November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

Finding a balance between showing their love for Brian and not putting pressure on him was frustrating. Pat and Mary fretted about Brian’s grades, which fluctuated with his moods. They suspected that he smoked marijuana, and they knew he drank with his friends in the neighborhood. Liquor occasionally disappeared from their cabinet, and for a while they kept it locked in the basement. The Harts were especially concerned about alcohol because Pat had had a drinking problem years earlier. There were occasional arguments and fights, and once when Brian was in the eighth grade, his mother marched him down to the local Alcoholics Anonymous office, where a counselor gave Brian a talking-to. More often the Harts tried to give their son space. “At that point we were beginning to walk on eggs,” says Mary. “We were hoping that everything was working and that the psychiatrist was able to help.” Dr. Kornhaber told the Harts that their son’s case was difficult to diagnose, and he was having a hard time pinpointing what should be done. But though he wasn’t sure what was wrong, everyone agreed that things were not quite right.

  The summer before tenth grade, the Harts sent Brian to a camp in Maine. Brian’s letters home described the swimming, boating, and hiking in exuberant detail. He seemed to be involved in everything. Although Brian had failed math that spring and would have to pass a special examination before returning to school, he solved the problem in typical Brian style: he found a pretty girl at the camp who also needed instruction, and they canoed daily across the river to the house of a math tutor. When the Harts picked him up at summer’s end, Brian was euphoric. “We felt we had a different Brian back,” says Mary. “He was happy and confident, he knew he was going to pass the test, and he was on top of the world.” The day of the test Pat returned from a meeting to find a phone message from Brian: “Your stupid son managed to get an eighty-six in math and just wanted to let you know!”

  Two months later, in mid-October, Brian took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test. When Mary picked him up at school that afternoon, she found him surrounded by five of his friends. “I don’t know what’s the matter with Brian,” one of them said, “but he’s just not with it.” When Brian got in the car, Mary knew immediately that something was seriously wrong. Brian’s face was expressionless, and he could barely speak. “I couldn’t do anything” was all he could say. “I couldn’t do anything.” Later, the Harts were told that Brian had checked off the same answer for almost every question on the test.

  The next day, after examining Brian, Dr. Kornhaber told the Harts that Brian was having a psychotic episode and would have to be hospitalized. (The Harts would later learn that Brian had tried to kill himself that morning by pulling a plastic bag over his head and wrapping an extension cord around his neck.) Although they hardly understood what was happening themselves, Pat and Mary explained to Brian that something in him had snapped and needed to be fixed, and that he would have to go to the hospital. Brian seemed almost to welcome the news, and he packed an overnight bag with two pairs of pants and a sweater, enough clothes for a few days.

  Brian would be in the hospital for nine months.

  The Harts had been warned by Dr. Kornhaber that when someone enters a psychiatric hospital for the first time, his psychosis may initially increase, both because the doctors are likely to experiment with various medications, which can take weeks or even months to evaluate, and because of the change of environment. Still the Harts were unprepared for their first visit with Brian, two days after they had driven him to Stony Lodge, a private hospital in Ossining. The Harts were escorted through two locked doors and into a stark common room in which several men gazed numbly at a television. Brian stood in the doorway on the far side of the room. He was neatly dressed in a white T-shirt and corduroy pants, but he looked pale and terrified. He didn’t move. The Harts went to him and put their arms around him, and the three of them hugged and wept. In a tiny voice Brian said over and over, “I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m scared.”

  Brian thought his parents had abandoned him. “Why am I here?” he kept saying. His parents tried to reassure him that it was for the best, but they were unnerved. Heavily medicated with Thorazine, an antipsychotic drug commonly used to sedate patients, Brian had difficulty speaking and couldn’t articulate his fears. He just squeezed their hands so hard he left marks. Driving home that afternoon, Pat and Mary were deeply shaken. “We wondered if we were doing the right thing,” says Mary. “But people that know say you’re doing the right thing. You’re putting your whole life in the hands of strangers.” Says Pat, “We wondered if we’d ever have him back. We wondered if we’d ever have him right.” Wild ideas flashed through Mary’s mind. She thought of fleeing with her son into the woods and taking care of him there.

