Resilience Read online

  My grandfather Edward Bennett Close—Eddie—was on her list.

  Originally from Yorkshire, England, the Close family had helped found Greenwich in 1640. Both my grandfather and father wore signet rings bearing the family crest and motto: Fortis et fidelis—strong and faithful.

  By the late 1800s, Greenwich had become a sanctuary for New York’s wealthy. The Rockefeller brothers had built grand estates there, joining others eager to escape sweltering summers in the city. Granddad Eddie met his first wife, Marjorie, at a dance in Greenwich when he was twenty-one years old and she was only sixteen. Four days later, he secretly proposed. Because of her age, they agreed to keep their pledge secret, especially from Marjorie’s father, Charles William (C. W.) Post. It’s funny that both my father and his father each became secretly engaged to sixteen-year-olds, although, in my father’s case, he was sixteen also.

  C. W. Post changed the American morning coffee habit in 1903, when he began selling an alternative to coffee, Postum, in Battle Creek, Michigan. Marjorie was his only child. Two years after meeting Marjorie, Granddad formally asked for her hand. C. W. tried to prevent the marriage but eventually gave in.

  Eddie Close and Marjorie were wed on December 2, 1905. Marjorie would later tell biographers that her new husband didn’t want children. Even so, they had two daughters—my father’s half sisters, Adelaide and Eleanor—during their twelve-year marriage. My grandfather had little to do with his daughters except for a tradition that began with them and spilled over to my father and his twin: he would take them on outings, albeit infrequently, and he called those outings “beanos.” A beano would be a trip to the ice cream store or a ride in a rowboat; all beanos were great fun and remembered well.

  On May 9, 1914, C. W. stuck a rifle in his mouth and squeezed the trigger, killing himself at age sixty. C. W. had been worth $33 million, which he left to be equally divided between his second wife, Leila, and Marjorie.

  Marjorie felt cheated, having been told that all the family’s holdings in Postum Cereal Company would be hers based on a trust signed when her parents had founded the company. Granddad Eddie went to the cereal company’s headquarters and spent days digging through files until he found the original trust agreement. He returned to Greenwich triumphant, and on December 8, 1915, The New York Times reported that C. W.’s widow had agreed to a $6 million settlement to avoid a legal fight. Marjorie received all her father’s stock and property, which was valued at $27 million—$620 million in today’s dollars. Women didn’t run major companies at the time. A board of directors made most decisions, and Grandad became a vice president on the board.

  During World War I Grandad was sent to Europe and ended up a Major on General Pershing’s staff. While he was serving in Europe, Marjorie attended a party on Long Island, where she met Manhattan stockbroker E. F. Hutton. Family legend holds that Marjorie and Hutton had an affair. When Grandad returned home in 1918 he found his wife cold and distant. Marjorie divorced my grandfather and shortly thereafter married Hutton, who helped her transform Postum into the General Foods Corporation, a move that increased her fortune to the equivalent of $3.4 billion in today’s dollars.

  Only a few months after the divorce, my maternal grandparents, Charles Arthur and Elizabeth Hyde Moore, planned a double date with Granddad and a young piano and voice teacher from Houston, Texas, Betsey Taliaferro. Eddie and Betsey (Granny Close) agreed, and they all traveled into New York to attend an opera.

  Shortly after this date, Eddie and Betsey married. They left immediately for France, where he took charge of the American Hospital of Paris.

  My sister Tina once asked Granny Close if Granddad, then deceased, had gotten a large divorce settlement from Marjorie. Granny Close had taken a last puff on her cigarette and stamped it out in her silver Scotty ash tray. She then explained that Granddad had not accepted a single penny from his first wife. In fact, without even being asked, he’d voluntarily returned all the stock that he had collected during their marriage. Granny Close quoted my grandfather as saying, “A gentleman doesn’t take money from a woman when they are divorcing.” Too bad for us!

  Granny told us that on their honeymoon, Grandad stated he didn’t want any more children. She begged and he relented, but told Granny she could only have one. Certainly not to be outdone by Marjorie, Granny was able to present Eddie with twin boys: my dad, Billy, and his brother, Ted. Twins were her revenge.

  I always felt that Granny was a sad woman who thought, deep down, that her husband didn’t really love her. Within the family, we believed that Grandad never got over Marjorie.

  As intriguing as my Close family history may be, it is my mother’s side that contains the most likely genetic link to my own mental illness.

  Grandmother Moore, my grandmother, was the eldest daughter of Seymour J. Hyde and Elizabeth Worrall Hyde, members of another prominent Greenwich family. The Hydes had been farmers in New Hampshire and eventually established a highly successful dry goods manufacturing business, A. G. Hyde and Sons, famous for Heatherbloom Petticoats.

