by Sands Hall
it may have taken them a while to persuade me, but once they did, my belief was absolute: I was bad for him. I didn’t visit Oak in the hospital again. Mom and Dad stayed on the other side of the country. Friends tried to see him, but mostly, Mary got her wish. We left him completely alone. It makes me tremble, now, to imagine my brother’s loneliness.
That was August. Late that fall, Oak and Mary returned to Manhattan. No doubt Oak should have stayed in the hospital longer, certainly have engaged in rehab, but in the late seventies, no one knew that there were ways to rebuild a damaged brain. Once he’d recovered from reconstructive surgery, there was no reason to keep him hospitalized. All things considered, the plastic surgeons, who’d asked for photographs, did an astounding job. They even managed to retain the rather impish quality of his nose. But his eyes were set at slightly different levels. It looked as if some massive force, running along a fault line, had shifted the two sides of his face. Still, he could see. He could hear. He could talk. He could walk, and did, to purchase Camel non-filters at the corner store and measure Folgers and water into the battered Mr. Coffee. Once again he sat cross-legged on the old chair. Above the collar of his shirt, the wicked red star left behind by the trach was perfectly visible.
Nothing was irretrievably broken. Except his brain. But I didn’t know that yet.
on a snowy February night in 1979, Mary was rushed to the hospital to have a C-section. The umbilical cord was wrapped three times around her baby’s throat. He survived. They named him Oakley Hall IV. Soon they were calling him O4.
Mary now had two children to take care of. Because Oak was like a child, a terrified one. He was convinced that huge bugs and even larger spiders were crawling across his skin, that snipers were swarming the rooftop of the building opposite, lying on their stomachs, aiming rifles into his living room. He snuck from window to window, hiding behind the frames, peering out, swiping continuously at his shoulders and back. Mary moved his reading chair so he couldn’t see the building opposite. She hung a mirror so he could twist and turn and confirm that insects were not drifting across his back with long scaly legs.
His friends tried to act as if things were the same, trekking up the stairs to visit him.
Was that a cigarette in his hand? Was that a beer?
Well, perhaps those were just signs that he was on his way back. He’d survived; what else was possible?
I accompanied others on those visits; I never came alone. I felt terribly guilty, convinced my presence might harm him, perhaps already had.
That accusation stayed with me for decades. It dented any joy I took in being with him. It meant I lost him in two ways: to the brain injury, and because I simply didn’t talk, laugh, be with him. The amount of time I squandered believing what I’d been told—years I stayed away from him, years in which I didn’t let him know I loved him—makes me weep.
later that spring, Kate Kelly, with her red hair and her voice that in two seconds could rise from a hum to a note packed with vibrato, appeared on Broadway. A group brought Oak to the opening, his first theater outing since the accident.
I’d forgotten about it until recently, when a photograph jolted the evening into memory. Oak is standing outside the theater, the name of the musical, The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall, visible on the marquee behind him. His face is eggshell white. His hair is lank, unwashed. He’s attempting his cocky gap-toothed grin, but his eyes are full of fear.
I sense that a number of people surround whoever is taking that photo. They are all jubilant: thrilled for Kate’s success and that, no matter how ghostlike, Oak is with us again!
Except it wasn’t Oak. He’d changed, forever.
I think that was the moment I finally and fully understood that the brother I had known was not coming back. That damage to his brain wasn’t temporary. The damage could not be undone, reversed, repaired, rejoined, healed, solved, fixed.
He was no longer Oak: driving a hearse, drinking a beer, writing a play, running a theater company.
He was no longer Tad, my older brother, always leading the way.
But who was he?
And who in the world, then, was I?
Vertigo closed in, seeping like India ink across wet paper, darkening everything with that terrible understanding.
i remember little of that winter and spring. One reason is that I was eating ever-smaller amounts, and though I didn’t know it at the time, low blood sugar makes memory murky. I was controlling what I could control, I see now, but even I was shocked, if vaguely gratified, the day I got on a scale and peered between my toes to find that—I’m almost five foot seven—I’d gotten myself down to 104 pounds.
I began to notice that I brought my parents into every conversation. “My father says . . .” “When my mother was growing up . . .” “When my parents lived in Mexico . . .” It was as if, with Oak—brother, mentor, leader, friend—“gone,” I no longer existed unless I substantiated my existence with theirs. I’d hear myself say, “My mom told me . . .” “In a letter from my dad, he . . .” and close my lips around the rest of the sentence. I stopped telling stories, as they all seemed to revolve around my family. Although this had not been the case before, I found that without those stories, I seemed to have nothing to say.
At some point that winter, I was involved in a rock-musical adaptation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, part of what I remember as a kind of three-woman chorus. Or it could be that I was working on the show in some other capacity and, watching these women, channeled myself into them. We/they wore spangles and tights and corsets. Rehearsals were wild and eerie and immersive. Through that process, I found fellow musicians. We created a band, among other things playing a fundraiser for the Lexington Conservatory Theatre. One of the only images I hold of this time is performing my song “Chippewa Street,” to which a band member added a powerful pockety percussion:
Don’t know what’ll happen
Don’t know who I’ll meet
But I’m gonna keep on walking
That ol’ Chippewa, Chippewa Street
I sang those lyrics as if it were the end of my life, and maybe it kind of was. A shock wave tore through me as we rocketed to a close and the audience, as one, rose to its feet and roared.