  The next months were agonizing. The BB gun lawsuit had recently gone to court, and Brian was terrified that his family would lose their house and all their possessions because of the incident. At the same time, he insisted he wasn’t as sick as the other patients, that he would be back in school soon. After a month or so he seemed to improve. He began to make friends with other young patients. He refinished chairs and tables in the woodworking shop, made pottery and paintings for family Christmas presents, and kept up his schoolwork with a tutor. Brian was anxious to go home, and his parents, telling him to try to take things day by day, continued to pay the tuition at his private school each month in the hope that he would soon be well enough to return. They visited him as often as they could; after Brian started improving, Mrs. Hart drove over almost every night. “I used to watch TV when a commercial would come on and say, ‘Did you hug your child today?’ And, oh . . . I’d feel so awful. And I’d get in the car and take off to Ossining to see Brian.”

  Eventually, Brian was allowed home for weekends, during which he did all the things he used to do—football games and skiing with his family, movies and pizza with his friends. But he didn’t seem to be getting truly better, just having up days and down days. At times he would be what his parents came to think of as “good Brian”—bubbling over with energy. Other times he was depressed. Brian and his father usually went to the Giants game on Sunday afternoons. Afterward, Brian would go home for dinner; sometimes, though, he would ask to be driven straight back to the hospital, and the Harts knew he was feeling down. At one game in December, Patrick sensed that Brian was not really conscious of what was happening on the field, and he asked him if he wanted to leave. Brian said yes, and Pat drove him straight back to Stony Lodge. The following day Mary got a call from the psychiatrist in charge, who told her that Brian had disappeared.

  With images of dragnets combing the roads and radio bulletins warning the public about “an escapee from the mental hospital,” a frantic Mary Hart called the Bedford chief of police, whom she knew in her job as town clerk. They drove the streets between Ossining and Bedford Hills but saw no sign of Brian. Shortly after they got back to her house, Brian walked in the door. “I’m home,” he said. He had left the hospital after breakfast and walked seven miles through the woods. Mary was overjoyed that her son was safe, but as she hugged him, she knew she had to tell him he had to go back. While Brian changed his clothes, she made him a chicken sandwich, then she drove him to the hospital. Brian was quiet. “To this day,” says Mary, “I’ll never forget the look he gave me as I took him back: How could you do this to me? How could you do this to me?”

  That spring the doctors, who still hadn’t settled on a diagnosis, decided to try Brian on lithium, a drug used successfully to treat manic depression, an illness characterized by extreme mood swings and having strong genetic roots. For Brian (whose illness would indeed eventually be diagnosed as manic depression), lithium seemed to be a miracle drug. He was no longer subject to drastic mood swings. Says Mary, “He was himself again.”

  In July, as he approached the day of his release, Brian wrote in his journal about his feelings on leaving the hospital after nine months:

  Today I hit a landmark. Today for the first time since late February I was and am depressed. Not really heavily dep
ressed like I used to be, but a kind of melancholy, silent mood. . . . I figured out why I was depressed. I’m going to leave this land of make-believe where everyone is nice and so much like you. No matter how much I cursed and damned this place, no matter how long I prayed, hoped, dreamed, and begged to get out of here, it still was a heavy big part of my life I’ll never forget. I’ve made friends here. I’ve grown accustomed to this life. Being babied and looked after. I’m used to it but at the same time sick to death about it. I want my independence back! Give me Liberty or give me Death! I’m happy to say I’m alive enough to say that. You see, if I didn’t come here I surely would of found some way and enough guts to end my life. Kill myself. Now I’m ok, I want life. I want, need challenge, excitement and a girlfriend. Not necessarily in that order.

  What I’m saying is that I want and deserve to be let out. The question is, will I want to come back to the false security like I described in the last passage? Only time will tell.

