by Bruce Feiler
The afternoon had slipped into evening by now. Our families were waiting back at the house. We sat up in our chairs.
“So it’s ten years from now,” I said. “We’ve gathered at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, and our daughters are about to leave on their first trip abroad. You’ve earned the gravitas that your father always had, and—I’ll say it—I’m not there.” For a second, the emotion of why we had gathered returned to my voice. “What will you say to my girls?”
He took a deep breath. “I think I would say, ‘Girls, you come from a background that’s open to the world. You come from a set of values that appreciates learning, and you will have many opportunities to take in human civilization at its highest levels of achievement. But I would urge you to approach this experience as a small child might approach a mud puddle. You can lean over and look at yourself in the reflection, maybe stick a finger in it, and cause a little ripple. Or you can dive in, thrash around, and find out what it feels like, what it tastes like….’”
Once again Jeff had the same twinkle in his eye I first saw that night behind the castle in Holland. He had that look that said, “Hey, let’s go cow tipping,” even though we never did actually tip the cow. Even though no one tips the cow. Even though cows don’t sleep standing up.
“‘I urge you to jump in, girls,’” he said. “‘And I look forward to seeing you, back here, at the end of this experience, covered in mud.’”
.6.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY TWO-THIRDS
MY BROTHER KNEW THE GUN was there. My father sensed that his father was feeling down. My mother believed he needed an outlet other than work.
Just before lunchtime, on Wednesday, March 30, 1983, Edwin J. Feiler stood at his dresser on Early Street, immediately behind our home on Lee Boulevard, and scribbled a note to his family. Then he strolled into the bathroom with the gold and white tile. For as long as anyone could remember, my grandfather and grandmother had slept in separate bedrooms. It was a Southern thing, perhaps, a nod to gentility from the traveling salesman’s son who rose to become a small-town lawyer. It was a mark of formality for a man who earned an honorary title from the governor and told my stupefied, Baltimore-born mother, “Just call me ‘Colonel.’”
Or maybe it was the manifestation of a pain he could never express.
“I spent two hours with him that morning,” recalled Jazie Ingram, his bookkeeper. “His Parkinson’s was getting worse; he was showing signs of dementia. ‘I’ll never come back to the office,’ he told me. I said, ‘Sure, you will!’ But now I realize he was sending me a message.”
Standing in the bathroom, he surely couldn’t avoid looking in the mirror. He would have seen a once-jolly face with spectacles, a teardrop nose, and a gap between his two front teeth. Perhaps he paused. Twelve days later he would turn seventy-eight. A month later I would graduate from high school. The following year he would celebrate fifty years of marriage.
He put the pistol to his temple.
My grandmother was a few steps away in the den. She heard the gunshot. She found her husband folded on the floor. He was still alive. She reached my dad on the telephone. “Your father shot himself. There’s a lot of blood.” My dad hurried to the hospital. “He’ll never recover,” the doctor told him. My father made the decision to grant his father’s wish. It was he who ended his dad’s life.
“He thought he was doing it to relieve the burden on all of us,” my father said. “Instead he gave us a burden for the rest of our lives.”
THE TAPE WAS SCRATCHY after all these years, but the voice was slow, clear, and strong. It reminded me of white corn in summer, a bit of old country charm.
This is to be the story of the life of Edwin Jacob Feiler, born in Meridian, Mississippi, on April 11, 1905. I am going to call it Twentieth-Century Two-thirds. The reason for this is that I have lived and been active for approximately the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. That is from 1905 until the present date, 1970.
From 1970 to 1982, my grandfather recorded twenty-eight cassette tapes that detailed his childhood, his education, and his sometimes-colorful professional rise. He was a notoriously slow driver in the brown Ford Granada he owned during most of those years, and he dictated as he drove. After the suicide, my father had the tapes transcribed. The resulting document, four-hundred-plus pages, sat in the family vault, unread, for more than two decades.
That is, until I got sick.
Faced with my own mortality, I suddenly ached to know why Papa had ended his life. I was curious if the tapes might answer some long-held questions I harbored about his life. Mostly I wondered if his memoirs contained clues about our family that might benefit my girls. In a year in which I was trying to capture my own voice for my daughters, I first had to revisit the voices that had fed into mine.
EDWIN JACOB FEILER WAS raised in a modest frame house in Meridian, Mississippi, a railroad town near the Alabama border. The house had no central heat and no hot water heater. “By the time I came along they had electric lights,” he noted. The highlight of the week was when ice arrived by freight train because it meant he could order a cold Coca-Cola at the drugstore.
The Feilers were descended from a wave of German Jews who had emigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteeth century, bypassed New York, and headed deep into the South. Many of these families went into the grocery and dry goods business, and Papa’s father, Melvin, was a traveling salesman for one such firm. He never made more than $250 a month, his son recalled, and “never had any money that he considered a gain or a surplus.”
The principal lesson my grandfather took from his father’s plight was the same one he passed on to us as we drove with him on Saturday morning to work in the family office. The proper life is the working life. The highest value is labor. The one treasure no one can ever take away from you is the self-confidence from knowing you have done a good and earnest job.
