motionless as baby rabbits, and their mother,
quiet, peeling carrots at the kitchen sink.
“January, February, March… “
the boy tries again, and in her head
the mother whispers April, child, April.
The father, his finger in the boy’s face,
mutters, “Dumb mother and you get dumb kids,”
and strokes his necktie back in place.
Silence darkens the kitchen. He waits,
rattles the ice in his glass again.
The other two stare at their plates.
The mother’s back feels the eyes
of her child begging her to Mama
Mama do something Mama.
“January, February, March. . . “ he quails.
Once again she holds the father still
with her stillness
and goes on peeling carrots with her fingernails.
Myra on the shore of Lake Winnemissett in Deland, Florida, visiting her parents in 1962.
HIDDEN BOOKS, HIDDEN LETTERS
It always happens so fast.
Mom’s making dinner and you’re having a snack at the kitchen table maybe thinking about Spider-Man or Dare-Devil, and a rabid dog leaps gracefully up on the table and walks down the length, grinning through its foam.
Maybe something else will attract its attention, you think, maybe somebody will break from the pack and try for the woods. You freeze. You don’t even move your eyes. You stare into the pattern on the plate, into the flowers, past the bee.
When Dad had a drink he became predatory. Some drunks get amiable, some maudlin, all of them stupid; but Dad attacked. He looked for something to piss him off and chewed until he drew blood.
One drink said, “Oh, sounds like somethin’ Momma read in one of her books, am I right, boys?”
The second drink said, “Maybe you boys would’ve had your homework done if Mama wasn’t writing to Grandpa all day?”
By the bottom of the third drink he was taking street-fight swings at Mom’s character. “MAMA WANTS TO VOTE FOR JACK KENNEDY BECAUSE HE’S SUCH A PRETTY MAN, ISN’T THAT RIGHT, MAMA? WHY DON’T YOU JUST GROW UP?!?”
Kip, today
One of the very first times I saw Dad drunk and abusive with Mom was right after the election in 1960. I was 13. It was in the kitchen. Mom was standing over the stove making soup. And Dad was drunk, berating and belittling her for voting for Kennedy.
I remember Mom just looking up at the ceiling, stirring soup, and crying. Dad was using swear words and yelling at Mom for, God, what? An hour or so? I retreated upstairs to take a bath but left the door to the bathroom ajar so I could hear the yelling from downstairs. It scared me. The next morning I remember asking Mom, “Are you guys gonna get a divorce?”
Most of us did not see the early years of abuse. Much of it happened late at night and down in the kitchen or living room, spots chosen by Mom because they were the farthest away she could get from the bedrooms of her six boys. She would sit on the couch in the living room and let him rage.
“It was usually a matter of just waiting,” she says. “Waiting until he got that last drink in him and would simply tip over.”
The rages flamed hotter and burned longer and over time Mom, like the caretaker of an old furnace boiler, learned tricks to keep him from exploding.
“When he really got going I would drop my eyelids half-way down,” remembers my mother. “If I completely closed my eyes I got in more trouble, because it looked like I was asleep or was shutting him out. I found by closing my eyes half-way he wouldn’t take it as insult and, for me, it was sort of like covering your eyes at the scary part of the movie.”
Roger returned home every night and picked up where he’d left off, coming around to the same subjects again and again, pawing at his prey, searching for that smell to set him off.
“When he came home, I had my letters hidden away, my books put away.” But no matter how safe she made the room he always found some purchase for his anger. It was always the same things: how “easy” Mom was with his money, the letters she wrote to Grandpa, the books she had her nose in, the trips she wanted to take to her parents. One autumn his preferred feeding spot was by the front door where we tied our shoes before school; none of us could lace up fast enough for the famous doctor, a failing he would point out with humiliating comments. When Mom recognized the pattern she bought us loafers.
Money was the big flashpoint. He’d worried about it for years. Even in 1953 Myra was writing, “Roger is in one of his recurring dumps, depressed about money and the lack of it. Says he sees no future for an extra dollar for pleasure for the next 15 years.”
Yet it seemed his fretting was never that of a man but of a child whining, of wishing things were different, and demanding somebody fix things. Mom remembers, “He resigned any authority position long ago. Left every decision to me – even regarding little things like getting the snowplow to come or what to do when a teacher sent home a note about misbehavior. He’d say ‘It’s your problem.’”
The other landmine was “the trips to Florida.” The plural “trips” makes too much of it considering that my mother visited her parents in Florida a total of three times after moving to Rochester in 1950. Yet every time she proposed a visit home, the night would end with Roger hoarse from drunken rage. The next afternoon he’d pick the subject back up and rage for hours until finally Mom would go to the train station downtown, cash in the tickets, put the money back in the bank and show him the receipt. Roger would then go back to the station, buy another set of tickets, force Mom to take them and then rave when she took the trip.
