Donald

The parallel stories of Donald and Belle are not quite parallel. Only in the doing of the research did they take on any sense of parallelism. Neither character had enough umph in their own lives to command anything being written about them, or even really much being mentioned about them in the lives of others. But Donald, as I understand him, was a fascinating character. Now here I am telling someone else’s story but I’ll give it a shot.

Donald graduated from high school in 1937 and joined the army. He was shipped off to the Pacific theatre and was in China when the Japanese entered Nanking in early 1938, and played out their rampage. He saw things no human being should see –pregnant women eviscerated, limbs hacked off, mangled bodies left in the street. At some point during the rape of the city he may have been captured. But that possibility is not clear and it seems somewhat unlikely since the American soldiers were ordered not to intervene. The rules of non-engagement, of course, made things all that much worse for the American GIs since they had to stand by and watch as one country’s soldiers murdered another country’s citizens. Thousands of them. So something in Donald snapped.

It’s not clear what went crazy in him, but crazy he went. His buddies tried to calm him but he was unreachable. The separation from reality was deep enough that he was shipped back to the states and locked away in St. Elizabeth’s – the famous psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Washington DC that has housed, in the years before and since, some of America’s most famous crazy people. Donald spent the next five years, much of World War II, locked up in America’s government run mental institution. When he arrived back in rural Pennsylvania after his release, the small town to which he returned simply assumed he’d been away fighting for god and country. He’d joined the army, after all, and there was a war on. Donald did nothing to disabuse them of this reasonable notion.

Soon he took up again with his high school sweetheart. The courted and soon married. Her mother was part of the deal and the two women moved in with Donald at his farmhouse outside of town and settled into married life. Donald wasn’t as happy with the situation as he’d let on. He probably felt trapped by when he considered to be his shrew of a mother-in-law. One day he took his shotgun and killed his mother-in-law. He sat in the kitchen waiting for his wife to come home. When she arrived she knew something was wrong, but before she could find out why this awful thing had happened, Donald killed her too. Then he calmly called the police and reported that he’d just killed his wife and mother-in-law.

Much like the last time he’d been in trouble, Donald wound up locked away in a mental institution. For a period of time, he was treated by the famous psychiatrist Thomas Szaz – the man who hypothesized that people aren’t crazy, they’re simply not conforming to society’s ideas of who they should be. Donald was a long walk from society’s expectations, having shot his mother-in-law in the face and then killed his wife. This time he spent thirty years locked away. Thirty years. But when he was released he again returned home to his small town and took up his life. He didn’t drive, but he would walk into town to eat at the nice restaurant on weekends. And there is where he met my friend Diane’s mother.

Although she knew his bizarre history, she fell in love with sweet Donald. And he with her. Before Diane could suggest a second thought, Donald and her mother were married. And from there things became, as you might expect, stranger than one could ever expect.

Here my story of Donald ends (for the time being anyway). Not because I know nothing about the remainder, but because this is where my friend Diane enters Donald’s life and can be a first person narrator. All prior story was discovered by her and told to me in the course of her working on a book about Donald’s life. And that is the intersection – the non-parallelism – of Donald and Belle. They both stymied their biographers. The bare bones of their stories, odd enough and compelling enough, are lifted away to reveal…nothing. All that we can unearth are these skeletal remains of their lives, the stories that engage listeners and elicit requests for more. But the more, the context, feels permanently locked away.