One night, to escape the yelling, I snuck outside with my sleeping bag to the long porch overlooking the gardens. I was awakened when I heard the glass door slide open, and my parents entered the porch, not seeing me in the dark. Hour after hour of that long night, he lectured, browbeat, badgered; and she sat, mostly silently in a chair, as he paced back and forth or stopped, sputtering in rage. His voice rose and challenged, her soft voice dropped away to nothing.
My hatred concentrated that long night. I had to do something. To end this. Someone had to do something. He went on until dawn lit the mist rising off the fine landscaped gardens we’d toiled over for years. They never saw me. He rolled back the sliding glass doors and motioned my mother back into the house, and she followed, crumpled and obedient.
IT WAS A house of pain we stepped in and out of, sometimes finding relief when we left the house, sometimes forgetting. I found a strange comfort reading the books on Jo’s bookshelf on the Holocaust, the rise of Hitler, and his insidious takeover of the minds of a population. Those books helped me. The Jews in Germany had lived in a country gone mad. My home was overtaken by madness, but I was fortunate. I could leave my house and the craziness stayed inside.
One morning, I woke up to the sound of someone quietly breathing in my bedroom. I lay under my covers curled on my side, afraid to open my eyes. Someone was in the other twin bed. I lifted up my head. A figure was sleeping on its side, its back away from me, with short dark hair showing above the covers. My mother. She’d come in during the night. She would sleep in my room the rest of that summer. Later that day I saw the phone cord pulled from the kitchen into my room, the door nearly shut. I heard her whisper “rape” as I tiptoed by.
August sweltered outside the air-conditioned glass. We were held captive inside by the heat and our father’s nightly yelling. It seemed we never left the house. No one visited us.
One morning, I woke up and knew what I had to do. It was so simple. All I had to do was kill my father. Then the yelling would stop. Then we would be free. I felt clear and calm as I calculated my plan. In the kitchen, as I put dishes and silverware away after breakfast, I lingered over the drawer of my father’s collection of well-sharpened German and Japanese cooking knives. I examined their blades and handles. All I had to do was stab him in the heart. Nothing else could save us. All I wanted was to stop his voice, stop the threats, the lectures, the cross-examining. We’d be out of pain. Just take a knife. I looked them over. I fingered one of the carving knives he’d taught me to use, slicing precisely. I didn’t know where I’d stab, didn’t know the hardness of bone. I imagined only silence and freedom.
There had been a murder case in Cincinnati. The papers ventured that the teenage daughter had killed her well-to-do parents in a comfortable neighborhood on the other side of town. People wondered how a normal, quiet high school student could do that. The papers would say we looked like a perfect family. Except our neighbors who heard his voice yelling at night from the glass house. I thought about prison and made lists of books I’d want to take. I was resigned to my fate.
THE MURDER WOULD occur in the galley kitchen, between the oiled walnut banks of cabinets and below the steel rack of hanging copper cooking pots and lids. I chose the spot where my father normally chopped onions with a fine Japanese blade at the counter in the center point of the kitchen, where he commanded our lives in the Great Room. Rolling open the three-foot-wide drawer crowded with his cooking knife collection, his booming voice always demanded our full attention to his instruction.
His voice filled the house, down to the farthest reaches of the high-ceilinged room where Wood hid behind a book. His voice followed our mother where she folded laundry, out of sight, in one of the covey of bedrooms whose doors opened on either side of the kitchen. Hubbard slid open a glass door and vanished on his bike all day.
THE DAY CAME. We all stood in the long open aisle kitchen at the end of the Great Room lined with glass doors. The oiled walnut cabinets became a stage. My father stood in the middle in front of the closed drawer of knives. My mother and I stood on one side, my brothers on the other side. Time slowed down. Actors in position, playing our parts. I was poised. This was the time to step forward, open the drawer and grab the sharpest blade. But I couldn’t move. His rage surrounded us like the Chinese red panel that circled the Great Room. We were mired in an erupting lava flow of sound.
