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  But Grandma insisted on the biggest, brightest room so she could look out the window onto Washington Boulevard. Mom ignored Dad’s wishes and acquiesced to her mother, perhaps to avoid a psychotic episode. A short while later, in February of 1954, Mom told Dad, “I want you to make an extra effort to be openly friendly to my mother. It’s not that you’re unpleasant to her, but sometimes you ignore her and she feels she’s in our way.”

  As usual, Dad didn’t confront Mom on her request. Instead, he unloaded his frustration with Grandma K’s repeated intrusion into their home life to his diary: “Too bad Grandma didn’t feel that way ten years ago, when we could have enjoyed some privacy. Once [I’m] a little friendly, she starts taking over, considering we are living with her instead of her with us… . I didn’t promise one way or the other.”

  Having her own bedroom turned Grandma K into a recluse. With the door closed and the shade drawn, she sat alone in her room for hours, never enjoying the view she had insisted upon. For eight months, she refused to wash her hair. She shuffled about in an old gray dress and a torn robe, a raggedy cloth diaper draped over her head, rejecting Mom’s pleas to bathe or to wear the new robe Mom had bought for her. Her condition became ever more alarming.

  Certain that Mom and Dad stole from her, Grandma locked her bedroom door, even when going to the bathroom or to eat. During disagreements, she flung at my mother her favorite epithets, “whore” and “streetwalker.” If Mom defended herself, Grandma slapped her face as if Mom were a child.

  In July of 1956, Mom wrote a long letter to a psychiatrist, summarizing Grandma K’s previous fourteen years. After five pages describing Grandma K’s insane behavior, my mother wrote, “I hope and pray that she can be helped back to a normal existence.” I was dismayed to discover that Mom made no mention of a “normal existence” for her husband and children.

  About a month after Mom wrote the letter to the psychiatrist, we were about to leave for our annual camping trip to Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin. Dad had spent days preparing, jamming a rented trailer with tents, tarpaulins, fishing gear, Coleman lanterns, a portable stove—everything to make our vacation as comfortable as possible. The night before we were to leave, Mom reassured Grandma, preparing her for our departure with gentle words “so she wouldn’t go berserk,” Dad wrote in his diary. He continued with what unfolded.

  The next morning, Dad was in the alley hitching the trailer to the car, when he heard “an awful commotion and screaming in the kitchen.” He ran toward the house. Paul, Billy, and I were shouting at Grandma, “Stop it! Stop hurting Mommy!”

  Grandma had Mom by the throat and was pushing her backward onto the porch, screeching, “Whore! Thief! Crook!”—the usual. I can still see Mom, clad only in pants and her bra, her lips pressed together in desperation, slapping at Grandma K, trying to free herself from her mother’s powerful, crazed hold. I was frozen, but the paradoxical thought that consumed my wheeling brain was, You’re not supposed to hit your mother.

  At that moment, I saw Dad leaping two steps at a time onto the porch just before Grandma shoved Mom backward down the stairs. Wedging between the two women, prying Grandma’s grip off Mom, Dad yelled, “Hey! Hey! Get your hands off Lil! Stop it! Stop it!”

  He pushed flailing Grandma back into the kitchen. She grabbed a glass off the table, swinging it in a wide arc toward Dad’s head. He ducked. The glass crashed to the floor. Grandma grasped Dad’s right thumb and wrenched it sideways, taking Dad to his knees in agony. I was paralyzed. Grandma K stood panting over Dad, glaring at him with hate-filled eyes. Mom was crying. My mind was a spinning whirlwind, my only hope with Dad, who was on the floor.

  He found his footing, rose, locked Grandma in a tight embrace, and dragged her flailing body to the dining-room couch, where he forced her to sit. He held her arms pinned against her sides until the fury subsided. I stared mute with fear and confusion. Mom called the psychiatrist, who asked to speak to Grandma. She yelled into the phone, “They’re thieves! They’re trying to kill me with rat poison!”

  Mom spoke one more time to the doctor, then hung up. My mind whirred, but because Dad and Mom stayed calm, I felt grounded. We all gathered at the kitchen table, eating breakfast in silence while Grandma K continued a nonstop tirade until ten o’clock. Then Dad, Paul, Billy, and I waited in the car, while Mom said some final goodbyes to her mother. When she finally climbed into the passenger seat of the car, Mom’s face was streaked with tears, her mouth grim. She said nothing.