In 1961, another trip was cancelled.
Mom, today
I approached your father that spring about my taking a few days to visit the Civil War battlefields of Chancellorsville or Gettysburg with Poppa. Roger’s response was that whiny fretfulness which worked itself into wide-ranging wrath, no longer complaining about my proposed trip but, as usual, berating me with the battery of charges regularly leveled. I gave up the plan rather than face prolonged trouble before and after such a trip. I don’t remember how I told Poppa that I couldn’t make the Gettysburg trip. I probably sent a wire merely saying I couldn’t go. No explanations. But this time my short note so troubled my folks they phoned our neighbor, Betty Hartman, to find out if I had been taken to the hospital or hurt in some way. I still hadn’t the courage to tell my mother and father the real reason.
There was never enough in the bank for Mom to visit her parents, yet when Dad wanted a vacation, money wasn’t an issue. Even here Dad found material for anger – Mom was scared of flying and preferred traveling by train. “I couldn’t decide which was worse,” she remembers. “To endure my own anxieties while flying or his psychotic ravings aboard the train.”
There were other reasons to dread going on a trip with Dad. Away from the eyes of the family his vitriol and outrages went up a level. Mom remembers a night in a hotel room when Roger threatened suicide, saying he was going to jump out of the hotel window if Mom wouldn’t “change,” wouldn’t “grow up!” He went so far as to open the window and put his foot on the sill. Even with the possibility of a similar episode, she left on another trip with him. It was probably better than keeping him near her boys.
In 1985, as part of an assignment in her writing class, Myra wrote this stream-of-consciousness essay about that trip.
Myra remembers the trip to Chicago
She sat there in that Chicago restaurant uneasy in the elegance, uneasy in the thought she’d probably have to find her way back to the hotel alone. He was cranking up toward another attack. One drink after another. The persuading her to go along with the drinks and her refusal only inflaming him, sending him to faster drinking and more vicious abuse. None of it new. All the same old stuff. That was the real nightmare: the having to hear the same things over and over again, knowing there was no way to protest, no words to deny, no logic to pursue, no way to stop him onc
e he’d begun. Efforts to make him stop only angered him, made him talk louder, made him threaten more. Though only a few of his threats were ever carried out. Only his threats against her. A threat against a waiter or a train conductor or a passing driver or his boss or a neighbor… none of these threats were ever directly made, never carried out, only announced to her in his ripping voice, the ripping that tore into her and bled her and left her silent, screaming in her head to stop stop stop, staring straight ahead or half closing, unfocusing her eyes. The waiter had not brought that third drink fast enough, obsequiously enough. So he lashed out at her for over-tipping the waiter, and started in at the beginning of the record again, telling her what a total failure she was as a wife, as a mother, losing her mind she was, fast, and would soon have to have the children taken out of her care. Why wouldn’t she grow up, for god’s sake! Grow up! And on and on and on and on and the people at nearby tables beginning to listen, beginning to try not to listen, beginning to be annoyed at his monotonous voice. And when the meal came he just ordered another drink, threw it in himself, put down money which might cover the bill, came as near as ever to throwing the table over into her lap but hadn’t the final guts for that much open defiance of the rest of the world; just of her. And left. Left as he’d left her times before, often in strange cities. Left her again without a thought to her getting safely back to the hotel. Left. She always carried extra money, hoping it would be enough. She paid the bill. There wasn’t enough to get a cab back to the hotel. But if one doesn’t get too far from the lake and the street where the hotel was, it’s not too hard to find the way back alone, along Michigan Avenue. So she walked. Walked in the city with her country-girl fears alongside. Walked in the dark, fearing every footfall she heard behind, fearing every figure that approached. Huddled into herself, holding her hands so that any mugger could see she had no pocketbook to steal. Counting the blocks backward from how she’d counted them when they left the hotel… 19… 18… 17… where he was didn’t trouble her. She walked most of the way back to the hotel without thinking about him, except to hope he wouldn’t be there when she got back. She wanted a quiet bath. A long bath to clean in. But first she had to get there… 12… 11… 10… 7… 5 … a lifeline from here to the hotel. She could take a taxi from here probably but still wasn’t sure the few dollars in her pocket would be enough and a final humiliation from a cab driver she didn’t need. She was afraid even of cab drivers here in Chicago after dark. She was a small-town girl and wasn’t sure anything or anybody in Chicago was really safe. And yet, for these last few blocks, she was safe from him.
A photo my father took in New York City the night JFK was assassinated.
ELEVEN TWENTY-TWO
Mom writing her parents on November 22, 1963
It is 10:30 p.m. and I am tired. But before I leave this day, it is fitting I should write down its date, as it is one none of us will ever forget. So exhausted am I in mind and spirit I cannot find other words. Good night, my dear ones. I know how much this day’s infamy has shaken you.
