Right after I gave birth, I moved back into my parents’ apartment together with Michael, Zoë, and a baby nurse named Maria, who had been hired to help me through the transition to motherhood. Maria was an elderly spinster of German extraction and infinite Christian faith who had definite ideas—indeed, a thoroughgoing methodology—about how best to get infants to sleep without too much fretting. Her approach involved tucking Zoë up into a tight bundle, placing her on her stomach—always her stomach!—in a corner of the white wicker cradle that had been passed on from one grandchild to another, and went on from there to a great deal of rocking and patting on the back. Maria was also a big believer in the power of the pacifier, although its use was already looked down upon, together with that of playpens and walkers, in the current ideology of enlightened child care. I watched Zoë suck on her pacifier contentedly and imagined that she was learning how to provide solace for herself—a psychic process that is described by child developmental theorists as “self-soothing”—through finding consolation in that rubbery, invincible nipple. It was something, or so it seemed to me, that I had never learned to do.
I was still working in book publishing—my recent promotion to associate publisher had come with a new raft of responsibilities—and had negotiated two book deals while I was in the hospital, within a day of Zoë’s arrival. My own one-bedroom on the West Side was a bit tight for all of us but I think the real reason I moved back into my parents’ apartment for what was originally planned as a two-week stay (and ended up lasting three times as long) was because I couldn’t resist my mother’s offer to make a nursery for Zoë—and, by extension, to take care of me. She set up the cradle and a makeshift changing table in the small room off the boys’ bedroom and bought some Carter’s polyester onesies at the neighborhood Woolworth’s to kick-start my daughter’s wardrobe.
I cried rivers when I saw the onesies—not out of gratitude, but because I had hoped my mother would suddenly become expansive and buy my daughter a proper layette, featuring a baby blanket and matching outfits of softest cotton and touches of pink, the kind they sold at the posh children’s clothing stores that had begun cropping up on the Upper East Side in the latter half of the eighties, in keeping with the vast amounts of new hedge-fund money. But that was to mischaracterize my mother as an affluent and indulgent grandmother, when she saw herself in another spirit altogether—as a tough-minded matriarch who didn’t believe in spoiling anyone, not even infants. She steadily refused to rise to auspicious occasions with auspicious gifts; years later, when Zoë turned twelve, the significant age of a bat mitzvah, and might have expected a strand of pearls or a silver bracelet, similar to the gifts her friends received at their bat mitzvahs, my mother gave her a Timex alarm clock. Love or money, money or love, my mother scrimped on both, had always done so, and at some point I had begun confusing the two. Those Carter’s onesies felt like a mortal blow because they suggested a larger withholding, a refusal to respond with unstinting maternal largesse to anything about me, not even the birth of my child.
Michael, Zoë, and I eventually moved back across town to my one-bedroom, urged on by Maria, who came right out and told me in her guttural accent, that my parents’ apartment had “bad vibes.” (This was particularly independent-minded of her, seeing that her wages were paid by my mother.) I think she was appalled by the lack of interest expressed by my parents in their new grandchild, but I don’t think that’s all she was referring to. There was some crucial deficiency she was picking up on that went beyond simple inattentiveness, some hardened form of indifference—call it a calcification of the heart or a failure of the bonds of affection—that must have stood out from the usual deviations in family interactions she would have witnessed in her line of work. It was the aberration at the heart of our family, the ties that bound in all the wrong ways and none of the right ones. It was what had made me inconsolable with sorrow as a young girl and rendered me inconsolable now.
* * *
Shortly after we got married, before we left on our honeymoon, I received a phone call from my mother asking that Michael and I come to my parents’ on an upcoming evening, with no explanation given. The four of us met in my father’s study, which signaled that it was an official occasion. After a few minutes of perfunctory chitchat—neither of my parents were good at warming up a conversation—my father said that he had asked us here because now that we were married we must surely be thinking of providing for the next generation. He didn’t use the phrase “starting a family” because that kind of benign pastoral tone wouldn’t have been like him. He went on to say that he wanted to help us with the purchase of an apartment, as he had done for my siblings, but he had one stipulation: I was to agree to sign a contract that I would keep kosher in our new abode. I was the only one of my siblings who hadn’t remained observant—something my father knew implicitly if not explicitly, from my mother if not from me—and this was one way of correcting the situation, of bringing me into line.
