A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (21 page)

We went to her psychiatrist’s house and sat in the front room and when a car passed by, we ducked out of sight. Her doctor announced that my father was homicidal. And when I heard this, something in my head 
clicked
. It was a mechanical sensation, like one gear fitting into another. And then it was as if a small amount of pressure were relieved, a blister popped. Because now I had a name for what it was about my father that had always puzzled me, always been on the tip of my tongue and yet impossible to quite say. Before, I’d explained to myself that he was missing something. Or there was something 
off
 about him. But now I had the word for it.

WHEN WE PULLED into the driveway a few days later and saw my father’s shadow behind the screen door, my mother said, “Damn it to hell, he’s supposed to be gone.” She killed the engine, and we sat for a moment.

I saw his dark form standing behind the screen door. A trick of the light made him appear as not a man in shadow, but the black 
absence
 of a man, a cutout, a void. “We are not safe here,” I said to my mother.

“It’s okay. He won’t hurt us. This will be very quick.”

I climbed out of the car and Cream did not run to me. My precious, joyful Ice Cream, just a massive puppy at heart. I called her name and heard her bark. I followed the sound of her voice and discovered her back in the woods, tied to a tree. No water bowl, no food. As I approached, she leaped at me, choking on her cruel leash, wild with excitement and relief.

If we hadn’t come home to get clothes that day, Cream would be dead. And what would my father have done, then? Put her head on a stick and placed it at the foot of the driveway, to welcome us when we did finally come?

If I turned out to be anything like him when I grew up, I would destroy myself. I unleashed Cream and led her to the spigot. I cupped my hands beneath the flow and offered her my human bowl.

I would not go inside the house. My mother packed for me.

WE MOVED INTO the basement unit of an apartment house in Amherst. A local priest had made the arrangements. Nobody knew our address, it was a secret. Cream came with us.

Every time I stepped outside, I looked all around me in every direction before venturing forward. The sun was merely a bother, illumination when I needed darkness and the safety of concealing shadow.

In bed at night, I could not take my eyes off the window across from my bed, terrified I would see his face suddenly behind the black glass. That he never appeared hardly mattered—the window owned me nonetheless. My eyes belonged only to it and I was tired, so tired.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” my mother asked, noticing the dark crescents beneath my eyes.

“I’m scared,” I said. I refused to say why. I wouldn’t tell her that I spent my nights watching the window, expectantly. I worried that to voice the fear might make it become true. I could possibly create the fact of him outside my window just by speaking the words.

MY FATHER MOVED out of the house and my mother and I moved back in. He rented a single room in the cellar of a house on Lincoln Street, in downtown Amherst.

My mother could not bear to be in the house she’d shared with my father, even though now it was just the two of us. She gave a few poetry readings. She saw her psychiatrist. She called a real estate agent to put the house on the market. The agent walked through the rooms and I saw the house through her eyes: the filthy, worn floors, the rotten deck, neglect everywhere.

With my mother gone most of the time, the house was mine. I cracked a tooth eating dry spaghetti from the box.

One day my mother told me, “I’ll be home late tonight.”

It was dark. She’d been gone for hours. The phone rang. I picked up the wall phone in the kitchen. “Hello?”

It was my father. “Son?” He was drunk. I could hear it in that one word.

“Yeah?” I said, walking with the phone attached to my ear out into the hallway. It was a long cord and stretched all the way to the front door.

“Son?”

“Yeah?”

“I have stolen a car. It’s a Mustang. And I am driving out there to the house right now and I’m going to kill you.” There was silence. And I heard him breathing.

“What did you say?” I whispered.

The phone went dead.

I let go of the receiver. Because I’d stretched the cord to its limit standing near the front door, the phone flew back into the kitchen and smashed against framed photographs on the wall.

I ran into the kitchen, did not see the shattered glass, and stepped all over the shards. My feet began to bleed immediately, the blood making the floor slippery. I lost my balance, slid, then brought my other foot down hard to catch myself, and sliced my toes.

