Most of the reasons behind Dad’s increasing displays of temper were easy for me to grasp. Children always know more about what’s going on with (and between) their parents than they’re given credit for. Frequently, I’d overhear Mom pleading with Dad to not drive himself so hard at work, to watch his diet (the diabetes meds caused weight gain and increased appetite), to get out of the house so they could take up their old habit of strolling the neighbourhood and, my personal favourite—to stop picking fights with Danny. Dad’s beleaguered response, “Once I’m finished with this case, Donna, things will ease up,” was never that convincing. So long as there was discrimination there’d be no shortage of cases, so long as there was food Dad would overindulge and so long as there was school there’d be report cards, most of which carried the same message from my teachers: “Danny’s grades could be much better if he …”
Much as I thought I understood the myriad pressures facing Dad, I didn’t know the half of it. One by one, all but a few of my adult female relatives, on both sides of the family, were being diagnosed as manic-depressive. It seemed that when Dad wasn’t paving the way for improved human rights legislation, or browbeating his kids into becoming world-class scholars, he was darting off to the rescue of one of his ailing sisters. He single-handedly policed his sisters’ sanity and, really, if anyone was capable of pulling off such a feat it would most certainly have been Dad, even if that meant delegating some of this responsibility to Mom and, indirectly, us kids.
When Dad’s sister Jean had a breakdown in 1958, he immediately offered to take in several of her children, insisting to his mother that:
Financially and in terms of space, I have never been in a better position to assist than now. My working hours are extremely flexible [and] left up to my discretion … I have fixed my den up considerably and could absorb two kids with no difficulty whatsoever (and more by grabbing off a few cots from the Canadian Army Surplus) … I can readily afford to come down and transport the children to Newmarket personally.
Jean recovered from her episode that same year—”episode” being the family euphemism for a temporary crack-up—and, a few setbacks notwithstanding (once she accused a callow male psychiatrist of being a “doctor of dubious degree” and socked him in the mouth), enjoyed a long and healthy life. Dad’s sister Margaret was not so fortunate.
“Family looks out for each other,” Dad explained to me when Aunt Margaret first came to live with us. I was in grade three. “Remember, Danny, the strong take care of the weak. That means the males in the Hill household always protect the females.”
Suddenly I felt myself grow in stature. Dad was including me in some special pact. Meanwhile, Mom didn’t have to say a word for me to sense that she wasn’t overjoyed with this arrangement. Dad, after all, was constantly on the move, scampering all over the province, if not the country, attending some high-level government convention or another. That meant Margaret, who never seemed to sleep, was left in Mom’s care, with the three of us kids tiptoeing around the house on our best behaviour, saddled with extra chore duty to keep the household, as Dad said, “running efficiently.” I’d come home from school and Margaret, as beautiful as she was phlegmatic and fat, would be keeled over in Dad’s living-room chair, as if drunk from unhappiness, crying hard and long while listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing “Shiny Stockings.”
“Why is Aunt Margaret always so sad and lonely?” I asked Dad, so disturbed by this display of adult suffering that I was willing to break his cardinal rule of not discussing Margaret’s problems.
“It’s all her children’s fault. They’re spoiled rotten and they constantly run roughshod over her,” Dad said, shooting me a dark, accusing look. After doing a quick inventory of my recent misdeeds—dropping Larry’s toothbrush down the toilet and causing it to overflow, then blaming the whole brouhaha on him and not copping to my crime till Larry was severely spanked—I looked anxiously in Mom’s direction. Dad let the silence build as I stared down at my hands. Once satisfied that I’d stewed in my own guilty juices for long enough he resumed:
“Margaret’s mean-hearted husband left her for another woman at the first sign of her illness. And this after my sister had worked night and day to put him through medical school.”
There was real hate in Dad’s eyes, and for a moment I felt anxious for Margaret’s “mean-hearted husband,” fearing for what would happen if he chanced to run across Dad. Then I felt like a traitor for worrying about such a bad man instead of my aunt.
