by Sue Miller
“It was the first time I let myself think that there was something wrong with Randall,” he said to me as he stacked and restacked the photographs. “And what I remember most vividly is the relief, the letting go of all the denial.”
I could hear Tony in the kitchen, the water running, the radio playing softly. They’d agreed, apparently, that he should talk to me alone about this. We sat in Tony’s handsome living room, full of bright colors and carefully chosen objects: an Eskimo-looking clay mask hanging on the wall, the Portuguese tiles around the fireplace, a cherry-red woolen shawl carefully placed along the back of the couch. My mother had had no such gift. Preoccupied, exhausted, she’d let the house happen around her. She seemed never to notice that the slipcovers were worn, that a lampshade had a scorch mark. Even now her apartment looked unplanned and shabby.
“But hadn’t you noticed it before about him?” I asked. “I mean, Mother said he was strange from the start.”
He nodded quickly. “Well, of course that was true. He was slow in every way, and sometimes we thought he couldn’t hear, he seemed so locked away. But then he’d speak—a whole sentence—and we’d think, Well, he’s just doing it at his own pace. We didn’t want to seem to be pushy parents, you see. We’d mention Einstein, who was famous for not speaking until he was three. We talked about perfectionism, children who waited and waited and then just magically did something impeccably. It seemed possible. His first word was ‘umbrella,’ for God’s sake.” There was a kind of happy wonder stamped on my father’s face. He was still sharply handsome, his taut skin nearly unlined. “Perfectly enunciated. ‘Umbrella.’” He shook his head at the memory.
We sat in silence for a moment. Tony said something to herself, or perhaps to the radio. My mother had this habit too. I’d hear her voice somewhere in the apartment when I knew there was no one with her. It startled me in both of them.
“In all honesty, the thing is, we were both awfully busy. We couldn’t afford any help then, and your mother had her hands full—the ironing alone took her almost a day a week, wedged in around the children’s needs. And I was … very happy in my work, very occupied. So we were both probably relieved that he was so quiet. So good, you might say. In some ways, I must confess, I saw him as being like me. Liddie and Mack had been such surprises to me, so lively, so vigorous. And Randall was … what? You could have said hesitant, inward turning. He seemed perhaps more the child I should have had. And the pediatrician kept assuring your mother that we’d been spoiled by the precocity of the other two, that Randall was still within the normal range.”
“So what difference did this … revelation make?”
“Oh, probably not too much, practically speaking. I mention it mostly by way of apologizing to you for my response to your pictures.” He focused on me briefly with his intense, pale eyes. Then looked away. “It is true that over the next year we began to push for tests. But we might have done that anyway as he got older. It’s just that, from that moment on, I had the conviction that there was something wrong with him. And that changed my life. And eventually, of course, your mother’s.”
“It would.”
He nodded sadly, acknowledging, it seemed to me, what there was of blame in this. “I hadn’t thought of it in a long time, but I kept a journal that year. It was the only way I knew to cope with it. I’d always kept a professional journal—notes on each patient at the end of the hour, that kind of thing. But this was more a sort of personal journal. Though in essence it was like the professional journal. But slightly larger-scaled, and all about him, about your brother. And it started because of that moment, there’s no doubt of that.”
He stood and crossed to the mantelpiece, picked up a book lying there. “I got it out yesterday. Tony helped me find it.” He flipped a few pages, frowning down at it. Then he looked over at me. “I thought you might be interested in looking at it. It’s nothing I’m proud of, but it’s part of what happened.”
“Oh, I would be,” I said.
He paused a moment, holding it. It was old, a liverish red worn almost to pink at its edges. “I’d like it back when you’re done,” he said.
I nodded. “Of course,” I said, and then he handed it over.
When Tony came back in, she brought us both Irish coffee, with homemade whipped cream, I noted. Somehow this made me happy for my father. We talked about their plans for the wedding, about which of their children might be able to come. They’d heard from Sarah, my youngest sister—and, I suspect, my father’s favorite—that she couldn’t make it, that the country band she played fiddle with had gigs lined up in Washington and Oregon straight through the next couple of months.
When I got home that night, home to my mother’s apartment, I opened the book and looked quickly through it. Page after page was filled with my father’s neat, rhythmic handwriting in black ink, fading now to a yellowy brown. I got under the covers then and began to read. The journal started with a list my father had made on July 6, two days after the parade, a list of things my brother had never done. Never asked for the name of anything, never pointed, never hugged, never fed himself, never gone up or down stairs, never said mama or dada. On and on, everything a two-year-old might have been expected to do.
And then the list of his accomplishments. Tapping his mouth, unfurling his fingers over and over, rocking for half an hour at a time, spinning objects with great dexterity. Once he said, “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.” His favorite toys: rubber bands, a bathroom plug chain, string. His favorite object was a red blanket. He liked to lie underneath it and hum.
In all of this my father never noted his own response to Randall, his feelings about this baby my mother once told me was undeniably the prettiest of her children. Just over and over the initial R, and then the observation.
