The Quiet Room (16 page)

13

Marvin Schiller Scarsdale, New York, June 1984-August 1984

At first, Nancy and I were delighted when Lori got herself a job. We didn't have any problem with our daughter working as a waitress. It was honest work, and we knew she would be good at it. She seemed to like it too. After a very short time, it seemed that she was spending most of her time there. Just about every evening she worked a shift, and most weekends too. Many weekends the only way Nancy and I saw Lori was to go over to the restaurant for dinner.

That was all right with us. We would head over about dinnertime and wait for a table in her section. I would order a burger or spare ribs and Nancy would get a salad from the salad bar. To my eyes, Lori was doing pretty well for someone who had just been locked up for almost a year in a psychiatric hospital. I would sit waiting for my food and watch her moving briskly through the crowds. She was lively and efficient, and she knew she was in the service business. I would watch her laughing and chatting with the customers, keeping up a cheerful repartee as she took orders and made change.

Sometime the previous fall she joined a video dating service. That seemed like another good sign. Even though Lori was living at home, Nancy and I thought she ought to be making a bigger effort to make friends with people her own age. She paid $500 for a subscription to the dating service, and I told her I thought it was a good investment.

Very seriously, she explained to me how the service worked. 1

“There was a lady off camera asking me all kinds of questions! about what kinds of guys I like, what kinds of things I like to do,| how I feel about different things.”

It seemed that she was given the chance to see similar videotapes! done of men, and select the ones she felt she'd like to date

“So if I pick Andrew and Scott, then the service calls them in and tells them someone's interested. They come in, see my video, and decide if they're interested in meeting me too.”

Lori was, like me, old-fashioned. She liked the idea that if the attraction was mutual, the woman's phone number was given to the man to call. The attraction must have been mutual a good bit that fall, for men were always showing up at the door. One man showed up with a big bouquet of roses. On another evening she returned home laughing: She had just had dinner with a magician who had performed his tricks over the meal.

All through the winter I loved to hear the phone ring. It meant to me that our Lori was back.

I was so grateful she was back, so grateful she was out of that hospital.

Now that she was out, I felt my job was to encourage her, to shepherd her along, to make sure that she didn't get stuck in the hospital system. I embarked on a program to encourage her. Marshal your forces, Lori, I told her. “You are in charge of the way you present yourself to others.” She was a fighter, a winner. She could pull it together and hasten her own recovery.

Although she was up off the bottom, I knew she wasn't altogether well. I had only to look at her to know that. I could see it in her eyes. From the time Lori was a baby, I used to say that Lori had devilish eyes. There was mischief in them, and intelligence and sparkle and fun. These eyes were dead, their stare vacant. Her walk was different too. Her arms hung lifelessly from their sockets. She looked like a zombie, moving as if walking in her sleep.

It wasn't the Lori we knew. But it was better than the Lori we had seen over the last several months. I figured that she was in the early stage of recovery. When she picked Dr. Rockland as her psychiatrist, we all agreed that what she needed was to be eased back into her own life. With work and friends, meaning and \ purpose, she would merge herself back into the life she had left behind.

Lori herself seemed to feel that way too. In May of the year before, just after Lori left the hospital, Nancy threw a wonderful party for my fiftieth birthday. It was at a restaurant in SoHo in Manhattan, and about two dozen of our family friends were there. Mark and Steven were with us, so it was the first time the whole family had been together in one spot in a very long time. The boys were getting punchy, acting silly, calling for a toast and then passing chunks of browned bread around the table. Everyone was in a good mood.

Lori, with a new, short and bouncy haircut, looked lovely that evening. And then, when the real toasts began, she did something that brought tears to my eyes. She stood up before our guests and thanked me for all the help I had given her while she was in the hospital.

“I'm sorry for all the trouble I caused you then, Daddy,” she said. “Thank you for helping pull me through a rough time.”

When you make a jump from a 1 to a 3 it's not like the 10 you had, but it's still progress.

