Blue Genes (19 page)

I, too, always felt I was not
good enough
at what I did. On some level—bizarre as it may sound—I believed that if I were as creative as I
should
have been, if I were truly a beautiful person, then Mother wouldn’t have abandoned me!

While Tony and I were moving up our ladders, Dad was changing gears, too. In the 1960s, he became deeply involved in civil rights causes and organizations and went to the South to defend black men and women in courts where few white Southern attorneys wanted to go, and few black lawyers were allowed.

I had never been as brave, nor as able in public service, but I began to think of my work at Channel 13 as a way I could contribute to the world. In those days of the deepening civil rights and antiwar movements, I asked myself about each program: Does it advance equality among Americans? Does it give unpopular views a hearing? Do we hear enough about what is right, as well as what is wrong, with our world?

If Tony thought about his work in the same way, I never heard such sentiments expressed. Proud as he was of Dad’s civil rights activities, as a journalist he believed his role was simply to write objectively about the world. On the other hand, as a private person, he contributed his time to the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Authors Guild; also, he helped young reporters on their way up. In fact, some have written that he was the preeminent “quiet” journalist in America: the reporter who was not in the limelight because he took such care (and time) to write his books, but whose efforts on behalf of younger talented writers and journalists were stellar.

In 1970, a new general manager came to Channel 13, which meant a management shake-up. In 1971 I was again out of a job.

I secured myself six months’ severance pay. Susan, our two young daughters, and I went off to Aspen, Colorado, for the summer, to figure out the rest of our lives. It was a glorious summer, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what my professional future would turn out to be.

About a month into the summer, Tony joined us for a vacation. He had already won the Pulitzer for his story on Linda Fitzpatrick and had published a book on disaffected youth,
Don’t Shoot—We Are Your Children!
as well as his slim but famous book on the Chicago Eight conspiracy trial,
The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities
. He was the Chicago bureau chief at the time of the trial and returned to New York after the book was published. He came to Colorado both for a well-earned vacation and to do some of what I was doing: figure out his future. It would not be long before he left the
Times
for good, choosing the freelancer’s route.

One weekday afternoon, as the cumulus clouds drifted over-head, revealing occasional bursts of great sunshine, Tony, Susan, and I rented horses and some fishing gear and rode an hour up into the mountains to a pristine lake where, the locals said, beautiful trout awaited us. Tony had not ridden since Santa Fe; as Susan and I watched him, dressed in what we always thought of as his Harvard uniform—cordovan shoes, a wool pullover sweater, gray slacks—climb unsteadily atop the stocky horse the stable provided him (“Does he really know how to ride?” queried the wrangler), we leaped nimbly aboard our own steeds, but began to wonder if this was the best idea in the world. Nonetheless, with sandwiches, fresh worms, and light hearts, we took off for the lake, which was at eight thousand feet above sea level.

The horses knew their way, so we relaxed on the way up, joking back and forth about the fish we hoped to catch. At the top, as the crystal lake reflected a crystal sky, we let the horses graze and set to work to best each other at fishing.

Three hours later, neither nibble nor catch. Clouds began to cover the sky, darkening at the horizon; it was getting chilly. Clearly, a storm was coming, and neither Susan nor I wanted to remain at the lake without shelter. Tony, on the other hand, had come to the mountain to catch trout. He was unwilling to leave and begged us for another half hour so that he would not have to return to New York without word of his prowess. Reluctantly, Susan and I acquiesced. A few minutes later the first drops fell, increasing with frightening speed into a downpour. Thunder rumbled. We packed up.

As sure-footed as the animals had been on the way up, they were even better on the way down. We let them pick their path along the often tricky route. Soon, despite my rain jacket and hat, I was soaked. So was Susan. Tony, who had not brought a jacket or a hat, was dripping with cold water. His expensive wool sweater was soaked through, and I worried that it would shrink on him if we hit sunnier weather.

There was no jocular banter this time. It took us an hour and a half to wind our way down to the stable, where we all rushed to our little rental Toyota, undressed to our underwear, and drove home with the heater blasting.

Like many adventures, scary
during
the episode, our eventual safety provided all of us with a sense of derring-do in years to come. If we didn’t exactly dine off this experience, we could remember it with pleasure.

IN OUR FAMILY
, the old seemed to die with terrible reverberations of how the young had perished. Again and again their deaths were marked by depression, bipolar disorder, and suicidal disappointment.

