Authors: Christopher Lukas
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 grandmother’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.
THAT NIGHT MY UNCLE
, Ira, flew to White Plains airport, and the next morning my father and he drove me the six hours up to camp, to be with Tony.
Along the way to Treetops, it rained. Dad and Ira talked of inconsequential things. I, only six years old and frightened of the strange turn of events, sat in the backseat, dumb and virtually ignored. While I knew nothing of the disaster we were leaving behind, I cannot understand how the two of
them
avoided dropping in their tracks from the pressure. Halfway there we passed a flatbed truck carrying part of a house that had literally been sawed in two. A little farther on was the other half. Did Dad and Ira even see the unavoidably personal symbol it later came to represent to me: a world cut in two?
Arriving at Treetops in the evening, I was put to bed in a room all by myself. Ira and Dad promised to visit me in the morning. For now, though, I was alone. My mother had not said good-bye to me. She, who was always to be by my side, comforting me when things got tough, had simply disappeared. I cried myself to sleep.
In the morning Tony came to my room. He didn’t ask questions, simply taking me by the hand to the staircase. Alongside the stairs was a long, curving wooden slide on which the braver kids descended from the second floor to the first. I was enchanted by it and gave it a try. Then another, and another. Tony had to drag me to breakfast.
Later in the day, I wrote and mailed a letter. “Dear Mommy,” I said, “I don’t like it here. I want to come home.” Dad and Ira came by, as promised, but then said they had to go. By now, with Tony as my protector and guide, I was sufficiently secure to let them leave. But that night I cried my eyes out again. How was I to interpret this abandonment by the one person with whom I had experienced such joy for six years?
But children can be resilient, and as the ten days passed, in which my main memory is of sunshine, bad food, and carpentry shop, the lonely nights, fear, and bewilderment began to fade.
Had the recriminations already begun down there in White Plains? Were they arguing over how to tell us about Mother’s death? Were Missy and Dad fighting over who was at fault in this terrible no-win war? Should they have gone back to shock therapy? Should they have kept a “suicide watch”? Should they have trusted the psychoanalyst?
Dad once told me that he spoke to Dr. Nunberg shortly after Mother’s death, to try to glean a hint of how this event had not been foreseen. The doctor said, “How could she do this to
me
?”
Dad was horrified, but said nothing to reprimand him.
But wasn’t that what they all were thinking? How could this beautiful, sweet, talented woman desert me? Shame me. Anger me. Make me feel guilty. Make me fear for my own life.
Ten days after Mother’s suicide, Tony and I came home, and Dad met us at the train station. I was six and Tony was eight. Normally, if either of us had been anywhere, it was Mother who picked us up. This experience was again
not normal
. I had never been to sleepaway camp, nor had I been absent from the house for more than a night. It was all strange, and the fact that Mother was not there made it even stranger.
“Where’s my mother?” I asked as Dad opened the car door for us.
“I’ll tell you in the car,” he said.
Once we were on our way, I asked again.
Dad said, “You remember that your mother was sick when you left?”
I nodded.
“Well, she died.”
I turned toward the backseat and said to Tony, “Don’t believe him. He’s just kidding.”
“No,” said my father. “I’m not kidding.”
His face was solemn, but there were no tears, no quivering voice. I began to cry, and as I looked back at Tony, there was moistness in his eyes, but he did not sob or weep. Dad asked if we wanted him to pull over to the side of the road so we could cry. We said no. We wanted to go home. Maybe we’d find out he was wrong about Mother.
When my own young children wept, I found it impossible not to sweep them up into my arms and comfort them. Even today—they are in their thirties—I would find it impossible not to hug them if they were in pain. I do not recall any such behavior on my father’s part—not then, not in subsequent weeks. Maybe my memory is faulty. Tony never did remember the events of those years, so he was no help. But I recall that we all froze in place, and only I gave way to the emotion of the moment.
As we reached our house, I ran inside, shouting to anyone who would listen: “My mother’s dead. My mother’s dead.” Of course, they knew it. They knew it beyond reason and doubt.
It would be ten years before we learned the truth.
