Pharmakon (28 page)

“Why’s that?”

“Because your father is not a Christian.”

“What are you, Dad?” I asked.

“My friend, I’ll let you know when I figure that out.”

Casper Gedsic remained at large for two full days after the murder of Dr. Winton. The killing and subsequent manhunt drove the Korean War off the headlines of the New England papers for more than a week. The fact that Casper was a Yale student dating the granddaughter of a governor, and that Winton was
Social
Register
rich, and that there was lots of blood made it fodder for the New York tabloids as well. When Casper was finally apprehended, he was found sleeping in the forward cabin of a fifty-foot schooner that was in dry dock at the Wainscot Yacht Club.

Perhaps he thought he was at sea and had made good his escape. The death list with my father’s name on it was found folded neatly in his wallet.

The evidence against him was incontrovertible. The stepdaughter gave an eyewitness account of seeing Casper standing over her stepmother’s body with a pistol in his hand. His fingerprints were on a .22 caliber eight-shot Harrington & Richardson revolver found next to a rosebush a quarter mile away; the ballistics matched. My father was not called to testify and did not volunteer. A jury was never assembled to pass judgment.

A trio of eminent psychiatrists examined Casper. Two pronounced him a paranoid schizophrenic; the third judged him a sociopath with schizoid tendencies. Casper’s state-appointed attorney pleaded insanity. Casper remained mute. The judge sentenced him to life in the Connecticut State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. According to newspaper accounts, Casper refused to give any explanation for his actions other than to say, “They made me.”

Among psychologists and psychiatrists in the academic community, the case was well-known but little discussed. They categorized Dr. Winton’s death the way my father dealt with Jack’s—a tragic accident. But then, isn’t that what all murders are?

A crazed, delusional patient kills the brilliant young physician trying to help him—it was an occupational hazard, remote, but real. Dr. Winton wasn’t the first mental hygienist who suffered at the hands of a paranoid. My father’s research on
gaikau dong,
his study of its effect on depression, its uncanny ability to produce that subtle electrochemical state commonly called happiness, was never completed, much less published.

My father and Dr. Winton had kept their research to themselves. Desperate to be the first, they ended up, well,
CRAZED
YALIE KILLS LADY SHRINK
was not the headline they’d hoped to garner. Their adviser on the study, Dr. Petersen, was the only person at Yale privy to their preliminary test results. They were in the bottom drawer of his desk when a blood clot formed in his carotid artery and turned out the lights in the left hemisphere of his brain. Stroke, coma, he died the day after Casper’s capture. Perhaps he would have added something to the inquest.

In spite of the fact that Yale became the first Ivy League college to expel a student for murder, there was no scandal. The Yale community was more isolated then, a fortress of greatness more than an ivory tower, immune to any and every thing but success. Alfred W. Griswold, the president of Yale, was number three on Casper’s list. Winton was number two. My father was number one. My father had his theories as to why Casper, the Angel of Death, had passed him over that Sunday and gone straight to Winton’s. But he never shared them.

By the time the tulips had flowered the following spring, Winton’s husband was out of the hospital. All Thayer remembered was the doorbell ringing. The bullet Casper fired into his face damaged his tear duct. His right eye wept constantly. No one was sure whether it was the way Thayer fell against the stone floor in the hall or the beating Casper inflicted with the help of a field hockey stick that fractured his spinal column at the T8 vertebra. When not in his wheelchair, he walked with canes. There was a picture of him in the paper the following summer at the helm of his sailboat, winning the regatta. He stayed in Hamden and endowed a scholarship in his wife’s name.

My father left Yale at the end of that academic year. Yale wanted him to stay. He had promise, he was on the right track. He could do a standard deviational analysis in his head, he was alive. The head of the department took Dad out to lunch and tried to talk him out of leaving. My father always said he left because they didn’t make him a full professor. It was more complicated than that.

In June of ’53, he traded in the White Whale for a brand-new robin’s-egg blue Plymouth station wagon with automatic transmission and a V-8 engine, and drove what was left of himself and his family south.

Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey in New Brunswick, not only made my father a full professor at double the salary, he only had to teach one semester per annum of doctoral candidates in the final year of their PhD program—the rest of the time, he was free to do research.

Rutgers wasn’t Yale. Except for the old Queens College, a handful of dark brown nineteenth-century stone buildings, and an impressive iron gate, the campus was a dreary, sprawling hodgepodge of clapboard and stucco. Happy homes for the skilled laborers who used to work in the factories that lined the banks of the Raritan, fouling its waters blue green with chemicals, had been hastily coopted by the university as its ambitions grew and the factories closed and the workers moved on to places not yet poisoned.

We lived across the river in Greenwood in a pre–World War I housing development that had seen better days. Now that my father could afford it, there was no High Lane Club to join, no polite private school to send his children to, i.e., nothing to offer proof positive that all he had compromised he had compromised for them.

