Walking with Moonshine: My Life in Stories

By Lucy Daniels

Praise for Walking with Moonshine This series of linked stories traces the journey of a sensitive child, then hospital-traumatized adolescent and young adult, who emerged, after psychoanalysis, as a brave young woman. This book is the inspiring story of how that woman ?nally realized her creative potential and found her own voice. Gilbert J. Rose, MD Psychoanalyst and author of Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art In Walking with Moonshine, revered therapist and writer Lucy Daniels writes: Aging is like dreaming. In both, you keep going back to places you know from the past and have to struggle with the feelings that journey evokes. Jill McCorkle Author of Life After Life From her vantage as a psychotherapist, Lucy Daniels looks back on a rich and varied life. This collection speaks to a wide experience of life and a wisdom borne of no little su?ering. David Payne Author of Back to Wando Passo Lucy Daniels is a writer whose exceptional life experiences join seamlessly with her insightful stories to give us a multilayered view of the interaction of art and life. Helene Brandt, Artist Dr. Daniels has crafted extraordinary stories of complex and creative lives. This book is inspiring reading for anyone interested in lifes struggles and redemption. Charles C. Bergman Chairman of the Board of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491701508

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WALKING WITH MOONSHINE:

MY LIFE IN STORIES

LUCY DANIELS

iUniverse LLC

Bloomington

WALKING WITH MOONSHINE: MY LIFE IN STORIES

Copyright © 2013, 2014 LUCY DANIELS.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-0148-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-0149-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-0150-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013913686

iUniverse rev. date: 02/10/2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Note to the Reader

Sentenced to Writing

Golden Wedding

Good-bye, Bobbie

Legacy

Christmas Journey

Half a Lavender Ribbon

Blackout In Prince Edward County

Crazy

Christmas Cake

Heartless

The Price

Virtuoso

Double Vision

Leftovers

Freedom’s Price

On the Way to Salvation

Walking with Moonshine

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Writing and Publication History

I dedicate this book to my wise and challenging children: Patrick, Lucy, Jonathan and Benjamin Inman. And to my grandchildren: Will, Lucy Rae, Isabel, Ezra, Kathryn, Jesse, Anna, and Sadie.

A NOTE TO THE READER

Presenting stories that deal with connections between my life and my writing inevitably brings up many people associated with me at different periods. The identities of some, such as people with whom I was hospitalized and patients in my practice, I consider it unethical to reveal. Other identities I’ve simply thought it wise to conceal. Where patients in my practice are mentioned, I refer to composites of experiences with several people. As a result, numerous names and identities in this book are fictional. My rule has been to eliminate, wherever possible, any pain from exposure. There are, however, people whose names could not be changed without adding a false note to these stories that I’ve valued for their genuineness: my sisters, for instance, cousins, children, grandchildren, and first husband (father of our children). I hope that telling these stories will not cause any hardship. Not writing them would have deprived me.

SENTENCED TO WRITING

Writing has been a significant presence in my life from the very beginning, but over the years our relationship has shifted dramatically. I learned about writing as a small child because our family owned and ran a major newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina. After writing editorials, my father spent all his spare hours writing books in our home library with my mother beside him re-typing his manuscripts. As a lonely cross-eyed preschooler locked outside that library in our walled garden, I was painfully exposed to the prestige and exclusivity of being a writer. On summer afternoons, when I could hear the typewriters through the open windows, if I went close enough to be seen, Father would yell at me to not disturb his work. Also, as one of four daughters in a family that accepted only male editors for our newspaper, I was desperate to find some way to overcome my worthlessness. And given how books and editorials contributed to the importance of Father and Grandfather, both at home and in the world, writing was clearly the most valuable course.

So I started and used my partnership with words to earn good grades in elementary school. But at fifteen, when Seventeen published my story Good-bye, Bobbie, that major success marked the first big shift in my relationship with writing. It triggered such extreme exacerbation of my already present anorexia nervosa that George School, the Quaker boarding school I attended, insisted I not return until my illness had been effectively treated.

