Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (3 page)

My mom lifted me up and sat me on the sofa while my dad proceeded with his discussion of David Cooper’s
The Death of the Family
, which had been interrupted by her entrance. “Cooper shows how the family institution is rife with subtle violence, meant to bring down the individual.” Their conversation stopped when the telephone rang. My dad picked up. “It’s John!” He took the phone into the other room, but through the French doors my mother could hear his muffled excitement. John was visiting his family in St. Louis for the summer.

“How’s Alysia?” John asked.

“Incredible. We have a telepathic connection. It’s like I know what she’s tuned in to even when she’s quiet. Barbara thinks I ‘neglect’ her. But I think A-R feels the security of a deep love with me.”

John told my dad he’d be up this weekend from St. Louis and my dad could barely contain his excitement. “Really? Friday?” My mom picked me up off the couch and stomped into the side room. Dad felt embarrassed, protectively cradling the phone. “She’s making some scene in Alysia’s room. I have to go.”

Jeff and Phoenix had been tripping on mescaline all afternoon. My mom drove them home as my dad watched me and picked at the lasagna in the kitchen. She returned twenty minutes later and began to cry, black mascara streaming down her face.

“Why do you have to go on about the evils of the family like that, and in front of other people? If you’re having a problem with us, just tell me.”

“Your response only proves my point! The family structure is corrosive. It feeds paranoia and hostility.”

“Shut up with that already!” she snapped. “Don’t you ever think about growing up?”

“Have I ever made you happy? Have you ever felt fulfilled with me?” Hearing himself start to yell, my dad tried to calm down. “Or . . . supposing I was everything you wanted me to be? You’d probably still be unhappy. Maybe you’re the sort of person who always wants more.”

My mom started crying again and walked to the other side of the house with me in her arms. My dad followed her.

“Things have heated up too much here,” he said. “I think it’d be best for both of us if I leave for a while. I spoke with Larry the other day. He’s got a place set up in Frisco and he’s invited me out. I think I’ll take him up on it.”

IN JANUARY
1973 my dad sent me an illustrated letter:

What Daddy Is Doing

Daddy’s feet are big feet. Alysia’s feet are little feet.

Today Daddy took his feet for a walk in the park.

On the way Daddy talked to the flowers.

“Hi, Flowers.”

Daddy saw a doggie. The doggie barked and wagged his tail.

“Bark! Bark!”

But Daddy is thinking about Alysia and Mommy.

When Alysia is asleep Daddy will give Alysia a big kiss.

Soon Daddy will get in his car and drive home.

Then Daddy can play with Alysia again.

“Hi Baby.” “Whee!”

Then we can go see the ducks again. Alysia can feed the ducks.

“Quack! Quack!”

Detail from letter, 1973

My dad had driven to San Francisco from Atlanta and stayed for six months, exploring the city and peddling his comics at various places including Last Gasp, publishers of the underground Zap Comix. S. Clay Wilson, the cartoonist behind Zap’s
Checkered Demon
, had been a friend of my dad’s in Nebraska and made a few introductions, but Zap had little interest in Dad’s gay-themed strips. When not working, he visited the city’s many bookstores, bars, and cafés, where he’d write letters to my mom back in Atlanta.

One evening, he telephoned. “I’ve felt peacefulness out here alone,” he told her. “I’ve sometimes felt this with John. But with you, there’s usually some shadow of anxiety, some worry about the past, or the future. It’s hard to imagine just being—
be
-ing with you. Sometimes I think you can’t let things just be.”

“I just want things to go well with us.”

“I think things will go better for us if you can find more fulfillment on your own—not build your life around me so much. Maybe an extended vacation would help. Why don’t I take A-R with me to my folks in Nebraska and you can mellow out in Atlanta for a while?”

“No,” my mom answered. “I don’t want you traveling together without me. What if something were to happen? I’d be left alone.”

SHORTLY AFTER
his return from San Francisco, it was clear that my father’s concerns about his marriage were unchanged:

June 6, 1973: Going to Frisco it was easy to be born again. How to continue doing so when living in the midst of hassles so familiar is the challenge. Going to Stone Mountain [in Atlanta] with Barb & Alysia was fun at first, then a tired duty which wilted into an unbearable feeling of being trapped, oppressed and sucked dry. Why is this? Is the insanity in my own head that I cannot be satisfied with Barbara? So at night I go out to the bar, where the dim lit haze of smoke is a backdrop for smiles, drinking, sweaty dancing & seeking sex with some attractive man stranger who may perhaps lift me out of this routinized world I sink around in.

