On one level, it was kind of cool having a dead dad. At school, I was able to strike some seriously sad poses for Debbie Laney, leaning against the bike rack with a look that said, “Yep. My dad died. Pretty sad. Me? Nahhh, I’ll be all right. Maybe I’ll see ya ‘round then.” I’d walk away (in slow motion, of course) employing the Lonely-Guy-On-Cold-Street walk. Lonely Guys aren’t supposed to turn around to see if they’re being watched, but if they were, I would’ve walked backwards for blocks yelling back to Debbie, “STILL DEAD, MY DAD IS. YEP. FEELIN’ PRETTY SAD!”
The Beatles’ new album Revolver was #1 on the charts and all the films of my fantasy life were now scored with Harrison’s Taxman. Paul McCartney’s joyful numbahs one-two-three-FAH! had matured into George’s deadlier count-off, intoned like a mortician and followed by a guitar riff a Lonely Guy could nicely time his steps to as he walked down the hallways of Central Junior High School.
I turned to smoking cigarettes full-time and posing for effect at every opportunity. For my birthday, Mom bought me my first bike, a Sting Ray with Banana Seat and Ram’s Horn handlebars. I would ride this fantastic machine to the YMCA downtown and Lonely-Guy my way around the edges of seventh-grade mixers hoping to be noticed.
If only Debbie Laney had read the script I’d written for her.
“Hey Sue, look, it’s Lonely Guy. Walking alone down the street, threadbare collar turned up to the cold November wind. Suddenly I feel so shallow.”
My fantasies were becoming self-conscious and were harder to sustain. Still, I never had the courage to just talk to Debbie Laney – until the day I was beat up. On that day, I was riding my bike to the Y across a footbridge on a golf course where three “hoods” blocked my way. When I asked them to move, they blocked the footbridge completely.
I said, “Don’t be such pricks.”
* * *
“Lonely Guy” Beats Up 3 Hoods
With one slow-motion roundhouse kick, I ruin the lives of three…
* * *
POW! Right after I said “pricks,” one of the hoods hit me hard in the face, I fell off my bike and began to bleed. The hoods rode off laughing and I lay there measuring my options. Since I couldn’t go into the Y with blood all over my face and shirt, there was clearly only one alternative – let the blood dry on my face and then pedal to Debbie Laney’s house. When I got there, I would park my cool Sting Ray bike with Banana Seat and Ram’s Horn handlebars, ring the doorbell, and give ‘er an eye-full of the rough-and-tumble life we Lonely Guys lead. I wouldn’t even mention the injury unless she brought it up.
“There’s what? Blood, you say?”
Twenty minutes later, the look in Mrs. Laney’s eyes when she opened her door suggested my fantasy wasn’t playing out as scripted and the soundtrack of Taxman came to a scratching halt. Debbie wasn’t home and never saw Lonely Bloody Guy. Mrs. Laney did, but just cleaned me up and sent me home. As I prepped my cool Sting Ray bike with Banana Seat and Ram’s Horn handlebars for flight, I looked back at Mrs. Laney and said, “But you’ll tell Debbie about, …you know. Okay?”
Back at the Millstone, the six of us dealt with Dad’s death privately, each of us retreating to our rooms – to play a guitar, to build a model plane, to draw comic book super-heroes. With Dad no longer our common enemy, fights between the four little ones became worse.
Chris’s diary, August 26, 1966
Dan and Luke have been fighting so much. There are, on the average, 3 free-for-alls a day. Both demand full rights. Luke’s a Goddamn needle and Dan’s a Bull. Luke is worse even than Collin. He smokes. He spends all his time in the basement. He has big plans for his stupid comic book career. He likes his hamsters more than anyone.
