by Patty Duke
My parents had both grown up in that same Kips Bay neighborhood before me; in fact my father’s sister dated my mother’s brother for a while. John Patrick Duke’s family was Irish as far back as anyone could remember, but my mother’s mother was German. She had eleven children and died when my mother, who was the youngest, was only six. It’s a terrible story. Apparently my grandmother had emphysema or bronchitis, some ailment that disturbed her breathing. My aunt Lizzie was taking care of Grandma, who was choking, when the doorbell rang and kept ringing. Lizzie went to the window to see who it was—it was little Frances—and in the interim, before she could get back, Grandma died.
When you think what an old-fashioned Irish Catholic wake on Second Avenue must have been like, with the body in the living room, all the drinking, and how many times Lizzie, not meaning to blame Frances, must have told the story about the ringing doorbell, you realize the kind of guilt my mother must have carried around all these years. I think that, and the fact that I was the youngest and smallest and looked like her, made her feel very, very close to me.
I was born on December 14, 1946, in Bellevue Hospital, the first one of my mother’s children who wasn’t born at home, and named Anna Marie. The Anna is easy to figure; both my parents had sisters named Anna. Who this Marie person is, nobody knows. We figure it might have been a drinking partner of Dad’s, or maybe he just thought another name was needed. My mother always says, “It went good with Duke.”
At first it was the classic case of the baby everyone was nice to, getting all the presents I wanted while Carol and Ray weren’t so lucky. Though I could be a tomboy on the street, I was really a traditional little girl and played with little-girl things. I wanted books and new Crayolas and when I would color outside the line my sister would make me feel dumb. My poor sister. She says I broke everything she ever had. Well, she could play with me. I was a nice toy.
When I was little, it seemed that every holiday, every event that’s supposed to be joyous and wonderful—Christmas, Easter, graduations, weddings, birthdays—turned into a nightmare for my family. We were like a family out of O’Neill, with the melancholy and the fire of the Irish. There was, for instance, the tradition of the Christmas trees always going out the window. Almost every Christmas, my father would get angry about something and there would be an argument, and before anybody knew it the tree was gone, out the window and down into the street. Years later, after my father himself was well gone and we were living in a basement apartment in the Astoria section of Queens, my mother and my brother had an argument about the tree: my mother had bought a fake one and my brother came home and freaked. There was screaming and yelling back and forth and the next thing we knew, the tree was going out the window. Except we were in the basement! Ray was so frustrated and embarrassed that he dragged the tree up the stairs and into the courtyard. So we kept the tradition alive.
Funerals were the big family gatherings where relatives who hadn’t spoken to each other in fifteen years wound up in the same room. They’d have a few too many, sparks would fly, two or three folks would beg that this wasn’t the time or place, and then the free-for-all would begin. We’d hear “Step outside of Skelly and Larney’s,” the local funeral home, and after they’d had it out, everything would be fine.
Everyone in my family has a temper. My sister has a terrible temper, my brother, too, and, though I’m beginning to have mine under control, I have the same kind of explosive disposition my mother has. Until quite recently I used to throw things (you can still see the holes in my bedroom walls). My brother and my sister had miserable fights. My sister has scars all over her body to prove it. Usually Carol was passing along some order that Mom had given, and he’d tell her to go to hell. She’d scream at him, he couldn’t stand that because it sounded just like Mom, and sooner or later he’d get physical. I remember Ray pushing Carol so hard he accidentally sent her out of our fourth-story window. Luckily it was the one with the fire escape.
If my mother found out what Ray had done, he would get killed. Though I got threatened more than I got hit, my mother was very, very physical. The steam would build up in her, she’d go completely out of control, and all of a sudden we’d get a whack, a real unpremeditated backhand whack. She had a phrase that always terrified me: “Wait till I get you home.” Even after I began working, when I made her angry she’d get that stony look on her face, and the minute we walked in the door, there was the payoff. But it inevitably went worse with Ray; all that rage she couldn’t release with Dad was directed at him.
The problem with my father was that he was an alcoholic. From what I know and what I hear, he started out a happy drunk who loved his family and enjoyed a lot of dancing and good old times when he was younger. He never got past the eighth grade, and when he left the Navy after World War II, he had a variety of jobs, everything from working for the telephone company to being a parking lot attendant, a cab driver, and a handyman. “If you give me the tools, I’ll do it,” he used to say to my mother, “but I can’t do it on paper.” The problem was he used to drink up his salary. My mother remembers all kinds of excuses he’d come up with, like not getting paid or losing his check or getting robbed on the subway. He began getting into trouble, having accidents with the cars in the parking lot, coming in at all hours. Finally, when I was about six years old, my mother told him, “John, this is it. You’ve gotta leave. I can’t take it.”
My father moved to a furnished room and over the next ten years—he died when he was fifty—I almost never saw him again. A journalist once said my father sounded like an elegant but sad man. In my memory he is very dignified, which seems contradictory when you remember he was an alcoholic. Then again, I’m not sure if that image is the man who really existed or just a terrific ideal I’ve created.
