Success or Suicide

By Vance Cunningham

This is the story of Vances drinking years and how he dealt with the underlying causes, the sex, gambling, suicidal impulses and compulsive change of circumstance that ruled him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 11, 2007
• ISBN: 9781465326508

Vance Cunningham

Vance Cunningham needed to fit in. More than anything, he wanted to blend in and go unnoticed with the ebb and flow of humanity’s tide. For his first thirty-three years, compulsions disabled this ordinary life. This is the story of those obsessive years and how he lived with the overwhelming urges of alcohol, sex, gambling and change of location.

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CHAPTER 1

My mother, Florence Eleanor Fife, was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1904. Conceived out of wedlock, she was resented by her father who blamed her for a marriage he didn’t want. Despite that, her mother bore him three more children, all boys.

While helping her mother raise the three boys, Florence studied the violin and became good enough to receive an invitation to join the Boston Symphony Orchestra. At sixteen, she became the subject of a prizewinning portrait by Avedis Apegian, the twenty-year-old director of the Fitchburg School of Art, with whom she had a love affair. When her father discovered the relationship, Apegian promptly moved to Boston where he accepted a faculty position at the New School of Design; and Jesse, her father, moved his family to New York City. Florence never saw Avedis again.

In New York, Jesse (my grandfather) found work in the electronics industry. He later became associated with the Manhattan Project, probably the only alcoholic wife beater to work on nuclear fission. Florence gave up the violin but continued to help her three brothers. She gradually came to feel trapped within the family and by the constraints of a society, which proclaimed that women should keep silent and stay at home and bear children. She adopted role models like Amelia Earhart, Pearl Buck, Mme Chiang Kai-shek, and, later, Eleanor Roosevelt—all women who rejected the female stereotypes of their day.

She enrolled in Columbia University and became active in show business as a dancer. In 1927, desperate to get away from home, she married an older man named Harold Luckey who was a very sick patient in a tuberculosis hospital in Saranac Lake. Luckey died a few months later. For more than thirty years, she kept this first marriage a secret. I discovered it while exploring some old family documents, immediately suspecting that Luckey might be my real father since I bore so little resemblance to my apparent father. But Mother assured me that her first marriage was made to get away from home and that it was never consummated. After all these years, I still wonder sometimes whose genes I’ve got.

When Florence met Walter (my father), she must have sensed a new freedom. Dad recognized no authority, cut parental ties, resigned from West Point, developed amnesia just before his wedding date (I think I’ve got that gene), and was discovered in a Cleveland, Ohio, hospital. Mother had found her mission in life. With her, Dad became relatively normal. She became his mother as well as his wife. They were married December 14, 1929.

Thus begins my life.

The following information is from the files of the Bureau of Vital Records, Department of Health, City of New York:

Date of Birth: September 18, 1930    Certificate No.: 29873

Borough: Manhattan    Date Filed: 09-30-30

Name: Walter Vance Cunningham    Sex: Male

Mother’s Maiden Name: Florence    Fife Father’s Name: Walter Vance Cunningham

The certificate bearing the above facts was signed by Earline Price, city registrar.

The name of the place at the time of the above occurrence was Sloane Hospital for the Poor. It was (and remains to this day) an enormous concrete edifice lying between Riverside Drive and Broadway in upper Manhattan, within sight of the George Washington Bridge. There is, among my mother’s personal effects, a small yellowed envelope from Dennis Flower Shop, Broadway at Ninety-second Street, New York City. The handwritten address is to Mrs. Walter V. Cunningham, Sloane’s Maternity Medical Centre, 168 Street and Broadway. At the bottom, it says Card Enclosed. Inside this envelope, the dried and brittle remains of a red rose that blossomed in 1930 remind me that someone, probably my father, sent flowers to the new bride and mother. (I do not recall sending flowers to my own wife when she bore my daughter about twenty-eight years later.)

I was born in Manhattan because that was where my mother’s parents lived. Father’s parents lived in Texas and weren’t interested.

My parents were both twenty-six years old at the time of my birth. Father tended to be unemployed, and they often relied on the largesse of Mother’s relatives. This was the first year of the longest depression in U.S. history.

I was breast-fed for a short while, then weaned and toilet trained within six months. Mother would later tell friends that she studied psychology at Columbia University and applied Freudian principles to my early training. Both my parents were attractive and intelligent, so I lucked out genetically on those traits. But I got some bad ones as well; for example, a predisposition to obsessive-compulsive behavior. My mother, grandmother, and great-aunt doted on me—I was spoiled probably from the very beginning.

