by Robert Ward
Sherry Butler had another fascination for me as well. She was one of the few people who I knew disliked my grandmother. They had had words several times over, Sherry being loud and screaming foul language in the streets. Grace was no busybody, no Mary Worth. She didn’t seek out people or problems. On the other hand, she never shied away from them, and when Sherry got unruly and drunk and acted out in public, Grace wasn’t afraid to talk to her face-to-face.
But Sherry wasn’t the only person who had problems with Grace. In one falling-down row house just across the street from my grandparents lived the sprawling, drunken, and criminal Watkins family. Inside that dilapidated building dwelled drunken and mean grandfather Jerry Watkins; his daughter, the middle-aged Cherry Watkins, a once sexy woman who had now gone completely to seed; and her two sons: Nelson, who was in his mid-twenties and had already done a two-year stretch in the Maryland State Penitentiary, and his younger brother, Buddy, my age.
Though I liked to think at the time that we were a typical American family in every way, the Watkins-Ward feud seemed like something out of another century, a citified and not quite as vitriolic version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. I didn’t know why it had started, and everyone in our family was too ashamed of it to even dignify its existence by talking about it, but to the best of my knowledge the whole thing had begun with the two grandfathers. What it was between them I had only the dimmest idea. All I knew was that my grandfather’s drunken bar fights had reached their most legendary and violent apogee when he battled Jerry Watkins in a famous, knock-down-drag-out street battle two years before I was born—a battle that had started at the Oriole tavern around the corner on the old York Road, spilled out into the street, and ended up at the corner lamppost where Cap had smacked Jerry Watkins’s big bloated head on the curb until blood ran out of his nose.
The Baltimore city cops had come to put in their two cents, but Jerry Watkins, like everyone else in the neighborhood, didn’t “talk to no gendarmes.” Police weren’t exactly hated, but no one ever took them for friends. The neighborhood fought its own battles, and took care of its own, without outside help.
Needless to say, I didn’t hear about these battles from anyone in my own family. Gradually, as I spent more and more time at my grandmother’s house, the story leaked out from the local boys I had befriended, Johnny Brandau and Big Ray Lane. When I asked my father about it, he said it was “all a myth. The two men had a slight disagreement, and maybe a couple of drunken punches were exchanged.” My father was a bad liar, though. He always rubbed his nose when he was fibbing. He nearly rubbed the skin off the end of it that day.
Whatever had happened, bad blood had come down through the generations. The daughter, Cherry, hated my father, and her sons, Nelson and Buddy, hated me. I, who was not allowed to hate my enemies, tried simply to ignore them, but that wasn’t easy to do. For they lived outside of their ramshackle home, hanging out either on their fallen-down front porch, where they constantly threw a ball around, or more usually on the street corner, by the light pole, right on the very spot where my grandfather was said to have pounded their grandfather into the curb.
Though it was a time when it was fashionable to explain every single evil known to man as a “product of an unfortunate environment,” I never believed such bunk when it came to the Watkins brothers. They had high simian foreheads, deep-sunken brows, and heavy-lidded eyes. Nelson, especially, looked like the legendary Missing Link, and he had the prison record to go with it. At eight he’d started a fire in another kid’s house, nearly burning the place to the ground. When they asked him why, he said, “The kid had better comics than me, so he deserved it.” That little act had earned Nels a trip to reform school, where he had spent two years and learned his true calling, breaking and entering. Around the neighborhood it was well known that he was a cat burglar, that he spent a lot of time across the York Road in Guilford, the wealthy old section of town with mansions and the Baltimore aristocrats. There was even some pride in Nelson’s work among the locals. “Did you hear about old Nelson? The boy robbed the swells over in richtown. Got his mother a silver tea set. No stopping him.” The problem was that Nels wasn’t very good at it; he’d been busted twice, and the last time he’d spent two years downtown in the state penitentiary, where he’d added “dope dealer” to his repertoire. Now not only was he a thief, but he also sold drugs to high school kids. In short, he was mean, dumb, and bad, and he was busy teaching the tricks of his various trades to his little brother, Buddy, who was short, wide, and had a conspicuous gap between his eyes. Buddy hated everyone in the neighborhood except his running mates, the two horrible Harper brothers, Butch and Mouse.
The Watkinses and Harpers, who lived a few blocks away, spent nearly every night hanging down on the street corner, making cracks at anyone who happened to want to get by them to shop at the corner grocery store, Pop’s Place. I feared them, especially Buddy, whom I knew I was destined to have a run-in with. It was really just a matter of time, because making peace with him was definitely not an option.
With the exception of that old and mysterious feud, though, peace, kindness, and generosity flourished at Grace’s. As I sat on the porch listening to the men talking of the Orioles’ chances to escape the cellar, I experienced a deep warmth, what I now believe was the glow of inclusion. We were part of a family, our family was a good one, kind, decent, smart, but not overly intellectual, caring of others and minorities but not self-righteous or smug about it. In short, in those happy days, I felt that we had a place in the world, maybe not the highest or most exulted, but a respectable and very real place in our neighborhood, in our city. And though I didn’t think in such grandiose terms, if you had put the question to me, I would have said, “Yes, of course, we have a place in America, too.”
