Thirty Rooms to Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock 'n' Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic

Leaving the Millstone

123 LEAVING THE MILLSTONE 6 My father’s Mayo Clinic psychiatric record, November 17, 1964 The patient Dr. C.R. Sullivan consulted me on this date regarding marital problems. . . . It would appear that he never drinks during the day but in the evenings when tensions rise, his drinking complicates the total situation. By the fall of ’64, Roger’s drunkenness reached a level that even Mom, thick of skin from years of abuse, could no longer bear. The night’s booze had begun to linger on Dad’s breath when he arrived at work the next morning. His boss, Dr. Mark Coventry, weighed in expressing concern, and now with pressure from two sides, Roger grudgingly agreed to see a Mayo psychiatrist. “But he is very slippery about any promise to stay with him,” warned Mom in a letter to Florida. Two problems made this effort futile. Alcoholics are fabulous and convincing liars. And psychiatrists are not chemical dependency counselors. Roger lied to his psychiatrist, minimized the amount he drank, and attributed the few thimblefuls he did drink to having a hysterical wife. His psychiatrist believed the lies Roger told him and so his conclusion was essentially written backward. Where the psychiatrist wrote: But in the evenings when tensions rise, his drinking complicates the total situation. His logic flow should have been: But his drinking in the evenings makes tensions rise and the total situation is not complicated . . . dude’s an alkie. LEAVING THE MILLSTONE 124 There are no records of any subsequent visits Dad made to the psychiatrist and it’s likely he broke the promise almost immediately. Given the treatment model of the times, it hardly mattered. On Thanksgiving Day, 1964, just nine days after the psychiatrist made those notes, Roger’s drinking “complicated the situation” again; he went on a bender and we had to leave the Millstone, this time abandoning the holiday turkey on the kitchen counter. The seven of us had our Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant of the Howard Johnson’s hotel downtown and managed to have a good time of it. “It was classic us,” remembers Chris. “We didn’t know whether to weep or burst out laughing. So we laughed.” The HoJo dining room was empty except for one large, nearly identical family sitting on the other side of the room. No father sat at their table either and we assumed they also were alcohol refugees, sharing what Chris describes as “a sort of generic grief in our culture, but still calling it their family’s own.” There were stolen looks and the occasional eye lock while we muddled through another broken evening telling jokes, making fun of Dad, and jabbing at our own emotional itinerancy. We relished the dysfunction of it. Being different was cool. The next day, we crept back into the Millstone and it was quiet. Mr. Hyde was gone and upstairs asleep on the bed in his clothes lay the doctor. Mom, December 4, 1964 The weekend faces me again, like a nightmare ogre. Only the thought of Monday morning—like a carrot dangling ahead of the poor donkey—sustains me through Saturday and Sunday. Every year the pretense of gay holiday festivities is harder to assume. My poor poor helpless children . . . The word “divorce” had been said as early as 1958. “After Collin was born I took him to Florida to see his grandparents,” Mom remembers. “Of course, that trip sparked another one of those horrible rages. Even selling the tickets didn’t buy peace and he of course purchased them again and forced me to go.” Sitting in an Adirondack chair on the shore of Florida’s Lake Winnimesset , she wrote Roger a letter. “It was a long letter. I suggested I would agree to a divorce if that would make him happy,” Mom recalled. But upon returning to Rochester, Roger never even mentioned the letter, and looking back now, Mom knew a divorce wasn’t ever in the cards. It wasn’t written policy, LEAVING THE MILLSTONE 125 but no Mayo Clinic doctor could expect to retain his job with something as unseemly as a divorce on his résumé. But by late 1964, Mom finally had had enough. A divorce wasn’t going to happen. The psychiatrists hadn’t helped. Family friends weren’t able to help. Warnings from Dad’s boss didn’t help. And even though it was school season and...