The next day, we crept back into the Millstone and it was quiet. Mr. Hyde was gone and upstairs asleep on the bed in his clothes lay the doctor.
Mom, December 4, 1964
The weekend faces me again, like a nightmare ogre. Only the thought of Monday morning – like a carrot dangling ahead of the poor donkey – sustains me through Saturday and Sunday. Every year the pretense of gay holiday festivities is harder to assume. My poor poor helpless children . . .
* * *
The word “divorce” had been said as early as 1958.
“After Collin was born I took him to Florida to see his grandparents,” Mom remembers. “Of course, that trip sparked another one of those horrible rages. Even selling the tickets didn’t buy peace and he of course purchased them again and forced me to go.”
Sitting in an Adirondack chair on the shore of Florida’s Lake Winnimesset, she wrote Roger a letter. “It was a long letter. I suggested I would agree to a divorce if that would make him happy,” Mom recalled. But upon returning to Rochester, Roger never even mentioned the letter and, looking back now, Mom knew a divorce wasn’t ever in the cards. It wasn’t written policy but no Mayo Clinic doctor could expect to retain his job with something as unseemly as a divorce on his resume.
But now, in late 1964, Mom finally had enough. A divorce wasn’t going to happen. The psychiatrists hadn’t helped. Family friends weren’t able to help. Warnings from Dad’s boss didn’t help. And now even though it was school season and mid-winter with Christmas just around the corner, Mom realized it was time to leave Roger and move her six boys out of the Millstone. The woman who’d been shamed out of taking music lessons, who’d hidden her $5 books while her husband spent hundreds on booze, and who’d stood in a wind tunnel of verbal abuse, finally dug in her heels and said something she regrets to this day.
Myra, 2005
My decision to leave was made in an instant. It came on a night of another ceaseless, tormenting, inescapable, long-into-the-night harangue.
I had confined it to the kitchen as I often did. It was more of the same, just hours and hours of his quiet drilling voice, his vicious invective, a poisonous stream of accusations one after another. Along with half-closing my eyes, my only other defense was silence; any attempt at an answer would only inflame him.
I was standing at the sink having all this ugliness dumped on me and when he put down his reloaded glass to go for ice, I swatted it into the sink. This was the first and only violent gesture I ever made. And then in that moment I whispered through clenched teeth, “I hate you so much I could kill you.”
I might just as well have shot him. The color left his face and he leaned against the counter and slowly sank to the floor. He looked as if he he’d finally gotten what he’d been waiting for. The horror to me was not so much that I could have said such a thing, but that I could have meant it. I knew right then I had to leave.
Mom in a letter to her parents, December 7, 1964
The first decision is whether anything is to be gained by waiting another day to move out of this house. The prognosis is poor – even under the best of treatment, should he succeed in overcoming it, there are years of psychiatric care to go through – and my children haven’t that much time – nor have I. My love for him is dead – and probably irretrievable.
So what does it profit any of us to remain in our present situation? Nothing that I can see, only more damage done to the boys. My decision therefore is to leave this house as soon as possible, enroll at Winona State College and when I am qualified to teach fifth/sixth grade, move to another part of the country. That requires I have the courage to give up this house (which despite all I do dearly love), give up the life of ease I have come to enjoy, face the necessity of going to work, and hope that I have made the best decision for the future well-being of my boys. I hope I have what it takes.
Mom, December 14, 1964
[The letter bears our new address: 2551 13th Ave. N.W.]
Dear Momma and Poppa: So it is done. We moved out of the Millstone on Friday the 11th – from the house where Collin was born, where Luke has lived since he was a month old; in truth, the only home any of them but Kip and Jeff remember. But ever since our first few years there, it has not been a happy home. Perhaps my most serious mistake was in having stayed there so long.
The decision to move out was made a week ago yesterday. While his manner and attitude toward me was not markedly different, his treatment of Kip and Jeff was degenerating rapidly. Every morning they left home in a fury – and arrived back to find him lying in wait for them in the evening. He did not wait for an excuse – but launched out at them with insults the moment they walked in.
Monday night I told him that one of us had to move out. He refused to do it – in the face of every argument I could offer. Wednesday I rented the house and began the necessary payments for utilities. Thursday I arranged with Allied to move us out on Friday.
I wish I could say the boys are happy here – but they are not. They have only their clothes and one or two possessions with them, so there is a feeling of being adrift. And the move itself has been traumatic. They have been fretful and argumentative for two days – it is hard to keep them content even for a few moments at a time. But I hope this will pass.
Each of the six of us reacted differently to the new house. Much of the time it felt fun, like we were on one of our motel retreats. At least we were out of the battleground of the Millstone and our military readiness stood down to Def-Con 3. But when the novelty wore off and we looked out at the postage stamp of winter that was our back yard, we realized we weren’t vacationers but exiles. We continued to fight as much as ever but a new camaraderie developed, too. We didn’t have our big back yard with the wolfhounds pounding through the snow, we didn’t have our regular neighbors, our usual paths through the woods to our friends and our forts. It was just us now.
