Blue Genes (20 page)

Some of this angst had already become apparent when we moved to England. After several months there, and after I had written Tony about our trip several times, and after my discovery that it would be hard to get work there, I was disappointed not to hear from him. We had even invited him to spend Christmas with us in London. Nothing. It would have been good to have him share the holiday with us. We missed him.

Finally I heard. Tony said that his pride had kept him from admitting to us—and to himself—how “wrenching” our move to England was for him. It had caused “an inexpressible loneliness and sense of loss.” Susan and I had never seen him so emotionally expressive before.

He should—he avows—have his own love, his own family, his own niche. He goes on to say that his “analysis” was helping in that regard. (In fact, it was a very short-lived psychotherapy. He would decide, after less than a year, that he was getting little from it.)

Finally, in a statement typical of the grief caused by long silences and the fantasies they create in our heads, he ends, “I’m writing now because I realized that to extend my silence any further would be to damage our relationship, perhaps irredeemably. I hope I haven’t done so already, because I value it as I value few things in my life.”

How much misunderstanding there is in silences! I would never have given up our relationship, no matter what happened, certainly not for his lack of letter writing. I felt his pain sharply.

WHILE WE LIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO
, Tony came for visits occasionally. We had him for Christmas two or three times. The last time, in 1977, Susan sent us both off to Reno to enjoy ourselves at the gaming tables. She bought the airplane tickets, reserved a hotel room, and gave us a little bit of cash. We lost our money in a few hours at the tables and slot machines, but enjoyed being with each other. After leaving the casinos, we traipsed through the town—a poor man’s version of Vegas—peering into gun shops, taking in a bad movie and a travesty of a stage show, and talking about our lives.

A foggy, socked-in airport forced us to take a bus back home. We slept a lot, but we also talked about other rides we had been on together, including with Dad out west, and in Mexico. I enjoyed myself tremendously. It had been almost twenty years since we had spent that much time “alone together.”

From San Diego, where he had gone to do a bit of research, Tony wrote a short note that ended: “I love all of you very much and I love being with you.”

I believe Tony meant that. I believe that he enjoyed being connected to us and seeing what joy our family engendered. In the early days Tony was comfortable enough with our children. When he and Megan first met (she was two weeks old), she spit up on his best jacket, but he laughed it off. For baby Gabriela, he played “the ape,” leaping around and making monkey noises. She loved it.

As our daughters entered their preteen years, however, Tony didn’t know what to do with them. There was talk of going to Yankee games and of other activities, but we realized soon enough that Tony wasn’t going to become a father, and he wasn’t much suited to being an uncle, either.

Then, after we had settled again back East, a hard split came between us. It probably started earlier, when Susan and I were still in the process of moving to what she called “a beached whale of a house” in suburban New York on the west bank of the Hudson. The house was long and narrow and had thick stucco walls and lots of rooms, probably too many for the four of us. Still, high on a hill, it viewed the river and the Tappan Zee Bridge, and on spring afternoons we could see Pete Seeger’s
Clearwater
sloop sail by. How could we not buy it? But we had yet to get an approval from the bank for our mortgage. Because I had no job, getting a mortgage would be a particular challenge. I needed help.

I AM STANDING
on the sandy verge of a one-lane road on the New Jersey coast. This spit of land running north to south was where Uncle Ira and Aunt Frances occasionally went to seek peace and quiet. Frances was already suffering from the cancer that would kill her. Ira was aware that he would soon lose his wife. I had flown here with our two daughters because Susan and I felt that the cross-country trip by car was too arduous for them. She and her niece were driving some of our household goods in our old Volvo across the States. Also at Ira’s were his younger son, his wife, and a small child of theirs. It was a crowded, steamy summer scene, and I was already feeling nervous and out of sorts when I went for my evening phone call from Susan.

Ira and Frances had no telephone in their rented house, so I had arranged to receive calls from Susan at a pay booth on a deserted street at nine each night, not far from the beach and the house.

