Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 9

  Until Charleston, I’d never seen anyone or anything like Oral Roberts, or Aunt Bessie for that matter. I would watch him on the TV while sitting on the floor next to Aunt Bessie, and I’d feel increasingly uneasy as he’d get worked up about casting evil spirits out of the sick and crippled people who’d hobble or sometimes even crawl up to him at his altar to be healed. One at a time they’d come up out of an audience of thousands and kneel on a platform in front of the Reverend Roberts.

  Roberts, his dark hair oiled straight back and his flashing eyes ablaze, would put both his hands on the head of a woman kneeling before him. Then he would close his own eyes tightly, raise his head up toward the roof and heaven beyond, and mightily bellow, “Dear Jeeesus, sweet Jeeesus, hear me, Jesus, show her your divine mercy and with your almighty power cast out these cursed spirits, cast them out of her, cast them out!”

  The woman would rise up, miraculously healed, and walk a few steps with no limp at all. I’m surprised she didn’t dance a jig on the spot. Instead, she’d hold her hands to her face, weep, and fall to the floor in tears of joy and religious transport, before getting up again and allowing another to kneel and be healed.

  This upset and frightened me. Could Oral Roberts really have this power of healing? On cue, on Sunday mornings? If so, why did people go to doctors? I suspected it was fake, but at the same time I wondered if it might be true. His way of laying on hands and calling upon Jesus totally creeped me out, though. It was not what I was used to. On the other hand, when I told our maid Victoria about it, she said, “Oh, child, I watches Reverend Roberts every Sunday. I never miss it. He has the true gift of healing.” So I tried to get used to him, but whenever I watched his act I felt that something wrong was being done in the name of something good.

  It was confusing. I took such solace at St. Michael’s Church and the community there, found comfort and actual fun in building the altar in my bedroom and in praying daily. I felt that God was my friend, but at the same time I was deeply unsettled by the religious fervor of Oral Roberts. How could religion on the one hand be such a force of hope and stability in my life, but when expressed with a certain kind of intensity and fervor become utterly destabilizing, frightening, and alien?

  Years later, when sitting in the company of psychotic people, I’d get a clue. Any emotion ramped up high enough becomes destabilizing, or, as my teachers would put it, “Psychosis is the mind’s last defense against unbearable affect.” At the right temperature, love may create the best feeling in the world, but when it gets too hot it can make us mad.

  Of course, I had no one to guide me along these lines in Charleston. I just had my own wits, and the angels who’ve always seemed to have my back.

  Not just on Sundays, but sometimes we’d also go to Gramps and Mary Francis’s place for supper on Friday nights and watch the Gillette Friday Night Fights. I remember seeing the great Sugar Ray Robinson, but what I remember even better than the boxing is the jingle Gillette made so popular: “If you want to look sharp, and feel sharp too, get the razor that is built for you …”

  Gramps would sit in the wingback chair that amounted to his throne and mumble comments on the proceedings. He was a hidebound racist in the tradition of Strom Thurmond, but this was when I was only just learning what a racist was. When he’d talk about niggers (I don’t remember the first time I heard that word, but it was in Charleston) and the world going to hell and perdition (certainly didn’t know what that word meant) because it was only a matter of time before the races started to mix, I felt completely confused. Didn’t we already mix? Colored people lived with me and were instrumental in raising me. I didn’t understand what Gramps had against them. As for Gramps, all I knew about him was that he was old, quite rotund, bent over when he walked, and very tired all the time.

  His wife, Mary Francis, on the other hand, was just about the peppiest and sweetest lady I ever met in Charleston, even though one day she told me I deserved “to be taken into the backyard and given a sound thrashing” for telling Uncle Unger that I hated him after he told my mother to “shove off.”

  Some Sundays, we would go to a restaurant called Henry’s on Market Street, right across from the roofed-over set of public stands and stalls where people sold fresh vegetables, baskets, shrimp, and all kinds of other goods during the week. It was closed on Sundays, though, and would be empty except for kids riding their bikes around and through it. Sometimes I’d see white boys riding by calling out the black boys. But I never saw any fights. All that wouldn’t start until a few years later, just as Robert predicted.

