The Inheritance

by Niki Kapsambelis

  The DeMoe house was destined to become a town institution, with petite, indomitable Gail at its core. After hours, when the bars closed, it was not unusual to find customers drifting down the street and through the large corner lot into the unlocked back door, where they’d fix themselves snacks in her kitchen. Gail DeMoe never minded. Her sense of humor was notorious. When her son Brian chased her through the house, spraying her with a garden hose, she laughed hysterically. Once, she popped out of a giant cake to celebrate the birthday of a friend who was expecting a showgirl. She briefly worked as an entertainer at local children’s parties, and kept a collection of costumes and wigs in her basement for kids to use for dress-up, frequently joining them. She would become the town’s most popular citizen, with a sometimes ribald sense of humor that immediately made people feel at home. Her favorite saying, which she often repeated to her children and friends, was: “Love you to the moon and back.”

  Gail formed a unique bond with each of her offspring, following the contours of each personality as if that one were her only child. She allowed Doug his lengthy silences, and he gratefully returned to the comfortable acceptance of her kitchen throughout his adult life. She snuck cigarettes with Dean, her rebel, and laughed off Karla’s criticism of her decorating style, which tended toward knickknacks that Karla found tacky. Even Jamie, who defied her so sharply in his preteen years that she sent him to live with Karla for a brief time, mowed her lawn for her and sought her advice. Several of her sons’ girlfriends viewed Gail as a confidante, and she sewed a prom dress for Brian’s date that matched his shirt perfectly.

  To support the warm household that Gail was building, Moe worked punishingly long hours, as would his sons when they eventually joined him in the oil fields. Over the years, the job would cost him the tip of his left index finger and two toes on his right foot, but he never quit, or even slowed down. When he started, he drove a cement truck, then later he moved into a job testing drill stems. It was a dangerous, demanding industry, but a hard worker could earn enough pay to support six children when the oil was flowing. More than the paycheck, Moe’s identity was wrapped up in his work ethic. It was his chief virtue, a defining characteristic in which he took enormous pride. He was frequently gone both day and night, even when the kids were little. If his temper was short when he finally came home to the chaos of so many children, nobody could really blame him.

  “As far as Moe goes, he was one of the better guys to work with,” said Hank Lautenschlager, who lived across the street and joined the Halliburton crew. “He was so well liked by everybody.”

  • • •

  Handsome and inseparable, Dean and Doug—the fourth and fifth DeMoe children—shared a love of wrestling, boxing, and football. Though Doug was older, he was the quieter of the two boys, his introverted personality overshadowed by Dean’s sociable good nature. Dean loved to drive his car too fast, to strike up conversations with pretty girls, to tell funny stories from work about the idiot who rode down a cable wire from the top of the oil rig to the ground.

  Doug preferred to let his actions speak for him. At the town pool, instead of drawing a crowd by telling anecdotes, Doug—a strong swimmer—would turn backflips into the water to attract attention. He loved water-skiing behind a speedboat on the lake formed by the Tioga Dam. When he developed an interest in motorcycles, he showed off by executing perfect wheelies that he could hold for as long as a mile. He and his best friend, Gary Anderson, sometimes picked up what passed for town derelicts in Tioga—“dope heads,” Gary called them—and talked them into going on a road trip, then drove them a hundred miles west and stranded the poor sots in Montana. They figured they were doing the town a favor.

  The oil fields taught the boys that hardships and dangers were unavoidable in life, and that they needed to grasp and savor what was good. Dean, in particular, was beginning to prove himself as a man by cultivating a reputation as a risk taker: There was no dare he would not accept, and people loved him for it. But his daredevil façade hid his sensitivity. He would grow into a thoughtful man, protective of those he loved, perhaps striving to show them the warmth he never felt from Moe.

  In ways he probably did not recognize in himself, Doug inherited many of his father’s personality traits. His best friend, Gary, perceived that they were both, in their own way, very soft-spoken—even though Moe had a fearsome reputation among his offspring, Gary thought of him as a kind man in the burly body of an old-fashioned wrestler. Like Moe, Doug’s sense of self-worth hinged on his job status. He wasn’t a particularly creative thinker, the way Dean was, but he was a completely reliable worker, never taking a day off if he could possibly help it. And like Moe, he had a soft spot for small children.

  Where Doug and Dean’s personality differences drew them together, Karla and Lori’s created more distance. Both were cheerleaders, but that was just about the only interest they had in common. Though they were a year apart in age, they wouldn’t share much of an emotional bond until many years later, when they were mothers themselves.

  Karla, the second oldest, was a typically self-centered teenager, worried about appearances and anxious to fit in. Her family’s popularity was important to her, a kind of status symbol. She liked being one of them, a big fish in Tioga’s small pond. The familiarity of her world was comforting, and she was easily flustered when she moved too far beyond it. She relied on her family and friends for guidance, secure in the knowledge that being in a large family meant always having backup when life got a little too scary.

  Just as Brian, the oldest, was their mother’s favorite, Karla was Moe’s, the only child who didn’t get the brunt of his famous temper. She was traditional and family-centric, a homebody who met her future husband at an eighth-grade dance, then stayed with him for the next forty years. Often, her chipper personality hid a lack of confidence. She got lost easily, for example, even when driving roads she had known her entire life.

  But Lori, the third child, was a free spirit. As much as Karla wanted to fit in, Lori loved to stand out. She was a wild rose, never caring what anyone thought of her, and she found Tioga stifling. She longed for new experiences, new faces, to explore the unknown.

  “She drove this old car that I wouldn’t be caught dead in, and wore these long earrings that I wouldn’t be caught dead in,” said Karla. Back then, those things mattered in a way that seems impossible now. They had their own friends, and even in a small town, their social circles didn’t mix.

  Lori wore her brown hair boyishly short and worked in the parts department of a local car dealership. She joined the cheerleading squad only so she could take the team bus to other towns and scope out boys she hadn’t known since kindergarten. Her rebellious streak rivaled Dean’s, but she was also a nurturer, like their mother. If a dog was ugly, she loved it even more because it seemed to need her. She connected easily with people on society’s fringes—the overlooked, the castaways—and she rejected anything pretentious. Most important, when Lori had a problem, she went looking for her own solutions, and prided herself in her fierce independence. She did not like answering to anyone.

  Among the siblings, no quarter was given for sensitivity; all character flaws—Doug’s stingy, tight-lipped silences; Jamie’s perpetual worrying; Karla’s prissiness—were targets for teasing. The constant jokes created a camaraderie that drew them closer together, because they accepted one another unconditionally, flaws and all. The teasing also toughened them up. While they did argue, they didn’t go for months without speaking; Gail would not allow it. She set the example for them, always keeping in touch with her own siblings and friends, reminding them how important they were to her, even when they were at odds.

  The jokes also served as a handy way of deflecting attention from their father’s strictness. They didn’t want pity. They wanted people to laugh with them, not at them, and they wanted everyone they knew to be in on the joke—one of the keys to their popularity.

  Their love for pranks sometimes bordered on public nuis
ance. The boys took potshots at a statue in the center of town and shot out streetlights. One of their favorite practical jokes was “canning cars.” The DeMoe boys threaded beer cans along a very long strand of fishing line, which was then stretched across the street. When unsuspecting cars whizzed by, boys on either side of the street would raise the line just high enough to catch in the car’s grille, and the driver would continue on, dragging a clattering tail of aluminum empties behind him. Even the Tioga cops knew about the can trick; they chuckled and turned the other way. One officer, who also happened to be Doug’s boxing coach, sometimes pulled the boys over when he saw them out driving around, then joined them in the car for a beer before resuming his shift. Tioga’s culture was solidly rooted in its wild frontier past.

  Laughter infused the family through its early years, embedding itself as their foundation hardened, ready to be extracted when times became impossibly hard.