When Dad was alive, at least we all knew what was wrong with us. Now the house seemed to be unraveling and we weren’t sure why. With Kip back at college studying pre-law, Jeff and the remaining Pagans limped along through the fall and finally disbanded. Everything was just different. There was no Kip, no Pagans, no Dad; even the Millstone was up for sale. The dark star we’d revolved around so long was gone and we became aware of a big bad world beyond the gates of the Millstone and saw things were just as shitty out there.
Barely a month after Dad died, Kip noted in his diary: “Sniper in Texas killed 12 people, wounded 33. They said he was an Eagle Scout and worked at a bank … like me.” This was the summer Richard Speck raped and strangled eight nurses in Chicago and Capote’s In Cold Blood was a best seller. Even my Beatles were in trouble, with John’s controversial statement, “We’re more popular than Christ.” We saw these things on TV and on the cover of Mom’s Life magazines and felt our frying pan give way to fire. We wondered if our troubled childhoods were just the cartoon before the movie.
Troop strength in Viet Nam leapt to nearly half a million in ’66 and the military draft was sweeping through neighborhoods. Without Dad around to dominate the political conversation, Mom’s liberal views flowered; books like The Anti-Communist Impulse and authors like Noam Chomsky became dinnertime conversation. When Jeff’s reading convinced him that joining the Navy meant he had to “barbecue farmers,” Mom used connections at the Mayo Clinic to get him a psychiatric deferment; when he entered college he began studying medicine.
Chris, too, could see revolution was in the air and discovered he had a lot more to be mad about than just three little brothers. With the war, civil rights, and women’s liberation on the Huntley-Brinkley Report every night, he could now smolder over a different injustice every day and not repeat one for weeks. His anger and emotion on occasion surprised even him.
Brother Chris, today
I didn’t understand what happened to me in Mr. Mason’s history class in September of that year. One day he rolled the projector into the room and played a pulp anti-communist film, something that looked like it was written by the Pentagon. When the lights went back on, I raised my hand and said the film was propaganda and its use in a public school was inappropriate. He scolded me in front of the class, said I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I wasn’t entitled to make judgments about his pedagogy.
The next day I retaliated. I remained totally silent and sat sideways in my chair staring out the window at the Mayo High School parking lot.
At the end of class, he asked me to stay behind. He was friendly and conciliatory, saying he wanted me to continue participating in class and that he didn’t mean to jump on me the way he did.
I have no idea how much he knew about me personally. Dad’s death had been mentioned in the newspaper a few weeks before and so he may have known I was raw. In any event, his kindness gave me permission to feel my sorrow. Mr. Mason felt soft to me; warm and human. I may have seen in him the father I needed. Here was a big, friendly, centered, sober and non-screwed-up man; and he was concerned about me.
He probably thought he was just patching things up with one of his students, but what he got for his efforts was a flood of tears.
In the empty classroom, I collapsed and just came apart completely. I remember weeping so hard my diaphragm and ribs hurt. He let me have my cry without shaming or limiting me and then gave me a pass to go to the bathroom to pull myself together before my next class. Years later I could see the tears of that day were part of a deep pain that had started a long, long time ago.
The photograph of Mom that Grandpa loved.
TAKE A SAD SONG AND MAKE IT BETTER
Mom’s letters, August, 1966
The deep unhappiness that occasionally overtakes me has two forms: one, that Roger’s life was such a misery to him – to him who seemed to have so much. The other, that the boys have not had in the last ten years a father – and never will have. Related to that, I have not and, at my age, never will have a husband who is rock and oak in life’s storms and a joy in life’s sunshine (you recognize the Ingersoll). In my life, I had such a short time of true love that I look with a wistful eye on other marriages. I am going to miss one of life’s greatest joys – and this often grieves me.
My dad died of “pneumonia.” It’s on the record. But if I ever turn up dead, bring my Mom in for questioning and grill her about what little bastards we were when she tried to start dating again.
