Because I Come from a Crazy Family Read online

  I also had a really rich fantasy life. At age six I’d imagine I was the boss of the world, and I’d be ordering armies around as I walked the streets of Chatham. Even though I felt safe in Chatham, I would imagine there were bad guys ready to pounce, hidden in various houses around town. I was really afraid of the dark and usually pulled the sheet up over my head, even though Chatham was as safe a town in the 1950s as a town could be. We never even locked the doors on our cars or houses.

  When I was in college, I asked Uncle Jimmy why he had decided to go into farming. He was sipping his usual mug of tea, sneakered feet up on the kitchen table, tilting back in his wicker-seated ladder-back chair, smoking the pipe he always seemed to have in his mouth.

  He loved these kinds of questions, because it gave him a chance to philosophize. He loved to talk about the meaning of life and why people do what they do. “I tried the banking world for a while, you know that, don’t you? I hated it. It wasn’t me. There were lots of people trying to be someone other than who they really were, and I just did not want to do that. To thine own self be true.”

  “Yeah, so I’ve heard,” I said.

  “Farming seemed real to me. You reap what you sow. There’s no faking it.”

  “And when you had to sell the farm, why did you pick Chatham and the bowling alley?”

  “Well, the girls, your mother and Duckie, grew up in Chatham on Minister’s Point. So they loved the idea of Chatham. And your dad and I grew up in Wianno, when we weren’t in Chestnut Hill. The bowling alley was a lark. It was a hot business in the fifties, and I’ve always liked machinery.”

  He didn’t add that in addition to alcohol, back then he’d used heavy doses of the various antianxiety agents of the day, like Librium, to get through. He never talked to me about that, but we all knew it.

  At the end of that conversation I told him how much I admired him for staying true to himself, and that I would try my best to do likewise.

  The older I got, the more I sensed I was different in ways like Uncle Jimmy, but I had no terms or diagnoses to attach to it. The reading issues became no big deal, just an inconvenience, if that, because I always got top grades.

  But the feelings of insecurity stayed with me along with pockets of depression we now call low self-esteem. Although invisible, they set me apart. Like Uncle Jimmy, I did my best to hide all that from the world, as well as a growing awareness that my mind really did not function the way most kids’ did. Not knowing how to explain it, I didn’t try. But the enduring gift I got from my family is that being different did not cause me to feel ashamed.

  10.

  Maybe a year after Dad left us, I found myself playing in the backyard of the man I would come to call Uncle Unger. He had a beat-up, slightly deflated leather soccer ball—I’d never seen any kind of soccer ball before—and Unger Stiles was playing keep-away with me in his spacious yard. I ran after him, happy as could be, trying to kick the ball from his control. He wore fraying gray flannel trousers, a worn-out white Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, and dirty gray Keds. He looked pretty old to me but he was quick on his feet.

  I liked him a lot. I had no idea who he was or why I was playing with him, nor did I ask or care. He was fun, and he paid attention to me, that’s all that mattered. He was just a man Mom had brought me to visit. No mystery, no big deal, as far as I was concerned. Just fun.

  I was wearing my usual shorts and striped jersey. This new man had leathery skin and graying hair combed straight back, a look I’d never before seen, as I was used to hair parted on the left or right in men, like my dad, or crew cuts in kids and Uncle Jimmy. Unger Stiles moved around the yard easily, crouching and dodging, swaying side to side to trick me as I tried to kick the ball away from him. Every now and then I’d succeed, and the ball would shoot off into a briar patch of wild blackberries, purple thistles, serpentine crawlers, and convoluted creepers all studded with the nastiest of tiny thorns that did not protrude far enough to give you visual warning but scratched you nonetheless upon every visit into their midst. But I gladly plunged into the tangled mess and fished out the ball, not at all minding the scratches, to bring the ball back and keep the game going. Playing with Unger was great fun. I found myself liking him more and more. That Dad had left didn’t seem to matter so much.