One afternoon that July, after my father had picked me up from the day care center while my mother was at work, he returned home to find my mom’s new boyfriend, Wolf, in the living room preparing to shoot up a tab of what looked to my father like psilocybin, which he had mashed with a spoon. Wolf pushed the needle through his arm. Nothing. Then his whole body turned red and he stumbled around the room. His face contorted with what looked like savage pain, his eyes bulging.

“Was there strychnine in this?” he rasped.

My dad felt helpless before Wolf’s cramped contortions and shudders.

“If I OD on this,” Wolf yelled through clenched teeth, “just take me to the road and dump me.”

“What will I do?” My father’s mind was racing. He felt his heart beating faster. “Call John – ask him to help me.”

Then Wolf fell on the sofa, lifted his leg, let out a fart, and smiled. At that moment, my mom returned from work and Wolf tried to pass the whole thing off as a joke. “But it’s a very macabre joke,” my dad wrote, “as we both know.”

A suicidal patient she treated at the Georgia Regional Hospital where she was working, Wolf and my mom got involved while my dad was in San Francisco. His mother had killed his two brothers before killing herself. She described Wolf to my dad as “incredibly real.” When my dad first met him, he was also charmed. With his lank, long hair and sunglasses pushed up onto his head, Wolf looked like Peter Fonda in
Easy Rider
, my dad wrote. And he was open, vulnerable, and appeared to love my mom. He certainly needed her in ways that my dad didn’t.

Maybe it was good for her, my dad thought at first. She seemed to finally develop her own emotional life and concerns. So when my mom suggested Wolf move into their house, my dad thought, why not? There were always roommates moving in and out of Adair Street. What’s another person?

But Wolf was different. His neediness was strong and intense. He pumped drugs into his veins, and Barbara was starting to do the same. They were spending days together in bed. She began to miss work and was losing weight. The house, formerly kept tidy and swept, was a mess. Garbage and papers covered the floor. Bugs crawled beneath unwashed dishes in the sink. The fish tanks were murky with billowing clouds of algae. Years later, my grandmother would recall the state of their house with tears in her eyes.

TWO WEEKS LATER
, my dad received a phone call from my mom. She asked him to pick me up from the day care center because she was doing MDA with Wolf. At about 1 a.m. that night she returned home crying. My father suspected she was drained because of the tension still between them and “too much dope.”

Early the next morning, my mother woke my father because she’d had a terrible nightmare and wanted to tell him about it. Their fish tank had broken and all of the fish had flopped into the street. No one would help her save them. After listening and calming her down, my dad fell back asleep, but an hour later he was again woken up. My mother had collapsed while walking through the kitchen, breaking a glass.

Ten days later, my father was sitting at his typewriter when Wolf approached, inviting him to “do up some MDA.” Dad had once done IV drugs with Wolf and my mom, but he didn’t like it and asked that they not do it around him. Taken aback by what he regarded as Wolf’s “gall,” my dad demanded that Wolf either lay off drugs or move out. To make his case, dad read aloud excerpts from William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
, hoping to convince Wolf to make the decision to quit drugs on his own. After hours of listening silent and blank-faced, Wolf finally promised to give up all drugs “save grass” for three months.

Later that same night, John Dale called and my dad recounted his troubles with Wolf. John suggested that he move out.

“I can’t,” my dad said, “for A-R’s sake, if not for Barbara’s.”

Eight days later, Wolf was arrested in northern Michigan for running drugs and guns across the Canadian border. My mom announced that she was going to drive up to Michigan the next day so she could post bail. “How long can this go on?” my dad lamented in his journal.

The next night, he received a phone call from my mom in Michigan. “Wolf’s charges have been dropped. I’m driving with him to Atlanta. We should arrive by Sunday.”

AUGUST 28, 1973.
It was raining in Atlanta when an early morning telephone call woke my father. Knoxville Hospital was looking for Wolf’s father, reporting that “he has multiple injuries.”

“What about Barbara Abbott?”

My dad was directed to call a hospital in Sweetwater, Tennessee.

“What about Barbara Abbott?” he asked again.

After much hemming and hawing, the hospital administrator said that my mom had “expired.” My dad started to shake. “What to do? What to do?” He called her parents in Kewanee, Illinois. Her mother picked up. He asked for her father but before he arrived my dad said, “I have bad news. There’s been an accident.”

“What accident?”

“Barbara has expired.”

“What are you saying?” Barbara’s mother shrieked into the phone.

“Barbara’s dead.”

“Oh God, no.” The phone clicked.

2.

I
RECEIVE THE ARTICLE
in a plain brown paper envelope. For nearly a week it sits in the entryway of my home. I don’t want to open it until I have time to read and take it in. Even when I find that free time, I want to leave it alone, afraid of diluting its power, or being disappointed by its contents. It is my history, my own secret. Finally I open the envelope, pull out and unfold a scratchy photocopy of the
Sweetwater Valley News
dated August 30, 1973. Thank you, Wanda, at the Sweetwater public library.

