Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell Read Online Free PDF Page B

think about doing it, Sister?” he says to me on 51 st Street. Not with you, I say.
     
December 31, 1962
    Will shows up sloshed at the Convent on New Year’s Eve. Nancy and I are sitting by a fire, reading, ready for a quiet end to the year, but Will is slobbering about ringing in the new. “Have a drink, have a drink,” he says. We don’t want to but we do, and Will starts to ramble on like a lunatic about his made-up story of our family. “It’s a tell-all and I can’t tell you anything ,” he says, but after another drink he tells us everything, about all the crazy sins in “Sins of the Flesh,” the name of the story he is writing. It sounds crazy, with mad hatters and archbishops and a great big fire, it sounds like it has nothing to do with the O’Kells. Nancy and I let Will talk and talk until he passes out on the floor of my room.
     
February 16, 1962
    Will has taken to wearing long capes and drinking from a vial.
     
March 17, 1962
    Will is drunk again . He’s been marching down Fifth Avenue in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in his cape and that is all the excuse he needs to get stinking drunk and to pound on my door at the Convent. But there is no excuse. It is one thing to get drunk. It’s another thing to be a drunk.
     
    March 30, 1962
    I’ve never seen Diana so happy. “It is his , after all,” she tells me. There can be no doubt about their baby, not with all those curls and those eyes. They name him Gino O’Kell Campobello. I tell Diana that God works in strange ways.
     
July 20, 1962
    I had to come down from the Convent to get Will at the Yale Club. They said they wouldn’t press charges if I would take him and if he never came back. He went in there tonight drinking from his vial and wearing his cape with nothing on underneath. He whipped the cape open in the dining room and then he began flashing the alumni as they were sitting down to dinner. The doorman wrestled him down. When I took him home, he was crying like a baby asking for his bottle.
     
July 21, 1962
    I check Will into a place up in Westchester where he can get treatment. He knows he needs help, and he’s too ashamed to fight back. The doctors say he could be there for a long time.
 
August 30, 1962
    What do you like about it here? I ask Will. “The hedges,” he says.
     
September 15, 1962
    I go up to Westchester to bring Will back home to The Big House. He seems like his old self again, laughing all the way about all of the crazy things he has done, especially his exhibition at the Yale Club. He says he won’t be drinking any more, and that if he does we should all have him committed and throw away the key.
     
September 16, 1962
    Everyone but Will and me leaves Southampton by Labor Day. The weather here in the country is more beautiful than ever. Will and I are out all day every day, riding our bicycles, licking ice cream cones in town on Job’s Lane, kicking at leaves, walking the beach with cold water washing our toes. At night, safe beneath the throws, we fall asleep in our old rooms with the ocean in our lungs and in our souls.
     
September 17, 1962
    The light is so lovely here in Southampton in September. We keep walking along the beach, talking and talking about everything in the world. It’s wonderful to have Will back among the living.
     
October 16, 1962
    We are all back in Southampton when the terrible scare about Cuba and the missiles comes on the radio. Tom knows all about it, of course. He says it had to happen this way because of what Kennedy did at the Bay of Pigs. In a few days, he says the Russians will have the missiles pointed right at Miami and Washington and New York. “Just wait and see,” he says.
     
October 17, 1962
    Tom was right. He gets off the phone and tells us the missiles in Cuba are aimed at the East Coast. He shepherds Becca, Diana, Will, and me into the bomb shelter. “It’s a drill,” he tells us, but everything seems real enough. The worst part is that Will is falling down