“So, finally, I called my parents and my father said, ‘I have this friend in Boston….’ So he sent me to your father. And I’m fairly sure my father hoped that he would calm me down, help me to restore my sense of confidence, and send me back to college. This is what I loved about your father: He said that it made perfect sense for me to take a year from college, since I didn’t have the least idea why I was there! He told me there was nothing wrong with my decision and I didn’t need to be afraid that it would have some dreadful consequence. Once I had a chance to gain a little more experience in life, maybe find an interesting job, or go abroad or to some other section of the country and perhaps just ‘look around at things’ without the feeling that I had a sword above my head, he was confident I’d recognize the time when I was ready to go back to school. He also said he would predict, in spite of all the bluster that the college had put up, they’d probably be glad to have me back.
“This is the thing: He was empowering to me. There was no sense of dire warnings and no sense of issuing commands. He never made me helplessly dependent, but he enabled me to learn enough about myself so that I could grow into a strong young woman who was capable of making my own judgments. He had this way of personalizing everything he said to me and, once I had made up my mind, he fought for me fiercely….
“At the same time he understood how much I loved my father and he knew I didn’t want to hurt him. He handled this so carefully! I mean: the way he could delineate between the suffering that I was going through, and the decision I had made, and the vulnerability to which this might expose my father. I feel so blessed that he was able to bring out the best in both of us and leave us feeling closer to each other.”
Ultimately, she told me, “when I was ready, I returned to college.” She went on to study law, then grew attracted to the problems faced by young adults and children and, after marrying happily and having children of her own, proceeded to carve out a new career as a special education advocate, in which, she says, she’s found a great deal of fulfillment.
“What I remember best about your father was this truly rare ability he had to transcend the boundary between his friendship with my family and his determination to enable me to reach the very core of who I was and what I needed to feel safe and whole. He was uniquely able to maintain the professional distance necessary to protect his role as my psychiatrist while at the same time acting as my trusted friend. In my work with children and their parents, I always try to keep in mind the model that he set for me. I thank him to this day for the gift he gave me.”
After I’d been corresponding with this woman for a while, I got to know her better when she came to Boston for Thanksgiving and invited me to spend an evening with her mother, who, at the age of eighty-five, still remembered vividly how furious my father was with the orthopedic specialist who told her husband he would never walk again. She also had a nice nostalgic memory of going fishing with my father and her husband some years later and my father’s great delight in pulling out a pickerel from a river near their home. I was reminded of the tackle box and those rods and marbled reels that were still in my garage….
A sensible awareness of the way that memory may frequently mislead us notwithstanding, memories recorded by so many different people and those that are preserved in so many of the notes and other documents my father left behind tend to reinforce each other. For good or ill, he left so large a volume of materials that even now I have yet to make my way through more than half these packages and file cases and have scrutinized only a small portion of the items they contain. Will I ever have the opportunity to look at all the rest? If he were alive to counsel me, I suspect he’d recommend that I should leave it to a person of a younger generation, perhaps a medical historian, maybe an archivist of modern neuroscience as it was evolving in my father’s day, to look at those materials for whatever value they may hold.
I think my father, in all likelihood, would tell me that I should no longer dwell upon remainders and reminders of a life lived largely in a century that’s passed. “Get on with your own work now. You have better things to do than try to make sense of another man’s existence.” That sounds like something he might say to me, or to a patient, in a moment of frustration with obsessive efforts to recapture every detail of the works and days that others, even those we loved, have now completed.
Still, every time I go up to the attic of my house, where all those documents are stored, I feel the strongest inclination to open up another set of folders and see what they may hold. Not long ago, I pulled out a transcript of my father’s grades from Harvard College in his freshman year. He got honors grades in English and philosophy, and a C in history, but I was surprised to find that he received a D in his first semester of psychology. He somehow brought it up to an A in the next semester. That was in the spring of 1924. I don’t know why I find myself attracted to these unimportant details. I guess I’m not quite ready yet to give in to finality.
Epilogue: 2015
I began these memoirs in September of 2008, a month after my father died. I continued writing through the winter of that year and the spring that followed. I finished in the summer of 2009.
At that point, I set aside these pages and continued with my work, visiting in public schools, interviewing teachers, lecturing at colleges, and writing about inner-city children, as I’d done for most of my career. In this way, I kept myself preoccupied as the aftermath of mourning dwindled down. It was a long time after that before I was ready to open up this manuscript again.
Today, as I read this story of my parents’ lives and the way that I remembered them after they had died, there’s not a great deal I would change, but, with the distance time affords, there are some important things that I would add.
After losing both my parents in so short a time, and with my father’s final year so keenly in my mind, I couldn’t bring myself to dwell at any length on moments when a thread of tension drifted through our lives. I mentioned once that I sometimes hurt my father unintendingly and that he sometimes caused me pain as well; but I added nothing more—I didn’t want to think of it.
