Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading Read online

  “But—”

  I interrupted him and went on. “If you’ll tell me what time your train gets into Penn Station, I’ll get a redcap to take Karen into the baggage room. If you’ll just look at her for five minutes, that’s all I ask.”

  “But—”

  Again I interrupted. “Oh, Doctor, please. Just to tell me—shall we keep on looking or is it hopeless. Is it as they say?”

  There was a long pause. A life hung suspended in the silence, to be saved or shattered by his reply. “Dear God, make him say yes!”

  “Very well, Mrs. Killilea”—his voice was sweet—“bring her to the clinic tomorrow and we’ll see if we can’t fit her in.”11

  The next day, Dr. B, who turns out to be a decent man, gives Marie the verdict she’s been dreaming of through all those long, agonizing years: he tells her that Karen will need a lot of help but that she’s mentally fit and capable of learning to sit up, use her hands, and walk. For the remaining 250 pages of Karen, Marie provides a chronicle of the Killileas’ formidable physical-therapy routine with Karen, as well as their role in helping to found the United Cerebral Palsy Association in 1948.

  Adding to the appeal of Karen and its sequel are the ofttimes black-comic travails of the Killilea family (which, by the end of Karen, includes not only Karen herself, Marie and Jimmy, and older daughter Marie, but baby Rory and daughter Gloria, who was adopted as a teenager). But what really distinguishes Karen as a secular-saint story with a profane attitude is Marie’s fed-up narrative voice. I don’t want to take away from the personhood of the Killileas or their very real and inspiring struggles. So I’m not trying to diminish the Karen books or their subjects by suggesting that, in those memoirs, Marie zealously records the suffering of two martyrs, not one.

  Marie Killilea, like so many other mothers of seriously ill or handicapped children, lives out a particularly tortured version of the traditional female extreme adventure. As she chronicles in the Karen books, Marie wears herself out, physically and emotionally, in the quest to give her daughter a shot at life—initially, by finding competent medical care, and later through daily physical-therapy sessions and judicious applications of tough love to make sure that the maturing Karen doesn’t fall into the abyss of self-pity. Karen’s father, Jimmy, is a partner in this mission, but since he works “outside the home,” as we would say these days, he’s just not around that much. Of course, Marie works hard, too, but her work doesn’t come close to the utopian ideal concocted by socialist dreamer William Morris or feminist detective-fiction writers Sara Paretsky and Lisa Scottoline. Instead, the grueling demands of Marie’s role as mother to a handicapped child fit the traditional, prefeminist, and very Catholic idea of work as service to others. Her work doesn’t sustain her mentally or financially. Rather, it’s the work of writing the Karen books that fulfills those seditious functions.

  No wonder the nuns were so enthusiastic about the books. “Write on, sister!” some of them might well have whispered to Marie in their heart of hearts. For in their revision of the patriarchal spiritual script whereby good women simply serve and submit, Marie’s memoirs are as cagey as any of those nineteenth-century protofeminist challenges to Milton’s Paradise Lost that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar excavated in The Madwoman in the Attic. Like Emily Dickinson’s poems, Marie Killilea’s Karen books appear on the outside to be ladylike literary vessels—yet they are vessels that barely contain their witches’ brew of potent female ambition and rebellion. No, I don’t think that, like Dickinson, Marie Killilea is consciously subversive in her writing—not all the time. I do think, though, that even at her most innocent, she was exhausted and angry, particularly infuriated with all those sanctimonious male authority figures, the doctors and priests, who made pompous pronouncements about Karen and the other members of her family. That righteous fury—always, ostensibly, on behalf of others, of course— finds its outlet in her writing.

  The Karen books, functioning as they so powerfully do as testaments to the Killileas’ faith, also were a sanctioned way for Marie to bask in the spotlight through being of spiritual service to her readers. It’s a weird coincidence, by the way, that soon after the Killileas move to a new house in Larchmont, New York, at the beginning of With Love from Karen, their new next-door neighbors turn out to be Walter and Jean Kerr—he the famous New York Times drama critic and she the author of that family classic Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. The Kerrs, like the Killileas, were also Catholic, and Jean’s bestseller, though it’s much lighter in tone and subject than Marie’s memoirs, also takes advantage of the opportunity to write about a big, energy-sucking family as a way of drawing attention to a mother’s labors, self-sacrifice, and know-how. What were the odds of two Catholic author-mothers, living side by side, tending their brood by day and brooding over their subversive pages by night?

