Caddy for Life (4 page)

Now, in September, in Gwyn and Lenny’s backyard, surrounded by people who had loved him long before he got sick, Bruce was doing everything he could to make the weekend as sweet as possible. He sat and listened to all the old stories, cracking up when his father described going to pick Bruce up after his first day of kindergarten only to be told Bruce had been kept after school for misbehaving.

“How many kids get in trouble on their
first
day of kindergarten?” Jay Edwards asked, laughing now at the memory.

“I was framed,” Bruce insisted.

“You were framed your entire life,” his mother said.

“Damn right,” he said.

Gwyn had arranged for a photographer to come in on Saturday morning to take family photos. Patiently, they went through their paces: a group photo of all seventeen of them—not easy with the younger kids squirming to go back and play—then breakdown pictures of each couple, each couple with their kids, the grandparents with the grandchildren. Finally Jay and Natalie’s four kids all together.

“They all turned out pretty damn well,” Jay Edwards said softly as he saw Chris, Bruce, Brian, and Gwyn smiling for the camera.

The photographer worked swiftly and was back a few hours later with images that Lenny was able to bring up on the computer for everyone to look at so they could decide which ones they wanted printed. Lenny had even gone so far as to set up soft background music as the sixty images came up on the computer screen. The kids were busy playing, so the adults went inside to look. There they all were, wearing happy smiles, a handsome, successful family spending a gorgeous weekend with one another, enjoying every shared moment.

That was when Bruce lost it. Seeing the photos of all the people he loved so much was simply more than he could bear. He fought the tears for a while, leaned on Marsha to try to stop, and then gave up. He had to go outside and get away. Marsha followed, and he cried on her shoulder for several minutes to compose himself.

“I just couldn’t stop thinking of the sadness I knew my dying was going to bring to all of them,” he said later. “I’m not afraid to die, I’m really not. But I know my death is going to bring the people I care about the most a lot of pain. When I saw those pictures, everyone together, enjoying one another so much, enjoying
life
so much, it all caved in on me.”

Naturally Bruce felt guilty about getting so emotional. Just as he had somehow felt guilty when he had to tell his parents about his illness. “I’m so sorry,” he had said that night, “to have to tell you this.”

Of course guilt was the last thing he should have felt. What he should have felt was pride, because that was what his family members felt when they thought about him. They were proud of what he had accomplished, proud of the man he had become, and proud that he had always done it on his own terms. More than anything, they had been proud—and amazed—by his ability to keep his sense of humor and his upbeat approach to every day, even at a time when so much of the future looked so terribly bleak.

“When I first heard, I felt compelled to sit down and write him,” Gwyn said. “I knew if I got on the phone with him and tried to tell him how I felt, I’d just lose it and that would make things worse. So I sent him an e-mail, telling him how much I loved him and reminding him that we were all here for him anytime, any way he needed us. I signed the note, ‘love and prayers.’ When he wrote me back, he signed his note, ‘love, prayers . . . and the Eagles.’ It made me laugh and it made me cry, because it was just so Bruce.”

If nothing else, Bruce would never stop being Bruce.

2

The Black Sheep

THE WAY JAY EDWARDS
likes to tell it, it began in “crown and bridges,” which may sound like the name of an English pub but was actually a dental class he was taking at the University of Pennsylvania. He was only twenty, but he was already a third-year dental student, having enrolled at Penn at the age of sixteen as part of a six-year dental program—two years of undergraduate work followed by four years of dental school.

It surprised no one that Jay Edwards would go to dental school. His father, Jonas Edwards, was a smalltown dentist, practicing in Riverside, a mill town in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. The family lived one town over in Delanco, which sits on the Delaware River about thirteen miles north of Philadelphia. Jay was his parents’ third and last child, but their only son. His grandfather had been a physician, his father a dentist, so it only made sense that he follow in their footsteps in some way. “I grew up being very organized and very careful. It just seemed to be the right way to do things,” he said. “I’ve always described myself as a belt-and-suspenders guy.”