The false planet Pluto was discovered in 1930. Herbert Hoover was president. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was being widely read. (Hemingway was my favorite author for a long while, being replaced by Aldous Huxley when I was in my twenties.)

Times were hard. The depression deepened. But I knew nothing of want. Cuddled and coddled as the third grandchild of my maternal grandparents, I spent more time with them than either of my cousins because my parents never had enough money to pay regular rent. When the rent came due, we moved, and I was invariably shipped off to Grandma Nana’s. My father once told me that we moved constantly when he was out of work, always staying within Manhattan, near Grandma. There is a three-by-five-inch card bearing my mother’s name as a student enrolled in Parents Course 109 of Columbia University in the city of New York for the spring session 1931-1932. Her address is 633 Amsterdam Avenue. This was my first home after being born at Sloane Hospital.

I was walking and talking by my first birthday, a kind of showcase for my mother. Mother believed in women’s fulfillment but recognized the need of my father to feel like the head of the family (even if he wasn’t). So she sublimated much of her desire for achievement and recognition through me, her firstborn son. The dominance of this unexpressed trait had caused me trouble all my life. I’ve always found a way to avoid worldly achievement. Perhaps I developed an unconscious hatred of my mother (for overwhelming my tiny personality) such that avoiding her desire for my success became my way of striking back. If this is true, it might also be true that any real achievement by me would tend to bring to life her controlling impulses now dormant within me. My unconscious views this as personality suicide and resists it fearfully.

The solution to this dilemma must come from a higher power, the true source of any success. Of course, this means the achievement aspect of the internalized mother must die (the higher power gets all the credit), and who can resist murdering his mother? Until I left my own children with my mother for several weeks when they were about five and seven years old, I didn’t have a clue as to how absolutely controlling and dominant she was. If she was that way with her grandchildren, I thought of how much greater must her imposition of traits had been on me, the greatest hope for her frustrated ambitions.

Prohibition was in effect. Dad once told me that he drove a bootleg liquor truck for Al Capone, who was sentenced to prison for income tax evasion in 1931. Both my parents stretched the truth though when it came to appearances or to, in Dad’s case, macho ego. For example, they implied for years that Dad had almost finished West Point but had to quit when he married Mother. I discovered the truth while sorting through Mother’s files after her death. Dad was at West Point for just a few weeks; he quit because he hated the discipline.

Mother always felt compelled to put a good face on less-than-praiseworthy situations for her family members. Recognition, rather than true achievement, was everything.

One of my earliest memories occurred in an apartment on Morningside Drive. My parents were playing bridge, their favorite pastime. I crawled underneath the bridge table and stood up, hitting my head. I started to bawl loudly. The man brought water cupped in his large hands, and my mother dabbed at the small cut on my head. (Where was my father?) The vision of those cupped hands, representing help, has stayed with me. When I stopped crying, Mother carried me to the window and tucked me into a comfortable small space out there under the stars. We lived in an upper floor, and for years, I had the impression of being placed in a sort of window box suspended precariously in space. I could hear the murmur of the bridge players, however, and felt secure enough at the time. I was soon asleep. Remembering the incident many years later, I believe my box or crib was in the fire escape.

My parents played bridge regularly in New York but must have gotten away from it when they moved to the Pittsburgh area. They left their bridge partners behind and didn’t acquire new ones. Reflecting on this, it would be easy to believe that my dad moved away from New York as much to get away from Mother’s relatives as to work in the steel mills. He once told me that he gave up trying to discipline me since I was so spoiled by the New York matriarchy. He stated that he was able to bring some discipline to my brother, Ted. I’m not sure what he meant by discipline although as far as I can remember, he certainly was not physically abusive to me.

Until we moved to Pennsylvania (when I was seven years old), I knew little of the impact of the Great Depression. I felt surrounded by and immersed in soft love. My brother, Theodore Herbert, was born on October 15, 1932. His middle name came by way of Herbert Strickland, a bridge friend of my parents. Mother’s address book listing Ted’s birth information gives her address as 101 West Ninety-fourth Street. I believe this to be the address of Nana and Pop, my grandparents, and it was probably written down before Mother married Dad. (I dreamed my parents were building an addition to a large and beautiful house. Suddenly, they stopped and focused their attention elsewhere, building something else. They continued with the addition to the first house but with much less attention.) I felt abandoned. I believe this dream reflects my feelings at the time Brother Ted was born. They continued attending to me, but I no longer received all their interest.

