by Tom Braden
I recall another telephone call, also the culmination of an adventure, but one in which the metamorphosis went the other way. The adventure itself had involved metamorphosis too.
It was Joan who agreed with President Kennedy one night at a White House dinner party that it would be fun to go to India with Jackie, but it was Mrs. Clark who arranged with Stewart Alsop to get the Saturday Evening Post to pay for the trip. It was Mrs. Clark who told Alsop that, of course, she would write an article for the Post about the trip just the moment she got back.
But it was Joan on the telephone from the American Embassy in London at seven one morning as I was getting out of bed in California. The voice was desperate. “The trip is over. We’re leaving for Washington in about six hours. And I haven’t anything to write. I can’t just rewrite the pieces I’ve been sending home for the newspaper. It would be a list of palaces visited.”
“Talk to Jackie,” I advised.
“I haven’t,” she confessed, “seen Jackie since the first day, except at a distance.”
I saw the problem. I had read the newspaper. Jackie visiting a palace with Nehru; Jackie visiting a monument with Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi; Jackie and her sister, Lee Radziwill, being entertained at a garden party; Jackie and Lee riding an elephant—all glimpsed and reported at respectful and secure distance by a dusty, sweating horde of “press.”
A serious foreign affairs reporter who had been along on the trip told me later that from the standpoint of serious reporting, it was a disaster. By accident this serious foreign affairs reporter had once come within earshot of Mrs. Kennedy and Prime Minister Nehru. The secret service noted his presence and hustled him back to the press fold, where his friends gathered around demanding to know about his experience close up and what words he had heard.
“Nehru said the monument was fourteenth century,” he confided. “And what,” his comrades asked, “did Jackie say?” “I leaned forward,” he related, “cupped my hands to the side of my mouth and whispered to the crowd: ‘Jackie said, “Oh.”’”
I felt sorry for Joan. She had come down from the giddy heights of a White House dinner party and a talk with John F. Kennedy to the back of a press plane; from the status of press notice as “a friend of Mrs. Kennedy who is accompanying her” to being a reporter with dusty shoes and a dirty dress; from the excitement of having the Saturday Evening Post pay for a trip to India, to the flattening realization that she had nothing to say about the trip that hadn’t been wire copy three weeks ago.
I thought of those pictures she had sent home by airmail; rolls of film from a camera she had borrowed from our newspaper. Small newspapers don’t have cameras with telescopic lenses. But Joan had taken pictures nevertheless at every stop that Mrs. Kennedy made, and the professionals in the press, so she had written me, had felt sorry for her with her unprofessional camera, and had permitted her to get right up in front.
We had developed the pictures at the office. If we had possessed a powerful glass, and had held it to the print, we might have been able to satisfy ourselves that those tiny figures way off in the distance, through the iron bars which usually dominated the foreground, were the Prime Minister of India and the wife of the President of the United States. But as photographs for the newspaper, they were useless.
Joan had worked so hard to get those pictures. And she had been so excited to “get to go.” Suddenly, I felt sad and wounded. “I don’t know,” I said. “Honestly, Joan, I don’t know what to tell you to do.”
It may be that the pathetic quality of my response and my admission of impotence regenerated that spark in my wife which Tommy defines as Mrs. Clark.
In any event, her voice immediately took on a firmer tone. “There’s one thing I could do,” she said. “I could write a note to Jackie and explain the problem and then get David to deliver it.”
“David?” I asked, “David who?”
“David Bruce,” she said.
Now, David Bruce was our ambassador to England. I knew him more or less in the fashion that a plain citizen may know his senator or a parts mechanic at the neighborhood service station may know the president of General Motors. During the war Mr. Bruce had been Colonel Bruce, second in command of the OSS, and so I could say that I had served under him, though he was not conscious of the fact. After the war, he had been a chief in the Marshall Plan and an ambassador to France, to England and to Germany, and I had worked with him—far down the line.
