Chapter 9
THE NEXT MORNING, JIM THREW UP HIS EGGS AT brEAKFAST, THE three of us shell-shocked. I don’t recall our sleeping accommodations but imagine Dad and Perry were in the bedrooms, my brothers and I camping out in the living room.
My father’s former law partner recently had been sworn in as a special assistant to U.S.
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Perry had connections, and obviously realized Dad was acting irrationally if not bordering on psychotic.
What I remember vividly, as does Jim, is Dad continuing to mention a book he would write.
He talked grandiosely about it changing the world.
I don’t know the details of what was put into motion, but I remember a white Coast Guard boat picking up Dad.
I watched as it churned away through the quiet cove, horrified that I might not see him again.
Perry loaded my brothers and me into the Boston Whaler, and I don’t know where he took us.
But I remember gliding up to a pier, water slapping the boat sides.
He stood up, a coil of rope in his hand, moving to the bow. Waiting with his feet far apart, he held his hands out to stop the boat before it drifted into the dock. He wound the rope around and around a piling, pulling it tight. Then he helped each of us out, unstrapping our lifejackets.
A station wagon was parked nearby on a narrow road, and I don’t know who was in it, but suspect it might have been Perry’s wife, Inez. My brothers and I were driven off, headed home. Tires hummed over pavement, and John cried quietly because he wanted his cowboy boots.
It would seem my father tried to give my brothers and me to the Nichols.
I’m forever grateful for their kindness and what they did to help.
Chances are this was when Dad ended up in the care of a psychiatrist he referred to as Dr. Salinsky.
Never seeing the name spelled out, I’m not sure who that was.
I don’t know how long Dad was hospitalized, undergoing what Mom referred to as sleep treatment, unconsciousness induced by drugs.
It was a good time for us to make a run for it, and we did that May of 1963.
I knew we were moving when a big yellow truck with green ships painted on the sides pulled up to our house.
I watched movers carrying out cardboard boxes, and lamps, couches, beds, loading them into the truck.
It took two men to carry the red velvet wingchair, shoving into the truck’s dim interior, sweat staining their gray uniforms and rolling down their tired faces.
Mom told my brothers and me that “Mayflower” would one day carry our furniture and other belongings to a quiet valley in the mountains, a place far away.
Before we left, we stayed with my grandmother. I remember sitting in her living room during that last visit before Mom moved my brothers and me to North Carolina. G.G. was distraught and kept rapping on a window overlooking the birdfeeder.
“GET AWAY FROM THERE! GET AWAY FROM THERE!” she yelled, rapping some more. “Darn old blue jays. They’re scaring away all the birds. And that’s the first scarlet tanager I’ve had in weeks. Did you see it, Patsy? Or were you asleep?”
“No, I wasn’t asleep.” But I almost was, the couch very comfortable, our gray cat Sniffy curled on top of me.
“Of course you weren’t asleep. I don’t suppose the dead could sleep with Gussie shaking the house like a hurricane. Sometimes I’m such a silly old lady.”
She was wearing her usual blue flower-printed dress and thick glasses. Her eyes looked unnaturally big, her white hair fluffy, and when she laughed, I could see bridgework and pink gums. We said goodbye, and it was the only time I ever saw her cry.
“G.G., don’t cry, don’t cry.” Mom was teary.
“If I lose you too, I’ll have nothing.” G.G. took off her glasses, wiping her eyes. “You’re the closest thing to a daughter an old lady could dream of. What will you do? And where will you stay?”
“All that matters is we escape,” Mom said.
G.G. worried about how we’d afford to live. She kept saying that she wished she could help us. But the only money she had was what Dad gave her, and her winnings at playing cards. Mom said she’d sold her engagement and wedding rings. She complained that she was given only $160 for both.
“The Cubans have flooded the market with diamonds,” G.G. said.
“I know I was cheated,” Mom complained.
She had $48 left, I heard her tell G.G. That would have to last until we were settled safely in North Carolina. As soon as Dad was released from the hospital, Mom would let him know our new address so he could send checks to support us.
“Pat, don’t give him a divorce. Don’t give in to his foolishness,” G.G. advised her.
“I wish I’d never married him.”
