“Yes. I lost it,” she repeated.
I thought she had dropped it somewhere, and we would have to go look for it. But that wasn't it at all.
“I lost it at three-card monte. I thought I had them. I thought I could beat them.” She was excited, frightened, overheated. “I used some twenties. I lost them. Then I put down everything in my wallet. I lost it all. I was out of money so I put down my bracelet, and lost that too.” It was clear she was worried. She was upset about losing the bracelet, and she didn't want to tell her parents. But she was also upset that she had lost. She felt invincible. She felt like she should not have lost, could not have lost.
Her funk had turned. Her agitation had begun.
A few days later, she called me. A group of people from work were getting together for holiday drinks in a bar in midtown. Could I join them?
After the Miss Universe Pageant ended, Lori had begun working in the personnel department of a big real estate company. I had wanted to meet the people she worked with, so I was glad to come. Besides, I felt I should keep an eye on her. I just didn't know what she was likely to do.
There were over a dozen people crowded into a small area by the bar, and the mood was jolly by the time I got there. But when I saw the look in Lori's eyes, I knew there was going to be trouble. They had that bright, out-of-control look that came just before she got wild. And it wasn't long before she started lashing out. Because of her job, she had access to confidential personnel files. In a loud voice, she began telling the group just what was in those files.
“You're on probation, and you're probably going to get fired,” she announced to one co-worker, while the others listened on, stunned.
“You asked for a raise, but you're not going to get one because your boss thinks you goof off too much,” she told another.
One by one, she went around the room, dishing up dirt on each person present. Everyone was too astounded to stop her, and in fact, no one knew how. As everyone grew angrier and angrier, I tried futilely to brush it off.
“Lori's such a kidder,” I said to one, before grabbing Lori's arm and making for the door.
On the way home, she grew calmer.
“Maybe I shouldn't have said all those things,” she said to me, looking abashed.
“Lori, you can't do stuff like that,” I said. “You are going to get fired.”
And the next day, she was.
A few weeks later, she got a job selling insurance. She seemed fearless, venturing out into neighborhoods where no other salespeople dared go, into immigrant neighborhoods where she couldn't understand her customers, and they couldn't understand her.
One day she came home with an engagement ring. A Chinese man she had met—or maybe he was Filipino—was in love with her and wanted to marry her. Her father was flabbergasted.
“We've never even met this man,” Lori told me he said. “How can you be thinking of marrying him?” The ring vanished, and the subject was dropped.
I began to think of marrying myself. I wasn't in love with the guy I was dating. But I began thinking: Why don't I just marry him? That way I can get out of here without hurting Lori's feelings. It was crazy. We had signed a two-year lease and I began thinking: There's only nineteen months to go, there's only eighteen months to go … It was like a marathon.
My parents were upset. I was in an intense training program, and having a tough enough time getting through that without worrying about Lori. I was starting to resent her.
The next time she dropped into a funk, it was March, and my brother Brad was there. He had just graduated from law school, and was on his first trip to New York for his firm. He had met Lori before when he came to visit us at Tufts, and at first he acted as if she were the old Lori, joking and laughing. But I could see that he thought there was something a bit odd. For one thing, she wouldn't look him in the eye. And when she did, she seemed so angry.
“I hope it's not an inconvenience my staying here tonight,” he said.
Lori twisted her face up into a grimace. “Life is horrible,” she said. “It wouldn't matter if it ended tomorrow. What's a little inconvenience?”
He laughed. I think he thought she was joking. I didn't. She was dead serious.
Lori began to pace. Down the hall to the bedroom. Back through the living room. Out into the hall. Brad began to realize something serious was up.
“Have I come at a bad time?” he said, during one of her swings out of the room.
“Brad,” I said, exasperated. “She's talking about killing herself.”
“Killing herself?” he asked. “What do you mean killing herself?”
I was so frantic I was almost rude myself. “I mean killing herself like in killing herself.”
He turned worried. “Is she violent?”
“I don't know anymore,” I said.
He took me seriously. The next morning, he told me that he had hidden all our big knives and heavy objects. He didn't sleep though. He was out on our big sleeper sofa, and all through the night, Lori had walked back and forth past the bed, pacing from room to room.
I was getting more and more worried, but not that Lori would hurt me. I was worried she was going to hurt herself. Her highs were getting higher, her lows lower. I asked her how she was doing with her psychiatrist.