After ten years of life with the Volcanic Thunder Bourbon God you’d think pretty much anybody Mom brought home would look like a fucking Ken doll. But for some sad reason we weren’t ready to be friendly to anyone Mom invited to sit in Dad’s seat at the table. Of particular note was a good man named Dick Swanson, a contractor Mom met while building the new house we moved into after the Millstone. He didn’t drink or smoke and there wasn’t a cynical bone in his body – which may have been the problem. We were dark little critters by then, Orcs with braces, and his avuncular knock-knock jokes didn’t fly with us. His stutter didn’t help matters either.
Have the cops ask Mom about that time I said, “Hey, Mom. You goin’ out again with D-D-D-D-D-Dick?”
* * *
There’s truth in that strange old saying, “You can shoot the horse, but it won’t fix the leg.”
Yes, Dad was dead but our family was still broken. There followed a few years of conflicts between Mom and the four of us who remained at home, but most of these skirmishes worked themselves out as our adolescence passed. We began to have great times there in the house on the hill, a home Mom designed herself.
She built the entire house around a library – her dream library: two stories tall, with catwalks and ladders to reach the high shelves; a stone chimney rising 40 feet; and books – books everywhere. Her hobbies and her reading no longer had to be hidden up in the Tower Library or tucked away in drawers at 5 o’clock. The Hill House spilled over with her interests: pictures of her beloved ships on the walls, dictionaries set open on pedestals, and a bust of Shakespeare looking down over her peaceful kingdom.
She began to do things for us she couldn’t when Dad was alive. For his 15th birthday, brother Dan asked for a “Viking dinner” – a dinner without a table or chairs, with the food served on the floor and no plates, no forks, spoons, or utensils of any kind – just the food. Mom loved the idea provided we spread our feast on a tarp of clean plastic.
So the sheet was rolled out, the brothers sat on the floor and Mom came in with the steaming tray of meat loaf and plop! it went on the mat. Hot mashed potatoes were scraped from pot to floor, followed by a green waterfall of peas and our feast was set.
We made Neanderthal grunts as we dug our fingers into the meatloaf as if it were a bison with the spear still sticking in it. Peas took some chasing around to get a decent mouthful, and all agreed sinking your fingers into a hot mound of the mashed potatoes was a rare culinary delight. At the very end of our Viking dinner, Chris scraped the “leftovers” with the flat of his hand into an urpy-looking pile in the middle.
“Anybody who’s a real Viking will eat a handful of that.” We all took the challenge and had our first, and last, taste of Tarp Goulash.
When the last of the brothers left the Hill House for school in 1972, Myra moved out of Rochester to a small town an hour north and become a “farm lady” (her description). She also took training to teach dyslexic children how to read. A love of books and the RJL-professor in her combined to make her an extraordinary, sought-after tutor. After teaching hundreds of kids how to read at the kitchen table in her farmhouse, she was awarded “master” status and began teaching the subject at Carleton College in Northfield. She never had the college degree she wanted but there she was, teaching a master’s course in one of the very highest-rated colleges in America.
Along the way she raised chickens, wrote poetry, and cried at When Harry Met Sally (the part when Billy Crystal runs up the stairs at the New Year’s Eve party looking for Meg Ryan). And though it was clear to the six of us she hoped one day to get married again, it never happened and she made her peace with it.
She continued her weekly letters to Grandpa and Monnie through the Hill House years and though Grandpa was by then too old to travel, she finally got her trip to Gettysburg. Brother Chris and I accompanied her on the train to Pennsylvania. The happiness on her face as we picnicked by the infamous Copse of Trees – a moment years in the coming – was complete.
“Right there, boys. That’s where General Armistead made it to the Federal cannon.”
In the fall of 2005, my mother and I took a vacation at an old lake resort in Wisconsin; Kip and his wife Georgia were there, too. They had Room 8 and Mom and I shared 7 next door. It was 10pm and we were both in our beds reading. She finally called it a night, placed her bookmark in its spot, and rolled over to sleep. After a little while she sat back up.
She was crying. And she asked a question that still astounds me.
“Was I good mother?”