Looking at the article, I’m first struck by the picture that accompanies it: a demolished VW bug in the foggy morning of August 29, just as it’s about to be towed away. The front of the car is smashed so completely that it doesn’t look like a car but like a sloppy metal wound. How anyone survived I can’t understand.

Some details in the article confirm what I know: my mom flew out of the car and was hit by another car. Others are new: the car hit a massive pulpwood truck. And there was someone else in the car too, someone who was pronounced DOA at Knoxville Hospital: a nineteen-year-old kid from Michigan named Thomas Hungerford. Was he a hitchhiker? Could he have been involved with the accident? Did he know Wolf? I also get Wolf’s full name: Jonathan Dennings Wolfe. He was the one survivor, sent to Knoxville Hospital. A quick Internet search reveals nothing more about him. Still, there’s now this proof, resting in my hands. This really happened. These were actual people. They didn’t just exist in my dad’s journals and in my imagination.

The accident occurred at 6:30 a.m., Tuesday in heavy fog on a straight stretch of highway in front of the entrance to the Lil’ Daytona Speedway near the East Tennessee Livestock Barn.

Reading on, I’m startled by the article’s mistakes. “Barbara Bender Abbott” instead of “Binder.” “Her body was shipped to Chicago by Kyker Funeral Home,” instead of Piser Funeral Home. Is this unconscious anti-Semitism on the part of
Sweetwater Valley News
?

When the morning fog burned off, when all the smashed pieces of the car and bits of lumber had been picked up and hauled away (“It took more than an hour,” according to the
Sweetwater Valley News
), when the blood on the ground was finally washed away by the September rains, there would be no more Barbara Binder Abbott. Only the promise of her. The high school valedictorian and Smith graduate never to receive her master’s. The future success predicted by her Latin teacher, Mr. Carlotta, never to be realized. The lover of children and dogs never to get a dog, never to nurse more than one child. And that child, now motherless.

MY DAD’S SISTER
, Elaine, arrived in Atlanta soon after the accident. She took the first plane she could catch from Lincoln, Nebraska. When she entered the house, I thought she was my mother.

“Is that Mommy?”

“No, Alysia,” my dad said. “Mommy’s not home.”

Elaine remembers my mother’s fuzzy white bathrobe, which was still hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and the closet still full of her clothes. “He couldn’t put them away.”

One night my dad planned an outing to the better Atlanta bars, even a drag show to shock his younger sister, who until this visit hadn’t known he was gay. “So that’s like two whammies that sent me into shock,” she told me. But Elaine hadn’t packed any “dress-up clothes,” so Dad went into my mother’s closet. “Take this,” he said, holding out a paisley pantsuit. It fit, so Elaine wore it, though she recalls feeling very strange. And then that night, when she came in and Dad paid the babysitter, she remembers me, a few months shy of three, waking up and asking again, “Is that Mommy? Is Mommy home?”

“No, honey. Mommy’s not here.”

Eventually, Dad tried to explain that Mommy wasn’t coming back. With toy cars, he acted out the accident. Reading the lines from my Babar book, he tried to explain the loss. “Babar’s mother was killed by a mean hunter. Babar cried.”

But I still couldn’t get it. I spent every day thinking Mommy would walk through the door or that I’d wake up and she’d be there in bed next to Daddy. And then one day, as Dad was dressing me for day care, I broke down. Wringing my hands, I cried over and over, “I want Mommy! I want Mommy!”

Dad calmed me, he held me, and again he explained to me, patiently pulling out the Babar book: “Babar’s mother was killed by a mean hunter. Babar cried.” Then he finished getting me dressed and drove me to the day care center, just like he did every morning. He wrote that I was okay after that day.

She flew out the car window. At some point my father must have shared this detail of my mother’s accident with me because it’s always been an integral part of my family story. She
flew
out of the car. As a child I imagined her flying, already a ghost in a long white dress.

MY MOTHER’S SISTER
, Janet, was asleep in my grandparents’ spare room in Kewanee, Illinois, when they received my dad’s phone call. She was visiting from Evanston with her kids, Judson, five, and Jeremy, a day shy of three.

“Should I take the kids home, Munca?” she asked my grandmother later that morning.

“No, I like to look at them,” she said.

Word of Barbara’s death spread quickly in her hometown, population 15,000. The next day, the local
Star Courier
ran an article about her accident and a small obituary. By nightfall, the asphalt driveway of my grandparents’ ranch-style home was full of cars. My uncle David, who was only eighteen and about to start his freshman year of college, recalls a constant traffic of people moving in and out of the house. They’d leave flowers and platters of homemade food on the table in the front room. They’d wash dishes and talk in hushed tones with Munca, who never took off her sunglasses.

