Still Talking (2 page)

But, strangely, in my rage I also felt bonded with Edgar, with the anger at me that must have consumed him. Like my own anger, this must have been a sickness that ran away with his reason. How many of those tranquilizers, how many swallows of brandy, had been aimed at me?

I think possibly my life was saved by two womencertainly my daughter, and Mariette Hartley. That evening Mariette, then the hostess of The Morning Program, telephoned me. Her father had killed himself when she was twentythree, and now she was part of a network of suicide survivors who rush to help people like Melissa and me.

She wanted me to know that every single feeling I was having was valid and necessary. She said, “Grief is not graceful.” She told me that my fury at Edgar was natural and even healthy, and that she had needed years to finally feel her anger and deal with it. When she told me, “There was nothing more you could have done,” I still thought, I could have gone to Philadelphia.

Mariette put me in touch with Iris Bolton, whose twentyyear-old son had committed suicide and who now ran a support group for suicide survivors at her family counseling center, called The Link, in Atlanta, Georgia. Melissa and I talked with her on the phone for an hour and a half.

I was impressed that she knew so well what we were going through-the shock, the disbelief, the wondering. She said, “The `why’ must be asked and asked and asked until the question is worn out and you can let it go and just live with your hunches.” She insisted that my anger was appropriate, telling me that suicide is the ultimate act of control and power. Edgar had had the last word and left me dangling, unable to resolve our conflict, unable even to say good-bye.

She warned Melissa and me that blaming was inevitable. Struggling to make sense of a senseless act, people

find answers by blaming others, by blaming themselves. She said my guilt was really grandiosity-“We think we are so powerful, so important in their lives, that they killed themselves because of what we did or did not do. “

I told her I felt guilty about ignoring Edgar’s signals, and she reminded me that his signals were mixed-and survivors have trouble believing that anybody would hurt that much-while the suicide misreads your signals and decides you do not care.

Iris and Mariette did not lift my anger, did not soften my guilt, but their clear voices, still tender with their own pain, reassured me that I was not crazy and not evil. I understood that Melissa and I were going through a double whammy, the regular grief process plus the special hell of a suicide. I was miserable, but in my misery I was normal. I was not alone.

When they both said, “You will survive,” I thought, Yeah, maybe, but I felt hope. If they had done it, so could I.

When I told Iris how worried I would be about Melissa, alone in the East in college, she said I was right to be concerned and urged us both to get counseling and offered to suggest a therapist for Melissa in Philadelphia: She also made us promise each other that we would not harm ourselves. That night Melissa slept with me-on Edgar’s side of the bed.

But I could not sleep. Now in the solitude, in the silence, of the house, the way was open for grief. All night in a mindless haze of pain and tears, I wandered through the house, walked upstairs, walked downstairs, into the library, the dining room, the living room. In grief the bad memories are washed away, the good ones stay.

Walking, walking, I felt so sad for the house, knowing it was going to change, remembering the warmth and light that had been in those rooms, the good times, the formal dinner parties with the women dressed to the nines, the major jewelry out and sparkling. I thought about the small gatherings for really good friends-the good times when we sat with the fire going and talked and laughed and talked and laughed and Edgar was optimistic and feeling good.

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The kitchen was the place where I did my crying, sitting at the table with Dorothy and Annie, who were still awake. And then I wanted to be alone again and wandered away into the library, a room steeped in memories-such as the wonderful trip to London when we bought the Chippendale chairs, our first big-time purchase, when we thought we were on easy street.

Every single thing in that house we had collected together. The grandfather clock we bought in England played eight Scottish tunes. I remembered how worried we were that it would get broken and we would have to say to an American clock man, “Do you know `The Bonnie March of the Ninth Brigade’?

Because you’ve got to fix that.”

Everywhere through the house were photographs-of Edgar, of his parents, of his ancestors, of Melissa at all ages. I picked up an unframed snapshot, the last picture taken of Edgar. In our suite at Atlantic City, one end of the room was full of friends and relatives, but Edgar stood apart, isolated at the other end, leaning on the back of a chair, head down.