  Brian had his heart set on returning to Kennedy High, but on the advice of his doctors and teachers the Harts decided he should go to a special school for a year, to phase him back gradually into the mainstream. That fall Brian entered the Anderson School in Staatsburg-on-Hudson, forty-five miles north of Bedford Hills, a small, coed, residential high school for students “whose behavior, emotional, and/or family problems are hindering their educational process.” The school’s fifty students took standard courses in math, English, and history but received extra attention and counseling from a staff of special education teachers, mental health workers, nurses, and physicians. In the first weeks after he arrived Brian held himself aloof, trying hard to show that he was much less troubled than his classmates. He succeeded so well that some of the staff wondered whether there had been some mistake—one counselor referred to Brian as “Jack Armstrong, all-American boy.” But Brian’s polish began to wear off. One night during a fire drill he stayed in his bed staring at the ceiling. When staff members came to get him, they were shocked when he refused to move and began cursing at them.

  With only three ninety-minute classes a day, academics at Anderson were designed not to push the student, but Brian pushed himself. He arrived early to class, sat in the front row, always did his homework, and, given an option to rewrite a paper, usually took it. He loved to read—Tolkien, Dickens, and Stephen King were his favorites—and always seemed to have a stack of books under his arm. At a school where to be called “not a problem” was high praise, Brian was “an ideal student,” according to Sandy Martin, his English teacher. “I remember one day when the kids had been giving me a rough time and I’d had it,” she says. “After class Brian came up and said, ‘I want you to know that I really appreciate your putting up with their BS. I get angry when people fool around when you’re trying to teach something.’ That made my day. I remember I wanted to hug him, but he was not a kid you could hug. He wanted to be hugged, but if you touched Brian, he would tense up.”

  While he was well liked by his teachers and classmates, Brian had no close friends at Anderson. “The other kids thought he was great, but Brian couldn’t believe it,” says Sandy Martin. “Inside he didn’t think he was worthy. He’d say, ‘Why would anyone want me?’” His lack of confidence was especially apparent with girls. Although he desperately wanted a girlfriend, and with his good looks and charm, girls flocked around him, Brian couldn’t seem to make the right connection. Because Anderson had a four-to-one ratio of boys to girls, few of his classmates had girlfriends. Yet Brian felt inadequate for not having one.

  There was another reason why having a girlfriend was especially important to Brian. At about this time he began to talk to his mother about his fears that he might be gay. During eighth grade he had been propositioned by a man in the town park. Brian had fled. His psychiatrist suggested he tell the police, but Brian worried that the police would assume he was homosexual. Brian didn’t mention the incident again, but he told his mother that when they had put him in the hospital, he had been terrified that it was a whorehouse for men. Mary listened to her son, but Brian was so popular with girls, she didn’t believe his fears were justified. “What’s the difference?” she would say. “Stop beating yourself over it—you are what you are.” Brian’s counselor at Anderson also felt his fears were groundless, stemming from common adolescent panic at being unable to connect with the opposite sex. But Brian remained troubled; talking with his mother, he would hold his hands up and shake his head sadly. “These hands,” he would say. “They’re such feminine hands.”

  Worries about his sexuality made Brian feel even further from the normalcy he strove for. Brian didn’t want to be a “special case,” but it bugged him that to be “normal” he had to take pills twice a day and have his blood level measured once a month. And so part of trying to be normal was skipping his lithium, which he called a “weakness.” “I refuse to take it anymore,” Brian would announce to a friend. “I’m going to try to do it on my own.” When he was feeling good, Brian would persuade himself that he could manage without lithium, and he would stubbornly try to overcome his mood swings through sheer force of will. Other times he would get high and forget to take it. Without the lithium, however, he would sink into depression. At meals, where he was usually at the center of a laughing group of students, he would sit alone, staring into space like a robot. If someone asked him to go for a walk or play a game, he would reply in a monotone, without looking up, that he didn’t feel like it. “He would phase out and you couldn’t get through to him,” says one teacher. “It was as if there were a plastic shield around him that you couldn’t penetrate. You’d want to take him by the shoulders and shake life back into him.” The difference between Brian’s highs and lows was so great that at staff meetings it was common to hear teachers say, “Which Brian are we talking about?”

