Blue Genes (6 page)

Her final letter from the sanitarium, written on the day before her birthday:

And so Mother came home.

It is hard to remember—all these years later—that I am writing here not about two mature human beings, in their middle age. Not the stern and distant father I remember when I was growing up. These are young, struggling people. Mother was twenty-six at this point; Dad was thirty-two. I can only imagine the horror my father would have felt at having a suicidal twenty-six-year-old return to our home, and how fragile a time period it would be for
any
young mother, much less one with a mental illness.

Within two months of her return home, Mother was again pregnant. It was me. I was born on March 6, 1935. Given what had happened after my brother’s birth—the postpartum depression, the attempted suicide—why did my parents decide to have another child? Perhaps it was an accident; perhaps they didn’t know the cause and effect between pregnancy and some depressions; or perhaps it was an example of hope triumphing over reality.

Whichever, it was a difficult pregnancy, and a difficult birth. There is a very testy letter from my mother to Dad in January 1935, berating him for not paying enough attention to what the obstetrician had determined was a medical abnormality in her, as her due date approached. Whether this was anemia or some unknown disorder is not clear, but she says that my father was not concerned enough. Perhaps Dad thought it was an overdramatic reaction on her part. Or maybe—and I have done this myself—it was one of those male denials that anything could go wrong, that there might be another disastrous turn of events.

As it turns out, I was born cyanotic, what’s called “blue baby syndrome”—either a genetic glitch or too much deoxygenated blood being taken into the lungs. Lips and tongue turn blue. Dad gave a pint or two of blood to bring me up to par. After that, I thrived, putting on weight as if I were eating seven meals a day.

OVER THE FIREPLACE
in my present home is a large portrait of my brother and myself, painted when we still lived in the old colonial house in White Plains. I am four, and Tony is six, though the artist—good as she was—has put a much older face on my brother. I wear green corduroys with a bib and straps and a red long-sleeved shirt. Tony is in a saturated royal blue shirt and dark red corduroys. The straps of his trousers are crossed, shortened, in deference to the fact that he was beginning to shoot up. Mother wanted him to have room to grow into them.

I remember posing for that painting. We stood in front of a French door that looked out on the back of the house. I was bored and didn’t want to stand with my brother’s arm around me, staring out at the recreation room, when it was warm and pleasant outside and frogs and other playthings beckoned. But I did as I was told, because I was a “good boy.”

When outsiders look at the painting, it is clear to them that Tony and I are well fed. The color of our eyes isn’t quite accurate—mine were actually lighter than his—but they are good eyes, with a clear view of our world. What is most striking about the painting are the strong differences between us. I am a curly blond, Tony’s hair is straight and black. His complexion is umber in tone, with almost a greenish tint, like our mother’s; mine is light, like Dad’s. His lips are thin and pale, mine almost like a woman’s and bright red. Allowing for the artist’s choice of color and line and her attempt to make us look part of the same family of colors and tones, it is almost impossible not to see that we are far apart in terms of looks, but we were also far apart in terms of temperament.

The ovum is fertilized. Immediately, it splits into two, then four, then eight, carrying with it into the multiplicity of cells copies of new genes, made up of the DNA of mother and father, but in a different combination from before. Each of us inherits from the same parents, but in permutations that dictate some of what we will be. Nothing can be said to be solely responsible for our future looks, behaviors, actions, feelings—but this random splitting and distribution are a big part of it.

Many of the differences between Tony and myself were inborn. The physical ones are easy to see. But I think much of our emotional and psychological differences were also due to the hybrid tossing of genetic matter.

Still, not all character traits are from our genes. Nature and nurture work together, and though my brother was always darker in color and spirit than I, there is surely more to it than his inborn temperament. As all of us grow from infant to adult, we learn to tell our own stories, our personal worldview. Sometimes, we construct good stories. If we’re unlucky, we build unpleasant ones. Luck, skill, fate—all play their roles in who we become and how we face the world. The remarkable thing is how long Tony survived.

