Thirty Rooms To Hide In (33 page)

Mom’s letter dated Friday, July 16, 1966

Kip and Jeff met Jim at the airport at 9:05 Sunday night. By this time news was beginning to spread faster. Though most of the phone calls were mercifully made to the Bianco’s house, there were still many calls here, and there was an increasing flow of good friends bringing food to us. … So I lack nothing that can be done for me. Let me go back to Ted Bliven, unknown to you, scarcely remembered by me, but to whom I owe much gratitude. He is the man in Augusta (an old medical school classmate) whom Roger went to see. And this man – fully aware of the situation – was willing to give Roger a chance. He gave Roger a three-year contract, beginning in a teaching capacity and returning him to surgery if he managed to get a hold of himself sufficiently. Again, much of this credit goes to Tony Bianco with whom Bliven talked at great length. Tony told him that Roger was eminently worth saving if Bliven was willing to take the chance. And Bliven was. Which meant that before he died, Roger had been given back his confidence, his self-respect, and we must hope, a degree of happiness. That Christian act cost Ted Bliven nothing but think of the joy it must have brought Roger in the last few days.

And so Jesus said to the worshippers gathered at the foot of his cross, “Come closer.”

And they came closer.

“What is it, my Lord?” asked one.

And Jesus said unto him, “I can … see your house from here.”

This joke used to make us howl. We’d collapse to the floor, delighting in its blasphemy. Yet even as we professed active disbelief in God or an afterlife, we did in fact believe in an unseen world – ours was the one full of all the scary shit. We Little Ones believed in ghosts and monsters. We believed in the Horrid Light and the gremlin on the wing of Rod Serling’s plane. Grandpa Sullivan may have thundered “Fear God” but it was monsters we feared. In fact, fear of monsters made us hedge our bets about God and adopt a sort of conditional atheism. We’d often find ourselves muttering conciliatory asides to God when we felt we were in danger and needed a back-up plan.
(“God, if you’re there, please let me make it to the light switch.”)

Kip however, being the oldest of us pagans, was the first to take his atheism public. He was on the speech team at John Marshall High School and in the fall of ’64 gave a podium-thumper promoting atheism and hammering organized religion.

“It created a big stir,” he remembers and said it led to an impromptu after-school discussion group that filled a classroom. “With the exception of a few people who spoke out with me, I was peppered by questions from irritated true believers. I remember feeling just great about the whole episode.”

Looking back, the controversy wasn’t surprising. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, there was no other strain of spirituality for sale in America except one-size-fits-all Eisenhower Christianity. So engrained in the culture was this house brand of religion, it’s surprising no one thought of putting it in the city water along with fluoride. Any child who had questions about subjects like death – or the soul, or wondered about existence, or mortality, or any fundamental life question – was anesthetized with party-line answers about crowns of thorns and bringing in sheaves and ancient tales of lost sheep and donkey jawbones all of which were so incredibly boring we simply stopped asking questions about the things that mattered.

We grew up, like many kids of that era, never having a single conversation with an open-minded grown-up who might embrace our doubts along with us. We never had a discussion about what it meant to be human – or about death or the soul – with someone who might wonder as we did what it all meant. Without any form of spiritual apprenticeship we simply made our way into what seemed a harsh world carrying with us an anger towards anything remotely associated with organized religion.

Now in the days following our father’s death, our anger was stirred by the assurances of well-meaning neighbors who took us aside to tell us, “Your father is now in heaven with the angels.” Kip noted in his diary that “Mrs. Martin stopped by, drunk as hell, made blunders that hurt Mom. I walked her home. She nearly cried praising Dad.” Worse than these blubbery eulogies for a man we were all angry with, were the whispered admonitions from visitors that perhaps it was time for us six boys to forgive. This one just pissed us off.

Okay, so Dad’s dead
and
he’s forgiven? Is this how it works? Everybody gets to crawl sideways out of their sin like a crab and go skittering off to their grave and hide out in eternity? Like death is some sort of payment? “Sorry everybody, I was an asshole, but I died so all bets are off. Paid in full. Ticket punched. Can’t touch me ’cause I’m in the Bosom of Jesus.”

