Intimate Wars

by Merle Hoffman

  Over the next two years, Ziss left Choices without heat or air conditioning, and unfinished roof work resulted in multiple floods. All of these financial pressures forced me to delay paychecks, forgo my salary for six months, purchase supplies on personal credit cards, implement pay cuts, lay off staff, and suspend all advertising, resulting in a drastic reduction in my patient population.

  Then came the ultimate test: should I choose theory or practice, vision or pragmatism, ethics or survival? I had only enough money to either meet payroll and get supplies, or to pay taxes. Opting to survive, I accepted the fact that I would have to deal with my tax situation when it arose, hopefully far in the future. I stopped paying them—the point was to have a future.

  By now I was living on pure adrenaline, going from one lawyer to another as I tried to stave off bankruptcy, keep the builders working, the clinic open, the patients safe, and my own sanity intact. Just as with the indictment, Marty was having difficulty keeping himself psychologically together. He often told me he felt weak, and he had difficulty walking long distances. He was nearly eighty years old.

  I REMEMBER EMBRACING Marty in the hallway outside of my studio apartment in Queens in the full flush of passion, telling him that I would love him forever, that things would never change between us. He looked at me with a poignancy that struck me as strangely sweet at the time. “No,” he said, “I will age, and it won’t be the same.” And he was right. In a brutally honest, yet gentle discussion, we acknowledged we were no longer meeting each other’s needs. We still loved each other, but we knew we had to let each other go. He began to spend his weekends in Florida while I stayed in Garrison. We were not legally separated, but we arranged to have split custody of the house.

  Despite all that, we were still allies. When Marty turned eighty, I wanted to honor him, our marriage, and our partnership. He was never really recognized by the powers at HIP for all his important work, and I wanted to give him the retirement dinner they never had for him. I threw him an eightieth birthday party at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park and invited many of the HIP colleagues and personal friends of his who were no longer friends of mine.

  About a month before he died we had dinner at one of our old favorite Italian restaurants in Greenwich Village. Having recently spent so much time apart, we began to reflect on our relationship. We expressed how much we had given one another, and how sorry we were for the hurt we had caused each other just by being ourselves.

  I arrived home at my apartment late one Sunday evening after an event. When I flipped on my answering machine I was greeted by my sister-in-law’s voice. “Merle, Merle, it’s Marty. He had a heart attack. He’s gone.” Click.

  I erased the message and sat in silence. After what seemed an immeasurable amount of time, I picked up a pen and spent the night writing Marty’s obituary.25

  BY THE TIME of Marty’s death I had come to know myself enough to be able to apologize to his ex-wife, Bernice, at the funeral, for all the pain I had caused her. Indeed, with Marty’s death, my eviction, and the constant stress of being a pariah, I thought I knew everything there was to know. But there was another lesson in reality waiting for me. I had never really felt that the world had lost its moorings, never questioned the certainty of my own survival, until I was betrayed, soon after Marty’s death, by one of my doctors, Alan Zarkin. He brought me the closest I had ever come to my own destruction. He was the worst of my paid enemies.

  Marty had taken Zarkin on as another of his pet projects, “rescuing” him after he came under fire for a drug addiction problem—all too common with doctors in high stress fields. I’d worked with him off and on for years, and I knew him to be an excellent physician, someone who had struggled with his addiction demons and triumphed, and a good Jewish son who took care of his mother. But one day I received a complaint from a lawyer naming Zarkin as the plaintiff. This in and of itself was not very unusual; a busy medical center receives complaints, requests for charts, and other legal documents on a fairly regular basis. I read through it quickly until my eyes came upon the words “carved two inches high into her stomach.” I went back and read it again, transfixed. Zarkin was being accused of carving his initials into a patient’s stomach after he delivered her baby at Beth Israel Hospital, where he had worked before coming to Choices. I picked up my phone and paged Zarkin, who was on the second floor doing cases.

  When he entered my office I waved the legal papers in his face. “Is this true?” Without even asking me what the papers were, he answered calmly, “Yes.”

  I had the sickening feeling inside my stomach that one gets when falling off a very high cliff in a nightmare.

  I called my management team and my lawyers for an immediate meeting in my office, during which it was revealed that Zarkin had been sued for this carving in the past and had lied to me on his medical application when asked whether he was accredited to work at Beth Israel. He was not. I was sitting in amazed silence, still shocked, when Zarkin announced, “If you have nothing else for me to do I have to catch a plane for Paris.” I told him he was fired.

  The first phone call came from the Daily News, and then the games began. Dr. Elahi, the medical director I had hired Zarkin to replace because of his incompetence, told the New York Times he thought I’d known about Zarkin’s act when I hired him—a lie. But Dr. Elahi had known, my administrator had known, and Beth Israel had known, and they had all neglected to inform me that I had hired a compromised physician. The Department of Health had known, too, but since they were required to give Zarkin “due process,” they kept me in the dark, letting Choices take the fall.

