father, too, but she never said what. Do you know anything about that?”
“You mean, your parents never told you about Charley Hayes?” she asked incredulously. No, I assured her; I had never even heard his name before. And she told me all she knew:
“Charley and your father were inseparable. They were best friends. They must have been ten at the time. It was at our country house; we’d just come up the day before from Yonkers. The two of them snuck a rifle out of the house, one that the chauffeur kept in the trunk of the Packard. And some paper plates from the kitchen—they were going to go skeet shooting in a back field, you know, throw the plates into the air and pretend they were clay pigeons. Then it happened, somehow your father shot Charley. We don’t really know the details of it. Your father ran back to the house and then the chauffeur went out to the field and carried Charley’s body back. Your grandmother packed us up that same day and took us back to the city. I don’t know whether that was right or not, but something like that is so terrible. It was awful. I can’t believe they never told you about it when Peter died. It was the first thing we all thought about, the awful coincidence of it.”
And that was all she could tell me, though I sensed in her voice questions about how her family had responded to Charley’s death, whether Dad’s mother was right to whisk them so quickly back to the city. Behind that act, I could sense a familial response I knew from my own childhood: the sudden flight from the scene that is the first concrete step toward denial of the horror.
And so my father’s adolescence continued. Even in the middle of the Depression, he was dropped off by the chauffeured Packard at a fancy New York private school. By the time he went on to Hamilton College, his spirited and irresponsible tendencies had acquired a wilder, more dramatic cast. He flunked out before the end of his first year, then started over at Columbia College. But shortly after, when World War II began, he joined the Navy Air Force and was sent to Ithaca for flight training.
My mother’s maiden name was Barbara Howe. Her solid, straightlaced family traced itself back, with somber vanity, to an English ship that arrived off the coast of Massachusetts in 1630. My mother’s father worked as an executive for Boston Sand and Gravel, devoting his bland working life to selling off by the truckload soil mingled with his ancestors’ bones. Somehow it was apt—except for his big adventure as a young man in the First World War, he himself was a colorless, basic man who might have been made of the substances he sold. After high school, my mother became a scholarship student in architecture at MIT. I’ve tried to imagine her back then—what a serious, even brilliant student she must have been to have gained entrance into that bastion of male science and technology back in those prefeminist days. In her high school graduation portrait, she’s wearing a string of pearls and a simple, short-sleeved sweater. She has a wide, plain face, high cheekbones, and clear, intelligent eyes that make her quite beautiful in an unassuming way. In the photo, she’s wearing her hair in braids wrapped around the top of her head like a rustic halo. After her first year at MIT, America entered the Second World War and she was lured to Cornell by the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Company, which was training women to work in aircraft design. It was there she met my father, and by the time he was transferred to navigation training in Indiana, they were married.
In Indiana, he ran into disciplinary trouble and washed out. He started over again, testing so well that he was put in a “Ninety-Day Wonder” school at Northwestern University that put extraordinary enlisted men through intensive officer training and graduated them as ensigns. Again, he misbehaved and was demoted, though he somehow managed to graduate. From there, he was sent to underwater demolition training in Florida. One night, he smuggled my mother onto the base disguised in a sailor’s uniform and took her out with his crew and several cases of beer for a midnight cruise in the small landing craft he commanded. Drunk, they ran across a coral head and sank ten yards off a beach. He somehow escaped the full consequences of that escapade, only to find himself at war’s end on Guam, without ever having fired or been fired upon.
When Dad returned to the States, he went back to Columbia, where he was still only a sophomore. But he was admitted—rather inexplicably he thought—into medical school while he was still a junior premed. As far as he knows, he never completed his undergraduate degree but simply moved on in the confusion of all the servicemen returning to school on the GI Bill.
In the winter of 1947, when I was born, he and Mom were living in a farmhouse without indoor plumbing or hot water and heated only with a woodstove. The farmhouse was near the hamlet of Alcove in the rugged Helderberg Hills thirty miles southwest of Albany, where my Dad was enrolled in Albany Medical College. The one-story farmhouse was ramshackle, and the unpainted barn, where Mom kept her herd of goats, two dozen rabbits, and a milk cow, was even more dilapidated. What had been an apple orchard behind the house was long abandoned, and my first memory is of climbing onto a rusting truck that rested under one of these unpruned trees, bristling and scabbed with neglect. Still, the landscape had a bleak kind of beauty, according to my father, and the hayfield in front of the house gave a view down to the pine-flanked Alcove reservoir, where the occasional bald eagle was still seen.
I was the third baby boy born in as many years. That first winter of my life the house still had no furnace and no hot water—my mother washed our diapers in cold water handpumped into the kitchen sink. How odd it must have been for these two children of urban privilege to have chosen such a place to begin their lives together. Why didn’t they rent an apartment in Albany? Or a house in its suburbs? The only explanation my father has ever offered for their living in such primitive circumstances was that he’d had enough of close quarters with other sailors in the war and when he came back he wanted to live as far from people and crowds as possible. What my mother thought of it, I’ll never know.
Although alcohol fueled almost all the escapades that unraveled so disastrously and in such rapid succession during my father’s young adulthood, it had utterly vanished by the time I was born. The rash and passionate relationship with booze that had come close to wrecking his young life a dozen times had been replaced by something else.
Early on in his medical school days, my father discovered amphetamine. What a miracle this powdered electricity compressed into little tablets must have been to him, as it was to countless other overworked medical students and interns—what a descent of grace, what balm in Gilead, what an oasis of green energy in the gray wastes of his daily exhaustion and stress! The endless complex studying and exams, the red-eyed, round-the-clock ward duties, the long drives home, and the labor on the farm as well—all these responsibilities that rose up and promised to overwhelm him now receded before this potent chemical that unlocked the mysteries of the human brain so that a man was turned into a demigod and a mortal gained knowledge and concentrated powers a god would envy. Holy tablets more precious than gold—my father hugged them closer than Moses gripped those flat stones God himself inscribed.
Those pills so saturated my father’s life that they seemed to have the power to appear anywhere, like mushrooms on a green lawn. Years later, my father drove me to my first day at college. We’d just pulled into the freshman dorm parking lot and I’d begun to unload suitcases from the back seat when he lifted from the open trunk a large, opaque plastic jug. “Here,” he said, “this might come in handy,” and he transferred it to me. It weighed six pounds and had to be carried in the crook of my arm like a small baby. It could have been an industrial-sized jar of ketchup or some other condiment, but it wasn’t—it was a bottle of one thousand amphetamine tablets, an extravagant parting gift from a man ordinarily noted for stinginess.
In the short time we spent unloading my stuff in the dorm, he gave me my first full sermon on the gospel of speed, though there had been hints before—casual, grim quips like: “Unhappy? We can give you a whole new chemical personality.” “Unhappy” said with an unctuous, drawn-out tone of concern ending in the diabolical parody of a completely insincere, salesman’s grin. And this “we” was all the up-to-date physicians, my father chief among them. Today, our culture is inured to the concept of a chemically engineered personality, but back
