I was the third baby boy born in as many years. That first winter of my life the house still had no furnace and no hot water—my mother washed our diapers in cold water handpumped into the kitchen sink. How odd it must have been for these two children of urban privilege to have chosen such a place to begin their lives together. Why didn’t they rent an apartment in Albany? Or a house in its suburbs? The only explanation my father has ever offered for their living in such primitive circumstances was that he’d had enough of close quarters with other sailors in the war and when he came back he wanted to live as far from people and crowds as possible. What my mother thought of it, I’ll never know.
Although alcohol fueled almost all the escapades that unraveled so disastrously and in such rapid succession during my father’s young adulthood, it had utterly vanished by the time I was born. The rash and passionate relationship with booze that had come close to wrecking his young life a dozen times had been replaced by something else.
Early on in his medical school days, my father discovered amphetamine. What a miracle this powdered electricity compressed into little tablets must have been to him, as it was to countless other overworked medical students and interns—what a descent of grace, what balm in Gilead, what an oasis of green energy in the gray wastes of his daily exhaustion and stress! The endless complex studying and exams, the red-eyed, round-the-clock ward duties, the long drives home, and the labor on the farm as well—all these responsibilities that rose up and promised to overwhelm him now receded before this potent chemical that unlocked the mysteries of the human brain so that a man was turned into a demigod and a mortal gained knowledge and concentrated powers a god would envy. Holy tablets more precious than gold—my father hugged them closer than Moses gripped those flat stones God himself inscribed.
Those pills so saturated my father’s life that they seemed to have the power to appear anywhere, like mushrooms on a green lawn. Years later, my father drove me to my first day at college. We’d just pulled into the freshman dorm parking lot and I’d begun to unload suitcases from the back seat when he lifted from the open trunk a large, opaque plastic jug. “Here,” he said, “this might come in handy,” and he transferred it to me. It weighed six pounds and had to be carried in the crook of my arm like a small baby. It could have been an industrial-sized jar of ketchup or some other condiment, but it wasn’t—it was a bottle of one thousand amphetamine tablets, an extravagant parting gift from a man ordinarily noted for stinginess.
In the short time we spent unloading my stuff in the dorm, he gave me my first full sermon on the gospel of speed, though there had been hints before—casual, grim quips like: “Unhappy? We can give you a whole new chemical personality.” “Unhappy” said with an unctuous, drawn-out tone of concern ending in the diabolical parody of a completely insincere, salesman’s grin. And this “we” was all the up-to-date physicians, my father chief among them. Today, our culture is inured to the concept of a chemically engineered personality, but back then, in the early sixties, the phrase shocked and unnerved me. Nor was it reassuring to hear my father so insistently and intently cynical. Some of that cynicism must have emerged from despair: amphetamine in the morning; sleeping pills at night; then amphetamine again as the next morning dawned. My father was a walking, fast-talking endorsement of his grandiose claims, but he was also a partly empty husk sparked by the stuff—a hopped-up, volatile, addicted puppet. Only last year, Jonathan told me that, lying on the living room couch one day when he was ten, he heard my mother shout: “Jim, a mouse!” Dad was napping in his shorts at the time, in one of those frazzled collapses that alternated with his chemical highs. He leapt up, grabbed the .38 he kept in his bedside drawer at the time, ran down the stairs, and began blasting pistol shots at the tiny beast as it scurried among the dining room chairs and Jon screamed for help from the next room only a thin wall away. “Yes,” I said, though Jon’s anecdote was more overtly violent than any memory I had of that time. Yes, this is the man about whom we’d whisper our encrypted warnings in the dark halls of the house: “Stay away, he’s in a bad mood.”
Even with amphetamine’s chemical assist, my father’s struggle to graduate from medical school was immense. When he was still at Columbia, a professor told him that if any medical student lived more than fifteen minutes by subway from Columbia, his teachers knew he would flunk out by semester’s end. My father often thought about that as he drove his Model T truck the one-hour trip down out of the hills into Albany.
The life my parents lived those years in Alcove wasn’t an easy one. It wasn’t easy to survive in those circumstances. Not everyone did. Bill, the oldest, was born in 1945; Christopher, a year later; and I, the year after that. When Christopher was three years old, he climbed out of his crib in the middle of the night, opened my father’s desk drawer, found and swallowed enough pills to poison himself, put the bottle back and closed the drawer, then returned to his bed to sleep. By the time my mother found him comatose the next morning, my father had already left for school. Not until much later that day did they discover what had happened, but by the time they could pump his stomach it was too late. He died the following day.
The one account my father gave of Christopher’s death, years later, was so freighted with guilt and shame that I felt guilty myself as I tried to press past the narrative’s bare bones. My father’s genial countenance distorted into twists and turns, as if half the muscles in his face contracted in a painful effort to focus even as the rest tried to blur and avert his gaze.
“What kind of pills were they?” I asked.
“They were a French antihistamine, little sugarcoated pills Dr. Perkins prescribed for your mother’s allergies,” he said.
“How did he find them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Tortured by my own guilt, I had no stomach for his suffering no matter how much I longed to know more. And yet I saw it clearly—the small boy alone in the room, opening the forbidden drawer. There in the dark, with moonlight from the window leaking in and smearing the edges of things with its cold, mercurial light. He slides it open, that drawer, that narrow rectangle of wood that could have been his coffin if he were smaller. Careless drawer, irresponsible box that gives away so easily its dangerous secrets, that surrenders its poisons so readily. Of course such a drawer is appalling; of course, my father will learn from this and lock up these evil boxes before they can do more harm. And yet he does not—its lesson of jeopardy is one he cannot learn and only ten years later my brother Jonathan will enter my father’s bedroom and slip open the distant cousin of Christopher’s drawer and lift out the loaded .38 pistol to point around the room, to pretend with.
How can you reason with a drawer, a stupid piece of wood? You can’t grab it by the lapels and shake it and scream, “Wake up, don’t you see what’s going on?” A drawer in a desk doesn’t think, it doesn’t act, it’s not responsible for what happens.
Jon told me the story of my father’s mouse hunt in response to my telling him the story of Christopher’s death, which he knew only as rumor. I have always been the difficult member of my family—the one whose desperate curiosity about the past irritates and threatens others because it brings back such painful memories. For much of my life, I’ve felt compelled to probe certain silence-shrouded events and their consequences. It’s not a role I chose but one born out of my own torment and guilt and desire to survive. I wasn’t after other people’s secrets; all I wanted was information that could be light and clear air. And so, periodically, when the pain got bad, got unbearable, I would ask questions I knew I should not.