Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke Read Free Page B

could be funny, witty, the belle of the ball, but then, the minute I’d get in the car to go home, I’d become venomous. Every vicious thing I could think of to say, every injustice that I could recall—I was Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde. When I finally recognized the effect drinking has on me, which was more than a dozen years ago now, I just stopped cold. Never missed it. Though I now seem able to have a glass of wine, if I never have another drink, I won’t even notice. That ability to say, “Whoa, let me stop now and see if I can stop,” that’s one of the things my dad left me, because I’d witnessed what happened to someone who couldn’t.
    I have just a few pictures of Dad: sitting at a desk; dancing at a party; the wedding portrait, with the two of them standing together like little leprechauns. He was always a sharp dresser. I remember gray suits with very sharp creasesin the pants, spiffy-looking fedoras: there was no such thing as going to Daddy with sticky hands, you would wash first.
    When I look at those pictures, when I talk about him, I still feel the sadness; tears are always very close. And it makes me mad, too; I wonder how long this process has to take. When people ask me when I realized my parents’ separation was final, I tell them I’m still not buying it. I’ve never stopped wrestling with the loss and inevitable romanticization of my father, and I’m sure it’s interfered with my marriages: as long as that idealistic figure exists, who could live up to that?
    Yet, on the other hand, I think that some of my drive, which in part comes from wanting to succeed for myself, also has a lot to do with evening the score for my father. It’s like what Annie Sullivan says at one point in The Miracle Worker, talking about the loss of her brother: “I think God must owe me a resurrection.” I don’t know what made my father the way he was, if it was character flaws or lack of societal knowledge about alcoholism or something else. Whatever it was, my need is to say, through my life and my work, “This was a magnificent soul who didn’t get a chance.”

TWO
    M y father, as it turned out, was not the only parent with problems. My mother, though you’d never know it to look at her today, had episodes of severe depression. There were times when my mother could be warm and wonderful and generous, both of spirit and with things like ice cream cones and dolls, but much of the time she was not. She now takes medication that regulates her moods, but before that she did a lot of what we call “acting out.” She’s had to be hospitalized three times, the first when I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old.
    We had a fireplace in our apartment, boarded up as many are in New York, and a big cedar chest in front of it. We kids thought this was a great piece of furniture, but at times it was the dreaded cedar chest because whenever any thing went wrong—if my parents had had a fight for instance—the three of us were awakened, taken out of our beds, and lined up by that chest. He would be gone, she would be sitting in the chair, and we’d have to sit up all night with her.
    Why’d she do it? I’m not sure even she knows. Either she didn’t want to be alone or she needed to take revenge, and if she couldn’t take it on him, she could take it out on those closest to him. But it was also terribly self-destructive:how much worse can you make yourself feel than by having your three innocent kids sitting there crying, unable to go to bed, worrying, “Is he gonna come back? Are they gonna throw things?”
    Usually these episodes happened after she threw him out, but there was one time when he said enough was enough and he left. That was it for her. She lined us up by the cedar chest, said, “We’re all going together,” and turned on the gas. Now, she also left the windows open, but I didn’t know that, I thought this was it. And we sat there for hours.
    I don’t remember if someone