  After a half hour or so of “soccer,” Mom, “Uncle Unger,” and I went inside, where he asked Josephine, his colored maid (“colored” was the word used in Chatham back then), to give me a Coke while he whipped up some cocktails for Mom and himself.

  Soon he was sitting in his easy chair by the fireplace and entertaining me by holding a cigarette between his upper lip and his nose. Doing this made his face look awfully funny, and I giggled. “You try it,” he said.

  Within a few minutes I was able to do it as well. I couldn’t wait to show Jamie.

  Soon, a visit to Uncle Unger’s became such a treat that my mother would use it as an inducement to persuade me to go to doctor or dentist appointments. Even though Jamie would at the same time try to scare me into believing those appointments would include intense pain, shots from the doctor, and some diabolical procedure that involved a jackknife, the thought of visiting Uncle Unger was enough to get me to go anyway.

  Before I turned six I was sitting in a grand living room in the mansion of Junior Howes, whom I called Uncle Junie, watching my mother walk down a makeshift aisle to marry Uncle Unger. Junior, one of the wealthiest men in the area, and his wife, Dot, who was always really kind to me, were two of Uncle Unger’s best friends.

  Jamie, who attended the wedding, was about ten years old and remembered it well. He would later tell me he thought it was really stylish and fun, creating a look like that of the movie High Society, starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra, which came out the same year Unger and Mom got married.

  Being so young, just a few months short of my sixth birthday, I didn’t really grasp the significance of the wedding or even vaguely understand how dramatically this event would change my life for the worse. Instead, I was happy as a Chatham clam. I do remember marveling at the opulence of the Howes estate. I was mostly concerned with finding Jamie and eating the hors d’oeuvres. No one could have prepared me for what was to come, because no one knew.

  After the wedding, when I wasn’t living on Kettle Drum Lane, I lived in the house on Bridge Street. When I was living with Jamie I’d walk to school with him, but when I was on Bridge Street I took a yellow bus.

  I didn’t have any friends in the Bridge Street neighborhood, so I would occupy myself by reading in my room, hanging out with Uncle Unger’s maid, Joey, and her friends, or walking around in the fields and woods out back. I’d take a bow and arrow and try to shoot a rabbit, but I never bagged one.

  Every now and then Jamie would come to Bridge Street to play, but usually I would get driven down to Kettle Drum Lane, or if it was still light out I’d ride my bike. Sometimes I’d stay at the Kettle Drum Lane house for days or weeks.

  Lyndie and Jamie started to resist coming to see me on Bridge Street because after Uncle Unger married my mother, my friend, the man I had so liked, changed. There were many more martinis and fewer soccer games in the backyard, if any. A mean streak flared up. One incident stands out, a harbinger of many others.

  Uncle Unger had gone to Harvard but had dropped out before graduating due to some dispute with the administration. He did, however, boast about attending Harvard, and he treasured the highball glasses he owned with the red VERITAS crest embossed on them. He regarded these glasses as priceless, even though I would later learn they could be purchased at the Harvard Coop for small money. Obviously their value to Uncle Unger lay far beyond their cash value.

  One day Jamie accidentally dropped and broke one of those prized glasses. Uncle Unger launched into a tirade, yelling at Jamie, cussing at him, and raising his hand as if to hit him. Jamie must have been ten at the time. I remember his starting to cry, and my feeling that I should do something, but I had no clue how to
quiet this raging man whom I’d recently so adored.

  It was about five o’clock in the afternoon, the rays of the sun slanting in through the windows of the house, highlighting the hair in Uncle Unger’s ears and nose. The people in my family could be strange, but they were never cruel, and they never struck fear in me.

  But in that moment, the sun accenting hair where I didn’t know it could ever grow, I felt what I’d never felt before (but would often feel again): I was terrified by a person I looked up to.

  I should have known then, even so young, what I would come to know as well as I knew my name: the signs of Unger’s having dipped into gin. Gin drew out the rage. I remember the fear, my concern for Jamie, confusion over how Unger could suddenly become so mean, and my wishing for life to be different. I wanted Dad to come back, or for me to move permanently to the house on Kettle Drum Lane.