In October 1933, Mother received a notice that Dad was being held in the psychopathic ward of Bellevue Hospital. Did she arrange for his release? What was his diagnosis? What were the circumstances? We’ll never know. He wasn’t a drunk or a druggie. We do know that he claimed to experience a bout of amnesia before he was married. I suspect that this was a reoccurrence of that amnesia. But how does one go about getting himself picked up and put in the psycho ward for amnesia? There must be a certain amount of deliberation in it. Ted had been born a year earlier, just after my second birthday. Here was Dad—two infants and a wife and no job. I probably would have developed amnesia too.

During these times and for the next several years, he must have spent most of his energy trying to overcome his severe mental and emotional problems. As far as I know, he did not return again to the Bellevue psychopathic ward. He developed a habit of constantly searching the classified ads for work. Years later, even when he had a good job, his compulsion was to open the paper and become absorbed in the jobs available section.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932. Until he died, still president in 1945, the word Roosevelt was synonymous with the word president for many of us born in the early 1930s. I caught a glimpse of him once in 1940, sitting in the backseat of a black limo as he campaigned in Pittsburgh. My parents voted for Wendell Willkie, but FDR was reelected to a third term in 1940.

One memory from the early 1930s is that of living in an apartment over a dry cleaning shop on Ninety-fourth Street. The elevated train rumbled over the street nearby, and people sold their goods from pushcarts in the shadows of those tracks. It was in this apartment that my mother pointed to a coconut sitting atop our icebox. It was her only birthday gift, she said. I wondered how anyone could be satisfied with a mere coconut for a birthday present and hoped I would do better on my third birthday. I did.

Dad looked for work in New York but was unable to find anything steady besides the WPA. Maybe his dislike of his new in-laws had something to do with it. He did work intermittently at jobs out of town, especially in the mills of Pennsylvania. Mother tinted photos and also worked as a manicurist. Years later, she demonstrated on my own nails how she did it; and whenever I file my fingernails, I recall her sessions with me on how to manicure your fingernails correctly. The truth is I don’t give much of a damn about how finely my fingers are manicured; but I am, somehow, always reminded of her when I do it. In the same way, I am reminded of my dad when I start a game of chess because he taught me those opening moves. My parents did not make enough money for us to be independent; we continued to rely on Mother’s relatives for our intermittent care.

In 1934, I became aware of a larger world. I heard my mother and others talk of the Dionne quintuplets, born this year in Canada. I began to hear talk of a depression, of politics, of the WPA. I was well cared for despite the general poverty. During these years in New York, we never lived far from my mother’s parents. When my own parents were broke and out of rent money, Mother moved in with Nana, her mother, while Dad took off to find work.

Sometimes, the relatives, usually our grandparents, keep Ted and me for a few days or weeks at a time. During one of these times, I scribbled on a heart-shaped cutout; on the back of it was Mother’s handwriting: 1934. Vance to His Mommy (Age Four Years). It contains a small pencil drawing of me by my mother, but I was no longer the sole focus of her life; now there was brother Ted. The slack was taken up as usual by Nana and Ninie (her sister, pronounced nigh-knee). Dad is not in the picture.

These years devastated any idealistic dream my parents may have entertained. With unremitting poverty in the face of the needs of two newborn children, Dad, withdrawn and solitary, was pushed even further into himself by the national depression. Sometimes, I wonder how he survived. I think part of the justification for not committing suicide was his conception of a moral obligation to support his wife and children.

CHAPTER 2

In the throes of the Great Depression, I turned four years of age. I was walking, talking, reading, and beginning to draw and make letters—totally unaware of any deprivation. I was used to sharing the bed with my two cousins and brother. All families on our fifth-floor brownstone walk-up share the bathroom. I took these conditions for granted. Mother put me in a prekindergarten class. Above all, she wants my education, wants me to achieve. Together, we climbed to the Statue of Liberty’s crown and to the top of the Empire State Building. She took me to the museum where we gazed in awe at the huge dinosaur skeleton. I was a bright student, eager to exhibit my knowledge. This trait persists. (Perhaps that’s why I came to enjoy teaching.) Mother read to me regularly from books like The Story of Babar and Rumpelstiltskin. She also played classical music on the windup Victrola while explaining its meaning to me. The Death of Ase from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite no. 1 brought tears to my eyes, and Mother comforted me. It was my first encounter with classical music. Porgy and Bess opened at Times Square. Later, I ranked it as my favorite American opera.

