Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  During that five-month stay at the home, my mother called my grandmother almost every night. My uncle David, then ten years old, remembers picking up the phone and hearing my mother crying. The rooms were poorly heated, she complained to my grandmother. The housemother was brusque. Every winter afterward, my mother slept with a plug-in electric blanket. It was Kermit green with a soft, nubby texture. She hated to feel cold, my father told me.

  So on this spring night in 1970, my mom told my dad she wanted to keep me. Perhaps she thought having a baby would change him, might make him a more attentive husband or make him forget about his young lover, a lean blond undergraduate named John Dale. In his journals Dad recalled her saying that if he wanted to leave, he could.

  I imagine their conversation, with Dad crossing and uncrossing his legs. He flicked ash from his cigarette into an abalone ashtray perched on an end table but said nothing. She read hesitation and fear on his face, then came up with a compromise.

  “If I have this baby and it’s too much for you, you can split. I won’t chase you. You won’t even have to pay child support. I’ll take full responsibility.”

  My mother took a deep breath and exhaled. Her brown eyes widened and then narrowed in a fixed gaze on my father. He felt, sitting next to her standing figure, like a small boy. He had no argument to offer. “We are married,” he wrote in his journal. “She’s free to be herself. How can I hold her back?”

  JOHN DALE told me that the rain fell softly down the oak-lined streets in front of the Emory University hospital on the night of my birth. He sat with my father in a hospital hallway. My dad smoked a cigarette and talked nervously waiting for his child to be born.

  “Sometimes I find myself wanting it to be a boy and then I think, why do I want that?” My dad crossed his right leg over his left, and his one dangling foot twitched nervously from side to side. “Is it because . . . I’ve been taught to want a boy? Or do I need to see a version of myself reflected in this baby?” John shrugged, offering a weak smile. They continued talking when a nurse appeared from a side door. “Mr. Abbott? Your wife has delivered a healthy little girl. She’s resting now but you can see the baby in the window of the south ward, just down the hall.”

  My dad stood behind the window of the baby ward, so close that he fogged the glass with his breathing. He scanned the many baby faces searching for mine. In a letter he later wrote me, he described all the babies as looking “like fruit in a fruit display.” When he found the baby with the index card reading “Abbott,” he studied my face and wondered if I would be like Angela Davis, the Black Panther activist famous for her Afro, her fist held high in court. “My hope was that you’d grab the world by the ears,” he wrote, “and carry on the revolution for ‘The Good.’”

  But I wasn’t named Angela. My parents wanted a hyphenated name “like a real Southern belle,” Dad would later explain, “like Peggy-Sue or Betty-Joe.” After searching through books of names at the hospital, my parents decided on Alysia-Rebeccah, which translates as “captivating peacemaker.” They’d call me A-R for short.

  Later, in the hospital room, my mother lay holding me against her chest. Her whole body ached. When she saw my dad, she smiled and placed me in his arms. I was smaller than he’d expected. He didn’t know how to hold me, and my mom laughed, showing him. My dad said I squirmed like a small reptile in his hand and then peed on his arm. He was elated.

  SUNDAY

  Alysia – 1 egg, 1 jar cereal. 2 pieces of bread. 1 jar fruit.

  Barbara – 1 piece of toast + butter – juice.

  Steve – 2 pieces of toast + jelly.

  Steve – 3 pieces of bacon – 2 eggs. 4 pieces of bread. 1 glass of juice.

  Barbara – 1 piece of bread – cheese. Marshmallow. Juice. Handful of nuts and raisins.

  Alysia – 6 tbls yogurt. 1/4 jar prunes. 1 marshmallow.

  This note is a surprise in the middle of my dad’s 1971 notebook. It’s the only time I’ve seen my mother’s handwriting. Unlike my father’s scrunched and tight letters, her script is neat and controlled, slanted to the right, leaning toward the future. She writes with a thin, blue, felt-tip pen. Perhaps money is tight. Perhaps she’s worried about our nutritional intake. It’s a concerned hand, a loving maternal hand that writes out the meals for the day.