And boy did he do a good job—in dozens of unglamorous circumstances. From the time he could throw a baseball, my grandfather was working. He collected payments for a dry cleaner, he sold penny magazines, he delivered scenery to the opera house (and hung around to ogle the actresses). He delivered homemade medicines from Stanley’s Drug Company, namely, stomach tonic, which was 98 percent alcohol, and hair tonic, which was 99. “I didn’t realize at the time that Prohibition was what brought about the sale of all these tonics.”
He was consumed with self-improvement. He went to the library and read the entire World Book Encyclopedia. He reveled in every good grade and teacher’s praise. On the one-year anniversary of the armistice of World War I, a group of students decided to take an unannounced day off. “That was their fatal mistake,” my grandfather recalls. “I had no more idea of walking away from that school than flying.” The renegade students were suspended for two weeks, and “practically everyone failed their courses.”
My grandfather attended the University of Georgia, then law school, where he earned a spot in Phi Kappa Phi for being in the top 10 percent. He briefly joined the army, then moved to Savannah. Renting a room in the YMCA, he was disheartened to find little demand—or respect—for lawyers. So he did what he did best: He adapted. He wrote wills; he sprung people from jail; he defended gangsters and pornographers. And he got breaks. A steamship went down in the Atlantic, and he handled the claims. He got a coveted job defending the railroads against a law that held them responsible for any cow found dead within twenty feet of a railroad. Someone, it seems, was cow tipping, and it was the Southern and Coastline railways.
By the time my father joined him in 1959, and they pioneered the business of low-income loans, little Eddie Feiler had finally achieved some of the status he long craved. “I have dwelt on the things that were successful,” he says near the end of the tapes, “and purposefully left off the things that weren’t. Nobody wants to be bored with my troubles. They get bored enough with my successes!”
BUT AS I READ, I sensed a darker, sometimes sadder story infused with his successes.
For starters, he was remarkably candid about the seamy side of small-town life. He describes bags of cash being passed around the police department and the judges’ chambers. He includes a recipe for brewing moonshine. And when the army plans a base near Savannah, he and a friend drive all day to Columbus, to investigate how soldiers spend their pay. My grandfather brings along my dad, then five, but leaves him in the hotel—alone!—when they go out to inspect the layout of local brothels. “When I got home and told my wife,” he reports, “I was the recipient of considerable scorn.”
Even more haunting, an air of premature, spectacular death shadows his life. His earliest memory is the sinking of Titanic. The first time he sees a plane, at the Mississippi State Fair, it crashes and kills the pilot. Later, when a firm in Pittsburgh suggests he and a colleague fly up for a meeting, my grandfather declines, declaring the plane unsafe. His friend chose to fly, and the airplane crashed, claiming his life.
More troubling, my grandfather could recount exacting details of bank failures and equity trades. His memoirs are so dry in places that when he mentions coming to Tybee Island to visit our family, I felt a well of relief. But in twenty-eight tapes, in twelve years of recording his life, he never describes his mother—or what he felt about her. He doesn’t talk about his sister. He never mentions his wife by name—or their courtship or wedding. My father is referred to fewer than half a dozen times; his younger brother even less. My mother does not appear at all, my brother and I only once, my sister never. Women come up only when he describes how difficult it was to hire good secretaries.
A son of the dirt-poor South, my grandfather surely loved his family. But his complete disinterest in personal feelings was undeniable—and maybe the clue I had been seeking all these years. He simply didn’t define himself by relationships. He was that boy looking for work; that young, hungry lawyer; the man on the rise. I had always believed that he could have relieved his pain if he had someone to talk to in those final years. But his memoir told me he had a deeper problem: He had no one to listen to him at all. He felt alone in the world.
And maybe that’s why, when he did come down with Parkinson’s, when he could no longer be productive, when he lost his sense of self, he ignored the feelings of his wife sitting in the next room, of his son building their business, of his grandson about to reach a milestone.
His work had come to an end. He had no other reason to live.
AFTER THE AMBULANCE LEFT for the hospital, Jazie Ingram went to 333 Early Street to clean up the blood my grandfather had discharged all over the bathroom tile.
“I loved him,” she explained. “He was like a second father to me.” She and I were sitting in his former office, which Jazie has used for the last quarter century. No taller than an ice-cream sundae, Jazie speaks with the cane-syrup sweetness (and occasional rattlesnake bite) of her rural Baptist upbringing. “I have something you might want to see,” she said.
She walked into the vault and returned moments later with a piece of paper. It was yellowed with time and stained with pain. The words were large, as if written by a child.
I cannot live a sick man. I am taking my own life. Edwin J. Feiler
His life ended where it had always been lived: With one last piece of work. His final act was conscientious, professional, and cool. It was devoid of emotion.
“There’s one thing I want you to hear,” Jazie said.
“Even though it was a month before you graduated from high school, I know your grandfather was proud of you. He loved you. You must know that.”
