Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 2

Now and then her brother Eric would appear when he was depressed, taking up temporary residence in one of her rooms. This was long before “depressed” had achieved anything like its current status as a well-recognized medical diagnosis. To most people, including your average doctor, depressed meant at best mentally ill—at worst, weak, lazy, manipulative, parasitic, or possessed.

  Marnie didn’t see it that way. She knew Eric couldn’t help how he felt. He deserved no blame. He needed help, so she took him in. Others would call her a born sucker. We young folk saw her as a kind of rooming-house Mary Poppins, and we loved her.

  Eric would retreat into his room like a mole into a hole, turn off the lights, pull down the shades, and stay for however many weeks it took until he was ready to emerge. A couple of times a day Marnie would leave a plate of food on the floor. When hungry, he’d open his door a crack, reach one arm out, and snatch the plate back into his room. When asked, Marnie would casually say, “Oh, don’t worry about Eric, he’s just having one of his spells.” When his depression lifted, he’d don his dark blue business suit, white shirt, and tie and walk down the three flights of stairs and back into the world.

  He could also flip out. The McCarthy hearings in 1954 made him so angry he became manic, traipsing over the Boston Common with FBI agents keeping an eye on him because he’d made subversive public statements. He was never arrested, though, nor, thanks to Marnie, was he ever homeless or committed to an asylum, to use the vernacular of the day.

  Each time he became manic, Eric would find a new wife, divorcing the previous one. Over his lifetime he married seven women, with whom he had many children. As he was never able to find the right treatment, his moods cycled over and over again. He used Marnie’s apartment as his safe haven during his depressive periods and by the grace of God stayed out of serious trouble when he was manic. During his stable periods he was able to work in sales, earn a decent living, and support whichever family he was with at the time. I never knew him, only meeting him for a few seconds one time when he was holed up at Marnie’s apartment, but I loved how Marnie so faithfully took care of him. Without her knowing it or meaning to, she became a role model for me.

  You could say that Marnie, born Marjorie, was the archetypal wildflower. She was the daughter of a Unitarian minister, my eccentric inventor and man-of-the-cloth great-grandfather George Kent, who’d migrated to Chatham from his home in England. Marnie’s sister, Dorothy, was my aunts’ and my mother’s mother. One of her brothers, Willem, whom I never met, had lived a happy, normal life, I was told, leaving the other brother, Eric, to hopscotch his way through life, producing a flock of children and somehow earning a living while coping with what is now called bipolar disorder.

  While Eric married many times, Dorothy and Marnie, great beauties when they were young, each married only once, and not happily.

  Dorothy would marry John McKey and have three daughters the world would deem extraordinarily beautiful: my aunt Mary Francis (called Miffie but whom I called Duckie because when I was born she lived on a farm where there were many ducks), my mother, Dorothy (called Doffie or Dodie), and my aunt Janet. John and my grandmother, Dorothy, separated for a while in 1935 but otherwise stayed together, begrudgingly. Marnie, on the other hand, after marrying Charles and giving birth to Rosamond (Rozzie), kicked Charles out when she realized he couldn’t make a living.

  Marnie was a character who defied diagnosis, other than having a heart rhythm so unusual that the famed Harvard cardiologist Paul Dudley White brought her into his class every year so his medical students could listen to her irregular heartbeat. As an adult, she showed her Unitarian minister father who was boss by becoming an atheist.

  Living alone, she kept the entirety of the pittance she lived on in a coffee can under her mattress, or in the oven, or in a variety of other hiding places that she would change often, I guess out of fear that one of her renters might have cased the joint and steal it.

  One night there was a terrible fire in the building so the population of 92 Revere had to evacuate. Marnie escaped in her bathrobe and slippers, but once outside, she remembered what she’d forgotten. Breaking through the fire department’s barricade, unflappable as ever, bathrobe billowing behind her, she charged back into the still-blazing building. She climbed three flights of smoky stairs and rescued her money from its hiding place—that night, the oven—before making her way back to safety.