David remembers Munca’s close friend Daisy Gerwig arriving through the front door and making a beeline for Munca, who was sitting in a chair off the kitchen. With her arms outstretched, Daisy said only these words before embracing her: “Hostages! Hostages!”

Only later did David learn that Daisy was referencing a quote from Sir Francis Bacon that would often come up in conversations about their kids: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”

For two days, visitors and friends came to support and feed and mourn with the Binder household, but my grandfather, a distinguished radiologist who was never socially inclined, avoided the scene. Instead of greeting people in the front room or sitting with friends in the living room, he retreated to his bedroom in the back of the house. Behind a closed door, he sat on the end of the stiff sofa under the window, and read a book. He kept the shades closed.

He remained there for hours, undisturbed by the many visitors, until on the afternoon of the second day Munca came in. David remembers seeing her kneeling on the floor in front of Grumpa and pounding the carpeted floor of the bedroom with her fists, crying, “Why didn’t they take me? Take me! Take me! Give me my daughter. I’ll go!” Barbara was the second daughter Munca had lost; her first child, a tall, dark-eyed girl named Rozanne, died of leukemia at age three.

Munca’s friend Millie Jensen heard her crying from the hallway and rushed in to comfort her. She bent down to the floor to hold her close. But Grumpa stopped her by lifting the palm of his hand. Millie moved back to the front room, leaving Munca to her keening grief.

Barbara had died early on Tuesday. On Thursday her funeral was held outside Chicago. It took my grandparents, aunt, and uncle three hours to reach the Piser Funeral Home from Kewanee. They planned to bury my mother in a family plot at Westlawn, Chicago’s Jewish cemetery. By the time they arrived, my father was there. He brought me along, though I was not yet three years old. His journal:

I cry when AR sings, “All the little children,” and “Happy Birthday to you Mommy.”

Barbara’s sister Janet waters flowers. Barbara’s mother complains about her dry throat. Barbara’s brother asks how I like his shoes. The Rabbi asks if I’d like anything in particular said about Barbara. Later, I think I would have liked it if he said she gave her life helping others.

The service is simple, dignified. The rabbi talks about psalms and about poetry. Sounds good but I can’t remember a word of it. Barbara’s mother says “impersonal” and thinks that’s good. They kept the sermon to ten minutes. Only the grandmothers cry, and Barbara’s mother when I meet her. We hug. During the service, while I cry my choked, silent cry, Barbara’s brother talks with his mother about waterhole golf. Riding to the cemetery Barbara’s father jokes about the funeral car being unwashed, how that’s rude, how he doesn’t think he’ll come back here again.

Trying to fit in is such a strain. Some relatives want to joke and small talk. Then a new group comes in with the mask of grief. Uncle somebody squints as if sand had just been blown in his face.

At home at last alone (A-R at daycare center) I read. I feel as if Barbara might walk in at any moment and fill the house with her buoyant presence, her smile, her energy. Does anyone at all know I wonder how I loved Barbara. How I needed & counted on her. I am now free, free of protection. But I loved her.

A-R & I seem to relate as we never have before. A new awareness, a new discovery, a new companionship. We have only each other now.

I’m told that within a few weeks of my mother’s death, my maternal great-grandmother asked my aunt Janet if she was going to adopt me. She said she could, if Steve was okay with it. If he had accepted my aunt’s offer, I would have grown up in the suburbs with a mother and father, two brothers, and a dog named Pokey. But my dad told my grandmother very clearly that he wanted to raise me, even if he had to do it on his own.

BACK IN ATLANTA
, Dad floundered. Wallowing in his grief, he sought the company and support of John Dale. But John was no longer interested in Dad’s intensity and was too young to sympathize with his anguish. John had also moved in with his girlfriend, Susan, and taken a job at Southern Bell. He met with Dad a couple of times, but answered only some of his letters and phone calls. With nothing left in Atlanta, my dad decided to move to the city that had been so hospitable to him only a year before, San Francisco.

In August 1974, within a year of my mother’s death, my father drove us over the Golden Gate Bridge into the city that was to become our new home. His hands tightly gripped the wheel of our beige VW bug as a cigarette dangled from his mouth. In the backseat he’d stacked boxes and suitcases, our oriental rug, my favorite little blue chair, and the smallest of our fish tanks. On the rear bumper of the car, a sassy Minnie Mouse sashayed in a polka-dot dress. From the front seat I looked out the window at the wide expanse of water below us. It was my first time seeing the ocean.