For I believed that the world was based on families like ours. There were problems, of course, with the U.S.A., just as there were problems in our own family, but by and large, just as our family was decent, so was our neighborhood, our city, and our country.
A feeling, incredibly, I think now, that I took for granted in those bright, warm, and innocent years. But by late 1961, the year I turned fifteen, the feeling that the world made sense, that people meant well and were basically good, that we all belonged, was gone from my life, my grandmother’s life, indeed our whole family’s life, forever.
Mother and me, 1953
I Suppose the serious trouble with my parents had been there for a long time, years maybe. But I had never seen it. That fact alone astonishes me. I like to think that I was a sensitive, observant kid, that little or nothing passed me by. And yet, for a long time, I had no inkling that there was a problem with my family. Did I miss it, or did my parents just keep it from me, to protect me? I’ve asked both of my parents since, and the not-so-surprising answer is that they don’t know either. Neither of them could tell me when things turned bad, but I can certainly remember when I first became aware of the situation.
The year I turned fifteen the cracks began to show. My father started working late every night at his new job in the civilian computer unit at the army base at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He’d worked late shifts before, so at first I thought nothing of it, but during the second week of June my mother stopped sewing, watching her favorite shows on television, or even reading one of her A. J. Cronin novels. Instead, she sat in the dark kitchen, alone, her hands folded on the Formica-topped table as if in prayer. After I watched her spend two nights in utter silence, I ventured in from the couch where I had been watching Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson in the old underwater adventure series Sea Hunt
“Mom,” I asked, “is something wrong?”
She looked up and smiled faintly in the darkness. “No, sweetie, I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“You’re not sick or anything?” I asked.
“No, of course not,” she said.
I shuffled in behind her, put my arms around her shoulders, and hugged her tightly.
“I lo
ve you, Mom,” I said.
“I love you too, sweetie. More than anything in the world.”
I sat down with her at the table. The kitchen door was open, and through the screen we could see the fireflies glowing in the darkness, hear the crickets chirping in the backyard grass.
“It’s nice sitting here,” I said, trying to sound optimistic.
But my mother didn’t answer, and I felt a dread that I’d never known before.
“I like the crickets. Don’t you, Mom?”
My mother said nothing to that at all. She just looked up at me and smiled weakly.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s a good sound, their song.”
We sat that way for a while. I felt the dread opening like a poison flower inside me, and it was such a new feeling that it struck me as curious. It was as though I was a third person watching it bloom, and though it was intensely painful, it seemed interesting, nearly beautiful. After all, I was young and in love with any new sensation. Especially since I had the naive confidence that any negative ones would soon pass away, and all would be right with the world again.
But my mother’s pain was something else again. I could see it in her eyes, in her sagging shoulders, and I suddenly felt afraid and then furious. But at whom I wasn’t certain.
Suddenly, outside, from across the little woods in front of our home, there came the sound of Elvis Presley singing “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” and both my mother and I were startled.
“It’s the rec center,” I said. “The dance over at Northwood school must be starting.”
“And you should be there, hon,” she said, putting her hand over my wrist. “Not stuck in here with your old mother.”
“Ahhh, who needs it?” I said. “I’d rather be here with you.” Suddenly, feeling desperate to make her happy, I jumped up. “You want to dance, Ma?” I said. “No … come on.”
“Last chance,” I said, holding out my arms.
Then she smiled and got up, and I held her close to me, stealing the self-conscious hug of a fifteen-year-old boy who is supposedly “too cool” to need them anymore. My mother was a big woman, overweight by twenty-five pounds or so, but she was terrifically light on her feet, and we two-stepped around the kitchen twice, then took a turn around the dining room table, and moved neatly and quickly into the living room.
As the song ended, I pulled away from her and did my best imitation of a formal bow, and my mother held the edge of her dress, curtseying and smiling sweetly.
“I am charmed, dear sir,” my mother said, managing a smile.
“No, madam,” I said, “the pleasure is all mine.”
Now the music floating across the moonlit woods was another ballad, Jerry Vale’s “You Don’t Know Me,” then secretly one of my favorite songs, though I would never have admitted it to any of my friends.
I sang to my mother as we danced, and then she stopped halfway through the song.
“What’s wrong, Ma?” I asked.
“Nothing at all,” she said. “Just that song. There’s a lot of truth in that.”
“I guess so,” I said. But I didn’t like the sound of that. “I’m very tired tonight,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Well, why don’t you go up to bed then, Ma,” I said. “I’ll lock up down here.”
“No, honey. It’s all right. I’ve got to do a little work on my patterns. I’m going down to the cellar and sew for a while. You really ought to go over to the dance.”
“Ahhh,” I said. Actually she was right. I wanted to go, but I wasn’t sure about my dancing, especially my jitterbugging, so I stayed at home on Thursday night, rec night, and listened to the music, only fantasizing about the girls I would meet from school, the beautiful Diane Hooper, or Pam Hoschild, or the perfect, black-haired Ruth Anne Muir.