If you regard my brother in that painting closely, I believe you can see clear through to his soul. In his eyes, you can see the dark, brooding boy and man that I came to know—the Tony who shows in his photos a serious intent, his lower lip pushed out just a little, his elegant fingers clasped in front of him. Tony of the “raccoon eyes,” rimmed with dark shadows. A wounded look sometimes crosses his face—as if he has been stabbed or punched in the solar plexus. I recognize the same look from my father and my grandmother: a wounded bear in the forest or a deer about to be run down by a car could not have stared with more hurt and, often, more anger.

I HAVE READ MOTHER’S LETTERS
to Dad shortly after my birth. She had taken Tony and me up to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where Missy had a summer rental. While Dad slogged along in the sweating city, practicing the kind of law he would later abandon, Mother enjoyed cool sea breezes, unlimited space, and coddling by her mother. In one of those letters, she says, “Kit bubbles with delight. He is pure joy.” Missy wrote: “Kit is Master Sunshine as usual; easing his way into everyone’s heart.”

“Master Sunshine!” While Tony was what—“Master Gloom”? That was the difference people saw between us. The big painting in my living room already describes that disparity. But if the psychologist was correct—and Tony’s depression stemmed from Mother’s depression—then what went right with me? Was Mother a beaming, communicative person with me, whereas with Tony she had been a gloomy woman who could not take her son into her life? If so, Master Sunshine I remained—to the outside viewer. Inside was a different story.

Meanwhile, while everyone cooed over me, they ignored the huge blue elephant lying about our household. No one wanted to express either hope or pessimism for the future.

As promised, my parents moved back to New York, into an apartment in a brownstone on Ninety-second Street on the East Side. There, the first year of my life was spent in relative ease. I was a fat little baby. There is a photograph of me sitting in a tiny sleigh—the equivalent of a stroller—dressed for winter, a fur throw on my legs, pudgy cheeks puffed out against the cold. My family finds it hilarious.

Then, in an about-face and a burst of enthusiasm for Dad’s growing law career, and for the money that he was making, and with a boost from the “manic” phase of our mother’s illness, my parents splurged and bought seven acres in White Plains, with a large white eighteenth-century house. It was here that Tony and I spent the next four and a half years.

This was the dream house that every American couple wants. Like all such dreams, it came at a cost. Since it was the Depression, the property cost only about $10,000, but that was already two and a half times the average cost of a house in those days. (The Dow Jones Industrial Average was only at 134, and the annual income of a wage earner was $1,800.)

Mother decided the house needed a lot of work. They put another $5,000 into fixing it up with appurtenances like large, curved windows in the dining room and living room, a screened-in porch for summer guests, and a screened-in bedroom for Tony. I have seen some of the correspondence between Dad and the contractor during the months it took to do the work: endless problems with the sump pump, with the supporting walls, with the special glass they’d ordered for the windows. Dad threatened to stop all payments. The contractor threatened to stop all work.

Eventually, it was finished, and I remember the result as being quite remarkable. Aside from the huge rooms, the gorgeous furnishings, and the ample space to play indoors, outside there were all sorts of delights. Huge apple and pear trees sheltered the ten-room house from the summer sun. They would have borne rich fruit if they’d been fertilized, but that fruit became rotten at once, attracting hundreds of bees. In the front, where the sun could reach them, roses were planted. Mason jars of poison were attached to green stakes to attract and kill Japanese beetles. I watched the jars fill up, then scurried to tell my mother.

Up a gravel driveway, which ran parallel to the front of the house and up a slight incline, there was a two-car garage. A beautiful cherry tree decorated the bottom of a hill that stretched back a hundred feet, with a rock garden full of fragrant herbs. I recall that I learned my ABCs on a little stone seat there, chanting them in time-honored fashion until I had committed them to memory many months before my peers would do so. Mother believed in preschool education long before
Sesame Street
arrived on the scene.

On one side, woods bordered the property. On the other, a picket fence ran along Rosedale Avenue. Missy contributed to the funds for the house. Sometimes she contributed trimmings that were neither expected nor wanted. My parents came back from one trip shortly before we moved in to discover that she had commissioned a small lake to be dug in the back two acres; steam shovels were driving across newly laid crocuses.

