But a few sentences later, he slipped and called me my mother’s name, “We’ve always loved driving together, haven’t we, Jo?” He caught himself with a start, suddenly glaring. His words stumbled. He shifted gears raggedly as he accelerated up the steep, winding Wildcat Canyon. He turned a face of fury to mine for an instant before he jolted the car around the next bend. “Your mother destroyed my life, and you just won’t see it!”
My heart broke in an instant. I’d been hoping that after years of careful phone calls that maybe now my father was all right, that he wasn’t crazy anymore. But at that moment, as he free-fell over the edge, my heart walled him out, and my body stiffened. I instantly remembered I needed to protect myself. His strident voice lectured, his thick finger pointed as he fired off a barrage of sins we had done against him. “Your mother and you children all conspired to destroy me.”
The Renault lurched as he shifted gears. I braced myself in the slippery leather seat, staring ahead, trying to hold us to the road with my eyes. My body grew rigid. I refused to look at him, but his ragged breathing filled the car. I felt claustrophobic, trapped by his voice, bellowing, “Your brothers aren’t going to amount to anything. They have no integrity.” The tires squealed. He steered too close to a rough rock face with loose stones scattered onto the road. I was frightened but couldn’t say anything, couldn’t protest or defend my brothers. He would get worse, louder, and even more dangerous. I knew it. All I could do was wait him out.
Slamming jolts at stop signs. Heavy piston brakes grabbed. Rapid acceleration, curves taken too tight. “You bankrupted me, you and your mother’s divorce.” His large body jammed into the bucket seat was too big for the car. “Your court case for college tuition drove me into the ground.” With one hand I gripped the dashboard; with the other I seized the handle above the window. How many times had I endured this kind of ride, praying to arrive safely?
“Please,” I whispered to the trees whipping by, “let me survive. Please, I can’t die yet.” I looked out the car window and felt like someone drowning, scanning for a branch along the edge of a river I could grab onto. My mind started racing through the old fights. A tight turn slammed me against the door. I tried to remember the old protests I used to defend myself. By the time the car careened onto Skyline Drive, I was hooked back into his madness.
I remembered my mother’s mantra. “There is no way to reason with craziness. It will make you crazy.” But through all these years, I’d never given up on him. I tried to stay connected to both parents. When I visited my dad, in the years after the divorce, my mother lived in a fury, turning away from me, saying, “You have no sense of ethics. Your brother will have nothing to do with him ever again.” My brother Wood did not notify our father when his daughters were born and never let them meet him. I couldn’t do that. My brother would joke, but looked at me piercingly. “You may be smart,” he’d say, “but you sure are stupid.” My mother would nod, agreeing. My move to California was the exit from my parents’ war zone.
But because I had tried, because I loved my father, here I was, all over again, trapped in the car, trapped by my trying. The engine at high rev, he squealed into a parking spot at Inspiration Point. He fumbled with the key, turning it too far so the engine ground harshly before he could turn it off. He looked at me, his face huge and contorted, hands in fists on the wheel, spit flying from his thin lips. I turned away, staring ahead. I couldn’t bear to look at him. He shouted, “You have no integrity. You have to choose between your mother and me. I won’t stand this impasse another moment. It’s up to you.” I was frozen silent, once again the teenager I’d been when we lived in the glass house.
As I stared across the gleaming white hood, down over the sparkling patchwork gypsy skirt of gardens and buildings stretching to the bay, I wanted to cry. This was my new world, where no one knew I was Woodie’s daughter, where I was safe, thousands of miles from Ohio. Here the bay was stitched with bridges, glinting in the afternoon light, and beyond the Golden Gate stretched the Pacific Ocean. Somehow I thought being here would protect me from their battles. But I was caught all over again, trying to endure, just like my years in high school when I would stare into the grain of the teak dining room table as my father grilled me for hours.