  An unsentimental realist, she seasoned family conversations with stark opinions. When we were little and would ask what happens after we die, she’d blithely reply, “Blackness, petty, blackness.” I’m sure she meant no harm by saying that, and did not mean to scare us; she was merely stating what she took to be an obvious fact and wanted to disabuse us of foolish or romantic fantasies. She attended nearby King’s Chapel often, not for “the nonsense they preach” but for the music and the socializing.

  Decades later, at a graveside ceremony for a cousin, with the extended family gathered to pay respects, someone asked where Aunt Marnie had disappeared to. As people looked around, she swooped down from a green hill above us, loping as if about to take flight, long white hair flowing behind her in the wind, black dress blowing up and exposing her pasty white legs, while triumphantly brandishing a stunning, clearly professionally done flower arrangement.

  “Marjorie, where did you get those flowers?” her daughter Rozzie angrily whispered when she reached us at the graveside, knowing very well her mother would never have paid for flowers.

  “Oh, well,” Marnie said in a full voice, not the least embarrassed, “I just lifted them off one of the pretty graves over that hill. Why shouldn’t I? After all, no one is going to miss them.”

  4.

  When my dad graduated from Harvard in 1936 everything looked rosy. He and his brother Jimmy were headed toward careers in business, and their exceptional intelligence, charming personalities, excellent upbringing, and fine schooling predicted they would shine. Gammy’s middle child, Nancy, constitutionally the happiest and most balanced of the three Hallowell siblings, but not gifted with the extraordinary intelligence her brothers possessed nor cursed with the psychological difficulties each of them wrestled with all their lives, found a good and stalwart man to marry and embarked on the wonderful adult life she did, in fact, live. She and her husband, Dick Heckscher, had three boys, my cousins Ben, Maurice, and Jack, all of whom went on to make happy families themselves as well as to find great professional success. Accomplished athletes as well, Ben and Maurice are the only pair of siblings in the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame.

  Gammy lost her much older husband years before her children were teens. A single mother, she presided over the family like the Social Register matriarch she was. That her two sons picked girls whose family had little money didn’t matter as much as the fact that they had private school education, beauty, and charm. Gammy embraced them, as well she might have, because both McKey girls, Miffie and Doffie, were gems by any reckoning.

  While Gammy had always had money, thanks to her husband, she became wealthy after Jimmy sold the family house in Chestnut Hill during the Depression and invested most of the proceeds in a stock called IBM. The family lived off that income for the next seventy-five years.

  Jimmy started out working in finance in Boston, but he discovered that the business-suit life wasn’t for him. In retrospect, I can see he had a major anxiety disorder, but back then, in the 1930s, anxiety was not a condition you admitted to, especially if you wanted to maintain a respectable career and a prominent family name. That a large portion of the names in the Social Register suffered from one kind of mental illness or another was ignored, if acknowledged at all.

  Rather than getting help for his crippling anxiety, Jimmy, who was literally a fighter, having boxed bantam-weight at Harvard, told Gammy that he didn’t like the pretentiousness of Boston finance and high society, and that he wanted instead to be a farmer. No doubt aghast, Gammy, who was above all else loyal to family, agreed to subsidize the cost. Jimmy had made
the money, after all, even though he had turned it over to his mother.

  He bought a farm in Pepperell, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, named it Cloverluck Farm, and for a time turned it into a successful dairy operation. His wife would have vastly preferred to be married to a socially prominent businessman, but she went along with her husband.

  Even though she complained about Jimmy all the time because he wouldn’t attend parties or go dancing, and he insisted on drinking beer out of a can, dressing down, wearing sneakers and tattered trousers, having his hair cut as short as possible (Duckie cut his hair in the kitchen), and looking as little like an executive as he possibly could, I always believed that Duckie loved him. You can tell when there’s true poison in a person’s resentment of another, but I never sensed anything close to that between the two of them. Frustration and superficial resentment for sure. But also what I perceived as love.

  Jimmy, teeming with anxiety he did his best to hide, harbored a lifelong terror of death. As he got older, and it became clear after a lifetime of smoking cigarettes, then a pipe, that his lungs were not going to let him live much longer, his mortal fears intensified.

