Evelyn Explains Everything

By R.W. Gill

The day after her brother is picked up staggering down Main Street, dishabille and disheveled and beating himself repeatedly about the face and genitals with a slatted serving spoon, Evelyn is paid a visit by the Secure Medical Facility’s chief psychiatrist. Urged to think better of his request, when “Dr. Ike” refuses to take no for an answer, Evelyn is forced to give him exactly what he’s asked for: her family history.

Manufactured Blurbs from Dead Writers I Admire:

A jolly inflammatory satire on the managerial class...
- Samuel Butler

Evelyn, a cheeky embattled force of nature, brings all her wit and fury and sexuality
to bear in her campaign to rise above her hated upperish-middle-class
origins and achieve owner-class status.
- Mary McCarthy

Unapologetically invidious...
- Gore Vidal

A bit ribald for my taste, but not a bad first novel.
- Maya Angelou

A terrible beauty is born.
- William Butler Yeats

• Language: English
• Publisher: R.W. Gill
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463670224

Book preview

Prologue

Six intoxicating hours in the bedroom of a woman of noble Spanish descent left me feeling dizzy. When the Dona first approached me about painting the interior of her lake home, I was holding up a Will-Work-For-Food sign in the parking lot of the Home Depot. And when she asked, out of a concern that her house cats might escape, if I could do the job with the windows shut, I said, Not a problem!

Already numbed by hunger, six hours of inadequate ventilation later, I was feeling a good deal number.

In strict honesty I can’t say that the paint fumes I inhaled on the job were solely to blame for the strange vision I was about to have. Because I spent a couple of hours after painting her bedroom (Danish Guelder Berry walls, Faded Rose trim and Bunny Nose Pink accents - two coats throughout) trying to get my mind off the rooms that remained to be painted, and nearly a quart of her excellent bourbon proved helpful in that regard. Possibly the combination of booze on top of the unintentional huffing caused my brain to go temporarily off the rails.

In any case, that night, with the reek of acrylic still up my nose and leaking whiskey from every pore, I fell woozily into bed, glad to put the day’s ordeal behind me. And no sooner had I switched off the light and closed my eyes than something happened which had never happened to me before, even after drinking similar amounts of alcohol. To wit, the insides of my eyelids began to flicker with frightful images of a spirited girl I used to idolize back in the fourth grade.

Without ever being aware of it until that moment, it seems that for the better part of half a century I’d succeeded in repressing a distant disturbing memory involving this bewitching nine-year-old femme fatale who I’ll call Evelyn for purposes of avoiding litigation. I once shared a bowl of cherries with this born enchantress, and the recollection of tucking into those cherries with Evelyn by my side remains a cherished highlight of my boyhood to this day.

But the scene I now found myself reliving had to do with a less appealing moment – one with none of the convulsive merriment that attended taking turns spitting cherry stones off of Evelyn’s kitchen patio. It had to do instead with a more sinister time when Evelyn once climbed a Maypole for me. For me and another boy, to be precise.

That long-buried episode took place on the school playground during recess one day. And in my nightmare there we were again standing at the foot of the festive pole, the three of us. Me – a much younger version of me. The other boy – presumably the one she preferred since she’d stationed him there first. And Evelyn, smiling her irresistible smile. After arranging us just so, my first heartthrob, pretty in petticoats, began to shinny.

It’s doubtful that at that age I could have put any but the simplest of my thoughts into words and yet I had little trouble in sensing what was going on. And what I sensed was this: Born of some primal instinct in our species for which Evelyn cannot be blamed, the beautiful alpha female of our fourth-grade class was endeavoring to induce one of her devoted admirers to clobber another one of her devoted admirers by way of wooing and winning her.

For the boy standing next to me, towering over me the way he did, it’s possible that the experience was unmixedly pleasant. But for me, quailing in the shadow of my larger rival's beetling brow, my emotions were decidedly mixed. Looking up at Evelyn, a surge of awe and gratitude gripped me, along with the first confused heart-stabs of carnal desire. Add to that a pang of guilt, a pinch of possessiveness, and the unstaunchable flood of terror already alluded to, together with an odd prickly sensation I would later come to associate with sucker-dread, and there you have the full emotional aggregate - all the ingredients in the batter, so to speak. You might call it the beta male’s sad lot in life.

And now, in my alcohol-and-paint-fume-fueled reverie, this alarming prelude to disaster was repeating itself exactly as it happened in reality all that time ago. Except that in the mental replay, as the inevitable dream-beating loomed, blending all the old symptoms of deep devotion tinged with nausea, plus a sweat-soaked desire to wake up screaming, I suddenly found myself being struck, not by the boy at my side - thank goodness for that - but by an ingenious literary idea instead. I asked myself: Why not turn my employer’s life-story, which I’d happened to overhear that afternoon, into a surefire bestseller in the memoir genre?

The point to the above verbiage is that I owe the following book in large part to a masterful little girl I once adored. Also to America’s Best Paint, One-Coat-Coverage, Twelve-Year, Interior Satin, in the colors mentioned above, and below. And let’s not forget the dozen or so stiff belts of my employer’s Maker’s Mark. I name the brands in case there's any money in it.

