Before I went to sleep that night, I examined the contents of a wooden box about the size of a briefcase in which Raymond kept his lifetime accumulation of papers. There was a sales slip from Ames, his favorite department store. Recipes, for baked spaghetti and meatballs, oven-roasted potatoes, and, in our mother’s handwriting, meat loaf. He had a paperback copy of the Train-Watcher’s Guide to North American Railroads. There was a series of receipts for odds and ends that he used to pick up at tag sales and then bring to the Amherst Auction Galleries to resell: a chair and a globe for which he was paid $10, a lamp for $15, a canister set for $5, an “as is” trunk for $5. Refill request forms for various pharmaceutical products, including alcohol prep pads, insulin lisinopril in 5 mg tabs, lithium carbonate in 300 mg capsules to be taken by mouth three times a day. There was no address book, but there were several return addresses ripped off the corner of envelopes. A “separation document” from the United States Air Force confirmed that he had entered the service on April 30, 1962, served a total of twenty days, had completed two years of high school at the time, was not eligible for veteran’s benefits, and was given an honorable discharge. The Social Security Administration had contacted him at various times, to inform him that his monthly stipend would be $485 after deductions for Medicare. Sometimes these documents were accompanied by their Spanish and their Khmer translations. His housing subsidy from the government amounted to $328 a month. He was obligated to pay an additional $71 rent out of his Social Security. The box had an odometer disclosure form for his VW Jetta and information about car insurance. There was a card dated December 21, 1989, from an old acquaintance from his encyclopedia days.
There was a newspaper ad, dated 1990, from a store called Bradlee’s for a dozen long-stem roses, premium quality, eighteen-inch minimum length, wrapped with greens and baby’s breath, arranged in a crystal vase for $19.99.
That night I dreamt that the Summit House had slowly collapsed and slid down the mountainside, plummeting in silence.
At work the next day I received a message from Raymond’s oncologist at Baystate: “I’m very sorry to see in one of our reports that Raymond had expired. Would you please be willing to give me a call and tell me what happened?”
The voice of the doctor was soft and respectful, “What happened?” I wanted to call him back and comfort him, to say that this recent report was meaningless. My brother had died long ago. The boy who might have been had gotten lost in the forest one night and never returned.
I wanted to tell him that I have often heard it said that when a plane crashes, it is usually the result of not one glaring mistake so much as a series of seemingly unrelated events. It occurs to me that the same may be true when a personality disintegrates, a mind collapses. Was there a key time in my brother’s life when timely intervention might have made a difference? How much was he slowed down by our insistence on interpreting his failings and failures in moral rather than medical terms? What of the failure of medicine to see the mind and body as each other’s spokesman? Did the high expectations, those third-generation immigrant dreams of striving, keep him from settling for a downsized, more reasonable existence? What was the price of shame?
A few weeks after Raymond’s death, Jacqueline and I visited the courthouse in Springfield in order to settle, and I use the term with all the irony due it, his estate, which consisted of the car with which we supplied him, a few pieces of furniture of little objective value, and less than two thousand dollars in the bank.
“One thousand and seven hundred and eighteen dollars and change,” said Jacqueline. “Knowing Ray, he would want us to buy a lottery ticket with this combination.”
As we looked for the arrows pointing the way to Probate, we saw a sign that said, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE. TAKE A NUMBER.
Since then, well-meaning friends have asked me more than once whether or not I miss him. The question fills me with incredulity: how can you miss someone who is missing to himself? Yet the memory of him returns to me unbeckoned, his offbeat observations and passionate opinions, often at moments when it might be said that I am wallowing in ease. The children are home, we are eating dinner, the house is friendly with rich colors and treasured objects, a life of chenille and kilims, dinners with napkin rings and bread served in a wrought-silver basket. It is a dreamworld of satisfied people who might be tempted not to reveal their good fortune, people who fret over artificial dilemmas, the more artificial the better, such as how the wrong swatch arrived from Brunschwig & Fils or how Bread and Circus has for some reason run out of fresh capers, a life filled on the surface with what might be called Protestant tragedies, designer woes.
