Читать книгу Full Blown: Me and My Bipolar Family - David Lovelace - Страница 6

My parents met in 1954 at the Peniel Bible Conference, a small church camp in upstate New York. This camp shaped my parents’ courtship, their marriage and the rest of their lives – all of our lives, really. It’s the closest my brother, sister and I ever got to a hometown. Peniel sat at the base of Mount Cobble, best described as an oversized hill with a good view. The camp took its old-time religion straight from the tent revivals of the Great Depression and it looked it. Unaffiliated with any specific denomination, any real source of funds, the camp was built from the basics: sweat, rough lumber, God and the Devil.

The dining hall was sheathed in wooden slats pulled from World War II ammunition crates. It was a long, utilitarian building with a massive stone fireplace set at one end and it smelled of wood smoke and porridge. The pine woods were full of cabins built from damp, greenish pine and dotted by red and white lichen. Each section, the boys’ and the girls’, had two outhouses. Our assembly field was the packed earth between the dining hall and the chapel, and it doubled as the playing field. Peniel had an underused baseball diamond in a place we called the Dustbowl. The Channel, our swimming hole, was a cleared stretch of marsh full of soft mud and sharp grasses. There were redwing blackbirds and painted turtles, too, and there was no swimming on Sundays. The chapel was a simple pine building with a great bronze bell on its porch. This bell woke us, sent us to calisthenics, meetings (Bible study), meals, more meetings (prayer) and bed. Peniel washed my whole family in the blood of the Lamb – regularly – and that’s something each of us carries in various ways. It’s hard to forget.

My mother was born in 1925, the youngest of three children. Her father was a banker and the family lost almost everything in the Crash of 1929. He lost the rest five years later when his wife died. My grandfather continued; he kept his suits pressed and found work, but his sorrow went bitter and poisoned him. He began attending the fire-and-brimstone crusades and was saved by the infamous Billy Sunday, the preacher who rallied for Prohibition. ‘There isn’t a man who votes for the saloon who doesn’t deserve to have his boy die a drunkard,’ Sunday thundered. ‘He deserves to have his girl live out her life with a drunken husband.’ This made good, stern sense to my grandfather. He renounced the Devil and set about raising his children, my mother, Betty Lee, her sister, Rose, and her brother, Frank, in a dark world full of sinners. My grandfather ruled his house absolutely, with righteousness and a hard hand, and my mother, the youngest, served him from breakfast to bedtime. He remarried but his new wife resented the children. Their stepmother berated them all for years and then she just left.

My mom was the youngest and seemed to suffer in her childhood the most. She was nine when her mother died. At sixteen, her brother, Frank, took charge of the family’s happiness. He staged my mother’s dearest memories with magic, vaudeville acts and art. He called her ‘Midget’ and she was his magician’s assistant. He scoured the city for costumes and wigs and had his younger sisters up on his backyard stage every day after school. Rose dressed my mother; she turned her baby sister into princesses and cowgirls and fairies. The three of them pretended together; they acted out other people’s stories, happy ones. Frank and Rose are the heroes of her happiest memories. Mom is the one who still carries her father’s heartbreak. She was his favourite, and all of her love is stitched down by worry.

My dad was born in Hollywood, where his father fixed scripts for Twentieth Century Fox and drank. When he smashed my grandmother’s Rolls-Royce she initiated divorce proceedings immediately. As soon as the court allowed she moved my six-year-old father to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she burned every letter, photograph and press clipping concerned with the man. If my grandmother could have extracted her ex-husband’s DNA from her son, she would have done so immediately. She never spoke of Hunter Lovelace again, not even with my father. She told him Japanese submarines were the reason they left California. An attack, she said, was imminent.

My father grew up a virtual orphan on the high New Mexican desert. By the time he turned nine he discovered books could rescue him and let him leave his autocratic mother far behind. The further the better, and for my father that meant spaceships. Back then, before the Bomb, science still conjured a utopian future. The classic science fiction of the era took this on faith, built its castles in the air and sometimes destroyed them. My father never quite outgrew these stories. He let go of the hardware, sure, but he never let go of the vision, his hope for a shining city on a hill.

Gus Armstrong, my father’s only school friend, dragged him out of the books and into the desert. They caught lizards and hunted, jumping ducks from irrigation ditches along the Rio Grande. They found a case of dynamite down in an old mine-shaft and they spent weeks blowing boulders from cliffs. They spied on a Hopi snake dance and afterwards caught two of the rattlesnakes and brought them back to town. The rattlers’ fangs had been ripped out for the dance. My grandmother tolerated them until new fangs appeared.

In the summer of 1948, just before my father went east, Gus Armstrong decided to round off my father’s preparatory education with a trip to a brothel he knew in Juarez. Driving south, the boys entertained themselves with a twenty-two-calibre pistol, shooting road signs and groundhogs from the car window. A groundhog ducked; my father pulled back the pistol and slipped the gun’s hammer. Bang. Silence ensued and then Gus asked calmly, ‘Richard. Did you just shoot a hole in my Buick?’

