terrorism on the nightly news, no anthrax, no AIDS; no buildings falling, no children disappearing. There was only the sunny back yard with games of Army Guys and Mom’s sandwiches and the grass unreeling under your feet as you ran and ran and never grew tired.
Wait. There may have been one thing – Being In Trouble. That was scary. And you knew you were in trouble when Mom changed your name to “Young Man.”
“And just what do you think you’re doing, young man?”
That was bad, but Mom’s punishments were swift and fair. Far worse was Being In Trouble with Dad.
Convicted murderers await execution at midnight but you, Young Man, your hour of reckoning was always “When Your Father Gets Home.” You had to wait. Since this was before you knew how to tell time, the hour of When-Your-Father-Gets-Home ’o’ Clock arrived when it arrived, with only the warning crunch of gravel in the driveway as his car pulled in. You ran upstairs to watch unseen from a high window as Dad entered the Millstone. You caught some of the muffled conversation down in the kitchen, certain you’d heard the phrase “limb from limb,” and then listened for the inevitable thump of feet on the stairs. When at last the door to your room opened, there was nowhere left to hide but the fort inside your head. Dad’s red face bent down within inches of yours and then came the huge wads of angry sound you could almost hear with your hair. With his spittle misting your black-framed 1960’s glasses, the Alamo inside was as far away as you could get and it’s there you waited for the final whack on the back of your head.
It wasn’t particularly painful, the whack – just humiliating. It always came, and always with its signature phrase: “WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO AROUND HERE?? KNOCK SOME HEADS TOGETHER??”
In the early days, that was the closest we Little Ones got to the furnace of Dad’s anger, its orange flames not yet white with rage.
COLD WAR
For now, the thick walls of the Millstone were a safe place for my mother to raise six little boys. But beyond the gates at the end of the driveway the country drifted into a period of dangerous intolerance: the Cold War was getting into high gear and civil rights were more than a decade away. The ‘50s were a combination of boredom, paranoia, racism, and sexual repression. If the Religious Right could travel back there today, they’d break the return switch and set up shop in Paradise. They had Russians to hate, Generals to vote for, “Negroes” to fear, beatniks to laugh at, and church to go to on Sunday.
Life was good.
Grandpa Longstreet, who’d voted Democratic in every election since Wilson, voted for DFL nominee Adlai Stevenson in ’52 and served as the county campaign manager for him when he ran again in ‘56. My mother read widely to inform and support her political affiliations but took counsel in these matters from her father. RJL was of the opinion “The General’s” White House was fear-mongering half the time and golfing the other.
The state of Minnesota was one of few Democratic stalwarts, with local heroes like Hubert Humphrey making a stand for civil rights at the ’48 Democratic National Convention. “But Rochester and the Clinic were a Republican strong-hold,” my mother remembers. “Which is why the Democrats had to dig around to find people like me, you see. To stand in the reception line for Eleanor Roosevelt when she came through town campaigning for Adlai.”
The little town was Republican; full of what Myra called “rabid Ike-men”: men who’d survived the war and wanted now only to practice medicine and raise their families. World War II was over. They’d all paid their dues: some in combat, all in medical school. They were the best in the world at what they did and the world needed what they did. Polio stalked the summer streets and cancer was warming up on-deck.
The Republicans beat Adlai Stevenson twice; in ’52 and again in ’56. During the months leading up to the elections, tensions grew between my father and mother. What began as dinner disagreements lasted until the dishes, and then until bedtime. Arguments about who was fit to serve in the White House devolved into who was fit to have an opinion. In October of ’52, Myra wrote: “Rog and I have gotten into such violent arguments I am reminded of our Roosevelt-Dewey days”.
When Adlai Stevenson’s sister, Elizabeth Ives, campaigned for him in Rochester, my mother had the opportunity to tell her the story of the great divide in Sullivan family politics. When a local pol later suggested it was time to “get out and ring a few doorbells,” Mrs. Ives interrupted, saying, “Everyone but Mrs. Sullivan. She has her work cut out for her at home.”
Outnumbered in Rochester and overpowered at the Millstone, my mother sought more “ammunition,” as she put it, from her father and brother Jimmy: facts, figures, proof. To which Roger’s reply would be, “You’re not thinking for yourself.” To which Myra responded by visiting the public library – “to get newspaper articles and read both candidates’ speeches and some editorials.” But no matter how she fortified her position, she gained no ground and by election time was writing, “Things are so tense in our house we hardly dare mention politics.”
