This Close to Happy

by Daphne Merkin

  * * *

  It was after this hospitalization that I started taking the bus uptown to Columbia Presbyterian once a week to see a brisk Texan child psychiatrist named Dr. Hanson. Dr. Hanson wore squared-off black glasses and looked a bit like Clark Kent; he was the very same doctor who had advised my mother to isolate me in her bedroom when I cried. I was usually accompanied on these trips by Willie Mae, a taciturn black woman who did washing and ironing for my mother and rhythmically snapped her chewing gum in a way I found mesmerizing.

  In retrospect I think Dr. Hanson had no idea what manner of uncuddly family he was dealing with, if only because he had so little contact with anyone other than me. He may have met my mother or talked to her on the phone but I imagine she could spin things her way and I’m sure my father was spared any involvement. How was the doctor to know what I was up against, a member of a clan that might look, at first glance, like a normal family, but was anything but normal? How to explain the pathology that began with the strange, quasi-symbiotic union my parents had forged (in which they spoke to each other in their native German, a language neither I nor my siblings ever managed to wholly penetrate, despite being privy to it throughout our growing up) and spread outward from there to affect every aspect of the hyper-regimented, sadistically tinged existence that went on behind the front door of Apartment 6B? An existence that was largely run by the merciless—and, to be fair, entirely overworked—Jane.

  This was the mid-sixties, before the popularization of the family systems model of therapy, as espoused by theorists like Carl Whitaker and Nathan Ackerman, and no one thought to address the problem at its root cause—which was the nature of the family itself, as rotten at its core as Hamlet’s Denmark. Or perhaps it had been determined that my parents weren’t the type to participate in any kind of therapy. Instead it fell on me, a talkative, eager-to-please young girl with shiny brown hair, implacably afraid of everyone—my parents, my siblings, my classmates, my teachers, and most of all Jane—to explain what was wrong, why I cried all the time, what I was doing there in Dr. Hanson’s office in the first place.

  A particularly energetic psychiatrist I saw in my twenties—Dr. Harry Alpert, the same person who would coax me into trying antidepressant medication for the first time—went up to Babies’ Hospital, foraged around, and found a note I had written while I was there that someone had thought to keep in a file. He gave it to me at one of our sessions, explaining that he had taken it because he believed it would help me to look upon myself more kindly by reminding me of all I had been through.

  The note was written on a blue-lined piece of paper that had been ripped out of a small pad. At the top of the page, in keeping with my religious-school education, I had written “bet” “hay,” the two Hebrew letters that stood for “Be’ezrat Hashem,” With God’s Help; I had been taught to append them to everything I wrote. (It seemed inconceivable to me that I had ever been so dutiful—so religiously compliant—but then again it is always difficult to try and reenvision oneself as an infinitely moldable child, before the revisiting and questioning that comes with adult consciousness sets in.) Then, in a very legible, surprisingly mature script for an eight-year-old, I explained that I was afraid to go home, and that I wanted to know why my mother was only nice to me when I was sick.

  The girl who had written the note sounded sweet and fearful and overwhelmed. I remember feeling an initial jolt of sympathy for her, but I couldn’t hold on to the sensation long enough for it to make a difference. She was a clue to what I would become but she also seemed like someone I wanted to keep clear of, lest her manifest vulnerability contaminate me by association. Still, I folded up the note into quadrants and put it in my wallet, as a sort of reverse charm, an antidote to my own habit of self-belittlement, until I eventually lost it.

  9

  “My time is up,” I tell Dr. P. “I’ve hung around long enough. It’s ridiculous,” I add, warming to my case. “I should have been dead years ago.”

  Dr. P. is the latest in a long series of shrinks I have seen, a tall man with a full head of white hair who has read all of Proust three times (I myself have never made it past Volume 1) and loves classical music. I have alternately wished he were my father or my husband, but mostly I try not to put all my eggs in his basket, lest he fail me. He is advanced in years and when I’m not entertaining thoughts of offing myself I worry that he will die before our work, whatever it consists of, is done.

