After going AWOL, even Brian realized that returning to Kennedy was out of the question. But once he was back on lithium, his senior year at Anderson went smoothly. He earned an A in an expository writing course at a local community college. He was accepted at all four colleges he applied to and decided to attend the State University of New York at Brockport, a small liberal arts college near Rochester. When he came back to Anderson after a weekend at home and told people about his new girlfriend, he was so enthusiastic that one teacher thought he had invented her. Mary, a pretty, red-haired girl Brian had known at Kennedy, was devoted to Brian. She visited him as often as possible, drove him back on Sunday nights after weekends together, and wrote him long, encouraging letters almost every day. Brian’s parents were so delighted that even when Mary’s mother called to tell them that she and her husband had come home unexpectedly and found Brian and Mary in bed, they couldn’t be too angry—Brian was so happy.
Brian felt closer to the mainstream than he had in years. In an essay for his class on “The Modern Age,” he wrote:
Anderson is an escape. It is an escape from real life. It is more relaxed and less distressing. I am bored of this make-believe world, and I am anxious to graduate to the real world. I have become too comfortable in this safe, get-over world. But there have been times when I needed this escape like a man with a bullet wound cries for morphine. The realization of my departure is solidifying as my graduation day grows nearer each passing moment. But I jump for the chance of change! So I will take everything I have learned about myself and people, as well as everything else I have learned and move on. . . . I will move on, change, and weep later.
Brian graduated from Anderson first in his class of eighteen, winner of the prize for Best Attitude, and valedictorian, as voted by the teachers. In his address, he urged his classmates to make use of what they had learned at Anderson as they went on to face new challenges. He concluded:
On behalf of the graduating class I thank each teacher, dorm parent, social worker, cook, kitchen worker, maintenance man, housekeeper, administrator, secretary, as well as our parents and our families for their support and guidance whether or not they knew they gave it. We must leave to be born again, to start fresh, to take our second chance with an understanding of why we had it: We are loved and we are believed in. Thank you.
That summer Brian dove back into the mainstream with a vengeance, as if trying to make up for lost time. He worked as a clerk in a department store by day and as a busboy in a restaurant at night. Then he partied with his old Kennedy friends. His parents would hear him come home as late as two or three in the morning. He occasionally skipped his lithium, and his mother grew tired of asking him whether he had taken it. He was going to be alone at college, and he would have to learn. Brian saw less of his girlfriend, Mary. He wanted to “cool” the relationship before his freshman year at Brockport.
As late August approached, Brian started to get apprehensive. At a precollege orientation seminar at a nearby hotel, the other young men and women had acted so sure of themselves; they knew what they wanted to major in, and their careers seemed planned and focused. Brian’s aspirations—forestry, social work, and the Peace Corps were among the possibilities he had mentioned—were as changeable as his moods. He fretted that although he had been a star at Anderson, an Anderson education was not as rigorous as that offered by public high schools. He worried that he might not be up to college. One night shortly before school started, when his parents were out to dinner, they got a call from Brian asking if he could come and talk to them. He arrived at the restaurant in a panic. He had been talking to another college-bound Anderson friend whose nervousness had kindled Brian’s fears. His parents tried to calm him, telling him he didn’t have to go, but Brian’s response was “I’ll go, I’ll go.” The night before they drove him to Brockport, Brian seemed dazed. He couldn’t decide what to pack, although he had been planning all summer. On the ride up, as he talked about the courses he wanted to take, Brian was clearly anxious. At registration he thought he saw someone from Bedford Hills. He was upset—it seemed that even as a college freshman hundreds of miles from home, he couldn’t start out with a fresh slate.
That fall Brian worked hard to be like everyone else. In early October, when Pat drove up for Parents Weekend, he was impressed at how Brian seemed to be a part of everything, at how many people knew him. They went to a football game, to a play, and to church. But though it had all the earmarks of a typical college weekend, Pat could tell Brian was on edge, straining hard to have him think that things were under control.
