Blue Genes Page 5
Finally, Missy could spare some time. Mother met her at the train station, in tears. She had been unable to order dinner because she couldn’t decide on a leg of lamb or a roast beef. The indecision left her distraught.
That night, unable to really express to her mother the total load of anxiety, but somewhat more secure in the knowledge that her mother had her competent hands on the household now, she took a large overdose of medicine.
Looking back, with all the power of modern psychological knowledge, it would be easy to make a diagnosis. What Mother had was bipolar disorder. In the 1930s, there was no one who made that clear diagnosis.
Today, too, we know about postpartum depression, with its hormonal component and its propensity to spring up where there isn’t enough social support for the mother. Postpartum depression is said to affect from 15 to 20 percent of women in the United States. In our family, where there is a genetic predisposition toward mood disorders, it’s not surprising that our mother suffered from that disorder, with its insomnia, sadness, guilt, hopelessness, and thoughts of suicide. Unfortunately, at the time, few knew about that disorder, either.
More troublesome still is how strong an effect depression in the mother can have on infants. Mother exhibited a wish that her child disappear not only so that her own “incompetence” would not be a burden but also so that Tony would not be a burden on her.
The result was disastrous. As psychologist Dr. Sandy Zeskind has said:
The mother may reach to take the baby’s hand, but if the baby pulls his hand away, so does the mother. It’s almost like she gives up on the interaction. Over time the missteps add up. The baby displays sadness and irritability and starts to take on the mother’s depressed affect.
In short, depression can be seen as a “communicable disease,” transferred through a mother’s communication to her baby. The consequences for Tony would be lifelong. The brilliant English psychologist D. W. Winnicott reassured parents that it was impossible to be perfect. But it was—he assured them—okay to be a “good enough mother.” From the distance of over six decades and as someone who lived through the life and death of my mother, I can say that she was not good enough.
Missy and Dad debated what to do. Psychoanalysis? Hospitalization? They once again decided to rely on Dr. Glueck, who had a sanitarium called Stony Lodge, near Ossining, New York.
When Mother entered Stony Lodge in February 1934, the procedure for massive depression and attempted suicide was twofold: insulin shock therapy (massive injections of insulin resulting in convulsions and coma) and careful observation. Insulin shock as a treatment for schizophrenics and others with severe affective disorders had been discovered in Europe only a few years earlier. In fact, 1933, the year of my brother’s birth, was the first time it was tried in the United States. It seemed to work, though the convulsions it caused were not controllable. Later, in 1937, researchers discovered that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was better than insulin shock, causing most patients with severe depression to feel better. Because the convulsions produced mild amnesia (and fewer broken bones than insulin therapy), no memory of the traumatic treatment remained to hinder patient cooperation. After some years of banishment because of its appearance of torture, ECT is back in fashion: much better controlled, and used only for the most desperately depressed patients. Mother would have been a good candidate.
For now, however, there were talks with the doctors, some insulin shock therapy, a ban on sharp objects, and a lack of freedom to wander around the grounds. Shortly after arriving, Mother had tried to pierce her jugular vein with a paper knife, so for now she was never left alone.
Nonetheless, she wrote to Dad almost every day—at first in pencil (no pens permitted), then in ink. The notes began with a few tentative sentences expressing her intense guilt at having disappointed him with her suicidal acts. Later she added promises “to be good.” In her autobiography, which she continued writing after getting out of Stony Lodge, she made perfectly clear that she felt she had betrayed Dad in thought, that she had continued to yearn for Francis Froelicher long after marrying my father. Now, in her letters, she strove to make up for those treacherous thoughts.
March 15, 1934
Dearest:
We will move to town; we will do everything that can make up one iota to you for the pain I’ve caused you. You are henceforward my guide in all these things.
March 19
Dearest:
We shall both need great patience but I hope to be really worthy of you soon. Please stop talking about becoming worthy of me. You can do a good job by concentrating on Tony for the present, in any spare moment you may have. I am going to get well for you. If you can be as remarkable a father as you are a husband, Tony will be a very remarkable fella.
But if Tony was going to be remarkable, he was also going to suffer from the fact that my mother could not relate to him.
When they brought Tony to see her she wept bitterly, only because she felt nothing for it. When Edwin came to tell her that her father had died she could not weep. She felt nothing and was agonized that she could not feel. She had ceased to care for the first time in her life what people felt about her, and faced the horrible fact that she herself was devoid of feeling for most of these people.
By the first week in April, Mother was writing letters about normal activities, urging Dad to find a place in New York City so he could be near his work. At the end, she returned to the hidden theme in both of their minds: “Please, dear boy, remember and believe that you are the only man whom I love. Go to sleep knowing it and wake up knowing it, too.”
On April 11, she was talking about how much freedom they were giving her at Stony Lodge, and then, “It’s all very odd, this thing called the human being. I don’t know yet what’s caused all this but I guess I’m destined to find out.”