But thanks most of all to the wealthy free-speaking woman who I’ll call Evelyn for purposes of avoiding legal action, for allowing me, after nearly passing out while painting her bedroom with the windows closed, to relax and recover by her pool, where I was in a position to eavesdrop on the explanation she gave to our state asylum’s chief psychiatrist as to why her loony brother Freddy makes a habit of pummeling himself to a pulp every so often before renouncing all affiliation with the human race and lapsing into the delusion that he’s a house cat.

1. Sailcloth Flecked With Buckthorn

Sit, doctor. No, not there. Here by me so we won’t have to shout. I promise not to bite unless provoked. Just brush the shredded remains of that op-ed page off the bench unless you prefer to nest on them. You caught me in the middle editing my husband’s weekly output of paternalism somewhat after the fact.

I don't suppose you read the publisher's columns? Thinking people refer to them as his Sunday morning sops to our devoted subjects. I should have waited to get your take on it. But since there’s no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, I’ll just tell you it was another of Winny’s standard forgiving pieces on past Southern sins. A poignant retrospective on a notorious instance of man’s inhumanity to man which we’ve all learned simply gobs from. A somber reflection on old scores and old sores which are settled and healed now – so Winny assures us. A painful lesson duly heeded that can at long last be forgotten. And, with the closing of his benediction, mercifully pardoned. Look away, look away, look away, and pay no nevermind to that ruckus atop the arbor, sugar. It’s only What's-his-face, our young protégé for the summer.

When he first got to hollering up there I thought he was pretending to be a falling Wallenda. Or maybe a giddy novitiate in an escadrille of flying nuns or some such fantastic thing. Perhaps an a-cappella doo-wopper. Or an ululating jihadist looping footage of planes one and two plowing into the Trade Towers. Then I heard the crunch of your footsteps coming down the primrose-stained-gravel path and realized he was only doing some cage-rattling to mark his territory.

HUSH, O’SMILEY! RUN TELL COOK THE GOOD DOCTOR HAS ARRIVED! AND BRING BACK WHATEVER FINGER FOOD SHE'S PREPARED!

He’s supposed to be with the publisher today, but fair-weather naturist that I am, he prefers my company in fair weather.

YOU HAVE YOUR ORDERS, BOY! NOW HIE ON!

I trust you’ve checked on my little bubbalub this morning? Is his flight from reality still the ailouros stage? Past episodes predict that he’ll soon start writing more of those epitaphs I mentioned to you. He’s completed eight-eight of them to date, each one through the eyes of a different dead cat. A veritable feline Spoon River Anthology in my view. Ashley is the best of them I think. It goes:

Declawed is why I was so vocal. I might have expressed myself to better advantage with my feral mitts that fatal day if my mistress with the mock-Hepplewhite chairs hadn't left me helpless to climb a nearby tree and escape the maw of the pitiless pug who chewed my throat for sport, quieting my voice for all time. You should have saved your money on those silly cat toys, you fussy bitch. All I really wanted for Christmas was my two front paw claws.

There’s another called Lazy Lids which is even more seditious, about a dead cat who confesses how a blend of shame and vanity and a failure of nerve led him to embrace the most proximate source of his humiliations and become a conservative talk-show host. Once in cat-mode, just give Freddy a puddy to observe and he'll picture the poor thing dead and produce a heart-rending epitaph in under ten minutes. It’s uncanny how he gets into their souls and captures their personalities and power plays; their jealousies and frailties and so on. I’ve had them published. Remind me to give you a copy before you leave. It’s a thin volume, so don’t neglect to send along anything he may add to his oeuvre. To my mind, he’s the Edgar Lee Masters of the cat world, with the psychozoological eye of Rafael Arevalo Martinez.

Thank you, O'Smiley. My compliments on a quick delivery, dear. Cook must have met you at the door.

Canapé, Ike? It's okay to look at me, sugar. Your retinas won't burn. At least I don’t think they will.

He's quite the acrobat, you know. What’s-his-face there. You wouldn’t think it to look at his gangly frame, but a few minutes ago I was tossing cashews at his not unattractive, asymmetrical head, and he was dipping and darting like a feeding martin, catching the morsels in his mouth. As my tosses grew wilder, he never missed a one. Finally I signaled an end to our game and, holding nothing back, flung the last nut so high there wasn’t a snowball’s chance he’d catch it. But he surprised me. Leaping like a salmon in springtime, he got high enough for the nut to ricochet off his left ear, which is noticeably higher than his right. Then, diving for it, mouth open, he inhaled it an inch before it touched the patio.

When I applauded his performance, he was so proud of himself that, still on his belly, he held his arms to his sides and used his hands like flippers to undulate himself to the edge of the pool, where he arched his back and swayed his torso back and a forth a few times a la Stevie Wonder and, with a comic arf, slipped into the water with the grace of a seal.

O’Smiley, be a dear and go practice your side-straddle hop elsewhere, darling. I know you like to show off your athletic prowess, but Doctor Ike and I are fixing to discuss my brother's upcoming competency hearing. You might busy yourself by checking on my housepainter over there. He fell out on that chaise over an hour ago with Xs in his eyes and I haven’t seen him stir since. And then go water my cannas, por favor.