  We’d sit in a booth, my mother and Unger next to each other. They’d usually order Manhattans and give me the cherries. After a while I’d get bored watching them sip their cocktails, so I’d go out and ride around on my bike in the deserted market, imagining I was a detective or a superhero in search of bad guys. Then I’d go back in to eat.

  When I finally went back in—I knew to take my time because Unger liked to savor the two Manhattans he had first—our dinner had arrived. Unger was having planked steak, rare. Planked steak was his favorite, which I thought was really cool, first because the steak came on an actual oval-shaped board, and second because it was surrounded by a thick, browned coil of mashed potatoes. Unger enjoyed the fact that I liked it, and we would happily commune on the merits of planked steak.

  He always wore a sports jacket, usually tweed, sometimes camelhair; one of his Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, usually yellow, white, or pink; and a carefully knotted tie set off by a gold collar pin in the shape of a classic safety pin. Even though he knew what he was going to order, he’d study the menu as if looking at it for the first time, wearing his thick tortoiseshell reading glasses, which he would remove after ordering but then don once again to study the check at the end of the meal—and I mean study. The bill could not have been complicated, but he would bear down on it as if Henry’s restaurant and he were in a competition to see who could cheat whom.

  Sometimes he’d get mad at me because I’d inadvertently kick his legs under the table and he’d order me outside. And sometimes I’d kick his legs on purpose, wanting to annoy him. This is how we were with each other. We fought every day and I hated him, but at the same time I was drawn to him.

  I loved his collar pin—why does a nine-year-old boy love his stepfather’s collar pin?—and I loved how his shoes were always shined, loafers the color and sheen of polished mahogany. He taught me to shine shoes, using a small brush to apply Kiwi shoe polish from a round tin you had to pry open with a coin, buffing them with a horsehair brush first, then with a shoeshine rag, adding a little spit at the end to make it “shine up real good. ” He could be like a real dad. Without meaning to, he taught me that a kid can love someone he also hates.

  It was all so confusing. One night Uncle Unger came home late from the annual meeting of the Yacht Club, which was only a few hundred yards from our house. It had been a night devoted to heavy drinking and gambling. Even though I was on the third floor, he woke me up when he came in with a couple of other men. The next thing I knew he was calling me down from my bedroom.

  I got out of bed, went downstairs, and found him in his bedroom, my mother lying, with her nightgown hiked up, passed out on their bed, and two other men standing next to Unger shooting dice using my mother’s uncovered, naked rear as the backstop. A big heap of cash lay on the bed next to her like so much trash.

  “Watch,” Unger said. “You might learn something.”

  I wasn’t used to seeing my mother naked, even partially naked as she was then. I remember wondering if it was really her, even though I knew it was. I didn’t know what craps was, so I had no idea why they were throwing dice against her, but I did know it was wrong. I wanted to stop them, but I didn’t know how. Later I thought that I should have done something and felt bad that I hadn’t.

  Unger and his friends were so drunk they didn’t notice me silently retreating upstairs to my room.

  Nothing was said the next
day. It was as if it never happened. I don’t think my mother even knew it did. I didn’t say anything because I was half-pretending it hadn’t happened myself. I was long past the stage of lodging complaints.

  It was always at night. Later that same year, Unger called me down to their bedroom in the wee hours and handed me a hatchet he’d given me for my tenth birthday. My mother was sitting in the loveseat across the room. “Boy, I want you to throw this hatchet so it sticks into the door.”

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “Because you’ve never used this hatchet since I gave it to you and I want you to learn how.” He didn’t know it, but I’d been throwing that hatchet at trees outside and in Bobby’s and my fort down at the old pier ever since he’d given it to me. I would just always return it to the same place, so he must have thought I never played with it.

  I thought throwing a hatchet indoors would be fun. I would have thought it was against the rules, but I assumed Unger was so drunk he was suspending those rules.

