by Gail Sheehy
I don’t have to tell you how reassuring this was for children. We would dive under our desks and wait for the flash. With controlled alarm, the voice of the civil defense worker would issue a final, comforting instruction: We must be ready, all the time, for the atomic bomb. I always wanted to ask my father if his magic eye could see an atomic flash in time to warn us.
IN THE CHAOS OF OUR FAMILY LIFE, one person’s position relative to me did not change: Grandma Gladys’s. On Saturday mornings she invited me into her room to listen to a radio show called Grand Central Station. I was enthralled by the stories, tense psychological dramas inspired by O. Henry. The sound effects pushed away the confines of our little stucco house on a tidy suburban street. Over a frenetic score, the narrator followed the rhythm of the trains as they flashed by the tenement houses south of 125th Street and dove into the long tunnel beneath the swank buildings along Park Avenue, and then . . . a screech of brakes and hiss of steam as the narrator shouted:
GRAND CENTRAL STATION! CROSSROADS OF A MILLION PRIVATE LIVES!
I began dreaming about riding into the city on one of those very trains. I just had to see those millions of private lives crashing up against one another and write about them. That was a different era: the Eisenhower 1950s. America was flush. Houses going up. Children playing hopscotch on side streets. Cars looking out for kids on bikes. Parents didn’t much care where we went on Saturday as long as we were home for dinner. Bicycles made us free. My friends and I had hideouts in the woods. We roughhoused with older boys. When the ice broke up on Mamaroneck Harbor, I would go down with boots and a broomstick and pole-vault from iceberg to iceberg.
Nowadays, no doubt, someone would call Child Protective Services. My mother and father would be arraigned and sent to a parent retraining course or worse. But in that Ed Sullivan Show era, children were not the obsession of adults. We were there to flesh out the family album.
In seventh grade, I started to sneak into the city on Saturday mornings. My grandmother understood. She kept my secret and gave me the change to call her if anything untoward happened. The New Haven train stopped frequently at our station, a commuter hub. I bought my ticket from the old ticket master. “Tap class,” I’d say, then do a little shuffle and ball-and-chain. He’d smile benevolently and punch out my ticket to the crossroads of a million private lives. My legs were too short to reach the high steps to the old washboard trains, but somebody would always give me a boost. The ride to Grand Central Station took only forty-three minutes. Then I’d run up the steps to the marble balcony that overlooked the teeming throng and become a giant telescope, sweeping around, all-seeing, able to record everyone’s secrets. No one knew I was there. No one knew I was missing. Except Grandma. I was little but I was in control. I had a notebook and a pencil.
The aqua ceiling was as high as the real sky. Animals flew across it, outlined in gold stars. An invisible voice echoed off the marble walls: “Stamford, Track Fifteen!” I scribbled notes about the stick figures below. Why did the bearded man stop when he bumped into the woman with a floppy hat? She must be passing him microfilm; they were Communists, like the bad people Senator McCarthy talked about on TV. I dreamed myself into the life of the colored man who sat on the floor with one trouser leg empty from the knee down. His sign read NEED A LEG UP. Was he really a cripple? Yes, but he had a fine wooden leg at home. He would put it on and go out at night to play his trumpet and pretend to be Louis Armstrong. Who was the little lost dog who yapped and yapped and dragged his bottom across the floor? He must have dropped from the aqua ceiling. He needed somebody to put him back up among the stars.
I couldn’t wait to ride back to our dozy suburb. I’d bike home to the desk my father had built beneath the window overlooking our porch and punch out little stories on my typewriter. Sometimes, I got so excited, I’d jump off the roof of the porch and roll over in the backyard. That was what they scolded me for, not for the secret rides into the city on my magical mystery train.
