Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  From the front door I can see the spot in the pine grove where a good dog named Caesar has been resting all these years. I think, “Stay, Caesar, stay” and the dark humor brings water to my eyes. But that’s what we did here – dark humor.

  The new owners have tried to make the space their own, but decorating the Millstone is like sprucing up the Pyramids – it is what it is, and the rooms want things where they belong, and so their living room couch is where we had ours, chairs where we had them. Even the stereo is in the same place, now with computer chips instead of the warm tubes that glowed orange in back of the wooden cabinetry of our “Hi-Fi.”

  I walk through the dining room, where our father returned from work and kissed each boy on the cheek, move into the kitchen and – well, I’ll be damned – the liquor’s found its natural habitat, stored in the same kitchen cabinet. Ah, a refrigerator, I see, with no dent marks. (Their kids must’ve scored well on their months-of-the-year quiz – alriiiight!)

  There are small things here too, details only a brother would know to look for.

  In Dad’s study, where the wall-mounted pencil sharpener was, three discreet screw holes mar the wood. The dent in the thin wood panel over the fireplace is there too, right where Mrs. Buttert leaned against it. (This is not a Mrs. Buttert Joke; it happened.) Even the plumbing pipe in the basement where one of my hamsters disappeared is there, still open for business.

  And around the corner, here’s my old room in the fallout shelter. The national boogeyman – the Communist – has been dead for years and the bricks over the windows probably came down long before the Berlin Wall. Our family boogeyman, he too is long gone and accordingly my old hidey-hole is awash in summer light again; there’s even a small breeze. Out the open window, I can see the back yard from an angle I haven’t seen since October, 1962.

  The owners have returned from the store. I greet them, and thank them for their trust and hospitality. Time for one last stop.

  I go up two floors to stand outside Momma’s Tower Library. The door is open now; no need to pound on it this quiet August afternoon. Come on in, and I do. It is still an oval room and its shelves still wrap around you like arms. But there’s no literature or history here today – no Elizabeth Barrett Browning, no Lee and Longstreet at Gettysburg, but a mixed bag of how-to books, novels, cookbooks, old magazines. Overhead I see they’ve painted over Momma’s constellations; and the wall’s yardstick markings of six growing boys are also gone. It is different now this room, yet it is the same spot, the very place where Momma took my face in her hands and said, “Honey, do you think you can make the climb down from the balcony and go get help at the Martin’s?”

  The French doors are still there. Looking over the edge of the balcony, I can see the first stone I set my foot on in descent. The very stone, used by Spider-Man himself. And on the ground below, the spot where the little boy runs off into the July heat to look for help that won’t be there.

  It strikes me at this moment: Why didn’t we turn on him? The seven of us, turn and with locked arms say, “No, Roger. No, you cannot do this. You cannot treat us like this.” It was seven of us – one of him. There was no reason. It simply didn’t occur to us we had the power.

  But Spider-Man had the power. And he saved me, in his way. As did Quiet-Man, Lonely Guy, and Suave Ghost. The Pagans and the Beatles saved me, too. And of course our laughter – our constant, inappropriate laughter – at the wrong times and the wrong things, it saved us. We laughed at victims, at ourselves, and at Dad; we laughed in the face of tornado weather, at 30-story falls from water towers, at death, and at funerals. Even to the hour we moved out of the Millstone, we were laughing.

  We made another Ridiculous Film that bright sad day in the summer of ‘67, when the big moving truck was in the driveway. Here comes Luke out the front door carrying Mom’s delicate model ship-building kit (secretly emptied of its fragile contents); he cavalierly tosses it in the car. (Mom gasps a month later when she sees the film, then laughs.) Here’s Chris, hauling something incredibly heavy, followed by Collin carrying a salt shaker. Kip emerges, carrying Collin himself, stiff as a board, and throws him on the truck with the rest of his stuff.

  We were just screwing around. Screwing around to the very end.

  As I leave, I stop at the stone gateposts at the end of the driveway. Turning to take a last look at the old house, I think of the many places I’ve searched to find the original memories of my childhood –the photographs and films, the letters and diaries. But the living memories are right here, on these grounds, stored right where they happened, each one buried like Caesar in the grove. With memories embedded in every curve of stone, in the light hitting a high window, the house remembers itself for you. I’ve stepped through the black-and-white photographs into color, reached through the amber and at last touch the actual thing. Every memory, good and bad, is all right here.

  And today, at the end of this driveway, the bad memories, they don’t seem so scary anymore. They’re bullies, bad memories, and they take up more room in our heads than they ought to. For every bad moment, the house has a thousand memories of joy and teems with happy ghosts. Just look at it. There in the front yard a collie dog chases the ghosts of six little boys through the deep snow, and on the back porch the Pagans are warming up – there are ghosts down in the fallout shelter building forts out of the canned food stored away for Armageddon – there are ghosts up on the pitched red slate roof doing things dangerous even for ghosts – there are Halloween ghosts too, still noisily counting out the night’s take of candy at the dining room table, and down the hall from the living room Hi-Fi comes the ghost of John Lennon and the lyrics of Help! – our soundtrack for the years of romping through the great house. And everywhere there are boys – boys rolling and tumbling, singing, laughing, fast and slightly out of control.

  “And yet I trust that good will fall,

  at last far off, at last to all,

  and every winter change to spring.”

  The seven of us at the Hill House, August, 1970

  Photo by Susan Blackmun

  “AND EVERY WINTER CHANGE TO SPRING.”

