My mother liked being a mother and she took naturally to it. In my favorite picture of her from that time, she’s wearing a cap-sleeve shirt, a wide black belt, and a billowing skirt, and she’s standing under a clothesline in the Spartan Village yard. She looks like she’s calling to me, and she looks happy.
Family members have told me that she enjoyed life and laughed a lot. She wasn’t serious, like my dad. She was more carefree, and liked to have fun.
In my memory, she was a very loving and indulgent mother. I remember being held and hugged and kissed by her. I remember being loved. I have fleeting pictures in my head of green grass, of sunshine, of running past my mother’s full skirts. I remember her laughing.
My father was restless and ambitious. His desire for a better job moved us again. He left the one-room schoolhouse where he had been teaching in Pollock Pines and got another elementary school job in the nearby Camino school district.
He later took a job where his brother Kenneth was working, in the Barron Gray Cannery in San Jose, packing pineapple and other fruit for Dole. We moved in with Kenneth and his wife, Twila, and their four children in Saratoga, a San Jose suburb. This lasted until my mother got pregnant again.
Just like she did when she was pregnant with me and with Brian, she went to live with her mother for the last few months of her pregnancy. My dad stayed in Saratoga with me and Brian, crowded into his brother’s house, while everyone waited for the baby to arrive.
Then he was born, and it was very bad. He was brain-damaged—so severely that the doctors said he was not expected to survive. The doctors said he had only half a brain. His name was Bruce. He was born in Oakland, in the Highland-Alameda County Hospital, and he stayed there.
But so did my mother. Something was wrong with her, too, and it was serious. The doctors had missed it. Maybe the symptoms had been covered up by the problems with her pregnancy. Maybe the doctors were so concerned about what was wrong with the baby that they didn’t notice something was wrong with her. Maybe, like my father insisted later, it was because her family was too cheap to get her to a good private hospital.
Whatever the reason, by the time they figured out she was sick, it was too late for them to help her.
My mother died in the hospital twelve days after Bruce was born. Not until an autopsy was performed did her doctors realize she had cancer of the colon. According to her death certificate, the cause of death was “peritonitis, acute,” brought on by a perforated colon, which was caused by colon cancer. The doctor’s notes say she had been suffering from the cancer for months, but her death had followed the perforation of the colon by a matter of hours.
That is why my father almost did not see his wife before she died. It took a full day for someone from Daisy’s family to call him at work and let him know there was a problem. When he finally arrived at the hospital, he had to meet with a doctor before he could see his wife. Someone from Daisy’s family—her brother Gordon, my father said—had told the doctors that June and Rod were separated, and that he wasn’t really part of the family anymore. My father had to convince the doctors this wasn’t true before they would let him in.
By the time he got to see her, my mother was in a coma. Her eyes were open, but she was incoherent. She died that night. She was thirty-nine.
The autopsy was conducted the following day. Her own physician participated. He hadn’t known anything about the disease that killed her until after she was dead. Some family members would remember later that she had complained to her doctor repeatedly that she didn’t feel well, that she had pains. The doctor had chalked it up to morning sickness, and paid no attention to it.
My mother died without ever leaving the Oakland county hospital, without ever saying good-bye to her two sons, and maybe without ever saying hello to her newborn. I don’t know if she ever even laid eyes on Bruce.
Years later, I learned that she was cremated, and that her ashes were interred in the Chapel of Memories cemetery in Oakland. My father told me that the funeral service was attended by dozens of June’s personal friends, by my father’s mother and two brothers, and by June’s two brothers—but not by her mother.
I don’t know if my parents’ marriage was a happy one. My dad always said it was. I have no reason to think it wasn’t. But I learned many years later that one of the very last things my mother did in her life was change my name. I became, legally, Howard August Pierce Dully, taking on her maiden name as my second middle name. My father’s mother told me my dad was very angry about this. June had done it without his permission.