I listened to all this in a state of dazed alarm, not having had any indication that my father’s habit of control was so ingrained that he was planning to oversee my marital conduct. I looked at my mother, who sat next to me on the couch, and who had uncharacteristically said nothing. Feeling as though I had been thrown under a bulldozer, I sat in silence for a minute and then came out with the trembling assertion that I didn’t believe in it. By “it” I meant the whole institution of religion, but I didn’t want to be too specific for fear of insulting my father. I needn’t have worried either way; he was already enraged that I had dared to state my article of nonbelief as though it carried any weight with him. “I don’t give a shit,” he shouted, with the emphasis on the word “shit,” “what you believe in.” His face had gone red and the spit flew out of his mouth. I felt that the sheer force of his fury would blow me to pieces. Michael, meanwhile, maintained a diplomatic—or terrified—silence. Before things could get any worse, he and I got up to leave.
Outside, as we walked along Park Avenue, I felt my heart banging loudly against my chest. I suggested that the two of us should try and make it on our own, without benefit of a parental infusion of money. For a minute I had an image of us as a feisty young couple taking on the city; we would be like Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park, finding the comedy in making do, flying free of the family. Michael gave his wobbly assent but I could tell his heart wasn’t in spurning my father’s offer for higher principles. I’m not sure my own heart was in it, but it seemed important to me to at least pretend to be above such power-broker tactics.
About a week later I received a note from my mother on her light blue stationery saying that she didn’t agree with my father’s approach and was sorry it had happened the way it did. The issue of my signing a contract was never brought up again and shortly after Zoë was born we moved from my one-bedroom to a three-bedroom off Lexington Avenue; the apartment boasted an imposing entry that gave the impression of leading on to a much larger apartment than it actually did. This aspect was enough to impress my mother, no matter that, once past the living room, the apartment collapsed into a dining nook and a cluster of bedrooms one on top of the other. I took the closet-like third bedroom as my office and tried to like the apartment more than I did. Every time my mother visited she would look around the foyer approvingly and say, “It makes such a good impression”—whether to convince herself or me that I had made the right choice, I was never sure.
22
By the time I was back on my own turf—Zoë must have been about six weeks old—my depression had deepened. I didn’t go into my office at HBJ but continued to work as best I could from home, although I was officially on maternity leave. I had acquired and edited a book that meant a lot to me, about the eerily symbiotic relationship that existed between John Lennon and Yoko Ono, written by a former live-in assistant. The publishing house was excited about the book’s prospects and I talked frequently on the phone with the head of publicity about our marketing plans for it, w
hich included a large first printing. Once in a while I ventured out to a restaurant near my apartment and met an agent for lunch, feigning enthusiasm for some project or other, smiling past the despair that gripped me, wondering if my eyes looked as sad as I felt.
Most days, though, I shuffled around my apartment in a nightgown until it was time to go to my therapy appointment. Or I arranged to meet my closest friend, Susan, whose daughter was nine months older than Zoë, and walk with her in Central Park, two mothers out with strollers. These excursions usually ended with me sitting on a bench in tears, explaining to Susan that I couldn’t go on anymore. The antidepressants I was on seemed to do little other than make me feel logy, sapping me of what scant energy I had left. I found myself thinking less about killing Zoë and more about killing myself. Sometimes, when Maria, who had agreed to stay on longer than planned, was out with Zoë, I would take a big knife out from one of the kitchen drawers and stare at it, willing myself to plunge it into my chest.
