Mother is getting used to the idea of retiring to the beach and I fully expect you to find an eligible husband from the elderly Miami dating scene. Michael requests a retired history professor (like uncle but with more of a sense of humor), but I’d settle for an ex-jewelry seller. Also, Ray tells Mother he can’t come home and Mom tells Ray he can’t come home, so at least they are in complete agreement for a change.
A letter dated May 14, 1979, shows how hard my mother was taking the news of yet one more setback:
I have just received notification from the hospital that Ray is going to be committed by the state for a six month period. This was necessary because he can’t be depended on to stay voluntarily and he needs to be there that long in order to get him on the right program. Michael went up to see him yesterday. Guess he was quite unreceptive. The social worker told Michael that he will probably improve, but we can’t expect miracles. I don’t, but I am bitter about the fact that this should have been done years ago and maybe with the right treatment, he could have done better. That’s where money counts. Ray is now at the bare minimum of his lithium intake (sort of like getting a D– in a college course). He talked to his psychologist and the psychologist said the lithium is having a dramatic effect. Not a cure-all but very efficacious. Also, and this kills me, Ray could have had it all along. It’s just that Northampton State did not utilize it, because they didn’t want the trouble of monitoring it. I don’t want Ray to know this. Isn’t it sad? I just hope he gets calm enough for Maple House and leaves me alone.
In June, from Springfield Hospital, Raymond began a letter to me with the salutation—unusual for him in that he had the kind of healthy respect for religion that permits a person to leave it out of as many situations as possible—“Jesus and God Bless You!” He wrote that he had heard that the new owner of the house in Granby might need a repairman:
Maybe I’ll get the job. He’s a really good guy. The last time I saw him I said I’d go to work for his company and he said I’d have to marry his sister. I said that’s too high a price. It’s our house but I think it has a jinx on it since Daddy died. You and I were the only ones to know that perfect life. Dermot thinks he knows everything and all mother did was make birthday cakes. Some way to make a man out of me. Things will be better once I leave here and get a business started. I hate being in the nut house.
Whatever you girls can do I love you. Jay you can forget because she’s too self-centered.
The letter concluded with an offer to pray for my happiness.
Raymond was released from the hospital and hung around the valley. He did not want to go to a halfway house because he did not want the structure and the rules, or the stigmatizing and labeling. When he was functional, he was just functional enough, as one social worker put it, to “pass.” He stayed in Massachusetts, while our mother headed down to Connecticut. It was one of those difficult lost summers.
Jacqueline wrote that she would be moving into a small rented cottage with our mother:
I think I will survive the summer very well, if only Mother doesn’t cook chicken and leave the carcass hanging around in the fridge in anticipation of a couple of dinners, and mmm mmm, homemade soup. The other stuff, the bouquets of Kleenexes, overflowing ashtrays, and dishes put back on the shelf before they have fully dried, is such a familiar routine I am well rehearsed. The chicken, however, becomes a new affront every time.
The timing of Raymond’s breakdowns was textbook. They always took place in the late fall, heading into the holidays, or in the spring.
But it wasn’t every fall and it wasn’t every spring.
Whether he was on medication or not, he would send us letters with his Christmas list starting in October. In this letter he is calm, and he begins it by lampooning his more runaway desires:
Corvette.
Cottage (three bedroom on Maine coast).
Use of American Express card for 30 days.
Trip to France.
Should I add more?
Anyway, back to reality:
X-large knit shirts, long and short sleeves
X-large crew neck sweater
Pants 44 inch waist, 30 inch legs or longer, can be hemmed
Coat 46 long
Could also use socks, maybe a gift certificate for shoes
Last year you surprised me and I like surprises. However, the clothes list should give you something to work with.
With the money you have sent so far I got a good pair of winter boots and some Levi’s. I’ll call you this week-end and see what’s going on. I should get a lot of use out of both. (The boots and Levi’s.)
I got a beautiful plant yesterday for the apartment. It’s a Bolivian Jew about four feet long. I only paid $3.50 for it wholesale. It would have been fifteen at a florist. It’s really big and you need a big window for a plant that size.
