His Brother's Keeper

by Jonathan Weiner

  When he moved from Columbia to Brown University, in Providence, my parents bought a Victorian on College Hill, a few minutes’ walk from the university. The house was three stories high and formal, with two staircases and a butler’s pantry. A speaking tube ran from the kitchen to the old servants’ quarters on the third floor, which became my aerie as a teenager. My mother planned and oversaw the restoration. When she was done, I think Stephen Heywood would have liked the house. It had a fine front staircase, a wall of books in the living room, a dining room with a long sweep of polished walnut floorboards. She decorated the house with antiques and also with a few of the heavy, dark, Germanic pieces from Bensonhurst, because at that time my mother was the only one in her family who had room for them.

  Providence is four or five hours’ drive from New York City. When my aunts and uncles came to visit, they thought the house was too far away. They may also have thought it was a little too much. My parents always seemed so perfect, cousins on both sides told me after my mother got sick, and there was something about that line I hated. I know they loved my parents, and I am sure they were worried about me, but what I heard was, “Lo, how the mighty have fallen!” Forty miles away, in Newton, Massachusetts, the Heywoods would soon be receiving the same line of sympathy. One of their cousins told Melinda that the Heywood family had always seemed almost too golden, too blessed. Melinda brooded. It was as if their cousin was saying, “You finally got yours.”

  Lucretius put that problem on papyrus, along with so much else. “Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.”

  Well, that is a human resentment on both sides, on the boat and on the shore: one of those eternal human feelings that make us all eternally uncomfortable, even when we believe that we are the one who is up there on the hill.

  My parents certainly had gotten way out of Brooklyn, in the big house on College Hill, and they paid for their isolation once my mother got sick. Late one night my mother called one of her sisters back in New York. She said hello and then started to cry. She did not say a word. She would not stop crying.

  Ponnie, what is it? What is it, Ponnie?

  By the late 1990s, I was driving up Route 95 to New England as often as I could, often with Deb and the boys. At home in Pennsylvania I spent hours on the phone with my father discussing doctors and medicines. Sometimes I began my days at dawn writing down early family memories. I kept going back to our year in Italy, when I was five, and our year in Israel, when I was twelve. We used to have family picnics at the Caves of Carmel, where my kid brother, Eric, and I found flint tools made by Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, and where we placed our palms against palms that children had painted on the walls of the cave tens of thousands of years before we were born.

  In neurodegenerative diseases, nerves die. The differences in symptoms between the multitude of related diseases depend in large part on which nerves die first and which ones die next. As her illness progressed, my mother became very difficult, and she drove my brother away. But I was the first son, and I could still revive all those ancient memories. She was a children’s librarian and when we were growing up she always had the right book. I could hear her voice singing to us: Toorah loorah loorah. My memories went all the way back to the crib. In one of them I am looking through the crib bars, or sometimes through the five fingers of one hand. I move my head a little to the left, then a little to the right, and watch a light across the room appear and disappear. It is more than just something to do. It is a game, it is almost a play, a story about light and dark, here and gone. New pairs of eyes must have played that game in every generation and made some kind of parable out of it. Martin Buber heard a saying from a disciple of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, who had passed it down from his great-grandfather, the Baal Shem Tov: “Alas! the world is full of enormous lights and mysteries, and we shut them from ourselves with one small hand!”

  Something was very wrong with my mother, although she still kept herself fit, watched what she ate, kept up her bridge and tennis, and dressed with style. She was still Ponnie, Florence, the pretty one, her father’s daughter, and she looked younger than her age. But she lived in dread that her disease was about to tear her apart.

  Late one evening I visited my parents in the tall old house in Providence. Was this during the same season when she stumbled on the steps of the Met, or was it earlier, or later on? Most of our family disaster is a blur to me now. In houses, even big houses, the most important conversations sometimes happen in the most cramped, out-of-the-way places, as if there anything goes. The conversations that are not meant to take place somehow find their way out in corners or in back stairways under sixty-watt bulbs, where they are shared as if by conspirators. My mother and I were standing at the foot of the back stairs by the coatrack. In the stark light and dark of the landing every object looked slightly surreal, the tennis rackets and tubes of tennis balls, the rubber boots way in the back, the filing cabinet for her favorite catalogues. We had turned out all the other lights on the ground floor, getting ready to go up, when I stopped and turned. I told her that I could see that she was suffering, and I said, “Sometimes you must think about ending it.”

  Her expression when she looked at me was startled, abashed, and frank at the same time. Her face was confessing that she did think about suicide all the time, and that she put the thought away again and again. She would never kill herself, she told me. “I know what kind of legacy that would leave you and Eric.”

  In the dim light, I asked her to promise me that if she ever began thinking seriously of killing herself, she would call me first. I thought there had to be something that medicine could do for her, and I wanted her to hold on.

  I will never know what she thought of our talk that night, or if she even remembered it. She was so shut down in her own weather by then that she was not looking to me or to anyone else for much. My father was still real to her; the rest of us were already far away. I was stepping forward, pushing through that distance, getting in her face. It was the boldest I had been with my mother since I left home. I was offering a contract. You hold on. I will get help. Stay with us.