I hurried out of the kitchen, running straight for the front door. I locked it. When I turned around, I was surprised to see my own bloody footprints on the floor. I looked down and saw that my feet were covered with blood. And I wondered if I had lost too much already.

I ran back into the kitchen, sliding along the way, and hung up the phone.

Where was my mother? Could I call her? I could not.

I dialed 
4
 on the rotary phone, screaming “Come on, hurry” as the dial slowly returned to its neutral position. I dialed, 
1
 and then 
1
 again. “God, hurry, come on, ring, ring, ring.” I was frantic, my heart pounding, my feet pounding as if they each contained their own beating heart. I endured three, four rings, and then the operator picked up. I asked for the number for the Amherst police department. And then I dialed it very carefully, so that I didn’t make a mistake and have to start over. In the middle of the number I realized I should have just called 911 but it was too late now, I couldn’t start over.

The police answered immediately.

There was too much breath behind my words and I couldn’t focus. “My father just called saying he stole a car and is coming out to kill me, it’s a Mustang he said and he isn’t far, he could be at the reservoir by now and there’s so much glass here, it’s easy to get in.”

The officer may have asked me questions and if he did, I answered them. He may have given me instructions and if he did, I followed them. I remember nothing until fifteen minutes later when the phone rang again and I answered.

It was an officer. His tone surprised me, the anger in his voice. “We’re here at your father’s apartment and he’s not drunk. He’s not stolen any car. He seems perfectly fine. You know, this is a very serious thing you’ve done, this prank.”

“Put my father on the phone,” I snapped.

I waited.

“Hello, son?” my father said, sounding concerned. “What’s going on here, what have you done?” His voice was bone-dry sober.

“Why?” I asked him. “Just 
why
?”

“Why what, son? Are you upset? Are you all right?”

“You just called me, drunk. You said you’d stolen a car, you said you’d stolen a Mustang and were coming out here to kill me. What’s going . . .why are you . . . this is . . .” I couldn’t get the words out, fury and terror and confusion overwhelmed me. I was standing in my own blood.

“Son, I did not just call you,” he insisted. And I would have believed him, fully, had I not just spoken to him moments before. For one brief, dark instant I questioned myself.

An officer came back on the line. “We even checked under the bed,” he said. “We didn’t find anything, not so much as an empty bottle. What kind of game are you playing here?”

He waited for my answer.

And when I didn’t give him one he continued, “Don’t you ever do that again. Calling the police like this? Wasting everybody’s time? Don’t you 
ever
.” Finally, he said, “This is a lousy thing to do to your own father, kid.”

Then he hung up on me.

I STOOD EXACTLY where I was beside the wall phone and my chest convulsed as the sobs came out of me in rolling waves. Tears dripped from my eyes and a long strand of mucus hung from the tip of my nose and I felt something washing out of me.

My mother came home and found me sitting in the dark kitchen, dried blood and glass still on the floor at my feet. When she saw me, she froze. “My God,” she whimpered. “Oh my God, what has happened?” Her breath smelled like coffee and this trace of normalcy restored my ability to blink and breathe and exit my stupor.

As I recounted the details of what happened, I never once took my eyes off hers because I needed her to hear every word I said and I needed her to believe me.

And because this was the man that she married, the father of her children, the one she knew so well, she did.

THE FURNITURE FROM our home in Shutesbury was now crammed into a much smaller rental house in Amherst. It was strange to see the black metal bookcases that had once lined the expansive rear wall of my parents’ bedroom now assembled in the living room, blocking the two windows. The long floral sofa, which at home had floated on a white rug in front of the sliding glass doors, now ran the length of the living room wall. Everything I’d grown up with was here, mashed into these few rooms.

The divorce itself was just a piece of paper signed by a judge and yet it had a profound impact on my mother. It was as if her entire personality changed. There was something wild in her eyes, fierce and furious. She paced the apartment like a caged animal and struggled for weeks with the same seventy-line poem. She called it, “my masterpiece.”