If asked to sum up the spirit of my sweet husband’s Dixie Delight columns, I believe Happy Slaves are the two words I would choose. Yes, Happy Slaves. It’s really Winny’s one and only motif. Fifty-two installments a year and rarely a missed episode in what might be called the saga of the fond owner reigning over his plantation with Christian kindness, starring himself as the beloved and benevolent patriarch.

One Sunday it's the universally recognized obstacle - a devastating family illness, say, illuminatingly come to terms with. The next week it's some mildly inspirational workman’s struggle – like finding a good ribs joint – which ends in modest triumph or instructive failure. Last week, he memorably embarrassed himself by singing a song about his noble lineage, laden with enough false humility to gag a billygoat. A few weeks ago, the sweet baby penned an ode to a former Sunday school teacher with a knack for keeping her students in line by narrating the very bloodiest Bible stories with a happy twinkle in her eye. And stand back when my little gingersnap sinks his teeth into another hag piece on the late Bear Bryant! A slipper-fetching spaniel couldn’t lick that poor coach’s dead balls any cleaner than Winny - not without smearing them beforehand with bacon drippings.

SCAT, FROG LEGS! WHAT PART OF WATER MY CANNAS DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?

I’d gladly take a stick to the pest, but you know how it is. I don't want him adoring me that much. He’s headed to Princeton in the fall to pursue an advanced degree in mogul-stroking, but I’m afraid we’re stuck with his truckling for the remainder of the summer.

Speaking of marking territory, I caught the trainee christening that pot of reeds the other day, but I commissioned no portrait. I did however run him like a rat.

Am I correct, doctor, in assuming that you and your staff of compassionate pill-pushers are dosing Freddy up beyond all recognition on psychotropics? Exactly how much longer do you plan on holding my poor kitty incommunicado? It’s a lucky thing I remembered about his hiatal hernia before turning in last night. It appears to be exacerbated by rice more than anything - a dish I’ve noticed Asians cook to stickiness for optimal chop-stick deployment, which coincidentally seems the best policy for hiatal hernias as well. Personally, I prefer my rice al dente, but then I don't suffer Freddy’s esophageal problems. There’s nothing delicate about my digestion, knock wood. I eat like a horse and have a solid bowel movement twice a day.

Thanks for getting back to me on that by the way. If he’d choked to death due to my neglect, I’d have never forgiven you. My apologies about the hour. What was it, coming up on three a.m. if memory serves?

Yon know it’s not so much the substance of his columns I object to – speaking of my husband again – it’s the fact of them. If produced by one of our talented staff writers, I couldn’t ask for better. But coming from the pen of the publisher himself, it’s simply bad form. People aren’t as innocent as they used to be. Too many thinking slaves understand that our media holdings are essentially the PR arm of our empire.

Ah, how I yearn for the good old days, back when my little dewberry used to amuse himself working the folk-art scams and fool himself into believing that he was connecting with the people. That's how Winny used to fribble away his time when his father still ran the family conglomerate: touting himself as a humble medium in the tradition of that dead and buried musical archivist whose name has slipped my mind, he’d grab his camera and tape recorder, and rush off to interview some yodeler-for-his-supper.

But after Big Daddy took to riding his exercise cycle five, ten, and finally up to fifteen hours a day and his Alzheimer’s could no longer be swept under the rug, the heir-apparent had to step up and assume responsibility for carrying on the tradition of those uplifting Sunday-morning columns – otherwise known to intelligentsia as the weekly chorus of zip-ah-dee-do-dah – and ever since, he’s has been delivering the same patriarchal dribblings his father was so beloved for delivering back when that poor guffin still had a partially functioning brain.

Forgive me for going on in this degage manner, Ike. Normally I wouldn't speak so glibly about such things to a stranger, particularly to one not of my social station. But to a hardcore man of science, someone in the business of apprehending the unspoken truths hidden away in the human heart, I figure why not open the floodgates?

Just to fill you in, this is not the first time Freddy’s become a cat, but it’s the first time he’s wandered off and got stuck up a tree in the Confederate cemetery where Winny’s Aunt Melody, when she raised the fringed shade of her office window in the old Marmaduke-Williams rectory which serves as the current headquarters for the Hysterical Society, saw him staring back at her naked as a sphinx cat with a dead mockingbird in his mouth.

Incidentally, you don’t mind my calling you Ike, I hope? I know that’s not your name, but devotee of the sobriquet that I am, I have nicknames for everyone. And with that big round baby face of yours and that high cathedral forehead and those soulful wide-set eyes, I just can’t get over you how much you look like a young Eisenhower. Surely I’m not the first to spot the resemblance?

In any case, as I keep trying to get across to the bubbly hubbly, some traditions are best left to die a natural death. Our more disgruntled slaves have long since caught on to his hokum from on high. They know that beneath the vast fatuity that is Winny, there beats the wily heart of a man of commerce who may not consciously know what he does, but he’s a shrewd strategist nonetheless who inherently promotes a sugared-up picture of society that will keep the common throng toeing the line. Which is why I sometimes take it upon myself to suggest to my little melon ball the value of acquiring a bit of understatement when selling his benevolence.

Less is more, I advise my life-mate in a purely constructive spirit. "Take a moment to reflect on the effect of your heartfelt productions. Consider that only the most ambitious subjects are going to be gratified week after week listening to their owner romanticize slave-life like a kid on a carnival ride.

