Wendy and the Lost Boys (22 page)

To the family’s command performances—the gatherings for Thanksgiving and Passover—Wendy usually brought a friend, in part to prove that the stories she told were true and partly for self-protection. Bringing someone home was also a sign of real affection.

Even as the children became adults—and husbands, wives, and parents—their most intense bond remained with one another. “Bruce was his most human and humane with Wendy,” Doug Altabef remembered, long after he was out of the picture. “They would get very silly together. That was probably the only relationship where he let his guard down, back to being the kid at Yeshivah of Flatbush, riffing, letting his hair down.”

When Wendy had been trying to decide between Columbia Business School and Yale Drama, and her parents had been pushing her toward business, it was Bruce who encouraged her to go to Yale, to take a risk on her talent and do something she loved.

“It was a very tight family,” said Peter Schweitzer, Sandra’s former husband. “God forbid you should ever criticize one of them to the others—the old thing about blood.”

In 1976, the year Wendy returned to New York from Yale, Bruce remarried, to Christine Parrott, a willowy redhead. She’d met Bruce in a bar three years earlier, shortly after he separated from Lynne. Christine, who owned a preschool on the Upper West Side and later became a psychoanalyst, was impressed with his intelligence and his dedication to public service; he told her he’d been a Nader’s Raider and that he’d edited books with Mark Green. He was working at a corporate law firm, but she believed that he was an idealist who cared about people. “I thought he certainly had that side to him,” she said.
⁹

Soon after they met, he took her to meet his family, at a Saturdayafternoon swim party at Sandra’s house in New Canaan, Connecticut. Even though Christine had lived in New York for two years by then and her training was in psychology, she was startled by the Wassersteins.

“Sandy had the two darling little girls and this high-powered executive position,” said Christine “All of them were so talkative and vivacious and outgoing—not Morris, but Lola, Bruce, and his sisters. I was really intrigued by them, though, for those reasons, because it was so different from my own upbringing. They just said whatever came into their minds as far as I could tell.”

Lola’s critical outbursts felt like an assault to the gentle young woman. She had grown up in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in a middle-class Presbyterian family. “We were taught to be nice. ‘Don’t throw stones,’ ” she said. “I was shocked by the things Lola would say to Bruce—‘Pull your pants up! Tuck your shirt in!’ I don’t think he experienced much in the way of empathy from his mother.”

Wendy was cordial enough, but Christine always felt that her sister-in-law was wary of her. “She probably felt ambivalent toward me,” she said. “In some sense I took her brother away from her.”

As for Sandra, Wendy’s reliance on her older sister had become even stronger over the years. Sandra could be aloof but was comforting. “She was maternal in her own, always-in-control sort of way,” said Jenifer, her older daughter. “She was the kind of person who, if you showed up at night upset, she would cook you something and sit you down and give you a glass of wine.”

Sandra’s home in Connecticut had been a refuge for Wendy when she was at Yale. Several times she called Sandra at midnight to ask if she could come to stay for the weekend, when the pressures at school became too much for her. She was a constant presence in the lives of Sandra’s daughters, Samantha and Jenifer, instilled in their earliest memories.

Even before that, while she was at Mount Holyoke, she had come to relish the role of Aunt Wendy to Georgette’s daughters, Tajlei and Melissa, who were born while Wendy was still in college. On trips to New Haven to visit James Kaplan, Wendy had often stayed at Georgette’s house, amusing her nieces with her endless store of games, delighting them with marvelous gifts, like the little illustrated books she made for them.

By the time Wendy resumed life in New York after Yale, Sandra had divorced Peter Schweitzer and moved back to the city. The two sisters began talking on the telephone almost every day, a routine that became a lifelong habit. They discussed everything: what shoes to wear, their weight, their mother, their careers, their dates or would-be dates. Wendy called these conversations “Opinions with Sandra Meyer.” Sandra had firm ideas about almost everything, and Wendy accepted her authority (bridling only when she disagreed with Sandra’s editorial comments on her work). Although Sandra took pains to keep Lola at bay, she, too, relied on her family. Often Lola and Morris would baby-sit for Jenifer and Samantha during her frequent business trips, but sometimes the job would be Wendy’s.