When Woodie finally stopped shouting I used my voice to soothe, to palliate, to draw him back into the moment. Some of these quiet words caught hold. “We need to get some dinner. There is a performance tonight. You need to get a good rest before you start driving on the rest of your trip tomorrow.” He quieted. He shrank. Soon he was a lost old man staring at the cities sprawling beyond him.
MY FATHER’S LIFE was haunted from the beginning. Soon after he was born in the Victorian house, his mother disappeared into a darkened room for three years. How could a mother lie in bed for years and not come out when she heard her children crying or playing on the stairs or running in the backyard? When I heard these stories as a child, I did not wonder, as an adult might consider: was this post-partum depression, migraines, or something more serious? I did not consider this was similar to what my father sometimes did, staying in bed with the curtains drawn all weekend or sometimes even for weeks. My mother would say he was tired and we needed to be quiet. Families can get used to mysteries, used to hearing stories and not asking about them, not wondering out loud. Until something shifts somehow and we begin to investigate our history, like a detective.
In the early 1950s, my father’s first major building, the Cincinnati Public Library, was under construction when my father stopped getting out of bed. His business partner called daily, frantic to talk to my dad. Contractors were demanding answers to questions. My father would turn away when my mother brought him the messages. She finally called Phil Piker, my father’s psychiatrist, who advised her. “Carry on life as if nothing is wrong. Bring him meals. Be cheery and upbeat. When people call, say he can’t speak to them. Carry on as if everything is fine. It will lift, eventually.” And it did. Again and again.
It wasn’t until I was in my thirties, flying over the Southwestern desert for a week of outpatient therapy at a treatment center for adults who had experienced severe abuse as children, that I read a magazine article describing new advances in treatment of the mental illness once called Manic Depression, now referred to as “bipolar disorder.” I was stunned. My father had a mental illness? How had I not realized this?
Years later, I read a legal deposition taken when my father had been sick in his seventies and had sued a doctor for medical negligence. The court reporter recorded a battle, a lawyer gathering medical history while trying to entrap my father into misleading generalizations. Like a dying bull in the ring, heaving with countless goads in his back, my father lashed back. They skirmished repeatedly while mapping out my father’s many hospitalizations over 150 pages of onionskin testimony.
Unexpectedly, my father acknowledged his mental illness—or what he preferred to call his “emotional difficulties”—with candor. He described depressions “that literally rob you of your ability to function at all.” He didn’t remember when they started. He asked on the record, “Doesn’t every teenager get depressed?” However, it was after his first marriage ended and his wife took their young daughter, disappearing for thirty years, that a depression broke him. A young doctor prescribed electroshock convulsive treatments in the late 1940s in Cincinnati. This was when my parents were dating. The treatments scrambled my father’s memory, erasing months of memory at a time.
Soon afterward, my father found his way to Phil Piker, trained at a psychoanalytic school in Chicago, who stopped the shock treatments. My father told him he wanted answers, he wanted a cure. He stated in the deposition, “I’ll never forget what Phil Piker said to my dying day... ‘I will never let you down’... He said, ‘I may not be able to cure you but I will teach you how to live with your problem.’” Phil told my father that emotional problems were causing his extreme reactions because he “took everything with such intensity.... These things a
re not all bad... If you didn’t have this intense emotional approach to your work, you wouldn’t be the hell of an architect that you are.”
My father described how he would talk to Phil when he had problems that “were really disturbing me... He was marvelous, the way he helped me unravel them.... He never gave me any medicine, we just talked.” My dad was with Phil the day Phil died, who even then repeated his belief in my father’s gifts. I can only wonder, having no idea if medication might have helped my father, whether Phil Piker’s decision not to constrain my father’s brilliance is what cost my father his family.
In the years after we were all cast out of the glass house, we tried to understand what happened when we lived there. In the first years, we would say he was crazy. It was craziness. Nothing else to say. But when my mother worked as a child protective worker, she attended a seminar on the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. She was excited when she called me. “This is what he is.” She read me a list of characteristics. Charismatic, manipulative, compulsive liar, can change their personality on a dime, blames others.