She was under the care of her psychiatrist, a white-haired Svengali who had a group of loyal patients, or followers, many of whom tithed ten percent of their incomes to him. The doctor had a large biological family and a number of extended family members—a “spiritual brother,” additional “wives,” and “adopted” children, many of whom were his psychiatric patients.

I began spending time at the doctor’s run-down, rambling house in Northampton. There was always somebody there, something going on. And it was better than being cooped up in the small Amherst home with my mother.

In time, I would move into the doctor’s home with his family. I would be given my own room, which I would paint white with bright red trim. The doctor would become my legal guardian.

And my mother would struggle through multiple psychotic episodes, tended to by the doctor and her new girlfriend, at eighteen just a few years older than me. She was also one of his patients.

These years living with the doctor and his family would come to be the defining years of my life.

And when I finally broke free, it would be many years before I fully comprehended just what had happened.

SEVENTEEN

ONCE, HOLYOKE, MASSACHUSETTS, was a thriving industrial city on the banks of the Connecticut River. Settled originally in the early seventeenth century by Englishmen, Holyoke’s very bones are British. Stand beside one of the old brick paper factories—its tapered, elegant smokestack reaching high into the sky—and squint, and you’d swear you were looking back in time at a factory along the River Thames. In the residential areas, wide boulevards are lined with old-growth oak and elm trees and the mansions are set back from the street—Greek revival, Victorian, Tudor. These were the homes of the paper factory owners and managers. Glorious, stately structures decidedly European in their design and construction.

In 1919, even Rolls-Royce opened a manufacturing plant in Springfield, the city next to Holyoke. The plant was a brilliant success, producing over three thousand Rolls-Royce motor cars. But in 1929, the Great Depression forced the plant to close forever. Yet, Springfield remains the only location outside of the United Kingdom where Rolls-Royce cars were ever made.

Dr. Seuss was born in Springfield and was a teenager when Rolls-Royce opened its doors there.

Holyoke could have become another Boston, or even a New York City, but instead, it stopped following the bread crumbs and lost its way. After the war, when the American economy moved away from manufacturing, Holyoke failed to reinvent itself. It just sat there and wondered where everybody went. And then it began to smell bad and its wounds became infected and it stopped bathing.

The city plunged into failure. It became the grimmest, poorest city in Massachusetts. A splotch of cancer in the center of the state. An entire brick factory, weeds sprouting from between the mortar, could be bought for tens of thousands of dollars. You could buy yourself a Craftsman home right near the river for under ten grand. But then, you’d have to live in it.

The crumbling brownstones that lined the downtown area, once so elegant they could’ve been in London’s Hyde Park or Boston’s Beacon Hill, were now in shambles. Some were occupied by check-cashing stands, the clerk seated behind a thick piece of bulletproof glass. Others were repurposed into low-income housing. Slumlords bought entire city blocks and carved up the buildings, cramming in as many families as possible.

The citizens of Holyoke no longer packed tin lunchboxes and went to work at the paper mills or the glamorous Rolls-Royce factory, where only one hide in five hundred was fine enough to become a car’s upholstery; many didn’t work anywhere. Holyoke was now just another depressed former mill town in a sorry state of decay. The city’s greatest resource was its rich Puerto Rican community, with the largest percentage of Puerto Ricans found in any city in America—second only to Puerto Rico itself. But like the empty factories and the intricate canal system, the rich heritage of its people was neglected. Poverty had infected Holyoke like a virus immune to treatment.

In 1983, at the age of seventeen, I moved into my first apartment on Appleton Street in downtown Holyoke. By lying about my age and adding a year, I was able to find work as a waiter. And I was able to afford this, my first apartment. My building had 
most
 of its windows, unlike the surrounding structures, where the blown-out windows were either boarded up or left as gaping black holes. My street looked like a mouth that had been punched, knocking out its teeth.

A car, stripped of all its saleable parts, sat outside my apartment building, its charred remains like the bones of a long-dead animal abandoned on the plains. Graffiti adorned nearly every building and the murder rate was high enough that you really had to think carefully before you walked outside to buy a soda, even in the afternoon.