Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  Finally Mark said, so very gently, “There’s no easy way to say this, Myra. Roger died last night.” Despite the years of violence and anguish and torment, it was still hard to take. As Kip later said, it wasn’t a surprise or a shock so much as it was the wrap-up punch.

  And so it was – the wrap-up punch. Kip and Jeff were sleeping in the basement because of the heat. Mark went down and woke up Kip and brought him up to my room – giving him the news in much the same way as he told me. I watched Kip. His eyes flickered – he swallowed hard – and then he looked at me. “You all right, Mom?”

  Kip, today

  I recall Dr. Coventry woke me up and asked me to come up and talk with Mom. She was sitting up in bed with the sheets covering her legs. Dr. Coventry got right to the point and said something like “Your father died last night.”

  I think he said “passed away.” I don’t recall much of my immediate reaction. My recollection is I was relieved. Eventually I did experience a lot of anger toward Dad; several years later – when I discovered that old letter from him actually – I finally cried hard about him. But that morning I don’t think I felt that stuff – not consciously anyway.

  Mom’s July 11, 1966 letter continues

  Mark left then. He would have told the other boys – as would Kip – but it seemed right for me to do that. So Kip woke Jeff and I told him. Then one by one, I told the other boys. It wasn’t easy and I hope I did it in the right way.

  Jeff, today

  I found Mom lying in bed, covers pulled up, Kip was standing on the far side of the bed. Kip said it simply – something like, “Dad died last night.” I remember going downstairs and joining Bonnie on the porch swing. Her reaction surprised me because she responded with a gush of how sorry she was. I didn’t feel anything. It seemed to me that she was saying what you’re “supposed” to say when someone learned 90 seconds ago that their father had died.

  Kip’s 1966 diary

  Jeff came in bedroom. I told him. Both of us reacted in same way – no change in expression but heart jumped. Just for a second I couldn’t speak easily. I think I almost felt like crying for a minute. I went in to wake up Chris, followed him into Mom’s room. He took it kinda hard. Eyes widened, mouth hung. He turned away from Mom, then said “God!” and left crying.

  Chris, today

  Kip retrieved me from my room on that Sunday morning. He told me Mom wanted to see me in her room. He preceded me down the hallway and sat by the bedroom fireplace. I stood at the front of her bed.

  I have a recollection of having my right leg up on the bed when Mom told me “Your father died last night.” I do not remember if those were the exact words but I distinctly remember having a falling sensation combined with the feeling of getting punched in my solar plexus. The floor beneath me exploded and I said “Oh, God.”

  I could see Mom had been crying but Kip seemed undisturbed. I do not remember crying then. The first moment I can remember crying was at the funeral.

  Chris’s 1966 diary

  God Mom called me into her room this mourning [sic] and told me Dad had died. I think he died of pneumonia. It was around 1 or 2 last night. I was really struck down at first. After I thought about it for awhile, I thought it was best. He would never have gotten another job. He is going to be cremated and buried in Ohio by his mother and father. Uncle Jimmy is here tonite. I think he will stay for a couple days. I hope we get enough insurance for us to go to college.

  Kip’s 1966 diary

  Danny and Luke were brought in next. (Mom feeling dizzy all morning.) They didn’t believe it at first. Then they both left, crying.

  Dan, today

  I was at the side of Mom’s bed and I remember making a conscious effort to react “properly.” I did an obligatory cry and then went to my room. Instead of grief, I felt shock. Sitting in there, I could hear people talking and crying and I was moved by the magnitude of the events.

  But I didn’t feel grief. In fact, I wondered how these events would effect my standing in the eyes of my eighth-grade peers. I had always thought it was pretty cool to come from an abnormal, dysfunctional family.

  What I remember

  I saw Dr. Coventry go upstairs and then after he left, somebody called me upstairs, just as I was pouring Cheerio’s into a little metal bowl. Up in Mom’s room I stood in the sunlight, spoon in hand, chasing one of those little tan-colored O’s around in the warming milk, knowing what I was about to hear, and then hearing it. There is a jump in the film and the next memory is buying a couple of cigarettes from Jeff and smoking one down in the Low Forty. I was not worried about being seen or caught or punished.

  Kip’s 1966 diary

  I smoked like mad. Collin just sat there with a gloomy, sad look and when Mom said “Go ahead and cry,” Collin just said “It’s not that important.”

  Collin, today

  I was in my room playing with a little radio that had an alligator clip on an antenna wire. I was looking for something to clip the antenna to when someone, I think it was Kip, invited me into Mom’s room. When I came in, Mom was lying on the bed looking quite somber, Kip was sitting at her side, facing the fireplace.

  I don’t recall word for word how Mom told me Dad was dead. She said something like “He’s not coming back.”

