the family closet

This dark house, on a little rise, green front yard, a large oak off to the right. The back yard is terraced with a downward slope into woods. There's a circular driveway and slate steps leading to the entrance, that's as far as I've ever gotten to the house where this family moved to in the late 1940's. It's a tall house, three stories, shingled and painted. Typical New York city suburban wasp house. Cold, a family couldn't afford to heat the whole thing. The mother had sole use of the bathroom closest to the kitchen, it was warm.

Imagine 1956 the father stumbles home, tossed out of a taxi his knees bruised and hands bleeding from the gravel driveway. He drunkenly bangs on the front door and his wife refuses entry. His business just went belly-up that day and closed. They have three children the two eldest are home for the weekend from their boarding prep school. The youngest, nine, so timid and acquiescent, ignores the chaos surrounding him. The father enters a sanitarium for a couple of weeks. His wife seeks the family doctor to medicate them both. Father has been a binge drinker all his life, he'll go two to three months at a time before this breakdown; and the wife tries to help him by trying to control his drinking for him. The doctor, on the cutting edge, prescribes a toxic mix of speed and barbiturates to both mother and father.

The mother starts her drinking. She is a blackout drinker; and this is when the screaming and the fighting, the tantrums, the negative manipulating starts. She withholds the drugs that she buys bulk from a pharmaceutical magazine, like Sears & Roebucks from her husband. She's drunk from the vodka by dinner, she takes some speed to get through it, but she doesn't understand what she is putting in her body since her doctor doesn't understand it either. By the end of dinner she's on autopilot and her husband and her elementary school aged little boy get beaten.

The boy retreats to his room, somewhere safe, he makes model airplanes and boats. The older boys get in-between their parents when they start hitting each other. The youngest enters his boarding prep school, comes home during the weekends to the same reenacted nightly drama.

It's his high school graduation day. You remember yours, vaguely, too inane really to remember all the details. The two older boys went out to meet some friends, leaving the youngest at the house, retreated in his bedroom, and this night the drama played out in his mothers room, adjacent to his own. The same cocktail of vodka, speed and barbiturates, mixed together with the unimpenetrable haze of black. They were fighting again, she was screaming again. There was a pillow over her face to drown her, and it stopped the screaming. The father stumbled out, the vodka dragging his shined shoes on the floor. And she didn't wake up the next morning when he went to work and left her there with her youngest son, just graduated to enter the collegiate world under a terrible shadow.