Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  “I think possibly when you’re with somebody who causes you pain, they’re empowered as the only person who can get you out of pain,” Bank said. “So we would take breaks and be separate for a time and then come back together. We were very bonded.… He just was an incredibly devoted boyfriend.” He loved giving her quirky gifts, including things he had made himself. He gave her a black-and-white photograph of Batman and Robin “where you could see the seams of Batman’s tights,” she said. He made her a menorah out of coat hangers and a pair of shoes out of duct tape. He cut out animal stories from the newspaper and sent them to her. “It was incredible,” she said, “and he was really, really romantic in a way, like everything to the nth degree.”

  They lived in separate apartments in Manhattan. At one point, Will decided he needed to move out of the West Village to Brooklyn as a way to save money. Bank thought the prospect of moving to Brooklyn made him nervous, or scared, and so he broached the idea of moving into her apartment. She thought about it, and seriously considered it only because she thought it might lead to “a major change” for the better in their relationship. “What I realized was that it would just be more of the same, and more of the same is not good,” she said. “It wouldn’t have calmed him or made him happier. It wasn’t going to make us a happy couple. I couldn’t do anything else and be with Will. I’m not sure I could’ve written that book and been with Will. He was so consuming and volatile.” In retrospect, she remembered a few comments he made that gave her pause. Once, when visiting her mother, Will said that he was “against marriage” because “there’s a property arrangement.” He also said that if he were to have children, he’d want them to try all different kinds of drugs. “That just says, ‘Don’t think of me as a potential father, a mate exactly,’” she said. Things got so bad that she was hoping for an “apocalypse” so that she could use it as an excuse to get out or to see that he was “so committed to this relationship” that she needed to remain in it. “At times he really tried,” she said, “and I think at times he really wanted to be together.” He sent her a card that said, “Your boyfriend loves you to death,” which bothered her: “There was a violence to it, or something dark also,” she said.

  To complicate matters further, Bank was diagnosed with cancer. She was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatments. As she was deciding to switch her radiation oncologist to a doctor at Columbia Presbyterian from a doctor at New York University, she was “really conflicted” and “upset.” This was the moment that Will announced, “I love you and I want to move in with you.” His timing could not have been worse. Then, as she was riding her bicycle up to Columbia Presbyterian, a car hit her. She lost consciousness and ended up at St. Vincent’s Hospital, in the Village. She had been wearing a helmet but was concussed. She had “retrograde amnesia” for a year and couldn’t make any new memories or remember things from one minute to the next. She couldn’t even remember for sure if Will was, or had been, her boyfriend.

  Between her cancer treatments, her concussion, and Will moving to Brooklyn, that was pretty much the end of things between them. She recalled it wasn’t his finest moment. “He was really pretty shitty about the concussion stuff,” she said, “and he didn’t really believe me about the trouble I was having. It wasn’t until later that he was told or read up and found out that actually, ‘post-concussion syndrome’ is a real thing that does cause these problems and wasn’t something I was trying to inflict on him. I think it really was pretty much over at that point. I think we still saw each other sometimes, but he was seeing other people and I was seeing other people, I guess.”

  She still thinks about his dark side. “Will was in a lot of pain for most of the time I knew him, through all the time I knew him,” she recalled. “He drank to get out of pain, and he took a lot of chances. I remember actually getting really angry with him when I did have cancer and he was talking about dying. I remember it was so much a part of my life at that moment that I felt it was frivolous to talk to me about death when it was just symbolic [for him], seeing at that moment what I was facing. But he was not careful, and the reason that he was not careful is that part of him wanted to get out of pain in a big way.” She wondered if Will had a death wish. “You live carelessly partly because the worst thing in the world would not be if you died,” she said. “He was in a lot of pain, and he put himself in situations, dangerous situations, as a result of that.”

  In the fall of 1995, Will was living in Park Slope. One night, Will Iselin and his English then-wife invited Will to dinner at their apartment on Columbus Avenue and 71st Street. Iselin was in the business of selling beautiful antique furniture to the people who could afford it. He and his wife had two young children. In other words, even though they both lived in New York City, Will Iselin was living a very different life than was Will Daniel. “I’ve never been a politically active human being, it’s not my thing,” Iselin said. “I should be, but I’m not. And so he knew that. He would always give me a hard time. He’d say, ‘When are you going to actually do something? All you do is sell used furniture to rich people, and you should be doing something better, you should be doing something more worthwhile.’ He was half joking, but there was definitely an edge to it, and he could have a very moralizing tone.” Will was still pursuing his efforts to register homeless voters as well as playing a lot of softball in Central Park, as part of a team called the Cats and Dogs. It was an awkward evening, at best. “It was clear he couldn’t relate,” Iselin said. “Here I was with a wife and two kids and sort of a company job. I think it was very hard for him.” Will’s way of dealing with that uncomfortable situation was to more or less shut down. Iselin said the “curtain” would “come down” and “you could talk about all this stuff but you didn’t really get very far.” Will wasn’t one to fill the gap in a difficult conversation. “I think that must have come very much from his mother,” he said. “She was not a woman of many words.”