Our house in Greenwood was three stories of gingerbread bric-a-brac with a curving porch curtained by a tangle of un-pruned rhododendrons and old maple trees that provided too much shade for grass to grow green. It was clear from photographs that our house was twice as big as the box they had lived in back in Hamden. But I never once heard my father say something nice about our home in Greenwood. My mother would occasionally well up the energy to talk about fixing it up, tearing down walls to enlarge rooms, adding a terrace, a fireplace, bigger windows in the hopes of making it more cozy and less claustrophobic. But my father would always say, “What’s the point? It’ll never be right.”

Other more renowned and scenic universities courted my father. He had offers to go to Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco. His rating scale and tests were being used all across the country. He knew the questions to ask, the statistical formulas to tell America just how crazy it was getting.

New Jersey was a strategic retreat. My father picked Rutgers because New Jersey, the Garden State, was where the drug companies were. Hoffmann–La Roche, Merck, Sandoz, Johnson & Johnson, Ciba all lay between the Delaware to the west and the Passaic to the east, the Tigris and Euphrates of prescribed modernity. The sixty-mile crescent that lay between those rivers was the cornucopia of pharmacology.

I was not yet one year old when Miltown hit our local pharmacy: C
₉
H
₁₈
N
₂
O
₄
. It was named after a town in New Jersey. A pink pill that put your blues to sleep, it made everything feel okay, even when you knew it wasn’t. Newspapers called it the “happy pill.” Wildly addictive and incredibly popular with middle-class housewives, it was sometimes referred to as “mother’s little helper.” Family doctors all around the world gave it to brides-to-be nervous about their wedding nights, and to wives diagnosed frigid by their husbands. By the time I was three, one in twenty Americans was on Miltown.

For a few years, it swept anxiety, what the ladies’ magazines called “emotional problems,” under the carpet. By that time people had begun to notice that if you upped your dosage, you felt a buzz. If you took a little more, side effects included stomach upset, blurred vision, headache, impaired coordination, nausea, vomiting. Try to stop? Convulsive seizures. Take too many, your body forgets how to breathe. By then a prescription for Miltown was being written out every second of every day.

No longer just a psychologist, Dad was now a neuropsychopharmacologist. He didn’t come up with the drugs that made the world feel better about itself; he just picked the ones that had promise, designed the tests, came up with the numbers that brought them to market. Dad stayed out of the lab after Hamden.

Officially he was a consultant to the drug companies. Over the years he worked for almost all of them. He wrote books and articles with titles I still don’t understand. He worked hard and lived frugally. He still lived the dream of the magic bullet. Ambition and salvation were one and the same to Dr. Friedrich.

Bunny Winton’s name had never been mentioned in our house, not once. Fiona was eight when Dr. Winton was murdered. Lucy was seven. They remembered the day the tulips were buried. They met Sergeant Neutch at our house in Hamden. They heard my mother wail, “No!” They saw Jack facedown in the birdbath.

My parents hid the newspapers in the days after the killing. Fiona was a precocious reader. Her friend showed the headlines to her. Lucy remembered. They filled Willy in on it. They had met Casper, they knew the bogeyman was real.

It must have been hard for them to resist telling the secret to me when I was little. But to their credit, they did. Dad had told them there was only one thing they could do that would be more unforgivable than telling me about the shadow in the pricker bushes: playing with the big, blue-black revolver my father kept loaded in his bedside table.

Our neighbors in Greenwood weren’t academics; they were professional people, small-business owners, midlevel management. A sales executive named Lutz who worked for a paint company lived directly across the street from us with his wife, June, and their five children. Over the hedge to the east were the Murphys. The father was a plant manager for Squibb. They had three boys.

Behind us was a pediatrician, Dr. Goodman, who had daughters the same age as Fiona and Lucy and a cherry tree that hung low over our back fence, pink with blossoms in the spring, heavy with fruit in the summer. I was sixteen months away from being born when we moved to Greenwood. But I imagine our neighbors were pleased when they heard a youngish professor with a wife, two girls, and a boy had bought the old Conklin house on the corner. They looked forward to meeting us, had every reason to believe we’d fit right in. And when they looked out their window in the summer of ’53, and they saw us arrive with the moving van, they must have liked what they saw. My family looked neat, clean, reasonably attractive, white, had a brand-new Plymouth station wagon, and all their fingers and toes. They couldn’t see what was missing from our family. Not at first, at least.

My father blamed my mother for getting us off on the wrong foot in Greenwood. June Lutz, head of the PTA, den mother, Girl Scout leader, piano teacher, and everything else a mom was supposed to be in 1953, waited until the movers had gotten all our furniture into the house before coming over to welcome us into the neighborhood with a freshly baked plate of brownies.

My mother was upstairs when Mrs. Lutz knocked. As she hurried down the stairs, she saw the smiling neighbor holding the baked offering through the glass of the front door. My mother made herself smile and wave. My father had told her she was obviously clinically depressed and had tried to talk her into going into therapy. “I’ll go when you go” was what she had said. Even though she felt as if her life had miscarried, she was prepared to pretend she was happy, to open the door and ask Mrs. Lutz in, offer her coffee, introduce her to the children, say all the things that are expected: “How sweet, you shouldn’t have, you have to give me the recipe.”