I’m off to the mall to see my friend and for lunch (a hot dog). Only trouble is I’m there twice a week and I think I’d like it better if it were once a month. It gets old fast in the malls, especially if you go twice a week window shopping.
One more thing.
A three-piece suit.
Love,
Ray
A three-piece suit always implies a fourth piece: a reason to wear it. How Raymond longed to be part of the bright world of commerce and connection. That never happened on a day-in, dayout basis, but occasionally a reason to dress up did materialize, such as for my wedding in May of 1980.
The wedding was held in a small Catholic church in Connecticut where most of the family had migrated. My husband-to-be was Episcopalian, and we joked about how the bride’s side of the church should have a banner “Guns for Belfast” and his should say “No Irish Need Apply.” Each of our mothers supplied us with her own guest list. On my side: Shea, O’Sullivan, Walsh, Murray, Mahoney, Donahue, Collins, Welch, McCormick, Teahan, Cosgriff, Glynn. On his: Christian, Phelps, Stokes, Hawkins, Chamberlin, Chapman, Duncan, Gardner, Ketcham, Harriman, Harrison. We found an organist who could play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and a caterer who called hors d’oeuvres “pick- ups” and asked if we wanted paper plates and paper napkins or did we want real. We said real.
I’d met my future husband at the Trenton Times in New Jersey, where I was a society reporter. Not only did the title have a false sense of glory, it was also a true contradiction in terms. The events that I covered included such high-level glitz as a Polish debutante ball and an Easter egg hunt at the Trenton Y. When I arrived in Trenton, I told myself it was time to grow up and buy a car. The executive editor asked whether I preferred a domestic car or a foreign car. He had two people on the staff who could help me either way. At the time, this decision was highly politicized. Vietnam had not yet ended.
A domestic car meant support for the domestic economy, which on the one hand helped pay for a racist war in Southeast Asia, but on the other hand provided a living wage for all the hardworking guys in Detroit.
A foreign car was a vote against “Amerika,” spelled with a k, and all her fascist ways.
The first expert was a middle-aged ex-Marine with a crew cut and with four children in the suburbs. He was an authority insofar as he covered the Trenton Speedway.
The second expert was single, tall, athletic, funny, liked to read, and was an expert on foreign cars insofar as he possessed a Porsche that was always breaking down on the way to assignments. Also, he had heard of Martha’s Vineyard and Bruce Springsteen.
The next day I signed the papers for an orange VW Dasher that said “Dasher” in huge black letters on the side.
Eventually, my future husband was offered a newspaper job in Florida and one in Alaska. “The perfect existential choice,” he called it. “You could either burn or freeze to death.” We both emigrated to Miami. Although it has always had a renegade streak, with its welcome mat constantly out for gangsters who could afford their own private islands, Miami then was mostly known as a sleepy pastel backwater brimming with timid retirees who lived for thei
r early-bird specials. The Cubans were still considered a quaint subculture, here on loan, with piñata shops, thick, high-octane coffee, and elaborate coming-out parties called quinces for their fifteen-year-old daughters. South Beach was filled with Jewish refugees who sat on deck chairs on porches in front of the decaying art deco hotels, patting their canes like pets, living on fixed incomes, hoping that the diminishing supply of pennies and minutes would have the good grace to run out simultaneously. The police who walked the area called it “raisin patrol,” and the most common reason for stopping someone was for driving too slow.
We got to Miami just as it was doffing its old skin. The narcotics trade was just heating up. It got so bad that drug dealers dumped each other’s bodies by the side of the road on such a routine basis that this practice became known as “felony littering.” A gunshot at the temple was called a “serious headache.” The autopsies revealed that the victims usually lacked the U-gland, standing for “upright.” Miami was on the verge, by the late seventies, of transforming into the city it is today: loud, brash, bold, shocking, and a total original. America’s teenager, as it is sometimes called: spiked, branded, pierced, and out of control.
