Family Pictures Read online

  RAVES FOR SUE MILLER’S EXTRAORDINARY NOVEL OF FAMILY LOVE AND COURAGE

  “Sue Miller’s Family Pictures is true to its title; reading it is like flipping through a family album, drawn deep into recollections that cut across time… . The writing is so engrossing and the scenes so immediate that a reader feels like a participant in the family’s complex history.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Miller makes us feel, intimately… . Her ambitious and complex story touches a major nerve.”

  —Glamour

  “Family Pictures is even more convincing fiction than Miller’s acclaimed bestseller The Good Mother; the author leaves very few stones unturned in this comprehensive familial portrait… . A complex, deeply believable story about the intricate bonds between children and their parents.”

  —Parenting

  “An album full of family triumphs and tragedies… . Miller’s is a disciplined, stunning performance, one that cannot fail to make a lasting impression on anyone who reads Family Pictures with an open heart.”

  —Atlanta Journal

  “Admirers of Sue Miller’s excellent first novel, The Good Mother … are in for a treat. Family Pictures, her second, is even better; a richer, deeper, far more accomplished work of art… . Miller’s grasp of family dynamics and her gift for subtle dramatization are nothing less than extraordinary… . Sue Miller has created a painfully honest, exceptionally moving novel.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Ms. Miller is not merely interested in bare-bones moral conflict… . Ms. Miller is particularly good at dramatizing scenes of domestic chaos and the complex interplay of adults and children… . The reader is irresistibly drawn through their pain by the author’s exquisite eye for psychological detail and sexual nuance.”

  —New York Times

  “Compelling and filled with the complexities of life… . Author Sue Miller has a gift, a knack of sorts, for tuning in to what tugs at the heart… . Ms. Miller’s characters are hauntingly real.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Engrossing: … Hard to put down… . Each major character is beautifully drawn… . Those Eberhardts upon whom the author turns her gaze are firmly imprinted on our consciousness. Their multiple perspectives are utilized to great advantage—we understand them, care for them, forgive them their trespasses more thoroughly than they can forgive themselves.”

  —Detroit News

  “Intimate… . The currents of anger, pain and tenderness she describes are convincing.”

  —Mirabella

  “Strikingly rendered. With a photographer’s eye, Miller distills the details that allow a reader to see her characters in their surroundings and furthermore to know what it is to be any one of them at a particular instant.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A big, wonderful, deeply absorbing novel that retains the vivid domestic focus of The Good Mother while spiraling far beyond it.”

  —Newsweek

  Dedication

  For my father, James Hastings Nichols,

  who helped me believe in my dreams

  and always, for Doug

  I want to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for its generous support during the final stages of work on this novel.

  Contents

  Dedication

  PART ONE Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART TWO Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  About the Author

  Also by Sue Miller

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  It’s my brother Mack’s birthday. He’s fourteen. We’re all sitting at the table in the dining room. The curtains are drawn, though you can see the glint of summer evening light through the cracks. When my mother rounds the corner from the kitchen with the glowing cake, we burst into ragged song.

  Heaped next to Mack’s place on the table are his opened presents—odd homemade things from me and my younger sisters; but a nice sweater my mother gave him on behalf on my other brother, and three Roy Orbison forty-fives from my older sister, Liddie. You can also see the neck of the guitar my parents have bought him, leaning against the table’s edge. It seems to me that color rises to Mack’s face as we sing to him, though perhaps it’s just the soft light from the candles that makes him look this way—young, and suddenly sweet and shy. When my eyes meet his, I’m embarrassed; I feel a catch in my voice.

  The moment we’ve finished the song, Mack leans forward and blows the candles out. In the silent twilit aftermath of our applause, my other brother—my autistic brother, Randall—speaks. “Happy birthday, dear Mackie,” he says.

  We are all silent, and then Liddie, the oldest, laughs, “My God!” she says. “Did you hear him? My God!”

  “I wouldn’t get excited, Lydia,” my father says. “That’s about his annual quota of words, isn’t it?” And my mother’s face, which has turned in astonishment to her younger son in the dim light, instantly drops. My father changes the subject; someone gets up to pull back the curtains on the windows, to let what’s left of the daylight in.

  This is the way I remember it. But I’m wrong.

  My mother tells me he never spoke after the age of four or so. My sister Liddie says it’s her memory, her story, one she told me much later. I’ve appropriated it, she says, the way I do with everything in our family’s history. I’ve changed it to suit myself—made myself older, an observer, when in reality I was an infant when it happened, and Mary and Sarah weren’t even born.

  And yet. And yet it seems as clear to me as a picture I might have taken. I could swear this was exactly what happened.

  But that’s the way it is in a family, isn’t it? The stories get passed around, polished, embellished. Liddie’s version or Mack’s version changes as it becomes my version. And when I tell them, it’s not just that the events are different but that they all mean something different too. Something I want them to mean. Or need them to. And of course, there’s also the factor of time. Of how your perspective, your way of telling the story—of seeing it—changes as time passes. As you change.

