Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  As he weaved down the middle of the road, Myra saw another car approaching and had to push him off to the side of the road to save his life.

  How Roger ever felt “dominated” mystifies my mother to this day. “Dominating? I was the wimpy wife who didn’t protest this treatment,” she remembers. “I was the doormat who let him get away with saying such nasty things to me and to you children.”

  By 1964, things at the Millstone had become even worse. In a poem my mother wrote years later is the line “I was raped more times than I can remember.” That’s the most she ever said about it – a line in a poem. She doesn’t talk about those nights and none of us ask her to. One of them, however, I came close to seeing myself.

  I was in fourth grade. We were on a weekend vacation in the Twin Cities’ Curtis Hotel – Dad, Mom, Collin and me. My little brother and I played in the pool most of the day as Mom, reading poolside, watched from behind her big white plastic sunglasses. Dad was off somewhere drinking. We had two rooms that night – one for Mom and Dad, one for us boys. After putting us to bed Mom deliberately fell asleep in our room. At midnight I heard my father lurch through the connecting door and in a voice bubbly thick with bourbon and Winston cigarettes, growl, “Let’s fuck.”

  I cannot remember exactly what happened next. How Mom got him out of our room, I don’t know. Whatever she did, he soon left the rooms. Hours later when Dad hadn’t returned, Mom went out into the city to look for him. Collin was asleep and although she’d told me to sit tight, after an hour of waiting I too headed out into the rain looking for the place I’d heard her mention– the Normandy something. I remember going down in the elevator alone and going through the lobby alone and out the door and down a street until, wow there it is – the Normandy Inn Bar – all big-city and outlined in yellow light bulbs that splinter into wet stars through the raindrops on my black 1964 glasses and I pull open the heavy oak door and walk in and smell the smoke and see the red carpeting and the hunched backs of lonely men and I can tell the bartender doesn’t much like seeing a wet fourth-grader in his place at one in the morning but out he comes from behind the bar to show me around and prove my parents are not there. And I leave.

  Back in the room there is only Collin, little and asleep, and I soon join him. In the morning Mom and Dad come out of the other room and on the two-hour drive south to Rochester, nobody says anything.

  * * *

  They say summer colds are the worst.

  Turns out, actually, it’s summer Tornado Lightning Planet-Shattering Anger Rages from the Volcanic Thunder Bourbon God that are the worst.

  You know – “spats.”

  The Millstone wasn’t air-conditioned, but in high summer there was always plenty of ice for drinks and in the July heat Roger’s binges began to last whole weekends. At first sign of one of these summer rages Mom began packing us into the Plymouth station wagon and we went to stay at a motel for the night. When these rages became a pattern, Mom started taking us to out-of-town places so neighbors (and Dad’s colleagues) wouldn’t wonder why we were poolside regulars at the Klinic-Vu Motel.

  My little brother and I enjoyed these trips. Motels were high adventure – pools to play in, long balconies to race down, and candy machines in the lobby. Seeing the Volcanic Thunder Bourbon God start to crank up another summer rage was scary but it also meant it was time to get your swimming suit off the line!

  In mid-1964, Mom finally told her parents the truth about life in the Millstone. Blue Book letters that had once been about sailing ships and Shakespeare were now about brutality and trauma and written on the stationery of motels. Even the continued existence of their letters was threatened that summer when Roger began raging whenever he found one of Mom’s Blue Books lying about the Millstone.

  “Is this another letter to Daddy packed full of chit-chat about me? Like the one I found last week?!?”

  Grandpa stops writing in Blue Books and starts typing letters on 8x11” paper; August 28, 1964

  I believe I shall discontinue our usual Blue Books and return to the typed sheet, where I need not restrain self carefully in what is writ and which can be destroyed upon reading. With the hope that before too long, matters may improve and our traditional Blue Books can be resumed. Your mother and I are talking about the tragedy which has overtaken our daughter. I expressed a feeling that your parents were almost deserting you – here we sit in comfort and do nothing for you – but what can we do? Can we accomplish anything by coming up to Rochester? A “secret mission” unknown to the other party? Could I help in any way?

