Another Kind of Madness Page 5

  She pondered before slowly raising her head. “Yes, Steve, I believe that you really could try to be both.” Excited, I asked whether I could divide my drawing into two parts. She nodded.

  I finished the next day. On the left side, the astronomer peered through a telescope, a few stars showing through the opening in the observatory’s ceiling with the roof retracted. On the right, a tall basketball player took a shot on a wooden court, as the crowd—little circles in the stands—cheered.

  Several years later, Mom and I sat in the kitchen of our new house as I pondered my future. Thinking back on that drawing, I asked if I could be both a pro basketball player and a scientist. Starting off brightly, Mom replied, “Now Steve, playing sports is wonderful. Keep it up as long as you can.” Yet her tone quickly changed as she stated, with authority, that they’d never be the main thing I’d do in my life.

  “It will be fine to keep playing sports,” she went on, “but remember: Your contribution to the world will be with your mind. Not through sports, but with your mind.”

  I started to protest but stopped in my tracks. I knew Mom was right before I could emit a word. The legacy in our family was to contribute through learning and knowledge. Yet as she made her pronouncement I had the strange sense that I’d need to stay alert at all times and keep my mind sharp. Without real effort, things might happen to a person’s mind. I couldn’t say precisely what, but something about Dad’s relatives who hadn’t fared well—and something unspoken about his disappearances—gave me a chill I couldn’t quite comprehend.

  *

  First grade was coming to a close. On a bright Saturday afternoon our back yard felt wondrous. Each blade of grass invited my bare feet. As dusk approached the sky turned luminescent, faint yellow streaks off to the west. Smoky shadows from the neighbor’s trees crept up our lawn. I could sense myself growing up, the possibilities endless. I walked over to Mom’s chair, hoping she’d agree that becoming an adult was as exciting as I thought.

  “Can I be older?” I called out. “Big people know so much and get to do so many things. It’s unfair to be small!” I paused. “Can’t I grow up sooner?”

  She gazed at me with a smile and then looked out toward the middle of the yard. Light on my feet, I wanted to run somewhere just to feel my body moving. Yet before she answered, her mouth drew in at the corners.

  “Stevie, you shouldn’t be in such a rush to grow up.” Though devastated, I tried not to show it. I can still picture her silhouette and the sky behind her, while she spoke with a blend of tenderness and conviction I’d never before heard.

  “You don’t know this yet, Steve, but there are many worries when people get older, many important things to take care of.” I stood there, staring. “Once you’re grown up, you’ll wish you could be a boy again.”

  What did she mean? What was she protecting me from?

  Grown-ups have big responsibilities, she went on, telling me to be glad that I was still young. With a wistful look, she summed up. “There’s no rush to grow up.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say. We lingered outside for another few moments but it was by now getting seriously dark. I tried to hold on to the rapturous feeling I’d had all afternoon but it was fading faster than the daylight. Deflated, I trudged inside. For a long time I couldn’t shake the glimmer of doubt in Mom’s face as she talked about all those responsibilities grown-ups have.

  On a warm evening not long after, Dad was barbequing outside on the grill. He started up the fire by dousing the briquettes with gasoline from the red can he used to fill up the lawnmower and then waited a few moments before throwing in a match or two. I knew it would take a while for the fire to get going, so I tried to be patient. Yet once the fire was raging, he reached in toward the fire, squirted extra gas right on top, and quickly leapt back. Roaring ever louder, the flames shot up straight toward the sky, the whoosh tremendous, everything wavy in the air above the yellow-orange flash.

  As Dad looked back toward me, his eyes gleamed with supreme enthusiasm. With a sly grin he did it again, once more revealing his thrill.

  I was excited but scared. I half-knew you shouldn’t pour gas right on the flames, but the feeling was tremendous all the same. The updraft and surge: What power! Yet I was terrified over what might happen if things got out of control. Dad craved this kind of thing, but I couldn’t help thinking of the consequences. Something pulled me back from too much excitement.

  Toward the end of the school year we examined my first-grade school photos, the group shot of the whole class and the individual, wallet-sized ones of me. I was wearing my favorite shirt, silvery-gray with thin black and red stripes, the opalescent buttons fastened all the way to the top. “School Days 1958–9,” said the small writing at the bottom.

