All this time, in reaction to Bob’s incurious attitude, I had also stepped away. Some of his actions had pushed me further. What husband doesn’t pick his wife up at the hospital? Had I really forgiven him for that?
Candlelight helps me think, and I lit another one of aromatic sandalwood. I suddenly realized something. I was no longer fixated on Bob’s death. Since I had been married, the fear would catch me unawares, at breakfast, while writing, in the hot sweat of the night. If I saw so much as a hair whitening on his head, a cold panic could run through me. And then, one day, it was I, not he, who suffered the dreaded sickness that had no cure. It was my own health that I found myself concerned with now. The doctors hadn’t told me I was cured as they had told Bob. He might outlive me. At that moment, I felt nothing for him. But when I caught sight of his picture on the piano, smiling roguishly at my camera, my throat tightened.
The sight of couples in a restaurant who ate their food without sharing a word had always disturbed me. What were they thinking about? Their stopped-up drains or their stopped-up hopes? Were they bitter about lost loveless years?
Would we be?
Finally, I bundled up and went to Central Park, to a place that never failed to calm me or present me with new ways to look at my troubles. All I needed was my favorite rock in the wildly thicketed underbrush of the Ramble and my book of ancient Greek philosophers. Plato, especially, with his Socratic parables, has lifted me out of many a dark night. His stories organize my chaotic mind, each one explaining another absurdity or contradiction. He had taught me what was behind much of human frustration: the imperfection of the senses colliding with the perfection of the idea. That made me think about the unreality of my idealistic expectations.
I grew up believing that human experience was static. When I was young, my mother used to call me Sarah Bernhardt. Whatever befell me was high drama. And each drama seemed immutable, fixed, a shadow of the last that would be a shadow of the next. My world took place in a single Sisyphean moment. Everything changed and everything stayed the same.
Women are the ones who are adept at redemption. They have the vision and are willing to take the emotional risks. But if, deep down, I still believed in stasis, how could I redeem our marriage?
Brooding on that depressing thought, I began flipping aimlessly through the writings of other Greek philosophers. I was stopped short by two fragments from the work of Heraclitus: “Nothing endures but change” and “He who does not expect the unexpected will not find it.”
It was February 1998. I had a choice: I could try with everything I had to save our marriage, or I could simply live expecting the expected. But I couldn’t figure this out alone: I needed help.
A friend recommended a psychotherapist named Laura Pancucci as one of the best and most knowledgeable in the city. I feared a tough, aloof woman, but when she opened her office door, she welcomed me warmly. She was a spirited woman, no pretense of grandeur, and clearly accessible.
Over several sessions, she learned the details of our predicament. I was often reaching for the box of Kleenex she kept on the floor next to my chair. One day she gently asked, “Do you think it’s possible that your husband has post-traumatic stress disorder? What we call PTSD?”
I held my tissue in midair. That was the last thing I expected her to say. “Uh … like Vietnam veterans?”
“Yes, like the Vietnam veterans who came back from the war traumatized. I’m not saying this is the case, but it’s worth exploring.”
So over the next week, I read exhaustively about PTSD to see if I saw something I recognized. To my surprise, I discovered that the mental disorder that followed trauma could hit ordinary people as well as soldiers, especially if they faced one of life’s major blows, the death of a spouse being number one. I remembered Bob telling me that he cried every day after his first wife’s death and Renia saying he wouldn’t come out of his room for weeks.
Although Bob knew she was very sick, Martha’s chief doctor at Sloan-Kettering had been upbeat, giving Bob the illusion that she would beat the odds. Another doctor was not as sanguine, however, but Bob was often blind to bad news. I thought it likely that when Martha finally died, he had gone into a state of shock similar to that suffered by war veterans.
After her death, symptoms of PTSD that seemed to fit Bob included irrational self-blame. I knew somehow that Bob had survivor’s guilt and a feeling of detachment from others (he avoided seeing friends after her death). He also tried to avoid remembering the event (making it clear to Steve Kaufman he never wanted it mentioned).
Then I read about what happened to a PTSD sufferer if the trauma was repeated somewhere down the line. The symptoms included “psychological distress at an event that resembles the original event … persistent avoidance of people that arouse recollections of the trauma … numbing of responsiveness to them … nightmares … inability to participate in previously enjoyed activities or to feel emotions associated with intimacy, tenderness, and sexuality.” “The duration of the disturbance,” the book said, “could last for an undetermined time, especially without treatment.” I was so startled, I read it over twice. I found other books, and they described the same thing.
At my next session, I nearly ran into Laura’s office. “It’s him! The books describe him, even down to his restlessness at night.”
She nodded. “You know, one other risk factor is experiencing still another trauma that happened even earlier in life. Do you think there was something traumatic in his childhood, his early youth?”
“The war. World War II. He was sunk by the Germans in one ship and hit by a kamikaze 550-pound bomb in another.
“He watched his men die. He saw … God, he saw horrible things.”
