Blue Genes Page 20

  In the dim light from the bedside lamp, I turned, cautiously, to look at my brother’s body. Tony was lying on the bed fully dressed, only one leg slightly drooped off the side. The room was dark; but Tony’s rooms were always dark and messy.

  Time slowed down, and I felt, curiously, stereotypically, in a dreamlike state.

  Someone has removed the cord from around my brother’s neck; without it, he could easily be asleep, his large form carelessly slung across the bed. I am surprised how serene he looks, his umber brow no longer creased, his fat, turned-up lips relaxed across his teeth, features less troubled than I have ever seen them. Only the slight bluish tinge to his dark complexion gives the clue that he is not breathing. I want to touch him, to know that it is my lifeless brother, my companion for sixty-two years—though separated often by physical and emotional distances. Still—my brother. Without touching him, I can’t be sure he is dead. But the cop is watching, Susan is at my elbow, and, like most of us, I fear what a dead body might feel like.

  Reticent and embarrassed by the situation, I cannot bring myself to reach out my hand, to verify my brother’s death. As a result, were it not for the fact that I have been sitting in the other room, talking to those people about this event, I would be tempted to shout at him, “Get up and stop kidding around.” I wish he would—and put an end to the nightmare that is just beginning.

  How strange, I think: no sign of a struggle; no sign of agony. For once, he looks at peace. Even while I register the fact that this is a cliché, I see that it’s true; he looks okay. And still I can’t bring myself to touch him. I go as close to the bed as I can, then stop and try to remember this image. For the future.

  On the bedside table is a clock, its electric second hand moving peacefully around the dial. Time hasn’t stood still, I think. Isn’t that peculiar!

  Well past midnight. I turn to Susan. “Come on, let’s go call the kids.”

  In Linda’s kitchen—what used to be their kitchen—I was able to reach Megan (our eldest, at twenty-nine) on the phone. Her first, intuitive reaction was not for her own pain but for mine.

  “Oh, Dad,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” We arranged to meet her downstairs at her apartment.

  As we said good-bye, I realized that no one in the living room was crying. I felt that was strange, but then I realized that I hadn’t cried yet, either. Maybe I never would.

  At two in the morning, when our pounding on her apartment door brought our youngest, Gabriela, twenty-seven, groggy and bewildered, to open it, her reaction, too, was generous and instinctive. Tears welled from her luminous eyes, but her words and hugs were for my sorrow. “Oh, Dad,” she sobbed. “Not again. You don’t deserve this.”

  THE MORNING AFTER TONY’S DEATH, we were awakened by a phone call at seven-thirty. A friend had read the Times, where Tony’s obituary was prominent on the front page, and was calling to ask what had happened. Having had only a couple of hours of sleep, I was not terribly gracious. Also, I thought the newspaper had pretty well summed things up. Nevertheless, we chatted for a while, and then I thought the way to handle the calls from close friends was to invite them to dinner that evening.

  “Are you sure you’re up to that?” Susan asked.

  “No,” I said, “but there’s only one way to find out.”

  I had long since become the cook in the family, not only because Susan’s office hours often stretched late into the evening, but because I enjoyed being the giver of sustenance to our family. I loved eating, and I loved cooking. I relished the sit-down, the conversation, the satisfied sighs. I like mothering people.

  So I invited some with whom I felt especially close. And our daughters, of course. Ten or twelve altogether.

  I cooked a large pot of spaghetti with homemade sauce. A salad. Bread. Wine. The good stuff.

  We talked mainly about what everyone was doing. But we also talked about Tony’s death. And we talked about what people remembered about my brother.

  Looking back now, I cannot remember feeling any pain that night. As is the case with many who have had to face death, the trauma didn’t have its greatest impact on me at that particular point in time. As I sat with those friends, I was grateful that they had responded to my need; I thought how lucky I was to have people who understood both my brother and me. They didn’t sit through dinner saying, “I can’t believe it. What a tragic event.” They’d all had some inkling of the pain in his life.

  In the months to come, we would go through all the ifs and whys. For now, it was good food, good friends, good comfort.

  It didn’t take long before other reactions set in. As the past caught up to me, I became very silent. I listened to my voice on the answering machine and thought it was Tony’s. Just a week after his death, I began to have sharp pains in my right hand. Soon, it became difficult to pick things up, to write, to eat properly. “I’ve lost my right arm,” I said to Susan. Gently, she suggested that the words had symbolic meaning. The interpretation soon struck an emotional note with me. He had not been my right arm any more than I was his. But I wished that he had been, that we had been sidekicks, cronies—had spent more time together, looked out for each other in our later years.

  He was the brother I had. But he was also the brother I never had. And the irony of Silent Grief was that I had been able to help others, but not Tony.

  Who would be my big brother, now that he was gone? I hated him for leaving me behind like that.

  There was release in the tears that followed those thoughts. My hand and arm began to return to their normal state of usefulness. But the memory of that pain endures.

  Six months later, I had recovered much of my equilibrium. I no longer suddenly burst into tears at the strangest moments, nor did I exclaim angrily at the dry cleaner, the gas station attendant, or my wife.