Why? What difference would it make? Why did she care if Pierce was part of my name?
I never found out. But I did learn, years later, that after June’s death her mother, Daisy, and brother Gordon tried to have me and Brian taken away from my father. Daisy filed papers to have me adopted by Gordon, so he could take us away from our dad and raise us as his own.
“Gordon wanted to adopt the kids” my dad told me later. “He would raise them, himself. He said I was a lousy father, that June should never have married me. If I’d had a gun, I would have shot him.”
I wasn’t conscious of any of this at the time. All I knew was I missed my mother, and she was gone. No one told me she was dead. I didn’t understand that she was dead. But I understood that she was gone. My father told me so. One evening sometime after my mother’s death, he told me she wasn’t coming home.
It was almost dark. We were alone in the car. We were in San Jose, riding down Seventh Street in my dad’s Plymouth station wagon. He told me my mother had gone away. She wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t ever going to see her again.
I was four years old, and I got very, very upset. I threw a terrible tantrum. I screamed and yelled. I needed to see my mother. I cried my eyes out and shouted that I wanted to see my mother. I demanded to see my mother.
It might have been better if he had just told me she was dead. Then I would have understood, maybe, what was going on. As it was, I thought she had left me. I was afraid she didn’t want to see me. I was afraid she didn’t love me.
What other explanation could there be? Why else would your mother leave you and never come back again, except that she didn’t love you?
This was too painful for me. So I decided she was still there, somehow. I thought she could see me. She knew what I was doing. She was nearby, somewhere, smiling down at me, or crying, about what she saw me doing. I wasn’t alone, even when I felt alone, because she was watching me.
I didn’t tell anyone that I felt this way, or had these ideas. Maybe I knew it was all imagination, or maybe I was afraid they would tell me it wasn’t true. I kept it to myself.
This was a very hard time for me. And I see now how hard it must have been for my father. He was twenty-seven years old. His wife—the woman he loved, the mother of his children—was dead. He himself had already suffered a stroke. He had two sons at home under the age of five, and a third son, severely retarded, who was probably going to die but who would require permanent professional care if he didn’t. He was estranged from his in-laws, who had money—and who had conspired to take his sons away from him—and his own family had no money to speak of. And he didn’t even have his own place. He was staying with his brother, living off the charity of his family. It must have been hard for that kind of man, born and raised like he was, to live like that.
For a few months after my mother’s death we continued to live with my uncle Kenneth. We had to. My dad had started a new career. He had just gotten a new job, teaching elementary school in Los Altos.
Most people who know San Jose these days think of it as the center of the Silicon Valley, or as a bedroom community for the wealthier city of San Francisco—in either case, a place where rich people live. It’s the oldest city in California—it was founded in 1777—and it was once the capital city of the original Spanish colony of Nueva California. For a while its primary business was supplying farms and canneries to feed San Francisco. Later on it would be a big
military center. But when I was a kid, it was just another working-class town.
There was always money around San Jose, but most of it didn’t live there. Even if they worked or owned businesses in San Jose, most of the people with money went home at night to places like Palo Alto, home of Stanford University, and ritzy communities like Mountain View, Saratoga, and Los Altos. Especially Los Altos, where rich people lived in big houses and drove expensive automobiles. These were people who played golf and rode horses. They didn’t live in low-income housing for married students or have to move their families into their brothers’ homes because they didn’t have anyone to watch their kids.
Even though it was only ten miles away from my uncle Kenneth’s house, Los Altos was like a different world. That’s where my dad went to work every day. He had started teaching fifth grade at Hillview Elementary. Los Altos is where he spent his days before coming home at night to share the crowded house with his brother Kenneth.
It wasn’t perfect, but pretty soon we lost that, too. My aunt Twila couldn’t take the overcrowding. Kenneth told his brother that we had to go. My dad, who had spent his own childhood bouncing from place to place, had to find a new home for us, again.
