Stories for Boys: A Memoir (8 page)

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Authors: Gregory Martin

BOOK: Stories for Boys: A Memoir
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It follows that if my mother and father had decided to go on a brief golf vacation, as they’d often done in the past,
after
my father’s suicide attempt and recovery, then their memories of those
six and a half
weeks would be more positive. The golf vacation would have no doubt been difficult, but they both liked to golf, and they could have even booked separate hotel rooms and taken only a few meals together, eating in silence or not, whatever. Most important would be their time together on the tees, fairways, and greens, my mother biting her tongue, struggling to refrain from offering small, constructive pieces of advice on my father’s swing. This golfing vacation would not have been nearly so painful as those moments when the fire trucks and ambulances arrived, lights flashing, sirens blaring throughout the Manito Park neighborhood – though my father’s memories of these particular moments are hazy. He was still conscious at that point but fading fast. Soon afterward, there is a two-day period of which he has no aversive memories at all, because he was in a coma.
According to Kahneman, rememberers suffer “duration neglect”:
By collapsing experience into moments, they seem to lose almost all impact of duration … The overall impression is determined as an average of how people felt at the peak and at the end.
 
My mother is a Public Choice economist. Almost forty years ago, she wrote her dissertation under the direction of James Buchanan, who, like Kahneman, is a Nobel Laureate in Economics, though Jim, as my mother calls him, wasn’t a laureate back then, not yet. So, for a long time, my mother has been a scholar interested in rational choices. But even had she known about the upside, memory-wise, of one more golf vacation together, I doubt my mother would have chosen this option. She does not want better memories. She does not want any memories.
My father would have chosen the golf vacation. He knows all too well that bad memories are to be feared.
Cold Case
 
