Mothering and reporting required the same basic ingredient: hanging out, being there. I was having trouble trying to do both jobs at once. The world and the womb, the beckoning of both.
We had another child, a daughter this time. I thought of naming her after Lizzie, but I was afraid that the name rang too deep an emotional chord for all of us. She would be asked to live up to too great an ideal. In the end, I called her Justine, partly because it is the name of a novel by Lawrence Durrell, about a smoky, mysterious woman given over to breaking hearts, and also because it means “justice,” and she was born on the first day Martin Luther King’s birthday was celebrated as an official holiday—a fact made clear to me because even though it was a week-day, there was a shortage of nurses on the labor room floor. Also, the name Justine was the closest I could come to combining the names of my three sisters, who, though shaping up into women of stature, were not so ideal as to be intimidating.
I missed them.
I missed seasons, real seasons, the hefty kind, not the tropical version, in which bold scents get bolder.
I missed cider.
The decision to leave had to do with the roots that cling.
It had to do with where to raise the children, and I gravitated back to a setting I knew, having been offered a job teaching at the University of Massachusetts.
But even then there were choices to make. There were two roads diverging in a yellow wood, with imaginary signs.
One said, REPEAT.
The other, REPAIR.
Traditional Irish culture operates under a system of primogeniture, meaning that the oldest son inherits the land. What is also true, but involves less of a legal framework, is that the oldest daughter inherits the people. It was now my turn, and, of course, I discovered the obvious: it was going to be just as frustrating for me to try to control Raymond’s illness as it had been for the others. Raymond might go for as long as a year or two without any flagrant breakdowns, only to find that the pressure cooker inside his head had to give off more steam.
One Christmas—after the holiday itself, before the New Year—I got a call. He needed a half gallon of orange juice, a case of beer, a carton of cigarettes, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies. And he needed all of this pronto. I brought them to him. When I got to his place, he was sleeping. I knew where to find his spare key, so I opened the door and left them right inside. The next day, same call, same requests, same scenario, although this time I went inside, picked up the cans strewn everywhere, emptied the ashtrays, swept, and left. He was out. The next day, ditto; call me a slow learner. I kept hoping he’d get through this without another hospitalization, and since he refused to go on his own, what I hoped didn’t really have much weight to begin with.
Each time after the first day I checked his meds. I laid them out in piles of the appropriate dosage. On the fourth day, when I called him early in the morning, shortly after six, he sounded more than ordinarily groggy. After I got the children off to their play dates, my husband and I went to Raymond’s. “You have to come with me. I can’t do this alone, I said.”
Unexpected intimacies, not so unusual in a marriage, are often their secret spine.
This unexpected intimacy went the extra lap.
We found him on the floor, passed out, twitching.
Raymond had overdosed on lithium.
Baystate Medical Center in Springfield kept him for five months, first for the detox, then for the bilateral pneumonia that followed, then in chronic care, waiting for an open sore to heal and he was strong enough to leave.
Once he was back at home, another year or two might go by without an eruption. My sisters and Michael and I would be in constant contact. Raymond’s illness drove us closer and fostered an interdependency in ways that were not always healthy or desirable. Instead of being little kids fighting over whether or not to watch Dobie Gillis, we kept exhausted tabs on who had visited Raymond during his last hospitalization and whose turn it was to visit now, who called him, who sent him money, who let him inside their house and under what circumstances. Christina would cook for him, but only if he ate at Maureen’s house. Michael felt, correctly, that he had been left alone on the Raymond Watch for long stretches in the sixties and the seventies, and he would do what he could, but he was busy launching his career and others had to pitch in. Maureen invited Raymond to every major holiday; Michael once described her house as being like the inside of a warm muffin, with its hanging shelf of dishes that always catches the light. Jacqueline had him visit her in Washington at least once, often twice, a year, during which time her friend Hank would take him to the horse races, once remarking that you hadn’t seen anything until you saw the look on Raymond’s face when he thought his horse was going to win. But even with all of us doing what we comfortably could, there were times when it felt as if we were floundering in a leaky dinghy in a rabid sea. One time Raymond called the Department of Mental Health and delivered a message, which was recorded automatically, complaining about how he had been treated during those early visits to Northampton and how his uncle, who happened to run the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and I, a major investigative reporter for the Boston Globe, the most major investigative reporter ever, were on the verge of personally shutting it down and exposing its fraudulent ways. The friend who gave me a copy of the tape said it showed how profound Raymond’s betrayal had been at the hands of the system early on. The very people who could give him help were the people he feared most.
Every parent has a special stockpile of panics, and usually in that stack one distinct source of fear rises taller and sturdier than all the others. People worry that their child will choke on a piece of popcorn, fly over the handlebars, put a tongue on a live socket. When my children were old enough to venture forth from the house on their bicycles, I would beg them to assure me that they would not travel to the nearby railroad tracks. “It’s very dangerous,” I would say. “It’s got to do with the physics of sound. If you are walking or riding on the tracks, you can’t hear a train coming from behind until it’s too late.” I would say this each time with such fresh urgency that it was years before my daughter turned to me and said, “You don’t have to tell us that every day.”
