Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  After we had been married seven years, late on the night of July 21, 1977, Larry’s mother rose from bed and stepped over her underwear lying on the floor, its crusty yellow crotch facing upwards. She walked to the closet across the room and pulled out a Stevens single-barrel 410 shotgun and a box of shells. Returning to her side of the bed, she sat next to her husband, who was covered up to his chin with a light summer blanket, sleeping on his back, his left foot casually crossed over his right. Breaking open the gun, she loaded one shell and clicked shut the breech. Then she pressed the muzzle tight against the back of his head between the ear and the midline and blew his brains out the other side.

  We’ve wondered whether he registered the lock of the breech or if his eyes foggily flicked open at the cold touch of the barrel against his head. And we’ve speculated on how long she sat there afterwards, ears ringing with the blast, the air pinkly misted with blood. The pillow and sheets were a ruin of tissue and bone, and a dark stream was running from her husband’s right nostril. Except for the slightly elevated left eyelid revealing a sliver of dull eye, the crime-scene photos show that his face was intact and looked to be that of a handsome deep sleeper, an incongruously debonair Superman curl of black hair drifting across his forehead.

  Here’s the thing, buried in the police report, that I thought strange: after she fired the gun, Larry’s mother picked up the ejected shell casing and carried it, still warm, across the room to the trash can. As if, in that scene of murderous disorder, one spent shell casing was just too much mess.

  Who knows how long it took her to reload the gun with the second shell, and adjust the two pillows behind her head so her upper torso was slightly elevated. Placing the stock between her legs, she fed the gun barrel up into her mouth. When she pulled the trigger with her left forefinger, the wad of the shell exited ferociously from her forehead.

  The air conditioner continued to run for three days until a friend who had come to the unlocked front door heard the barking of the frantic, starving German shepherds who had the run of the downstairs. He called the police, who somehow pushed the dogs into the kitchen and went upstairs to find the bodies.

  When we arrived at the house the next day, nothing except the bodies and bedclothes had been moved. On the living room rug were several weeks of unopened mail, each day in its own pile, and dog shit smeared by frantic paws. The curtains were all closed tight, just as they had been for weeks. Upstairs, the underwear, somehow for me the most disquieting thing, was still untouched on the floor. Was it a testament to her suicidal state of mind that she hadn’t reached out with her big toe on the way to the closet to flick them over into the corner? Or was it her final Fuck You to leave them there?

  The contents of the bathroom said Fuck You, too, fuck the New Canaan society she so wanted but couldn’t get into, fuck the country club, and fuck her husband’s medical reputation. It was awash with prescription drug bottles, many empty, the mirrored medicine cabinet door hanging ajar. A deep, multishelved bathroom closet and a closet outside in the hall each held a cornucopia of prescription drug bottles, way more than any two people could use in a lifetime.

  And Fuck You, she said, in leaving behind a peculiar letter in the pages of a book next to her bed. This frustratingly cryptic piece of evidence, overlooked or ignored by the New Canaan police, indicated that there was more to Larry’s parents’ death than we knew. On the blood-flecked front of the envelope, in confident feminine handwriting, was “Rose Marie.” On the back flap: “Leave answer under garbage can—? & I will pick up if not understood on phone.”

  The text:

  Rose Marie—

  Today I took $ 1500 out of my safety deposit—then I was concerned how to get it in check form from my family and not me—So, as you thought, I will give it to Mr. Glazer Monday in cash form, saying my family had sent me a check for $1600 instead of $1500 so I had cashed it.

  1) Is this what you suggest?

  I am concerned about the rest of the money in the safety deposit box–that it could possibly be examined—

  2) Do you think I should take it out in the morning?

  3) Perhaps get a certified check at the P.O. or money order and mail to Tommy?

  4) Or should I get a check just from the bank for the sum? Giving them the cash? I would rather do this if you think this would be alright—

  I have the 4 questions written down so you can answer yes or no… or else leave a note and I will pick up early Saturday morning.

  The letter is not signed.

  At the time, when I asked Rose Marie’s friends, nobody recognized the names Tommy or Mr. Glazer or the handwriting, and there was no safety deposit box that we could find in Rose Marie’s name. I guessed that she was somehow involved in selling drugs, but no one in the New Canaan police department seemed inclined to investigate, and Larry and I were overwhelmed as it was.

  In fact, we were so overwhelmed that we were unable even to do the most straightforward, obvious things. For example, as strange as it seems to me now, it never crossed my mind to take pictures. I almost certainly had my camera with me at the cabin on that Sunday afternoon when a friend brought the news to us as we took turns rope-swinging into the river. But when we dashed out of town the next morning, I didn’t think to tuck that camera in my bag. An image of that darkened, shit-smeared living room, or the underwear or the drug-filled closet, would have told the whole story of their addiction. What kind of dumbass photographer does that make me?

