Keeping the Feast (12 page)

In 2007, when we spoke on a phone line that stretched from Paris to Rhode Island, Mrs. Vincze, well into her eighties, still sounded as bright and sharp as she had fifty years before. Trying to catch up on perhaps forty years of news, we both were thrilled to hear each other’s voices. Our conversation seemed to jog her memories of my childhood in the two-family house that stood next to hers. “Your mother was so sick after you were born,” Mrs. Vincze recalled without prompting, her accent still reflecting her Hungarian roots. “Your grandmother and your aunt used to come and take care of you because your mother couldn’t.”

Her simple explanation, uttered with empathy and kindness, hit me hard after I hung up. My mother had spoken of these illnesses to me only once; my aunt and grandmother never. Each of them, in her own way, was good with secrets. My mother’s friends knew little if anything about it, and though a few may have known she had had some unidentified “problems” with childbirth, all of them seemed to have bought the picture she presented to the world: a plain-talking, loyal, and lively woman, both tiny and tough, who never appeared so happy as when she was ballroom dancing.

Even though I had known since my late twenties that my mother had suffered four bouts of postpartum psychosis, I had never really thought about what it had meant on a day-to-day basis for my infancy and childhood. I never dreamed her illness would have been so obvious to neighbors who lived across a stretch of two gardens separated by a chain-link fence. My mother’s last bout of the baby blues ended a year after my brother was born, eighteen months before my parents bought a house of their own. All four of those collapses occurred in their sunlit rental flat, and it makes me wonder if at least some of the unfettered joy she experienced when we moved into a house of our own was not somehow connected to the idea that there she would find a refuge from the many fears that had plagued her. Oh, how my mother loved having a home of her own! Whenever we would come into the house after a day or even a few hours away, she would turn the key in the lock, excitedly, yelling happily into the empty rooms, “Hello, house, we’re home!” as if she were greeting a dear, long-lost member of the family.

My mother’s fears were legion, though I did not know that when I was young, because she hid them so well behind various shields: gaiety, ferocity, silence, anger, and most of all, feigned normality. I always thought that one of her favorite lines—“We’re so normal we’re weird”—was meant as a statement of fact, not desire. She didn’t tell me about her depressions until I was twenty-eight. She didn’t tell me they had returned until another dozen years had passed. Her two revelations were both too little, too late.

 

 

 

 

N
ine months after the shooting, we were still in America, waiting until John’s doctors felt he had recuperated enough to return to work. He was not the only one impatient to get back. The truth was, I wanted John better yesterday. I wanted his liver count normal. I wanted his yellow eyes white. I wanted him bounding out of bed in the morning, as he always had. I wanted him giggling and teasing, gabbing incessantly. I wanted him dancing me around the kitchen, spouting Latin jokes. I wanted him wearing a belt, not those ridiculous suspenders. I wanted him looking into my eyes, not off into space. In short, I wanted John back, the man I married, so that we could return to the years-long honeymoon we had enjoyed before I was beaten, before he got shot. I was preternaturally impatient to get back to our real lives, not these fake lives we had been living, with him playing patient and me playing nurse.

John had no idea how impatient I was at the time, when my idea of a helpful spouse was still naiveté itself: patience, fortitude, endurance. Only now do I think that I was not acting like a spouse at all, but like a child, a child who watches her own mother suffering in a similar way but who feels powerless to help, afraid to do anything but watch and wait, lie low and hope.

We were fortunate that the editors at
The New York Times
could not have been more accommodating. They kept telling John to take his time and recuperate fully, though none of us truly understood how long that would take. But we were blessed that John’s editors in New York had arranged for the Bonn bureau manager to find and set up a new office in a tree-lined neighborhood of West Berlin so that it would be ready when John arrived. It would have been beyond us both to even try.