‘No, Gus,’ my father answered, just as slow and deliberate. ‘I did not. I shot a hole in my leg.’ Gus pulled over, fashioned a sort of tourniquet, and they turned back home.

‘I guess that trip just wasn’t God’s will,’ my father remarked to me years later. The doctors left the slug in my father, just above his right knee, and when I was a boy I’d ask to see the bullet all the time. The bullet is still lodged right there in his muscle, like a piece of God’s will, coppery green and buried in flesh. Shortly after the aborted trip to Juarez, my father limped into Yale on crutches, a gun-shot atheist.

In 1943 Frank encouraged my mother to enroll at the Pratt Institute in New York City. He had become a successful photographer and supported his worried kid sister with money and love. My mother hoped to illustrate children’s books and she worked extremely hard, repaying Frank with her happy watercolours: the girls all in pigtails, their brothers with slingshots, calico aprons for Mom, and for Dad a pipe and the paper. But her normal undergraduate concerns began building and mutating. She stopped worrying about grades but feared for her soul. She worked harder and harder to stay with her painting, to keep her paranoia contained.

She finally broke at the end of her final year, just prior to project deadlines and exams. She had been studying and painting for days. She was jacked up on coffee and had stopped sleeping, just pushing herself. And then late one night she looked up from her paintings, the blue skies and children, and she saw a wicked figure, a demon hunched in the corner of her room, watching. She snapped and heard voices; the creature just stayed in the corner, waiting. Her close friend and roommate, Margaret, sought help. By the next day she was labelled schizophrenic and put away. Her diagnosis didn’t change for forty years.

It was 1949 and psychiatrists diagnosed almost all delusional illness as schizophrenia – ‘shattered mind’. Nervous breakdowns were one thing, but with hallucinations it was pretty damn hopeless. They didn’t have antipsychotic drugs. They didn’t have Thorazine, Stelazine, Trilafon, Zyprexa and the rest. All they had was electroshock. They’d been using it for eight or nine years when my mother got sick. The treatment wasn’t yet perfected, but it was a fairly simple procedure. Electrodes are placed on either side of the patient’s head. An electric stimulus is applied, causing seizure and convulsions lasting fifteen seconds or so. Patients may experience short-term memory loss but no evidence of brain damage has been linked to proper dosages. They had established the proper doses by the time my mother got sick. Now it’s called ECT and technicians use muscle relaxants to inhibit the full-scale convulsions. This removes physical dangers such as the breaking or dislocation of bones. Sedatives are administered to quell panic. ECT is often effective, especially with chronic, drug-resistant depression. It seems to work for some people – no one knows why exactly.

It seemed to work for my mom. She was there for quite a time but her delusions did pass and before long she returned to her painting. It remained unclear when my mother would be released but in those days, before all the medicines, a diagnosis of schizophrenia usually meant long-term hospitalization and even lifelong institutionalization. Eventually, one of the nurses noticed her artwork, the healing it had brought, and she began advocating for her release. My mother’s college roommate, Margaret, enlisted help from her church camp and Peniel brought in its big guns. Miss Beers was the central leader and spiritual guide of the camp. She was formidable, a veteran of the prewar mission fields of Japan. Grover Wilcox was a fundamentalist preacher from Newark, a firebrand who turned his house into a church and combed the ghetto streets for souls to save. His sense of righteousness made him fearless and he hit like a freight train. Beers and Wilcox descended on the hospital like twin holy terrors and demanded my mother’s release.

Wilcox brought my mother home to his house church, where his family gave her a room and a place at their table. My mother stayed afraid but Wilcox had built a mighty fortress and he kept her safe for a time. He kept my mother from slipping out of the world, even as he renounced it. He didn’t approve of art, but he helped my mother graduate, finally, from Pratt. She took a job teaching art in Newark’s elementary schools. Every morning my mother stood in front of kids from the projects, handed out scissors and glue, and tried to organize art. Art teachers are just a step removed from supply teachers. Their motives are pure and their discipline vague. They make excellent time-honoured targets and provide ammunition in the form of art supplies. And my mother, she was a hopeless disciplinarian. She raised me. Mom says teaching art in the Newark state schools was the most terrifying experience of her life. The next summer, when the pastor offered her a lift to Peniel she jumped at it. He packed up his family, thirty-odd church kids, a few lost souls and my mother and headed upstate.

As for my father, he soon outgrew science fiction, pistols and groundhogs. He majored in philosophy and music composition. He studied existentialism seriously enough to be terrified and found Schoenberg’s twelve-tone scale appalling. He packed up his life and moved everything into his head. He often closed his eyes in concentration, as if hearing some silent, slow music. This slow music made driving dangerous and dating awkward; by his final year my father had dug himself into a social and ideological hole. It wasn’t long before an odd student named John Guray stepped into it.

Guray was prematurely bald, walked with a limp and a cane, and wrote light verse. He wore berets and had discovered psychoanalysis. Guray was made for psychoanalysis and began practising his art on my father incessantly. He kept notes and made charts. He pondered my father’s dreams. It was Guray who convinced my dad to travel west and find his father. In fact Guray went along for the ride, guiding my father and his subconscious across the country.

