LITMIR.BIZ

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and my father could listen to anything.

      They were finally making their life together and things proceeded smoothly until I was born in 1960. It took my mother six months to recover. Her postpartum depression soon deepened into paranoia and delusion. It had been ten years since her last breakdown. She lay on the couch and suffered Old Testament fears and delusions – she was damned or maybe a prophet, Elijah perhaps – and all the while church ladies came with their casseroles and left with their gossip, their prayer concerns.

      That summer, as my mother recovered, Dad carried me around camp in an unzipped plaid suitcase. I was swaddled in blankets, a sort of precious luggage. It was as if I’d been found in the rushes down by the channel, or perhaps baggage claim. If I returned to Peniel tomorrow – and it’s still there – I’m sure some ancient camper would chuckle and say, ‘I remember that suitcase. Your father was a riot.’ My father has long been the camp’s celebrated eccentric, a subject of lore and apocrypha.

      My mother recovered over that summer and when we returned my parents discussed having another child. They consulted a psychiatrist, who advised against it in no uncertain terms. It could ‘aggravate my mother’s schizophrenia and pass it on,’ he said. They ignored him and my mother gave birth to the sanest Lovelace in the bunch, my sister, Peggy. Again, my mother slipped into the black. I was just two years old but I remember her black eyes. I remember how frightened I was growing up, scared my mother would leave and never come back. Peggy says at age three she began worrying for our mother, afraid she would make Mom cry.

      I didn’t share that worry until later. By age three I had thrown church picnic chicken and coleslaw at deacons. Desperate, God-fearing adults had tethered me to trees. Bucktoothed, thin and agitated, I resembled the young Jerry Lewis to my sister’s Judy Garland. She was a beautiful kid, crowned with brown curls. She possessed a quiet, reflective spirit and a holy terror for a brother. By all accounts, but especially by the accounts my sister still continues to share every Christmas, our sibling rivalry was intense and one-sided. I did get the most attention. Any kid who deploys airborne sprocket weapons built from smashed clocks, spikes breakfast cereals with stockpiled Tabasco sauce and generally lays in wait for his saintly sister will get the most attention. My sister retreated to her room and read for the greater part of her childhood. She resents it to this day. Still, she was better off on the moors with Heathcliff than in the backyard with me.

      My mother was happiest at Peniel, where she spent her summers painting still lifes and camp signs, and always painting Bible verses on banners. I remember helping my mother decorate the chapel with the armour of God. Together we cut the cardboard shapes: the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the sword and the shield of faith. Mom painted them silver and black and we hung them from the rafters. Peniel made clear to the children that we were at war. In the camp nursery – the Olive Yard – all of us sang, ‘We may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery, but we’re in the Lord’s army.’ As soldiers of Christ ours was a battle ‘not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the darkness of this world’. I loved it. A holy war is the best kind of war a boy can have, full of demons and superheroes. Vietnam wasn’t important when the Prince of Darkness himself hid under our bunks and threw darts from our woods.

      Peniel was more think tank than camp. Its programme was a veritable wailing wall of religious training and I spent each July and August ducking out of the tent. It didn’t matter. By the time I was ten Grover Wilcox had my loud mouth testifying on the streets of Lake George, confessing sins before I had committed them and diagramming the Four Spiritual Laws on signboards with marker pen. Peniel’s religion was hard to dodge, even twenty miles away. I suspect Peniel’s founders, Miss Beers and Mrs Mac, viewed recreation as a gateway to sin – exercise heats up the flesh and leads to temptation. They made no excuse for the camp’s asceticism, its unrelenting schedule of chapel meetings. It was our evangelical heritage, stiffened through Prohibition and run straight through the Depression.

      I remember my cabin challenging another set of boys to an eating contest in the dining hall. Before it was over the camp’s cofounder and disciplinarian, Mr Mac, hauled us up in front of the camp. We stood shamefaced as he glowered. And then, after a long silence, he began.

      ‘Gluttony, campers, is one of the deadly sins. Gluttony makes a mockery of the gifts God brings us. Gluttony is wasteful. It is selfish. Now, these boys are no more sinful than the rest of us. They want to be good, mindful of God’s blessings. But gluttony is an abomination to the Lord…’ He continued straight through dessert.

      Today’s Republican megachurches have no problem with gluttony. Evangelical churches lure children to camp with imitation rock bands, Jet Skis and parasailing. Peniel, with its outhouses, its stick-framed chapel and broken-spined hymnals, seems a poor country cousin, its children just a motley crew of preachers’ kids and other unfortunates. It was hardwork but we made our own fun or we stole it. There were plenty of rules and we broke them. We swam on Sundays, stole canoes and kissed girls. We ran away but never long enough, really, to leave.

      It was fine, a boyhood surrounded by austere mystery, by dusty prayers, with the small mountain behind us and all the white pines, a place threshed and winnowed by prayer. We sang the old, muscular hymns I still love – ‘Lead on, O King Eternal’; ‘A Mighty Fortress’; ‘Power in the Blood’ – and Sunday suppers were brimstone and honey, and it all made you hungry. There was no entertainment, no frippery. The camp got its name from an Old Testament story in which Jacob demands his god’s blessing. He wrestles the angel all night for it, and at dawn the creature relents; it twists Jacob’s hip, blesses him and leaves. He called the place Peniel and that’s what we learned there. We were crippled and blessed and taught to be thankful.

      Every August, after leaving Peniel and before heading back to Scotch Plains, we visited my dad’s mother in Woodstock. We never called her Grandma; we weren’t allowed. As a young woman my grandmother had taken her inheritance to Europe, where she came of age and commenced a lifetime of seasonal grand tours. Although her means came from unwashed cowboys once removed, my grandmother adopted old money and the old world as her own. Shortly following my birth she actually willed herself French and insisted the family call her ‘Grandmére’. She got her table manners from Marie Antoinette and enforced them with a cold imperial stare. She was a lifelong member of the conservative John Birch Society and supported Woodstock’s Christian Science Reading Room. She had sent her food back to kitchens and dressed down their chefs all across the Western world.

      My mother, of course, was terrified by the time we hit Albany. By the Catskills the grooming had begun in earnest. She picked at our clothes and plastered our hair with her spit. ‘Now, David,’ she’d say, ‘remember to stay at the table until she lets you go. She will excuse you.’ My sister and I sat in the backseat holding our infant brother and happily fending off our mother’s fluttering hands. We were off to see the matriarch, her meadow and the trout stream, but my mother continued to fret. Our station wagon filled with hairspray and fear. ‘Richard,’ my mother would say, ‘you should polish your shoes. I didn’t have a chance to wash the children’s outfits. Please don’t bring up money with your mother.’

      My father, oblivious to my mother’s growing panic, usually responded by turning up the radio and commenting, ‘Now, listen to this. This is a beautiful movement; listen to how the horn comes in.’ He would look up in the rearview mirror and say, ‘David, do you know what horn that is?’

      ‘French,’ I’d answer. They were always French and he’d nod approvingly. He never asked our mother or Peggy what horn it was, he always asked me.

      It was 1967 and we’d pass through Woodstock and ogle the hippies, turn left at the Bear restaurant and then down her long drive, past the ruined well, the leaning stone post with its BEWARE OF DOG sign. Grandmére was terrified of hippies. When we arrived, just after she assessed and welcomed us, she asked, ‘How was it in town? Were they out on the green?’

      ‘Yeah. Tons of ’em!’ I answered enthusiastically.

      ‘Yes. Well.’ She turned from us and to her son. ‘The town, Richard, is in a state of siege, nothing less.’

      ‘It’s lively, all

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