Blue Genes Read online

  In my files, there is a letter from Ernst Kris, one of Freud’s American disciples. It’s handwritten on staid stationery, dated September 20, 1942. Dad had been in analysis with Kris, but only briefly. The tuberculosis would interrupt that work.

  My dear Mr. Lukas:

  It is with distress that I learned from your letter that what must be a period of agonizing inactivity has been superimposed upon the difficulties which of late have become your share. Naturally, no other consideration should now gain precedence over the wish to restore your physical health as fully as possible. After that, I feel certain, you will be able to re-assume with new vigor the new career, so successfully started in so short a time, to re-establish the home for your children—and I hope—“get yourself analyzed.”

  While not enough clarity exists about the interrelation of physical and mental states, it seems to me that the old doctrine of worries as contributing to disease is so amply confirmed by recent findings that your condition should at a later date re-inform your inclination to undergo the treatment interrupted last year.

  Much luck for your recovery.

  But Dad never did return to therapy. Tony’s psychotherapy—recently ended—had lasted no longer than our father’s.

  In the midst of his second Watergate piece, Tony spent part of the early summer in San Francisco, clearing up Dad’s meager belongings, and part in D.C., finishing the article. Then all of us joined up in New York for Dad’s memorial service. It was held in a small room at the Society for Ethical Culture. The ashes went to a Hungarian burial society. That seemed fitting.

  Ira and his wife, Frances, came up from Philadelphia to babysit the kids while we went to the service. Susan, Tony, and I sat together. As the moderately large crowd listened to the speakers extol Dad’s virtues, Susan began to cry and took our hands. Both of us also wept. The service was attended by luminaries from the civil rights movement and reinforced my belief that Dad, despite his own despair at “not having accomplished anything” during his seventy-one years, was an important figure.

  Tony later told me a final, sad story about Dad and Aunt Judy. I don’t know whether they made amends or not, whether they forgave what needed to be forgiven, but in any event she had replaced Tony at Dad’s bedside, especially near the end of his life. One afternoon, after Dad had died, Judy sat at lunch with Tony and berated him for not spending enough time in California with our father. Stung by this accusation, Tony lost his cool.

  “And where were you when he needed you all those years?” he snapped back.

  She slapped his face and burst into tears.

  Shortly thereafter, Aunt Frances was diagnosed with throat cancer. She had survived lung cancer some years earlier, but now this brave, thoughtful woman, who had paid loving attention to the needs of her brother-in-law (my father) and his sons, needed attention paid to her. But she was in such pain that we were cautioned not to expect much from a visit. Nevertheless, we went down to Jenkintown—Susan and I—and sat talking to my aunt for a few hours. Frances tried to carry on that conversation, but it was all too difficult. We cut our weekend visit short. After a painful year, she asked that an overdose of painkillers be administered by her physicians. They agreed, and she died of her own time and choosing. I considered this suicide an unwelcome addition to the family legacy, but I went to Jenkintown and spoke at her memorial service because I loved her and honored her. Strangely, despite the generally public acknowledgment of her “rational” assisted suicide, none of us at the service spoke of how she had died. I recognized my own hypocrisy in the matter. I had been the one to broadcast the “news” of Mother’s suicide to my brother, and to others. Why was I silent here?

  Only about a year later, Uncle Ira went into his bathroom and, in an anguished replication of his sister’s death forty years earlier, cut his throat. His eldest son called us in New York with the news. I was aghast. I did not believe history could repeat itself so directly. Tony said he wouldn’t go. “I’ve had enough of suicide,” he sputtered. I felt similar doubts, but again I went. Ira, too, had been a protector and a mentor to me, especially during my college years, when I would come over from Swarthmore to his house. He even set up blind dates for me. How could I not provide some solace at his service? Again, however, I said nothing of suicide in my talk. Again, I recognized my own hypocrisy.

  If we had had enough of suicide, suicide was not through with us. In the 1980s, my ex-roommate Tom Russell, on his fiftieth birthday—recovering from alcoholism, but suffering from schizophrenia—took his own life.

  I went into a deep depression. Though I didn’t realize it, I was turning inward the anger I felt at all those people who were “abandoning” me or had done so in the past: mother, grandmother, aunt, uncle, best childhood friend, even my father, who had continued to drink in his isolated aerie in California, knowing it would kill him.

  Why, Susan asked, did I drug myself with depression instead of feeling the anger?

  “Read up on it,” she said. “What it’s like to be left behind after suicide. Maybe other people’s experience can give you some help.”

  But there were no books on the subject. In the years before the words “physician-assisted suicide” had become popular parlance, or anyone had heard of Dr. Kevorkian, the silence surrounding the subject of suicide was pervasive.

  A psychoanalyst friend, Henry Seiden, and I began to talk to survivors of suicide, those left behind. I discovered all sorts of companions—people who shared some of the feelings and conflicts that I had thought were only my fate. Susan helped make it clear to me: as I was doing, they were protecting others from their anger about these terrible acts, but not protecting themselves.

  I didn’t want others to undergo what I had experienced. And I didn’t want to go through any more of the depression myself. Perhaps, paraphrasing the words of the satirist Tom Lehrer, I could do well for myself by doing good for others.