  Despite having read the letter, we didn’t quite pin down the drug thing then, either. We spent that first day walking through the house and doing some of the police paperwork down at the station. Our friend Robbie Goolrick arrived from New York and took one look at the contents of the bathroom and the closet and went in search of a box big enough to contain all the drugs. In the laundry room he discovered that a new washer had recently been delivered and the box had been set aside for the trash man. He brought it to the bathroom and nearly filled it with drug bottles and sample packs.

  By evening, we were more than ready for some drugs ourselves, but maybe not for the fancy cocktail party that friends of Larry’s parents held in our honor. The living rooms of the house were filled with animated, well-dressed strangers, and we stood somewhat dazed, strong drinks in our hands. After a time, one of the guests who had been in the Manns’ house with the police furtively gestured for us to follow her into a back room.

  In an agitated whisper she confessed that she and her husband had seen the extent of the drug archive in the bathroom and the adjoining hall closet. They knew they shouldn’t have, she whispered, glancing out the door and into the living room, where the sound of cocktail chatter reassured her, but as a favor to the memory of Rose Marie and Warren, they had removed as much of the incriminating drug evidence as they could carry.

  Startled, since we had seen the washer box damn near full two hours before, we thanked her and drifted back into the crowd. A medical examiner who had worked the case was also at the party and, mimicking the hostess’s secretive maneuvers, he too pulled us aside. Sotto voce he told us that, while the police were otherwise occupied, he had slipped into the bathroom and pocketed some rather serious drugs, which, had they been found, would have reflected badly on Larry’s parents.

  Again we stared in amazement and he, mistaking it for the expected gratitude, patted each of us on the arm in that “Don’t mention it—it’s the least I can do” kind of way and turned back to the party.

  As if to reassure ourselves that we were not imagining things, when we got back to the house that night we checked the bathroom: Sure enough, the box was filled with bottles of Valium, Dermid, Miltown, Seconal, Darvon, Percodan, Librium, Dalmane, Tranxene, and Placidyl, some in extra-large size, and punctuated with syringes preloaded with Adrenalin and Valium.

  Okay, then.

  So what the hell were the reputation-destroying drugs that the helpful friends had removed? And why on earth did they have so many drugs anyway, the prescription
s written not just by Dr. Mann but by other doctors as well, and written to people other than the Manns?

  Thirty-five years later, and still asking those questions, I picked up the phone and called the Records Department of the New Canaan police. I requested the Mann murder-suicide file, and at the time, I didn’t think it strange when the officer reported that it was easy to get since the file was on the desk in the next room. When the copies of it arrived they included several curious pieces of information, among them an anonymous letter sent to the chief of police a few days after the deaths. The handwritten letter stated that the police were too stupid to get the facts right and here they are: Dr. Mann was having an affair with one of his patients, a divorced woman in Greenwich, and when he asked Rose Marie for a divorce she killed him. Since it was not the same handwriting as the letter by the bedside I presumed the infidelity wasn’t tangled up with the drug business.

  This affair made some sense to me, though, as the final indignity for Rose Marie. Murder-suicides committed by women, especially with a shotgun, are rare, and I always figured that she was in a state of extreme agitation and rage, her apparent sangfroid in carrying out the deed notwithstanding. She had dedicated her adult life to climbing the social ladder but knew they would never be among the landed gentry to which she aspired. They were deeply in debt, and a risky drug operation designed to make a little more money could well explain an unstable state of mind. But why that night, three days before her fifty-first birthday, and a week before a big party they’d been planning? A jealous rage began to make sense to me.

  In addition to the anonymous letter, within the file was mention of the numerous, usually empty, drug bottles found by the police although, perhaps to protect the reputation of the Manns, the quantities of drugs found in the house were not mentioned. Two notations in particular caught my eye. One was that an empty bottle of Placidyl had been found that had been prescribed only six days before by a Dr. Schwimmer. When asked by a detective about this July 15 prescription, Dr. Schwimmer denied writing it, suggesting that Dr. Mann must have somehow renewed a prescription written previously.

  The other odd thing was that the police found a bottle of Dalmane prescribed to a Deanna Pritty filled less than a month earlier. It struck me as curious that in the Manns’ bathroom would be prescriptions written to other people.

  Continuing my detective work, I placed a phone call to one of the friends who had been in the house when the police found the bodies, a soft-voiced, tack-sharp octogenarian now living in Florida. I asked her first about the letter by the bedside, and whether she knew anything about a safety deposit box, a Mr. Glazer, or someone named Tommy who appeared to be handling the money transactions with Rose Marie. She was as mystified as I was, but said she had also suspected that some shady drug business was going on.

  I asked her what had happened to the drugs that she and her husband had taken from the house. She told me that they had enlisted a police detective to help get the really bad ones out. The detective had often driven the Manns to the airport in his off-duty hours. Like everyone else, he wanted to protect their reputation and the reputation of the other doctors whose names were on the prescription labels. The staggering amount of drugs found in the hall closet and the fact that some prescriptions were written to other people were bound to have concerned the detective as well.

  The husband wanted to take the drugs out on a boat into Long Island Sound and dump them, but the police detective nixed that idea. Instead they contacted a third friend, who worked at a pharmaceutical company and arranged to have them destroyed there.