The tests began in October, usually several a month. My father recorded them all. There were tests at first for his vision, his hearing, for the possibility of motor problems. All negative. Then tests for neurological problems. Again normal, as far as they could tell. Throughout, my father makes notes on what they think, what they say to each other: “October 4: L. sure it’s neurological. Some damage, she thinks. Maybe that long wait, the nurses telling her not to push because the Dr. wasn’t there yet?” “October 12: L. said he jerked his head today when a car outside backfired. A distant pop, she said, and he started slightly, eyes widening. Clearly not deaf.” “November 2: R. alone in the backyard. I set him on the grass, then timed him. For an hour he didn’t move, except to swing his head after his hand, to laugh when the trains went by.”
Throughout, too, terse notes of other events in their lives. In January: “L. tells me she’s pregnant. How? I ask. These things happen, she says. I suggest terminating it; L. unresponsive. She’s happy, so I pretend to be too, though I’m uncomfortable with something so clearly compensatory.” In February: “All three children in bed with croup. L. moving from one to another, and in between violently ill because of pregnancy. My going to work seems self-indulgent.”
Then the psychiatric evaluations and interviews begin and seemingly go on for months. My father’s notes are more cryptic here. F. is the doctor, and clearly my father feels he knows what he’s doing. Various references are made, abbreviated, to the standard wisdom in these situations, to Bettelheim’s point of view. What’s most evident, though, is that slowly Randall as the patient disappears and my mother becomes the focus of the journal. “L. reluctant to consider psychogenic options. Weepy. Denies there’s any possibility she rejected him, even subconsciously. But we’ve hit dead ends everywhere else, I tell her. And F. is the finest in this field. We owe it to R. to pursue this. She consents, but I’m sure the issue’s far from resolved.” In April: “L. broke down last night. Wants to know why no one is helping R., why they keep talking to her about her feelings instead of training him, teaching him. It’s difficult for me to try to explain the psychiatric perspective, needless to say. I start, and she’s instantly defensive: ‘I wanted this baby.
No one can tell me I didn’t. I love him. I wanted him.’ Her fatigue with this new pregnancy isn’t helpful either.”
The sorry year progresses, with a palpable distance growing between my parents. My mother’s pregnancy with me is clearly a difficult one, and the intermittent interviews, the long waits between for the system to respond, all push my parents farther and farther apart. Slowly the pattern emerges: a medical system that can’t, won’t, provide answers about Randall that don’t implicate my mother; my mother desperately insistent that he’s the one who needs help, not her; my father implicitly a part of the system that’s making the accusations, that’s saying she’s the one who caused the disease.
And more and more this image of my mother: exhausted, angry, difficult, drinking too much. Everyone’s adversary.
As summer approaches and the last trimester of my mother’s pregnancy, she becomes obsessed, apparently, with polio. It’s easy enough to imagine. Predictions call for an epidemic year, and the heat starts early. Down the block an older child is hospitalized. My mother begins boiling dishes, she buys glass straws. She takes Liddie and Mack out of school ahead of time, and she won’t let them leave the house to play with other children.
It has been recommended by now that she go into therapy, that she discuss with a professional her ambivalence about having Randall. It has been recommended that Randall be institutionalized when he’s old enough, in order to separate him from her destructive emotions. She’s having back trouble, she has a heat rash betwen her breasts and the raised shelf of her belly, her feet have swollen to shapeless lumps.
“L. seems lost to reason in this polio thing. In anger over the irrationality of it, I accuse her of trying to prove something about R., about herself as a mother, by this compulsive need to keep the others safe. Everything quickly out of hand. I make the mistake of labeling R. autistic, I say we know what causes it, that she has to come to grips with it. She tries to hit me. I hold her. L., weeping, ‘Don’t dare to say we to me! We! We! I am not your patient. I am your wife.’”
In July, three days after this entry, I am born. The note is: “We have another little girl. Not named yet. Seemingly healthy. Peaceful day at home. Penny manages the children smoothly. I’m trying to arrange for her to stay on until Mother Green gets here. R. speaks at breakfast: ‘Quaker Puffed Wheat. Shot from guns.’”
Sometimes as a child, because I didn’t understand its nature, its embattled origins, I felt confused by my mother’s intense love for Randall. It seemed so different from her love for the rest of us. And it made me suspicious of her love for me, even when she was most affectionate, because I felt that it was false; that the moment it was put in the balance with her love for Randall, it would be found wanting.
I remember one summer afternoon. I was ten, I was working on a project on the dining room table, coloring in the intricate patterns on some Elizabethan dresses I’d copied from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Randall was in the living room, sitting in a patch of sunlight with his Slinky, lifting the end again and again and watching it fall, almost humming as he did it. My mother was in the kitchen, making a cake. It was Mack’s birthday. She called out, “Nina, come in here and look at this. It’s turning out beautifully!”
I finished coloring in the red flower on a skirt. My pencil was labeled vermilion, and I remember saying the word to myself out loud as I set it down. I had never heard that word before. I looked quickly at Randall before I left the room, but he hadn’t noticed Lainey’s voice. He was watching the Slinky undulate metallically in the sun.
