Chapter 1 New York City 1939

 

NEW YORK CITY 1939

In the year I was born war was declared, Sigmund Freud died, and with hope and trepidation the first edition of the "Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous was published. July 24 of that year was sultry - nothing unusual for a New York summer. My father- tall, thin, introvertedly brilliant - was in the process of "breaking down." This mysterious phrase haunted me for years, making me wonder if I, too, possessed the elements of such a degeneration, delicate nerves somehow unraveling in a way that would show on the surface and influence the lives of everyone around me forever. My mother, a luminous young Communist, was involved with the WPA as World War II developed. Her lifelong motto had already formed: "As long as a soul in the world is suffering, we can never be happy." Looking at them now, 55 years later, in the black and white photos of many sizes which they posed for and kept, and reading the numerous missives to family and friends left behind in dusty boxes, they seem Fitzgeraldian - slender, elegant, articulate - and full of energy, good looks, and hope for a better political future. In these faded moments trapped on camera and old notepaper, they are forever pausing somewhere on the arc of motion between beginning to move and coming to rest. They were born in small towns within 300 miles of each other - my mother in Crystal Lake, Illinois just northwest of Chicago near the Wisconsin border; my father in Peru, north central Indiana. In all these years, I am only now looking for these places in a road atlas where I find the two states bordering each other both geographically and alphabetically. Albert, Mary, Marjorie, Malcolm, JeanThe oldest brother, Donald, is missing from the picture. My father's siblings numbered two brothers and three sisters, all with Scottish given names to match their heritage. He was fourth in line in what several of them have told me was "dour" family, a word I have never in my life heard anyone else but them speak aloud. It has the Scottish meaning of "barren, rocky, infertile, or otherwise difficult or impossible to cultivate" according to my father's huge Random House Dictionary of the English language which rests on a stool in my study.

My father's father was a high school Latin teacher and he moved his wife and children to Portland, Oregon where he eventually became a high school and middle school principal. As a child, I visited the house they lived in and remember it as large, with much solid, dark trim on banisters and mantelpieces, dark red carpets, an upstairs with a porch where my father slept growing up, and a mysterious attic full of books and esoteric treasures which drew me like a magnet in spite of my apprehension of dim and cobwebbed places. Above all, it was dark, self-contained - as they were.

They were an intellectual family which prized education and the correct employment of the English language (or any other languages they studied). All of them went to institutions of higher learning and all three brothers achieved Ph.D. degrees. They went out into the world in their different capacities, though rarely did anyone from the outside world disturb their insularity at home. Inside this boundary, the family dynamics produced six adults who learned to cover fragility with a veneer of impatience which ranged from amused sarcasm to deadly bitterness. My father, I believe, may have been the most sensitive, and most cynical, of them all.