Maybe next Sunday, snackcakes, I coax and cajole, you might find it in your emotionally overflowing heart to give us something a bit closer to the straight shot? If not for your own hopelessly tarnished literary reputation, then do it for your favorite gal. Pretty please? Avoid, just this once, I did my best to enlighten the candied pecan we Southerners call a praline, "the slippery omission of uncharming truth? Don’t give it all away, mind you, but just for the novelty of it, why not have something approximating an honest thing to say about the horror and humiliation of slave-life. Consider the thing as research, I beg of him. Dare to sully your shining halo a bit. Surprise your loyal legion of Aunt Pittypats by speaking an unflattering truth or two this Sunday. Admit, for the very first time, I counsel him, to having a moral blemish worthy of the name without appending every quibble known to mankind in an effort to endear yourself to the world of workadays. Act like you’ve experienced the first dawning of something like an idea in that finely chiseled, perfectly empty head of yours, angelpuss," I purr.

But sweet-talk him as I might, Ike, the man has proved to be one tough nougat to crack.

Anyway, I can see by your pallor that you’re champing at the bit to get at the family history. You must be thinking, good gad, what a gabbling beau parleur this perfect goddess is. In my defense, you can’t go charging into these things. Some preliminary chitchat seemed in order, as my old pal Bertie Wooster would say.

However, this is not a social call, is it? My crack legal team has advised me that the way to expedite my brother’s release is to give you my full and complete cooperation. Rigorous honesty, they tell me, is what you’ve called for, so rigorous honesty you shall have. I’ve made up my mind to hold back nothing in my efforts to Free Freddy. So let the full scope of the horror be told. The slave-family chronicle here we come. Or, as Faulkner’s Lena said passing into Tennessee, My, my, we ain't been knowing each other but for a short time, and already we’re about to stick this unopened can of pork-and-beans in the fire and see who backs away first.

But, before we begin, you best fuel up with a tumbler of this pouilly-fuisee. What a thoughtless host I am. I should have offered earlier, especially as I was obliged to dip into it before you arrived in an effort to remain compos mentis throughout the ordeal of reading Winny's column.

No? Up to you, butter pat.

Don’t forget the heavy toll the search for truth exacted on the German philosopher Nietzsche. I read somewhere that that poor slave-reviling slave ended his truth-seeking days on laudanum and Christmas toddies - in addition to the STD gnawing at his superbrain. According to the bio I read, Fritz dropped dead on holiday dancing mad Dionysian reels in a Swiss hotel lobby while gibbering homoerotic passages from the Iliad in the original Greek with his tunic virilis down around his ankles in a final hero-worshiping salute to the cruelty of the strongest of strongmen who he found it easier to adore rather than face his cowardice for not defying them. It often happens that way.

Not even a little nip? Well, face the sobering task at hand sober then. On with the show, hon.

2. Pained Vanilla Tan

So where to begin? With the Seminal Spasm? The miracle of life’s inception. Or shortly thereafter? Observe Fred in slide number two, a microscopic parasite feeding on Mother’s uterine wall, duplicating the metabolic habits of our not-so-distant ancestor, the enduring ameba.

Or I could cite the dhoti-wearing swami we had to a dinner last week who, after solemnly studying Freddy’s aura for half a minute, declared that bubba had the distinction in his previous life of being the last surviving platypus on the island of Borneo. At exactly the same time our father was busy rutting on our mother, said the magic man, Freddy’s former incarnation was ducking and dodging his destruction in the Kayan River. Right up to the moment of impregnation when his heart was pierced by a bamboo spear and his carcass, according to our mystic, was sold to an apothecary in Tarakan for the boner-enhancing qualities associated with his bill and webbed feet.

Our best-selling novelist, piqued at being upstaged as the evening’s main entertainment, interrupted the admiring oohs and aahs being heaped on our spiritualist by the A-list guests to ask what happened to the forty-nine day interval between death and rebirth, only to be informed that he was thinking of Tibetan Buddhism, at which time he clammed up and tottered over to those bushes yonder and hacked up his dinner.

But I’m jabbering again, Ike. What say in true sitzkrieg style, dear, we begin with this shiny new penny I’m depositing in your shirt pocket for purposes of confidentiality and suffice it to say that poor Freddy suffered the usual amount of humiliation suffered by children of untitled parents everywhere. I don’t think we can go far wrong in positing a home truth as fundamental as that one. My brother’s problems began where most childhood problems typically begin, with progenitors who lack capital.

Our father was the son of an Arizona judge who read the Harvard Classics methodically at the rate of ten pages per night with near-perfect incomprehension, as his marginal notes clearly attest, and whose claim to fame was having once shot an Indian for some slight too slight to remember. And our mother, though she came from aristocracy, it was Alabama aristocracy, which meant she belonged to that distressed tradition of Lost-Cause Cinderellas who regard Gone With the Wind as their favorite literary work.