  The week before, my father had lost his job at the Atlanta Mental Health and Retardation Center, a job my mother had helped him get. So during these months, while my mother was pursuing her master’s in psychology and working every day at the clinic, my father worked on selling his comic strips to underground newspapers. He also stayed at home with his eighteen-month-old daughter, playing the revolutionary role of househusband.

  Every day, after making calls and mailing off query letters, Dad would put me in the stroller and walk me into Lullwater Park. From a small paper sack, he ripped pieces of stale bread and handed them to me to toss in the water for the ducks. I loved watching the ducks quack and splash as they struggled to get every crumb.

  Because of money concerns, my mom and dad moved their fish tanks into a larger apartment, which they shared with a roommate, an antiwar student named Bill. After work one afternoon, my mom came home to find my dad sitting with Bill and his friends Jeff and Phoenix on the sofa while I played on the oriental rug with a pink wind-up musical giraffe. My mom announced that she felt “intense feelings of love for everyone.” My father told me how she liked to imagine everyone as part of one big family.

  My mom lifted me up and sat me on the sofa while my dad proceeded with his discussion of David Cooper’s The Death of the Family, which had been interrupted by her entrance. “Cooper shows how the family institution is rife with subtle violence, meant to bring down the individual.” Their conversation stopped when the telephone rang. My dad picked up. “It’s John!” He took the phone into the other room, but through the French doors my mother could hear his muffled excitement. John was visiting his family in St. Louis for the summer.

  “How’s Alysia?” John asked.

  “Incredible. We have a telepathic connection. It’s like I know what she’s tuned in to even when she’s quiet. Barbara thinks I ‘neglect’ her. But I think A-R feels the security of a deep love with me.”

  John told my dad he’d be up this weekend from St. Louis and my dad could barely contain his excitement. “Really? Friday?” My mom picked me up off the couch and stomped into the side room. Dad felt embarrassed, protectively cradling the phone. “She’s making some scene in Alysia’s room. I have to go.”

  Jeff and Phoenix had been tripping on mescaline all afternoon. My mom drove them home as my dad watched me and picked at the lasagna in the kitchen. She returned twenty minutes later and began to cry, black mascara streaming down her face.

  “Why do you have to go on about the evils of the family like that, and in front of other people? If you’re having a problem with us, just tell me.”

  “Your response only proves my point! The family structure is corrosive. It feeds paranoia and hostility.”

  “Shut up with that already!” she snapped. “Don’t you ever think about growing up?”

  “Have I ever made you happy? Have you ever felt fulfilled with me?” Hearing himself start to yell, my dad tried to calm down. “Or . . . supposing I was everything you wanted me to be? You’d probably still be unhappy. Maybe you’re the sort of person who always wants more.”

  My mom started crying again and walked to the other side of the house with me in her arms. My dad followed her.

  “Things have heated up too much here,” he said. “I think it’d be best for both of us if I leave for a while. I spoke with Larry the other day. He’s got a place set up in Frisco and he’s invited me out. I think I’ll take him up on it.”

  IN JANUARY 1973 my dad sent me an illustrated letter:

  What Daddy Is Doing

  Daddy’s feet are big feet. Alysia’s feet are little feet.

  Today Daddy took his feet for a walk in the park.

  On th
e way Daddy talked to the flowers.

  “Hi, Flowers.”

  Daddy saw a doggie. The doggie barked and wagged his tail.

  “Bark! Bark!”

  But Daddy is thinking about Alysia and Mommy.

  When Alysia is asleep Daddy will give Alysia a big kiss.

  Soon Daddy will get in his car and drive home.

  Then Daddy can play with Alysia again.

  “Hi Baby.” “Whee!”

  Then we can go see the ducks again. Alysia can feed the ducks.

  “Quack! Quack!”

  Detail from letter, 1973

  My dad had driven to San Francisco from Atlanta and stayed for six months, exploring the city and peddling his comics at various places including Last Gasp, publishers of the underground Zap Comix. S. Clay Wilson, the cartoonist behind Zap’s Checkered Demon, had been a friend of my dad’s in Nebraska and made a few introductions, but Zap had little interest in Dad’s gay-themed strips. When not working, he visited the city’s many bookstores, bars, and cafés, where he’d write letters to my mom back in Atlanta.