  PEOPLE ASK WHY MY BROTHER KILLED HIMSELF.

  “Why would such a gifted journalist, whose works have won all the prizes in the world, do such a thing?”

  “He had so many friends, why would he want to leave them?”

  “But what about all he had to live for?”

  In a short space of time, I had a drawerful of articles written by reporters pondering the death of one who, like them, made a living out of trying to sort out the truth, separating fact from conjecture. They were hell-bent on making sense out of this event.

  When they phoned, I told them that they were going to fail. I told them that the problem with suicide is that it is a senseless event. There is no why.

  But of course that’s wrong. There are numerous whys, though it’s almost impossible, or unlikely, that any single one of them is “the answer” that people want to hear.

  But I, too, have been trying to make sense of that event. Trying to procure an answer that will absolve us all from guilt and grief.

  At first, ignoring his lifelong depression, I wondered if he’d gotten some terrible disease and didn’t want to tell anyone. Years before, perhaps after a one-night stand with a prostitute or an affair with a promiscuous woman, he told me that he thought he might have AIDS. Was that it? Unlikely.

  Susan and I had noticed that his teeth were rotting, or seemed to be. Was there some horrible ailment that frightened him and presaged pain and disability? In order to satisfy myself, I phoned his physician, an old friend who had treated me for some years before I moved away from New York. The doctor assured me that Tony had no serious illness. And then he said a peculiar thing.

  “I always made sure not to give him a prescription for sleeping pills.”

  I didn’t reply, because I already knew where that was leading us.

  Some people suggested that Tony killed himself because he had become convinced that Big Trouble was not good enough. I think he thought Big Trouble wasn’t good enough because he was already depressed. It was bad timing—the end of a nine-year writing journey that put him at the bottom of the psychological heap.

  Or perhaps he died because those Pulitzers and other awards couldn’t bin
d up the gaps in his personal experience, in his genetic makeup, in the physiology and the psyches of our parents and grandparents. Who he was and, more important, who he wasn’t just didn’t fit the pattern he desperately wanted. And he finally gave out.

  Or Tony died because he finally turned his rage in on himself. Just how intense his anger was is revealed in a story that he himself told me. In 1972, he was on assignment for the New York Times in San Francisco. Feeling the need for female companionship, he went to the Tenderloin district. Every city has one—a number of blocks where bars, gambling, and prostitution thrive. Tony would have known where to go.

  He entered one positively dismal place where he was immediately accosted by a B-girl who sat down to drink with him. When he went to pay for the drinks, the bartender asked for $50. Tony told me he felt suckered and said he wouldn’t pay. When the bar-tender threatened to call the police, a violent rage erupted inside Tony—one that he couldn’t control.

  Throwing the remains of his drink in the bartender’s face, he said, “Go fuck yourself.” The bartender reached for a baseball bat and swung it at Tony’s head. He ducked, but the prostitute attacked him from behind, using her high-heeled shoe as a weapon.

  Luckily for everyone, the woman realized that murder would be a far worse result than losing fifty bucks. They let Tony go. He told me later that it was the most frightening moment of his life, but there was also something about the telling of the tale that was sad: a sense of fury at women who led him down the garden path, offering love, or at least sex, and then betraying him.

  Or Tony died because when he finished Big Trouble he had no next task. Most creative people—especially writers—have postpartum depression. The applause they expect and hope for hasn’t come yet; and maybe it won’t. The adrenaline of the writing period has ceased to flow because they are no longer writing. There is dead silence—dead!

  Tony and I had performed for our mother on the window bench. The sun shone, and Mother was beaming. She applauded our efforts. But he had been abandoned by her twice: A short while after his birth, she tried to kill herself and disappeared from his newborn life for a few months. Then, seven years later, she did it again. He was then and forever permanently alone. I believe that Tony never gave up hoping that his efforts would waken Mother from her long sleep. He wanted to hear—and see—her applause, to experience her beaming face just once more.

  I understand that wish. Every morning, for many years, I have awakened, thinking: “I’m ready to kill myself.” Then, afraid of those words, I soften the language. I think, “My God, this could be the day,” a mournful, fear-filled expression of trepidation, a caution to myself that something terrible could happen, ignoring the fact that the worst thing that could happen had already happened, many years before.

  Occasionally, I will think these deadly thoughts when driving across a long bridge, one high enough to be a sure killer if I were to turn my wheel sharply. But mainly it is in the morning, dredged up from the murk of my dream-filled sleep.

  For a while I thought these suicidal thoughts were left over from my brother’s death: after he died, I didn’t want to live. But that isn’t what they were. They were throwbacks to my childhood. Through therapy, and through experience, I have learned that they are ancient mantras that come from the days right after my mother’s death. It is a metaphor for my unwillingness to accept the fact that my parents abandoned me before I was ready to take on the world.

  The despair that attacks a small child’s sense of well-being under such circumstances causes wretched responses. “I’m ready to kill myself” is a way out of the terrifying thought “How will I live without her? Who will comfort and protect me?” Death may appear to be an answer to all of that.

