Family Mystery

This is a creative non fiction piece, all true, mostly about events before my birth. It relies heavily on family member's memories.

Family Mystery

It is 1975, and my mother is living in a two-bedroom house in the snowy little town of Channahon, Illinois. She is married to a man named Marty Nichols. She has already met my father a couple years earlier in high school, an all star basketball and baseball player who married young to a friend of my mother’s. The woman’s name is Susan, just like my mom’s. Back then my father is a friend of Marty’s. Everybody is a friend of Marty’s.

            Marty likes to drink. So much, that after eight years of marriage my mother will leave him, taking my half-brother and sister with her. A few years after that Marty will commit suicide by inhaling exhaust fumes from a garage-parked car. My father and his first wife, the other Susan as I’ve come to think of her, will divorce, and my mother and father will reconnect through a high-school friend. They will console one another about the failures in their previous marriage, consequently beginning a new one of their own. 

These snippets of information were clues to a grand mystery when I was younger. I was a child detective, searching for truths about the family. Clues were released slowly over the years, usually by word of mouth at a reunion or holiday dinner. Sometimes a certain amount of prodding was needed, which I endeavored to do enthusiastically; the true spirit of Sherlock Holmes. When found, they were put together carefully to create a somewhat less murky picture. They said to me my parents had a life before me. The world had been here even when I wasn’t.

By the time my mother realizes Marty is an alcoholic, they have been married and living in the little house in Channahon for a year. She has one child, my brother Ryan. He is a dark haired, freckled faced boy and will be indistinguishable from my sister a few years later. With Marty spending more time at Cookies, the local bar, than at work, it is up to my mother to support the family.

This is something she is used to. She felt the strains of family duties at an early age when, at eighteen, her mother died of cancer, and she was left to raise her two younger sisters alone. Their father, the familiar man and patriarchal head of the family I now lovingly call Papa, left them a couple years before their mother’s death. He was having an affair with another woman.

 I remember the first time I heard this story, another clue to the mystery passed in secret through an elder cousin. The day I learned my grandfather, a devout Baptist and southern family man, had betrayed the family, I realized how long people’s lives really are. How much things change, and how much people can forgive.

In the second year of my mother’s marriage to Marty, she begins interning as a student nurse at Saint Joseph’s Hospital. She works on the psychiatric triage floor where patients are kept for only three months, a fact that keeps the nurses on their feet when disorders range from paranoid schizophrenia to multiple and anti-social personality disorder. The hospital is in Joliet, only fifteen miles away from my mother’s house in Channahon. She works a shift from three to eleven-thirty pm.

The stories she has told me from her three years at Saint Joseph’s are many and varied. They have meshed deceivingly together to create a sort of cliché movie montage; screaming patients tied down with leather straps, two faced doctors, sterile needles. How they shocked me as a child! These stories were the beginnings of a budding interest in the field of psychology, something that in elementary school evolved to an obsession with experiments in Auschwitz, somewhat disturbing my Lutheran teachers. In college it earned me a minor.

·          

She is walking down a white-washed hall, paper shoes padding quick and light across the rows of tiling. In my mind’s eye she is young. A collection of old photos and stories has given her waist-length hair and light brown eyes so similar to my own. She has been interning as an assistant nurse at Saint Joseph’s for a few months and is going to speak to the head doctor about a patient.

            My mother tells the doctor that a patient told her something she thought was worth mentioning. He’d said, quite calmly, that when he left the ward and returned home next week, he was going to go to his closet, take out the shotgun hidden there, and shoot himself. He is a middle-aged man, has a wife and children. He has been in the psych ward for three months and was admitted for depression. My mother is fairly certain he is serious.

The doctor is the kind of man that thinks all nurses, being predominantly female, know nothing. “He has to go home sometime,” the doctor says, shuffling through a stack of papers and not quite meeting her eye.

The man did go home the next week. He did exactly what he told my mother he would. When the news got back to Saint Josephs, my mother describes how cold the other nurses were. Numb, she calls them. They’d worked on the floor for much longer than she. They were used to the frequent deaths. But even when my mother finished her internship, had graduated from college, and was returning to work as a nurse at Saint Joseph’s, she says she never became numb like the others.

