Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  The corned-beef hash is passable but the Coke is without fizz and he sets it down. He goes up to his old room and lies on the plywood frame where his mattress used to be. As the coals settle in the fireplace downstairs, he falls asleep under his coat. His father never comes home that night.

  * * *

  While our parents were separated, all six of us took trips back to the Millstone; sometimes together, sometimes alone. We’d walk around the place like it was a crime scene and even with winter sunshine pouring white through the windows the feeling in every empty room was “something bad happened here.”

  We’d visit during the day, running over from school during lunch period so we wouldn’t risk meeting Dad. To see what, we weren’t sure; to dig through our disassembled rooms perhaps; a bit of childhood archeology. There is a sadness to the detritus of a separated household. Each particular thing, even in its correct place, has a discarded look. Everyday objects like a pen in a drawer, or a pair of ice skates in the entryway, feel abandoned. This spatula on the kitchen floor, is it Dad’s spatula now? Mom’s? Ours?

  We were angry at Dad for betraying and exiling us, so we came for mischief as much as curiosity. During one of these lunchtime visits, Chris and I went through the house and tilted every framed picture on the walls a few degrees to the left. We hoped Dad would return home, mix a stiff one and seeing the ever-so-slightly canted pictures wonder, “Ye gads, has at last the drink turned on me?” We poured out bottles of Old Grand-Dad, went though his Playboy magazines, and picked through the rooms of any brother who wasn’t with us. After lunch, we’d return to school where Mom would take us back to the tiny house in Elton Hills.

  Had we not been born into a home like the Millstone, it’s likely we’d have been happy in the Elton Hills house. It was an honorable dwelling. It’s still there on 13th Street and has likely been nest to several generations of happy children. But as refugees from the Millstone we felt the crunch of space, the loss of privacy.

  On the first floor at Elton Hills, Mom had one of the two bedrooms and Collin and I shared the other. The unfinished basement was one large room and the older four each claimed a corner as his own, with the backs of dressers and footboards of beds indicating where one room ended and another began.

  That Roger could sleep at night while exiling his wife and six children to a tiny house is testimony to the miracles of fine charcoal mellowing in the sugar-maple barrels of Kentucky distilleries. But now, with nobody to argue with when he came to, he began driving out to the Elton Hills house to pick fights. And the phone calls began. Hundreds of phone calls.

  Entries from Kip’s diary, February and March, 1965

  Dad called six times. Mom doesn’t know what’s next. … Dad over here. One more try at reconciliation. Mom and Dad can’t even talk. He just bitched about the car situation and money. … Dad called for seventh time at 10 at night, “just to talk.” Poor lonely bastard. … Dad has been bitching about Mom’s reading. How it “hurt the family.” Christ.

  Mom, January 22

  I will not go back to Roger yet. I have had enough experience with these periods of abjection to know that they are short-lived.

  I cannot live with him until some very fundamental changes are made in him. I simply cannot step back into that chaotic, violent, senseless life.

  Mom, February 5

  At no moment since December 11th have I had even a flicker of regret over leaving or a beam of hope I could live with him again.

  I am no longer (except spasmodically) angry or disgusted or outraged – my foremost emotion toward him is tiredness. I’m tired of trying to deal with him, tired of hearing the same stuff over and over again, tired of shaking off the clinging, whining, consuming dependence. Tired tired tired!!! And I wish I could decide what to do. If I were dealing with just a sorry marital situation, I would get a divorce and be done with it. But I am tangled with a psychiatric problem and such decisive action might threaten my economic security and the futures of my boys. There are so many decisions to make.

  Mom, February 10, 1965

  I have got to force this situation. He called yesterday to say he was done “jumping through hoops,” that it was “high time I quit having my way” and that he was getting a divorce and keeping the house. Like it or not, I am going to force him to sell that house so that I can buy a house with the minimum amount of space for these boys to live in.

  Mom, March 15

  Thursday morning at 10:30 I have an appointment with the lawyers to hear them explain why they think 1/4 of Roger’s salary is adequate for seven people to live on. … When I consider how breathlessly busy I am hour by hour every day, I wonder how I can handle a steady job – a problem I may not have to face very soon since I am having no luck at all finding work. If I had ability to write shorthand it’d be much easier to find stenography work. I have brought home my shorthand text and will review it until such time as I can get a course started.

  From Grandpa’s letters, April 16

  Do not give up. A way will open.

  If divorce law seems unfair today, in the ‘60s it was worse. Somehow an Olmsted County judge was able to keep a straight face when he awarded my mother just one quarter of Roger’s salary – 1/4th of the money to house, feed, and clothe 7/8ths of the family. Unable to find a stenography job, Myra temped for the U.S. Census Bureau and then one day came home to discover that the Elton Hills house was being sold. She had to move the family again.

  “I simply could not find a place for the seven of us at any figure I could afford,” remembers Myra. “There seemed to be nothing left to do except to crawl, humiliated, back to the Millstone.”