What I really remember is so little, just brief flashbacks. Sunday morning lying on top of the bed where my parents were, watching the kids on the Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour and reading the funnies. Sitting on his lap in the summer while he watched the ballgame and drank beer. Begging for Worcestershire sauce, which I ordinarily wouldn’t touch, but if Daddy was eating it, then I wanted it. I remember a strong, strong attraction, almost a physical need to be close to him when he was there, and the longing when he was gone. And my envy of little Pamela who lived next door because she had a great dad who would take us places. I always felt like the poor relation.
And then there was the smell of Camels. And Old Spice. One of my most exact memories is sitting on the kitchen floor early one morning and going through my father’s duffel bag. I find this wooden thing and this good-smelling stuff and I’m playing with it while my parents are arguing at the front door. My mother says, “What the hell are you doing here?” And he says, “I live here.” She says, “You’ve been back for three days now, you don’t see fit to come home, you don’t live here anymore.” I’m sitting on the floor with this wooden soap dish that has a top on it, and he picks up his duffel bag and he leaves and I’ve got the dish. I don’t remember him saying good-bye to me or anything, just leaving in a huff. That little wooden dish, you can imagine what a treasure it was to me. And very shortly after, in a rage, my mother threw it away. I used to blame her, but how can you? It wasn’t malicious, just the act of a desperate woman.
The other smell I remember is booze. It smelled embarrassing. I intuitively knew it meant trouble. It conjured up that terrible dilemma of wanting him around but not wanting him around, because if he was there, he was going to drink, and if he drank, there was going to be trouble.
A job that my sister or brother usually handled that fell to me once after Daddy had moved out was meeting him at a bar somewhere and getting ten dollars to bring home. It was summertime, all the kids were in the street, and two of my friends came up and said, “Where ya goin’? We’ll walk ya.” I always wanted somebody to walk me—in broad daylight I was scared of being by myself—but this time I made up lie after lie about why they couldn’t. I went blocks out of my way so the
y wouldn’t know where I was going, and I kept looking behind me to make sure they weren’t there.
The bar was on Third Avenue and Thirty-first Street and I’d gotten strict instructions from my very angry mother that I wasn’t allowed to go in. I had to tap on the window and let him know I was there. It took a while for him to turn around, but others did, too, they began waving, and finally his attention was diverted. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, so when he came out he wanted to hug me, but I wouldn’t let him. He smelled of booze. I took the ten dollars and went back the way I’d come. I’ve felt guilty and ashamed about that from that day to this because I think that’s the last time I saw him on his feet, the last time I could’ve had a hug. If only he knew how important he was to me. But I don’t think he did, I don’t think he was able to get outside of all that chaos he was in, to notice how much he meant.
My father’s drinking has had an effect on us all. My brother, Ray, who had to be brought over from his army post in Germany to identify my father’s body when he died about ten years later, hasn’t drunk at all since then. Not a drop. With me, part of the legacy is an awareness that I’m an addictive personality so I better keep on my toes. I drink too much coffee, smoke too many cigarettes, and if I’d ever gotten involved in drugs, I would have ended up seriously addicted or dead. But because of my dad I have a built-in censor that says, “No, I don’t think you should be doing this.” What I’d seen firsthand wouldn’t allow it.
Yet the fact that I come from a very long line of alcoholics means that I have had some problems with liquor. I have gone through periods of drinking very heavily, never while I’m working, but either in the privacy of my own home or at parties. And when I drink, my personality is sometimes altered to such an extent as to be destructive or disruptive. I could be funny, witty, the belle of the ball, but then, the minute I’d get in the car to go home, I’d become venomous. Every vicious thing I could think of to say, every injustice that I could recall—I was Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde. When I finally recognized the effect drinking has on me, which was more than a dozen years ago now, I just stopped cold. Never missed it. Though I now seem able to have a glass of wine, if I never have another drink, I won’t even notice. That ability to say, “Whoa, let me stop now and see if I can stop,” that’s one of the things my dad left me, because I’d witnessed what happened to someone who couldn’t.
I have just a few pictures of Dad: sitting at a desk; dancing at a party; the wedding portrait, with the two of them standing together like little leprechauns. He was always a sharp dresser. I remember gray suits with very sharp creases in the pants, spiffy-looking fedoras: there was no such thing as going to Daddy with sticky hands, you would wash first.
When I look at those pictures, when I talk about him, I still feel the sadness; tears are always very close. And it makes me mad, too; I wonder how long this process has to take. When people ask me when I realized my parents’ separation was final, I tell them I’m still not buying it. I’ve never stopped wrestling with the loss and inevitable romanticization of my father, and I’m sure it’s interfered with my marriages: as long as that idealistic figure exists, who could live up to that?
Yet, on the other hand, I think that some of my drive, which in part comes from wanting to succeed for myself, also has a lot to do with evening the score for my father. It’s like what Annie Sullivan says at one point in The Miracle Worker, talking about the loss of her brother: “I think God must owe me a resurrection.” I don’t know what made my father the way he was, if it was character flaws or lack of societal knowledge about alcoholism or something else. Whatever it was, my need is to say, through my life and my work, “This was a magnificent soul who didn’t get a chance.”