  I never saw Duckie console Jimmy on that score, or on any score for that matter. That’s not how they interacted around us kids. But I’m certain that as they went to sleep at night, she’d say something like “Dying is no more than just going off to sleep. Catching forty winks. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You just say nighty-night and go peacefully off to dreamland.”

  At Jimmy’s grave, Duckie’s point proved, she reassured him one last time: “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  Uncle Jimmy was not merely a bundle of nerves, he had a unique style and a certain panache. It makes sense to me that a woman as smart and universally appealing as Duckie fell in love with a man some would deem if not a misfit then at least a cranky iconoclast determined to hide from the world. He actually could be very charming, he had a great sense of humor, and Duckie loved to laugh. Jimmy was also an inveterate practical joker. Unlike my father, Jimmy was too short for most varsity sports, and he loved football, so at Harvard he became manager of the football team, carrying on a long-standing tradition of pranking the Yale team the day of the Harvard-Yale game.

  In Jimmy’s senior year the game was in Cambridge. The night before the game, Jimmy got the security people to let him into the Yale team’s locker room. Using his knowledge of electricity, and his innate creativity, he rigged up an apparatus in each of the urinals and toilets that couldn’t be seen so that when a person used the urinal or toilet an electrical current would zip up the stream of urine and zap the player where he least wanted to be zapped. Before the game the next day, people wondered what caused all the yelps coming from the Yale locker room. Harvard won, and Uncle Jimmy liked to say he supplied the electricity.

  Duckie could be just as playful. Shortly after they were married, they lived in an apartment on T wharf in Boston. Having believed they’d lucked into a fantastic steal of a deal, they soon discovered why their rent was so low. On the floor below was a brothel. Jimmy found out first but kept it to himself. Duckie always wondered why cabdrivers gave her funny looks when she told them her address. When Jimmy finally told her, she burst out laughing. As luck would have it, they soon discovered a knothole in one of the floorboards that gave them a perfect view of the goings-on in the brothel. They’d see all sorts of well-heeled Bostonians coming and going. One night Duckie saw Arthur Fiedler enjoying himself with one of the hookers. Far from disapproving of Fiedler, she thought all the better of him for it.

  If there is a gene for humor and practical jokes, almost all of us had it. For example, when Janet, the younger sister of Duckie and my mother, got married, the wedding was held in Pepperell because the family was still living on the farm. Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Willem (Uncle Eric and Aunt Marnie’s sane brother) cooked up a plot using my older brother, Ben, who was ten, as the doer of the deed.

  Uncle Jimmy found a big old bullfrog on the farm, which he gave to Uncle Willem, who was charged with taking care of Ben during the wedding. Willem put the frog in his pocket, and then he gave the frog to Ben and told him to put it in his pocket until the service began. Willem said he’d give Ben a sign when it was time to release the frog.

  The pews were full at the Pepperell Congregational Church when the minister started his remarks. When Willem gave Ben the OK to release the frog, it immediately hopped forward under the next pew. Suddenly the minister’s remarks were interspersed with loud croaks. No one knew what to make of it. As Ben and Willem started giggling, there came a woman’s muffled scream. After a few more sonorous croaks, someone grabbed the frog and managed to muzzle it. At the reception, Ben, Willem, and Uncle Jimmy were personae non gratae. Janet’s mother, Gammy McKey, was fit to be tied, which is how she usually felt about Uncle Jimmy anyway.

  The few serious ones in the family, like Aunt Nell and Gammy McKey, often became the brunt of the jokes. Comedy so depends upon the person who will not laugh that there is a term for that person: the agelast. Those two were dependable agelasts.

  As is so often the case with comedians, we harbored lots of turmoil underneath our jokes and pranks. Uncle Jimmy couldn’t stomach working in the financial world, so off the couple went to Pepperell and Cloverluck Farm. According to all that I would later learn, Duckie worked as hard as Jimmy did, organizing the farmhands, doing all the cooking and cleaning, making sure everyone was healthy and well fed, and getting her hands dirty every day. Now and then she went waltzing with her father, whom we kids called Skipper, at the Rainbow Room in New York City to the music of Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians. She and Skipper became friends with Guy Lombardo.