In 1936, FDR started his second term and got the Social Security Act started. Published that year were Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Prohibition was over, and I sipped my first beer. It happened while I was visiting Uncle Gerald’s house. I didn’t like the taste. In fifteen years, I’d be drinking alcoholically. Cousin Jack taught me how to play stickball. Among other things, Cousin Leota taught me how to play hopscotch. Mother received a letter from the new Teachers College of Columbia University regarding their occupancy of an apartment, presumably the one being vacated by Mother who planned to move. The apartment is to be occupied by the new college neighborhood kindergarten for four-year-olds who came from the emergency nursery schools in which I have apparently been a student.

The memory of love, love piled on like blankets in sultry weather, must bring to mind my great-aunt Nellie. Brother Ted and I knew her only as Ninie. Her husband, Joe, died in 1936. My grandmother’s sister spared no effort and left no stone unturned in her slavish efforts to please her Vancie. Ninie worked as a housekeeper and lived on the second floor of a brownstone walk-up. She had no children of her own. She walked with one stiff leg, unable to bend it at the knee.

While visiting Ninie, I wrote letters to Mother, who preserved some of them. I still have one or two of those little scribbles. Childless, Ninie must have lavished a lifetime’s longing into those more or less regular days we spent together. The bountiful meals of chicken and mashed potatoes—cooked to a delicate, almost unchewable perfection—were followed by mountains of ice cream or any other dessert my heart desired. The precious horde of five or six dimes, saved at God knows what cost in those days, poured into my eager small palm at each visit. Once, not two or three blocks from my grandmother Nana’s house to which Ninie was returning me, I complained idly of an upset stomach. Over my insistence that it was nothing, she hailed a cab. The cabbie refused the regular fare, accepting instead a penny or two proffered from a bony red hand—the gnarled evidence that we weren’t the type that hired cabs for the distance of a few blocks.

In an effort to focus on my kaleidoscopic world and relate myself to the immediate environment, I developed a fear of the new and unfamiliar. Coupled with flagging discipline, this fear expressed itself in open rebellion. My introduction to the first grade teacher ended abruptly with a violent kick to her shins. Through rivers of tears, I forced my patient mother to accompany me to class, sitting nearby for hours until she was able to steal away softly, unnoticed. By dint of special effort, my mother had managed to get my brother and me into some sort of highly recommended posture clinic, only to be confronted by the spectacle of her children quaking with fear at the thought of being stripped to the waist while strange hands molded their little round shoulders, hiding in a dark narrow crevice behind a huge mirror and absolutely refusing to come out.

In the first grade, Mother used to meet me after school and take me home on the streetcar. One cold rainy day, when she wasn’t at the appointed corner, I undertook to walk the distance to Nana’s. Little did I guess of my mother’s frantic calls to the police, the streetcar company, the hospitals—even the morgue. (She must have learned thoroughness in the days of search for my amnesia-stricken father). Walking unconcernedly through the downpour, I arrived at Nana’s in the early darkness, cold and dripping wet. There followed a solicitous drying and tucking into a warm bed, propped up enough to consume quantities of hot cocoa and sandwiches. My mother’s admonishment was weakened by relief, and for long afterward, the story of my exploit was told with much wonderment.

Nana, having raised four children of her own, invoked a more experienced love than either Ninie or my mother. Still, her watchfulness, divided among three or four of us grandchildren, was spread a little too thinly to prevent our getting into all sorts of mischief. One of her lax spells found me kneeling at the living room window, where I proceeded to discharge an alarming number of items to the street six floors below. Not the least of these was a long strip of bathroom tissue, which, floating majestically downward, came to rest directly on top of an opened umbrella. Under the umbrella, taking advantage of the light drizzle, a young couple huddled lovingly. I still reflect with amusement that a more unseemly article could not have been chosen to dangle suddenly before their startled and indignant eyes. It turned out to be my last adventure from the window. The couple, crossing the street to where a policeman stood, pointed to the window; and the trio, looking up, must have laughed to see the small anxious thatch of hair immobile with fear. The blue-uniformed figure of justice turned ominously to his police call box and, lifting the receiver, began to dial what must seem to be the whole riot squad. He glanced every few seconds at the sixth-floor window, and suddenly, that tiny head was gone. Sick with apprehension, I had raced to Nana’s bedroom and changed to my flannel pajamas. Crawling into the darkness between the blankets, I contemplated my alibi. I would be sick. I concentrated on getting sick so they could see I couldn’t have been out of bed. I fell