The Good House: A Novel (17 page)

“I don’t think they had that kind of thing up here then,” I had told him.

Of course, when Scott and I split up, we had the girls see therapists, to “process their grief.” Their school counselor had recommended it. Tess was fourteen, Emily twelve at the time. And they’ve both been in therapy, on and off, ever since. I still pay their therapy bills, though I’m less and less able to afford them. I’ve told the girls I think it’s a bit of an indulgence. I’ve never been in therapy and I manage quite well. If anything, in my opinion, therapy has made the girls, especially Tess, more brooding and self-absorbed. She went through a stage where she was completely obsessed with finding out every detail about my mother.

“What was
really
wrong with her?” she would ask me, and sometimes, if I’d had a couple of drinks, I’d offer up what I knew. “She had manic-depression. The doctors told Dad it was manic-depression.”

“Bipolar,” Tess would proclaim excitedly. “It’s called ‘bipolar’ now.”

“Okay. Fine,” I’d reply.

“Well, it must have been hard for you, having a mother with such unpredictable moods,” Tess would say.

“Honestly, I didn’t really notice. I don’t think I paid a lot of attention. We were at school all day. In the summers, we spent our time outdoors, mostly.…”

“Because your mom found it so hard to cope?”

“No, because that’s what all kids did in those days.”

I would usually try to change the subject, but Tess would steer me back. “It’s important for me to know,” she’d say. “My therapist wants to know my history. I mean, if your mother was mentally ill, and such an alcoholic, and we know that there was insanity on your father’s side, going back to Sarah Good—”

“Oh, please, don’t start up with the witch business again,” I’d cry out. “The poor old hag was hanged. Let her rest in peace.”

Scott and our younger daughter, Emily, had a theory about my witch ancestress, Sarah Good. Emily even wrote an essay about Sarah Good in high school, called “Goodwife Good.” Here’s what she and Scott learned: Sarah Good’s father killed himself when she was a young child and when her mother remarried, her new husband took her inheritance. Sarah married once, at age sixteen, was widowed, and married again, this time to a man named Good. I guess she had a screw loose, because she somehow caused their ensuing bankruptcy and debt, and the Goods—including their four-year-old daughter, Dorcas—were soon homeless beggars. Sarah Good was not a sweet, humble beggar. She was antisocial and belligerent. She would knock on the doors in Salem Village and, if she was refused charity, would issue a series of incoherent curses under her breath. She and her daughter were unwashed and wore others’ cast-off rags for clothes.

Sarah Good was one of the first three women in Salem accused of witchcraft, when the mass hysteria began, and her own little daughter, Dorcas, and her husband both testified against her. Here’s something I find so, so sad about the case of Sarah Good: Four-year-old Dorcas was also accused of witchcraft, and because of her youth and ignorance, she confessed. She was chained in a dungeon, like the others, and when she was interviewed by magistrates several days after her arrest, she told them that her mother had given her a snake, and that the snake bit her thumb and sucked her blood. The officials assumed that the snake was a “familiar,” and this pretty much sealed Sarah Good’s fate. She had been pregnant when arrested, and after giving birth to her baby (which subsequently died), she was hanged. Dorcas Good was eventually released. So deranged was she by her time spent chained in a dungeon that she was deemed “never good for anything” by her father, who received some restitution for his damaged progeny. She must have been good for something, to some man, as I am her descendant, as are my daughters.

Emily’s paper asserted that had Sarah Good lived today, she would have been diagnosed with a severe form of mental illness—bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. She cited the witnesses’ descriptions of Sarah Good’s odd behavior—her inclination to mutter things to herself and others, her sometimes hostile and antisocial nature. There is a genetic component to these mental illnesses, Emily wrote, and she made reference to Sarah Good’s suicidal father. Scott helped Emily research her paper and she received an A. The essay was actually entered in some kind of statewide essay contest. She didn’t win, but she did receive an honorable mention.

Scott was always fascinated by this theory, about this double line of madness in my family. He never met my mother, of course, but he was quite preoccupied with what he called the “ironies” of her situation. For example, the fact that my mother spent a good part of my childhood in Danvers State Hospital, an institution for the insane. Many don’t know that the Salem witch trials actually took place in Salem Village, which is now Danvers, in very close proximity to the hospital where my mother was confined more than once. Scott got a big kick out of the fact that Danvers State Hospital, built in the late 1800s, was originally called the “State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers,” and that the hospital stood on Hathorne Hill, which was named after John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials.

