November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  The next few years were a period of change for Peter, in which he seemed to loosen up somewhat. He began to wear brightly striped shirts and jeans instead of white button-downs and tailored slacks. He bought a motorcycle and could be seen riding into town in his business suit with a pipe in his mouth. Once, when Sally gave him a joint, he even tried marijuana. Nevertheless, it was a lonely time. Since his departure Sally had become even more out of control. Although she kept him at a distance, Peter tried to be a dutiful father. When she broke both legs in a car accident, he visited her often at the hospital. She got pregnant at age twenty by a boy she had met at a rock festival. “I told my mother right away, but it took me a long time to get up the nerve to tell my father. He took things so much to heart, I knew it would be a real blow. We talked for two hours, and he sort of begged me to get married for the baby’s sake. He really put his heart and soul into that talk. He was so moving and caring that he persuaded me. It had been a long time since we talked that long.” Though Peter had always dreamed of giving his daughter a traditional church wedding, he was one of the few witnesses when Sally and Bill were married by a justice of the peace. Four months later he rushed to the hospital in time for the birth of his grandson, Owen. And when Sally and her family moved to California, where they lived on welfare and food stamps, he wrote her faithfully, whether or not he got a reply.

  After his divorce Peter joined Parents Without Partners, an organization that sponsors parties and outings for people who are divorced or widowed. Through this group he met Anna, a woman with whom he began a passionate, stormy relationship. They fought, broke up, and made up many times. The breaking up was always painful for Peter, but the making up was so sweet that he stayed with her for nearly two years. The relationship’s downs, however, seemed to throw him into despair; after a fight he would call Anna and beg her to come by. Alarmed at how depressed he sounded, she would relent and rush over to comfort him. In a four-page letter to his older brother, Peter matter-of-factly described his job, his golf game, and his carpentry projects. Then he wrote:

  The next “event” on my calendar is the breakup of Anna and I in early November. All fall, at my suggestion, we had been seeing each other only every other weekend. I had suggested that we each do a little “outside” dating. She apparently did and I didn’t, so finally she said she didn’t think we ought to date each other anymore, and we haven’t. All this threw me into an absolute panic. I proposed. She refused. Pop’s old revolver misfired. And I started dating another lady. All in the space of five days! Boy, do I need psychiatric help!

  In the next paragraph he was back to news of mutual friends and a discussion of the weather. “Well, that’s about all the news I have,” he concluded. “My very best to you both.” If the letter was a cry for help, it was characteristically well camouflaged, using offhand remarks and exclamation points to mask his deepest feelings. His brother shrugged off the reference to “Pop’s old revolver” as some unfamiliar figure of speech. In any case he did not reply to the letter for eleven months, and Peter did not seek “psychiatric help.”

  Peter’s new “lady” was Jane Freund, a bright, vibrant woman who worked with problem learners in a local elementary school. Eleven years younger than Peter, she had been divorced five years and had three teenage sons. They had met through Parents Without Partners, and a few days after breaking up with Anna, Peter asked her out. After thirteen years of strained marriage, Jane was surprised that a relationship could be so relaxed. Peter was gentle, with a good sense of humor and a miscellany of talents. Unlike Peter’s ex-wife, Jane loved the outdoors, and they frequently skied, sailed, and hiked. On a weeklong canoe trip in Minnesota, Jane remembers Peter playing chanteys and hymns on his harmonica in their tent during a rainstorm. She was impressed at how easily he made others happy. They also enjoyed simpler pleasures—movies, the theater, and long walks. “We’d have dinner at his apartment,” recalls Jane. “He didn’t know how to cook, so we’d put some food on to simmer and then go make love. One of our jokes was that we were going to write The Lovers’Cookbook—easy recipes that you could make quickly and then let simmer for an hour or two.”