  In February of 1915, Seymour J. Hyde fell from his horse and cracked his skull while riding in Greenwich. He died a few hours later, leaving behind an estate worth $2 million—about $46 million in today’s dollars. His namesake son, Seymour Worrall Hyde, took charge of the family business and soon found himself caught in a scandal that was reported on February 1, 1918, page 1 of The New York Times under the headline:

  INSANE LIEUTENANT

  KIDNAPS FOUR MEN

  —

  Soldiers Tell of Spending a

  Night of Terror in Home

  of Seymour Hyde

  DETAINED AT PISTOL POINT

  A Times reporter wrote that Seymour W. Hyde (my grandmother’s brother) had taken four men hostage at gunpoint in Manhattan during what appeared to be a mental meltdown. He forced two of his hostages to undress and put on purple gowns. He then had his chauffeur transport his hostages to his father’s Greenwich home, where he’d proceeded to beat one man and force him to dance until he could barely stand by threatening to shoot him. He then pulled a hot poker from the fireplace and threatened to brand another helpless hostage. During this entire episode, Hyde kept claiming to be a German spy. Two of his hostages slipped away and notified the police, who were met with pistol fire when they arrived at the Hyde property. When Hyde ran out of ammunition, the police broke inside, placed him in a straitjacket, and announced that he was clearly “insane.” His mother told reporters that Hyde was simply suffering from fatigue brought on by the pressures that came from running the family business.

  For a short period, Hyde was institutionalized, but he eventually returned to Greenwich, where some viewed him as completely mad. He was known to have gone riding naked on horseback through the hills, which actually sounds like a lot of fun to me…

  Seymour Worrall Hyde may have been mentally ill, but he was one of the few multimillionaires to withdraw all his money from the stock market shortly before the crash of 1929. He eventually established a Hyde family trust, which still pays benefits to my mother, my siblings, and me, although through my grandmother Moore.

  What all this means is that my dad, William “Billy” Close, and my mother, Bettine Moore, came into their marriage with some baggage. My dad had a father—Granddad—who had not wanted children. My mom had an uncle who had been institutionalized for a severe mental illness. Now that we know about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we can also wonder if Seymour Hyde, who fought in World War I, was afflicted with that terrible syndrome.

  Given their privileged upbringing, what was really surprising about my parents was how little either of them cared about social status and money. It’s possible they were that way because they grew up with social status and money. Having something as your birthright and turning it down is easier than not having it at all. We can only ignore what we have. But if anything, my dad and mom made a point of teaching us kids that social rank didn’t define a person. This was particularly true of
my mother. She grew up in a thirty-room home with servants. Yet she never felt that she was better than they were; they were her world.

  My mother remembers a time when her parents came in very late from New York City, and the cook had waited up with a hot meal. Her father told him offhandedly, “We’ve already eaten.” Suzanna Mannagotter, who helped in the kitchen, had heard the cook swear under his breath, “They won’t be singing that tune when the revolution comes!” Mom heard the servants talk about Communists and revolution and understood the disparity between them and her family. Mom told me, when I asked her about this, that years later Suza told Grandmother Moore what the chef had said and Grandmother was horrified. She found out where he lived and apologized to him in a letter.

  But rather than instilling feelings of superiority in them, that disparity caused my mother and, I believe, my father to feel a special obligation to help others less fortunate than they, true altruists.

  That said, none of us can escape our childhoods. And my father, in particular, would pass a ghost from his past to all of us.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After she was married, my mother began following my father to a series of Texas airfields while he learned how to fly C-47 troop carriers. She’d wanted an adventure, and that’s what she got.

  The wives of aviation cadets were not recognized by the military, which meant that Mom was not permitted on base. The first room she rented had cockroaches skittering across the floor and no windows. Outside another, two men got into a knife fight. She followed Dad, moving from one shoddy boardinghouse to the next. That was a lot for an eighteen-year-old girl raised in genteel Greenwich.

  Dad was allowed to leave the base one day a week, and my mom eagerly waited to see him, but their honeymoon didn’t last long. My father would arrive at her room carrying a stack of airplane magazines and flop down on their bed to read, barely saying a word. The first time this happened, my mother ran outside and cried. As time passed, my mother would realize there was another reason for his apparent coldness.

  My parents would be married nearly sixty-seven years, and they clearly loved one another. Yet my father found it almost impossible to express his emotions. But he had them, and he could be terribly sentimental. Once, when he was much, much older, he returned from a local landfill with a battered, eyeless Sesame Street Cookie Monster—a stuffed toy—that he’d rescued because he couldn’t bear the sight of it being abandoned there. He put the Cookie Monster on a shelf in his bedroom with other favorite objects. Despite these events, he found it nearly impossible to share his innermost feelings with my mother—or any of us kids. The only time we saw him cry was when he had to put down one of his beloved dogs.

  Years later, when I was an adult, my mother would tell me that she suspected Dad’s inability to express his emotions was rooted in his childhood. His parents had shipped him and his twin brother off to rigid English boarding schools when they were seven years old. My mother said that when my father and his brother had been left for the first time at Summerfield, a venerable British boarding school, my father had chased after the car and leaped onto its running board, crying. The chauffeur stopped and literally peeled his little fingers from the car before driving away.

  I’ve already mentioned that my grandfather Edward Bennett Close had not wanted children, and apparently he had little to do with either of his sons, except for the occasional beano.

  I think an exchange between Mom and Dad that happened in January of 2009, shortly before Dad died, is telling. Dad was feeling ill, and late one night he turned to my mother and said, “Tell me you’ll never leave me.”