Ever so slowly John’s physical condition improved, while even more slowly he began withdrawing into himself. Although neither of us recognized he was slipping into depression until he was already there, his overall mood continued to slide imperceptibly downward and inward, worsening when I lost my job and the financial burdens fell more heavily to him, improving superficially and temporarily only when Peter and Anna were with us. Two summers after the shooting, we finally managed a visit to Trevignano with the children, with high hopes for what it might do for all of us.

But that longed-for vacation was cut short when John was called back to work early, to cover the revolution in Yugoslavia. There, exposed to the same kind of urban warfare he had seen in Romania, he began experiencing vivid flashbacks to the night he was shot. I begged him in nightly phone conversations to tell the foreign desk he had to leave, but he refused, saying he had to take the bad assignments with the good. Had I been listening to my heart and not to my head, I would have made the call to the desk myself and let them know what was going on. But I was afraid to interfere. I still feel that had I called then, had John been ordered out of harm’s way before Yugoslav snipers started shooting in the streets of Zagreb as Romanian snipers had shot in the streets of Timişoara, we might have avoided years of woe. But I did not understand this at the time. I had yet to figure out what my role in John’s recovery would have to be.

At precisely the same time John began experiencing flashbacks in Yugoslavia, my parents called me to say that my mother’s clinical depression, which had been lying low for some thirty years, had returned unexpectedly. My mother—my own introduction to the woes that depression can bring to a family—tried everything her doctors prescribed. Electroshock therapy, which had unfailingly pulled her out of her earlier depressions, was out of fashion in the early 1990s, supplanted by new drugs that the big pharmaceutical concerns were churning out. My mother started medication immediately after seeking treatment, but after a few weeks her psychologist sent her to a psychiatrist, saying she was not responding and that she needed a doctor who himself could prescribe stronger drugs.

As the days and weeks of that sunny, warm autumn passed, it was soon clear that the new drugs were not braking her descent, but in fact hastening it. Like John, she too spiraled downward and inward until, in the middle of a mid-November night, she slipped out of the house and into the cold, black waters of Ash Creek, the saltwater tidal basin that lay at the foot of their street. By the time she was found, it was too late.

The shock of her death was worse than any of us could have imagined, a devastation of body and soul. “Heartsick,” just a word or cliché before, took on an unutterable reality after. I lived, heartsick and unhinged, for months. When I think back to that time of violent grief, I think always of waves: waves of grief like body blows that started each morning before my eyes had opened; waves of pain that would convulse gut, heart, and head day after day, night after night. Were there waves slapping against the shore the night she slipped into the water? Or was the tide, as it so often did in that sheltered bay, rising silently, pulled by the moon, just as my mother was pulled into the water by her illness?

Months later, when I thought I had finally hit bottom, I realized with horror that my mother’s death had taken on a virulent life of its own, infecting us all in our own ways. Her death helped push John back toward the depression he thought he had left safely behind the monastery walls three decades earlier. At the same time, however, her death would propel me to be on top of John’s case, to remember always where depression could lead. In that way, I think, she helped save him, too.

Throughout that long, disturbing autumn of my mother’s last bout with depression, I felt a growing ache to take her on my lap and in my arms as if she were a child, to hold her tight, to try communicating physically that she was not alone. When I think back on those unreal weeks, I see myself sitting on the floor of our Berlin bedroom, a phone receiver glued to my ear, night after night talking to my mother in Connecticut, night after night talking to John in whatever Eastern European hotel room he happened to be staying. It is tempting to think that my mother’s full-blown depression made me miss the signals of John’s incipient one. But I am certain I would have missed them in any case, just as my father had missed them at the beginning of my mother’s descent. Perhaps we missed these initial warning signs because both John and my mother unwound quietly and at a crawl, because both were used to fighting depressive feelings on their own and hiding so well the ones they could not master.