  But mostly she worked the farm. They worked so hard that every afternoon they had to take a nap, or “catch forty winks,” as they called it. Even as a three-year-old, I grabbed on to that phrase, wondering how you catch winks. Years later I’d learn that Duckie and Jimmy reserved that time for making love.

  While Jimmy and Duckie were working the farm, my dad was working at Goldman Sachs in Boston and living with my mother on Newbury Street. They had two healthy baby boys, three and a half years apart, my brothers Ben and John. Life was good.

  But then World War II hit. As a farmer, Jimmy was given an exemption, but Dad volunteered for the Navy, leaving my mother and brothers behind. Dad left his promising job in investment banking, his idyllic marriage, and the sons he adored to become the captain of a destroyer escort in the North Atlantic, fighting U-boats. His life, and the life of my family, would never be the same.

  Meanwhile, Uncle Jimmy and Duckie kept the farm going. Jimmy made a deal with the government to employ German prisoners of war as farmhands. Jimmy spoke fluent German, and Duckie had learned a little of it on a trip they’d taken together to Germany, so everyone was able to communicate. The POWs all liked working there so much that no one ever tried to escape, which would have been easy to do.

  My older brother Benjie told me Jimmy named the first herd of cows after Greek goddesses. Ben, who had to bring these cows in at age six, told me Athena was the nicest and Aphrodite was the biggest pain in the ass to drive into the barn. He said the biggest, baddest, meanest bull ever was Kitch (short for Lord Kitchener), and his sidekick, Beau Brummel, was no day at the beach either.

  Jimmy named the next herd of cows after Shakespeare’s women: Desdemona, Ophelia, Cleopatra, and my favorite, Mistress Overdone. I can just imagine coming up to this cow as she was chewing some grass and saying, “OK, Mistress Overdone, time for milking.”

  Tapping into his science background from college (he took a double major in physics and Romance languages, graduating magna cum laude), Jimmy invented a kind of corn that crows didn’t like to eat. He did most of the veterinary work himself, delivering calves and diagnosing diseases, calling the real vet only when he couldn’t handle the problem himself, which was not often.

  After years of trying, on the brink of giving up, Duckie unexpectedly be
came pregnant, so my mother starting helping out at the farm. She wasn’t much of a farmer, though. She had a way of getting out of the scut work. In fact, my mother was more or less allergic to any kind of work that generated an income. She never held a paying job her whole life. She wasn’t lazy—she raised three boys—but she was born to take care of others and be taken care of, it seems, rather than to work in the world.

  Benjie was six and Johnny two when Josselyn—my cousin Lyndie—was born. Four years later came Jamie, to the utter astonishment of Duckie and Uncle Jim, who never thought they’d have a first child, let alone a second.

  When the war ended, I arrived on the scene, four years after Jamie.

  The farm got sold after the war because the farming business was down. We all moved to Chatham, a half-hour drive from Wianno and Gammy Hallowell. Uncle Jimmy opened a bowling alley, and Dad got a job at a boatyard named Ryder’s Cove. Life was good, at least as far as my three-year-old self could tell. That’s why I don’t understand why Dad left. It’s kind of a haze. The story that they got divorced because Dad had a serious mental illness doesn’t add up, considering how in love they reportedly had been, and that Dad was getting better.

  Less hazy is the day Cloverluck Farm was sold. That sale sticks in my memory because of the auctioneer. The sound of his voice as he auctioned off our livestock hypnotized me. I’d never heard anyone talk so fast, or talk—almost sing—quite like that. The words were incomprehensible but they totally held my attention. “Gimme one hunnerd, hunnerd, hunnerd, one hunnerd in the back, gimme two, who’ll gimme two, how ’bout hunnerd fitty, who’ll gimme hunnerd fitty …” I sat and listened, transfixed, for what seemed a long, long time.

  That auctioneer’s amazingly rhythmic jive was like an introduction to rap music. I remember not being able to comprehend why so many grown-ups were standing around with tissues and hankies to their eyes, crying, because I was totally happy, listening to the music of the sale of our home, Cloverluck Farm.