  So Henry and I wrote Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide. It was about all the aftereffects: depression, anger, guilt, anxiety, replication of the act itself. We warned survivors that if they did not receive intervention in the form of comfort, therapy, and grief counseling, they, too, might end up as suicide statistics.

  The book did, in fact, help me understand my own depression; my confusion over what I had experienced; my need for some way of saying good-bye to my mother—not simply ignoring that she had ever existed.

  And it began to help others, too. I put a lot of energy into talking about the book on television and radio, spreading the word. Oprah and Donahue took me onto their airwaves. I was gratified when, among many who said I’d helped them, Bill Moyers wrote the following:

  I have waited a long time for this book. The secret grief that is at the soul of every survivor is in its own way a killer, slowly eroding one’s ability to bear witness to life. The message of this book is redemptive: Life begins anew when silence ends. Lukas says the telling of this story helped him. Now, he has helped me.

  In the early 1970s, Tony was beginning to feel the kind of depression that would become more and more severe. He had no permanent love relationships, no immediate prospect of a family of his own. Having won one Pulitzer Prize, he saw David Halberstam—and others—win a second and go on to write best-selling books. The old jealousies were rising.

  Some of this angst had already become apparent when we moved to England. After several months there, and after I had written Tony about our trip several times, and after my discovery that it would be hard to get work there, I was disappointed not to hear from him. We had even invited him to spend Christmas with us in London. Nothing. It would have been good to have him share the holiday with us. We missed him.

  Finally I heard. Tony said that his pride had kept him from admitting to us—and to himself—how “wrenching” our move to England was for him. It had caused “an inexpressible loneliness and sense of loss.” Susan and I had never seen him so emotionally expressive before.

  Ultimately I realized
the great guilt I felt about my dependence on you both—for discussion of the most intimate matters; for the warmth of a home to which I belonged even peripherally; for the love and understanding which I should long since have found elsewhere.

  I enjoyed our Sunday night dinners, our monopoly and chess games; most of all the Dictionary games in which I bested Sue. Being “Uncle Tony” to Megan and Gaby, having you both read and criticize my work, traveling to Philadelphia together for Christmases and other holidays.

  He should—he avows—have his own love, his own family, his own niche. He goes on to say that his “analysis” was helping in that regard. (In fact, it was a very short-lived psychotherapy. He would decide, after less than a year, that he was getting little from it.)

  Finally, in a statement typical of the grief caused by long silences and the fantasies they create in our heads, he ends, “I’m writing now because I realized that to extend my silence any further would be to damage our relationship, perhaps irredeemably. I hope I haven’t done so already, because I value it as I value few things in my life.”

  How much misunderstanding there is in silences! I would never have given up our relationship, no matter what happened, certainly not for his lack of letter writing. I felt his pain sharply.

  WHILE WE LIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO, Tony came for visits occasionally. We had him for Christmas two or three times. The last time, in 1977, Susan sent us both off to Reno to enjoy ourselves at the gaming tables. She bought the airplane tickets, reserved a hotel room, and gave us a little bit of cash. We lost our money in a few hours at the tables and slot machines, but enjoyed being with each other. After leaving the casinos, we traipsed through the town—a poor man’s version of Vegas—peering into gun shops, taking in a bad movie and a travesty of a stage show, and talking about our lives.

  A foggy, socked-in airport forced us to take a bus back home. We slept a lot, but we also talked about other rides we had been on together, including with Dad out west, and in Mexico. I enjoyed myself tremendously. It had been almost twenty years since we had spent that much time “alone together.”

  From San Diego, where he had gone to do a bit of research, Tony wrote a short note that ended: “I love all of you very much and I love being with you.”

  I believe Tony meant that. I believe that he enjoyed being connected to us and seeing what joy our family engendered. In the early days Tony was comfortable enough with our children. When he and Megan first met (she was two weeks old), she spit up on his best jacket, but he laughed it off. For baby Gabriela, he played “the ape,” leaping around and making monkey noises. She loved it.

  As our daughters entered their preteen years, however, Tony didn’t know what to do with them. There was talk of going to Yankee games and of other activities, but we realized soon enough that Tony wasn’t going to become a father, and he wasn’t much suited to being an uncle, either.

  Then, after we had settled again back East, a hard split came between us. It probably started earlier, when Susan and I were still in the process of moving to what she called “a beached whale of a house” in suburban New York on the west bank of the Hudson. The house was long and narrow and had thick stucco walls and lots of rooms, probably too many for the four of us. Still, high on a hill, it viewed the river and the Tappan Zee Bridge, and on spring afternoons we could see Pete Seeger’s Clearwater sloop sail by. How could we not buy it? But we had yet to get an approval from the bank for our mortgage. Because I had no job, getting a mortgage would be a particular challenge. I needed help.