Family lore has it that the two indigents met at a Red Cross-sponsored dance. The war was on – number two – and Father, a major in the Army Air Corps, was between combat tours teaching tactics to student pilots at a training facility outside of Mobile when…

Excuse me for disrupting the flow of this chronicle so soon, sugar, but your complexion has been taking some odd turns ever since you arrived, mostly in the blenchier shades of gray. Are you sure you want to proceed? Seriously, why put yourself through this? I’m no advocate of unsparing honesty. I'm no Gregers Werle from Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. I feel no burning desire to spread unpleasant truth to kindly cuckolds who will end up taking their frustrations out on fragile duck-doctoring little girls. Everybody knows Gregers simply should have stretched his father’s legs out between two sawhorses and dropped an anvil on his knees, and let it go at that.

You know the writer Joyce Carol Oates? Miz Oates makes the point that she values kindness over honesty. And she’s no boob. She knows the degree to which kindness masks all manner of cruelty and cowardice. At the same time, she knows kindness can sometimes be a generous effort to feast a little less. Kindness can be an act of self-restraint, and thus a good thing. So let’s do be kind, sweetie. Cancel the competency hearing and return Fred to me, and let’s forget this whole misunderstanding ever happened. Things would be so much kinder if you would. We could enjoy a refreshing bottle of wine. Pass an afternoon exchanging tales of youthful indiscretions. Even whisper a few sweet nothings behind the etched panes of the pool house for an hour if you’re so inclined. Then go back to our lives with no one the wiser.

Be honest, flapjack. What’s the story behind any normal slave-life - yours or Fred's or, stretching the possibilities a bit, mine - but a series of endless humiliations, big and small, and the less than sterling ways we’ve handled them? Boiled down, little bubba’s problem is that he grew up in a perfectly average slave-family. That explanation should satisfy any reasonably honest person’s curiosity. The terror took him. What more really needs to be said? Case solved, mais oui? Exit the insufferable Monsieur Poirot simpering in triumph.

As for me, kiddo, I was scared rich. Mystery explained. Life’s imponderables pondered. I mean, no matter how ingeniously you may classify Freddy’s goofiness in the formal language of loon-disorders, what could possibly trump the trauma of a typical upper-middle-class upbringing as the cause behind the effect? Are we done yet? Make the most of your disadvantages is my recommendation, hon.

Push on with the fun then? Okay, but I’m going to pour you a little of this wine whether you want it or not. Because I think you’re going to need it.

So where were we? Ah, yes, global war was in full swing and Papa, that meagerly paid minion, was stateside on rotation. A soldier under any flag, he happened to land on the moral high ground in that conflict and found himself teaching tactics to American pilots at a training field outside of Mobile where Mother - as I was on the point of saying - was persuaded, along with a bevy of other like-minded swamp angels, to do her bit by attending a weekend mixer at the camp.

Possessed of all the social graces you’d expect of a Southern ingénue, our young deb could sing like a canary, play piano with proper restraint, draw reasonably lifelike fruits and flowers and converse mellifluously at little depth on every socially acceptable topic under the sun. Add to that the fact that she was built like a brick shithouse and was taught to pretend to be as dumb as a brick around men and Father fell for her – to keep the brick metaphor going – like a ton of bricks.

Mother’s charms, rising well above the rest, made her the belle of the ball, and one look at the double portion of quivering blancmange that preceded her into the hangar was enough to sweep all the flyboys off their lightly tripping slave-feet. By virtue of being the ranking unmarried officer at the function, Father was able to monopolize her dance card. A whirlwind courtship followed, and the dewy-eyed couple married a few days before he returned to the front.

Presumably their union was consummated before the groom shipped out because Frank - their first issue - was born to be crucified nine months later.

I think that pretty much covers the nuptials, Ike. They met. They wed. They went to bed. And along came Fred. Well, Frank first. And I inherited Mother’s spectacular knockers. Now would be an appropriate time to nod if you’re intent on sticking this thing out - just to grease the wheels a bit. No? You don’t find my contours impressive? A bit churlish of you, baby, but never mind.

Down the lonely wedded years, Mams would remember the heartrending howls of the local beau she’d jilted in favor of Father. Sick over her hasty coupling with the interloper, the ex-swain got in the habit of driving out to her home late at night, where, drunk as a skunk, he thrashed about in the shrubbery beneath her window, bellowing his undying devotion and bewailing her treachery well into the wee hours.

His spirited exhibitions lasted throughout her pregnancy, reaching a crescendo, by Mother’s account, on the occasion when Frank's bulge first began to show. That’s when the discarded suitor, bitter with rejection, began wishing a fiery death on his successful rival. I HOPE THE BIG APE GOES DOWN IN FLAMES AND BURNS TO A SMOKING BLACK CINDER!

Legend has it that Papa was still in town the first night the boy whose time he beat dropped by, and he stepped out to give the chivaree a proper Southern tone by punching him in the nose. Thereafter, with Papa back overseas happily killing more Germans, Mother lay in bed night after night listening to her wasted wooer holler himself hoarse with grief, always charitably ending his operatic rants just prior to passing out with a blubbering promise to wed the widowed girl of dreams as soon as she received the glad tidings from the War Department that Father was a thoroughly charred crisp and then go on to help her raise her fatherless child and give him his name despite her heartless betrayal.

From the frequency of Mother’s sighs whenever she shared that poignant tale of love and woe, I gathered that the tormented Romeo made quite the soulful spectacle out there reeling amongst the camellias. Just the sort of crushed-worm-writhing-in-its-death-throes image that’s bound to linger in a young girl's heart all the rest of her days.