  Dad immediately diverted our minds with car games. “Let’s see how many out-of-state license plates we can spot before we get there,” he challenged us. En route we sang familiar songs and talked of hiking five-hundred-foot bluffs and what fun we’d have swimming in the always-warm waters of Devil’s Lake.

  In the pleasures of the week ahead, I didn’t dwell on Grandma’s physical attacks on both Mom and Dad. Looking back, I would think this would have roused my mother to action, to find a mental institution for her dangerous mother. Nothing changed.

  CHAPTER 21: Travels with Dad

  Dad teaches Linda to swim in Enid,

  Oklahoma, July 1958.

  1958

  Vacations were about the only time during the year when Dad could really connect with his children. Mourning this lack of one-on-one time, he came up with a solution. During our summer breaks, Dad started taking Paul or me with him on National Board business trips. In July of 1958, I traveled with Dad to Enid, Oklahoma. That time with him still unspools like a movie in my memory.

  On the highway south from Chicago, we drove straight through Missouri, night drawing down around us. By the time we looked for a motel, every neon sign blinked “No Vacancy.” Dad pulled onto the highway shoulder, and we snuggled together in the back seat to sleep. In the morning, Dad apologized for the cramped conditions, but I hadn’t noticed.

  After arriving in Enid, we checked into the Trail Motel. Dad and I walked to the pool outside. “Honey, I’m going to teach you to swim while we’re here,” he told me. I peered into that vast expanse of blue, reading “Nine Feet” on the deep end. A knot of fear tightened in my chest.

  We arose every day by seven, trekking for miles in the southern heat on inspections. “She’s my shadow,” Dad wrote to Mom. “No demands. No complaints.” Of course not—I had Dad to myself. Every evening, we returned to our motel for swimming lessons. Dad started me out in the shallow end, where I hung onto the edge, kicking my feet and turning my head to his instructions: Head out, breathe in; head in, breathe out.

  When I developed a modicum of coordination, Dad had me swim the width of the pool. “Daddy, I’m afraid I’ll sink!”

  “I’ll be beside you all the way.”

  So I pushed away, flailing my arms and legs, gasping, sputtering. Dad urged me forward, not holding me, until the opposite wall was within reach. We both smiled. “Now back,” he said. With each width, my breath found its rhythm, my legs obeyed, my arms stretched long.

  It was time for the deep end. We swam together across the rosy, twilit surface, the bottom falling away from a touchable three feet to a chasm of nine. Back and forth I went, until I could do length after length. In my dreams, I swam in such smooth, rhythmic strokes, I was faster than Paul.

  “Are you ready to swim underwater?” he asked one evening. He held my hand on the first plunge beneath the surface, as I kicked fiercely until my lungs cried “uncle,” then tried again. Dad swam under the water with me, back and forth. Then he sent me off alone. Each time I swam farther, enveloped in silence, until I could stay under for an entire length.

  At the deep end, Dad tossed in a quarter, challenging me to retrieve it. “What if I have to breathe and I’m at the bottom?” My heart shuddered at the thought.

  “Just go a little deeper each time. I’ll be watching.”

  On my first attempt, I barely got halfway, resurfacing like a bobber, sputtering, eyes wide, blinking out the stinging chlorinated water. I pushed deeper with each dive, until I pi
nched the coin off the pebbly floor, flipped upright, and scissor-kicked hard, breaking through the surface to see Dad’s beaming smile.

  Dad wrote Mom, “She’s a trooper. Tramping with me all day, then working hard on her swimming at night.”

  I helped Dad with his job by making a fire-limits map based on official records. It was like book coloring. “Good job!” Dad said when I had finished. “You saved me about four hours of work!” I glowed.

  One day, we walked three miles to downtown Enid and spent eight hours trudging around on inspections under a broiling sun. On our way back to the motel, we picked up groceries for a “picnic” supper in our room, which seemed like an adventure to me. En route back, I took Dad’s hand, kissed it, and said, “I love you, Daddy. I’m glad I’ve got you for my daddy.”

