Thirty Rooms To Hide In (36 page)

Mom’s letters, August, 1966

The deep unhappiness that occasionally overtakes me has two forms: one, that Roger’s life was such a misery to him – to him who seemed to have so much. The other, that the boys have not had in the last ten years a father – and never will have. Related to that, I have not and, at my age, never will have a husband who is rock and oak in life’s storms and a joy in life’s sunshine (you recognize the Ingersoll). In my life, I had such a short time of true love that I look with a wistful eye on other marriages. I am going to miss one of life’s greatest joys – and this often grieves me.

My dad died of “pneumonia.” It’s on the record. But if
I
ever turn up dead, bring my Mom in for questioning and grill her about what little bastards we were when she tried to start dating again.

After ten years of life with the Volcanic Thunder Bourbon God you’d think pretty much anybody Mom brought home would look like a fucking Ken doll. But for some sad reason we weren’t ready to be friendly to anyone Mom invited to sit in Dad’s seat at the table. Of particular note was a good man named Dick Swanson, a contractor Mom met while building the new house we moved into after the Millstone. He didn’t drink or smoke and there wasn’t a cynical bone in his body – which may have been the problem. We were dark little critters by then, Orcs with braces, and his avuncular knock-knock jokes didn’t fly with us. His stutter didn’t help matters either.

Have the cops ask Mom about that time I said, “Hey, Mom. You goin’ out again with D-D-D-D-D-Dick?”

* * *

There’s truth in that strange old saying, “You can shoot the horse, but it won’t fix the leg.”

Yes, Dad was dead but our family was still broken. There followed a few years of conflicts between Mom and the four of us who remained at home, but most of these skirmishes worked themselves out as our adolescence passed. We began to have great times there in the house on the hill, a home Mom designed herself.

She built the entire house around a library – her dream library: two stories tall, with catwalks and ladders to reach the high shelves; a stone chimney rising 40 feet; and books – books everywhere. Her hobbies and her reading no longer had to be hidden up in the Tower Library or tucked away in drawers at 5 o’clock. The Hill House spilled over with her interests: pictures of her beloved ships on the walls, dictionaries set open on pedestals, and a bust of Shakespeare looking down over her peaceful kingdom.

She began to do things for us she couldn’t when Dad was alive. For his 15th birthday, brother Dan asked for a “Viking dinner” – a dinner without a table or chairs, with the food served on the floor and no plates, no forks, spoons, or utensils of any kind – just the food. Mom loved the idea provided we spread our feast on a tarp of clean plastic.

So the sheet was rolled out, the brothers sat on the floor and Mom came in with the steaming tray of meat loaf and plop! it went on the mat. Hot mashed potatoes were scraped from pot to floor, followed by a green waterfall of peas and our feast was set.

We made Neanderthal grunts as we dug our fingers into the meatloaf as if it were a bison with the spear still sticking in it. Peas took some chasing around to get a decent mouthful, and all agreed sinking your fingers into a hot mound of the mashed potatoes was a rare culinary delight. At the very end of our Viking dinner, Chris scraped the “leftovers” with the flat of his hand into an urpy-looking pile in the middle.

“Anybody who’s a real Viking will eat a handful of
that
.” We all took the challenge and had our first, and last, taste of Tarp Goulash.

When the last of the brothers left the Hill House for school in 1972, Myra moved out of Rochester to a small town an hour north and become a “farm lady” (her description). She also took training to teach dyslexic children how to read. A love of books and the RJL-professor in her combined to make her an extraordinary, sought-after tutor. After teaching hundreds of kids how to read at the kitchen table in her farmhouse, she was awarded “master” status and began teaching the subject at Carleton College in Northfield. She never had the college degree she wanted but there she was, teaching a master’s course in one of the very highest-rated colleges in America.

Along the way she raised chickens, wrote poetry, and cried at
When Harry Met Sally
(the part when Billy Crystal runs up the stairs at the New Year’s Eve party looking for Meg Ryan). And though it was clear to the six of us she hoped one day to get married again, it never happened and she made her peace with it.

She continued her weekly letters to Grandpa and Monnie through the Hill House years and though Grandpa was by then too old to travel, she finally got her trip to Gettysburg. Brother Chris and I accompanied her on the train to Pennsylvania. The happiness on her face as we picnicked by the infamous Copse of Trees – a moment years in the coming – was complete.

“Right there, boys.
That
’s where General Armistead made it to the Federal cannon.”

In the fall of 2005, my mother and I took a vacation at an old lake resort in Wisconsin; Kip and his wife Georgia were there, too. They had Room 8 and Mom and I shared 7 next door. It was 10pm and we were both in our beds reading. She finally called it a night, placed her bookmark in its spot, and rolled over to sleep. After a little while she sat back up.