Belt and suspenders in hand, he went off to Penn shortly after the end of World War II, having been skipped ahead twice in grade school, and found himself in classes with men many years older than he was. “Guys back from the war going to school on the GI Bill,” he said. “In fact my third year in dental school, I was still the youngest person in the entire school.”

It was in that third year that he met Natalie Oberhaus, an aspiring dental hygienist, who was also a Penn undergrad. The hygienists were assigned to different dental classes to work with the future dentists, and Natalie walked into Jay’s crown and bridges class one day and left him feeling as light-headed as if he had been given laughing gas. “Love at first sight,” he said. “She was assigned to help me with something. I took one look at her and said, ‘This is it.’”

“He was very definitely the aggressor,” his wife said with a smile more than fifty years later.

Aggressiveness led to dating, which led to engagement, which led to marriage in December of 1951, soon after Jay had graduated with his dental degree. The following summer, Jay, who was now in the Army dental corps, was sent to Great Britain. By then, Natalie was pregnant with their first child, Chris, who arrived in January. Six weeks later, Natalie and the baby flew over to the United Kingdom so Chris could meet her father. “She was a colicky baby,” Natalie Edwards remembered. “By the time I got over there, I was completely worn out. The first night after we got there I said to Jay, ‘She’s all yours, I’m going to bed.’ Jay made it about halfway through the night before he fired a cigarette lighter against a wall in frustration because Chris simply wouldn’t stop crying. “I said, ‘There has got to be more to life than this!’” he remembered.

Chris got over the colic and quickly became a model child: smart, well behaved, neat, always on time, great grades, adored by all her classmates in school. If you were to order a kid from a mail-order catalog, you would have ordered Chris. “She was always the perfect kid,” said Gwyn, a description that makes Chris cringe.

“I wasn’t close to perfect,” she said. “But I guess I was a fairly typical first kid. I followed rules. I listened to what I was told. To this day if there’s a sign somewhere that says don’t walk on the beach, my instinct is to not walk on the beach. My husband will walk right past the sign, and I’ll be standing there saying, ‘John, the sign says you aren’t supposed to walk there.’”

Soon after Jay finished his two-year Army stint, he and Natalie and their daughter settled in Wethersfield, Connecticut, a rapidly growing suburb a few miles south of Hartford. Jonas Edwards would have liked to see his son join his practice, but Jay didn’t want to work in a mill town in New Jersey and Natalie had grown up in Farmington, about ten miles from Wethersfield. He decided to set up practice in Wethersfield.

“We liked the town, it seemed like a good place to raise kids,” he said. “We were able to find a house that was perfect to build an office onto. I always had my office right there in the house. It ended up working out very well.”

The only drawback to having Dad’s office at home, according to the kids, was when he had a cancellation. “He’d walk over and say, ‘My four o’clock canceled, let’s take care of that molar,’” Chris remembered. “If we saw him coming over during the day, we all scrambled for cover.”

By the time Jay and Natalie were settled in Wethersfield, Chris was two and Natalie was pregnant with child number two. He arrived on November 16, 1954, with a shock of brown hair and a quick, easy smile that was a part of his personality almost from the day he was born. They named him Bruce Jay Edwards and were extremely relieved when he wasn’t the least bit colicky. “I’m not sure either of us could have lived through that again,” Jay said with a laugh.

It wasn’t long after he began walking and talking that Bruce began to provide his parents with an entirely different kind of challenge. They had more or less expected their son to be a male version of Chris. “We got spoiled by Chris,” Natalie said. “She was just about as easy a kid to raise as you could ever hope to have. So we got fooled. When Bruce wasn’t the same way, instead of seeing him as different, I think we probably thought something was wrong.”

Bruce was independent, always in some kind of trouble in school, anything but a model student, and rebellious. Everyone in the family remembers Jay and Natalie telling Bruce he had to come inside in the evening as soon as the streetlights came on. Then they would walk outside and find Bruce firing rocks at the streetlights to knock them out of commission. “If they didn’t come on,” he said, “I didn’t have to come in. I’d usually miss with the first three or four, but sooner or later, I’d get them.”

