Because I Come from a Crazy Family

by Edward M. Hallowell

  I could have kissed her. She was so concerned, so maternal. I promised her I’d learned my lesson and would never, ever be so stupid again.

  “Good,” she said. “You could have given me a heart attack.” The other members of the compartment were smiling. It was wonderful to be so looked out for by strangers.

  39.

  Why Cousin Lyn and Tom Bliss picked the day before New Year’s Eve to get married is beyond me, but it seemed fitting that Lyn would not choose just any day for her wedding. In a more symbolic sense, their wedding marked the start not only of a new year, but new lives. Lyn would say to me years later, “My life is divided into two parts: before Tom and after Tom.”

  I had a ball at their wedding, drinking a lot of beer. When it came time for toasts, I stood up on the banquette where I was sitting and raised my glass.

  I was expansively emotional, the way I was (and am) when I drink too much, but it was all heartfelt. I was (and am) nothing if not sincere, transparently so, often too much for some people. What I didn’t know at the time was that Tom really does not like big displays of emotion; they make him feel awkward, especially when directed his way. Tom must have wanted to crawl under the table as I went on and on about how great he was and how glad I was to have this new brother. He was a good sport, though, as always. It was in his DNA.

  He also was under a permanent spell cast by Lyn. He believed he’d just won the Irish Sweepstakes. Best of all, so did Lyn. They’d each found the person of their dreams. I know—it never happens in real life; but it had happened to them.

  As Lyn had written me earlier when I was in Africa, her friend Kendall had suggested they go watch a rugby match Kendall’s boyfriend was playing in. That’s when Tom Bliss caught Lyn’s eye. She liked athletic guys, and he was that, for sure: fast, quick, and a cagey runner. (I know because I went to see him play rugby a couple of times, and years later, when we’d play games in the yard or on the beach, he would run circles around me.) He was a star on the field, although he would deny that. A Jimmy Stewart kind of guy, he’d deny being a star at anything, even though he was good at almost everything he did. And, in part because of a prominent nose, he was drop-dead handsome.

  They went out for drinks after the rugby match, and, to hear Tom tell it, that was all it took. He knew Lyn was the one. “The minute I saw her, I couldn’t believe my luck,” he’d tell me years later. “I thought she was way out of my league, but for some reason she seemed interested, so what the hell, I kept coming around.”

  Dr. Zhivago had just hit the screens, so Duckie dubbed “Lara’s Theme” Lyn and Tom’s song. Lyn and Tom thought having a song of their own was way too hokey, but I bet underneath all their sophistication (and after a few drinks), they’d feel it when “Lara’s Theme” came on, wherever they were. For my mother and father, their song was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Long after the divorce, whenever that song came on, I saw it affecting Mom more than a little.

  Following Lyn’s adolescence in which small-town teenage boys laughed at her after planting a crazed, shit-shooting turkey in her car and an English teacher took advantage of her, and an early adulthood in which she fell for an older man and tried to make believe that that relationship was ideal, now, with Tom, the dream actually did come true.

  Lyn opened up this Catholic boy from Westfield, New Jersey, who’d grown up in a family that by anybody’s standards (except maybe their own) was normal. Tom was the oldest of five children. The closest thing to a hang-up that Lyn, ever the psychological detective, could decipher from Tom’s childhood was this: His dad went off to war when Tom was an infant, giving young Tom his mom’s total attention. Then, when his dad came back from the service, little Tom got displaced by his father, leading the boy Tom, and then the man Tom, to be inordinately possessive and jealous of whatever woman he was with. Other than that quality, which isn’t that unusual, Tom was about as well adjusted as a person could be. Still, never daunted, but unable to find any imperfections Lyn could use against this man in the heat of battle, she pulled out the Hallowells’ worst insult: boring. While Tom wasn’t boring in the least, that was the best Lyn could come up with when she needed some put-down to throw at him.

  But boring was so what Lyn, and all the rest of my family, needed. Stable. Reliable. Consistent. We’d never had that. Hello, boring! We thought we’d never findja!

