The Long Journey Home (16 page)

Clearly I couldn’t call him. He’d give me medication. I imagined being put to sleep by the heavy dose of something.
No. If I’m tranquilized to sleep
, I thought,
I’ll never wake sane
.

Sane
, I thought. Somehow it was a matter of keeping my sanity, and to remain sane meant to remain conscious and free of drugs.

Then this flat, declarative sentence came to my mind:
I’m going to kill myself
.

I’m going to kill myself with a razor blade from Ilse’s medicine cabinet
.

In my mind’s eye I saw the package lying on the right side of the bottom shelf of her medicine cabinet. But how did I know exactly where Ilse kept her razor blades? I’d never look into someone else’s medicine chest. But a part of me must have looked, and kept the looking secret from the rest of me. Where would my conscious mind have been?

I’m going to kill myself
.

No. I’m not going to kill myself
.

Yes. I have to kill myself
.

A calm, observing self escaped my body and floated above me. It watched as two other aspects of me, two personalities, broke off from the core of who I was and faced each other in a struggle: one fighting to take my life, the other to save it.

My body was paralyzed.

The life-taking personality was without hope. It saw no other course of action except to commit suicide.

The lifesaving personality argued. It talked about my responsibility to care for my son.

But there are other people who could take better care of him than you
, my hopeless self told my lifesaving self.
You’re not a good mother anyway
.

You wouldn’t really mess up Ilse’s apartment like that, would you? All that blood. Hell of a way to treat a friend
, the lifesaving self said with forced humor.

The hopeless self found nothing amusing. It was determined that I kill myself. It could see no other solution.

For hours the debate continued while I lay paralyzed. Then the lifesaving self spoke strongly:
Stay with him. Stay until you find a safe way out
.

This is no solution. You’re only saying this to save my life
, the hopeless self responded.

It doesn’t matter if I am. The important thing is to save your life
.

To save my life. Yes
.

To save my life
.

The two aspects of myself moved to a place of agreement. They merged, then slipped back into the whole as if they were pages temporarily fallen from a book. Now all of me was once again inside my body.

And I was no longer paralyzed.

Terrified that I would lose my tenuous hold on life, I got up quickly.

My body and hair were drenched with sweat.

Shower. I have to take a shower
, I thought.
Then get outside as quickly as possible
.

But did I dare go into the bathroom with its razor blades waiting?

I rushed in and turned the shower on.

Get out in a hurry. Just get in and out in a hurry
.

Outside the day was bright and clear. It was hours until Ilse got off from work. What if I would again split apart, perhaps killing myself this time?

Don’t stay alone. For God’s sake don’t stay alone
.

I walked up and down the streets of the city. Terrified, I walked a long time, until my attention was caught by a solitary wall standing in the rubble of a wrecked building. I stood behind a chain-link fence watching the demolition crew at work, watching the huge iron ball swing into the wall again and again until there was nothing left standing at all.

Next door to the ruined building, a movie theater marquee advertised
The Guns of Navarone
. I was exhausted. Would the movie take my mind off myself? “Compelling and suspense-filled,” the ads claimed. Surrounded by a theater full of people, perhaps I’d be safe from my mind. Perhaps I’d be able to rest a little. I bought a ticket and went in.

I sat there in the dark, still absorbed in my terrors. Then, on the screen, the side of a mountain slowly opened, revealing an enormous gun pointing straight at the audience. The camera moved in close, filling the screen with the image. For the rest of my life I would carry with me the image of that gun, at close range, pointed directly at my face.

When I got out of the movie, I met Ilse in front of her office building. We went to a little Chinese restaurant for dinner. I couldn’t eat but sat trying to put words to the experience I’d had in her apartment that morning. She listened quietly. Then she told me that she wanted us to take a ride on the Staten Island ferry to see the Statue of Liberty.

We took the subway to the ferry. I was disappointed that the statue was so far from the boat. Memory has pushed it even farther away. Liberty. Maybe that’s why Ilse took me there. What did liberty mean? I had no idea. I looked out across the choppy water to the figure flooded with light, while my head began to throb. My headache increased in intensity as we rode the subway back to Ilse’s apartment. After taking two aspirin, I finally fell asleep, exhausted.

The next morning I took the train back to Philadelphia. The train car was filled with actors on their way to give a performance there. The energy level was high, the conversation constant. I closed my eyes, blocking out the animated chatter, aware now of the sound of the wheels of the train, their rhythm and click, and how they seemed to echo the words “A safe way out, a safe way out, a safe way out, a safe way out …”
Stay with him until you find a safe way out
.

Once I was home, my mother-in-law made plans to return to Georgia. As she dismantled John’s shotgun to take with her, she assured me that he truly loved me. John had agreed to go to a psychiatrist at the university, a man much older than he. It would be months before I found out that John stopped going after two visits.

And then, when he cried out his lover’s name in a moment of orgasm, my heart hurt even more. As always, he refused to talk about the affair or my feelings. When I did try to talk with him, he
would either get angry or lie down on the bed and begin to utter his now familiar nonsensical phrases. I talked with friends, resolved nothing.

Then graduate school was over and John accepted his first job, a temporary position at the University of Washington in Seattle. He phoned me from school to let me know. On the radio I’d just heard of the death of Marilyn Monroe. I lay on the bed and sobbed. I didn’t know what I was crying about—the death of Marilyn Monroe, leaving all of my friends and my beloved Philadelphia, or the end of an era that had brought with it a sense of life as I’d never known it before—rich and wonderful things, together with almost more pain than I thought I could bear.