Her final letter from the sanitarium, written on the day before her birthday:
April 16, 1934
Edwin, Darling—
The knowledge that we love each other and have years of joy and sorrow, struggle and achievement ahead of us together makes me overlook the bad weather. Both of us have much to learn and I know we can do it . . . as always I thank the powers that be for you.
Ever yours.
And so Mother came home.
It is hard to remember—all these years later—that I am writing here not about two mature human beings, in their middle age. Not the stern and distant father I remember when I was growing up. These are young, struggling people. Mother was twenty-six at this point; Dad was thirty-two. I can only imagine the horror my father would have felt at having a suicidal twenty-six-year-old return to our home, and how fragile a time period it would be for any young mother, much less one with a mental illness.
Within two months of her return home, Mother was again pregnant. It was me. I was born on March 6, 1935. Given what had happened after my brother’s birth—the postpartum depression, the attempted suicide—why did my parents decide to have another child? Perhaps it was an accident; perhaps they didn’t know the cause and effect between pregnancy and some depressions; or perhaps it was an example of hope triumphing over reality.
Whichever, it was a difficult pregnancy, and a difficult birth. There is a very testy letter from my mother to Dad in January 1935, berating him for not paying enough attention to what the obstetrician had determined was a medical abnormality in her, as her due date approached. Whether this was anemia or some unknown disorder is not clear, but she says that my father was not concerned enough. Perhaps Dad thought it was an overdramatic reaction on her part. Or maybe—and I have done this myself—it was one of those male denials that anything could go wrong, that there might be another disastrous turn of events.
As it turns out, I was born cyanotic, what’s called “blue baby syndrome”—either a genetic glitch or too much deoxygenated blood being taken into the lungs. Lips and tongue turn blue. Dad gave a pint or two of blood to bring me up to par. After that, I thrived, putti
ng on weight as if I were eating seven meals a day.
OVER THE FIREPLACE in my present home is a large portrait of my brother and myself, painted when we still lived in the old colonial house in White Plains. I am four, and Tony is six, though the artist—good as she was—has put a much older face on my brother. I wear green corduroys with a bib and straps and a red long-sleeved shirt. Tony is in a saturated royal blue shirt and dark red corduroys. The straps of his trousers are crossed, shortened, in deference to the fact that he was beginning to shoot up. Mother wanted him to have room to grow into them.
I remember posing for that painting. We stood in front of a French door that looked out on the back of the house. I was bored and didn’t want to stand with my brother’s arm around me, staring out at the recreation room, when it was warm and pleasant outside and frogs and other playthings beckoned. But I did as I was told, because I was a “good boy.”
When outsiders look at the painting, it is clear to them that Tony and I are well fed. The color of our eyes isn’t quite accurate—mine were actually lighter than his—but they are good eyes, with a clear view of our world. What is most striking about the painting are the strong differences between us. I am a curly blond, Tony’s hair is straight and black. His complexion is umber in tone, with almost a greenish tint, like our mother’s; mine is light, like Dad’s. His lips are thin and pale, mine almost like a woman’s and bright red. Allowing for the artist’s choice of color and line and her attempt to make us look part of the same family of colors and tones, it is almost impossible not to see that we are far apart in terms of looks, but we were also far apart in terms of temperament.
The ovum is fertilized. Immediately, it splits into two, then four, then eight, carrying with it into the multiplicity of cells copies of new genes, made up of the DNA of mother and father, but in a different combination from before. Each of us inherits from the same parents, but in permutations that dictate some of what we will be. Nothing can be said to be solely responsible for our future looks, behaviors, actions, feelings—but this random splitting and distribution are a big part of it.
Many of the differences between Tony and myself were inborn. The physical ones are easy to see. But I think much of our emotional and psychological differences were also due to the hybrid tossing of genetic matter.
Still, not all character traits are from our genes. Nature and nurture work together, and though my brother was always darker in color and spirit than I, there is surely more to it than his inborn temperament. As all of us grow from infant to adult, we learn to tell our own stories, our personal worldview. Sometimes, we construct good stories. If we’re unlucky, we build unpleasant ones. Luck, skill, fate—all play their roles in who we become and how we face the world. The remarkable thing is how long Tony survived.
If you regard my brother in that painting closely, I believe you can see clear through to his soul. In his eyes, you can see the dark, brooding boy and man that I came to know—the Tony who shows in his photos a serious intent, his lower lip pushed out just a little, his elegant fingers clasped in front of him. Tony of the “raccoon eyes,” rimmed with dark shadows. A wounded look sometimes crosses his face—as if he has been stabbed or punched in the solar plexus. I recognize the same look from my father and my grandmother: a wounded bear in the forest or a deer about to be run down by a car could not have stared with more hurt and, often, more anger.
I HAVE READ MOTHER’S LETTERS to Dad shortly after my birth. She had taken Tony and me up to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where Missy had a summer rental. While Dad slogged along in the sweating city, practicing the kind of law he would later abandon, Mother enjoyed cool sea breezes, unlimited space, and coddling by her mother. In one of those letters, she says, “Kit bubbles with delight. He is pure joy.” Missy wrote: “Kit is Master Sunshine as usual; easing his way into everyone’s heart.”