“Now that my sister’s husband has made all this money,” Dad paused on “money,” making it sound like the most vulgar, hideous thing in the world, “now that he’s a rich doctor, he’s taken custody of their two children. That man destroyed my sister. Margaret was happy as could be before she came across the likes of him.”
A couple of weeks into Aunt Margaret’s stay with us, I returned home from school for lunch to see an ambulance, red lights flashing and sirens wailing—just like on TV—parked in our driveway with the motor running. I pushed through the throng of neighbours whispering and pointing on my front lawn, and tiptoed through our suspiciously wide-open front door. Margaret was being carried out of the living room by two ambulance attendants who’d somehow managed to hoist her up onto a long white stretcher. She looked like she was sleeping, her mouth open in the shape of a lopsided O, most of her massive breasts and thighs spilling out from under a torn, undersized bathrobe.
“She’s overdosed on sleeping pills,” Mom was sobbing to Dad over the telephone. Deciding I wasn’t that hungry, I returned to the calm of my school playground, where I announced to my classmates swinging on the monkey bars that my aunt had just committed suicide. Sure, it was only an attempt, but I didn’t know that at the time, and it came as little comfort when Mom explained later that evening that most suicides don’t succeed. “Don’t worry Danny, they’re only a cry for help. Just the same, do not discuss this with anyone.”
How trying to kill yourself was a cry for help was way beyond me, yet another example of the confusing logic adults used to explain away bad things. And family loyalty—i.e., keeping secrets, never a strong suit of mine—could only go so far.
Inserting a word like “suicide” into my vocabulary brought forth wonderful reactions. As the days passed and I went into greater and greater detail on the dangers of swallowing too many sleeping pills, kids and teachers gaped at me, trying to determine if this story was yet another in a series of my magnificent lies.
“If you’re lucky and don’t die, you wake up as a vegetable.”
“What kind of vegetable?” one of my freaked-out classmates asked.
“That’s enough, Danny!” my teacher snapped.
Margaret was back living with us within days of her overdose. “They upped her medication,” Mom explained, “so she’ll feel happier.” But Margaret didn’t seem much different to me. She cried a little less and slept a little more. And she stopped listening to “Shiny Stockings.”
For the next month or so, I felt safer out of the house playing sports, momentarily free of whatever mysterious mental-illness germ seemed to be circulating through our air vents.
“Children are resilient,” I overheard Dad say to Mom late one night, shortly after Margaret returned to Washington, D.C., to live with my grandparents. Although Margaret continued to stay with us sporadically throughout my childhood, when she wasn’t visiting, I did my best to block her out of my thoughts.
To my way of seeing things, mental illness, divorce and being a Negro were part and parcel of the same equation. Margaret was guilty of all three, and from where I stood, the combination of divorce and brown skin was a perfect recipe for a nervous breakdown. Thus, the last thing I ever worried about was Mom succumbing to madness. She was happily married and white.
Just watching how she greeted Dad when he came home from work gave me the impression of a couple that, due to the armour of each other’s love, would always be safe from any kind of harm. Dad always made the same staged entrance, ringing the doorbell twice and waiting for Mom to answer. His winter or suit jacket would be folded neatly over his left arm. When Mom greeted him he would kiss her, first on the cheek and then all over her face and neck, with a big sloppy, slurping sound. She’d quietly soak up his wet smacks, all the while remaining perfectly still and expressionless, as if voluminous, soppy kisses were something a wife had to endure. We all knew, however, that this was a pose put on for our benefit, and that she really loved Dad’s public display of disgusting, touchy-feely love. “Your Dad’s the most affectionate person I’ve ever known,” she used to tell us, as if she still couldn’t quite fathom it. Sometimes, when Dad let Mom go and she took his coat and hung it in the closet, I could catch the faintest hint of a smile on her face. Which is why her descent into madness took me totally by surprise.
Other than helping Dad edit his speeches, articles and papers, Mom rarely worked outside the home once we moved to Don Mills. This was exactly as Dad wanted it. His frequent boast—”Your mother is in charge of the family bookkeeping. She pays all our bills promptly and keeps our chequing account in perfect order”—articulated Dad’s idea of the perfect job for Mom. But whenever he praised her for her impeccable book balancing, she’d scrunch up her face to indicate that she felt patronized. Here she was, an unusually intelligent, energetic woman in her thirties, with children at school all day and a husband out of town or returning home exhausted late at night.