  “Do you see it?” Dad said to Mom, gazing at the photo. “Steve has a Mona Lisa smile!” Mom nodded.

  I didn’t know what they meant, so they got out an art book and showed me da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. “It’s a small smile but a profound one,” Dad said. “It’s the smallest part of a circle, an arc. From some angles it hardly looks like a smile, but from others you can see it. Look from here, then here.”

  I looked at the page, tilting my head for different angles. I did see it: mysterious, slightly thrilling.

  When people came over to the house, Dad opened his wallet and showed off the photo. Could everyone see Steve’s Mona Lisa smile? he asked eagerly. Each time, heads nodded. At those moments I was weightless, floating through the day, larger than life. The surge in my body was overwhelming, just like the flames shooting above the glowing coals.

  But I knew I couldn’t stay there for long. Strange things might happen in that zone above my line of sight, where adults conversed and flames flared. When I came back down from such heights, where might I land?

  3

  The Midnight Drive

  Sitting handsomely on its treelined street, Grandmother’s three-story house exudes a quiet majesty. It’s still there on the other side of Columbus, out in Bexley. The new owners have modernized it, removing some of its charm although undoubtedly adding to its value. But if you half-close your eyes, it’s possible to imagine what it looked like all those years ago: the side porch with its wicker rocker; the lift of the wood-and stone-framed floors heading toward the roof; the detached garage at the end of the driveway, abutting the back yard and alley. The garage held the wooden scooters that Mom and her brother Buddy used years before, preserved for Sally and me when we visited.

  When we got tired from scootering, Sally and I explored the rooms of the house. Each one featured dark wooden floors made from the lumber of our grandfather’s mill in West Virginia. Student boarders at the college a half-mile away rented rooms up on the third floor, heading out the front door to class with a curt nod. Even into her nineties, Grandmother changed their sheets and did their laundry on a regular basis.

  Sally and I gazed into a second-story bedroom with its polished floor and heavy woolen bedspreads. We tiptoed in to the room, taking in the smell of varnish on the floorboards and the view through half-drawn shades across Fair Avenue to the Tudor homes on the other side of the street. Mom’s older sister, Virginia—Ginny Ann—had been born with mental and physical problems of some kind; no one knew what to call them back then. She limped with leg braces and called out some barely intelligible words. But her life nearly ended at age nine when she crashed headlong while trying to navigate the steep steps to the stone-floored basement far below, a fall to near-oblivion. Bleeding from her head, immobile, she survived but never spoke or walked again. Once out of the hospital, she lived in that bedroom for the next 25 years.

  When friends came over to play back in the 1930s, at the time Mom was in grade school, she heard them warn one another to be quiet. “Alene’s sister is very sick,” they’d whisper, looking down. “Don’t disturb her; she needs rest in her room upstairs.” I didn’t know my sister was sick, Alene thought. It’s just the way life was.

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p; She and Buddy would sometimes go in and sit with Ginny Ann. No one talked about any kind of tragic fate; life just continued. That kind of fortitude, laden with silent denial, provided the model for the responses Mom exhibited throughout her marriage.

  By the early 1950s Grandmother had finally needed to send Ginny Ann—a vacant stare in her eyes, wheelchair bound, mute forever—to Columbus State Institute, the massive building on the west side of town for those with feeblemindedness, as it was called, right across West Broad Street from Columbus State Hospital, where insane patients were sent. Miraculously, though, by the early 1970s the institute suddenly downsized and Ginny Ann entered a beautiful community residence. She lived there until the age of 89, having never walked since she was 9. The loving attention of the staff showed that, at least in some domains, respect and dignity have turned stigma on its ear.

  On the first floor of the house was a sitting room with a low sofa and reclining chairs that looked directly out to the back yard and the grape arbors in the garden. Grandmother made grape jelly each year. We watched as she poured the deep-purple boiling fluid into glass jars with bronze screw-tops and vacuum-sealed wax. When we spent the night, Sally and I played board games in the sitting room after dinner. On the huge Zenith in the corner, Grandmother watched her favorite shows, Lawrence Welk and Rawhide.