  Unger retreated back to his chair by the fireplace and Jamie and I fled to the basement to play. We both felt really nervous. I remember Jamie trying to console me instead of vice versa. Even after being terrorized by Unger, Jamie tried to look out for me.

  After he went home I told Mom what had happened and she said that Uncle Unger really loved his Harvard glasses, but that he should not have been so harsh with Jamie, especially since dropping the glass was an accident.

  Later that night, eavesdropping from the top of the stairs, I heard Unger and Mom fighting about what had happened.

  “He’s a brat,” Unger spewed. “I would have spanked him if he’d been mine. He’s not welcome here anymore.”

  “That’s not fair,” my mother protested. “He’s Neddy’s best friend.”

  “Well, Neddy needs to make some new friends. Your sister Miffie and her whole family, Jimmy and Lyndie and Jamie, they are all inbred and twisted. It’s not normal. That’s what happens when two brothers marry two sisters. Mark my words, Neddy will not turn out well. Look at his brother Johnny. All he wants to do is go down to Kettle Drum Lane and fuck Lyndie.”

  “Unger, be quiet,” Mom said. “People can hear you. What you’re saying isn’t true and it’s way, way out of line.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s out of line. You’re totally naïve. Don’t you know what the score is, sweetheart? Now with Ben out of the way, Jimmy has his eye on you, for you to get in bed with him and Miffie. Why else would brothers marry sisters? It’s all in the family. A true family affair.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Mom said. “And wrong.”

  “So say you. Don’t you see how Jimmy looks at you? He says he loves you like a sister and he’ll look out for you. Hah! Some kind of sister. I guess we’ll see some day what kind of ‘looking out for’ that actually turns out to be.”

  “How can you talk that way? How many of those martinis have you had?”

  “Enough to tell the truth. Can’t you see what’s right in front of your eyes? You’re so innocent. Your whole family are a bunch of innocents. It’s truly amazing. And what do you think is up with your father and Miffie? What do you think all those trips to New York and the Rainbow Room and Guy Lombardo are all about?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. Duckie and Skipper loved to dance. Duckie would try to teach me how to waltz from a very early age.

  “You’re drunk,” Mom said. “I can’t listen to this.”

  “Fine, fine. Have it your way. Just shove off and leave me alone.”

  “Shove off” was one of his favorite conversation stoppers. Sometimes he elongated it to “Shove off, coxswain, and make your regular trip and return,” punctuating it with a flip of his wrist. It was a line he took from the Navy: captains of ships would say it to instruct what were called the coxswains of the dinghies that would come up alongside to transport people ashore. I would hear that phrase hundreds and hundreds of times again. I can even hear it today, with the drunken slur in which he usually spoke it.

  From my perch on the stairs, listening to words I didn’t understand but knew were bad, I felt confused. How could this man whom I had liked so much become so mean?

  Their words were both riveting and terrifying. Why did I listen to Uncle Unger and Mom fight that night, and why did I continue to listen so many, many nights after that? Why didn’t I plug my ears or just go up to bed and put the pillow over my head?

  I guess for the same reasons people stand and watch their houses burn down.

  11.

  When my mother and Uncle Unger were together in Chatham, Joey often looked after me. She was fun to be with, she taught me how to cook, and she became my friend. I often didn’t know where my mother or Unger was but didn’t care because I had Joey. She was nice and really pretty and always very peppy.

  One day we stopped on Shore Road, and Joey told me to wait in the car while she ran across the street to pick something up. Being curious if not downright nosy, I watched her intently. I loved Joey and wanted to track her every move. In a moment, I saw her friend Topper emerge from his little gardener’s shack, meeting her at an opening in the tall green hedge. Joey often stopped to see Topper, just for brief visits.