  Mom’s July 11, 1966 letter

  I don’t have a very clear recollection of the rest of that day. Kip and Jeff stayed with the little ones, keeping them busy and under their eyes. Jeff’s girlfriend Bonnie took care of everything – cleaned up the house, fed us all, answered the phone, and generally made the day easier for all of us. Mark had called Tony Bianco who was at a luncheon party. He came right over, shortly after Mark left, but did not tell JoAnn till after the party was over. She was here for me for the rest of the day, with Tony coming in and out as the affairs of the day demanded his attention. As usual, they both carried me through tough times I could hardly have done alone.

  The moment Mark left I phoned my brother. As I reported to you earlier, his simple answer to my “Jimmy, can you come help me?” was “I’ll be right there.” He phoned back within half an hour to give me his arrival time – and from that moment a huge load slid away from my shoulders.

  Chris, today

  The pain was dulled for me on that first day, except for one particular moment. Which came not long after lunch. We had a lot of visitors that Sunday and Mom received most of them on the screen porch. At least two people were already there when still more arrived. I was walking behind these new visitors – it may have been the Biancos – and they preceded me onto the porch. Mom stood up and embraced the woman, laid her head on the woman’s right shoulder so that I could see part of Mom’s face from my position at the door to the kitchen. The arrival of her friend sprang Mom’s tears again. Seeing her pain released a great swelling of pain in me, one that has been so familiar to me for as long as I can remember.

  Jeff, today

  Kip and I picked up Uncle Jim at the airport. We came home in the blue Falcon, taking the back way home. Just like Bonnie, Uncle Jim seemed to feel obliged to say things that would make me feel better. I have a vivid memory of him describing the body as a “shell that contains the soul.”

  And even though the shell has died, the soul lives on. I was already a raging atheist by then, but didn’t choose to argue the point with him just then.

  Kip’s 1966 diary

  Picked up Uncle Jim at airport 9:00. Mom cried when he slipped in front door and hugged her. Jim got to work on papers, tried to make guesstimates of insurance. . . Today, it looks like insurance payout of $155,000 + V.A. benefits + Social Security.

  Mom’s letter dated Friday, July 16, 1966

  Kip and Jeff met Jim at the airport at 9:05 Sunday night. By this time news was beginning to spread faster. Though most of the phone calls were mercifully made to the Bianco’s house, there were still many calls here, and there was an increasing flow of good friends bringing food to us. … So I lack nothing that can be done for me. Let
me go back to Ted Bliven, unknown to you, scarcely remembered by me, but to whom I owe much gratitude. He is the man in Augusta (an old medical school classmate) whom Roger went to see. And this man – fully aware of the situation – was willing to give Roger a chance. He gave Roger a three-year contract, beginning in a teaching capacity and returning him to surgery if he managed to get a hold of himself sufficiently. Again, much of this credit goes to Tony Bianco with whom Bliven talked at great length. Tony told him that Roger was eminently worth saving if Bliven was willing to take the chance. And Bliven was. Which meant that before he died, Roger had been given back his confidence, his self-respect, and we must hope, a degree of happiness. That Christian act cost Ted Bliven nothing but think of the joy it must have brought Roger in the last few days.

  PAGANS IN THE TEMPLE

  JULY 4TH, 1966, MONDAY

  And so Jesus said to the worshippers gathered at the foot of his cross, “Come closer.”

  And they came closer.

  “What is it, my Lord?” asked one.

  And Jesus said unto him, “I can … see your house from here.”

  This joke used to make us howl. We’d collapse to the floor, delighting in its blasphemy. Yet even as we professed active disbelief in God or an afterlife, we did in fact believe in an unseen world – ours was the one full of all the scary shit. We Little Ones believed in ghosts and monsters. We believed in the Horrid Light and the gremlin on the wing of Rod Serling’s plane. Grandpa Sullivan may have thundered “Fear God” but it was monsters we feared. In fact, fear of monsters made us hedge our bets about God and adopt a sort of conditional atheism. We’d often find ourselves muttering conciliatory asides to God when we felt we were in danger and needed a back-up plan. (“God, if you’re there, please let me make it to the light switch.”)

  Kip however, being the oldest of us pagans, was the first to take his atheism public. He was on the speech team at John Marshall High School and in the fall of ’64 gave a podium-thumper promoting atheism and hammering organized religion.

  “It created a big stir,” he remembers and said it led to an impromptu after-school discussion group that filled a classroom. “With the exception of a few people who spoke out with me, I was peppered by questions from irritated true believers. I remember feeling just great about the whole episode.”

  Looking back, the controversy wasn’t surprising. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, there was no other strain of spirituality for sale in America except one-size-fits-all Eisenhower Christianity. So engrained in the culture was this house brand of religion, it’s surprising no one thought of putting it in the city water along with fluoride. Any child who had questions about subjects like death – or the soul, or wondered about existence, or mortality, or any fundamental life question – was anesthetized with party-line answers about crowns of thorns and bringing in sheaves and ancient tales of lost sheep and donkey jawbones all of which were so incredibly boring we simply stopped asking questions about the things that mattered.

  We grew up, like many kids of that era, never having a single conversation with an open-minded grown-up who might embrace our doubts along with us. We never had a discussion about what it meant to be human – or about death or the soul – with someone who might wonder as we did what it all meant. Without any form of spiritual apprenticeship we simply made our way into what seemed a harsh world carrying with us an anger towards anything remotely associated with organized religion.