But ignorance and the silence that surrounds mental illness played an enormous role, too. Neither my father nor I had ever seen the list—available these days on countless websites, in doctors’ office pamphlet racks, in newspaper articles, in books—of textbook warning signs for depression. Neither of us knew such a list existed. And even though we had lived for decades with my mother’s repeated bouts of depression, we both were still shockingly unaware of depression’s potential power and fury. In fact, it may have been our basic familiarity with my mother’s depressive collapses in the early 1950s, when she was young, that contributed to our inability to see that this one was different. In her first four brushes with the illness, my mother suffered mightily, but after electroshock she always pulled through. When she collapsed again, no longer young, we were worried about her health, not her life. And all of us accepted what the doctors told us at the time, that drugs were now the best, most enlightened treatment. If the medical community had begun to discover cases of drug-resistant depression, we certainly had never heard of it.

I could only make sense of a few basics. My utterly prudish mother had left the house in nothing but her nightgown. My mother, always cold and shivery, had gone out on a frigid, rainy night without a coat and boots and scarf and hat. My mother, who loathed cold water to the point of giving up swimming even in August, had willingly walked or jumped or dived into Ash Creek in the middle of November. My mother, who prayed on her knees nightly before getting into bed, who feared her God perhaps as much as she loved him, had broken the great taboo on taking her own life.

Intellectually I understood nothing about my mother’s death at the time it happened, although intuitively I began to sense that her depression had been of a depth that only a fellow sufferer might have begun to imagine. Though the coroner’s report of her death rightly and logically says suicide, my gut knows today that it was not my mother who took her life. It was the depression that took her life, the chemical imbalances in her brain that caused the depression that took her life. My mother, all five feet, one inch of her, fought heroically for most of her seventy-three years against those chemical imbalances. She battled silently and unceasingly, more than I ever really understood until long after her death.

It has taken me nearly twenty years to lose the denial, anger, anguish, terror, and confusion I felt after her death. It has taken me nearly twenty years to discover the depths of my admiration for the battle she waged. It has taken me nearly twenty years to be able to say, with pride and with love, that she fought like the tiny scrapper she was.
Ave!

T
he Clam Box was Westport’s premier fish restaurant for most of my childhood. An enormous hulk of a building, painted white with dark green trim, it sat high and dry on the old Post Road, a couple of miles from the beach. No clam shack catering to the beach crowd, it offered fresh lobsters, shrimp, scrod, turbot, sole, steamers in their own broth, tiny, fried little-neck clams, raw cherrystones, even finnan haddie for the odd sort who enjoyed his fish smoked.

Waitresses were generally middle-aged except for the summer help, twenty-one-year-olds drawn to the pricey restaurant by the potential tips. We all wore dowdy white dresses, dowdier white aprons, and sensible white nurses’ shoes; long hair was pulled back off the face and coiled neatly into a bun or French twist. When Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who lived nearby, would slip in for an occasional meal, the white-haired Greek boss would immediately dispatch his eldest, dowdiest, and most circumspect waitress to their table. Even first-year servers like me knew that our job was not only not to stare, but to keep the occasional swooning fan at bay so that the Newmans could enjoy a good meal, undisturbed.

Except for the post-lunch lull, we were run off our feet on the job. But the tips were solid and I needed every nickel to pay for my first trip to Europe later that summer. Somehow my exhaustion would lift each night once I arrived home, sat down at the kitchen table with my parents, ate a dish of blueberries or a cut-up peach, and counted out my nightly take. I quickly found my rhythm, and the tips, the mainstay of my earnings, began piling up.

One night I got stuck with a client who had slipped past the radar of the chief hostess, the boss’s tall, skinny daughter. A man of late middle age, alone, he was not the usual Clam Box patron, though in his crisp suit and rep tie he was dressed like one. Single guests, especially men who arrived half lit, were normally seated at the counter, apart from the main dining room, where they could be watched and kept from disturbing their neighbors. This man was trying his best to appear sober, but even I, who had seen only the occasional drunken boy at a prom, could see he was far gone.