  For Peter the relationship offered a real challenge. Jane was far more opinionated and assertive than he. One night early in their affair, Jane ran into a former lover at a party and kissed him warmly on the lips. Peter left the party disturbed. The next day they had planned to go sailing. When the hour came and he had not come by to pick her up, Jane called him. “I’m not going,” said Peter in a tight voice. “I can’t see you. I can never see you again.” Jane was confused. When she drove to his apartment, she found him in a terrible, agitated state. “I just can’t talk to you now,” he said, weeping. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I just can’t see you now.”

  Although they smoothed things over, Jane was alarmed by Peter’s reaction. She found other aspects of his behavior similarly unsettling, if less extreme. “When we had people over, Peter was a wonderful host for the first ten minutes,” says Jane. “He’d extend his hand, hang up coats, get people drinks, sit them by the fire, make small talk. But as the evening went along, he sort of faded into the background.” At one party Jane remembers hearing someone ask Peter if he was a commuter. “No,” he replied. End of conversation. Later Jane explained to Peter that the woman wanted to know more about him, and asking whether he was a commuter was merely a conversational opening. At another party Peter remained silent during a spirited discussion of single-sex education at college. “Well, Peter, what do you think?” asked Jane. “I don’t know,” he said. “Come on,” pressed Jane. “You must have formed some opinions about it.” But Peter said no, he didn’t have an opinion. Jane, who liked a good discussion, even an occasional argument, found this reluctance exasperating. “Peter was not a passive person,” she says. “But in some ways he didn’t know how to stand up for himself.” Even discussing the relative merits of drip-dry and all-cotton sheets, or the best way to wrap meat for the freezer, Peter preferred to concede rather than to make waves. “Please tell me how to do it,” he’d say, “then I’ll just do it that way.”

  Annoyed by Peter’s meekness in minor matters, Jane was troubled by the way he repressed truly important issues. When Peter mentioned that he had a third daughter, Kathy, who was in an institution, Jane asked him how she was. “I don’t know,” he said. He told her he hadn’t seen her in many years. Jane, who worked with autistic children, was appalled. “He didn’t want to be involved with anything that would tug at his heartstrings,” she says. “He didn’t like things that weren’t clean and clear, that he couldn’t solve. He seemed to block out difficult and stressful things, just pulled the blinders down.”

  One night after making love they began talking about the worst times they had ever known. Peter said he had once felt so bad that he had put a bullet in a gun, spun the chamber, put the gun in his mouth, and fired. Jane was stunned. She asked how often he had done this, and he said, “More than once.” Jane threatened to leave him if he didn’t get help, so Peter went four times a week to a psychiatrist, who put him on antidepressants.

  They never talked about his suicide attempts again. Though Jane couldn’t forget them, she dismissed them because they had happened before he’d met her and because things seemed to be going so well. “One thing that helped me put it out of my mind was that the sex was so beautiful and so loving. It was free and erotic with lots of laughing and tumbling around,” she says. “So whenever this little worry came up, I would argue myself out of it by saying that anybody with whom lovemaking is this beautiful can’t . . . you know . . .” Her voice trails off.

  As Peter continued in therapy, he seemed to be gaining confidence. “He really didn’t know how to stand up for himself,” says Jane. “But he was learning.” She smiles. “We had an argument once, it was something so stupid, it was about which material is warmer, down or Polarguard. We argued all evening long, and I kept thinking, ‘Gee, he’s not quitting.’ Next morning I apolog
ized, and he said, ‘You know why I kept that argument going? I’ve never really been able to argue. Before this my stomach used to tie itself into knots, and this time my head kept sending messages down to my stomach saying, ‘Everything all right down there?’ and my stomach kept saying, ‘I’m fine down here, keep it going up there!’”