One night not long after that weekend, the Harts received a call from Brian, who was weeping and said he couldn’t handle college. “Oh my God,” Mary thought. “Why don’t you come home,” she said. “Everything will be okay.” Brian told her he was calling from the phone booth in the school cafeteria, and he didn’t want the other students to see him crying. Mary told him to stay there. She called Dr. Kornhaber, who called Brian. They had a long talk, and Brian managed to get through the night and remain in school.
Once again Brian was up and down. The Harts would receive a ten-page letter full of plans and projects, telling them he was going to stop fooling around and get down to work and that they shouldn’t worry. Brian was taking his lithium, they could tell. Then there would be a phone call at two in the morning and a thin, lonely voice asking, “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” When Sandy Martin, his English teacher at Anderson, who had received many spirited, chatty letters from Brian, called him in November, Brian was stoned. “I’m losing it,” he told her. “I’m partying too much.” His grades were sinking, and he had skipped several midterm exams. He said that he was hanging out with the drug crowd and didn’t have enough self-control to break away. Searching for a spark of the old Brian, Sandy encouraged him to make a list of things he needed to do to get his act together. Brian said he would do it, but he sounded drained and sad.
“At Thanksgiving vacation when I picked up Brian at the train station, he was wearing blue jeans and a white, cable-knit Irish sweater and he looked terrific,” says Mary Hart. “He got in the car, but when I asked him if he wanted to drive, he said no. I knew something was off. He started talking about his girlfriend, Mary. ‘She’s been so good to me, and I’ve been so bad to her,’ he kept saying. He cried and started pounding the seat with his fist. I had never seen him this disturbed, and I said, ‘Brian, you’re frightening me. I think we’d better go to the hospital.’ He said, ‘No, I’m all right. I am just really, really upset.’ I held his hand, and he squeezed mine so tight I thought he might break it.”
On Thanksgiving Day, at a family reunion at their cousins’, Brian’s sister told her mother that something seemed wrong with Brian. Mary Hart went downstairs where Brian and his cousins were watching a football game. She saw immediately that Brian was “not right.” He was gripping the chair tightly, with a dazed expression on his face. “We’ll go home now, Brian,” said Mary. “Good,” Brian said in a remote, clipped voice. “Good. Yeah. I want to go home.” As they walked into their house, Brian turned to his mother and waved both hands at her, as if shooing her away. “It was the oddest thing,” she recalls. “He was looking at me, but he was seeing something that he didn’t want to see and he kept waving his hands, as if to say, ‘Please go away.’ I realized afterward that he was hallucinating.”
The next day Pat took Brian to Dr. Kornhaber, who told them that Brian’s blood levels were unbalanced and would have to be stabilized. Brian later admitted that he hadn’t been taking his lithium at school and to compensate had gobbled a handful of tablets on the train home. Kornhaber recommended hospitalization. Brian said no. Kornhaber said if Brian refused, he could not take responsibility for him. Brian reluctantly gave in. That afternoon his parents drove him to Stony Lodge. As they pulled in the drive, Brian looked out the window. “I was in this place for my sixteenth birthday,” he said quietly, “and it looks as if I’m going to be in it for my nineteenth bir
thday.”
Once again Brian believed that he would be at the hospital for only a few days. But this time, instead of being edgy to get out, by the end of the month he stopped asking when he would be released. His parents grew concerned that he was becoming too comfortable there, that he might be giving up. Nevertheless, when the doctors decided Brian was ready to go home, provided he found a job, Mary realized she wasn’t sure she was ready. “I didn’t know if I could take it, if he was going to get into drugs again,” she says, shaking her head. “We had tried just about everything. We had tried Brian at home. We had tried freedom at college. Now home and work. I didn’t think he was well enough to come home. I just felt things were not quite right.” Meanwhile, the insurance for Brian’s hospitalization was running out. “Everything seemed to be going down the tubes, and Brian just didn’t seem to be getting better,” says Mary. Her frustration concerned the doctors, who suggested Pat and Mary begin family therapy with Brian. The Harts agreed. After seven weeks in the hospital, Brian was discharged.
