The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  To these women, what happened to Irene Schwartz appeared so incomprehensible that it brought them not only sorrow but terror—the terror that always explodes when life seems arbitrary and one can fathom no cause and effect in the universe. It was largely to still this terror, to explain that there was some cause and effect in the story of Irene Schwartz, that I undertook writing about her.

  “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote in The White Album. “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the moral or social lesson in the murder of five.… We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

  In the case of Irene Schwartz, there was no moral or social lesson to satisfy our need to find patterns in the world and thus feel safe. But there was a psychiatric lesson. There were warning signs, however Irene Schwartz’s life may have looked to the outside world.

  Certainly her life appeared temperate, comfortable, even enviable. Irene and her husband, forty-three-year-old Robert Schwartz, a professor of economics at New York University’s Graduate School of Business Administration, lived in one of Manhattan’s most fashionable, most placid neighborhoods, the East Eighties, just off Park Avenue. There they had, as Irene’s father, Alfred Schwarzchild, president of the Royal Mills textile firm, told me, “no financial worries. None at all.” Their valuable co-op was large, with separate bedrooms for each of the children, and when a smaller studio apartment adjacent to their own had become available, they bought it, too, breaking through the wall so that Robert could have a study at home.

  He must have liked working at home. He was known as a fond husband and loving father. Some of Irene’s friends told me that while they always gossiped about whose marriage was in what creaking condition, there was never any gossip about Irene and Robert, who had been married for ten years. And one of the family’s baby-sitters, an eighteen-year-old who often worked for them, said, “They were extremely close. They were always holding hands.” Robert’s hobby was amateur photography, and one of his favorite subjects was his family. His study walls were lined with pictures of the two smiling children and of Irene, a pretty woman who wore her curly hair to her shoulders and, eschewing makeup, had a natural, modest air.

  She was utterly devoted to Joshua and Judy. She’d attended college, received an M.A. in education from New York University, and taught school for a while before she had the children. But once she became a mother, she gave up the notion of working outside her home. Instead, she channeled her skills at guiding and caring for the young into ministering to her own progeny.

  It was an unusual choice in the early 1970s, when most women were clamoring to work. But certainly it was one with a long history of distinguished practitioners, and Irene, according to her friends, excelled at it. She spent virtually all her time with her children and was active in their schools. Both children attended private schools—different ones—and Irene participated regularly in the parents’ groups at both. She was also enormously protective of her children. One friend said that what struck her most about Irene was that whenever she saw her out walking with her son and daughter, she was holding their hands tightly clasped in hers. Another said that at a swimming pool to which she and Irene belonged, Irene, unlike the other mothers, would never let her children swim with the lifeguard’s supervision alone but would herself stand interminably and patiently in the shallow end of the pool until they had finished disporting themselves.

  Among the other examples her friends gave to illustrate her painstaking mothering was the fact that she never failed to escort her children to and from school, never sloughed the task off onto maids and babysitters, though she could well have afforded to do so. They said further that unlike so many mothers of young children, she wasn’t given to procrastination. She’d mail the children’s tuition deposits to their schools well before the start of each semester and make appointments for their pediatric checkups in sufficient time for the required medical forms to reach their schools before, not on, the first day of classes.

  Indeed, anticipating her son’s and daughter’s needs was second nature to Irene. Once, when she was to be away from home for a while, she warned her children’s teachers weeks before her departure so that they could plan for the possibility that the children might miss her and thus act out or cut up or just behave differently.

  But if she was protective of her own children, she was also greatly protective and fond of children in general. Whenever her friends had scheduling problems and couldn’t pick up their children at school or couldn’t be at home with them in the afternoons, it was always Irene to whom they would turn for help. She invariably came to their rescue, absorbing their kids into her own household for play and snacks. In fact, the very day before she took her own and her children’s lives, she had arranged to care, the next day, for a child whose mother was preoccupied with a sick baby.

  No wonder that to the outside world Irene Schwartz looked like Supermom.

  It would have pleased her to be remembered this way. Apparently, she had set out to be a perfect mother, an available, responsive, uncomplaining maternal figure. No doubt it was because she knew what it was like to be deprived of such a bulwark. When she was a child, her own mother had often been away from home. She had suffered some kind of mental breakdown and was frequently hospitalized in psychiatric institutions.

  After her mother died—it was in 1977—Irene grew extremely despondent. She saw a psychiatrist but became increasingly depressed. Ultimately, in the spring of 1980, she herself was hospitalized and given shock therapy—a treatment used frequently in cases where psychiatrists have established that a patient has suicidal yearnings. Most of her friends didn’t know about her depression and its treatment.