Yet I grew stronger and clear. My intention was as sharp as a knife blade. The roaring wall of our father’s voice went silent. Something powerful had also built up in my brothers and my mother, a calm of a unified hatred. We all turned our faces towards him. We didn’t cower submissively.
Like the day a revolution sparks and a suppressed people all rise with a single-minded purpose and fill the streets, demanding freedom, we each turned our faces towards him. Silently and steadily, we channeled our fury into our eyes. We turned to face the barrel-chested man who had devoured our lives.
I never had to touch a knife. Something happened. We turned our eyes on him and he cried out like a stabbed bull. He crashed to the ground, his hands grabbed his fibrillating heart. Crying out, he was small and pitiful, like a statue of a dictator pulled down by peasants.
We didn’t move. We stood there silently. We looked down on him on the white vinyl kitchen floor. His chest heaving, his face red, sweat slick on his face, sweat seeping through his shirt. He was fumbling on the ground, trying to sit up. No one knelt down to help. Not the ones who usually came to his side, not my mother, nor me. One at a time, my brother Wood, then Jo, then I turned and walked away. He lay there panting, gasping for breath until my youngest brother Hubbard helped him to bed and got him his heart pills.
I slid open the glass door and entered the damp heat of August, dazed. Disoriented. Free. I didn’t have to kill him. I didn’t have to sacrifice my life to free us. We had acted as one. We had liberated ourselves. We didn’t know what would come next, but we knew we would save our lives.
ABOUT A WEEK after my father’s collapse in the kitchen, he walked into my bedroom before breakfast and sat down on the desk chair to face me. My mother and I were sitting up against the pillows in the twin beds, drinking coffee, when he came in. The moment she saw him, I could feel her tense with fear, but curiously I didn’t. In three weeks, I had plans to fly to France to study for a year and somehow that now gave me a sense of safety.
He was excited, and talking fast. “I just remembered. When I was about to leave for college, my great-aunt Ada, the matriarch of the family, gave me an unimaginable gift. Her car.”
I imagined it was a Dusenberg from the 1920s, something priceless, regal, and astonishing. He continued, “This was during the Depression. My father had lost everything. I was eighteen, and had no money for tuition. I never even imagined owning a car.” She gave him the choice; he could sell the car for his college tuition payment to start at Cornell or keep it and not go to school. He beamed. “I loved that car, and it broke my heart to sell it.”
My mother and I stared at him. He was oddly elated, caught up in an excitement we couldn’t understand. He was acting like nothing was wrong, as if there was nothing strange about his wife sleeping in my room. He looked at me and continued, “So I have decided to give you my Jaguar.”
I was stunned. His white convertible XKE Jaguar that he’d never let me drive? Give it to me? Oh my god, to own that car! To drive it! I felt I could leap out of my skin with excitement. All caution vanished.
He explained, “The choice is yours. Keep the car and not go to France. Or you can sell it to pay for your year away.” He calculated I could get about $2,500 for it. I was to clean and wax it, run an ad in the paper, and sell it. “This is how you’ll learn the value of money.”
My mother remained silent but in the clenched muscles of her jaw, I could sense her warning. “It’s a trick. He’s crazy.”
He reached into his pocket, and pulled out the key. “So what are you going to do?” He held out the key.
I lo
oked at my mother cowering under the covers. I looked at the key and his strangely animated face. I took it. My ticket out the door.
TWO DAYS LATER, with a small bag packed and my stash of babysitting cash, I backed that long white lion of a car out of the garage. The top was down. I slid into the red leather bucket seat behind the wood and metal steering wheel. The engine revved and purred as my foot played the accelerator. I was eighteen years old. My mother’s face was grim and scared, my brothers laughing and envious. My father, no longer manic, sternly admonished me, “You have to sell it before you leave for France.”
I waved. “I know, I know. I’ll be back in a week.” I gave the car an extra series of revs as I steered down the drive across the creek and waved goodbye. I followed the narrow road past the old farm edging the village, before I headed to the highway and accelerated like a rocket out of the magnetic pull of their misery.
