The Mythical Bill: A Neurological Memoir

Part Four

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PartFour Ourself behind ourself, concealed— Should startle most— Assassin hid in our Apartment Be Horror’s least. c. 1863, emily dickinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saturday May 4, 1974 [fifth entry] It’s pretty difficult to reduce all the events of one week into a single common denominator except to say that last weekend was a complete success. It was a little bit difficult getting back into the harness of everyday living but, bit by bit, + with considerably less confusion than originally anticipated I brought myself up to date on my caseload, + there’s just the matter of getting through this weekend successfully. However, I feel just a little depressed + apprehensive about the rest of this day but I know that, with God’s help, and the guidance of Doctor Rovner, I can successfully deepen that wedge into the psychological element of my personality. I have got to get through this Saturday without “cracking up.” I simply have to do it. Incidentally, I noticed that the last time we visited Jody she seemed a little bit down in the dumps. This diary might serve to be a little life saver in putting my emotions down on paper. Last Tuesday we had a final interview with Maggie + Jim, who were my favorite nurse + orderly at Passavant Hospital. Everything went along smoothly although I did find it a bit difficult answering the probing questions asked me by Maggie + Jim. If I get through this weekend successfully I’ll know I have this infamous weekend + holiday syndrome successfully licked. I’ve the knowledge now of how to do it through the group therapy + assumption of responsibility concepts learned through the efforts of staff + the insight of Doctor Rovner. We took my mother to see Serpico which was a good movie, but the language was pretty obscene + mother was a little flabbergasted. All in all, good start on a good weekend. Adios Hawaii Pre-Joy Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie opens in Chicago on December 26, 1944, and runs while Bill is stateside but not yet discharged. 82 Part Four Laurette Taylor finds the play she has been waiting for and Bill sees it. An indelible image of excellence, her miraculous performance in this dream/nightmare of loss, loss, loss, takes up permanent residence in his mind. It was for him one of those life-changing moments in the theater—a moment of intensity more real than so-called real life, and one of the few things he told me about his past that actually happened . The hero joins the merchant seamen, refuses responsibility for his mother and crippled sister, and embraces his vocation as a writer. One night in the theater can flip the switch, convince Bill that theater is what he needs in order to live. A model, a possibility that he might be good enough. The war ends and he returns to the South Pacific in 1950 for graduate study in English and theater at the University of Hawaii. I learn this from his obituary. You’d think he might have told me himself. Bill never talks about his having wanted to write plays. In his despair as a writer, he never attends a professional production from the time I am born until his death—The Glass Menagerie perhaps the last performance he ever saw. He never mentions any other. On the blind, I write to the current chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance of the University of Hawaii at Manoa to find out what kinds of courses my father may have taken there. He writes back suggesting he’ll go to the bound volumes of the playwriting classes taught by Willard Wilson, part of the postwar explosion of writing programs, to try to find a copy of my father’s script. Aloha. Two weeks later he will send me two one-act plays written by my father, from a bound volume in the library there, with an introduction by the professor at that time, including his notes on my father’s plays. I am stunned to receive these early, usually autobiographical plays—a window on his soul. Jody: Your father wrote two one-act plays here in Fall 1950 in the English Department Playwriting class of Prof. Willard Wilson. Wilson was a pioneer in the development of playwriting in the state. The plays are in volume 6 of ‘College Plays’, call. no. PN 6120.C6H39...