  It is here that the story of Irene Schwartz begins to take its tragic turn. After her hospitalization and as a result of the treatment, she began to improve. The summer before she died, she was no longer brooding, and on occasion she even worked as a volunteer at her children’s day camp. To her doctors, she seemed well enough to be maintained on antidepressive medications as an outpatient; to her husband, well enough for him to leave her for a short while to go to Europe to attend an economics conference. But it is one of the commonplaces of psychiatry, and one of the aspects of the discipline that most demoralizes its practitioners, that it is often only when severely depressed, potentially suicidal patients are on the upswing, only when they show signs of being less melancholy and once again taking an interest in the world around them, that they can organize themselves sufficiently to carry out an exit from the earth. All psychiatrists dread this ironic fact and fear the responsibility of caring for the severely depressed.

  This was the case with Irene Schwartz. Her father said to me, “No one knew what she was planning. Not just the outsiders. Even we, her family. I spent the Saturday before her death with her and the children. She was laughing. The children were laughing. Yes, she was in treatment. But no one suspected anything like this at the time.”

  In her final hours, Irene Schwartz must have missed her mother and longed to be reunited with her, for she left a note saying that she wanted to be with her mother. She also wrote that she was afraid that unless she joined her mother now, she too might have to spend her days in hospitals. And then she picked up the shotgun.

  That Irene Schwartz should have wanted to kill herself, given her history of severe depression, seems comprehensible. Suicide among depressed people is twenty-five times greater than among the population at large. But the children? What makes a loving mother, however depressed, murder her offspring?

  I asked several authorities on female depression to explain this phenomenon. “There are several components,” Dr. Helen Kaplan, clinical professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical Center, told me. “One of them is rage. When you talk about an infanticide, as opposed to a suicide, it isn’t really e
nough to talk merely about depression. Think of Medea. There’s no better way to do your husband in than to kill not just yourself but your children. It’s better than suicide, because if you die, your husband will eventually forget about you. No matter how much he loved you, he’ll eventually marry again, and he won’t even have to pay alimony. But if you obliterate the children, you can be sure he’ll remember you to the end of his days.”

  Dr. Alexandra Symonds, a psychiatrist who has worked at New York’s Bellevue Hospital with women who killed their children and then tried to kill themselves but survived, concurred with Dr. Kaplan but stressed that her patients had usually not been aware of the rage component. “It wasn’t just that they denied it,” she said. “They actually believed they were saving their children from, say, the devil, or that they had to kill them because there was no one around who would look after them once they themselves were gone. They were delusional.”

  Maggie Scarf, author of Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women, suggested to me that in the case of Irene Schwartz “there may have been a blurring of the boundaries between herself and her children.” Some psychic blurring goes on during pregnancy, when a child is in its mother’s womb, and during early infancy. At those times it’s normal, perhaps even essential, for the well-being of the child. “But later on,” she said, “a woman has to recognize that there are boundaries, has to know that when her child feels bad it doesn’t mean she has to feel bad, or that when she feels bad, her child needn’t. If a mother can’t separate herself from her children, it’s pathological.”

  Clearly Irene Schwartz, who had devoted her life to her children, had blurred the boundaries between herself and them and had come to believe that there was no one to look after them once she died. That this was a delusion that didn’t even approach reality is what makes her story so painful, for consider this: at her funeral services, held jointly with those for the children, the chapel was thronged with relatives and friends. Many of them, had Irene only been well enough to communicate her fears, might willingly have volunteered to raise and coddle Judy and Joshua. There was Irene’s father, her in-laws, and a host of aunts, uncles, and cousins. And, of course, her husband.

  He rose before the assembled mourners and spoke out in a heartrending but steady voice. “My daughter, Judy, was precious in every way,” he began. Then, with a father’s awareness of a child’s most intimate affections and habits, he told the group that Judy had had a favorite song, one she listened to on her phonograph each night before she went to sleep. The song was “Tomorrow,” from Annie, with its exuberant melody and buoyant lyrics. He’d found the record there on her child-size phonograph the morning he’d been summoned precipitately home from Europe. “I love ya, tomorrow.… Just thinking about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and sorrow till there’s none.”

  As for his son, “Josh was a dynamo,” Robert Schwartz said. “For the rest of my life, Josh, I’ll be a better man because of you, little buddy.”

  The desolation in the stunned man’s voice was almost unendurable. Those mourners who had not cried earlier began weeping inconsolably until at last a rabbi, the very one who had married Irene and Robert, tried to stem the sobbing by seeking to explain how so loving a mother could have performed so desperate an act. “It was not Irene who did what was done,” said the rabbi. “It was the illness which overwhelmed her and her life.… Who can comprehend the power of the disease?”

  I left the funeral that afternoon thinking obsessively about my teenage daughter and how, when she’d been little and mischievous, I’d frequently snapped, “Do that again and I’ll kill you!” How often had it happened? How often, when she and her friends had played their favorite games—Tent, which involved burying masses of clothes and toys and even food and drink under a canopy created by a bedspread on the floor; Swimming Pool, which involved filling pots and pans with water and spreading the vessels out on the carpet for Barbie dolls to swim in and little girls to knock over—how often in those days had I said to my husband when he came home, “I came within an inch of killing the kids this afternoon.”