My first vision of Florida, coming in on the auto-train, won my chilblained New England heart for all of time: the near impossible flatness of the thin-lipped landscape, the dancer’s stance of the loose-limbed trees dotted with oranges and lemons and mangoes, the sun that day after day has the same bright greeting, a solar cuckoo, hello, hello, hello. Miami was the dream opposite of New England. It was not a place where you could ever under any circumstances imagine anyone saying, “Least said, soonest mended.”
People court in whatever way works for them. I once interviewed a famous editor from the New York Times who said that in the twenties he and his wife had no money, so they used to find a pretty spot outdoors and read out loud to each other: “That was our way of making love.”
We sealed our engagement by covering the Ted Bundy trial together.
The Washington Post contacted us separately during a mercifully brief period in which we were both freelancing, which can be interpreted as a time when we were both footloose and light-headed with self-invention, which is to say, broke and uninsured. The national desk was looking for a story that pointed out all the issues. The Bundy trial was supposed to make great strides in the field of forensic dentistry and would John mind taking all that recondite expert testimony and boiling it down into cogent prose that could be readily accessed by the masses?
I was called by the Style section and asked to do a color piece. What was the defendant wearing, did he make eye contact with his girlfriend, what was the mood outside the Metro Justice Building?
In one of my color paragraphs, I described Miami that June as being short on rain and short on mercy. A man at a movie theater had actually stabbed another patron to death because he tripped over his feet trying to find a seat. It was a time when the nerves of all citizens were frayed. The “mean season,” I called it. We ended up melding the two pieces into one, we thought, seamless account, our first and only joint byline until the children came along.
To our wedding we invited friends we’d met in the newspaper business who now lived up and down the East Coast. Many said yes, which impressed Dermot, who kept saying throughout the festivities, “I’ve not seen a wedding like this since the war—so many people from out of town. No, nothing like it since the war.”
At the rehearsal dinner, we had seated people next to each other because they ate fast, or they had lived in Providence at one time or another, or they might fall in love. Although it was never in question whether Raymond would be invited to the wedding, I was worried that he would do something to undermine the event. At the time I had many friends who had postponed marriage because they couldn’t stand the thought of inviting any number of people to an actual public ceremony, including their perpetually tanked aunt, the neighbor who compulsively played air guitar, the born-again anybody. Afterward, I came up with a universal theorem about weddings: Someone’s going to act badly, but it’s never the person you predict.
At my wedding, it was not the distant cousins on either side, not the newspaper friends who were known to be rowdy on occasion, not the people who eat too fast, not my brother.
It was me.
Raymond was fine, even after I made him drive two hours round-trip back to Massachusetts to get the fake front tooth that he forgot to bring.
Brides usually have one of two styles. Either they happily assign every detail of the entire shebang to minions, or they engage in a kind of grotesque overinvolvement best left to others.
“You have to wear your tooth,” I told him, as if the day itself rode on that fragment of porcelain. “It’s my wedding.”
Knowing that some people were more comfortable talking to Raymond than others and were even able to take an uncondescending pleasure in Raymond’s offbeat creativity and desire to be included, I saw to it that he was seated at the rehearsal dinner next to a man who had served as a Marine in Vietnam, and who knew life isn’t fair, and his wife, a nurse, always a bemused compassionate listener. She had a long conversation with Raymond, after which she told me he seemed to be doing very well.
“You think so?” I said eagerly, figuring that if anyone could make a prognosis, it was a trained professional.
“Oh, my goodness, yes,” she said. “He told me all about his new business, and it sounds just dynamite.”
“His new business?”
“The International Book Search. He told me that he’s taken out ads in the Times and other places and that the company motto is ‘We’ll find any book, anywhere, anytime.’”
“He said that? Any book, anywhere, anytime?”
The International Book Search existed in the form of a letterhead on a piece of stationery and in the clutter of the trunk of whatever ailing vehicle Raymond had recently inherited from one of us. He had written to me that he had taken some ads in newspapers, but the prices were generally prohibitive: “By the way, I checked out the Globe’s advertising rates out of curiosity. Don’t Ever Feel Guilty (not that you do) about salary. $150 per column inch. One inch. Unbelievable.” He did manage to pay for an ad or two in the Times, however.
