Janet was probably hiding behind the living room sofa or under her bed, and Mary Beth was out somewhere escaping the chaos. As much as possible during the summer, Mary Beth stayed with friends at the lake. Mom and I were usually in the house, making the potato and macaroni salads and the sandwiches to fill Dad's vending machines.
A few days later, Steve tried to strangle Mom in the kitchen with the telephone cord. Somehow we managed to call my father and the police. By the time the police arrived, followed by the county sheriff, my brother's fury had abated. He was shaken and full of agitated remorse. He was confused and couldn't understand why the police were there. When the sheriff put him in the car to take him to the county jail in Newfane, he was exhausted, deflated, and terrified. No one in the family was in a much better state, and it only got worse.
Mom and Dad went to see him in Newfane, where he cried and begged to come home, promising that he'd never be “bad” again. They returned from the jail without him and emotionally in shambles. Both of them cried for their son. They cried for their inability to make him happy. They cried for his inexplicable anger and for their self-perceived failings as parents. I cried for them, but I didn't cry for Steve. Not yet.
The court determined my brother to be a danger to himself and to others and incapable of making his own decisions. He was to be taken directly to Waterbury, the state mental institution, for observation and supposedly for help. Dad was made my adult brother's legal guardian by order of the court and remained so until he died at the beginning of 2004, when Mom took on the role.
My parents felt acute agony tinged with hope. Maybe, just maybe, someone at Waterbury would be able to figure out the root of Steve's anger. But Mom's novenas didn't work that time either.
Mom and Dad couldn't face seeing their son in Waterbury. I don't remember how I felt about that at the time. Although I wanted Steve to quietly disappear from the face of the earth without a trace, it was impossible to leave him alone and afraid. He'd been absolutely terrified just a few miles from Brattleboro at the county jail, and he knew Newfane. Nobody wanted to think about what he was going through at Waterbury, but it had to be much worse. So countless times over the year that he was there, I borrowed a friend's car and drove the twenty-one miles south to Waterbury to see my brother.
A few weeks after he'd been admitted, Steve was permitted to go out on the hospital grounds during the day. But the only thing my brother wanted after he got to Waterbury was to go home. The minute he was out the door, he walked straight over to the interstate, which you could see from the hospital, and hitchhiked back to Brattleboro.
When my startled and frightened mother saw him come in the front door, she immediately called Waterbury, only to find they hadn't noticed he'd left. This happened several more times until the powers that be, in their eternal enlightenment, decided to lock my brother up with the seriously insane. My first visit to him then mirrored scenes from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Big locked doors slid open to let me into a large open room. As they clicked shut behind me, I saw my brother on the other side of the room, just as he saw me. He watched me make my way to him. The room was peopled with ravaged examples of humanity, many of them shuffling about, in various states of disarray. Others slouched in chairs, open eyes fixed on nothing as they drooled through their day. I wondered what drugs they were given to keep them that way.
It was too agitating to look around and take everything in, so I tried to breathe deeply and move through it. I couldn’t avoid seeing two men sitting on the floor, propped against the wall, vigorously handling their exposed genitals. They howled when they saw me, and Steve could see I was freaked out. He stepped between me and the men and told me not to worry, that he’d protect me. He flexed his muscles to show me he was man enough to take on all the crazies, as he put it. Maybe he could protect me if need be, but who in that hellhole was protecting him?
That day after I left Steve there, I did cry in horror and empathy and anger. This time my anger wasn’t directed at my brother but at those who ran Waterbury. What exactly were they doing for him? There were no psychiatrists or social workers there who understood sign language. The administration didn’t have the presence of mind or the interest or will to bring in sign interpreters so the “mental health care professionals” could, at a minimum, try to communicate with my brother. Steve was never diagnosed, nor was he given medication. He simply did his time and, one year later, was released. He returned to Brattleboro and resumed life with the family.
The mere passage of time had not magically cured him. His curse was not acute, like Mom’s depression when we first moved to Brattleboro, nor was he simply an “angry deaf man.” His condition was chronic. But what the hell was it, and how was he ever going to have a life? His rage had not dissipated, but it was held in check for some time by his terror at the thought of going back to Waterbury. That threat was the only real weapon my parents could wield to manage his violence.
· · ·
My brother was released from Waterbury shortly before I got home for summer vacation. But I had a plan. I wasn’t going to make sandwiches with Mom all summer for my father’s vending machines. I got a job waitressing at Howard Johnson’s. I’d spend less time near Steve, and maybe, since Claude and I wouldn’t both be working for my father, I’d manage not to go out with him over the summer.
I was looking forward to renewed summer fun with Casey, but she had other plans. On the spur of the moment, she’d decided to stay in Burlington to work for the summer and had found someone to share an apartment with. I was stuck home with my parents. With Steve. Who was I going to mess around with; where was my escape?
It was a dismal prognosis. Nor did I excel at being a waitress—then or a decade later, when I got fired after two weeks of “wait training” at a new restaurant on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Waiting on people is not my forte. Howard Johnson’s was particularly uninspiring. One week, I managed to get a few days off, tacked onto a long weekend, and went to Burlington. I wanted to hang out with Casey and meet her roommate, Linda, at their apartment on Monroe Street in a less-than-great neighborhood (although, that didn’t have much meaning in Burlington, Vermont, in 1970).
When Casey opened the door to their apartment, my view of the place was consumed by Linda, who was draped across an old sofa in the living room decorated with an Indian-print bedspread. She was wrapped in a sheet and engaged in intense conversation with a man, also wearing only a sheet, who was at least twenty-five years older than she was. His salt-and-pepper hair was wavy and full and he spoke with an indeterminate European accent. They were smoking Gauloises cigarettes and discussing poetry or philosophy or freedom or the lack of it. They could have been talking about waste management and it would have sounded heady to me.
Linda was the most exotic person I’d ever met. She was slim with huge breasts for her size and liquid brown eyes that filled her thin face. Her beautiful cheekbones were objects of envy, and her fine, wavy brown hair framed her face perfectly. And how did a girl from Burlington, Vermont, get to be so worldly?
I was taking all this in as Casey, who, thankfully, was fully dressed, broke into their conversation to introduce us. They were friendly enough but immediately returned to their conversation as Casey took me to her room and showed me the mattress on the floor where I’d be sleeping.
Those first few hours in Burlington, I felt awkward, drab, and pedestrian, like a kid in junior high school trying to fit in with adults. By the end of my stay, I felt more or less comfortable in a sheet myself. I’d also smoked my first cigarette, which made me so faint and ill I had to take to my mattress. (Fortunately, I never became a smoker.) Most important, I’d engaged in what I considered to be mind-broadening discussions with Casey and Linda and her European friend.
With each passing hour my dread at having to return home to my parents and Steve increased. The