That particular night, Susan called with a sense of urgency and anxiety. The bank had refused to give us the mortgage because I had no new job. She was sitting in a motel in Nebraska, midway to New York. I was stuck with the kids on the Jersey Shore. We talked for a few minutes as she told me the situation. My anxiety level rose second by second. No job. No money. No mortgage. No house.

I put in a call to Tony. He was single at the time. He had saved lots of money from his
Times
salary. I was sure he would help me out.

I told him that I was standing in a phone booth on the Jersey Shore, with moths flying around my head beneath the streetlight; I told him that I didn’t know how to secure our mortgage without his help. I told him I was frightened.

“I don’t understand,” Tony said. “Why won’t they give you the mortgage?”

Tony had no experience with loans on houses—or on anything else. He was a novice where banks were concerned. As patiently as I could, I explained the situation.

“They need a co-signer, Tony. Someone with an income above $50,000 a year.” The bank was asking for someone to vouch for us, to back us up if there should be financial problems. I didn’t expect any. I told Tony this.

There was a long pause. It was the kind of pause that had an inevitable outcome. Tony was preparing to say no. I had heard that no before.

He started out with a different tactic, however.

“I don’t know that I have that kind of money.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. It was my turn to be nonplussed.

“I don’t think I made that much last year. Let me go check.”

I could hear Tony riffling through some papers, but I already knew the answer. He came back on the line.

“Christopher,” he said, using the formal moniker he sometimes employed as a joke, but this time the voice was troubled and I knew he was miffed. “No, I didn’t make $50,000 last year.”

“Jesus, Tony, what am I going to do?”

Long pause.

“Well, why didn’t you think of this before you chose the house?”

Eventually, Susan’s brother co-signed, we got the house, and we always paid the monthly mortgage on our own.

But that night, standing in limbo, I felt terribly betrayed and lost. Whatever the reasons that Tony could not or would not help out at this time, I felt bitter about it. My big brother was not there for me. Just as he hadn’t been there for me when I went off to school in 1942. When I really
needed
him.

IN THE LATE 1970S
, Tony was working on
Common Ground
. It had taken him seven years to complete this epic book that interweaves the busing crisis in Boston with two key families: the (white) Mc-Goffs and the (black) Twymons. A third family, the Divers, was not directly involved in busing, but provided a kind of Greek chorus on the scene.

When it was announced that the book was coming out, I was eager to read it. As with all his work, he had taken the opportunity many times to call and read passages over the telephone. I knew enough not to make any suggestions about these testings: they were meant not for us but for him to hear the words out loud and to get positive feedback. I had liked what he told me about the book, liked what I’d heard.

When I actually read the book, I was disappointed. It didn’t leap off the pages at me as it had when Tony read parts of it aloud. There was more detail and what I considered extraneous material than I preferred. I felt the book wasn’t a slam dunk.

Clearly, I was wrong. The book got rave reviews and a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a television series. That should probably have made me reconsider my views.

It didn’t, though I never told Tony I didn’t like the book. When we were invited to the publication party, thrown at a luxurious East Side apartment, we went. There were dozens of literary luminaries, but no one that Susan and I knew. After a while, feeling ignored—and that we had paid our respects—we left.

It took a year before I learned how angry Tony was. I had called him many times in the interim, but we hadn’t seen each other. And he had never called me—until now.

The phone call went something like this: “Christopher”—the voice as sonorous and serious as ever—“I haven’t been in touch for a while because I couldn’t believe what you and Susan did at the party for
Common Ground
. I have to tell you that I was very upset for a long time. But our relationship means too much to me to let this go on. I’d like to get together to talk about this.”

We met for a drink, and Tony expressed to me his vast disappointment about our reaction to the party and the fact I’d never said whether I liked the book or not (though he had probably gathered how I felt). Again, I recognized Tony’s intense need for total approval, love, and gratitude.

Still, in retrospect, I knew that we should have stuck it out at the party. Boredom should not have kept me from doing the right thing.