  But back in the late 1930s, when Mom was 12, her father spent a year there in a reclining chair after his first stroke. There was no way to transport him upstairs to the bedroom. Drooling, he could no longer speak intelligibly. Mom and Buddy spent time with him but everyone knew he’d never be the same. A year later, he died from a second stroke. Grandmother soon took over the family business. Once again, quiet forbearance was the order of the day. No one moped or complained; life proceeded.

  After hearing these stories, I wondered how any problems of mine could even begin to compare to theirs. And if I did wonder where Dad went, or why everyone kept silent about the issue, wasn’t it clear that the only way forward was just to not think about it?

  A small breakfast area abutted Grandmother’s kitchen, leading the way into the formal dining room. A large painted mural filled an entire wall of the small nook: a sailing boat on the blue-gray ocean, with billowing white clouds above a rocky coast. Eating at the wooden table, I secretly sailed to faraway lands, the cliffs and mountains beckoning, far from the house’s memories, far from the quiet terror of our own home.

  Mom finished high school in 1942 and then continued to live at home while taking the streetcar all the way down Main Street and then up High Street to Ohio State. For her last years, she lived in a sorority on campus. Dark haired and beautiful, she was an honors student as World War II raged overseas. Despite the losses she’d experienced, she persisted. A few years later, as a grad student, she would meet a new philosophy professor, changing the course of her life forever.

  *

  Sally, with her light-brown hair cut just above her shoulders. Sally, with the small gap showing between her front teeth, once her baby teeth were gone. When I was two and Sally one, she would bite my arm if I bothered her too much. The wet sting of her teeth and the tiny tooth marks indenting my skin lingered for hours. But while growing up, we were mostly inseparable.

  One day back on Wyandotte Road, I heard Sally’s screams from upstairs. Running through the bathroom, she’d slipped, and her forehead had crashed straight down on the rock-hard porcelain rim of the toilet. Mom and Dad rushed in. I hurried behind, my eyes huge when I saw the pale towel coated with fresh red blood. Suppressing the frightened look in his eye, Dad stayed with her as Mom ran to call the doctor, arranging for the stitches Sally soon got. The horizontal half-moon of the scar marked her forehead for years afterward.

  Many days, Sally and I played together, petted our hefty black-and-white cat Slim, and huddled together when it was cold or stormy outside. As we got older I showed her how to throw a spiral and helped her with homework. But when Dad was gone, we never talked about him, not once. Maybe it would threaten his ever coming back if we spoke. We were co-passengers on the same plane, flying to unknown destinations, strapped into our seats and staring straight ahead, neither of us able to steer.

  The difference was that when Dad returned from his mystifying absences, he spent private time with me, discussing his family out in California—but not with Sally. It’s as though he didn’t quite know what to do with a daughter. Far more than I, Sally was left to fend for herself.

  In her bedroom Sally built a make-believe world of small plastic animals on the bottom layer of her nightstand, with tiny trees, a beach area, and a blue-colored mat serving as the ocean. We played with the animals in their land, where they spoke their own special language, which we called Hossareeneum. It sounded like English but with different words: “lea” meant “please”; “dip, tonk” meant “yes, thanks.” Some days, Sally and I spoke to each other in this dialect. Perhaps we needed a special language amid the silence surrounding us.

  Sometimes I could see it in her eyes: a hint of fear, a need to stay close at home, to protect Mom. Maybe I’d be the one, when the time came, to explore the world further.

  *

  First grade had ended. I noticed that Dad wasn’t home. The air outside was warm, the pavement baking in the noonday sun. I asked once or twice but Mom said that he’d return from his trip pretty soon, maybe a few more weeks. What trip? I inquired as softly as I could, but she said nothing more.

  One afternoon in the early summer, crossing the living room toward the back porch, I stopped short. Something seemed to be hovering nearby though I couldn’t figure out what. My skin grew cool. Soon, my eyes were pulled upward as though by a magnet. With a start I saw them, near the ceiling: a string of balloons.

