The Quiet Room (7 page)

If Lori had been in any danger, by the time Nancy and I arrived at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan it was long past. In the ambulance, the paramedics had given her medicine to make her throw up, and in the emergency room she had had her stomach pumped. When she saw us, she started to cry.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean it. I didn't mean to do it.” She was sobbing, and contrite. “I didn't mean to make all this trouble.” She turned to me. “Take me home, Daddy. I want to go home. I won't ever do it again.”

Lori Winters was with her, looking shaken. She pulled me aside to tell me the whole story. The policemen had arrived quickly, before the paramedics. But when they tried to take Lori out of the apartment, she became violent.

“It was awful,” Lori Winters said. “She was struggling with them, and trying to hit them. She said if they came near her, she would take their gun. Then she tried to grab for it.”

Looking at my Lori sitting hunched over in her hospital gown, it was hard for me to believe Lori Winters's story. My Lori looked so tiny and harmless, and so frightened by the horrors surrounding us.

Bellevue Hospital Medical Center is a big public hospital that, in the middle of the night, is a magnet for society's outcasts, the homeless, the pushers, the addicts, the prostitutes. While we were sitting there, a man was carried in on a stretcher, blood oozing from a knife wound in his side. He lay there screaming, his cries nearly drowning out the shrieks from a woman in labor—a teenager, it seemed—lying in the crowded corridor.

It didn't feel real. It felt like a scene from a bad movie. This was no place for my daughter, who was cowering there whimpering for shame and fear.

Just then Lori's psychiatrist arrived. Lori Winters had called him too, and he had driven down from his home to see what needed to be done. He apparently was familiar with hospital bureaucracy, and had come prepared for a long night: He had a pillow under his arm.

When Lori Winters saw him, her face darkened in anger. “How could you do that,” she lashed out. “How could you turn your back on her like that?”

She was speaking so loudly that I think she wanted me to hear, and to step in. But I didn't think quarreling was going to do us any good right then. The important thing was to get Lori the help she needed. I wanted to put the whole thing behind us as quickly as possible.

In my mind, the most important help she needed was to make sure that nothing of this incident ever came to light. As a psychologist, I knew she could carry a psychiatric label for a long time— if not forever. I didn't want my daughter to be stigmatized by some temporary rash act. I thought that whatever had been bothering her had passed, and that she could leave the hospital now and come home with me right away. But the hospital personnel refused to let her go. Attempting suicide was a serious act, they said, and they wanted her to stay for a few days in the psychiatric ward for observation. That was absolutely out of the question. I didn't want anything on Lori's record that could come back and haunt her in her later life.

We needed to negotiate, and fast. Nancy and I left Lori in the care of Lori Winters and went out to talk with the hospital people. If she had to stay in the hospital, I wanted them to let her stay overnight in the medical unit, not the psychiatric ward. We were out in the hall arguing with the staff when a friend of mine just happened by, a physician I knew from my country club in Scarsdale.

“What are you doing here?” Nancy called to him. Actually, he seemed more surprised to see us than we him. He had an office at New York University Medical Center, and had just finished up with some of his own patients. But what reason could I have for being in a city hospital emergency room in the middle of the night? Hurriedly I explained to him the situation. He left me and went off to talk to the physician on duty. I don't know what he told her, or what strings he pulled, but soon after, the paperwork arrived for me and Lori to sign, admitting her overnight to a medical ward.

“It's better this way, lovey,” I said. “This way you can put this whole thing behind you, and no one will ever need to know you were here. It will all be over.”

I didn't see Lori's problems as serious. She didn't need to stay in a psychiatric ward. She wasn't mentally ill. She just had a few problems. She was having a difficult transition out of her teens into womanhood, making the complex and stressful leap out of college into business, from the security of her college campus into the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan. She was just having some trouble dealing with those changes. I didn't want to believe it was anything more than that. This was no more serious than other phases in her life she had gone through—like being a vegetarian, or losing too much weight, or getting depressed over her date to the prom. Those things had passed, this one would too.