Six years of isolation followed. During the first year, spent at home, I lost forty pounds until I weighed just under sixty. After that, I spent five years confined in mental institutions where I received radical treatments—ECT, insulin shock, and tube-feeding, but no psychotherapy. For the first two years I was so shocked out of my brain that I could not remember the start of a sentence as I read or tried to finish writing it. But after that, as my mind recovered, I became aware of my isolation—I was a young girl locked up with insane women, all at least thirty years my senior, with no therapist to talk to. Since there were no schools in mental hospitals, my parents paid for me to take correspondence courses in French and creative writing. Once I had completed them, I remembered it was writing that had once made a difference for me. It could no longer overcome my worthlessness. Nothing could. Yet in this wild place with no one to talk to, I thought it might help me maintain myself.

I began writing a novel. And when I had to go out to a day job, my doctor gave me permission to get up ninety minutes early each day to write before I left for work. I wrote just to have a companion to keep me alive, never expecting my words to be read. My subject was the conflict produced by the Brown decision in a black family like that of my kind childhood caretakers and my parents’ cook.

When I finally left the hospital and returned to Raleigh to try to pursue life as a high school dropout and ex-mental patient, I had to work at our family’s second paper, the Raleigh Times, because doctors at the University of North Carolina would not let me be accepted there unless I underwent psychoanalysis which my father would not let me have. While I was working at the paper, Father asked to read the novel I’d been writing in the hospital. To my surprise he praised it, and just a few months later it was published as Caleb My Son by J. B. Lippincott and became a best seller translated into several languages. On my way to the Today Show where I was a featured guest on the day of its publication, I was amazed to see Caleb hailed as the book of the day by reviewers in both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. Again, however, I could not accept writing success. I felt the book could not be as good as critics said or that if it was, I myself was not as good as the book. My father disagreed and urged me to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship. Then, of course, when I won that prestigious award, I had to write another book!

Writing again became a relatively comforting companion. But by then, I was married and busy, and halfway through that effort, I gave birth to a son. By the time that novel about a mental hospital was published, I had a daughter as well. High on a Hill, published by McGraw-Hill, was positively reviewed in several major newspapers, but it was not a best seller. As a result, I decided I was not a writer and would not try or pretend to be one anymore.

So I gave up writing and lived the best I could without it. I raised my four children and when my marriage was ending and I needed to be able to earn a living, I went to college and graduate school to become a psychologist. And ironically, it was becoming a psychologist that brought me back to the written word. You see, I felt I needed to undergo psychoanalysis (as recommended but denied me eighteen years earlier) in order to be a good psychologist. But the idea of returning to writing came in 1979, the fifth year of my analysis, when Dr. John Howie asked, What about your writing?

That made me mad. I told him I believed that giving up writing had been in my own best interest, as I was no longer willing to humiliate myself in order to please my parents. But as a result of Dr. Howie’s prodding, I did try writing again, and eventually made the discoveries that have illuminated my work as a writer and a therapist and led me to assemble this book of stories spanning my life. And there’s more as well. In 2002, I published my memoir, With a Woman’s Voice, and three years later The Eyes of the Father, my first novel in forty years, as well as Dreaming Your Way to Creative Freedom, a brief account of the psychological process needed to get beyond silence. Even more valuable than the publication of these books, however, are the personal discoveries I made while producing them. They include:

• The best way to write is the way I wrote Caleb My Son at age twenty, while a patient in a mental hospital. Not expecting it to be read, I let the story write itself. I just wrote down by hand what the story told me to write.

• What I’ve feared unconsciously all these years is SUCCESS, not writing. I’d learned at an early age that being valuable was something I did not deserve and was despicably greedy to seek. I’ve also harbored fear of my voice in general—of its being destructive when strong or humiliating when weak.

• The years when I abandoned writing and lived for myself and my children and my patients did not destroy writing for me. They just made me more separate from it by interrupting our association.