Missy came first. In January of 1970, suffering from heart problems, she was moved to Philadelphia by Uncle Ira and settled in a nursing home. The day after she got there, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. A depressive for her entire life, she was never satisfied with the love she got from her children and grand-children. She felt abandoned by me—when I married, and when I did not follow her to the Philadelphia hospital. She died, in 1971, at the age of eighty-seven.

Two years later, Dad died. At the age of seventy-one, his liver weakened by endless drinking, his body not up to the stress of all that abuse, he had a stroke. Susan and I had moved to England the year before, both to escape Richard Nixon’s America and for me to look for exciting work.

While I was job hunting—and Susan and the kids were acclimating to the English pace—Tony phoned from Washington, where he was working on a huge piece on Watergate for the
New York Times Magazine
. It was time to say good-bye to our father, who had retired to California. We agreed that he and I would meet on the West Coast at the hospital.

When we arrived, it was not clear whether Dad would last a long time in his coma or would die soon. Tony and I talked about it over dinner near Dad’s apartment in Tiburon. The doctors could give us little accurate information.

“I’ve got to get back to Washington,” Tony said. “The
Times
needs this piece. It’s going to take up the
whole
magazine; nothing else.”

I understood. But I, too, had a conflict. Susan had just heard that her first book,
Fat Emily
, would be published. Her editor was coming to England to work on the final copy with her. I needed to take care of the girls while she did work on that.

Tony and I decided that we would both go back to our respective obligations, leaving Dad at the hospital; we’d return as soon as something “happened.”

Within two weeks, Dad awoke from the coma and was sent to a nursing home. Tony visited him, then I replaced him at Dad’s bedside; the
Times
wanted a second piece on Watergate.

Dad was moving in and out of sleep, heavily sedated, his right side badly paralyzed. There was an open sore on one arm. This was a new experience for me. Ever since I could remember, I had always been with an active father, one from whom I sought support and praise. That man now lay helpless and dazed from sedatives. The moment of separation was on me, and I didn’t know what to do. How was I supposed to act?

He’d rubbed his paralyzed arm, turning and twisting to get comfortable, and it had become raw. They now had him restrained and sedated. As he slept, I sat by his bed quietly, which was characteristic of our relationship. My fear of his power and anger dampened any real give-and-take. He would awake for brief periods, look at me in surprise as if he didn’t remember I was there, and then soon go back to sleep.

What I do remember him saying, shortly before I left that morning, was that he hoped Tony would find a woman to marry pretty soon. Shortly after he told me that wish, he complained of an ache in his left shoulder, and I massaged it until he fell asleep. In the years since, I have often thought of that moment as the one and only time that I actually gave him comfort.

Tony told me that he, too, had had a “last talk” with Dad. He mentioned nothing about “finding a bride,” but said Dad hoped
I’d
find a job soon and “be happy.”

Those dual wishes, told to the wrong sons, have always stood as a symbol of the miscommunication between us. Not that I thought Dad wished me ill, but a heartfelt statement of love would have been very welcome at that time—when I’d been drifting for so long. And he was leaving us.

Tony reported that Dad’s last words to him of any kind were “Shit, piss, and corruption,” and then he fell asleep.

That was more like him.

Before Dad’s death, after we knew he was ill, Susan and I made plans to move to San Francisco, to be near him as long as he lived. Maybe I could jump-start my career back in the States. It was not going anywhere in London. Before we could even move, however, Tony phoned to say that Dad had died.

I didn’t cry, not at that moment. It all seemed too futile, too far away emotionally. I thought, maybe I’ve done all my crying for dead people. Maybe I should reserve it for the living.

In my files, there is a letter from Ernst Kris, one of Freud’s American disciples. It’s handwritten on staid stationery, dated September 20, 1942. Dad had been in analysis with Kris, but only briefly. The tuberculosis would interrupt that work.

But Dad never did return to therapy. Tony’s psychotherapy—recently ended—had lasted no longer than our father’s.

In the midst of his second Watergate piece, Tony spent part of the early summer in San Francisco, clearing up Dad’s meager belongings, and part in D.C., finishing the article. Then all of us joined up in New York for Dad’s memorial service. It was held in a small room at the Society for Ethical Culture. The ashes went to a Hungarian burial society. That seemed fitting.

Ira and his wife, Frances, came up from Philadelphia to babysit the kids while we went to the service. Susan, Tony, and I sat together. As the moderately large crowd listened to the speakers extol Dad’s virtues, Susan began to cry and took our hands. Both of us also wept. The service was attended by luminaries from the civil rights movement and reinforced my belief that Dad, despite his own despair at “not having accomplished anything” during his seventy-one years, was an important figure.