MY BAD MEMORIES FROM CHILDHOOD WERE NOTHING like my father’s. Still, after my father’s suicide attempt, certain bad memories from my childhood kept coming back to me, nagging at me, daring me to puzzle them out.
When I was thirteen, my mother was granted a sabbatical from the University of Nebraska, where she was an economics professor, and our family left Lincoln and moved to Rockville, Maryland. My mother took a position as a fellow in an economic think-tank in D.C. This was my freshman year in high school. My sophomore year, we returned to Lincoln, ostensibly because my mother needed to return to teaching at the university. But my mother had worked out an understanding with her department – and with my father – and she took a job as an economic analyst in the Reagan White House. I was not party to these negotiations. My mother remained in D.C., flying back to visit us in Lincoln one weekend each month.
I missed my mother terribly. She’d always been the one I confided in, looked to for guidance or encouragement, the one I wanted to talk to most, about anything, the one whose recognition I coveted and worked hard to earn. How do you explain why someone makes you laugh, or feel at ease, or valued, important, distinct, cherished? How do you explain that the simple presence of a person makes the world feel less cold?
I did not understand why my mother had chosen to live away from us. Why did our family have to be separated? If my mother’s career opportunities were too good to pass up, great, but why couldn’t we have
all
just stayed in D.C.? So what if we needed to get the house in shape to sell? We didn’t need to live in it for that to happen. These were lousy reasons to split up a family. It didn’t make sense. It seemed like her choice only, an abandonment I couldn’t explain to myself, no matter how many times I turned it over in my mind. It never occurred to me that she might have been pushed. It never occurred to me that my father, like Iago whispering in Othello’s ear, only appeared to have my mother’s best interests, and all of our best interests, in mind.
When my mother flew back from D.C. that winter for Christmas, she was not herself. She had always been intense, passionate, willful. But now she spoke too quickly. She stood in our living room, her eyes too wide, waving her arms wildly. She told us, breathlessly, that there had been a miracle. Her flight had passed through a storm somewhere over the Midwest – through terrible turbulence. The plane was going down and should have crashed. Everyone should have died. But God had saved them.
I had never seen my mother behave this way before – fast talking and arm waving. She wasn’t overly religious. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes, in our house, was a parable, a biblical tall tale. We all knew the difference between literal truth and underlying mystery. But on this night, my mother claimed that God had spoken to her directly. God had told her that she should not fear. For her flight would pass through the storm and be brought down to rest in safety.
I did not believe her. She was not to be believed. I don’t remember looking to my father for some explanation. I try to remember what happened next, how the remainder of my mother’s first evening home played out, but there’s nothing there.
Then my mother was in bed and could not speak. I remember a period of several weeks when she lay in bed, catatonic. I remember her nightgown unbuttoned too far and her thin, veined hand absently scratching at an exposed nipple. She was completely unable to respond, unable to even acknowledge me, though her eyes were open. There was no way to break her silence. I yelled at her. I yelled that she was not my mother. But she could not respond. The most she could do was turn her head and look to the wall instead of the ceiling.
My mother says now, “I remember you yelling at me, that I was not your mother. But I couldn’t answer.”
I remember, later, running after her through the snow. It was a cold, overcast afternoon. She’d gotten past us, out the front door somehow, and was making her way down the block toward my old elementary school. She was in her slippers and nightgown, carrying her briefcase, which was empty. She’d recently regained the power to speak, and she told me she was late for work. She could not keep them waiting. She had to hurry. I took her by the elbow and steered her back home. I helped her back inside, upstairs, sat her on the bed, and I took her soaked slippers off her feet and helped her back under the covers.
I remember red, cold, bony feet and opening her briefcase to find it empty. But most of my memories of this time have the quality of a bad lyric poem – full of the kind of atmospheric impre - cision I have no patience for. I want to know what happened. Why not just say what happened? But I can’t. I can’t remember.
I remember sitting in the front row of Cathedral of the Risen Christ Church. My mother had insisted we go to 10:30 a.m. mass, insisted we all sit in our usual place in the front pew. Off and on throughout the service, my mother wept. She wailed. Caterwauled. There was no other sound. I tried to get her to leave the pew, no genuflecting, just leave, just walk down the aisle and outside. The priest continued saying the mass, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, displaying a Catholic willingness to ignore calamity that should surprise no one.
My mother would not be moved. Her wailing still rings in my ears.
My father told me that the muscles in my mother’s neck were too tense; the muscles were constricting the flow of blood to her brain. She just needed to rest. The muscles in her neck would eventually relax, and she’d be herself again. She did not need to go to the hospital. He did not utter words like “psychiatrist,” “manic-depression,” “bipolar.” He would not even say, “nervous breakdown,” though I heard other people say this, in my presence, about my mother. He did not tell me about the time my mother escaped from a mental hospital when I was ten. He did not tell me she’d once admitted herself to a mental hospital before I was born. My father did not even say the word “crazy.”
I wanted to know why. Why couldn’t my mother even speak to me? Would she ever get better? Did she know what was happening to her? How much did she understand? Would this awful feeling in my heart ever go away? I don’t know that I ever asked my father any of these questions directly. I don’t think so. I can’t remember. But I will never forget the power of those unacknowledged feelings – confusion and helplessness, fear and grief.
It occurs to me now that here is one reason why it was so completely unacceptable that my sons did not know why their grandparents had divorced. They were confused and sad, and I had an explanation, and I was keeping it from them, and this unspoken explanation was intimately related to other unspoken explanations – a chain of secrets and unacknowledged sadness that now ran through me to them.
LATE ONE NIGHT, that winter I was fifteen, I “stole” our red Ford Escort wagon. I only had my learner’s permit and so wasn’t legal to drive on my own. Sometime after midnight, I silently rolled the car out of the driveway, turned the key in the ignition halfway down the block, and drove to my girlfriend’s house. Or at least I thought of her as my girlfriend; she had a boyfriend off at college who was shorter than me. My father was awake and discovered first the car, then me, missing. I’m speculating, but perhaps he missed the car because he was planning to go somewhere himself. Perhaps he was planning to meet someone, someone anonymous. One more person who didn’t know him.
About an hour after I arrived at my girlfriend’s house, my brother showed up. He said, “You should go home.” When I came in the kitchen door around two in the morning, my father was sitting at the table. My mother was upstairs, in bed, but it’s not quite right to say that she was asleep. She mumbled at all hours. Sometimes her eyes were open, sometimes not. My father did not yell at me. Nor did he commiserate, regaling me with his own late night escapades, hamstrung by desire. In a leap of logic that only now makes sense, my father told me that he wanted me to talk to Monsignor Crowley. I didn’t have to make a confession. I just had to talk. So, that very next day, Monsignor Crowley and I talked, though I don’t remember the conversation or even where it took place.
If you could have seen me during this time, walking the halls of my high school, attending class, at basketball practice with my teammates, there would have been no way for you to surmise that all was not well at home. I was engaged, purposeful, kind. I kept earning straight As. I raised my hand in class, though not too much, and either I knew the answer or was willing to speculate. I never said it aloud to anyone, much less silently to myself, but I was troubled.
My mother’s madness diminished like an echo. She returned to herself. She did not talk about what had happened to her any more than my father talked about what had happened to her. Or what had happened to him. I did not want to bring up what had happened out of the fear that at the mention of certain words or phrases or events she might start wailing again. I did not know how fragile she was – or I was – and so I assumed the worst and buried my need for explanation.
At the end of that year, my mother left her job at the univer - sity, we sold the house on Stratford Avenue, and we moved back to the D.C. area, where we bought a house in Falls Church, Virginia. To say that I didn’t like attending three different high schools in three years in three different states is an understate - ment I wasn’t capable of then.
During that time, I perfected a skill I’d been learning all my life, a skill that had been modeled for me since the day I was born, a skill that I have to this day in all kinds of contexts and situations – the ability to maintain a veneer of equanimity, a surface polish, a detachment from my emotional life, that I no longer trust. Because, then and now, it is not an act, not a conscious one anyway. I have even myself fooled.
 
TWENTY YEARS LATER, after a mysterious suicide attempt, like a cold case detective presented with crucial new clues, I started piecing a few things together. I understood that my father might not have minded those months of separation. Not so much. That time he spent parenting us alone while my mother remained in D.C. – maybe that wasn’t so bad for him. I had always assumed it to be a tremendous hardship for him. It certainly was for me.
One summer night, I interrogated my father on this issue. What really happened is that I started shouting.
“Didn’t you
want
that to happen? Didn’t you
engineer
that to happen? Didn’t you want her to be halfway across the country? Didn’t you play the part of the martyr? Wasn’t that an act? Didn’t you love that you could come and go late at night without any chance of being caught out? Didn’t you feel responsible for pushing her away? Do you think that had
anything
to do with her losing her mind? Do you think that would have happened if we’d all been together?”

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