  I’m not sure how I pulled up these words, which I seldom heard in our family. They must have just emerged on their own from my joy in Dad’s company. And I hadn’t even recalled this sweet scene or many of these details—until I read Dad’s July 12 letter to Mom, in which he also wrote:

  I am very happy that we have a little girl, especially one like Linda. Little trips like these give me an opportunity to know the children, their moods and thoughts. At home, they are just one of the family and can get very little personal attention.

  I didn’t feel ignored at home, but Dad was right about the “personal attention.” We kids simply didn’t expect it, seeing how hard our parents worked. That’s why this trip was so special for both of us, and why Dad continued including Paul or me on summer travels for years to come.

  Dad didn’t write what he’d said in response to my spontaneous, “I love you, Daddy.” He didn’t need to.

  Dad and Linda at pool, Enid, Oklahoma,

  July 1958.

  CHAPTER 22: The Asylum

  Mom and Grandma K, Manteno,

  Illinois, 1960.

  About a month after Dad and I returned from Enid, Oklahoma, our family made the annual pilgrimage to Devil’s Lake, two years after Grandma K had tried to push Mom down the back steps. When we got home from Devil’s Lake, we found a soot-laden oven with a charred chicken inside, the odor of smoke still permeating the kitchen. For days, Mom and Dad spoke to each other in quiet undertones. I overheard snippets: “burn the house down,” “danger to children,” “lock herself in,” “take off the door,” “straitjacket.” I sensed what was coming.

  Mom drove Grandma to the psychiatric ward of Cook County Hospital for evaluation on August 12, and a week later received another court order, like the one from nine years earlier, declaring Louise Koroschetz to be incompetent and authorizing my mother to commit her to an institution. Mom explored several Illinois mental hospitals and chose one located in Manteno, Illinois, a minimum ninety-minute drive from our home. Enamored with Manteno’s lovely grounds, Mom rejected closer choices.

  The sun shone from a brilliant blue sky on August 20, 1958. Grandma locked her room, as usual, before shuffling to the washroom. Dad worked fast. Using a skeleton key, he unlocked her door, then drove the hinges up and out with a hammer and a screwdriver. He lifted off the door and hid it against a sidewall in the living room.

  When Grandma K exited the bathroom, Mom gingerly took her arm. “Mama, we have to talk to you.” Grandma looked from Dad to Mom in an oddly calm state, allowing them to lead her to the dining-room couch, where she sat between them. They spoke to her softly—their heads bent, both looking intently into her blank face. I heard words like, “a safe place for you,” “a place to get better,” “come home for visits.”

  Grandma said nothing. She seemed not to be listening, just staring from one to the other, then down at the floor, her present calm as inexplicable as her past explosions. The doorbell rang. Dad walked to the front, leaving Mom talking to Grandma K.

  As a child, I couldn’t have understood the despair Mom must have felt in her unrelenting, and ultimately futile, attempts to cure her mother. I saw Mom from across the room, her face close to Grandma’s, their hands intertwined. Mom’s voice had a pleading tone, like I might have used if I didn’t want to be blamed for something. I sensed Mom’s sorrow, but I had no idea what to do about it. I had learned through my parents’ reticence over the years to keep silent.

  Two men in white coats wheeled a gurney down the long hallway into our dining room. Mom and Dad stood, one on each side of Grandma K. They each gently grasped Grandma by an elbow, helping her to her feet. “The doctors have come to make you feel better, Mama,” said Mom, her eyes glistening.

  The men led Grandma to the side of the lowered gurney. “Here, we’ll give you a hand getting on the bed,” one said, as he helped her sit, lifting one leg, then the other. She lay back, and they covered her with a light sheet. Grandma’s blue eyes traced the faces peering down at her. I don’t remember if I kissed her.

  She said nothing that I recall. I wasn’t sad that she was leaving, but I knew this moment was a turning point in our family. She had lived with us for my entire life, wandering at times through the house like a wraith, until she exploded, screeching like a banshee, that banshee now being exorcised. With each progressive step of the process, I felt tension, even fear, lifting from the air. What if Grandma had refused to leave, or had erupted into full paranoid mode? Relief flooded the room, but my mother’s sorrow flowed with it.