From the distance of twenty years, my brothers, mother, and I began to debate the details, putting together a diagnosis like an addition problem. Bipolar plus rage equals Borderline. The hardest to treat. My youngest brother, Hubbard, emailed me lists from the Internet listing symptoms, convinced our dad was a sociopath. We were like survivors of a war, cataloguing what we had survived. My brother Wood said our father had no empathy, giving examples, like the time he walked by Hubbard with his broken arm and didn’t even look at him. My brothers agreed. Our father had only used people. He was incapable of love.
But I couldn’t imagine he had never loved us. What about the good times when I was a girl? It couldn’t have all been poisoned by madness. I spent years fitting puzzle pieces together from my father’s history to try to understand him, as well as to heal myself. As a child with a mother locked away in the dark, he grew up wanting to control women. As an unmothered and untouched child, he became a man desperate for a woman’s touch. He became a man who was enraged by illness, or ignored it as if it didn’t exist. He became a man who, when his sick daughter was dying, or when his youngest son lay on a kitchen table with a broken arm, walked by, didn’t look, or say a word. He left for the office, escaping into the world of architecture.
He was bipolar, a sex addict who fondled a few teenagers, was emotionally intrusive with a few little girls he had fixated on, a mentally/emotionally/spiritually abusive parent; and he was also a charismatic, brilliant architect, receiving the AIA lifetime achievement award for his impact on modern architecture, creating modern buildings amidst huge controversy that impacted a city. He was my father who loved, abused and trained me through intellectual seduction, grooming my mind to be his intellectual companion.
At the core of his self was a damaged individual, and yet I believe he also had a capacity to love. There was a genuine, loving, not-seductive part of him, and a seductive, grooming, not-loving part of him, and he could move between these two places in a moment. He had a natural genius and a natural enthusiasm that people responded to. But his radical vision was not tolerated, and in the battles to manifest his work, he went crazy. A German tyrant father raised him, and he became a tyrant too. The deeper story doesn’t excuse the behavior, but I have compassion for the suffering he lived with and compassion for those he harmed.
I REMEMBER THE best times. My father came to my graduation from acupuncture school. I was thirty-one, dressed in a San Francisco–designer white linen dress with a red leather belt and shoes. I loved my white, wide-brimmed hat with the modern touch of a black veil. He was seventy-one, in a summerweight Brooks Brothers seersucker suit and a favorite red and black bow tie. He was proud of me, toasting with the other families, talking avidly with my teachers at this second graduating class of twenty students from one of the earliest schools of acupuncture in the US. It was 1984 and we were standing at the beginning of what would become a tidal wave of alternative health care.
Afterwards, I would be going back to California to begin my practice; he was on his way to visit friends and go sailing. We had a few days together and drove north. In the Philadelphia art museum, we fell by accident into an exhibit neither of us knew anything about. The paintings were an eruption of brilliant reds, yellows, blues, and metallic luminosity, cubed, built into structures, ribbed lines of hot colors printed on black. Hundertwasser. “In German that means one hundred waters,” my father said. We gazed into a golden wheat field becoming a woman’s face, with lines of brilliant orange and red houses extending out of her eyes and mouth. “Irinaland over the Balkans.” We paused between paintings, exuberant, in the pure pleasure of discovery. “Woodie, look at this next one! It’s amazing!” We faced golden onion-shaped domes, doorways with faces, tears in brilliant windows of color. We read the titles out loud like poems. “It Hurts to Wait with Love if Love is Somewhere Else.” In that long-ago room we were beginners, no one knowing more or less, no teacher or student, just enthusiasts, father and daughter, alive and breathing in color.
