Authors: Christopher Lukas
Speculation, indeed! How could Dad know what was going on in the mind of his beloved? How could he know what she was doing? Or thinking?
What
is
clear is that the two of them now began a dialogue where a certain doubt had been injected into the relationship, and that doubt remained—permanently.
Take the end of that year, for instance. It was almost New Year’s Eve, and, upset and perturbed, Mother had gone to Philadelphia to spend Christmas with her parents. Dad was not included. While there, Mother went to visit the Lavensons and from there phoned Dad. What transpired in the call is not known, but its
character
can be judged from the letter she sent him that evening:
My darling:
You break my heart with such talk as we have just had. I feel that I can have been only the most cruel and stupid of people to have allowed you to suffer like this. Certainly you must know, despite your protests to the contrary, that much, much has been done in this past year towards the rebuilding of my life. I have often said, and more often thought, that your understanding has been unbelievably self-effacing, and perhaps I’ve relied on that too much, much more than was fair to you. I want so much to make you happy, and yet I seem only to achieve the contrary. Any human relationship is a difficult thing to work out, and ours, having started out with certain added obstacles, needs more skill and patience and love than most. I’m spending these three days at home and hope to be rested enough in body and spirit to present a saner outlook on your return. I think my curious inexplicable feeling and behavior of the last weeks has been sheer weariness. Yes, I know I’m stubborn, but at least it’s put to one good use: I stubbornly persist in loving you.
The recognition that she hoped to present a “saner” outlook gives some evidence that by now my mother was beginning to feel the more intense pulls that would soon blossom into full-scale bipolar disorder—that complex mental illness, sometimes called manic depression, in which waves of a depressed state alternate with some form of mania, the ups and downs coming without much warning, and sometimes getting deeper and higher and deeper and higher, without relief. A person who is bipolar can become catatonic—unable or unwilling to get out of bed or do the usual chores. Alternately, a manic-depressive can be ferociously active, sleeping very little, exhibiting a great deal of energy, sporting many creative ideas, spending money wildly, or madly performing sexual activity. Unfortunately, the science of psychology was too much in its infancy to be much help to my mother. Today, many medications are available to tame the bipolar beast.
At the end of 1932, Mother and my father were in need of the kind of help they were never to get.
Having gone to upstate New York with Missy, for a short visit to some friends, Mother wrote a letter to try to tell Dad what she needed from him, and what he could expect from her. She was, she said, beginning to discover in him some of the same worries and mental jumping jacks that pursued her from time to time.
At this time, sick of “taking money from Mr. A. to give to Mr. B.,” Dad was planning to give up the civil cases that were bringing some money into the law partnership. It would be some years before he left the firm altogether, but he was already worried about his career, which he didn’t think allowed him to make a great enough contribution to society. He was also deeply worried about money. He didn’t want to depend on the Schambergs’ wealth to sustain his own family. He wanted to be independent.
But my mother saw his financial doubts as only part of the problem:
Edwin, you really worry me badly at times. I seem powerless to dispel your deep gloom. I think there is an alternative to letting this money thing possess your mind and soul. There is much beyond the ugly pettinesses of our existence which is waiting for us to explore and which remains full of reward to the curious seeker.
By the time she wrote this letter, Mother had been pregnant with my brother for five months. Later, as winter bore down on her for her first delivery of a child, she felt compelled to write Dad again.
It was a long epistle, written from a distance (again, she was with Missy), and clearly some troubled exchanges had preceded it. In it, Mother expressed dismay that Dad refused to believe that she loved him. “You are tormented by doubt of me.” My father would never lose that doubt. And my mother would, more and more, be sure that it was a failing in
herself
.
______
J. ANTHONY LUKAS WAS BORN ON APRIL
25, 1933, two years after my parents’ wedding.
Shortly after Tony’s birth, my grandfather’s heart gave cause for alarm. He was sent off to Stanford, New York, where it was cooler than Philadelphia and where Missy could take care of him. Mother and “the infant” traveled there, too. While Tony played in the sun with his grandfather, Mother watched them both and wondered if she could ever feel the joy that other mothers felt for their children—and for their fathers and husbands. As she wrote in her journal:
She watched the aging man and the growing baby lying together on the lawn and wondered whether they would ever really know each other and whether Tony could give her father the love she wanted to and could not give.
None of which is what she wrote to Dad. To him, she said:
Your Tony boy has been angelic and he is the admired darling of the household. Grandma has him in bed with her every morning and he coos and gurgles vociferously in response to her rapturous adoration. But we both miss you, my darling, and he will coo and I will be glad when you are with us again.
Soon, Dad and Mother began looking for a proper place to settle down. In the country. For a while, they rented places in Westchester for the summer. But Mother was certain the air and foliage would be better for everyone if they could find a permanent place outside New York. Dad didn’t want to commute, but Mother won the debate, and they found a year-by-year rental in New Rochelle, not too far by train from New York.
Dad was stewing and worrying about his choice of career: whether he should do more for the outcasts of society and less for the rich and famous. He also worried about his wife. God knows he loved her, but he found that she was indecisive about house-hold matters, overspending when it was not called for, and then panicking. He worried—Caroline Lavenson’s warnings continually echoing in his ear—whether she was also indecisive about him, whether Froelicher was going to be a persistent, silent stalker in their relationship.
Mother had her worries, too. One potential house rental had a wet bar in the basement. Dad wanted to take the place, and in a letter to Missy, Mother wrote, “I only hope I won’t have to seek refuge in your arms from the curse of a drunken husband.”
In the fall of 1933, Mother decided to get a graduate degree in education so she could teach. She studied such newfangled psychological materials as Rorschach tests. Tony was left in the hands of Mary (whom he came to call Baba), a young black woman who also labored with cooking and other chores. In her autobiography, Mother says she used Mary’s presence as an excuse to stay away from the house and from Tony, with whom she began to feel she was “inadequate.”
It was during this course of study that she wrote in the autobiography:
Gradually a state of anxiety took hold of her and, though she continued to run to school each day and go through motions, she felt that she had ceased to dictate her own conduct.
Mother lost her appetite and her ability to handle social situations. She would panic, her hands perspiring, her heart beating faster and faster. She felt she needed to learn from Missy how to deal with “the household,” perplexing problems such as the best cuts of meat, what to do about laundry soaps, the maid’s time off, the linen closet. By now, however, Dr. Schamberg was seriously ill, and Missy was needed elsewhere.
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.”