I sat there frozen, unable to speak. Tears poured down my cheeks. I hadn’t gone seeking confirmation, but now I realized I must have been waiting for it all along.
And sitting in my grandfather’s office, I began to see how my own experience with sickness had changed how I viewed my grandfather’s death, and with it the role of being male in my family. Like many men of his time—particularly men of the South—Papa approached his illness as a saddle to bear, both wordlessly and alone. He didn’t even share his anxieties with his family. I, by contrast, was not only writing regular letters to family and friends, but I was also sending them through e-mail, which meant they were being bounced around to people I didn’t even know.
Papa never talked about his feelings. I talked of nothing else.
And as someone trying to figure out how to “live a sick man,” I suddenly yearned to be transported back to that bedroom where he slept without his wife, to that dresser where he scribbled that note, to that mirror where he stared at himself for the final time, to be able to call out across the generations what the men who came after him have been able to learn.
“We’re listening, Papa. We hear you.
“You are not alone.”
.7.
CHRONICLES OF THE LOST YEAR
volume II
August 15
Dear Friends and Family,
Some rain passed through Brooklyn in the last week, leaving us with a string of clear, beautiful afternoons. The Brooklyn Bridge, which just turned 125 years old, is looking fresh-faced and handsome overhead, its famed promenade glittering like the pot of gold at the end of a long journey to come.
On July 31, I was admitted to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in Manhattan for the first of a dozen cycles of chemotherapy. Each cycle lasts one to three weeks. Because initial exposure to chemotherapy can trigger heart failure, I was kept at the hospital as a precaution. After what seemed like a month of anticipation, followed by a banquet of pills, a nurse hooked my arm up to an IV of Cisplatin and unwrapped three syringes of Adriamycin. The liquid in the syringes was the consistency of melted lollipops and the color of a Shirley Temple. I whispered to the drugs, “Be good to me,” then closed my eyes. Tears pushed against the inside of my eyelids. I didn’t want Linda to see me cry. What these drugs do to my body over the next three-quarters of a year will go a long way toward shaping the rest of my life: How long it lasts; how much quality I take out of it; whether I have one at all. The nurse noticed I was having a reaction.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Physically, yes. Emotionally, it’s just very intense.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “These drugs are going to make you better.”
The biopsy on my left femur had confirmed that I have a high-grade, osteoblastic, osteogenic sarcoma. As my surgeon, Dr. Healey, put it, “You have a bad disease.” Pediatric sarcomas appearing in adults are extremely rare, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of recurrence in the lungs in the first five years. The morning I heard those figures was one of the worst of my life.
At the same time, these tumors are responsive to chemotherapy and in many cases can be cured outright. My doctors agree that the seven-inch tumor in my left femur will not kill me; it’s eventually coming out; but the cancer cells that have likely spread to my blood and are looking for trouble are the graver threat. For that reason, we are leaving the tumor in place for now.
My oncologist is Dr. Robert Maki of Sloan-Kettering. Bean-pole tall with aw-shucks reserve, he has the unfortunate quality of reminding some people of me (at least in appearance, and some pounds ago at that). If Dr. Healey is the rousing warrior, straight out of The Iliad, Dr. Maki is the upstanding do-gooder—think Gregory Peck as a young Abe Lincoln. He has called for four to six months of aggressive chemo, followed by surgery in which the bulk of my femur will be removed and replaced, followed by three more months of chemo, then extensive physical therapy. The Lost Year.
A lot of the specifics of treatment will be determined by how a forty-three-year-old man bounces back from a course of treatment used much more often in teenagers. As many of you have sadly learned, the idea behind chemotherapy is to flood the bloodstream with poison, which the more aggressive, rapidly dividing cells in your body hungrily attack. This includes not only malignant cancers, but also hair and the lining of the gastrointestinal tract. My particular chemo drugs are also neurotoxic, meaning they assault the central nervous sy
stem. The body’s reaction is to rally around the vital organs to protect them, thus leaving more peripheral parts to suffer. I am therefore vulnerable to permanent hearing loss, as well as numbness in my fingers and toes. The resulting list of dos and don’ts is quite precise, including no sushi, manicures, or tattoos. Really, how do metrosexual Japanese bikers get through this?!
On the side-effect front, my first week after taking the drugs was pretty brutal, with an ever-changing menu of nausea, heartburn, dry mouth, fatigue, and a smog in my head as thick as that over Mexico City. I probably sat up in bed less than one hour a day; ate only half a bowl of chicken soup and a cup of Jell-O; and grunted through the few phone conversations I was forced to have. With the fog in my brain, I would have had a difficult time picking out my daughters in a ballet lineup. I feared I would not leave my bed until Valentine’s Day.
After bottoming out around Day 7, my energy and appetite returned astonishingly strong. In my second week, I’ve coordinated over a dozen relatives moving up and down the East Coast to help us out; supervised home renovations; and eaten a Michael Phelps–size diet of barbecue, tacos, and Graeter’s cherry ice cream from Cincinnati. I have a third week to regain my strength before being walloped again.
