Читать книгу Full Blown: Me and My Bipolar Family - David Lovelace - Страница 7

In 1968 my father was named professor of church history at Conwell Seminary, a small evangelical school outside Philadelphia. Conwell soon merged with another conservative school and we all moved to Hamilton, Massachusetts. We didn’t really belong in Hamilton. In fact, my father’s employer didn’t belong in Hamilton. Theologians do not mix well at the hunt club. On Boston’s North Shore matters of religion were settled properly ages ago. God chose sides and the hunt club won. Sunday mornings are set aside for polo games and horse trials, not church. The Catholics had already fled the place, leaving a large, empty campus above town, and, in a sort of religious lateral pass, they sold it to us.

Dad went on ahead to Hamilton and Mom stayed behind with us and packed. She seemed fine then, fully recovered from Jonathan’s birth. He was almost two, my sister seven, and I was nine years old. Dad brought his mother house shopping and Grandmére put a down payment on a low-slung, damp house surrounded by oaks and scrub saplings. He found it in Hamilton’s scruffy outback, where ranch homes with mulch-pile lawns were hidden away in the woods like the servants’ quarters. Dad wired the house for sound, set up his snake room full of heat lamps, unpacked his typewriter and sent for us. Grandmére loved Hamilton. She believed there was hope for us yet.

In any school the new kid always gets it in the neck. And in New England, the new kid is new until two or three generations stack up in the town graveyard. I was pilloried at the bus stop and shunned at school. The heir to a major banking concern beat the tar out of me by the lockers. The children of law firms gathered to taunt me. My fistfights all degenerated into inconclusive heaps; they won me no allies. I hated school and every afternoon I ran home, dumped my books by the door and headed for the woods. Just across our street was a series of bridle paths that went for miles, through marshes, thickets and streams, until reaching the rolling estates closer to town.

Before long I tired of aimless walks and begged for a BB gun. I snuck along the bridle paths and took ambivalent shots at squirrels and songbirds. I fancied myself a poacher of the king’s deer when I carried that gun, and incredibly, the cream of Hamilton society played along with me. On one grey November afternoon, miles from home, I heard what sounded like a pack of wild dogs barking and baying. There must have been dozens. I held my popgun tightly as the noise got closer, and then it arrived. The hounds tore around the corner and came straight at me. They were mad, the whole slobbering, yelping lot of them were mad and charging full tilt. I slipped behind an oak tree and looked for a branch. The dogs didn’t slow, their tongues lashing and eyes rolling as they passed, chasing something, not me.

I heard a horn and then it made sense – at least in a limited, theatrical way. It was the aptly named Myopia Hunt Club, my new neighbours. I dropped the gun and kicked leaves over it just as the first horse and rider came into view. Another dozen or so rounded the bend, resplendent and ridiculous in brass buttons, red swallowtail jackets and boots. The man in the top hat blew his horn again and the entire spectacle rode past swiftly and awkwardly.

None of the riders acknowledged or even made eye contact with me, a scruffy, modern American boy who had wandered into their game. Myopia has guarded their club’s mix of nearsighted tradition and horses since 1882. Nevertheless, by the time I arrived lax zoning and thoughtless development had degraded both fox and Brahmin habitats. The club had stooped to dragging fox scent through the lower class of Hamilton neighbourhoods. It was embarrassing for all of us, my poaching deer that didn’t exist and the whole gang of them, costumed by P. G. Wodehouse and chasing a nonexistent fox.

I was overjoyed. I had found people – grown-ups – who were stranger than us, stranger than my family. Next time maybe I’d get caught and they could place me in their imaginary stocks down in front of their English-like club. I was heartened and redoubled my hunting efforts.

My father flourished at Gordon-Conwell and hit his stride as a church historian. His doctoral thesis, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather, was now in print and well regarded. Academia, even evangelical academia, gave my father’s eccentricities license and he was respected by the school’s faculty. The social graces required of ministers are not expected of professors. The students loved his lecturing style and his classes filled immediately. He was forgetful and distracted and they loved him for it. He couldn’t remember their names but he knew his stuff cold.

My father argued that Cotton Mather, of Salem witch trial fame, had laid the foundations for modern evangelicalism. Dad asked his readers to look past the trial, but I put it front and centre. Mather played a pivotal role, arguing for the court’s admission of ‘spectral evidence’: dreams, visions and nightmares. Years later he defended the trials in his work Wonders of the Invisible World. In short, Mather legitimized hallucination in the New World; he brought hysteria into the courtroom. I’m no church historian but I am a Lovelace. I’ve heard my mother speak of demons and my father of angels. I’ve watched my family’s religion conspire with our brain disease to conjure spectral evidence and trumpet it.

Mather’s world proved too dark for my father, and he soon jumped a generation and focused on Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. Edwards’s sermons sparked a wildfire revival that spread through the colonies and across the Atlantic. He had it all: rock and roll fame, brimstone and poetry. Edwards was a theologian’s action hero, America’s answer to Luther, and he became my father’s intellectual touchstone. My brother was named for Edwards, and I was named for his missionary friend, David Brainerd. These two preachers stand at the opposite poles of my family’s religion and give witness to its ongoing cycle of redemptive ecstasy and damning guilt.