  Now, for example, I see that we must always have known, my younger sisters and I, that we hadn’t been wanted or planned, that there was something complicated and painful for our parents in our very existence. But what we would have said then was just that there were too many of us, too many children in our family. So this might be one place to start my version of our story: how we felt about ourselves, in our world, where every house spilled kids into the Chicago street.

  Most of them spilled two or three, though. Four was a little excessive. Five absurd. And there were six of us. Six meant something different, a special case in some way. Catholic. Or a man who couldn’t keep his hands off his wife. A neurotic breeder of a woman. People would ask, “Six of you?” and yes never seemed a sufficient answer. Occasionally I would say of myself and my younger sisters, “Well, we’re the extras,” passing along one of our father’s nicknames for us without understanding it—as though it might answer the question. And sometimes it seemed to. “Oh!” the questioner would say. “Yes.”

  Certainly even then we thought of the family as neatly divided down the middle. The first three, Macklin, Lydia, and Randall, were the special ones. Even those names, we thought, showed greater imagination, greater involvement on our
parents’ part, than ours did: Nina, Mary, Sarah. Clearly by that time they had run out of gas.

  But we didn’t necessarily connect any of this with our father’s nicknames for us. These were embarrassing not because of what they meant—which none of us stopped to consider then anyway—but because they existed at all. Not because they pointed to some quality we shared, but because they pointed to us. He called us “the unexpected guests,” or “the surprise party.” He would lower his book and watch us as we passed his study door, the three of us always together. Under his high, narrow forehead, his blue eyes had the trick that eyes in certain portraits or photographs do, of seeming to follow you while actually remaining steady, unmoving. “There they go, the extras,” he’d say. Or, “Ah, the fleet’s in. The Nina, the Pint-sized, the Santa Maria.” We were “the little pitchers of health,” “the coup de grace,” “the last straws.” We complained and laughed and whined about it, we told our mother, but it only made him worse.

  “Pay no attention to him,” Mother said when she was in a good mood. But when she was in the dumps, her mouth went tight. She would turn away from him quickly in anger. She’d pick up again whatever she was drinking—cold, milky coffee, flat beer, an inch or two of something brown and sticky in the bottom of a glass. “I don’t know why you imagine they’re never going to understand you,” she said once to him. “Someday, out of the blue, you know, they will.”

  “And then what, Lainey?” he asked. And when she didn’t answer, he said, “The truth shall set you free.”

  But there was no moment out of the blue, no revelation. It didn’t happen that way. And though I did feel a strange sense, a sense that ran through my childhood, of being yoked to my sisters, of having some meaning as a group that had nothing to do with who I was alone or intended to be—still, what my father said remained as meaningless, as much a part of unexamined family habit, as when my mother called one of us “honeybunch” or “sweetie pie.” Who would dream of asking what these meant, literally? In fact, it wasn’t until years later, long after I already knew the sad story of how we got here, that I realized what the nicknames referred to, that I understood he’d been joking about it with us since we were small. Affectionately, ruefully, he’d dared to make fun of the awful way we’d come into the world, the way he’d felt about us before we were people. And we’d heard only the affection, paid attention only to his tone. “Ah, the unexpected blessings,” he’d say mockingly, tenderly. “Let’s count them: one, two, three.”

  No, in my version of our story, it was always my mother—boozy, or jittery from too much coffee—who made us feel strange when we were small. It was her intense loving that frightened us, her desperate quick embraces, her sudden anger, her “internal combustion engine,” my father called it—a set of mysterious, private emotions which ruled her. You could never tell in what direction she’d suddenly veer.

  My father, tall and sober and steady, would listen to me, to all of us. In spite of the teasing, the sense of mockery in much of what he said, he seemed reliably connected to the world of events in a way our mother didn’t, then or later. He knew the names of stars, of galaxies; he knew what berries you could eat and which were poisonous. It was he who explained to me, with a little chart he sketched on a paper napkin, the Mendelian laws, which dictated that probably one of Impy’s kittens—like her—would have no tail, two would have half tails, and one would have a tail the length of any other cat’s. Because he was a doctor, it was he who sat at the edge of the bed when one of us felt sick, who touched our foreheads for the heat of fever, who looked for white blisters on our throats or the toss of red splotches on our bodies. His hands were cool and dry.

  But that changes over time too. He moved out for a while when I was twelve, and for me, after that, his magic seemed to vanish. This was partly because, though he sometimes had Mack or Liddie over alone, when I went I was always invited with my two younger sisters. At that time I was eager to be thought of as different from them, more grown up, and this didn’t seem fair to me. It was true that the first few times we visited were like an adventure. His new apartment was clean and bare. I had never seen such rooms, uncluttered by what I’d always understood to be the necessary, the normal, furniture of family life. There was a bunk bed and a fold-out couch in the extra bedroom, so we could all sleep together, a treat for us. For dinner he usually fixed us what he called his “spécialité de l’appartement,” runny omelets crammed with mysterious flavors he wouldn’t tell us the names of, but which we all loved.