“It’s a present,” said my grandmother. Of course, whether they wanted it or not, my parents had to take it. There was no going back.

Decades later, I went to visit the house. Normally, adults think that the places they lived as children have shrunk in size, or at least diminished in grandeur and beauty. For me, it was the opposite. Even though the house itself was a little run-down (two of its black shutters were askew; paint was peeling on the upper dormers; the grounds needed maintenance), it was
bigger
than I remembered it. I looked for additions since I lived there, sixty-four years ago, to account for the size, but there were none. It was just plain large—with many rooms, hallways, porches. The old, rotting apple tree had been pulled down; a pool had been installed where the rose garden used to bloom. Over half of the acreage had been sold off to other property owners. But the garage and rock garden remained. And so did the lake, which was also larger than I recalled. It filled over an acre of land. I walked down the road to West Street, turned left, and stood looking at what used to be the one-room schoolhouse where I attended kindergarten and first grade. Miss Honeywell, a rotund woman in her forties, taught eight grades, each with no more than five or six students. Still, we must have been a handful. On the front of the building, now a comfortable home painted a robust barn-red color, a plaque announced that the building was constructed in 1884. I remembered the potbellied stove that kept us warm in the winter. I remembered everything, and my eyes filled with tears.

I DON’T THINK I UNDERSTOOD
that my family was very well-off. At the age of five, I had no such perspective. I didn’t know that families existed all over the country with no one to drive the car or cook the meals or put their little ones to bed. Though almost every upper-middle-class family had at least one person to help with the chores, ours had two. And this was during the Depression.

When I went away to school, it wasn’t Groton or Exeter, it was coeducational and “progressive”: more chinos and blue jeans than flannel slacks; more outdoor activities and chores than perks. We were forbidden to have expensive items in our bare-bones rooms. Egalitarian in the extreme, it was a place where we were meant to ignore differences. No, it was more than that: we weren’t supposed to know that money was a factor in people’s lives.

I grew up believing that a happy life did not require having a lot of money, that work was beneficial for one’s soul as well as for society, and that equality between the sexes was a given—and constructive to boot.

Nevertheless, for much of my young life, I was coddled, protected by Missy’s largesse.

______

IN HADES
, there is a river called Lethe. For those who drink from those waters, the past becomes obliterated. It’s not clear to me who in the big white house at 250 Rosedale Avenue actually drank, but they all
appeared
to be oblivious to the immediate past: nothing bad had happened.

It was a grand illusion.

All continued to think they were living a golden life. On weekends, visitors sat with the family in capacious Adirondack chairs on the side lawn, sipping iced tea. A formal dining room was the scene of parties—not just for the grown-ups but for the children as well. I remember my fifth birthday. A number of neighborhood children were invited to an Italian feast. We had fake noses (Pinocchio had recently been in my reading material) and ate spaghetti.

Willows grew quickly in the moist soil at the edge of the lake. Even the algae that persisted in the lake were of a quality such as to make friends, relatives, and even ourselves shimmer with delight at the sheer beauty.

Fall was the most devastatingly beautiful there ever was. Spring, the most pleasurable.

Our nanny was warm and generous and devoted to us. She was married to a man who lived elsewhere. Where he was or when she found time to see him was unclear, for she took care of us and did housework and cooked a good deal of the time. Tony had named her Baba, an infant’s attempt to merge “Mama” with “Mary.” She was kind, attentive, and aware of everything that went on in the house. I have a photograph of her in our garden in White Plains. She sits, primly dressed, quite small, quite young, in a large rocking chair. On one side, his arm leaning on the chair, stands Tony in a striped T-shirt. He is three years old. I, clutching the chair to steady myself, stand on the other side. Both of us wear shorts. My curly hair needs cutting. An impish grin is on my face, and Baba looks with great love upon the scene. In her lap—a book and a ball, some of the paraphernalia of her work.