We continued to New York, driving up through the fresh warmth of spring, leaves unfurling, a baby-green lace canopy over us as we drove along Central Park to the Guggenheim. He always said he hated Frank Lloyd Wright, but we both loved the Guggenheim. I’d spent a day there in college walking the ramp, studying the plans, writing a paper for a class on Modern Architecture. We entered the building, took the elevator and emerged at the top in the filtered gallery of light at the top of the spiral. This building was an old friend we’d each made on our own. We walked arm and arm following the pathway, standing at the edge to look down the spiral, pointing out what details we’d discovered. Waiting for us was a show of Kandinsky’s The Blue Rider period. We sounded out the words in German, Der Blaue Reiter. We both loved and knew these paintings, but had never seen them in person, only in books. We savored each one, finally agreeing our favorite was the orange-robed horsemen on white leaping horses, crossing indigo mountains, with trees, yellow and deep pink reds, erupting into pure abstraction. We moved in close to study the thick brush strokes of yellow mounding out of the mountains, melting into green and pink-tinged white.
We left slowly, walked arm and arm back to his car. He would continue north; I was meeting friends before taking a plane west. As we hugged goodbye, he said, “Lilibet, I’ve loved this trip together.”
“Woodie, it’s been the best.”
After he got into his car, ready to drive off, he rolled down the window and said, “Love you.”
And I said back as I always had, ‘Love you, too.”
LAST WORDS
1994
We are a landscape of all we have seen.
—ISAMU NOGUCHI
MY WORK TO BREAK MY BONDAGE TO HIM, TO stand up for myself, and to say no to him continued until the last month of his life when he was dying in 1994.
After years of wandering I had found my way. I was in my sixth year of a busy private practice as an acupuncturist in a small coastal town in Maine. My husband and I designed the passive solar house he built on seventy-five acres, where we lived with our two young children.
My mother had also moved to Maine, and lived two hours south, where she and her second husband were renovating an old Maine Cape. My brothers, Hubbard and Wood and their families, would eventually move to New England, and we all lived two hours away from Jo, the dynamic center of our family. We feasted at her cozy home for Thanksgivings and ate on the back porch in summer while our children played in the yard. Often one of us would turn to another and say quietly, “It’s amazing, no one is yelling at us.” We’d nod with relief.
Even though I talked weekly with my dad as his health steadily declined, I never knew what a call from him would bring. To distract him from his furious complaints about the people helping him, I’d tell him things he’d like.
“Guess what, Woodie, I’m making applesauce with your favorite apples, Jonathans.”
His
voice belted out his gasping enthusiasm. “The secret is cooking down the peels separately. That’s how you get that incredible red color. You remember, don’t you?” He sighed. “We used to freeze over a hundred quarts of applesauce. That wasn’t too terrible, was it?”
“No, of course not,” I reassured him. I didn’t say I would never make my children work until midnight canning and freezing food.
He said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Missy. This was really great talking tonight.”
“It was. Good night, Daddy. Love you.”
One winter day I came into my house and heard my father’s voice on the answering machine. “Hi Sugar. I was hoping I could talk to you.” I stood, poised with water bottles to take to my husband and children cross-country skiing in the meadow.
His voice continued. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.” His usually commanding voice was quieter, gentle.
I put down the water and picked up the phone. “Hi, Woodie. I’m glad to hear you.”
I pulled the phone cord so I could see the kids at the crest of the hill. Four-year-old daughter Miriam was trying to ski in tracks in the snow. My husband Peter showed eight-year-old Gabriel how to use his poles as he skied downhill.
My father’s voice was subdued. “I want to know what I did to you. I don’t remember.”
I was stunned, silent.
He continued, “Peter once yelled at me, saying that I’d ruined your marriage because of what I did. I’m ready to talk about that.” He was waiting, leaving a space for me to speak.
Where to begin? I’d spent years in therapy, filled journals with nightmares and memories. There were years when I couldn’t let my husband touch me because his hands turned into my father’s in the dark. But my life now was filled with love. I didn’t need to blame him or attack him.
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