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speak. I probably just sat there with my mouth open, a series of unwelcome emotions
washing over me in waves. First anger at the seeming ease with which my father, who
had no right to do so, had oered his judgment. After all, if my mother was crazy, at the
very least he was a contributing factor. But even more powerful than anger was a
totally unexpected surge of relief, because his verdict was no sooner rendered than I
realized it was true, that I’d known this myself at least since the morning in Phoenix
when she’d nally come clean about not really having a job at GE awaiting her there;
and probably, truth be told, some part of me had known it for much longer. How many
meltdowns, followed by good talking-tos, had I witnessed as a boy, too frightened to
draw the necessary inference? Later on, as an adolescent, how many times had I
suppressed the terrible possibility that something in my mother was o-kilter? Hadn’t I
also suspected all along that other family members—my grandparents and aunt at a
minimum—also knew this but refused to say anything? Now, for the rst time, I
understood how lonely I’d been in my fears and suspicions, how alone I’d felt in the
possession of adult knowledge to which I was hardly entitled.
And, nally, I felt guilty. That I’d come to the same heartless conclusion as my father
was a terrible betrayal, surely. I don’t recall whether that came right away or later. I
only know there’s been enough to last a lifetime. How else to explain my willingness to
jeopardize my young marriage a decade later and, as the next three decades unspooled
and my mother’s condition worsened, the many times I’d repeat that same mistake,
refusing to acknowledge the primacy of other loyalties subsequent to those forged on
Helwig Street. Suce to say that my mother wasn’t the only one caught in a dangerous
loop of repetitive behavior.
NOT LONG AFTER she returned to Gloversville from Tucson, I began a decade-long academic
nomadship during which I jumped from job to job, trying to teach and be a writer at the
same time. For a while, after our daughters came along, we were even poorer than we’d
been as graduate students. And I was a bad boy. Caring not a whit about tenure and
promotion, I thumbed my nose at the advice of department chairs about what I needed
to do to succeed in the university. I left jobs for other jobs that paid less but oered
more time out of the classroom. In the summer, when many of my colleagues taught
extra classes, I wrote stories and spent money we didn’t have on postage to submit them
to magazines. I wrote manically, obsessively, but also, for a time, not very well. I wrote
about crime and cities and women and other things I knew very little about in a
language very dierent from my own natural voice, which explained why the editors
weren’t much interested.
My rst full-time job was as an assistant professor at a branch campus of Penn State
University. Altoona was a good day’s drive from Gloversville, close enough for holiday
visits but too far for my mother to expect much more. We continued to talk on the phone
at least once a week, and these calls were for her a lifeline. I knew things weren’t going
well. She’d moved into the spare bedroom downstairs as planned, but she and my
grandmother, who was by then in her eighties and crippled by arthritis, still weren’t
getting along. They liked dierent TV shows and dierent food, and rather than come to