The Long Journey Home (47 page)

On September 25, 2002, I wrote an email to Chris about the pain I felt in being misrepresented in an article in
People
magazine for which
I’d been interviewed. My email went unanswered. On September 29 I attempted to send the following email to him:

When I attempted to send the email, the following message appeared on my screen: “This member is currently not accepting e-mail from your account.”

Reading those words, I bent sobbing over the keyboard. I felt like a large part of my heart had been torn out. I had lost one of the most precious things in my life—the email connection with my son, that thin, fragile line of communication I had nurtured with such care because it was all that I had with him.

When working on my memoir, I talked with Suzanne about the time Chris overheard us making love. She told me that her memory of the occasion was that Chris walked into the room in which we had just made love and that I asked him to hand me my robe from the foot of the bed. Suzanne said she was already dressed by that time.

My memory was that Suzanne and I were at the kitchen table drinking coffee when I heard Chris walking down the stairs and out the front door. I realized then that Chris must have been in the next bedroom taking a nap while we made love and would have heard us. Was Suzanne’s memory at all shaped by details one of her daughters might have told her about the incident as described in
Running with Scissors
? (Suzanne herself has never read the book.) Was my memory
shaped by an attempt to ease the pain of what really happened, whatever that might have been?

According to Chris’s account in
Running with Scissors
, he walked in on us making love on the living room couch, a thing we would never have done. And his disgusting description of our lovemaking as well as his talk with Suzanne outside the apartment were both fiction, fiction his anger toward me must have inspired. That he was having a sexual relationship with Jim contributed nothing to his understanding and acceptance of me as his mother having a sexual relationship with another woman. After Suzanne left, I sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. It wasn’t long before Chris returned to the apartment and came into the kitchen shouting angrily at me for having had sex with a woman. Instead of recognizing his emotions and trying to talk with him in an understanding, supportive way, I responded defensively. I hope Chris will find it in his heart to forgive me someday for this, and for all the ways I failed him.

When John Elder was forty, a doctor friend of his diagnosed him as having Asperger’s syndrome. That knowledge changed John Elder’s life dramatically for the better. He not only had a clearer understanding of his feelings and behavior from the time he was a boy until he was diagnosed, he learned ways in which he could change his behavior in order to relate to others more effectively.

I didn’t learn of his diagnosis and its effects on his life until he was nearly fifty. Once he and Mary were divorced, he rarely visited or called me. It wasn’t until he began to write his memoir that he began to call me, and then he called frequently. His editor told him he needed to write more about his experiences growing up. Because he remembered so little, he depended on me to tell him my memories
of his childhood. I was more than happy to do this, not only because I wanted to help him, but also because it gave me the opportunity to hear his voice.

His memoir,
Look Me in the Eye
, has spoken to people over much of the world and continues to educate people about Asperger’s as well as to inspire them. I am proud of him and his memoir, though I was surprised at some of the things he wrote that never happened. No ambulance, but Ethel Swift, Dr. Turcotte’s part-time assistant, came to take me to the state hospital, and John Elder didn’t visit me there. He and Chris were in Georgia with his grandparents the entire twenty-one days I was hospitalized. But more important than questioning our different memories is affirming the fact that not only did John Elder survive his past, but that he has created an incredibly successful and fascinating life.

He must have been not more than twenty-one when he began to build trick guitars for the rock band KISS—guitars that were lit in various patterns with dozens of tiny lights blinking on their surfaces, and guitars that shot rockets into the audience. He traveled with KISS for several years while building and working on their sound equipment. After that, he went on to be an engineer designing electronic games for Milton Bradley. He then worked at a company that built and installed burglar alarms and at another company that built computer components. And always he has been involved in one way or another with cars.

After he married Martha, a woman I really never got to know, he built a house on the outskirts of Amherst. Jack lived there while attending the Amherst High School, and spent many weekends with his mother in South Hadley.