  Hanging up, I thought, okay, that’s what happened to some of the drugs, whatever they were, but how did the Manns get that many prescription drugs in the first place? And what about that anonymous letter to the police about the Greenwich woman, the patient with whom Dr. Mann was allegedly in love?

  Remembering the empty bottle with the prescription for Dalmane written to Mrs. Pritty, I began a search for her and, after a bit of sleuthing, found her still in Connecticut, in what she referred to as “a shitty nursing home.” Yes, she’s a character, eighty-four years old and I think still in love with Warren Mann.

  So the last piece to the puzzle, or almost the last piece, anyway.

  The charmingly candid Mrs. Pritty told me that when she heard about the murder of the man who had been her psychiatrist for six years, a man who, she said—and this was couched carefully—was “inappropriately fond” of her, her grief was so great an ambulance had to take her to the hospital, where she stayed for several days. She was quick to say that there was no sexual aspect to the relationship, but I didn’t find that entirely convincing. If you think about it, why would anyone admit adultery to a stranger who calls up out of the blue on a Sunday afternoon almost forty years later? I wouldn’t and don’t blame her for not.

  The final puzzle piece slotted in when I asked her about the prescription for Dalmane found in the bathroom. “Oh,” she said, “that’s the thing Dr. Mann was famous for—he refused to give any of his patients drug prescriptions. He just never did.”

  My theory?

  Dr. Mann was writing prescriptions for his patients, and he, Rose Marie, or the bedside letter writer was picking them up from the drugstore and bringing them home to the hall closet. He was able in those lax regulatory days, as Dr. Schwimmer confirmed, to renew prescriptions written by other doctors, and he collected the drug samples that were lavishly handed out back then by pharmaceutical companies. Those drugs that the Manns did not use themselves—and judging by their pungent stew of neuroses they were using plenty of them—I think they sold, hoping to work their way out of the debt their social-climbing lifestyle had caused them to accumulate.

  So when he came home and told Rose Marie he wanted a divorce, where would that leave her? Really, are you surprised that she did what she did?

  We hired a bagpiper to play at the funeral and when it was over, our friend Robbie approached him to settle up. The man, plainly embarrassed, confessed to Robbie that for the last two parties at which he had played for Larry’s parents, with whom he had posed for pictures beforehand,

  he had never received payment, despite repeated requests. Mortified by proxy, Robbie quickly wrote him a check.

  This distressing pattern became the norm as we sifted through their financial affairs. Despite the appearance of wealth, the Babylonian lifestyle, the big house, the horses, the country clubs, the parties, travel to Europe in the summer and Florida in the winter, despite the drug business, the Manns died deeply in debt. Their mortgage insurance barely covered it.

  After disposing of everything in the house, as a gesture of absurd hope, Larry and I brought home from New Canaan the custom tack, the saddles, bridles, boots, and horse blankets. We kept them around for several years but we each knew, struggling as we were and living in town, that we would never put them to use. Eventually we sold them.

  We never voiced it but we were reasonably sure that our riding lives, the only slim sickle of intersection between our two childhood orbits, were over. And, indeed, for twenty-one years, until we bought the farm in 1998, the closest I came to a horse was pressing my face into the steaming necks of the carriage horses, with their madeleine-powerful horse scent, that carry tourists on the streets of Lexington.

  5

  The Remove

  In the summer of 1973, four years before the deaths of Larry’s parents, he and I returned to Rockbridge County for good. This was our third year of marriage, following my sophomore year at Bennington and junior year studying abroad, where we held each other close, broke and lonely, throughout our travels from Great Britain to Greece.

  Lying on the empty beaches of Paros, the remote Greek island where we washed up that spring, we stared out at the storied Aegean while homesickness sucked our starving hearts right out of our chests. Even after all we had seen in our year of travel, Rockbridge County was still the most beautiful place we knew.

  We were certainly not alone in this opinion.
Travelers on I-81 frequently pull off at the Lexington exit to get fuel, and, while gassing up, gaze in wonder at the landscape. Then not a few of them restart their cars and head directly to the realtor’s office. It is a testament to the allure of the area that the artist Cy Twombly, who lived and traveled in some of the world’s most beautiful places, chose to live half the year in Lexington, his hometown.

  In writing about Cy’s work, the late critic David Sylvester cited Paul Klee’s depiction of artistic creation, which he said was analogous to a tree’s growth. Nourishing sap from the roots flows through the tree’s trunk (the artist) and enriches the crown of growth (his resulting work of art). While the crown does not exactly reflect the roots, existing in a completely different element, it nevertheless forms a mass equal to them, just as a great oak is said to require the same amount of space below ground as above.

  Sylvester implies that Cy’s early experience in Lexington, like the root system of that oak, quietly but essentially informed and enriched the crown of his art throughout his life. Cy seemed to concur, saying to Sylvester in a 2000 interview:

  Where I’m from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it’s one of the most beautiful. It’s very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it.…

  I’ve found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn’t become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic.