Dark Valley Destiny (13 page)

Although she must have been taught that comparisons were odious, Hester was not averse to reminding her husband of the virtues and financial success of the stalwart gentleman from Goldthwaite and deploring the folly of her choice. Thereupon the doctor would fling himself out of the house, whistling loudly to control his rage, and seek out a friend to tell his troubles to.

The Howards' neighbor Annie Newton—later Mrs. Davis—thinks that this contention between his parents was responsible for Robert's problems with adjustment:

Mrs. Howard was in love with ... a young man, and she expected to marry him. But this dashing young doctor came along, and she hurriedly married him. Then the rest of her life she lived in disappointment. . . . She had no love for him, and she didn't want the child to have anything to do with the father. She just wanted to hold him. And I feel like if Robert had been reared under different circumstances, he'd have been different. . . .

I feel that [Robert] was what he was because of this family disturbance. ... I knew them because I talked to all of them; and of course I

knew . . . the child. I have been with Dr. and Mrs. Howard and I know they were desperately unhappy . . . her being in love with someone else and married to this dashing young doctor. And then after she married him, she wouldn't divorce him, but she lived with him. She treated him fair, but he knew and they all knew that her heart was some place else. So she took it out on Robert. . . .

But she didn't mind letting you know that this other fellow . . . became prosperous, and made more money than the doctor. And here she's married to this poor country doctor, and the other man was making lots of money, and what a mistake she'd made!
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Hester Jane Ervin was no longer the handsome spinster who had been courted by her Goldthwaite suitor a decade earlier. Now in her mid-forties, her health failing, her face lined by the toil of a semifrontier existence, she showed every year of her life. Although her big frame had filled out, she carried herself well and seemed calm, self-assured, and ladylike—"the perfect Southern gentlewoman," as some acquaintances described her. When neither keeping house nor supervising her son, her main occupation was reading.

When patients called at the Howard home for medication, Mrs. Howard always greeted them with graciousness tinged with melancholy. Although her home was well-kept and, by local standards, nicely furnished, she rarely invited neighbors in. Excellent cook though she was, Hester Howard almost never asked the doctor's associates to dinner, except when custom demanded that patients coming from a distance be offered refreshment; and such rare guests as she did have found her meals fancy and citified and thought she was putting on airs. One of the Baker boys reported that, while she did accompany her husband and son to the Baker farm for Sunday dinner, she returned the courtesy only at intervals of years. "A peculiar woman" was his assessment.
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Hand in hand with her self-imposed isolation from the community went Hester Howard's total absorption in her son. Watching him every minute, she "just lived for Robert and Robert for her."
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This excessive preoccupation with her child had its roots in Hester Howard's deep-seated uncertainty about her competence as a mother. Moreover her constant fatigue led her to resent the demands of motherhood that she found herself unable to fulfill. This unconscious resentment toward her child leads the insecure mother to overprotect her young. So it was with Hester Howard.

Abetted by her husband, Hester strove to protect Robert from all pain, shock, and frustration. Both parents tried to keep him from contact with anything "unpleasant," such as sex, childbirth, illness, and death.
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Since a child who is constantly protected from emotional crises does not learn to deal with difficult or painful situations, Robert never found out how to cope independently with his fears, hates, and angers. He grew up depending entirely on the presence and support of his mother in times of crisis, a dependence that was to have fatal consequences:

All through Robert's life, his mother spoiled him. This may have been in part because of his early frailty, in part because of his great dependence. Perhaps his openness, his kindness, his vulnerability invited spoiling. Years later Kate Merryman, who criticized Mrs. Howard for making Robert a "mama boy," sheepishly admitted: "I petted him, too, I guess."
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Everything seemed to conspire to keep Robert attached to his parents, especially to his mother: the frequent family moves, his early ill health, his mother's lengthy illness and negative attitudes toward life, the schoolyard bullies, his father's daily absences, and the failure of his parents' marital relationship.

His mother's own feelings of dependency caused her to focus all her attention on her son, and her possessive overprotection magnified the boy's suppressed fears and rages. Robert must have felt at times enormous resentment of his mother's constant demands and the daily restraints she placed upon him. But by clinging to his mother, Robert, boy and man, could reassure himself that his hostile wishes would not come true and that he would never feel the helplessness, the guilt, and the loneliness that would engulf him if his death wishes for her were realized.

Robert's extreme reliance on the presence of his mother to resolve his anxieties and control his turbulent emotions, while distressing, was reassuring to Hester Howard. She felt that her devotion was justified, that she was indispensable, a perfect mother. The sacrifice of life to love was the theme that ennobled Hester Howard's existence and dominated her relationship with her son. From the day she gave him birth to the day he died, she was unable to let him go. *

Early in 1936, Mrs. Howard reported to her nurse that when Robert was a very small boy he began to tell his mother that if she died, he would die too.
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This remark, typical of a six-year-old, would have seemed poignant and memorable to Mrs. Howard because of her ill health; but to Robert it was probably only an expression of his normal fear of separation. A child of six has no understanding of death; he cannot comprehend the thought of his own nonexistence. We suspect that Hester, charmed by her son's devotion, conveyed her approval by smile or gesture; and that this unspoken approval reenforced Robert's youthful resolve.

A child's concept of death involves some sort of reversible action. When, as an adult, Robert persisted in his decision to die with his mother, he made the same mistake that he made as a six-year-old: he confused the irreversible reality of death with its symbol of rebirth. As a rule, the child of nine or ten, having acquired a more realistic concept of death, understands that someday he will be left alone. He therefore strives for independence, for emotional separation from his mother, by making a hero of his father. Robert, however, never took this developmental step. His mother, disappointed in love, isolated from her peers, jealous of her husband's popularity, neglected and ill, was not about to let her offspring go. Convincing herself that the boy's efforts to free himself from her apron strings were the result of her husband's attempts to take her child from her, Hester set about thwarting the doctor's efforts to spend time alone with his son. In the end she won the battle and, in
ho
doing, sealed Robert's fate.

One of Robert's Cross Cut acquaintances described the nine-year-old Kobert as "what a boy would term a sissy."
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Herself a dressier woman than the village wives among whom she lived, Mrs. Howard kept her son in white shirts when the local boys wore khaki or denim. This alone would have made Robert a marked boy in the neighborhood, but in addition he was shy and withdrawn. If he was, as we surmise, recovering I rom childhood tuberculosis or rheumatic fever, his lack of vitality would have increased his shyness and wariness.

Moreover, his mother's obsessive devotion to his welfare and his consequent dependence on her fostered Robert's earlier dread of going to school. The bullying he had endured made him distrustful, and his mother's constant concern endowed him with the belief that he was the center of the universe. He could never feel comfortable in the classroom, l iven when, in Cross Cut, and later in Burkett and Cross Plains, he was no longer teased or threatened, Robert transferred his unconscious resentment of maternal restraints to resentment of his teachers and of all other authority figures. Many years later he wrote:

I got through school by the skin of my teeth. I always hated school, and as I look back on my school days now, I still hate them with a deep and abiding hatred. Outside of mathematics—at which I was a terrible mugg —I didn't particularly mind the studies, but I hated being confined indoors —having to keep regular hours—having to think up stupid answers for equally irritating questions asked me by people who considered themselves in authority over me.
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It is curious to note that, except in mathematics, Robert was a good student; and as far as his schoolmates remember, he seemed to get along well with his teachers. Yet, this intense resentment of restraint remained with him all his life and affected his decision not to go to college.

All the doctor's friends knew that the Howards were not getting on well. They quarreled almost daily about money, about the doctor's boisterous-ness, and about their son. Isaac, loud and bombastic, was a constant! embarrassment to his wife. When annoyed with people, he would shout:! "I'd just like to take my knife and slash their entrails out and hang thern^ on the wire fence!"
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At patients' homes, he more and more ofteni demanded food and drink before refreshments were offered to him. He< monopolized the conversation with crude jokes and undisciplined hyper bole, not infrequently at Hester's expense. Trying to correct him only made matters worse.

Her sense of propriety outraged, Hester drew further away. In time] she embroiled young Robert in the family tug-of-war as she tried to shut; her husband completely out of the family circle. She went on drives wit' father and son to monitor the conversations and keep the two fro growing closer. Isaac responded in kind. The more his wife regarded hi with distaste, the more he teased her in public with bad jokes an" egregious behavior. And when she answered his clowning with scornfu silence, he spent less and less time at home. *

The doctor often sought solace from his neighbor-patients, Mrs. J W. Newton—an aunt of Austin Newton—and her attractive unmarrie daughter Annie. Dr. Howard regularly got his family's drinking wate.

from the Newtons' cistern, asserting that their water was more palatable than his own. On angry evenings, if he found the Newtons' sitting-room lamps lighted, he would set down his bucket and come in for a visit.

According to Annie Newton Davis, Dr. Howard was a great talker who wanted to chat with someone all the time. He presented himself as the misunderstood husband, not only rejected by his wife but also separated from his child by his wife's close intimacy with the boy. It was he who first told the Newton ladies of his wife's earlier attachment to the gentleman from Goldthwaite and of the bitter disappointment that robbed him of her companionship at home.

These nocturnal visits worried J. W. Newton, who kept farmer's hours. Having to be up with the sun to tend his cattle, he retired early. A male caller who appeared after the head of the house had gone to bed, even if he were so esteemed a neighbor as the doctor, made him uneasy. He feared that people might talk. Still, Mrs. Newton was undergoing certain difficulties, and the doctor's almost daily attention seemed to help her. Grateful for that benefit, Newton did nothing, although he told his family that he did not like the situation.

Isaac Howard enjoyed his practice. He made friends with all his patients and spent his days chatting and joking with them. Sometimes he told them stories of the supernatural; sometimes he prayed with them. Often he dined with them, keeping them laughing at his tall tales. "Everyone loved him," said Annie Newton Davis. "He had namesakes all around, and that shows that the mothers liked him."
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Even after he had moved to Cross Plains, when a contest was held to choose the most popular man in the area, Mrs. Burns clinched the honor for Dr. Howard by sending in a letter with 250 signatures.

The doctor formed close bonds with the nearby families of the Newton brothers, with the rancher Stephen B. Stone, and with Calvin Baker, who farmed in the neighboring village of Burkett. Dr. Howard dropped in on all these friends while making his rounds. Sometimes he called on two or three of them in the course of a single round. Dr. Chambers's son recalls that "Dr. Howard came by our house at all hours of the day or night."
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Dr. Howard's best friend was, without a doubt, Dr. Solomon Roe

Chambers, whose presence in Cross Cut had induced Isaac Howard to settle there. His visits to the Chamberses' doubtless occurred on evenings when no lights showed at the J. W. Newtons'. The doctor asked advice on domestic matters of anyone who would listen. When relations with Hester were at their worst, he would sometimes threaten to "take out" —leave and get a divorce. Although most of his confidants could offer the stubborn, self-centered man no more than a sympathetic shake of the head, Dr. Chambers would set himself up as a marriage counsellor, "to iron things out." Then for a time the Howards' family life would run more smoothly.
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Dr. Chambers shared Isaac Howard's intellectual interests. Together they studied and practiced hypnotism. When Calvin Baker's wife suffered a bout of pneumonia, Dr. Howard put her into a deep sleep, from which she awakened refreshed and free of respiratory distress. And she continued to improve from that point on.
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Isaac Howard and his friend were also seriously interested in occultism. Solomon Chambers owned a book by "Yogi Ramacharaka" titled
Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism,
published in 1903 and often republished. Isaac read this book and underlined many passages that impressed him. Ramacharaka was actually William W. Atkinson, a writer affiliated with the New Thought movement, founded at the turn of the century.