She was crying. And she asked a question that still astounds me.

“Was I good mother?”

“What are you
saying
, Mom? ‘Was I a good mother?’ Of
course
you were. What is it, … what can you be thinking?”

“I should have taken you boys out of that house sooner. Just taken you all away.”

This was what was on my mother’s mind as she tried to fall asleep 39 years after it had all ended: “I should have taken you out of there sooner.”

“Momma, leaving was never an option,” I tell her. By now, I’ve come over to her bedside and am stroking her head. “We all know divorce laws then… they were medieval. And it doesn’t matter anyway because … you
did
save us, Mom, you saved all of us.

“We’re all fine, Momma,” I assure her. “I’m proof. I’m right here. Kip’s right in the next room. We all made it, Momma.”

As earnestly as I spoke those words, as hard as I looked into her eyes, I don’t think I reached her. After a while, she simply stopped crying, patted my hand, said “I love you,” and rolled back over to go to sleep.

My mother is 82, as of this writing. She was little when she was young and that night under the covers in her cabin bed, she seemed positively teeny. As I looked at her sleeping form I remembered how she saved all six of us. And then it occurred to me, 40 years too late, that no one had saved her.

No one had saved her.

She made it through all those years, had protected us, shielded us and tended to our wounds but no one had tended to hers. She rebuilt the family, created a new house, got us through our dangerous adolescent years, and sent us into the world as a group of fairly normal young men. Yet even while the family stitched itself back together, for years after Dad’s death it seemed there was sadness behind her eyes.

In November of ’65, while Dad was hospitalized at Hartford, brother Jeff captured this sadness in a portrait he took of her. Whether Mom knew how poignant and telling the shot was I don’t know, but she liked it enough to frame the picture and send it to her parents as a Christmas gift.

Grandpa’s letters, December 24, 1966

It is noon. What do I see on opposite side of room? A fascinating photo of my daughter!! I sit here and gaze at it, trying to decipher what was in your mind as the camera snapped. I said to your mother, “There is maturity beyond any hitherto shown.” To me, there are vague lines of grief, deep trial, sadness, overcome by a philosophy akin to that expressed by Tennyson in those words I so often quote: “And yet we trust that good shall fall, at last far off, at last to all. And every winter change to spring.”

I look at the photo and see intelligence, beyond any I ever possessed. I have been a doer rather than a thinker. But you, you have the philosophical mind. Otherwise how could you have survived these recent years? But they may have left their mark upon you. I think I see it in your face – serene, untroubled now – but still, how shall I say – aware of tragedy.

Is it my imagination which leads me to say there is a Mona Lisa touch of a smile? Perhaps I am imagining things. I confess I am unable to arrive at an analysis. I lay pen down to let impression ripen.

[Later:] I look across room again at your picture, which now is in the shade of Christmas Eve. There is a slight smile – and do I discern a bit of the quizzical in the eyes? Well, I confess, I love this framed photo of you, my only daughter.

There are places in the world where bad things happened. In these places the illusion of time grows weak and if you stand still enough you can hear what happened there, lingering like the last notes of a sad song. If you go to Dallas and stand in Dealey Plaza where Mr. Zapruder stood, you can fade back to November ’63 and, at the sound of the shots, throw yourself to the green grass and weep.

In the summer of 2007 I went to Rochester and visited the Millstone. I should say I went to visit the nice family who lived there, but it was the house I’d come to speak with. Driving up Institute Hills Road, I could see the water tower still keeping its watch over Bamber Valley, though today there are no boys standing on its red conical top. Coming down the last bit of road, the same 80-foot fir trees keep the Millstone from view until you come at last to the stone gate posts, which still announce your entrance like a guest at a ball. Another Mayo Clinic doctor answers the door and after hearing again the story of my connection to the house, he and his wife kindly allow me and my camera to wander the rooms while they go grocery shopping. I am alone in the Millstone.

From the front door I can see the spot in the pine grove where a good dog named Caesar has been resting all these years. I think, “Stay, Caesar,
stay
” and the dark humor brings water to my eyes. But that’s what we did here – dark humor.

The new owners have tried to make the space their own, but decorating the Millstone is like sprucing up the Pyramids – it is what it is, and the rooms want things where they belong, and so their living room couch is where we had ours, chairs where we had them. Even the stereo is in the same place, now with computer chips instead of the warm tubes that glowed orange in back of the wooden cabinetry of our “Hi-Fi.”