  Many of our sessions revolve around my learned habit of distrust, my inability, as the analyst Wilfred Bion put it, to “link”—to maintain connections. I insist to Dr. P. that no one tries to stay linked to me, that, despite my covey of friends, I can go for a whole weekend without a phone call, that I’m tired of doing all the work. “You think you’re not worth it,” he reminds me. “You don’t realize what an appealing person you are, how much people are drawn to you.” His comments fly over my head, like a flock of birds up in the sky heading in the wrong direction.

  “I want my mother back,” I say. “Even though she was terrible.” My mother has been dead for nearly a decade now, leaving me absolutely in the lurch. I used to think that she, demon-lover that she was, had succeeded in keeping me alive by finally coming through as a proper, mothering mother precisely when I was at my worst, thus making the whole descent into darkness worthwhile. At these times she would step up to the plate, envelop me with reassurances, cajole me, humor me, tuck me into the narrow bed in my old room at home and bring me cervelat sandwiches with mayonnaise and thinly sliced tomatoes on a tray, as though I were an invalid. It was as if my desperation brought out the best in her, the sliver of empathy that wasn’t discernible otherwise. You can see the problem right there, the “carrot” that would materialize in front of me only when things had become truly unbearable.

  Once upon a time—throughout my twenties, thirties, and forties—there had been my mother and the apartment I had grown up in to retreat to, my mother who always rose to drastic occasions in a way she never rose to ordinary life. Tough as nails, she had withstood any number of breakdowns, depressions, and crises in her children, all of whom appeared to be of less sturdy stock than she.

  When my father died, in 1999, at the age of ninety-one, I felt bewildered that his absence had become finalized, the trail gone dry. I had never known him except in flashes and now I would never be able to form a fuller picture. My mother, by contrast, entered a period of intense mourning, after which she magically sprouted new sides of herself. She lost a bit of weight, dressed in a softer manner, went to movies and the theater with friends, and traveled, going on a cruise to Alaska with one of my sisters and two granddaughters and staying in her apartment in Jerusalem for months at a time. She seemed released in some essential way, even taking up the fiction writing she had mostly set aside when she married. I had expected her to live on into an indefinite future in which she would finally mutate into the mother I yearned for her to be, but instead she went and died, rather abruptly, in 2006, at the age of eighty-six, of lung cancer. (Although both her father and my father were smokers, she wasn’t.)

  Whatever was wrong with her as a mother, including a striking deficiency of maternal impulse, she had been my all—far more so than any man, including the one I married and divorced. She was my North, my South, my East and West. She had been larger-than-life for me in her presence and she continued to consume me after she was gone. I could make no sense of her death, not at the beginning and not after the passage of time, and so I sat in Dr. P.’s office, wanting my mother back, if only to shoo away my despair. From childhood on, my episodes of depression had brought her over to my side, wrested her attention away from my father and my siblings, however briefly, to do battle on my behalf. She did so in the only way she knew how, which was by being ironic and minimizing, making light of the darkness that engulfed me.

  “Everything will be all right, you’ll see,” she would assure me. And for the moment, at least, I was reassured. But now she is in the ground and I am
hideously alone with my depression and there are no longer any secondary gains to be reaped from my suffering. Being in despair no longer means my mother will come flapping around me, loaning me her feisty energy, her refusal to look too closely at anything. I am left to my own insufficient devices, staring into blackness.

  “I don’t want to be here,” I say to Dr. P., a note of quiet fury in my voice. “I have never wanted to be here.” By “here,” I mean in this world, but I probably also mean in therapy itself, which I have found only really avails me when things are going relatively well. When I am in extremis, caught in an ancient snare of self-loathing, it fails, like everything else—feels like scratching one’s nails against the wall of a cell.

  “I don’t know if this is helping,” I say, hoping Dr. P. will intervene in some drastic manner, offer to bring me home with him at the end of the day, tuck me into bed. I wonder if he realizes that I am not all talk, that I have schemes up my sleeve.

