“What do you mean? Crazy as a coot is more like it. Look at the whites of your eyes. Here, I’ll get out my compact if you like.”
“Crazy is bueno, muy bueno,” chuckled Bill, rolling his eyes in their sockets.
“Come on, Bill, cut it out. They’ll get stuck like that, as Mother used to say.” As Mother used to say. Not a single day of the last eleven years had gone by that I didn’t wonder what Mother would have been doing right that very minute.
“Crazy keeps us young.” He thumbed through the pile of notes and telegrams on the table.
“In that case, we’ll live forever.”
“God, I hope so. Ah. Look. Here’s one from Kate Hepburn.”
The nurse had just come back in and was looking at us both strangely. “He’s still asleep, I see,” she announced briskly.
“Superior deductive reasoning,” muttered Bill under his breath, his face buried in the latest flower arrangement. “Keenly observed. Look where sanity can get you—”
I stuck my elbow in his ribs. “Bill.” I could feel hysterical laughter coming on. “Be serious. I want to ask you a serious question.”
“What?”
I’d never dared ask him, perhaps because I was afraid of the answer. There was no telling why I was curious enough now.
“Well, have you ever been so depressed you wanted to kill yourself? I mean, have you ever thought about what would make you …”
“Hmm,” replied Bill, becoming serious very quickly. “Let me take you away from all this, my dear.” He extended his arm to me.
“Hold down the fort for us,” he said to the nurse; “we’ll be back.” He winked at her.
We walked down the corridor and around the corner to the elevator.
“I must be going stir-crazy,” I said. “It’s awfully nice to be out here, hideous as it is.”
“Let’s chow down,” said Bill. “I’m starving. I see a double Bloody Mary in my immediate future.”
“What about Father?”
“We’ll check on him after the play. Tell him what we think.”
“They won’t let us back in.”
“Private room. Different rules.” He snapped his fingers. The elevator doors opened.
I felt very gay (as if we were playing hooky) and, at the same time, guilty. Unfairly privileged. Charmed. And running the risk of missing something.
“Well, have you?”
“What?”
“Ever thought about committing suicide?”
“Often.” He ignored the riveted gaze of the other occupants of the elevator. “I’ve always held on to it as an alternative. If things got really screwed up—the idea of having another choice. I’ve never tried it, although I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. But thinking about it is a way of recognizing there is a choice. I’d like to think that my affairs would be in order. But, of course, if my affairs were in order, I wouldn’t be thinking about suicide.”
He chuckled to himself. Bill tended to communicate information in a way that was meant less for other people’s enlightenment than for his own private entertainment.
The elevator let us out into the lobby. Now he was lost in thought.
“Where do you want to eat?” I tugged at his arm. We moved toward the night.
“Shit, I don’t have any of the right clothes. I left Los Angeles too—uh—precipitously, you might say. It was seventy degrees there. I didn’t have a chance to unpack my ski gear. I need warm gloves desperately.”
“Russian Tea Room, please,” I told the cabdriver. “I wonder where Pamela was this afternoon.”
“Legal crap,” said Bill, rubbing his hands together. “Once I got frostbite skiing, and that screws your hands up whenever they hit the chill winds afterwards. Wanted to be a surgeon, too, oddly enough.”
“How would you do it?” I asked, staring out the window.
“What?” Bill glanced at me. “Kill myself? You do persist in these morbid notions.”
But I knew he was secretly pleased to be asked.
“I’ve always thought if I did it I would shoot myself with a pistol,” he replied matter-of-factly.
I wasn’t so sure about that. “What, shoot yourself in the head? Terribly gory.”
“No, I figure I can find my heart.” He laughed. “Quick. That’s the trick. Bang. Whatever pain there was would be so instantaneous it wouldn’t count. I decided a long time ago—back in the Menninger years—that if I did it, it would have to be one hundred percent for real. No false attempts. Pills would probably be the most pleasant way, except so many people fuck up and leave clues and get saved. Another thing about pills is if you do get discovered, the recovery period in the hospital is extremely unpleasant—I mean from the stomach pump to all kinds of crummy aftereffects. If a strong enough barbiturate like Amytal is in your system for any length of time, you’re futzing around with brain damage, kidney damage. Ideally, what you get is the spy pill. You just bite down on it—”
“Cyanide?” I could feel him opening up, relaxing.