Chris and his partner, Dennis, moved from New York City and built a house on the lot next to John Elder’s, though John Elder rarely saw or communicated with Chris, who spent most of his time inside writing on his computer. After nine or ten years Dennis terminated his relationship with Chris. In their settlement Dennis kept the
house and Chris moved to a small apartment in New York near Central Park. Since both John Elder and Chris are now divorced from their partners, they sometimes talk on the phone or email each other. However limited their relationship may be, I’m grateful that my sons have each other.

“I’
M DYING
, M
ARGARET,”
J
OHN ANNOUNCED AS SOON AS HE SAW ME IN
the doorway of his hospital room. His wife, Judy, waited in the hall. She was to take him home the next day to die.

John was so weak he could barely speak above a whisper. Grateful to have time alone with him, I parked my wheelchair next to his bed. He was struggling to lift a plastic spoonful of crushed ice. He handed me the spoon, and I raised it to his open mouth. Then I continued to feed him crushed ice as we talked.

My husband for twenty-three years, father of our two sons. He was the person with whom I first saw the vivid colors of fall leaves in the North, and, after that, our first snow, the two of us standing in our backyard in Philadelphia in the middle of the night in our pajamas, snow falling on our upturned faces. “Because I experienced these things first with you,” John wrote in an anniversary note to me years after our divorce.

I fed him more crushed ice. We said we still loved each other. There was no reason to remember the anger, pain, and sadness, and every reason to remember the love.

“What do you think happens after we die?” John asked, his eyes lit by fear and longing.

“I believe we just continue our journeys,” I replied.

He was quiet. Reflective.

He opened his mouth for more ice.

After a while John Elder arrived. I said I was leaving so that they could have time alone together. As I pushed my wheelchair toward the door, John Elder, who stood by the bed holding his father’s hand, reached back and grabbed my hand, gripping it tightly. “Stay,” he said.

I stayed.

“So your liver finally gave up, is that it?” he asked his father, and began to sob aloud. He gripped my hand harder. “I’ll dig your tractor out of the snow and park it so you can see it from your window when you get home. Would you like that? And the Jaguar?”

“Yes, son,” John whispered.

Still holding both John’s and my hand, John Elder sat down in the chair beside the bed. We talked about happy times during John Elder’s early childhood. Especially we talked about our many adventures camping. John was too weak to say many words, but I elaborated on the few images he suggested, and he affirmed the stories I told.

There, for a few precious minutes, at the threshold of John’s death, we were a family again.

John has been dead for four years now, and Chris has written his sixth book,
The Wolf at the Table
, published in May of 2008. Another memoir, it is a dark, grim book focused primarily on his father. Since reading
Running with Scissors
, I’d read none of his other books. When I scanned them in bookstores and found each to contain more fiction about the woman he called his mother, I didn’t bother to read more. However, after reporters from several newspapers, including
The New
York Times
, asked for my response to his new memoir, I decided to buy a copy of it.

I must have read it quickly and put it away, blocking it from my mind. I’d not planned on writing any more about Chris. But after I recently came across an interview with him that I’d not read, I realized that I had to state that John didn’t do several terrible things Chris claimed he did, and I read it again. It’s true that John did many terrible things when we were married, but he didn’t do those things, and I can’t find it in my heart to let those things stand as fact when John is not here to defend himself.

John certainly didn’t starve Ernie, Chris’s guinea pig. As I remember it, Chris gave Ernie to a little girl, a friend of his from school. And John was nothing but kind to Chris’s dog Grover. I was the one who took Grover to the vet, who did all he could to ease his pain from throat cancer. When Grover’s pain could no longer be eased, John took him to the vet, who put him to sleep.

John never turned Chris’s dog Brutus against him. Brutus was a gentle, friendly dog all his life and slept on Chris’s bed nights. The only trouble we had with him was when he followed runners passing the house and got lost. He was once lost for several months before someone called and Chris and Brutus were reunited. Sadly, when the time came for us to have to move from the Shutesbury house, the owner of the only apartment we could find in Amherst didn’t permit pets. Chris decided to give Brutus to a friendly fireman from the Amherst Fire Department, so he became the firehouse dog.

