The Spike
(an op-ed)
My great great grandfather was named Col. Thomas Wentworth Peirce. My name is Tom Jr., although technically I'm Tom IV.
Col. Tom has an interesting background. At one point he was one of the richest men in the country, having financed the construction of a railroad down in Texas. You can google him and read about it on-line, if you're interested.
While Col. Tom was away, he made arrangements to have his house built in Topsfield, Mass. It was to be a large three story manor overlooking fields and a lake. He chose the location because it took only one change of horses to ride into Boston.
He returned from Texas to find the house completed with a small problem: it was constructed facing the wrong direction. The Salon was supposed to overlook the view, but the entire house was reversed so that the beautiful library looked onto the horse fields behind the house.
I'm not sure what Col. Tom thought about all that, but perhaps it was an omen of sorts, indicating that great success can have unexpected consequences.
I've heard that Col. Tom died fairly young of a heart attack, perhaps also an alcoholic. One item I treasure, however, is a collection of humorous verses with his name hand signed inside, dated 1855. It makes me feel happy to believe that he had a sense of humor.
His son was also named Tom Peirce. Despite a market crash that wiped out a considerable amount of the family fortune, Tom still inherited a comfortable life. He became a gentleman farmer. Col. Tom had made a gamble with some of his wealth by buying up land in Mexico.
He bought up enough land equal to the size of Rhode Island and was gambling that the United States would be bold enough to annex Mexico, or a good portion of it, into the Texas territories. His son, Tom Jr., spent much of his life trying to get back claims to this land. It was a fruitless endeavor as Mexico took most of it back. I'm not sure of all the details but have a stack of his letters and land journals to sift through to figure it out at some point.
Tom Jr.'s wife was a bon vivant of the 1920s who apparently thought Tom to be a pretty boring guy. She married him and then went onto a fast lane life of parties and horse races, making the scandal papers of the day. They had one son, also named Tom, then divorced.
Tom remarried a sweet young thing and had four kids, one of whom was my grandfather. Since the name Tom had already been taken, my grandfather was called John Peirce. He had three brothers. Their father, my great grandfather, died fairly young of a heart attack, so the mother was left to raise four boys. Eventually, they inherited what remained of the family fortune...greatly diminished by vulturous lawyers but still relatively bountiful by the standards of the day.
My grandfather's brothers were neer-do-wells who threw their fortunes away, marrying multiple times, leaving broken homes and lives behind them. My grandfather, however, felt a great burden of family history. He also married well, into a family arguably more wealthy than his own, the Minots. They were descended from French petite aristocracy and re-made their fortune through shipping on the China seas. There was only one problem with my grandfather: although extremely smart, he lacked the capacity for empathy and was, from everything I saw and heard, a rather mean alcoholic.
My father was named Tom Peirce out of my grandfather's effort to reestablish the family heritage. Sadly, he was sent away to boarding school very young, I think about in third grade. He wrote letters home each week which I have. They are heartbreaking. Clearly he was an exceptionally intelligent and sensitive child starving for affection. My grandparents, though lacked the capacity to give affection, most probably due to their own sad childhoods.
After my grandfather came back from World War II, he apparently took over the household in a belligerent way. My memory of my grandfather is of him yelling at me every summer vacation because I didn't remember how to sail from my week there visiting a year earlier. I dreaded contact with him where every comment would only serve to reinforce how stupid and worthless he perceived me to be. I can only imagine what my poor father had to experience.
My father was a smart guy. He went to Stanford and Harvard Business School and was a vice president of international marketing in Geneva. I'll jump ahead a bit and let you know that he died when I was in college in a car crash. I went to a college counsellor at Tufts after it happened at the suggestion of a friend. The counsellor, a very nice guy, asked me to describe my father. I forget what I said, but it was something I felt was rather innocuous. "What happened to your father to warp him so profoundly?" the counsellor asked me.
That was the beginning of confronting my father's legacy, but it took another twenty odd years to fully come to terms with the past.
--
I don't have a lot of memories of my father. My earliest one was when I was about three. We lived in Canada (where I was born) and I got a train set for Christmas. I was so excited I kept pestering my father to help me set it up. This made him furious. Finally, later in the evening, he stormed up to the playroom to put the train set together.
As he was angrily setting it up I took two trains that were wired together and bent them. "Now you've broken it!" my father yelled. He stormed away. It was the first time I experienced such anger so it made a deep emotional impact on me. I never understood what I had broken or why it couldn't be fixed. The train set was thrown out.
--
We moved to Switzerland and, based on letters I found after my grandfather died, my father almost immediately began an affair with his much younger secretary. Her name was Ilse (later they married, thus, she is Ilse Peirce). I have few memories of my father in Switzerland except for him taking me to her apartment.
He would drop me off with her and leave, I suppose in some truly distorted way trying to get me to form a bond with her. There was nothing for me to do there. Ilse sat on the couch smoking, probably as uncomfortable as I was. Eventually I'd panic and want to see my father.
After much pleading Ilse would reveal to me my father's location, typically downstairs at the bar. i remember her laughing as I tried to figure out the locks on the door and then telling me that she would only let me out if I kissed her. Out of desperation I complied. I see now that this was the defining moment where I began to hate myself because I could not comprehend such manipulative evil. As soon as my father returned she would transform into a sweet innocent person. Truly Hans Christian Anderson and others who have written about evil stepmothers are among the most perceptive of the world's psychologists.
--
I rarely saw my father except when he came home to drink and beat up my mother. He tried to kill her multiple times in front of me. He told his family that my mother was crazy and a gold digger. Meanwhile, my father had some sort of bad opium trip while on business in the Mideast. He got into parapsychology and thought he could talk to ghosts and manipulate people with his mind. It's hard to know exactly what his problem was - clearly drinking two bottles of scotch a day and a bad drug trip didn't help. My father divorced my mother, who always loved him, and married his mistress.
--
While I rarely saw my father after that, he did have some lucid moments on vacation. What he told me repeatedly was that he wanted me to be happy and to inherit the spike which he kept on his desk. The spike is a silver spike that my great great grandfather, Col. Tom, had symbolically hammered into the ground at the completion of the railroad. "This will go to you," my father told me.
--
Due to my father's emotional and substance abuse issues, he lost his job and hit rock bottom. His new wife had her green card and had no more use for my father. My father called my sister and told her that his wife was leaving him. My father was killed a couple of days later in a car crash. He died without a will.
--
Ilse was the grieving widow to be consoled by family. Of course she received all my father's possessions and would not give anything, even a photo, to his children. My grandfather, who always struck me as in lust with her (turning into a beat red school boy in her presence) made sure she inherited a significant portion of my grandfather's assets and changed my grandmother's trust documents to have monies go to Ilse.
And the spike? I asked Ilse if could have it as the one memory of my father, as he told me he wanted me to have it. "No! you'll never get it!!" she shrieked. I see her once a year at an annual summer family gathering. All my father's family hugs her and calls her darling.
In college my grandfather took me to dinner for the purpose of telling me that I should grow up and accept her as my "real" mother. I considered throwing my wine into my grandfather's face, but decided to simply walk out instead. I'm still chastised by my relatives for my "childish" behavior in not welcoming her into my heart.
--
I let go of the spike.