  “How would you do it?” Dr. P. has asked me, more than once, as though to prove how seriously he takes me.

  Then there comes a moment, suicide or no suicide, when the session is over and I am called upon to leave the therapist’s creaky old-shoe of an office, with the artifacts he has chosen to display and the piles of unopened mail scattered across his desk, everything sorely in need of a good dusting. I find it difficult to leave, each and every time. I am safe inside Dr. P.’s office—safe from strangers and, more importantly, safe from my family, who often materialize in my sessions. “Begone,” he likes to say, quoting Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. “You have no power here.” Outside the world awaits, impervious and unforgiving—notwithstanding Dr. P.’s assurances to the contrary.

  10

  Another recollection: I am eight, nine, ten years old, leaning over the banister, imploring my mother not to leave me in Jane’s clutches. She is going on a trip with my father—to Europe or Israel—and, as is her wont, has told me only at the very last minute, perhaps to spare me anxiety. She will be gone for a week, ten days, two weeks, forever. My stomach churns and I feel jittery at the thought of her absence. No one will look out for me without her.

  My mother is also not to be relied on—although on occasion she uses German endearments like Schatz or goldige Kind, she can turn on me at a moment’s whim, is fearsome when angered, slaps me in the face or pinches me hard on my arms. But she is still all I have, intermittent as her presence is and unavailable as she is when she is around—all that stands between me and the hostile forces arrayed against me everywhere I turn. Who, I wonder nervously, will protect me from Jane? Certainly not any of my siblings, who are busy trying to look out for themselves. The six of us have never bonded together in an “us against them” fashion, the way some siblings in unhappy families do, never tried to defend one another. “Please tell Jane to be nice to me,” I plead.

  The first time I was left in Jane’s care was when my parents took my three older siblings on a trip to Israel, leaving me at home with my two younger brothers. I must have been three or four and was already deeply afraid of Jane. My mother had brought me an uncharacteristically lavish present—a baby carriage for my beloved, ceaselessly disciplined dolls—to keep me distracted, but I was so upset that I went to bed early even though I was being allowed to stay up later than usual because of their departure. My brothers and I were already in pajamas when good-byes were made, and I felt it was best to get out of Jane’s way. The baby carriage stood in the living room, untouched by me for days.

  It is curious to me that I have forgotten so much else that has happened, and yet can still re-create the bleakness of those long-ago Sunday evenings, when Ed Sullivan’s ritual good-night wave at the end of his weekly show—the wave that seemed to project directly from the middle of his peculiar hunched-over body rather than as an extension of his arm—signaled that the television around which the six of us, huddled in pajamas and leather slippers from Indian Walk (red for the girls, navy for the boys), was about to be firmly turned off. The gray-blue light of the black-and-white TV screen would wink out, like a firefly, and then there was nothing to be done but go up to bed and acknowledge that the weekend, which you hadn’t liked all that much in the first place, was officially over and would now be followed by the advent of the school week, which you liked even less.

  Given this immediacy of recall, it is all the more curious that I find it so hard to summon up Jane, to put the various images of her together into a lasting impression of a singular person whose life touched mine at all its crucial points. That was what we called her—Jane, blunt and American—although she was in fact born and raised under the name Adrienne in far-off Holland. I don’t know when or why she Americanized her first name, but it always intrigued me that she held on to her original surname of Van der Ven, so that she became Jane Van der Ven, as though half of her belonged in a See Spot Run primer and the other half of her in wooden clogs.

  I could pull out any detail from the vast inventory of yellowing sorrows that make up my childhood, and not one of them would be of much help in filling out Jane’s stringent outlines. None of these would serve, that is, to leave a sufficiently weighty imprint, some warm doughy impression that would make her feel real to me even in memory. Jane was in the habit, for instance, of wearing incongruous pastel-colored baby-doll pajamas summer in and summer out, drawing my mother’s chilly glare of disapproval at their slutty abbreviatedness. She was proud of her figure, although she was in fact the least sex-kittenish of women, one who I believe died a virgin. She had taut legs and frighteningly visible muscles in her arms, well before the Age of Fitness had dawned, biceps you could win a boxing match with.