  I was familiar with the manipulation of the media, acutely aware of how one word, one turn of phrase, could create new worlds. New headlines greeted me each morning. The Queens Courier: “Clinic Director Says, ‘Dr. Zorro Betrayed Me.’” The New York Post: “Abort-Clinic Deaths Didn’t Nix His Career”; “Probed Doctors Aren’t Feeling Much Pain”; “Mark of Zorro Remains a blight on NY Women”; “Zorro Clinic should be out of abortion biz”; “Zorro cut some slack.” And the Tablet: “Abortion Is a Dirty Risky Business.” I tried to protect myself when I gave an interview to the New York Times by having my lawyer on the other end of the conversation, but the piece was essentially a smear job, and my reputation in the field, which had been the best in the industry, was blasted to pieces.

  Newspapers called ex-employees who were living in other states to try and pull up dirt about me. Reporters pushed their way into Choices, and someone sneaked in with a hidden camera posing as a patient to see if they could find anything. Confidential files were stolen from my office. Memos that I had written were flashed across the screen on prime time. My enemies watched and waited. People who were very close to me, people who were working for me, competitors, feminists, politicians—everyone was quick to believe what they read about me and the clinic. Even the women with whom I had fought on the barricades, people I had mentored and trained in radical abortion politics, were not there to support or defend me.

  The next lie told by the New York Times hit Choices harder than anything that had come before: “Queens Clinic being investigated for Medicaid Fraud.” This was patently untrue. I was undergoing a routine audit like all other regulated health care providers, and if they found anything that they perceived as suspicious it would be referred to the attorney general. No issues were found, but the consistent negative publicity led to the loss of many longterm referral sources, an inability to recruit new staff, and ultimately, the near bankruptcy of the clinic.

  It also left an opening for the Department of Health to go after the clinic with a vengeance. Antonia Novello, the health commissioner at the time who was later indicted for having abused her power during her seven-year tenure, had a personal anti-choice agenda. During a speech she made to a pro-choice group, she announced that she intended to go “hunting bear” at Choices the next day, looking for anything she could find to shut me down. Novello subsequently published a negative report detaili
ng Choices’ infractions: our medical records were not organized according to the DOH’s specifications, the doctors’ signatures were not always legible, and we had difficulty with heating the facility due to problems with the landlord. She had gone searching for problems to make a political point. Choices was given a $60,000 fine, $40,000 higher than that of Beth Israel, where Zarkin had actually done his dirty work. I was ordered to close the clinic for two weeks, while Beth Israel was allowed to continue to operate without interruption. Their only casualty was Dr. Daniel Saltzman, the head of the OB/GYN department of Beth Israel at the time, who had known about Zarkin’s act when he came to Choices for a meeting to institute a referral agreement for prenatal patients with him. Saltzman had been fired by Beth Israel shortly after that meeting.

  The DOH sent their operatives into the clinic the morning after Novello shut us down and put their fingers in the sinks to check whether we had used them in the middle of the night. It reminded me of Marty’s description of the Midnight Express—abortion by candlelight.

  In a way, the patients had a better sense of reality than the media or the movement. Even when we were closed, they continued to show up for services. The Department of Health had developed a list of places to which the abortion patients—about 250 a week at the time—could be referred, but amazingly, some of these “facilities” were unlicensed doctor’s offices that didn’t even have anesthesiologists. The Department of Health wasn’t living up to its own standards. The patients preferred to follow my recommendations instead, trusting my judgment. Every morning when they arrived they willingly boarded buses I hired to take them to the Brooklyn Ambulatory Surgery Center, a licensed clinic that arranged to accommodate our patients in their facility.

  After the two weeks were finally up and Choices had answered all the numerous citations of the Department of Health, I was told that I could begin to treat patients again. I was relieved, excited to get back to work and serve those who had loyally come back to Choices. There were about sixty patients in the waiting room the morning we reopened. My lawyer came into my office with a strange look—and more bad news. Ziss had reported to the Department of Buildings that I had been operating in his building for years without an appropriate certificate of occupancy. This was entirely untrue—I could never have opened in that location in the first place without Department of Buildings approval—but nevertheless, the claim had to be investigated. We were forced to close for one more week.

  The Zarkin scandal had metastasized into losing longstanding referral sources, competitors taking advantage by feeding negative publicity, patients believing that Choices was closed for good, staff leaving because the press was harassing them at home, and international defamation of Choices and myself. To this day people come up to me and ask, “Does that crazy doctor still work for you?”

  I HAD BEEN instrumental in defining the reality that it was not politics, but necessity which brought women to choose abortion. The only thing that bound them together, the primal commonality, was the physicality of the thing itself. The legs spread apart, the speculum, the suction machine—that never changed. But everything else had become a mediated reality. I wanted to go back to the beginning, when there was just me and my consciousness, not even informed by feminism. I longed for true solitude.

  I stopped debating and giving speeches. In 1999 I suspended publication of On the Issues. The bomb threats, Marty’s death, the eviction from a space I had leased for twenty years, and my inability to subsidize the magazine anymore overcame my need for artistic expression. Looking back, I see now that I was in a constant state of agitated depression. Abortion had become as codified politically and institutionally as anything else. It was exhausting.