  • • •

  That winter day when an oil hand found Moe crying in his truck between job sites was the first time anyone outside of the house had noticed his trouble. Gail herself had seen other changes, but kept them to herself.

  It started with the smallest things. Moe had a hard time remembering phone numbers, so he scribbled them on the back of his hand. When he wanted a cup of coffee, he struggled to remember how to turn on the pot. The man who had loved sports since childhood abruptly stopped playing softball with his friends. Moe no longer made time for a round on Tioga’s golf course. Gail watched and wondered, but at the time it didn’t occur to her that something might be starting to go drastically, terribly wrong.

  “Dummy me,” she said later.

  Even more obvious, in retrospect, was another warning sign: The same thing had happened to his mother. Gail and Moe’s children had been in elementary school when Wanda DeMoe, back home in Wisconsin, began to seriously decline. Her two oldest children had already moved out: Moe was in North Dakota, and Vic, a former Marine, was working as a policeman after returning home from Korea. But Wanda’s three youngest children were still home. The next oldest, Pat—the only girl—was barely in her teens when her mother began to forget; the little boys, Jerry and Ray, were even younger.

  “It was really hard for the kids,” Gail remembered.

  Nobody could really say what was wrong with Wanda. Doctors originally theorized that it was multiple sclerosis, but this was the late 1950s; it was a murky diagnosis, at best.

  Wanda was in her forties when her symptoms surfaced. To avoid parallel parking, she instead usually stopped across the river that ran through her town, leaving her grade school–aged children in the car as she walked across the bridge. When she was finished with her errands, she took the bus home, completely forgetting about the kids or the car. She couldn’t be trusted alone; she left food cooking on the stove while she was out of the house. And when she walked, her steps turned into shuffling, like a woman twice her age.

  Whatever was ailing Wanda also seemed to be affecting her two brothers. At one family gathering, both men saw their reflections in a glass door and demanded to know who those strangers were.

  When Wanda’s husband took her to a doctor, she was prescribed shock treatments to address a possible nervous breakdown. Pat, her young daughter, took over most of the housekeeping. Eventually, in her early fifties, as her speech became unintelligible, Wanda went to live in a nursing home. She never had a true diagnosis while she was alive.

  Gail went to visit her mother-in-law and was horrified to find Wanda in a facility full of moaning, screaming people. To her, the ward looked like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nobody was physically active; most people seemed to be bedridden. Seemingly overnight, Wanda’s hair had turned white, and she lay curled in the fetal position.

  On July 15, 1964, five years after her strange symptoms began, Wanda DeMoe died at the age of fifty-four. Bedsores covered her hips, buttocks, and shoulders. The doctor who performed her autopsy peered into her brain and found that her cortex had, like Auguste Deter’s, atrophied and was speckled with dense clusters of tangles.

  Wanda DeMoe did not, as it turns out, have multiple sclerosis. Wanda DeMoe had Alzheimer’s disease.

  • • •

  About twenty years prior to Wanda’s death, science began establishing that at least some forms of Alzheimer’s might be genetic. And in 1963, the year before she died, a group of doctors led by Robert Feldman, then of Harvard University, wrote about members of a family who seemed to be inheriting the disease in a pattern that suggested it could be passed down by one parent, known in genetics as autosomal dominance. But it would take another decade before researchers would more fully understand that pattern as it applied to Alzheimer’s.

  Wanda’s younger children dispersed not long afterward, their father apparently unable to take care of them on his own. Pat got pregnant at sixteen and married her boyfriend; Jerry, the second youngest, went to live with Moe and Gail in North Dakota, where he finished his last five years of school.

  Jerry adapted quickly to his oldest brother’s household, agreeing to babysit his nieces and nephews—who were not much younger than he—so Gail and Moe could go out for the evening. Then he shooed the children into their rooms so he could throw parties. The DeMoe siblings loved to peek in on the fun, and Jerry’s friends bribed them with amusing stories and candy if they didn’t tattle.

