by Sue Miller
By the time we got home, my crying would have become a joke; he would say something about it in his usual mocking voice at the table for the amusement of the others, and I would have to laugh too. But I would remember his tenderness in his office, as though it were a quality that resided there; I would remember the soft murmur of his voice alternating with his patient’s. Later I used to wonder why it was so difficult for him to bear the pain of his family when he was so forgiving of the pain of his patients. I’ve sometimes thought that if he’d had a different profession, maybe everything would have been different, too, in our lives.
It’s especially hard for me to imagine what he must have thought when he discovered he had a son with what he believed at the time was a psychogenic illness. Wasn’t there sometimes a bitter pull to his handsome face as he surveyed Mary and Sarah and me, just before he called us “the little pitchers of health”?
This was the way it had worked, I thought: My parents had made their family, they had had the requisite three pretty children, they’d bought a house on a street in Chicago where other young couples were buying houses in the years after the war. My father’s career was flourishing, they loved each other.
And then it all went haywire.
Randall sat in their midst, more beautiful than the first two, but immobile. At two, he still didn’t walk. He didn’t speak except when whole sentences, out of context, dropped from his mouth, as though someone invisible were using him as a ventriloquist’s dummy. He seemed possessed, my mother had said. Enchanted. Under a spell.
Sometime in the process of Randall’s diagnosis—he was variably and at different times thought to be deaf, retarded, autistic, and schizophrenic—my mother got pregnant with me, as though she thought another child would break the spell. Mary followed a year later, and then Sarah a year and a half after that. From the start we knew what was expected of us. We were to be normal, happy. We were to make up for Randall’s illness, Liddie’s resentment, Mack’s wild struggles. Sometimes, looking at us, my mother’s eyes would fill with tears. “Oh, my perfect babies,” she’d say, and swoop down on whoever was closest to fold her up against her broad, strong body.
For my parents, and for Lydia and Mack, deciding what Randall’s illness meant and figuring out what to feel and do about it became lifelong preoccupations. Mostly it meant they struggled with each other, since they all disagreed about him. For us, though, for Mary and Sarah and me, Randall was a given. He was just there, silent and for the most part lost in his inner world. Sometimes he was in the way, but sometimes he was useful to us: he was the troll under the bridge, he was the baby in the carriage, he was the bogeyman, the prince, the father.
When we were older, teenagers, we occasionally called our siblings and our parents “the Giants.” “What were the Giants up to today?” we asked each other, wanting only to know the mood in the house. We poked into their lives, talked about them, theorized. No one really had time or energy for us, the extras, so everything we knew we found out for ourselves. Shamelessly we opened letters, read diaries, eavesdropped on arguments, lovemaking. Unapologetically we used them, used the drama of their lives and their pain, as our primer. We appropriated everything.
Somehow, though, my sisters broke away from all of this early on. They made their own lives, free and clear. And actually for a long time it seemed I had too. It’s only more recently that I have wanted to think about it all again, to make sense of it once more—in a different way—for myself.
Why? Because I dwell too much in the past, my mother would say. Let it go. She’s something of an expert in this, having shed several lives like useless old skins. In this latest one we all call her Lainey—except for Mack, who says he can’t bring himself to it.
Liddie says my problem is just that I know too much about everyone in the family, that they all think of me as sympathetic and pour out all their secrets to me. “They don’t notice till a whole lot later, cherub—if they ever notice at all—that you never tell yours back, do you?” She was a little drunk when she said that to me, so we both just laughed. But it’s true. Once, actually, I was sitting in a mirrored restaurant, listening to my sister Mary, and I kept seeing reflections of my face, maybe ten of them—all so anguished, so sympathetic, that it shocked me: I was aware of feeling almost nothing at the moment. I was just watching Mary’s mouth and thinking about what time I had to meet Will, my husband. I think it’s that reflex in my face, the sympathy that rises to my features sometimes without my feeling it, that makes me a good photographer. People look at me and they believe that I understand, I care. Then they don’t mind so much if I take a few shots. I’ve passed some human test. Sometimes it isn’t until much later that I weep, if I do. Sometimes when I’m developing a picture, then it finally seems real, whatever’s happening—a fire, a funeral, an eviction, all that suffering.