I drove east from Cincinnati, my hair whipping around my face, on the first solo long-distance drive of my life. I kept the top down in good weather. When it looked like rain I’d stop, unfold the roof like an accordion, fasten the black cover on snaps along the top of the windshield. It didn’t bother me that it leaked in the rain. I double-clutched down, the way he’d taught me racing car drivers would shift gears. I studied the map, refueled, and checked the oil.
I visited friends from the ship. Near New Hope, Pennsylvania, Kimble photographed me in a meadow, my long hair golden in the sunset. I sat inside the open driver’s door, the long white Jag gleaming rose. My eyes laughing behind wire-framed glasses, wearing my favorite Mexican embroidered peasant shirt and bell-bottoms. Cruising across New Jersey with three friends from the ship squeezed into the Jag, we sang “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine” as I drove down the Garden State Parkway.
As I turned west a week later, a toll booth attendant in the middle of Pennsylvania asked, “How fast can she go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go find out. No one’s come by here in a while.”
The Jag accelerated to 120 miles an hour, effortlessly. It probably could have gone faster, but I didn’t want to push it. I didn’t need to. I was a girl who could drive a Jag, go to France, and leave home.
Villa Savoye, 1973
LE CORBUSIER
1973
In this house, one will find a truly architectural promenade which offers constantly varying aspects, unexpected, sometimes astonishing.
—LE CORBUSIER, ON VILLA SAVOYE IN POISSY
AS THE TRAIN RUMBLED AND SHUDDERED ALL NIGHT from Paris south to Grenoble, with students and baggage clogging every aisle and squeezed into every seat, I leaned against the cold black glass, my heart racing out of rhythm. I had no idea that my mother was also sitting awake at night, afraid of what lay ahead of her.
Within weeks of my leaving in September, my mother informed my father she was moving out the following Wednesday. On Tuesday, when she got home from work, the locks had been changed. He never let her into the glass house again. He informed her that anything she thought was hers had to be written down on a piece of paper and he would choose what he gave her. Desperate, she went to Sears that night, bought a nightgown, clothes for work the next day, two mattresses, sheets and pillows, a few plates, pots and pans, and a vacuum cleaner. The next day he cancelled her credit cards. This is what happened if a woman dared to leave.
The war of belongings would continue for years. My brothers, at sixteen and thirteen, were divided between them, Wood leaving with my mother, my younger brother Hubbard choosing to stay with his father.
My mother’s letters to me were upbeat, taking ten days to cross the ocean to my rented room four stories above the narrow streets of old Grenoble in the French Alps. She never let me know how terrified she was. At forty-three, she was supporting herself for the first time. Fortunately, my father had told her a few years before, “Your volunteering is fine, but for my taxes it would be better if you got a part-time job.” She had graduated from college, but when she started a full-time job as a probation officer, our father had not been happy. This was not good for his taxes. He had no idea she’d bought her ticket to freedom.
In her letters to me, she wrote, “Things were really hard at first when we moved to our apartment, but life is settling in. I made meatloaf and mashed potatoes last night. We thought of you.”
In the letters from home, no one told me my father was haunting the parking lot of the dingy Kenilworth Court Apartments, where my mother and brother Wood slept on mattresses on the floor. No one told me my father slashed the tires of her car, or tapped her phone, or let the phone ring at all hours of the night, followed by heavy breathing or growled threats before my mother slammed down the receiver. The phone was wired to the wall and couldn’t be disconnected, so they wrapped it in blankets in a drawer to muffle the sound. No one told me these things until I came home, when they were hauled out like war stories: how Hubbard found the tapes from the private investigator hidden in my dad’s desk, how they just said any crazy thing, because they knew the phone was bugged.
One of my mother’s clients on probation asked her why she looked so stressed. When my mother explained, her client lectured her. “You watch for when he leaves, then you pull up a van, pick the lock, and take what you want. Honey, it’s yours!” When my mother said she couldn’t do that, her client shrugged. “I just don’t know what it is with you white ladies. Scared of your own shadow.”
