Nameless Night
Montana, Day Six: Aiming for Hazards
Montana, Day Six: Curdles and Limits
Montana, Day Six: Inclinations
Montana, Day Eight: No Second Chance
Panorama
Most of my siblings are here. One by one we’ll take the oath and testify. We hate to do this, but we have to be here. And we have to speak.
I am sick to my stomach. Who wants to say words that lead to locking up a loved brother? But his behavior has become…so bizarre.
How did we come to this?
Weren’t we just a simple big old-fashioned Catholic family? A mom, a dad, seven kids, a Midwest city. Most of us grown up out of the fifties into the sixties. Sorta normal, right?
They call my name. What will I say? My testimony will be the most urgent. I’ll have to describe his recent strange demeanor, how frightened I was at his hands. We say this is for “his good.” Is it?
Years later when my sister calls to tell me John has died, these are the memories that savage.
•••
I was born in the middle. In the middle of seven children, in a mid-size city in the middle of the country, in the middle class, in the middle of the twentieth century. In a leafy neighborhood neither urban nor suburban. In the middle of surprising anxieties, given the idyllic qualities a mid-century childhood afforded: freedom, autonomy, solitude.
Our parents never beat us. We had enough to eat and wear. But one brother cut all his pictures out of the family scrapbook. Another brother: committed to a madhouse. Another: hamstrung in hierarchy; another: crippled by pain. One sister suffered and drank, one sister trembled in fear. I ate myself upwards of two hundred pounds. What happened to us?
•••
A family is a landscape of its own, as granted as the earth and trees.
Each person, each event becomes environment, familiar, dear, and scary. Emotion is the weather of the family, patterning the faces, the voices, and the hearts.
A family is a landscape changing scope and light and season. One day the father is a mountain peak sheltering a gentle mother river, and the next the father is a fallen pine by a dried riverbed and scattered children rocks.
Dad worked in landslides; Mom in abrasion, erosion. Either way, trees fall.
A family is a landscape, not a house. Houses are intentional—everything picked, planned, placed. Chosen for a reason. A house is what a parent wants to teach a child. Nothing unexpected included.
But a family will spill and charge and go its growing way, resist attempts to still it, clip it, and capture it. Shoots grow into wild events in even the serenest grove when bent against the nature of the plant.
•••
My brother John’s death prompted more than a trip to his memorial service. It impelled a journey through Montana’s living wilderness with other family members and an inner passage through the landscape of family itself.
Tangletown, Midcentury
Traveling north on 35W, we could see downtown Minneapolis spring up from the plains like a spread in a pop-up book. Our family emerged from stability itself: the wide flat plains of the upper Midwest, and the level terrain of our parents’ “’til death-did-them-part” marriage.
To a child’s eye: a shimmering blue Emerald City. The sturdy Curtis Hotel, the Foshay Tower, shaped just like the Empire State Building; later, the IDS rising up, a real skyscraper. Minneapolis. An oasis of lakes and forward thinking. Why, in 1958, the first indoor shopping mall was invented and built here. In 1963, one of the first regional repertory theatres was started by Tyrone Guthrie. Five years later, downtown’s main street, Nicollet, would be planted with trees and closed to automobiles—a radical, internationally-noted and imitated innovation: the Pedestrian Mall. An I.M. Pei building would anchor it. In a few more years, Mary Tyler Moore would toss her hat here. How right she was.
Downtown. The magical place you went when Mom was in a good mood. Step on the wooden shoe-sizer, get your stocking-foot measured, Buster Browns or bump-toed blue Keds to try on, march up and down the little you-sized staircase, hear the jangly snick-snack of Mom’s charge-a-plate, then eat plush coconut marshmallows on the cab ride home.
(Unless she bought you the horrible brown Oxfords, which looked like corrective shoes and all the kids would laugh, but why did she do it and make you wear them? Your feet were okay.)
They called them “The Twin Cities,” but they never seemed Twin to us—Minneapolis all silver, blue, shiny; St. Paul all dark brown, old wood, like our old confessionals before they built the new church.
Our neighborhood was known as Tangletown. Unlike the orderly elm-lined