So I knew him—in fact, I had stayed one night at his residence in Paris and breakfasted with him in the morning. I admired him. I liked him. But I would no more have thought of asking him to deliver a note for me than I would have thought, back in the days of the war, of walking up to him, slapping him on the back and addressing him by his first name.
“If David delivered a note, Jackie would be sure to get it and sure to read it.” Was that what Joan had said?
I demurred. “You can’t ask him to do that,” I replied.
But Mrs. Clark was now in full control. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “He won’t mind at all. I’m sure he won’t mind. That’s exactly what I’ll do.”
And that was exactly what she did do. Perhaps Joan would have been able to deliver a note on her own. Perhaps Jackie would have seen a message so delivered. But it is certain that Ambassador Bruce was able to deliver the note and certain that Jackie saw it.
Joan and Jackie rode home on the plane together, seat by seat, and chatted about the trip, and Joan wrote everything down after they chatted. Back in Washington, the President himself went over the manuscript, inserting in his small, fine hand a suggestion with respect to Mrs. Kennedy’s maid, Pruvie.
Alsop was amused when he saw the President’s marginal note, “Say something nice about Pruvie,” it read. “The dear old Post,” Alsop remarked, “a chosen instrument for straightening out relations with the White House staff. Well, there are worse missions for men and magazines.”
As I say, Mrs. Clark’s own self-confidence occasionally cracks and when this occurs, Mrs. Clark simply ceases to be, and there is Joan again—tiny, vulnerable, and anxious to be cared for.
The times when Joan is going to be Joan and when she is going to be Mrs. Clark are fairly predictable. Any accident or external challenge to the family or any member thereof almost always brings Mrs. Clark to the fore. When the challenge has been met successfully, Mrs. Clark becomes Joan again.
The reason I needed Mrs. Clark during the summer that Joan went to Africa was the odd behavior of Mary. Joan had no sooner embarked upon her long journey than it was called to my attention that my oldest daughter was behaving, well, strangely.
“Where is Mary?” I asked as we sat down to dinner on the first night after Joan’s departure.
“She’s upstairs,” Nicholas answered, “staring at the wall.”
I raised an eyebrow toward Joannie, who replied, “That’s literally true, Dad. Haven’t you noticed? Mary is out of it.”
We had a discussion about this at the table, quietly and somewhat obliquely, and Joannie explained what she meant by “out of it.”
“I mean if you say to Mary—it doesn’t matter what you say to Mary—if you say, ‘That happened during the Arab-Israeli war,’ or you could say, ‘I’m looking for the broom,’ Mary will say nothing for a long time and then she will say, ‘What do you mean, Arab-Israeli war? What was the Arab-Israeli war?’ Or she will say, ‘Broom? What do you mean, broom?’”
I confessed I had not noticed this behavior and I tended to disbelief. But the next day, driving downtown in the car with Mary on some joint errand, I was pulled up at a series of corners by red lights. “A lot of red lights,” I remarked, vacuously, and Mary said nothing. And then, about two minutes later, she said, “Why, Dad? You think I am a red light?” Her voice was dull and expressionless. “Mary,” I replied, “you’d better see a doctor.” “Dad, I am seeing a doctor.”
Three or four doctors, it turned out. Mary was apparently making the rounds of th
e city’s psychiatrists, trying to decide which one she wanted, a fact I discovered that very afternoon, when one of them called to inquire why my daughter hadn’t shown up for an appointment.
Mary was making a cry for help, I realized, and I was worried, and even a little frightened. I don’t know anything about psychiatry or psychiatrists. But obviously, something was wrong. Mary explained that she was off to see another psychiatrist that afternoon. I decided to go along.
He seemed, this psychiatrist, much like any doctor of medicine, wearing the familiar white jacket of doctors, and very sure of himself. After he had talked privately to Mary for about ten minutes, he summoned me from the waiting room and came at once to the point.
“Your daughter,” he said, “must enter a hospital at once. She is exhausted and on the verge of what you, as a layman, would call a ‘nervous breakdown.’