  What really distinguishes the Karen books from their literary neighbor, however, is their recognition of the very real existence of evil— a recognition that’s one of the enduring strengths of the two memoirs. Karen’s cerebral palsy is a heavy cross to bear, a tragedy that the Killileas’ mid-twentieth-century Catholicism interprets as a sign of God’s greater love for Karen. Marie chronicles the family’s struggles not just to win independence for the handicapped Karen but also to win Karen’s soul for God by arming her against the satanic siren calls of bitterness and self-pity. In an electrifying scene toward the end of Karen, Marie recalls her first confrontation, verbal and physical, with the demons that lie in wait for her young daughter. Karen and her friends are playing “doctor” in the nursery, and Marie momentarily leaves the room to answer the telephone. As she returns, she overhears Karen demanding that one of her playmates fetch something for her:

  I didn’t at all like her tone. As I walked into the room she said in a tone of revolting complacency, “You have to do it for me—I’m crippled.”

  Mama struck.

  Maybe it was good. Maybe it was bad. I still don’t know. But the action was a simple reflex. Eight years old and capitalizing on her handicap! I knew from harsh personal experience the abundant misery that stems from such a trick and I reacted as I would if I saw a black-widow spider crawling toward her—I’d crush it instantly.12

  You could imagine how that scene would play itself out today. Mom would remove her wayward child from the room for a “time-out” and lots of talk. But as rock-’em-sock-’em Marie endearingly admits, who knows what the best approach is? Slap! When a Catholic bishop administers the sacrament of confirmation to adolescent boys and girls, he slaps them on the cheek, signifying that they have become soldiers for Christ. Slap! When Marie delivered that blow to Karen, she was knocking into her small daughter not only some sense but also a sense of spiritual duty. The hands-on approach apparently succeeds: at the very beginning of With Love from Karen, Marie writes, with relief, that despite the then-twelve-year-old Karen’s many physical and emotional torments, “she never complained. A large statement—of a large truth.”13

  Not complaining is a redeeming virtue in the world of the Karen books, as it was in the Catholic world of my childhood. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” declaimed our nation’s first Catholic president, “but what you can do for your country.” JFK’s famous words were of a piece with the gospel of self-abnegation I would hear throughout my Catholic schooldays. The burdens that Marie and her family endure throughout the time span of the two memoirs range from the calamitous to the traumatic. So, what’s a good but overburdened Catholic mother to do if she can’t complain to her family and friends? One answer is to start writing memoirs.

  Marie always stresses the altruistic motives behind her autobiographical self-advertisement. In the foreword to With Love from Karen, she notes that the Killileas had received nearly thirty thousand letters thus far in response to Karen. Thus, she was called upon to write this sequel out of a sense of duty. Marie’s two-volume marathon litany of the Killilea family’s trials would be burdensome reading were it not, as I’ve s
aid, for her unusual narrative voice. As a martyr, Marie is wry rather than whiney, fuming rather than always forbearing. Here is a very partial list of the Job-like afflictions the Killileas weather through the course of the books: fourteen bouts of pneumonia endured by daughters Gloria and Marie; daughter Marie’s episodes of rheumatic fever and TB; Jimmy’s severe hearing loss; a persistent money shortage; Marie’s near-fatal allergic reaction to some sleep medication; and Marie’s chronic miscarriages and “secondary” infertility. (She and husband Jimmy have been trying for seven years to have a fourth child. Altogether, Marie tells us in With Love from Karen, she’s been pregnant eleven times.) Karen’s sufferings, which are the raison d’être of the books, include a series of tonsillitis attacks and ear infections, pressure sores from ill-fitting braces, excruciating muscle spasms, sleeplessness, two dislocated hips, hours of repetitive physical therapy every day, and unremitting thirst (her water intake eventually needs to be restricted to alleviate her spasticity).