  But then, very quickly really, it got boring. We began to find things to grouse about to each other. We never had exactly the books or drawing things or dress-ups we wanted; we couldn’t get any real projects going because he wanted it all picked up before we went to bed. And strangest of all, the teasing seemed awful, embarrassing, without the others there—without Mother—to hear it, to be amused or offended. Three wasn’t enough for my father. His gifts required an audience, a larger house.

  He seemed to feel it too. He often phrased his invitations in the negative. “I don’t suppose you’d like to come over and keep an old man company,” he’d say. “I guess you’re probably too busy to have dinner tonight.” And as time went on, he asked us less and less. And what I felt about this shift, I realized after a while, was pure relief—relief that my father, whom I’d loved more dearly than anyone in my family, seemed to have forgotten us, “the extras.”

  I can remember that moment, the moment when I knew that, sharply and clearly. It was summer. I had been sent by my mother to get my brother Mack from Steinway’s drugstore, where he liked to hang around. I was walking down Fifty-seventh Street toward the university, running my hand along the top of a dusty, squared-off privet hedge; and all of a sudden, here was my father, walking toward me on the other side of the street. He was alone, moving fast. He had his jacket off, hooked on a finger over one shoulder, and his tie was dancing out to the side. I stopped to watch him, and I nearly called out. But at the last minute I decided not to.

  He did look over as he hurtled along—he glanced quickly my way. But nothing about me stopped his moving eyes or slowed his motion. He kept walking; he passed by me on his side of the street. I turned to watch him striding away, the swing of his jacket across his back, the lilting alternation of his legs in blue-striped seersucker; and what I felt was gladness that he hadn’t really seen me, that I’d not had to talk to him. That he hadn’t even recognized his daughter in this adolescent girl on the street.

  Part of what shapes the story for me is that my father is a psychiatrist. Now that psychiatrists are defrocked weekly in New Yorker cartoons, it’s difficult to recall what this once meant, how seriously men like him were taken. But when I was growing up in the fifties and early sixties, he was a sort of shaman in our world. My friends used to worry that he could read their minds, and often they were silent in his presence. Grownups too reacted oddly to him. They were too respectful, even defensive, as though he could see through them, as though he knew their weaknesses at a glance. “Now, I know this will sound compulsive,” they’d say, after telling an anecdote or recounting a dream. Or, “I suppose you think I’ve got some sort of Oedipus complex.”

  More important to what happened in our family, though, was the way my father felt about his work. He loved it. He believed in it with a pure fervor bordering on the religious. I heard him speak often of the excited feeling he’d had while training of being in a profession that was truly on the verge of understanding how the mind worked. And he was as uncomfortable with those who backed away from the implications of Freudian teachings as a priest would have been about revising what was inconvenient or painful in the Church’s pronouncements for a parishioner’s comfort.

  But he wasn’t rigid or unkind in his approach to patients. On the contrary, his work brought out his most generous, gentle qualities. He had an office downtown, an office I went to as a special treat every time I had to see the dentist, who worked only a few blocks away. My teeth were �
�a tragedy,” my mother said, and each time I went, I had to have at least one filling, usually two or three. After the slow grinding of the drill, the long tortured probing at what seemed to me like the place where all pain started, I would walk the two blocks to my father’s building, rolling the silver bits around in my mouth, surreptitiously picking them out. Sometimes I stopped in the lobby and splashed water from the fountain onto my face before I took the elevator up, hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell I’d been crying again in the dentist’s chair. He liked me, he liked all of us, to be brave.

  I would wait in the room outside my father’s office, pretending to read Life and Look and National Geographic, staring at the disasters, at the photographs of inexpressive victims, phlegmatic witnesses. This seemed the mark of the adult to me, the blankness on these faces as bodies were carried past. I could hear his patient’s voice—not the words but the dreamy murmur—through the frosted glass pane of my father’s office door; and occasionally, too, my father’s voice, clear, gentle, with a short question that set the murmur going again. When the patient was leaving—pulling on his coat and hat in the waiting room—I would carefully avert my red, sore eyes from his curious ones.

  My father always took a few minutes before he came out, and when I saw him, I always burst into tears, even though I knew he didn’t like it. He would hold me silently for a moment, not speaking, not comforting me except by his touch. And then he would tell me what treat he had been saving for me, as though I had been brave: a sundae, a special painting at the Art Institute he wanted me to see, a pretty doll just right for me at Carson Pirie Scott. His voice at those moments was always tender, and I remember the sense I had that I was getting something meant for someone else, that the special tone was connected to the office, to the patient who’d just left, to my father’s professional life.