Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 3

  It would be just the first of many unexpected moves.

  5.

  The night that Dad left, I was three and a half. I remember sitting on the living room floor with him in our little Cape house in Chatham playing matchies. This was a card game he’d made up, a game uncomplicated enough for a little boy like me to learn. As the name implies, the object of the game was to find matching cards, drawing one at a time from a deck. Simple-minded as it was, I never tired of this game. And even though it must have been really boring for Dad, that particular night he played it as long as I wanted him to.

  I was actually tired when Dad put me to bed. He told me a bedtime story involving the character he’d made up: Johnny Creepmouse. My father was a phenomenal storyteller. It was a gift he had, as did many members of my extended family. I was always rapt as I heard the many ways Johnny Creepmouse took down bad guys and made the world safe. I never questioned for a minute how a mere mouse could make drawbridges rise and tall ships sink. I only wish my dad had taped some of these stories. I felt then the way all kids feel listening to stories they love: completely given over to the realm the tale creates, excited but safe as can be, not a worry in the world.

  That night, however, my sense of safety in the world shattered, never to return. I would build lean-tos in life but never again feel the undiluted security I felt when playing matchies on the living room rug that night with Dad.

  My mother came in late and sat down on my bed. “Neddy,” she said, “your dad is moving out tonight, right now in fact. He’s going to live with Gammy Hallowell.”

  “Why is he moving out?” I asked, nonplussed.

  “Because your father and I have decided that we should not be married any longer. We are getting a divorce.”

  I felt a pang of panic. “Will I still see him? Can we play in the shop?”

  “Of course,” my mother said. “Right now he’s gathering up his tools. At Gammy’s you can visit him as often as you want to.”

  “Is there a place for his workshop there?” I asked, needing details.

  “Of course. Gammy’s house is huge, you know that. I bet he creates a spot inside the garage for his tools where you can play with him.”

  Hammers and saws floated through my mind, planes and chisels and a vise the size of a melon, as I tried to understand what was going on, which I was unable to do. I’d never heard of divorce, so I didn’t comprehend what Mom was telling me. I just knew it was not good.

  “Go to sleep now,” she said. “Everything will work out for the best. I promise.”

  Up until then, my mother had never promised without meaning it, so her word meant something to me. Still, I didn’t get it. To this day, I don’t know for sure why they got divorced. My mother would later declare it was because the doctors said he had an incurable mental illness and that she should divorce him, but the months leading up to that fateful night he was living with us, sane, and holding a job at Ryder’s Cove, a local boatyard. All I know is what I knew even then, the night he left: It was a really stupid thing for the two of them to let happen.

  For a long time, I would wonder about it. If he was healthy and out of the hospital, why leave us? I knew he loved me and my two brothers. What had happened? Had I done something wrong?

  I didn’t know.

  Nor would I know for the longest time how my mother met the next man to come into her life, what he was up to, and what his game was. I wouldn’t ever know for sure why Unger Stiles, whom I at first embraced and loved like a father, would later change so dramatically.

  6.

  While I was growing up, everyone was too busy being who they were to pay attention to what other people thought. It wasn’t out of arrogance or the belief that we were better than them—although in retrospect I imagine some outsiders might have thought so. It was more that we focused on the details—the old milkcan top from the farm that we used for Bessie’s dog dish, or the church key Uncle Jimmy used to open his can of Pabst Blue Ribbon—rather than what other people thought about anything.

  We weren’t loners, though; Duckie saw to that. She was a true social butterfly, a world-class connector. She made her rounds every day, stopping at various houses for a drink (bourbon or scotch on the rocks with water), or what her father, known to us as Skipper, called a “heist,” before she came home to cook dinner.

  As a kid, no one ever told me to do well, dream big, or aim for success, and that was fine with me. I had no notion of a trajectory into adulthood. I was unaware of any expectations regarding performance in school or anywhere else, other than Skipper giving me a quarter if I got a good report card, which was not difficult to do. As mentioned earlier, the only expectation of me was to be polite.

