The Myth of Dorothy

Facebook let me know it is my half sister's birthday today. I found the birthday notification somewhat odd as Joan passed away in September, 2021. 

I first met Joan on a trip to Texas to drop off some inherited goodies from my Aunt Helen's estate. That was in the late 1980's. We had had no contact before nor have we connected since. I met my half brother Bob jr. on the same trip. 

It was a once in both our lifetimes brief connection to attempt to heal wounds that were not of our making. We all decided what was, was not now and we all had nothing to do with it anyway, other than being witnesses to the extreme dysfunction that ran through our two families for a period. 

Their mother was my father's second wife. She went off the deep end in the 1940's while my father was still stationed in post WWll Europe . Dorothy moved to Mexico and took the children with her. My father never saw them again until after they were adults and Dorothy had passed.

As a child growing up,  all I knew about the situation were from infrequent alcohol infused rants by my dad. His take was; Dorothy was a crazy woman and she had done him wrong. He claimed she smacked him around sometimes. She was the reason I grew up in a household on half of the salary my father received as a Air Force officer.

And so the myth of Dorothy grew in my ten year old mind. I envisioned an evil witch with an evil face and huge biceps knocking my badass father on his ass. Yeah, I was seriously afraid of her because of the reputation my father had construed in moments of drunken regret.

Then in 1961, she called our house in Chevy Chase, Maryland and threatened my life. I was dead if my dad did not send her more money. Apparently my half siblings were of age by then and the child support checks had dried up.

My father was not at home; he was in Florida working a new job after retiring from the Air Force. Mom and I were still in Maryland so she could button up things and let me finish the third grade in Maryland and then start the fourth grade fresh in Florida.

My room at the time opened on the front foyer. On the wall next to the stairs leading up to the living room was a small table with a phone. The sizable expanse of the foyer caused the phone to ring so loud it often woke me up. It rang one night and my mom, who was in the laundry room next to my bedroom, answered it. 

I will always remember that call. It went something like this:

"Hello, Macrum residence."

Indiscernible wah wah sound of someone speaking on the line.

"What did you just say? ............. Kill Bug? ......... Who is this?"

I remember climbing out of bed and standing next to the door. I remember panic and fear as the rest of the call played out. By the end of it, my mother was hysterical and I was literally shaking and crying. That may have been the first day of more than a few I would never forget.

The back and forth on the phone lasted maybe another minute and then my mom slammed the phone down and sort of collapsed on the love seat next to the phone table. I was frozen. I remember not knowing what I should do or if what I had heard was supposed to even be heard by me. Was I in trouble for hearing it? Was somebody really going to kill me? After a moment standing next to that door and listening to my mom sob, I decided that I was not going to comfort her because I was too afraid of being caught listening in on a conversation I definitely understood was not for my ears. I have always felt some regret for not going to her. 

I climbed back in bed and covered myself completely with the bed covers. I don't remember sleeping after that, but I must have. I woke the next morning on top of urine soaked sheets. I was not a bed wetter as a child really, so for a moment I did not understand. Then the previous night played itself back in my mind. The shaking, the panic, the fear began all over again.

Mom called an FBI agent who lived a few houses away. He came to the house that next morning. He and my mom went up to the living room and I was kicked out of the house and told to go out and play. I noticed my mom had recovered some and was no longer the basket case she was ten hours earlier. She had a new dress on and she had put her face on; what she referred to as applying makeup. She once again was that bad ass mom I had learned to love in spite of the distance she kept between us.

Of course I did not go outside for long. I came back in on the premise of going to the bathroom. I never left after, deciding to sit at the bottom the stairs to the living room and eavesdrop on the conversation between our FBI neighbor and my mother. As they lost themselves in their conversation, I took the opportunity to slowly sneak up the stairs to a better vantage point. 

What I heard actually helped me calm myself some. Both my mom and the agent spoke in even tones with no emotion really, just as a normal conversation would unfold. That helped me immensely. The agent was very clear more than once that he could not get involved but he would check into what he could. The one part of the conversation I remember well is him advising my mom to find a safe haven for me; a relative, a friend, etc. My mom told him we were going to be moving to Florida and that my dad was already there. She also told him she was positive it was Dorothy who called. He asked why. She said because Dorothy was a maniac and had done the same thing shortly after I was born.

That afternoon I was on a flight to Tampa, Florida with one of those damn information filled notes pinned to the lapel of my itchy new suit Mom bought me at Garfinkels department store just across the line in Washington, DC. I hated that suit and found a way to ruin it a few weeks later.

I did not tell my mom I knew about the phone call until I was in my twenties. 

We got word sometime in the early 1970's Dorothy had passed. We also found out she died of a brain tumor that had probably been growing for years. Immediately the family kind of forgave the madness and upheaval she instigated. For me, I felt some guilt over hating her so much.

Odd, what a simple birthday notice from Facebook can create on a Saturday morning.

Later ....................................

BTW - The image above is the only picture I have of Joan, my half sister from Texas. What I knew of her, I liked. 

_______________________ 

Joan spent her early life in Mexico and then settled in Brownsville, Texas to become a juvenile parole officer. She ended her career as a honcho somewhere in the Texas state bureaucracy and later would get into social services, working with Hispanic children living in poverty. I thought a musical tribute should be in Spanish. Here is "The Happy Birthday Song" in Spanish. It is so much better than ours. 

And yeah, I know she is dead. ...... So what?