Blue Genes Page 7

  Tony was the writer, of course, but Mother was the impresario, and the audience as well. She applauded, encouraged, critiqued, and supported our little theater company. Only years later did I realize that this seed of theatricality, implanted in me at that early age, became a life force. It was a result, I later realized, not of our mother’s desire to have us express ourselves but of her inability to ask us directly how we felt about things—to connect with us. The plays were the only real contact our mother had with us. At meals, at bedtime, at all the normal points of communication between mother and child, we were Baba’s children.

  When Aunt Judy came out to the country, she would type up some of the plays that Tony wrote, and we might perform them in the big playroom in front of a larger audience—of three or four. Naturally, the writer took the hero’s roles; I played villains. I played Hitler to Tony’s Roosevelt, and later I would play Stalin in Prussia Under Pressure, Tony’s four-minute playlet about the German retreat from Moscow.

  In adulthood, I often looked back at those experiences as key to understanding not only my love of the make-believe of theater but the depth of my need for applause. These were the times that Mother spent concentrated, in-depth “quality” moments with us. This playacting on the dining-room banquette stands out as a time of pure pleasure and excitement. Mother was, at those times, in love with us, and we were in love with her. I speak for Tony because I think I can claim without doubt that he shared my pleasure in our mother’s joy and intensity.

  IF MOTHER COULD LAUGH AND APPLAUD at our little plays, the rest of the time she was more and more in the throes of unwelcome feelings. Sometimes up, sometimes way down, always in doubt about the strength of her husband’s belief in her. Always in doubt as to whether she could give him what he needed. She felt that Dad would not express his love for her as she imagined other husbands or lovers did: with wooing and sweet words. She believed he doubted her trustworthiness. She doubted her own trustworthiness. They both doubted the relationship.

  Perhaps Mother was simply realizing that her needs as a woman were not to be met by this rational, twentieth-century man. Perhaps he was realizing that his needs as a man could never be totally satisfied. But that would leave out all the other history and pathology. Mother ends one letter, “I can’t get past the idea that underneath all the formalities which we scrupulously observe, neither of us has a very good idea of what the other is thinking or feeling.”

  I know you are weary and overburdened with worry and I don’t like to be an added one. I’ve tried to do my part in minimizing my demands on your strength and energy. I know I am childish and immature—call it what you will—but I need a little spoiling, a little petting, a little manifestation of the feeling which compelled you to say not so many years ago, “I want you under any circumstances.”

  Maybe you don’t know that when one has been wooed and won under such circumstances you don’t stay won just out of inertia. You start to watch the years slipping along and you see your children leaving babyhood and you know that soon you will have left your real youth behind, and you don’t want to leave it without some deep and abiding experiences which belong to you alone, by nature and by right.

  I’m sorry to have had to say so much. When we discuss these things orally we can’t seem to do it without anger and harsh words, so I’m putting mine on paper in all sincerity and without any intent to hurt you or—as you think—to be unfair. This is one last attempt [emphasis mine] to put my viewpoint before you, with the hope that you can see what I mean. I don’t think I’m unnatural or different from other women in my hungers and needs.

  Perhaps that’s the trouble. You thought once that I was an angel. Though you’ve modified your idea in most respects, I think you still hoped that I was free of some of the “peculiar ties” of my sex. It’s too bad, I can’t live up to that hope.

  You are such a grand person and I love you so much; I could love you more if you gave me the chance. I respect and admire you and I would like our marriage to be something we could both look forward to and back upon with pleasure and joy as well as responsibility and pride.

  With much, much love. Elizabeth.

  I have read this over and over, hoping to change the words, hoping to change her mind. I cry now as I have not cried before. As I look at the total sweep of their lives, I feel my mother and father are doomed.