  Lyn did show Tom a different way than what he’d been used to. One night, for example, she dared him to take a letter she needed to have mailed and go to the mailbox around the corner from their apartment. Sort of like when Lyn asked me to go to HoJo’s and get her a cheeseburger, Tom asked why she couldn’t go mail her letter herself.

  With Tom, she had inducements she couldn’t use with me, and he was quite susceptible to them, so he agreed, OK, he’d take her damn letter and mail it for her.

  Oh, good, she said, except there’s one additional requirement if you want to get your reward.

  What might that be? inquired Tom.

  You have to perform this mission without clothes. You have to go out stark naked. As a jaybird. Without a stitch.

  No way. There was no way this nice Catholic boy from New Jersey was going to risk getting arrested for indecent exposure, get kicked out of medical school, and forfeit his dream of becoming a doctor on some kind of a crazy dare.

  I have no idea how Lyn talked him into doing it. It was her genius. Once she had you, she really had you. She could talk a person into doing almost anything.

  Tom took off his clothes and used all of his athletic skills to run and dodge and hide behind bushes around the block to the mailbox, drop the freakin’ letter in the slot, then, always on the alert for flashing lights or any sign of police, hustle and dodge his way back to the safety of the apartment. When he got there, he faced one last barrier. Not having a key—he was naked, after all—he had to knock on the door. Lyn, of course, couldn’t resist keeping him waiting just long enough to scare the daylights out of him. When he barked in the loudest whisper he could muster, “Someone’s getting off the elevator! Open the door now!” she relented and let him in.

  Their wedding was picture perfect. Tom had a bunch of handsome ushers and Lyn a bunch of beautiful bridesmaids. The hidden agenda was that Johnny, who was an usher, would ask out Avery, who was a bridesmaid. That this would not happen because Johnny was gay—a secret known only to a few people, not including me—did not prevent a romance from blossoming at the wedding, though. My brother Ben fell for Avery, and she for him. They drove off to Boston after the wedding and have been together ever since.

  40.

  About nine months after they got married, Lyn and Tom had their first child, a girl they named Mary Josselyn, Molly for short.

  Tom had graduated from Georgetown Medical School the previous summer and was doing his internship at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, where he would also go on to do his residency in Orthopedic Surgery.

  At the time, I was a freshman at Harvard, Jamie was a senior. We could easily drive down to Providence for dinner or to keep Lyn company when Tom was on call.

  Back then, Lyn had been urging me to go to medical school because Tom was a doctor, she thought I’d make a good doctor, she wanted me to be practical and find a way to make a living (which others in my family had not done terribly well), and she thought being a doctor would make me happy. She wanted everyone to be happy. This was the major ambition she took out of childhood: a burning passion that the people around her, especially her family, would be happy. This was her ruling purpose, her daily preoccupation. To that end, she could be what’s often called controlling and manipulative, but it was in the service of trying to help us lead happy lives. I, for one, really needed the guidance she provided. But sometimes she took it a tad too far.

  For example, one day when I came down from Cambridge to visit and spend the night, along with Jamie, she decided it would be a good idea to straighten my hair. I had naturally curly hair, which I had inherited from my mother. For some re
ason, Lyn seemed to think I’d look better with straight hair.

  She’d always been able to talk me into anything and, sure enough, she talked me into this ridiculous undertaking. The process of straightening took hours and was a real pain in the ass. Once it was done, I looked OK with straight hair, but certainly not better enough to make it worth getting regular treatments to keep my hair straight. That experiment ended.

  But this was who she was. She loved keeping all of us off balance. She never allowed herself to become predictable. Like being boring, being predictable was a sin. One evening she contacted a girl I was going out with and persuaded her to come to Providence and jump out of a big cardboard box as a surprise present to me. The girl was a good sport, but our relationship ended soon thereafter.