In any case, I don’t think I would have wanted to look so carefully back if I hadn’t gone home to visit a few years ago. It was the late summer of 1983, and it was not a good time between me and my first husband. I’d gone to Chicago as much to get away from him and us together as to see anyone in my family. I ended up staying almost three months. I was also waiting to hear about a grant, and looking back on this now, I think that I had devised some magic rules governing all of it: If I won the money, it would be a sign that I was meant to have a life alone, and I’d leave Will for good. If I didn’t get it, it meant the opposite, and I’d go back to New York. That’s what I thought at the start of my visit. By the end of it, my life had changed—but for an entirely different set of reasons.
My parents themselves had finally been divorced a year before my visit, and I was staying with my mother in her new apartment. The guest room, the room she. gave to me, was still full of unpacked boxes and trunks. “It’s all family stuff,” she said. “In another world, it would have sat in funny places around the house till we both died, and then you girls would have come and divided it all up. Now it’ll just sit here, I guess. You’re welcome to anything you’d like. I haven’t the moral fiber even to look at it.” This was like her. A quality other people would have characterized as energy or strength—or even curiosity—had a purely moral element for my mother.
And so each morning I woke among the boxes that held my past, my family’s past. My mother had a job now, and she was usually gone by the time I got up. Often I began my day idly flipping through the artifacts of all our lives.
In the evenings she and I sat around together drinking beer or tea and talking. She talked a good deal about my father, about their marriage and our childhood. It was as though the divorce had set her free to acknowledge all the problems that had plagued them in their younger life. She never spoke angrily. My father’s very name, David, seemed to make her voice soften, and she talked of him, of them both, of all of us, as though we were dear relatives who’d gone together through some natural disaster—a shipwreck, a tornado—and barely survived.
Her job was painting sets for a theater designer who was well known in Chicago. She smelled of turpentine and soap when she arrived home, and her cuticles were permanently stained, her fingers slightly tinted, as she gripped her glass. Early in my stay, it was usually hot in her apartment, and we would sit out on her balcony and watch the twilight thicken, the car headlights coming on down below under the wide dark trees on Hyde Park Boulevard. The colors slowly bled from both of us as the light left, until I was, like my mother, just a grayish shadow on the deep porch, and only our voices—remembering, reinventing the past—had any color or depth. Over the months, I came to feel that these talks, this remembering, were somehow connected to the point of my being there at all.
“How shall we work this?” she asked after dinner one night. “You ought to spend some time at your father’s too, I suppose.”
“I’ve been seeing Dad,” I said. “I’m having dinner with them Friday.”
She had her back to me—she was pouring us beers—so I couldn’t tell whether this news startled her. I
felt foolish that I hadn’t said anything to her before, but I simply hadn’t been able to figure out how to bring it up. I watched her back. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and from this angle, if you didn’t look at her elbows, she looked as though she were in her twenties. She’d gotten thinner in her fifties, she took better care of herself now. She poured the beer slowly, in stages, for a few long moments. “How did he seem to you?” she asked. She turned then and leaned against the counter, raising her glass. “Tony suits him, doesn’t she? I’m glad they’re getting married.”
I didn’t want to answer her question, so I said, “Why don’t you two just call each other up and talk? He asked me the same thing about you.”
When they had finally decided to separate again, several years before, my father had moved out to an apartment. But then, within a year or so, he moved again, into the home of an old family friend, Tony—Antoinette—Baker. She lived halfway down the block from the house we’d grown up in—the house Lainey was then trying to sell. They were planning on getting married.
The first time I’d gone over there, it wasn’t just my father, but Tony too, who had asked how my mother was doing, each when the other was out of the room.