“I’m kinda tired,” I said. “I gotta cut Gracie’s lawn tomorrow. I think I’ll go on up to bed.”
“Sure, honey,” she said.
I hugged my mother again and kissed her on the cheek, and I was starting up the stairs when she called to me. “I love you, Bobby,” she said. “Me, too, Mom,” I said.
I smiled and tried to pretend both to her and myself that I hadn’t heard the desperation in her voice.
It wasn’t long before it was impossible to pretend things were the same. My father came home later and later, and on the few nights he managed to make it for dinner, he was surly and furtive. My mother was never a good cook. At her best she was able to do a passable meatloaf or a decent stew, but when things were going right for our family, it hadn’t seemed to matter. Now, though, her shortcomings as a cook seemed to be forever on my father’s mind.
“Meatloaf again, Shirley? Typical.”
“Leftovers? Yeah, this is real cuisine we have here, Bobby.”
From the quintessential happy ‘50s family, we suddenly fell into a parody of ourselves. My father would come in and go directly into the bathroom, where he would wash himself for over an hour. Much later in his life, we understood that he’d been a victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a disease that I myself suffered from only a few years later. He’d had a brief bout with it as a boy, thinking that he’d drunk poisoned well water and becoming so obsessed with the thought (this days after the “poison” had failed to kill him or even make him sick) that he had missed school for a week. Indeed, I would have given anything to know such a disease existed in those days, for then I’d have been able to forgive him for his hours spent alone in the bathroom. As it was, I came to the all-too-obvious conclusion that something had gone wrong with all of us—perhaps, foremost, myself. I was growing up, I had pimples on my face for the first time, and I was starting to notice girls, and in a year I would be going to high school. I badly needed emotional support and desperately needed to talk to him about what I was going through.
But suddenly he was gone, either working late hours or locked behind the bathroom door.
I remember making a fairly sensational catch in a neighborhood football game once—I thought of myself as the Northwood version of Raymond Berry—and I rushed home to share my triumph with my father. When I arrived, breathless and exuberant, I ran to the bathroom door, opened it quickly, and said, “Dad, I have to tell you about the football game. I made this really great catch, and—” I never finished the sentence. My father was naked down to his boxer shorts, his head covered with salves and cotton balls. He must have seen the shock on my face, because he said, “Don’t ever come into this bathroom without knocking again. You see my face? I’m cursed, Bobby. Cursed. I’ve got to use all my time to fight the curse, you hear me? So get the hell out and leave me alone.”
I turned and walked toward my bedroom, convinced that he was a mad man and that he hated me.
Now, of course, obsessive-compulsive disorder can be treated with a psychotropic drug like Paxil and group therapy sessions, and most of these destructive mental states can be greatly reduced or nearly eliminated. I’ve used the drugs and attended the sessions myself, and as a result I have little or no trouble with it, after half a lifetime of my own such problems. (In my own case blasphemous words repeated themselves in my ear for an entire year, until I finally thought about committing suicide, but that’s another tale.)
Unfortunately for my father and our family, no such help existed then. Instead my dad really believed that God had laid a terrible curse on him and that, like Job, he had no choice but to go through his life in this terrible agony.
Eventually the bathroom became his whole life. In the morning, he would spend an hour and a half washing himself again and again with special soaps, cleansers, and alcohol-soaked swabs before driving to his job. Curiously, he told me much later in life, the obsessions didn’t bother him much at work. As long as his mind was occupied on solving computer problems, he was fine, functional, even a unit leader—the same bright, witty, and sweet guy we’d always known. Insidiously, the disease took hold as he was driving home. He would begin to think about all the dirt in the air, al
l the germs he’d been exposed to while working in a crowded office, and by the time he arrived at home, around six, he was quietly panicked, convinced that his very existence depended upon repeated but useless washings. Useless, for as soon as he was clean, he would become convinced that he’d missed an area, near his ear, that the curse was upon him again, and he would begin rubbing the “filthy area” until the germs were “dead”—only to soon find another area, this time near his right nostril, that he’d “missed.” And so the whole crazy ritual would begin again.
My mother, who worked as a secretary for a typewriter company, a lousy job with low pay and a bullying jerk of a boss, would come home, herself dispirited and half-dead, and cook dinner. She’d say the magic words “Dinner is ready,” and my father would be forced to come out of the bathroom. The meal itself had become a tension-filled agony. Gripped by his compulsion, my father felt that while he was eating, he was wasting precious time, that the insidious germs he’d missed wiping out were doubling their efforts, making their way back across his face.
Filled with huge and incomprehensible anxiety, he unloaded on my mother and on me, knocking the food (“This damned burger is so overcooked it could be used to play step-ball. Why don’t you take it outside and bounce it for a while, Bobby?”), rebuffing all efforts to talk with him (“I work all day. I don’t have time to discuss inanities like the Baltimore Colts, son”). Within a few torturous minutes he’d be back in the bathroom, with the door locked, and my mother would be sobbing at the kitchen table. And I would be in the front room with a huge lump in my stomach, a lump that radiated pain all through my body.