My dad had not seen or heard from his father until the day he and Guray tracked him down. They found him in Hollywood, working on a studio lot. ‘He was nice enough. Somewhat reserved,’ my father said to me recently. ‘He introduced us to some blonde starlet. I think he wanted to make sure we weren’t gay, that we showed some interest.’

His father then introduced them to Cecil B. DeMille, and when my father asked, ‘How did you part the Red Sea, Mr DeMille?’ DeMille replied, ‘I didn’t, son. God did.’ And that was it. That’s all my father told me. That’s all he knew of his father. A blonde bombshell and Cecil B. DeMille stole the show.

Upon their return to New Haven, a crestfallen John Guray claimed the analysis and their relationship could go no further, that my father had experienced a great breakthrough. He then produced a bill for four thousand dollars. All my father got from plumbing his subconscious was a road trip and a ridiculous invoice. My father felt he really owed Guray – that’s how lost he was. He looked for guidance in his books and found it in Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton’s story brought him to God. Yale’s so-called New Critics, Cleanth Brooks among them, had given my father a well-lit, archetypically ordered universe, and now Merton’s God would give it meaning. My father even considered monastic life in Merton’s order.

About this time John Guray began sending my father handwritten bills that he marked ‘Overdue’. My father avoided him and began attending church. Guray began attending church and suggested my father meet a minister acquaintance, Don Mostrom. Before long my father was attending a weekly Bible study run by Mostrom and some other theologically astute, serious men. A number of them spoke highly of the Peniel Bible Conference; a few were in leadership roles as members of Peniel’s Prayer Council. They tore up John Guray’s bills and began mentoring my father.

My dad had recently been fired from Berman Salvage & Scrap, where he had earned his way by scraping gold tracings from discarded spark plugs. He had few prospects. But he had a Yale philosophy degree, so he found a job teaching seventh graders at the Riverdale Country School. Like my mother, he found the experience unrewarding. He’s referred to his pupils as ‘snarling, derisive children of affluence’. He fled in a hail of spitwads and headed straight for Peniel – again, just like my mother. His career had stalled, perhaps, but he was now clear about what he wanted to do. He wanted to help build the Kingdom of God – that ‘shining city upon a hill’ proclaimed by the Puritan leader John Winthrop. He went to Peniel because it was a big job and he was unsure where to begin. That was 1954, the summer he met my mother.

It’s a wonder Peniel Bible Conference ever brought my parents together, a tribute to the biological imperative. Love is a great mystery, and nowhere more mysterious than at Bible camp. In my experience the place routinely smothered romance with spiritual angst and Bible study. We were taught that no matter how attractive we found fellow campers, we were all clothed in the Old Man or the Flesh, camp-speak for our corrupt, fallen natures. My father, of course, has a different view. I know my father believes they were set up. Why else, he argues, would they have made him assist in my mother’s arts and crafts class? But in the end, it wasn’t church history or Peniel’s machinations that drew them together, it was my mother when she’s well – her empathy, her ease and laughter with friends, and what my father calls her ‘cheery, elfin smile’.

They were married in 1958, just after my father graduated from Westminster Seminary. My parents honeymooned in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Dad commenced Mom’s education at the Tanglewood Music Festival. When they returned from Lenox, Grover Wilcox ordained my father as his assistant pastor. He moved in, and so my parents began their life together on the top floor of a house church in Newark, New Jersey. Wilcox was known for his legalism, a worldview held by the hardest of the hard core, the separatists of fundamentalism. Wilcox labelled anything secular – art, sports, politics right or left, beer – ‘of the World’, a distraction from God. He disapproved of my father reading the New York Times. He threw out the arts section. His church piano was for hymns only – certain ones – and my father remembers playing a Beethoven sonata when Wilcox barged in. ‘What is that, Richard?’ he yelled. ‘Scales?’ Wilcox and other Peniel leaders took pride in their cultural isolation, in the blessed assurance of songs known by heart. My father was suspect; he worked on a whole different scale.

But the following summer Dad connected with Julian Alexander, a like-minded minister from Scotch Plains, New Jersey. They were washing dishes together in the camp kitchen when my father began complaining about Wilcox and legalism. ‘The elders at Mostrom’s church drink beer all the time. And John Murray, at Westminster, the theologian, he drinks sherry.’ He threw a pot down in the sink. ‘Did you know, Julian, that Calvin’s salary included forty gallons of wine annually? Or that Luther recommended drinking a beer before confronting the Devil?’

Alexander was himself an intellectual and allergic to legalism. He enjoyed my dad’s mind and loved his idiosyncrasies. I believe he hired my father as youth pastor just so he had someone with whom to discuss Luther, Calvin and Kierkegaard. His church provided my parents a house, furniture and a generous stipend. Freed from the Wilcox house church, my mother could wear her lipstick again and my father could listen to anything.

