Episode Three: Home

We live in a big two-story stucco house with a wide, white front porch on a service road just below MacArthur Blvd. It was built by Mr. Wedding, who borrowed the Sears plan used by his father-in-law for the house next door. He adapted it to suit his own needs. In 1950, my parents buy the house for $16,000. The house and land now are worth over $1 million.

When I am in college, I meet Mr. Wedding, who is then in his nineties. He tells me he made a big mistake selling the house. He only did it because his wife wanted to live closer to the city. At one point he begs my mother to sell it back to him. She declines. For a while, he drives by the house daily to moon over it.

My house in Cabin John.

Five people live with me in a house with three bedrooms, an office and only one full but quite narrow and cramped bathroom on the second floor: me, my mother, stepfather, after 1962, and three older brothers. My brothers Jake, Tyler and I take after our father. We have good German bones, blue eyes and brown hair. Eddie, the eldest, looks like a foundling with a slender build, very dark brown, curly hair, dark green eyes and a withdrawn nature. We are cruel enough to tell him that he must be adopted, a notion that my mother repeatedly tries to squelch.

I am born on Christmas Day in 1953 at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I arrive late and my mother says that Dad drives her over bumpy roads and railroad tracks trying to rattle me loose. He wants to take the tax deduction for me in 1953.

In my early years, tensions are rising between my mother and father. She is in love with someone else, and has been unhappily married for 17 years, yet he doesn’t want a divorce. There are vicious fights and, according to my mother, Dad tries to retaliate to her infidelity, entering into an affair with the local Union leader’s wife. Uh, bad idea. This large man confronts my mother at our home and demands she have sex with him to get even. She laughs in his face, which oddly works to defuse the situation, luckily for her.

My parents finally are divorced in 1958 when I am four years old. Legally, Dad has to leave a year before the divorce will be granted. He is gone by the time I am three. She finds him a basement apartment, also on MacArthur Blvd., but in Washington, D.C. and gives him the boot.

Even at four years old, I remember Dolly, Earl Huntington’s wife next door, leaning over the fence and telling me that she’d miss my father, what with his hollering at us kids all the time being so entertaining.

Gee, thanks, Dolly.

In addition to other reasons Mom wants a divorce, the fact that Dad is mean to Jake must count. Dad hits him and Mom stands up to my father, telling him to pick on someone his own size. She is tiny. He never touches her. As for the rest of us, he seems indifferent.

Jake is a charming boy, the kind old ladies pat on the head in grocery stores. It’s hard to imagine what brings Dad’s animus down on his head. Jealousy?

Dad comes out to the house to do chores from time to time. One day, he is breaking up large rocks with a sledgehammer on the top step to the basement door. Jake, at about 10, is practically wiggling with eagerness to try, and begs Dad to let him take a swing.

Dad says okay and hands him the heavy sledgehammer.

“Don’t swing until I say so,” he says. Jake nods enthusiastically.

Dad arranges a rock in the right place. “Okay, go!”

Jake starts to swing and is halfway there when Dad says, “Wait,” and sticks his right hand in to adjust the rock.

Being a small boy, Jake can’t stop the momentum of the sledgehammer in mid-swing and it smashes my father’s hand. Dad nearly passes out from the pain, then runs into the house with a rag over his hand, and is taken to the hospital. The sledgehammer has crushed the upper two thirds of his right index finger. It is beyond repair.

I think I witness this awful event, but my memory may be based on family stories.

Did my father ever tell Jake that it wasn’t his fault? I don’t know. My mother does, but that’s not enough.

This event sends a shock wave through the family.

My father is not a bad man. He has trouble showing soft emotions and lacks parenting skills. He probably never wanted kids anyway but is a victim of his time. And his mother.

At some point, perhaps after the divorce, my father converts part of the basement into a bedroom for two of the boys.

Initially, Eddie and Jake live in the basement together, but they fight constantly. Jake has insisted over the years that his older brother has tried to kill him on several occasions, and it’s true that he hates his guts. The only reason we can come up with is that Eddie really, really wanted to be an only child, then Jake came along to ruin everything. Plus, something’s different about Eddie. He keeps to himself much of the time and doesn’t say a lot, ever. He liberates Jake from the yard by hoisting him over the fence, a mere 30 feet from nearby MacArthur Blvd., and shoots a real arrow at him. Although eventually Jake is bigger, Eddie is wiry and strong and always prevails in a fight because he’s driven by rage.

In a fit of anger after a fight, Jake smashes his fist through the wall at the foot of the basement steps. He hangs a poster over it. Mom is none the wiser for 30 years.

Finally Mom decides to switch Jake out and put Tyler in. All’s well until Tyler’s hoarding habits begin to mature. Junk piles up on his side of the room and invades Eddie’s space inch by inch. My mother thinks she’ll embarrass Tyler by putting a fence of chicken wire in the middle of the room to separate their space. But she doesn’t know who she’s dealing with. Slowly his belongings and bits of trash and candy wrappers begin to creep up the fence until it reaches the point where the chicken wire sags heavily like a drunk with a pot belly into Eddie’s side of the room.

A Digression

When it’s time to go to the doctor, we go to Bethesda for the pediatrician. For the dentist, we go to K Street in downtown Washington. The ride takes a little over a half an hour, with four kids bickering most of the way. We follow MacArthur Blvd. until it feeds into Canal Road, just a bit west of Key Bridge. At the last minute, we dip onto an access road that goes under the bridge and takes us to the Whitehurst Freeway.

I'm sure my mother has to steel herself when we reach this point. As one, all four of us start screeching and pinching our noses, crying “Eeeewwwwwwwww!” and “Ugh!” at the top of our lungs. No matter how hot it is, we roll up all the windows.

We are passing the rendering plant that sits on the side of the Potomac below Georgetown. The stench is absolutely disgusting and we aren’t the only ones who object, just the most obnoxious.

A rendering plant turns dead animals, slaughterhouse blood, butcher shop trimmings and used cooking grease into animal by-product materials for the production of tallow, grease, and high-protein meat and bone meal.

The Hopfenmaier plant at the foot of Georgetown opened in 1873. Two years later, the city passed an ordinance banning rendering plants — new ones, anyway. Hopfenmaier was grandfathered in and the battles with neighborhoods near and far began. They went on for years. [5]

On the wall of the Washington Flour Company on the other side of the freeway, there is a sign that says:

The Objectionable Odors You May Notice in This

Area Do Not Originate in this Plant!

We get almost as big a kick out of the sign as we do from all the bad smells. It seems so hoity-toity, as if it should be read with an English accent.

But poor Mom. She doesn’t have much choice for the return trip. Going through Georgetown or any other way will just slow us down. So she heads west on Whitehurst Freeway, and experiences the whole ordeal in reverse.

5 John Kelly, June 4, 2011, Washington Post