Laura said nothing. She must have seen on my face what was happening within.
“I feel so upset for him, but I’m also kind of upset for me. Maybe his past-past is wiping out his present-past? Maybe he doesn’t love me anymore, ’cause I got sick?”
“I think he loves you plenty, but if he’s a victim of PTSD, it must have been hard for him when you contracted the same disease as his first wife. It wouldn’t be a safe place for him.”
At that, I bristled. “So he can just throw away twenty years of feeling safe and passionate and totally attached because of a bunch of bad memories?”
“It’s a disease, a condition, Lucinda. It sounds like he’s depressed and doesn’t yet see that his reactions to you are connected to his traumas.”
“Well, he can’t express his feelings, and then they poke out in little bursts and go right back in again. The other day, we were trying to clear a clogged drain, and his head was under the sink, and out of the blue he said, ‘No, I had cancer too. And you told me it was nothing, but it wasn’t nothing.’ He had blamed me all this time for giving him false hope.”
“Why don’t you encourage him to talk about it? If you are kind and nonjudgmental, and know it’s not about you, you might help him.”
I tried to follow Laura’s advice, but he would always cut me off. Then I had the idea of using his own language—arid attorney talk—to present the ultimate repercussion. One night, insisting that we talk, I sat across the dining table from him. I calmly said my piece: “Bob, I think we’re proceeding toward an end neither of us wants. As we discuss this, I don’t want to misunderstand or misrepresent you. You say that my breast cancer hasn’t driven you away, but I think you’re a deeper person than that. This is a moment of reckoning, and I want to be as honest and clear as we can. We need to be aware of the issues as we take the next step in our marriage.”
He looked vulnerable for the first time in months. “You sound as if you’re going to leave me.”
“I’ll never leave you. But I want the truth.”
“I’ve told you. I have no sense of pulling away from you. I depend on you.”
“Sweetheart, please answer this question as truthfully as you can. Have you been feeling depressed?”
He looked down, pulled off
a loose thread from his button, looked up, and said, “Yes.”
“Really? For how long?”
“Oh, since I got cancer, I guess.”
“Have you been scared?”
He nodded. “It was a very serious kind of cancer; it can spread to the intestine, anywhere in the body. I remember going up to the Amherst reunion and talking to the president, and when he saw those early red scars, he said, ‘Oh, that’s terrible. A woman on our staff had a melanoma and she had it removed, but it spread down her face and she’s walking around completely disfigured.’ It scared the hell out of me.”
“Oh no, just what you needed. You never told me about that. And all I’ve been doing is focusing on my own cancer. Have you been mad at me?”
“No, no, not at all. I’ve been upset, disturbed, depressed, but I never thought of being angry.”
“But I’m aware I’ve been ignoring you,” he reluctantly added.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” He looked so hapless, I felt sorry for him.
“I can imagine the terror you must have felt at Martha’s illness. And even guilt. And now, with me, it’s happened all over again.”
Something began happening to Bob. His forehead was moist; his face had gone pale, slack, tentative. “Radiation wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now,” he said, taking out his handkerchief. “She was very badly burned, and she was confined to the hospital for months. She never talked about dying. It was very difficult for everybody.”
I swallowed. “God, what a double whammy. Two wives with breast cancer.
“Bob, I understand why you’ve been abstracted.” I touched his shoulder lightly. “People who’ve come out of a war might hear a log crack in the fireplace and relive the gunfire that killed their buddies. Well, people in peacetime can relive a life shock when something happens to bring it back. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“Breast cancer kills your wife, and then it happens to me. Do you think it was so traumatic that you went into a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder?”
It was as though he knew already. I didn’t have to convince him.
“Doctors say that full-blown PTSD begins when you have a second shock that is just like the first one,” I said.
“It wasn’t the second shock, more like the third. The fourth, the fifth, really.”
“How do you mean?”
He looked at the wall. “I had to put my father into Bloomingdale’s; that was a place in Westchester for people with psychiatric problems. I went to see him every weekend.”
Henry junior had met and married a Frenchwoman, Marcelle Puthon Hirsch, not long after Elinor died.
“But then he got hardening of the arteries, and he hardly knew who or where he was half the time. He would do things like go around in the middle of the night, waving a gun and shouting, ‘Where is that Charles de Gaulle?’”
“Your father? Oh, Bob, and you so revered him.”
“I was the only one of my siblings to come to see him. I came every weekend and longer at the end. He had his leg amputated. He had circulation problems. He was sick, physically and mentally.”
“So you had to take him to a psychiatric hospital.”
“Marcelle wouldn’t let him come home,” he replied. “She didn’t want him around, so one day I just picked him up and brought him back.
“I took care of him until he died in 1967, and a year later Martha got breast cancer.”
Bob got up to get some water. I could hear him sniffling in the kitchen. This was so hard for him. I knew I wouldn’t have his attention much longer. I had better get to the point. But when he came back, he was already talking.