She began to keep her politics to herself. The Cold War had arrived in the Millstone.
My father in his prime, sitting on the bench in front of the Millstone, a year or two before everything went to hell. Probably 1956.
FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW
A few years ago, an arsonist nearly burned down my brother Chris’s house. Neither Chris nor any of his family was there at the time, though the family hamster died. The morning after, Chris and I drove back to his house to examine the damage. When we pried away the firemen’s temporary plywood door and entered, the smell of wet charcoal was strong. I watched Chris walk through the dripping cavern of his old bedroom, where ceiling insulation hung down like stal
actites. As he looked for possessions worth salvaging I noticed a clock on the wall. Its hands had stopped at the height of the fire and its melted plastic housing had begun to droop like a Dali painting. My reverie was broken when Chris handed me the first undamaged things pulled from the shelves – his collection of old family photographs and the diaries he’d been keeping since 1965. We packed them in boxes from the U-Haul store and carted them out to the trunk of his car.
Like everything else in the house that hadn’t burned outright, his archives suffered smoke damage. Weeks later, when he opened the box, its contents still had the odor of a wet barbeque pit – so very different from the pleasant smell most old books develop as they sit on a shelf, preserving history. Chris sent his diaries off for the suggested ozone treatments, but even when he lent them to me months later, the smell of disaster and ruin wafted from the turn of every page; a strange sort of olfactory onomatopoeia, reading as I was the story told there of the ruin of Chris’s childhood home. Like the clock on the wall, here too time was frozen; here too was damage.
As our father’s anger began to burn in the Millstone, everybody near the heat suffered.
The clock on the wall of our childhood began to melt around 5 o’clock when Dad got home from work and poured a drink.
5 o’clock was when the tension began, when eggshells were spread up and down the hallways of the Millstone. In November of ‘58, a letter from my mother reads: “There are tragic overtones in our house today – and omens of catastrophe ahead. Jeff has lost Roger’s transistor radio. So everyone in the house is trembling at the necessity of revealing the loss to Roger. There is sure to be donder and blitzen crashing over his head tonight – poor luckless boy… Few indeed (and bless you for it, Poppa) are the memories of my father in anger.”
5 o’clock was when the arguments began. Argument isn’t the right word because it suggests a back and forth; two voices. In the Millstone, it was only Dad’s voice and it was angry. Mom didn’t pick up the fight and, as we eavesdropped from the top of the stairs, it was like listening to a man yell at somebody over the phone – you heard only half the script and had to imagine what the other person was feeling.
It wasn’t a sound you could hide from. The bass notes of my father’s voice came through the walls of the Millstone and though we little ones couldn’t make out the words, even a dog knows when its owner is angry. Like dogs, we too assumed the anger was because of us, but what we’d done we had no idea. You crept away to a quiet room and you learned to handle things as best you could. You certainly couldn’t approach the grown-ups with any kind of a problem. It could light another fire.
They say, “When elephants fight, ants suffer.” True, and when elephants drink the ants are toe-jam because we never knew which way to run. You might get maudlin Dad, with the false cheer and boozy kisses. You might get Sulking, Silent, Sitting-in-his-study Dad, burning like a fuse to an unseen bomb. And if anyone said the wrong thing, boom – you had Angry Dad. Wrote Mom in a letter from 1958: “Thursday was Thanksgiving. A very pleasant day until nighttime when the boys caught you-know-what from their father. He was sleeping on the couch and they made too much racket playing with the dog. So everyone was sent to bed about 6:15.”
Arson investigators pick through rubble for clues to how a fire started. Perhaps this smoky diary has clues. Here, in Chris’s handwriting: “Dad came home all mad today.” Perhaps all the damage that came later can be traced to a short-circuit in Dad’s head; to the anger that smoldered in his study as he sat there after work nursing grudges and a drink: mad at Mom’s politics, mad at the noise we made playing with the dog, mad at…at things.
Head X-Ray: Roger In 1957
You say, “Don’t mind if I do.”
Why, yes, a whiskey would in fact be just the thing to take a fella’s mind off that jack-ass who hogged two parking spaces in the lot this morning. Or the pretty nurse who batted her eyes at you during surgery. And now, here it is seven at night, you’ve finished ten surgeries, and you’re supposed to what? Just go home??
