Out: Being Myself

Chapter One:
Secrets

I was looking for my mother. I was six years old, wandering alone outside our one-story suburban house on a drizzly fall evening. My mother should have been in the kitchen. But peering through the darkness, I spied her tall, lanky frame lying in the leaves in the narrow space between the house and the bushes that surrounded it. She was crying.

“Mummy, are you ok?” I whispered, creeping closer. She was facing away from me.

“Yes, Chrissy, I’m fine,” she said, faintly. “Go back inside.”

I did what I was told. I guessed my mom had been drinking again, but I didn’t tell anyone where she was. Instead, I went into my bedroom and shut the door. My two older brothers, with whom I shared a tiny room, were somewhere else in the house, so I got under the covers in the dark room. What was wrong with my mother? Why was she lying on the ground outside instead of taking care of me?

When my father came home from work hours later he knocked on my door, then opened it halfway.

“Chrissy, are you okay?” he asked, gently, as if he knew something had happened.

“Yes,” I answered from under the blankets. I was weeping—too softly, I hoped, for him to hear me.

“Goodnight. Everything will be fine in the morning,” he said as he closed the door. The next day, my mother did not mention the incident, and I did not ask her about it.

On the surface, we were a classic baby-boom family. My father was a lawyer who worked in New York City. My mother stayed at home, raising us—three boys and a girl—in a modest, three-bedroom suburban house built right after World War II. We had a big yard, and lots of kids lived in the neighborhood.

In reality, our family was a few degrees off normal. As a young attorney just starting out after attending law school at night, my father did not make much money. Our house was small. The tiny galley kitchen, for instance, was dominated by a washing machine that did not work. We sent our laundry out and ate our meals seated at the dining room table or standing up at the breakfast bar opposite the defunct washer. The clothesline in the back yard never got used.

With four small kids close in age, my mother was overwhelmed. A shy, attractive woman with auburn hair, from Swampscott, Massachusetts, near Boston, she moved to New York when she married my father, who was from Brooklyn.

“We met on your mother’s birthday at a bar in Boston.” My father was telling me the story of how they got together. I was home from college and we were at dinner at a Manhattan restaurant while my mother was at their weekend house.

“She was out with her friends, and my ship was in Boston at the end of the war,” he recounted, one of the few times he mentioned his Navy service. Then, he dropped a bombshell. “We actually got engaged that night.”

My eyes widened. It sounded preposterous. But my Dad was very impulsive—and handsome—and my mother, stunningly beautiful, was heading toward 30, which was late for a woman to marry in those days. Meeting in a bar suggests alcohol was involved. They wed four months later.

Married life proved grittier than the engagement story. Mummy, as we called her, didn’t know anyone in Wantagh, the Long Island suburb where we lived. For the first few years, she didn’t have a driver’s license or even a checking account—she’d never learned to drive, and my father did not trust her with money.

In addition, she was often ill, the remnants of the rheumatic fever and respiratory problems she suffered as a child. Besides being in bed a lot, her sickly nature profoundly affected our childhood: she rarely hugged us, saying she did not want to give us her germs. I did not understand what I had missed until years later when I enviously watched my wife constantly hug our children.

Instead of affection, we got medicine. If we got a cold, with our orange juice Mummy casually dispensed antibiotics from her ample supply.

She couldn’t manage the housekeeping but we couldn’t afford help, or perhaps my father was too cheap. As a result, the house was messy until the four of us were old enough to pitch in during Saturday morning clean-ups organized by my father. Cleaning the bathrooms was the worst job, which often fell to me, perhaps because I was the youngest. As a little boy I could squeeze behind the toilet to clean the floor back there.

The real problem, however, was alcohol. Even before I started kindergarten, my mother started drinking with a new friend in the neighborhood—a Swiss woman who was, like my mother, an outsider. Sometimes she took me with her because I was too young to be left alone at home. The daytime drinking was probably why she was lying in the bushes drunk that time.