It might have been this feeling that led me to sit down in my room with Mom’s antique quill pen and inkpot to scribe – in “olde tyme” calligraphy – this screed.
DECLARATION OF A NEW HOME
When in the course of human events it becomes nessary [sic] to have a family split up, it does not mean we die down in work, chores, and duties. It means we should even work harder and longer. We must work and make this house as strong as it has never been before. It does not mean we argue among ourselves and say this person does your chore or the other guy takes it. It does not mean we be assigned to do all work, but each one do a little bit more and make this house a little bit better!! And if one does not believe this he is not one of this family!! –Luke Sullivan
I briefly considered charring the edges of this seminal document to give it an authentic pre-Colonial feel but opted instead for a long John Hancockian flourish at the end of my signature. I tacked my Magna Carta to our front door and was sure Mom’s reaction would be a sort of Vince Lombardi attaboy fist pump. I was surprised when she came through the door with tears in her eyes. I remember her hugging me in the little living room. I remember feeling the house, for all its deprivations, was safe.
Mom had pulled it off. When the emergency flares hadn’t worked, she’d gotten the women and children into the lifeboats and lowered us to safety. But on the very day we left the Millstone, Grandpa became ill. Within a week her brother Jimmy would be calling to say, “Perhaps it’s time you come to him, Myra.”
Christmas, 1963: Mom with one of her cute holiday creations. She’s already showing the strain on her face.
“WE’VE ALWAYS LIVED IN THIS CASTLE.”
Mom, December 16, 1964
My good brother Jimmy just phoned to tell me about your illness, Papa. As I told Jimmy, if only I had delayed the move out of the Millstone by two short days I could have found a housekeeper and come to you in Florida. But to leave the boys out here in this little house at this time is out of the question. They are already so very upset by this move that I cannot leave them even for a few days. I hope you will not think me callous – it
is a hard choice to make – but I hope you can accept my judgment that I must stay here.
Mom, December 17
Still I have had no word on Poppa’s condition. I have just sent a wire hoping it will find you at the hospital. I am concerned for both of you and feel so very far out of contact. I trust you’ll call when you receive the wire.
In the mean time, our lives here continue along such as they are. This morning the temperature was 14˚ below zero. Naturally our cars sitting unprotected on the street would not start. It was 9:00 before the truck arrived to put us in motion. So the boys were all late to school.
You should have seen us in this little house – all in our boots, mittens, caps, coats, ready to run when our cars were started: Kip standing before the stove clock delivering his citizenship speech, Danny & Jeff practicing guitars, Christie showing Collin magic tricks, the dog & the cat caught up in the excitement and chasing one another around the Christmas tree. And I, clomping about in my big boots, trying to get some housework done. Kip shouted out over the hub-bub [referring to the current Shirley Jackson book about a house full of crazy people] “We’ve always lived in this castle!”
People continue to call – to offer their help and sympathy – but truly there is nothing anyone can do. Two have invited us for Christmas Day dinner, but of course that is a day I would not go anywhere.
By Christmas Day, Myra would in fact travel 1,500 miles. Just as we were settling in for as normal a holiday as we could muster, her brother Jimmy called to say a stroke had landed RJL in the hospital; he could not speak, move, his vital signs were not good and no matter what her circumstances were in Rochester, Jimmy said, it was time to come.
The next train to Florida left at noon and Myra had just one hour for emotional triage. Since none of us lay dying, the choice seemed clear and so on the way out the door to the train station, she handed the reins to Kip and Jeff with orders to “make Christmas happen” for the little ones. But within a day Kip and Jeff decided to strike the tents and move the family back to the Millstone for the week. They packed it all up: the Christmas tree, the pets, and the bags of unwrapped presents Mom had hidden in the basement. We moved back into the drunk’s castle for a Christmas not one of us remember. There’s blank spot in our collective recall. We have photos of Christmas, ’63; films of Christmas, ’65; but of ‘64, nothing but a single image.
Where our father was on that Christmas morning none of us can recall; we know only he wasn’t with us. There was no tree either. (Dad had “sent away” the tree Kip had brought from the little house, lashed to the roof of the Plymouth. “She” had picked it out.) What we do remember of Christmas morning, 1964, is the six of us gathered in our parents’ empty bedroom standing in our pajamas around a pile of bags full of unwrapped gifts. As we pawed our way through the pile guessing at what was whose, nobody looked up from our business to ask, “Isn’t this weird?” None of us wondered if the neighbors’ kids weren’t also pawing through bags of unwrapped gifts in their parents’ empty bedroom. This is just the way it was at the Millstone. If there was trauma it was limited to 7-year-old Collin whose belief in Santa Claus was surprised that morning the way Sonny Corleone was surprised at the tollbooth in The Godfather.