  But the bigger picture she was creating inspired me. Seeing the happy family she was growing child after child with Tom proved to me it could be done. After Molly, they had another baby, named Thomas, after Tom, but called Tim. Not too long after came James, named after Lyn’s dad as well as Jamie, but called Jake. Lyn had wanted a girl this time, so when she got Jake she persuaded Tom to adopt a girl from Korea, whom they named Anna. Not quite finished, Lyn got pregnant one last time and had Ned, named after me. Between Molly and Ned there are twelve years; five children born between 1968 and 1980.

  Before all the kids arrived, we used to play various games to stay entertained. Not just Lyn, none of us did boredom well. Lyn invented one game that was especially diabolical. Tom, Lyn, Jamie, and I would sit around a table with a glass in the middle of it. Someone would take a single layer of a napkin, wet the rim of the glass, and lay the napkin atop the glass so that it stuck, and then place a dime on top of the napkin.

  This was back when both Jamie and I smoked cigarettes. One of us would light a cigarette. Each person then had to burn a bit of the napkin with the cigarette, enough so that you could see a portion of the paper burn. Whoever made the dime fall into the glass lost the game.

  Here’s where it got interesting. The loser had to make a phone call to whomever the others designated. Since we knew each other well, we could designate the person the loser would be most embarrassed to call. For example, Lyn would have to call one of the boys who put the turkey into her car.

  Predictably enough, we were usually drinking when we played this game, which made steadying the cigarette more difficult but making the phone call less of a trial. One time I had to call Uncle Unger and I actually got him on the phone. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I know the conversation was brief.

  The funniest time, though, was when Tom lost. Lyn made him call her old boyfriend, Dick. For all that Lyn had loosened up Tom enough to marry her and go along with her antics, his DNA was still that of a reserved, somewhat uptight, respectable man. He was not the type to call old boyfriends, even on a dare.

  Watching him call Dick was hysterically funny. I can still see him, receiver to his ear, closing his eyes praying that Dick would not answer the phone.

  But Dick did answer. There was a slight pause as it hit Tom that he had to speak. He then cleared his throat. I’ll always admire him for not just hanging up and saying “Fuck this.” Instead, likely praying it was a wrong number, he said, “Hi, is this Dick?”

  When the reply came in the affirmative, Tom cleared his throat again. “Hi, Dick, this is Tom Bliss.” Awkward doesn’t begin to describe what I am sure Tom was feeling. He looked sick.

  Tom listened to Dick’s reply.

  “Well, the reason I am calling you is that we are playing a game, and I lost.”

  We all heard the click as Dick abruptly hung up.

  I suppose it was a sadistic game but it made us all laugh. People’s feelings could have gotten hurt, but they never were, at least as far as I knew.

  When she wasn’t designing diabolical games or straightening hair, Lyn was helping to manage the lives of Tom and her children and the people she loved, her mother and father, Jamie and me, and the odd cast of characters she’d made friends with over the years.

  Gammy Hallowell and Duckie, extremely extroverted and comfortable with the Social Register set, intimidated Lyn. Born with her father’s anxiety gene, she never developed their social confidence. She got a master’s in Arts and Teaching but was never able to hold a teaching job, largely because anxiety got in the way. Instead she worked behind the scenes, where she felt confident, coaching her kids, Jamie, and various others whom she took on informally. I was just one of the many to benefit from her ongoing counsel.

  As much as Tom stabilized her, which he did beautifully, Lyn also helped him with his various social anxieties. On their way to cocktail or dinner parties, Lyn would coach Tom on topics of conversation and how to stand with a drink without seeming to be too tongue-tied or anxious. As much as she credited Tom for helping her, he also credited her for helping him.

  We developed a rhythm that lasted years. Jamie and I would drive down and help them move, first from one apartment in Providence to another, and then to the house in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, some ten miles east of Providence, where they lived once Tom finished his training and they could afford a house. With a swimming pool, no less. And a huge yard. It would be their only house, where all the kids grew up.