“What are you saying, Mom? ‘Was I a good mother?’ Of course you were. What is it, … what can you be thinking?”
“I should have taken you boys out of that house sooner. Just taken you all away.”
This was what was on my mother’s mind as she tried to fall asleep 39 years after it had all ended: “I should have taken you out of there sooner.”
“Momma, leaving was never an option,” I tell her. By now, I’ve come over to her bedside and am stroking her head. “We all know divorce laws then… they were medieval. And it doesn’t matter anyway because … you did save us, Mom, you saved all of us.
“We’re all fine, Momma,” I assure her. “I’m proof. I’m right here. Kip’s right in the next room. We all made it, Momma.”
As earnestly as I spoke those words, as hard as I looked into her eyes, I don’t think I reached her. After a while, she simply stopped crying, patted my hand, said “I love you,” and rolled back over to go to sleep.
My mother is 82, as of this writing. She was little when she was young and that night under the covers in her cabin bed, she seemed positively teeny. As I looked at her sleeping form I remembered how she saved all six of us. And then it occurred to me, 40 years too late, that no one had saved her.
No one had saved her.
She made it through all those years, had protected us, shielded us and tended to our wounds but no one had tended to hers. She rebuilt the family, created a new house, got us through our dangerous adolescent years, and sent us into the world as a group of fairly normal young men. Yet even while the family stitched itself back together, for years after Dad’s death it seemed there was sadness behind her eyes.
In November of ’65, while Dad was hospitalized at Hartford, brother Jeff captured this sadness in a portrait he took of her. Whether Mom knew how poignant and telling the shot was I don’t know, but she liked it enough to frame the picture and send it to her parents as a Christmas gift.
Grandpa’s letters, December 24, 1966
It is noon. What do I see on opposite side of room? A fascinating photo of my daughter!! I sit here and gaze at it, trying to decipher what was in your mind as the camera snapped. I said to your mother, “There is maturity beyond any hitherto shown.” To me, there are vague lines of grief, deep trial, sadness, overcome by a philosophy akin to that expressed by Tennyson in those words I so often quote: “And yet we trust that good shall fall, at last far off, at last to all. And every winter change to spring.”
I look at the photo and see intelligence, beyond any I ever possessed. I have been a doer rather than a thinker. But you, you have the philosophical mind. Otherwise how could you have survived these recent years? But they may have left their mark upon you. I think I see it in your face – serene, untroubled now – but still, how shall I say – aware of tragedy.
Is it my imagination which leads me to say there is a Mona Lisa touch of a smile? Perhaps I am imagining things. I confess I am unable to arrive at an analysis. I lay pen down to let impression ripen.
[Later:] I look across room again at your picture, which now is in the shade of Christmas Eve. There is a slight smile – and do I discern a bit of the quizzical in the eyes? Well, I confess, I love this framed photo of you, my only daughter.
&
nbsp; On a visit to the Millstone, many years after I moved out.
THIS VERY ROOM
There are places in the world where bad things happened. In these places the illusion of time grows weak and if you stand still enough you can hear what happened there, lingering like the last notes of a sad song. If you go to Dallas and stand in Dealey Plaza where Mr. Zapruder stood, you can fade back to November ’63 and, at the sound of the shots, throw yourself to the green grass and weep.
In the summer of 2007 I went to Rochester and visited the Millstone. I should say I went to visit the nice family who lived there, but it was the house I’d come to speak with. Driving up Institute Hills Road, I could see the water tower still keeping its watch over Bamber Valley, though today there are no boys standing on its red conical top. Coming down the last bit of road, the same 80-foot fir trees keep the Millstone from view until you come at last to the stone gate posts, which still announce your entrance like a guest at a ball. Another Mayo Clinic doctor answers the door and after hearing again the story of my connection to the house, he and his wife kindly allow me and my camera to wander the rooms while they go grocery shopping. I am alone in the Millstone.
Thirty Rooms To Hide In Page 25