It was right around this time that the book about John Lennon that I was so committed to was abruptly canceled, without any discussion, after Yoko Ono sent a cease-and-desist letter from her lawyers to the recently appointed new publisher, who happened to be Bill Jovanovich’s son. This change had happened abruptly, with no prior notice given to me by Bill to the effect that he was stepping down. Peter had some of his father’s arrogance but little of his charm, and he and I had an uneasy relationship. Peter was corporate above all else and I think he both admired and resented my ascent in the company and in his father’s affections. When he called to tell me that he had killed the book because of Yoko Ono’s letter, I said without pausing to reflect, “I don’t work for you, I work for your father.” This was clearly no longer true, but even if it were, it was a provocative and undiplomatic thing to say. Within minutes of this phone call I was unceremoniously fired from my job at HBJ, my office kept under surveillance by two security guards lest I try and enter it, my high-flying career over and done with. I never set foot in the office again.
I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach; my professional identity was shattered, and with it my fledgling sense of being more than a damaged child. In the coming weeks I found it impossible to accept that Bill, who had so much faith in my abilities and whom I had felt far closer to than my own father, didn’t come to my rescue. I faxed him a letter telling him how important he and the company were to me but never heard back from him. (Years later, he wrote me a letter complimenting me on a piece of my writing he had read, and attempting to take things up where we had left off. I regret to say I never answered it, putting off doing so until it was too late.)
* * *
When Zoë was six months old, I left her in Michael and our housekeeper’s care, and went into a hospital in Westchester. The hospital was recommended by a psychiatrist I had consulted with at my mother’s urging, a cultured Austrian named Peter Neubauer who tried to engage me about my literary career and seemed dismayed by my inability to do anything but shed tears in his office. My depression had taken an ever stronger hold since my termination at HBJ, and by the time I entered the hospital I had nearly stopped eating and was barely speaking.
This time around, the hospital had a misleadingly lyrical name, which made it sound more like a spa than a psychiatric institution. It was an hour north of the city and I was driven there by Conrad, my father’s driver, on a weekday afternoon, accompanied by my sister Debra, who happened to be in from Israel. We talked little on the ride up; I was lost in my thoughts and, even had I been able to form the words, didn’t want to discuss how anxious the idea of going into another hospital was making me. The psychiatrist who ran the hospital was overseeing my care and seemed disconcertingly jubilant to see me. I said a weepy good-bye to my sister and then was checked into the unit I had been assigned to, where “sharps”—anything that might be assessed as a danger to myself or others, such as nail scissors or glass containers—were taken from my luggage. I was weighed, like an express package, on a scale in the nurse’s office. I still remember my weight (138 pounds, which was a steep decline from my post-pregnancy weight of 180) and how strange I felt being away from Zoë. I had become very attached to her, despite my depression, and wondered whether she would notice that I wasn’t there to kiss her good night and sing her “Numi, Numi,” the Hebrew lullaby my mother had sung to me.
At first, the hospital seemed like a summer camp, with rustic cottages, green lawns, and a pleasant cafeteria. The staff was gung-ho about a type of therapy called Psychodrama, in which you punched pillows and pretended they were the father or the spouse or lover you were angry at or hurt by, while the other members of the group made encouraging noises. But, this vigilantly supportive atmosphere notwithstanding, I soon decided that the facility was run, quite matter-of-factly, as a business—that the fit took care of the unfit not only out of compassion but also the coolest of profit-making instincts. With the exception of myself, the hair-spray-drinking wife of a prominent politician, and a man who sang in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera, most of the patients in my cottage worked at blue-collar jobs for companies that provided excellent medical coverage for psychiatric illnesses—places like IBM and Con Edison. It seemed to me that these patients stayed out their allotted time whether it was indicated or not, and were discharged promptly on the day their insurance ran out, even if they had talked about killing themselves the day before.