  The lack of pressure or encouragement was not due to neglect. My family was not interested in advancement, status, or appearances the way I guess most families are. Whatever the opposite of social climbers is, we were that. It was a loving, sprawling family but very much in the moment, with little mention of or apparent care about the future.

  What mattered, what so much depended on, and defined each day were the common details, like the burnt toast with marmalade served us before school by my never-married, highly literate great-aunt Nell (Skipper’s sister, the McKey side of the family, while Marnie and Dorothy were Kents), who was rumored to have had a dalliance with Wells Kerr, a revered dean at Exeter, but otherwise had lived a life free of romance. She’d met Wells Kerr because her brother Skipper had gone to Exeter. I don’t know how in the world she managed to get intimate with Kerr, which makes me doubt the rumor, but on the other hand, she was phenomenally literate, as was he. This is how it so often is with family lore—the people who would know all the details for sure die before the whole truth is known.

  For some reason, Aunt Nell loved her toast burnt and spread with marmalade. She turned Jamie and me into fans of this treat as well. After eating it, the three of us would count the new morning glories that had appeared since the day before, climbing the trellis next to her kitchen door, before we walked off to school while Aunt Nell shooed away cowbirds from bothering her beloved chickadees. So many details filled the bubble in which I lived, details like the old foghorn I’d hear on my way to sleep, that still rise up in the sun-rimmed scenes I see when I reenter that bubble by looking back on my early years. I carry a perpetual slide show in my mind that varies each time I view it, scenes zipping by, none allowing enough time to be fully viewed, each emotionally striking a nerve, yes, there it is, there I was, there we were, how green it was, how white-capped and blue, how dim the moon on foggy nights, how much fun, how free of what fills my every day today, and yes, that’s the lily pond and there’s the leather mail bag Uncle Jimmy took with him every day, and there are the old golf clubs propped up in the corner of the vestibule, how lost and gone forever it all is now and yet how close at hand, tantalizing, irretrievable. Olly olly oxen free.

  Memories speed up after Dad moved out, when I was living with Jamie’s family on Kettle Drum Lane, just off Shore Road, right next to the Chatham Bars Inn. Aunt Nell lived in a separate house across the yard. Uncle Jimmy had bought two houses when we moved from the farm in Pepperell to Chatham, one house for his immediate family and one for Aunt Nell, Duckie’s aunt. We were all intertwined, my extended family, which I thought was wonderful.

  Later, in my psych training, I would be taught that intertwined families like mine who relied so much on one another to the exclusion of the outside world were called “enmeshed,” deemed by professionals not a healthy way to be because such people do not develop true autonomy but depend too much on one another for identity and support, instead of making their (our) own way in the world independent of the family. I thought this way of looking at us, while true in its way, was too harsh. I liked enmeshed just fine. Enmeshed saved my bacon.

  I found (and still find) many of the words psychiatrists use overly weighted toward sickness and pathology. They overlook the strengths in the people they purport to describe and in so
doing demean us. Some of those words, like “enmeshed,” put me on the defensive and make me want to say, “Oh yeah? So you think you could do better?” Enmeshed sure beats lost and lonely. Instead of enmeshed, I go for terms like “interdependent” or “heavily reliant on one another.”

  At dinner with Jamie’s family, we didn’t talk about plans or ambitions. We spoke about the family or played ghost, a word game. For quite a while, I spent most of my time at their house. I can’t remember why I lived with them or exactly where my mother and my older brothers, Ben and John, were after Dad left.

  The object of ghosts was to add a letter to a growing word but not to complete the word. So, for example, when it came to me, if the letters so far were s, t, a, m, I would have to add a letter, but if I added p I would lose, as that would spell “stamp.” So I had to come up with another letter. Let’s say I added a q. The next player could challenge me, and if I did not have a real word in mind—there are no words I know of with the combination “stamq” in them—then I would lose, and be given a g. You lost when your score spelled out “ghost.” I could also add a letter to the front of the word. So, for example, I could add an e to the front, and if challenged, say the word I had in mind was “prestamp,” and we could go to the dictionary, which we often did, to see if “prestamp” was an actual word. Or I could add an i at the end, my word in mind being “stamina.” Playing this game night after night fueled a lifelong love of words and wordplay.