I ASKED MY GRANDMA GLADYS to tell me her story so I could write a “book” about her. Born Gladys Latham Ovens in 1887, she was proud to tell me that her ancestor, William Latham, came over from London on the Mayflower in 1620. (I had no idea then that hundreds of thousands of Americans had ancestors who somehow managed to stow away in the hold of that hundred-foot-long vessel, unbeknownst to the 102 men and women whose names were actually on the passenger list.) But Grandma had records to prove that Billy Latham really was one of the early settlers of New London. “A pretty shrewd customer,” she said, making me promise not to tell that he was the town tax assessor and he cheated on his taxes! Now Cary Latham, his son, she told me, was even shrewder. He got the lease for the ferry from Groton to the other side of the Pequot River. That made him as rich as a tollbooth!
Grandma Gladys had married a man named Harold Merritt (like the Parkway) Henion. They had one son, my father, also named Harold Merritt Henion. But until the day she died, my grandmother would call my father “Sonny Boy.” Did that mean he never had to grow up? She didn’t answer my question.
It wasn’t until I was older that I learned about the Great Depression. Grandma’s husband didn’t have to jump out a window on Wall Street when he lost all his savings. He suffered a stroke at the age of fifty and died in my father’s arms. Grandma Gladys had no money and no skills. She had never gone anywhere except in the backseat of a car or a horse-drawn carriage. But she remained true to the self-reliance of her forebears. She promptly learned how to drive, bought a typewriter, taught herself to type, and marched out to get herself a full-time job as a real estate agent. For the next forty years she went to work from nine to five every day. Still working, she moved in with us when I was a baby. I never heard her complain.
I would be the first of the women in my family to go to college, something I wanted desperately. My father took me out in the backyard for a serious talk. I planned to be an English major. He said he was prepared to pay my tuition to a state university, but after graduation, immediately after, I would be expected to support myself, and a B.A. in English wasn’t going to earn me carfare.
“The University of Vermont has a good home economics department,” he said. “Why don’t you study something practical?”
“You want me to get an MRS degree?” I was crestfallen. I wanted to be a writer. Didn’t he know? Hadn’t he edited my copycat Nancy Drew mystery stories? He’d even read some of my stories out loud to his golf friend. “She’s every bit Hal Henion’s daughter, can’t you tell?” But when it came to money, my father was a tightwad just like my mother’s father. I could not pretend that I could make a living at writing. Who did?
Because Vermont was basically an agricultural school with a robust government extension service, the home ec department was the closest thing they had to a business curriculum. They told me I could take courses in economics, advertising, design, even public speaking. I agreed to take a double major, English and—the one I never told my friends about—home ec.
I WANTED THE FRAGMENTS OF MY YOUNG LIFE to link up and convey the satisfying feeling one gets from piecing together a puzzle. I was my grandmother’s child: plucky and selfish, and determined to be a writer. I was my mother’s child: a cute little shrimp who liked being onstage. I was my father’s child: coached to be as competitive as boys and sent out into the world to win, for him. But there are puzzle pieces that I left out, jagged pieces that didn’t fit into a neat coherent picture.
It was my sister, on reading an early draft of my recollections, who pierced my idealized rendition of our father. I’d always told people that he encouraged my writing, how he’d get down on the floor with me and help me concoct stories. What more could a writer want in a father?
You forget, my sister said, you became more successful than he was. He never read anything you published. Not one of the hundreds of magazine articles you sent him. Not one of the books you’ve written. Not a word.
CHAPTER 3
False Starts
CHEERS
STARTLE THE SILENT VERMONT NIGHT. A ladder slaps against the sill of my dormitory window. All along the third floor, girls in rag curlers and baby doll pajamas throw open their windows and stick their heads out, straining to witness a scene as dramatic as a high school production of Romeo and Juliet.
“He’s here! Gail, come out!”
My roommate is calling for me, calling for the girl who was thrilled only hours ago because of a summons from her excitable boyfriend.
“I’m coming to get you,” he had announced over the long-distance line in his dark and secretive voice. “After midnight. Be ready.”
Tremors of dangerous delight.
“But they lock the doors after curfew.”
“I don’t need a door. I’ll use my extension ladder. Your room’s the last one on the left, third floor, right?”
“Your ladder! You’re a genius.”
“Wait at the window.”