During those years, Dad never spoke about Mother. Nor did anyone else. It was as if she hadn’t existed. Tony and I were well-behaved little boys. We should have attended a memorial service where we could mourn and share our grief with others. We should have been given a chance to say
good-bye
. We
should
have been asking, “How
did
Mother die?” We didn’t ask, because that’s the way the adults seemed to want it. To some this may seem difficult to believe. How could two children
not
inquire what had happened to their mother—so mysteriously there one day and not the next? The answer lies in the tenacity of my father’s game plan to “protect” us (and himself) from the terrible experience, in the lie itself (“she died because she was sick”), which was so bland as to be believable, and, finally, in our wish to be good and careful and silent, so that bad things wouldn’t happen again. But underneath, at least for me, the questions kept coming. Answers did not come.
AS SUMMERS END
, I reflect on the several anniversaries that are coming up: the suicide on August 23; the return from Tripp Lake Camp in early September.
I was taught from childhood to be a
rational
man.
I do not believe in astrological signs.
I do not avoid black cats or leaning ladders.
I laugh when the elevator passes the twelfth floor and comes next to fourteen.
I try to organize my life around what I can see, what I can hold in my hands, what I can prove.
And yet—
I believe deeply in anniversaries.
OF THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS
, I have almost no memory. My psychiatrist later said that it was some kind of defensive fugue—an attempt to garrison myself against feelings of helplessness and despair, not to mention intense rage, at my mother’s disappearance. I just could not comprehend it. No one took the time to tell me of her illness and angst. It was considered too grown-up a discussion to have with a six-year-old boy (or, for that matter, with Tony, an eight-year-old). As a consequence, I went through a series of painful question-and-answer sessions within myself: “Why me?” and “What if?” and “What did I do?” questions. The answers were all unpalatable, full of self-blame and self-doubt; I finally put them away, deep into my unconscious. I do not know what Tony thought or felt. Years later, when we could finally discuss these matters, my brother professed no recollection of the events preceding or immediately following Mother’s death. Nor did he indicate any desire to pursue the subject. It was, he insisted, another indication of my “preoccupation” with death. To my mind,
not
tackling the subject, continuing to shove it out of his consciousness, left Tony vulnerable to a barrage of feelings that sandbagged him over and over again.
In 1941, Missy quickly took over the household. She stayed for a year, bringing with her an I-am-always-right attitude. Missy had firmly dominated Mother’s activities and behaviors until—judging by her letters from Europe—Elizabeth struggled and then
did
pull clear of my grandmother’s taffy-like grasp, finding both freedom and madness. It was a struggle with control and self-control with which I can empathize. I also found myself torn between Missy’s overprotective grip and freedom.
I can think of no better demonstration of her sense of rectitude and her need to control than a story told me by Ira. In 1933, before Mother had been so ill, Ira had entered medical school and was studying for his first year’s big exams. Missy, always concerned for his health because of his youthful tuberculosis, wrote and suggested that he accompany her to Marblehead for a week, so she could make sure he was well.
“You need a rest,” she said.
He replied, “I have exams. I can’t go.”
A day later, she arrived at Johns Hopkins and told him that she had talked to the dean, who said it was okay for him to take the examinations when he came back.
Imagine them, then, the twenty-three-year-old Ira and his forty-eight-year-old mother, up in beautiful Marblehead, sunning on the beach, eating good food. Ira loved to sail, and I can envision him out on his own (Missy wouldn’t go near the boats) in one of the sloops of his day, taking in the sylvan coastline, letting the boat heel over against his touch on the tiller, doing the balancing act that all sailors do: between speed and safety. Perhaps he experienced frustration at his mother’s insistence that he turn in early—as did I, twenty years later. Perhaps he felt embarrassed when she told him to wear a sweater, or suggested he meet that “nice girl” at the table next to them.
After a week, refreshed, ready to take his exams, Ira returned to Johns Hopkins only to learn that he had been failed for not taking his finals. He rushed to see the dean.
“But my mother . . .,” he explained.
Actually, Missy had never talked to the dean. Luckily, when that august personage learned what had happened, he allowed Ira to take makeup examinations. And Ira had that story to add to his list of Missy tales.