They were finally making their life together and things proceeded smoothly until I was born in 1960. It took my mother six months to recover. Her postpartum depression soon deepened into paranoia and delusion. It had been ten years since her last breakdown. She lay on the couch and suffered Old Testament fears and delusions – she was damned or maybe a prophet, Elijah perhaps – and all the while church ladies came with their casseroles and left with their gossip, their prayer concerns.

That summer, as my mother recovered, Dad carried me around camp in an unzipped plaid suitcase. I was swaddled in blankets, a sort of precious luggage. It was as if I’d been found in the rushes down by the channel, or perhaps baggage claim. If I returned to Peniel tomorrow – and it’s still there – I’m sure some ancient camper would chuckle and say, ‘I remember that suitcase. Your father was a riot.’ My father has long been the camp’s celebrated eccentric, a subject of lore and apocrypha.

My mother recovered over that summer and when we returned my parents discussed having another child. They consulted a psychiatrist, who advised against it in no uncertain terms. It could ‘aggravate my mother’s schizophrenia and pass it on,’ he said. They ignored him and my mother gave birth to the sanest Lovelace in the bunch, my sister, Peggy. Again, my mother slipped into the black. I was just two years old but I remember her black eyes. I remember how frightened I was growing up, scared my mother would leave and never come back. Peggy says at age three she began worrying for our mother, afraid she would make Mom cry.

I didn’t share that worry until later. By age three I had thrown church picnic chicken and coleslaw at deacons. Desperate, God-fearing adults had tethered me to trees. Bucktoothed, thin and agitated, I resembled the young Jerry Lewis to my sister’s Judy Garland. She was a beautiful kid, crowned with brown curls. She possessed a quiet, reflective spirit and a holy terror for a brother. By all accounts, but especially by the accounts my sister still continues to share every Christmas, our sibling rivalry was intense and one-sided. I did get the most attention. Any kid who deploys airborne sprocket weapons built from smashed clocks, spikes breakfast cereals with stockpiled Tabasco sauce and generally lays in wait for his saintly sister will get the most attention. My sister retreated to her room and read for the greater part of her childhood. She resents it to this day. Still, she was better off on the moors with Heathcliff than in the backyard with me.

My mother was happiest at Peniel, where she spent her summers painting still lifes and camp signs, and always painting Bible verses on banners. I remember helping my mother decorate the chapel with the armour of God. Together we cut the cardboard shapes: the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the sword and the shield of faith. Mom painted them silver and black and we hung them from the rafters. Peniel made clear to the children that we were at war. In the camp nursery – the Olive Yard – all of us sang, ‘We may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery, but we’re in the Lord’s army.’ As soldiers of Christ ours was a battle ‘not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the darkness of this world’. I loved it. A holy war is the best kind of war a boy can have, full of demons and superheroes. Vietnam wasn’t important when the Prince of Darkness himself hid under our bunks and threw darts from our woods.

Peniel was more think tank than camp. Its programme was a veritable wailing wall of religious training and I spent each July and August ducking out of the tent. It didn’t matter. By the time I was ten Grover Wilcox had my loud mouth testifying on the streets of Lake George, confessing sins before I had committed them and diagramming the Four Spiritual Laws on signboards with marker pen. Peniel’s religion was hard to dodge, even twenty miles away. I suspect Peniel’s founders, Miss Beers and Mrs Mac, viewed recreation as a gateway to sin – exercise heats up the flesh and leads to temptation. They made no excuse for the camp’s asceticism, its unrelenting schedule of chapel meetings. It was our evangelical heritage, stiffened through Prohibition and run straight through the Depression.

I remember my cabin challenging another set of boys to an eating contest in the dining hall. Before it was over the camp’s cofounder and disciplinarian, Mr Mac, hauled us up in front of the camp. We stood shamefaced as he glowered. And then, after a long silence, he began.

‘Gluttony, campers, is one of the deadly sins. Gluttony makes a mockery of the gifts God brings us. Gluttony is wasteful. It is selfish. Now, these boys are no more sinful than the rest of us. They want to be good, mindful of God’s blessings. But gluttony is an abomination to the Lord…’ He continued straight through dessert.

Today’s Republican megachurches have no problem with gluttony. Evangelical churches lure children to camp with imitation rock bands, Jet Skis and parasailing. Peniel, with its outhouses, its stick-framed chapel and broken-spined hymnals, seems a poor country cousin, its children just a motley crew of preachers’ kids and other unfortunates. It was hardwork but we made our own fun or we stole it. There were plenty of rules and we broke them. We swam on Sundays, stole canoes and kissed girls. We ran away but never long enough, really, to leave.

It was fine, a boyhood surrounded by austere mystery, by dusty prayers, with the small mountain behind us and all the white pines, a place threshed and winnowed by prayer. We sang the old, muscular hymns I still love – ‘Lead on, O King Eternal’; ‘A Mighty Fortress’; ‘Power in the Blood’ – and Sunday suppers were brimstone and honey, and it all made you hungry. There was no entertainment, no frippery. The camp got its name from an Old Testament story in which Jacob demands his god’s blessing. He wrestles the angel all night for it, and at dawn the creature relents; it twists Jacob’s hip, blesses him and leaves. He called the place Peniel and that’s what we learned there. We were crippled and blessed and taught to be thankful.