With the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight and medical knowledge that didn’t exist in the 1950s, Jay and Natalie are convinced now that their first son had attention deficit disorder (ADD). In those days ADD was unknown, and smart kids like Bruce who couldn’t concentrate in school were often accused of not trying hard enough and of failing to live up to their potential. That’s what made it tough for Jay and Natalie. They knew Bruce was smart, he simply refused—or so they thought—to apply himself.

“Of course knowing what we know now, we would have handled things entirely differently,” Jay said, shaking his head. “We always thought Bruce was testing us, that he was simply being stubborn. I’m convinced now it wasn’t nearly that simple.”

Brian was born three years after Bruce, in September of 1957, and Gwyn came along in 1962. By then the family hierarchy was pretty much set: Chris was the good child; Bruce was the bad child. Brian and Gwyn became observers of the family dynamic as they grew up. “We probably shortchanged both Brian and Gwyn growing up because we were so focused on Bruce,” Jay said. “Almost everything that happened in the family seemed to center on Bruce and his behavior. Whenever we traveled, we gave him a pill that was supposed to help him sleep. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But it was always the same: If he slept, the others slept; if he was awake, they all stayed awake.”

It is not at all unusual in today’s world for a family with an ADD child to be ruled by the whims and moods of that child. Many ADD kids today take medication to modify their behavior and to help them concentrate in school. When Bruce was growing up, there was no diagnosis, no medication, and no relief for anyone in the family. “I think I challenged them and tested them almost every day,” Bruce said. “It was never easy.”

It certainly wasn’t easy on Bruce, who was keenly aware of what his family perceived as his shortcomings. He was sent to different child psychologists, which angered and frustrated him. Brian remembers Bruce coming home from one psychologist’s where he had run into one of his classmates. “That kid is crazy,” he told Brian. “I’m not perfect, but I’m
not
crazy.”

Chris and Bruce may have had different personalities, but they were similar physically: slender, dark-haired, with easy smiles, and good at any sport that involved speed. Brian and Gwyn were both stockier, Brian with sandy hair and Gwyn with the same brown hair as Chris and Bruce but swimmer’s shoulders. In fact she swam in high school and briefly in college at Lafayette. When she stopped swimming, she played women’s rugby briefly. “I played until we went up to play Rutgers,” she said. “I was a pretty big kid, five seven, a hundred and forty pounds, but these women were
huge
. I was the biggest girl on our team, and I was smaller than anyone playing for them. They were mean too. They just beat us to a pulp. That, and knee surgery, ended my rugby career.”

Brian was always a runner. He ran cross-country in both high school and college and still runs today. He has run in several Boston Marathons, with a best time of 3:07. “Brian likes to do anything that’s hard,” Bruce said. “Marathons, white-water rafting. If it isn’t hard or dangerous, he isn’t interested in it.”

Bruce and Brian were roommates briefly as kids before Brian decided to turn the family’s sunroom into his room. Gwyn, always the observer, didn’t think Brian moved out of the room because he needed more space but because he wanted to get away from the crossfire between Bruce and their parents.

In spite of Bruce’s frustrations with his parents and theirs with him, the family remained close-knit as the kids grew up. Gwyn, eight years younger than Bruce, adored him because to her, “he was always so cool.” Jay and Natalie had a strict rule on school nights that all four children had to spend the hours between seven o’clock and nine o’clock in their rooms, either working on homework or, if they finished their homework, reading a book. There was absolutely no way Bruce was going to spend two hours in his room studying or reading. Most nights he would climb out his window, onto a balcony that he shared with Gwyn, wave goodbye to her, climb down the balcony, and come back just before nine. He would smoke a final cigarette on the balcony, flip the butt away, and climb back inside just before quiet time, as it was called, came to an end.

His study habits had to catch up with him sooner or later, and when they did, it created more tension. Chris was reeling off A’s in high school, en route to Bucknell, where she would major in French and international relations. Brian and Gwyn were both good students who rarely got into any kind of serious trouble. Bruce was always the one with the bad report cards and the calls coming home from teachers about his behavior.