Dead End Gene Pool (16 page)

MY MOTHER WAS nothing if not practical. She owed this trait, her saving grace, to her ancestors. The end product of twelve arrogant generations of New Englanders descended from a handful of Plymouth Colony founders, Leslie Hamilton was the only issue of an army colonel and a melancholic ex-spinster whose sole objective in life was to search out, examine, cross-reference, and interpret every branch, twig, leaf, and aphid of her family tree. According to my mother, her mother’s premature death was due to hypochondria, but I’m convinced she was a victim of
genealogical nervosa,
a debilitating disease that attacks the brain cells of the afflicted with the speed of a tanker’s oil slick. Research has correlated the illness to membership in societies such as the Colonial Dames Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Mayflower Society. Sadly, there remains no cure, only preventive abstinence.

In a celebratory wrap-up of her first—and final, as she saw it—year of widowhood, my mother relocated us to the arty environs of Georgetown. The house we moved into was a comfortably disheveled federal row house on Reservoir Road. It was painted a peeling biscuit color and was set back from the herringbone-brick sidewalk by a wrought iron fence with the world’s clangiest gate. There were three skinny floors, a basement, and a cool finished attic. Naturally, my brother got the attic.

I had the front room on the second floor, and a bunk bed, which I did not ask for. I am not a bunk bed sort of person. Edward had his crib in a cubicle next to mine. My mother’s master suite took up the rest of the floor. Henrietta had her smoky domain in the basement, and hanging out with her down there, watching TV, shooting the prepubescent breeze, felt like patronizing a grotto nightclub.

Behind the house, a narrow garden ran twenty feet or so down to a freestanding garage barely large enough for my mother’s new Austin Healey Sprite. The garage was accessed by one of the alleys that ran behind the houses of Georgetown like convoluted but biologically necessary plumbing.

Alley life was like ant farm life. The cramped thoroughfares were not only practical, they were highly social. They were where you took a shortcut to the bus stop, or met up with your friends, or roller skated, rode your Stingray, skateboarded, and jumped rope even though there was a continual flow of pedestrian and motor traffic and the pavement was maybe as wide as a 1965 station wagon.

A lot of artists had studios in the old garages and carriage houses, and my mother had hers two alleys over, in a lopsided structure that had once been a car repair shop. Before that, it had purportedly been the shanty of a freed slave, though that was never validated and was probably a stab at historical sensationalism on the part of the Realtor. It was a ramshackle little space made airy by a glass-windowed garage door on one side. When it was warm out, everyone kept their doors up or open, and neighboring artists would trickle by when they grew bored with their own endeavors.

My mother did mostly animal sculptures, stylized turtles and seals and otters and bears that she carved from huge blocks of alabaster and soapstone, or chiseled from stumps of wood the size of small cars. I adored being in her studio. It was at once cozy and macabre, a cross between the school art room and a serial killer’s lair. The room smelled of earth and stone and wood, and everything in it was coated with a lovely soft, carcinogenic dust. Torturous tools of the trade—rasps and files and chisels and mallets—lay about on the worktables amid sculptures in various stages of progress. On the rough wood shelving photographic reference books leaned up against boxes of sandpaper, drills and their bits, and buckets permanently lined with a coating of hard white plaster. Next to an old laundry sink was a ten-pound block of modeling clay, swaddled in thick plastic sheeting to keep it malleable. Aprons, welding masks, and safety goggles hung from pegs along a wall. Sacks of plaster of Paris used to make the molds the finished bronzes would be cast from lay in a heap in a corner. When you opened the sacks up, they smelled divine, just like a dank mausoleum.

Normally our mother didn’t have the time of day for us, but in her studio she took on her birthday persona. We could run amok in there and she just laughed. We ripped into the clay like mice into a bar of soap, and made action figures (Will—soldiers and guns; me—horses and victims for the guillotine), and dipped our arms and legs in buckets of wet plaster she made up for us so we could pretend we were victims of ghastly car wrecks.

If a homework project called for creativity, and she happened to be in town, our mother became a wildly enthusiastic collaborator. The Nagasaki After the Atom Bomb project she helped me build for Social Studies was not to be believed. I considered it the apogee of my five years of combined elementary school training, and if the terrain displayed over the four-foot length of chicken wire and painted plaster was more doomsday lunar crater than Japanese ground zero, the care that went into depicting human carnage and vegetative devastation was justly rewarded. But I couldn’t have scorched the model trees without her knowledge of acetylene torch work.

Gomez and Morticia would have been so proud of my A+.

As it turned out, so was my mother. When I presented her with my inscribed gold star, she stunned me by putting her arms around me and awkwardly kissing the side of my head. I, in turn, nearly forgot myself and leaned in to receive it—but then I remembered that she had only just arrived from Miami and was leaving for Haiti in the morning, so it wasn’t too difficult to remind myself of all the literary mothers she wasn’t, which was one of the formulas for hating her that I followed. Blame it on the lower school English Department.

Lamenting the fact that I wasn’t an Addams was really only 75 percent of the equation; the rest of the time I longed to be my favorite character from
A Wrinkle in Time,
Meg Murry, if only to have her mother—the gifted, beautiful, wonderfully vague but fiercely doting Mrs. Murry who was always there to support her nearsighted, ugly duckling daughter, someone I resembled not a little. The fact that Meg Murry’s father (also achingly brilliant) had vanished, and was subsequently found to be not dead but merely on another planet in a glass tube, the prisoner of a giant brain named IT, would have no bearing on my obsession with this book.

