this chapter is now streaming free on YouTube: Dooms of Love
My father moved through dooms of love
– ee cummings
My dad’s dad was a successful country doctor in Austin, Texas before all hell broke loose here. My dad also became a doctor, under duress. I am not a doctor. My son, on a walkabout at the moment, refusing to accept the medicine of rehab, is unable to finish college for the third time. I am happy and horrified to say, “I understand.”
The original McElhenney country doctor, Dr. T. J. McElhenney was married to an alcoholic who got bitter into her third scotch. He was a teetotaller, an odd term used for “those who don’t drink.” His wife’s drinking was one of the sadnesses of his rich and prosperous life. The legend goes, my mom was invited over after the McElhenney lake house, modeled after Frank Lloyd Right’s architecture, was completed on Lake Austin.
“What can we get you to drink, darlin?”
“Oh, I don’t drink,” said the new bride.
“I can make you just the perfect drink then, we all enjoy a cocktail.”
I never could understand my father. I didn’t know his father all that well, other than the lake house, my first experience of The Wizard of Oz, and fishing contests we would have on the dock at dusk. I would always win the nickel. He appeared to love me. I was six years younger than my youngest sister. A mistake, miracle, and maelstrom of emotions for everyone to delight in. [Until later.]
As my dad’s medical practice, pediatric allergy took off in the “allergy capital of the world,” my dad began to build his own lake house, a mile up the river of Lake Austin. It was going to be, was, a more famous lake house. My dad loved design, architecture, and playing one single song, beautifully, on the piano. It was his parlor trick. As his family moved into the two-story house of glass, dwarfing his parent’s more subtle and yet opulent house, his wife (my mom) began to throw appropriately opulent parties. The house wound up on the cover of the Texas Almanac that year. The parties were written up in the social section of the Austin-American Stateman. Both mom and dad were photogenic at that time. There was more money than they knew how to spend. I think the tax rate at that time was like 70%, but I could be mistaken.
He began leaving his fancy German car at the country club across the lake from his parent’s house and driving his Century up the lake each morning on the way to work. His work was thriving. His marriage and kids were… Well, beginning to wobble a bit under the explosion of joy and alcohol. My brother began drinking at twelve. Showed his younger sister the miracle of dad’s bar. Failed to recruit my oldest sister or me into the family pleasure principle.
His drinking became more self-soothing and less about pleasure. His wealth skyrocketed with each season of “cedar fever.” Before he died, my sister, the younger one, had a sweatshirt made for him. “Yea, Pollen!” Yes, indeed. The yellow dusting of Austin each year brought more power, more dark prince, and more strife into my father’s life.
He became a man who was revered by his nursing staff and feared by his peers. He learned the art of manipulative leadership from his resident mentor in Houston, the great Dr. McGovern. I think there are hospitals and wings of museums named after him. My dad’s mansion, bigger and bolder than his dad’s mansion, became a mausoleum. We kids, well, my three siblings began to act accordingly. I was a lost child. A mama’s boy. A sensitive young man, who entertained at the exclusive public spectacles of the annual Christmas and 4th of July parties at the lake house.
As things spun out of control, my mom had no calculus or compass to navigate out of the imperfect storm. She threatened divorce. Dr. McElhenney the 2nd became a fury. My hippie sister, the elder, became a harpie. My brother and other sister became escapees and alcohol enthusiasts. In response, I became a magician. I tried to make the demons disappear. They were more powerful than any of us knew at the time.
My dad began to stop by his mom’s on the way home, in the boat. Have a toddy. Maybe two. Before puttering his beautiful boat up the river to his estranging wife, the good old Southern cook, who fattened herself and three of her four children. The hippie remained thin, beautiful, and untouched by alcohol.
The sound of my dad’s boat pulling into the boat house caused our St. Bernard, Houston, to sound the celebration, and later the alarm.