Brian found a job almost immediately. Jim Candon, a supervisor at the Margaret Chapman School in Hawthorne, says he will never forget his interview with Brian: “I asked him what made him think he was right for the job. Brian said, ‘Because I have a lot of love to give.’ I interpreted that to mean he needed a lot of love.” The Margaret Chapman School is a school for profoundly retarded children, many of whom cannot perform even simple tasks for themselves. As a teacher’s aide Brian dressed the children, toilet trained them, brushed their teeth, washed their hands and faces, combed their hair, fed them, and assisted them in the classroom with their drawing and counting. Many new staff members are squeamish when asked to brush a child’s teeth or wipe his bottom, but Brian showed no reluctance, even volunteering for tasks that others refused to do. The staff realized that Brian had a gift for working with these children. Playing basketball with kids who could barely move, he would guide them around, encouraging them, getting them involved in the game. In class he persuaded a little girl who had always drawn with only one crayon to use four other colors. “There was an immediate bonding between Brian and the kids,” says Jim Candon. “He had a gentleness about him, a way of being able to reach the kids without the necessity of verbal expression. These children were real human beings to Brian. He always treated them as normal, not retarded. I think he found in the children a reflection of his own brokenness, and thus, more than any of us, could empathize. He could see the human being beneath the mask, the real person struggling, aching, and reaching out for understanding.”
Once again Brian was full of plans. He talked about his work at Chapman with his parents, overflowing with ideas for programs, passionate about the need for funding to help retarded children. He talked about returning to school for a degree in special education so he could make a career of this work. Reconciled to living at home for the time being, he began buying plants and hanging posters of rock groups on his bedroom wall. With his first paycheck from Chapman he bought a stereo. He worked double shifts to help save for a car. He enrolled in a sculpture course at Westchester Community College and talked about clearing a space in the cellar for a studio. He constructed a collage from magazine photographs of his favorite things—skiing, travel, wildlife, and women—and hung it on his bedroom wall. He jotted down lists of things he planned to do.
But just as it had at Anderson and at Brockport, Brian’s period of normalcy began to fray. Once again the Harts could tell he wasn’t taking his lithium. He grew a scraggly beard and dressed less neatly; at his grandmother’s birthday dinner he was the only man without a tie. He hadn’t talked to his girlfriend, Mary, since before Thanksgiving, and he spent most of his free time with Melinda, a sixteen-year-old girl he had met at the hospital who had been a member of the fast crowd. He had started smoking pot again, going to parties, and coming home late. He began to skip his sculpture class; he stopped getting to work on time. Some days he didn’t show up at all. Questioned by his parents, he would offer vague answers and half-truths. While the Harts were concerned, they agreed that they shouldn’t hector Brian. Once again, they were walking the fine line between protecting and intruding.
One evening in January, Brian called his parents from a bar in the nearby town of Mahopac. He would hitchhike home, he said. It was a cold night, and several inches of snow lay on the ground. As the evening wore on and Brian hadn’t returned, the Harts grew concerned. Pat drove to the bar. Brian wasn’t there. Pat combed the roads between Mahopac and Bedford Hills, and finally saw Brian hitchhiking. When Brian got in, Pat could tell his son had been drinking heavily, and he questioned him about it. Suddenly Brian reached for the door handle and tried to jump from the moving car. His father grabbed his arm and tried to hold him as he slowed the car. When the car stopped, Brian jumped out. Pat got out of the car and chased him through the snow. Brian swore at his father. “Leave me alone!” he screamed. “Leave me alone!” Pat finally tackled his son and held him down. But as soon as he got up, Brian took off again. Pat caught up with him again, but Brian shook loose and rolled under a guardrail and down a ravine toward a two-lane parkway. Pat was terrified that Brian would be hit by a car, but he saw Brian get up and cross the road. Pat got back in his car and tried to follow. When he reached the exit ramp from the parkway, he saw Brian lying on the road. He stopped the car and pleaded with Brian to come home. “You don’t want to miss work,” he said. “Yeah, they love me, those kids,” Brian kept saying. “I love those kids and they love me.” But Brian broke loose again and ran off into the night. Pat finally drove home, feeling frightened and powerless.