Edwards claimed that true grace was evidenced by a supernatural illumination of the soul. Further, he argued that as ‘visible saints’ his congregation should expect the bodily effects and feverish symptoms of salvation. Before long he had his congregants swooning in the aisles, crying and convulsing. Neighbouring preachers denounced the church as hysterical, even possessed. Ultimately, Edwards conceded that some of these signs were suspect, but not before he had raised the psychological bar: the evangelical rush, the high as conversion’s sure sign. I tried to catch this ecstatic proof all through my youth. All of us did.

I’ve never received this blessed assurance, but I’ve found its complement. I found what David Brainerd suffered at the faith’s other pole: the sickness of the soul, the self-loathing that marks a true pilgrim’s progress. Brainerd renounced the colonial world and lived in self-imposed exile. He lived, he said, in a ‘hideous and howling wilderness’. Brainerd complained ceaselessly of ‘vapoury disorders’, of distraction and despair. At the end of his life, he retreated to Edwards’s spare room, finished up his sad notes, and died. He said he was unworthy of love, foul and sinful. His heart, he wrote, was a cage of unclean birds. My sister, Margaret Lee, has never seen this place. She’s the only one of us who isn’t bipolar, the only one of us named for a loved one rather than a Puritan.

When he wasn’t lecturing, my father preferred to write at home in the living room. He would hole up with symphonies blasting and a constrictor draped around his shoulders. The three of us children were altogether too young for my father’s distracted, intellectual disciplines. Even my mother lacked the critical tools necessary to share in my father’s cerebral world. I’d lose myself in the woods, and my sister lost herself in books. My mother put flowers and vases on her kitchen table and worked on her paintings while Dad hunkered down in a low upholstered chair, hunched over his typewriter and insulated from the family by a wall of classical music. There was always music in the living room. Finally he ran speaker wires out to the kitchen and our dinners were swamped in Brahms and Bartók. My father would sit at the head of the table and hum, his eyes closed as his right hand hovered with the strings. He ate between movements.

‘Who can tell me the composer of this piece?’ he’d ask, and my sister and I vied for his approval. My mother never guessed. Once she had me pull the wires out of the speakers.

‘Now listen to this. This passage gives it away. Who wrote it?’

‘Mozart.’ My guess was always Mozart with a Beethoven fallback. The occasional choral work had to be Bach.

‘No, no. Here’s a hint. Afternoon of a Faun!’

‘What’s a fawn?’ my sister asked.

‘Bambi’s a fawn,’ I said. ‘Duh.’

‘Okay then, it’s Beethoven,’ my sister said confidently. ‘It has to be Beethoven.’

‘What’s Beethoven have to do with fawns?’ I challenged.

My sister faltered. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay, Bach.’

My father smiled broadly. ‘Wrong. You’re both wrong. It’s Debussy!’

Of course, Debussy.

But my father had other records, records the Willow Grove kids had given him. He didn’t have much rock and roll but he had Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. I listened to it over and over and memorized its lines, especially: ‘God said to Abraham kill me a son / Abe said man you must be putting me on / God said no Abe said what / God said you can do what you want Abe but / The next time you see me coming you better run.’ Dad had his Debussy and I had my ‘Desolation Row’.

Some nights, when he was sick of Puritans, my father bundled me up and we went fishing. It was always just my Dad and I. Jonathan was too young and my father rarely invited my mother or Peggy. My father cited their complete and utter lack of interest and I think deep down he welcomed it. After all, they were girls. But Dad and I, we always fished.

We returned again and again to Salem Willows, a broken-down amusement park beside smokestacks and the harbour. It smelled of fried food, cigarettes and drunks. At night – it was always at night – we would walk out on the long, dark pier, twenty feet above the water. Thirty-five years ago, before all the trawlers cleared the ocean, my father and I could regularly catch twelve-pound cod on cut clams and jigs just out from shore. When the fish hit I lowered our rusted Coleman lantern just about down to the water and lashed the line. The cod flashed white in the bright green water and I’d hold the rod while my father dropped a nasty fist of grappling hooks. I’d play the fish towards Dad and he would wait for the moment, yank and haul the fish up hand over hand. When we stood on that pier, I couldn’t have cared less for the sad merry-go-round behind us, its seasick music and mouldering horses. I didn’t need candyfloss, spinning lights and rides. And I don’t think Dad needed Debussy. We were happy just standing in the dark with some hooks and a box of slippery, translucent clams for bait, waiting for fish.