The truth is that not every bit of tension that came up between us was quite as slight or evanescent as I have implied. There were areas of disagreement—most of them about the course of my career—that could be, on some occasions, almost confrontational. At these times, I felt disarmed to a degree by the commanding and authoritative role he had always held for me.
The power that he exercised over my state of mind was magnified, I’m sure, by my early recognition of the power that he wielded over other people’s lives. I recall, for instance, that when I was eight or nine he brought me with him to the MGH to observe a neurosurgical procedure that one of his colleagues was performing on a patient whom my father had been treating. I have a memory of standing there beside him on some kind of balcony, just above the operating area, as he was communicating with the surgeon while the surgeon was removing a brain tumor from his patient.
My father and the surgeon were talking with each other by the use of tiny microphones. (The area where we were standing was divided from the operating theater by a glass partition.) The knowledge that my father’s judgment and the guidance he appeared to be providing to the surgeon might, in part, determine if his patient would emerge from the procedure with his faculties intact did not leave me simply with the sense of fascination any child, I imagine, would have taken from that neurosurgical arena. It was more like an enduring imprint of amazement that so much seemed to be resting on my father’s intuition and interpretation of the E.E.G. his patient had been given, as well as on the careful and decisive motions of those white-gloved fingers just beneath us. Only someone godlike was, I thought, supposed to have this kind of power.
I have no idea if my father could have guessed the full effect that this would have on me. I do know this experience and others like it in the years to come left me with a sense of awe and admiration for my father that would render me more eager than
a child probably should ever be to look for his approval as I got into my teenage years and then went on to college. His approval, I would soon discover, wasn’t going to be given easily.
At the end of my freshman year at Harvard, for example, when students were ranked numerically according to their grades, my roommate’s ranking was among the highest in our class. My own grades were also good, but they were lower than my roommate’s. As comical as it may seem to anyone except for me, my father made a comment, the words of which I’ve managed to forget, that gave me the distinct impression that I’d disappointed him. Like many Harvard students, I had been ranked at the head of my class while I was in secondary school. My father expected I would keep on in this pattern at the university. For a man who chastised many of the parents of his patients for holding their own children to unrealistic and unhealthy expectations, my father’s uncontrollable competitiveness on my behalf seemed almost inexplicable.
By my junior year, when I began two years of study with the poet Archibald MacLeish, I was able for the most part to dismiss my father’s pressures, for which I’m grateful to MacLeish, who told me, when I wrote a piece for him (which I unconvincingly disguised as “fiction”) about a father who was overbearingly ambitious for his son, that I should “take it easy” and allow myself to have some fun while I was in college. He even spurred me on when he detected my infatuation with one of the two Radcliffe students in our class.
Still, I continued to study hard and in the spring of junior year I was one of the eight members of my class who were elected, one year early, to Phi Beta Kappa. At a dinner that was held in order to induct us into PBK, we were required to elect one of our fellow members to serve as the “first marshal” of our class at our graduation a year later. One of my friends, Jared Diamond, whom I’d known since we were in secondary school, was sitting near me at the table. Jared was not only, as I thought, by far the smartest boy I’d ever known; he also had a lovely sense of humor and (as he still does) a likable and self-effacing personality. I thought he ought to be the one to represent us.
My father, whom I had invited to the dinner, looked disappointed when I nominated Jared. I don’t recall if Jared won or if it was another member of our group who was chosen as first marshal. But I do remember that my father was unhappy. At the end of dinner, as I walked him to his car, he said to me, “All the same, it would have made me proud if it was you who was selected.” I remember standing with him on a corner of Mount Auburn Street, a block from Harvard Square, as he unlocked his car, still looking discontent. As I watched him driving off, I was sorry I’d invited him.
My father’s high ambitions for me were appeased, but only briefly, when, in my final year of college, I was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. (It was, I’ve always been convinced, MacLeish’s strong and generous endorsement that led to my selection.) As it turned out, however, I was bored by the curriculum at Oxford and greatly disappointed when the tutor I had been assigned told me she did not allow her students to concentrate on modern British authors—which, of course, prohibited my wish to write my thesis on a living poet, W. H. Auden, and on the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Then, too, the atmosphere among the undergraduates and graduates I got to know struck me as more socially class-conscious, and uncomfortably so, than what I had experienced at Harvard.
I went to Paris for the winter break and, encouraged by some older writers I encountered—William Styron was in Paris at the time, as was his friend and fellow novelist James Jones—I decided to remain there. I showed the writing I was doing to my newfound mentors and, with their help, sold one of my stories to a European magazine. With these meager earnings and the royalties from a piece of juvenilia I had published in the fall, I was just barely able to support myself.
MacLeish, after having helped me to receive my scholarship to Oxford, was not in the least disturbed by my decision to abandon it. My father, on the other hand, told me I was making “an egregious mistake.” He wrote me some horrendously alarming letters, in which he said he hoped I would return to England promptly and continue with my scholarship—“before you find that it’s too late.”
