By Poultney standards, Brattleboro, ten times its size with a population of about twelve thousand, was a megalopolis. At least my mother viewed it that way. She also acted like we were moving to the ends of the earth rather than ninety miles southeast of Poultney.
None of us wanted to move, but Steve needed to go to school, and the Austine School for the Deaf, in Brattleboro, was the only one my parents could find where he could be a day student. Most schools for the deaf at the time required students to live at the school. My family had already suffered through one such fiasco with Steve, and Mom and Dad weren't about to make him or any of us relive the experience.
Just before Steve turned six, they'd started looking for schools for him. They'd decided against the Austine School at the time. Back then, it consisted of one ancient building that looked like something out of Dickens, and its headmaster, nearly as old, didn't exude any apparent love for his calling. With few options, my parents finally settled on a boarding school in Connecticut.
The first time they dropped him off at that school, Steve broke loose from the people holding his hands and tried to claw his way over its eight-foot-high chain-link fence. That unsuccessful attempt to get back to my parents as they slowly drove away marked the beginning of the complete disaster that the boarding school experience was, not only for my brother but also for the rest of us.
As Mom's endless novenas to Saint Jude made their way toward the heavens, Steve showed no signs of settling in. In their equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, my parents decided that every Friday they'd drive the pre-interstate, two-lane roads to Connecticut to see him. Sometimes they'd stay there, and other times they'd bring him home for the weekend. Either way, I felt unsettled by the constant comings and goings of my always-tense parents. It's probably then that Mary Beth started sucking the middle fingers of her left hand while pulling out her already sparse hair with the right. Even with the end of those torturous trips, she didn't spare her hair.
Steve was wasting away. At school he'd barely eat, and everyone was concerned about his deteriorating health. Already a slight kid, he began to look ever more waiflike. He became extremely pale and totally passive. My brother no longer had the energy or spirit to fight, a result of the medications he'd been prescribed to calm him enough to adjust to the school.
Mom's novenas continued wafting upward, but apparently no one heard them. The intolerable situation came to an end when everyone agreed it was in Steve's best interests that he return home. He'd not even made it to Christmas vacation. Boarding school was not his solution.
Once he knew he was home to stay and the meds washed out of his system, my brother was a boy transformed. I have a black-and-white studio photograph of him, Mary Beth, and me taken not long after the Connecticut misadventure. My sister looks under two, I'd have been three, and Steve six; it must have proved too much of an effort to try to include infant Mark in the shot. Actually we have no pictures of Mark until the requisite grade-school photographs.
Wearing a white shirt with a bow tie, Steve shines handsomely in the picture, and his huge smile reveals no vestiges of the Connecticut nightmare. Mary Beth looks out, pathetically appealing with her slightly crossed eye and ragged hair. She was born anxious, and her anxiety had only been exacerbated with the dramas of Steve's time away at school. As a kid she was string-bean skinny. I, on the other hand, was born round and topped with a bald pumpkin head like Charlie Brown's. I also had an eye that moved about on its own terms. I sucked my thumb until I was nine, but kept my hands out of my hair. This was a good thing, because I've never had much.
By the time this photo of the three of us was taken, Mom either hadn't discovered home permanents or had decided I wasn't old enough to have one yet, because my white-blond hair is in a little flip. She'd already started attacking my bangs, however. In that picture I have raggedy bangs chopped so short that they almost didn't exist. But at least to my own eyes, the bangs and my new horn-rimmed glasses in no way diminish my round cuteness.
With Steve's return home and familial harmony restored for the time being, my parents found a tutor for him who used mailorder guides to teach the deaf at home. By the end of three years, she'd reached the limits of what she could teach him. Mom and Dad had to renew the search for a school for the deaf that would accept him as a day student. And that was how we ended up moving to Brattleboro.
The choices were still discouragingly few, but my parents had heard positive things about changes at the school they'd first visited in Brattleboro before the doomed Connecticut decision. New classrooms and a gymnasium had been built at the Austine School, and they'd also hired a dynamic, innovative headmaster. After long discussions with him and much deliberation at home, my parents agreed that Austine was the place for Steve and we'd be moving to Brattleboro.
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We couldn't manage to leave Poultney without drama. Since we were moving right before my birthday, Mom planned my party early so my friends and cousins could help me celebrate. It was a grand birthday and good-bye party all rolled into one. Everyone was caught up in high-energy, sugar-fueled excitement.
As I was blowing out the candles on the cake, five-year-old Mary Beth jumped out of her chair and began teasing Mark, who was a few months shy of four. He had a sourball in his mouth, and my sister was dangling the bag of hard, round candies over his head, just out of his reach. As he looked up and stretched to grab the bag, he inhaled the sourball.
Clutching at his throat, Mark immediately began coughing and choking, but gasping for breath only lodged the candy more firmly in his throat. The festive party atmosphere dissolved instantly. Mom started slapping his back to try to dislodge the candy. It didn't work. She flipped him upside down and shook him by the heels. That didn't work either. Turning him right side up again, she slapped his back another time. No luck, and Mark was turning a distinct shade of blue.
Desperate, my mother stuck her finger as far down his throat as humanly possible and managed to get the edge of her long, beautiful, red fingernail under the candy and flip it free. By that time, Mark's eyes had rolled back in his head and he wasn't quite conscious, but at least he started breathing again.
Through it all Mom wept in fear, but she never stopped trying to get that damn candy out of her son's throat. The rest of us were her hysterical chorus. When the town's doctor arrived, Mark was lying on the sofa, still dazed. By then his normal color had been restored, and he was declared sound. Not long ago Mary Beth told me that once Mark had started choking, she'd fled and taken refuge under our bed, trying not to cry out loud. Long after the event, she continued to feel upset and guilty because she'd “almost killed her brother.” None of us had ever noticed her part in the drama.
Mark's near-death experience frayed whatever resolve Mom might have had to try to make our move to Brattleboro as smooth as possible. Instead, it was sheer hell. My mother was immediately and totally miserable, and every single weekend without fail we'd pile into the family's blue-and-white Ford and drive home to Poultney to stay with my grandparents. In between those trips, Dad would continue his search for a job.
The two-hour ride was mostly a nightmare. My stressed-out parents took turns hollering at the four of us in the back seat to “behave” or “be quiet” or, in desperation, “shut up or we'll stop this car and spank you.” The threats were idle, but sometimes Mom would completely lose patience and make weak efforts to slap at us over her shoulder while Dad focused ever more intently on driving.
Much of our misbehavior in the car, if that's what it was, was a battle for space. Sometimes one of us would lie down in the rear window, above the back seat. Another would get on the floor and try to find comfort stretching out over the hump in the middle. That left the two others vying for the back seat itself. And somebody was always carsick. The worst case was when Mary Beth lurched forward to be sick on the floor, only to throw up on sleeping Mark's face. His mouth happened to be open at the time.
Just as it seemed like the road trips from hell were never going to end, they did. Unfortunately, it wasn't because the family had happily adjusted to Brattleboro. We no longer went to Poultney, because my mother couldn't. She couldn't get out of bed. In the terminology of the time, Mom had a complete nervous breakdown.
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After half a year without work,