We could pass for my mother’s dreaded smuggos and complacos. We are talking about something of little consequence, a neighbor’s new minivan, the deplorable conditions of the rain-ravaged soccer fields at Smith and Wesson, the return of the college students from one of their endless breaks with their mattresses teetering off the roofs of their cars. We discuss my daughter’s dress for the eighth-grade dance. Long? Short? Black? White? We discuss my son’s summer job prospect pumping air into bicycle tires at an establishment called Wheel Happy. We audition ideas for what to do during the next spring vacation. Should we visit our old haunt, Florida, the Fleeing Felon State, where I love the lanolin odor of the air, the creaminess of a tropical night, and take a perverse delight in what we used to call “Only in Miami” stories, the outlandish events fueled by the peculiar atmosphere consisting of sunlight and garlic and firearms? Or will it be back to Italy, where I have supervised students at the University of Massachusetts in the writing portion of a photojournalism class for the past two years? My all-time favorite student proposal for an essay was entitled “Sicily Today: Now and Then.”
Into this busy, nearly spoiled talk, my brother will suddenly intrude, and I will recall his face. In Raymond’s agony to lead as normal a life as possible, his struggles became as much mine as his, and they belonged to my other brother and our three sisters as well, let alone our mother. Most people I know have a Raymond somewhere in their family. Everyone’s Raymond is special; everyone’s Raymond is impossible. I have little doubt that in another family in another time his life might not have been so blighted, but I also believe, perhaps because any other belief is intolerable, that despite the flaws of the family he had, some measure of coherence and caring kicked in so that he died in relative peace. In the end he killed neither himself nor anyone else. As success stories go, this may seem grim, but I find I must look at it differently. “Where is it written that families have to be (a) happy or (b) unhappy?” Jacqueline once said, and then answering her own question, “Oh, yeah, it was Tolstoy, sort of. Do you think it ever occurred to him they can be both at once?” My husband always says that we were either the most normal eccentric family in the world, or the most eccentric normal one.
In the end, we did what we could to inject tenderness into a life that often courted its opposite. We were, as Jacqueline says, “good enough.”
Northampton State Hospital is closed down, as shuttered as a bad clam after it’s been boiled, a series of boarded-up buildings that are sometimes explored by teenagers on a dare or a double dare. The interiors are collapsing in on themselves. The last patient left in the early nineties.
Outside, the gardens that used to be tended by the patients as a form of therapy in the early hopeful days are now given over to the community at large for its radishes and its lettuce.
A field is devoted to youth soccer, and on weekends you can hear fans shouting for a pass or cussing out a bad call. Plans are underway to tear down much of the hospital and rebuild on the property, with a mix of housing for the poor and the not so poor.
Raymond would have shaken his head in wonderment to learn that Northampton State Hospital got star billing as the setting for the movie The Cider House Rules, and he would have been even more flabbergasted to learn that a performance artist got money from the state of Massachusetts to stage a kind of public exorcism at the hospital.
The artist, Anna Schuleit, first saw the hospital in 1991 while on a field trip from her nearby prep school, and later told a reporter that she had been taken aback by the beauty and the architecture of the facility. “It was created with such care, such amazing attention down to the last detail. It was obvious to me that the people who built the hospital were idealists, that this was going to be a great place—a real contribution to human happiness and fulfillment. And it all went so badly.” She found the silence most stunning, “It was like an indrawn breath. It felt like the end of the world.”
