The Communist's Daughter (27 page)

The time spent away from Frances acted as a balm. Remembering only the happiness we'd shared, I grew optimistic. When I recovered, that sad chapter in our lives would close and we could return to our love affair. I needed her, I wrote, but in order for me to love her again, as she deserved to be loved, some part of me first had to die, and it would die here in the place of my birth. This return to my hometown was, of course, heavy with symbolic meanings not lost on me. I hoped for a rebirth, if you'll permit the poetic licence. I wrote poems and confessional letters. I bared my soul. There were, I wrote, certain things about myself that could stand second consideration. I was contrite. But here was an opportunity. I was committed to returning as a new man, I said, in body and in spirit. I would look afresh into my heart, and find in this dreary isolation a new optimism.

Not long after I returned to Frances, only a month later, our marriage stumbled again. We were both back into the thick of it. The optimistic words about our future had meant nothing. It was as if we'd never been apart. We finally agreed upon an official separation. Then, in the middle of December, the wait list for the Trudeau cleared.

Deep in the heart of the Adirondacks, I bunked with a young physician named John Barnwell and was restricted to bedrest. It was customary to be given passes to leave the grounds just three times a month, but I resisted all attempts to constrain me. Anxiety over Frances, and the financial status of my practice now floundering back in Detroit, only added to my desperation. Sick as I was, I was also deeply resistant to the idea of someone exerting control over my life after I'd already given up what little freedom it offered. I was restless and eager to declare myself however I could.

As a remedy for the monotony, Barnwell and I soon took to visiting Brook's Tavern, a small establishment on the road leading into the town of Saranac, its walls covered with fishing and hunting memorabilia, stuffed trout and deer and wolf heads and antique hunting rifles and colourful pheasants and photographs of proud men standing beside poles sagging under the weight of snow hares, wild turkeys and grouse. The log building contained a bar and a small dining room, with an outfitters' shack butted up against the west end where you might purchase hunting and fishing gear, camping supplies, tobacco, stamps, magazines and newspapers. Pickerel, trout, perch, whitefish and venison were offered on the menu, though we never arrived before the kitchen had closed. It was only at night we came here, after the sanatorium had closed down for the evening. As patients we were not permitted to drink or smoke, and so as a consequence of this most reasonable policy our little establishment became a welcome oasis of liquor and tobacco in an abstemious sea of lake, rock and pine. The owner came to know us well. He was a sympathetic New Yorker who'd lost his leg at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines. He limped around behind the bar on his prosthesis, pulling draft beers and pouring single-ounce shots for the foresters, travellers and locals who collected there after everything else had shut.

During the day I recall reading widely, making full use of the sanatorium's library. I also delivered a series of lectures on human anatomy to the nursing students at the school connected with the sanatorium. In order to further distract myself I laid out a scheme to establish a university on the grounds, since I'd noticed how many highly specialized patients, myself included, had been attracted there. To provide much needed status, and to fill out faculty requirements, I decided my new university should be affiliated with NYU and McGill University in Montreal. It was a wonder no one had thought before of a highly specialized teaching hospital at the foot of the Adirondacks. I took my plans to the Trudeau board and explained in the greatest detail the need for just such an institution, but my hopes were dashed by a table of wooden, conservative men who saw little value and no practicality in this enterprise. That night, in my familiar oasis, I listened to stories of the Battle of Manila Bay.

Around this time, I arranged for the sale of my private practice, then sinking into a morass of unpaid bills and shrinking patient lists. These negotiations briefly kept me busy and lifted the tedium off my shoulders. A young doctor by the name of Wruble paid me $5,000, a small triumph that did little to assuage my financial anxieties. Toward that end I returned to Detroit and resumed my teaching at the Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery.

Things between me and Frances had not improved, and on a grey Sunday afternoon in April, I said the inevitable words: “I want you to do me a favour, Frances. I want you to divorce me. It will do you a world of good to get away from me. You're miserable, you must admit that. We've tried long enough. You want to go home. You want to be happy. You want a family. I can give you none of those things.”