TWO
My father, as it turned out, was not the only parent with problems. My mother, though you’d never know it to look at her today, had episodes of severe depression. There were times when my mother could be warm and wonderful and generous, both of spirit and with things like ice cream cones and dolls, but much of the time she was not. She now takes medication that regulates her moods, but before that she did a lot of what we call “acting out.” She’s had to be hospitalized three times, the first when I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old.
We had a fireplace in our apartment, boarded up as many are in New York, and a big cedar chest in front of it. We kids thought this was a great piece of furniture, but at times it was the dreaded cedar chest because whenever any thing went wrong—if my parents had had a fight for instance—the three of us were awakened, taken out of our beds, and lined up by that chest. He would be gone, she would be sitting in the chair, and we’d have to sit up all night with her.
Why’d she do it? I’m not sure even she knows. Either she didn’t want to be alone or she needed to take revenge, and if she couldn’t take it on him, she could take it out on those closest to him. But it was also terribly self-destructive: how much worse can you make yourself feel than by having your three innocent kids sitting there crying, unable to go to bed, worrying, “Is he gonna come back? Are they gonna throw things?”
Usually these episodes happened after she threw him out, but there was one time when he said enough was enough and he left. That was it for her. She lined us up by the cedar chest, said, “We’re all going together,” and turned on the gas. Now, she also left the windows open, but I didn’t know that, I thought this was it. And we sat there for hours.
I don’t remember if someone finally called us or if she made the call because she wasn’t getting the attention she wanted, but they came from Bellevue, took her away, and hospitalized her for a week of observation. That had to have been a nightmare, because when she came back, though her temper still existed, the outbursts were fewer and farther between. I think she was petrified of going back to the hospital. She suffered deeply after each of these episodes.
Other times when she was feeling melancholy, my mother used the city bus as a form of recreation. At one or two in the morning, when she was having insomnia, she’d wake me up and we’d take the Lexington Avenue bus back and forth all night from one end of the route to the other until she felt safe enough or relieved enough to go home. After a few trips the excitement of being up late was replaced by a feeling of sadness, and I’d just want to get back.
But the funny thing was, that didn’t matter; it really didn’t as long as I was with her. Because I was desperately emotionally attached to my mother. If she was around, my hand was always in her hand. It wasn’t always the nicest hand-holding, there was a lot of tension in her, but my hand was there, even when she did some things that were very hard for me to forgive. She took my dog, Skippy, to the Bide-A-Wee because nobody would walk him and nobody would feed him, and that was a major drama—I cried and cried and cried. In fact, every New Year’s Eve until I was fifteen, when all the grown-ups had something to cry about when they played “Auld Lang Syne” and I didn’t, I used to cry about Skippy. I couldn’t even remember what he looked like anymore, but when the ball went down in Times Square, I cried.
One thing that was ultra-important to both my parents was religion; Dad even showed up for church on Sundays, though I’m not sure if he ever went to confession. What fascinated me at church was the ritual, what we now in the eighties call the bells and smells. It was drama and show biz rolled into one, with the mystique of Latin thrown in for good measure.
Our church was Sacred Heart, and the grade school there, The Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, was the first one I went to. My poor sister went to Immaculata, a high school in the same building, and every time I wet my pants, which I did a lot whenever I got nervous, she would have to be taken out of class to bring me home. Each school had a navy and white uniform. The little girls wore jumpers over a blouse and the older kids wore a skirt and a blouse, and the blouse had to be clean and starched every morning; I can’t believe there’s any starch left in the world. Every morning would find my sister crying because she was ironing her blouse and
she was late. I don’t ever remember my sister as being young, being a kid. She was always the responsible one. We used to tease her that she’d be carrying her ironing board down the aisle at her wedding.
When I look at pictures of me at that time, I can see I had a spark and pizzazz, but I never thought of myself that way then. I had skinny, skinny legs and knobby knees, and my mother cut my hair so I looked like Buster Brown, the kid in the shoe. Only I was missing the dog. I felt very mousy, I felt very nervous, I felt very little. Even though my father had always called me Ree-Ree, a diminutive of Marie, it’s only when you go to school that you really know you’re small. Everybody’s calling you Pee Wee or Shrimp, and patting you on the head—they’re still doing that—and you get to be first in line. That part was good, especially at church events, because you got to see the most.
As a child I had the kind of acceptance that Catholic priests pray for in their little parishioners. We were supposed to have blind faith and I did, I really believed all the things they told me. I was the first in my class to learn the Confiteor in Latin. The priest would come in to teach it to the boys while the girls were supposed to be practicing their Palmer Method penmanship. It wasn’t going very well in our class. We had kids like Joey Gallo, who’d smart-mouth the nuns (an attitude I found very attractive) and who wore his uniform just a little more rakishly than the next guy. One Wednesday the priest said to the boys, “Okay, when I come back next Wednesday, I’m going to give a prize to the first person who knows the Confiteor.” Notice he did not say “boy,” he said “person.”
