Carol did suggest that her husband at least talk with Richie and try to improve his attitude toward school and friends.
She always left the discipline to George. During Richie’s preadolescence, there were no more than two or three incidents that so provoked her that she lost her temper and hit the boy. Normally she would insist that George punish Richie for the rare trouble he caused at home. And when George did impose a punishment, usually nothing more than ordering his son to stay in his room for a treasured Saturday afternoon, Carol—the daughter of a disciplinarian—would usually weaken. “I couldn’t stand him lying in there and moping around,” she would say to George. “When he started to cry, I let him go outside. I know I’m a soft touch, but all my life I’ve gone out of my way to avoid a scene.” This inclination to revoke her husband’s will would lead—perhaps contribute is a fairer word—to terrible moments beyond her imagination by the time Richie reached his mid-teens.
In those turbulent later years, there would come criticism of George for having “forced his will” upon his son. But from talking with those close to the Diener family in the early 1960s, it seems more accurate to say that George was not only a good father but an excellent one. “He was never too tired to take Richie on weekend trips,” says June Marck, Carol’s sister. “Nobody worked harder for his family than George, but nobody cared about his son more, either. He worshiped that boy. His whole face lit up whenever Richie came into the room.”
When walking in a forest, George would sometimes stop and find a rock or a bed of pine needles to sit on. There he would bring up the subject of Richie’s erratic schoolwork. “I only want you to do the best you can,” he said gently. “You have so much more natural intelligence than me. You can be anything you want to be.” But Richie’s attention was not held by such talk. He was more interested in interrupting to find out why the maple tree turned red before the others in autumn. George usually let his lectures go with “See if you can do a little better, son.”
George wished that he could be more eloquent with his son, because he was never sure that his words were meaningful to a developing child. Insecurity still gnawed him. Did he have any real wisdom to impart to his son? Even though he was now thirty-four years old and had been with the same food company for nine long years, he somehow lacked permanence in his life. The fresh revelation came and came again to George that he was actually a father, that he bore awesome responsibility for the boy who skipped after him in the forests. He could not express it to anyone, but it was within him. And though he loved Richie deeply, there still rose up the moments when he wanted to run.
The best way he could communicate with Richie was in basic endeavor, like climbing a pine tree until he was fifty feet above the ground, until he could almost touch the sunlight just beyond. “Come on up, son!” George would cry. “There’s something wrong with a boy who can’t climb a tree.” And Richie struggled to follow his father. A stranger coming on the scene would have observed the grown man reaching for the sky, and, only halfway up the tree, a little boy reaching—perhaps in envy, perhaps in raw determination—for his father.
A second son, Russell, was born to George and Carol in 1961, and though his delivery was less grueling for Carol, his arrival in the green and white house was traumatic. Although Richie had no health problems in his infancy or childhood, Russell was a problem baby. From the day Carol brought him home from the hospital, Russell cried.
First there was colic that seemed never to go away, then his feet were discovered to be pigeon-toed and he had to wear orthopedic shoes. Later there were months of painful teething. The Diener house began to reverberate with the sounds of a screaming baby. George complained mildly that from the first week of his second son’s life he never could hear a newscast. The family dinners, at which Carol had always served carefully prepared meals, turned suddenly into thrown-together affairs. Richie, who was seven, had looked forward to dinner because it had always been a time when he and his father could talk of rope knots and beehives. But now Russell clamored for attention—and got it.
“I spent a year parading up and down with this crying, screaming baby,” says Carol in weary recollection. “He cried constantly. He’d be crying when Richie got up and when Richie got home from school. I did feel sorry for Richie, because instead of being able to get him ready for school and send him off with a good hot breakfast, I’d been up all night, walking the house with Russell. It got so bad that George started staying up nights to give me a break, and then he would have to go off to work exhausted. God knows we didn’t slight Richie deliberately, but perhaps he felt he had lost our attention.”
Russell outgrew his troubling early years and soon became a handsome, bright, and overwhelmingly energetic child. He was indeed hyperactive, so much so that the family pediatrician prescribed amphetamines, a controversial treatment in which a stimulating drug works conversely on a young child and calms him down. Neither Carol nor George was enthusiastic about having pills in the house, for theirs had never been a medicine cabinet well stocked with pills. Believing in proper food and exercise, George spurned all medications, taking only a rare aspirin for a cold.
As his little brother stormed into life, Richie began to withdraw. One side of the seesaw bounced up, the other went down. Richie stayed more often in his room, which was fast becoming the lair of a naturalist. His library of science and animal books grew as George willingly ordered every book that Richie insisted he needed. The shelves filled with the entire Life Nature Library, plus encyclopedias of animal behavior. Carol’s father, who was nearing retirement as a Westinghouse executive and who had more money than George could ever dream of, a fact that chewed at the son-in-law now and then, gave Richie a subscription to the National Geographic, which enchanted the child.