Now that we are back together, I hope this collection will reveal the greatest personal discovery of all—the important relationship between my life and my writing. They are now increasingly separate but equal. Neither looks to the other for value in the world. Yet the continuing interaction between the two enriches both, and makes them mutually inspiring.

And with me a practicing psychologist, this relationship has become even more complex. Of course, I do encounter story material in clinical hours. And while I’m conscience-bound not to use it, I’m sure that such experience enriches my imagination. Clinical exposure (as therapist, tester, professional colleague) has also made me aware of certain professional dilemmas that I want the world to know about. And fiction can help with that. Then, too, there’s the issue of how clients deal with me being a writer as well as a therapist. These and other themes flow through these stories.

But now, the publication of this collection, which freed my time and attention to work on new stories, has had dramatic effects on both myself and the writing. Before this, I regarded writing as a transitional process which enabled me to keep growing personally and in print as I left behind the confines of childhood abandonment, mental hospitals, and my return to the world as a ruined person. So, despite writing having remained an essential object for me most of my life, now, at seventy-nine, pursuing this relationship into old age has brought an amazing discovery. Our roles are reversed. As writing independently turns its products out, I (the psychologist? or thinker?) have become its assistant. And who knows? Certainly this growth process began with the writing of Caleb My Son in the mental hospital. But maybe I only discovered the true power of being separate while composing the final piece included here. I’ve chosen its title to name the collection, because Walking with Moonshine illustrates the strength possible when determination and creative luck bump into each other.

GOLDEN WEDDING

The dream pictured me at five holding Cleves as a newborn baby. Like the snapshot of us in the big horsehair rocker in Mommy’s and Father’s bedroom. My straw-colored hair was pulled to the sides in two ponytails the way Bea used to do it then. But unlike the snapshot, in the dream I was adult-sized and my snaggle-toothed grin had gone solemn. Also, inside me, the victorious thrill I’ve always associated with that memory of holding my baby sister had given way to sadness.

First word of the Golden Wedding came in early June 1938 when I was four years old. According to Bibba, my revered twelve-year-old half sister, Golden Wedding was like a birthday that meant Nanny and Grandfather had been married fifty years. Though I barely knew them because they had lived in Mexico most of my life, I did know that Nanny and Grandfather were very important. Whenever they came to Raleigh, their bleak stone house turned from empty to exciting with lots of company and Sunday dinners for the family. The Golden Wedding was scheduled for the following May and would be grander than any of their previous parties. Because, besides being an anniversary, it would celebrate Nanny’s and Grandfather’s returning to live in Raleigh permanently. And, as Bibba put it, after such a long time—fifty years was older than Mommy or Father—celebration was needed, because you never knew when someone might just up and die.

Our world in those days was insular but important. Although we knew that Grandfather, Josephus Daniels, was known all over the world as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the Navy and Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico, what mattered most to our family was Raleigh, North Carolina and the News and Observer, the liberal newspaper Grandfather had established in the 1890s and continued to publish, along with three of his four sons. My Uncle Worth, the next-to-oldest son, was a respected internist in Washington, D.C., where he lived with his wife and two sons. My father, Jonathan, served as editor while Grandfather was ambassador to Mexico from 1932 until shortly before World War II. Our house at 1540 Caswell Street, along with those of Father’s brothers, Frank and Josephus, Jr., formed a kind of compound adjacent to Nanny’s and Grandfather’s larger house which was called Wakestone. As a child, I associated their house’s name with its forbidding grandeur. I’d heard about wakes after people died, and I did not realize then that Wake was also the name of the county in which we lived. Meanwhile, our red brick house was sunny with the light from many windows, but, for some reason I could not comprehend, its back door, instead of its front one, faced the street. It was also surrounded by a high brick wall. Only much later did I come to understand that this seclusion and strange stance had to do with Mommy’s deliberate efforts to be superior in order to not feel common like our neighbors.

