Elsewhere: A Memoir Part 13

I sometimes wonder what he would have made of the fact that the house and town my mother and I fled back in 1967 would nourish my creative life for more than three decades. I have no idea what he'd make of my reflex anxiety at the thought of ever returning home. The part of me that's rational knows perfectly well that I have nothing to fear there. I'm often reminded that many people in Gloversville have embraced my stories and think of me as a favored son. There's no reason that the mere thought of returning should make a frightened boy of me, a boy who, as the Helwig Street dreams suggest, will be overwhelmed by adult responsibilities he's helpless to meet. I loved that house and everyone in it. I still do. Just how much was revealed one night not long after we closed on the Boston apartment. Barbara was away, and after dinner I found myself navigating through the unfamiliar television channels, stopping on one called American Life. It was playing an episode of 77 Sunset Strip, which was followed by Bourbon Street Beat, Hawaiian Eye, and Surfside 6, all shows we watched when I was a boy. At some point I became aware of the tears streaming down my face, realizing that I wasn't in Boston anymore, not really, but rather back home, stretched out on my grandparents' living room floor, with a pillow wadded up under my chin and-I have to say-happy.

But I don't want to be a boy again, not ever.

I wonder, too, what my grandfather would've thought about my mother's life had he been able to see it all the way to the end. Would he have blamed himself as a father, as I've sometimes blamed myself as a son? I have little desire to speculate on what his specific regrets might have been, but he wouldn't have let himself off easy, which maybe is why I can't. My own regrets, as these pages attest, are full and sufficient. It's worth saying, I think, that my own feelings of guilt and remorse have little to do with my failure to comprehend what was medically wrong with my mother, if indeed I understand it now. After all, it's only recently that OCD has been recognized for what it is, much less treated effectively. What distresses me most is that I made an exception for my mother in how I normally go about things. For almost as long as I can remember, my personal mantra has been: When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else. Perhaps I came to this philosophy as a natural consequence of living with an obsessive. One thing obsessives have in common is they seldom try something else. By nature ritualistic, they try the same thing over and over, always hoping against hope that this time the results will be different, possibly even good. Their cycles have to be interrupted or they're doomed. Perhaps because my mother's were so clearly established when I was a boy and I'd been drawn into them so early, I never had much faith that they could be altered. To me they seemed like the tides: necessary, inevitable, much more powerful than I.

I now know that I should have tried something else. Not as a boy, of course, but later as a man. Because even if I couldn't comprehend what I was dealing with, I was not ill equipped to at least try something and, if that didn't work, to try something else. For the last two decades of my mother's life, I was a working novelist, and novelists, if they know anything, should know how important stories are, that narratives often provide the key to things that run deeper in us, in our basic humanity, than can be diagnosed by even the most skilled physician. Given how often I'd heard it, I should have recognized the importance and meaning of my mother's Easter story, the one where she and her sister got new dresses and my grandmother did not.

One of the heartbreaking ironies of OCD is that the myriad anxieties of those afflicted invariably have a common denominator if not a single source. A person terrified of being abandoned and ending up alone will inevitably develop a series of obsessions and rituals that virtually guarantee this precise result. What my mother, a child of the Great Depression, dreaded most was poverty, a fear rooted in her not-at-all-insane conviction that in America, poor people might make the nation's clothes, build its highways and bridges, and win its wars, but in the end they don't matter. Her need to be free and live independently was real, but that wasn't the point. What independence meant to her was that she wouldn't be poor like her parents were, like the people she grew up around had always been, like the nation itself was during her formative years. What must have terrified her after I came along and her marriage to my father failed was the possibility that no matter how hard she tried, she'd always come up a little short. That fear wafted across Helwig Street from the house where the poorest family on the block lived. To her, fear smelled like the olive oil they cooked with because-or so she imagined-they couldn't afford b.u.t.ter.

Poverty. That was the odor that turned her stomach and made her sick with yellow panic and suggested that "things ... you know ... won't turn out right," a thought that scared her worse than death itself. Had I understood this in time, had my moral imagination-any writer's most valuable gift, perhaps everyone's-not failed me, I could at least have ...

Could have what? The story ends here because I don't know how to complete that sentence. My family a.s.sures me I did everything that could've been done, and I don't know why it should seem so important that I resist the very conclusion that would let me off the hook. Maybe it's because I've never been a fan of grim, scientific determinism, or perhaps it's a writer's nature (or at least mine) to gnaw and worry and bury and unearth anything that resists comprehension. But who knows? Maybe it's just hubris, a stubborn insistence that if we keep trying one thing after another, we can coerce the ineffable into finally expressing itself. How tantalizingly close it seems even now, right there on the tip of my tongue before slipping away. But no doubt I'm misjudging the distance, being my mother's son.

Acknowledgments

No memoirist likes to admit to a poor memory, but that, alas, is what I'm saddled with. For this reason I'm particularly grateful to my wife and daughters for correcting me on details I got wrong or out of sequence. I'm also deeply indebted to my aunt Phyllis Gottung, who set me straight about some events from the early years. She fiercely loved and was loyal to her big sister, and if she'd known at the time to what use I meant to put our conversations about my mother's life and struggles, she might not have been so forthcoming. At the beginning, of course, I myself didn't know where my curiosity was leading. I'm also much indebted to my cousins, Greg and Jim Gottung, for all the Gloversville skin-mill stories they shared with me over the years. Whatever I managed to get wrong despite the best efforts of my family is my fault, not theirs.

Despite my initial treatment of it, I'm also grateful to Judge Vincent DeSantis for sending me his book about Gloversville. I suspect we each love our hometown, if for very different reasons. And special thanks to John Freeman at Granta for nudging me at just the right moment.

To my mother I owe, well, just about everything, and to some readers these pages may seem like a strange way to repay such an enormous debt. All I can say is, this isn't a story I tried to remember; it's one I'd have given a good deal to forget. But despite my impressive amnesiac gifts, it refused to be forgotten, and I hope that that's because it's true in the ways that matter most.

ALSO BY RICHARD RUSSO

Mohawk

The Risk Pool

n.o.body's Fool

Straight Man

Empire Falls

The Wh.o.r.e's Child

Bridge of Sighs

That Old Cape Magic

Interventions

Other t.i.tles available in eBook format by Richard Russo:

Bridge of Sighs 978-0-307-26790-0

Empire Falls 978-0-307-80988-9

Mohawk 978-0-307-80984-1

n.o.body's Fool 978-0-307-80992-6

The Risk Pool 978-0-307-80993-3

Straight Man 978-0-307-80994-0

That Old Cape Magic 978-0-307-27330-7

The Wh.o.r.e's Child 978-0-307-42962-9

For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com