Every August, after leaving Peniel and before heading back to Scotch Plains, we visited my dad’s mother in Woodstock. We never called her Grandma; we weren’t allowed. As a young woman my grandmother had taken her inheritance to Europe, where she came of age and commenced a lifetime of seasonal grand tours. Although her means came from unwashed cowboys once removed, my grandmother adopted old money and the old world as her own. Shortly following my birth she actually willed herself French and insisted the family call her ‘Grandmére’. She got her table manners from Marie Antoinette and enforced them with a cold imperial stare. She was a lifelong member of the conservative John Birch Society and supported Woodstock’s Christian Science Reading Room. She had sent her food back to kitchens and dressed down their chefs all across the Western world.

My mother, of course, was terrified by the time we hit Albany. By the Catskills the grooming had begun in earnest. She picked at our clothes and plastered our hair with her spit. ‘Now, David,’ she’d say, ‘remember to stay at the table until she lets you go. She will excuse you.’ My sister and I sat in the backseat holding our infant brother and happily fending off our mother’s fluttering hands. We were off to see the matriarch, her meadow and the trout stream, but my mother continued to fret. Our station wagon filled with hairspray and fear. ‘Richard,’ my mother would say, ‘you should polish your shoes. I didn’t have a chance to wash the children’s outfits. Please don’t bring up money with your mother.’

My father, oblivious to my mother’s growing panic, usually responded by turning up the radio and commenting, ‘Now, listen to this. This is a beautiful movement; listen to how the horn comes in.’ He would look up in the rearview mirror and say, ‘David, do you know what horn that is?’

‘French,’ I’d answer. They were always French and he’d nod approvingly. He never asked our mother or Peggy what horn it was, he always asked me.

It was 1967 and we’d pass through Woodstock and ogle the hippies, turn left at the Bear restaurant and then down her long drive, past the ruined well, the leaning stone post with its BEWARE OF DOG sign. Grandmére was terrified of hippies. When we arrived, just after she assessed and welcomed us, she asked, ‘How was it in town? Were they out on the green?’

‘Yeah. Tons of ’em!’ I answered enthusiastically.

‘Yes. Well.’ She turned from us and to her son. ‘The town, Richard, is in a state of siege, nothing less.’

‘It’s lively, all right,’ he agreed.

‘Well, the place looks beautiful,’ my mother said hopefully. ‘Your lilacs are lovely.’

‘Yes, aren’t they?’ Grandmére allowed, and looked back to my father. ‘It’s nice to see all of you.’

‘So, Mother,’ my father asked. ‘How’s the mildew this year?’ Grandmére was obsessed with the hippies, my father with the mould. And with good reason; Grandmére’s house was famous for its virulent strains. A river ran through it – literally. Groundwater sluiced down the shale mountain behind her and it flowed straight through her stone crypt of a basement. All the water smelled of sulphur; her rooms smelled of rotten eggs and Chanel No. 5. Mould attacked the house from below but Grandmére had a solution of sorts. She painted the interiors teal green, a colour we called ‘Catskill Mould’. She painted everything that colour, the oak beams arching above our heads, the fieldstone fireplace, the furniture. She imported the massive teal-green curtains to hold back the north light. She installed green carpets. Her living room was a perfumed grotto, a wet place at the bottom of the sea.

But water saved Grandmére’s house as well. The house overlooked a gently sloping meadow with apple trees and a trout stream flowing along its far side against birches. Years ago, someone had built a large stone pool in its path and the brook flowed through its wooden slat gates. It had begun to collapse before I was born, and over the years it gradually filled with silt until the stream broke down its bank and swept around the old ruin. The pool drowned in mud and wildflowers and tadpoles. My sister and I would greet Grandmére, cut loose, and run down to the water. Dad waved and said, ‘David, hey, David. Try to spot some trout.’

Then my father always brought in the bags and stood in the kitchen with my mother and Grandmére, where he’d announce: ‘I need to run downtown. I can see the allergy situation is bad this year.’ He’d leave Mom and my infant brother alone in the house with Grandmére and dash back to the car. After two or three hours my father always returned with two dozen night crawler worms, a stack of lurid science fiction paperbacks, and a stockpile of allergy medications. He doped himself up on anti-histamines and disappeared into his books and his space travel, alone again in the New Mexican desert.

‘In our family,’ Norman Maclean famously wrote, ‘there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.’ Norman’s father, also a Presbyterian minister, taught him the counts of a fly cast. ‘He certainly believed,’ Maclean wrote, ‘that God could count and that only by picking up his rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty.’ It was different for my family. In Woodstock, just after dinner my father and I would take our polystyrene cup of worms and our rods and walk down through the meadow. When we were close Dad would crouch down and we’d whisper and thread the thick night crawlers onto the hooks. We’d crawl closer and flip the baits over the grassy bank and my father would count to twenty. If nothing happened we’d leave the worms drowning and go and watch television. In the morning I’d run down and pull out a trout, dead and all twisted up with the line. In fact, it wasn’t really fishing, it was trapping, and an ignoble introduction to something I love. Discipline and patience are hard-won in my family. Years later, after Grandmére was gone, I lived in her house until I learned fly casting, how to fish all her streams. I came home to teach my father and brother and together we fished through the Catskills’ own legends: the Esopus and Willowemock and Beaverkill.