“Lookee here, Neen,” Lainey said as I walked in. She held the cake decorator in her hand and stepped back from the kitchen table. A cigarette dangled from her mouth. It was hot in the kitchen because the oven had been on, and she wore a sleeveless blouse and shorts. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted red. The back door was open, and I could hear my sisters’ voices in the yard, the splash of water in their plastic pool. I looked at the cake. It was a series of concentric circles, like a bull’s-eye—pinkish-red, yellow, blue, green. In the middle, it said Mack 15.
“Pretty snazzy, wouldn’t you say?” Mother asked. She put her arm around me and I could feel her big soft breasts and belly squish against my own body. I wanted to turn into that flesh, to be cuddled, but I held myself back, I thought of the boniness of my body as a kind of reproof to that possibility.
“It’s pretty,” I agreed.
“Think Mack’ll like it?” she asked.
“Uh hunh,” I said.
My mother released me. “It’s going to be lovely,” she said, stabbing her cigarette out. “I love all you children’s birthdays. I think of each of you as a baby—you were all such lovely babies—and it brings back those happy times.”
Then Lainey pushed a couple of the pastel-filled frosting bowls toward me and said, “Now, someone or other is going to have to clean these up.”
Together we sat down at the kitchen table and began to scrape the bowls with our fingers. “Don’t tell a soul,” my mother said, “or we’ll have every Marey and Sarey in town in here with us.”
My fingertips slowly stained a bruised-looking color I couldn’t lick off. Lainey sang the song about the sow and the three little pigs through twice, the second time laughing so hard with me that her snorts became real and uncontrollable.
“Ig, Mom,” I said, and stuck my finger in the green bowl.
“Ig yourself, my baby pig,” she said. Her lips were the same purplish brown as my fingers, darker than the lipstick she wore when she and my father went out.
“Your mouth is all purple,” I said. “You look nutty.”
My mother stuck her dark tongue out at me, and we both laughed again.
When I went back into the dining room, Randall stood over the table, letting little pieces of torn paper flutter to its surface from his hand. It took me a few seconds to realize what the brightly colored confetti was. Then I ran at him, grunting with rage. I grabbed his arms and swung him from the table. Though he was nearly as big as Mack, he was uncoordinated, floppy and awkward, and he didn’t resist me. I slapped his face as hard as I could. His head snapped back. He bared his teeth and laughed soundlessly.
“You bad! Bad! Bad!” I shrieked, out of control. I slapped him again, and then again; but Randall shut his eyes and continued his silent laughing. Sometimes he could go on for hours like that once he’d started. I was lost in fury, lost in hitting him, in wanting to hurt him. As he staggered backward I pursued him, punching him on the face and chest and shrieking at him.
Suddenly my mother’s hands grabbed me, flung me away. Then reached out and stung like electricity across my cheek and mouth. She seemed huge. Randall stood behind her, still laughing. I held my face where it felt torn.
“You are not to hit him!” she said. She was panting; her face was white, her mouth still bruised dark red from the frosting treat we’d shared in secret. “Not ever, you understand?”
I covered my face. Then she was holding me. “Oh, Nina,” she said. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Randall sat down on the couch, rocking, laughing out loud now. I watched him as my mother held me. She had started to cry, but I had stopped even wanting to, as if by magic, the moment she touched me. Now I blurred my eyes and held my breath and let my dizziness pull me far away from them both—from my crazy brother, who wouldn’t stop laughing; and from my mother, who seemed to be taking comfort from the body I’d left behind me as I swam forward to a safer place, a place where I couldn’t feel or see them, where the world rocked rhythmically with my own dark pulse.
While I was in Chicago, I went with Tony and my father to a party, an open house of the kind I remembered from my youth. Then, I would have been making the rounds with an hors d’oeuvres tray or drifting around the edges of the grownup groups, happily eavesdropping, made invisible by my age. There was such a child at this party, wearing a frilly, old-fashioned dress with a bow at the back of the waist, a dress very like the ones I’d had to put on then to help
. “I know you,” I wanted to say. “I know what you’re thinking.”
Now I was expected to account for myself, and I dutifully did. I spent a long time talking to a woman who’d been a classmate of Liddie’s. “I always wondered what happened to girls like her,” this woman finally said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, offended on Liddie’s behalf. “What do you mean, like her?”
“Oh, you know,” she said. She shrugged and looked embarrassed, as though only at this moment realizing I might not share her assessment of Liddie. “Girls who come into it all so early.”
“Oh. Sexy girls,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry about them,” and I turned away from her.
Across the room I could see Tony giving me a signal, pointing to her watch, then raising a hand, fingers spread, to show me she wanted to leave in five minutes. I signaled back, enthusiastically, and then realized that an elderly woman between me and Tony thought I was waving to her. Her hand up, echoing my gesture, she approached me, an expectant smile lifting her face. I smiled back.
“You must forgive me, dear. I don’t remember you.”
“Oh, not at all,” I said. “I’m Nina Eberhardt.”
“Nina. Such a pretty, old-fashioned name. I hope you don’t mind my saying that.”
“No; I’m glad you think so.”
“And I’m Alice Curtin. Charles’s wife. My only claim to fame.”
I’d heard of Charles Curtin. A professor at the law school. “Well, that’s not an insignificant claim, you know.”