  Grandpa writing on his birthday, September 28, 1966

  Well, I look over these 74 years and consider myself fortunate, a child of Providence, that I have been granted 74 years of life on this interesting planet; that I found a wonderful woman to take care of me and give me two wonderful children; that I have had many friends who out-numbered my enemies; that I was able to get a good education; that I had work of an honorable sort my entire professional life; that I came unharmed through World War I; that I was never tempted to use alcohol or to gamble; that I had excellent teachers in my little Florida college. Oh! I have so much to be thankful for! Even if my 74 years produced no great work. I just was not endowed with the brains to do great things.

  Grandpa Rubert James Longstreet, a man who did many great things, died on October 9th, 1969, at age 77. Monnie was with him in Florida when he passed after a short illness. My mother took the train south again and attended the funeral with her little brother Jimmy again at her side. In Rochester, a family friend stayed with the three of us still living at home and when Mom returned a week later she bore with her several boxes full of green books bound by Grandpa. They were the letters – a conversation of 30 years. She never went back to Florida.

  I did go back, as I traced this family history, to see the house where my mother grew up; it’s still there in Daytona Beach on Braddock Avenue. I went also to Mt. Dora, Florida, to see Grandpa’s and Monnie’s graves (Monnie lived to age 93). During my visit I made a grave rubbing of that grand name – LONGSTREET – and it hangs here in my study as I write. Next to it is a rubbing of my father’s headstone.

  I visited my father’s grave in November of 1988, 22 years after he died. I was driving from Richmond, Virginia, to take a job in Minneapolis and planned my route to take me through Ohio. Dad’s grave is there, in the cemetery of a little town called DeGraff, near his
father’s and mother’s headstones.

  My map said the town was just an hour’s jog off the main highway and, once I found the cemetery, my map became a 1966 photo of the gravesite. I used the silhouette of the horizon in its background to find the plot.I was videotaping this pilgrimage to show my brothers the final resting place of our father. As I approached his grave, I was giving a matter-of-fact description of the surroundings and when I was finally close enough to read my father’s name on the gravestone, I stopped short and began to weep. The videotape stops there and when it resumes you can see the headstone is wet where I’d laid my head.

  This for a man who terrorized us?

  Betrayed us? Belittled us? Left us?

  I didn’t understand the tears. I still don’t.

  Over the years since his death, everyone in the family has gone through phases of anger, of sadness, of bewilderment, and back again, buffeted by contradictory emotions. There were days in the ‘70s when I asked Mom about the things Dad did, she’d wrinkle her face and say, “Why do you want to know such terrible things?” By the ‘90s, she was pulling Grandpa’s old letters off her shelves to clarify an answer. There’s no finality to it. Only, “This is how I feel about it today.”

  We all lived it. But not one of us understands it.

  Brother Dan, writing in 2005

  Even though I can’t think of one single incident when Dad made me feel good about myself, for some reason I can still feel sad about him and feel his loss. About three weeks ago, I had this dream about him, which was surprising because I’ve never had a sad dream about Dad.

  In the dream he had that young, clear face of his early days, with none of the puffiness that came with the booze, and of course he had on one of those starched white shirts I always remember. And he was leaving.

  To where, I don’t know, but there was a bus he had to catch. He was looking for me because he wanted to say goodbye. But for some reason I avoided him. As he was getting on the bus and waving goodbye to everyone else in the family, all you other guys were calling for me to come, come and say goodbye. But I stayed back, hidden in some sort of place where I could still see all that was happening.

  Finally I grudgingly came out of whatever place I was hiding and went to his bus window to say goodbye. But I had come too late. It was somebody else in the window by then and Dad had moved forward. He didn’t see me standing there waving. The bus left and I waved and waved but it just pulled away.

  EPILOGUE

  “My name is Luke and I’m an alcoholic.”

  I’m in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Austin, Texas.

  I’m not visiting. I’m not here trying to learn what my father was like. I’m here because I’m a member of A.A., in recovery, and I belong here. I’m an alcoholic.

  I grew up promising myself that no matter what else I became, I wasn’t going to be a drunk like my dad. And yet I became one.

  How I became dependent on booze and drugs will have to be a story for another day. As for this story – about the years I spent wondering what my father was like – it turns out he was like me.

  # # #

  CITED SOURCES / NOTES

  The Flip Side: An Illustrated History of Southern Minnesota Rock & Roll Music from 1955-1970, by Jim Oldsberg (Jordan, Minnesota, 1991) Book #49 out of 400 in first pressing.

  Lyrics from the Beatles’ Paperback Writer and Can’t Buy Me Love

  Quotation about Hemingway in “Zee Tortured Arteest” from www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/features/art_hemingway_one.htm

  Lyrics from Rainy Night In Georgia by Tony Joe White, sung by Brook Benton

  Acknowledgements: Dr. Tony Bianco and the entire Bianco family, Ann Brataas, Maria Carvainis, Dr. Mark Coventry, Mike Ferrer, Karen Gregory, Karen Jacobs, Dr. Tony Lund, Jill Marr, Bonnie Mulligan, Maxine Paetro, Dr. Elizabeth Peacock, Chris Raymer, Col. W.P.Reed, Curlin Reed, Senour Reed, David Smyrk, Jackie Warner, Alexis Wilson, Steve Wolff, and of course my family: Mom, Kip, Jeff, Chris, Dan and Collin.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: There’s no fake stuff in this memoir. All the events in this book happened as depicted. Some content from the diaries or letters has been edited for readability. Many of the original documents are available for review online at ThirtyRoomsToHideIn.com. Names of a few family acquaintances have been changed to preserve their privacy. Note regarding title: as children we always said our home had 30 rooms but, looking at the original blueprints of the Millstone today, I count only 26. Thirty sounded better.

  Readers interested in seeing more of Myra’s letters, as well as more photographs and films from the Sullivan archives can visit:

  ThirtyRoomsToHideIn.com.