In 1965, Mom immersed herself in a summer teaching program. The course was a year of teachers’ college crammed into six weeks, something the Ontario government had recently set up for “mature women” who, according to Mom, “had lived a little.” When the school year started in September, Mom interned with a veritable revolving door of teachers, moving from class to class before getting a chance to connect with either teacher or students. Mom found the entire experience a nightmare. Her assigned school was in a poor area peppered with tough, demanding kids and teachers who, in Mom’s view, ranged from awful to indifferent, giving her precious little exposure to good teaching. Draining as her school day was, the hours of preparation she had to put in each night for the following day’s class left her feeling under siege. This, in turn, led to Dad’s biggest problem with Mom teaching: not so much that she was working during the day, but that at night, when he wanted to talk to her about his work, Mom was unable to give him the time and support he’d grown accustomed to.
“Dan, please, can’t this wait,” Mom would say. “I’m working on tomorrow’s lesson plan.”
With twelve years of marriage behind them in which Mom had faithfully followed Dad’s lead, giving him whatever invaluable feedback and attention he needed, exactly when he needed it, this represented, from Dad’s vantage point, an unwelcome change in their relationship. It didn’t take long before his hurt feelings turned from sulky to openly hostile. Of the two parents, Mom had the sharper tongue, something that proved to be her best weapon whenever Dad needed to be reeled in. Conversely, Dad’s power with Mom didn’t display itself verbally; a husband with his presence rarely needed to use harsh words to exert his will on his wife. This is precisely why Dad’s stinging late-night condemnation shook Mom to her very foundation: “You’re a failure as a wife and a mother.”
Neither my siblings nor I were present when Dad unloaded this on Mom. That, however, did not stop Mom from repeating those nine eviscerating words to us, ad nauseam, in the weeks leading up to her unravelling. Rightly or wrongly, I came to believe that one sentence was what eventually broke her. She started coming home from school talking so fast and loud my head would hurt. “The other teachers are horrible. They’ve given up on the kids. The kids are out of control because a lot of them come from rough homes. I’m the only one who cares enough to get through to them.”
Mom could go on for hours like this. I’d follow her at a safe distance, mumbling “uh huh” or “oh no, that’s awful,” as she darted all over the house, straightening a picture, dusting a lamp, folding and refolding a sweater; she seemed too agitated to stay in one place for more than a second. Just as I was getting the hang of tuning her out, she’d start to complain bitterly about Dad.
“He doesn’t want me to work or be independent in any way. Now that I’ve started teaching, I could really use his support. But it’s like he wants me to fail.”
It was one thing for me to sometimes despise Dad, but I couldn’t bear to hear someone else say anything bad about him. And now, whether Mom expressed her anger to Dad’s face or behind his back, it didn’t flare and quickly subside, the way it used to. What was worse was that her complaints were no longer limited to specific actions or inactions of Dad’s, but went deeper, cutting to the core of his shortcomings as a man. Dad would respond in one of two ways, by tuning her out or throwing up a smokescreen of deflective humour.
Earlier that year, Dad had objected to the moaning sounds Mom made when my friend Don gave her a quick shoulder and neck massage. Mom quickly went on the offensive. How dare he sexualize such an innocent gesture? After calmly taking in her response for a while, accepting, with feigned diffidence, all the zeitgeist terms—”chauvinist,” “hung-up,” “sexist”—Dad finally asked, “How would you feel if I went up to Don’s mom and said, ‘How ya doing, Mary?’ and started patting her behind, like this, pop-pop-pop-pop?” By way of demonstration, he began whirling his mitt-sized brown hands into cupped scooping gestures, like he was playing the congas upside down. He staged a lascivious look, nostrils flared like upside-down thimbles, his mouth making revolting, sucking sounds. With everyone laughing too hard to continue, the argument was over. Advantage: Dad.