  Incredulous, blinking, I looked outside through the porch, where another strand hovered over the back yard. All those different colors!

  Had there been a parade nearby, or maybe some kind of celebration? Limp and deathly still, their tight skins glistening, they floated there without a sound. As I continued staring it dawned on me that the balloons were filled with poison gas. Hidden by the stretched plastic skins, the molecules inside were pressing for release. The danger was huge. Thoroughly frightened by now, I scurried upstairs to my bedroom.

  Was this a vision of some sort? To this day I’m not certain. But I told myself back then that if I kept my eyes focused right in front of me, my gaze pointed straight ahead, I might never see them again.

  I rode my bike more than ever that summer. Tearing down the streets and sidewalks, I felt the wheels under me vibrate as the asphalt whizzed by, the rush of wind on my face. At least I felt something. For a few moments I could forget about Dad and where he might be. One day in the vacant lot half a block from our house, I met up with a boy I didn’t know very well, Howard, who lived on a side street. As we rode down the sidewalk, the air was stifling, streets and trees bleached in the white sunlight. We stopped in the parking lot behind the stone church a couple of blocks away, where we got off our bikes and walked down a shaded stairwell, where it was cooler. Eventually we hopped back on and pedaled, single file, up the gentle incline toward Wyandotte Road.

  Behind me I heard a muted crash. I stopped and turned. Howard was lying still on the sidewalk, his bike half on top of him. He must have hit a bump; he couldn’t move. I stared at his face, partially covered by the bike but numb with pain. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t say anything.

  Time slowed. My legs turned to lead. The street was empty, no cars or pedestrians anywhere to be seen. Any breeze had stopped as the searing sun beat down. I looked at the houses behind the lawns, the air wavy in the heat, curtains drawn. Maybe I’d get blamed for all this, even though it wasn’t my fault. Was it?

  Ever hotter in the stillness of the afternoon, I staggered to the door of the closest house and knocked, but no one was there. With all my energy now drained, I couldn’t imagine trying anymore. Strangely inert, I felt paralyzed.

  I then did something I’ve ne
ver understood. Back on the sidewalk, I looked down at Howard again—immobile, silent—jumped up on my bike, and rode home. I went inside and found something to play with. For the rest of the afternoon, I tried to clear my mind of all thoughts. All I could remember was that feeling, outside in the oppressive heat, of being unable to move, my ears filling with a strange static.

  The next day, Mom asked if I’d been riding bikes with another boy the day before. Looking down, I meekly assented. She’d heard something from a neighbor. Apparently Howard had been injured pretty badly.

  “And what did you do, Steve?”

  How could I tell her that I’d just left him there? Like venom, the shame spread to each cell of my body. “I didn’t know what to do,” I replied, a flush rising to my face. Looking confused, Mom stared back at me. Neither of us said another word.

  I heard a few days later that Howard had ended up all right, even though he’d hit his head after falling from the bike. But I couldn’t escape that I’d left him there. During the school year I saw him occasionally but never played with him again. The humiliation was overpowering.

  I still feel it today, the shame like dry ice, frozen fire.

  I’d learned, by instinct, to place anything frightening into an airtight, vacuum-packed bag. I had no language for discharging negative feelings. Any failings pulled me down into a region of self-hatred so deep that I wasn’t sure I could ever climb back out. Turning my back on Howard was part of the pattern, created by the shame and silence, of how I approached anything outside my usual rigid routines. Walling myself off may have seemed the ticket to survival, but—though it’s hard to admit—I’d turned my back on someone who was clearly suffering.

  Throughout my adult career, I’ve fought a dual battle: trying to understand, dispassionately, the causes of and treatments for mental illness, while nourishing my humanity at the same time. The struggle continues to this day.

  One day a couple of months later Dad was back. No announcement from Mom, no discussion with Sally or me. “Can we throw the football?” I asked timidly as I saw him walk through the house. “Certainly,” he replied. After trudging out to the back yard, he patiently showed me how to hold the ball correctly and coached my weak passes into longer throws. But should I ask about where he’d been? No one else was making any kind of fuss about it, so maybe I shouldn’t either.