Tony later told me a final, sad story about Dad and Aunt Judy. I don’t know whether they made amends or not, whether they forgave what needed to be forgiven, but in any event she had replaced Tony at Dad’s bedside, especially near the end of his life. One afternoon, after Dad had died, Judy sat at lunch with Tony and berated him for not spending enough time in California with our father. Stung by this accusation, Tony lost his cool.

“And where were
you
when he needed you all those years?” he snapped back.

She slapped his face and burst into tears.

Shortly thereafter, Aunt Frances was diagnosed with throat cancer. She had survived lung cancer some years earlier, but now this brave, thoughtful woman, who had paid loving attention to the needs of her brother-in-law (my father) and his sons, needed attention paid to her. But she was in such pain that we were cautioned not to expect much from a visit. Nevertheless, we went down to Jenkintown—Susan and I—and sat talking to my aunt for a few hours. Frances tried to carry on that conversation, but it was all too difficult. We cut our weekend visit short. After a painful year, she asked that an overdose of painkillers be administered by her physicians. They agreed, and she died of her own time and choosing. I considered this suicide an unwelcome addition to the family legacy, but I went to Jenkintown and spoke at her memorial service because I loved her and honored her. Strangely, despite the generally public acknowledgment of her “rational” assisted suicide, none of us at the service
spoke
of how she had died. I recognized my own hypocrisy in the matter. I had been the one to broadcast the “news” of Mother’s suicide to my brother, and to others. Why was I silent here?

Only about a year later, Uncle Ira went into his bathroom and, in an anguished replication of his sister’s death forty years earlier, cut his throat. His eldest son called us in New York with the news. I was aghast. I did not believe history could repeat itself so directly. Tony said he wouldn’t go. “I’ve had enough of suicide,” he sputtered. I felt similar doubts, but again I went. Ira, too, had been a protector and a mentor to me, especially during my college years, when I would come over from Swarthmore to his house. He even set up blind dates for me. How could I
not
provide some solace at his service? Again, however, I said nothing of suicide in my talk. Again, I recognized my own hypocrisy.

If we had had enough of suicide, suicide was not through with us. In the 1980s, my ex-roommate Tom Russell, on his fiftieth birthday—recovering from alcoholism, but suffering from schizophrenia—took his own life.

I went into a deep depression. Though I didn’t realize it, I was turning inward the anger I felt at all those people who were “abandoning” me or had done so in the past: mother, grandmother, aunt, uncle, best childhood friend, even my father, who had continued to drink in his isolated aerie in California, knowing it would kill him.

Why, Susan asked, did I drug myself with depression instead of feeling the anger?

“Read up on it,” she said. “What it’s like to be left behind after suicide. Maybe other people’s experience can give you some help.”

But there
were
no books on the subject. In the years before the words “physician-assisted suicide” had become popular parlance, or anyone had heard of Dr. Kevorkian, the silence surrounding the subject of suicide was pervasive.

A psychoanalyst friend, Henry Seiden, and I began to talk to
survivors
of suicide, those left behind. I discovered all sorts of companions—people who shared some of the feelings and conflicts that I had thought were only
my
fate. Susan helped make it clear to me: as I was doing, they were protecting others from their anger about these terrible acts, but not protecting themselves.

I didn’t want
others
to undergo what I had experienced. And I didn’t want to go through any more of the depression myself. Perhaps, paraphrasing the words of the satirist Tom Lehrer, I could do well for myself by doing good for others.

So Henry and I wrote
Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide
. It was about all the aftereffects: depression, anger, guilt, anxiety, replication of the act itself. We warned survivors that if they did not receive intervention in the form of comfort, therapy, and grief counseling, they, too, might end up as suicide statistics.

The book did, in fact, help me understand my own depression; my confusion over what I had experienced; my need for some way of saying good-bye to my mother—not simply ignoring that she had ever existed.

And it began to help others, too. I put a lot of energy into talking about the book on television and radio, spreading the word. Oprah and Donahue took me onto their airwaves. I was gratified when, among many who said I’d helped them, Bill Moyers wrote the following:

In the early 1970s, Tony was beginning to feel the kind of depression that would become more and more severe. He had no permanent love relationships, no immediate prospect of a family of his own. Having won one Pulitzer Prize, he saw David Halberstam—and others—win a second and go on to write best-selling books. The old jealousies were rising.