But lately, even Dad’s madcap routines could do little more than provide the odd moment of comic relief—like a diversion in a horror movie just before the bloodletting starts—in the face of Mom’s scary mood swings.
Trudeau-mania was starting to sweep the country. My parents were staunch NDPers. So Dad wasn’t exactly thrilled when Mom taped a sexy picture of a Speedo-clad Trudeau diving into a pool to their bedroom wall. Dad took the picture of Trudeau down. The next day Mom bought a nude painting of a woman and hung it in our living room. Dad, claiming it was too provocative, demanded she take it back and get a refund. The next morning during breakfast, Mom lashed back at him with profanity-strewn invective so extreme that it made every insult Dad had tossed my way over the years sound like constructive criticism. Dad, who sat there quietly absorbing Mom’s vicious outpouring with a grim expression, explained to me later that night that he had no other choice. Nor would I, he emphasized, if she chose to lash out at me. “It hurt, son, but I couldn’t criticize her. She’s extremely fragile and anything I might’ve said against her could have destroyed her. You have to be very gentle with your mother.”
The day before Mom was finally taken away, Larry and I got in a fight over a bowl of cottage cheese and applesauce. In our struggle the bowl slipped from our fingers and crashed onto the kitchen floor. We jumped back, startled by the thwackkk of the bowl breaking into pieces and the oozing of cottage-cheese-speckled applesauce everywhere. But Mom’s reaction startled us far more than the broken dish. It was as if that bowl were the final straw. When she finished screaming at us, she started sobbing with a forcefulness that didn’t seem human. I always hated seeing Mom cry, but this seemed to come from a darker, forbidden, place. This wailing person staring back at me, through me, seemed altered, totally unrecognizable. That got to me more than all her crazy, fast talk, all her yelling and swearing and crying combined. Suddenly it felt like someone or something had scooped out my insides.
Dad had warned me to tread softly around Mom. To protect her and help her and be extra attentive. And my response was to pick a fight with my brother over a silly bowl of cottage cheese and applesauce. It was my fault when she went away.
The day Mom left, I was playing ball hockey on our driveway with a classmate. I remember Dad seeming as agitated as Mom seemed subdued while he slowly escorted her out of our house, down the front steps and into a car. His car? A hospital car? Was there another adult, a hospital official, helping Dad? I don’t recall. I did everything in my power to erase the particulars surrounding Mom’s departure. What I do remember is trying my hardest not to pay attention to my parents, keeping my eyes glued to the tennis ball on our recently paved driveway, stick-handling ardently, careful not to utter a sound. I could hold it together so long as I didn’t have to look up at anybody. At eleven and a half years old, I was becoming something of a pro at remaining, on the outside at least, stoic in the face of the emotional unravelling of family members.
We were never told when Mom was coming home, or even if she was coming home. I don’t recall any of us asking, either. We were scared of what the answer might be. What had happened to make Mom turn out like this? Why had it happened? Could she be fixed? Could it happen again? I kept all those questions to myself, as, I imagine, did Larry and Karen, since we never talked about Mom among ourselves. Some things were just too awful to talk about. Our collective behaviour, always pretty good, became perfect. Maybe because Larry and Karen, just like me, felt responsible for Mom’s hospitalization and believed, like me, that if we went from merely good to outstanding Hill citizens she would somehow get better and be returned to us. And then all would go back to normal. When Dad brought back a letter Mom had written to me from the hospital I was scared to read it, terrified that she would put into words what I considered to be the horrible, unspoken truth. That I had pushed her over the edge. But instead:
Daddy will probably be in to visit me soon, and I promised yesterday that I’d have a note for each of you. Take a good, long look at the picture on the front, as well as the “notes” on the back of this note paper. It might be useful in a history workbook. Oh yes, if I’m in for a long stay, tell Mrs. Anderson [my teacher] I’ll be glad, in fact grateful, for a chance to translate that French pamphlet on Champlain’s first settlement at Port Royal. Please practise up on one of your classical guitar preludes, and polish up on Michelle and Yesterday …
Happy New Year!