Mary went out to look for Brian and found him downtown. She pulled up beside him, opened the door, and said, “Come on in, Brian.” Brian lunged at the car and kicked one of the headlights. Mary drove farther down the road and parked where she thought he couldn’t see her. She wanted to stay close to her son in case he fell or passed out in the snow. When Brian spotted the car, he walked up and spat at it. “Leave me alone,” he shouted. “I’m not an alcoholic. Leave me alone.” Then he stomped off. Mary went home.
Half an hour later, as Pat and Mary sat in the living room, they heard the back door open. Brian walked in. Nobody said a word as he went straight up to his room.
The following morning Brian showed up at his mother’s office at the town hall and asked to borrow her car. He wouldn’t say where he was going, he just insisted that it was important. Feeling uneasy but wanting to let him know she still trusted him, Mary gave him the keys. When he returned, he gave her a big hug and told her he had been to Alcoholics Anonymous. “This is the first of ninety meetings in ninety days,” he said. But his enthusiasm for AA lasted only a few sessions. He continued to drink and to have his ups and downs, but now there were more downs than ups. Brian was verbally abusive to his parents, and they could tell he was doing drugs again. Brian’s friends were away at college, and he had more or less pulled away from everybody except Melinda, with whom he now spent much of his free time. One day Mary called her and asked her to persuade Brian to go to work. That Tuesday night Mary arrived home to find Brian at the dining room table, sketching, and saying over and over again, “Fucking bitch. Fucking bitch. Fucking bitch.” Mary, who had to prepare for a town board meeting that night, went to her room and closed the door. Brian stormed in, swearing at her. She lost her patience. “Get out of here,” she shouted. “Just get out of this room.” Brian stomped into his own room, which adjoined his parents’, and banged on the wall.
On Thursday, boiling with anger at his parents, Brian announced to Dr. Kornhaber that he refused to attend any more family sessions. But by Friday morning he had changed his mind, and their therapy session was their best ever. Brian was more open and forthright than he had been in some time. He acknowledged that he’d been drinking and smoking pot and even gave them a rundown of the drugs he’d tried at college—cocaine, acid, and angel dust. He admitted that he had been lax in his attendance at work, and he vowed to apologize to his bos
s. He talked about saving money for a car and about returning to school part-time. Though Pat and Mary couldn’t help thinking, “Here we go again, off on another roll,” they were elated.
Brian got a haircut, shaved his beard, and even washed his clothes—every last shirt and sock. His apology was accepted at Chapman, and Brian worked Saturday and Sunday. Sunday afternoon he visited Melinda, but instead of staying out late as usual, he was home by suppertime. Mary cooked veal parmigiana, Brian’s favorite dish.
After dinner Brian and his parents sat in the living room and talked. They didn’t discuss anything in particular; it was just a pleasant, relaxed conversation—about college, the New York Giants, Melinda, how he’d appreciated his mother making veal parmigiana, how he’d started smoking pot in the sixth grade, the rock concert he planned to attend the following Saturday night. “It was nothing spectacular,” says Mary. “It was just a mother and a father and a son talking.” But after all the troubles and frustrations, during which Brian and his parents had become almost adversarial, the evening was so relaxed and normal that Mary was overwhelmed with relief. She believed that this might be the beginning of a new level of honesty between them. Now, looking back, she thinks that her son was saying good-bye.
The following evening, when Mary and Pat got home, there was a note on the kitchen blackboard: “Gone for a walk. Going to stop at library. Don’t worry. Love, Brian.” An hour and a half later, as they sat in the living room, they heard a thump in the attic. They rushed upstairs. Brian was walking down the attic steps. His mother asked him what he’d been doing in the attic, a rarely visited storage area. “Looking for books,” he said. The Harts knew it was too dark to see much up there. Brian said he’d used matches. Pat, concerned about the fire hazard, started to get angry, but Mary gave him a look, and they didn’t pursue the matter.
November of the Soul Page 11
