Thirty Rooms To Hide In (7 page)

For now, the thick walls of the Millstone were a safe place for my mother to raise six little boys. But beyond the gates at the end of the driveway the country drifted into a period of dangerous intolerance: the Cold War was getting into high gear and civil rights were more than a decade away. The ‘50s were a combination of boredom, paranoia, racism, and sexual repression. If the Religious Right could travel back there today, they’d break the return switch and set up shop in Paradise. They had Russians to hate, Generals to vote for, “Negroes” to fear, beatniks to laugh at, and church to go to on Sunday.

Life was good.

Grandpa Longstreet, who’d voted Democratic in every election since Wilson, voted for DFL nominee Adlai Stevenson in ’52 and served as the county campaign manager for him when he ran again in ‘56. My mother read widely to inform and support her political affiliations but took counsel in these matters from her father. RJL was of the opinion “The General’s” White House was fear-mongering half the time and golfing the other.

The state of Minnesota was one of few Democratic stalwarts, with local heroes like Hubert Humphrey making a stand for civil rights at the ’48 Democratic National Convention. “But Rochester and the Clinic were a Republican strong-hold,” my mother remembers. “Which is why the Democrats had to dig around to find people like me, you see. To stand in the reception line for Eleanor Roosevelt when she came through town campaigning for Adlai.”

The little town was Republican; full of what Myra called “rabid Ike-men”: men who’d survived the war and wanted now only to practice medicine and raise their families. World War II was over. They’d all paid their dues: some in combat, all in medical school. They were the best in the world at what they did and the world needed what they did. Polio stalked the summer streets and cancer was warming up on-deck.

The Republicans beat Adlai Stevenson twice; in ’52 and again in ’56. During the months leading up to the elections, tensions grew between my father and mother. What began as dinner disagreements lasted until the dishes, and then until bedtime. Arguments about who was fit to serve in the White House devolved into who was fit to have an opinion. In October of ’52, Myra wrote: “Rog and I have gotten into such violent arguments I am reminded of our Roosevelt-Dewey days”.

When Adlai Stevenson’s sister, Elizabeth Ives,
campaigned for him in Rochester, my mother had the opportunity to tell her the story of the great divide in Sullivan family politics. When a local pol later suggested it was time to “get out and ring a few doorbells,” Mrs. Ives interrupted, saying, “Everyone but Mrs. Sullivan. She has her work cut out for her at home.”

Outnumbered in Rochester and overpowered at the Millstone, my mother sought more “ammunition,” as she put it, from her father and brother Jimmy: facts, figures, proof. To which Roger’s reply would be, “You’re not thinking for yourself.” To which Myra responded by visiting the public library – “to get newspaper articles and read both candidates’ speeches and some editorials.” But no matter how she fortified her position, she gained no ground and by election time was writing, “Things are so tense in our house we hardly dare mention politics.”

She began to keep her politics to herself. The Cold War had arrived in the Millstone.

A few years ago, an arsonist nearly burned down my brother Chris’s house. Neither Chris nor any of his family was there at the time, though the family hamster died. The morning after, Chris and I drove back to his house to examine the damage. When we pried away the firemen’s temporary plywood door and entered, the smell of wet charcoal was strong. I watched Chris walk through the dripping cavern of his old bedroom, where ceiling insulation hung down like stalactites. As he looked for possessions worth salvaging I noticed a clock on the wall. Its hands had stopped at the height of the fire and its melted plastic housing had begun to droop like a Dali painting. My reverie was broken when Chris handed me the first undamaged things pulled from the shelves – his collection of old family photographs and the diaries he’d been keeping since 1965. We packed them in boxes from the U-Haul store and carted them out to the trunk of his car.

Like everything else in the house that hadn’t burned outright, his archives suffered smoke damage. Weeks later, when he opened the box, its contents still had the odor of a wet barbeque pit – so very different from the pleasant smell most old books develop as they sit on a shelf, preserving history. Chris sent his diaries off for the suggested ozone treatments, but even when he lent them to me months later, the smell of disaster and ruin wafted from the turn of every page; a strange sort of olfactory onomatopoeia, reading as I was the story told there of the ruin of Chris’s childhood home. Like the clock on the wall, here too time was frozen; here too was damage.

As our father’s anger began to burn in the Millstone, everybody near the heat suffered.

The clock on the wall of our childhood began to melt around 5 o’clock when Dad got home from work and poured a drink.

5 o’clock was when the tension began, when eggshells were spread up and down the hallways of the Millstone. In November of ‘58, a letter from my mother reads: “There are tragic overtones in our house today – and omens of catastrophe ahead. Jeff has lost Roger’s transistor radio. So everyone in the house is trembling at the necessity of revealing the loss to Roger. There is sure to be donder and blitzen crashing over his head tonight – poor luckless boy… Few indeed (and bless you for it, Poppa) are the memories of my father in anger.”

5 o’clock was when the arguments began. Argument isn’t the right word because it suggests a back and forth; two voices. In the Millstone, it was only Dad’s voice and it was angry. Mom didn’t pick up the fight and, as we eavesdropped from the top of the stairs, it was like listening to a man yell at somebody over the phone – you heard only half the script and had to imagine what the other person was feeling.

It wasn’t a sound you could hide from. The bass notes of my father’s voice came through the walls of the Millstone and though we little ones couldn’t make out the words, even a dog knows when its owner is angry. Like dogs, we too assumed the anger was because of us, but what we’d done we had no idea. You crept away to a quiet room and you learned to handle things as best you could. You certainly couldn’t approach the grown-ups with any kind of a problem. It could light another fire.

They say, “When elephants fight, ants suffer.” True, and when elephants drink the ants are toe-jam because we never knew which way to run. You might get maudlin Dad, with the false cheer and boozy kisses. You might get Sulking, Silent, Sitting-in-his-study Dad, burning like a fuse to an unseen bomb. And if anyone said the wrong thing, boom – you had Angry Dad. Wrote Mom in a letter from 1958: “Thursday was Thanksgiving. A very pleasant day until nighttime when the boys caught you-know-what from their father. He was sleeping on the couch and they made too much racket playing with the dog. So everyone was sent to bed about 6:15.”

Arson investigators pick through rubble for clues to how a fire started. Perhaps this smoky diary has clues. Here, in Chris’s handwriting: “Dad came home all mad today.” Perhaps all the damage that came later can be traced to a short-circuit in Dad’s head; to the anger that smoldered in his study as he sat there after work nursing grudges and a drink: mad at Mom’s politics, mad at the noise we made playing with the dog, mad at…at
things
.