In Seattle, we lived in an apartment complex north of the city, filled with young couples with children, many of them around John Elder’s age. Our next-door neighbors, the Cranes, had five children. The oldest boy, Dennis, had a hatchet that John Elder envied daily. But even more than he envied the hatchet, he envied all of Dennis’s friends. John Elder longed to have friends. Often, as they played, he sat silently on a large rock in the woods as if contemplating the universe.

One day John Elder came running into the apartment, sobbing loudly. I sat down, took him in my arms, and held him tightly. “Why don’t I have friends?” he asked, sobbing. “Why won’t the boys play with me?”

I was at a loss for words. I could only hug him more tightly.

Sometimes the boys would let him play with them, but more often than not, he played with Dennis’s little brother Jeff or held the hand of the youngest child, Mike, as he was learning to walk.

Sometimes Kathy, the oldest at thirteen, came to visit me when her mother was taking a nap and her sister, Diane, was taking her violin
lesson. It always distressed Kathy to be in the apartment alone when her mother was asleep.

With five children in a small apartment, Jean Crane needed all the rest she could get. Her efficiency amazed me. The apartment was spotless and the kitchen linoleum shone with layers of wax. And still she had time to sit on the back steps with me most afternoons, smoking cigarettes and talking.

We went together to visit another neighbor, who taught us how to make candles using molds. The neighbor’s husband was a mortician. She told us that at the West Coast Morticians Convention that year, the major topic of conversation was the embalming of Marilyn Monroe.

Somehow I was able to put aside the problems of the past and focus on enjoying our new life in Seattle. John taught three days a week, and more often than not we camped the other four. We camped on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, in the Hoh Rain Forest, and along the Oregon coast all the way to a campground in a redwood forest.

On weekends when we didn’t camp, we went on short trips, or spent time at a beach nearby, where John shot at tin cans with his BB pistol, John Elder played in the sand, and I did sketches of them, the sea, and landscapes. Sometimes we went to Mount Rainier, where John Elder sledded in the snow. Once, the three of us climbed to a glacier-fed river on the mountain, and once we went to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park.

It was a year of family activity and exploration.

When the school year was almost over, John was offered a teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh and accepted it. The trip from Philadelphia to Seattle and our many trips on the West Coast with the car top-heavy with camping equipment had worn out our VW. We traded it in for a new Chevrolet station wagon. John Elder cried and cried. He’d loved that little car, and a much larger and more powerful car didn’t impress him. The VW had been his friend, and now his friend was gone.

We said goodbye to all our Seattle friends. Jean Crane and I agreed to keep in touch even if it meant only notes at Christmas. For almost a year we had shared our lives daily, talking through the razor-blade slot in our bathrooms, listening to Julie London records on my record player, or sitting on the back steps together smoking cigarettes. And there was the time when we spent the day in her kitchen dipping candles, drinking wine, and laughing ourselves silly over nothing.

John Elder gave his red tractor, Chippy, to Jeff Crane. He had pedaled Chippy up and down the streets of West Philadelphia. And when not riding Chippy, he’d propped him on building blocks, while pretending to fix him with his Playskool toy tools. But John Elder had outgrown Chippy. Now he nursed a dream of owning a bicycle.

As much as I had enjoyed our experiences on the West Coast, I was glad to be going east again. After John backed the car out of our parking space and headed for the highway, I didn’t look back.

A
FTER TWO THOUSAND MILES OF DRIVING, WE WERE FINALLY IN
P
ITTSBURGH
, with its hills, rivers, bridges, steel mills, and the tall Cathedral of Learning of the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh had none of the charm of Philadelphia, and we woke mornings to find our windowsills and breakfast table covered with soot from the steel mills. But Pittsburgh was in the East, and for me the East was home.

We rented a house in Edgewood, within walking distance of John Elder’s elementary school. He was six years old, and in the first grade. Almost as soon as he entered school, I began to get complaints from his teacher that he wouldn’t obey her instructions and was disruptive to the class. She wanted me to “do something with him.” I could do nothing except feel bad about doing nothing. I didn’t understand my son and felt like a failure as a mother.

The good thing was that almost immediately John Elder made friends with a neighbor named Lenny. They walked to school together, and many afternoons Lenny came over to play. Once they tied a rope to the handle of a battery-operated radio, turned it on, and lowered it down the laundry chute. I stood startled at the kitchen sink as loud music suddenly blared from the wall.

I was always glad that John Elder liked to spend much of his time playing contently by himself, and I never interpreted his inclination to do this as a sign that something was wrong with him. I, too, had enjoyed many hours of playing alone when I was a child. And like my son, I had spent much of that time drawing and reading.

By the time John Elder was in the second grade, he was making incredibly detailed drawings of sailing ships. I was amazed at their precision, and at his skill as a draftsman. He also began to put plastic models together. His first model was a submarine. After finishing it, he left it on the table and went outside. It felt odd that he’d said nothing and hadn’t even shown it to me. After a while I became concerned and went to see what he was doing.

I found him sitting on the front steps, crying.

I sat down beside him.

“What’s wrong, John Elder?”

He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I ruined my submarine,” he said.

“It looked fine to me,” I said hopefully. “Let’s go look at it again.”

We went inside together. John Elder stood looking at his model while tears welled up in his eyes again.

“See, it’s ruined,” he said, pointing to a drop of glue that had seeped from the seam on top.

“But you can hardly see that little drop. I don’t think that ruins your submarine at all,” I protested.

“It’s not perfect,” he responded with a tone of finality. Then he got a book from the bookcase, sat on the couch, and began to stare at it, though I could see that he was still thinking about his submarine.

Years later I saw that little gray submarine in a place of honor on top of a bookcase in his home after he’d grown up and married, with many interesting jobs already in his past and even more in his future. I was happy that he’d finally seen that his first model hadn’t been a failure but a triumph.