Often the mail brought wildlife catalogs that Richie had sent off for in his childish scrawl. Poring over them for days, he made copious notes and illustrations in sketchbooks. In one, Carol noticed a crow advertised from a mail-order firm in the Northwest. Secretly she sent off for one, paying $26 for an unusual birthday present for her husband. The day it arrived, the United Parcel Service delivery man brought in a crate with black tail feathers sticking out. “Well,” said the man, “I suppose this is better than having your mother-in-law come live with you.”
Father and son built a cage for the bird in the backyard. Richie set out to teach his pet—for he had assumed ownership—to talk. But the crow refused to utter a sound, despite Richie’s diligent instructions. One night at four, a cat crept around the cage, and Richie’s crow exploded with a torrent of sounds. Lights went on all over the neighborhood; Richie rushed into the backyard triumphant. His crow could talk when necessary.
One morning Richie went to the cage to feed his pet before leaving for school. He did not close the door firmly and lock it, and the bird pushed the entrance open, flying away before Richie could stop him, ignoring the child’s tearful cries to come back. Richie could not bear to make immediate confession, and he went to school with guilt weighing heavily on him. That night he told George, asking punishment, but his tears were so heavy that his father could only console him.
The first animal in Richie’s life had been his mother’s Boston bull terrier, Boots. When Boots died at a noble age, Richie was so disconsolate that Carol found another terrier, almost a double, with the same black and white markings. She left it up to Richie to name the new pet, and he selected “Boots” once more: Boy and dog were inseparable. Richie talked to Boots, and, people swear, the dog talked back. When Boots was ill, Richie knew how to treat him. The child was becoming so expert at animal medicine that other youngsters in the neighborhood, who often excluded Richie from their games, began bringing their pets for him to examine.
Carol grew familiar with the touching sight of a small boy struggling down the street with a large dog in his arms, coming to see Richie. But that was the only reason they would come.
Chapter Five
After nine years of living i
n the green and white house, George and Carol decided, in 1965, that it was time to find a larger home. Their two sons, eleven and four, were “getting on each other’s nerves,” said Carol. She longed for a house big enough to give them separate rooms, preferably some distance apart. Richie in particular needed space for his increasing collection of books, animal skeletons, rocks, and leaves. George agreed, listing among his needs a full basement, which their first house did not have. He wanted a place to store his stock of spices and a work area to putter around in with do-it-yourself projects.
With Richie in the sixth grade and about to enter junior high school, Carol wanted to make the move immediately. She felt that children should not be uprooted after their secondary education began, once their more lasting friendships were formed.
There was also the implied consideration that George’s ego would receive a boost by moving himself and his family into a more expensive home. It seemed proper to him that years of hard work and obeying the rules of the American game of life should be rewarded with a step or two up the ladder.
As they had done before, and with the same apprehension of getting into something they would not be able to afford no matter how much they wanted it, George and Carol set forth every Sunday afternoon to search the fastgrowing village of East Meadow. When they had settled in the town in 1956, there were only 28,000 residents scattered about the 8.7 square miles of level land, streams, woods, and quiet lanes. Now the population was nearing 60,000, the roads were broad boulevards often crowded with automobiles, and new subdivisions were springing up rapidly. On more than one Sunday afternoon, the Dieners found themselves lost in their own town, at sea in a puzzle of circles, courts, and cul-de-sacs being carved from what not long ago had been potato fields.
During their explorations, Carol would keep her eye out for the “For Sale by Owner” signs in front yards, wanting to avoid the extra cost of a real estate commission. Their search went on for months until one Sunday they turned into a street marked by two white brick columns, down a gently winding lane lined with mature pine trees and maples. An older area of Cape Cod and ranch-style houses, it seemed to have been developed by contractors who had respect for nature. George liked it immediately. Many of the houses had small touches that pleased the couple; one builder had used flowing script to spell out the house numbers. The lawns were carefully groomed, with masses of azaleas and tulip beds and hedges trimmed and elaborately shaped. It impressed Carol as almost a suburb within a suburb, a place of permanence and peace.
On Longfellow Avenue, a street reached only by so many twists and turns that it could have been the prize in the center of a maze, the Dieners found a fine house painted a sunny lemon. The architecture was nondescript, but within were all the things the family wanted.
Originally there had been three bedrooms, but a previous owner had taken the attached garage, enclosed the front, constructed a bay window, and created a unique fourth bedroom. Carol grasped Richie by the hand and showed him. “This will be your room” she said in a sales talk, for Richie needed convincing about the move. Even though his existence in the old neighborhood had not been a totally pleasant one, eleven-year-old Richie had never known another way of life. He was loath to swap it for an unknown.
Carol pointed out that Richie could be his own man in the new room, for it was almost a separate apartment from the rest of the house. One had to walk down three steps to enter it, and there was a private entrance off the kitchen that Richie could use. Between the kitchen and Richie’s room were more steps leading down to a full basement, room enough for George’s projects and Carol’s washer and dryer and freezer.
