Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  I’m just sayin’, it’s feasible.

  That’s the .22-caliber rifle Dad later pointed in the other direction. And those are the sunglasses he knocked off.

  HIDING IN THE BATHROOM, FROM BULLETS

  By the summer of ’65, we found ourselves back in the Millstone playing Beaster for real. Now we crept through the house at high noon wondering when Dad’s anger would lurch from a corner. It could come for any of a hundred reasons now: for roughhousing, for being a child, for existing.

  Nothing had changed as a result of the three-month separation. When Dad came home from work, the hinges of the liquor cabinet creaked the same as before and by dinnertime he’d be hovering behind Mom making his accusations (“You’ve never liked sex, have you, Myra?”) and she would listen in silence. Her anger, however, would show in her quick physical movements: she’d slam a drawer shut, or set a pot down on the stove harder than she had to. Dad seized the opportunity to coin a word he used the rest of the summer; a degrading, childish insult. He called our mother a “Slam-Banger.”

  “OH, THERE SHE GOES AGAIN, BOYS. MOMMA’S A SLAM-BANGER, SHE IS.”

  Roger’s attacks now began as soon as he got home; everyone had to listen. But the main show in the center ring – the late-night abuse down in the living room – continued. There were the same tired themes (money, sex, books, the letters to Grandpa), the same vitriol, the same ice rattling in endless drinks. But alone with her downstairs at night, his tantrums took new measures.

  “One night he grew so angry he picked up a chair and held it over his head like he was going to kill me with it,” she told me. “I just looked at him, thinking, ‘You are a tyrant, but you are also a coward. You will threaten, but you will not do it.’”

  The abuse she found most painful was the horrible things he said about her to her children. Many nights, after he was too drunk to continue an energetic attack, he would crawl into my bed, or my little brother Collin’s bed, wake us up and begin telling us horrible things about our mother. All of them untrue of course, but for 8- and 11-year-old boys the poison and filth he substituted for bedtime stories were scary nevertheless.

  We didn’t know it at the time but Mom was always there, standing out in the hall by our bedroom door, torn between roaring in and defending herself or just letting the serpent bleed its venom until it passed out on the bed.

  “I decided it was better to remain silent than to create a fight in front of you children in the middle of the night,” says Mom, remembering the loneliness of that hallway. “I always trusted that, even if you boys grew up thinking you had a horrible mother, one day you’d figure out the truth for yourselves.”

  In the summer of ’65, the six of us went into bunker mentality. We hid. Hiding was easy because drunk dads were like zombies in horror movies – they looked ugly and could kill you, but because of the way they lurched about, even fifth-graders could outmaneuver them. The older brothers could go stay with friends but we little ones had to find hidey-holes in the Millstone where Dad didn’t go. “Only the smartest of mice would hide in the cat’s ear,” goes the saying and perhaps hiding in Roger’s liquor cabinet would have been brilliant but I chose the cool and the dark of the fallout shelter. I moved my bedroom down to the basement and bunked in the safety of that concrete metaphor.

  That was the summer I discovered the distant land of Marvel comic books and spent hours down in the fallout shelter drawing my own super-hero comic book, “Dr. Fear,” an angry wounded soul who saved the world. Upstairs the adult world continued to need saving. Viet Nam was just getting started, the Freedom Marches moved from Selma to Montgomery, and the Watts ghetto was boiling to an August riot. Even Grandpa’s life was unsettled; he’d begun to have second thoughts about having moved into a retirement center. (He didn’t like the medical care.)

  At the Millstone, we fought back in what ways we could; pouring the odd bottle down the drain; making fun of Dad behind his back; and when he screamed at us, defiantly not crying. That June, Kip and Jeff tried something ambitious. They hid their new cassette tape recorder in the kitchen on a night when Dad was gearing up for another rage. Like tornado chasers they left their recording equipment in just the right spot and captured an F-5 on tape. Kip referred to the recordings as the “Rage Tapes” and made good use of them, taking them directly to Dad’s Mayo Clinic psychiatrist, Dr. Martin, and pushing PLAY. Later in his diary, Kip wrote hopefully: “He said the tapes ‘give a different picture.’ Said it helped.”

  Whatever Dad was telling the psychiatrist about “spats with the wife” was finally being countered with grim evidence. Still, another two months would pass before the psychiatrist would recommend hospitalization. Mom continued to seek counsel from her own psychiatrist, Dr. Stienhilber, who knew full well what these “spats” were and, ultimately, he warned her she might be in danger: “Be on the look-out for extreme violence,” came the advice.

  Mom continued the battle on another front as well. “Mom says she has to talk to Dr. Coventry cuz Dad not in shape,” wrote Kip. “Goes to work after lunch with booze on his breath.”

  Of course, when Roger returned home after being questioned by Dr. Coventry, it only got worse. He threatened Mom with the .22-caliber rifle, bringing it down from its high shelf in the entryway closet, out of its canvas bag, and waving it back and forth in her face. Although she never thought he’d pull the trigger (“He was gutless, a paper tiger”) it scared her. Some nights she locked herself in the bathroom to sleep in the tub where she felt safe. A dogleg in the bathroom’s design put the tub around a corner, out of a bullet’s straight trajectory.