When I was nine, Peggy and I brought a cassette tape we had made especially for Grandmére on Dad’s new machine. After dinner we begged Grandmére to turn down William F. Buckley – the man somehow dominated her television – and listen to us, to the new tape we had made. ‘Well,’ Grandmére said. ‘If we must. We shall wait until the next commercial.’ Peggy and I squirmed while Bill Buckley listed our gains in Southeast Asia. It was a long list but finally Grandmére turned the sound off and my father popped the cassette into his portable recorder.

‘HI, GRANDMÉRE. THIS IS DAVID,’ it said. ‘I’M GOING TO READ YOU SOME RECORDS. WORLD RECORDS FROM THE GUINNESS BOOK.’

‘Hi, Grandmére, this is Peggy. I want to say a poem that –’

‘THE WORLD’S FATTEST MAN WEIGHS FIVE HUNDRED SIXTY-TWO POUNDS TEN OUNCES STRIPPED NAKED. A MONSTER PIG WAS KILLED BY AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD PHILL-I-PINO BOY IN 1962 AND IS CONSIDERED THE WORLD’S LARGEST SWINE. THE WORLD’S MOST – hey, cut it out, Peg, I’m reading. THE WORLD’S MOST PRO-LIF-FIC MOTHER WAS RUSSIAN. NADIA BUKansky or something GAVE BIRTH – stop it, c’mon, stop it – TO SIXTY-NINE CHILDREN FROM 1725 TO 1765. THE MOST HOT DOGS CONSUMED IN…’

Grandmére’s smile, normally frozen, had calcified. She was clutching the arms of an antique chair, her eyes fixed on my mortified mother. Just under my tinny voice you could hear my sister crying. Dad and I thought it was great. Everyone just loved it.

Grandmére said a quick thank-you and lapsed into silence, watching William F. Buckley talk on the screen. My father picked up his science fiction and my mother picked up Jonathan. Grandmére finally broke her silence. ‘It was quiet here,’ she said. ‘Just the real artists before that communist boy moved in up the road.’ It all went to hell, my grandmother maintained, when Bob Dylan came in 1965. ‘You know his manager, that Jewish man, what’s his name? Grossman. He owns property in Bearsville. Just over the stream.’

‘Oh, really,’ my father said. He held his book on his lap and kept reading.

‘Richard, I was speaking to Henry Maust yesterday.’ The Mausts were Grandmére’s only Woodstock friends. ‘Henry came home yesterday and found a number of naked hippies just lying on the lower field. Just lying there. Imagine, Richard.’ The red menace and flower children kept Grandmére on her toes. When she drove us to town in her Cadillac, she had us lock all the doors. ‘Put your hands in. I’m rolling up the windows.’ We were pushing twenty miles an hour. ‘Hilda Maust said a hippie on a bicycle actually reached into her car. Imagine.’ I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t believe a hippie tried to grope Hilda Maust. There were far more interesting things to do in Woodstock than grope Hilda Maust. The town was full of psychedelia and head shops. Even the hardware store was a head shop. I loved it.

Our last mornings in Woodstock had ritual. My father and I would clean the last brace of brown trout. My mother had finished packing by eight a.m. and lay on the green couch in a state of nervous collapse while Grandmére fried the trout in bacon fat, filling her kitchen with sweet smoke. After the trout and English muffins Grandmére would give us all stiff little hugs and we left. Grandmére would soon leave herself, decamp to her winter lodging at the Women’s Republican Club in New York City.

My father always slowed at the base of Grandmére’s long gravel drive; he’d honk and we’d shout, ‘Goodbye, Grandmére,’ and then, finally, relax. Mom and Dad would start laughing again; Peggy and I could get back to our quarrels and jokes. Despite all the forced manners, the endless wait to be excused from her table, I never wanted to leave my grandmother’s. I loved its ruined slate pool, the meadow, the trout with their red spots circled by orange, their brown sides sliding into buttery yellows. The Catskills are old mountains, worn down and haunted; Woodstock was an old artists’ colony shot through with new colours. Scotch Plains, New Jersey, stood in stark contrast to all this, a flat patch of white suburbia, my father’s church full of middle-management parents and bored kids.

I know my father struggled as much as I did. It was hard to just blend into the normality of a suburban pastorate, especially at the helm of a youth group. His occasional sermons often confused the congregation with concerns they viewed as tangential to the gospel, things like poetry, music and film. My father was aloof and cerebral and lacked many of the basic ministerial tools, social skills like facial recognition. Dad was terrible with names. He once buried a body without knowing its gender, fudging the pronouns. When he looked out over the faithful, I’m convinced Dad simply had no idea who most of these people were or what they were doing in his church.