“Yeah. Potassium cyanide. You’re dead instantly. No pain, all that shit. It’s funny, I have a thing about disfiguring my body. I suppose that’s why I’d rather shoot myself in the heart than in the head. I guess anybody’s who’s really serious just goes and jumps off a bridge. Which I don’t think I’ve ever had the urge to do.”
The experience of Menninger’s, I was convinced, had burned a small hole right through the center of his mind just the way a laser would, neat and clean. He’d spent the most formative years of his adolescence there. Wasted years, untold damage. A small hole in his brain that went right through his forehead and out the back. It wasn’t that he was crazy now—he certainly hadn’t been when he went in—but that empty spot explained a lot. It had been fashionable to send your children to places like Menninger’s in those days, if you didn’t have the time but did have the money. It took a lot of money. Bill had been sent up when he was sixteen. Two and a half, three years. I went to visit him once, flew to Topeka. Walked around the grounds. It looked like a country club, lawns as far as the eye could see. From the moment he’d arrived, he’d tried to escape. He’d broken out several times, stolen getaway cars, crossed state lines in them, landed in jail. Father had said, “This time I’ve had it with the kid. He’s really loco. Let him rot there.” And wouldn’t bail him out. Nine days in jail. Bill knew better than I about emotional detachment, although we’d all been given an equal head start.
He sighed and fished through his overcoat pockets for a cigarette and matches. “I always thought I’d check into a hotel with some creepy desk clerk to find me. You know, to be the wife or husband—I never wanted anyone to find me, it’s a bummer to be around. Notes can be very irritating, but I have always thought there should be a few instructions. I wrote the note once—I hadn’t figured out how to do myself in, but I did write the note.”
“What did it say?”
“Well, most people who commit suicide are trying to inflict some kind of pain on other people, which I’ve always felt was immoral. I think anybody’s got the right to do it, to me it’s not a mortal sin, but you ought to be kind of clean about it and not hassle too many other people. I’ve always felt you ought to check out with a little.”
“Style?”
“Yeah. But to try and blame it on somebody else is wrong, especially if you are successful. [We both grinned at that absurd bit of sophistry.] So I tried to make it clear, in my note, that there was absolutely nobody to blame, that I didn’t feel there was any way to continue on my present road and couldn’t see any way to get off it, either.”
He began to laugh again.
“Cracking yourself up, aren’t you?”
“I carried the note around for a while, figuring the precise moment hadn’t quite come, but it was right around the corner—and then finally I got embarrassed and threw it away.”
Somehow, this was all very reassuring.
“Bill, listen. I want to ask you another question.”
I knew he was thinking about it anyway, even if he didn’t verbalize his thoughts without being prompted, or exhibit my kind of curiosity.
“When Mother and Bridget died, what did you think? How did you feel? I hadn’t seen you in so long. You were totally withdrawn at the time, do you remember? You never said much.”
When I asked him the right question he’d talk all night. Sometimes he would hold forth about the most astounding trivia. He was a pack rat of information on every subject known to man, the more arcane the better.
“When Mother died”—Bill cleared his throat—“I think I was shocked that I was not as moved as I felt I should be, not at that time. I don’t think I was aware of the reality for some time afterward. I’ve always buried that kind of trip. Because I remember being constantly stunned that I wasn’t more moved. I think the only time I cried was at the service. And I don’t know if that would have happened if everybody else wasn’t unhappy.”
He began to laugh.
“There you go again, you crazy galoot. I remember you flew in from Topeka in a rage because of the black-suit episode.”
“Yeah. I’d just terminated Menninger’s as an outpatient. I was engaged to Marilla and going to school, I think, and working, and about to—I recollect Mother died on the first day of 1960 and I went into the paratroopers on the fourteenth. I was visiting Manila’s apartment when the phone rang and I had one of those flashes about some impending disaster. It was Father.”
