An Uncomplicated Life (4 page)

My mother said she heard voices. She sometimes kept me home from school because she wanted the company. She was a loving mother, and we took long walks to the park, where she pushed me on the swings and laughed when I let her down quickly on the teeter-totter.

She loved the mountains of North Carolina. We’d spend a week in Montreat, a Presbyterian retreat 20 miles east of Asheville. The Rev. Billy Graham still lives in Montreat. It’s a town of 250 people, tucked into a cove in the Black Mountains of the Blue Ridge. Calmness abides. Everyone says hello.

My mother and dad and I hiked the local Lookout Mountain. I ran up the hill, and they would pray to the Rev. Billy that I wouldn’t take a header off the narrow trail. We hiked Grandfather Mountain, whose main attraction was a swinging bridge connecting twin peaks. When the wind blew—which it did all the time—the bridge swayed mightily, and I refused to cross it. To this day, my dad calls Grandfather Mountain “Chicken Peak” in my honor.

We’d venture into Asheville to eat at the S&W Cafeteria, where my “vegetables” were French fries and mashed potatoes. My mother was never happier than when she was roaming the spines of those ancient hills. Their beauty was cathartic.

After I’d been sitting on the porch for a while, my dad came home. The suicide note lay on the table in the dining nook. He read it as I sat on the porch, peering in. He put the note down. He opened the sliding glass door and held me for a long time.

“I think she’s done it this time,” he said.

My mother had left us by adding a hundred sleeping pills to her bloodstream—too many to pump away. She’d gone to her parents’ apartment for the day. Mom died in her father’s bed, in the apartment her parents shared in Washington, D.C. It was what she wanted. I don’t know why she chose their apartment for the final goodbye. It didn’t matter.

Memory is a con man. Time creates distance between what is
true and what we believe to be so. I remember my mother’s death, though. It isn’t a souvenir of recollection. It is part of who I am.

I am not fluent in the language of grief. The internal engines governing my emotions rarely crank up. I didn’t cry much after my mother died. I was praised for that: “What a brave boy.” It wasn’t that. I wasn’t brave. I repressed. I knew my mother wasn’t coming back, and a part of me—a selfish, guilty, yet practical part—knew life would be hard after that. But it would never be so uncertain as it was when she was alive, when every day held the potential for love and terror in equal measure. I would be secure. My dad would ensure that. I would have a place to go, with no surprises. At the very least, the surprises wouldn’t be the terrible kind I’d been used to.

THREE HUNDRED MILES TO
the north and west, Kerry Phillips was eleven years old, almost four years older than I. She lived in Hopewell, Pennsylvania, 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, in the sort of fantasy world I knew only from television. Hopewell wasn’t Mayfield where the Cleavers lived. And Sid and Jean Phillips weren’t Ward and June. But the Cleaver ideal had a soul mate.

Kerry lived in a cocoon of family. She and her sister endured a babysitter exactly once. Every close relative lived within five miles of her front door, and the extended family could practically converse from its front porches. It was a time of middle-class prosperity, ensured by the huge and hulking Jones and Laughlin steel mill, which spread for seven miles along the Monongahela River, in nearby Aliquippa.

The area had benefited from the World War II demand for trucks and tanks and bullets, and after the soldiers came home, the mill remained busy, producing steel for automobiles, appliances and other accoutrements of the freshly unleashed American Dream. Union shops guaranteed the men would be paid well for their time. Moms didn’t work outside the home. They fixed kids breakfast before sending them off to school. They filled metal Batman lunch boxes with peanut butter sandwiches and short thermoses with Kool-Aid. The kids came home to snacks. Houses were spotless. “I went through this phase in high school where I wanted Jell-O for breakfast,” Kerry recalled. “Cut up in little squares, like you see in restaurants. My mother would make it in little squares and put it in a parfait glass for me.”

At 4:00 p.m. or 5:00 p.m., or whenever Dad’s shift at the mill ended, Mom had dinner on the table. The whole family ate together and talked about the day. Sundays were spent at church and at the homes of grandparents. Parents, siblings, aunts and uncles gathered to eat and live the family dream. It wasn’t unusual for Kerry to spend all or part of her Sundays with 14 or 15 family members.

Summers were spent at the swim club. Jean would drop Kerry off at 10:30 in the morning for practice. Sid would pick her up at 4:00 p.m. After dinner, she would roam the safe, suburban avenues until the streetlights came on. That was the sign that it was time to go home.

