Volume 48, Number 9 · May 31, 2001
In the Radical Nursery
By Jennifer Schuessler
How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories
Dorothy Gallagher
Random House, 187 pp., $22.95
A few fierce sentences into the title chapter of Dorothy Gallagher's memoir, readers might be forgiven that sinking feeling of being spectators at yet another act of literary revenge by a grown child with a grievance. Gallagher's parents are in their early nineties, living in a jury-rigged house in upstate New York with a wood-burning stove (her father removed the hot water heater a year earlier—too expensive) and a feces-smeared bathroom. Her mother—'the woman was certified senile,' Gallagher tells us, just 'a heap of rags' slumped in her chair—can't take two steps without falling. No nurse lasts more than a few days. 'This house is very dangerous to work in. The man is a very bad man I think he's mad,' writes one of the nurses ('not the one who refused to masturbate him, or she would have mentioned it,' Gallagher adds helpfully). 'His daughter lives in the city. She's a very nice person but he treats her bad.' Gallagher thinks there's a million dollars hidden in the mattress; her father thinks the young con man he keeps writing checks to is going to triple his money in real estate. So the very nice daughter hires a lawyer and a judge makes her her father's conservator. 'My father couldn't believe it,' she writes. 'The look he gave me! Bitter hatred.'
Review, 1895 words
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