  Grandpa’s letters

  Your wire of last evening was troubling, indeed. Perhaps the return to the ‘Stone has the advantage of a three-month playground for the boys. Otherwise, one fears the effect on you.

  August 25, 1965: Coming out of the dentist with half my face numb.

  CEILING TILES OVER A PSYCHIATRIST’S COUCH

  I cried two times that spring. The first was when I heard that Stan Laurel of our Laurel & Hardy films had died.

  The snows were melting in Elton Hills, running off the great hill where the convent still frowns over the small houses of north Rochester. I’d come indoors from snow-damming the cold waters as they came in freshets down the edges of 13th Avenue and was warming up in my bedroom when Jeff leaned in and told me Stan Laurel was dead.

  Something happy and good was taken from my world. Let fathers be assholes, I thought, let families suffer; but the empty space where this gentle clown had been, who’d babysat the six of us on a hundred popcorn Saturday nights could not be filled. Minnesota April’s are all grey and mud and now with an uncertain summer months away it may as well have been November.

  Perhaps it was the chill in my soul that spring which led me to steal some colorful packs of spring flower seeds from the local grocery store. Perhaps I was showing rebellion. Or perhaps I was just a larcenous fifth grader and sticky fingers. Whatever the reason, there I was, bookended by two store clerks back in the manager’s office, in tears and calling my mother to come bust me out of the joint.

  Mom, who’d given up any hope of mapping the demons in Dad’s psyche, wasn’t about to let one of her sons grow any new ones of his own. And so the week we moved back into the Millstone she took me to the Mayo Clinic and I had my first look at the ceiling tiles over a psychiatrist’s couch.

  From notes of Mayo Clinic psychiatrists Drs. Delano and Morse, May 11, 1965

  INTERVIEW WITH MOTHER: Mrs. Sullivan states the main complaint is that Luke has been taking things from his brothers and denying it for the past year. He was caught stealing flower seeds from a store and finally broke down and cried about it, one of the few times he has cried and told her he didn’t know why he’d done it – though one reason he gave was they were to be a birthday gift for his father.

  Mother emphasized she and her husband also have seen and are seeing psychiatrists. When I asked if she ha
d any idea about why Luke was doing this stealing, she said she knew little about psychiatry but thought perhaps he might be searching for security, going on to state he is involved in a very unpleasant family situation and has been for most of his life. When I asked her to elaborate on this, she said, of course I was getting only her viewpoint on the problem and she was sure she was partly to blame but also that her husband was probably paranoid and there has been a severe marital problem for the last seven or eight years. She described this as severe emotional violence at home, which included drunkenness and fighting.

  Chiefly verbal attacks, she says, with no physical violence although the husband may go on with his foul language and verbal lashing for up to six or seven hours at a time. He says ugly, obscene, and untrue things about her and in the past two or three years has said these things in front of the children. Things such as: she was really no woman at all, she has no normal sexual urges, that she “couldn’t earn 25 cents by spreading her legs,” that she is abnormally attached to her father, that she is stupid, and reads the wrong books, that she keeps the household in a chaotic state, that she cannot manage money, etc. In December of 1964, “he drove me out” and this was chiefly due to his rantings about her lack of sexual interest. This abuse was occurring in front of the two older boys, and she finally, after threatening to leave, did walk out.

  This drunkenness has interfered at times with his work and he has been unable to report for work on occasion. He apparently has been encouraged very strongly by his Section Chief to get psychiatric help, otherwise his job is in danger. She began seeing [adult psychiatrist] Dr. Steinhilber about a year ago and has continued to do so. She candidly admits she is now a very “stony” and cold person and is sure … she is a “different person now than ten years ago.” She is more determined now but before she would always do what was the best thing for her husband. He has told her since their marriage that she wasn’t good enough for him and she said she believed him for the first part of their marriage. She believed for some time it was all her fault and withdrew from her friends and became depressed. At the present, she has no sexual urge at all for Roger and this is one of their problem areas. She says she has gone from one extreme to the other and is very determined now to do things she wants to do whether her husband wishes it or not.

  A break in the psychiatric records, then my session begins

  Luke is a ten-year-old fifth grader, rather short, horn-rimmed glasses, big teeth, and quite a deep voice for a boy his age.

  When I asked him if he knew why he was here today, he said yes, and after some hesitation said he had been taking things. The only reason he gave for stealing was that they were “things I don’t have.”

  He was quite guarded in telling me about other things he had taken. He mentioned taking stamps from his brother’s collection at one time but then said it “wasn’t really his fault.” He then mentioned taking ten cents from another brother – “But that was two years ago.” Throughout this part of the interview, he was continually looking around the room surveying things.