* * *
As we sit in the study of my mother’s little Minneapolis house discussing Christmas of 1964, it’s clear her decision to leave for Florida still troubles her.
“You couldn’t do everything, Mom,” I tell her. She shakes her head, says, “But still.”
She holds one of the books bound years ago by her father. Burned into the spine in a silver-colored ink is RJL’s script identifying the year: 1964. The volume is thicker than previous years, the letters more numerous now; she no longer cared what Roger thought of her letter-writing. The letters here begin to take on a gallop, one after another, reeling out the story: her unraveling marriage, her collapsing husband, her disintegrating life, and of course her Christmas trip to Florida.
Grandpa had finally recovered and when he was released from the hospital on Christmas Day, Myra took the train back to Rochester.
Mom, now back in Rochester, December 29, 1964
I unpacked, took a bath, cleaned up the little house, and even took a nap. I could not go get the little ones at the Millstone because the two big boys (asleep in the basement) still had the car loaded from a Pagans’ engagement the night before. It was nearly noon when Kip and Jeff came upstairs and my little ones had been calling from the Millstone every 15 minutes to ask when they could “come home.” When Kip and Jeff left, it was 10˚ below. At the Millstone, they loaded the car to the roof with mattresses and blankets and Christmas gifts and dirty clothes, one cat and my 6 boys.
You know with what joy I greeted them all again. We had a peculiar supper, being without an ice-box here, but we were all so happy no one noticed.
Grandpa [transcribed as is]
dear chn here goes foran expriment – typing wyth my right frtrfingrt and i bet i make so mzny mistakes that yt will bw herder to read than my usul spastic scrawrl.… appetite reamins ok. and if your t-v carrisx the same cultursl ads as does ours, you will understand me when i say that carters littlr liver pills or ex-lax produce desirable results. your mother sez i am showing more skill in the use of my walker. but i declare to you that progfrtess seems a bit slow. i cannot use my right hand at all , but enuff of this tripe.
Mom’s letters, December 30, 1964
Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. The Pagans are on stage somewhere, so I will see the last of 1964 with my four little ones. And glad I am to see the last of ‘64 – the most miserable year of my life. But “things are looking up” – so I am welcoming ‘65.
Tonight Danny has a friend to spend the night with him. And Kip brought his Linda home about 8:30. We all watched the “Danny Kaye Show” and then sat in the living room eating candy and talking – in the middle of which Collin got out of bed (hearing Linda, whom he loves), Christie took a bath, Danny & his friend were playing guitars, the dishwasher spurted water all over the kitchen floor and the bathroom doorknob mysteriously locked itself (the punch-in-the-middle variety), requiring the concerted and individual efforts of all of us with a tiny screwdriver to open it again. (“We’ve always lived in this castle!”) But dear heaven, it was fun and relaxed and fearless and happy!
The Millstone in winter.
HAUNTED HOUSE
It is mid-winter – January, 1965 – and the sun is setting.
The driveway gate to the Millstone is open and the two Irish wolfhounds have run away.
Snowfall has gathered unplowed for a month and almost entirely blocks the driveway. Brother Chris, 13, is sitting on the stone gate posts at the end of the driveway looking at the house he used to live in. A scarf covers his mouth. Of the six boys, he is the one who looks most like his father; aquiline nose and intelligent eyes that have a haunted look – like the house at the end of the driveway.
No one knows Chris is here. He’d simply walked out of the little house in Elton Hills, trekked the six miles over back roads through Rochester, and arrived in his old neighborhood as darkness fell. He wants to look at the Millstone for a while but the 10-degrees below drives him in.
He’s pretty sure his father is not here or the sporty little Italian MG would be parked out front. The front door is unlocked and he enters. His feet crunch on something. In the dim light it’s hard to tell if the dried puke is from one of the wolfhounds or his father.
There is trash everywhere, with no overturned garbage can nearby to explain it. This trash has been dropped right where it is – tin trays of Swanson TV dinners, empty bottles of mixer, a china cup with coffee dried to a lacquer. Across the room in the dog bowl, Chris sees the wolfhounds have been fed Cheerios. The empty cereal box, too, has simply been tossed to the floor. It is a mess that looks angry; a home vandalized by its owner.
Chris walks through the kitchen to the pantry and clicks on the light. The red and white cans of soup on the middle shelf are gone,
moved to the Elton Hills house along with most everything else. But there’s a can of corned-beef hash he could heat, and abandoned out on the porch Chris finds a frozen can of Coca-Cola with its new-fangled pull-ring top. He takes his dinner to the living room, builds a fire, and after opening the cans sets them near the flames.
As they warm, he watches his shadow dance across a strange living room. There’s a reading lamp but no chair to read in. Where the sofa was are four square imprints in the carpeting; its absence gives the matching coffee table an unmoored look.
Thirty Rooms To Hide In Page 12