  But that inch was really a mile. There is an enormous divide that separates the normal mother from the infanticide. It can be an alarming, lonely space, a daunting desert that makes a mother say of her children, “I just can’t understand them. They’re nothing like me.” But it is what keeps our children safe.

  THE TRANSSEXUAL, THE BARTENDER, AND THE SUBURBAN PRINCESS

  Rockland County, New York

  1981

  THE HUDSON RIVER WASHES up a hundred or so bodies a year. It is New York’s Ganges, the watery resting place of numerous dead, many the victims of stabbings and shootings. The identities of these victims and of their assailants frequently remain unknown. But when, on October 28, 1981, a woman’s body, dressed in a lavender spaghetti-strap camisole and lavender pants, wrapped in a yellowish water-sodden blanket, and riddled with four bullet holes in the skull, was fished from the river at West Twenty-eighth Street, the body was quickly identified, largely because there was something most unusual about it.

  Examining the lavender-garbed corpse, doctors at the city’s medical examiner’s office discovered that it belonged to no ordinary female. The vagina was abnormally large, there were no ovaries or uterus, and there was a telltale bit of prostate gland. They informed Manhattan detectives of these anomalies, and the detectives, who had already begun checking on missing persons in and around New York, began to suspect that the body belonged to a twenty-four-year-old named Diane Delia, who had disappeared from her home in Yonkers. Diane, they had learned, had been a woman for only a short while. Indeed, until a year before she had been John Delia, a man.

  So began one of the most bizarre criminal cases of our era. It resulted, after a three-month investigation, in the indictment of two people: a well-to-do, twenty-six-year-old doctor’s daughter named Robyn Arnold, who had purportedly been engaged to marry Delia when he was still a man, and a twenty-two-year-old, down-at-the-heels bartender named Robert Ferrara, who had actually married Delia once he became a woman. It led to a tension-filled murder trial and a dramatic verdict. But what proved most intriguing of all about this odd case was the door it opened on a style of life in a corner of suburbia few people knew existed.

  Philip Roth once observed that the American writer in the mid-twentieth century has his hands full trying to comprehend and then make believable much of American reality. “The actuality,” he wrote, “is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” I thought of Roth’s words constantly as I began my immersion in the case of John/Diane Delia and his/her best beloveds.

  I started my research by visiting a disco called Zipperz, in New Rochelle, New York, on a Saturday night about a year after Delia’s body had been hauled from the river. I’d heard that John/Diane Delia had been well known at Zipperz, where, long before he altered his body to make it female, he used to do female impersonations. His impersonation of Diana Ross was famous in his crowd, and indeed, after the disco learned he had been murdered, it sponsored a kind of memorial service for him—a John/Diane Delia night during which a pride of female impersonators mimicked Delia mimicking Ross.

  Zipperz was a gay disco, catering to both sexes, and the clientele for the most part was young, unsophisticated, and employed at unskilled, low-paying jobs. The night I was there, I met an abundance of sales clerks, waiters and waitresses, hair stylists and manicurists. “Most of the people here are just coming out,” one muscular hair stylist explained. “Some of them are still in high school, and some of them are just starting their careers, just beginning to look for jobs.”

  The place was jammed that Saturday, the dance floor teeming, the lines at the bar three deep. Behind the barroom itself was another area, a large, dark room with low-slung couches set into little cubicles. On the couches, couples or threesomes were sprawled in complicated embraces. “It’s not polite to look,” the hair stylis
t chided as he showed me through the room.

  I’d never been in a place like Zipperz before, and at first I felt uneasy, sure that none of its patrons would want to talk to me, an outsider. But, to my surprise, I found that as soon as I explained that I was there because I wanted to write about the Delia case, I was deluged with communicants. Delia had apparently been everyone’s favorite transsexual—although this, said a lesbian who claimed to have been a good friend of the deceased, “is a distinction not unlike being everyone’s favorite concentration camp guard. Transsexuals as a bunch are not a very nice bunch.”

  It was this woman who told me that Delia had been an extraordinarily talented impersonator. She’d seen him do Diana Ross not just here, at Zipperz, but in a Manhattan club called the Ice Palace. “He was beautiful,” she said. “Tall, olive-skinned, with long dark hair streaked with red highlights. And then he’d put on this Diana Ross wig, a really expensive wig, and he would just become Diana Ross. It was magical. I’ve seen lots of female impersonators, but he was far and away the best.”

  Another woman disagreed about Delia’s abilities, pointing out that he never actually sang during his shows but lip-synched to a recording. “He was only so-so,” she muttered. “Nothing special.”

  “She’s just jealous,” said a man in a curly blond wig. “Ask them over at the Playroom about Diane Delia. Or at the Talk of the Town. Or even down in the city, at Studio Fifty-four. Diane Delia was a star!”