“What did he say?” All those years ago. I had never forgotten how angry I’d been at Father for not telling me himself.
“He said she’d died of natural causes but that the papers were very likely to pick it up in some other manner. And obviously for me to fly back immediately. He told me to bring a black suit and all that—he didn’t have to tell me—but I remember the dialogue. So the following day I went to a store where a charge had been set up for me to buy clothes while I was in Menninger’s. I bought a black suit, shirts, ties, all the gear for a funeral. Hadn’t been in there in several years, so when I went to charge it they said they’d have to get an okay from Father. They got off the phone and said, ‘This charge has not been authorized.’ I said, ‘Well, who said no?’ I couldn’t believe that Father would have refused it. They said, ‘Well, some lady answered the phone and she said no.’ And I remember assuming the lady must have been you. I guess I was eighteen, yeah, and extremely irritated about the whole thing. Then before I took off for New York, I spoke to you on the phone and you clued me in about Pamela. Which was the first I heard about that business. I knew that Father and Nan had had some kind of problem; he’d told me that. But I had no idea there was another woman involved. And she nixed the charge. I flew back that afternoon, but I wasn’t nearly as distraught as I should have been. And I was extremely pissed off about the clothes.”
That memorial service in Greenwich, Connecticut. The family, according to the protocol of these things, had traipsed in, in single file, to be seated in the front row after everyone else. The church was jammed. We—Bridget, Bill, and I—felt more exposed at that moment than ever before in our lives. Afterward I’d sworn to myself I’d never go to another funeral. If it hadn’t been for Bridget—
“Aha! That explains your filthy mood. You were really uncommunicative.”
If it hadn’t been for Bridget, two thousand horses couldn’t have dragged me to another one.
“And when Bridget died, it was the same thing. I was married, stationed at Fort Bragg, rented house, the phone rang, and it was Father again. ‘Natural causes,’ he said.”
Bill put his face up to the partition where change was made.
“Driver, got a match?”
“We’re almost to the Russian Tea Room.”
“Thank God. I want caviar. Golden caviar.”
“Who do you think you are, the Shah of Iran?”
“We deserve it.”
“Is that all he said?”
Bill struck the match and let it burn almost to his fingernails before blowing it out.
“I can only remember both calls minimizing any question of suicide. The—Mother’s thing—the only indication was that the press would probably pick it up because there had been a bottle of sleeping pills on the scene. Very underplayed to me. With Bridget—I think the line was the same; she’d probably taken two of the wrong drugs or whatever.”
He was even vaguer about the details than I. Right afterward, I had been too numb to engage in the proper detective work, and later I didn’t have the heart for it. Besides, as time went by, the explanations that we got from Father and Pamela had become increasingly elliptical.
“I didn’t even know she had epilepsy,” Bill was saying. “I’d no contact with the outside world for a couple of years. But I do remember the funeral. And the church. It was dark during the service, late afternoon and raining. Typical funeral.”
The only funeral I’d relented about going to after that was David O. Selznick’s, because he was almost like my own father. My own father—
“Oddly enough, I still flash on Mother from time to time—”
Bill struck another match and aimlessly let it burn.
“I mean the reality that you’ll never see somebody again never struck me fully. You just get a taste of it from time to time.”
“Bill, listen.” The cab was making a U-turn on Fifty-seventh Street to land us at the door of the restaurant. “Listen.”
This was the crux of the situation.
“Do you think the possibility that Mother and Bridget … killed themselves has ever affected your feelings about suicide? Your own, I mean?”
“I’ll tell you,” said Bill, scrunching the lower half of his body forward so that his hands could root for change. “It’s possibly been, on some small level, a preventive, only because I feel that it would be more of challenge not to do it. Since it seems to run in the family. It’s like trying to beat the system. There must be something inherently weird—the family drops like flies.”