  Playing softball in Central Park twice every week became an integral part of Will’s New York City life. He started pushing some of the other, better players in the Cats and Dogs to also play in a more competitive, and more organized, all-guys game on Tuesday. Will became the captain and the pitcher of the team, which became known alternatively as the Fetchers, the Bad Dogs, and then, finally, the Mad Dogs. They recruited recent college athletes to be their teammates. Not everyone thought Will’s obsession with softball was charming. Melissa Bank remembered that on their first date, Will took her to a Cats and Dogs party. “I played on that stupid softball team,” she said.

  By then, Will had decided to abandon his project to register the homeless to vote. Instead, he enrolled in a graduate degree program—apparently to try to get his Ph.D.—in clinical psychology at Columbia University. In early 1996, he wrote Wallis, “I am recruiting and assessing families for another genetic study of schizophrenia. This one at Columbia. Subjects are also being collected at Wash[ington] U[niversity] among other places. Apparently, there are crazy people out your way too. I have taken a leave of absence from the doctoral program to do this full-time.” Then Will turned to his love life. “I am also still looking for Ms. Right, if only to make the both of us miserable,” he wrote. “I’m making progress though. I have gradually reduced the time that elapses between the first meeting and the final scene to almost zero. My goal is to begin breaking up with a woman before I meet her so we won’t have it hanging over us.”

  Will never completed his doctoral work at Columbia. Instead, he switched over to the school of social work and earned a master’s degree from the school in 1998. After he graduated, he came to the attention of Dr. Steven J. Donovan, a professor in the psychiatry department at the Columbia University Medical Center. It was a bit unusual for a student with a degree in social work to end up getting a gig at the medical school. “But I remember particularly somebody telling me there were two extraordinarily strong social work candidates graduating and that I should interview them and so I did,” Donovan said, “and
I ended up hiring Will.” Donovan had a grant to study “explosive aggression in children,” he explained, and he took an immediate liking to Will. “He was a terrific guy. We became friends and he contributed a lot to the intellectual life of the project.” As usual, Donovan had no idea about Will or his family. Will never talked about the Truman connection, of course. Donovan just saw a smart guy who seemed interested in the work, with whom he got along well.

  The purpose of the study was to test the effects of a drug—divalproex sodium—on children who were prone to mood swings and inexplicable outbursts of aggression. Will interviewed the children and adolescents who were to take part in the study. He helped to parse the study’s findings and to accumulate the data. He did the psychotherapy with the adolescents. He completed the grading forms. He interacted with the main regulatory agency—the institutional review board. “He seemed to function very well on that level,” Donovan said.

  But during their work together on the study about disruptive adolescents, Donovan began to notice that Will, too, was capable of similar kinds of uncontrollable outbursts. He wasn’t sure what was causing Will to behave in this way—if he perhaps was reacting to how the disruptive children were behaving. But he was pretty concerned about Will’s odd mood swings. “His anger was uncontrollable,” Donovan explained. “His need to yell. He would have to excuse himself and go yell and then he would come back as if nothing had happened. It was a bit of a mystery as to what was torturing him. I never got to the bottom of it.”

  Donovan said Will’s strange behavior began to appear about a year into their work together. “I started hearing stories of him staying late at work and just not going home,” he said. “He would pen these little notes to me sometimes. I remember one time he had been going through some old records of mine just because he was curious as to how I’d gotten this research going. He would give me little notes just saying he liked the idea that it started out with sort of hunches and I kept pursuing this thing and it eventually developed into something that was worth researching, something to that effect. It was nice in a way, but on the other hand I mean what’s he doing at three in the morning plowing through these old records? What was he searching for? What was he trying to find?”

  Will had been seeing a therapist for years. He told Donovan that this process wasn’t bringing him any closer in touch with his deepest feelings. He was bottled up inside, a cliché of a middle-aged WASPy guy who could not reconcile the things that were bothering him. Donovan recommended that Will go see a friend, a well-respected analyst whom Donovan thought could help Will get to the bottom of some of his deep-seated issues, mostly related to the anger he seemed to harbor against his family, particularly his father. The new approach seemed to work, up to a point. “He felt more authentic and in touch with this stuff, but he just didn’t know what to do with it,” Donovan said. That’s when he noticed Will would have uncontrollable outbursts of rage. He said Will’s explanation of his strange behavior “never made complete sense to me,” but he didn’t want to probe into it in too much detail. “We were friends,” he continued, “but on an intellectual level.… I didn’t want to contaminate it with things that would force me to assume a clinical role.” He thought that at some point in the sessions between Will and the new analyst “something got set off” and “it wasn’t contained. It wasn’t resolved.”