“We’re having fun,” I said. “It’s like having a roommate again.” I said this to Tony, maybe in part to make her feel bad, to make her remember that she’d once been good friends with my mother.
“What about this man she’s working for?” Tony asked. Her voice was lowered so my father wouldn’t overhear her. “Anything happening there?”
“Terry?” I asked, incredulous. Had she never met him? Was she blind?
“Well, I guess I just hoped.”
“Tony, he’s gay. And besides, I don’t think Lainey’s interested right now.”
“Everyone’s always interested,” Tony said firmly. She was beautiful still, at around sixty. Small, exquisitely formed. Her hair was the same dense halo around her head, white now where it had once been a glittery gold. I wondered if I should tell her everyone was not always interested. That I, for example, couldn’t have been less interested at the moment. Instead I changed the subject, and we began to talk about her children, whom I’d grown up with.
My father was even more straightforward when we were alone. “Your mother’s by herself too much. I worry about her,” he said. “Don’t you know any men she could go out with?”
I stared at him, trying to register my disapproval. Then I said, “Why don’t I fix her up with Will? He’s available.” His face seemed to pinch in. I went on, recklessly. “The only problems are that he’s twenty-five years younger than she is, he lives in New York, and he’s on the rebound.”
There was a long silence, and my father looked shamefaced. “All right,” he said gently. He took off his glasses and polished them. When he put them back on, he smiled his modest smile and said, “Well, Freud teaches us we’re all, always, on the rebound anyway.”
I laughed with him. Then I stopped and said, “You mustn’t talk that way about Mother to me again.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The night I went over for dinner, I showed my father and Tony some of the pictures I’d been taking. They were studies of children I’d made in the playground near the apartment Will and I lived in. It was a mean playground, asphalt and busted swings, the ground in the corners and under the one grimy linden littered with glass and the occasional syringe. The children were mean in the same sense too—roughly dressed, foul-mouthed, sometimes scabbed with impetigo. But their play was not so different from what I remembered from my own childhood. In many of the photographs, I’d been experimenting with a technique that results in a central sharp image around which the background appears to swirl in dizzying motion. I liked it because it recalled the way life felt to me when I was young, when you focus on what’s important to you so clearly that everything else swims out of your consciousness.
My father took a long time looking at the pictures. His eyesight was already pretty bad then, and he had to hold them at a certain angle to see them. One by one he moved them around in front of what was his narrow tunnel of vision. Finally he said he didn’t like them much. “They’re very riveting, and they do get your attention.” He gestured. “But it’s all really a gimmick, isn’t it?”
I felt stung. My face must have changed, because Tony was watching me and she suddenly began talking, picking up first one picture, then another, trying to decide which was her favorite.
I waited until she was through. Then I said to my father, “You might be right. It might just be a gimmick. But you have to be willing to try gimmicks. It’s how you learn technique. That’s all technique is, finally, anyway: gimmick. Gimmick perfected.”
A few days later, my father called me to ask to look at the pictures again, so I got them out and brought them over. Again he went through the odd business of waving them back and forth in front of his face. Then he set them down, arranged them neatly in a stack, and apologized. He said that actually he thought they were good, very good. He said he had realized almost right away that his first response had been bizarre, based on some unconscious associations. He’d been lying in bed after I left that night, feeling uncomfortable about his remarks to me, when he remembered. And then he told me this story. His story.
My father is walking home, toward the IC down Fifty-seventh Street. Let’s put him in a seersucker suit—the same one I saw him in years later, when he didn’t see me—because it’s summer again, the Fourth of July actually, and because he’s just been seeing patients. Not his everyday, ambulatory patients—those he sees downtown—but his hospitalized ones, those more deeply confused, those gone beyond understanding that the doctor might not come today because it’s a national holiday.