My father spent a fortune on postage for his twenty-page letters to me, his huge handwriting scrawling fury about how my mother had destroyed his life, page after page on his office stationary with his logo, a large orange stylized G in the bottom right corner. He never encouraged me, never offered sympathy for my loneliness, like my mother did in her letters.
His letters pounded me with lectures, including the need to keep precise accounts for every franc I spent and to send them promptly for his inspection, which I did:
Week of Oct 16-22 (in French Francs): food 28.90, transportation 5.40, birthday present 52.60 (rapidiograph pen, Modigliani poster for my room and little cake) for a week total of 86.90 FF or $15.40 US
I wrote in my journal. I filled thin blue aerogrammes to my mother and brother Wood in the apartment where through the walls they heard neighbors yelling and smashing plates. I wrote to my father and Hubbard in the modern house where the lights were left on all night, like an ocean liner sailing through acres of darkness. Postage was a weekly expense, sometimes nearly half of what I spent in food. I needed to write and I needed someone to hear me. The only connective line between my parents was the exchange of xeroxed copies of my aerogrammes so everyone had a copy of my tiny handwriting running over every flap describing my tentative life.
My brother Wood flunked half his classes, dropped acid on weekends, and paid half their rent from greasy night shifts frying burgers and eggs at Country Kitchen. Hubbard left home at dawn for swim practice. My father had no work. After bringing us up with the strict rule that television was only allowed on Saturday night, and only after all homework was done, he bought a large television the week my mother left. He set it down into the middle of the Great Room and left it on for hours every night to disguise the silent crater of an absent family. Hubbard came home late, stoned out of his mind, to find his father crying over “The Waltons,” or snarling profanity before driving off in the Jag for hours in the middle of the night. Before I left for France, he had decided he didn’t want me to sell the Jag. He wanted to keep it a while longer.
I was desperate for their voices, and flooded my family with accounts of my classes, books I read, jazz clubs I discovered, and colleges I was applying to (Bard, Reed, Radcliffe). I told my father I needed the Parent Confidential Form filled out by mid-December, never dreaming he wouldn’t comply. On a tight budget, I boiled cabbage on a tiny camping gas stove and seasoned it with butter and pepper. I slathered torn chunks of baguettes with apricot preserves. I squeezed my life onto pale blue paper while I waited for word from home.
As I grew more confident with my French and traveling, I scoured my Michelin map and planned journeys to Le Corbusier buildings in Paris, the Cathedral in Ronchamps, and most important, Villa Savoye, my favorite house design since childhood.
AT NINETEEN, IN February 1973, I knew I was embarking on a pilgrimage when I woke in a hostel to the red haze of dawn over Paris. I walked fast over freshly washed stone streets, stepped into the smoky rush and rumble of trains at Gare St. Lazare, to purchase my ticket to Poissy. The train jolted staccato as street lights ticked by shuttered apartment windows. Men in grey work smocks scurried along sidewalks. Deux Chevaux, like armored beetles, and Velo scooters crammed the narrow dark streets. I was heading to the Mecca of Pure Design, the Taj Mahal of Modern, a miniature Chartres for devotees of abstract: Le Corbusier’s Machine for Living In, his Villa Savoye à Poissy. I was going to kneel at the feet of the god of my father. I was ripe with the meaning of the day, ready to etch my journey onto a thin blue aerogramme in cramped italic penmanship.
The evening after my trip to Poissy in February 1973, I filled two aerogrammes, titled them Part 1 and Part 2. I addressed them to both my brothers, and mailed them to the glass house as if my family continued to live there intact. “Some people go on religious pilgrimages,” I began. “I went on an architectural one.”
It was clearly a letter to my father from the daughter who was a devotee, who wrote in such particular detail about Le Corbusier’s design that I can’t imagine anyone but my father would have bothered to decipher the cramped lines. What I didn’t know was that, with the recession of the early 1970s, his office echoed without work. No one gathered in the conference room to talk specifications, there were no new blueprints, no one pulling down books in his library. In spite of everything that had happened, he and I still shared architecture. I had become his sole student, writing home descriptions to the only person I could share them with, writing what mattered so much to me because it would mean so much to him.
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