I was also shocked anew at the fiction he’d written about his father and me.

I don’t know why he chose to imagine me telling him about John’s and my wedding, but he did, including a false account of my emotional state that day. I felt upset at how he portrayed Lucille, the black woman who worked for my family until I was thirteen years old. I was especially offended by the way Chris said she talked. And she would never have added rum to the punch served at the wedding reception, for mine was not a drinking family. I certainly didn’t think
the day of my wedding would be the happiest day of my life, as he wrote, and my friends never told me that I should go to New York City and become a model or an actress. Perhaps Chris wrote about the mother he wished he had.

Whether Chris’s memoirs are fact or fiction, the stories he’s written about his survival have inspired many young people with troubled childhoods to believe that they too can survive and succeed in life. For this I am grateful. Sometimes troubled parents and young people write to me at my website for support because of Chris, and I’m grateful I have had the opportunity to be of help. I send him love and wish him well as he continues to live his gifted and extraordinary life.

Three years old, I woke from my afternoon nap. The room was hot and stuffy. I climbed from my bed and went outside to find my mother in the backyard. As the screen door slammed behind me, she looked up from where she was bent over in the flower garden and waved. I climbed down the steps and felt the warmth of the prickly grass on the soles of my bare feet
.

Next door the undertaker unloaded a body from the hearse and carried it through the wide back door of the funeral home. I watched as he backed the hearse into its usual parking space and went inside again. Troubling thoughts tumbled inside me. First there were thoughts about Granddaddy’s recent death. Then I thought about my own death
.

I felt frighteningly alone
.

As if instructed to do so, I looked up at the sky
.

Above me, three small white clouds floated slowly north—north past Grandmother’s house and Uncle Frank’s and the filling station; north to Albany and Atlanta; north to New York City, where Daddy went on business trips and bought me a dress from a place called Macy’s
.

North
.

As I stood watching those clouds, I heard a voice speaking in my heart. “Don’t worry, Margaret,” it said. “You will die in the North when you are very old. By that time you will understand about death and will not be afraid.”

My whole self filled with wonder. I felt comforted as never before. All my troubled thoughts dissolved, and I was once again in a world of butterflies and flowers and the heart-shaped fish pool where fish flashed gold among the lily pads
.

Now I’m an old woman and live in the North, just as the voice told me I would. And I am no longer afraid of death. It’s been a long journey from the Cairo, Georgia, of my childhood to the New England of my old age, and I know that, for all its detours, wrong roads taken, and stops along the way, it has always been a spiritual one. I also know that the all-loving, all-knowing voice I heard in my heart when I was a child has been with me forever, even during the many times I turned away from it. I know now that I’ve always been coming home
.

I am deeply grateful to David Kuhn, my agent, who believed in this book from the beginning and sold it almost as soon as he received it, and to Jessi Cimaforte, an associate at Kuhn Projects, who encouraged and inspired me with her enthusiasm and her many positive remarks. I am also deeply grateful to my perceptive editor Cindy Spiegel, whose edits made all the difference, and to Hana Landes, assistant editor at Spiegel & Grau, who worked faithfully on my memoir. I am also forever indebted to Susan Wyant, who was the only person to read every page of this memoir during the ten years I spent working on it between writing several books of poetry. Susan not only gave me her insightful responses and brilliant suggestions, but also had a deep and consistent appreciation of my work that encouraged and inspired me through even the most difficult times of remembering and writing. I am forever thankful for my daughter-in-law Mary Robison, who continues to devote much of her time to doing everything she can to keep me healthy enough to continue my work. I’m grateful to my son Chris (Augusten Burroughs), who critiqued the chapters he read over the years and supported my work until the publication of his book
Running with Scissors
. And to my son John Elder Robison, author of
Look Me in the Eye
, who supports my memoir as well as supports me in my everyday life. I am especially grateful to my grandson, Jack, for his exuberant nature, his helpfulness,
his sharing of his many interests, and the joy he gives me by simply being Jack.