Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  In fact, as I re-read Mom’s early letters I begin to see where she was writing about Roger’s alcoholism without realizing it.

  Mom, January 30, 1958

  I seldom see Roger lose his patience with Clinic policy or pronouncements but he came home last evening in a monumental rage. His time to prepare for the presentation of his paper had been worse than halved! He goes to Chicago early to set up an exhibit he has planned but now has to be back Tuesday. His exhibit and paper prove a theory of his that the blood supply to the talus is not through a single artery but several. Says Roger, “It simply stands to reason. God wouldn’t have made it that way!!”

  My mother says she thinks it was 1958 when bottles gradually began to appear on that shelf in the kitchen. Gradual also was the appearance, in my mother’s letters, of my dad’s souring temperament. She mentions a bit of snappishness here, an angry moment there. Reading the letters again, the pattern seems clear but at the time it wasn’t. The first attacks were mostly put-downs, jibes at Mom’s character calibrated to make her feel bad about herself. If Mom bought a new Erroll Garner album of jazz piano it was “Why did you waste money on this?” Everything she did that wasn’t housekeeping was cause for eye rolling, derision or contempt. The worst thing was that, for a long time, Myra believed him. In a letter to her father, she wrote, “Call me a crazy fool if you like – I am! What poor man other than Roger has to suffer a wife who takes horseback riding lessons and string bass lessons, and builds model ships! Poor Roger.”

  Poor Roger also expressed contempt for Myra’s love of reading, a subject he would return to again and again: “Why are you wasting money on books?”

  Looking back today, Mom says, “Even my Greek studies were seen as further proof of my inadequacies. And my beautiful instrument, the cello? Given up to avoid more recriminations from you-know-who. He was unappeasable. In college days when I wore my homemade Florida dresses and big white pearly button earrings, he was embarrassed that his roommates called me ‘El Gitano’ – the Gypsy. But then by 1957, I was disapproved of for wearing my hair in a conservative bun.”

  When the bun wouldn’t do, she acquiesced to a shorter hairstyle in front, confessing in a letter, “I hate it – but my husband likes it – so what else can I do?”

  I go back through the family photographs and find the September ’57 shot of Mom in the shorter hairstyle. For the first time, I discern she was angry when the picture was taken. When I show her the picture, she says yes she remembers trying to ignore Dad and his camera, looking down at her book, embarrassed at having to pose like a shorn prisoner of war. When I mention I’ve had trouble figuring out exactly when dad’s drinking went nuclear, she says, “I’m not sure, but one incident does come to mind.”

  She was pregnant with Collin when she had her first look into the lupine eyes of Roger’s true rage – which would make it 1957. In the summer of that year my parents hosted a Mayo Clinic party at the Millstone. The festivities were winding down to a very late end and at 2am only a single guest remained, drinking and talking loudly with Roger. She doesn’t remember his name, only that he was the kind of saloon fixture who’d quickly show up on my father’s radar (“I hail from Texas. Where the ‘hail’ you from? HA-HA-HAAAA!”): the too-hard laugh, the high-and-tight haircut, the florid skin of the veteran drinker. With five of his children sleeping upstairs and his pregnant wife standing right there to hear it, Roger began telling this sodden stranger what a horrible wife Myra was. She stood there puzzled, then insulted, then sick at hearing lies so cheerfully shared with this bar-stool tumor: “She’s frigid, Bob. Won’t have sex. Don’t make the mistake I did, Bob. Don’t marry a woman like this.”

  It was the eyes, she said, the eyes that were the worst. There was nobody back there anymore; not a person anyway but something else, a sort of predatory cunning that peered out and looked for things it disagreed with, looked for things to FUCK WITH.

  One night she was just about to lead her four youngest boys upstairs for the customary bedtime story. Dad walked out of his study where he’d been drinking since 5:00. He stood at the foot of the stairs and calmly put his leg out across the staircase, blocking her ascent.