The encouragement he’d given other people of my age not to be afraid to interrupt their studies and go out into the world and look around a little, and to defend their need for independence without fear of repercussions, whatever they might be, as he’d conveyed this to one of the patients I’ve described, was not to be replicated in the case of his own son. When, in a defensive letter, I reminded him of his decision to give up Harvard Law School and the time of wandering and searching for direction he’d allowed himself, not only then but even after he’d become a doctor, he replied that he was “amused” but “not convinced” by my attempt to claim his own experience as precedent.
“I wasn’t a Rhodes Scholar,” he said bluntly. “This is a different ballpark altogether. I don’t think you understand the risks that you’re incurring.” He said that my decision troubled him “considerably.”
After I returned to Boston, he was mightily relieved when I told him I was thinking of going back to Harvard to pursue a doctorate under the guidance of my former teachers. But his anxieties came to the fore again when, in the rising turmoil of the civil rights campaigns, I abruptly changed my mind and, as I have noted, decided to become a teacher at an elementary school in the black community of Roxbury. My father didn’t openly oppose this but he told my mother he was worried by the seeming randomness and suddenness of my decision.
He would later reconsider his objections as it grew apparent to him that I had at last arrived at something he regarded as at least a temporary destination. And when, in the years ahead, he recognized that it wasn’t going to be temporary and when, unexpectedly, it led me back to writing and, at last, to publication of a book about the children I was teaching that he genuinely admired, his concerns about me seemed to be allayed.
I was fortunate that a social critic and psychiatrist named Robert Coles, whom my father held in high esteem, gave the book a good review in the New York Times. My father told me that he found this “gratifying.” And when, in the spring that followed, I was given a National Book Award, he took me to dinner at the Harvard Club, the two of us alone, and said that, “all in all,” he was “very pleased.” He even conceded that he now believed he had been in error in the reservations he had had when I became a teacher.
Nonetheless, I can’t forget the look of grimness and foreboding in his eyes when I first ventured into Roxbury. Even though he had restrained himself from telling me, as he told my mother, that he feared I’d “lost [my] bearings” and that I was going to regret the choices I was making, the admonitory undertone I heard within his voice in almost every conversation that we had that year was not easy to dismiss.
As late as five years after that, in the early 1970s, I discovered that I still was not exempt from the power that my father wielded over me. This was at a time when the civil rights campaigns to which I had attached myself were starting to disintegrate after having lost their most dynamic leaders either to assassination or to the attrition of their stamina as they were growing older, while others were the casualties of self-destructive personal behavior. My father, who could read my mind with the same acuity he brought into his work as a clinician, was able to detect the mild stirrings of uneasiness I underwent as I watched increasing numbers of the activists and younger leaders I had known, especially the ones whose motivations had been rooted in their ideologies, abandoning the causes to which they’d been committed since their days as undergraduates.
My own beliefs remained unchanged. I had not become involved in civil rights out of ideology but out of the sense that, if I stepped back from the fray, I would be avoiding an obligation that belonged to people of my age at that moment in our history—a feeling that was deepened by the visceral experience of teaching my young students and observing the conditions of immiseration in the neighborhood in which they lived. So the rapidly changing ideological environment and the splin
tering of left-wing groups had little effect upon the work that I was doing or the books that I was writing. Nonetheless, it was increasingly apparent that the activist mentality of many of the students I’d been meeting at the universities was rapidly diminishing. In part because there was no longer any movement to sustain and mobilize their idealistic energies, they seemed to see no concrete ways to act on their beliefs. With this, inevitably, there was a fading of audacity: a loss of urgency and fervor.
Within another year or two, my father recognized that I was starting to experience more than a “mild stirring” of uneasiness about the changes taking place around me, but he also realized that I was unable or unwilling to adapt to these political realities. I think he decided I could use a wake-up call. When he sat down with me one evening in his home, he got directly to the point.
“I’ve been watching you the past few years,” he said, “and, if you want to know what I’ve been thinking, I won’t sugarcoat it for you. Here’s what I believe. You’re still living as if you regard yourself as some kind of mild-mannered, Harvard-educated reembodiment of Che Guevara. But your soldiers in blue jeans are going back to business school. They’re thinking about salaries and mortgage payments, not about a revolution….I think I know you better than you know yourself. I’m your father. I want to see you thinking hard about what I’ve just said to you.”
His choice of words (“soldiers in blue jeans”) startled me, to say the least. I was anything but a revolutionary by the standards of the times. But I think the gravity of his concern was heightened by the fact that a number of the few remaining activists I knew had been attracted, since the last years of the 1960s, into some alarmingly irrational and violent activities. The emergence of a group known as the Weather Underground had been given wide attention in the press. As a psychiatrist, my father was convinced that they were living in a world of fantasy—“total detachment,” as he put it, “from the slightest recognition of the damage that they’re doing to the very causes they claim to believe in.”
The Theft of Memory Page 18