My father’s mother, my grandmother Beulah, was still living in San Francisco and working in the Southern Pacific offices on Market Street. To help us out, she moved down to Palo Alto and rented a little house—a kind of factory worker’s house, with two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a small living room—from a local Christian Scientist woman, and we all moved in together.
Beulah was a short, stout, tough Irish redhead who was very cosmopolitan and stylish, and extremely direct. Because Beulah was a strange name to us, we called her Grandma Boo. She was a working woman, and she had no time for nonsense. She ran a strict household, and, like my dad, she wasn’t what you would call affectionate. Every afternoon she’d walk down to the train station and take the train north to work. Early the next morning she’d come back.
Because she worked and my father worked, someone had to come in and take care of the children. So my dad found a neighbor who would watch me and Brian during the day. She served us sugar-and-cinnamon toast. I remember the toast, I think, because I remember being hungry. I remember thinking about food a lot, and I remember searching for it in that house.
It was a dark, crowded place, with Grandma Boo’s things and our things piled up everywhere. There was one bedroom for me and Brian at the front of the house, and one bedroom for my dad and Boo in the back. It had a curtain running down the middle of it, so they could each have some privacy. Hidden away in a corner of the room was a big cookie tin where Boo kept these delicious, soft oatmeal cookies.
I was crazy for those oatmeal cookies. I’d sneak down the hall and open the tin—while my dad and my grandmother were right there in the room, sleeping—and steal a couple of cookies. And not just once or twice, either. I made a career out of stealing those cookies.
We lived that way with Grandma Boo for about a year. I got old enough to start kindergarten. I remember being afraid to go. The school seemed like a big, scary place. I was afraid I’d get hurt there, or I’d get lost, or I wouldn’t be able to find my way home.
It wasn’t just the school. I was scared of a lot of things. I was afraid there were crocodiles under my bed at night. Later, when we moved again and I had to take the bus to school, I was afraid of that, too. I was so afraid that I’d get on the wrong bus, or get off at the wrong school. Things like that really terrified me.
Maybe it was because of my mother’s death, but I was afraid a lot of the time. I remember having terrible nightmares.
One of them stayed with me into adulthood. In this dream, I am walking on a deserted city street. It’s cold, and the city is gray. A long white car pulls slowly to the curb, and the door opens. I can’t see who’s inside, but I know they have come to get me. Then a rope, its end tied into a noose, comes out of the car and begins to slither along the sidewalk toward me. I know it’s going to catch me and pull me in. I know I can’t escape. I’m terrified and I want to run away, but I can’t. I can’t escape.
I always wake up before I find out who’s in the car, or where they’re taking me.
Other than the night terrors, I think I was a pretty normal kid. I was physical. I liked playing games. I had a mechanical mind. I would spend hours underneath the kitchen sink, pulling out all the pots and pans and trying to figure out how to stack them so they’d fit under there again. My father used to bring home things like broken radio sets for me to play with. I’d pull them apart and try to put them back together. My father always told people how impressed he was that I could put them back the right way—always figuring which tube went where, even though I was so little.
I don’t remember whether I ever wondered what had happened to Bruce. To this day, I’m not sure where he was living at that time. I know that he surprised the doctors who delivered him and did not die as an infant. At some point he was able to leave the hospital. I found out later that my dad had found a Christian Science woman to look after him. But at the time his existence was all wrapped up in my mother’s death. We never, ever talked about him.
In the end, my dad’s new teaching job saved us from our cramped living arrangement with Grandma Boo. The families of Los Altos and the parents of my father’s students at Hillview Elementary heard about my mother’s death, and they came to our rescue. We started getting invitations to dinner. Me and Brian and my dad went to dinner at a bunch of people’s houses. They fed us and clucked over us and made sure we were doing all right. They helped my dad with things like sewing and washing.
One of the women was especially helpful. She started doing laundry for us. Then she offered to babysit me and Brian. Her name was Lucille, but everyone called her Lou.
