4. TOTAL UPHEAVAL

TOTAL UPHEAVAL

Dodie and I Before We Were Separated

ONE WEEK BEFORE THE BREAKDOWN WITH LELA MAY LOOKING ILL

We Probably Should Not Have Been Born

Having babies was a serious mistake made by Lela May Patton Harvey, our mother.  Lela May’s husband, Leonoreon de Lyon Harvey was already in his late 60’s and Lela May was 32 when Dorothy was conceived.   Lela May viewed her elderly husband’s declining interest in sex as being her fault so she did everything she could think of to entice him.  She enlisted the help of her 7-year-old daughter, Lenora, in campaigning for a little brother.

"No Fool Like An Old Fool"

Never was any cliche truer than that!  Under ordinary circumstances, Major (as Leonoreon was referred to by all due to his retired military status), would have had the good sense to resist getting himself saddled with yet another dependent plus the inconvenience of caring for a newborn baby, but Lela May hit his sore spot:  he had no son.  He had gone through several wives over his lifetime, divorcing each when she produced only female babies and no male.  

He had recklessly sired Lenora knowing full well that he would be 61 when she was born and he would probably not live long enough to see her through school.  This would mean leaving his widow, Lela May, with no income, no insurance, and no way to support herself and children.  Then, to compound that error, Lela May talked him into fathering another child when he was 68! Although he had already fathered two daughters with Lela May (one of whom was still-born), she sold him on the idea that the third time would be the magic number and a little Leonoreon Junior would emerge.  To a man who had sired 7 daughters and no sons, the idea was irresistible.  One last try at keeping the family name alive without any care about who would support them after he died.

Still No Son:

When daughter #8, Dorothy, appeared on December 5, 1945, Lela May realized her gamble had not paid off and Lela May was now referred to (in private arguments witnessed by family members) as a “millstone around his neck”.  He pointedly ignored the new baby and avoided spending time at home whenever possible.  Lela May descended into a deep post-partum depression and left the care of the children to a  part-time maid named Della.  After the first few months, Lela May gave up on breastfeeding and left the preparing bottles of formula to feed Dorothy and checking her for diaper changes primarily to Lenora who was now nearing her 8^th birthday.

The Baby Who Didn't Exist:

Dorothy clung to anyone who would show her any attention, give her food to eat, and make sure she was dressed and warm.  It became the hallmark of her life:  Dorothy just desperately wanted someone to love her and make sure she was fed, clothed, and safe.  I would come running home from school each day to change her diaper, warm up her food, feed her, and bathe her.  Then I would not take her out of that crib where she had been imprisoned all day and I would play with her.

I felt so sorry for that baby.  She was alone in that house most of the time with a mother who didn't want her.  And Major had little or no interest in her because she was not the son he had been promised.  I wasn't surprised.  It was clear that they never wanted me, either.  I cannot remember one instance in my childhood when my mother held me or showed me any affection.  What I do remember is being hit with whatever was handy anytime I made a mistake, even if it was an accident.  

Money Troubles:

To compound the situation, Major was addicted to gambling.  Not only was his Army pension being stretched to the breaking point in trying to keep Lela May and the children housed and fed, he was also being hounded by sheriff deputy visits regarding his failure to pay the required child support payments to his latest ex-wife and their daughters.  He gambled away the family car and buried the house in debt.  They had no choice but to split their small 2 bedroom/one bath house on Drexel Street into a duplex to be able to get rental income to keep them going.

This was shortly after the end of World War II, with all the military returning home and housing was scarce.  It was easy to get tenants.  The East side of the house had a new entrance door cut into the wall to what had been the front bedroom.  It was then designated as the living room.  The rest of the apartment consisted of the original hallway to the one bathroom and the other bedroom and the original kitchen.

This left Major and Lela May (plus children) living in the West side  of the building with the original living room, a dining room which had been converted into a bedroom for the entire family, and a hastily added extension of a tiny kitchenette and bathroom tacked onto the house where the back porch had been.

If things had been difficult before, now they became impossible.  The parents were sleeping in their bed with Dorothy in a crib next to them and Lenora on a cot by the window.  With Dorothy fretting and crying for attention, sleep became a rarity.  Left at home alone with the two children in a cramped little apartment and no money to use for anything other than necessities, Lela May started to lose her mind.  Literally.  She wrote prayers to God in her diary begging for her sanity, terrified of losing all contact with reality.

Frank Rutledge Moves In:

The new apartment was rented to two young soldiers who had just returned from the war in Europe and were looking for peacetime jobs in San Antonio.  Lela May was 33 years old, lonely, frustrated, and desperate.  One of the young soldiers (in his mid-20’s) took an interest in her – and probably saw her as an easy mark for a healthy young male who had been deprived of female companionship for too long.

Major began to suspect that something was going on between his wife and Frank Rutledge, the tenant, during the daytime while he was away at work.  He enlisted Lenora as his spy and required a detailed report from her each day of everything Lela May had done during the day while he was gone.  In one loud argument with Lela May  he declared, “If you aren’t fucking him in real life, you are fucking him in your head.  I know you have him on your mind all the time.  You can’t fool me.  I already had one wife who cheated on me.”

The tension in the house was so great, the baby, Dorothy, responded by crying and clinging to anyone who was willing to pick her up.  For Lenora, it meant getting very little sleep at night, then waking up to feed the baby, and get ready for school.  After school, her time was taken up with trying to make sense of the squalor in which they now lived, making sure she and Dorothy got food to eat, and then coping with Major coming home drunk, hostile, and suspicious, badgering her with questions about what was going on there.