  She sought assistance where she could and the most helpful of all was our good neighbor, Dr. Tony Bianco. Tony remembers getting several panicked phone calls from Myra, the one in particular when she mentioned guns. He drove the half-mile from his house and parked his station wagon across the front of our driveway, blocking it so Dad couldn’t grab his keys and go roaring off in the MG. The best Tony could do was divert Roger long enough for Mom to pack us up and leave for a motel. He also did our family the service of removing the rifle from the Millstone.

  But the stiletto remained Roger’s weapon of choice; his tongue was a surgical blade. One day, near the very end, he made a withering comment about Jeff’s flying lessons. (As preparation for a possible pilot’s career, Jeff was taking flight lessons in a Cessna.) In an almost casual assassination on the front step Roger told his son, “The airlines aren’t interested in pipsqueaks who fly those little putt-putts.”

  “Dad got me with his stiletto as well,” Chris told me. “Remember when we were on the houseboat with Dad, Kip, and his girlfriend Linda? I was around a corner changing into my swimming suit, a little anxious about Linda possibly coming around the corner. Dad heard me worrying about this and his public response was, ‘You don’t have anything she’d be interested in.’”

  As I sift through these stories from brothers and try to piece together a picture of my father I wonder why a world-class Mayo Clinic surgeon would go out of his way to humiliate two teenage boys, much less his sons. I realize my difficulty in understanding Roger is that, by 1965, rationality may no longer apply. Maybe I won’t be able to think my way through to where he was, that I’ll have to consider alcohol was simply pickling his brain. Dad could stand in the kitchen with a bourbon-and-ice glowing right there in the sun and deny it was booze. Look you right in the eye: “I’m not drinking.” But perhaps it was simply denial – a break with truth, not reality.

  Still, there seems no rational explanation for a phone call Roger made to Myra’s parents that summer. He’d called RJL before to tell him what a worthless wife his daughter was, but now he reported she was “throwing tantrums” and had “scratched my face so badly I had to go to the hospital.” Grandpa, of course, knew this was delusional but the violence of its bloody imagery made him worry for his daughter’s safety. He telephoned back just to hear Myra’s voice. Had RJL heard the “Axe Story,” however, he would have sent
the Florida National Guard to the Millstone.

  It took years for my mother to tell us the Axe Story; she peeled back the layers of my father’s outrages as she thought we could handle them. The details of this particular attack she kept to herself well into the 1980s.

  On a day when we were all in school, Roger drank to insensibility, began his assembly-line verbal assaults on Mom’s character, and as his anger grew she retreated to the master bedroom. She’d discovered that by placing Collin’s toy wagon flush to her side of the door, it could not be opened more than an inch. Roger pounded on the door growling nobody’s gonna keep him out of his own goddamned bedroom. Behind the door she remained silent, dripping no blood into the water to feed his frenzy.

  “WELL, THEN I’LL JUST GO OUT TO THE TOOL SHED AND GET THE AXE AND SMASH THIS GODDAMNED DOOR IN! WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?”

  There was no dialing 9-1-1 in those days. But on hearing this threat, Mom placed the first and only call she ever made for official help – to the volunteer fire warden of Bamber Valley. She barely knew this man, having met him once at a school function.

  But he was a man, he had a uniform, and a siren.

  “When I got him on the phone and told him what was happening, all this man said was, ‘There’s nothing I can do for you’ and hung up. No mention of calling anyone else, no empathy, just a report of impotence and the dial tone,” she remembers. But she knew Dad heard her making the call and she believes it’s all that kept him from breaking down the door that day. Such were the times – no alcoholics, only “party boys.” No spousal abuse, only “spats with the wife.”

  When we thought things couldn’t get worse, the bottom dropped out, and then the bottom of the bottom dropped out – we fell deeper into the heat of the summer of ’65.

  Kip’s diary, June 7, 1965:

  Came home to find Mom just haggard. Says it was one of worst rages so far (that he was hitting her with a fly swatter, throwing laundry around). We might take off to hotel again if he goes nuts again. This could be a week-long rage. This could be it. He could go crazy.

  By the summer of 1965, little Collin, so long at the edges of the storm, now found himself caught in the gale with the rest of us. He’d inherited all the lessons we’d learned: freezing, hiding, surrendering. Only 8 years old at the time, his memories of the summer of ’65 are like mine – flash frames from a violent film roaring through a broken projector. Sometimes not even an image but a sound, like the jingle of coins in a pocket.

  “I remember being mad at Dad,” Collin says, “and I leaned over the railing and yelled downstairs, ‘I hate your guts!’ All I remember next was the sound of him running up the stairs after me, change and keys jingling in his pockets. I don’t remember what came next. Only that I was scared and running to my room. And behind me the sound of change jingling in his pockets.”

  Collin and I seem to dissolve into each other’s memories of that summer.

  He remembers part of one incident, I the other.