Waiting for ducks was an entirely different matter. I remember sitting in duck hides all through dark November afternoons, scanning the horizon for anything other than seagulls. ‘Seagulls are protected,’ my father explained, to my great disappointment. ‘We can’t shoot seagulls.’ We used a small skiff to navigate through the salt marshes and, if necessary, retrieve ducks. I wanted a dog, of course, a retriever, but my father pleaded allergies and said the snakes were enough. We didn’t really need the dog; we rarely hit ducks. Instead, we sat and watched our rather sad group of plastic decoys bob out in front of our hovel while I listened to my father talk about jumping ducks along the Rio Grande of his youth: whole rafts of them, he’d say. I don’t remember bringing home edible ducks, but the family feasted on sea duck occasionally, a kind of feathered herring. I was too young for a gun and just played with the duck call. My father had a twelve-gauge monster of a Browning, a goose gun if there ever was one. It was an automatic and it jammed every time.

Although our duck hunts never lived up to their promise, I loved the idea of hunting. Anything. I spent more and more time on the bridle paths killing small innocent things with my BB gun: chickadees, nuthatches, large beetles. I knew it was wrong but I kept score. I played for keeps. I longed to poach larger game from Myopia’s forest but stags were scarce, as were pheasants and partridge. This left squirrel. It was clear I needed more gun.

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘it’s perfectly fine to shoot squirrels. There’s a season and everything.’

‘I don’t know, David. It just seems cruel.’

‘People eat them all the time, Dad. Really.’

‘I’ve never seen anyone eat a squirrel. Maybe in Appalachia.’

‘Dad, there’s tons and tons of squirrels out there. A few less wouldn’t matter.’ My father resisted the idea, but I kept at it. I found recipes.

The Browning was useless on ducks but we knocked down half a dozen grey squirrels in no time. Hitting squirrels with a twelve-gauge shotgun is as easy as it is pointless, and although the gun’s kickback knocked me into the leaves repeatedly, I quickly mastered the skill. I could squirrel hunt and trout trap like a professional. My father and I had left legal concerns such as trespass, gun law and licence vague, so when we heard the shouting my first instinct was to run but my father stood his ground. It was Mr Mosley, our neighbour. His son, Dick, beat me regularly down at the bus stop.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Mosley asked.

I dropped the squirrels and my father said, ‘Oh. Hello, Mr, Mr –’

‘Mosley.’

‘Right, Mosley. Mr Mosley. I’m Richard Lovelace and this is –’

‘I know who you are. I want to know why you’re out here killing squirrels with a damn shotgun.’ My father stared at him blankly. What could he say? That we needed the food? That squirrels were overrunning our lawn? Killing our livestock?

‘Listen, Lovelace. This is no way to teach a boy. Take him to the dump and shoot rats if you have to. Go ahead. But if you kill another goddamn squirrel with a shotgun around my house I’ll have you arrested. Understand?’ My father nodded silently and Mosley stalked off, back through the woods. I picked up the dead squirrels by their tails and ran for home; Dad caught up with me on the back porch. He gave me some pointers on gutting and skinning the poor things, put his gun away, and went back to his typing. I threw the innards, the heads and the feet into the woods.

My mother had not been apprised of the hunt but was unconcerned when I came into the kitchen and slung a sack full of dressed squirrel into her sink. She was standing over the kitchen table, fretting over her calligraphy. ‘Hi, dear,’ she said, and looked over. ‘Oh, David. That’s a good pillowcase, dear. I could have given you an old one. What’s in there?’

‘Mom, I’m making up a surprise for dinner,’ I told her. ‘I need onions and carrots.’ I pulled the recipe from my back pocket. ‘Let’s see. I need chicken stock. Do we have any chicken stock? I’m making a stew.’

‘All right, dear, use bouillion – those cubes up in the cabinet. Just look at that pillowcase.’ It was filthy and spots of blood had soaked through the flowered cotton fabric.

‘I’ll wash it. I promise.’ I peeked in at the sadly diminished squirrels. Bits of thread and fuzz stuck to their shiny, sinewy bodies. ‘Never mind, Mom. Just don’t worry about dinner.’ I pushed her out of the kitchen.

By this time my mother had seen just about everything. She wasn’t worried about my surprise; she’d find out soon enough. Mom had enough concerns. She dressed us, got us on the bus, cooked our meals and washed our clothes. She periodically wrested the chequebook from my father and pleaded for budgetary management. She kept our family presentable, even with snakes in her spare room and dead squirrels on her stove. And yet, banished from her kitchen, she just stood in the hall at a loss. There was nowhere for her to go. The front of the house with its sonic-boom speakers and Dad was off-limits, their bedroom was dark and small, and the family room smelled of snakes.

Dinner was horrible, of course, a shocking, watery mess with the rodents floating up out of the boil. My sister began crying immediately. I myself was racked by guilt and nausea but recognized I must eat squirrel or admit to wanton slaughter. My mother made toast. Only my father tucked in with gusto. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Not bad. Better than eating frogs.’

Mom cleared the table and made me promise to throw the leftovers, my entire stew, into the woods after family devotions. Every evening, my father shut down his music, read a passage from the New Testament or Psalms, and asked our opinions. I always had opinions and Dad always followed them with his own, longer and more coherent, commentary. After that came the prayer.

‘Does anyone have something they would like to thank God for? Any prayer requests?’