Balancing on The Edge of Despair

By R.Z. Sheppard

A HOLE IN THE WORLD

by Richard Rhodes; Simon & Schuster; 271 pages; $19.95

Freud hoped that his mind science would teach people how to love and to work. Like most great notions, this one is simple to express but difficult to realize. Just how difficult is the subject of Richard Rhodes' account of his deprived childhood and struggle to escape its consequences. It is a story of modest dimensions but classic proportions, involving orphans, a wicked stepmother, lifesaving benefactors and years of psychoanalysis. It is a story that is painful to read and hard to put down.

Rhodes, 53, is an author whose breakthrough book was the 1988 Pulitzer- prizewinning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The connection between events leading to Los Alamos and an obscure domestic tragedy in Kansas City is not readily apparent -- except to the author. Each story, writes Rhodes, "focuses on one or several men of character who confront violence, resist it or endure it and discover beyond its inhumanity a narrow margin of hope."

In other words, Rhodes is drawn to balancing acts at the edge of despair, above what he calls "a hole in the world." His was blasted open in 1938 when his mother put a 12-gauge shotgun in her mouth and pushed the trigger with a slat.

Rhodes' older brother Stanley discovered the mess. The author was only 13 months old at the time. His first memory was of a large stone-and-clapboard house where his father rented rooms. The homeowners were a nurturing German couple who cared for the boys while their father worked as a boilermaker's assistant.

In 1947 the widower Rhodes married a 48-year-old, thickly mascaraed Texan with a record of multiple divorces. Aunt Anne, as she was called, had a talent for intimidation and exploitation. As her husband stood by ineffectually, she forced Richard and Stanley to do the heavy housework, forage for walnuts and , sell them door to door. Not allowed to use the toilet during the night, Richard surreptitiously relieved himself in jars. Beatings were common, and hunger constant. While Aunt Anne and her husband ate steak, the boys were fed rotting hard-boiled eggs.

When a court order finally released the brothers from bondage in 1949, Stanley, 13, was 5 ft. 4 in. and weighed 97 lbs. Richard, 12, was an inch under 5 ft. and only 80 lbs. The pathetic pair were admitted to the Andrew Drumm Institute, a boy's home on a working farm near Independence, Mo. There Richard attended high school and learned to grow vegetables and slaughter chickens for the institute's kitchen. There, too, he escaped to the pages of books and so impressed his teachers that they put him on a scholarship road to Yale.

Remembering the Midwest during World War II and recalling the routines of farm life, Rhodes again demonstrates his impressive powers of description. Revealing the abused child still writhing within, he controls his anger like a man operating a nuclear reactor. The tension is palpable. The accomplishment -- learning to love and to work by controlling destructive urges -- is inspiring.