When our kids were growing up I pushed them. I always told them that although they would never reach perfection, they should always be reaching for it. I reviewed their report cards, and urged them to take advanced placement courses and tutorials. Good was never good enough. I wanted them to stretch the limits of their abilities in whatever they did.

Everything in my own life taught me this lesson, that education and striving and initiative were the ways to success. Both my parents were born in Europe. My father was born in 1901 in territory that was sometimes Poland and sometimes Russia. He fled a brutal military service, and found passage to America on a cattle ship.

My mother was born in Austria, but because she was only six months old when she arrived here she grew up speaking English without an accent. From childhood, she worked in a sweatshop making ladies’ millinery. As the oldest girl in a family of nine, she became a second mother to her siblings.

When I was born, my father didn't have the money to pay the hospital bill and take me home, so he pawned a silver candlestick his mother had sent him from the old country.

I learned early that my brains and my determination were my tickets out. I graduated from high school when I was fifteen and started college at sixteen. I wanted to go to Cornell, but my parents didn't have the money, so I went to Queens College, a New York City school instead, where my first semester cost only $87, including books.

After my military service interrupted my studies, I returned to school, graduated with honors, and went on to graduate school. I zoomed through. I started my studies—in clinical psychology—at Michigan State University in 1956. Three years later, I had my master's degree and my Ph.D., and was beginning to work.

When I started to work at A.T. Kearney as a management consultant to business, I knew I had made it. In very short order, I began climbing the ranks of the firm. When we moved to Los Angeles, I headed that office. When we moved back to New York, I was coming back as head of that major office. On the day we shook hands to buy our big beautiful house in Scarsdale, Nancy and I drove back to the Bronx tenement where I had grown up. I didn't want us to forget where I had come from. Although it had taken a long time for me to really feel secure financially, by the late 1970s, money was no longer a problem in our family.

But by the spring of 1982, when Lori was having her problems, I was playing a high-stakes game of bet-your-job. The country was in a recession, and our consulting business was being restructured. After twenty-two years, several of my old colleagues and I felt as if we were being pushed aside.

It was a tremendously traumatic time. Those of us being shunted aside decided to stage a coup, to gain control of our company. My days were filled with tension, clandestine meetings, caucusing, polling the partners, trying to get enough votes to reconfigure the current management so that we could take control. If we won, I would be in the new senior leadership. If we lost, I would be out of work. I told no one at the office about Lori's troubles, and instructed Nancy to do the same at her job. Our work and our personal lives were separate, and no good could come from letting our minor problems leak out into the public eye. They were nobody's business but our own.

When she left the hospital, Lori was still contrite, still apologetic, still giving every sign that she realized what she had done had been wrong.

“I just flipped out, Daddy,” she said. “I won't do it again.”

Nancy and I tried to reassure her. We didn't want to put any more pressure on her than we had to. So we brought her back home to Scarsdale for a few days. I called her boss at the insurance company and explained that she had been taken ill, and would like a leave of absence for a while, but that she would definitely be back at work soon. He was very nice about it. Lori was a productive salesperson, he said. They would be happy to have her back whenever she was ready.

But Lori's problems didn't go away.

Although she returned to her apartment, she didn't seem willing or able to go back to work. And she began to seem alternately more agitated and more depressed. Sometimes she seemed nearly frantic, at other times she seemed nearly rigidly, profoundly down. Her appearance began to change too. She had once been meticulous about her grooming, and, while she never shared Nancy's love of ultra-feminine things and high fashion, she was always nicely dressed, with attractive clothes, and nattering haircuts. Now she was more slovenly. Her clothes seemed like she had slept in them. Her hair, once shiny and bouncy, stuck together in oily strands, looking as if she hadn't washed it in weeks.

Lori Winters had moved out, so Nancy went down to the city often to check on our Lori. She began to report to me with growing dismay the increasing disorder of Lori's apartment, and her agitation. It was hard to be in the same room with her sometimes, she was so stirred up, pacing back and forth, pulling on one cigarette after another until the room was filled with the foul smoke.

