her body was still, he knelt and straightened her bloodstained dress. He gently laid the gun away from her body. Then he rose and walked calmly to the kitchen, avoiding the sight of his faceless mother-in-law. He continued on his path and turned off the stove.
He pulled a kitchen chair over to the corner of the room and removed the telephone receiver from its cradle on the wall. He calmly asked the operator to connect him to the Washington County Sheriff. He needed to sit down. Suddenly he was so tired.
CHAPTER ONE
My Mother’s Donald
I sensed Donald’s entry into my mother’s life before I actually met him. It was the spring of 1984, and I was living in Washington, DC. I had the habit of waking on Sundays to my mother’s regular phone call from Pittsburgh. But one Sunday I noticed, well into the evening, that my mother hadn’t called. I left a message on her answering machine to check in, and when I called her later that week she said she couldn’t talk long; she was going out. That was new. Something had changed.
When I mentioned that she seemed to be busier than usual, she said, “Yes, well, I have plans,” and laughed.
I called my brother Larry, who also lived in Pittsburgh, to see if he had any more information. “Mum has plans?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “she met this man, a really old guy. He has a farm out in Washington County. She says he was a Marine.”
I was happy for my mother and happy for me. If my mother had a boyfriend, it might mean she’d leave me alone. I was recently divorced and making a new life and wanted some distance from my mother’s neediness. My mother had been widowed for thirteen years. My father—her husband of thirty years—had died in 1971. He was fifty-six years old when he passed away, and I was seventeen—the last of their five children still at home. I saw my mother’s grief up close and watched as she made the transition from married mother of five to single older woman. It wasn’t easy for her, and I hated being the sponge for all her grief.
Part of my mother’s pain was that she hated to be alone. An extravert, with no use for introspection, she needed the company of people. Growing up, I heard my mother talk about her lonely childhood. Her parents, Frank and Josephine, both worked long hours—her father was a machinist, and her mother rolled cigars in a factory. When her father was out of work during the Great Depression, her mother played poker every night—quite successfully. She went out to smoky card halls and brought home money to keep food on their table.
Consequently, my mother coped by promising herself that when she grew up, she would have a big family and give herself the brothers and sisters she longed for. We, two boys and three girls, were her promised “siblings.” So when she was widowed at the age of fifty-six, as all her children were leaving home, her loneliness was doubled.
Perhaps it does not need to be said that a woman who had five children to replace her fantasized siblings might have gotten off on the wrong foot as a parent. But that is the least of it. In her pain—from her childhood, certainly, and from other causes—my mother grabbed at many salves for her misery.
My father’s family had been poor, and he went to work at fourteen years old to support his six brothers and sisters. In their marriage, my father’s childhood poverty and large family ran headlong into my mother’s childhood loneliness.
My mother, fighting her childhood ghosts, was determined to have her large family. My father, recalling the crowded rooms his family had shared and the pain of real hunger, dreamed only of financial security. He worked constantly, rising in his career as an industrial engineer. My parents’ pasts were dueling with each other. As my mother got more insistent on a big family, my father withdrew into his work and worry about money.
I was born when my mother was thirty-eight years old, and her frustration peaked soon after as it became clear that making more babies was time limited, and these five faux siblings could not soothe her loneliness.
On a visit to our family doctor when she was fifty years old, she complained that she was feeling sad and tired. Dr. Heck, who had treated all of us for chicken pox and measles, wrote my mother a prescription to boost her energy. She began taking the amphetamine Dexedrine when I was ten years old. Before my eleventh birthday, she was a full-blown drug addict.
My father was traveling during those years. He was an engineer in the corrugated box industry. He left home at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday nights to drive to Ohio, New Jersey, or New York, and he’d return on Friday night in time for supper and to attend choir practice at our United Methodist Church.
Life with a speed-addicted mother was unpredictable, to say the least. The Dexedrine ran our household. My mother was full of false energy all day, and then she crashed horribly at night.
Each morning she’d wake groggy and disoriented, and it would take her an hour to get her bearings. I learned to be careful in those morning hours, waiting to see what my mother could remember of the night before. It could go one of two ways. She might, on seeing the damage she had done—clothing and dishes strewn about the house—be remorseful and ashamed. If this was the case it was sad to watch her, but that was the safer scenario for my brother Larry and me—we were the only two left at home. We would let her cry and then leave for school.
The other possibility was that she might become upset again, and her anger of the night before would be rekindled. I would wait and watch and try to feel out the situation. I was prepared to shift gears quickly. I learned to assess my mother’s mental state by watching her face, and I’d predict, sometimes before she was conscious of it, which way her emotional tide was moving. It could be the slightest change in her eyes or a small movement of her jaw.
I also learned, through repeated practice, how to assume a totally passive stance even when I was very frightened. On one occasion, when I was twelve years old, I tried to put blonde streaks in my hair using a bottle of peroxide; it was a disaster. I remember trying to wash it away, not really understanding how bleach works. But when my mother saw the orangey stripes in my hair, she began screaming, dragged me to the dining room, and shoved me in front of the large mirror over the buffet. She grabbed a sharp knife and began to saw at my hair. I was crying but I kept my eyes open, not daring to even blink as the knife flashed around my face.
Years later, while taking an Outward Bound course, I learned this is exactly what you should do if you come across a bear in the woods. The instructor said if you encounter an angry bear, you must do the opposite of what your body wants to do. He explained that if a mother bear spots a human, she will scan the person for any sign of agitation. He added that you should bring your arms to your sides, move slowly to the ground, and remain passive and immobile. “Hopefully,” he said, “the bear will read that submissive posture and walk on.”
As a child, that’s what I did with my mother. If I could stay small—moving carefully and quietly, and never making eye contact—she often would move through her anger and then become distracted by something else, which allowed me to—very slowly—gather my things and get away.
Part of my mother’s morning routine was “taking her pills.” This meant some vitamins, her Dexedrine, and black coffee. On most weekday mornings, we’d head to school. But sometimes, after we’d leave, my mother’s acute loneliness would kick in and in her distorted emotional scenario there were two possible villains: the lazy children who had left the house or the husband who had “abandoned” her by going to work.
If her anger swelled before the drugs kicked in, she would use the phone to punish those who had left her. There were many days when she called my school and had me sent back home. On other days my father got the calls at his office.