“They actually called it a lunatic hospital,” he would call out to me as he read from one of his stacks of library books. “Did they still call it that when your mother was there?”

“No, of course not,” I would reply impatiently.

Scott knew I hated talking about the place. Most everything he knew about my mother, he had learned when we were half in the bag, both of us. Drinking always loosened my lips. Apparently, it had had the same effect on my mother. When she was “up,” according to my dad—I actually don’t recall her periods of mania very well; I don’t think they happened often—she would drink to slow herself down a bit, to get a little sleep, but she would overdo it, I guess. I’ve been told that she ended up at Danvers once, when I was very small, because she drove over to the home of Reverend Howell, who was then the minister of the Congregational church. (Another favorite irony of Scott’s: Reverend Howell’s former dining room is my current office.) She marched into his dining room and, as Reverend Howell sat at the dinner table with his wife and three young children, asked why he kept raping her and sodomizing the children of the parish. I didn’t know about that until my aunt Peg told me, in hushed, faltering words, a few days before I left for college. We went to the Congregational church every Sunday of my youth. Mrs. Howell had taught my Sunday school class and led us in the church children’s choir. She was always so kind to me. I had no idea.

The first time I remember my mother going to the hospital in Danvers was after my brother, Judd, was born. I was six; my sister Lisa was about four. I guess my mom had postpartum depression after each of us was born—they just didn’t know as much about it then. She became very depressed. She slept all the time. Aunt Peg came over and stayed after Judd was born. My cousin Jane is just a year younger than I am, and Eddie is three years older, so it was fun having them at the house with us all the time. One day, Peg was doing something in the kitchen and she tried to get my mother to hold Judd. My mother kept refusing tearfully. Finally, she whispered into Peg’s ear that she was afraid to hold him because she might take him into the bathroom and drown him in the tub. She had repeated visions of doing it. My mother hadn’t bathed in weeks. It turned out, she was afraid to go near the bathtub because of the visions of drowning the baby.

So back she went to Danvers State. I do remember her hospitalization this time, because we went to visit her there. After a few drinks, Scott could usually persuade me to tell him about it. Mostly, I remember the smell. It just filled the air at Danvers State—the smell of urine, feces, ammonia, and some strange amalgamation of chemically tinged body odors. You walked into the stench the minute the attendants opened the doors to the wards. You never stopped smelling it, because you were just completely immersed in it. You had to go home and soak in the tub for an hour and shampoo your hair over and over again to get the smell out. My mother was very confused and mostly silent during our visits. She must have been heavily sedated. But some of the other women on the ward, they cackled and swore, and one told me she could see the devil above my head. He was always there, in a vapor, she told me. She kept staring at the space above my head and shaking her head with wild eyes, then looking at me with pity. We never went back to visit after that. Eventually, Mom came home.

My mother was depressed. What else can I say? Scott and the girls were always curious about her, but I haven’t a lot of details. She loved animals. Our cat, Calico, was one of the few things that was guaranteed to always make my mother smile. She taught me to knit. She liked to read. She needed quiet. She was rather pretty. When I was twelve, she killed herself.

It was on one of the first days of summer. I remember my brother and sister and I were just giddy with the excitement of no school that morning. My mother stayed in bed, which wasn’t unusual. We rode our bikes down to the market and our dad gave us doughnuts for breakfast. Then we went to my aunt Peg’s—she lived down the road from us—and played with our cousins, Janie and Eddie. Eventually, Peg took us home. It was suppertime and Peg said she had a feeling, a premonition. She wanted to make sure my mom was feeling okay.

Mom was still in bed. The bedroom door was locked. Peg knocked and knocked. Then she called my dad, who came home and propped a ladder against the house, and I climbed up and into the small upstairs window. My dad was too big to squeeze through the window frame; my aunt Peg, weeping and wringing her hands, was too anxious. So I climbed through the window and ran to the bedroom door and unlocked it. I remember that I held my breath as I ran through the room, for some reason, as if I were swimming underwater from one side of a pool to the other. I just caught a glimpse of my mother out of the corner of my eye. She was curled up, facing the wall. I unlocked the door and ran past my father. I don’t know how I knew she was dead. I just did. She had swallowed every pill in the house (and we had a houseful of pills).