“I just talk to him,” she said. “And he gives me medication. But it doesn't help.” We never talked about what it was that needed helping. I never knew. I don't think she knew. And it was beginning to seem to me that the psychiatrist didn't know either.
A few days after my brother left, Lori came in from work. She was upset.
“What's wrong?” I asked. “Did something happen at work?”
She looked different. She was agitated, but at the same time she seemed down, defeated. She pushed by me and went into the bedroom. Leaving the door open, she made for the telephone. She began talking in a loud voice. She was clearly distraught, but at the same time, I couldn't help thinking that she wanted me to hear. After a minute or two I realized she was talking to her psychiatrist.
“I have to see you,” she said. “I'm really, really bad.” It was the first time I had ever heard her talk like that. I couldn't hear the other end of the conversation of course, but it was clear he was trying to reassure her. It wasn't working.
“Please, you have to help me.” She was begging this guy, but he didn't seem to be responding. Her voice got higher, and more and more strident. “You don't understand,” she said. “I'm telling you I'm really bad. I'm not going to make it through the night. Please help me. Please.”
I don't know what he said, but he clearly wasn't going to see her. She was in tears when she hung up. She walked out in the living room where I was standing, and she mumbled something I thought was goodbye.
“I have to go take my pills now,” she said dully. She went into the bathroom and closed the door.
What should I do? I stood outside frozen with indecision. “Lori? Lori?” I shouted through the door. I could hear her moving around inside, and water running. Was she going to slash her wrists? What was she going to do? Then the door opened, and she walked out.
I looked into the bathroom. For weeks I had been keeping my eye on the bottles of pills that her psychiatrist had given her, just checking their levels every day. I didn't know what they were, but I was pretty sure they were tranquilizers, and pretty powerful ones. Up until yesterday, the bottles were nearly full. Now as I looked past her, I saw empty bottles on the sink. I stood right in front of her.
“You took all those pills!”
She nodded. I was stupid with fear. “You took all those pills!” I repeated.
I heard the doorbell ring, and without knowing why, I went to answer it. It was a girl from down the hall, and I shooed her away. “I'll talk with you later,” I said. I had never been so scared in my life. Lori was looking groggy. Was she going to die right here in front of me? What should I do? Who should I call? Who could get here the fastest?
My
hands trembling with terror, I picked up the phone and dialed 911.
5
Marvin Schiller Scarsdale, New York, March 1982–June 1982
It was late at night when the phone rang. Nancy and I were just getting ready for bed. It was Lori Winters, our daughter's roommate. She was so upset that at first it was hard to understand what she wanted. It was something about our daughter, and the police.
“Calm down, Lori,” I said, trying to reassure her. “Calm down. Everything is going to be okay. Tell me what the problem is.” There was a lot of commotion in the background, and she could barely get the story out. Our Lori had taken an overdose, she said. The police were there. So were the paramedics. They were taking Lori to the hospital. She had tried to commit suicide.
“I'll be there as fast as I can,” I said.
Nancy was already sobbing, and shaking. I didn't want to upset her unnecessarily. I played down the news.
“Lori's fine,” I said. “She's going to be fine. She's taken too many pills and she's going to the hospital.” Lori was in no real danger, I assured Nancy. She's just made a little mistake with her medication. Everything will be fine in the morning. Nancy, I could see, was eager to believe me.
Driving with Nancy through the dark of the Hutchinson River Parkway, I more than half believed it myself. There was some misunderstanding, I thought. Lori Winters was just a kid herself. She was getting herself riled up over nothing. My daughter kill herself? That was impossible. Nothing ever happened to her that she couldn't handle. She had just had some little upset, and made a mistake, that was all. All this business about police and paramedics—well, Lori Winters must have been frightened and overreacted.
I had known that our Lori had had problems, of course. She had told us about them in college. She had felt some stress at school, it seemed, and she felt the need for counseling. That was nothing unusual in Westchester. Many of our friends’ children had troubles of one kind or another. Seeing a counselor was just a normal part of life in many families. Lori had seen someone at the university and I understood that she found those sessions to be helpful. She had told me that herself.
She was our oldest child and only daughter. We didn't have any standards to compare her with. It seemed like her problems were just what might have been expected from any moody teenager.
After she graduated, I felt she was in good hands with the psychiatrist we had chosen, a man we knew to be a respected member of our large circle of friends. She would sort out her problems with him, get herself together, and go on with her life, I was certain.
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 ol
d 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.
The Quiet Room Page 5