Other than those snippets of memory, these months are encased in a bubble: no sound, no feeling. I see now the bubble was grief, or, rather, my inability to face that I had reason to grieve. I was in a vast depression, one that would last for years.
that’s that scientology stuff he does
April 1979, nine months after the accident, I was out for my morning jog along the East River when I stopped, midstride.
I had to leave.
Staring out over the gray surging water, I said it aloud: “I have to leave.”
I jogged back to my apartment and began to make arrangements to move to Los Angeles. In no way did this seem connected to my brother, to my inability to accept who he now was. I was following, as I saw it, my career trajectory.
And so I abandoned an apartment full of things, the cherished music I was making with that band of artists, a circle of beloved friends. The money from the soap opera, crammed into savings, funded the move. By the time my friends were again in Upstate New York, creating LCT’s fourth and what would turn out to be final season, I was gone.
That final Lexington summer, Oak insisted on being part of things. Yet what was there for him to do? He might have been capable of physical labor, but his damaged brain meant he couldn’t even figure out how to hammer a nail. If someone gave him a project, his mind got waylaid between step 1 and step 2. He was terrified of getting on a ladder.
What he could do was sit and smoke at one of the tables outside the canteen, telling tales no one could understand. He’d get a few sentences out and then, as if all the information that wanted to emerge just jammed up at the exit point, he’d say a nonsense word: kakapadoo
dle! Recognizing it was nonsense, he’d shrug.
At the end of that summer, members of the company moved to Albany, New York, to create a year-round theater, Capital Rep. This was a plan that, before his fall, Oak had been concocting, and he went with them.
For a while, Oak was perceived as a tragic figure, even a heroic one. I think there was hope that his brain might come back, that the work would make him whole again. But while he couldn’t drink the way he once had, that didn’t mean he didn’t try, and the alcohol worked on him quickly, and badly. More and more he just looked and acted and smelled like a bum.
At the time, I knew none of this. I was on the other side of the country, doing my best to start again, doing my best not to think about it. I pieced it all together much later.
my youngest sister, Brett, had enrolled at UCLA. We decided to rent a place together and found a charming bungalow in a warren of them, the walkways filled with glossy greenery and splashes of bougainvillea. The rent was extraordinarily cheap.
That first year in LA, 1979 to 1980, I landed decent acting work, including guest-starring roles on shows like Lou Grant. But my personality had undergone a seismic shift. I drank, a lot. I, who eschewed all drugs, fell in with company that snorted cocaine. It made food irrelevant, while also making me feel extremely thin and very smart.
While Karen Carpenter had not yet died of complications due to anorexia nervosa, the eighty pounds she weighed, the gasps in the audience when she walked onstage, and the possible reasons behind such an obsession had begun to draw attention. I dismissed a lot of what I heard: Karen Carpenter might be anorexic; I was fat. But one day, I read that it’s an illness that affects young women from “good homes” who long for approval, and who fear they’ll lose their parents’ love if they don’t live up to expectations. This rang a distant gong, but I clapped a mental hand against it. Yes, my parents expected much. But how else would they teach their children how to live not just a good life, but the best life?
More and more, I ate almost nothing all day, so I could “spend” the calories on dinner, and on alcohol. Little by little, I stopped meditating. Whatever depression I’d been in when I left New York, I sank into it more deeply now. Leanin’ into loneliness, I wrote,
With my elbows on the bar
Sipping from a shot glass
Wondering where you are
I slid into affairs with not one, but two married men. The first I’d met at the Writer’s Conference the previous summer, the whole thing stoked by cocaine. The second I came to know during rehearsals for a play, our lust ignited and then fueled by love scenes that for a month we played out on stage. As Roger and I steamed up the windows of his car, even as we took a hotel room, I assured myself I wasn’t really doing what I was doing. I was aware he was married, that he had children, but the kissing was sublime, the sex immersive. For hours at a stretch I was able to lose all sense of time, of thought. I didn’t want to think.
Roger was an accomplished actor, including having had, at one point, his own television series. He was a member of a master acting class that met on Saturday mornings at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. As Roger told me stories about his teacher, I was reminded of the workshop I’d attended with Kate Kelly a few years before.
When I described the way that teacher had held the actor’s jaw, Roger said, “Yeah, that sounds like Milton. Milton Katselas. That’s the Scientology stuff he does. ‘Is there an earlier, similar incident?’ He probably signed that guy up.”
He laughed at what must have been my aghast face. Yes, Kate and I’d been told that, but here it was confirmed! But Scientology was a cult! Scientology hounded those who said or wrote anything negative about it. It claimed it was an actual religion—how laughable was that!—so that it could get tax-exempt status. How could that charismatic, reasonable, wise-seeming teacher have anything to do with Scientology?
“Lots of actors who study with Milton aren’t Scientologists,” Roger said. “Me, for instance! Don’t worry about it!”