  But RJL liked the Blue Books; they were easy for him to bind into hard-cover volumes. In a subsequent phone call, he and his daughter agreed to go back to Blue Books but temporarily restrict all discussion of problems at the Millstone to the last pages; pages they could cut out after reading, thereby preserving the format so good for binding. Today the bound volumes of 1964 and 1965 have missing pages as well as passages which tell of the absence.

  “What else is there to write about?” Myra queried. “Believe I’ll turn to Page 7.”

  The summer of ’64 was tough in its own way on Grandpa RJL. Age had finally nudged him into selling his home on Lake Winnemissett where he and Monnie had lived since 1949. They made plans to move into a retirement home outside of Jacksonville.

  Grandpa’s letters, 1964

  Am just now packing my grandfather’s tools and putting them in the second trunk to send to you who have space for such things. I suppose I am a sentimental cuss, but I just stood out by lakeside to see the yellow moving van with said possessions round the lake to the south and on its way to you. In the van were some Longstreet treasures, headed 1,500 miles north to one who knows how to take care of them. Bless your heart. A part of me is on the way.

  Memory: I Am “Suave Ghost”

  I am nine years old and standing in full uniform in front of my big brother, Chris. I am wrapped in a sheet. I am “Suave Ghost.” Not only am I a ghostly spirit, I am suave.

  Suave Ghost takes everything in stride and no matter what happens, he keeps a suave James-Bond remove. Nothing can touch him. Who would have thought detachment could be a Marvel Comics super-power? No one. Except, maybe, Suave Ghost.

  Say something mean to the quiet specter that stands before you. Go on, give it your best shot.

  “You have huge buck teeth,” says my brother Chris, “and I can see the rims of your big black glasses under the sheet.”

  Hardly a fold of my sheet twitches; I am unruffled. Why? Because I am Suave Ghost. Say anything you want. Suave Ghost just stands there and thinks, “Is that all you got?”

  Chris says, “Hey look, everybody. It’s my buck-toothed little brother who looks exactly like Ernie Douglas from ‘My Three Sons,’ standing under a sheet.”

  No answer. Just silence. What power! I sweep from the room, triumphant. God, how it must rankle my foes! Is there no chink in his armor? What iron must lurk ‘neath his sheet to repel such barbs as these? They gnash their teeth and fall to the floor in front of the Untouchable One. (Ooh, that’s good – “The Untouchable One.” A secondary descriptor, like Batman’s “The Dark Knight.” Imagine it in the headlines: “Downtown Disturbance Fails to Vex Untouchable One.”)

  Retiring to his lair, Suave Ghost hides his costume by making his bed and as he does so, he thinks back to how it all began – The Early Days. Volume I. That day when the mild-mannered schoolboy first discovered he wasn’t ticklish. Neither finger nor feather could coax a quiver from him, however light the touch. No matter where his brothers tickled him – under the feet, the arms – it was as if there were no feelings at all.

  The Polaroid Dr. Lund took of my father the night of the Beaux Arts Ball. Roger is second from left.

  THE ALCOHOLIC’S GUIDE TO RUINING EVENINGS

  At the Millstone we had no father figure and when a sane adult male drifted into our lives we swarmed him like a lifeboat. There were two such men in our world – the Tony’s.

  One was Dr
. Tony Bianco, himself an orthopedic surgeon at the Clinic and head of his own large household of seven just down the road. The other man we looked up to – often literally – was our dentist, Dr. Tony Lund.

  In Dr. Lund’s waiting room I’d page through the Children’s Highlight magazines, stare at the goldfish in his quiet aquarium, and actually look forward to being with this man who whistled cheerfully as he stuck needles in my head and ran drill bits over the nerve highway connected to the center of my brain. Dr. Lund was simply a likeable person.