Afterward, for years, I felt a strange guilt about running through the room like that. I should have gone to her. In fact, people who knew the story assumed that I had actually done just that—walked over and tried to wake her somehow. But I didn’t. I’m not sure why I feel that guilt. I still feel it at times. Somewhere, deep inside, I think that maybe if I could have held my hand in front of her nose to see if she was breathing, like my father had done when he ran into the room, she might have been revived. By my need. Like that mare Rebecca had saved that first morning, revived by the presence, the simple and undeniable need of her baby.

But my mother knew we needed her when she took all those pills. There was no denying our presence. We weren’t babies anymore. We were wild, my brother, sister, and I. Always tearing through the house. Telling on one another, having raging fights that spilled into her room. Jumping on her bed, screaming accusations about one another. Judd was always in trouble in school; he’s a cop now, in Swampscott. My sister, Lisa (now a makeup artist in L.A.), and I had howling, slapping brawls and we’d shriek and curse at each other in front of my mother, trying to get her to take sides. Sometimes she would. Usually, though, she’d tell us that she needed quiet. She was too tired. She wanted us out of her room.

“You’re all driving your poor mother out of her mind,” Aunt Peg used to shout at us when she stopped in to “check on things,” which she did regularly. We were, too. We knew it. We seemed to drive her into herself, make her distant and sad. But once she got that way, during what I now realize were her very depressed times, our mother didn’t even seem to know we were there. We could be jumping around her bed, screaming and cursing and kicking one another, and she’d just turn and face the wall.

We are here, we are here, we are here
was our constant chaotic, cacophonous cry.

Who gives a fuck,
I guess, was her answer.

eleven

I had been invited to Tess and Michael’s for Thanksgiving dinner. It was going to be Tess, Michael, and Michael’s parents, Nancy and Bill Watson. Emily was coming from New York, without Adam, who had decided to spend Thanksgiving with his own family, for some reason, this year. And Scott was coming. It was the first time since our divorce that we would be spending a holiday together with the kids. When Tess first presented the idea to me, several weeks earlier, I had balked.

“Just have Scott. I’ll have dinner with Aunt Jane,” I had said. My cousin Jane lived in Wendover, and in the past I had spent holidays with her and her family when Scott was with mine.

“Mom, why?” Tess had demanded. “Dad’s all alone and you’re all alone. I know you two get along fine. Dad said he just spoke to you last week.”

It was true. Scott had called from his home in Lenox to ask my advice about whether he should put his house on the market now, or wait until the spring. Now that he and Richard had split up, he wanted to move closer to Marblehead, so he could see more of Grady. I had told him to wait. The Berkshires are beautiful in the spring, but the fall and winters are a little desolate, in my opinion. Scott knows that my opinion on the Berkshires is based on one visit to Lenox in midsummer twenty years ago and multiple readings of
Ethan Frome.
But he took my advice. He was going to wait until spring, and in the meantime, he made frequent trips to Brooklyn to see Emily and to Marblehead to see Tess. He always was a dedicated father.

Thanksgiving week marks the beginning of a slow-down time for me. It’s a time I usually look forward to, but this year was different because the preceding months had been very slow. Plus, it was right before the holidays, two years earlier, that I had been shipped off to Hazelden. This year, holiday invitations had already started to arrive, but I didn’t feel inclined to attend any of the parties. People get so drunk at holiday parties. I used to love that; it made me feel like a normal drinker. Now, prim and sober at parties, I often find myself cornered by somebody’s shit-faced husband who’s determined to have me hear his incoherent monologue about Barack Obama or how much he’s always loved the sea. And, of course, there are always those people who ask me how much their property is worth. People have always asked me this, and it can be a little irritating. It’s like asking a doctor about your niggling cough while at a social occasion. Sometimes I’d actually sold the house to the person doing this. When I was drinking, I’d usually tell them it was worth at least 10 percent more than what they’d paid, just to make them happy. Now I’m tempted to admit, “Not even close to what you paid for it,” just to see the look on their faces. In general, I had been refusing invites for holiday parties, but I did finally agree to go to Tess’s and be with the rest of the family.