  Brian’s two moods are strikingly juxtaposed in his journal. Four months after arriving at Anderson he described his feelings about the school, concluding:

  It’s kind of funny, but I’m due out of here in June, too. To go home, with Mom, Dad, and Vicky, good pup. That’s kind of fun, no, sad. Because chances are I’ll be due to leave there to college in a year after I get home, then on my own. It seems so unfair to me that two years of my life could have been taken away from me like that. I feel cheated, as surely my parents do too. The pain and guilt they must have felt signing their baby into a loony bin, to get him back for themselves two years later, only to send him away again. Oh Mom and Dad, I love you so much. Please forgive me.

  Six weeks later Brian circled the entry and wrote below it in a scrawled, angry hand:

  I read that now and all that seems like total BULLSHIT! It’s like a script to a soap opera. Reading that is like cutting your way out from the bottom of a giant bowl of spaghetti with clam sauce. No matter how fast or how much you chop, you fall, sink deeper and deeper, gasping for air, almost drowning from a roomful of smoke, then fog, then finally rain of liquid lead.

  Underneath he drew a picture of a man disappearing beneath a massive weight. Only the man’s hands are visible as he struggles to stay alive.

  One Friday afternoon near the end of his first year at Anderson, Brian’s friends became concerned about him. The students at Anderson were a tight-knit group, bound together by their troubles. If a student played hooky for an evening or was involved in drinking or drugs, his friends typically covered for him, but when someone was in a deep depression, they alerted the staff. Suicide attempts at Anderson were frequent—almost one per week, according to a teacher. Most were not life-threatening—cuts from flip-top cans, razors, knives, or glass, or minor overdoses of medication. When Brian seemed to be withdrawing that weekend, his friends spoke to his teachers. On Saturday morning when Brian discussed suicide with some of his friends at breakfast, again those teachers were alerted. But it was too late. Shortly after breakfast Brian disappeared.

  The next week was a blur of telephone calls and search posses. The school believed Brian might head ou
t West to see one of his sisters. The Harts hired a private investigator, who was convinced that Brian had not left the area. The students at Anderson were somber—almost all of them had considered or attempted suicide at some point, and they were fearful that they might come in one morning to learn that Brian had been found dead. “In all honesty people expected to find him hanging in the woods,” says an Anderson teacher. The police searched the shores of the Hudson for Brian’s corpse. The Harts never believed that Brian would kill himself but feared he might have a psychotic break, wander off someplace, and be hit by a train. As the days went by and the chances of Brian’s being found alive grew slim, they were terrified that perhaps this time they had lost him forever. Friday morning at the breakfast table, six days after he had disappeared, they began to discuss where to bury Brian. That afternoon when Mary got home from work, she heard a soft, apprehensive voice on the answering machine: “Mom, I’m all right. Can you come get me? I’ll call back.”

  Fifteen minutes later the phone rang. It was Brian. He was calling from a pay phone in a park twelve miles from school. Mary sped up Route 9, furious at every red light, terrified that Brian wouldn’t be there when she arrived. Though it was seven o’clock when she pulled into the park, it was still light out. Families ate at picnic tables and children’s voices pierced the warm summer night. Then she saw Brian walking across the field toward her, his jeans and sweatshirt coarse with grime, his hair tangled, his face shadowed by a week’s growth of beard. People at the picnic tables eyed him nervously. Mary put her arms around him, but Brian, self-conscious, said, “Let’s get in the car.” Not long after they got on the road, Brian asked his mother for a hug. Mary stopped the car and clutched her son tightly.

  Brian had no idea how long he had been gone. All he remembered of that week were a few images: lying in a gutter in the rain, hearing people call his name but being unable to respond; finding a deserted hunter’s cabin in the woods where he had eaten a jar of moldy peanut butter; sneaking down to the park at night to scavenge watermelon rinds and other scraps from the garbage pails; wading into the Hudson River with the intention of drowning but then walking out. When he talked about that week with his counselor at Anderson, his eyes widened with fear. “Jesus, what a thing to do,” Brian would say. “How could I go through that?” For almost a year, the terror of that week would return to Brian like a sudden chill.