My memories of JFK’s assassination want to come in shivering from the cold of a Minnesota November and stand by the big furnace in the Millstone’s basement. It’s been turned on since October and you can see the flame in its belly through the slots in the iron door, roaring orange to send steam up four floors to distant radiators.
Outside in the valley, thin not-quite-winter snow blows through the fields of cut cornstalk. In the yard, our secret summer places are abandoned; June’s bicycles are in the garage, July’s toys in the bushes under a layer of leaves and frozen crust. Even October’s color has flown south. Everything about November 1963 is in black and white, like the news shows on the television set in Dad’s study.
Down at the school in Mrs. Maus’s fourth grade classroom, and up on the wall above pictures of pilgrims, Indians, and turkeys, is the intercom speaker. It is from here our principal, Mr. Patzer, announces, “Boys and girls, I’m sorry to say the President of the United States has been shot and killed. There will be a period of national mourning and school will be dismissed for the rest of the day.”
There is a cold quarter-mile walk home with brothers Collin and Danny, up the steep hill and past the Hollenbeck’s. Soon we are clomping into the Millstone, peeling parkas and dropping mittens. Roger and the oldest three are out of town – on a sightseeing vacation in New York City – and so we call for Mom, breathless to tell her the news. She answers from Dad’s study where we find her in front of the TV. There are no cartoons, no commercials, just the man with the black glasses sitting at the desk with the phone on it and talking in that voice adults use when something really bad is happening and they don’t want you to feel the way they feel.
It’s not until we’ve been in the study for a while and seen the look in Mom’s eyes that we realize something big and terrible has happened. The country’s father was suddenly gone and the world wasn’t as safe a place as it was at lunchtime in the gym.
By bedtime, a light snow is falling.
* * *
Brother Jeff, today
On November 21, 1963, the night before it happened, Dad and we three oldest boys had gone to New York City, just to visit. Did the usual stuff – top of the Empire State Building, toured NBC, watched the taping of a TV show, “The Match Game.”
That evening the four of us were at dinner in a little restaurant. Dad was across from me and I remember it was a tense dinner. I think Kip and Dad were having one of those discussions that bordered on an open argument. Dad was boozing and I remember he said none of us should “get nervous and start masturbating.” There were other demeaning remarks, but that’s the one I remember. Somehow, Dad became so irritated with Kip he suddenly told Kip and me to just go; go off and do whatever we wanted. Dad got up, took Chris and left. I remember watching them cross the busy New York street and disappear.
The next morning, the 22nd, Kip was too pissed off at Dad to stay any longer and left for Minnesota. Dad, Chris, and I took a subway downtown to see the Statue of Liberty. It was there on the train someone told us JFK had been shot.
We never went out to the Statue of Liberty. Instead we stood along the wrought-iron fence in Battery Park listening to someone’s radio. That night, Dad went out and took pictures of Broadway. All the advertising lights were off, restaurants were closed, and there was very little traffic.
Brother Kip, today
I was sitting in a plane at O’Hare when the captain announced Kennedy was dead. A stewardess standing a few feet up the aisle instantly dropped her face into her hands and began to weep.
Mom, November 26, 1963
I write this date and there is too much and nothing to say. This is the day after his funeral. The ranks have closed up and we move on. This has been such a shattering event it has left a scar and we are changed by it. No one of us is the same person we were last Friday noon. I am still dazed – I cannot write about it – yet we talk of nothing else and think of nothing else.
Kip was alone in Chicago when he heard the news. Once home, he climbed into the car and we never spoke (other than our mutual “Have you heard?”) and continued listening with horror to the radio.
Roger called from New York City about 3:00 to say he and the other two were leaving – and there was no longer any pleasure in being there. They were on a subway when someone gave them the news – they had only moments before left NBC where they had been watching the news being hung in great sheets. One of the newspapers they brought home was an “Extra,” printed and on the streets before 2:00 EST, with the giant headline “JFK SHOT” and the “news” that Johnson too was wounded.
As you, we sat for long unbroken hours watching the TV. From 7:00 in the morning until late in the evening for three uninterrupted days. Even my Republican husband was crying several times that dark weekend.
But as Montaigne wrote: “No one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind was no more yours than that which was lapsed and gone before you came into this world. Whe
never your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time.” Wherein I find some comfort.
The six of us in our parents’ bedroom.
From left: Kip, Jeff, Chris, Dan, Luke, and Collin.
FUN AT THE FOOT OF THE VOLCANO
1963: Coldest Winter Since 1927.
– Rochester Post-Bulletin
We had no Nine Eleven to compare with Eleven Twenty-Two, but looking back similarities exist. The exact freeze-frame answer to the question “Where you were when you heard?”
The empty feeling the adults must have had when returning to work, picking up useless tools from wooden desks that no longer mattered really.
Thirty Rooms To Hide In Page 7