·          

My mother is promoted to charge nurse at Saint Joseph’s. All the other nurses now report to her. She is responsible for the dangerous patients. She gives these patients Thorazine injections and every so often must call the police for her and the other nurses’ protection. Saint Joseph’s has grown in the past two years. There are now one hundred beds for psych patients, and six psychiatrists she reports to. 

Saint Joseph’s gets a new transfer patient. When my mother first meets her, the woman’s name is Karen. Karen has been transferred from a hospital in Chicago where the doctors there slapped her with a diagnosis of hysterical paralysis. In all reality, they have no idea what is going on. She is in a wheelchair and cannot, or will not, walk. It has yet to be seen which is the truth. She is a plain woman, doesn’t wear any makeup. She is quiet and keeps to herself. Before being institutionalized, she was a hand writing analyst for the police. She analyzes my mother’s, tells her she is having power struggles in her marriage.

Karen has been in the psych ward for three weeks now, and still the doctors at Saint Joseph’s do not know what is keeping her in a wheelchair. My mother is going through her daily rotations. She stops by Karen’s room to check on her. When she walks in, Karen is in the bathroom. But she is not in her wheelchair. She is standing up, looking at herself in the mirror. She is putting on make-up.

“Karen,” my mother says, “what are you doing?”

“Don’t call me Karen. My name is Pam.” She slicks on a stick of bright red lipstick.

The doctors and other nurses are skeptical. They don’t think Karen has multiple personality disorder, something that then was just beginning to be understood. She is just desperate for attention, they say. She is faking. But my mother knows better. She gets to know Karen and Pam well. Karen has a husband, Pam does not. Karen likes to read, Pam likes to go out with any and all of her many boyfriends. Karen sits in a wheelchair, Pam does not. My mom gets along with Karen better, and sometimes Pam gets jealous.

·          

It will be three years after Karen leaves Saint Joseph’s that my mother sees her again. She is still working as a nurse, but no longer at the same hospital. She is also still married to Marty. His alcoholism has gotten worse. Signs of depression are becoming more and more evident, but it will not be another eight years until he commits suicide. My mother is still the main provider for my half-brother and sister. Ryan is four now. Melissa, my half-sister, is one.

It is a Friday morning in the little house in Channahon, Illinois. My mother is cooking breakfast, half listening to one of her morning talk shows. Regis Phelbin is the host. Marty still has not come home from the night before, something that my mother is used to. The children no longer ask why. Later that day she plans to take them to get their pictures taken. A free seven by five will be the only print she can afford. She will have to argue with the photographer for even that.

            Regis Phelbin’s voice echoes across the linoleum tiles of the kitchen as my mother cooks. “Please, miss,” he says to his guest. “Take a seat.”  The woman is wearing a powder blue suit, and she sits with her legs crossed tight. “Tell us your name.”

            It is at this moment that my mother notices something about the woman. She is oddly familiar, and now my mother sees that she is not alone. Another somewhat smaller woman is sitting demurely in the next chair. This woman is wearing white from head to foot. She is a nurse.

            “My name?” the woman in the powder blue suit says. “Well, that really depends.” She smiles. “But you can call me Karen.”

            The show is about multiple personality disorder. Karen is the only guest. My mother has stopped cooking now, and she listens intently as Karen explains. She is no longer living in an institution. The woman in all white sitting next to her is a private duty nurse who lives with her. Karen talks about the controversies surrounding her disorder. How many of her doctors and nurses didn’t believe her.

            When my mother hears this she feels empowered. She knew Karen was telling the truth, and she feels validated as a true professional. When she explained it to me, she said it gave her the confidence to leave Marty. In her words, to “get her s**t together and divorce him.”

·          

            It will be another ten years until I spring to life. I will hear about Marty and the other Susan and think of them as phantoms. I will see my half-brother and sister and always think of them as full. I will put the clues together, piece by piece, until they fit. Until the mystery is no longer a mystery at all, but a story.  A history, really. My family’s history.