I walk through the dining room, where our father returned from work and kissed each boy on the cheek, move into the kitchen and – well, I’ll be damned – the liquor’s found its natural habitat, stored in the same kitchen cabinet. Ah, a refrigerator, I see, with no
dent
marks.
(Their kids must’ve scored well on their months-of-the-year quiz – alriiiight!)

There are small things here too, details only a brother would know to look for.

In Dad’s study, where the wall-mounted pencil sharpener was, three discreet screw holes mar the wood. The dent in the thin wood panel over the fireplace is there too, right where Mrs. Buttert leaned against it. (This is not a Mrs. Buttert Joke; it happened.) Even the plumbing pipe in the basement where one of my hamsters disappeared is there, still open for business.

And around the corner, here’s my old room in the fallout shelter. The national boogeyman – the Communist – has been dead for years and the bricks over the windows probably came down long before the Berlin Wall. Our family boogeyman, he too is long gone and accordingly my old hidey-hole is awash in summer light again; there’s even a small breeze. Out the open window, I can see the back yard from an angle I haven’t seen since October, 1962.

The owners have returned from the store. I greet them, and thank them for their trust and hospitality. Time for one last stop.

I go up two floors to stand outside Momma’s Tower Library. The door is open now; no need to pound on it this quiet August afternoon. Come on in, and I do. It is still an oval room and its shelves still wrap around you like arms. But there’s no literature or history here today – no Elizabeth Barrett Browning, no
Lee and Longstreet at Gettysburg
, but a mixed bag of how-to books, novels, cookbooks, old magazines. Overhead I see they’ve painted over Momma’s constellations; and the wall’s yardstick markings of six growing boys are also gone. It is different now this room, yet it is the same spot, the very place where Momma took my face in her hands and said, “Honey, do you think you can make the climb down from the balcony and go get help at the Martin’s?”

The French doors are still there. Looking over the edge of the balcony, I can see the first stone I set my foot on in descent. The very stone, used by Spider-Man himself. And on the ground below, the spot where the little boy runs off into the July heat to look for help that won’t be there.

It strikes me at this moment: Why didn’t we turn on him? The seven of us, turn and with locked arms say, “No, Roger. No, you cannot do this. You cannot treat us like this.” It was seven of us – one of him. There was no reason. It simply didn’t occur to us we had the power.

But Spider-Man had the power. And he saved me, in his way. As did Quiet-Man, Lonely Guy, and Suave Ghost. The Pagans and the Beatles saved me, too. And of course our laughter – our constant, inappropriate laughter – at the wrong times and the wrong things, it saved us. We laughed at victims, at ourselves, and at Dad; we laughed in the face of tornado weather, at 30-story falls from water towers, at death, and at funerals. Even to the hour we moved out of the Millstone, we were laughing.

We made another Ridiculous Film that bright sad day in the summer of ‘67, when the big moving truck was in the driveway. Here comes Luke out the front door carrying Mom’s delicate model ship-building kit (secretly emptied of its fragile contents); he cavalierly tosses it in the car. (Mom gasps a month later when she sees the film, then laughs.) Here’s Chris, hauling something incredibly heavy, followed by Collin carrying a salt shaker. Kip emerges, carrying Collin himself, stiff as a board, and throws him on the truck with the rest of his stuff.

We were just screwing around. Screwing around to the very end.

As I leave, I stop at the stone gateposts at the end of the driveway. Turning to take a last look at the old house, I think of the many places I’ve searched to find the original memories of my childhood –the photographs and films, the letters and diaries. But the living memories are right here, on these grounds, stored right where they happened, each one buried like Caesar in the grove. With memories embedded in every curve of stone, in the light hitting a high window, the house remembers itself for you. I’ve stepped through the black-and-white photographs into color, reached through the amber and at last touch the actual thing. Every memory, good and bad, is all right here.

And today, at the end of this driveway, the bad memories, they don’t seem so scary anymore. They’re bullies, bad memories, and they take up more room in our heads than they ought to. For every bad moment, the house has a thousand memories of joy and teems with happy ghosts. Just look at it. There in the front yard a collie dog chases the ghosts of six little boys through the deep snow, and on the back porch the Pagans are warming up – there are ghosts down in the fallout shelter building forts out of the canned food stored away for Armageddon – there are ghosts up on the pitched red slate roof doing things dangerous even for ghosts – there are Halloween ghosts too, still noisily counting out the night’s take of candy at the dining room table, and down the hall from the living room Hi-Fi comes the ghost of John Lennon and the lyrics of
Help!
– our soundtrack for the years of romping through the great house. And everywhere there are boys – boys rolling and tumbling, singing, laughing, fast and slightly out of control.