Nevertheless, he grew close with Willow Grove’s pastor, Julian Alexander, and before long they were staging all manner of unlikely cultural events. The church youth group performed my father’s adaptation of Waiting for Godot. Julian and my father presented a series of dramatic readings, including No Exit and Franny and Zooey. My dad’s flock of teenagers grew both in numbers and enthusiasm. My father and his group began dismantling preconceptions, the distinctions between high culture and low. ‘They got me into the Beatles,’ my father told me, ‘and I got them into Schumann.’ Eventually, my father embraced the artistic bloom of the ’60s and in doing so inflamed Willow Grove’s cultural anxieties. He quoted Bob Dylan in sermons. The church mothers didn’t know what to do.

Christ taught his followers to be ‘in the world but not of it’. My father emphasized the former and, moreover, he argued for total immersion, and it wasn’t all Bach. He took me to see A Clockwork Orange and Deliverance when I was twelve. The good Presbyterians of Willow Grove still remember when their church sign announced:

Sunday Services 9 & 11 am This Sunday: God’s Eternal Grace Next Sunday: Rosemary’s Baby

The deacons protested and Julian asked us over to dinner. After grace and the passing of pot roast, Reverend Alexander allowed that the sign had spiked interest. ‘We’ve been getting calls, Richard. Are you aware that the film is a horror film? An R-rated horror film?’

‘Yes. Have you seen it?’

‘Certainly not. I understand it involves Satan.’

‘Absolutely. It is Satanic,’ my father enthusiastically concurred. He helped himself to seconds. ‘It emphasizes how counterfeit spiritualities promise heaven without a real Christ.’

‘Look, Richard. I’m not sure I can help you if you go through with this. I’m not convinced a sermon on Rosemary’s Baby is a good idea.’ Julian chuckled in spite of himself. ‘You know, they might riot.’

‘Julian, I would not recommend this film without a good reason, without a real message.’

Julian remained sceptical. ‘That’s all well and good, Richard. But I don’t think it –’ A thought struck him. He put down his water glass. ‘Richard, you don’t plan to show the film, do you? I cannot allow it. We don’t have a projector.’ He winced. ‘Do we?’

‘No, no. Of course not.’ My father laughed. ‘It’s a good movie – I loved it – but I’m not going to show it. It’s just a sermon illustration, that’s all it is.’

Julian smiled in spite of himself. ‘A pornographic sermon illustration?’

‘The film is about modern witchcraft. There’s some sexual magic, I suppose – offscreen. It’s not pornographic. I wouldn’t recommend it if it didn’t have redeeming social values.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as witchcraft is bad news.’

Julian relented and the Rosemary sermon was a huge success. People poured in that Sunday to see what rough beast was lurching towards them. It was standing-room-only and my father made them stand in a church a little bit larger, a little more open to the world. Excepting the witches, of course; they had to stand outside.

Meanwhile I roamed with a band of neighbourhood boys through frog ponds and waste ground. We were all seven, eight, or nine, busy testing the boundaries of backyards and parents and school. I was the minister’s kid; I pushed harder than the rest because I had much more to push – all the weight of my sin, my father’s congregation and all the heavenly host. I couldn’t listen anymore. My kindergarten teacher dragged me by my ear to the office. By second grade I was sneaking out after dark to soap cars and egg houses. I stole copies of Mad magazine. When we went to the circus I convinced my parents to buy me a real leather whip. I terrorized church picnics and flunked out of Sunday school. I was not a bad child, simply my father’s. It’s kid stuff, but ministers’ children must run amok. They maintain the cosmic balance.

One Saturday morning, the neighbourhood bully, a large dimwitted boy named Eric, began taunting my band of friends. My whip had been confiscated by then but I still had my slingshot. Eric said I was a lousy shot, that I couldn’t hit a barn, and then the rock hit his forehead. He stood there, stunned, until blood covered his face. Everyone scattered. I ran home, hid in my closet, and cried for twenty minutes until I heard Eric’s mother arrive. I crept into the hall and listened.

‘Your son,’ began Eric’s mother, ‘is out of control. My boy could have very easily lost his eye.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m sure David didn’t mean to hit him.’

‘He didn’t, did he? Where did he get that slingshot, that weapon?’

‘I’m afraid I bought it for him. After he lost his whip.’ Mom suspects she’s guilty of everything and confesses at every opportunity.

‘Does his father know this? Does the church know about your son?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

‘You will punish him. He can’t just roam the streets with weapons.’ I heard a chair scrape and ran for my room. ‘I’ll be leaving now, Mrs Lovelace –’

‘Please, Betty Lee.’

‘I hope your son understands what he’s done.’

She left and I crept down to the kitchen. My mother sat very still and I thought she would cry. I crawled up into her lap and she kissed my streaked face, pushed back my hair, and just held me.