Matters ran smoothly at home when our mother was out of town, thanks to the domestic superintendancy of Cassie Diggins and Henrietta. When she was home, everything went out of whack. Like I couldn’t go to the bathroom. Which is why I remember November 22, 1963, the day that President Kennedy was shot, as the day of the Kennedy Poo, because my mother had left for Mexico that morning.

Other than that, things were okay. Meaning, I was mostly having a decent childhood, other than the glaring hole of deprivation caused by my not having a pony. Since my father hadn’t had much of an impact on my life when he was alive, I can’t say I missed him. It’s hard to miss someone you didn’t know in the first place. To save my brother from the dishonor of having to repeat fifth grade and be in the same class as me, Will was sent off to boarding school. But we were already beginning to part ways gender-wise, so I didn’t really miss him either.

The most cherished thing in my possession then was an autographed copy of Charles Addams’s book
Nightcrawlers
. I had purloined it from my grandparents’ library in the city, along with
Homebodies
,
Drawn and Quartered
, and
Dear Dead Days.
I deserved them more than my grandparents. Besides, they were friends with the Maker himself, referring to him as “Charlie” even, so they could get more copies anytime they wanted. I’d met Him once, when He was over for lunch in the country. I’d been suitably starstruck, and uncharacteristically polite, but He hadn’t found me amusing enough for conversation. The whole thing was reminiscent of my meeting with Walt Disney, when, during our visit to California, my brother and I had knocked on the back door of his Beverly Hills house. Old Walt had actually answered the door himself. I don’t remember what my expectations were at the time. I was five, so undoubtedly they were vast, but they probably weren’t that Mr. Disney, creator of
Cinderella
and
Bambi,
would glare at us and snap, “Scram!” before slamming the door in our faces.

Oh, happy mournful day! On September 18, 1965, the Addams Family came to television. Even though I much preferred her two dimensional persona, I stepped up my slavish emulation of Wednesday Addams. I even built a replica of her guillotine. This was a crude but fully functional piece of engineering that I constructed with pieces of wood from my FAO Schwarz riding stable after watching the episode where Wednesday chops off the head of her Marie Antoinette doll. The blade was problematic, since Cassie Diggins would have missed even a piece of Saran Wrap from the kitchen, so I had to make do using a pocket mirror and pair of industrial-sized scissors that I snapped at the exact moment the mirror fell, which was sort of cheating but ultimately had the desired effect.

I quickly ran out of things to decapitate. Will wasn’t around much, and I was too attached to my hamster. I considered martyring the baby, but Edward was too enthusiastic to be a worthy victim. He would have gladly laid his gurgly little melon on my guillotine, but he didn’t deserve the honor. And Mary Falusi, the old lady who sometimes filled in for Henrietta, would die of heartbreak. She loved my little brother like he was the young John the Baptist. (Mary Falusi was very religious.)

The last time I’d behaved magnanimously toward Edward was on the night he was born. This event had long been anticipated, mostly with intense skepticism, and had finally occurred when my mother hit the eight-month gestational mark and began running up and down all four flights of stairs. Thirty-six hours later her water broke, three weeks shy of her due date (though she’d later say she’d been aiming for four). She lined the seat of her Willys jeep with a towel, put the top down, and drove herself to the hospital to have the baby on her own goddamn schedule, thank you.

A witness was dispatched from Burdenland to see what color the baby was. Despite all in-house predictions, the squalling pupa in the hospital basinet was the spitting image of his rightful father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on. He might as well have had a tattoo of the family crest on his right butt cheek. The signature pink hair and humongous Burden testicles were enough validity, and the baby was hailed as a prince—a boy!—and proclaimed second in line to the throne. The night we heard the news, Will and I had danced arm in arm, celebrating our new sibling. We hadn’t much noticed him since.

The only suitor to have appeared since our father had accomplished the opposite was Charles Thomas, a darkly handsome foreign attaché whom I liked to imagine my mother had fallen hopelessly in love with. For a long time I retained a single, far more saturated memory of him than any of my own father— that of Charles swinging me in his arms in the kitchen while I laughed my brains out. It was my only clear vignette from the weeks after the funeral, other than Henrietta accidentally pouring a baby bottle of boiling water on my hand and me watching in silent awe as the skin peeled back on either side like the biblical parting of an ocean.

Down in the grotto nightclub, watching television on Henrietta’s bed with Obadiah and Piddle, our corpulent dachshund, I’d sometimes ask her what had happened to Charles, but she never wanted talk about him.

Nor did Cassie. “Don’t you go asking about that man” was all she would say, and point to the pancake turner if I ragged on about it further.

Enter Mr. Love.

Mr. Love’s attentions started up shortly after we moved to Georgetown. In the beginning, he seemed nice enough, but then so do most people who arrive bearing gifts, even if they’re as lame as saltwater taffy. When she was in town, Mr. Love took my mother out to Trader Vic’s, and Harvey’s for oysters, and Georgetown nightclubs and discotheques, which he nerdily referred to as the “heppest new thing.” As far as I could tell, my mother didn’t like dancing. She certainly had no rhythm, and from watching
Shindig
I knew that that was what discotheques were all about, so it worried me that she might like Mr. Love for something deeper than what I imagined people did on a date. Even worse, she seemed to be sticking around town just to date him, and it was wreaking havoc with my bowels.

Mr. Love was so anxious to get at my mother that he always arrived early. It fell on me to entertain him while she did her getting ready thing upstairs. He would mosey on in and make himself a cocktail in the kitchen, like he lived there or something, and then he’d go plop himself down on the living room sofa and read the paper.

For the first few dates I tried to soften him up for her, like I was sent in to warm up the audience before the main act came on. My routine went something like this:

“Hey, Mr. Love, you wanna see me do the Bongo Board? I can do it for an hour straight.”