Love, Mom
We three kids took on the cooking, cleaning and all the household chores. Dad would visit Mom twice a day without fail. At lunchtime he brought flowers. After work he’d commute home, supervise the three of us, checking that our chores were properly carried out (“I’m gonna give this the old army test now,” he’d warn, wetting his middle finger and then running it over top of the shower rail, checking for dust) and that our homework was ready to be tackled. Then he would quietly and gently braid Karen’s hair. After supervising Larry and Karen’s bedtime routine, he’d drive back downtown to visit Mom in the evening.
Whenever he included us on one his visits, Dad would forewarn: “Don’t ask your mother any questions or let her talk for too long. She’s easily worn out.” His face would always light up the moment he saw her, whether tucked away in bed, sedated, or sitting in one of the arts and crafts rooms. He always had some kind of present for her: a book, chocolates, magazines, makeup. He’d made sure we’d all written her letters, offered as our small tokens of love. At first the three of us would stand back at a safe distance, unsure of how she would react to us. Sometimes she talked in spooky, elliptical riddles. Other times she’d be too tired to say much of anything. But she always seemed happy to see us. By the end of each visit, Dad’s visible affection for Mom would slice through our fear. We’d inch closer to Mom’s bed, saying little as she told us about her day.
I never talked about Mom’s situation to anyone in my neighbourhood. And no one, not teachers or friends or even the mouthiest kids at school, mentioned a thing about my mom to me. That was definitely one of the good things that came with living in Don Mills. People knew better than to talk about stuff like this.
At home, my constant singing and guitar playing helped fill the space left by Mom’s absence. “Come on in here, just for a second, I gotta play you something,” I’d say to anyone unlucky enough to get within a few feet of our front door. The mailman, the meter reader, the kid collecting for the Toronto Star—no one was spared my latest rendition of “Yesterday.” Everyone patiently indulged my spontaneous “stop everything and listen to me” performances. Even Dad didn’t discourage my growing penchant for dragging total strangers into our living room and subjecting them to my Beatles interpretations. In a small way, the music that sprang out of my guitar helped lighten some of the shadows that had crept into the house when Mom was taken away from us.
Before long, I was being asked to perform at parties and school functions. I jumped at the chance, inhaling every syllable of praise, every infinitesimal glance of approval, using it as fuel to practise more, to sing better.
Mom returned home after several months, drugged and sluggish. Dad insisted she go everywhere with him. “He knew the key to my recovery was to get me out of the house, to keep me in motion,” Mom told me, not long after she felt better. “‘C’mon, we’re going to Windsor,’ he’d say. And when I’d resist, he’d announce, ‘I have to investigate a case there and I don’t want to drive all that way alone.’ I’d always agree, knowing it took more energy to refuse your dad than to go along with him.”
Grandfather Bender, still riding high on the recent successful publication of his book, Great Moments in Pharmacy, tucked some articles on the efficacy of lithium in treating manic-depression into the autographed copy he mailed us.
“Three things saved your mother’s life,” Dad said, once Mom’s health started to improve. “One: lithium. Two: an outstanding female psychiatrist. Three: she had three children and a husband who loved her.”
“You three kids,” Mom later claimed, “were all that held me back, in my darkest moments, from ending it all. I knew you guys needed me.”
If my view of women changed after Mom’s breakdown—that women were fragile and in constant need of protection from men—my view of men, and more specifically of husbands and fathers, changed as well. Maybe Dad did hasten Mom’s breakdown, or maybe, judging from our family history, Mom’s breakdown would have happened in any event. But what remained beyond speculation was Dad’s behaviour once Mom fell ill. Indeed, if anything positive could be gleaned from Mom’s hospitalization, it was simply that a man, a real man, is always there, without fail and whatever the circumstance, for his family, for his wife. Always. Whether that means pushing a station wagon with your three kids, wife and sister out of the middle of a New York throughway and safely back onto the shoulder, or visiting your wife in the hospital twice a day with flowers in one hand and chocolates in the other, you do it. Because that’s what men, husbands, fathers do.