  My father thought so too and if the insular Roger Sullivan could be said to have had a best friend, it was this talkative, gregarious, huggy man – Tony Lund. He and his wife Mary were soon going out for dinner with Roger and Myra and on one of these outings they gathered for a ride down the Mississippi aboard the Lund’s houseboat, the Sneaky Pete.

  It was a small craft, not grand by any means; more like a floating motel room and moored in nearby Winona, Minnesota. Drifting down the river, the vista moved my father to say, “Tony, I’d love to own one of these things. It would add umpteen years to my life.”

  That was 1964. Dad died in ’66, so umpteen apparently equals 2. Roger bought one anyway and our houseboat, the Lethe, was soon bobbing alongside the Sneaky Pete. We’d pile into the family station wagon on Friday afternoons for the hour trip east and by 3pm the Lethe was in the water and Dad was behind the wheel half in the bag.

  With enough booze, even a strip-mining executive can go all John Muir on you and Dad was no different. After a few tumblers of liquid conversation, he’d wax beatific on the timeless beauty of the river and I’d get the “Have-you-ever-really-looked-at-a-sunset?” speech, delivered with that condescending earnestness of the florid drunk whose cerebellum is on auto-pilot.

  Auto-pilot would’ve been a nice feature for the houseboat actually, considering the captain was seeing two rivers and trying to drive between them. At the end of one particular excursion my mother could tell Dad wasn’t capable of pulling the boat safely into the dock.

  “I walked around to the side of the boat where the housing hid me from Roger’s view,” recalls my mother, “and pantomimed our plight to Tony across the water on the Sneaky Pete.”

  When Tony understood what was happening, he gave the wheel to his wife and did a Double-O Seven leap from his deck to ours. Somehow he managed to get Dad away from the wheel to guide us in safely and did it without us kids knowing how close we came to appearing on the local news.

  It was on the houseboat where Dad first accused Tony Lund of having an affair with my mother. Roger and Tony were relaxing on deck chairs watching Myra walk down the dock to retrieve a life-vest when my father said, “Why don’t you just get it over with and screw her?”

  Tony was a children’s dentist and this may have explained his hesitancy to rearrange Roger’s teeth. It was his good nature however to respond with only a gentle, “What are you saying? Don’t do this, Roger.” When I call Tony Lund to learn more about this incident, I can almost hear him shaking his head as he remembers it. “I loved your dad. I really did, but this was, well, it was too much.”

  Both my mother and Tony are certain Roger’s jealousy surfaced the year before at Rochester’s annual Beaux Arts Ball. It was on this night that Tony, after waltzing with his wife Mary, asked Myra for a dance.

  “He was such a marvelous dancer,” recalls Mom. “I could just shut my brain off and go.”

  Tony takes pains, needlessly, to assure me there was no affair. “But your mother could dance well and I remember what a great time we had at that first ball.”

  “Looking back,” says Myra, “Roger must’ve just been consumed by insecurities. He had so little confidence he couldn’t even let himself believe he had a loyal wife.”

  It was at the second Beaux Arts Ball in 1964 my father pushed Tony too far. The evening started off with drinks at the Lund’s house with everybody dressed formally for the big to-do. Tony took a photo of my father, using his new Polaroid camera and remembers, “Your dad, he’d had a snoot-full before we even left for the ball.”

  At the Kahler Hotel downtown, my parents and the Lund’s were seated at a large table for eight and – as the Alcoholic’s Guide To Ruining Evenings suggests – Dad started throwing the drinks back before the food arrived. One drink followed another while the table guests covertly locked eyes and formed conversational couplets on either side of Roger to avoid getting trapped with him. Set adrift on the table without a close audience, Roger mumbled things to the general vicinity and, if not for the tux and ballroom surroundings, could’ve been mistaken for a street drunk talking to his haircut.