Ladders have always excited me. I used to climb a ladder up to the ten-foot diving board. That was a heart-in-the-mouth climb. The ladder my father put up against the little roof under my bedroom window was meant to discourage me from jumping. I used it in high school to sneak out in the middle of the night and meet my friends to drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Ladders are challenge. Ladders are adventure. Ladders allow escape.
I am in the bathroom primping, knees shaking, heart racing. How does a girl dress to elope? I’m not ready. This is only my third week at the University of Vermont. I’ve hardly finished unpacking. I don’t have a white dress. The black-and-white polka dot I was going to wear to the first freshman dance will have to do. And white gloves, the beautiful white kid gloves my mother gave me for church. The thought of church turns me limp. I can’t put my lipstick on straight. Does God know?
“C’MON, GAIL, C’MON! He’s climbing up the ladder!”
I am about to be wooed away from confinement on the freshman women’s campus of a remote university into the arms of a lover who will not take no for an answer. I am all of seventeen. He is a ravishing twenty-two, a real man, a brooding veteran who has seen the hell of war and has the wounds to show for it. My Romeo holds the lure of jailbreak.
I had warned him. “If the housemother sees a man on the girls’ campus, my God, she’ll call out the Green Mountain Boys!”
“I’ve got my knife, got my ladder, I’m ready for them,” he said. He sounds like he’s back in the swamps of Korea. He’s a man on a mission. My crazy brave Romeo is going to spirit me away on his extension ladder to a life of adventure where my father can never hold a gun to my back again. All my new girlfriends are jealous.
They sing to me as I back out the window, sobbing silently. Goodnight, sweetheart, well it’s time to go, Doo doo doo de do. One last glance at my roommate’s sad face, our cozy little room, the poster of Elvis we tacked to the wall, the books on my desk that invite me into new worlds—do I really want to give all this up? I hate to leave you, baby, and I don’t mean maybe. My foot slips, the high heel falls off—heels, Gail, what are you thinking? I feel his hands, big mannish hands, the hands of a tree surgeon who knows how to brace branches. His hands circle my whole waist and steady me like a falling tree. I am in his hands now.
We get no farther than the Vermont border before I ask to stop. “I need to make a phone call.” I can see that McCarthy—that’s his name (he likes to be called by his last name as if he’s still a soldier)—is not pleased. He senses something is not right. His mission is to steal me away from college before I get any high-class ideas about another kind of life and throw him over. He drives straight through this dot of a city, past the police station, the public library, the opera house. I beg him to stop.
“I have to call my mother.”
“What the hell do you want to do that for?” he demands.
“I always tell my mother what I’m doing,” I fib.
“I don’t like this idea, Gail.”
I stare at this man’s profile, his lips drawn tight as a slash, and wonder how I let him take over my life. When he turned up in town at the start of my senior year in high school, the proverbial tall dark stranger, he pursued me wherever I went, offering me rides home from school, turning up at football games, even crashing parties where he must have known I would be bored with boys my own age. He was worldly and exuded a dark and illicit energy. There were days when he would lure me to sit in the cab of his truck during my study hall break and have a cigarette with him. He brought me wildflowers and told me of the terrors of war. I thought, of course, that I could save him from his paranoid fears; I would make him believe again that people can be good.
Toward the end of the year, I would sneak out at night to meet him a few blocks from my house. He would take me to his house and make us scotch and sodas and kiss me with a violent passion. He showed me the long purplish dent in his thigh where he had been knifed by the enemy. I found it strangely erotic. When we finally coupled, the scream of pain quickly surged into a crescendo of desire that scarcely left me for the rest of the summer. I was lost to lust.
My mother tolerated him. My father wanted to kill him. That maniac McCarthy, he called him.
Before we cross the Vermont border, I persuade him to pull into a roadhouse. He finds the bar while I look for a pay telephone. Thank God it’s in the ladies’ room. I call home. I pray my mother’s head won’t be in the clouds. She answers.
“Hello, honey, everything all right?”
“McCarthy wants to marry me,” I blurt. “We’re eloping, but don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”
A long pause, I hear her thick breathing. “Where are you right now?”