I tried to keep our relations simple and on an even keel. On Sunday afternoons, we walked on the golf course together. On Saturday afternoons, we did errands. We drove up to Central Avenue in Yonkers to pick things up for the house or the car or the garden. Sometimes we stopped at Caldor's and I would buy her a Diet Coke and a soft hot pretzel, which she seemed to like, and I loved. We tried to make some fun out of simple things. We had a little competition to see who could find the cheapest 93 octane gas in Westchester County. I found a station in New Rochelle; she found one in Eastchester. We'd compare notes and then go out of our way to fill up at the winning station. We probably spent dollars saving pennies, but I didn't care. It seemed to amuse her, and gave us something to talk about.

Nancy was always troubled by my psychologizing. “Why don't you leave that to the doctors?” she kept saying. “Don't get involved in her therapy.” But when Lori returned home I felt I owed it to her to give her my best. I had good training. I would use it to try to help her.

I tried to talk to her about her voices, what they were saying, who they were, what they meant to her. I encouraged her to write down her dreams, and for a while she kept a paper and pencil by her bed. She was having such a difficult time communicating, talking to us—or to anyone—about how she felt, that I encouraged her to write down as much as possible. If she felt free to bring those feelings to me, then I would try to interpret them for her. Over and over I would say to her that it was important to remember how she was now, so we could all look back and appreciate how far she had come.

One thing I insisted she talk to me about was suicide. She had already tried to kill herself twice, and many times in the hospital it was obvious that she would have tried again if she had been able. I tried to talk with her about how final death was. That if she attempted suicide she might actually succeed. That even if she weren't completely serious about the attempt, there was always the possibility that she'd make a fatal error.

“It's not like so many other things, Lori, where if it goes wrong you can try again and do it over,” I told her. “If you make a mistake, you don't get another chance.”

As the weeks went by, I kept asking her: “Are you planning on killing yourself, Lori? You have to tell us if you are.” I would try to drag it out of her. More often than not she would become belligerent.

“Stop hounding me,” she would snap. “You're just trying to provoke me. You don't understand.”

But strangely enough over time our relationship began to grow closer. She had always been my little girl. But these days it was clearer to me than ever before just how much she needed me. She needed my support and my reassurance and my encouragement, and she was actively seeking them out.

She would walk up to me and say, out of the blue:

“You're mad at me.”

“No I'm not, Lori.”

“Well, you're looking at me like you're mad at me.”

Over and over I had to reassure her.

“You hate me,” she would say.

“Lori, I don't hate you. I love you.” Finally it began to dawn on me. When she challenged me like that, she wasn't making a statement. She was asking a question. And she needed to hear the answer. She needed to hear that I still accepted her. She needed to hear that I still cared for her. Over and over again she needed to hear me tell her that I loved her.

During this period, my life was difficult on all fronts. My clique of partners had won the power struggle and had become the new management of my company. That meant much more responsibility and power. It also meant more work and travel. I was now responsible for fifteen offices all over the country, and I had to visit them often. It also meant more worries. Now that I was in charge, helping the company thrive was my responsibility, and I took it very seriously.

Nancy and I continued to support each other emotionally, but our lives these days were far from the carefree frolic that I had expected when our three little ones had left the nest. Life for me these days largely boiled down to work, Lori and sleep.

Earlier in the spring, I had told my firm about Lori's problems. I had been forced by necessity to confront the issue with them much sooner than I had been ready to. Because Lori had already graduated from college, she was considered an independent adult, and no longer covered on my medical insurance. Her coverage had lapsed by only a few months when she was hospitalized. She had no insurance of her own, and her bills were mounting by the tens of thousands of dollars. The costs were more than I could comfortably handle on my own. So in March I wrote a memo to my firm, asking them to help me out.

The memo went to the board. I was a member of the board. That should have made things easier for me, but—emotionally at least—it made things harder.