Carol’s sales talk was aided by the fact that Richie discovered a family of squirrels living in the large backyard, scampering across the branches of elderly trees. After seeing them, he told his mother that he liked the house and would be happy to live in the special room.
The Dieners sold their first house for $18,500, earning enough profit to make the down payment on the new one, whose price was $21,050. Monthly payments on the mortgage would rise to an ominous $165. As Carol did hasty arithmetic on the back of an envelope, George insisted, with a quaver in his voice that he tried to hide from his wife, that the budget could handle it. In 1965 he was making around $125 a week, and if necessary he could find odd jobs. During one Christmas season he learned how to do screen printing and in his spare time produced holiday greeting placards and sold them to neighbors and shops for a few hundred dollars extra money. In the mid-1960s “moonlighting” was a voguish new term. Magazines were running articles about thousands of Americans who held two jobs in order to pay for homes and freezers and cars and children.
Of course, Carol pointed out, she could always return to work if a crisis occurred, but she was reluctant to do so. Her feeling was that she was needed at home until both children were well along in school. In the other neighborhood she knew children whom she considered ill-mannered brats. The reason, Carol felt, was that both parents worked, with no adult at home when the children returned from school.
A few years later, when the Diener tragedy came under intense community analysis, there was gossip that one contributing cause was that George and Carol had been runabouts, involved in so much social and civic activity that their children grew wild. That was simply not the case. Not until Richie was sixteen did his parents even go away for a weekend without him, and their social life would not have alarmed a fundamentalist preacher. Mainly it consisted of dropping in for after-dinner coffee and cake at Carol’s sister June’s house, or to a neighbor’s, and after an hour of conversation, home to bed early. Rare was the month when a baby-sitter was engaged to watch Richie and Russell while their parents took a late night out.
Both George and Carol did develop areas of outside interest, but neither seemed threatening to their children’s development. Interested in her family history, Carol’s sister, June, paid a genealogist to trace the line. The report revealed that the ancestors could be placed all the way back to a sixteenth-century English knight. Coming back up the line, there were Revolutionary War figures, enough for Carol to join the DAR. For a few years she attended meetings of a Nassau County chapter and proudly placed the certificate of membership on the living-room wall of the yellow house, a rather startling object in her otherwise modest home. Some friends teased Carol now and then about belonging to an organization whose reputation was that of elderly and rich dowagers, and Carol would hasten to defend the group, saying that there were plenty of younger members like her and that the day of banning Marian Anderson from Constitution Hall was long since over. But in truth Carol did not feel comfortable in the DAR. She knew she was the wife of a spice salesman whose salary would barely cover the mortgage. She usually knew who she was, more than her husband did.
To replace the DAR, Carol became a leader in the community’s retarded children’s charity, an unusual development because both of her sons were normal. The interest began when Carol grew friendly with a neighbor woman who had a son with brain damage. The child spent the week at a nearby state mental institution, but he was usually home on weekends. The first time Carol encountered the damaged little boy, her instinct was to turn her head. “What a horrible thing,” she thought to herself. “How does she bear to have him in the house?” Sometimes Richie would go with her, and when he saw the retarded child, he would smile and show him whatever pet he had in his arms that day.
One Sunday afternoon, the mother of the retarded boy asked Carol if she could help take him back to the institution, as the father was unavailable. Carol agreed, but during the trip, as she sat in the back seat with him, the child fell into convulsions. At that moment the car was on a crowded expressway and there was nothing for Carol to do but endure the terrible few moments until the mother could stop the car and climb into the rear. The episode made Carol feel so helpless that she decided to learn more about the retarded. She joined the Association for the Help of Retarded Children, of which her friend had been a founder. “At f
irst it was a meeting once a month, but only during the morning when Richie was at school,” said Carol. “Then I started running bingo parties to raise funds. These were once or twice a month, but George was always at home those nights with the boys.”
A willing worker, efficient and creative, Carol was elected president of the association in 1965 and reelected for four consecutive terms, so effective was her leadership. But even when she became president, Carol insisted, meetings were held during the day so she would not neglect her children. “Mainly the job consists of a lot of telephoning,” she told George. On the few times a year when big affairs were held, Carol took Richie with her to help decorate. “Neither he nor Russell nor George could have felt neglected,” said Carol. “I would have dropped my work in a minute if there was any indication of that.”
When George was sixteen and a restless boy in Brooklyn, he served briefly in the New York State Guard. It was then that he fell in love with guns. A psychiatrist might suggest that any man only five feet seven would feel taller with a weapon in his hand, but George was certainly not conscious of this. He knew only that he enjoyed holding them, tending them, and firing them, a paradox for a man who held reverence for all forms of life. The few times he went hunting, he could not put down the feeling of revulsion afterwards that he had killed an animal, even though he could rationalize that it was in the scheme of nature to shoot for food. “Too many of those guys,” said George once in reference to other hunters, “are out there just to kill.” He would find another way to enjoy his guns.
Richie Page 4