Forgiveness wasn’t what we needed to hear just then. The wounds of his rages were still tender, the bottles still in the liquor cabinet, the image of Mom’s big white sunglasses still lingered in the lawn out front. But the religious bromides came into the house along with the casseroles and we accepted both, guessing this was simply what grown-ups did when someone died. Harder to accept, though, was the pressure we were feeling to embrace the rituals and ceremonies required by a church we didn’t consider ourselves members of. When Kip and Jeff began feeling railroaded into buying an expensive coffin, their anger began to surface.

“I remember having to go to the funeral home to pick out a coffin,” Kip told me.

“The whole idea of putting us all through a funeral pissed me off. Dad was to be cremated and a coffin seemed a waste of money. I tried to quickly pick a plain coffin and just get out of that place, but Uncle Jimmy called me farther back into another room to look at more expensive coffins, soothing me along the way with spiels about ‘custom and society’.”

Jeff also remembered feeling anger while at the funeral home. Only hours before, Uncle Jim had been assuring him “the body is just a shell that contains the soul” and now his uncle was pressuring him to buy an expensive box to put Dad’s “shell” in – a box they were only
renting
, given that Roger was to be cremated and only his urned ashes were to go beneath the sod near his father’s grave in Ohio.

“I remember a cramped little basement display area with 30 or 40 coffins,” Jeff recalled. “Kip and I argued with Uncle Jim that we not blow money on an elaborate coffin. We favored the simple blue metal one but Uncle Jim said, ‘You must keep in mind that people at the funeral might judge us as being disrespectful.’ This conversation happened more than once and I think Jim was getting pissed. Eventually we settled on an oak and brass one with white satin lining for $1,000.”

The tension grew again when Uncle Jim began double-checking the details on Roger’s funeral clothes. Mom had provided Kip with Dad’s favorite blue suit but at the last minute, Kip remembers, “I couldn’t find any of his ties. I had no tie for him when I got to the funeral home, so I wound up taking off the tie I was wearing and donating it to Dad, for him to be cremated in. I was so angry I think I came close to tears.”

Kip, today

Having to deal with Dad’s funeral angered me because it forced our family to deal with our incredibly mixed-up feelings in public. I just wanted the transition from Life-With-Dad to Life-Without-Dad to begin immediately. I wanted to retreat to the Millstone and begin mending my psyche, and tending to the wounds of the rest of you guys. But the funeral forced us out into the public eye where everyone could see us trying to cope with our pain and confusion. The fact that Jimmy wanted me to think about which tie Dad wore angered me. It was bad enough we were going to have to parade ourselves into a church and listen to formal blather about Dad from someone who didn’t know him and didn’t know us. Having to sweat the details – which coffin to buy, what shirt to put him in, which tie – it was more than I could bear.

Chris’s 1966 diary

The only thing that bugs me is to see how Mom is hurt. She crys a lot. It just broke her when she took her wedding ring off and had Kip put it in Dad’s pocket. We had to pick a casket today. Tomorrow is the reviewal.

Death, caused by a long illness, often allows a family to prepare for the end. At the Millstone, however, we’d moved in one leap from alcoholic insanity to religious ritual, and we understood neither. One day there’s a mad dog foaming through its teeth and the next a minister is smiling in through the screen door. All we really knew was that we were angry and even our anger we didn’t understand.

If we could have had our way, there would’ve been no funeral, no viewing. We’d simply have raised the drawbridge to the Millstone and retreated to its rooms. Was it not as if a cancerous tumor had been removed from the family body? Was there really a need to go “view the tumor”? Is it really “with the angels” now? We were
ANGRY
and in our fury and trauma, the religious rites that were offered to us as comfort felt more like cover-up.