  They just don’t realize that nothing can possibly match their fantasies of what life is supposed to bring. For Dad—and I know this from his lifelong behavior—women were never smart enough, beautiful enough, or comforting enough to calm his soul. He needed to be stroked and fed and soothed. For Mother, the genetic blow she had been dealt created a perpetual state of anxiety or depression. Bipolar people have a heightened sexuality. Mother wanted a romantic male to woo her constantly. I want to shout at them, “Get real!”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1941, Tony was offered the opportunity to go to Treetops, a camp in upstate New York. He accepted gleefully, and for the first time I was left totally alone with Mother. By now, Dad had left the law firm. He took off each morning to meet with those who might help him find another career, something more suited to his wishes to be of public service.

  Being alone with Mother meant piano lessons, peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and warm days in the rose garden. Perhaps it was on one of those days that we sat together in the rock garden and she fell abnormally silent, and I couldn’t goad her into talking.

  A few weeks later, she left for Tripp Lake Camp, run by Caroline Lavenson, to be a counselor. She had begun to suffer again from depression, and Missy and Caroline thought it would be therapeutic for her to be away at camp, distracted from the pressures of being a mother and wife, taking her back to her childhood pleasures. One of the psychotherapists I worked with over the years raised his eyebrows upon hearing this.

  “Excuse me?” he said. “She was to leave her child and husband at home and go take care of a group of teenage girls? And this was supposed to be therapeutic for a woman with a major depressive disorder?”

  Bad advice as it may have been, everybody seems to have agreed to it. I was left alone with Baba and—when he was there—my father. I was furious with my mother for leaving me alone. She was the sun in my life, as I was supposed to be the sun in hers.

  She wrote us several times.

  Dearest Tony:

  You must be very busy indeed. I’ve been waiting and waiting for a letter or a card and none comes, but I know that swimming and butterflies and hikes take lots of time. I’m busy too but I’m sending this just to bring my love and a big kiss from Mother.

  Darling Kit:

  I’m so happy that I’m going to see you soon. I know I shall recognize you but I wonder whether you’ll know me. I shall probably look very fat and be all decorated with snakes around my neck, turtles in my arms, caterpillars in my hair and butterflies all over me. We go on lots of walks and collect bugs and flowers and frogs and then put them in cages and take care of them. Here is a picture of me to get you used to the idea of your camping mother.

  Great big hug and ten kisses for my Kit boy, from Mother.

  The letters to Dad are vastly different, and quite painful.

  July 24, 1941

  Darling, oh my darling.

  While I sit and wait for the call which I fear may not come I shall write you to say what I won’t be able to say over the phone—in case the call does come. I had no more intention of suggesting that I didn’t want to see you than I had of using “slippery phrases” to mislead you. Apparently, like you, I don’t know how to express my ideas and feelings so that they are fully understood. What I did mean to suggest was, that having had only 2 letters from you since June 25th, I wondered how much you wanted to see me or hear from me. I’ve tried so hard to remember how little words mean to you and to believe that you do love and miss me without any overt assurances of it. My only intention in writing you the letter which angered you so was to relieve you of any obligation which, however you m
ight enjoy, would have put an added burden on you. I succeeded only in annoying you, and it’s made me very unhappy.

  I do love you my darling, I do miss you terribly, I do want to see you and be with you. I do need to know that you want me. I don’t want to repeat my so frequent mistakes of forcing you to say and do things which are a strain on you and a drain on your time and energies. Besides all else I’m not as satisfied with my achievements here as my too generous bosses would lead the world to believe. I want to prove to myself that I can do a job and be a really independent person without having to cry out—as I’ve wanted to—“Oh love me Eddie and in your love protect me from my own lacks and shortcomings!”

  The clock ticks on. I think your call won’t come.

  Your most loving and impatient wife.

  I have read these letters from sixty-seven years ago many times. Each reading brings new thoughts and fantasies, as well as a frisson of anxiety.

  I have a devout wish that I could reach out to my parents and tell them how wrong they both are about what is happening to them, how much misconstruction and miscomprehension there is in their communications.