  “You are not going to turn those boys into sissies by reading them to sleep,” he told her. “Let them go to sleep on their own.”

  No further explanation. No discussion. Just the eyes.

  It wouldn’t be until May of 1964 when Myra began writing openly to her parents about how life really was at the Millstone. For now, instead of saying Roger came home drunk and yelled at the kids, she wrote “the kids caught you-know-what from their father.” She wasn’t ready to open the furnace door and let them see into the Millstone, to witness their daughter burning. So she said nothing.

  But Myra’s parents picked up on some of the trouble at the Millstone anyway. Myra and RJL had planned a trip in 1958. Mom was to come visit her parents in Florida.

  It was a trip talked about in their letters, planned there, and warmly anticipated. Then Grandpa RJL received a Western Union telegram from Minnesota; a dozen apologetic words glued in a strip on yellow paper: “FORGIVE ME. HAVE BEEN TOO HASTY. SOMETHING MAY YET WORK OUT. – LOVE MYRA.”

  In 1959, she guardedly mentioned to Roger renewed plans for another trip to Florida. Surprisingly, he agreed but then began to sulk, sitting alone in his study. Later, as the drink took effect, his eyes would get the look and he’d rage.

  “How in God’s name do you think we have the money for this? For you to run off and see Mommy and Daddy? Huh? You make me buy this goddamned house and fill it with kids just so you can go waltzing off?? Grow up, will you? Just GROW UP!”

  Rage is different than anger.

  Rage is the inferno firemen don’t even try to put out. There’s no talking to rage. Anger is explosive; rage is nuclear. Rage is the end of hope – Armageddon. In this new nuclear landscape Myra realized fighting back meant unleashing her own anger which, in the parlance of the times, was “mutually assured destruction.” All she could do was to keep silent. Anything she said in her defense would only escalate the attack. She just had to wait it out.

  By morning the rage would be gone but Roger’s silence and the way he slammed the door on the way to work made it clear any trip to Florida would cost more than money. At the Clinic he was still the charming, brilliant doctor and giver of care to all. Back at home his wife was sending yet another telegram with another excuse just vague enough to finally prompt Professor Longstreet to call his daughter “to see if everything was all right up there.”

  Being a somewhat worse liar on the phone than in a telegram, Mom would back-pedal a bit, and say, “Roger thinks with money as tight as it is perhaps it’s best to wait.” (No mention of the nuclear rage, the fallout.) “But don’t worry, we will work something out.”

  No matter how Myra tried to spin it, RJL suspected things at the Millstone were not entirely right. Still, as thin as her excuses were, at least she kept the cops from looking in the trunk.

  Mom’s final letter from the ‘50s, New Year’s Eve, 1959

  And so another year has passed, and on the whole it has been a good one. 1959, the last of another decade ends jubilantly! My only cause for remorse is my weakness in exposing you to unnecessary alarm and helpless concern [regarding the cancelled trip]. For which forgive me. The 1940s were a fateful ten years, bringing college days, tuberculosis, marriage, and two children before their close. The 1950s brought a mighty economic improvement, our beautiful home, and four more sons. Life has been lavishly kind to me these twenty years. God (and the politicians of this world) willing, “the best is yet to be.”

  Myra and her father, R.J. Longstreet.

  CYCLOPS AND THE FALLOUT SHELTER

  The Millstone sat on its hill in Minnesota for nearly 30 years before the first television was carried across its threshold; or lugged, rather. In 1958 Dad brought home the single heaviest object ever to exist in the house – a “portable” TV. If I owned the thing today I could stri
ng a purple rope around it and charge people admission just to cool off in its shadow. The old black-and-white was as portable as a box of anvils and was moved probably twice in all the time we owned it.

  My brothers and I, of course, met it at the door like an honored guest and became without knowing it the first generation of kids to grow up bathed in the bouncing light of television. At first, we watched mostly Westerns: Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, and Bonanza. But their themes of righteousness and gunfire soon bored us and we discovered the cartoons, which showed almost exclusively on Saturday mornings. Rocky & Bullwinkle was a favorite.