Milton’s master class comprised a who’s who of Hollywood luminaries, most of whose names I did not recognize, as I did not watch television and rarely went to movies—a revealing detail about my supposed choice of careers. Roger kindly offered to take my résumé to Milton and ask if I could join the class. Somewhat to the surprise of both of us—usually one needed to be a pretty big star, or to have taken a number of previous classes at the Playhouse—Milton said yes. I was honored, and very nervous.
The class was surprisingly inexpensive, a good thing, as, unlike most of its starry members, I was working as a waitress in a Westwood café. But on Saturday mornings, carrying a cup of coffee, I joined those sitting in the charming Beverly Hills Playhouse to watch Milton work his magic. I was not the only one scribbling in a journal when he stopped a scene to nudge, cajole, badger the actors into more truthful characterizations. Sometimes he and some of the actors seemed to talk in code, acronyms that represented a shorthand. Roger called it “Scientologeze.” Other than that, Scientology didn’t come up much, although one day, a woman in the class cheerfully asked me where I was “on course.” When I said, “Pardon?” she said, “Aren’t you a Scientologist?” My “No!” sounded as if she’d asked me if I’d like to kill her cat. But it did cause me to wonder: Why would she think I was a Scientologist? She clearly intended it as a compliment. I found that intriguing.
Acting issues are usually connected to life issues, and sessions with Milton often led actors to examine larger elements of their lives. Perhaps that’s why I let Saturday after Saturday go by without performing a scene. My psyche was fine. I was a Hall. Halls didn’t need therapy. And if anything about me wasn’t fine—I have no memory of thinking about my brother’s accident, or about my need for approval, especially parental—I certainly didn’t want that examined in front of an audience.
Which inaction pretty much reflected my acting career. I simply could not will myself into the guise of an LA actor, those shining paragons of success who know what shoes go with which hemline, who can manipulate brush and hair dryer, who own enough tubes of lipstick to select with purpose a particular shade. None of it had to do with what I adored about theater: language, verse, the immediacy and even sacrament of live performance. Increasingly, I thought of myself as a child in a sandbox, wielding her truly-unimportant-in-the-scheme-of-things shovel and pail.
Shyly, I made a private appointment with Milton. I think, now, that I was angling to be told that he (or, perhaps, Scientology) could “fix” me. He was characteristically blunt: “The whole thing’s a game,” he said. “Think of it as a role. You need the wardrobe to play it. Get rid of those long skirts, to start with. Cut your hair, you look like a hippie. Wear a skirt that shows off your legs, you have good legs! Buy silk shirts, good jeans, an underwire bra.”
I owned none of those things, and would do anything to avoid wearing pantyhose (hence the long skirts), which made my legs feel as if they were stuffed into sausage casings.
He must have read something in my face. “Do you even want this?”
I had no answer. Why would I cut and style my hair, wear pantyhose and push-up bras, use makeup to enhance my features, when natural is best?
I’d wrapped myself in a straitjacket, a natural fiber one. My agent lost interest and focus. I was sent on fewer and fewer auditions. I was seldom in touch with my New York friends, not even Kate. I do not remember ever thinking about my brother. I examine this now with a kind of horror. How could that have been possible, when he had been such an elemental, even titanic force in my life, all my life? But so it was.
however, one morning in our little Westwood bungalow, Brett and I received a phone call: Oak was being put on a plane in Albany, New York. He’d be landing at LAX.
As the Lexington company had gone about creating the new theater, they’d done their best to keep him part of things. But he was still drinking, still smoking, still not bathing (
I shudder to think where he slept)—things that could no longer be chalked up to a droll and charismatic nature. Quite rightly, his friends felt it was high time for his family to step up. Perhaps my parents felt it was his wife’s responsibility, but Mary was living in Manhattan with O4. And I was certainly MIA. We not only failed him, we utterly failed.
I don’t include Tracy and Brett; they stepped up to the plate. It was Brett who picked him up at the airport, brought him to our apartment, and ran him a bath. After the water slipped down the drain, a slurry of silt remained. He hadn’t showered for weeks. In addition, on the plane, terrified to be so high above the ground, afraid of falling, he’d defecated himself. Brett had to run him a second bath.
Eventually—I think we put him on a Greyhound bus—he landed in Squaw Valley, back with his parents. Mary and little O4 would eventually join him there.
I do not recall being in the car when Brett picked him up at the airport. I might have taken him to the Greyhound station; I don’t know. I remember almost nothing of this whole episode. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to think about him. I simply . . . didn’t. It’s as if what smashed his brain also wiped out a portion of mine. I was still eating hardly anything. Not only does that diminish memory, it also makes one cranky—depressed, in fact. But that never occurred to me. Halls didn’t get depressed. Despair is base is the motto of Dad’s Scottish ancestors, the Maxwells. And despair is base. But you kind of have to know it is despair, in order to label it as such and do something about it.
One day, as Roger was driving and I crying, a not uncommon situation, he pulled into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and, leaving the engine running, disappeared into the shop. Sliding back into the driver’s seat, he tossed two packets of Planters peanuts into my lap.
“Eat these,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”