When Theodore Roosevelt’s mother died, he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life,” and that’s what happened to my dad, too. Years later, a therapist outlined something essential to me by piecing together my father’s history. He asked me to examine the period from the fall of 1967 to the fall of 1968. “In one year, your father turned forty and with that came all of the self-appraisals about what he had and had not achieved; as a progressive, he watched Martin Luther King and RFK get killed; next, his political nemesis, Richard Nixon, rises from the dead and is elected president; his mother is killed in a horrible, freak accident.” I saw my dad in a clearer light, one that explained why, up until his death in 1983 at the age of only fifty-five, my father was never the same again.
My grandfather was hospitalized in May of the following year. After another angioplasty to overcome the effects of all those Chesterfields and Ballantines, corruption hearings and general shiftlessness, my uncle Charles reported that his father, Alexander Rae Baldwin Sr., had died after eating a pint of maple walnut ice cream in his hospital bed, in direct violation of his doctor’s orders. He took an afternoon nap, moaned in midsleep, and died at age sixty-nine. My father sighed and said to me, “When both your parents are gone, you are an orphan.”
Without this cozy, albeit urban-blighted, sanctuary to retreat to, without his mother available to support him or comfort him or simply to parent him, my father grew more and more withdrawn. Add to that the fact that he had six kids, all growing, all needing, all costing, and he chose to be around less and less during my early teens, taking any job at the school that would lengthen his day. Often my brothers and I would go up to the school and hang out with him during Saturday recreation programs, or “rec.” Rec was big with my father and especially Daniel and Billy, who could each play basketball six hours on end, against older kids, as if it were nothing. My dad volunteered for these assignments, which paid him next to nothing, to avoid going home. My parents’ marriage was pretty much done by the time I entered junior high school at age twelve.
My mother was lonely. Without a comfortable home or money to go out and meet friends for lunch, without her own siblings nearby or any real connection to her husband, and, most important, without much spirit or vitality left after raising her large family, her social existence was confined to the telephone or my sister Beth and me. So I exploited that. An early acting assignment for me was to come to the kitchen table in the morning and confide in my mother that I was sick. She would scowl at me, in a perfunctory way. Then a strange thing would happen. A quick review of the day ahead would lead her to say, “Don’t ever ask me to do this again.” Knowing the drill, I would sit at the kitchen table, dressed for school. My father would enter, mutter some gruff good-bye, and go. Once we heard him driving down the street, it was straight to the couch, where we’d spend the day watching The Dinah Shore Show, Art Linkletter, Match Game, Divorce Court, Virginia Graham, Graham Kerr, The Outer Limits, Mike Douglas, just acre after acre of this stuff. This bizarre retreat lasted, off and on, for the three or four years from seventh through tenth grade. Eventually, isolating myself at home watching these meaningless programs presented a problem. I missed more school than I should have, to say the least. However, in the meantime, my lonely, virtually homebound mother only required that I join her on a trip to the laundromat, so that I might carry the seven or eight plastic baskets of laundry to be washed and dried, only to be added to the Great Laundry Mountain in her room. If it was Friday, my sister and I would drive with my mother up to the school where my dad worked, pick up his paycheck from the office, and then head to Jade East, a mock pagoda-style restaurant. Eating eggrolls with my sister and my mother while playing hooky from school was the greatest extravagance of my young life. My sister and my mother developed an unbreakable relationship, forging an emotionally incestuous bond that pulled me, or at least attempted to, into its wake.
I could say that it was puberty that stifled my memory. However, I think it was just the deadness of my home and the loss of my dad’s attention. I can’t summon up a single memory of school from those two years. The seventh and eighth grade classes were held in a school far across town, which meant an interminable bus ride of forty-five minutes each way. The school bus was a rolling jailhouse of twelve-and thirteen-year-olds shouting tedious, vulgar dialogue. There wasn’t a well-delivered, witty line to be heard.
My three brothers and younger sister were still kids, and thus either invisible or annoying. Beth was just beginning to run around with boys, though maintaining her innocence. The six of us were lost souls washed up on the shores of 32 West Iroquois Street, Massapequa, New York. Beth, Xander, Danny, Billy, Jane, and Stephen. Six pieces of driftwood, just bobbing through our neighborhood, without a current to carry us in any particular direction, passing time, trying to pass our classes, avoiding trouble, courting trouble, scoring points, telling jokes, drinking, smoking, always mindful of how little we had.
One day, I was walking out of my house, headed to see some friends or ride my bike by myself, and I saw my brother Stephen up the road, bent over something. As I got closer, I could see he had a stick from a tree branch in his hand and was poking at a squirrel that had been crushed by a car. He looked incredibly moved for a kid who was eight years old. He just stared at the dead squirrel and ran the stick, gently, up and down its fur. “We have to bury it,” he said, still fixed on the dead animal. Then, he looked up and said, “Will you help me bury it?”
And as he looked at me, I thought, “He’s that squirrel. So am I. And all we have is today and the hope that we don’t get crushed by something. We have nothing. And everything seems so fragile.” We picked up the dead squirrel using two other branches like chopsticks. We dug the hole and buried it. I always remember how Stephen was very sensitive in that way when he was a kid.