If Sandra had a business dinner nearby, she would sometimes leave Jenifer alone with Samantha for a few hours, knowing that their building had a doorman. Jenifer remembered feeling terrified, worrying that someone was breaking into the apartment. Just as Wendy had called Sandra when she needed help at Yale, Jenifer called Aunt Wendy. “She would sit there for hours and talk to me, about how somebody couldn’t crawl up the side of the building,” said Jenifer. “She would totally take it seriously and have real conversations about it.”

Even then Wendy approached life with a sense of urgency, and with good reason. Despite the outward image of unstoppable success, the Wassersteins suffered. The family Bible might have been the
New York Times,
but their story was rooted in the book of Job.

While Wendy was enjoying the acclaim that greeted
Uncommon Women,
she watched Sandra fall deeply, madly in love. The object of her passion was Andrew G. Kershaw, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies.

Kershaw fulfilled Sandra’s strict demands. He was brilliant, dashing, larger than life, a Hungarian-born World War II marine commando, fearless businessman, and pugnacious debater. When they met, she was almost forty, twice divorced; he was fifteen years older and still married. While his divorce was pending, they made plans to marry and began to live together.

They were smitten, necking in the backseats of cars like teenagers. On October 28, 1978, they were together at home in Pound Ridge, an affluent New York suburb, when he came in from the yard, where he’d been trimming tree limbs. Twenty minutes later Sandra found him dead of a heart attack.

A few days after his death, she appeared, stricken but composed, at Alice Tully Hall, where twelve hundred people had gathered for a memorial service. Even when submerged in grief, Sandra maintained a surpassing ability to coolly appraise a situation.

“If I do say so myself—Andrew would have been proud of me and the girls,” she recalled, writing about that day. “We looked exactly right: I was wearing a stunning, very classic black suit (bought the day before with my sister, Wendy), with a wine coloured silk shirt and one rope of pearls. The girls, with their very blond hair, dress-up clothes, and solemn manner, walked into the hall with me after almost everyone else was seated—escorted by one of Andrew’s partners. I’m sure we looked admirable. . . .

“How Andrew would have laughed at Jock’s obvious inability to admire him—right to the end,” she said of the eulogy delivered by John “Jock” Elliott, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather’s worldwide operations. “If you really analyze the eulogy, Andrew was being credited with immense energy and the ability to work hard . . . not with the extraordinary qualities of mind and character that were really his. . . .”

She revealed the complex mixture of qualities that made her such a grand and intimidating presence in Wendy’s life. “I loved him—really,” Sandra wrote. “And from me that’s saying a great deal. I’ve never loved any man, or even admired any man before. In fact, other than my children, my sisters and brother and in a way, my parents—I don’t suppose I have ever loved anyone. In fact, most people who know me would wonder if I was capable of loving.”

Passion was the overriding theme. “I’ve lost my man and I feel I’ve lost my life,” Sandra confessed.

S
mall wonder that Wendy often found herself in emotional turmoil and unable to deal with mundane reality. In her family, relationships were writ large or erased. Her sister’s doomed, no-holds-barred love for Andrew Kershaw set an impossibly high standard for romance. Yet even at this moment of supreme loss, Sandra—whom Wendy trusted more than anyone—joined the family’s unspoken conspiracy of silence about Abner, their absent brother. As Sandra spoke about people she loved, she chose to delete him from memory (“my sisters and
brother
”).

Wendy’s inability to forget was both a blessing and a curse. Memory fueled her work, but her family’s past nagged at her. She was haunted by Abner and what he represented. Her older siblings had known him, had witnessed his seizures and been frightened by his behavior. None of them questioned their parents’ decision to send him away. For Wendy, Abner became mythic, a symbol of what might happen to children who didn’t meet Lola’s standards. They could be banished. Wendy could never shake that empty feeling, the sense that love, like life, was precarious—parents abandon their children, husbands and lovers die, and sisters are left to wonder, are they their brother’s keeper?