But the deeper underlying bathos behind it – the real point to the story which Mother never failed to quietly convey – was that the bleating dud who loved and lost his chance to deflower the sweetest honeysuckle bloom on the Chickasaw County debutante vine came from money. Barnfuls of the stuff.

Alas, she pulled the short straw when Daddy came marching home from the war unscathed. Brash with victory and full of praise for the fine fighting spirit of the enemy he’d relished slaughtering, the conquering hero was convinced after so many narrow escapes that he led a charmed life, and, weighing his options, he chose to stay in the military and become a test pilot. Posted to Wright Field in Ohio with his new family, they lived there snugly in a converted Quonset hut for the next two years.

I relate all this secondhand of course, being but a future egg in the maternal ovaries. Not till our migration to Muroc in California did I make my arrival. Fred came along a year later. With her bulky Brownie box camera, Mother filled three bulging baby albums with photos of the growing Hitcherson clan, preserving us in all our innocent vulgarity

Keeping the relationship between bliss and ignorance firmly in mind, the photographic evidence seems to indicate that our lives were fairly peachy for a while. Father looks to be all smiles risking his life testing new aircraft technology while Mother looks delighted to be the dashing wife of a glamorous test pilot and the devoted mother to three grubby military brats. On weekends, we piled in our puce Plymouth - a car the color of eggplant - and sped off to the beach, to Mount Cucamonga, to La Brea tar pits, to Death Valley, to Yosemite.

I have no memory of any of it, except for a single fuzzy recollection of the neighbor’s Great Dane making a snack of our first kitten.

My mind was pretty much a blank slate until Father’s luck ran out.

Bradycardia, the flight surgeons broke the news at his annual physical, means you have a slow heartbeat. Idiopathic, they added facetiously, means we're idiots because we can't figure out why."

And just like that, corroborating Freud’s theory that a child’s memories begin with a tragic event, mine were kick-started when America’s thirty-fourth or forty-third leading ace found himself grounded for a bum heart.

If you stick around, sweetie, I think you’ll agree that the Supreme Being got off one jim-dandy of a practical joke that day. Never mind that His dupe was in no position to appreciate the gag. It was a class-A beaut on a scale you’ll be able to appreciate shortly, trust me. Because no sooner was Papa’s sustaining image of himself as a fearless warrior yanked out from under him than he came fluttering home carrying a case of Old Crow under each clipped wing and, clinking his way back to his den, holed up there for the next six months and did nothing but guzzle quart after quart of cheap whiskey for the express purpose of drinking himself to death.

At the risk of getting ahead of myself, I’m going to tell you now that I wish he’d succeeded. Sad as it would have made me feel at the time, given my knowledge of the horrors to follow, it’s my opinion that Papa’s death at that early date would have been a blessing to us all. Because it’s never pretty what a professional fighting man will do when threatened by that first terrifying glimpse of himself for the vassal he really is.

In the early stages of his binge, Mother did her best to comfort him. But he was beyond consoling. He just needed time, she reasoned, to get the misery out of his system, and except for tapping at the locked door and announcing mealtimes, she let him be. But as his bender lengthened, her anxiety increased. And as the days turned into weeks, her knock at mealtimes grew louder. Then she began to pound.

As the weeks stretched into months, she started pleading with him to think of his family. And when her only answer was the sound of bottles crashing against the other side of the door, we’d see her come away bent with worry and wearing a hunted look.

Desperation led her to sandbag Father’s colleagues at the front door. Luring them to the kitchen with the promise of cake and coffee and the sight of her in a low-cut frock, she begged them to quit dropping off more booze when Father ran dry.

A few would comply, but she could never entirely cut off his supply lines. These were young warriors, after all, test pilots for whom it was contrary to their rough-and-tumble image of themselves to take a homebody’s side in any dispute, no matter how well she filled out a sundress in all the right places. The more docile among them might be talked into getting their updates over crullers and cleavage and one or two might even go so far as to remind Father that he had a family to provide for, but none would argue her case with any enthusiasm.

After I got a little older, I sometimes wondered if the support they lent to Father’s self-destructive goal may have come from a desire to free up a juicy tidbit like Mother, in the romantic tradition of Ulysses and Penelope. But today I’m pretty sure that even if a wish to boff DeeDee was a factor, their behavior revolved mostly around every warrior’s determination to put his servitude in the best possible light. I mean what combat pilot wouldn’t prefer to drink a tragic goodbye to the flightless bird the flock is preparing to leave behind rather than blow raspberries at his profession by shrugging his shoulders and saying, Aw, hell, brother, it’s no big deal. Go be an office-drudge. We’re all sucking master’s cock one way or another.

Please have a sip of wine, won’t you, Ike, and lose that disapproving look? In vino veritas, what? Would you prefer something harder? Brandy? Scotch? Framboise? Or something lighter? Beer? Cider? Shandygaff? You really mean to dharna your way through this interview then? You know it’s bad form to come sashaying into a person’s garden demanding the truth, only to scowl so when you get what you came for.

As the months stacked up and the crippled bird of prey kept drinking himself into a succession of blackouts, Mother got in the habit of tiptoeing around to the den window where, with the aid of a step stool, she’d peek in and count the empties which slowly covered the floor and began rising like flood water. We’d hear her on the phone afterwards giving anxious updates to friends and relatives.