My mother was a tall, handsome woman with strong features, wavy black hair, and a very feminine sense of fashion. In all of the pictures I have of her, she’s dressed like she’s going someplace special. She’s wearing dresses, or nice skirts and blouses. She has her hair done nicely and she’s wearing makeup. She looks pretty, and she looks like she looks that way on purpose. She’s spent some time making herself beautiful.
Lou was the opposite. She was shorter, and plainer, and kind of mannish. She wore her curly hair cut short. She hardly ever wore makeup. In the pictures I have of her, she’s dressed like she’s going to work in the yard. She wore jeans, or pants, or slacks, but hardly ever skirts or dresses—which was unusual for that time—and checked shirts, like a farm woman. She was slender, and had a sort of girlish figure, but her presentation was more masculine than feminine. She wore round tortoiseshell glasses. She smoked non-filter cigarettes. She was all business.
Her full name was Shirley Lucille Hardin. She was the daughter of Herbert Sidney Hardin and Shirley Lucille Jackson, who was in turn the daughter of George William Gresley-Jackson and Shirley Lucille Daughterman. Lou was born in San Francisco—just like her mother and grandmother before her.
Her childhood was very unstable. Lou was born in 1919. Her mother was born in 1900. So her mother was a just teenager when she had Lou. According to family stories, her mother was a real 1920s flapper, who bobbed her hair and danced the Charleston.
Lou’s parents didn’t have any interest in raising a child. Herbert seems to have disappeared right after her birth. Her mother then turned Lou over to the care of her own mother. She was raised by this grandmother, a widow whose husband passed away when Lou was a little girl.
Lou’s mother went on to have at least four husbands. With one of them she had another daughter, named Virginia, a few years after Lou was born. Lou’s father, Herbert, remarried a woman named Daphne, who was known as Nana, and spent most of his life in Idaho. He was an alcoholic, and worked as a house painter. After he retired, he moved back to the San Jose area, where he and Nana became good friends with Shirley and her new husband, Lynn Swindell. One of my cousins remembers them all getting together for bridge games.
> So Lou, like my dad, didn’t have a normal childhood, surrounded by good, traditional role models for healthy parenting.
Lou grew up around San Francisco. She had moved to the San Jose area by the time she was a teenager, and was going to Mountain View High School when she met her first husband. His name was Red Cox. He was a teenage runaway from Alabama. Red and Lou waited until they both graduated—and until Lou’s grandmother had died—to get married. That same year, her mother married her fourth and last husband. By then, Lou’s mother had moved to the San Jose area, too. For the first time in her life, Lou had a relationship with her real mother.
Lou and Red had two sons, Cleon and George. But she didn’t take naturally to motherhood—at least not according to her niece, Linda Pickering, who as a little girl spent a lot of time around Lou. Linda remembered watching Lou raising George. When he was a little baby he would sit in his bassinet and cry. Finally Linda’s mother would say, “Lou, that boy is hungry. Why don’t you feed him?” Lou would say, “I just fed him. He isn’t due to eat again for another hour.” Then Linda’s dad would say, “You better feed that baby, or else get him a watch.”
“Because of the way she grew up,” Linda said, “nobody ever taught her how to be a mother.”
By the time she met my father, Lou was already divorced and was living with Cleon and George in the house in Los Altos that she’d shared with Red.
I don’t remember meeting her. I don’t remember her babysitting us, or doing our laundry, even though that’s what I was told later. All I knew is one day she wasn’t there, and the next day she was. My father said later that he had known her for about a year and a half before he proposed and she accepted. Soon enough, we all moved in together.
That would have been about 1955, when I was seven. Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle were hits at the movies, which meant that rock ’n’ roll and the American teenager were both officially on the map. On TV, there was I Love Lucy and Dragnet and The Honeymooners. Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was playing on the radio. It was a cool time to be a young person. It seemed like the whole country was changing.
My Lobotomy Page 2