“It may take a long time to find out the why of all this, Mr. Braden, but in the hospital we can begin to find out. I shall book a room this afternoon, and you should go now and pick up her things from home.”
I gazed up at the diplomas on the wall. “Well,” I said, “if you say so.”
But Mary would not say so. Summoned from the waiting room for conference with both of us, she stood first before the doctor’s desk, and then made a move toward the door. She had a hunted look on her face, and I thought for a moment she might flee. To the doctor she said, “I do not want to go to a hospital.” Then turning to me, “Dad, why are you doing this to me? You know I don’t want to go to a hospital. Dad, I will not go to a hospital.”
“I’m sure your father agrees with me,” I heard the doctor saying.
“Mary,” I responded, trying to be enthusiastic, “I could bring over that first volume of H. G. Wells you’ve been reading, and you could finish it in a couple of days. It might be fun—and restful—to get away from all your brothers and sisters.”
“No, Dad. I will not go to a hospital.”
The doctor motioned me to his inner office while Mary waited. “Look,” he explained, after he had shut the door. “This might be very serious. Quite clearly, your daughter is not herself. You must get her to a hospital. I cannot otherwise be responsible.”
I didn’t know what he meant by being “otherwise responsible” but the words frightened me. For the first time I noticed his small, neatly trimmed mustache. It made him look more positive. I wished that I could talk to Mrs. Clark, who was by now, I reflected, in Upper Volta.
“I don’t know,” I said, “how I can get her to go to a hospital if she doesn’t want to go to a hospital?”
“Have you ever had a family conference, Mr. Braden?” he asked me. “If all her brothers and sisters tell her she would be wise to go to the hospital, wouldn’t that help you? I’ve always found the family conference supportive.”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking about it. “I can try.”
“Do. I think you’ll find it supportive too.”
Mary and I drove home in silence. Mary went immediately upstairs, and I went into my office, put my feet up on the table next to the typewriter and stared at the wall. Suddenly, the door to my office room burst open.
It was Elizabeth, her face pushed close to mine, her long red hair bobbing with fury, her blue eyes narrowed, “Dad, you’re going to send Mary to a hospital? I’ll tell you, Dad, you’re not going to send Mary to a hospital. She’ll run away before she lets you send her to a hospital, and I’ll run away with her.”
“Elizabeth,” I said, removing my feet from the typewriter table, and standing against the assault, “you don’t know anything about this. You don’t know what the doctor said. You don’t know what the dangers are. You haven’t talked to me.”
“I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t need to talk to you. I’ve talked to Mary.” She burst out of the room, and out the front door, and I saw her heading down the street blindly, raging with the injustice of her father’s cause.
Thus ended the notion of a family conference. I wondered what the doctor’s family was like, and how he envisioned a family conference. Would there be a Bible? Would everybody remain silent until Father spoke? Would the children listen, wide-eyed, and nod sagely, as though he had expressed their very thought? Would they then suggest small, yet not insignificant ways in which they could aid Father’s objective? And where was Mother? Sitting there with the knitting basket? Or in Upper Volta?
Again I thought of Mrs. Clark. Joan would not want Mary to go to a hospital. But Mrs. Clark might. On the other hand, Mrs. Clark might say, “Mary will come with me and we shall go off and lie on a beach somewhere and talk and then there will be no necessity for a hospital.” Mrs. Clark might say, “She will recover because I shall see that she does.”
But what was I to do without Mrs. Clark? I could not go off to the beach with Mary. I had a column to write, a television broadcast to perform. The doctor’s warning was dread. How much did psychiatrists know?
I had no standard or experience by which to make a judgment. There were those diplomas on the wall. An M.D. at the University of Buffalo, psychiatry at Columbia. He must know more than I know. Perhaps, with Elizabeth out of the way, a family conference was possible still.
It was a Sunday afternoon. Nancy had, after all, gone off to Alaska with the love affair. David, Susan, Tommy and Nicky had gone fishing. I waited until they arrived and told David and Susan I wished to see them. Tommy and Nicky were at once suspicious. They hung near the door.
