...And Never Let HerGo

boom years, when it had trademarked a miracle formula known as Ban-Lon. Highly thought of in the company and in Wilmington, MacIntyre would work for Bancroft for forty-seven years, and his son, Bill, would join him in the upper echelons of Bancroft management.
    Bill and his bride, Sheila, had a wonderful future ahead when they married in St. Ann’s in Wilmington, just after World War II; they had each come from prominent families. Sheila Miller’s father was an attorney who worked for the DuPont company, and an uncle, Don Miller, was one of the Four Horsemen, the legendary backfield that played football under Knute Rockne at Notre Dame in 1924. Sheila’s brothers, Tom and Creighton, also played for Notre Dame. Both Bill MacIntyre and Sheila Miller were well placed in Delaware society, and they married for love.
    But despite their high hopes going into it, this was to be a blighted marriage. Sheila was so fragile emotionally that she was incapable of being either a wife or a mother. Despite the wealth and privilege the MacIntyres enjoyed, her illness cast a pall over many generations of the family.
    Deborah MacIntyre, Sheila and Bill’s second daughter, always longed for a secure family life—and never found it. She would fill the walls of her homes with photographs of Millers and MacIntyres.One particularly poignant picture shows Sheila at the age of eight in the early thirties, posing with what appears to be her perfect family. Harry and Mary Cecilia Duffy Miller and their children sat self-consciously on lawn chairs on a sweep of manicured grass. Within a year, the young woman with the marcelled bob would be dead, and Sheila left without a mother, a loss magnified by the fact that she was never allowed to grieve for her mother: child psychology of the era dictated that children must simply go on and not dwell on sadness. Indeed, Sheila did bottle up her tears and her questions, and it well nigh destroyed any hope that she would ever be able to cope with the world.
    Catholic, Sheila and Bill MacIntyre had three children in just a little over two years; she was twenty-four and hadn’t been able to care for even
one
baby confidently. In the winter of 1953, Mary Louise was three and a half, Debby was two and a half, and their little brother, Ralph, was barely one when Sheila had a complete nervous breakdown.
    “That was the end of my having a mother,” Debby MacIntyre recalled forty-five years later, the loss still caught somewhere in her voice. “I was abandoned. We were all abandoned. There was money—that’s what saved us—but money doesn’t make up for not having a mother. We lived with my father’s parents for a year. My mother was in the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Hospital for six months.”
    When Sheila was released from the hospital, Bill bought a little white house on Woodlawn Avenue, four doors down from his parents’ much larger home just off the Bancroft Parkway. The children stayed with their grandparents, while Bill and Sheila lived together for six months. They could
visit
their mother, but Debby and her brother and sister made Sheila too nervous for them all to live together. The elder MacIntyres were there to give them some semblance of a serene home. Eventually, the children did move back in with their parents, but it was never to be a normal home. Sheila never spoke of her own mother to her children. “I didn’t even know my grandmother’s name,” Debby said, “not until one of my cousins told me it was Mary Cecilia.”
    Debby was Bill and Sheila’s second child, but she was right in the middle of the birth order for many years. “My sister was the first grandchild on my father’s side, and she could do no wrong,” Debby recalled. “And my brother was the first son, the namesake, William Ralph MacIntyre III, and I was the one in the middle—the classic middle child. I needed to be noticed. I would do
anything
to be noticed.The way I grew up, I would do anything to please. I became the placater; I did everything to please my grandparents and my parents to get their love and attention.
    “Sometimes I just had to keep doing it and doing it. I became very persistent because they just didn’t notice me most of the time. I had to compromise—but to be strong about that—even as a little person.”
    Bill MacIntyre was the parent who looked after his children; Sheila couldn’t—but Debby was too young to understand why. All she knew was that she had no mother in the sense that