Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘We were both so happy when he had these periods of apparent high spirits. Especially as he spent so much of his adolescence keeping to himself. At the local high school in Bath, he was always regarded as the class weirdo. The school psychologist ran tests on him and felt that he had some “issues”. And he sent him to a therapist for a while, though Muriel — that’s my wife — was against it all.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Muriel is very much someone who believes that “mind stuff” — as she calls it — is a sign of weakness. I guess that kind of comes with her childhood territory. She was raised down in Dorchester, where her dad was the ultimate in tough-guy Irish American cops. A drinker, of course — and someone who regularly used his wife as a punchbag. Eventually Muriel’s mom could take no more. As she herself was raised in Lewiston, back she and Muriel and her two brothers went to the family home when Muriel was just twelve. She never saw her father again. He decided that, by following their mother back to Maine, all the children had rejected him. So he shut them out of his life until the bottle finally killed his liver five years later. and that’s all far too much detail, isn’t it?’

‘It’s interesting detail,’ I said.

‘You’re not saying that to be nice, are you?’

‘I’m saying that because I want to hear the story. Your story. How did you meet Muriel?’

‘My dad hired her as his secretary.’

‘When was that?’

‘Late 1981. She’d been to secretarial school in Portland and had been married briefly to a cop. ’

‘History repeats itself.’

‘Especially Freudian history. But that’s another story, me and Muriel.’

‘Just the one child?’

‘She’d had around three miscarriages before Billy. So we both considered him our great gift, our recompense for all the grief that the three failed pregnancies had caused. But when Billy finally arrived, Muriel was thirty-six, which is not an old age now for a first-time mother, but in those days was regarded as pretty darn late. From the outset, though Muriel did all the right things when it came to looking after Billy, I always had the sense that she hadn’t ever bonded really with the boy, that there was a part of her that always sensed he was so different from the start.’

‘Did he hit all the usual developmental marks?’

‘Absolutely. And when he had some of those early aptitude tests he was shown to be off-the-scales bright. Especially when it came to math. That was always his great saving grace throughout school — the fact that, when it came to all things mathematical, he was a wizard. I remember getting a call from his tenth grade calculus teacher — I think his name was Mr Pawling — asking me to come in, and him telling me that Billy had the most gifted theoretical mind he’d encountered in twenty-five years of teaching, and would I agree to extra tutoring after school, and enrollment that summer in an intensive math camp that was held at MIT, of all places. Muriel felt it was all too much — ‘What’s he going to do at a math camp except become more withdrawn?’ was how she saw things. But I argued that his was a great gift that we needed to encourage, and that math really could be a way out of the isolation and loneliness that had categorized his life so far. The way I figured it, once he got to that math camp at MIT he’d be with like-minded kids — what Billy himself called “us numbers geeks”, and of which there were none at Bath High School. Muriel also complained about the cost of it all — almost three thousand dollars, which was a stretch for us back then, despite the good times. Still, I prevailed. Billy went to MIT Math Camp. For the first two weeks he seemed so incredibly happy. Loved the professors. Loved his fellow math whizzes. I even dropped in on him after ten days. I had never seen him so focussed, so at ease with himself and his surroundings. And this professor who was teaching Lambda Calculus — I had to look up what that meant — took me aside and told me that he was going to put a word in with the admissions department about getting Billy fast-tracked for entry into MIT the following autumn.

‘I drove back to Bath elated. My son the math genius. My son the future math professor at MIT or Harvard or Chicago. My son the Nobel Laureate. And yes, I know this was all the stuff of pipe dreams. But what this professor was saying to me really made it seem like Billy could do it all.

‘And then, five days later, we got a phone call from MIT. Billy had tried to set fire to the sheets and mattress in his dorm room. Fortunately there was a fast-thinking proctor down the hall. He smelled smoke. He got a fire extinguisher and put the flames out. But Billy had caused several thousand dollars’ worth of damage. When he admitted that he’d started the fire himself he was expelled on the spot.

‘Of course I was devastated by what had happened. What devastated me more was the fact that, when I came to pick Billy up, he wouldn’t talk about what happened.

‘“Guess I just wanted to screw up,”’ was all he said.

‘When he repeated that statement to his mother she wanted him committed to the nearest insane asylum. Then again they hadn’t been getting along for years. Billy knew that his mother considered him nothing less than strange and different. Muriel has never been comfortable with anything or anyone outside of her comfort zone. She hates to travel. She’s only been out of Maine twice in the last five years — and that was owing to family funerals in Massachusetts. And she can’t really cope with her brilliantly gifted, but truly eccentric son. I’ve tried repeatedly to talk with her about all that — and tried to get her to show some empathy towards the boy. But when Muriel has decided that somebody is bad news, that’s that.’

He broke off the sentence, reaching again for the bloody mary. I too took a long sip of my drink, my mind now endeavoring to work out the complex contours of Richard’s marriage. From the way he was reporting things, Muriel sounded cold, judgmental, emotionally detached. But was I thinking that because I could see the immense distress that her husband was embroiled in right now?

‘We all have our private griefs, don’t we?’ he said. ‘And I certainly didn’t want to go upending our lunch with—’

‘Do not apologize. What has happened to your son is so evidently huge and terrible. ’

‘What has happened to my son?’ he said, his voice just above a whisper. ‘You make it sound as if all this was visited upon him. Whereas the truth is. he visited it all upon himself.’

‘But you said he was bipolar. And if you are bipolar—’

‘I know, I know. And you’re right. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Muriel threw that line from Luke at me when I tried to explain away Billy’s behavior after getting expelled from the MIT Math Camp. “Making excuses for him as usual. You should march him down to the nearest Marine Corps recruiting office and get him signed up. Three months of basic training at Parris Island will knock all that craziness out of him.”

‘Now I know that all makes Muriel sound rather extreme. But the truth is, when I brought Billy home from MIT and he refused to talk with her, I woke around three in the morning to find Muriel sitting in a chair by the window in our bedroom, crying uncontrollably. When I tried to comfort her she told me that she blamed herself for so much that had befallen Billy. “I know I’ve been a bad mother. I know I’ve never given him the love he needs.” And it was wonderful hearing that. Because she had articulated a certain truth that I was always afraid of discussing with her.’

But why were you afraid? I stopped myself from posing that question. Because I knew just how much of a long, difficult marriage is often based around sidestepping so many painfully evident truths, and how we all are afraid of opening up the sort of conversations that can lead us into the darker, distressed recesses of the lives we have created for ourselves.