  About his dad, he said, “He is a doctor who works on West-6 at the Clinic and I think he is 43 years old and sure gets enough bills. I suppose he told you about his drinking? He is nice and he gives me a good job and allowance, and a room. He has a room with Mom. He likes to go on trips and goes out with Jeff with their rifles to shoot at targets.”

  While he was sketching a picture, he asked me if I knew his dad, to which I said I hadn’t been able to talk with him yet. I asked if he would like to be a doctor when he grew up and he said “I would like the money” but he didn’t think he would like to “look inside of guys.”

  RECOMMENDATION: His parents clearly have severe marital strife. They are attempting to resolve some of this with psychiatric help. Suggest watchful waiting in that Luke shows little in the way of disturbing signs besides the stealing.

  Memory: I Am “Quiet-Man”

  Every night my little brother puts on a Beatles record and sings himself to sleep, rocking back and forth on his bed in a trance. Dad won’t let Mom put us to bed anymore so the rocking is my little brother’s lullaby to himself. But the singing, that’s his fantasy. He is singing himself to a better place; he’s probably onstage at The Ed Sullivan Show. But in my fantasy, down here on the carpeting of my little brother’s dark bedroom, I am “Quiet-Man.”

  Quiet-Man’s super-power is ninja stealth. For the last fifteen minutes I have been slowly crawling through the dark towards my goal – to hide directly under Collin’s bed.

  He will never know Quiet-Man is in the room with him.

  Quiet-Man knows precisely what he is doing. He times each carpet-burning inch forward to a lilt of John-and-Paul harmony, rubs his itchy nose at Ringo’s cymbal crash. No one is more silent than Quiet-Man. He could move under a librarian’s nose and make it all the way to the card catalog and never show up on her radar.

  Chicks dig Quiet-Man.

  When you get right down to it, though, Quiet-Man’s Super-Silence is sort of a Woolworth’s five-and-dime super-power. He can’t really do anything once he’s arrived wherever he’s sneaking to. He just sort of lies there under the bed or behind the couch.

  It has another drawback: nobody ever says, “Look, down on the carpeting! It’s Quiet-Man!” Best he ever gets is, “I think I just heard something.”

  Collin hates it when Quiet-Man invades his privacy like this. If I crawl over a crinkly candy wrapper and reveal myself, he sits up in the dark and screams down at the floor.

  “Get out of my room!”

  Quiet-Man also uses denial; he doesn’t answer, doesn’t move. Like the Devil, his greatest trick is to convince you he doesn’t exist.

  “I know you’re down there! Get out!”

  But John and Paul pick up a new beat. “’CAUSE I DON’T CARE TOO MUCH FOR MONEY. MONEY CAN’T BUY ME LOVE.” It’s too infectious a song for Collin to let pass. He doesn’t want to get out of bed, feel his way across the room, and set the phonograph needle back at the beginning of the song. So he warns the darkness, “You better not be there!” and resumes his singing and rocking back and forth.

  “I MAY NOT HAVE A LOT TO GIVE, BUT WHAT I GOT I’LL GIVE TO YOU.”

  Quiet-Man has finally made it under the bed. The springs of Collin’s mattress now creak rhythmically, inches from my face. There is a kind of cocoon safety to hiding under your little brother’s bed at night. Nobody knows where you are. And you know your little brother is safe, too.

  The Millstone gates at night.

  THINGS THAT WERE SCARIER THAN DAD

  We used to play an incredibly scary version of hide-and-seek called “Beaster.” It was the last organized game any of us remember playing with Dad before he went over the edge.

  It was always played at night. To begin a game of Beaster the six brothers would scatter through the four floors of the Millstone and extinguish every light. Wherever you were when the last light went out, the game began.

  My father, armed with a rolled-up newspaper, was now waiting for you somewhere on one of the four floors of the huge house. His job was to whack you with the newspaper. Your job was to not make a high wailing girlie-scream when his form loomed out of the darkness and the whacking began.

  So you crept through the Millstone looking for a hiding place. The Minnesota winter banished any thought of escaping the game by going outside. There were 30 rooms to hide in, but most were too scary to be in all alone. After a half hour of hiding in a distant hallway closet, part of you wanted to give up and run screaming and public through the house and just get it over with. Eventually though you tiptoed past the dead-end of the music room to the relative safety of the living room.

  It was in the living room where my last game of Beaster ended.

  I’d made it to the red chairs near the fireplace and tucked myself into a small triangle of space behind the back of the chair and the corner of the room. It was a good place to hide but offered no escape if you were discovered. On the far si
de of the living room was the stereo amplifier (or the “Hi-Fi,” as we called it then). From where I hid in the corner I could see its little orange on-light, the only illumination in the room and a sort of lighthouse, a reminder that the room was the way I remembered it in sunshine.

  As I looked at this light I listened, trying to hear Dad’s footsteps overhead; listening for the discovery of one of my brothers and the high girlie scream which would surely follow. I fixated on the little orange light and waited; listened.