  One evening, he telephoned. “I’ve felt peacefulness out here alone,” he told her. “I’ve sometimes felt this with John. But with you, there’s usually some shadow of anxiety, some worry about the past, or the future. It’s hard to imagine just being—be-ing with you. Sometimes I think you can’t let things just be.”

  “I just want things to go well with us.”

  “I think things will go better for us if you can find more fulfillment on your own—not build your life around me so much. Maybe an extended vacation would help. Why don’t I take A-R with me to my folks in Nebraska and you can mellow out in Atlanta for a while?”

  “No,” my mom answered. “I don’t want you traveling together without me. What if something were to happen? I’d be left alone.”

  SHORTLY AFTER his return from San Francisco, it was clear that my father’s concerns about his marriage were unchanged:

  June 6, 1973: Going to Frisco it was easy to be born again. How to continue doing so when living in the midst of hassles so familiar is the challenge. Going to Stone Mountain [in Atlanta] with Barb & Alysia was fun at first, then a tired duty which wilted into an unbearable feeling of being trapped, oppressed and sucked dry. Why is this? Is the insanity in my own head that I cannot be satisfied with Barbara? So at night I go out to the bar, where the dim lit haze of smoke is a backdrop for smiles, drinking, sweaty dancing & seeking sex with some attractive man stranger who may perhaps lift me out of this routinized world I sink around in.

  One afternoon that July, after my father had picked me up from the day care center while my mother was at work, he returned home to find my mom’s new boyfriend, Wolf, in the living room preparing to shoot up a tab of what looked to my father like psilocybin, which he had mashed with a spoon. Wolf pushed the needle through his arm. Nothing. Then his whole body turned red and he stumbled around the room. His face contorted with what looked like savage pain, his eyes bulging.

  “Was there strychnine in this?” he rasped.

  My dad felt helpless before Wolf’s cramped contortions and shudders.

  “If I OD on this,” Wolf yelled through clenched teeth, “just take me to the road and dump me.”

  “What will I do?” My father’s mind was racing. He felt his heart beating faster. “Call John – ask him to help me.”

  Then Wolf fell on the sofa, lifted his leg, let out a fart, and smiled. At that moment, my mom returned from work and Wolf tried to pass the whole thing off as a joke. “But it’s a very macabre joke,” my dad wrote, “as we both know.”

  A suicidal patient she treated at the Georgia Regional Hospital where she was working, Wolf and my mom got involved while my dad was in San Francisco. His mother had killed his two brothers before killing herself. She described Wolf to my dad as “incredibly real.” When my dad first met him, he was also charmed. With his lank, long hair and sunglasses pushed up onto his head, Wolf looked like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, my dad wrote. And he was open, vulnerable, and appeared to love my mom. He certainly needed her in ways that my dad didn’t.

  Maybe it was good for her, my dad thought at first. She seemed to finally develop her own emotional life and concerns. So when my mom suggested Wolf move into their house, my dad thought, why not? There were always roommates moving in and out of Adair Street. What’s another person?

  But Wolf was different. His neediness was strong and intense. He pumped drugs into his veins, and Barbara was starting to do the same. They were spending days together in bed. She began to miss work and was losing weight. The house, formerly kept tidy and swept, was a mess. Garbage and papers covered the floor. Bugs crawled beneath unwashed dishes in the sink. The fish tanks were murky with billowing clouds of algae. Years later, my grandmother would recall the state of their house with tears in her eyes.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, my dad received a phone call from my mom. She asked him to pick me up from the day care center because she was doing MDA with Wolf. At about 1 a.m. that night she returned home crying. My father suspected she was drained because of the tension still between them and “too much dope.”

  Early the next morning, my mother woke my father because she’d had a terrible nightmare and wanted to tell him about it. Their fish tank had broken and all of the fish had flopped into the street. No one would help her save them. After listening and calming her down, my dad fell back asleep, but an hour later he was again woken up. My mother had collapsed while walking through the kitchen, breaking a glass.