  Kindhearted neighbors took in Moe’s youngest brother, Ray, who had grown close to them while working on their farm and didn’t want to relocate out of town. He planned to become a farmer one day, but first he followed in his brothers’ military footsteps, joining the Marines during his senior year of high school. In November that year, he was shipped to Vietnam.

  On March 25, 1967, Ray’s platoon was pinned down by enemy fire. They were running low on ammunition, so Ray, heedless of his own safety, tried to get some. Exposed, he was killed by the mortar fire. Private First Class Raymond DeMoe was nineteen when he died. There was no way to know if he had inherited the same illness that had killed his mother.

  • • •

  Nine years after Wanda’s death, Gail’s growing concerns about Moe prompted her to take action. In 1973, they visited a neurologist in Fargo who ran him through a battery of paper-and-pencil tests, took X-rays, and attached electrodes to his skull for a neuroencephalogram, which Moe blamed for giving him a terrific headache.

  The doctor called Gail into a room by herself to discuss his findings: He thought Moe had dementia, and that it could be hereditary—a remarkably perceptive diagnosis, especially for the time. It was then that Gail first heard the word “Alzheimer’s” used to describe her husband’s condition. She had never heard of it. Seven decades after Alois Alzheimer’s discovery, it was still considered a rare affliction, though the doctor who had performed Wanda’s autopsy had been able to identify it when he examined her brain tissue under a microscope.

  Gail asked if it could be related to whatever had been wrong with Moe’s mother, who had died at a young age with similar symptoms; the doctor said possibly. He also said that if that’s what it was, maybe half of her children could inherit the disease, which was the theory that Robert Feldman’s 1963 paper had suggested. It was a crucial detail that Gail, to her everlasting regret, would not fully grasp for another thirty years. She thought the possibility of the disease being hereditary was much more remote, the way any other ailment could be—something that a few of the kids might get when they were old, the way some people might worry about heart disease if a parent suffers a heart attack, or about cancer if it seems to run in the family. There was no medicine the doctor could offer.

  • • •

  Back in Tioga, the DeMoe house remained a hub of activity—it could hardly be otherwise with such a large family. But as Moe’s forgetfulness increased, his personality changed, too; always strict, he became angrier, more irrational. Moe’s temperament would forever be a point of dispute between Gail and her children. They saw him as a mean man, but she re
called a different Moe, the one who adored children and had been proud of his large brood. He had never been a soft touch, but it was the disease, she insisted, that changed him into a moody, violent man. The kids weren’t buying it—not even Karla, his favorite child. His personality changes had occurred so gradually that it didn’t seem as though they happened because he was sick; it seemed, to their teenage eyes, like he was behaving that way deliberately, because he didn’t like them. He’d been acting that way since their preteens; in Jamie’s case, because he was the youngest by so many years, it was virtually his entire life. They began avoiding the house, and so did many of their friends.

  At work, Hank Lautenschlager was slow to notice any changes. “I was so close to him, I didn’t realize what was going on till it was too late,” he admitted ruefully. “I just couldn’t believe that he was like that.”

  The first time Hank realized that something might be amiss was when Moe got angry with the shop foreman over some perceived problem. “Moe came off the truck with a hammer and chased him around the truck,” Hank recalled.

  Although the foreman forgave him and they went out for a drink that same afternoon, the truce didn’t last long. In the oil fields, if you couldn’t do the job, there was only so long anyone would carry you—even if you were as well liked as Moe. Drill stem testing was the last upper-level job he’d hold; he returned to driving a truck. That lasted until he started struggling to find locations and ran over a mailbox. Then the company demoted him to washing the trucks he used to drive.

  “He’d stand there and just wash the floor down for hours,” said Hank, who had an unwilling front-row seat to Moe’s decline. One night, Hank looked out his window to see Moe poking around his own house, looking for a lost set of keys. He was naked.