She stared at me silently, expressionless. And so, without another word, after only three short years of marriage, that was that.

*

My health took a turn for the worse shortly afterward. I checked into the Trudeau again in June of that year, 1927, but my return was cloaked in dread. It was now clear to me that my TB was no less than a death sentence. My friend Barnwell had died over the winter, and I would surely die there too. The odds were highly stacked against me. The slightest physical task was now practically unendurable, and walking fifty paces soon became intolerable. At my insistence, Frances had retained a lawyer, and our separation would become legally binding by the end of the summer. I was alone, as I'd wanted to be, though I know now this solitude stemmed not from purely selfless motives, as I'd led Frances to believe, but from a selfish and destructive anger.

I can tell you now that I did very little in those days to be proud of. Ill health is a terrible thing, however you choose to look at it. But for some people the thought of death is a first step toward redemption. To getting his affairs in order. To setting things right between himself and those he may have wronged. After a last hushed conversation and a handshake, he makes his peace. There is a beauty there that I marvel at whenever I see it.

It shames me to admit that I sought neither peace nor redemption. Instead, my anger and frustration grew to the point that I decided to take my own life. I stared up at the ceiling of my cabin, the pressure and pain in my chest increasing by the hour, running through the most efficient manners of suicide. For days I lay motionless in my bed, summoning the courage.

It is not easy for me to tell you this. I have always wished, if and when the time ever came, that I would be able to offer my life up to you as a shining example of the wisdom and the glories that accrue as you grow old. But I was simply ungrateful, consumed with resentment for the hand I'd been dealt. I know now that each single day is a wonder and privilege to behold, yet during those difficult months, held in the grip of that illness, the opposite thought became stronger as my body grew weaker. The lake was only a hundred yards away, no more, and in the mornings I'd walk there slowly, resting when necessary, to stand on the shore and imagine sinking into the water.

In the infirmary I slipped the first 50 cc ampoule of morphine into my pocket. As a doctor, I knew what was needed. At night, sleepless, I imagined myself floating out onto Saranac Lake under a ringed moon, wearied, heavy with that diseased lung, yet warmed by the late hour's peacefulness and the soft summer breeze shifting the water's glassy surface. These last few moments alone in a rowboat would prove to be the focus of my life, the narrow end of a funnel that had collected and directed all experience to this one last perfect moment of distillation. Somehow the night would know this and show both gratitude and a proper respect. It was there in the ringed moon, in the dirge of the loons crying for the end of me, in the moonlight on the water, in the harmony of midnight. I knew a man could never know a greater solitude than the one he sees as he peers into his soul and prepares for his death. Having seen it in other men, I now saw it in myself.

Yet as I lay on my bed on those nights, I remembered all the damage I had done to others. None of my triumphs sparkled there, only my failures and the sentence of death that was the heaviness in my lung. I imagined the warmth of the drug streaming through my veins, the euphoria that would rise up within me as I disappeared into the lake.

I needed only one last ampoule. One sunny morning I sat quietly on the front step of the infirmary, gaunt, frail and grey, yet filled with resolve. I knew this trial would soon be over. As I gathered my strength to continue on, a young woman from the main desk approached to tell me that Mrs. Bethune was calling on the telephone. She then helped me inside, my elbow in her tender grasp as if I were an eighty-year-old pensioner, to where the receiver of the telephone sat on a handsome edition of
Walden Pond.
I picked it up and heard Frances's voice. She was in tears.

“Please, Norman, promise me only this.”

I waited.

“Promise you'll do nothing,” she said. “It was my fault. I was foolish.”

“What happened?” I said. I'd heard of her new companion, a pioneer in children's speech therapy at Johns Hopkins who was, according to a letter she'd sent some weeks before, a kind and elegant man.

