Read Online Stories for Boys: A Memoir by Gregory Martin - Free Book Online

eventually relax, and she’d be herself again. She did not need to go to the hospital. He did not utter words like “psychiatrist,” “manic-depression,” “bipolar.” He would not even say, “nervous breakdown,” though I heard other people say this, in my presence, about my mother. He did not tell me about the time my mother escaped from a mental hospital when I was ten. He did not tell me she’d once admitted herself to a mental hospital before I was born. My father did not even say the word “crazy.”
    I wanted to know why. Why couldn’t my mother even speak to me? Would she ever get better? Did she know what was happening to her? How much did she understand? Would this awful feeling in my heart ever go away? I don’t know that I ever asked my father any of these questions directly. I don’t think so. I can’t remember. But I will never forget the power of those unacknowledged feelings – confusion and helplessness, fear and grief.
    It occurs to me now that here is one reason why it was so completely unacceptable that my sons did not know why their grandparents had divorced. They were confused and sad, and I had an explanation, and I was keeping it from them, and this unspoken explanation was intimately related to other unspoken explanations – a chain of secrets and unacknowledged sadness that now ran through me to them.

    LATE ONE NIGHT, that winter I was fifteen, I “stole” our red Ford Escort wagon. I only had my learner’s permit and so wasn’t legal to drive on my own. Sometime after midnight, I silently rolled the car out of the driveway, turned the key in the ignition halfway down the block, and drove to my girlfriend’s house. Or at least I thought of her as my girlfriend; she had a boyfriend off at college who was shorter than me. My father was awake and discovered first the car, then me, missing. I’m speculating, but perhaps he missed the car because he was planning to go somewhere himself. Perhaps he was planning to meet someone, someone anonymous. One more person who didn’t know him.
    About an hour after I arrived at my girlfriend’s house, my brother showed up. He said, “You should go home.” When I came in the kitchen door around two in the morning, my father was sitting at the table. My mother was upstairs, in bed, but it’s not quite right to say that she was asleep. She mumbled at all hours. Sometimes her eyes were open, sometimes not. My father did not yell at me. Nor did he commiserate, regaling me with his own late night escapades, hamstrung by desire. In a leap of logic that only now makes sense, my father told me that he wanted me to talk to Monsignor Crowley. I didn’t have to make a confession. I just had to talk. So, that very next day, Monsignor Crowley and I talked, though I don’t remember the conversation or even where it took place.
    If you could have seen me during this time, walking the halls of my high school, attending class, at basketball practice with my teammates, there would have been no way for you to surmise that all was not well at home. I was engaged, purposeful, kind. I kept earning straight As. I raised my hand in class, though not too much, and either I knew the answer or was willing to speculate. I never said it aloud to anyone, much less silently to myself, but I was troubled.
    My mother’s madness diminished like an echo. She returned to herself. She did not talk about what had happened to her any more than my father talked about what had happened to her. Or what had happened to him. I did not want to bring up what had happened out of the fear that at the mention of certain words or phrases or events she might start wailing again. I did not know how fragile she was – or I was – and so I assumed the worst and buried my need for explanation.
    At the end of that year, my mother left her job at the univer - sity, we sold the house on Stratford Avenue, and we moved back to the D.C. area, where we bought a house in Falls Church, Virginia. To