  Out came Will’s anger at his family for how they treated Harrison. Out came Will’s own feelings that he seemed stuck socially, unable to commit to a relationship while two of his brothers had settled down, married, and started families of their own. “When he talked about his family I remember, when his father was still alive, he was very, very angry at him and would write very angry letters,” Donovan said. “He felt very warm toward his mother, but I noticed that he didn’t have anything particularly good to say about his father. I didn’t even know that his father was the editor of the Times.” As often was the case with Will, Harrison—and the way he was being treated—was at the center of the rage he felt toward his father. “There continued to be a squabble about whether he was being bullied by some of the people at the Westchester place,” Donovan recalled. “I remember coming into his office when he was working on sending a letter to his father or to the institution trying to help his brother.”

  Michaeline Bresnahan, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, worked with Will on a follow-up study on people who had had congenital rubella during the last rubella epidemic. Will did the interviews with the patients to see whether there was an increased occurrence of either autism or schizophrenia in the population of adults that had been exposed to rubella during their mother’s pregnancy. Occasionally, she and Will would take long car rides together to visit some of the rubella patients in the study. “We talked and talked and talked,” she said. “And we talked about his brother, his disabled brother.” She did not know that Will had two other brothers without learning disabilities. She only knew about Harrison because he was the brother Will wanted to talk about. She shared with Will that her son, Charles, was autistic. Will began trying to figure out whether Harrison might be autistic, too. Part of Will’s journey was trying to figure out what was wrong with his brother.

  She said Will thought about issues of mental illness deeply. “I don’t know that he carried that with him all the time,” she explained. “But when we were together, that’s what we talked about and that’s what he seemed to understand. And he raised questions about his brother a lot. And he was concerned about his brother’s care, the quality of his brother’s care. I mean, how many [brothers] are doing that? This was a person of incredible character who had finally gotten his life—whatever mishaps had happened and all of his getting lost along the way—he had gotten things straightened out. He was on a path. I don’t know where he was going to go, but he was on a path and he was productive and he was contributing. And he had things to contribute. And he was a decent sort of person. He was a person of high moral character. Andover looks at him as a psychiatric social worker, and I’m sure a lot of people think, ‘Loser guy.’ And I look at him and I think that this was a real profound human being.… He was a person of substance. And his brothers probably don’t have any clue. They have no clue.”

  * * *

  DONOVAN HELPED WILL GET his next gig—working with homeless AIDS patients. In February 1997, Sarah Conover was leading a new study of HIV among homeless men—to follow up her previous work—and needed a full-time field coordinator, someone to work closely with her, and others, to find and interview the men who would participate in a study designed to find ways to get the men to change their behavior—for example, by wearing a condom—to reduce the incidence of HIV among their population. Conover was looking for someone who had previously worked with mentally ill adults in a clinical setting and who could work independently. The studies were all conducted near the Columbia University Medical Center in Upper Manhattan, at the Fort Washington Armory, which was then the largest homeless shelter in New York City. Some one thousand men lived there.

  In recommending Will, Donovan told Conover about Will’s inexplicable bouts of rage, which he thought was probably Tourette’s syndrome. “He told me that he needed to have a kind of safe place to be where the Tourette’s part of his behavior would not cause him troubles,” Conover explained, “because it was [a problem] over at the psychiatric institute.” Will would kick the elevator door. He would swear loudly and disturb his co-workers. People were getting concerned. But Conover worked out of an apartment near the medical center—not a typical work environment. The hope was that this would make it easier for Will if his anger persisted. “In the beginning, he frightened people,” Conover said, “because he would put his fist through the door. One day I came in and there’s a big hole in the door. And he would swear a lot.” When Will drove around with other team members, they were struck by how he would “always” swear at other drivers. “You sort of got the feeling that there was a spontaneity to some of
it that was not controllable,” she said. The odd behavior was chronic: “Every day he would have little outbursts.” But, Conover continued, after she explained Will’s condition to the other professionals involved in the study, they realized that his outbursts were not personal. He no longer frightened them. “When I explained this and then after he charmed them, everybody got over that,” she said.

  Conover’s husband, Ezra Susser, was the chair of epidemiology at Columbia. Although Susser never was in a position to diagnose Will, he also described his behavior as consistent with Tourette’s syndrome. “That was a major, major part of his life,” he said, “and one of the reasons I think that he was working here, and not in some other kind of job. It was a significant thing. He would often have outbursts, where you say something, and you can’t control it. People tend to say swear words and stuff like that.” He said Will had had Tourette’s “for ages” and “certainly long before he came to us and so he was living with it.” (If so, this was news to his brothers Clif and Thomas, as well as to people who knew him best such as Melissa Bank, Richard Riker, or Will Iselin. They were aware of his temper, yes, but none of them ever thought he had Tourette’s.) Susser said having Will be a part of the study of homeless men with HIV gave him “the room” to work with other people in an environment that would be forgiving to his penchant for random outbursts. “We were working with really down-and-out people, marginalized people, there were all kinds of people both who were among our patients, and then the staff, too, so that he fit into that niche very well,” he said. “Everybody was very fond of him, and he was an excellent worker, and sort of irreplaceable.”