Anger, like lightning, needs to strike something and discharge itself in the ground, but at the Millstone there was no target anymore – he was dead. Anger could only crackle out of our scalps and the tips of our fingers, fly around the empty room, and rebury itself in our chests. How could you be mad at a body?

Roger’s body was, in fact, now back in Rochester, delivered from Georgia in the cold cargo hold of a jet. Brother Jeff drove out to Rochester’s small airport to watch the plane land. “It took quite a while to unload cargo onto a train of three or four wagons,” he remembers. “The people got off. The luggage was picked up. Finally I saw what was clearly a casket being lowered from the cargo door with two guys in the plane’s hold and two on the ground.”

With the arrival of the body came more details of how Roger had actually died. Kip wrote in his diary that Uncle Jim had confided some details: “Vomited (flu), evidently fell (bruise on forehead) unconscious, choked to death.” This information was passed down to the rest of us and as the day approached to view our father’s body at the funeral home, our group anger curdled into a shared sense of anxiety.

That night, Kip and Uncle Jimmy dressed to make the trip downtown for the viewing, Kip bearing Mom’s wedding ring and her instructions to slip it into the pocket of Roger’s blue suit. “The poor dear man – who was so afraid of being alone – took something precious with him to the grave,” Myra wrote to her parents. “For no logical reason, it makes me feel he didn’t make the journey alone.”

Dan and I, seeing these tribal elders dressed in suit and tie, guessed where they were going and, in Mom’s words, “put up a clamor to go along. And so Jim and I found ourselves faced with a truly big decision.”

From Mom’s July 16, 1966 letter

My first response was “No!” as was Jim’s. I could see Jim was ready to explain it to Luke so I walked out of the room. But I realized that I was refusing Luke the last chance to see his father and that perhaps I hadn’t that right. I went back toward my library and met Jim on his way to me. “Let’s consider this, Jimmy. We’re dealing with a finality here and we mustn’t make a mistake.” My dear brother stood before me with tears running down his face. “I’ve already decided,’” Jim said, “I asked Luke why he wanted to go and his answer was, ‘Because I can’t believe my Daddy is dead’.”

My 1966 diary

See Dad dead.

* * *

That was my last entry in my diary for the year 1966 – three unemotional words: “See Dad dead.” – a diary I’d begun on my February trip with Dad to his mother’s funeral in St. Petersburg. I have no memory of writing the three words, but there they are in #2 pencil.

I don’t remember the ride downtown to the funeral home either. I don’t remember wearing a suit, what words were said in the car. I do remember that when we walked into the funeral home someone over my shoulder quietly said, “He’s right in here.”

I went around a corner and entered a dimly lit room. The walls were green. It took a minute for the image to come together, to understand that the box over there with the curved top was a coffin, that half of the box was open and that only the top half of my father was visible. There was no anger now – only awe. And a wondering:
What happened? What sort of trouble did you run into, Dad? You were just at home the other day. And now … look at us.

The perspective in this memory is from a low angle, it being the summer after my sixth grade. The left side of my father’s face is at eye level. I can see he’s banged his head on something, a small wound the mortician’s make-up can’t hide. I stand with my hands at my sides and wonder:
Should I touch him? Shouldn’t I? What if I do and it’s only out of “Wow, a dead guy. What’s that feel like?” It’s bad to think that, isn’t it? If I touch him I might get nightmares too, right? But in a few minutes I’ll never see him again. This is it. So if I don’t touch him, won’t I get nightmares about that? What if I turn around and walk out of this green room without touching my father ever again, what about that?

I reach out, up a little, over the edge of the casket and touch his … his cheek? his hand? I don’t remember. I do remember a feeling of cool. The suppleness of skin was gone. There was a hardness that the living have only at kneecaps or where the bone rides under flesh.

The reaching out, that touch of cool, and then nothing. The film stops. No memory of turning my back on my father forever, no image of sidewalk under my dress shoes, no feeling of the hot summer night, no sound of car doors slamming. Just the goodbye hand reaching over the suit, the cool, then nothing.