There is more to it than that. I now realize that Tony was to me what Halberstam was to him. I was jealous. Like Tony, I just couldn’t accept that I had my own aptitudes, my own acclaim. I was married to a warm, loving, and talented woman. I had two loving and beloved children who would make anyone proud. Scribner’s was about to publish
Silent Grief
.

But I retained jealousy and anger toward Tony. Why didn’t some of his success rub off on me? Why, in fact, didn’t he play big brother by putting me in touch with people who could give me a quicker, bigger leap up the ladder of success?

Because this didn’t happen, I concluded that Tony had no faith in me.

The deep core of both our jealousies (mine of him, his of other writers, such as Halberstam) went back to childhood. As with many siblings, there was bound to be rivalry. I felt that Dad favored him over me, while he was sure that Dad did nothing but criticize him. If asked, I might easily have said, “Dad loves you more,” and he might have said the same. This common, though unnerving, set of emotions usually gets ironed out as children grow into adults. My two grown daughters, with adulthood, have become close, confiding friends.

When traumas occur, however, no one makes the effort to sort out the conflicts, the negative feelings, the jealousies, the suspicions. In our case, neither of us raised these issues with the other. I, like Tony, continued to suspect that I had been the “outsider.” Neither of us was able to look at relationships and family dynamics closely or correctly, or even honestly.

Tony felt competition more vividly, more dangerously than I. While I eventually took these matters up with psychoanalysts, Tony took them up with no one.

As Tony’s depression deepened, there never seemed to be a way for us to examine the rift between us, or to heal it.

“WHY ARE YOU SO OBSESSED WITH DEATH?”
Tony asked me one day out at Sag Harbor as we walked across the excruciatingly hot sand on the way to a refreshment stand. In 1982, at the age of forty-nine, Tony had wed Linda Healey, an editor at an important New York publishing firm, and they had bought a house on the eastern tip of Long Island. That weekend Susan and I joined them. He was referring to the kinds of television programs I was making about end-of-life care, and the books I was writing.

“I’m not,” I retorted. “I’m obsessed with living.”

He didn’t get it, which was surprising, because he
had
understood why I wrote
Silent Grief
. On that occasion he had sent me the most moving communication I would ever receive from him and given me a publication party at his home, for both of which I was extremely grateful.

The reference to “last year” was to that point in time when Tony was in desperate emotional straits. Having finished
Common Ground
, he was searching for something else to write. In the meantime, he wrote magazine articles as a freelancer, one of which had been syndicated nationally. Unfortunately, the article resulted in a libel suit. With no future income in sight, and with his reputation on the line, Tony went into a series of anxious and depressive fits that threatened to undo him entirely. On the phone, his voice was deep, slow, devoid of any life. Susan and I worried about him constantly.

One evening after work, I suggested we have dinner. We went to an Afghan restaurant on Manhattan’s West Side. This was a modest place, with the cookstove in the front of a narrow store-front space. It specialized in spicy meat broiled on skewers. Tony and I had always relished this kind of exotic but simple place. That evening, however, Tony could not enjoy his meal. He told me how badly the suit was going; that the lawyers were botching the job; that he wasn’t going to do what they told him to—he knew better. Just before dessert, he stood and said, “I have to get out of here!” His anxiety had reached such a level that he couldn’t stay cooped up in this claustrophobic space. He went out to the sidewalk to wait for me. I paid, and we took a cab uptown.

By now, Susan had begun practicing as a psychotherapist and social worker. I asked her what we could do for Tony. She said his anxiety was probably an agitated depression, in which feelings of anxiety and irritability, even some
mania
, may predominate, rather than the lethargy and other kinds of symptoms we associate with a depressed person. A good psychiatrist and medication were called for.