At first, she could think of no graphic or pictorial way to capture the essence of what she felt about the hospital, but eventually she came up with a plan that would fight the silence. She would make the building sing. She spent several years getting permission from the state to allow a group of technicians to run wires through the abandoned buildings so that for twenty-eight minutes, Bach’s Magnificat would be played over state-of-theart loudspeakers in its entirety. The piece is a polyglot of voices, never a mere babble, but in fact a conversation between one movement and the next. The Magnificat is about feeling and emotion as much as it is about tempo and pitch and crescendo. It is a mosaic of moods, and as such she believed it would make a perfect set piece to accompany an otherwise silent vigil at a defunct mental hospital.
Articles in the local press quoted naysayers who dismissed her scheme as an ego trip, speculating that no other possible end than Anna Schuleit’s self-aggrandisement would be served by the event. Before the musical tribute, a two-day symposium entitled “Beyond Asylum: Transforming Mental Health Care” was held on the campus at nearby Smith College, culminating in statements from former patients about their time at the “haunted house on the hill.” They spoke with a sense of subdued outrage, but sometimes ventured toward nostalgia and even outright humor. One woman said, “Yes, there were gang showers and you could go on about that, but we were all women at least.” Someone else burst into laughter as she recalled faking seizures for the fun of it. Another patient remembered how there wasn’t enough money for towels and the patients were given men’s underwear that had been laundered, but was nonetheless tattered and stained, to use as washcloths. The pure absurdity of it was lost on no one, staff and patients alike.
The former patients who spoke that day saw the end of the Northampton State Hospital in large historic terms, writ in boldface across a huge convas. They likened its proposed demolition to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. When they were finished, the crowd of hundreds walked from the campus up the steep incline to the adjacent grounds of the hospital where they were joined by hundreds more. At noon, all the churches of Northampton rang their bells and everyone in the city was asked to observe a moment of silence in honor of what had been done intentionally, or unintentionally, at the hospital to harm those who had stayed there.
Later, dressed in dark bulky coats and the scarves and hats needed in a New England winter, most of the audience circled the building in a trance while the music resonated through the air. A few people sat by themselves off to the side, in apparent meditation. Some in the crowd exchanged greetings with a nod of the head, or a quick hello, but, as if by common consent, it was understood that no one would ask any one else why he or she had chosen to be there.
Not birds but Bach fought against the gray sky and, in this, the composer’s most ambitious and life-affirming work, a glorious chorus, called for renewal, expressing the desire for God’s divine mercy on all people. The fallen creation embodied by Northampton State Hospital was transformed, if only for a moment. The snake pit was replaced by a cathedral.
To this day my desk drawers are filled with requests from Raymond for small items that helped guarantee his daily survival, especially grocery lists, with their unceasing emphasis on Dinty Moore canned stew. By the end, we all operated a sort of bucket brigade, trying, not always with perfect success, to see that he received the proper medical attention, and food and clothing. Maureen not only offered him an invitation to her house on every holiday, she even helped with his laundry. “Not that he didn’t have twenty hours a day to do it himself,” she used to say, laughing, but she also understood that we all trade in symbols and the symbol consoled him. Sweet with the smell of soap, starched and civic-minded, carefully folded clothes are the opposite of abandonment. Whenever he was feeling well enough to express his gratitude, he did. For my children a candy bar or a dollar, free balloons from a bank opening; for all of us, various plants that he would get at one of his vaunted bargains. One time he gave me a dictionary, and since then, I have sometimes wondered: was this a gift with a subtext, implying permission for this endeavor, perhaps even endowing it with his blessing? I can assure you he would have had no truck with such blatant sentimentality. “Now that,” he would be likely to say, leaning forward, his face reddening with conviction, “is pure bull.”
Chapter Fourteen
Lucky Ladies
RECENTLY, WE GOT TOGETHER, THE FOUR BLAIS GIRLS, IN CONNECTICUT, where our mother’s efforts to pair us have paid off especially with Maureen and Christina, who are neighbors on the same street and teachers in the same school system.
In her work as a kindergarten teacher, Christina spends her time helping others put their feet out the door. Perhaps because the world greeted Christina with a warm bath of approval, she had one foot out the door early, marrying first, owning a house first, producing the first baby, and, eventually, getting the first divorce.