  Jane lived in a tiny maid’s room upstairs, behind what was called the nursery. She looked after the six of us with very little help from my mother, and as a result was always harried. On her day off on Thursday she went shopping, scouring for bargain-priced clothes she would triumphantly display when she got home. She would also report the details of her dinners out, where she mostly ordered seafood dishes and savored an alcoholic drink or two. For a while, when we had all been young, there had been a boyfriend, a good-looking, somewhat dim-witted hulk of a guy named Dick, who took my brothers to ball games and seemed to dote on Jane. There is a photo I still have of her wearing a red two-piece and matching lipstick standing shyly next to Dick on the sand in Long Beach, but at some point he ceased to be in the picture. Every so often Jane would have a female friend up to her room, but these visits grew rarer with the passing of time.

  At night she liked to smoke while sitting straight up in bed and watching TV, hour after hour, the ashes piling up in a little blue-and-white ceramic dish she kept by her bedside. She read in exactly the same fashion as she watched TV, sitting straight up and smoking while she resolutely paged through a paperback novel she had picked up from around the house, never slumping against the pillows with what I considered to be a true readerly surrender. I don’t know what powers of imaginative empathy or even simple identification she had, whether she ever saw herself through the eyes of a character she was reading about, envisioned herself leading someone else’s life. It wasn’t that she lacked discernment—she noticed the sort of little things about people, mannerisms and gestures, that suggested some kind of psychological attunement—but it seemed to me that she read very much from the outside in, refusing to get overly involved. This posture of disengagement fascinated me as much as it puzzled me: What was the point of reading if you didn’t allow yourself to get immersed?

  Which brings me to the crux of the difficulty in writing about Jane: I never learned during all those years how to read her from the inside out—never learned what made her, as they say, “tick.” Jane woke me almost every grade-school morning and turned off the light every night when I was still young enough to have a bedtime. Yet she exists for me now as more of an absence than a presence—like a blur at the center of the portrait where a likeness should be, a snapshot that fails to develop, a character who nev
er quite comes off the page. I cannot, for instance, remember her ever reading to me; or her taking my hand as a little girl, other than to drag me away from a playground swing or to pull me along faster than I was going on my own steam; or her leaning down and saying something sweet to me. But she must have, even if rarely.

  The thing is, she left so few traces. We are all born to die, of course, and in the end few of us leave indelible marks; we exist mostly in the memories of others. But even erased or lost memories must be a clue to something, if only to a need or insistence on the part of the person doing the erasing. Why, then, do I insist on erasing Jane? What is making me so uneasy, back there in the far reaches of the past?

  * * *

  Jane came to work for my family in the fall of 1953, half a year after my older brother was born and seven months before I joined the group. It was during that brief, zealously domestic period when it was fashionable for even upper-middle-class American mothers to look after their children themselves. They might not do all the drudge work but they tended to be around and available, to dole out the eggs and toast at breakfast as well as the steak and peas at dinner. True, the word “bonding” hadn’t yet achieved the pride of place that it would by the time I had my daughter in 1986, but I don’t think my mother would have much bought into the notion even if it had. She ridiculed such ideas, like the emphasis on people being “warm,” as being inanely American, lacking the rigor of her European background.

  (My own mothering approach would be quite different—more overtly affectionate, for one thing—yet if I look back I recognize that I had my own difficulties in attaching to Zoë. The situation wasn’t helped by my sliding into a postpartum depression shortly after she was born, but there was also the lingering influence of what I had imbibed about the maternal role from my mother and from watching my sisters with their children. I was afraid of making Zoë too important, of letting other people know how important she was to me, for fear—of what, exactly? I feared my mother’s mockery if I made too much fuss over Zoë, but I also feared the intensity of my feelings for her, that they would show me up as a simpering fool.)