No matter how hard we tried to prepare ourselves for the cycles in Raymond’s illness, it was always a new shock when the disease erupted, as if we didn’t hear the train coming.
We would get lulled into thinking there would be no more breakdowns. He had exhausted his particular coupon book for that kind of travail.
Then, a call from the police one Saturday evening when we had company.
“We have your brother in protective custody. We can release him now, and we’d like you to come to the station and bring him home.”
Raymond was being detained at the Palmer Police Station because he had called Barnes Airport in Westfield, requesting an ambulance, saying it was a matter of life and death.
It was nine-thirty at night. The image of me trying to pick up my brother in an agitated state and get him up the dark wooden steps to his apartment unnerved me. I said I would be there in the morning.
“In the morning? He’s ready to leave now. Is there any other family member in the area who could come get him now?”
“There used to be. But they all moved away.”
“You’re it? How are you feeling about that?”
Now the cops are shrinks too. I could not tell if I was being baited, or if this was a neutral, maybe even sympathetic, interrogation. I knew how the cops and prosecutors in Dade County used to view some of their less appealing suspects. “N.H.I.,” they would say, a term that I thought stood for some little-known legal maneuver until I was apprised otherwise.
N.H.I.: No humans involved.
“It’s not always easy. I can’t leave now to get him. I have company. I have young children. They need me here at night. I’ll call in the morning to see if you still want me to come.”
The next day I brought Raymond home.
The pol
ice gave me copies of the documents detailing the charges against him. How often in Miami I had looked at documents just like this, with their strange, stilted, staccato language, always astounded anew at how people got themselves into such pickles.
“Mrs. M. called from Video Paradise. Older male subject (Raymond Blais), just in store threatening them.”
Raymond wanted one of the women to come to his home immediately: “in 10 minutes or he’ll be back to kill them.”
Later that day, he called a series of distant family acquaintances with whom he had not been in touch for years to ask them to a nonexistent surprise party. I received phone calls from some of them at home. Although the callers were polite enough to act as if maybe the invitation was genuine, they were in fact trying to alert me to something I already knew: Raymond was going downhill fast. He went back later to Video Paradise to apologize, “saying he is manic-depressive and on medication,” and when he was asked to leave, he left the store angry, stopping traffic as he crossed the street.
He frightened some women who worked at Friendly’s across the street.
He was taken into custody again and on Monday at the advice of the police, I went to district court in Palmer to get him committed to a mental hospital.
The moment in court went quickly.
The judge took one look at my brother (in shackles, eyes downcast) and one look at me (Joan Vass dress, eyes steady), and the papers were signed without much fuss.
But it still took all day, because I had to wait for a psychiatrist to interview me, in part for information about Raymond, but also to evaluate my motives. When the doctor finally showed up after many hours, I explained that I was there at the suggestion of the police, who believed my brother needed to be hospitalized in that he presented a danger to self and others. This was not the first time I had gone through this spiel, though it would be the last. I knew the doctor was gauging my sincerity, taking a grudge x-ray. Was I on the level, or was I so demented with some revenge scheme against my brother that I had cooked up baseless accusations and phantom complaints simply because it gave me some kind of sick pleasure to see him packed off?
It was a song and dance, even at the best of times.
Song, dance, dance, song.
I reminded myself: follow the formula.
Sit up straight.
Modulate your speech, so that sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slow, but it’s never out of control.
Convey that you know something about the problem, but not so much that you are in any way questioning the superior resources of the system and its ability to solve it.
Avoid their words: enmeshment, designated patient, dual diagnosis, noncompliance, and stick to your own.
Describe your sense of Raymond’s decompensation, the technical word for loss of sound psychological function, with facts, not feelings.
Don’t say, “I’m scared of my brother.”
Do say, “On Sunday night he threatened violence against a clerk at a video store, who is now afraid to return to work.”
Don’t exaggerate, but do describe the gradation of dangerousness to the highest grade possible.
All accidental overdoses are suicide attempts.
All suicides are homicides.
Anything is a weapon.
Raymond was at Franklin Medical in Greenfield for ten days.
It was his last time in a mental hospital:
“Patient was not threatening during this hospital stay as he maintained a routine of expectations with reminders from staff. Patient is relatively stable medically and psychiatrically.”
A chest x-ray raised the suspicion of chronic lung disease.
When I went to pick him up, he seemed in a good mood, or at least he seemed subdued, which is what I often interpreted as a good mood. I called it his pharmaceutical harness. We took the longest way back to Palmer I could think of, going through the smallest of the small hill towns, places like Wendell, mere geographical twinges, but, somehow, the passing landscape was a kind of ballet for his eyes, a visual balm pure and simple.