  Ten days later, my father was sitting at his typewriter when Wolf approached, inviting him to “do up some MDA.” Dad had once done IV drugs with Wolf and my mom, but he didn’t like it and asked that they not do it around him. Taken aback by what he regarded as Wolf’s “gall,” my dad demanded that Wolf either lay off drugs or move out. To make his case, dad read aloud excerpts from William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, hoping to convince Wolf to make the decision to quit drugs on his own. After hours of listening silent and blank-faced, Wolf finally promised to give up all drugs “save grass” for three months.

  Later that same night, John Dale called and my dad recounted his troubles with Wolf. John suggested that he move out.

  “I can’t,” my dad said, “for A-R’s sake, if not for Barbara’s.”

  Eight days later, Wolf was arrested in northern Michigan for running drugs and guns across the Canadian border. My mom announced that she was going to drive up to Michigan the next day so she could post bail. “How long can this go on?” my dad lamented in his journal.

  The next night, he received a phone call from my mom in Michigan. “Wolf’s charges have been dropped. I’m driving with him to Atlanta. We should arrive by Sunday.”

  AUGUST 28, 1973. It was raining in Atlanta when an early morning telephone call woke my father. Knoxville Hospital was looking for Wolf’s father, reporting that “he has multiple injuries.”

  “What about Barbara Abbott?”

  My dad was directed to call a hospital in Sweetwater, Tennessee.

  “What about Barbara Abbott?” he asked again.

  After much hemming and hawing, the hospital administrator said that my mom had “expired.” My dad started to shake. “What to do? What to do?” He called her parents in Kewanee, Illinois. Her mother picked up. He asked for her father but before he arrived my dad said, “I have bad news. There’s been an accident.”

  “What accident?”

  “Barbara has expired.”

  “What are you saying?” Barbara’s mother shrieked into the phone.

  “Barbara’s dead.”

  “Oh God, no.” The phone clicked.

  2.

  I RECEIVE THE ARTICLE in a plain brown paper envelope. For nearly a week it sits in the entryway of my home. I don’t want to open it until I have time to read and take it in. Even when I find that free time, I want to leave it alone, afraid of diluting its power, or being disappointed by its contents. It is my history, my own secret. Fi
nally I open the envelope, pull out and unfold a scratchy photocopy of the Sweetwater Valley News dated August 30, 1973. Thank you, Wanda, at the Sweetwater public library.

  Looking at the article, I’m first struck by the picture that accompanies it: a demolished VW bug in the foggy morning of August 29, just as it’s about to be towed away. The front of the car is smashed so completely that it doesn’t look like a car but like a sloppy metal wound. How anyone survived I can’t understand.

  Some details in the article confirm what I know: my mom flew out of the car and was hit by another car. Others are new: the car hit a massive pulpwood truck. And there was someone else in the car too, someone who was pronounced DOA at Knoxville Hospital: a nineteen-year-old kid from Michigan named Thomas Hungerford. Was he a hitchhiker? Could he have been involved with the accident? Did he know Wolf? I also get Wolf’s full name: Jonathan Dennings Wolfe. He was the one survivor, sent to Knoxville Hospital. A quick Internet search reveals nothing more about him. Still, there’s now this proof, resting in my hands. This really happened. These were actual people. They didn’t just exist in my dad’s journals and in my imagination.

  The accident occurred at 6:30 a.m., Tuesday in heavy fog on a straight stretch of highway in front of the entrance to the Lil’ Daytona Speedway near the East Tennessee Livestock Barn.

  Reading on, I’m startled by the article’s mistakes. “Barbara Bender Abbott” instead of “Binder.” “Her body was shipped to Chicago by Kyker Funeral Home,” instead of Piser Funeral Home. Is this unconscious anti-Semitism on the part of Sweetwater Valley News?

  When the morning fog burned off, when all the smashed pieces of the car and bits of lumber had been picked up and hauled away (“It took more than an hour,” according to the Sweetwater Valley News), when the blood on the ground was finally washed away by the September rains, there would be no more Barbara Binder Abbott. Only the promise of her. The high school valedictorian and Smith graduate never to receive her master’s. The future success predicted by her Latin teacher, Mr. Carlotta, never to be realized. The lover of children and dogs never to get a dog, never to nurse more than one child. And that child, now motherless.