It’s 1950, patriotism is still fashionable, and he notices the occasional flag hanging off someone’s front porch, draped out an apartment window. From time to time one of them billows dramatically in the breeze coming off the lake. My father’s suit flaps too, flaps against his legs. The jacket flutters behind him as he strides along, moving fast, bent forward slightly from the waist in his hurry. He’s a tall man, dark-haired and too serious-looking. My mother has said that when she met him, he looked so sober it was her impulse to want to make him smile, laugh. He still looks that way eight years later. He invites the attention of women with his apparent gravity, though he himself is cool and witty.
He’s hurrying because he’s promised my mother, his wife—Lainey—that he’ll be back in time for the Fourth of July parade and block party. All three of his children will be in the parade, Liddie and Mack marching with tiny flags distributed by the teenage girls who’ve organized everything. And the baby, Randall, aged nearly two, who has been chosen to ride in a carriage at the head with a two-year-old girl from the block, king and queen of the whole affair.
Lainey told him about this several nights earlier. Told him while they drank beers in the kitchen and did the dishes. It was hot, and she’d changed into a sheer cotton nightgown after they’d put the children to bed. She was laughing as she described the delegation of self-important teenagers who wanted to borrow her youngest child. “It was like a Nobel Prize committee,” she said. “It took them about five minutes of hemming and hawing to get around to their announcement.” They had made crowns and scepters, which they showed Lainey, as though that would convince her if all else failed. “Good Lord, these projects,” she said, and set the clean plate she’d been drying down on top of the others. “All I did at that age was follow my brothers around, hoping somehow I’d figure out how to be a boy.”
“Clearly you had no luck there,” he had said, looking over at her.
Now he turns the corner onto Harper Avenue, and first hears, then sees, through the tunneled light under the dense elms, the parade meandering toward him. Ahead of it, circling on their bikes like wheelbound birds of prey, are boys, teenage boys, braying to each other, their faces masked in contempt for this girlish civic enterprise. The side
walks by the square, where the parade will end, are thick with people waiting, and my father begins to push his way through them. He sees the two elderly Chase sisters parked in lawn chairs by the curb so they won’t miss anything. He’s in the crowd now, looking for Lainey. His hand brushes across Harold Baker’s shoulder. “Seen my wife?” he asks. Harold gestures vaguely behind him. David moves slowly along the sidewalk, and then he sees her, leaning against the wooden rail at the edge of the square. She’s talking, holding a cigarette; her hair is barretted severely back. She looks like a big, strong girl. The crowd is dense around her: people have brought guests, adults he doesn’t know, visiting relatives. He’s waving to Lainey, but she doesn’t see him. She throws her head back and laughs.
There’s a press forward now, as the front of the parade reaches the square. David finds himself, too, pushed and pushing toward the curb, still looking more at Lainey than at the children—but turning now, just turning—when a voice at his left and behind him rises, resonant with concern, with diagnostic inclination: “What on earth is wrong with that child?”
And as my father’s face swings to look at the approaching parade, he knows—the sudden fist of his heart in his chest hits it home—that the voice is speaking of Randall, that he will see him now, emperor of the parade, stripped of the illusions of normalcy they’ve spun for him.
As he looks, it seems the other children, the parade itself, the adults watching, all swirl and blur, are only color, motion, like the background in a photograph. Dead in the middle, motionless in the carriage he shares with his tiny queen, sits Randall, unseeing, inert, his sequined, glittering cardboard crown perched square on his head. His queen, a frail wriggling blonde, is chewing on hers. She’s turned backward, squirming to see the big costumed girls pushing the carriage and the grownups cheering as their children march by. My father watches them pass, watches the messy little girl, her chin streaked with drooled paint. He sees her speak, point with a tiny finger. Randall, perfect king, rides on, looking neither left nor right; and the pubescent baby-sitters—now yanking at the queen to keep her seated—let their eyes fall on him with nearly maternal pride. My father stares, appalled, at the motionless, joyless lump that is his child, frozen in the blur of life around him. Over and over, his brain asks, “What’s wrong with that child? What’s wrong with that child?”