More Renters

First Freddie and Virginia Huntress moved in.  They were adorable newlyweds, all over each other like warm kittens in a basket.  They were fun to have in the house until she got pregnant and demanded they moved to a larger apartment so that the baby would not have to sleep in the same room with them.

Frank Rutledge had departed hastily, fearing the wrath of an angry husband and the mess of a relationship with a woman who wanted him to take over her life for her, take her away from it all, and give her the home and life she wanted.  After he disappeared into the sunset, another young couple, the Newells, moved into the apartment.

Mrs. Newell took great pity in Lela May’s plight and did what she could to help out with Dorothy and to be the friend that Lela May urgently needed.  But it was too little, too late.  Lela May’s contact with reality had begun to erode and she sank into a deep melancholia.  What no one realized was that she had begun to slide into a psychosis:  paranoid schizophrenia.

The Disintegration of a Mind

Lela May's personal diary from that time period shows a woman who was terrified that she could no longer distinguish between reality and hallucination.  She became obsessed with religion.  Her husband and her family had no patience with what was happening with her and kept telling her to "snap out of it, Lela May."  "Stop acting like a damn' fool and start taking care of your children".   She became alienated from her friends with whom she had attended club meetings, played cards, and chatted on the phone.  She was also asked by the pastor at the church to stop coming to church services because she would sit huddled on a back pew, mumbling and muttering to herself, weeping silently. "It was a distraction to the other worshipers", he said.

Thus, she became isolated, fearful and suspicious of everyone around her.  Finally, one night in May, 1948, when Dorothy was two and a half years old and Lenora was 10, Major came home to find the house a filthy mess, the children wandering around unfed, and Lela May laying in the bed staring at the wall.  Apparently, she had never gotten out of bed that day.  He became infuriated, having reached the point where he could no longer bear the situation.

He yelled at her, shook her, and pushed her onto her feet, demanding she get up and 'do something'.  I can still vividly recall Lela May in a house-robe, hair disheveled, mopping the kitchen floor with a an old rag mop that was leaking all over the floor, with Dorothy, naked and crying, holding onto the hem of her robe, and Lela May singing a church hymn, "Wash me in the blood of the lamb and I shall be cleaner than…." And so on.

The Blocked Memory

For most of my life, my conscious mind refused to remember that night.  Later it began to come back to me:  I ran out of the house and put on my roller skates and kept skating along the sidewalks until after sunset when it was no longer possible to see the pavement.   One of the neighbors who could hear the screaming and shouting coming from our house, came out and stopped me and asked what was happening and why wasn't I inside for my dinner.  I told her, "My father is killing my mother.  I don't want to see any more of it."  The neighbor asked whom she could call for help and I gave her my grandmother's phone number.

Relatives To The Rescue of Lela May

About a half hour later, my grandmother arrived with my uncles Paul and George.  They ran into the house, dragging me with them, and found Lela May on the bed, staring blankly, frozen in position by catatonia.  Major, by then, was drunk and storming around the house.  He was still yelling at her.  Dorothy was naked. crying hysterically and climbing on the bed, trying to wake her mother.

My grandmother called the family doctor who recommended she contact "South Presa", the nickname for the insane asylum located on South Presa Street in San Antonio.  Shortly thereafter, the ambulance arrived, the attendants strapped Lela May to a gurney and headed to the hospital.  Grandma and the uncles followed in Uncle George's car to the asylum to fill out the commitment papers to have Lela May admitted there as a patient.

Orphans of the Storm

I guess they assumed that Major would take care of Dorothy and me.  He, however, stormed out of the house and went off to get drunk to the point of passing out.  Dorothy was still screaming, terrified, and shaking.  I got some clothes on her and managed to get her to drink some hot Ovaltine.  I really thought he had tried to kill Lela May and I was afraid if he came back, he would kill Dorothy and me.  We hid in the back of the closet overnight, too afraid to sleep.  I was trying to comfort Dorothy so that if he returned, he wouldn't hear her and be able to find us.

The next morning, Grandma realized that she needed to go back to that house and make sure we were okay.  She and my uncles found us hiding in the closet, the house a shambles, and Major nowhere in sight.  They discussed taking us to the orphanage but Grandma thought that Lela May might 'come out of it' and be able to return home to take care of her children.  So, because Uncle Paul had been my godfather at the christening and Uncle George had been Dorothy's godfather, we were split up and sent to live with them.

Split Up and Sent Packing

I was moved into a small apartment with my Uncle Paul and his new wife, Fay.  They had no children of their own at that time, and, as newlyweds, they found sharing a bedroom with a 10-year-old girl a bit disconcerting.  None of us was happy with that arrangement.  I kept running away, riding my bicycle for miles while I tried to sort out in my head what in the hell I would have to do to survive.

Dorothy, meanwhile, was sent to live with Uncle George and his wife, Dottie.  They had no children and Dottie, who wanted very much to have children in her life to love, wanted to take Dorothy and give her what that little child so urgently needed - someone who would care about her.  Dottie was truly one of the best mothers I ever met - her instincts were there to shelter, comfort, give unconditional love, and whup your butt if you got out of line.  Dorothy finally had a home.  At least for a little while.