“One day, the money will go,” my mother often told my brothers and me. “Especially if Dad continues to spend this way.”
Her warnings encroached like a black cloud on an otherwise lovely day, and the fear of having nothing took hold deep within each of us. Where would we go? How would we live? Having nothing seemed as inconceivable as not existing, and the two became inextricably linked in my consciousness. This constant sense of scarcity—a fear of impoverishment that had been part of our DNA before it became a self-fulfilling prophecy—was a feeling against which my father rebelled with cocktails and ever more aggressive spending sprees.
One afternoon we came home from swimming at the club to the surprising sight of my father sitting behind the wheel of a new Cadillac Seville parked in the driveway. Standing there with one hand on the gleaming silver hood, he waved us out of my mother’s station wagon. He opened the doors and had us smell the rich red leather seats and try the fancy electric windows and the air-conditioning. Three-year-old Whitney, I remember, smudged the glass, and my father barked at him to go inside the house and wash his hands. I felt a sharp pang of guilt as he slunk off.
“Come over here, Franny,” my father said. “I want to show you something.” He popped an eight-track tape in a slot in the dash and suddenly Benny Goodman’s jazz filled the plush interior of the car. My heart swelled as I inhaled the new-car smell. I was flying high on abundance, and on my father’s glorious mood—all the more so because, of course, I knew it wouldn’t last.
My mother frowned and went inside.
Ollie peered out from behind a curtain. She did her best to protect all of us from my father. Often, after crying and begging her on a Friday, Whitney would ride with Ollie on the bus to spend the weekend in her house in Detroit, at the intersection of Seven Mile and Livernois, near to where the riots had erupted and where the sound of gunfire outside still blended unremarkably with the general hum of traffic. Even as a toddler, Whitney was a survivor. And certainly being cooped up with my father for an entire weekend, my mother off doing volunteer work or playing tennis, promised a roller-coaster ride of unpredictable and treacherous mood swings more threatening than the odd gunshot nearby.
But now, enveloped in the luxury of my father’s new Cadillac, I was happy. My father turned the key in the ignition and began to back out of the driveway just as Whitney was coming out of the house, his little hands dripping wet.
“Want to go for a ride?” asked my father as he turned onto our street—Grayton Road—and began to drive away.
I looked back and saw Whitney’s expression shift from bright expectation to confusion. Clearly, he would not be joining us. My mother pulled him back into the house.
My father’s love of cars, photography, and collecting was matched only by his love of movies. Horror films were his favorite, and he took me to see them all, including Night of the Living Dead within a few years of its release in 1968. He would routinely screen 35 mm films in our living room, too, inviting guests for Sunday afternoon movie binges that often included the Italian horror classic Suspiria, preceded by, say, Laurel and Hardy shorts. We kids would crunch our butter-drenched popcorn, thoroughly absorbed in this or that bloody scene, while the adults sipped cocktails, the sweet smell of gin our frail link to the relative safety of the offscreen world. And all the while my father would be standing by the projector, glowing with happiness, as Halloween or Dawn of the Dead unfurled on the screen.
I both loved and loathed horror films. The suspenseful music, the false sense of happenstance, the way two girls would get separated in the forest, guaranteeing their graphic slaughter—it all left me feeling by turns helpless and elated, danger becoming fused with excitement in my young nervous system.
MARY KATHERINE ROBERTSON AND GAIL ROBERTSON, CIRCA 1939
(by Norman Robertson)
My mother loved to drive cross-country. She took us everywhere by car—Florida, Martha’s Vineyard, New Jersey—running up the miles on the odometer even during the energy crisis in the seventies. We would stop to nap in rest areas along the highways, the police sometimes knocking on our windows to wave us on. If the trip required an overnight stay and no cheap motels were available, we’d sleep on a community center floor or in the backseat. If my father came along on the trip, we’d stay at a Howard Johnson’s or a Holiday Inn—the lap of luxury—until the car finally rolled into our resort or rental house.
“Why did you drive?” my cousins Pierre and Freddy would demand when we arrived at the ocean-side resort on Sanibel Island, candy wrappers and Coke cans littering the floor of our car.
“Flying and then renting a car is a waste of money,” my mother would tell them.