She'd spent the weekend with him in Pittsburgh, she said, where he'd gone for a conference. She'd humiliated herself, following him around like a puppy until he sent her away.

I imagined their time together, the humiliation. It was a reflection of my own callousness. “Did he do anything else?” I said. “Did he touch you?” I was overwhelmed by jealousy and rage.

This is a shameful episode in my life that pains me now to recount, especially to you. I was not the man I am today, please understand that. I was seized by an insanity I'd never known before and have not known since. But this abject, perverse insanity shaped me for the better, which is why I include the episode here. Through adversity we reach the stars, I've always enjoyed that thought. Since then I've attempted to live up to it in my own way, by pursuing the work I do. Back then it directed me away from the darkness of self-destruction and allowed me to see what awaited me.

What did I do? I dragged myself across two states with a mind to wreak revenge on a man I'd never met. The man who'd taken my place at my wife's side. Through the window of my train compartment I watched the flickering lights of sleeping villages and desolate whistle-stops. The world was indifferent to my passage and the murderous hate I carried.

It was early morning when my train pulled in at Pennsylvania Station. Commuters ran for their connections; young boys waved newspapers in the air that tomorrow would feature the face of the murderer I would become. Weakened further by my journey, I was jostled and bumped as I made my way out onto Liberty Avenue and hailed a cab. Frances had named the hotel where the man I was looking for could be found. It was a respectable establishment only four blocks from the station. I took a room there, rested for the balance of the morning, then journeyed down into the street. I purchased a pistol, left a note for the speech therapist at the front desk and waited for evening.

I held the pistol in my right hand. A surgeon's hand. I sat in wait by the window of my room, watching the street, listening for footsteps just beyond my door. My fingers felt every bit as dead as that cold steel. Was it my destiny to be the first Bethune to kill not in war but in a last, defiant act of love? Could this be so wrong? Would I not be vindicated? I knew the man hadn't touched her, but he had abused her nonetheless. He had led her to believe that he could replace me and had failed to do so. He had dashed her hopes, as I had so often done.

The pistol grew slippery with my nerves. I paced. I was sick to my stomach. The afternoon and evening wore on. I stared at the gun, barely able to believe that I was there, about to commit this crime, but also convinced that this was, in some bleak narrative, a merciful end to my story. I was no more than an embodiment of gloom: not a dime to my name, my wife gone, my health destroyed. I had seen death so often that another would make little difference either way.

When the knock came I raised my eyes from the pistol to the door, more fearful than I'd ever been. Trembling, I rose and placed the gun under the bed pillow, then walked over and opened the door. Standing before me was a short man, already undone by life, it seemed, around forty years old. He wore a grey suit and shoes of tired leather.

He tipped his hat. “Doctor Bethune?”

When he entered, I closed the door and crossed the floor to stand by the window. “Drink?” I said.

“No,” he said.

I stared at him.

“You've come all this way to speak with me?” he asked. “I understand you're ill.”

“It's none of your concern how far I've come.”

He stood awkwardly, hat in both hands.

I picked up my glass. “I've lost my wife to you, so there probably isn't much left to say. Should I talk to you? Should I ask how things are going between you? Should I express an interest in your affair?”

“No,” he said.

“We agree on at least one thing, then,” I said.

He was standing in front of the closed door. I poured a glass of whiskey, then turned and walked it over to him. My hand brushed against his when he took the drink. He didn't raise the glass, just stood there watching me.

“I understand you are separating, legally separating,” he said. “I would not come between a man and his wife.”

“What about a dying man and his wife?” I said, reaching under the pillow. “What about that?” Then I hit him across the face with the butt-end of the pistol. “Would you come between them?”

His head jerked back again and again as I kept hitting him. A wound opened on the left side of his face. I didn't stop until he fell to the floor.

It was then that I looked into his eyes. Then I knelt beside him and wept, begging his forgiveness.