Then she’d rush into her bedroom, grab the bottle of booze she’d siphoned from my father’s stash, and return to the kitchen. In front of us, she’d begin knocking it down, straight from the bottle, even though she hated the taste of whiskey. Each dramatic guzzle was followed by something similar to a child’s attempt at making herself sick so she didn’t have to attend school. My brothers would exchange looks, roll their eyes, perhaps chuckle behind their hands, which only exasperated my mother all the more (since I was so much younger, I followed my brothers’ lead in all of this). Here she was having her Hamlet-like soliloquy about being or ending it with a mere bodkin—or in her case, a mere bottle–and we, heartless, stupid children that we were, laughed at her performance. “You think I’m kidding? You’ll miss me when I’m gone. Just you wait and see, you ungrateful whelps.” (Despite growing up on a farm where we had plenty of litters of piglets and calves, chicks and puppies, I wasn’t quite certain what a whelp was. Later when I learned that the word meant “to give birth to,” especially to a “rude and impudent child,” I realized the word fit us boys to a tee.)
Her methods of “ending it” varied. Of course, the necessary though hardly sufficient condition was for her getting completely sloshed; she’d stagger around the house, cursing my father for being my father, us for being unappreciative whelps, uttering maudlin oaths intended to elicit sympathy. Other times, she’d use the booze to wash down some cocktail of pills she’d gotten from the medicine cabinet–sleeping, pain or anxiety pills, the more the merrier. Often, while in this state, she’d jump in her small blue Falcon and drive around town, hoping, I guess, to hit something substantial enough to make the decision for her. Or short of that, catching her husband coming out of some ginmill so she could plow into him—a kind of killing two birds with one stone, as it were.
She’d vanish for a few hours, perhaps half a day, sometimes not coming home until the next morning, having slept it off in the back seat of her car somewhere. My father, if he were home and not out getting drunk himself, never bothered going out to find her or contacting the police, because he knew it would be futile. There were two possible outcomes, he told us. First, that our mother would eventually be found somewhere, dead or alive, preferably the latter. Or two, she would, when the booze and pills finally wore off and reality once again set it, come home of her own accord, perhaps with a banged-up fender and a raging hangover. If she kept it up for a few days, my father would threaten to have her packed off to Norwich—Norwich being a town that had what was still called in the fifties an insane asylum.
But her favorite means of ending it was death by drowning. Water held this almost mystical allure for my mother. As with Ophelia’s suicide, this method provided her with the necessary backdrop for a heightened sense of drama, a broad stage upon which she could act out the shuffling off of her mortal coil. This method became such a common occurrence in our family, that if our father asked where our mother was we’d reply with something callous like, “She’s gone for a swim.” We considered this a normal way of sizing up the situation, not to take her threats or our potential grief too seriously. However, belying that cavalier attitude was a sensation I secretly had as a child of utter terror. What if thistime she wasn’t kidding? What if this time she had the last laugh on all of us? What if this time, I lost my Mom? As I grew older, I slowly began to realize that the flippant language we used, including that of my mother, was intended to keep at bay something truly terrifying: the fact that she was unhappy enough to contemplate taking her own life.
One of her favorite spots was the Connecticut River. She’d park her car nearby and walk out onto the old metal bridge crossing the river to the town where she grew up. There she’d act as if she were about to climb over the railing and pitch herself headlong into the roiling current below (“I warned you, you’d miss me when I was gone,” I imagined her calling out as she took a swan-dive into the murky waters). This spot, public as it was, offered various advantages. First, passing traffic might recognize her, and they’d know just how aggrieved she was with her life and how much she was justified in her ending it, the poor woman. Second, and perhaps more important, this spot was within a Seagram’s-bottle throw of one of my father’s favorite watering holes after work, Joe’s Restaurant. Perhaps, went her thinking, he might even chance to look out the window of the tavern and catch her just as she was plummeting to her demise. The problem was my mother was afraid of heights, and the water, as inviting as it might have been, lay some fifty feet below.
Another favorite spot was not far from the first. Here she could park her car beside the river and simply walk out into the shallow water, thereby avoiding her fear of heights. But some problem or other always seemed to rear its ugly head in this ending it business; why couldn’t suicide be simpler than the chaotic life she was trying so desperately to leave? Here the river was wide and flat and if you were really serious, you had to walk out a very long way to get to anything even close to suicidal depth. Several times my mother returned home wet up to her waist and shivering at the failed attempt. Once even, an intrusive cop had to butt in and call her to the shore, thus ruining her attempt; another time, the same nosy cop, seeing her car parked yet again along the river, peeked in the car and saw her passed out in the back seat. He lifted her into his cruiser and brought her home. When I saw the cruiser in our driveway, my breath caught in my throat: was this the time she finally went through with it? Had our callous indifference to her plight all those years finally been avenged?
Sometimes, sensing my mother was in one of her black moods, my father would hide her car keys or pull the wires off the distributor cap, in effect grounding her. He’d often give us boys the command to “keep an eye on your mother” as if she were our responsibility. But my mother was, if nothing else, persistent. When the coast was clear, say, when our father was actually working and we were at school, she’d slip out and head down to the stream in the cow pasture behind our house. This was a far less dramatic and much more private affair. Also, the water here was completely lacking in “ending it” potential, the stream at its deepest being just a foot or two. The best she could manage was to give her feet and legs a good soaking. When she changed her mind, she would simply walk back, wet and defeated looking.
I recall once in the dead of winter, my mother pulling one of her vanishing acts. It was brutally cold out, and we worried that she might actually freeze to death. Since her Falcon was parked in the driveway, my next eldest brother, who knew her moves by heart, told me to follow him as he started walking through the snow-covered field behind the house. Sure enough, we spotted her size six shoeprint in the snow heading down toward the stream.
I was perhaps nine, my brother sixteen. As we marched along, I asked him why she kept doing this.
“She just wants the attention,” he replied, mimicking what my father often said.
“But what if she actually did it?”
“She won’t.”
I thought, but didn’t say: But what if?
When we reached the stream, there she was, lying still and rigidly on her side in the frigid water, her head propped precariously on a tree root. She didn’t move. For several seconds, I stared at her, my heart rapping wildly in my chest. Please Ma, I’m sorry, I said to myself. And then, like all the other times, she moved, her frozen hand to reach out for me.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as if in reply to my silent prayer.
My brother had me take her numbed feet while he grasped her arms, and we lugged her home, got her changed, and into bed.
My mother’s suicide attempts continued until my father died, and we’d all left for college or the army or got married. Then she suddenly stopped trying to kill herself. That was when she got off the booze and the pills, went through therapy in her sixties, and from then on was very much committed to living. Which she did—for another 27 years, a relatively calm period in her life that was full of joy and laughter, gratitude and grandkids, as well as a renewed relationship with her four sons.
She formed the basis for Lyman’s mother in my upcoming novel, Skunktown. Like Lyman, I always feared that she would someday succeed, and like him, I loved her with all the fierceness and sense of vulnerability such a love entails.
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