  Topper looked odd to my young eyes, but in a good way. He was brown like Joey, but he looked much, much older. He was fit enough to garden but still appeared frail, as if he might just fall to the ground if Joey patted him on the back. I’d never seen anyone with his look, almost as if he had no blood in him. He had jet-black hair, thick with cream or oil that matted it down like a helmet and made it shine. When he saw Joey—or anyone, judging from the many different times I’d see him—he always broke into a wide smile, which, a year or two later, when I learned who Louis Armstrong was, I would see as an exact replica of his.

  Joey and Topper exchanged a few words, as well as envelopes, before Joey gave Topper a kiss on his cheek and ran back across the street in her blue and gray maid’s uniform to the classic Ford woodie station wagon my stepfather had her drive.

  She got in the car and said, “Only one more stop, then we go home and do some cookin’, hon.” She seemed happier than usual. I smiled, licked my lips, and said that was great, as I loved to cook with Joey.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I would later learn that Joey was heavily into hard drugs, like smack, cocaine, and meth, as was Topper, who was her dealer. He was more than her dealer, though. They were fast friends. And even though Joey may have been high most of the time, she was always attentive to my needs and safety and couldn’t have been kinder to me if she were of my own flesh and blood.

  Unaware that I had just watched one of the many drug deals I would unwittingly witness during my childhood years in Chatham, I sat back and listened to Elvis sing “Love Me Tender” on the car radio as we wound our way into town to pick up some chicken at Bearse’s, the grocery store my older brother Ben used to work at summers before he went off to Lawrence Academy and then Annapolis. Turns out Roy Bearse, the owner, paid Ben a little extra to cover for him when he’d leave early to drive to the dog track. There were many such little secrets in the town.

  Provisions soon in hand, we drove back to the stately white house on Bridge Street. My brother John hated Unger and had gone to live with Duckie and Uncle Jimmy, and I can’t remember where Ben lived at the time.

  I sat on a white stool in the kitchen while Joey started the fried chicken. I watched intently as she dipped the naked chicken pieces in buttermilk, then in a flour mixture, her secret recipe, and then laid them out on a platter next to the frying pan as the Crisco heated up. “You see, hon, Mr. S. asked for cold fried chicken for dinner tonight, but the chicken has to get hot before it gets cold, don’t it now?” She gave me a little wink, then disappeared up to her room for a moment. I assumed she had to go to the bathroom. “If the grease starts to spit, pay it no mind, I’ll be right back. Get yourself a Coke.”

  You bet. I popped open a bottle of Coke I took from the fridge and took a long drink of it before Joey reappeared, practically dancing into the kitchen, unbeknownst to me high on the drugs she’d just bought. I just thought she
was happy.

  “After I cook this up, I’m gonna take you out to see Vera and Pokey, because Vera wants me to bring her some of the chicken. Don’t be telling Mr. S. that I share food with her, OK?”

  “Can I tell Mom?” I asked.

  “Best not to, OK hon?”

  “Sure,” I said, not understanding why it would matter. I was an uncomprehending witness to all sorts of doings during my early years, which only adds to the spell they cast for me today.

  A gravel driveway led from the street down a slight hill and around behind the house into a garage underneath. Most mornings Uncle Unger would go down to the garage and rev the daylights out of that woodie. When I heard it for the first time, I thought the car was going to explode or the garage catch fire, but Uncle Unger later explained he was just “blowing out the carburetor.” The sound was similar to what I’d hear him doing to his own lungs every morning, coughing until I imagined him bringing up his insides. I’d never heard anything like it.

  “It’s because he smokes so much,” Joey told me one morning while making my favorite lemon meringue pie. “He has to bring all the junk up the next morning.”

  “Is there blood in it?” I asked.

  “Well, now, aren’t you just the little curious one? You oughta be a doctor. Honestly, child, you are the most curious boy I have ever met.”

  “Why does he smoke if it makes him so sick in the morning?” I asked, while also eyeing the lemon filling being patiently prepared in a double boiler, letting the egg yolks thicken first. Once it was ready—which always seemed like an eternity—I would get to lick the pan after Joey poured the filling into the crust.