“Why would I have gone to live with them, then?” Margaret asked.
Mimi turned to her daughter. “Oh, because we had four kids in the hospital at one—”
“I know—I know that side of the story,” Margaret said. “But why would they have taken me in, had you not been good friends?”
Mimi waved off the question. “I really don’t know. Well, she saw Brian had died, and she called.”
* * *
—
THE MORE ON the spot Mimi felt, the more she leaned in to her old perfectionism. “I don’t paint anymore,” Mimi said, glancing at Margaret, “mostly because I can’t compete with my daughter.” Margaret had taken up painting, finally, with her own daughters older now, and she was good. She chose natural subjects like her mother’s old paintings, but bolder, more inventive—and was even getting a few sales, right away.
Then Mimi turned and looked at Lindsay. “She’s always doing something. She runs beautiful, big parties. But she lost that contract!” She chuckled lightly. “She was giving the Anadarko party for a million dollars at a clip.”
Lindsay kept a smile pasted to her face. As casually as possible, she listed a few of her recent events, for an investment company and a health care company.
“In twenty years, she’s built up quite a clientele,” Mimi said. “She said, ‘Mother, I won’t do this very long, it’s not very intellectual.’ But the pay was pretty good. She should have gone on to grad school!”
She turned to Lindsay. “Are you going to retire next year?”
“Hopefully,” Lindsay said.
“Hopefully,” Mimi echoed. “And then she’s going to open a bookstore so she can read!” She gazed at her daughters.
“We both—all three of us—like to read,” she said, beaming with pride. “We’re all readers.”
* * *
—
NONE OF THE boys lived with Mimi anymore. Donald moved to assisted living at Point of the Pines three years earlier, after Mimi, sidelined for several months by a stroke, was too frail to care for him by herself at home. This saddened her. She liked having the company. But Mimi still saw them all, and she continued to snap at the sick boys, particularly Peter and Matt, whose hygiene appalled her. Zip up your pants! Where’s your belt? Go take a shower.
Margaret and Lindsay understood that, to a point. But would things with the boys be any better if they were wearing ties and sport coats? By now, weren’t digs like this beside the point? “She’s not able to really share how she feels about any particular thing,” Margaret said, out of earshot of her mother. “But she can be really critical about how the rice is being cooked.”
At the kitchen table, the sisters both laughed.
“Mom,” Lindsay teased, “if you had just said ‘Yes’ more often, there would be no schizophrenia.”
Mimi’s reply came quickly. “My problem,” she said, “was I said ‘Yes’ too many times.”
* * *
—
SLOWLY, WITH HER daughters next to her, Mimi was persuaded to talk about what had really happened—and how she really felt.
She remembered Jim, at the age of sixteen, threatening her with a large pot, and Donald trying to throttle her once when his medicine was misplaced. “It terrified me,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for three or four of the other boys, I think I’d be dead, because he really had me in a stranglehold.”
She had no compunction about saying that Jim and Joe both died of the medicine that was supposed to help them. “Both of those boys would go to the hospital complaining of chest pain and get no attention,” she said, “because they were mentally ill, and they both were dying of heart disease.”
She recalled how shattered she’d been to learn about Father Freudenstein. She and Don suspected nothing, Mimi said, because who would? “Well, we weren’t very savvy parents, not at all. We were as innocent as the day is long, and we let them go.”
She talked about her husband’s fragile mental state, which she felt was connected to his time in the war. “He saw a lot of action. But he never discussed it—I think he just kept it all inside.” His hospitalization during his posting in Canada came ten years after the war. “The Air Force panicked because being an intelligence officer, they wanted him out of there quick. So he was brought to Walter Reed. No disease found. There was no test for PTSD.”
When she talked about being blamed for her sons’ mental illness, she got her back up again. “We were all involved in a discussion with the doctors,” she said, “and they crucified us. We were the worst parents in the world. It made us feel terrible. It traumatized us. Don and I, we were both paralyzed mentally. It just freezes you, because you don’t know what to do. You have nobody to talk to. We were an exemplary family. Everybody used us as a model. And when it first happened we were mortally ashamed.”
She could talk about that shame now, unburdened at last. “Oh, that was the whole thing, it was so embarrassing. The blaming part really traumatized me to the point where I felt I couldn’t tell a friend or anything. It was just all inside, and it was hard, that part. That’s where I think the crutch of the Church kind of helped me. I was accepting it as my lot in life.
“And so I was crushed,” Mimi said. “Because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.”
* * *
Between bouts of sympathy for her mother, Margaret remained highly critical of her—how everything in her life was centered around Donald and the other sick boys, to the exclusion of everything else, including the chance to have the relationship she wanted with her. “I never got to have my mom,” Margaret said, “because of Donald.” She viewed her grimly now, as a woman who sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. “She got her way,” Margaret said, “and there was a large cost in that in terms of her relationships with her daughters and her other children who were not mentally ill. And so she really lost in the end. She pushed away the people who could have possibly had relationships with her.”
In Margaret’s view, that included her father. “I don’t know, I’m not excusing his affairs, but I don’t think there was a lot of thought going into any of this on either of their parts.”
Margaret could imagine the scenario now in a way she couldn’t when she was younger. Things got out of control because, with such a large family, the miracle would have been that anything ever was under control to begin with.