  Mom’s eyes brimmed when she stroked her mother’s silvery hair and kissed her forehead, saying, “I’ll see you soon, Mama.” The men wheeled Grandma K down the hall and out the front door into bright, cloudless sunshine, lifted the gurney into the back of an ambulance, and slammed the rear doors in two detonations.

  I wish I had known to take Mom’s hand and squeeze it.

  We all stood silently on the sidewalk, watching the ambulance drive away until it was swallowed in the distance.

  At the age of nine, I only knew that Grandma was “not right in the head,” that her name-calling outbursts had made Mom cry, that she had physically attacked both my parents, and that Dad had brought her under control, as he himself stayed calm.

  Until I read Mom’s detailed records and Dad’s personal diary entries of Grandma K’s bizarre behavior, I couldn’t have known the rift Grandma K had torn through my parents’ marriage. I hadn’t realized the quiet, restrained resentment Dad had felt for Grandma’s presence in our lives—or how she had singled him out for her explosive ire. I hadn’t understood that, despite Dad’s tolerance and control of his motherin-law’s outbursts and physical attacks, despite the gifts and greeting cards he had bought for “Mama” at Mom’s request, my mother had wanted more from him. Being “nice” to her mother wasn’t enough. She wanted Dad to be “openly friendly” to Grandma K.

  My brothers and I were left out of any discussions about Grandma K’s mental illness. I don’t recall either Mom or Dad explaining to us kids why Grandma heard voices, screamed vicious names, or tried to hurt them both. Maybe they didn’t have the words to tell us, didn’t understand themselves, or thought these outbursts would be forgotten by a child’s mind. But the tension, the anxiety, and the fear that Grandma might hurt them had settled inside me like a chronic illness I could neither cure nor control, but had to bear. How I wish I could go back and demand they tell me, “What’s wrong with Grandma?” I realize now how much better off we all would have been.

  The three hours of driving required to get to and from Manteno State Hospital to see Grandma, plus time for the visit itself, now created a new source of strife between my parents. In the first two months after Grandma K was committed, the whole family went along on several trips to the institution, but with his brutal travel schedule, Dad increasingly objected to giving up one of his few at-home Sundays.

  When we all visited Grandma together, Dad dropped us off at her residential building while he parked. Sometimes female patients came to the window and lifted their gowns, exposing themselves to goggle-eyed Billy, who was only five.

  The moment we entered the wide, open waiting area, our noses crinkled
, slammed by the odor of stale urine, diminished but not banished by Lysol. I breathed through my mouth. Peppering the air were whines, moans, and repetitive shouts from the patients: “Get away from me!” or, “Let me go!”

  A woman dressed in a white uniform greeted us. Mom said, “We’re here to see Louise Koroschetz.” The white-clad lady turned to a long, narrow file box and picked out a card.

  “One moment,” the lady said. “I’ll bring her.” She walked quickly away, her soft tread squeaking in the vast hall.

  As we waited for Grandma, I tried not to stare at the patients, listing permanently over wheelchair arms or swaying in the hallways, flimsy raiment sliding off their shoulders. Some women closed in on me to stare or babble about imaginary people. I used all my willpower not to shrink back, possibly embarrassing them, until a nurse led them away.

  I wasn’t frightened. I’d become accustomed to the odd assortment of types who had come and gone in our rooming house, some living right down the hall and using our communal bathroom. But I knew these women were beyond strange. Grandma had been loudly and aggressively off-kilter, but she was a conscious, if splenetic, even violent, presence. These patients appeared to be in a kind of anesthetized reality, beyond my ken, but expanding my comprehension of where a human mind can go. Seeing these people, lost to the world, I can understand how Mom might have indulged in denial, believing her mother didn’t belong in such a place; how she could have misplaced her loyalty, her fear and devotion to her mother overwhelming the sanctity of our home as a safe place.

  When hospital workers finally arrived in the front hall with Grandma, who always wore a loose, flowered housedress, Mom kissed her cheek. “Hello, Mama,” she said, entwining their arms. Grandma smiled at my brothers and me. I think I kissed her cheek, but the memory is dim. I knew we were there only for Mom.