  But then came the catch. At night, there was always a catch. When he was drunk, that’s when stuff got weird. “If the hatchet doesn’t stick in the door and stay, then I’m going to pick it up and throw it at your mother’s head.”

  This time he’d lost his power. Unlike the time when the men were shooting dice and I felt transfixed and scared, this time a switch got flipped. Instead of being terrified, I flat-out didn’t believe him. He was trying to scare me, or toughen me up, or whatever twisted purpose he had in mind, I didn’t know.

  What bizarre and malign design he had in mind for me during those years with him I would never figure out, but I do believe a dangerous madness was in play over and beyond the effects of alcohol. There was something blazingly insane raging inside him. He hid it from the world, but not from my mother and me. It kept us on constant alert. But that night, his spell over me finally broke. Sooner or later, fear peters out.

  I was able to manage his madness that night with no damage done. I knew he wouldn’t throw that hatchet at my mother’s head. I remember, maybe for the first time ever, not feeling the least bit afraid of him. He was just nuts. Still, I didn’t want to call his bluff, on the off chance that as drunk as he was, he might throw it just out of drunkenness.

  “You better hit that door,” he said as menacingly as he could manage—an Edward G. Robinson snarl if ever there was one.

  I calmly took the hatchet from him. Because I’d thrown it at so many trees, I knew it would stick. I wanted this charade to be over, so I didn’t give Unger the drawn-out drama he was looking for. I just threw the stupid hatchet. It stuck in the middle of the bedroom door with a shudder. Perfect hit.

  He was disappointed. “Go back to bed,” he said gruffly. I looked over at my mother, whose eyes were closed. I was glad that she’d passed out. I knew she was safe. And for the first time in the longest while, I knew that I was safe as well.

  21.

  Not long after that night, my mother asked me if I wanted to go to boarding school. “What’s boarding school?” I asked.

  My mother laughed and explained. “I’ve talked to a friend who lives in Chatham in the summer. He runs a school just outside of Boston. His name is Hart Fessenden and his school is called the Fessenden School. He said you could start there in September if you want to.”

  “So, what would happen to you and Uncle Unger?”

  “We’d stay here, and you’d live up there. On vacations you could go stay with Jamie.”

  I could see she had tears in her eyes. “Why are you crying?”

  “Because this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I know it’s the right thing, as long as you want to go.”

  “Why is it hard?”

  “Because I will miss you so much,” she said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “But this is not a good place for you to be anymore, and I think we both know that.”

  My mind was racing. “You mean, I can go live at a school and spend vacations with Jamie? Wow! You’d let me do that?”

  At last, my mother smiled. “Let you? I want you to do that!”

  Shopping for Fessenden required me to acquaint myself with clothes I’d never worn before but would wear for the rest of my life. Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, rep ties, khaki trousers, blazers, penny loafers. The school also actually required that I buy a fedora. Thank God I never had to wear it. A ten-year-old in a fedora beggars belief. In any case, I was baptized into the preppy attire I would wear forever after.

  Lyn, Duckie, and Mom dropped me off in September 1960. I’d never seen a school like it. Ivy-covered buildings surrounded by playing fields. After we parked, we took my trunk and looked for directions to my dorm.

  Walking the grounds, Duckie suddenly said, “Look over there. That’s Bette Davis.”

  “Wow, I think you’re right,” Lyn said.

  “Who’s Bette Davis?” I asked. It actually was Bette Davis. Her son Michael attended Fessenden for a while.

  A man approached and shook hands with us all. “I’m Charlie Guss,” he said to Duckie, my mother, and Lyn. “What’s your name?” he asked me.

  “Ned Hallowell.”

  “Well, Ned Hallowell, welcome to Fessenden.”

  Like almost all the teachers at Fessenden, Mr. Guss was really nice. He was balding, had a mustache, and stood about five foot ten. He taught English, and all the kids called him Minny Goo. No one ever explained to me how that name came to be.