That went on for six straight months. It was a marathon binge that would have killed a less extraordinarily fit man. But when the time came for Papa’s follow-up physical, he was still clinging to life by a thread.

My first clear recollection of anything was of Mother chauffeuring Father to the hospital. After a diet of nothing but booze for a half a year, his sense of balance was completely anesthetized, and he kept tipping back and forth through the turns like a giant metronome. The momentum of every right turn sent him falling over onto Mother’s shoulder until she centered him, and the momentum of every left turn sent him falling over against the passenger door, until she centered him again. I was four and too young to appreciate the financial peril we were in, so I giggled with every sweep of the metronome’s sluggish pendulum.

Flanking the entrance to the hospital, two orderlies flicked their cigarettes into the shrubbery and came forward to pluck the pickled patriarch from the car. One to an arm, they hauled him up the steps and bid us wait in the lobby as they had some sport walking the soused officer into the walls on their way back to the examining room.

A few minutes later we heard the first in a series of Papa’s celebratory shouts echoing up the hallway. They would multiply over the course of the afternoon as more and more doctors were called on to confirm a startling new development. Several of the doctors would come bustling out to the waiting room looking buffaloed and ask a question of Mother before scurrying back down the hall to summon another specialist to offer another opinion.

The phenomenon baffling them was the sound of Father’s heart, which was inexplicably pumping away under their stethoscopes at the normal rate of seventy beats per minute. The disappearance of his bradycardia unleashed a storm of bewilderment that continued to gather momentum until every doctor in the hospital was either milling around the patient’s bed or clogging up the corridor outside his room, discussing his case. The uproar would continue right up to the time their shift ended. Then, as quickly as it began, the din subsided. Before going home, the idiots had reached a consensus. Papa’s bradycardia, they announced, had miraculously cleared up, leaving them no choice but to reinstate his flight status.

And the re-fledged birdman came lurching out into the lobby a moment later, hollering, HALLELUJAH!

It's all there in the medical records, baby, minus a brush stroke or two of hyperbole I may have added for the sake of top-notch storytelling.

Poor Papa’s recovery came as a welcome reprieve for the whole family. Volant once more, he swallowed his first solid food in months, and after a few sauce-free days, with his equilibrium restored, he resumed his test-flight duties and our lives returned to normal. Fate had frowned for a moment, but now things were peachy again and the whole family breathed a big sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, on returning to his former high-flying days, the big lug made the mistake of returning to his old exercise regimen as well - a vigorous program of weight-training and roadwork, together with boxing and handball in his off-hours. And this passion for strenuous physical activity led directly, six months later, to the identical disaster.

Who’d have thunk it, pasty-face, as the virile young aviator strode back to the examining room for his next regular physical, having just recaptured his standing as the best handballer on the base and feeling in the best shape of his life, that he would flunk his exam flat? But the proof was in the numbers. Under the doctors’ many stethoscopes, the patient’s heart was plodding away at the substandard rate of forty beats per minute. His idiopathic bradycardia was back.

The idiots all gasped in amazement and stroked their chins and called for more tests, the results of which only mystified them further until their shift was about to end and they grounded Father a second time.

The second time he was grounded, the brass hats cushioned the blow by promoting poor Daddums to light colonel and posting him to the Pentagon. A plum assignment I’m told for officers with administrative ambitions, but the executive life held no appeal for Pop.

I remember the house we rented in suburban Falls Church came with a big backyard which I promptly set fire to, prior to coaxing Freddy to hotfoot it through the blaze. In addition to scorching his feet, the experience led to the onset of his asthma, a condition which I think I apprised you of? Give me a nod on that one, if you wouldn’t mind, Corky. Thank you.

Father’s new assignment proved a trying time for the whole family. Frank's efforts to deal with the upheaval led him to seek relief by rubbing peanut butter in his eyes. A perfectly nutty thing to do in my opinion. I mean a certain amount of wincing at life’s horror is understandable, but personally I like to keep my eyes skinned as much as possible no matter how unwonderful it gets, ready to duck and dodge as many of fortune’s slings and arrows as I can - as well as all those fardles fate would have us bear. But there's no accounting for the different ways people deal with humiliation. Consider the case of Sartre who famously said Man makes himself, meaning each of us is granted the freedom and responsibility for coming up with his own way of dealing with life’s humiliations, and then he chose to go blind in his waning years.

Between Frank’s self-inflicted blindness and Freddy’s sister-inflicted scalded feet and respiratory issues, Mother had plenty of opportunity to visit with Papa at Walter Reed where he was confined for a whole month getting his bradycardia looked into.

From a diagnostician’s point of view, his case was a rare gem. Specialists from every medical field and every branch of the service were called in to take a crack at explaining why his unexplained bradycardia kept unexplainably coming and going. Pathologists, aeroneurologists, symptomatologists with diplomas from the best schools in the land eagerly lined up, ready to subject the defective pilot to endless batteries of tests and countless hours of consultation as, one by one, they checked him out from head to toe and came up empty.

