The Boy with the Thorn in His Side

A MemoirBy Fleming, Keith

Perennial

Copyright © 2004 Keith Fleming
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060959304

Chapter One

The Flemings And The Whites

My mother says she married Daddy for his mother, for his family. My father had grown up on a chicken farm outside Cleveland as one of a crewcut brood of brothers and it was the very averageness of Dad's family, the Fleming clan, that attracted my mother. The Flemings were a breath of fresh air; all-American, unassuming, and simple -- everything Mom's own small, splintered family, the Whites, was not. Dad's mother, my Grandma Fleming, had been starstruck by Mom from the time Dad first started bringing her home from college for weekends at the family farmhouse. Grandma Fleming would sit with Mom for hours in the dark cellar "candling" eggs -- holding each freshly hatched egg over a candle flame to see if it was marred by a bloody fertilized spot.

Grandma Fleming found in Mom the woman friend she'd always wanted, while Mom found in her the mother she'd been looking for. Unlike Mom's actual mother, Delilah White, Grandma Fleming was a married homemaker who exuded a cozy calm that, particularly when Mom was around, became attentive and admiring. Grandma Fleming's presence -- so decent, like a country morning -- gave Mom the soothing sense that she herself was at last becoming normal and escaping the influence of what she regarded as her own "weirdo" family. Mom's parents had divorced when she was ten and after that it had been all downhill. Her mother, Delilah, never really recovered from her divorce and became tearful, heavy-drinking, and melodramatic, sometimes even threatening to jump out the window of their luxury hotel suite or to drive them all into Lake Michigan in her Cadillac. Meanwhile Mom's father, E.V., a wealthy businessman, had settled into a second marriage with his secretary -- a woman who soon enough was acting the part of wicked stepmother, nearly strangling twelve-year-old Mom with a telephone cord once during an argument.

Growing up like this my mother came to associate affluence and culture with misery and isolation, even with perversity. Her father had once cruelly shown her her "life bill," a methodical accounting of every last cent he'd ever spent on her. More shocking, at the very time Mom began taking refuge at my father's family's chicken farm for long weekends in the mid-1950s, Mom's younger brother, my Uncle Eddie, horrified the family by announcing that he was so afflicted with homosexuality he needed long-term psychoanalysis in order to be cured. Eddie had already been making Mom's miserable adolescence even worse for years by getting so bound up with their mother that Mom always felt like a third wheel. Delilah's worship of her son was so sickeningly flagrant, in fact, that she declared more than once that for her "God is number one and Ed is number two." Though my mother never disputed that her little brother was clearly some kind of genius, she saw little good in it. If anything, she resented how often Eddie had embarrassed her over the years in front of her friends, holing himself up in his room with opera records that were audible throughout the house, emerging now and then in his horn-rim glasses to tell everyone about his harp and tap dancing lessons, or about how he could no longer eat meat because he'd become a Buddhist. Now to top it all off, Eddie had come down with this terrible, terribly embarrassing illness, homosexuality.

And so in the crowded but very normal Fleming farmhouse, my mother had finally found a world she liked as well as a stage on which she could shine.

I tell you all this because by the time I myself was a teenager it became more and more mysterious to me that Mom had ever married Dad. Practically from the day my parents' divorce went through (April Fool's Day, 1971), my mother started mocking my now-absent father. She'd mimic the way he would invariably say, "Well, let me think about it," in response to any and all requests, even the most minor ("Can I have another Coke, Dad?"). But my mother's imitation of Dad exaggerated his flat voice, making it stubbornly, woodenly stupid. As Mom played him, my father became a cross between a robot and a retarded person. But my mother's favorite put-down of Dad was actually an observation that Uncle Eddie had once shared with her privately -- that my father was "like a long freight train where every car is exactly the same."

What my mother failed to tell me then was that my father's charm for her had always resided in how plainly he adored her, how he made her feel like a real prize. He was in fact the only boy she'd ever really dated. As a girl Mom had been so uncomfortable around boys that she developed what amounted to two different personalities. During the school year she was shy and awkward, a dowdy girl a bit over-weight in her long tartan skirt. But each July, when she went off to an all-girl summer camp in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, the dowdiness would melt from her along with the pounds as her hair turned platinum in the sun, her skin deep brown, and she changed into a powerful, magnetic leader of the other girls. It was not until she went off to college that she finally found in my father a boy as unintimidating as an old shoe, someone she could dazzle and dominate.Mom and Dad started dating as sophomores and by junior year they had become engaged -- two twenty-year-olds already so domesticated that they spent their dates fantasizing about the family they would raise.

Continues...
Excerpted from The Boy with the Thorn in His Sideby Fleming, Keith Copyright © 2004 by Keith Fleming. Excerpted by permission.
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