So you say “Don’t mind if I do” to a few other residents milling about and you toss your bloody scrubs into the laundry hamper and the three of you head out. You don’t really know these men but they say they’re gonna toss a few back, so you go. You’re soon settling on stools in the quiet of a small bar near the Clinic and, oh, you deserve to be here. You, after all, are a Mayo Clinic surgeon – the best and the brightest.
“Why yes, barkeep. A martini is ‘just what the doctor ordered.’” Laughs all around and then the mighty conversations begin.
“For Christ’s sake, that kid who came in with a fibro sarcoma? Of the femur? Huge. Had to excise a half a pound of good bone just to get the goddamn thing out. Should’ve taken the leg off, but it doesn’t matter. She’s dead by Christmas anyway.”
The day’s stories are remembered, told, and soon it’s 8:30.
The other two leave but you stay for a few more. You buy a new pack of Winstons in the machine and now you’re out in the parking lot. There’s a nice fire in your belly now, a little spring to your step, and … oh, there’s that asshole’s car, the one who hogged two spaces. Maybe a little scrape o’ the key is just what the shitbird deserves. You should do it. You really should.
But you don’t key his car and as you drive the short four miles home you notice you’re a little angry again; just at things in general. But it’s more than that. It’s just, well, the wife, you know? She’ll probably have her nose in a book or be writing another one of those long goddamn letters to Mommy and Daddy.
Jesus.
Myra and the short haircut she hated. Circa 1960.
SHIT GATHERS IN GENERAL AREA OF FAN
“You-know-who came home in a foul mood tonight.”
That sentence, in one of Mom’s 1958 letters, was the lump in the breast, the iceberg off starboard bow.
In 1958, the term “chemical dependency” didn’t exist. “Boozer” might have. “Party guy,” definitely. But alcoholic? Chemically dependent? Forget about it. Alkies flew under the radar. You could smack the wife, wreck the car, take a shit in the neighbor’s bird bath, and as long as you showed up for work on time all anybody did was roll his eyes.
“Having a delicious highball or two is a great way to unwind,” read the magazines. Even today when drinkers get shit-faced and do horrible things, people give them yards and yards of slack. But in the ‘50s and ‘60s, America was an especially confused culture on the subject of drunkenness. Dean Martin slurred his way to prime time and all the Dads in suburbia laughed while pouring another one. Drunk jokes are still common; and they’re funny.
So this drunk staggers into the church, okay? He sits down in the confession booth but says nothin’. The bewildered priest coughs to attract his attention, but the man says nothin’. The priest knocks on the wall a couple of times in a final attempt to get the man to confess. The drunk replies, “No use knockin’, buddy. There’s no paper in this one either.”
Couple the cultural confusion about alcohol with a woman’s place in 1950’s America and you have something like checkmate. My mother didn’t see checkmate coming and even if she had she couldn’t have done a thing about it. Mention to Roger his drinking was starting to scare her? It wasn’t in the realm of possibility.
As I sort through Mom’s letters, I wonder exactly when Roger became an alcoholic. Was it the drink Mom mentions in a letter on January 30th, 1958: to “unwind” after his boss cut the time he needed to prepare a presentation on pediatrics?
Perhaps it was the one he poured on May 30th, 1956: the night she wrote how he came home angry at a medical technician in the O.R. I imagine Roger putting the stopper in the neck of the bottle, then maybe popping it off again to pour that extra half-inch over the ice, talking over his shoulder about how the idiot technician didn’t move fast enough and this is an operating room, for crying out loud.
Maybe it was his very first drink.
The one on that marvelous night 12 yea
rs ago. You remember, in medical school, back when the war was over and Irene was no longer just down the hallway listening for heresies, and it was just you and Mack and Kupe and Tunk, you all had your booth at the Town Taverne and – damn – the wine really warms your chest from the inside out, doesn’t it though? And the words, they just come so fast and easy and everybody seems so happy and Jesus how you laughed and you all fit in so well and the cigarettes tasted better and even though it was late you didn’t wanna go you didn’t wanna stop you just wanted more of that same good feeling and more and more of it.
Going through the photos and letters, I begin to realize that trying to carbon-date the exact hour of the monster’s appearance is futile. It wasn’t a moment anyway, but the slow dawn of a long era. Alcoholism crept into the Millstone so quietly no one noticed.
Thirty Rooms To Hide In Page 5