  But we did not even have a diagnosis. If I had known what she was in for, I would not have begged her to hold on.

  Seven

  A Pang of Fear

  Jamie was intrigued by biology, but in his first few months at the Neurosciences Institute he felt very stretched. He learned a little genetics, cell biology, molecular biology. Complexity theory. Neural nets. He was asked to see if some of the software the institute’s cognitive neuroscientists were developing might interest toy manufacturers: Maybe it could help them develop new and improved Barbie dolls and G.I. Joes, toys with artificial intelligence. “But their stuff was so much more sophisticated and elaborate than you could handle in a toy,” he says. “NOMAD runs on sixteen computers and it can barely recognize a block. It’s an amazing achievement, but….”

  Jamie had a few private ideas, too. He had million-dollar dot-com schemes and business plans that he kept in the drawers of his redwood desk, including a concept for getting commercials onto computer screens. Some of his best ideas came in the evenings while he played computer games with Stephen. When they played and talked on the phone, they could see each other’s avatars dashing through the combat zones on the screen. Jamie thought that was amazing. There he was in La Jolla warning his brother in Palo Alto, Watch out for that guy behind you! At the institute, he met with a computer scientist from MIT who had designed software for reading and interpreting human facial expressions. Jamie wondered if he could write a module that used webcams to convey people’s expressions onto their avatars. Then when he played Quake, he would see Stephen’s reactions on the screen and Stephen would see his.

  Ideas like that could make the right entrepreneur 10 million dollars overnight in
1998, and Jamie loved to spin get-rich-quick schemes with his new friends at the institute. He loved to talk, and he had always learned best by talking, not by reading books. Stephen, who had turned away from books, could read a page in a flash and remember everything he read. But Jamie, who revered books, was dyslexic. He often scribbled down a phone number with two digits reversed and then reversed them back when he made the call. Like many dyslexics, Jamie was also dreamy, hyper, and distractible. In classrooms he used to wander from desk to desk and chat, which drove his teachers crazy. He did not do well enough at Newton North to get into MIT, and he flunked out of his first year at Carnegie Mellon.

  “I came home,” Jamie says. “Figured I’d work for a year, get my head on straight. Figured I’d get a job selling computer systems, and retake some classes.”

  “What he said was, ‘I think I’ll transfer to MIT!’ ” says John Heywood.

  John was sure that Jamie was dreaming another one of his dreams. He assumed that MIT was out of reach for a student with Jamie’s record. At least, that is how father and son tell the story. John had a friend in admissions, Dan Langdale, and he asked Dan to see Jamie, thinking that his friend would tell his son to wake up.

  “My father seized the opportunity to teach me that there is no recovery from terrible errors,” Jamie says. “Dad had every expectation that Dan Langdale would tell me I was going down hard.”

  “Yes. No one will ever believe that I didn’t expect that Dan wouldn’t gently say—”

  “But Dan said, ‘Of course.’ ”

  Langdale gave Jamie a chance. He let him take two MIT courses as a special student. When Jamie did well, Langdale let him in. “I probably hold the record for the lowest average of anyone to transfer to MIT,” Jamie says. “The funny thing was, my father had wanted me to learn a lesson. Instead I learned that rules can be bent!”

  Jamie was bending the rules again by quitting engineering to work at a biological think tank; and he was bending the rules there, in a way, by trying to get the gist of biology, skimming from subject to subject. That was his job—but it is not how scientists work. In his monk’s cell, while his office mate Joe Gally did abstruse theoretical work, or scanned the Web and absorbed the day’s discoveries in molecular biology, Jamie studied the research papers of the neuroscientists around him, with help from Gally and a growing shelf of books, including Edelman’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and a handy guide called The Human Brain Coloring Book. He tried to talk the talk at his meetings with Edelman. On his fast computer with the big screen, he ran the scientists’ models of the workings of the brain—highly mathematical, highly theoretical—looking for commercial applications. Maybe one of their computer models of consciousness could help predict the rise and fall of the stock market. Maybe he could help them turn that idea into a company. Now and then, as a favor, he designed his new friends a piece of lab apparatus, or coached them in the principles of business plans, dot-com entrepreneurship, and salesmanship. It’s got to have WIIF’M, Jamie said. That was one of his favorite acronyms: WIIF’M, What’s In It For Me. Show the other guy what’s in it for him and he will buy your idea every time. Almost every day he stopped by Ralph Greenspan’s office. I’m going to make you a rich man! Jamie liked to say. I’m going to make you all rich!

  All three of the Heywood boys had a kind of something-for-nothing charm in those days. They were at home in the new California Gold Rush. When Jamie visited Stephen and Ben in Palo Alto, they hung out at a pool bar and restaurant called the Blue Chalk, one of the hottest and toniest spots in Silicon Valley. The three of them knew everyone at the Blue Chalk. Jamie once boasted to me that his brothers could walk in on Saturday night when there was a three-hour wait for a table and have one in fifteen minutes. “And I don’t think that Ben ever bought a drink there—he got free beer from all of the bartenders. He tipped extraordinarily well, which helped.”