Another time, I found her lying down in the living room in the late afternoon, stretched out on the same couch where she often read to me at night.

“Yes, I’m drunk,” she said to me as I walked into the room.

Dad drank too, stopping at a bar most nights before he boarded the Long Island Railroad for the commute home. Upon walking in the front door, he went straight to the liquor cabinet in the kitchen to check the level of the scotch bottle.

“Claire!” he yelled, his voice echoing throughout our small house. “For god’s sake. You’ve been drinking!”

“I don’t know what you’re taking about,” Mummy replied, coming into the kitchen. “You’re got some nerve coming home from your gin mill and accusing me of drinking.”

“Look at this,” he said, holding up one of the bottles and raising his voice. “There was more in here when I left this morning.”

“Oh, shut up Bill,” she said and retreated to their bedroom and shut the door.

Hiding in my room, I hated when they fought and I was relieved when the shouting stopped. I got very practiced at noticing when they were drinking and when it would lead to an argument. Throughout my childhood I was always on the lookout for their next alcohol-fueled fight. It felt like my job was to know who had been drinking and who was angry with whom. After I left home, I telephoned home weekly but timed the calls early in the day, before they’d been drinking.

Short and scrawny, as a little kid I was a bit of a crybaby. Until I was in high school, everyone called me Chrissy, really a girl’s name. When my two older and bigger brothers bullied me out in the back yard, my father, sitting in his chair in the living room, would simply tap his wedding ring on the big picture window to signal us to stop fighting. The sound of his ring against the glass was piercing, but it didn’t signal any relief because he never came outside to break things up. My sister, the oldest of the four of us, did not take part in the bullying and sometimes told my brothers to stop hitting me. But I was left to fend for myself. I fought back not with my small fists but with a nasty wit and sharp tongue, which helped me to survive childhood. Except at home, I was never bullied.

When we misbehaved, or “talked back” to Mummy, Daddy would chase after us with his belt as we ran around the dining room table. He did not actually hit us, unlike the teenage babysitter they hired one Saturday night whose boyfriend mercilessly beat all four of us because we refused to go to bed while it was still light. Fortunately, my parents never hired that babysitter again.

Most of the time, I followed the rules, and “kept my nose clean,” as my father put it. After watching my three siblings get yelled at for bad grades or for hanging around with the wrong crowd, I vowed to stay out of trouble. I earned good grades. I ironed my Catholic school uniform by the time I was eight. There was really no one taking care of me, so I learned to be self-sufficient. I didn’t need anyone. A therapist later told me that ironing my clothes at eight was dangerous because of the hot iron, and a sign that I was neglected.

Being a good boy was likely my strategy for getting love and attention from my mother. It didn’t really work—she was not by nature an affectionate person, and, by the time I came along, her nurturing well had run dry. Even if she could not show it, I somehow knew she loved me, and I loved her. As a small boy, I would stand close to her at the stove when she was cooking, eating white bread and butter. Even in adulthood, I never lost that craving for affection, or for bread and butter.

My parents were determined to rise above their modest Irish Catholic beginnings—my father was the first in his family to graduate from college, let alone law school. They thought athletics were for the lower classes so we were discouraged from playing sports; instead, we were urged to read. Taught by my siblings, I could read before I went to first grade. As a smart little boy, I could tell that my teachers were annoyed that I was ahead of the class, even if they didn’t come right out and say it.

We could only watch TV on weekends, so on Friday nights my siblings and I went wild, eating pizza and drinking soda with eyes glued to TV sitcoms and cop shows while our parents went out to dinner at their favorite local restaurant. But Saturday mornings were rough, and not just because of my bathroom clean-up duties. I remember my father driving me to the dentist with the smell of his boozy breath filling the car. Lucky for the dentist, I, not my Dad, would be sitting in his chair.

My mother was exempt from the no-TV rule. Many early weekday mornings, I would find her in the damp,...