In My Mother’s House

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—1/3/11—Two-thousand-eleven, 2011, marks the 40th anniversary of my mother’s death. That is hard to believe. It’s weird enough to admit that your mother has passed away at all, but to realize that she has been gone for 40 years is somewhat staggering. But there it is. She died when I was 26 and when she, herself, was only 51. Her life was short, sometimes sad, sometimes rich, often bizarre, and I usually cannot think of her at all without a confusing rush of all kinds of emotions.

And, of course, it is impossible to think of my mother without also thinking of my father, who lived 16 more years without her, and of the home they had provided for me, their only child. It was a wild, comic, complicated, often happy, sometimes hurtful, Dickensian life that they made for me during the first 20 years of my existence; it was a household unlike any that my friends ever had. At times, like Dickens’ Pip, I was mortified by my family and tried to keep my friends as far away from them as I could. At other times, I realized how rich was the life they gave me, how rich in variety and color and experience; how rare.

I was the only child of a career Army officer and his Southern belle wife. We can start with those two stereotypes, though they will emerge as anything but typical as the story goes on. My father was the second of five children, born in Virginia into a rollickingly eccentric, itinerant family—there is enough material there alone for multiple columns! —who eventually settled down in rural Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I used to love to visit my grandparents on their ten acres of land. My grandparents were no yokels. They were the funniest, wittiest, and smartest people I knew, yet there was a Ma and Pa Kettle element to their lives that delighted and intrigued me. There was no indoor plumbing. An outhouse—a two-seater, so you could spend quality time there with a close friend!—squatted at the end of a narrow path from the back of the house.

For hot water, I would take two large buckets from the back porch and follow another path down to the spring, a bubbling ice cold stream, fill them up, and then struggle to carry the heavy pails back up the hill, trying not to slosh and spill. Then the water would be put on the stove and heated for dishwater, laundry water, bath water, and cooking.

Baths were taken in a big iron tub in the kitchen—and I can still feel the coldness of that tub until the buckets of hot water were poured in. You couldn’t expect much privacy bathing in the kitchen. More buckets of hot water were poured in as your bath grew cooler. You were lucky, of course, if you got the tub first. Someone else would get in the tub after you were finished. Water was not to be wasted. For me, these visits to the rural South were great vacations, but my father had grown up with this as his everyday reality and lived so until he grew up, joined the Army, and World War Two changed everyone’s lives.

My mother was a Lynchburg girl, a “city girl,” even though Lynchburg then was still a small town. She was a beautiful girl, vivacious and funny and talented. As a young girl, she had wanted to be a singer. For a while—it was the Big Band Era, after all—she had sung with a local band, a girl singer, with dreams of being the next Jo Stafford, Connie Haines, Doris Day, or Dinah Shore. When I was a kid, I used to listen to some of the records she had locally produced during her teenage years. They were old 78’s, scratchy and old even then, but I loved listening to her. I remember her recordings of “Imagination” and “Nobody’s Sweetheart Now” and “Mean to Me.”

The last time I tried to play those records was when I went home for my mother’s funeral. They were so scratched and damaged as to be nearly impossible to hear, but the clearest one was “Mean to Me.” Listening to it then, I dissolved into tears. It was a poignant arrangement of a poignant song, but the sadness of my mother’s later life made it all the more so.

I now have my parents’ scrap books and photograph albums from our lives together. The earliest ones cover the war years, 1941-45; then they move into the postwar years, into the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

We lived the nomadic lives of military families everywhere. We lived in Europe (twice), in various Army posts in the South, in California, in Cleveland, Ohio; finally settling down in Columbus, Georgia when I was in high school. It was while I was in high school that I first began to get an inkling of the uniqueness and the eccentricity of my mother and father’s house. Perhaps it was their background as nomads who had roamed the world and seen a great deal; perhaps it was just the sheer audacious weirdness of the Mergler family in general (we have always been a colorful lot), but I soon became aware that my home was nothing like any of my friends’ homes.

Sometimes I was horrified by that.

My parents were too weird, too outspoken, too unconventional, or so it seemed to a young teenager embarrassed by everything. But, at other times their eccentricities charmed me. They were very funny, very talented, and gregarious. Everyone seemed to like them. When I grew older and more literary, I used to think of my parents as the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of their crowd. There were always parties. Usually they were at our house. I learned, at a very early age, nine or ten, to bartend. It became a grand joke to order a scotch-on-the-rocks or a bourbon-and-ginger or a dry martini from the nine-year-old kid behind the mini-bar. And, if I recall accurately, I made them well.

As I got older, into high school, I remember some less charming anecdotes. I remember being groped and fondled by the drunken wives of Army colonels and majors, and another woman, the wife of a colonel, stumbling into my bedroom, with the party going on downstairs, and falling drunkenly into my bed, where she promptly passed out. I had to go downstairs, red-faced, in my pajamas and robe, to get some men to remove the colonel’s lady from my bed. Most of these things were funny, some were annoying, one or two were even a little traumatic. But they were not stories that most of my other friends could have related to, so I kept them, for the most part, to myself.

My two best friends in high school (and now, still) were Alan and Haskell. I mention them here because they were the first to recognize and to let me know how rare and, to them, charming, my parents’ house was. They both loved coming to my house for overnight visits. Both have expressed to me, in recent years, that coming to my house for visits changed their lives. They were charmed there, intrigued, dazzled, even smitten by my parents.

Haskell recently said, “Coming to your house may have saved me as a kid. It was like a light beaming in the midst of the gloom of my own life.” That sounds pretty dramatic, I know, but I can understand what he means. Haskell’s parents were fierce, fundamentalist Baptists; civilians, living in small-town Georgia. His mother was fearful and fretful about everything, particularly sin and what the neighbors might think of it; his father was suspicious, seeing perversion everywhere. Haskell was so repressed as a boy that, to this day, he is still horrified by scenes from his youth.