Father was, by far, the most important person in our immediate world. Even more than Grandfather. Besides writing editorials for the News and Observer, Father wrote books at home in the afternoons and kept Mommy busy re-typing them. I adored and admired Father and longed to find a way to be both like him and loved by him. Indeed, at an early age this became a driving force in my own strategies to matter. Our family viewed children as irritants—unruly creatures who cried, got dirty, said the wrong things, had to be kept out of trouble, and still usually wore grown-ups out. Furthermore, not one of the children in our household was a boy, the only kind of child that could grow up to be valuable. At twelve, Bibba was fat and pimply-faced and always at odds with Mommy. And Adelaide, twenty months my junior and the baby until Cleves’ birth, was so sickly and naughty that she took all our nurse Bea’s time and could never be put out in the yard to play with me. In this context, I labored long and hard over the dilemma of how to acquire love and status. My first effort—being deliberately naughty to rival Adelaide as baby—had ended quickly in response to Mommy’s, You’re too big to do that. Cut it out and act like the big girl you are. After that, being well-behaved and need-free so as to not set off parental explosions became my way of life. And eventually, alerted to the importance of boys, I settled into using my intelligence and obedient self-sufficiency to substitute for the smart son our parents obviously needed.

As a very little girl who could, nevertheless, be counted on to stay alone and take care of herself, I spent many hours confined to our walled yard. Despite the pain of this isolation, I would never have dared to leave that yard by myself. Bearing Mommy’s name and keeping myself good to appease her made me feel like a person others (most of whom, I believed, disliked Mommy) would reject. And Father, who enjoyed being excessive in ways that Mommy scolded, clearly considered my less obedient sisters—Bibba and Adelaide—both more adventurous and more lovable. Furthermore, my weird blue eyes which, even after surgeries, black eye patches, and daily exercises with Mommy’s slide box, still strayed in different directions, and upset strangers, kept me feeling ashamed and even more alone.

By the time I turned four, I knew that our daily regimen with the hand-held stereoscope was Mommy’s last hope of making me perfect. And recognizing her desperate need for my eyes to look normal, I was a most conscientious participant in trying to erase this personal perversity, even though I didn’t understand its cause. I strained to be right with each set of pictures, but had no way of knowing whether my eyes were focusing.

Stop it! Mommy would snap at me as we worked. Look at me straight!

Her dimple ticked angrily. So, though I didn’t know how to look straight, I did soon learn that when Mommy asked if I saw one thing or two, the right answer was one regardless.

Now, Lucy, look into the box and tell me what you see.

A house.

Just one?

Yes, ma’am, one.

Saying that always made peace. On the outside, that is. Mommy’s dimple would stop jutting in and out, and before long she would look composed and satisfied. By the time all the slides were run through, she’d be telling me how good I was and how hard I was trying. Inside, though, I felt empty and fake.

Controlling my tongue was another problem. Being both precociously verbal and a curious listener, I periodically heard surprising revelations, immediately followed by Don’t tell               ! And when I was too impulsive to obey the prohibition, my talking sometimes caused screaming explosions among the alienated factions in our household—Bibba, Mommy and the servants. It made me sad whenever Bea (our nurse) and Eunice (our cook) grew silent on my entering the kitchen, because I knew they jokingly called me the talker, as contrasted with baby Adelaide.

Despite these explosions, Mommy tried to keep life orderly within her house. There were well-known rules about who did what when and who was allowed in which rooms. The most sacred place was the library, where Father wrote with Mommy’s help every afternoon. The doors to the library were bolted when they worked, and children were not supposed to knock. In the summer, with the windows open (before there was air conditioning), I could hear my parents’ typewriters clicking from the yard. But I knew better than to go close enough for them to see me. That would make Father as mad as when I asked to go inside to urinate. Yet, while I had to stay in the yard alone, Bea kept Adelaide quiet and out of mischief inside.

Bibba, on the other hand, could come and go as she wished, as long as she got home in time for supper. Although she and Mommy were usually at odds, with Bibba the underdog and me feeling a gnawing need to reconcile them, Bibba had a street-smart substantialness that made her seem more effective than Mommy. I longed to be like her, and her angry confidence made me even more critical of my