She never stopped wondering about the figure long missing from Wasserstein family portraits. When
Uncommon Women and Others
was published in book form, she dedicated it “To my brothers, Abner and Bruce.” Was this a rebuke to Lola and Morris, for separating Abner from his family, or was the dedication simply an expression of Wendy’s urge for fairness, or a bit of both? If she was going to pay homage to the brother she adored, she would also acknowledge the brother she never knew.

A
bner was not a ghost. He had become a man. When Wendy turned thirty, he was forty. He was easily recognizable as a Wasserstein; he had the same broad features as Bruce and Wendy and a thicket of dark, curly hair, just like his younger sister’s.

His had been a long, lonely journey. After he was too old to remain at the Devereux School, Morris and Lola moved him to a state-run institution in upstate New York, for people who suffered from epileptic seizures. Even the best of these institutions were grim places, known as human warehouses. In the 1970s, spurred by the civil-rights movement, there was legal and political momentum to deinstitutionalize mentally ill people and move them into smaller halfway houses that were—theoretically—more humane. Abner lived in one of these for a few years, in Rochester, New York; when it closed, he moved into a group home in Penfield, a Rochester suburb with a utopian motto: “A Town of Planned Progress.”

Eleanor and Ray Newell met Abner at the Downtown United Presbyterian Church in 1978, shortly after he began attending the church’s monthly Joy Class meetings for developmentally disabled adults. During regular services the Joy Class met in the church assembly room for informal prayer and discussion. The Newells were volunteers who helped lead the talks, encouraging the participants to go to the microphone and read stories and poems they’d written.

When it was Abner’s turn to speak, everyone settled in for the long haul. It took him several minutes to collect his thoughts, which he delivered with awkward precision, punctuated by numerous pauses. As Eleanor Newell—a high-school math teacher—listened to his painstaking stories, she realized that Abner’s ability to reason far surpassed his speaking skills. “Abner often would use a mike and give us his ideas,” she said. “It might be a long, tedious wait until he had something to say, but it was always something worth waiting for. He thinks things through and analyzes things and makes observations that are well thought through.”

When the Newells learned that Abner’s sister was a writer who was becoming known, they began collecting newspaper clippings about her for their friend. He watched “The Sorrows of Gin” on television. Unlike the critic at the
New York Times,
Abner was deeply impressed by the show.

There is a record, however imperfect, of his reaction. The Newells and other volunteers began writing down what Abner had to say. Eleanor saved his poems and articles, which represented Abner’s thoughts as dictated and transcribed, perhaps edited and embellished, by the various people who recorded his halting words. There is no way to authenticate the accuracy of these typed documents, word for word, but they offer insight into what was on Abner’s mind.

After he saw “The Sorrows of Gin,” he dictated a review of the show in which he expressed his anger at being separated from his family:

In the world today, instead of putting people away (like the handicapped) let them show how they can help when they are helped.

An example of “putting people away” happens in families. Parents who leave their children each day, ignoring them and refusing to show them love, cannot expect to receive any respect from those children. Caring parents will stay at home with their family more often, paying attention to their children and learning what those children are like. They must realize how delicate and important children’s feelings are. . . .

Whether a child is handicapped or normal, his feelings are hurt when he is left alone. A true friend would not do this—he would help a person try to make him understand what’s happening. Parents—and others—should look into themselves first before they turn away from a child or a handicapped person who has been “brought down.” It might be their own treatment that was the cause. (Most parents do not see that; they see only the child’s fault, and yet they themselves are tearing the child apart, hurting him more and more each time he is left alone.)

L
ola and Morris visited Abner two or three times a year. During those visits they kept him informed on what his siblings were doing and how the family was growing. He wanted to be connected, even from a distance. Sometimes he called Morris at the office. That’s how Jenifer, Sandra’s daughter, learned that he existed. At age thirteen she was working at her grandfather’s business during a school break, when a man called. “Can I talk to my father?” he asked.