  Their cousin David Searls ate there with them one night when he was in town. “They’ve always known how to have a good time,” he says. “Stephen was especially well liked by the female servers. God, yes. He had no trouble attracting women.”

  Searls is fifteen years older than Jamie. He has degrees in philosophy, life sciences, developmental biology, and computer science. Back then he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, working on genomics. Jamie used to call him for advice as he tried to find his way into his new job. Searls has known all three of the Heywood boys since the week they were born. He has watched them grow up on the farm in South Dakota and on the beach at Duck, and he has never quite understood them. “The one word is ‘irrepressible,’ ” he says. “My uncle John is the quintessential academician, not to mention being British, so it always struck me that he must have always wondered,” Searls sighs, “about marrying and mixing his seed with the American strain, since this is what resulted. I don’t know how he feels, because he’s pretty quiet about his feelings, but I’ve always wondered if he didn’t quite know what to make of having all these wild children.”

  Like Searls, most of the Heywoods’ cousins have conventional careers as academics and other white-collar professionals. But Stephen was happy as a part-time carpenter, Ben had quit engineering to shoot for Hollywood, and now Jamie had quit to dabble at the edges of biomedicine. “It’s courageous to do what makes you happy and follow your muse and that sort of thing,” says Searls. “But all three of the Heywood boys followed their muses to the exclusion of any concern about tradition or the rigorous approach to life that us Midwesterners are supposed to have. Some of us have to work for a living.”

  Searls says he had warned Jamie that without formal training, much less the certification of a scientific degree, he might find it hard to get by at the Neurosciences Institute. “His intuitive style had clearly taken him a long way,” Searls says, “but I felt at the time, being trained as a scientist myself, that it would only go so far. There is a place for rigor and conservatism.”

  And Jamie did worry. From early on, he worried that Edelman was disappointed with his progress. Although neither Jamie nor Gerald Edelman will say much about it now, some scientists at the institute wonder if there was a clash of styles. Jamie has a genius for picking up the lingo of a place and fitting in—he is a chameleon. He also likes to dominate a conversation. From the beginning, he may have tried to talk as if he knew. Old-school scientists like Edelman have almost a physical revulsion against claiming to know more than they know or claiming to have done more than they have done.

  On the other hand, when Jamie explained business start-ups, Edelman may have tried to talk as if he knew.

  Jamie agonized that spring, but at the same time he felt sure that he would triumph in biology in one way or another. He could make anything work. He was a problem solver. He was a Heywood. All this was part of Jamie: pride, confidence, hubris, convictions of grandeur, dreaminess, family loyalty, compulsive salesmanship. When Jamie flew, he liked to talk a stewardess into bumping him up to first class. Once he badgered me into trying it, too, but I did not get far.

  “This is a coach-class ticket,” the stewardess said.

  “You’re right.”

  I told that story to Searls. “Yeah,” he said sourly. “I have to fly a couple of hundred thousand miles before I can do that.”

  Jamie could doubt himself. But he also had faith in an invulnerably charismatic charm, a charm that could get him into or out of anything he wanted.

  All through the spring of 1998, while Jamie chatted with biologists who study the human body’s nervous architecture, Stephen tried just as hard to put the subject out of his mind, even though his right hand reminded him every other minute that something was wrong. His buyers on Forest Avenue loved him, and even after the sale they paid him to keep working on the place. They wanted a doghouse in the backyard in the same custom-color stucco as the house. That spring, Stephen built them a twenty-thousand-dollar doghouse. This took a lot of stonework, and he began to notice weakness in his right hand as a whole. Now it w
as not just his thumb and forefinger. He had problems doing all sorts of little jobs, like wringing out a sponge. When he put his right hand under cold running water it would freeze up and he would have to straighten out the fingers one by one with his left hand. To hold a wrench or a drill, if his right hand was chilly, he had to wrap it into place one finger at a time with his left hand. When he wanted to put a tool down again, his fingers would be stuck around it, and again he would have to pry them straight one by one. Still, his right arm was as strong as ever. He could set a big piece of wood resting in his palm, and, using the hand like a hook, carry the wood up a ladder with no problem.

  When Jamie flew in, Stephen enjoyed having him around, although he did not care to hear much about science. Later on, Stephen would talk about that spring in his usual I’m-not-an-intellectual style. “The guy who bought the house, he works for a biotech. So he and Jamie had lots of conversations talking gibberish.”

  Stephen felt he had earned the right to slack off again. “It’s not like we made gazillions,” he would say, “but we made enough to relax for six months.” So that summer he and Ben celebrated the house sale with a trip to Europe. They stayed in hotels instead of youth hostels, and they tooled around Monte Carlo, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, and London. In Monte Carlo, they dressed their best and played blackjack, the only game in a casino where the odds against the gambler are close to even, if the gambler plays a perfect game. Stephen was not a bad gambler. The two brothers won a thousand dollars over two nights.