Forty years later after Simon’s heart attack, Louise grew bewildered and anxious. Her passion and lively banter gave way to paranoia and confusion. Finally, Louise spoke in fragments about her eldest son Martin, who’d died 10 years earlier, in 1929, just before Black Tuesday. Louise was visited by Martin’s two sisters, who had become mothers themselves by then. Louise rarely left her bed at the end, often staring out the window with regret. Louise kept wishing she could help her deceased son get better.
Martin had become something of a prodigy, though his brilliant mind bedeviled him, swerving toward darkness. During Martin’s chaotic life, he took on many roles: scholar, professor, engineer, husband and father, inventor, and, near the end, mental patient who couldn’t escape his terrifying visions of the past. Visions of bloodshed from long-gone wars. Visions of starvation and poverty. Visions of bare-knuckled combat. They came late at night, an unwanted reel of film that routinely played on a loop in his mind. The scenes left Martin reeling when he re-entered waking life.
After graduating Amherst with honors in mathematics, Martin moved to Cambridge and became a city planning engineer, specializing in the marvelous new subway system being constructed around Boston. For the first two decades of the 20th century, Martin was a bachelor, more interested in studying astronomy and philosophy than he was in dating. His mother Louis encouraged him to date, but he shuddered at the thought of engaging with strangers, especially as they seemed put-off by his obsessive ramblings.
After years of solitude, at 33, Martin met someone. A colleague surprised Martin by setting up a café meeting in Harvard Square, leaving him with Eleanor, the eccentric daughter of a life insurance salesman from Hartford. Eleanor and Martin had a surprisingly lovely time together. They agreed to meet again. The two met in the park. Conversation went in all directions. They walked and ended up sitting for hours on a bench. Whereas most others found silence awkward, Martin and Eleanor didn’t. Both were content to read and sip tea. Eleanor enjoyed chess and backgammon, which appealed to Martin. She was unlike the Stapletons. Reserved, tall and elegant, though many found her cold. She was a teetotaler, which was fine with Martin, who only occasionally sipped a glass of whisky himself.
Martin and Eleanor were an odd couple, mostly keeping to themselves. Martin was always busy. Eleanor gave birth to Edward in 1920. Then Paul. Several years later, a troublesome pregnancy that left her in bed most of the time, and the third son, Frederick was born in 1926. They boys were given books to read, games to play, baseball gloves and bats to use at the park, and winter sleds to ride. The family was very comfortable but frugal. Martin and Eleanor gave significant money to charities. Eleanor was suspicious of the wealthy families she grew up around, and abhorred her own father’s greed. When the Great Depression hit, they were stable financially, but Martin’s mind had been slipping away for years.
At first, Martin’s uncanny memory was simply a nuisance to Eleanor. He remembered trivial details and got hung up on the accuracy of mundane facts and events. Eleanor increasingly focused on the children. Martin grew more deranged. The boys were occasionally frightened awake by his late-night mutterings and pre-dawn screams. He seemed to have long conversations with ghosts when he was awake, and then be shocked to find them in his dreams. Finally, Martin lost it completely. Eleanor brought in the doctors. Martin was sent to the mental hospital. The family visited him every Friday evening for years.
Edward, Paul and Freddy grew up with a sense of confusion. Edward spent many nights in bed grappling with the conundrum that was his father. How did this happen? He had a father, but his father became a tortured ghost. He was a brilliant man. but also deranged. His mother was at times comforting, but at other times cold, providing stability for the family, but also detachment. She was calculating, but cerebral and thoughtful. Edward, the oldest within this tumultuous environment, was primed to overanalyze his own life.
Martin died in the mental hospital in 1929, just weeks before the country began to crumble. The family joked that Martin had avoided the Depression because he’d already lived it himself. By 1933, the savings had dried up. Eleanor refused to ask her father for support. Without Martin’s income, the family struggled. Food became scarce. The family sold their modest Cambridge house and moved west to Worcester, where several cousins lived and the prices were much cheaper.
The two older boys, Edward at 13 and Paul at 11, were forced to find employment. Eleanor drove them out to a farm and they began working with a local family. In return, they brought home eggs, chicken, pork and vegetables. These became luxurious as the families around them grew hungry.
In the late-1930s, as the war escalated in Europe, the Stapleton boys expected they’d be serving soon. In 1940, with the passage of the Training and Selective Service Act, Edward and Paul were called to train. They were sent to serve with the U.S. military in Algeria in 1942. Two years later, in June, 1944, Paul was one of the countless soldiers that stormed the beaches of Normandy to help liberate France.
During the same summer of 1944, a grease fire burned down the family home, taking Eleanor, her sister and cousins with it. Edward, who’d shown an aptitude for science, had mainly been stationed with medical battalions, away from the front lines. Edward was discharged first, as he’d served the longest. After returning to the ashes of their childhood home, Edward went to the insurance company and filed a claim. Eleanor had kept some money in the bank.
Edward began college at Boston University, with help from the GI Bill. Finally, the insurance money came through. Somehow, all three Stapleton men survived their tours. Paul was left with a limp from a fall he’d taken scrambling down a hillside. Freddy had seen the true horrors, narrowly surviving D-Day, witnessing horrific scenes of men dying all around him. Freddy came back as a silent shell.
There was enough money to start over again. Paul visited Vermont that October and came back describing the atmosphere of those autumn trees with reverence. Soon Edward and Freddy joined Paul and were taken with the land. Paul persuaded the two brothers to move north from Worcester. The Stapletons landed in a hamlet in rural Vermont, buying three adjacent plots, with endless maple trees.