Blue Genes (8 page)

“Get into bed,” he screamed again. I wanted to stop to take off my slippers, which I had carefully put on as I prepared to go for comfort to my mother’s arms. Dad would have none of it. Into bed I went, slippers and all. The door slammed on my room, and then on their room.

I was terrified of my father. And I hated him.

Crying, hurt, uncertain about my safety, I pulled the covers up over me, pretending that I was in a boat on the ocean, safe, water-tight, far from harm. Tony, in the next room, never awoke.

In some of the psychotherapy I underwent in later years, it was suggested to me that Dad’s fury had to do with my intervention in a sexual event—the “primal scene” about which Freud writes. I dutifully listened to this interpretation, but I reject it. I think that
my
motivation may have been Oedipal (
What is going on behind that closed door?
), but the scene I saw in my parents’ bedroom was not a happy one, much less sexual. Mother sat in her bed, a scowl on her face, Dad in his. I remember how much Dad liked his sleep and hated to be interrupted. But what I recognize now is the tension between them, and Dad’s fear that Mother might be getting manic or depressed again, that she might be in touch with Francis. And Mother must have had her own terrors: What would happen to her? What would happen to all of them?

THE MOST IMPORTANT PART
of our early life in White Plains was undoubtedly the little dramas Tony and I staged on the window seat in the dining room. This even had a curtain that could be pulled to close off the entire window seat from the rest of the house. There, at the ages of six and four, respectively, my brother and I began to play out our feelings, making up plays to express ourselves through mime or rudimentary dialogue. This was at the urging of Mother, the actress and budding educational psychologist.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.