Letters from foreign professors written in the stiffest, most roundabout dictionary-driven English devoid of nuance arrived at the house constantly: “I respectably seek perchance the collection work of John Galsworthy for study further. With all personals and all regards …”
The letters, which went unanswered, were shuffled aside into some dusty corner. They had one advantage over the wooden spools scheme. They took up a lot less space.
“Oh, Beth,” I said, “he’s right. It is a thriving business. In his head.”
She looked crestfallen and pressed on.
“Well, he also told me you might write a book about him.”
I nodded my head dolefully.
Raymond made that suggestion frequently.
Whenever he asked me to, I would answer, “Maybe, someday,” waffling because I knew the book he wanted written would be a falsification, a libel in reverse. Conceived in the summer, delivered in the spring, my brother led a life that fanned out into one long contradiction of all that early promise. In any official version that would win his complete approval, he would be pictured as healthy, flourishing, a success. I would have been obligated to concentrate on the few years after he dropped out of high school when he sold encyclopedias in Puerto Rico and lived the high life. Perhaps I would have listed his various passions and prejudices, how he liked horse races, spareribs, Miller Lite, smokes, girls, early Woody Allen, Arlo Guthrie, Corvettes, Mustangs, tag sales and antiques and didn’t like The New York Times Cookbook (which earned his most dreaded dismissal, “flaky”), the movie Clockwork Orange, arcane ingredients. One of his favorite expressions was “KISS: Keep it simple, stupid,” said with no enthusiasm. He believed that the worst drivers are old men wearing hats. End of story.
The eighties for all of the Blais children except Raymond were a time of acquisition, rather than of shedding, a time of getting.
Better jobs, new houses, our own babies.
Our generation would produce six children in all, born between the years 1980 and 1988, five boys and one girl.
Michael worked at first for the Town of Stonington in Connecticut, in the office of town planner, and then spent about five years as a corrections officer at a women’s prison in Niantic. I used to tease him that, after being raised in a household filled with so many women, this job must have felt like divine retribution. Later, he went into computer work, partly because he didn’t want to be someone who oversaw other people’s confinement and also because he was attracted to the endless tinkering of electronic communication. Maureen got married and bought a house, to whose bare bones she added several rooms, and had two sons. She took a year off from teaching for each baby.
Christina and her husband moved to his mother’s former house in the same seafaring village in Connecticut where Maureen lives. For a time the birth of their two boys and the weekend parties with their flow of boats and bonhomie seemed like enough to sustain a marriage that had begun too young. Like Maureen, Christina took time off when the boys were born, but other than that, she continued to cultivate a teaching career.
Jacqueline was the surprise. From that frightened girl who could not bear the extroversion of Girl Scout camp, she turned into a wry spirit. Back in the days when live telephone operators processed collect calls, she answered their question, “And who shall I say is calling?” with one word, “Ishmael.” Jacqueline remains the peacemaker and to some degree, the mascot. She is the one who, when our mother said, “You have my forehead,” pretended to peel hers off and said, “Here, take it back.” She has odd, precise, formal enthusiasms, for croquet, sherry, and grammar. Her first job after college was as a social worker at Belchertown State Hospital in the blind unit, working with children who were both blind and delayed. Later, she got a job putting out a newspaper for a community organization, and that led to the chance to work as a reporter on a small paper. It was the kind of paper where all the reporters got rotated into each other’s beats, and the only time we feared for her employment security was when she was assigned to “food and fine dining.” She has never been much of an eater and lacked the antenna that would make a person pause mid-bite to question whether tarragon really was such a good idea in this particular sauce or to think twice about cilantro in the salsa yet again. One time she wrote a recipe for which she meant to recommend two bay leaves. Instead, she wrote, “two cups bay leaves,” and for days on end phone calls came from concerned readers who said that the amount of bay leaves recommended by Jacqueline would surely poison your average eater, to say nothing of being inedible for all the crunching it would require. When the Gannett chain bought the paper, they snatched her away (as we saw it) and sent her to Washington, D.C., so that now one of the wittiest, most literate people I know lives in the stuffiest, least language-respecting city in the nation.
Uphill Walkers Page 17