  What happened to me was not the worst thing that can happen to a young boy. I could have grown up with no parents or with parents who beat me, or with rats in my bed. Or bombed out in Palestine or Lebanon. I didn’t. But there was that series of suicides and abandonments in my childhood. I have always felt lost and frightened that there was no one to keep me safe, and that I would be better off dead, away from all dangers. A terrified despair.

  For years and years I couldn’t be satisfied by product, by the films I made or the books I wrote, no matter how beautiful they were or how well received, because the audience I wanted to applaud and praise me was already dead, long ago. Did Tony also feel this desperation? Did he want to die because the one person whose applause and praise he yearned for was not available? We’ll never know.

  But we do know that my father, my brother, and I felt failure where there was none; that we discounted prizes almost as soon as we got them; that the Lukas human condition was to reach for the stars but never to acknowledge when we’d gotten to the moon.

  What’s remarkable is—despite the terrible depression—how much Tony accomplished during his life. He was a prodigious writer, an acclaimed journalist. A creative person.

  And it was still not enough.

  I am sure that I never answered the question of why Tony killed himself to the satisfaction of my interlocutors. It was almost impossible to do so.

  There is a parallel question that I have been more successful in answering: why I have not killed myself.

  Epilogue

  I WROTE THIS BOOK in the hope of coming to an understanding of my relationship with Tony. I believed that I would come to forgive him for his suicide and for abandoning us. And I hoped that in the process I would come to terms with the internal pain that caused him to exclude me from much of his life.

  But, more than a decade later, I see that the worlds we existed in were not only sadly flawed but quite separate universes: their almost parallel trajectories kept us on different flight paths. Our interior and exterior realities were more experientially disparate than I had imagined.

  I cannot penetrate entirely his view of the world—his need for perpetual love, for a kind of applause that in the end he could not accept even when offered.

  Perhaps—if there is such a thing as fate—we were not destined to be understood or to be understanding.

  Still, two things pain me: Am I—should I have been—my brother’s keeper? And, after all is said and done, should I be able to forgive him for killing himself?

  In the end, I have decided no—on both counts.

  We are capable of only so much: only so many responsibilities, so many burdens we can shoulder. We were brothers, but we did not cause, nor could we solve, each other’s problems. Tony was born with the blue genes that were his downfall. He spent his life half in pain and half in creative explosions.

  He did not kill himself to hurt me and the others who were his friends—though his way of going could not help but hurt. It is that final hurt that makes me unable to forgive him. I know that he did not choose to spurn me in his death any more than he chose to spurn me in his life. But I cannot let go of the fact that by leaving without saying good-bye, he left me, once more, all alone.

  IN 2002, at the age of sixty-seven, I started what I hoped would be a second career. I left filmmaking behind and returned to the acting I had done as a child on that window seat in our big white house in White Plains. After some meandering through community theater in our local town, I studied with a teacher of Shakespearean drama, performed in a production of The Brothers Karamazov off-off-Broadway, and then, to my surprise, was offered a chance to play the lead in Krapp’s Last Tape, Samuel Beckett’s one-act, one-man play about solitude, memory, loss, and desire.

  So it was that, one night in June 2006, I found myself on the stage of a huge theater in New York City, in front of a crowd of over six hundred people who had come to hear James Joyce’s Ulysses read from noon to midnight but were treated in the middle of the evening to a half-hour performance of Beckett’s play. Krapp is alone on the stage—just me and a tape recorder, on which I hear myself: words ostensibly recorded thirty years earlier. At the end of the play, the lights dimmed and I went offstage. Then the applause began. The crowd got to
its feet. It was a standing ovation for an amateur actor, doing a part for which he was by no means prepared artistically, but whose character was apparently brought into vibrancy by real-world experience.

  I wish I could tell you that the applause and cheers satisfied my craving. I wish I could say that the next morning I arose, satisfied with my life and with my creativity. Or that I no longer needed to hear the congratulations from the professional actors who were piling back onstage to read Joyce’s words that evening.

  It isn’t so. Just as Tony’s prizes and the thousands of plaudits for his work didn’t fill up the hole in his soul, the applause faded away into the night, and I was still left wanting.

  For I, too, have blue genes. I, too, have a voracious wish for “more.”

  The question then becomes: If Tony was only the latest in a long line of family members who killed themselves, will I be the next? My uncle waited until he was in his early seventies to kill himself. My grandmother did it in her eighties. I am in the out-box now.

  Hard as it may be to believe, in my adult life I have not had a single day when I felt wholly well—physically or emotionally. Every night I wake with stomach pains. My cancer has returned three times, and we continue to fight it off with the most current treatments. There are days—too many of them—when I ponder whether I would prefer to be dead and famous rather than alive and “just another striver” in the world of arts and crafts. Had my brother shown me a way out of the pain of never quite achieving a grander status, or had he shown me what happens when you do achieve that status and it’s not enough?

  Still, with full confidence, I know that I will never go into a room at the end of a day and kill myself.

  Too many deaths in my family, too many suicides.

  I will not follow suit.

  In my return to acting—not to the childhood scenes on the dining-room window seat, but to Shakespeare and Chekhov and Beckett—I am doing something that can sustain me.