By now my father was attending Princeton, working towards his doctorate in church history. Julian and he had long since agreed that my father’s strengths lay with academia. He couldn’t run a church. He was, as my dad puts it, ‘administratively incompetent’. In 1968 he published his thesis as The American Pietism of Cotton Mather. I remember his doctoral thesis in piles – three-by-four note cards stacked on the cold linoleum of his church basement office. And I remember standing with my father in the church office, helping as he mimeographed and collated late into the night, meeting his doctoral deadline by the hour.

It was clear to the deacons that my father possessed negligible management skills and found discipline tedious. But it was his eccentricities, the ones Willow Grove’s teenagers found so cool, that alarmed the church as a whole. It was widely rumoured my father closed his eyes in prayer while driving the church kids to camp. He let the teenagers listen to ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. He rode around on a Japanese motorcycle far too small for his frame and, worse, he regularly perched me on the bike’s gas tank, stuck a peewee football helmet on my head, and cruised the streets. By the end of summer the church officially forbade dangerous spectacles involving six-year-olds. They put my dad on a short leash.

It wasn’t simple culture shock. Beyond the ridiculously small motorcycle, the rock and roll, the salacious sermons and Mahler blasting from his church office, my father had one other consuming interest, one that clinched his suspect identity at the church: snakes. Mostly snakes, and also some lizards. He had never kicked the reptile-hunting habits of his desert boyhood. Claiming he was allergic to any common, domesticated pet, he spent large sums on reptiles. He began haunting exotic pet stores in the city, rank basements lit only by heat lamps and run by unshaven snake enthusiasts with names like Sal or Jerry.

If my father had left his pets to their reptilian stupors, safe in their terrarium homes, his collection would have remained no more than an eccentric’s hobby, harmless. Instead, he insisted on taking one or two of the animals to his church office daily, barricading the door with his thesis draft, turning the thermostat up to eighty and blasting his music. He flaunted the snakes. The habits of the hognose, in particular, provided my father with colourful sermon illustrations and he spent an inordinate amount of pulpit time exculpating common, garden-variety snakes from the sins of Eden’s symbolic dark serpent.

As my father completed his doctorate, a general and inevitable consensus formed. My father was, in a word, ill-suited for the ministry. My mother was unstable, a poor choice. A growing chorus of alarmed parishioners brought a wide range of Lovelace anecdotes to the church deacons. Their youth pastor had allied with the scourge, the unwashed, the counterculture. Church members wanted my father dismissed. At the deacons’ meeting, a phalanx of balding, relatively unimaginative midlevel managers found my father deeply strange but all agreed he was doctrinally sound and appreciated his affinity with the church teenagers. My father’s eccentricities were duly noted and discussions ensued, but no disciplinary action was taken.

Their mood darkened considerably, however, when Willow Grove’s cleaning woman quit abruptly after encountering a small alligator snapping at her from the church organ’s keyboard. An emergency meeting was called; my father reclaimed the vicious little reptile from the deacons and promised to leave him at home with the rest. He listened to their dire warnings with equanimity as his loathsome pet scratched and hissed from the cardboard box on his lap. By now my father had perfected his classic deacon-meeting defence. He simply wandered off in his head, rhapsodic, detached from any parish concerns.

He wasn’t worried. Princeton would award his doctorate in church history that spring. He would send out his impressive credentials and just wait for the right teaching position to open. He was a ministerial lame duck; he was on his way out. Now he could devote his time to Brahms and his reptiles, take more father-son trips to the Jersey shore to catch sea robins and blow-fish. It was a great relief to all involved.

Meanwhile my mother had her trials, shy and thrust into the role of a minister’s wife, God’s hostess. She bravely bought Tupperware, chatted awkwardly through shared suppers, and kept me in plasters. My sister retreated and my father was busy. I needed an accomplice and so I spent my entire seventh year praying nightly for a brother. When Jonathan finally showed I took all the credit. It was the power of prayer. I just kept at it till God relented.

I forgot what my prayers would cost. Mom lay on our couch in New Jersey, holding my infant brother, unable to speak, afraid for her mind and her soul. My mother soon drifted into paranoia and then deeper into delusion. She was damned and everyone damned her. When the churchwomen began arriving with food, began holding her baby, my mother’s fear grew worse. They had plotted to take her family, to poison her, to carry out Satan’s terrible will. I watched her each morning as she lay on that brown couch. She haunted the room. And then my mother was gone and we couldn’t go and see her. My father smiled and said Mom was just resting but I knew better. I knew she was crazy. Mom’s mind, my father said, had begun skipping and just needed a knock, a bounce back into its groove. But I knew things. I had heard things. I knew what had happened before I was born. They took her away. They locked her up. She lost the power of speech and she growled like a dog. When I was seven a nightmare lodged in my chest and never left. Alone late at night I saw my mother snarling and snapping. On some level, I think, my siblings and I felt responsible for the sickness that followed our births. My mother’s postpartum delusions threw shadows over my family’s world. She broke into black rooms we never could enter. My father began to shield my mother from the outside, from trouble and finances, from parties and friends – even from us. I spent my childhood afraid for my mother, afraid I would lose her to hospitals, to all the whispered secrets. It became my lifelong fear – our family madness, my mother barking, my mother convulsed.