Once a week, Kerry made the trip to Franklin Avenue in downtown Aliquippa, where her grandfather Oscar Barnhart owned a convenience store that had a soda fountain and a
large candy counter. Oscar allowed his granddaughter one piece of free candy.

Oscar and his wife, Marie, lived within walking distance of the store. When Marie needed to get a message to Oscar at the store, she wrote a note and attached it to the family dog’s collar. The pooch would amble the few blocks and present the note to Oscar. Before they owned the store, Oscar and Marie Barnhart taught school together in a one-room schoolhouse.

Kerry played flute in the Hopewell High marching band. She went to all of the football and basketball games, watching a classmate named Tony Dorsett break lots of records. Dorsett went on to a Hall of Fame career as a running back with the Dallas Cowboys.

Kerry says the home cocoon was so strong she never strayed. She never had the experience of being scared of a parent waiting for her when she missed curfew because she never missed curfew. She graduated from high school in 1972, yet never experimented with drugs, or knew anyone who did. Her dates were highly scripted: Movies, picnics or hanging at the local fast-food place, a strip-mall fixture called the Brighton Hot Dog Shoppe. Especially adventurous dates involved going to the Pittsburgh International Airport and watching airplanes arrive and depart.

MEANTIME, I’D LIVED IN
the storm of my mother’s schizophrenia.

In the days after she died, my dad and I returned to the apartment with the sliding-glass door. I took a few days off from school. We told everyone Mom had had a heart attack.
It was easier that way. My dad and I were making do. Jim Daugherty was steadfast. He had an eight-year-old son, he was all alone, his wife had just died in the most emotionally searing way, and he was heroic.

We were inseparable. “Wounded animals” my dad called us.

I got a key to the apartment. We tied it to a shoestring. I wore it under my shirt. Sometimes I twirled it in class. Other kids asked me what it was for. When I told them it was the key to where I lived, they were impressed. Having your own apartment key imparted a sort of freedom not seen among most fourth graders.

I was cool.

For my dad’s peace of mind—and so I would have something to do after school besides be cool alone in my empty apartment—he hired a woman to watch me for a few hours until he could pick me up. Mrs. McKee lived just down the block from my best friend, walking distance from the elementary school.

Her duties mostly involved being there. If I couldn’t go home to a real mom, I’d at least have an anchorage, a two-hour harbor where normalcy lived. Mrs. McKee offered the occasional snack. I’d drop my books and go out to play. No surprises.

Then one day, not long after we’d started this arrangement, I came to her house and found the door locked and the house silent. I went around back. That door was open so I went inside.

“Mrs. McKee?”

No answer.

“Mrs. McKee?”

“In here,” she said. Mrs. McKee lay sobbing on her bed, wracked with pain from an ulcerous stomach.

“Are you okay, Mrs. McKee?” I asked.

She wasn’t, of course. And I couldn’t stay with her in the afternoons anymore.

My dad found someone else, and I shuttled just up the street, where Aline Alexander lived with her son and grandson. She wasn’t my aunt, but I called her “Aunt Aline.” She was a heavy smoker who was emphysemic. She was at home all day so Dad had found a new place to keep me in after-school orbit.

That is, until Aunt Aline was no longer able to keep me. She had lung cancer.

People kept disappearing.

AT 4:00 P.M. MOST
weekdays, Kerry Phillips climbed the apple tree in her backyard in Hopewell. From there, she could see her dad’s car coming up Harding Avenue. For 37 years, Sid worked for Aliquippa and Southern Railroad, in the Signal and Water Service Department. A&S was a subsidiary of the steel giant Jones and Laughlin, its railway spanning the seven-mile length of the mill. Sid served A&S as an electrician, a plumber or a welder. Whatever the day’s work required.

The Phillips family—Sid, Jean, Kerry and her sister, Janis, two years her senior—sat down for dinner every night at 4:30 p.m. Family dinner was sacrosanct, and attendance was mandatory. For me, in the days when I was staying with Mrs. McKee, and then with Aunt Aline, in the afternoons, my dad would pick me up after work. Then most nights, we’d eat
dinner at the apartment of my mom’s parents. This was the same apartment where my mother had removed herself from all her earthly engagements.