When I visited with Tony again, his anxiety had lessened, but he seemed overwhelmingly sad and down. I asked him if he thought he might harm himself. When the answer was not immediately forthcoming—we were crossing Broadway at the time—I said that I would take him to a hospital right then if he couldn’t assure me that he wasn’t going to try to kill himself. He said he wouldn’t. I took leave of him with some reservations. He prevailed in the lawsuit, but I kept at him to seek help for his depression. He did go to a psychiatrist and started taking antidepressants. Soon afterward, he signed a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster for a substantial advance. His mental health markedly improved.

I felt relieved and gratified that I had been able to help him. Tony’s gratitude to me for seeing him through that particularly upsetting and dangerous episode was a sign of our love and his apparent well-being.

I hoped that things would go well for Tony, but he found it difficult to settle on a topic for either of the two books. He came up with many ideas and then discarded them. He worried that he would never find a subject that would allow him to follow
Common Ground
with another big hit. He felt he needed yet
another
Pulitzer, another best seller to make him feel alive.

ON RETURNING FROM MY FORTIETH REUNION AT PUTNEY IN 1992
, at the age of fifty-seven, I too faced a challenge: I was diagnosed with lymphoma.

After twenty-two days of radiation, the doctors pronounced me in remission. I was painfully aware that Tony had not come to the hospital, or volunteered to do so during any of my treatment. Perhaps now his fear of illness, blood, and death applied not only to himself but to others. Or perhaps fear of one more loss in his life kept him away, but I fervently wished that he had spent more time on the phone with me—reassuring me, offering and giving love and support. I came to see the absence of his support as one more piece of evidence that our relationship had changed permanently. We were no longer brothers in arms—more brothers at arm’s length. I wondered why my “loyalty” did not seem to be matched by his.

Tony’s moods were increasingly volatile. Meanwhile, he had discovered a story that fascinated him: a town in Idaho and the murder of a governor named Steunenberg. The book would be called
Big Trouble
. He researched a long time and began writing, but found the book a struggle. It didn’t have a neat ending, and that bothered him. If he wanted to be true to himself, he felt he should abandon the project. Linda tried to reassure him, as did I. He had had doubts before. Wasn’t this just another depressive episode? He asserted it wasn’t. Visits to his editor got him going again. It looked as if he’d finish the book within a year or so, and it was now going well.

By the mid-1990s I was again out of work. Tony was supportive. I remember him saying, “Hey, you shouldn’t be depressed; that’s
my
act.” Then, to my great surprise, he offered me financial support. “Listen,” he said, leaning forward in that earnest way I had come to know over sixty-two years. “I’ve got plenty—well, I don’t mean
plenty plenty
—but I’ve got enough for the two of us”—indicating himself and me—“so don’t worry. If you need any money, just ask me.”

I marveled at these words. Whatever else Tony and I had been to each other, we had not been financial safety nets. I was moved: now, at last, my big brother was going to take care of me. I never did need to take Tony up on his offer, but I felt his warm hand on my back, holding me up at a time when I really needed it.

Looking back, I think it should have occurred to me that his concern about the artistic success of
Big Trouble
and his cheerful offer to help me financially were signs of something badly askew. Cheerfulness in a depressed person can be a sign of bad things to come, of the decision to end it all. With the decision made, depression miraculously lifts. I didn’t pick up on the possibility.

In mid-May 1997, Megan, Linda, Susan, Tony, and I went to see Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
in a stunning production. Tony bought the tickets and took us all to dinner. Gabriela was studying around the clock for the bar exam and couldn’t join us. After the play, the women walked behind us as Tony and I talked about how much we enjoyed the play, how many times we had seen plays together, and how important drama had been to our lives.

I felt a difference in our relationship. This was a Tony who seemed very pleased to be with me and my family. This was a Tony who was finished with a big book and showed none of the anxiety that he had exhibited only a few months earlier—that the book wasn’t good enough. This was a Tony more relaxed than I had seen him in years. Again, in retrospect, I should have worried. But I didn’t. I was too happy to be with him, to see him enjoying himself, to go to brilliant theater, and to talk about it with him.

Three weeks later, we returned home from a party and to the phone message from Linda.