Two Sisters And A Brother

 

A Partridge Family Timeline

It’s a simple question and it seems like there should be an easy answer, but for me, it’s complicated. At a social event you get to chatting with someone. You talk about families of origin and they ask the question. How many siblings do you have? It happened with a neighbor just the other day. I always freeze for a moment before answering. This time I barely hesitated before replying.

Two sisters and a brother, I said. Then I had to add: and a step-sister who is not really a step-sister anymore, but I still consider her family. That was my answer and it is technically true, but leaves out the dead brother, the dead step-brother and the forty year old half-brother I haven’t seen since he was three.

The pictures tell the stories. My powder room is a holy shrine to the past, papered with family photos. I can walk in there and commune with my people. There’s the last photo taken of us five kids, when my sister, Laura, was three weeks old. Jeffie was holding baby Laura in his lap, a day or so before he was hit by a car and killed at the age of seven. In another picture, maybe six months later, there were four of us. The family classic is our Endless Summer photo. We were in Florida, all gathered around our VW bus. My father was shirtless, with the body of a Greek God. My step-mother, Dotty, looked tres chic in her white sunglasses. I was about eight, looking into a camera lens.

Six Kids

We had the full complement of siblings at that time. My father had left my mother and married Dotty a few years after my brother died. Dotty had two children so we were six kids. Dotty was the best thing that ever happened to us. My father was a chameleon. He was influenced by whomever he was with and Dotty was the best influence on him. He was a better father to us when they were together.

My parents got married the day they graduated from Oberlin College. It took some years to do the math and realize that Mom was expecting when they got married. They tied the knot in June and Jeffie was born in January. I have no idea how things would have gone had my mother not been pregnant. It is unknowable. There were four more kids and several miscarriages in the next seven years.

Clearly, fertility was high and birth control was low. Many people walk the face of the earth thanks to the “rhythm” method. I’m pretty certain I am one of them. My mother made it clear that she would have been quite happy with her two boys, and possibly Priscilla to round out the genders, but Laura and I were superfluous. Thanks, Mom.

Five of Us With Cousins Chris and Gary

I had two sisters and two brothers for three weeks. Then I had two sisters and one brother for five years. When Dotty and my father were married we added Annie and Peter as step-siblings. Every other weekend Dad would drive two hours each way to come pick us up on a Friday afternoon and drive us back home on Sunday evenings. We spent half our school vacations with them. We had good times as a family of eight. Annie and Doug were the same age and Peter was three years older. The kids were 5, 7, 8, 11, 11 and 14. We had big family dinners, went on road trips and did lots of sailing on our sloop, Xanadu.

Dotty was the glue that held everything together. She loved to do group activities, especially tennis. One year we had matching, monogrammed sweatshirts and there was a phase where everyone was playing the recorders. Think von Trapp Family, but we were literally named Partridge, so we were actually The Partridge Family, like the tv show. Other than a few instances of shop lifting and a fair amount of pot smoking (for some of us) we were all pretty good kids, except for Peter. He could be a real asshole and didn’t have much of a conscience. He seemed to be wired wrong. He was terrifically handsome and charming with a surfer’s beautiful body, but kept acting out and was sent to boarding school.

Eventually Peter moved to Hawaii where he was “living off the land” which was code for drug dealing. We assumed it was pretty innocent, as in he grew and sold weed, but when he was shot in the head and found dead in a rental car, we discovered his life was a bit darker than we had been giving him credit for. The killing happened in the city of Pearl on Oahu. I believe the detective’s words were something like: Peter was a known user and dealer of heroin. Yikes! He had recent passport stamps from some shady places, like Bangkok, Thailand. The last communication I had with him was about six months before he died when he called Doug and me in Los Angeles and asked us to carry a suitcase to New York for him. He wanted us to be his drug mule! What a total asshole. We said no and that’s the last we heard from him.

After Peter’s death our count was two sisters, one brother and a step-sister, although that didn’t last very long . Not content to have an adoring wife, the former minister turned teacher decided to have an affair with another married teacher who worked at his school. Ugh! Dad, really? Does it never end with you? Gloria was short-lived, and Dotty would have taken him back in

heartbeat, but that’s not the way he rolled. After their divorce was final Annie wasn’t technically a sibling so it was back to two sisters and a brother.