The whole time, Papa, who felt perfectly fine because he was perfectly fine, complained bitterly. Hell, if it’s a fast heartbeat you sawbones want, he groused, tired of lying around all day brimming with unnatural good health, you should've been in the goddamn cockpit with me when I was doing aerial tangos with Hitler's goddamn One-Nineties! But now that people aren't shooting at me from every goddamn direction, it suddenly occurs to you geniuses to take a keen interest in my goddamn health! It's goddamn asinine! he glowered at the physicians who, to a man, crooned a sympathetic chorus of assent.

In fairness, the second time he was sidelined, he did his best to adjust to life as a noncombatant. He made a concerted effort to think well of himself as a general's aide. But as a former combat pilot, accustomed to regarding anyone who did anything less nervy as a stodgy figure of fun, his self-opinion – and consequently his drinking – grew steadily worse. Until he finally keeled over in self-disgust one day and came home around noon with a case of Old Crow tucked up under each arm and announced with bleak dignity, !I’ve opened my last goddamn door for my last goddamn West Point hippopotam-ass."

And having delivered those fighting words of utter capitulation, he proceeded to clink his way down to the wet bar in our basement where for the next six months he never remained conscious longer than it took him to drink himself unconscious again.

On the subject of a combat pilot’s compelling need to fly, sweetie, allow me to state categorically that it had nothing to do with such valiant concepts as patriotism or duty or any of those abstruse theories about adrenaline rushes or harboring some secret death wish or any of the rest of that foolishness about feeding some addiction to living on the edge which the majority of excitement-starved slaves can’t seem to get enough of. Stripped of all such grandiose posturing and mystical malarky, what combat flying actually meant to my old man was a way of dealing with the shame he felt over knuckling under to the people he was afraid to defy. Bluntly put, that’s the essence of all derring-do.

Yes, hon. Poor Daddums risked his life up in the air to ease his feelings of cowardice over all the insults he left unanswered on the ground. If the unromantic truth be told, that’s the whole pork and poultry of all professional soldiering right down through the ages.

I mean no one hates his cowardice more than a manly man-at-arms, which is why they find it useful to define courage in strictly physical terms, so they can try to prove how fearless they are by killing and dying for the powerful people they don’t dare to disobey.

Feel free to call that dime-store psychology, muffin, if it helps you feel better about your own behavior. But no matter how self-unaware Papa strove to make himself, the man knew in his heart just how far he had his head stuck up the ass of the ruling class. Which is why, keeping his rivals manageable, he was aching to stomp the stew out of every superior officer he boldly served. And why, minus test-piloting as a way to salve his ego, he quickly filled up with self-loathing and hit the bottle again, choosing death by alcohol to consciousness of his servitude.

His second reprieve came six months later. On the appointed day for his follow-up exam we all gathered round the basement door to watch him crawl up the stairs on his hands and knees, trembling like a newly hatched squab. He lost control of his neck muscles at one point, causing his head to drop against an oaken stair-tread, leaving a bloody gash over one eye.

He repeated the metronome gag on the way to the hospital, and shortly after staggering back to the examining room, he delivered another jaw-dropping jolt to the medical community by passing his flight physical with flying colors.

Despite being barely able to stand up – or more to the point, because he was barely able to stand up – his heart was back to pumping away at the prescribed seventy beats a minute.

Every bit as idiotic as the doctors at Muroc, the doctors at Walter Reed came from every wing of the hospital to monitor the patient’s by now famously unpredictable heart. They congregated in knots of two or more according to their specialties, and quickly filled up the examining room and were milling around outside in the hallway, discussing his symptoms.

As best they could figure, the cure was to squat in one place for six months at a stretch, doing nothing but swilling cheap whiskey. Period. Because that’s the sum total of what Papa did every time he was grounded.

And so the great cosmic joke – if you’re picking up on the rhythm here – repeated itself. By day’s end, Fate's plaything left the hospital jubilant once more, his combat status restored. He was reassigned to Edwards – Muroc ‘s new name – with a clean bill of health, where his old flying buddies welcomed him back in the flock with open wings and our lives were peachy again for the next six months. Until he tanked his physical a third time.

Three times it happened in all. Three times, Kismet LOLed when it grounded our poor father for being TFTF – too fit to fly.

And therein lies the punchline to this drawn-out joke, sugar. Because twenty years later, medical studies conducted on long-distance runners would prove that bradycardia is a common sign of exceedingly good health in well-conditioned athletes.

Let me repeat that in case you missed it, dear. Your colleagues, operating within the canons of the day, ended up grounding our father not once, not twice, but three separate times for being too fit to fly. As I say, it’s in the medical records, tumblebug. Un-deux-trois - three separate and distinct times, they showed they were bigger idiots than they thought - and not merely in jest - by grounding our overhealthy father for being too fit to fly.

Each time it happened it threw our mother into a white-knuckled panic, wondering how she would keep her family afloat should God’s favorite patsy drink himself to death. Or, what loomed as the more likely possibility, given how preposterously fit the chronic washout was, into a discharge.

We were back in D.C. the third time his illness disappeared. The dealated schnook was six months into another suicidal drunk by then, preferring suicide to toad-eating. I remember the spilt-level brick home we were renting in Maryland had a big floor furnace which I enticed little bubba to walk barefoot over – the poor thing’s second fire-walking experience. Frank had stopped rubbing peanut butter in his eyes by