  I AM STANDING on the sandy verge of a one-lane road on the New Jersey coast. This spit of land running north to south was where Uncle Ira and Aunt Frances occasionally went to seek peace and quiet. Frances was already suffering from the cancer that would kill her. Ira was aware that he would soon lose his wife. I had flown here with our two daughters because Susan and I felt that the cross-country trip by car was too arduous for them. She and her niece were driving some of our household goods in our old Volvo across the States. Also at Ira’s were his younger son, his wife, and a small child of theirs. It was a crowded, steamy summer scene, and I was already feeling nervous and out of sorts when I went for my evening phone call from Susan.

  Ira and Frances had no telephone in their rented house, so I had arranged to receive calls from Susan at a pay booth on a deserted street at nine each night, not far from the beach and the house.

  That particular night, Susan called with a sense of urgency and anxiety. The bank had refused to give us the mortgage because I had no new job. She was sitting in a motel in Nebraska, midway to New York. I was stuck with the kids on the Jersey Shore. We talked for a few minutes as she told me the situation. My anxiety level rose second by second. No job. No money. No mortgage. No house.

  I put in a call to Tony. He was single at the time. He had saved lots of money from his Times salary. I was sure he would help me out.

  I told him that I was standing in a phone booth on the Jersey Shore, with moths flying around my head beneath the streetlight; I told him that I didn’t know how to secure our mortgage without his help. I told him I was frightened.

  “I don’t understand,” Tony said. “Why won’t they give you the mortgage?”

  Tony had no experience with loans on houses—or on anything else. He was a novice where banks were concerned. As patiently as I could, I explained the situation.

  “They need a co-signer, Tony. Someone with an income above $50,000 a year.” The bank was asking for someone to vouch for us, to back us up if there should be financial problems. I didn’t expect any. I told Tony this.

  There was a long pause. It was the kind of pause that had an inevitable outcome. Tony was preparing to say no. I had heard that no before.

  He started out with a different tactic, however.

  “I don’t know that I have that kind of money.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. It was my turn to be nonplussed.

  “I don’t think I made that much last year. Let me go check.”

  I could hear Tony riffling through some papers, but I already knew the answer. He came back on the line.

  “Christopher,” he said, using the formal moniker he sometimes employed as a joke, but this time the voice was troubled and I knew he was miffed. “No, I didn’t make $50,000 last year.”

  “Jesus, Tony, what am I going to do?”

  Long pause.

  “Well, why didn’t you think of this before you chose the house?”

  Eventually, Susan’s brother co-signed, we got the house, and we always paid the monthly mortgage on our own.

  But that night, standing in limbo, I felt terribly betrayed and lost. Whatever the reasons that Tony could not or would not help out at this time, I felt bitter about it. My big brother was not there for me. Just as he hadn’t been there for me when I went off to school in 1942. When I really needed him.

  IN THE LATE 1970S, Tony was working on Common Ground. It had taken him seven years to complete this epic book that interweaves the busing crisis in Boston with two key families: the (white) Mc-Goffs and the (black) Twymons. A third family, the Divers, was not directly involved in busing, but provided a kind of Greek chorus on the scene.

  When it was announced that the book was coming out, I was eager to read it. As with all his work, he had taken the opportunity many times to call and read passages over the telephone. I knew enough not to make any suggestions about these testings: they were meant not for us but for him to hear the words out loud and to get positive feedback. I had liked what he told me about the book, liked what I’d heard.

  When I actually read the book, I was disappointed. It didn’t leap off the pages at me as it had when Tony read parts of it aloud. There was more detail and what I considered extraneous material than I preferred. I felt the book wasn’t a slam dunk.

  Clearly, I was wrong. The book got rave reviews and a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a television series. That should probably have made me reconsider my views.

&nbs
p; It didn’t, though I never told Tony I didn’t like the book. When we were invited to the publication party, thrown at a luxurious East Side apartment, we went. There were dozens of literary luminaries, but no one that Susan and I knew. After a while, feeling ignored—and that we had paid our respects—we left.

  It took a year before I learned how angry Tony was. I had called him many times in the interim, but we hadn’t seen each other. And he had never called me—until now.

  The phone call went something like this: “Christopher”—the voice as sonorous and serious as ever—“I haven’t been in touch for a while because I couldn’t believe what you and Susan did at the party for Common Ground. I have to tell you that I was very upset for a long time. But our relationship means too much to me to let this go on. I’d like to get together to talk about this.”

  We met for a drink, and Tony expressed to me his vast disappointment about our reaction to the party and the fact I’d never said whether I liked the book or not (though he had probably gathered how I felt). Again, I recognized Tony’s intense need for total approval, love, and gratitude.

  Still, in retrospect, I knew that we should have stuck it out at the party. Boredom should not have kept me from doing the right thing.

  There is more to it than that. I now realize that Tony was to me what Halberstam was to him. I was jealous. Like Tony, I just couldn’t accept that I had my own aptitudes, my own acclaim. I was married to a warm, loving, and talented woman. I had two loving and beloved children who would make anyone proud. Scribner’s was about to publish Silent Grief.

  But I retained jealousy and anger toward Tony. Why didn’t some of his success rub off on me? Why, in fact, didn’t he play big brother by putting me in touch with people who could give me a quicker, bigger leap up the ladder of success?

  Because this didn’t happen, I concluded that Tony had no faith in me.