I remained at the hospital for five or six weeks, during which period my mother visited once, regally carrying a gift of a T-shirt that was printed with the concert hall that bore my family’s name thanks to my father’s philanthropy. I was taken aback that this was what she had chosen to bring me—did she really imagine I’d walk around a mental institution wearing a T-shirt that said “Merkin Concert Hall”?—as if to remind me of how far I had fallen from the lofty heights that once were mine to claim. In another person’s hands it might have been a cute gesture, but coming from my mother it seemed punitive more than anything else. Although my doctor had indicated a wish to meet with her, she declined his request.
Meanwhile, my father called once a week on the pay phone in the unit kitchen and we talked briefly; he asked if I found the place to my liking, as if it were a hotel. After the first week or so, when it was determined that I could go off the grounds, I started taking short outings with fellow patients to the bakeries and coffee shops that dotted the pleasant upstate village in which the hospital was located. Once in a while we were taken in a van to a movie and I felt as if I were on the other side of a mirror, part of an exotic group of “aliens” being observed by “normals.”
On weekends, Michael would come up with Zoë in a baby carrier, together with Susan and her one-year-old daughter, Emily. He would go to some effort to dress Zoë in her most charming stretchies or overalls and sweaters, which I had carefully chosen at an Upper West Side store called Monkeys & Bears, but there was usually a button missing on the sweater or a hole somewhere in the fabric of the stretchie. These tiny details made me feel unreasonably sad, as though Zoë’s well-being were being neglected in a more essential way during my absence. I would hold her on my lap as we talked, more hesitantly than usual. I loved the feel of her warm, wiggling body and the way her round brown eyes, under delicately arched eyebrows, followed everything. I tried to ward off the gusts of guilt that came at me for being away at this crucial period in Zoë’s development. “Hello, noodle,” I would say over and over again, kissing the top of her head or her velvety cheek. “Your mommy misses you a lot. Do you know that?”
After these visits I would return to the unit, with its faux-homey look, in a black mood, feeling more dislocated than usual. I couldn’t figure out how I had ended up at this institution, playing endless card games with an obese lesbian who was on permanent disability for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom and who had taken a distinct liking to me. Indeed, she told me that I could be a lesbian star, if only I cared to follow this line of romantic allegiance. I also had lo
ng conversations with my roommate, a tall and efficient-seeming woman who was planning to move to Israel when she got out. She didn’t strike me as particularly depressed and seemed to have checked into the hospital as a respite from her ordinary life, with a well-organized bag of toiletries in tow.
It occurred to me yet again that not everyone saw psychiatric hospitals in the same magnified light as I did—as a hoped-for rescue or, alternately, as a last-ditch escape hatch to climb into, with accompanying feelings of shame and self-loathing, when all else had failed. In spite of the ubiquity of depression as a term in general conversation, I was fully aware of the cultural opprobrium that still attached itself to mental illness, and the even greater stigma that came with admitting that you had become so unhinged that you could no longer function. Indeed, it made sense to me that there were people who killed themselves rather than face the social and professional consequences of hospitalization. In her memoir An Unquiet Mind, the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison recalls her panic at the thought of entering a hospital, even when she was at her most suicidal: “I was horrified at the thought of being locked up; being away from familiar surroundings; having to attend group therapy meetings; and having to put up with all of the indignities and invasions of privacy that go into being on a psychiatric ward … Mostly, however, I was concerned that if it became public knowledge that I had been hospitalized, my clinical work and privileges at best would be suspended; at worst, they would be revoked on a permanent basis.”
When I wasn’t lying on my narrow bed, anxiously staring at the ceiling, or pummeling pillows in Psychodrama, I sat in the smoky “lounge,” playing board games or talking with other patients about their lives. The director of the hospital who doubled as my therapist had a hearty way about him and seemed prepared to sweep away all the vestiges of my former life, including Michael. “He’s not up to you,” he would proclaim. “You deserve something better.” I didn’t know what he was basing his opinion on, since he didn’t know my husband other than to nod hello to him in passing when he came up to visit with Zoë, and I didn’t quite know what to make of him and his convictions in general—that my parents were noxious and cheap, that I was meant for a bright, writerly future—although I continued to see him for a time after I left the hospital.
This Close to Happy Page 15
