Full Blown: Me and My Bipolar Family - David Lovelace

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my father reclaimed the vicious little reptile from the deacons and promised to leave him at home with the rest. He listened to their dire warnings with equanimity as his loathsome pet scratched and hissed from the cardboard box on his lap. By now my father had perfected his classic deacon-meeting defence. He simply wandered off in his head, rhapsodic, detached from any parish concerns.

      He wasn’t worried. Princeton would award his doctorate in church history that spring. He would send out his impressive credentials and just wait for the right teaching position to open. He was a ministerial lame duck; he was on his way out. Now he could devote his time to Brahms and his reptiles, take more father-son trips to the Jersey shore to catch sea robins and blow-fish. It was a great relief to all involved.

      Meanwhile my mother had her trials, shy and thrust into the role of a minister’s wife, God’s hostess. She bravely bought Tupperware, chatted awkwardly through shared suppers, and kept me in plasters. My sister retreated and my father was busy. I needed an accomplice and so I spent my entire seventh year praying nightly for a brother. When Jonathan finally showed I took all the credit. It was the power of prayer. I just kept at it till God relented.

      I forgot what my prayers would cost. Mom lay on our couch in New Jersey, holding my infant brother, unable to speak, afraid for her mind and her soul. My mother soon drifted into paranoia and then deeper into delusion. She was damned and everyone damned her. When the churchwomen began arriving with food, began holding her baby, my mother’s fear grew worse. They had plotted to take her family, to poison her, to carry out Satan’s terrible will. I watched her each morning as she lay on that brown couch. She haunted the room. And then my mother was gone and we couldn’t go and see her. My father smiled and said Mom was just resting but I knew better. I knew she was crazy. Mom’s mind, my father said, had begun skipping and just needed a knock, a bounce back into its groove. But I knew things. I had heard things. I knew what had happened before I was born. They took her away. They locked her up. She lost the power of speech and she growled like a dog. When I was seven a nightmare lodged in my chest and never left. Alone late at night I saw my mother snarling and snapping. On some level, I think, my siblings and I felt responsible for the sickness that followed our births. My mother’s postpartum delusions threw shadows over my family’s world. She broke into black rooms we never could enter. My father began to shield my mother from the outside, from trouble and finances, from parties and friends – even from us. I spent my childhood afraid for my mother, afraid I would lose her to hospitals, to all the whispered secrets. It became my lifelong fear – our family madness, my mother barking, my mother convulsed.

       THREE

      In 1968 my father was named professor of church history at Conwell Seminary, a small evangelical school outside Philadelphia. Conwell soon merged with another conservative school and we all moved to Hamilton, Massachusetts. We didn’t really belong in Hamilton. In fact, my father’s employer didn’t belong in Hamilton. Theologians do not mix well at the hunt club. On Boston’s North Shore matters of religion were settled properly ages ago. God chose sides and the hunt club won. Sunday mornings are set aside for polo games and horse trials, not church. The Catholics had already fled the place, leaving a large, empty campus above town, and, in a sort of religious lateral pass, they sold it to us.

      Dad went on ahead to Hamilton and Mom stayed behind with us and packed. She seemed fine then, fully recovered from Jonathan’s birth. He was almost two, my sister seven, and I was nine years old. Dad brought his mother house shopping and Grandmére put a down payment on a low-slung, damp house surrounded by oaks and scrub saplings. He found it in Hamilton’s scruffy outback, where ranch homes with mulch-pile lawns were hidden away in the woods like the servants’ quarters. Dad wired the house for sound, set up his snake room full of heat lamps, unpacked his typewriter and sent for us. Grandmére loved Hamilton. She believed there was hope for us yet.

      In any school the new kid always gets it in the neck. And in New England, the new kid is new until two or three generations stack up in the town graveyard. I was pilloried at the bus stop and shunned at school. The heir to a major banking concern beat the tar out of me by the lockers. The children of law firms gathered to taunt me. My fistfights all degenerated into inconclusive heaps; they won me no allies. I hated school and every afternoon I ran home, dumped my books by the door and headed for the woods. Just across our street was a series of bridle paths that went for miles, through marshes, thickets and streams, until reaching the rolling estates closer to town.

      Before long I tired of aimless walks and begged for a BB gun. I snuck along the bridle paths and took ambivalent shots at squirrels and songbirds. I fancied myself a poacher of the king’s deer when I carried that gun, and incredibly, the cream of Hamilton society played along with me. On one grey November afternoon, miles from home, I heard what sounded like a pack of wild dogs barking and baying. There must have been dozens. I held my popgun tightly as the noise got closer, and then it arrived. The hounds tore around the corner and came straight at me. They were mad, the whole slobbering, yelping lot of them were mad and charging full tilt. I slipped behind an oak tree and looked for a branch. The dogs didn’t slow, their tongues lashing and eyes rolling as they passed, chasing something, not me.

      I heard a horn and then it made sense – at least in a limited, theatrical way. It was the aptly named Myopia Hunt Club, my new neighbours. I dropped the gun and kicked leaves over it just as the first horse and rider came into view. Another dozen or so rounded the bend, resplendent and ridiculous in brass buttons, red swallowtail jackets and boots. The man in the top hat blew his horn again and the entire spectacle rode past swiftly and awkwardly.

      None of the riders acknowledged or even made eye contact with me, a scruffy, modern American boy who had wandered into their game. Myopia has guarded their club’s mix of nearsighted tradition and horses since 1882. Nevertheless, by the time I arrived lax zoning and thoughtless development had degraded both fox and Brahmin habitats. The club had stooped to dragging fox scent through the lower class of Hamilton neighbourhoods. It was embarrassing for all of us, my poaching deer that didn’t exist and the whole gang of them, costumed by P. G. Wodehouse and chasing a nonexistent fox.

      I was overjoyed. I had found people – grown-ups – who were stranger than us, stranger than my family. Next time maybe I’d get caught and they could place me in their imaginary stocks down in front of their English-like club. I was heartened and redoubled my hunting efforts.

      My father flourished at Gordon-Conwell and hit his stride as a church historian. His doctoral thesis, The American Pietism of Cotton Mather, was now in print and well regarded. Academia, even evangelical academia, gave my father’s eccentricities license and he was respected by the school’s faculty. The social graces required of ministers are not expected of professors. The students loved his lecturing style and his classes filled immediately. He was forgetful and distracted and they loved him for it. He couldn’t remember their names but he knew his stuff cold.

      My father argued that Cotton Mather, of Salem witch trial fame, had laid the foundations for modern evangelicalism. Dad asked his readers to look past the trial, but I put it front and centre. Mather played a pivotal role, arguing for the court’s admission of ‘spectral evidence’: dreams, visions and nightmares. Years later he defended the trials in his work Wonders of the Invisible World. In short, Mather legitimized hallucination in the New World; he brought hysteria into the courtroom. I’m no church historian but I am a Lovelace. I’ve heard my mother speak of demons and my father of angels. I’ve watched my family’s religion conspire with our brain disease to conjure spectral evidence and trumpet it.

      Mather’s world proved too dark for my father, and he soon jumped a generation and focused on Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. Edwards’s sermons sparked a wildfire revival that spread through the colonies and across the Atlantic. He had it all: rock and roll fame, brimstone and poetry. Edwards was a theologian’s action hero, America’s answer to Luther, and he became my father’s intellectual touchstone. My brother was named for Edwards, and I was named for his missionary friend, David Brainerd. These two preachers stand at the opposite poles of my family’s religion and give witness to its ongoing cycle of redemptive ecstasy

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