  Lyn loved to garden, as did Jamie, and soon so did Tom. I never became the gardener they did, but the grounds around the house in Rehoboth could have been shown in a magazine or on a garden club tour.

  Lyn didn’t stop there. Perhaps influenced by her early years on Cloverluck Farm, she populated the Rehoboth property with a wide variety of animals. First, there was a horse that lived in the barn next to the main house. Molly developed a passion for riding, so there was a good reason for the horse.

  But Lyn added an array of other critters: dogs and cats, of course, but also guinea hens, ducks (they had a small pond), geese, peacocks, and turkeys. When you drove up to the house you were greeted by a god-awful honking cacophony dominated by the guinea hens and peacocks, but with all the other animals, except the cats, joining in.

  Through the years, Jamie and I went to Rehoboth for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Traditions developed. Lyn always made the Brandy Alexander pie for Christmas that Tom’s mother used to make and Tom loved. And she’d make a clam dip with sour cream and cream cheese that Tom also loved. She’d produce a Christmas card every year with all the kids on it, designed to be more funny than show-offy, and she’d somehow manage to mail them all out before Christmas while riding herd on each child’s education.

  As a surgeon, Tom earned enough to send the kids to private schools, all eventually ending up at Moses Brown in Providence, where they not only got a top-notch education but came as close to spiritual or religious exposure as they ever would, as Moses Brown adhered to Quaker traditions.

  Given our family’s Quaker roots, Lyn could embrace this. Tom, who, with Lyn’s encouragement, had decided Catholicism, the tradition into which he was born, made no sense, and was happy with the Quaker influence. Family members sometimes even called each other thee, and they opened each Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with a moment of silence while holding hands around the table.

  As the family grew, Christmases grew into increasingly lavish productions. Mostly, they were fun. But Lyn orchestrated them with such care and a critical eye that I sometimes felt as if each gift I bought had to pass her inspection. Indeed, she would ridicule gifts she thought did not demonstrate enough thought on the part of the giver. (I was often the recipient of such ridicule.) Lyn would also insist that each gift be opened by the recipient with enough time for everyone to see the gift and comment.

  When there was just Molly, and the adults, this was fine. But when there were five children, not to mention the additional adults Lyn brought in along the way, the opening of presents became all but interminable. Bloody Marys helped.

  The years run together, but I can see us all opening presents, nibbling clam dip, and drinking beer, wine, and cocktails, ending up seated around the long antiqu
e dining room table eating turkey, stuffing, and Jamie’s homemade cranberry sauce followed by Brandy Alexander pie.

  I remember, one Christmas in my thirties, wondering how long this could last. I imagined each Christmas as a red light on a horizontal white bar, and mulled over how many red lights I’d manage to see before the red lights went out. At sixty-seven, I’m still counting.

  41.

  My senior year at college, I had to apply to medical schools and write my honors thesis. It was a highly competitive time to try to get into medical schools, and while my GPA was high, my score on the MCAT, the standardized test you take to get into medical school, was not high enough to make my acceptance the slam dunk it otherwise might have been.

  I regretted not having taken chemistry and physics at Exeter. I’d taken plenty of math and done well, but in science I lacked a strong foundation. I’m pretty sure that if I had taken science courses at Exeter, I would have done much better on the MCAT, but at Exeter I didn’t know I would end up applying to medical school. At the time, I wanted to be a writer or an English teacher.

  Even though I ended up graduating magna cum laude with a summa thesis and outstanding recommendations, I did not get into a single medical school. This was a huge disappointment and a profound embarrassment. I had taken all the pre-med courses and done well, I had excelled in all the other courses I took, I had put up an excellent record, but because my MCAT was not high enough, I didn’t get in anywhere.

  Part of me wanted to say Screw it, if med school doesn’t want me, I don’t want med school. But then I talked to Lyn and Tom and the med school adviser. I took a deep breath and applied for a job as a research assistant with Dr. George Blackburn.

  I spent a year working for George. The idea was that if I did research and demonstrated a strong desire to go to medical school, I might get in the second time around.