“Then before that was the war. When the Lansdale sank, my men were in the freezing waves fighting to stay alive. We tried to save the ones we could, but there were sailors who were wounded or were just overcome, and those went down for good. When I came home, I would wake up screaming every night.”
“Oh, Bob, you’ve never told it to me that way. It’s got to have been horribly traumatic for you. And on top of that you had to have the inevitable survivor’s guilt.”
“Yes, I think I did.”
“Do you remember how you felt when they told you I had breast cancer?” I asked.
He nodded. “I felt bad. I was scared.” He hesitated. “I thought, ‘Here we go again: my father, Martha, me, now you.’ I didn’t want to end up taking care of anyone else. I wanted someone to take care of me.”
“And look what I went and did. You married a young girl and it backfired. You must have resented me.”
“It wasn’t your fault. How could I have resented you?”
“Then why have you stayed as far away as you could from me? You haven’t always been there when I wanted you.”
He looked surprised, hurt. “Maybe I haven’t been there every single time, but I’ve been there at the critical moments, when you really needed me. Don’t you remember when I went with you once to chemo? I was there when you were operated on.”
“You never went with me to the doctor.”
“I have an office to run; I can’t easily wait in waiting rooms.”
I tried to suppress a smile. That is, unless you are faced with competition. When I had follow-up tests after my cancer treatments, I told Bob that my friend Blair was accompanying me. I had barely met her in the lobby when Bob showed up and told Blair she could leave.
“I wish,” I continued cautiously, “I wish that you would just have comforted me a bit.”
“I thought I was comforting you. I also thought maybe you didn’t want it. You don’t really like sympathy.”
“If I don’t, I married the right husband,” I said under my breath. But I thought about what he had just said. He was right, to a degree. My father would put his arm around me and tell me things would be okay when they wouldn’t. But my mother had been a fixer. She tried to solve the problem, to make it disappear. That was her comfort. So now, if people pitied me, I would automatically think things couldn’t be fixed.
“I know it was hard for you,” I pressed on, “but all I wanted is for you to put your arms around me and tell me everything was going to be okay.”
He seemed to go paler. He started to get up.
“This is upsetting for you.”
“I don’t like talking about it, no.”
“Bob, I just need you to answer one more question. Why wouldn’t you just reassure me?”
“Because I’m not a good faker. I couldn’t be near you and say it was okay. I’m pessimistic about cancer, and I…” His voice shook. “I wasn’t sure you would be all right.”
A fist tightened inside my chest. In other words, the man who’s always right is scared I won’t be all right. The tables are turned. “Well, I’m not going to die on you,” I said, managing a smile. “I promise.”
He got up, and for the first time since I was diagnosed, he kissed my lips. Then he held me, and I nestled into the hollow of his shoulder, and I thought it was my tears that tasted salty, but it was his. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I really am sorry I didn’t support you enough. I’m sorry you felt I haven’t been there for you. I just didn’t know. I guess I never know.”
“It’s okay,” I said, wiping his eyes with my sleeve. “We understand each other now.”
He let go of me. “Let’s get some fresh air,” he said with a smile, affectionately giving me his suede jacket to wear.
We headed for the park, where the forsythias were budding and crocuses struggled to emerge from the warming March ground. As we stood in front of the tall, starkly lonely Egyptian obelisk, I asked, “Did you feel detached, did you have trouble concentrating after the melanoma and breast cancer? Those are PTSD symptoms.”
“After the Lansdale, when I was on the Bauer, I never slept. I was executive officer, navigator, and director of the CIC—Combat Information Center. I never left my post for close to a year and just dozed in a chair whenever I was exhausted.” He laughed. “O
ne time, the captain was giving me instructions, and I nodded off while he was talking. I guess you’d call that detached.
“I had a deal with my men on the Lansdale,” he said haltingly. “If anything happened and people were lost, I’d go see their families. So I remember going to see George Haines’s widow…” Bob stopped on the path and began to choke back tears.
Then we started walking again, and I saw he was holding his jaw tight. “But then there were the men on different ships,” he went on. “The Paul Hamilton in our convoy was blown up the same night as the Lansdale, and 580 men died. I got all kinds of mail from parents of those sailors, but I didn’t know anything; I didn’t know their sons or what had happened to them. I couldn’t do anything for them, and it was very upsetting. I ended up giving them to my father to answer.”
I squeezed his hand. “No one could have cared so well for those people you tried to save in the water. I read a letter Mrs. Roosevelt wrote to your mother sympathizing about her ‘poor boy having seen too many horrors.’ It seemed like you had one trauma after the next.”
“Then after the war,” he continued, “Judge Patterson asked me to go to Buffalo with him. I had accompanied him on every trip for four years, but this time I told him if I went with him, I didn’t think I could finish an important brief for the U.S. Supreme Court. He told me to stay and finish it.
“The day before he was scheduled to return, there was a blinding snowstorm. I looked out the window and thought what fool would fly in a storm like this.
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