  The adventures I had with Mahin were the only respite for me during these times. She understood my internal struggles more than anyone else, and I could be totally myself with her. On the eve of my fiftieth birthday we found ourselves in an old Russian helicopter, rising thousands of miles over the Himalayas. To further remove myself from materiality, I went to Nepal, a world that was, ironically, intensely physical. From Everest, where the rarefied atmosphere creates a constant focus on one’s breath, to Katmandu, where the fog of pollution and the stench of poverty and incense do the same, I found myself aware of my senses, surrounded by an endless cycle of death, birth, and rebirth that triggered a rush of physical memories of my own history.

  What did being fifty mean for a woman?

  I thought of the last twenty-five years: building Choices, defining and realizing a world where women’s lives and women’s realities were named and validated; the thousands of women who came expecting and receiving safety, compassion, and understanding; all the lives I touched, all the lives that touched mine; my deferred dream of doing the same for Russian women; all the great and small political battles fought and those still to come. Worlds away from Choices, I remembered the seeds of my passion.

  I kept moving. I flew to South Africa to work with a rape crisis center. I traveled to Iran with Mahin, entering her country curiously, and somewhat apprehensively. In a sense, Iran entered me. Dressing as a Muslim woman in a chador, I moved awkwardly into a socially constructed invisibility. But remarkably, by the time I left Iran I would find the restrictive coverings an unexpected revelation. I felt totally concealed, yet strangely naked at the same time. Free from an individuality defined by attire, and with only one’s face exposed, the presented “self” became more focused and authentic. For the first time, I inhabited a space without familiar roles or stereotypic assumptions.

  I traveled alone to the Galápagos. I experienced the barren, dry black lava with a breathless expanse of twilight-blue sky. At night there were so many stars I was able to lose myself in the sky, to reflect. I thought about my new life without Marty. At first I had struggled with my aloneness, with not having someone there to leave me alone. I had maintained the questionable belief that a romantic partnership could fill some void or truly fulfill me. Soon, though, I found that I no longer believed that. I knew how to fill myself.

  Amazing Grace

  “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”

  —AUDRE LORDE

  Welcome to my world.” My words were published in the New York Post on October 17, 2001, just a little over a month after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. It was a controversial statement, but it was the truth. Envelopes filled with anthrax were sent to television stations and five US senators instigated national panic, but I was used to checking my mail for white powder every day. Grand Central Station was threatened with a bomb, but I’d been looking under my car for signs of foul play, my heart beating quickly in anticipation of an explosion, for a decade by then. I’d been avoiding windows for fear of bullets since Barnett Slepian was gunned down at his kitchen window in front of his wife and children in 1998. I tensed my body every time I walked from my car to Choices.

  When a friend called me the morning of 9/11, telling me to turn on the television, I felt not shock, but powerful despair as I watched the second plane hit. I called Choices, told my staff to send the patients home, got dressed, and drove over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. There, on that perfect fall day, I could see the black smoke rising in the background to my right. At the clinic, my staff and I hovered around the radio and waited for directives until it became clear that I should evacuate the building. We hurried outside together, promising to keep in touch. I stepped into my car and turned on the radio just as it was announced that New York was under a terrorist attack, and people should not be driving in the city. Fortunately it was still early, so I was able to cross the bridge back into Manhattan.

  Two days later, a friend and I drove down to the site of the attack. We parked some blocks away due to the phalanx of police protection that prevented us from coming within a mile of the site. I could smell the charred remains of the towers and see the black, dripping
steel rising high from the smoldering ground. Already the hawkers with their souvenirs camped out on the sidewalks. Looking into the dazed faces around me, I sensed that we all shared the same reality. In the stores, on the trains, on the streets, everyone had a sense of connectedness that I had never experienced before. We were in a war zone and we had no idea what might be coming next. The immediate shock and fear of another attack was slowly replaced by searing grief, anger, and rage.

  New York State attempted to provide mental health support to those affected by the attack through a program called Project Liberty, a collaboration between the Office of Mental Health, local governments, and nearly two hundred local agencies that provided free and anonymous mental health services throughout the declared disaster area. Choices, like other mental health centers, wanted to do what we could, so we offered immediate and long-term services through the program. For many, the physical wound on ground zero was a smoldering metaphor for emotional and psychological wounds that would never heal.

  “How could this have happened?” I never asked that question. My body and mind were used to living in a constant state of functional anxiety, and as I absorbed this blow like the others that had come before, I wondered at myself for not reacting with more emotion.

  THE ATTACKS OF 9/11 provided an ideal context for Bush to lead his holy crusade as the god-ordained protector of American citizens, born and unborn. All Americans were awash in a sea of righteous patriotism. This was not the time for questioning or opposition to a “war president.” It was the perfect environment for Bush to attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to enact a deeply conservative reproductive and sexual agenda with the ultimate goal of banning abortion.