Her marriage lasted almost twenty years.
Christina’s husband worked his way up to representing a firm in Finland that manufactured luxury yachts, selling them to men who call beer “brewskies” and who pride themselves on not wearing socks between Memorial Day and Labor Day and who act as if they were the very first people ever to think of marrying someone half their age. Despite their wealth, these men took childish delight in the nautical tradition of making do, of, say, reworking wire coat hangers into sticks for kebobs, or stirring their coffee with the shank of their sunglasses rather than using a spoon. Christina would go to parties in Greenwich, Connecticut, at which all the women wore the same black dress and for which the invitations were calligraphic works of art suitable for framing. After the marriage ended, our mother often pointed out that Christina is her most modern daughter in the sense that she has those blended-family dilemmas that one hears about on daytime TV—and, in that she roller-blades almost every day.
Maureen lives with her husband and her two school-age sons. As a child, she was known to be stubborn, and now she is known as fierce, especially about her job teaching emotionally disturbed children, who are either mired in silence or, just as likely, boisterous. They are like her younger self, easily overlooked, or, like Raymond, likely to live out crippled fates if not for massive intervention. She slaves over her year-end reports, which serve as guidebooks for the fancy shrinks hired by the state to ratify my sister’s sensible advice about the best placement for each child.
Jacqueline and I ended up sharing the address of a similar profession. She is now an editor at USA Today, and one of her accomplishments was to go one-on-one with the New York Times to break its lock on the best-seller lists for books, creating one for the Gannett newspaper chain.
She had no children of her own, but instead became the designated “extra mother,” the spare that Anne Tyler talks about in the opening pages of her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. She keeps the scrapbooks for the next generation, saves their emails and their artwork. She treats them to astronaut ice cream from the Smithsonian and enters their relays and diving contests with an enthusiasm that the rest of us often cannot muster.
The children call her Aunt Mom.
And I remain dictatorial as ever, still bearing the burden, perhaps more a delusion than a reality, of being the one to report on the outside world to my sisters, to make pronouncements on fashion, such as, “Black goes with black,” or “Taupe is a godsend,” or to come up with the complicated recipes, the preparation of which
transforms me into a banshee in the kitchen, shouting directions as if they were brave-spirited slogans, “Toast the almonds! Section the grapefruit! Splay the cornichons!” I am the standard bearer, the queen of the brave front, the setter of example, the apostle of good grades, the arbiter of who does what for whom in the family, a low-level Mafiosa doling out the homely chore. All this, when I have long nursed the secret suspicion that my true nature was to be an adventurer, but circumstances replaced my original personality with one that is entirely different. I went from the rebel to that most odious of girl fates, the goody-goody. Born to be footloose and impulsive, I became tethered and domineering; born Jo, I became Meg.
Some clever person once said that in big Irish families the children squabble over everything, including which prefix attaches to their name, and there are three to choose from: poor, that, or dear. In our family, it was usually poor all of us for having lost our father. It was poor Raymond for having so many crosses to bear, and that Raymond for causing so much commotion bearing them. It was poor Jacqueline for having to put up with me, dear Jacqueline for being the kindest, that Jacqueline when she tried too hard and, of course, failed to make everything perfect. It was poor Christina when her marriage ended, dear Christina when she showed any evidence of her overall handiness, that Christina when she appeared to prefer others to her own family. It was poor Maureen for being so quiet, dear Maureen for being almost as kind as Jacqueline, and never that Maureen. It was poor Michael for having the added hardship of a brother who could not be a brother to him the way the girls could be sisters to each other, and dear Michael for being so good to his mother, and that Michael when he set the children up to commit some act of mischief or another. I rarely slowed down enough in my efforts to whip everyone into shape to earn the word dear, I avoid being called poor, and mostly, given my role as Mother Superior, am known, at my worst, as that Madeleine, “one cold cookie.”
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