...And Never Let HerGo

her friends did. Her mother was a vague, temperamental woman who withdrew to her room when her children got too close or too insistent.
    “I wanted her to love me,” Debby said later, “and I couldn’t understand that she couldn’t. It was a sad way to grow up.” But her father was there, and pleasing him meant everything to Debby. “I learned to do what I was told. Always. That way, I would make whoever it was happy. I couldn’t take anyone being mad at me, because that meant that I had failed.”
    Barely three, Debby formed behavior patterns that were natural to her. She never questioned her own reactions—not even as a grown woman. She made a little place for herself in the world and clung to it. She adored her father, and kept hoping that her mother might come to love her. She, of course, couldn’t begin to understand what alcoholism or drug addiction meant.
    Sheila MacIntyre not only was mentally ill, but also used both alcohol and drugs to assuage the depression that gripped her. The success of lithium in treating bipolar disorders was not yet proven, but even when it was, Sheila would continue in her addictions.
    There was to be yet another child, another son, Michael, born in 1958, when Debby was six. But nothing really changed. Sheila couldn’t care for three children—and now she couldn’t care for four.
    The MacIntyre children all attended the best private schools in Wilmington, and Tatnall was right up there in prestige. Debby would attend Tatnall for fifteen years. She was especially adept at athletics and would be nationally ranked in swimming—both in the butterfly and in the backstroke. As a young girl she was a pretty blond little tomboy. In high school she would still be athletic but hardly a tomboy. Her success in swimming competitions gave her her first glimmerings of self-esteem.
    Unlike the Fahey family, the MacIntyres never lacked for food or clothing or a nice house, but they also lived in a home where things happened that they tried to keep secret. With Sheila abusingboth drugs and alcohol, she was often very irrational, sometimes almost comatose. “I’m amazed she didn’t
die,”
Debby said later, “with what she was taking. She was unpredictable. Sometimes she would lash out. Sometimes she was incoherent. We didn’t know what she was going to do. It was embarrassing to us, and it was a very stressful way to live. We never wanted anyone in the house because of what our mother might do.”
    The MacIntyre grandparents were appalled by Sheila’s behavior. “My grandparents hated her because of what she did to our family,” Debby said. “So I was torn. I didn’t know what to think or who to side with—and I was still trying to be sure
everyone
was happy, because although I didn’t realize it then, I felt that was still my
job.”
    In December of 1966, when Debby was sixteen, Sheila MacIntyre moved out of the family home. Actually, she left because she needed to be hospitalized at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Hospital once again. Bill committed his wife, and when she was released this time, he found her an apartment in Media, Pennsylvania. He had accepted the truth that she could never come home again, not with the children there. Her psychiatrist recommended that she have a quiet place of her own.
    As a good Catholic, Bill had married for life. As a man, he still loved Sheila with a devotion that few could understand. He was terribly conflicted—but he stayed with the children.
    “My mother just couldn’t manage us as teenagers,” Debby said. “It was ruining her, ruining the family—so she moved away. My brother Ralph, who’s eleven months younger than I am, had been in boarding school since the seventh grade. My sister was invisible—that’s the way she dealt with the situation. I have no idea where she went, but she was never there. I was left to care for my younger brother. I was sixteen and Michael ten.”
    Scrambling as they all were for a small place in the sun, there was little cohesiveness among Bill and Sheila MacIntyre’s children. Debby was fully responsible for her youngest brother. “I was given the responsibility for raising him and running the house when I was sixteen.”
    A long time later, Bill MacIntyre admitted to his younger daughter that what he did was wrong—that he had compromised his children in his efforts to save his wife. “He loved my mother,” Debby said, “but he never dealt with the fact that she had all these problems.