“Then I came to your house for a visit,” he said, “and a whole new world appeared. I couldn’t believe it!”

My house, which was just simply my house to me, became a world as colorful and exciting as Disney World to Haskell. He has told the story often. Everything in my parents’ home surprised and enchanted him.

My father had a collection of nude statuettes, all luscious females, taking various seductive poses, displayed in a showcase. Never, Haskell proclaimed, had he ever seen so much voluptuous nudity in one place. (This was the early 1960’s, you must remember. This was before porn and Cable TV.) My father, who dabbled a bit in photography, also had a framed photograph of which he was inordinately proud. It was the famous calendar portrait of the nude Marilyn Monroe with the exotic red background. As a joke and as a display of his own cleverness, my father had transposed a headshot of my mother over the face of Marilyn, so that, in effect, it looked as if it were indeed a nude photograph of my mother. She and my father both thought this was very funny and I had become so used to it—and to them—that I thought nothing of it. But, trust me, it was quite a surprise to my teenage friends, who, initially, believed it was all my mother.

My father also had a collection of Chinese and Korean gods, strange and exotic little statues on pedestals, from Chinese mythology, which both fascinated and repelled. And there were dragons and mythological creatures in his showcase.

Haskell, whose only truck with the exotic was in his mother’s Bible thumping, could not take his eyes off the many curios in the house.

There were coffee mugs with ceramic naked women climbing seductively in and out of the cups and along the handles. There was a bottle-top squirter hose, patterned after the famous mannequin pis, which would “urinate” seltzer water into your drink. There was an antique cigar-store Indian, whom I called Hiawatha, on a pedestal by the kitchen door. My father collected guns, pipes, Indian arrowheads, erotica, art works from all over the world, gods, dragons, unicorns, ships in bottles, and clipper ships carved out of single branches of wood. All of these things now seem marvelous enough to me but, at the time, I took them all for granted. Wasn’t everyone’s house like this? Well, clearly, the answer was no. Especially when you only had to look at Haskell’s drop-jawed face and goggle-bulged eyes.

Today Haskell is a prominent psychologist (of course!) and a bon vivant of the first order. He is a man of sophistication, brilliance, and exotic tastes. And he claims that it all started with that first visit to my parents’ house. About 15 years ago, he closed his private practice in Atlanta and moved up here to Anchorage, Alaska, having fallen in love with the place after several visits to me.

“I am still searching for the exotic,” he said to me. “I knew if I followed you, I would find it.”

My friend, Alan, has a similar story. Alan, like me and unlike Haskell, was also an Army brat. All those exotic artifacts and collectibles were not so impressive to him. But he had other memories of my mother’s house.

“Your mother had a great influence on me,” he said, lately. (In fact, he said it just last night, via e-mail from Washington, DC, where he now lives.)

I was pleased to hear him say it because I don’t think my mother ever thought she had any kind of influence on anyone. She had always lived so deeply within my father’s larger-than-life shadow that she would be surprised, I think, to realize that someone, a mere boy, had noticed her at all.

Alan, a scientist and computer geek, is, at heart, a musicologist.

Alan’s family was a nice, conventional clan, very much the Cleavers or the Nelsons, if you remember them. I never knew his parents ever to raise their voices, or to swear, or even to show much inflection when they spoke. They were calm, adult, stable, polite, conservative, conventional, and—forgive me, Alan—deadly dull. They seemed to have little humor, little sense of adventure, little or no imagination. I remember leaving their tidy house, after an overnight stay there, and going home to my mother’s comfortable, chaotic mess with a great sense of relief and delight to be home.

On a visit to my house, Alan discovered that my mother was a musician. His mother was, too. His mother was a brilliant pianist, played classical music, and taught the piano. But my mother played the ukulele and the banjo and sang—and Alan was enchanted. I remember hours and hours of the three of us—Alan, my mother, and myself—singing folk songs and ballads and rock’n’roll and old banjo tunes from the 20’s and 30’s. On one visit, Alan recorded one of our sessions on a tape recorder. He still has those tapes and still plays them.

“Your mother was so good!” he still raves. “She could play and sing like a pro. And the harmony between the two of you! It was great!”

I remember the harmony and the playing and singing. I do not remember that it was great. But, when you live with the Cleavers, I guess an overnight visit to Lucy and Desi’s is pretty amazing. At any rate, Alan still remembers my mother and my mother’s house fondly. And that makes me fond of him.

Like so many Army officers’ wives of that era, my mother’s life was steeped in social rigmarole and alcohol. As the colonel’s lady, she was often expected to preside at teas and luncheons and to plan and organize events. She was too shy and too insecure to do that very gracefully. To get through it, she had a few drinks. She had a few drinks before the event, a few more during the event, and a few more at home, after the event, to unwind and to settle her considerably jangled nerves. By the time I was a junior in high school, both of my parents had become hopeless alcoholics, an insidious disease that killed both of them way before their time here should have been up.

But despite the sadness of their last years—and there are many sad stories that could be told here— there were also moments of great delight and joy. In my family—I have noticed it now in five generations of Merglers—there runs a dominant streak of humor, talent, and brilliance. And my parents had all of that in abundance. Their self-destruction was in part genetic, in part the times in which they lived, in part their own need to embrace life to the fullest, regardless of the outcome.

I am so pleased that at least two other people, besides myself, remember my mother’s house as a place of fun, laughter, warmth, and great interest. That’s not a bad legacy to leave behind.