  Sometimes at dinner we talked of distant relatives, a famous admiral, Great-aunt What’s-her-name, or Cousin So-and-so. Now and then, an illustrious name would pop up, although at the time I didn’t know it was well known—like that of my great-great-great-great-grandmother, Lucretia Mott, or another friend of the family, Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom the grown-ups referred to as Justice Holmes, and the various Hallowells after whom some gates at Harvard were named. These were all just names overheard at the dinner table as a little boy, but they were never brought up reverentially as if they or, by extension, we were anyone special. They were just names in the flow of conversation, names meaning far less to me than Horace and Joe, the barbers at the bottom of Seaview Street who cut Jamie’s and my hair in the waxed crew-cut style of the 1950s, or Roy Bearse, the man who owned the grocery store and gambled on the puppies at a dog track off the Cape, or Benny Nick, short for Benny Nickerson, the portly, friendly cop we’d usually see on our way to school, or Mrs. Forge, short for Mrs. Forgeron, the nice woman with a slight limp who’d come to clean our house and do laundry once a week.

  There was no big picture of life that I was aware of. It was the everyday moments that counted: the pork chop Duckie fried up along with the potatoes she mashed, and the frozen Birds Eye peas that would land on my blue Canton china plate, which I was supposed to “clean.”

  As I said, manners mattered. Stand up when a lady enters the room. Always say please and thank you. Shake hands firmly, squeezing hard, and look the other person in the eye. To this day, if someone doesn’t look me in the eye when he shakes my hand, my opinion of him drops, and if his handshake is weak, I really want nothing more to do with him.

  I was incessantly told “Don’t interrupt,” so much so that I embarrassed myself by telling friends, at age six, not to interrupt. A pompous six-year-old is not a popular boy. I quickly learned not to tell people my own age not to interrupt.

  Politesse is only part of the WASP triad mentioned before, which also includes alcoholism and mental illness.

  We’re certainly not all alcoholic, but we do seem to love our cocktails. While an Italian, French, or Jewish party will pile up elaborate foods of all kinds and also serve alcohol, a WASP party will flow with alcohol of all kinds while offering Goldfish, peanuts, and cherry tomatoes as hors d’oeuvres.

  Mental illnesses also seem to swim in our genes, even as we pretend otherwise. A WASP stiff upper lip is de rigueur, part of our code of honor, but the family trees of most of us include an ample sampling of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and a smorgasbord of eccentricities bordering on psychoses, often medicated with alcohol, our go-to remedy for whatever ails us.

  The drinking was usually not out of control, and when it did get out of control, as with Uncle Jimmy and Johnny, those people were able to stop drinking altogether. Iron will is another attribute WASPs tend to have. Unfortunately, though, my mother never quit drinking. In her mind, the benefits of alcohol exceeded the costs. More than a few of us reached that conclusion.

  The mental illness part of the triad exacted the greatest toll. It cost my parents their marriage. My father, my brother Johnny, my aunt Janet, and Uncle Jimmy lost the careers they could have excelled in. Numerous other relatives and ancestors missed the normal joys of life because of serious mental illness.

  However, despite our complicated struggles, I always felt loved. I enjoyed just about every day of my life, until we moved to Charleston.

  7.

  When I was born, my mom said she held me in her arms in the hospital and looked down at me with high hopes. “You were the cutest baby in the world,” she told me. “You had two perfect dimples and a little mole on your cheek. I said it was where the brownie kissed you. I knew you’d make us all happy again.”

  So those were my marching orders. Make people happy. It seems most of us are born into certain roles, and that was mine. That it ended up being what I would do for a living speaks to the powerful, invisible forces that shape each of us from the moment of conception.