  There are different levels of difficulty achieved in alcoholic stunts; it’s kinda like competitive diving. There’s the smaller stunts: inappropriate jokes or, say, throwing up while waiting for the valet. But accusing your wife and best friend of having an affair – publicly – that’s the triple gainer of Evening Ruiners and Dad threw one flawlessly. Roger’s accusations were overheard by everyone at the table, including Tony.

  “I didn’t come back at him right away but waited for the appropriate time,” Tony remembers. “When he got up to go to the bathroom I went in right behind him. I took his shirt in my fists and lifted him right off the floor, slamming him hard against the wall.

  I mean, I really slammed him, Luke.”

  Tony back-pedals a little bit here, caught between the memory and the realization he’s recounting it to Roger’s son. “You know, I’m generally a pretty easy-going fellow, but with something as bad as this …well, I just told him, ‘Roger, don’t you ever, ever say that again.’ I turned around and walked out.”

  * * *

  With a beep, the Polaroid image Tony took of my father that night arrives as promised in my e-mail. On my screen, the internet downloads the picture from top to bottom like an upside-down theatre curtain unveiling a scene from another era. The four men in tuxes have period haircuts and eyeglasses and it looks like the office Christmas party at Houston’s Mission Control. The thick black eyeglasses, the high-and-tight buzz cuts, it’s all very nineteen-sixty-five. My eyes, of course, go to my father.

  I lean into the screen to scrutinize his face and the closeness sparks a memory of kisses that don’t count; affection triggered by chemicals and given through a veil of bourbon mist.

  It is strange to discover a picture of my father outside of the familiar images in the box of family photos; like it’s a deleted scene from a movie I know well. Stranger still is the knowledge he is drunk at the very moment the picture was taken. Here it is, the thing itself, captured on film like a Jim-Beam Sasquatch a bare ninety minutes before a legendary stunt. This is what I’ve been looking for. This is Him. The thing I’d heard through the walls yelling at Mom. Shouldn’t there be music swelling here, a flash of memory? (“That’s the face, that’s the face!”) But the cotton padding of years protect me. It is only a picture of a man. The memory is there; the emotion, frozen inside the amber.

  The front yard of the Millstone, where we did horrible things to each other with snowballs.

  SNOWBALLS SOMEHOW MADE IN HELL

  10-year-old Kip gives a status report to Mom who is away visiting her parents in Florida, 1958

  Lukee is not getting along with Christie. They’re constantly arguing about who’s going to have the big, brown chair in the Dad’s study. Christie will cross his right leg over his left. This makes Christie’s knee get in Lukee’s half and when that happens, Lukee rises up and bops Christie on the head with a cardboard roll filled with the rolled up newspaper. Then Christie rises up and makes a swing and a miss. While he’s off guard Lukee comes down with a good, solid whack with his cardboard roll. This only maddens Christie and he jumps up and connects with a right to the jaw.

  * * *

  Mom says the earliest sibling argument she can remember was watching toddlers Kip and Jeff ride trikes in a circle and fight about who was ahead of whom, each loudly redefining the other’s position on the circle.<
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  Kip was born in 1947. With no brother to irritate him, correct him, or attack him things were peaceful, until 1949 when Jeff was born; after which began a 25-year-long series of arguments between brothers that ended only when we all went off to college and had Nixon to be pissed off at.

  Every brother was assigned a nickname calibrated to irritate him. Chris was “Rake.” Jeff believed Chris’s face was long and resembled the handle of a rake. Strangely, the name Rake pissed Chris off even more than the original appellation Jeff assigned him: “Mike Rosscopick.” (Translate: “Microscopic.”)

  The shape of brother Dan’s head also presented rich comic possibilities to Jeff. Dan, having a nearly circular head as a youth, was dubbed “Beach Ball.” Beach Ball was what you called Dan if you wanted to make him mad. But most of the time his name was, mysteriously, “Learbs,” for which no etymology exists.