  “Bill,” Mom replied in a shocked voice, “I will never leave you! By God, we’ve lived together as husband and wife for sixty-six years. Why would you think I would leave you now?”

  Seeing an opening, Mom asked Dad if he loved her. There had been several times during their marriage when she hadn’t been certain that he had. All he would have had to say was “Yes” or “Of course!” My father had looked at her through sad eyes but couldn’t utter a word. It was as if he couldn’t mouth the words “I love you.” He could write it in letters and, later, in his autobiography, but he couldn’t speak it.

  In 1944, my father completed flight training. A few months later, in June, the Allies launched the Normandy invasion. A week after D-day, Dad boarded a troopship leaving New York for France, where he immediately began flying over the front lines. Dad was smack-dab in the middle of combat, ferrying troops and supplies to the western front. One of his early missions was to supply General George S. Patton Jr. and his troops during the Battle of the Bulge, when the führer made his last-ditch effort to split the Allies’ ranks. After that decisive battle, Dad became one of the first Allied pilots (he was a copilot) to fly paratroopers and supplies into Warsaw, Poland.

  My dad never bragged or even spoke much about his war years. When I was young, I happened upon some pictures of skeletal bodies piled on top of each other. I asked my mom about them, and she told me to put them away. They were photos that my dad had from Poland during the war. Mom said my dad would become upset if he knew I’d seen them or asked about them.

  If my father had been distant before the war, when he returned in September of 1945—four months after Germany surrendered—he was even more detached. He had been gone for fifteen months, and my mom greeted him holding a baby. It was my sister Tina, who had been conceived on the night before my father had shipped off to Europe. Tina was six months old and teething.

  Mom, Dad, and Tina moved onto my grandparents’ farm, Mooreland, taking up residence in Stone Cottage, a building that had been the farm’s slaughterhouse before being converted into a residence. They were only a short walk away from the property’s main stone house, called the Big House, where Mom’s parents lived. All the buildings were clapboard with foundations of local gray fieldstone dug up and dragged on skids by horses to construction sites.

  Eager to pursue his dream of becoming a surgeon, Dad applied at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. Unfortunately, he had gotten bad grades at Harvard, so he asked my mother’s father, Charles Arthur Moore, to pull some strings.

  My mom’s father was quite a character. In addition to being a wealthy industrialist, Charles Moore was a noted explorer who’d participated in an 1897 expedition to the Arctic with Robert Peary. He was well known in New York, and the letter that he wrote to the president of Columbia did the trick for my father despite its tone.

  My son-in-law wants to become a doctor. Personally, I have no use whatsoever for the profession. However, his determination is such that I imagine he will make a good physician.

  Respectfully,

  Charles A. Moore

  Although my parents rarely argued in front of their children, their marriage continued to be strained. One night while my father was trying to study, my sister Tina began crying.

  “Why can’t you keep that brat quiet?” my father yelled.

  My mother slapped him. “She’s not a brat!” she declared. “She’s your daughter!” It was the first and only time she struck him.

  Mom had put aside her dream of becoming a nurse to rear a family. On March 19, 1947, my sister Glenn was born. She was twenty-one months younger than Tina, and they eventually became inseparable.

  Despite their parents’ wealth, my parents were not rich. The GI Bill paid for medical school, and my dad worked at two part-time jobs to pay their expenses. This required him to spend most nights in Manhattan, where he lived in a modest apartment. At night he worked at a blood bank, and between classes he collected women’s urine from a retirement home for a professor who was studying postmenopausal gonadotropins—hormones that stimulate the gonads. Dad earned five dollars for each five-gallon jug of pee that he brought back to campus. The elderly donors called him the Cider Man because they didn’t feel comfortable saying “urine” when he knocked on their doors for their specimen bottles.

  On June 28, 1949, my mother gave birth to a
son whom they named Duncan, but he died ten days later because of a defective heart. They buried him next to my grandfather Edward Bennett Close at Christ Church in Greenwich. Duncan’s death permanently cracked my mother’s heart into many pieces. She never got over losing him. To this day she feels his loss. A year and a half later, on November 18, 1950, Mom gave birth to Alexander Drummond Close, my big brother.

  Seven months later, in June of 1951, my father graduated from medical school and began his residency at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. He was thrilled, as he wrote later in his autobiography:

  I experienced the urgent drama of a dropping blood pressure and speeding pulse as a patient’s life hovered on the brink of extinction. I heard the surgeon snap orders against a background of hissing, pulsating equipment as he enlarged the wound to expose and clamp an errant bleeder. I felt relieved as the pressure stabilized and the operation could resume… “Someday,” I said to myself, “someday it will be my turn to operate.” I loved the operating room… I spent many hours sitting with patients at night. I heard, in their whispers and sleepless sighs, the hollow sounds of pain and fear of the unknown void beyond. When death claimed one of them, I redoubled my efforts to learn more and work harder. Death was defeat and my aim was victory.

  Dad moved into the hospital staff’s living quarters, where he put a photo of my mom next to his bed, but he only came home every other weekend. Most of those times, he was so exhausted that he only had time to eat and sleep before returning to Manhattan.