Life wasn’t terrible. My dad filled our loneliness with board games, and Pop-Tarts for breakfast. Eventually we began eating at home. Anything we could boil or slam into a toaster was suitable for consumption. We had season tickets to the Washington Redskins, a passion we shared with my mother’s father. We drove Grandpa to the games. Each game he’d repay the gesture by buying me a program.

My dad made sure I owned what was left of our cocoon. Home was never an entirely safe harbor for either of us. Jim Daugherty offered the strength of a father and, as best as the gender allows, the touch of a mother.

“Waffles or pancakes?” he might ask as we circled the strange land of the supermarket.

“French toast,” I’d answer.

Everything was frozen. Even now, my dad has the culinary skills of a college freshman. Anything that could be thawed and eaten, was. We were hungry men, living on Hungry Man.

A man with an eight-year-old son in tow doesn’t have the luxury of grieving from the tragedy of a lifetime. That first winter, we went to basketball games. The Baltimore Bullets had a deal: Five dollars got you a game ticket and a seat on a Greyhound from the D.C. suburb of Langley Park to the arena in Baltimore. On Christmas night in 1966, my dad and I went to a game. He suggested it. We both needed something to be cheerful about. Today they call it father-son bonding. I don’t know what we called it. It was equal parts love and desperation,
faith and hopelessness. It was a mystery ride in a dark bus. It was all we had.

That night my father sat close to me in the darkness of the bus, closer than he ever would again. We talked. I wanted to know how Earl Monroe could dribble the basketball behind his back without bouncing it off his heel. I wanted to know why he called himself “The Pearl,” a great leap of audacity in those less self-reverential times.

“Is Wilt Chamberlain the strongest man in the world, Dad?”

“I don’t know,” Dad answered.

“Can he beat up Wes Unseld?”

I wanted to know where the bus went after it dropped us off and before it picked us up again, how come Kevin Loughery shot so much and when my mother might be coming back. I wanted to know that.

“Why did Mom leave, Dad?”

He said she had an illness. It was nobody’s fault. Especially not hers. This satisfied me then, and now. Betsy Daugherty
was
ill, to an extent not a lot of people in 1966 understood. Not the least of whom was the eight-year-old sitting on a dark bus on the way to a basketball game.

KERRY NEVER KNEW ANYONE
who had a parent who died. She didn’t know any latch-key kids, or any kids whose parents split up. Her world was Jell-O for breakfast, cut up in squares, in a parfait glass. Just so.

Sid Phillips also owned and operated an appliance repair business, Phillips Appliance Service. He was a one-man repair
crew, mending everything from toasters to washing machines. He’d work his regular mill shift, come home, wash up, eat dinner with his family, then spend much of the rest of the evening on service calls.

The money paid for Kerry’s and Janis’s college educations, something that escaped Kerry until she graduated. “Now I’m done with Phillips Appliance Service,” Sid announced shortly after Kerry got her diploma.

Times changed in Hopewell and in Aliquippa, but not until after Kerry Phillips had graduated and moved away. The mill shut down. Without J&L providing reliable, well-paying work, Aliquippa fell into disrepair. It became the place the TV networks used as the visual metaphor for the downfall of American manufacturing. White flight, a healthy drug culture, high unemployment and high crime took over and led to a kind of hopelessness. Once-vibrant Franklin Street, its businesses shuttered, became no place to be after dark. Oscar Barnhart sold the candy store and moved to Hopewell.

By 1982, Sid Phillips was forced to retire early from his job as a supervisor on the A&S Railroad. Until early 2014, he and Jean still lived comfortably in Hopewell, in the house Sid built shortly after he returned from World War II. Then they moved into a retirement community not far from Kerry and me. They’ve been married 69 years.

ABOUT A YEAR AFTER
my mother died, Dad started dating. It had to be awkward for him, a 34-year-old widower suddenly back in the game. He joined Parents Without Partners, a social group for single parents seeking companionship. My mother’s
mother suggested it. Dad dated a few women but introduced me to only two of them. One was a divorcee with four children. The other was Elsye Allison, also divorced, raising twins. Jeff and Debra were 14 years old at the time.

At some point fairly early in the process, my dad shifted his attention to Elsye. Part of it was because he didn’t want to inherit four of someone else’s kids. Another part was, I liked Elsye better. After they’d been dating for six months or so, I asked out of the blue, the way nine-year-olds do, “Are you going to marry Mrs. Allison?”