Dad left mom after she lost a child. He left Dotty after she lost a child. With Mom, there was plenty of ugly guilt and probably a lack of compatibility, but he and Dotty were a good match. It seems he wasn’t attracted to damaged goods. Dotty had lost her kid right after she lost a breast to cancer. Not one to take time for therapy and introspection, soon Dad was on to family number three. This time he managed to find someone pre-damaged. The third wife was much younger, and a pathological liar. Despite claiming she was a virgin, and infertile due to some mysterious medical maladies, we were soon expecting a new brother, although Dad was already a grandfather to my first daughter.

Jamie was a blue-eyed, curly-haired blonde kid. We met him a couple times when he was a toddler. We had a falling out with Dad over the shabby way they treated my grandparents, which included inveigling them out of money, though there was little to spare. We eventually moved them from Massachusetts to California to be near us. We were also tired of the insane letters sent to us by his Mrs, always with a grain of truth, but mostly rambling psychotic nonsense.

We went no contact with Dad for seventeen years, until I heard he had advanced lung cancer. I was planning to go to New York to visit my daughter, so I got in touch and we agreed to meet at the place on East 52nd Street where Lucy was spending the summer. The apartment, formerly owned by Shirley MacLaine, was beautiful. Just before the scheduled meeting time I ducked out to the corner bodega to buy some flowers. I nearly crashed into Dad when I crossed the street. He looked pretty much the same, just an older version of himself, a bit more shaggy with a larger nose than I remembered. He must not have been very far into the chemo at that point, because I wouldn’t have known he was sick.

We spent all day talking and it was so good to see him. He said a lot of the things I needed to hear about how many mistakes he’d made and the numerous ways he’d failed his family. We didn’t speak much about the crazy wife or my half-brother, but as he got sicker she kicked him to the curb and he went to stay with one of his former mistresses. Oh, Dad.

It was so cathartic for me to reconnect that I wanted the same for my siblings. I wanted them to see and speak to Dad before he died and to have him meet their children. I bought him a ticket to California for Thanksgiving. When I went to pick him up from the airport I walked right past Dad without recognizing him. The chemo had done its work. The golden locks were gone, as

were the eyebrows. Three months earlier I had known him instantly. Now I looked right at him and couldn’t see him, with his bald head, broken glasses and old clothes.

Dad stayed with my sister for a Thanksgiving weekend visit. Unfortunately, he ended up in the hospital with pneumonia on Thanksgiving Day. We were hosting a dinner at our house which included my mother and step-father. I put the turkey in the oven and left it for others to mind while Mom and I headed to the hospital to see Dad. It was so strange to be in the ER with both my parents who had been divorced for decades. I remember Dad had white socks on and at one point Mom gave his foot an affectionate squeeze.

The hospital stay only lasted a couple days, but issues arose when Dad decided he’d like to die on our couch. I was happy to help get him sorted with lodging, but for that he needed money and he wasn’t willing to use any of his pension or social security to help support himself. All of his income needed to be funneled to loony tunes and the kid. We had taken over my father’s parents and cared for them until they died. It was hard to get motivated to do that again for someone so broken and selfish.

It became clear that I had to send Dad back to New York, come what may. One of my daughters cried at the thought of him leaving. The other cried at the idea of him staying. I was in both camps, and when I took him to the airport I was brokenhearted. I sent him back with some money, new glasses, filled prescriptions and warm clothes to ward off the December cold. I couldn’t figure out what else to do. We said we loved each other and I walked away and began to cry. I cried off and on for the next four hours. I cried so hard I gave myself an ear infection. I never saw or spoke to my father again. He died alone about a year and a half later, in a home for cancer patients in Stony Brook, New York, which was formerly housing for AIDS patients. He was seventy-five.

My beloved step-mother, Dotty, never remarried and died after suffering from Lewy Body Dementia. My mother hit the jackpot with David and they were happy for over forty years. She died in 2021 at almost ninety-two, after many years of failing health. I have no idea what happened to my little brother or his mother. My two sisters and one brother are now 71, 68 and 65. I am 67. We are still in touch with our former step-sister, Annie, who is also 71.

Four Kids