  “I was out on the screen porch,” Collin says, “when Dad started in on Mom. I knew there were some neighborhood kids on bikes out by our driveway and they could hear all of this going on at our house. I got up to leave but Dad told me to stay where I was. So I sat. He was raging at her about something and Mom said she was going to scream. I thought, ‘I don’t want everybody to hear this.’”

  He headed outside.

  The baton of memory passes to me and I’m standing out by the station wagon in the driveway, all its doors are open for another med-evac to a motel and the fight spills out of the Millstone as Dad follows Mom and Collin who are heading for the car. Dad’s demanding the car keys in her purse and Mom says through clenched teeth, chin down, eyes looking up, “Roger if you touch my purse, I will scream.” I look again to check if my friends by our front gate have moved on. They have. Good, they won’t see what’s happening to my family. Unless … they turn their bikes around and ride past our gate again. Dad moves for Mom’s purse with that bourbon-zombie lurch and my mother screams and I look to the gate and my friends have in fact turned around … they’re gliding right past our driveway, threading the needle at the exact screaming second, and they all see my disintegrating family and the blood rushes to my ears which burn in embarrassment and I dive into the back seat of the station wagon to hide. I feel the hot vinyl of the car seat against my face and the sense of Mom’s weight settling in the car as she gets in to drive away but suddenly she’s out of the car again and there’s the sound of a scuffle and another scream.

  My mother remembers, “He pulled me out of the driver’s seat and when I resisted he socked me in the face, knocking off those big white sunglasses I had at the time. They went flying into the grass. I reached down to get them and as I rose back up I said, ‘You animal!’”

  Collin’s memory differs slightly: “I think he hit her and she fell down into the grass. The only thing I remember after that is the hurt and rage in Mom’s eyes as she rose to meet him.”

  Neither Collin nor I remember how it ends. It just ends. There is no final scene, just that scream, that image of Mom getting back up to face Dad, the fury in her eyes – and then the last sudden foot of film is through the projector, going round and round hitting the empty upper reel, whap, whap, whap, whap.

  HIDING IN THE TOWER LIBRARY

  “Open this door, goddammit!”

  BOOM! And the oak door rattles.

  My father is outside the door. He is drunk and pounding with a flat hand. In his other hand is either a drink or the rifle. From inside, we think we can hear that ice-in-glass clink but we can’t be sure.

  It is July 1965. A half-hour ago I’d been alone down in the fallout shelter reading my super-hero comic book, The Incredible Hulk. The basement is cool and quiet in the summer and a good place to hide year-round. Dad had begun drinking at noon and by 3:00 was raging, saying horrible things calibrated to hurt my mother and, by saying them in front of us, hurt her more deeply.

  “Couldn’t earn 25 cents by spreading her legs! … Open this door, goddammit!”

  BOOM!

  Around 4:30 his raging became demonic. The older four brothers whose witness sometimes buffered my father’s anger had gone to see a movie downtown. When he mentioned the gun a second time, Mom gathered me, my little brother Collin, and we retreated to the locked safety of the Tower Library.

  Behind us now are the French doors that open onto a small balcony. Square in front of us, is the oak door and it’s standing up well to his blows. But its solidity only makes his rage burn hotter, until we can almost feel it radiating through the keyhole.

  “Won’t let me in to see my own goddamn kids!”

  BOOM!

  Silence.

  We sense him leave but when he comes back a minute later we can hear he’s brought the whole sloshing bottle and our retreat has become a siege. Mom puts her arms around the two of us.

  BOOM!

  The blows on the outside of the door are much harder now. We huddle in closer to Momma. Some nights, the look in her eyes is reassuring. (“We’ll be fine. He’ll be asleep soon.”) But this time feels different. The hour seems here for Dad to carry out the threats he’s made so many times but always scuttled when the alcohol took him down for the night.

  She cradles my face in her hands. “Honey, do you think you can make the climb down from the balcony? And maybe go get help at the Martins next door?”

  This was a climb I’d made many times before, pretending to be Spider-Man escaping Marvel foes like Electro or Mysterio. Climbing down the side of the house isn’t scary. Scary is the heat coming through the keyhole.

  I go over the wrought-iron railing and put my left foot out to the rehearsed spot, the stone jutting from the wall over the first-floor window. One last look into Mom’s eyes, a look into my little brother’s – their eyes say hurry back hurry back – and I’m climbing down the side of the Millstone. Above me, the pounding continues. Two more handholds, one toehold, and I’m down.

>   When my feet hit ground I’m running through the July heat down our driveway, past the stone gate posts, out onto the road leading to the Martins.

  I will get help. I will be a super-hero. I will tell my big brothers the whole story when they get home. How I climbed down from the library balcony, how I brought back help and everything was okay.

  I’m at the Martins. I ring the doorbell. I’m panting. I will tell them and they’ll do something. It’s taking them a long time to come to the door. But they’re here; I know it. Their car is in the driveway.

  Wipe the sweat out of the eyes, ring again.

  Please be here, please be here.

  There’s a fumbling inside at the lock. Yes!

  Mrs. Martin opens the door and she too is terribly drunk, slurring her words, unable to understand my message and unable to do anything for us even if she could. The world reels a little bit. The lesson tattoos itself inside: there are no sane adults in power anywhere in the land.