As I wandered, I talked aloud to myself, telling the air, “He was my rock.

I didn’t mean anything I said.” Unable to focus, I just moved slowly through the house, carrying one of the gardenias Edgar had sent me in the hospital, peering at everything like a tourist in a foreign country. Traces of Edgar were everywhere. “Look at his date book,” I said to myself. “Look at his writing on that pad. There’s his note on the freezer door. His briefcase is leaning against my bookcase; I don’t ever want to open it.”

The enormity of Edgar’s death was beyond my comprehension. Unlike a death preceded by an illness, where life has already been altered, there was no evidence that the center of my universe for twenty-two years had been removed. Nobody took me upstairs and showed me a person on the floor. His death was an abstract concept. The house was exactly the same, waiting for him.

In the bedroom his books and pills and notepads were on his night table.

When I wandered into the dressing room, his pajamas hung from the hook. In the bathroom, behind the glass door of Edgar’s floor-to-ceiling cabinet-

his sacrosanct preserve-I could see his meticulous arrangement of combs lined up, his gold manicure set, his can of shaving cream-with eight in reserve behind it-his lemon-lime cologne with spares behind it, his security in case of catastrophe.

I realized, heartsick, that I could now invade Edgar’s sanctums that had always been off-limits to me-like a mother’s bureau to a child. Now I could take over his side of the bathroom, could now go into his closet, could use his desk. Yes, he was gone. Yes, everything was different. Nothing would ever be the same. I stood there, utterly lost, thinking, What will I do without you?

I felt weak and sat on the edge of the tub. My last words with Edgar had been an argument. In my last talk with my mother, I had been angry. When my father was in the hospital with a heart attack, she refused to hire a live-in nurse for him when he came home, saying she wanted to do it herself, and I angrily insisted on it. The next day she was dead of heart failure.

Why do we fight with the people we love the mostand never with the people who do not care about us? Is this the human condition, hurting and being hurt by the ones you love-no way to make up, to be forgiven, blaming yourself for what you did or did not say, and should have done? May both Edgar and Beatrice rest in peace. May 1 rest in peace.

On Saturday, Michael Greenstein, a therapist suggested by my friend Wallis Annenberg, came to the house. I was open to the idea because I had done family counseling with Melissa to get us both through her period of teenage rebellion and individuation. Edgar came to the first session and sat there, silent, then refused to come again.

I knew the value of a nonjudgmental person you can tell the truth to who will help you, get it out so you can look at it and deal with it. A therapist will not solve your problem for you, but eventually you will solve it. Emotional troubles are like landfill. Get them outside, and the air disintegrates them.

I think when you are ill, you are torn between your

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rational mind and irrational emotions, and the guilts and fears have the upper hand. Getting well is gradually having the rational become your reality. I knew in my head that the suicide-support ladies were right, that Edgar’s death was not my fault. He had been a very sick man-and without therapy he would have dragged me down into his morass. Michael immediately began reinforcing that truth, telling me the bottom line: “After Edgar’s complete loss of control, his rage at himself and the world made life intolerable.”

Edgar’s body arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday. Melissa and I decided to have Edgar dressed in his best Savile Row blue suit with a pink shirt and a red-and-blue striped tiedressed the way he would have wanted, with class and dignity, like an English gentleman. I invited the staff to send personal mementos to the funeral home to go into the coffin. Marcia Tysseling, our all-purpose assistant, sent a loving note and Edgar’s morning vitamin packet and a business card from Frank’s Deli. Melissa put in hair from the dogs who loved him. Both pairs of glasses went inand a roll of Tums. Dorothy sent his phone list, and I added a can of the Diet Slice he loved and a bottle of 4711 cologne-and a note saying, “I love you. How can I go on without you?”

It was all very Egyptian. I think death beats every primitive drum we have in our genes.