  When her youngest son, Andy, went away to boarding school, leaving Jane alone in her four-bedroom house, Peter moved in. Jane’s children liked him, not only because he was pleasant and easygoing but because they saw how happy he made their mother. “He changed her a lot—she was not on edge so much,” says Andy, who was fifteen at the time. “She seemed much happier with him than she’d ever been with anyone else.” Peter grew especially close to Andy, a shy, introverted boy who, like Peter, had had problems in school. Peter taught him how to sail and how to work the rotary mower. He took him on the back of his motorcycle on errands into town or on Sunday-night trips to get ice cream. Once, Andy asked Peter, “When are you and my mother going to get married? Because if you do, I’ll like it that you’re my stepfather.” Moved, Peter had to turn away so Andy wouldn’t see his tears.

  Peter seemed to enjoy the new domestic arrangement. As always he loved doing yard work, rewiring electrical outlets, repairing old furniture. When Jane tried to teach him how to cook, Peter was initially resistant, but gradually he mastered omelets, hamburgers, and chicken. They soon settled into a period of tranquillity. Jane often thinks of lazy Sunday mornings in her backyard, trading sections of the New York Times, sipping coffee. Yet a part of Peter still held back; he continued to maintain his apartment even though he and Jane had begun to talk seriously about marriage.

  Peter’s work was a source of increasing unhappiness. In the past year he had been asked to join his company’s paper-purchasing group, an administrative post that used none of his technical skills. He ended up buying the paper for the subscription cards that fall out of magazines. He realized that he had been kicked upstairs, and he felt demeaned. “I think he worked not because he enjoyed it but because he had to earn people’s respect,” says Jane. “I think he was terrified of being without a job.”

  At the same time, Peter’s relationship with his own family seemed to be improving. That summer Sally returned from California with two-year-old Owen. She moved in with her mother and got a job cleaning houses. Although life was still difficult—she and her husband were considering separation—she never told her father. “I would have lied rather than tell him how miserable my life was,” says Sally. “I guess I saw him as an innocent, and I didn’t think he could take it.” On the Fourth of July, Peter, Jane, Sally, and Owen watched the fireworks display at the town beach, Peter carrying his grandson on his shoulders. They swam at the pond near Jane’s, and Peter held Owen on the surface of the water, just as he had held Sally when he’d taught her to swim so many years before. One night, Peter, Sally, and Ruth, who had come East for a visit, went out to dinner. “I picked a little family-type place because my father always liked this Italian restaurant when we were young,” says Sally. The evening was relaxed and pleasant, just the way they might have imagined it before all the troubled years. “He talked some about his personal life, and I felt really touched by that,” says Sally. “I wanted to talk to him more like this. I felt I was finally getting to know him.”

  One night a few weeks later Sally had dinner with Peter and Jane. Her father drove her home. “We took the parkway and got off at Westport, and I said why this exit? He said he wanted to take the long way. He said something about it being a prettier route, but it was unusual for him to go out of his way like that. We didn’t talk about anything special, but later it occurred to me that he wanted to drag it out, that he may already have known what he was going to do.”

  Two weeks later Peter spent the weekend alone. He had told Jane that he missed having time to himself just to read or putter around the house. Jane was due to drive Andy up to his new school in New Hampshire and planned to return Sunday evening. Although she would have liked to have Peter’s company, she suggested it might be a good opportunity for him to get some time on his own.

  That weekend Peter wrote an eight-page letter to an old friend. By Peter’s standards the letter was extraordinarily frank. He told her of his doubts about Jane; of his fear that because he was eleven years older he would end up being a burden to her; that one day he would be “old and tottering” while Jane was “still strong and healthy.” He wrote of her forcefulness. “Jane went through five years of psychoanalysis, which has left her overflowing with confidence. I’m just over a year into psychotherapy and, it seems to me, stalled out. The result sometimes is that I feel I am the one out of step.” He wrote of sometimes finding it difficult to be with Jane’s children, fond as he was of them. “Those absolutely awful years with Sally have undoubtedly left a lot of scars on me. I would much prefer to stay completely out of the business of raising kids. . . . All of this makes me feel very old and very inflexible,” he wrote. “Sometimes I think I’m best suited to be a hermit!” He wrote at length of his disappointment in his job:

  The work itself requires care and accuracy but absolutely none of my technical training and experience. In many respects it is clerk’s work. For the first time in my years with Time, taking time off for vacations is a real problem and the load when I return is appalling. But I guess more than anything else, it is humiliating! I’ve been hanging on by my teeth until I can take early retirement at 561/2, a whole year and seven months away. But sometimes even that seems an eternity. The early retirement benefits are very appreciable but I sometimes wonder if anything is worth it. It isn’t so much that I want to be something else—I don’t really know what I want to do—but I very much want to stop what I am doing.

  Enough of my troubles! The good news. Ruth continues to live in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband. She spent two days here in Connecticut this summer and . . .

  Sunday afternoon Jane drove home from New Hampshire in a storm. She stopped off in Springfield to call Peter and tell him she would be home in a couple of hours. Peter sounded a little down—there were awkward pauses in the conversation—but Jane was impatient to get back and didn’t press the issue. Rain beat down on the telephone booth. Cars roared past. Jane remembers feeling, “Oh, honey, I miss you, I can’t wait to get home and snuggle up into your shoulder.” But what she said to Peter was “I can’t wait to get home and have a drink.”

  When she walked in the house, Peter wasn’t there. She found a bowl of sliced peaches on the counter and thought perhaps Peter was making peach shortcake, one of his favorite desserts, and had gone to the store to get some whipping cream. Jane told herself he would be home in half an hour. He wasn’t. She telephoned his apartment repeatedly, but there was no answer. In the back of her mind she thought of the possibility of suicide, but she couldn’t believe it. “I was like a rabbit frozen in car headlights, paralyzed. I just sort of insisted on life as usual. I went to bed thinking, ‘He’ll come home at three in the morning and sit on the edge of the bed and tell me he’s depressed.’”

  At 6 a.m. she drove to his apartment and knocked on the door until her hand hurt. She called the police, who broke the door down. “At first I thought he was asleep. He was sitting with his legs crossed and his head tilted, and his hands were in his lap. And then I saw the gun in his hand. I saw that black metal and all the red, and I turned away and said to myself, ‘Oh my God, he’s done it.’ I told everybody—his parents, my parents, his children, my children—that he looked sort of peaceful. But that wasn’t true. His mouth was open, and there was a waterfall of blood.”

  Jane couldn’t look anymore. She went into the kitchen. “A big policeman standing at Peter’s desk called out that there was a note. I didn’t want to go into the room again so I asked him to read it to me.” At the morgue they gave her a brown envelope with the contents of Peter’s pockets. “There was blood on the money and on his credit cards,” she recalls. “I trimmed the edges of the bills where t
he blood was and washed the credit cards.” She drove to New Hampshire to get Andy. She had told him on the phone that Peter had died but said she couldn’t tell him how until she saw him. Andy guessed that Peter’s commuter train had crashed or that he had been in an accident on his motorcycle. When he got in the car, she told him. Jane recalls, “He looked so sad that I pulled over at a gas station, and we took a walk into a field. We hugged, and he was crying so hard I thought his legs would buckle. I wondered how this man could have done something that would hurt a fifteen-year-old kid so much he’s going to fall down if I don’t hold him up.”

  The memorial service took place at the church in which Peter and Jane had planned to marry. “I was in charge of the arrangements, which was probably the most responsible thing I’d ever done,” Sally says. “It made me feel like an adult.” It was a simple service, as the family agreed Peter would have preferred. They sang the familiar Protestant hymns: “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” and “Abide with Me.” The minister read from Ecclesiastes and from the Twenty-third Psalm. Jane spoke, as did Peter’s daughters and a friend from work. One of Jane’s sons remembers thinking how fragmented the group was. There were friends from different parts of Peter’s life—his family, his friends from work, from the navy, and from Parents Without Partners—but none of the different circles seemed to intersect.