“Birds are faithful, Pat. They’re more faithful than Daniels men.”
I remembered the scent of lavender and my grandmother’s heavy arms around me as we hugged goodbye.
Never again would I carry the picnic basket on treasure hunts with her.
I wanted her to come with us, but that wasn’t possible.
After saying goodbye, Mom loaded us and Sniffy into the Chevy Impala, white with blue swooshes on the sides.
My father could know nothing of our escape plan until we were safely in North Carolina.
I suspect that’s why Mom did little in advance beyond hiring Mayflower to pack up our house and put everything into storage.
I assume she was taking no chances that he would discover her intentions and try to stop us. For sure, he would interfere.
Jim sat in the front seat with the map open in his lap.
At the age of eight he was directing Mom which way to go.
I remember he kept instructing her not to turn right or we’d drive into the ocean.
Finally, we were on U.S. 1 headed north.
In the backseat with Sniffy’s cardboard carrier at my feet, I’d pet her through the air holes.
We drove some eight hundred miles, arriving in Asheville on June 6, three days before my seventh birthday. Mom found a motel and we spent the night, checking out the next morning after breakfast. She stopped at three different gas stations asking for directions to the tiny town of Montreat.
Tunnel Road turned into Old U.S. 70 as we drove east. Daisies and Indian paintbrushes dotted the roadsides, thick clusters of green leaves tumbling from gnarled branches. Clean cool air blew through the cracked windows, stirring my hair.
Mom was hugging the center line as we crept around turns with steep drop-offs beyond guardrails. I’d never seen mountains and thought they were a frozen ocean. Amazed by the cool temperature, I deduced that western North Carolina was air-conditioned.
Then banks of raw red clay soared on either side of the road, and it seemed the Red Sea was parting as we passed into the Promised Land where Billy Graham lived. It would be a secure haven for us. We would be fine, Mom assured us. Nobody was going to hurt us, she said.
Montreat is hugged by mountains on three sides, tucked in a cove crisscrossed with streams. That part of the world is rich in the granite used to construct the college, the church, the conference center, walls, bridges, waterfalls.
The rugged rock structures are a primitive combination of ancient castles and the Flintstones.
In 1897 a congregationalist minister named John C.
Collins was looking for an unspoiled spot where people of faith could gather.
He chose western North Carolina because of its temperate and healthy climate.
The forty-five-hundred-acre tract he decided on was untouched forestland in a valley some sixteen miles from Asheville.
He called his new utopia Mountain Retreat, the name later shortened to Montreat.
In 1907, the Presbyterian Church U.S. purchased the entire settlement for conferences, fellowship, and education.
It was to be a sanctuary where clergy and missionaries could gather, furlough, and retire, a place of rest and reflection, a spiritual oasis in a secular world.
My family arrived late morning, passing through the double stone gate that reminded me of the McDonald’s golden arches.
I remember slowly following Assembly Drive, hundreds of tourists and conferees milling about.
We’d shown up at the height of the season without a single acquaintance or a place to stay.
But Mom was convinced that God would find someone to save us.
As we crept along in traffic with no destination in mind, we neared the congested part of town where the conference center and college are located.
People were everywhere, some carrying fishing poles and tennis racquets. I saw a lot of families with children.
We neared the rugged stone Assembly Inn looming over Lake Susan, and Mom stopped in the middle of the road. She cranked open her window, flagging down a well-dressed man with white hair. He stepped over to see what this pretty young woman with three towheads needed.
Our car had a Florida license plate, and the white-haired man likely assumed we were lost, as were many visitors in these parts during the summer. Mom explained that we weren’t lost and were moving here. But we had no place to stay and didn’t know a soul.
The man she was talking to happened to be the president of Montreat Anderson College.
A few years later, he would become the town’s first mayor.
Grier Davis was prominent and well connected.
She couldn’t have picked better. What are the chances he happened to walk across Assembly Drive at the very moment we rolled up in our white Chevy?
Synchronicity, the universe reminding us that we’re not alone.
Or an answer to prayer, a miracle, something meant to be, as Mom believed.
To me they’re different names for the same mystical intervention.
Grier Davis told her to pull off on the shoulder, and they talked for several minutes, traffic rumbling past.