Episode Fourteen: Dad Retreats

After a show of reluctance to leave, Mom moves Dad into his basement apartment, 20 minutes away from home on MacArthur Blvd. in the city. The house, like some others in the neighborhood, sits below the road, so you walk down a staircase to get to the front door. The landlady, Mary, lives upstairs with her two hateful sons, Mitchell and David. The boys are fat, homely, spoiled rotten and almost impossible to be around. Mitchell is brilliant, David not so much. Mary must be happy to have a man in the house to help control them.

Dad doesn't look very happy with me in

his arms. In four years, he'll be gone.

Mom says she has to force Dad to take us on weekends, which is completely believable, but not something I need to know. Dad should never have had children; his personality isn’t suited to dealing with them. His mother ruined him for that. Mom tells me that after my grandfather D.G. died, Ruth tried to make a ‘little husband’ out of him. It’s a struggle he won,

but at a cost.

Juggling four children when you’re living in a basement apartment isn’t easy for Dad, especially with constant incoming from upstairs, so Tyler and I often go as a team. There are two built-in beds with thin mattresses, a small kitchenette, and a sitting area. The furnace is through the door at the far side of the room. There’s a print of a lady with a very narrow face and almost Asian eyes: Modigliani.

A nasty Siamese cat named Fussy patrols the house, looking for trouble. As far as I can see, she doesn’t like anyone. She’ll snarl and take a swipe at you for no reason at all and God forbid you should do anything to make her really mad. On more than one occasion, if she’s miffed at someone, she’ll wait until a drawer is left partly open, then craps inside all over the clothes or go in the closet in your shoes.

Fussy hates everybody.

After a year or two, Dad moves upstairs and marries Mary.

It’s true. Those shithead kids are now our stepbrothers.

Oh great.

Mary is a short, plump woman with an olive complexion and straight, chin length dark brown hair sliced with silver. She has a small dent on her nose. Like Dad, she smokes a lot. Both start smoking as teenagers when the truth about the dangers of tobacco is not public. Neither one is ever able to quit, though they move from the unfiltered Camels to various other options like menthol and filtered cigarettes. One day I visit them years later in Arlington and find Dad smoking Virginia Slims.

Really, Dad?

They warn Mitchell and David against the habit but they, too, become lifelong smokers.

Dad is a prodigious drinker. I’ve seen him drink, in succession at one sitting, beer, half of a gallon of Gallo Rhine wine, bourbon, fine French wine, and several bottles of good champagne. Mary does a pretty good job keeping up. Eventually, so do Mitchell and Davy.

Mental illness runs in Mary’s family and her former husband has mental problems. The boys don’t see him much, but in the coming years it will be discovered that Mitchell suffers a type of depression that is almost impossible to treat. It follows him the rest of his life. Mary tells me that once they bought an upright piano so he, at age five, could take out his deep frustrations destroying it. David treats whatever demons that possess him with a cheerful addiction to marijuana, and probably more.

Mary’s mother has some serious form of mental illness. When she visits, she roams soundlessly up and down the hallways of the house like a wraith, wearing what look like widow’s weeds. She doesn’t speak or look directly at you.

She scares the bejesus out of me and my brothers. Between trying to dodge her, Fussy and Mitchell and Davy, there’s never a dull moment.

But she is passed from child to child around the country, never staying in one home longer than a couple of months. My father finally puts his foot down and stops this merry-go-round. She will live with him and Mary.

Oh crap.

All of our lives are verging on momentous change.