Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke Read Free

Astoria section of Queens, my mother and my brother had an argument about the tree: my mother had bought a fake one and my brother came home and freaked. There was screaming and yelling back and forth and the next thing we knew, the tree was going out the window. Except we were in the basement! Ray was so frustrated and embarrassed that he dragged the tree up the stairs and into the courtyard. So we kept the tradition alive.
    Funerals were the big family gatherings where relatives who hadn’t spoken to each other in fifteen years wound up in the same room. They’d have a few too many, sparks would fly, two or three folks would beg that this wasn’t the time or place, and then the free-for-all would begin. We’d hear “Step outside of Skelly and Larney’s,” the local funeral home, and after they’d had it out, everything would be fine.
    Everyone in my family has a temper. My sister has a terrible temper, my brother, too, and, though I’m beginning to have mine under control, I have the same kind of explosive disposition my mother has. Until quite recently I used to throw things (you can still see the holes in my bedroom walls). My brother and my sister had miserable fights. My sister has scars all over her body to prove it. Usually Carol was passing along some order that Mom had given, and he’d tell her to go to hell. She’d scream at him, he couldn’t stand that because it sounded just like Mom, and sooner or later he’d get physical. I remember Ray pushing Carol so hard he accidentally sent her out of our fourth-story window. Luckily it was the one with the fire escape.
    If my mother found out what Ray had done, he would get killed. Though I got threatened more than I got hit, my mother was very, very physical. The steam would build up in her, she’d go completely out of control, and all of a sudden we’d get a whack, a real unpremeditated backhand whack.She had a phrase that always terrified me: “Wait till I get you home.” Even after I began working, when I made her angry she’d get that stony look on her face, and the minute we walked in the door, there was the payoff. But it inevitably went worse with Ray; all that rage she couldn’t release with Dad was directed at him.
    The problem with my father was that he was an alcoholic. From what I know and what I hear, he started out a happy drunk who loved his family and enjoyed a lot of dancing and good old times when he was younger. He never got past the eighth grade, and when he left the Navy after World War II, he had a variety of jobs, everything from working for the telephone company to being a parking lot attendant, a cab driver, and a handyman. “If you give me the tools, I’ll do it,” he used to say to my mother, “but I can’t do it on paper.” The problem was he used to drink up his salary. My mother remembers all kinds of excuses he’d come up with, like not getting paid or losing his check or getting robbed on the subway. He began getting into trouble, having accidents with the cars in the parking lot, coming in at all hours. Finally, when I was about six years old, my mother told him, “John, this is it. You’ve gotta leave. I can’t take it.”
    My father moved to a furnished room and over the next ten years—he died when he was fifty—I almost never saw him again. A journalist once said my father sounded like an elegant but sad man. In my memory he is very dignified, which seems contradictory when you remember he was an alcoholic. Then again, I’m not sure if that image is the man who really existed or just a terrific ideal I’ve created.
    What I really remember is so little, just brief flashbacks. Sunday morning lying on top of the bed where my parents were, watching the kids on the Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour and reading the funnies. Sitting on his lap in the summer while he watched the ballgame and drank beer. Begging for Worcestershire sauce, which I ordinarily wouldn’t touch, but if Daddy was eating it, then I