  My father had known about Francis Froelicher yet kept asking Mother to marry him. He didn’t give her time to peel herself away from the other man, to find love anew. What was he trying to prove? That he was the perfect lover? That he could conquer adolescent fantasies? The impossible?

  And to my younger self, I want to say, “Your parents are trying. They really are. But circumstances have gotten beyond them.”

  But, of course, there is no way of reaching back. I have to watch with the perfection of hindsight as they tread water, misconstruing, distrusting, waiting for the waves to take them under.

  July 28

  Darling.

  Thank you for your sweet responsive letter. It means so much to me to spend a few pages with you. And it’s what you’re thinking, not what you’re doing which really fascinates me. Do remember to take in everything that goes on at Treetops. I shall await details avidly. And I’ll be awaiting your voice and person early in the afternoon of August 4th.

  Elizabeth.

  I don’t know now how much self-awareness my mother had about her mood, how dark it had turned. I don’t know whether the camp personnel knew, either, but I suspect they had been in touch with my father, for after visiting my brother at Treetops on the afternoon of August 3, he continued up the long road to Poland, Maine, picked my mother up, and returned home to White Plains.

  During the years leading up to this crisis, Mother constantly fooled people. For those not within the immediate family (and for many who were), she was “beautiful,” “charming,” “capable,” the epitome of grace and happiness. Not once had anyone spoken to me of “desperate, unhappy Elizabeth.” “Bipolar Elizabeth.” What fools they must have been not to realize that this most beautiful, charming, adequate, talented, happy woman was also capable of killing herself. Did none of them see her as she was: a crushed spirit?

  In White Plains, I must have been delighted that she was back, but it was clear by now, to Missy and Dad, that she was seriously depressed. Missy had come up from New York City and—for the next several weeks—took Mother daily to Connecticut, where her new and renowned psychoanalyst, Dr. Herman Nunberg, agreed to see her, even though it was August, the traditional vacation time for analysts.

  Meanwhile, terribly concerned that the past might repeat itself, that Mother might attempt to kill herself, Dad consulted Missy’s analyst, Bernard Glueck, as well as Mother’s brother, Ira, now a physician. Letters and phone calls flew around between Stony Lodge in Ossining, our house in White Plains, and Ira in Ann Arbor. My brother and I were ignorant of the turmoil, though I must have felt the absence of a mother who was physically, though not mentally, at home. In the third week of August, Dad sent a despairing letter to Ira, who responded with caution.

  August 21, 1941

  Ann Arbor, Michigan

  Eddie:

  On a number of counts, I would completely oppose any thought of frontal lobotomy for Liza . . . I gather that Nunberg does not consider Liza as great a suicidal risk now that her depression is less deep. If so, I think the best plan is to carry on with the analysis, and hope that Nunberg is right. Shock therapy we can reserve—in our minds—for later, if Liza should not improve sufficiently or have another relapse.

  Your unfaltering devotion to Liza through these several difficult and trying years fills me with real admiration and respect for your integrity and courage. I genuinely doubt if I would have been willing to go through what you have.

  Keep me informed. Ira

  There are a number of ironies, sorrows, and shocks surrounding this letter. The first is that the idea of a lobotomy for Mother stuns me. A procedure that would rob her of her personality, charm, and wit in return for (possibly) removing her agonizing mood swings is a bargain that Missy and Dad would, I believe, have come to regret time and again, no matter how much it might have preserved Mother’s physical being.

  In fact, Missy and Dad fought for years over the issue of whether analysis or shock therapy was the right treatment. Today, few would recommend psychoanalysis for people with bipolar disorder. Analysis is best for neurotic conflicts, not for biologically caused mental illnesses, for which today’s psychopharmacologists would prescribe medication. Mother, Dad, Missy, and Ira all had different ideas about her struggles.