I had spent years cultivating my hard-nosed, cost-conscious, demanding image. I was the guy who operated by the book, played by the rules, and didn't believe in special deals. I built my career on that philosophy. I helped build our firm on it. And here I was, Marvin Schiller, the macho manager, coming to my colleagues with hat in hand, saying, “Please guys, can you help me out?”

They asked me to leave the room while they deliberated. I stood outside the large room where our board meetings were usually held around the half dozen rectangular tables pushed together to make one huge square. I was usually inside making decisions. Now I was outside, waiting for a decision to be made about me.

After the better part of an hour they called me back in the room. They had dictated into the minutes of the meeting a series of stern little warnings, including one to other employees to plan more carefully for the health insurance needs of their children who no longer qualify for coverage. The firm can't be responsible for the coverage of dependents who no longer qualify, they said. But then, after a reminder that this was a one-time-only exception, they agreed to extend my coverage for long enough to cover half of Lori's bills.

Still, I continued to keep disclosure to a minimum. About a year earlier, just as Lori had left the hospital, my new secretary, Anne Schiff, had joined our firm. She must have quickly guessed the situation, for she always put Lori's calls through to me right away. But I never mentioned Lori's past, and Anne didn't ask. During the ordinary chitchat that precedes business, I would talk about my one son heading for college, and my other son heading for graduate school…and then I would talk about my daughter who “worked” in a hospital. I figured it was a play on words. After all, she was working hard at getting well and was in a hospital. I didn't see any point in being more explicit than that. It would just make people uncomfortable in situations where we were aiming at being relaxed.

With our friends, though, we dropped the charade. Once she had transferred from Payne Whitney to New York Hospital's branch in Westchester, we knew that this was no short-term thing that could be brushed into the background. With doctors at Payne Whitney telling us to give up hope, I realized that this was not something that she was going to shake in a few weeks, that this was a very serious, and probably a long-term illness. I never believed she wouldn't get better, but I was beginning to realize that the hills we had to climb on the way back were steeper and higher than we had hoped for.

So Nancy and I talked it over and agreed that we would be open with our closest friends. We tried to be as matter-of-fact as possible in breaking the news to them.

“Do you remember that we told you that Lori was working in Boston?” we said to our friends. “Well, she wasn't. She was actually in New York Hospital. She's attempted suicide a number of times, and she's really very ill.” We explained as best as we could what we understood was wrong with her, and we tried to explain that we had concealed it for Lori's sake, hoping to shield her from stigma.

People were polite and seemed concerned. “When did this happen?” they would ask. “What is happening with her now?” “I didn't realize.” Their expressions were sympathetic, but we could see they were shocked. Some seemed confused about what to think about her illness, about how to react to us, or to her.

We were surprised too. People didn't behave the way we had expected them to. Some of our closest friends had the hardest time dealing with the news. One couple in particular had been very close to us and to our children. But they seemed to be particularly uncomfortable. They never asked about Lori and never visited her in the hospital. In fact, very few people asked about her, and fewer still actually visited her. They didn't know what to do.

As time went on, I began to wish that our friends could understand better, or be more empathetic with our situation. But in a way, how could I blame them? We had such a hard time understanding and accepting the situation ourselves. How could we expect more from them? And after all, what did they know about mental illness? A few bizarre stories about serial killers or cannibals, or young men who went up in towers and shot at passers-by. Deep down, our friends were probably afraid of Lori, afraid of what she might do. In the end, Nancy and I realized that this was our struggle, not theirs, and that we couldn't look to anyone else to ease the pain or make things better.

As Lori settled into her job, we began to let ourselves believe that things were getting better. But then, in the spring of 1984, Nancy and I started detecting a strange pattern to Lori's life. Phone calls came at odd hours, and seemed to be from odd people. Sometimes when Lori answered the phone, she spoke in hushed tones. Sometimes, Nancy said, Lori would leave the house suddenly after one of the calls.