“Master Sunshine!” While Tony was what—“Master Gloom”? That was the difference people saw between us. The big painting in my living room already describes that disparity. But if the psychologist was correct—and Tony’s depression stemmed from Mother’s depression—then what went right with me? Was Mother a beaming, communicative person with me, whereas with Tony she had been a gloomy woman who could not take her son into her life? If so, Master Sunshine I remained—to the outside viewer. Inside was a different story.
Meanwhile, while everyone cooed over me, they ignored the huge blue elephant lying about our household. No one wanted to express either hope or pessimism for the future.
As promised, my parents moved back to New York, into an apartment in a brownstone on Ninety-second Street on the East Side. There, the first year of my life was spent in relative ease. I was a fat little baby. There is a photograph of me sitting in a tiny sleigh—the equivalent of a stroller—dressed for winter, a fur throw on my legs, pudgy cheeks puffed out against the cold. My family finds it hilarious.
Then, in an about-face and a burst of enthusiasm for Dad’s growing law career, and for the money that he was making, and with a boost from the “manic” phase of our mother’s illness, my parents splurged and bought seven acres in White Plains, with a large white eighteenth-century house. It was here that Tony and I spent the next four and a half years.
This was the dream house that every American couple wants. Like all such dreams, it came at a cost. Since it was the Depression, the property cost only about $10,000, but that was already two and a half times the average cost of a house in those days. (The Dow Jones Industrial Average was only at 134, and the annual income of a wage earner was $1,800.)
Mother decided the house needed a lot of work. They put another $5,000 into fixing it up with appurtenances like large, curved windows in the dining room and living room, a screened-in porch for summer guests, and a screened-in bedroom for Tony. I have seen some of the correspondence between Dad and the contractor during the months it took to do the work: endless problems with the sump pump, with the supporting walls, with the special glass they’d ordered for the windows. Dad threatened to stop all payments. The contractor threatened to stop all work.
Eventually, it was finished, and I remember the result as being quite remarkable. Aside from the huge rooms, the gorgeous furnishings, and the ample space to play indoors, outside there were all sorts of delights. Huge apple and pear trees sheltered the ten-room house from the summer sun. They would have borne rich fruit if they’d been fertilized, but that fruit became rotten at once, attracting hundreds of bees. In the front, where the sun could reach them, roses were planted. Mason jars of poison were attached to green stakes to attract and kill Japanese beetles. I watched the jars fill up, then scurried to tell my mother.
Up a gravel driveway, which ran parallel to the front of the house and up a slight incline, there was a two-car garage. A beautiful cherry tree decorated the bottom of a hill that stretched back a hundred feet, with a rock garden full of fragrant herbs. I recall that I learned my ABCs on a little stone seat there, chanting them in time-honored fashion until I had committed them to memory many months before my peers would do so. Mother believed in preschool education long before Sesame Street arrived on the scene.
On one side, woods bordered the property. On the other, a picket fence ran along Rosedale Avenue. Missy contributed to the funds for the house. Sometimes she contributed trimmings that were neither expected nor wanted. My parents came back from one trip shortly before we moved in to discover that she had commissioned a small lake to be dug in the back two acres; steam shovels were driving across newly laid crocuses.
“It’s a present,” said my grandmother. Of course, whether they wanted it or not, my parents had to take it. There was no going back.
Decades later, I went to visit the house. Normally, adults think that the places they lived as children have shrunk in size, or at least diminished in grandeur and beauty. For me, it was the opposite. Even though the house itself was a little run-down (two of its black shutters were askew; paint was peeling on the upper dormers; the groun
ds needed maintenance), it was bigger than I remembered it. I looked for additions since I lived there, sixty-four years ago, to account for the size, but there were none. It was just plain large—with many rooms, hallways, porches. The old, rotting apple tree had been pulled down; a pool had been installed where the rose garden used to bloom. Over half of the acreage had been sold off to other property owners. But the garage and rock garden remained. And so did the lake, which was also larger than I recalled. It filled over an acre of land. I walked down the road to West Street, turned left, and stood looking at what used to be the one-room schoolhouse where I attended kindergarten and first grade. Miss Honeywell, a rotund woman in her forties, taught eight grades, each with no more than five or six students. Still, we must have been a handful. On the front of the building, now a comfortable home painted a robust barn-red color, a plaque announced that the building was constructed in 1884. I remembered the potbellied stove that kept us warm in the winter. I remembered everything, and my eyes filled with tears.
I DON’T THINK I UNDERSTOOD that my family was very well-off. At the age of five, I had no such perspective. I didn’t know that families existed all over the country with no one to drive the car or cook the meals or put their little ones to bed. Though almost every upper-middle-class family had at least one person to help with the chores, ours had two. And this was during the Depression.