After that, the physical energy it must have taken to explode mentally was no longer there. I am reminded of a feature story I wrote in the late seventies with the title “When Mommy Goes to Jail,” in which the warden told me that usually by the age of thirty the recidivism rate dropped steeply. The women stopped breaking the law.
I was taken aback.
Had they all become model citizens with pension plans who served on the school board and complained about crabgrass?
“Not really. After thirty, they are too old, too tired, or,” she said, “they’re dead.”
As mistakes go, it was sincere and honest, the most annoying kind.
A few years ago, my sisters and I decided that as a project for the holidays to occupy our mother, she should go through the dozen or so scrapbooks and photo albums that had survived as the official documentary narrative of our childhood. She should divide them into six separate story lines for each of her six children. The final entries were made in the late seventies and early eighties when our own babies came. There is a note home from me after the birth of my son, alluding to a booster shot and its screaming aftermath and how someone was dropping by with a prepared dinner but the person was “a frightful cook and I mean frightful. To reheat rice she boils it again.” Christina asked my mother to baby-sit, with these instructions on an index card: “Robby eats his lunch which Bob will leave in fridge at 11:00. At 12 or 12:30 he has his bottle (in fridge). At around 1:00 or 1:30, if he has not napped yet just interest him in a crib toy and put him in his crib. I’ll be home by 3:50.”
And then they stop.
The reason was less mournful than practical.
We began to keep our own records of our lives and those of our children. It is our turn to save the school play program from when the children were in The Gondoliers and their drawing of Sojourner Truth and the invitations to bat mitzvahs on homemade paper.
The photos we take are in color but not much less haunting. Just the other day, I paused, pierced deep inside for an instant, with the inescapable truth: the cars in these photos will look old someday too.
In the years since, at our bidding, our mother took all the old albums and parsed them so that everyone got his or her own class photos, in which the boys wore plaid or stripes and the girls all had on dresses with tiny round collars or the big bib kind or jumpers with suspender straps. We have all regretted the impulse that made us think this was a good idea.
When I look at my skinny wedge of the pie or at the abbreviated, hacked-up versions belonging to someone else, it startles me how much I had imagined that their work belonged as much to me as to them. Each separate book ends abruptly, like a hem that’s way too short; dismantled, they seem skimpy, even a little pathetic, a mouth with missing teeth.
My sisters and I will be seated at one or another one’s dining table, sipping coffee. We will sigh a Blais sigh, shooting air up our face to cool a forehead, and when the silence is broken, it will be in mid-thought, but everyone will know the subject at hand. We all agree: it was a bad idea. The albums are so misleading now. Anyone looking at them would have that maddening sense of having missed the first five minutes of the movie. The crucial context. But she meant well. We were the ones who urged her to do it. Maybe, somehow, we could restore them.
But, then, we have to consider the unrealistic nature of such a task: who really remembers how it went? The actual sequence. It was (how could we have been so foolish not to see this before it was too late!) the aggregate that counted. Before, if you saw those books, you could sense a fearsome force. A huge wind blowing across the invisible landscape of life itself.
The six of us as one.
Now.
Nothing … but a bunch of little gusts.
Chapter Thirteen
The Heaven of Lost Futures
IN THE END RAYMOND LIVED OUT HIS FINAL YEARS ABOVE AN AUTO repair store in the town of Palmer, Exit 8 on the Massachus
etts Turnpike. Next door was the defunct Casa de Diablo bar, whose name always makes our mother wince. His subsidized housing was subjected to periodic inspections by government representatives who counted the vents and the doors and the smoke alarms. In one of those typical petty bureaucratic displays of oneupsmanship, their notices always specified the day of the inspection but never the hour, or even whether to expect the evaluator in the morning or the afternoon. He would, of course, wait for them all day, a kind of house arrest.
His place was on the second floor, carved out of the roofline. It had a combination living area and kitchen, one bedroom, and an overlarge bathroom that could have been remodeled to create another bedroom, but Raymond always believed the landlord wanted a single tenant or a couple, feeling that any family whose best bet was to live above a motor repair shop in the middle of nowhere presented potentially more problems than the rent solved. There was a skylight, an architectural nicety that pleased him deeply. “Girls like skylights,” he would say. His living room contained two couches (one wicker, one upholstered), a couple of end tables, a small bench that subbed as a coffee table, and a little stand containing books written by me, my husband, and Fannie Farmer. He had a dark wooden bench that rocked. We saw to it that he had a microwave oven and a gas grill, a blender and a TV, lamps, an air conditioner, dishes, pots and pans, and plenty of clothes. He had a phone and an answering machine. He had a thermometer with a Moxie theme, Moxie being an old-fashioned soft drink that jolted its patron with its vile combination of medicinal flavors. A sign above the hallway leading to the bedroom and bathroom said, ROOMS.
He never married. The few times he had girlfriends he would become obsessed that they were ruining their life. He had a vague notion about what was good about marriage: it can give a guy goals, “like buying dishwashers and automatic garage door openers and all that house crap that keeps women happy.”
Uphill Walkers Page 19