  When the subject is the Killilea family’s troubles, Marie is unapologetic about demanding not only her readers’ attention but also God’s. After all, God, in the language and theology of pre–Vatican II Catholicism, is figured as male, and men, throughout the Karen books, tend to be a lot less focused than their female compatriots.

  Again, there’s a proper Catholic cover story that cloaks Marie’s paeans to female drive and competence, as well as her own frequent exasperation with male ineptitude. The flip side of the Catholic Church’s misogyny is its Mariolatry: the veneration of the Virgin Mary and, by extension, the idealization of all good Catholic women (particularly mothers) whose job it is to civilize and spiritualize their wayward men-folk. Marie is no ur–Betty Friedan: she doesn’t voice any explicit challenges to the patriarchy, spiritual or secular. The vision of women her books offer is somewhat empowering; but it’s also essentialist and, therefore, inadequate. There’s a subtext of grudging female strength that underlies the Karen books—a subtext whose theme could be summed up in the slogan “If you want the job done right, especially if it’s a dirty job, call in a woman.” Like Joan of Arc, Marie upholds the status quo, but armored and angry, she also clearly relishes doing battle with those male authorities who get in her way.

  That nervy phone call to Dr. B is fun to read, not only because it marks the happy turning point in Karen’s young life but also because Marie is acting like a tough broad and is obviously proud of herself for doing so. What makes the scene even more peculiar in terms of proper gender-role stereotyping is that Marie is wrestling with Dr. B all by herself. Husband Jimmy is flat on the mat, supine. A week earlier, he’d been rushed to the hospital with a ruptured appendix. His recovery, Marie tells her readers, was “unusually slow.”14 You get the sense that Marie thinks she herself would have been up and vacuuming again an hour after being stitched up. Her exasperation with Jimmy’s sluggishness becomes even more smilingly acid a page later when she recalls: “It was only a week before Christmas and we were involved in the welter of preparation peculiar to families with children. We were hoping that Jimmy would be home before Christmas, but the only thing we could count on him for was expert direction in the concoction of egg-nogs, from a horizontal position on the couch.” 15

  As the crucial moment of Karen’s examination and Dr. B’s pronouncement approaches, Jimmy’s absence—along with Marie’s super-woman self-reliance—is (always regretfully) underscored. To get to the appointment, Marie drives Karen through a dangerous sleet storm in a borrowed car with malfunctioning windshield wipers. “All nature,” she harrumphs, “appeared involved in a gigantic conspiracy to make my trip as unpleasant and hazardous as possible.”16 As she gamely steers the car through the ice, Marie prays and ruminates on the missing Jimmy, presumably safe and snug in his hospital bed. In the Karen books, Jimmy emerges as a good husband and father who, like the rest of the family, exhausts himself in the colossal effort to help Karen become as independent as possible. But he’s a male, so he’s weaker in spirit and even in flesh than the women of the family.

  Blessings have to be earned the hard way. That’s a belief affirmed again and again by the Karen books. Of course, their historical context has a lot to do with their worldview: Marie Killilea would have been a young adult during the Depression, and Karen opens just before World War II. But, the books’ message that blessings have to be worked for—as well as the complementary belief that any gratuitous good fortune will have to be paid for—is familiar folk Catholicism. “This is too easy; something bad has to happen,” sighed my friend Mary Ellen during a phone conversation a few years ago in which she was telling me about a great job offer that had just appeared out of nowhere. “Yeesh, you sound so Catholic,” I replied, and we laughed, knowing we both had a fear of falling into premature (i.e., preheavenly) contentment that parochial school had implanted deep in our young psyches. Certainly other cultures, religious and ethnic, have their superstitions about luck and happiness. For Catholics, however, there’s an atavistic worry that the good life will diabolically soften one’s soul. The theological term for the Catholic Church on earth, after all, is “the Church Militant.” Catholics are always supposed to keep themselves in fighting trim, and there’s no better way to tone the abs and biceps of muscular Christianity than through suffering. I said that we schoolkids at St. Raphael’s were trained to be the psychological equivalent of Navy SEALs. If that claim is anywhere close to the truth, then Catholics like the Killileas were our drill instructors.