That afternoon I went to the funeral home by myselfMelissa decided to spare herself that memory of her father. I made no announcement of a “viewing”

because I did not wish to be there receiving people, but I did not want him to be alone. In the midst of my anger I was still trying to nurture and protect him.

I was nervous about my reaction to seeing him. Bending over the casket, I saw that he had shaved off his beard. He had grown it after the heart attack because he could not lift his arms high enough to shave, and then, even though he knew I hated it, he left it on, perhaps because it was one thing he could control. Maybe shaving now was a peace gesture.

I saw a face that was young again, the inner Edgar, his

sweetness, the untroubled man who had come courting with two dozen roses and thought we were going to live on Fifth Avenue forever and own the world. I was pulled back twenty years to the fun and the excitement of becoming a couple and having our baby, the adventure of growing and moving forward together. I thought, Oh God. What have we done to each other? I thought, What a blessing we cannot foresee the future.

Feeling the terrible waste of this man who could have had everything, feeling a crazy urge to goad him back to life, I said, “Why? Why? This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever pulled. Look what you’ve done to Melissa. “

I waited. Nothing.

I told him the gossip, who had arrived, who had called, who was flying out from back East-a friend talking on the telephone. I cried, the tears falling on his hands and face. I said things that would have made him laugh: “You’ll be happy to know I’ve banned two of your cousins from the funeral. “

Back home I told Melissa how important it had been for me to see him so serene and how pleased she would have been to see him looking happy again.

That night I went back a second time alone to make sure he was okay, to let him have a visitor. The third time was at 4:00 A.M. Sunday morning to see him once more before he was cremated. Strangely, as long as he was lying there, he was still not dead. I felt tremendous pity for this man who had spent all those years on the run-from the Nazis, from his TB, from his pain and bitterness and secrets-so continually on the run that he could not get help.

On Sunday Edgar’s ashes were delivered to the house in a small square box.

I left it on my dressing table with a rose and a good-luck stone on top.

The funeral service was held in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, a very beautiful, very large synagogue. We traveled in a long file of stretch limos escorted by motorcycle police, all of us saying how much Edgar would have loved this parade. The family and close friends went in a side door-and were joined by an old friend of Edgar’s, Roy

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Zurkowski. III at ease, he blurted out, “Edgar was a classy guy. Classy dresser.”

That destroyed me. Nobody in California had understood that Edgar was a classy guy. I turned blindly down an empty hall, leaned my forehead against the wall, and wept. Melissa touched my hand and said, “It’s all right to cry. It’s all right.” I answered, “It’s not `classy’ to cry in public.”

Melissa, so sweet, reaching for our prescription for pain, made a joke, saying, “Princess Di cried in public when Charles’s horse died. ” I laughed and said, “Then the princess has no class.”

The temple was full. A thousand people came, including Mayor Bradley, Milton Berle, Bea Arthur, Jon Voight, Tony Franciosa, Jackie Collins, Michele Lee, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Walker, and Cher. Lovely eulogies were given by Roddy McDowall, Tommy Corcoran, and Vincent Price. Hundreds of people stood outside.

Left to myself, I would have had a very small, totally private ceremony with none of the display. And, believe me, People magazine would not have been in there. I decided to have these elaborate ceremonies for the sake of Edgar and Melissa, to show Edgar, “Yes, your life was important. Yes, you were somebody. Yes, a thousand people came when you died.”

In these first days ceremony is soothing, satisfying. A funeral allows the grievers to feel this person was worthy of their grief. And when somebody dies, ritual brings a form of life, a forum where all grievers can speak, get out their feelings, vent, cry, be told they are right, their loss is major-and no matter who died, people will have to listen and be polite.

Melissa said to me afterward, “If only Daddy could have seen it-and he thought he was so despised. It was like, `Daddy, people understood you.’ “

After a pause she added, “I’m sure he knew how much we loved him.” I said, “Yes, he knew. He knew.”

Following the service, there was a reception at the house, which looked wonderful, luxuriant with flowers, and was filled with people and talk and laughter. I grieved that