  I learned many years later from my mother that I was conceived when my dad was on leave from the mental hospital. Mistakenly given a pass when he shouldn’t have been, upon arriving at home he decided, for no apparent reason, that he wanted to murder my mother. There was my mother facing a psychotic man in a murderous rage who happened to be her husband.

  But she was amazing at handling men; it was her great talent in life, even though things didn’t work out well for her. When my father told my mother he wanted to kill her, she didn’t freak out. How she remained calm, I don’t know, but somehow she talked him into making love instead of killing her. (She told me this herself.) After they made love, Dad got out of bed and put on his galoshes. After a while my mother heard a loud noise and went outside where she found him standing stark naked in a snowy cornfield—they lived on a farm outside Boston. Wearing nothing but his galoshes, he was shooting crows out of the sky with a shotgun. He thought the crows were Nazis. He’d draw a bead on one, then bam! blow one up, then another and another, leaving feathers and blood all over the field. People on the adjoining property called the police, and the police came, but the poor cops didn’t dare go anywhere near my father when they got there. I guess disarming a naked man known in the town to be a war hero who’s shooting off a shotgun was not something they were trained for. They looked to my mother, who, artful as ever, sweet-talked my dad into giving her the gun and coming inside.

  That’s how my mother became pregnant with me: a unique beginning for a psychiatrist. But even though I was supposedly born to help others, I was anything but selfless as a little boy. In fact, I was pretty selfish, if the stories I heard about my fourth birthday party are representative. I didn’t want to share anything with anyone. But I was cute, innocent, trusting, and eternally naïve, and I had a natural sparkle that brought joy to most places I went, or so I was told years later.

  Since when I was born my father was in a mental hospital, my extended family all lived on my uncle’s farm to give my mother help with my two older brothers and me. Mom would visit Dad several times a week.

  Nobody talked much about my father’s condition, as insanity was thought shameful, not a state of mind any respectable person ever entered, as if it were a venereal disease, contracted voluntarily and irresponsibly. If she mentioned him at all, my father’s mother, Gammy Hallowell, would tell people her son Ben was in need of a rest.

  When I was a toddler, Dad was in different hospitals, Taunton State, Baldpate, and the VA. He was diagnosed
as schizophrenic and underwent numerous shock treatments, both electric shock and insulin-induced hypoglycemic shock.

  When I was about three, a smart young doctor put Dad on a new medication, lithium, and—presto!—he got better and soon thereafter was discharged. If he’d been put on lithium sooner, my family might have been saved.

  8.

  After Dad moved out, even though I think Ben and John were at home in Chatham, I didn’t see them much. Instead, Jamie, Lyndie, and I became a close-knit trio—enmeshed for sure. We were one another’s lifelines.

  Still, my lifelong feeling of being an outsider got its start back then. My two actual siblings were so much older than me that I couldn’t relate to them as close friends, while Lyndie and Jamie, my actual best friends, were not my true siblings. They almost were—which was great—but I was one step removed.

  Jamie and Lyndie had each other growing up, but even they shared a bit of the outsider feeling that I felt. Maybe it was because we were not natives of Chatham, or because anxiety ran so rampant in our genes. Maybe because none of us was particularly popular in school or in town. Whatever the reason, we banded together because we needed a safe haven in a world in which we did not feel we entirely belonged. With one another, we felt at home. It’s why the enmeshed thing was such a blessing.

  Back then—it was the 1950s, Ike was president and Elvis ruled—Lyndie was the queen. She was six years older than me and two years older than Jamie. Uncle Jimmy doted on her, as his only daughter, and gave her whatever she wanted. She was able to get Jamie and me to do pretty much anything she wanted us to do.

  One day, for example—I guess I was ten or so—she wanted a special cheeseburger called a 3-D (the progenitor of the Big Mac) from Howard Johnson’s, which was at the other end of town. Lyndie didn’t have her driver’s license yet, so to get the 3-D someone had to bike there.