The sound of his laughter, as we emerged from the cab, rang in my ears for the rest of the evening. There had been times, in the last eleven years, when I had been furious with Mother and Bridget. When I stopped to analyze my feelings, I knew it wasn’t really important to me how they died, and never had been. What made me angry, though, aside from the primary fact of their deaths, was the dark realization that whether or not they killed themselves, they had tinkered with my mind. They’d given me a double whammy. They’d planted it like a minefield with the idea, the concept of suicide—but also, by that perverse act, had disarmed the tricky little mechanisms set up to explode. Leaving it strewn with litter. Leaving me with the feeling that although the two things canceled each other out, I had been victimized, raped. Betrayed. The feeling of impotence. Yes? No? Would I ever dare? As Bill said, although it was a free country and we had a choice, we didn’t really. Suicide was a luxury we couldn’t afford. Not with that background. Not with those odds. For me, it wasn’t out of the question because of grave moral considerations but because I always resisted the predictable.
immy Stewart:
“Your father did a funny thing. He was always trying to get me married. When I got back from the service, he came to me and said, ‘Now, look, you’ve been away for five years and the movie business is all changed and God knows what, you don’t know what you’re gonna do—what you ought to do is marry a rich girl and take it easy. And I know exactly the one. Take her to dinner and the theatre and marry her and take it easy, because now you’ve had five years—and as I say, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the movie business.’ I said, ‘Well—’ He said, ‘Now do as I say, here is her number and call her.’ So I did. I went and picked her up, asked the doorman to get a taxi—this was in New York—and she said, ‘Don’t we have a car?’ That was my first mistake. Then we had dinner and we just—didn’t seem to have much to talk about, and she ordered something that she didn’t like. Then we went to the theatre and it wasn’t a very good play. A
fter the theatre we had a terrible time getting a cab, and she said, ‘I’d like to go home,’ so we went home. She said goodbye and left me in the lobby and that was it. Your dad, the morning after, called me up and said, ‘How’d it go? How’d it go?’ ‘Well,’ I said, and I told him my story. He said, ‘How many flowers did you send her?’ I said I hadn’t sent her any flowers. He said, ‘I’ll send her the flowers.’ He sent her the flowers and I got the bill. She called me up about the flowers he sent—there must have been a thousand flowers. She said, ‘I’ve never had so many flowers, the flowers absolutely cover the whole room. I don’t know where to put any more flowers. There are more flowers than I’ve ever seen in my life. Thank you very much.’ And hung up. Your father said, ‘You can’t fool around with a thing like this. You get a thing going, send the flowers.’ And I never saw her again.…”
At least my father died with his boots off. He was sixty-eight years old. There were many things, he said, that he wished he’d done or hadn’t done but, on balance, it was hard to see how he could have packed any more into sixty-eight years than he did. He looked his age. And he looked tired. The last ten years had been rough: he’d pushed the machinery at stress capacity for so long it had begun to break down. “I thought it was guaranteed to last a lifetime,” he commented. “I smell a bum deal here. Son of a bitch, didn’t have time to read the fine print. Some lousy contract. Christ, I feel cheated.”
As he lay in the pleasant, sunny corner room of a New York hospital, I had plenty of time to wonder what my life would be like without him. After that first vascular operation, when the young surgeon who had performed it a hundred times before without mishap sliced neatly into Father’s neck, replacing an inch or so of blocked artery—right carotid, to use the correct terminology—with a more efficient (impervious to shrinkage and hardening, unlike the real flesh and blood which constituted the rest of his body) segment of plastic—after that, there was the strain of the repeat operation, six days later, to remove the clot that had developed in his contralateral left artery. For a more sweeping diagnosis: what we had here was occlusion of the carotid vessels—two great arteries, I remembered from biology, one on either side of the neck, which carry blood to the brain. Or, in a grandiloquent summation: “Extensive arteriosclerosis”—i.e., thickening of the blood vessels—“of the entire vascular system, most marked in the region of the brain and the blood supply to the heart and aorta”—that last being another of the big guys, the main trunk of the arterial system. And certainly after that, it didn’t look as if this particular time this particular surgical intervention was going to be an unqualified success. It didn’t look that way to us, although the surgeon was insuperably cheerful every morning as he made his rounds.
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