In the meantime, she had stopped seeing her psychiatrist. Shortly after she was released from the hospital, we got a call from him. Lori's problems were more serious than he was prepared to handle, he told us. Lori needed more help than he could give, so he was recommending that we find another doctor. He was saying that Lori was really sick—much sicker than we had thought at first. But I couldn't hear him. I didn't want to hear him.

Partly it was my love for Lori that blinded me: I didn't want to see what was happening before my eyes. My daughter Lori was pretty and smart and talented. She was a model student and a model teenager. Everyone loved her. She was supposed to go to college, meet a wonderful man, get married, have children and live a long and happy life. I couldn't accept anything that got in the way of that picture.

But partly it was my own professional background, my training in psychology, that—rather than helping me—made it almost impossible for me to face what was happening. Back when I studied psychology in the 1950s, there was only one cause for all mental illnesses, even the most severe: a faulty upbringing. Everything was tied to the way you were raised. There were different schools of thought, of course. Some practitioners followed a Freudian model where understanding the id, the ego and the superego gave the answer to everything. Some followed Jung, with his emphasis on unconscious myths. But everyone believed that it was early life experiences that were behind mental disorders. A patient with serious mental problems had been subject at an early age to unacceptable pressures, to confusing messages, or to some destructive behavior on the part of the parents.

If Lori were really sick, my training told me, then I was to blame. I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it. So I refused to believe that Lori was really sick.

Nonetheless, Nancy and I were both ready to try anything that would help our little girl. When her psychiatrist suggested that rather than psychotherapy we try drug therapy, we were more than willing to listen. There was a man in New York, a Dr. Nathan Kline, who was experimenting in the field of psychopharmacology. He had established quite a reputation already for treating young people's psychological problems with drugs. There was even a whole clinic named after him. After reading some clippings that described all the good he was doing for young people like our daughter, we sent Lori over to his clinic on the east side of Manhattan.

After several weeks of treatment it seemed to me that Lori was much better. Her depressions didn't seem as severe, and she seemed much calmer. She seemed more in control, more relaxed. I thought the drug therapy was doing her good. Nancy disagreed.

“Marvin, that's not Lori,” she said to me one night. “That's not who Lori is. Look at her eyes. She's just drugged, she's in a stupor. He's giving her way too much medicine. She's taking ten or twenty pills a day.”

I knew he was giving her medicine, but I didn't know what it was, or how much she was taking, or why he was giving it to her. To resolve the argument, I told Nancy I'd go see Dr. Kline in his office, which wasn't far from my own office in midtown. I called and made an appointment.

But when I arrived at the clinic, I did more talking than asking questions. Dr. Kline was a pleasant man in his fifties with a beard. His office was full of impressive African art. His whole setup, in fact, was impressive. He was clearly well regarded for his work. I spent my time in his office thanking him for the help he had given Lori. He seemed glad to hear my comments.

But then the phone rang again.

It was New York Hospital calling. Lori was in the emergency room. Again. Once again she had tried to commit suicide. Once again they wanted to admit her to a psychiatric unit. This time Nancy was too terrified to come with me. So I asked our older son, Mark, who was home for the summer from college in New Orleans.

Mark and I didn't talk much in the car on the way down. I was too consumed with my own thoughts. It was mid-June, just three months after she had come out of Bellevue, and here she was in a hospital again. What was going wrong? What was happening to my daughter?

When we got to the emergency room, it was like a repeat of the time before, only this time it was much worse. She apparently had had an appointment with Dr. Kline in the afternoon. En route to his office, she had swallowed a handful of Ativan, the tranquilizer that Dr. Kline was prescribing for her, and then walked thirty blocks to the office. When she arrived she was incoherent and rambling so the nurses didn't even wait for her appointment. They felt she had taken an intentional overdose in a suicide attempt. They called an ambulance right away to take her to New York Hospital, just a few blocks away.