  Mr. Guss walked us up to my dorm. My room was a cubicle just big enough for a twin bed, a bureau, a small desk and chair, and a closet created by a curtain. The door to the cubicle was a curtain with green and white stripes, which I can see now as vividly as in 1960. Unpacking my trunk and putting shirts in the bureau, I encountered the smell of unpainted white pine furniture that I will always associate with Fessenden.

  We soon met Mr. Brown and Mr. Cook, the dorm parents. Although Mr. Brown could be a real terror, both Cook and Brown were basically good guys.

  I hugged and kissed Mom, Duckie, and Lyn goodbye, then sat down on my bed. Out the window was a pretty garden. I heard other kids and other families settling in. I bounced up and down on the bed a few times and checked to see if I felt homesick, as Lyn had told me I might. Jamie had also given me advice not to use our family’s words for private parts and bodily waste. I did not feel homesick, and resolved to heed Jamie’s advice.

  I was ten years old, embarking on a long stint in boarding schools. For some kids, this might have felt frightening, even tear-jerking. For me, it felt exhilarating.

  I took to the school right away. None of the teachers were drunks, at least as far as I could tell. There was a predictable schedule to the day. People were genuinely nice. None of the adults fought with each other.

  From day one, I excelled academically. For the first time in my life, I studied. We had study halls twice a day, before and after dinner. With nothing else to do but study during those hours, I applied myself. But I would have tried hard anyway, as I wanted the teachers, the kids, and the school to like me. I had longed to find a safe haven at Fessenden, and I did.

  The four years I boarded there were happy during the daytime, sad at night, as I would go to sleep worrying about my mother. Before bed I’d say a prayer, asking God to make her happy. But during the day, Fessy, as we called it, was fun. The food was delicious. They had two cooks, chefs really, named Peggy and Howard. We kids didn’t know how good we had it. I’d stack the food at Fessy up against institutional food anywhere. I can still almost taste certain dishes. They made a simple dessert called cottage pudding that wasn’t pudding at all but rather a yellow cake you poured a delectable caramel sauce over. And there was a lunch dish called cheese dreams that I’d pay dearly to get the recipe for today. It was a cheese concoction that included onions, peppers, and various seasonings atop a toasted English muffin. I don’t know what its secret ingredients were, but if they had let me back then, I could have eaten a dozen cheese dreams at every sitting.

  Most pe
ople talk about how they hated grammar, but the way Mr. Cook, Mr. Saunders, and Mr. Gibson taught it made it fun. I’ll never forget diagramming the Lord’s Prayer and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Those teachers took a traditionally dry and boring subject and turned it into an inviting challenge. Fessy fed my love affair with words and the composition of sentences.

  Mr. Slocum spent an entire term in eighth grade American History having us study the Constitution. We read the whole thing, accompanied by a cheat sheet that a brilliant local attorney had written up specifically for Mr. Slocum and us eighth graders. Only because of that course do phrases like “due process,” “habeas corpus,” “res ipsa loquitur,” or “cruel and unusual punishment” have resonant meaning for me.

  There was, however, a secret, terrible world at Fessy I knew nothing of. Completely unbeknownst to me, a faculty member at the time was part of a ring of pedophiles. He was arrested a few years after I graduated. I never heard about it when I was a student there. It saddens me very much that the place I found to be so safe, indeed the place that in many ways saved my life, turned out to be so horribly unsafe for other students, if not ruining their lives, then traumatizing and scarring them deeply.

  But for me, Fessenden was a godsend. Fessy bailed me out of a terrible situation in Charleston. Thank God my mother was strong enough to send me away, and thank God my grandmother could pay for it.

  22.

  One day I got a note instructing me to report after lunch to the office of Dr. Merritt, the school psychologist.

  I walked down the basement corridor, a corridor I’d sometimes run through in the middle of the night as a game, following the night watchman’s rounds. I passed a couple of classrooms before arriving at the tiny piano practice room that served as Dr. Merritt’s office. There was only room for an upright piano and bench, and two wooden chairs facing each other in front of a window.