Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 30
In addition to a fold-out couch, a small kitchen table with a couple of cheap chairs, and the TV, there were two more terrariums housing an iguana and a tortoise. We called them Tomato and Izzy.
Dad seemed proud of his new place, and he kept adding to the menagerie. On one visit, he took us down to the boiler room and led us to a cardboard box with six ducklings inside. The landlord had let him set up some heat lamps, creating a makeshift incubator. They were so tiny that we had to feed them with an eyedropper.
“Just give it a quarter of a turn on the mental carburetor,” my grandfather said to my father, as if that were all it would take for his son to stop drinking. As if it were just a matter of willpower. They were in the library, but for once they sat across from each other—not equals exactly, never equals—but as two people who had a problem to solve, even though they might never agree on the solution. Although the medical view of alcoholism and addiction had changed drastically in the previous few decades, public perception hadn’t evolved much. Despite treatment programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which had been around since 1935, the stigma attached to addicts and addiction persisted.
“Just make up your mind, Fred,” my grandfather said, offering a useless platitude that Norman Vincent Peale would have approved of. The closest thing Fred had to a philosophy was the prosperity gospel, which he used like a blunt instrument and an escape hatch, and it had never harmed any of his children more than it did right then.
“That’s like telling me to make up my mind to give up cancer,” Dad said. He was right, but my grandfather wholeheartedly embraced the “blame the victim” mentality that was still pervasive and couldn’t make that leap.
“I need to beat this, Dad. I don’t think I can do it by myself. I know I can’t.”
Instead of asking “What can I do for you?” Fred said, “What do you want from me?”
Freddy had no idea where to start.
My grandfather had never been sick a day in his life; he had never missed a day of work; he had never been sidelined by depression or anxiety or heartbreak, not even when his wife was near death. He appeared to have no vulnerabilities at all and therefore couldn’t recognize or sanction them in other people.
He had never handled Gam’s injuries and illnesses well. Whenever Gam was suffering, my grandfather would say something like “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive,” and then leave the room as quickly as possible, leaving her alone to deal with her pain.
Sometimes Gam forced herself to say, “Yes, Fred.” Usually she said nothing, clenched her jaw, and struggled to keep from crying. My grandfather’s relentless insistence that everything was “great” left no room for any other feelings.
We were told that Dad was sick and would be in the hospital for a few weeks. We were also told that he had to give up his apartment—apparently the landlord wanted to rent the place to somebody else. Fritz and I went to pack up clothes, games, and other odds and ends we’d left behind, and when we arrived, the place was almost completely empty. The tanks were gone, the snakes were gone. I never found out what happened to them.
When Dad returned from wherever he had been—the hospital or rehab—he moved into my grandparents’ attic. It was a temporary arrangement, and no effort was made to turn it into a proper living space. All of the storage boxes and old toys—including the vintage fire engine, crane, and dump truck my grandmother had hidden there all those years ago—had simply been pushed to one end of the attic and a cot set up in the cleared space at the other. Dad put his portable six-inch black-and-white television on his old National Guard trunk beneath the dormered window.
When Fritz and I visited him, we camped out on the floor next to his cot, and the three of us watched an endless stream of old movies such as Tora! Tora! Tora! and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. When he was well enough to come downstairs, Dad joined us on Sundays for the weekly Abbott and Costello movie on WPIX.
After a month or two, my grandfather told Dad there was a vacancy in Sunnyside Towers, a building my grandfather had bought in 1968—a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor.
As Dad was preparing to move to Sunnyside, Maryanne, with the help of a $600 loan, was getting ready to start her studies at Hofstra Law School. Although not her first choice, Hofstra was only a ten-minute drive from Jamaica Estates—close enough that she could still take my cousin David to school in the morning and pick him up in the afternoon. Going back to school was a long-deferred dream. She also hoped that becoming a lawyer would give her the financial wherewithal to leave her husband someday. Their situation had become increasingly dire over the years. The parking lot attendant job that his father-in-law had given him was a humiliation from which he hadn’t recovered. Over the years, David had lashed out at his wife from time to time, particularly when he was drunk.
Maryanne’s move toward independence sent her husband even further over the edge, and after she returned home from her first day at law school, her husband, in a fit of rage, threw their thirteen-year-old son out of the apartment. Maryanne took him to the House, and they spent the night there. David Desmond, Sr., cleaned out their meager joint savings account and left town.
When the whole family was together, we spent most of our time in the library, a room without books until Donald’s