We sat down quietly in the office and I began the tale of the day’s discovery. “Mary,” I said, midway into the story, “has apparently been seeing a number of psychiatrists, seeing them once, making appointments for a second visit and then not going back.” I was about to explain that this knowledge had persuaded me to accompany her to the doctor that afternoon. But David broke in.
“That’s good,” he said. “You have to go to a lot of psychiatrists to find one who won’t try to throw you straight into a hospital.”
It occurred to me that David’s basic assumption was that if anybody needed a psychiatrist, it was not Mary but her father; not he but his mother. All straights worry David. A man who wears a coat and tie and has his hair cut short is obviously in need of help.
“David,” I said, “this is a very serious matter. We have gone to a doctor. The doctor advises strongly that Mary enter a hospital at once. I believe in taking the advice of doctors. Now, will you help me?”
“Didn’t I tell you, Dad?” said David. “Isn’t that exactly what I said? Mary should go to a hospital if she wants to go to a hospital. I’ll tell her that. But I won’t tell her to go just because some psychiatrist said she should.”
I called the doctor and told him to cancel the hospital room.
But what would happen to Mary, this intense and beautiful girl with the bright smile and the Phi Beta Kappa grades who wanted so much to do well at everything and always had?
Did I push her too hard? I remember telling her once that she ought to have more fun. Imagine, going to a college and not even knowing whether it had a football team. I did tell her that she studied too hard. But did I ever do anything to see that she did have fun? That bottle of wine she brought me from California—I put it away and said we’d go on a picnic one day and drink it, just the two of us. That was three years ago, and the wine—I knew where it lay in the cellar.
Not enough. That’s what I did for Mary. Not enough. And what should I do now? I wished Mrs. Clark would come home.
Self-pity turns easily to anger, as I’ve often found when Joan is away. But this time, it seemed to me, I had just cause. “What the hell,” I asked myself as the weeks went by, “does she think she is doing blithely flitting around Upper Volta, doubtless smiling at natives, leaving me here with a whole lot of children, one of whom is ill with an illness I don’t understand?”
Blithe. It is a word I find helpful when I am angry at my wife, for it is true that she turns a blithe face to the world. Seat her at dinner next to a man with a
reputation for taciturnity and you will shortly observe the most animated and sprightly of conversations. She is polite to the surly, soft-answered to the wrathful. She smiles at people on streets and says “Thank you” to startled elevator operators, disgorging passengers at the rush hour.
“That little freckle-faced girl,” Jackie Kennedy once remarked to me, “does everything and goes everywhere and Jack and Bobby are forever asking her opinion and she has six [as it was then] children. Tell me, Tom, what is it about her?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Jackie, what it is about her. She’s blithe. That’s what it is about her, and that’s why she is so everlastingly cheerful. What she needs is somebody to shake her by the shoulders and tell her that life is real and life is earnest and to quit smiling about it so much.”
I didn’t say that to Jackie’s face. I said it to her when I was alone in my own room the evening after Mary had behaved strangely and the family conference had failed and the doctor had canceled the hospital room and Joan was in Upper Volta.
Sometime before Joan got home from Upper Volta, Mary found a very young, very long-haired psychiatrist who wore a sweater with a hole in the sleeve instead of a white jacket, and a beard instead of a mustache. But I was still annoyed with Joan, and never really got over being annoyed until last Labor Day.
When I woke up that morning, Mary was sitting as usual at the foot of the bed, waiting to talk to her mother. The moment she returned from Upper Volta, Joan initiated a series of conversations with Mary. They began each morning almost as soon as we awoke, and they seemed to me interminable.
I would shave and get dressed. Striding through the room, I would hear Mary say, “Do you think that Dad …?”
“Do you think,” I would interrupt, “that Dad what?”
“Quiet, Tom,” Joan would say, “Mary and I are talking.”