“Driving. In his truck.”
“You’ve left school?”
“It was really exciting, Mom. He came for me with his tree ladder and all the girls—”
“Where are you headed?”
“Massachusetts. He has a nice motel picked out.”
Her voice shifts suddenly into a calming neutral. “Honey, don’t do anything right now. Marriage is a big step. Don’t you want to have a lovely wedding? Honey?”
She must know. This isn’t all the romantic getaway I’m pretending it is.
“Mom? Are you there?” She must be telling my father. I wait, trembling. When she comes back on the phone, her voice is silky as warm bathwater. She coaxes me to come home and we’ll talk it all over. “You don’t want to elope and miss all the fun, you know? Shopping for the dress, I can give you a new hairstyle, we can have the reception on the terrace of the new house . . .” She is making it up as she goes along, bless her heart.
“Can I speak to Daddy? It won’t cost him anything, if I elope, I mean.” I hear her put her hand over the receiver and my father shouting in the background.
“Your father is going to bed tonight with a gun beside him.”
“A gun? Why?”
“Baby, just drive right straight home and we’ll work it all out, together.” I can’t remember when my mother sounded so sober and sure of herself.
McCarthy has that beery look in his eyes when I find him in the bar. He interrogates me about the phone call. Foolishly, I tell him about my father and his gun. I can almost see the hairs on the back of McCarthy’s neck stand up, the macho surge. Back in the truck I can’t stop thinking about McCarthy’s knives. He likes to show me how he can skin a rabbit with his army combat knife. His evasion knife is the most menacing, thin, black, easily hidden.
I somehow convince him that we need to see my parents together, to show them we’re serious. The fight starts when we pull off the Saw Mill River Parkway. I know, he knows, once I go back home and think about sacrificing college to be Mrs. Tree Surgeon, our elopement will lose its allure. It is almost five in the morning. We are turning off the Boston Post Road onto the avenue leading to my house.
“Let me off before Claflin Avenue, okay?”
“I’m not letting you off anywhere,” McCarthy says. “I love you and we’re getting married, just like you said on the phone.”
“But my father—”
“Forget your father. I’m going to take care of you now.”
As his truck grumbles into the long climb up our hill, I am overtaken by nausea.
“Stop the car, let me out, I have to puke.” He refuses. I beg. He reaches across me to try to lock my door. I grab his hand. “Don’t make me bite you!”
He slows down and I bolt out. Jackknifing up from the fall, I start running, streaking across backyards, scrambling over fences; spilling out two driveways from our house, I feel my skirt catch on something, a bush? No, a hand. His big hand, he’s trying to clutch at me! I feel the rush of adrenaline. I’m little but I’m fast. There’s a light on in our living room. I sprint for the door.
It is my mother’s arms into which I fall. I hear the swoosh of a window sash sliding up. My father’s voice: “Crazy McCarthy! I’ll give you a count of three to disappear—you hear—or I’ll point my weapon right at your pecker!”
His truck spits gravel as he tears off. My mother nudges me to the sofa, covers me with a quilt, and brings me tea. It isn’t useless to expect help from my mother, after all.
“Mom, I’m pregnant,” I choke out.
“I know.”
“How?”
“I’m your mother.”
We sit for a long time in the dimness of a slow dawn, hands clasped. My mother begins to pray: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.”
I repeat with her: “He restoreth my soul.” I start to sob. “My soul”—the shame chokes me—“my soul has no scruples.”
“Let’s pray to the Lord to take away your sins.”
We pray. Time passes.
“Don’t cry,” she says. “You do not have to have this baby.”
It takes time for the enormity of her gift to sink in. Gone is the cloudiness in her eyes. The whites glare like searchlights. She has stopped spinning out of the present and coalesced around the memory of a moment she lived before, the memory of a father who foreclosed her own future. Later that morning she dials doctor after doctor, then phones McCarthy and commands him to drive us in her car to New Jersey, that is, if he ever wants to see me again. She sits with me in the backseat and keeps up a pleasant pretense of conversation with him, the way people do when humoring a kidnapper.