  Kids then were no different than kids today. We would watch the thing for hours, our jaw muscles slowly relaxing until our mouths hung open and the tops of our tongues dried. The blank look on our faces and the crap we spent hours watching gave chills to intellectuals like Mom and Grandpa. They were both convinced television represented the death of Western culture.

  But it was the news programs on TV that finally hooked old RJL. Although he was a man who loved the printed word, even he could see television was the best way to follow the returns during a presidential election. And when JFK ran against Richard Nixon in the fall of 1960, Grandpa did the only thing any self-respecting book lover could do.

  He rented a television for the week.

  Myra was the first of the two to give in and actually buy a television. In a 1960 letter she admits to Grandpa, “It must now be told we are the owners of a television set,” and goes on to explain how “our two big boys are spending Saturday afternoons away from home to watch football games and Luke and Danny are too frequently going down the hill to the Maynard’s to watch cartoons there.”

  With the Millstone having fallen, grandmother “Monnie” as we called her, had less of a job getting old RJL to capitulate. She had no scholarly revulsion to television and simply wanted something to watch while she knitted.

  Eventually, a confessional Blue Book appeared in the mailbox at the Millstone where Grandpa admitted he’d given in. From that day forward until his final letters in 1969, almost every letter from RJL had some guilt-ridden mention of his deepening relationship with television, a one-eyed monstrosity he dubbed “Cyclops.”

  Grandpa, August 1962

  Here I sit before Cyclops – slowly declining in IQ, morale, and decent citizenship – and no rescue in sight. To entertain your mother, Cyclops portrays something styled “To Tell The Truth.”

  I bet you never heard of it, much less endured it. I see the ad is for Geritol – must rush out and buy a bottle. In fact, I have now become so exposed to the art of Madison Avenue that I am well determined never to buy anything that is advertised on TV.

  Television alternately amused and galled RJL. He hated the commercials most of all. For a man who loved the English language, Madison Avenue’s blithe disregard for grammar, clarity and truth was often too much for the old man. And in the 1950s, advertisers could lie all they wanted. “Not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking Camels,” read one ad. “Not a cough in a carload!”

  Up in Minnesota, we six boys watched the commercials, saw the grown-ups puffing away, and learned that inhaling the smoke of dried weeds rolled in paper was acceptable behavior; reserved for adults of course, but acceptable. It was on TV all the time; even sport stars extolled tobacco’s virtues. “Show Us Your Lark Pack! ... I’d rather fight than switch! ... Show me a filter cigarette that really delivers taste and I’ll eat my hat!” We let ourselves believe these commercials and one by one began to sneak cigarettes from Mom’s purse and Dad’s desk. Ultimately, four of us became addicted and it took us each about 25 years to pull free of nicotine’s talons. (Mom quit in ‘67.)

  The happy cigarette commercials seemed full of the same stuff that powered all of the Ozzie-and-Harriet America of the ‘50s – cheerful dishonesty.

  Sexual repression, too, cut across the continent like a fault line and ran straight under Rochester, Minnesota. The tectonic plates – God and Jayne Mansfield’s pointy breasts – ground against each other but it would be years before the whole thing blew.

  In fact, to understand the Eros of the ‘50s, picture the vice-president’s wife, Pat Nixon, and then imagine the only “mood music” you can put on is Doris Goddamn Day.

  Lies, sexual repression, public relations, and cheerfulness were the culture of the 1950s. There were the lies Joe McCarthy told about Pinkos and the Lefties, in between his trips to the liquor store; there was the lie that radioactive iodine 131 wasn’t contaminating the milk supply; that Gary Power’s U-2 was a “weather plane.” There were the lies about Thalidomide and DDT, the lies from Madison Avenue and the lies from Hollywood. (America’s macho hunk Rock Hudson? Gay.)