  None of the Killileas can let their guard down even for a second: when they do succumb to the temptation to relax, disaster strikes! This narrative/theological pattern is so endemic to the memoirs that it almost functions as comic relief: after a while, we readers just know that if anyone is having a good time, there’ll soon be hell to pay. Early in Karen, Jimmy and Marie run away from the kids for a few hours to go to a baseball game and then on to a cocktail party. They return to find steam pouring from their house and the children, babysitter, and assorted pets out on the street, crying. It turns out that Marie forgot to turn off the ancient gas water heater and the pipes exploded, stripping linoleum from the floors and veneer from the furniture. A few days later, as Marie is still contemplating the soggy wreck of her home, a package arrives from Laurette Taylor, the star of The Glass Menagerie, then on Broad-way. Inside is a glass unicorn for Karen. Marie comments: “Whenever we had a crisis, and they seemed to occur with satanic regularity, it was inevitably followed by some such nice pick-me-up.”17

  Which is then inevitably followed by an even bigger knock-me-down. Toward the end of Karen, Marie takes the children to the doctor for their regular checkups. Everyone, for once, is fine, so Marie decides that she and Jimmy should go to a movie and dinner to celebrate. Uhoh. They drive off from the house “feeling young and carefree” and “splurged and ordered cocktails and then spaghetti with red wine.” We “came home,” she concludes, “feeling . . . quite buoyed up as one is apt to be by unwarranted extravagance. ” 18 By now, the hardened reader can hardly breathe in anticipation of the Big Cosmic Bill that surely must come due soon. Sure enough, it arrives two days later, when daughter Marie shows her mother the lump on her arm where the family doctor had administered a tuberculosis test.

  Shortly after With Love from Karen opens, the Killileas move into their new home, a shambling turn-of-the-century handyman’s special by the Long Island Sound. It’s Christmastime, and adult daughter Gloria gives her parents the lavish gift of theater tickets and weekend reservations at a hotel in New York. Off Marie and Jimmy go to enjoy their rare escape, only to find, upon returning, that the family’s beloved Irish setter, Shanty, has been dognapped. (Shanty eventually turns up at the house days later, wounded and starved, having escaped his captors.)

  Then there’s that ill-fated Labor Day weekend trip. The entire family piles into the station wagon for a gay time at a distant country fair; at the fair, a hurricane whips up out of nowhere, and on the perilous ride home, they narrowly avoid a
head-on collision with a drunk driver. Or, consider the consequences of a working-weekend getaway Marie and Jimmy enjoy in Providence, Rhode Island. Marie delivers a lecture on cerebral palsy on Saturday night; Sunday morning, while attending Mass, she experiences a “familiar and most distressing sensation—at once physical and mental; . . . a heavy weightiness in my chest that had no confines, simultaneously with a sense that was a knowing of coming disaster.”19 A freak blizzard turns the usual five-hour drive home into a sixteen-hour ordeal. When the couple stumble into the house and open the closed door of Karen’s room, they find Karen comatose from the leaking fumes of her bedroom’s separate coal-gas heating unit.

  Enough already. The sermon that man (and woman) was made by God not to loll about in Edenic comfort but rather to soldier on with head held high is woven into the basic plots of the Karen books—just as it was a staple of my own childhood training, secular and religious.

  Good better best

  Never let it rest

  Until your good is better

  And your better best.

  The nuns at St. Raphael’s often incanted that jingle as they surveyed sloppy penmanship, slouchy postures, poor pronunciation. The concept of “self-esteem” would become big in primary schools and in children’s television programming during the following decade; but at St. Raphael’s Parochial School in the sixties, self-esteem (a word no one there would have ever been tempted to use, since it sounded too synonymous with the Luciferian sin of “pride”) came from being of service to God, without complaint.

  But the internal pressure generated by this command to always maintain a stiff upper lip had to be vented somehow. Maybe that’s why, in With Love from Karen, Marie begins firing off a gun.