  To Mother, her problems were her own “fault,” and she needed to get herself “under control.” How each of the others felt is lost in the ether, but I can guess: a lack of willpower, a neurosis gone wild, the fault of her upbringing, not to mention tremendous guilt over her past behavior with, and present thoughts about, Francis Froelicher.

  An irony is that Ira himself was bipolar. Whether he recognized it at this time I don’t know, but later he would acknowledge the disorder and treat it.

  Finally, Ira’s letter, written on August 21, arrived at White Plains on the very day that Mother made the last of her daily trips to visit Dr. Nunberg, the psychoanalyst. It was August 23. She had gone with Missy as usual—a forty-minute drive up the Hutchinson River Parkway.

  Missy decided that she needed to talk to the psychoanalyst to know what he could tell her about Mother’s “progress.” My grandmother went into Nunberg’s office alone and told Mother to wait in the car.

  Instead, Mother disappeared in an old greenhouse attached to the doctor’s residence. She had brought with her a razor blade, a detail that led people to believe she had intended to harm herself that day. In my view, though, she might simply have made a habit of carrying it with her for when her depression became too great—the kind of “worst-case scenario” preparation that shows itself among the potentially suicidal in the hoarding of sleeping pills. The question for me is, why that day, why that moment? Perhaps it was Missy’s insistence on having her own conversation with the doctor. My grandmother was a very intrusive woman; Mother struggled her whole short life to separate herself from Missy, to lead her own, independent life. Whatever the reasons, here, in the stifling damp of the greenhouse, the struggle ended: my mother slashed her wrists and throat.

  When Missy and Nunberg came out, they saw that Mother wasn’t in the car. Searching for her around the property, they found her body and called an ambulance.

  Within half an hour of her arrival at Norwalk Hospital, Mother was dead. The death certificate is painfully terse, typewritten on paper now decades old and crumbling. “Exsanguination,” it says, but we know what that means: Mother had bled out.

  She was thirty-three years old.

  AS I LATER DISCOVERED,, those who find the body have a particularly difficult time recovering from their grief and trauma. So I have thought many times about what it must have been like for my grandmother to discover her own daughter’s bleeding body. She and my father had dreaded that such a moment might occur, and now it had. Terror, anger, consternation, guilt, shame. These feelings, plus the most painful sorrow, must have been my gran
dmother’s experience, and my father’s lot as well.

  Often, I have returned to that event and wondered what lasting effect my mother’s suicide had upon the emotions, character, and actions of Missy and Dad over the next decades. Was Dad’s accelerated alcoholism due to Mother’s suicide? Did Missy’s need to control everything around her begin then, too? It seems logical to me that many of the character traits, anxieties, and depressive bouts of everyone who lived around Mother were made worse by her kind of death.

  What I do know is that I was not told that Mother was dead. I was told that she was “sick” and that I would have to go away for the night, to my friend Bobby’s house.

  I can imagine the activity and arguments that were behind that decision. Should we tell Kit? If not, what do we do? It all served a useful purpose—to dam up the horror of the day’s events, to create a false calm.

  Now they could make practical decisions. Tony, at Camp Treetops already, was booked on for another ten days. I was sent at once to my friend’s house. A flurry of phone calls was exchanged between Dad and the owners of the camp, asking if I could be brought there immediately—to get me away from the grief in our house.

  Not surprisingly, I don’t recall much about what I felt at the time, or thought I knew. I have few memories of that event. I do remember that staying at Bobby Ilgenfritz’s house was a big deal, because I’d never slept away from home before. I know I was surprised that my father brought me there, and not Mother, since it had always been Mother who took me places. And I also recall—with a little more sharpness—that I was angry that my mother did not come to say good-bye the next morning when I was driven up to camp.

  But beyond that was bewilderment and a series of questions. Was I being sent to Bobby’s house because I had been bad? Did my behavior make my mother sick? These naive and unanswered questions would inform much of my behavior—and Tony’s—for many, many years to come.