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289 TAKE A SAD SONG AND MAKE IT BETTER 6 Mom’s letters, August 1966 The deep unhappiness that occasionally overtakes me has two forms: one, that Roger’s life was such a misery to him—to him who seemed to have so much. The other, that the boys have not had in the last ten years a father—and never will have. Related to that, I have not and, at my age, never will have a husband who is rock and oak in life’s storms and a joy in life’s sunshine (you recognize the Ingersoll). In my life, I had such a short time of true love that I look with a wistful eye on other marriages. I am going to miss one of life’s greatest joys—and this often grieves me. My dad died of “pneumonia.” It’s on the record. But if I ever turn up dead, bring my Mom in for questioning and grill her about what little bastards we were when she tried to start dating again. After ten years of life with the Volcanic Thunder Bourbon God you’d think pretty much anybody Mom brought home would look like a fucking Ken doll. But for some sad reason we weren’t ready to be friendly to anyone Mom invited to sit in Dad’s seat at the table. Of particular note was a good man named Dick Swanson, a contractor Mom met while building the new house we moved into after the Millstone. He didn’t drink or smoke and there wasn’t a cynical bone in his body—which may have been the problem. We were dark little critters by then, Orcs with braces, and his avuncular knock-knock jokes didn’t fly with us. His stutter didn’t help matters either. Have the cops ask Mom about that time I said, “Hey, Mom. You goin’ out again with D-D-D-D-D-Dick?”· · · TAKE A SAD SONG AND MAKE IT BETTER 290 There’s truth in that strange old saying, “You can shoot the horse, but it won’t fix the leg.” Yes, Dad was dead, but our family was still broken. There followed a few years of conflicts between Mom and the four of us who remained at home, but most of these skirmishes worked themselves out as our adolescence passed. We began to have great times there in the house on the hill, a home Mom designed herself. She built the entire house around a library—her dream library: two stories tall, with catwalks and ladders to reach the high shelves; a stone chimney rising 40 feet; and books—books everywhere. Her hobbies and her reading no longer had to be hidden up in the Tower Library or tucked away in drawers at five o’clock. The Hill House spilled over with her interests: pictures of her beloved ships on the walls, dictionaries set open on pedestals, and a bust of Shakespeare looking down over her peaceful kingdom. She began to do things for us she couldn’t when Dad was alive. For his fifteenth birthday, Dan asked for a “Viking dinner”—a dinner without a table or chairs, with the food served on the floor and no plates, no forks, spoons, or utensils of any kind—just the food. Mom loved the idea provided we spread our feast on a tarp of clean plastic. So the sheet was rolled out, the brothers sat on the floor and Mom came in with the steaming tray of meat loaf and plop! it went on the mat. Hot mashed potatoes were scraped from pot to floor, followed by a green waterfall of peas and our feast was set. We made Neanderthal grunts as we dug our fingers into the meatloaf as if it were a bison with the spear still sticking in it. Peas took some chasing around to get a decent mouthful, and all agreed sinking your fingers into a hot mound of the mashed potatoes was a rare culinary delight. At the very end of our Viking dinner, Chris scraped the “leftovers” with the flat of his hand into an urpy-looking pile in the middle. “Anybody who’s a real Viking will eat a handful of that.” We all took the challenge and had our first, and last, taste of Tarp Goulash. When the last of the brothers left the Hill House for school in 1972, Myra moved out of Rochester to a small town...

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