  Now in the days following our father’s death, our anger was stirred by the assurances of well-meaning neighbors who took us aside to tell us, “Your father is now in heaven with the angels.” Kip noted in his diary that “Mrs. Martin stopped by, drunk as hell, made blunders that hurt Mom. I walked her home. She nearly cried praising Dad.” Worse than these blubbery eulogies for a man we were all angry with, were the whispered admonitions from visitors that perhaps it was time for us six boys to forgive. This one just pissed us off.

  Okay, so Dad’s dead and he’s forgiven? Is this how it works? Everybody gets to crawl sideways out of their sin like a crab and go skittering off to their grave and hide out in eternity? Like death is some sort of payment? “Sorry everybody, I was an asshole, but I died so all bets are off. Paid in full. Ticket punched. Can’t touch me ’cause I’m in the Bosom of Jesus.”

  Forgiveness wasn’t what we needed to hear just then. The wounds of his rages were still tender, the bottles still in the liquor cabinet, the image of Mom’s big white sunglasses still lingered in the lawn out front. But the religious bromides came into the house along with the casseroles and we accepted both, guessing this was simply what grown-ups did when someone died. Harder to accept, though, was the pressure we were feeling to embrace the rituals and ceremonies required by a church we didn’t consider ourselves members of. When Kip and Jeff began feeling railroaded into buying an expensive coffin, their anger began to surface.

  “I remember having to go to the funeral home to pick out a coffin,” Kip told me.

  “The whole idea of putting us all through a funeral pissed me off. Dad was to be cremated and a coffin seemed a waste of money. I tried to quickly pick a plain coffin and just get out of that place, but Uncle Jimmy called me farther back into another room to look at more expensive coffins, soothing me along the way with spiels about ‘custom and society’.”

  Jeff also remembered feeling anger while at the funeral home. Only hours before, Uncle Jim had been assuring him “the body is just a shell that contains the soul” and now his uncle was pressuring him to buy an expensive box to put Dad’s “shell” in – a box they were only renting, given that Roger was to be cremated and only his urned ashes were to go beneath the sod near his father’s grave in Ohio.

  “I remember a cramped little basement display area with 30 or 40 coffins,” Jeff recalled. “Kip and I argued with Uncle Jim that we not blow money on an elaborate coffin. We favored the simple blue metal one but Uncle Jim said, ‘You must keep in mind that people at the funeral might judge us as being disrespectful.’ This conversation happened more than once and I think Jim was getting pissed. Eventually we settled on an oak and brass one with white satin lining for $1,000.”

  The tension grew again when Uncle Jim began double-checking the details on Roger’s funeral clothes. Mom had provided Kip with Dad’s favorite blue suit but at the last minute, Kip remembers, “I couldn’t find any of his ties. I had no tie for him when I got to the funeral home, so I wound up taking off the tie I was wearing and donating it to Dad, for him to be cremated in. I was so angry I think I came close to tears.”

  Kip, today

  Having to deal with Dad’s funeral angered me because it forced our family to deal with our incredibly mixed-up feelings in public. I just wanted the transition from Life-With-Dad to Life-Without-Dad to begin immediately. I wanted to retreat to the Millstone and begin mending my psyche, and tending to the wounds of the rest of you guys. But the funeral forced us out into the public eye where everyone could see us trying to cope with our pain and confusion. The fact that Jimmy wanted me to think about which tie Dad wore angered me. It was bad enough we were going to have to parade ourselves into a church and listen to formal blather about Dad from someone who didn’t know him and didn’t know us. Having to sweat the details – which coffin to buy, what shirt to put him in, which tie – it was more than I could bear.

  ONE LAST LOOK

  JULY 5, 1966, TUESDAY

  Chris’s 1966 diary

  The only thing that bugs me is to see how Mom is hurt. She crys a lot. It just broke her when she took her wedding ring off and had Kip put it in Dad’s pocket. We had to pick a casket today. Tomorrow is the reviewal.

  Death, caused by a long illness, often allows a family to prepare for the end. At the Millstone, however, we’d moved in one leap from alcoholic insanity to religious ritual, and we understood neither. One day there’s a mad dog foaming through its teeth and the next a minister is smiling in through the screen door. All we really knew was that we were angr
y and even our anger we didn’t understand.

  If we could have had our way, there would’ve been no funeral, no viewing. We’d simply have raised the drawbridge to the Millstone and retreated to its rooms. Was it not as if a cancerous tumor had been removed from the family body? Was there really a need to go “view the tumor”? Is it really “with the angels” now? We were ANGRY and in our fury and trauma, the religious rites that were offered to us as comfort felt more like cover-up.

  Anger, like lightning, needs to strike something and discharge itself in the ground, but at the Millstone there was no target anymore – he was dead. Anger could only crackle out of our scalps and the tips of our fingers, fly around the empty room, and rebury itself in our chests. How could you be mad at a body?