  Then there were the lies about surviving an atomic attack. The government knew full well entire cities would turn to charcoal in the event of an attack. But they were still able to look us in the eye and assure us that the half-inch plywood laminate of our school desks was sufficient protection from fireballs of 10 million degrees Fahrenheit. My brothers and I later wondered if the announcer in the Duck and Cover film occasionally had to stop while recording the script just so he could get the giggles out of his system and make it through the whole thing.

  “And so, kids, when you see the flash, what do you do? That’s right, like a turtle going into its shell, you duck and....

  “CUT! Cut! Give me a minute here, guys. (Sound of laughter off-mike.) ‘That’s right, kids, desk tops will save you.’ Jesus, it’s … never mind. Okay, sorry. Take 2.”

  While the War Department rattled their sabers, the news media hopped into action and began telling citizens it was their patriotic duty to be very afraid and to build fallout shelters. (“If you dig a deep hole and sit in it while we have our war you can come out later and the Commies will be gone. Maybe even the beatniks, too.”) To the neighborhood kids, fallout shelters were just cool new forts to play in. But for Kip and Jeff and any kid coming of age in this time of paranoia and public relations, there developed an underlying cynicism. Their lack of faith in seeing old age probably contributed to the creation of a whole generation of wise-asses. An honest appraisal of their likely early demise (and the attendant “Krispy Kritters” jokes) seemed preferable to the grown-up world’s suppressed paranoia and billboard grins.

  The paranoia began with the successful explosion of a Soviet thermonuclear device in ‘49. It went up a couple of levels when East German soldiers strung barbed wire across Berlin in August of ‘61. And by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, my mother and much of America were teetering on the edge of hysteria.

  “We hear heavy planes flying south over our home here in Florida,” wrote her father, RJL. “I suppose this is part of the concentration of forces in this area. One is roaring overhead as I write.”

  Writing back, Myra noted, “The Maynard’s and the Wiedman’s are the latest in our neighborhood to begin construction of atomic fallout shelters. The contractor who is building the Maynard’s says he put in 50 shelters last month.” So at a cost of $600 Mom and Dad bricked over all the windows in the Millstone’s basement and turned that bright play area we once called the Rumpus Room into a dungeon. It became the ultimate room to hide in; our atomic Alamo, where we would wait out the end of days as the world’s grown-ups flung nuclear fire.

  Memory: Dad Helps with Homework

  LUKE:

  Mama is at the sink and my brother Collin and I are sitting at the table having hot cocoa and Danny is doing his homework and Dad sees Danny’s quiz from school about naming the twelve months, and Danny didn’t get a good grade, so Dad makes him stand by the ice box and says, “SAY THE MONTHS OF THE YEAR” and Danny starts to cry and I look across the table at Collin and we’re scared and Mom is at the sink and then Dad knocks Danny’s head against the ice box “IT’S APRIL! HOW DID YOU GET SO DUMB? SAY THEM AGAIN.” And then he grabs Danny’s head and gives him all the answers while knocking his head against the ice box after each month.

  DAN: />
  “JANUARY!” –THUMP– feels his head hit the ice box … “FEBRUARY!” … hits the ice box again wonders what’s happening … “MARCH!” … tries to see around daddy thinks mama mama do something mama but … “APRIL!!” … april hurts … “MAY!” … brings his head back upright but it’s like cocking a gun so maybe i won’t bring it back up and maybe it … “JUNE!” … but, but, … “JULY!” … can’t look at the ceiling cuz he’ll see tears, so look down … “AUGUST!” … look down … “SEPTEMBER!” … i am looking down, i am i am … “OCTOBER!” … all the guys are watching … “NOVEMBER!” … and i bet this doesn’t happen… “DECEMBER!” … this doesn’t happen to smart kids.

  MOM:

  Twenty-three years after that day in the kitchen, my mother wrote a poem she titled, Peeling Carrots.

  Ice rattled in their father’s drink

  when he shoved the boy against the door.

  At the table, two little brothers,