The Brother-in-Law. Part I.

                                               

                                               
So my sister dies after The Year of Cancer, the year in and out of Sloane-Kettering, that dreadful place.

The pod of doctors making the rounds daily, faces changing but all unsmiling and unrevealing. The chemo that worked, then didn't.  The radiation, the pain which they never managed to manage in spite of the meds taking her to other worlds. The flying visits from friends and relatives from Chicago, New Mexico, even from London with babies in tow.

Scan followed by scan followed by scan. The good news, the bad news, and then just the bad news.

Then the dark day of signing the DNR form, followed by the 24- hour care-givers (the good ones and The Nightmare) and finally the hospice nurses at home.  Three, maybe four good weeks of Marcia being Marcia, back in her own apartment and her own bed and not exactly "pain free". Witty, quick, funny, sardonic— she was once again my smart and endlessly hospitable New York sister. Entertaining and laughing with friends: the Elvis impersonator at her birthday, the trip out in a wheel chair to see her son’s new apartment (the last she would have alive). The joy of holding her young granddaughters she desperately wanted to see grow up.

“This cancer will kill you,” her seeming under-age oncologist had said months before. And on September 6^th 2012 at 2:30AM, it did.

A few months after we all walked down Amsterdam Avenue to the grim confines of Riverside Memorial Chapel, where we watched her paintings scroll by on video while she lay in oak, with the Mogen-David like a celestial address label inscribed on the lid, my brother-in-law became my former brother-in-law.

He never told anyone, not even his son, Max. From December, he went off air. Not a word.

Then March 12^th, an email.

He had met someone at Nice-Matin, the restaurant on 79^th Street, just down from my sister’s apartment, and gotten “involved”. That was “a couple of months ago”.  He was tired, he explained, of being miserable and why should he be? His silence, someone said, was because he was afraid the news would upset us or we would be angry.

Then a casual glance at his profile on Facebook revealed he was rather more than involved. He was married.

There was the name of his new wife. There was his big smile, showing the camera the new ring. The new wife? Also an upper west sider, just around the corner in fact, also a painter. He had found a replacement.

Later he told someone they “met” online in December, had their first date on New Year’s Eve, went to City Hall on January 31^st and tied the knot. This was followed, he confided nonchalantly, by a “nice, celebratory lunch". (Chicken? Steak? How was the Salad?)

Who knows when he started looking?  In the spring I remember a man at the end of his tether, desperate for a way out. On one monthly visit to New York to see her and support him, he was tearful.  He demanded I 'take over'. It had all become too much. But I'm not her husband, I protested. It's your job.

He started spending more and more time in Princeton leaving Marcia with 24-hour caregivers, until only the weekend was left for his wife and her inescapable trajectory. 

There had been a lot of talk about him remaining a member of the family. It was her great wish. It was ours too. We thought it was also his. We made a great effort to keep in touch. He deserved our support. He had had a terrible year and initially had nursed her wonderfully.  She had said so.

And anyway we liked him. There was no reason not to.

He wasn't what you would call domesticated. He needed things doing for him. But he was charming, a free spirit, fun to be with, and as a scientist he opened up a different world to us. Most of all, he made Marcia happy. We were grateful he came into her life when he did.

After the funeral we made plans.

Come to England for Christmas, we said, we’re renting a farmhouse in Suffolk with all the kids. You’ll be in Germany? 

Come to London, we said. It will be crowded but fun. No answer.

We’re coming to New York to see you. You’ll be in Paris?  (“For a little R&R”.)

Then silence. And since then, silence.

So my sister’s and his wife’s life together ended in secretive, furtive dissembling: the gauchness of a not-so-grown-up man feeling guilty and only his own needs. Marcia's memory and his putative family shoved aside.

Somehow we and she had become the enemy. The cancer and that terrible year were not something that happened to her, but done to him. He was the victim. As such, he found other injuries. We had never accepted him into the family. She had not given him enough closet space in the apartment after they were married. Resentment and anger poured out, a boil lanced.

And if he had to have enemies. he had to forget kindnesses. The many visits, weddings as part of the family, the meals, the intangible emotional support. And the material support so he wouldn't have to worry about money.

He took his revenge. Without telling her children he cleared the family apartment of 35 years of memories. Art books that had belonged to my father were sold on Craig's List. Her paintings disappeared. Furniture was sold. Two sets of china, one from my parents, were delivered to the new wife's country house, along with an old refrigerator ripped from the wall.  Neighbors reported  a string of people leaving the building with our family's things, all price-tagged. The new wife and her daughters oversaw the dispersal of my sister's life.

We found her wedding ring was at the back of a drawer.

Grief is not for someone who is "tired of being miserable" three months after his wife dies. Miserable is the hand you are dealt because your are alive and are a man and have loved. That love is the cause of grief, and if you can't or won't grieve, that's an absence, or rejection, of love.

And maybe, for some people, the past doesn't matter. It's about "me" and moving on.

He needed looking after. Marcia predicted it. She said he’d soon find someone. Perhaps not that soon.

At the beginning he had been good to her and for her. But at the end he was unmanly, with legal rights but no moral compass. He did great emotional damage to us, her friends and her memory. None of us deserved the sneaking around, the subterfuge, and now the self-pity.

We all suffered in that terrible time.

But he needs to remember who died.

Don Keller Conquers London

In the late 70s Don was packed off to London for a couple of months of R&R after his wife died. At the  time it was rumored that a rival agency had Don at the top of their wish list. So getting him out of town and out of sight may have been doubly appealing to Leo Burnett’s creative head Carl Hixon.

At first everyone in London thought he was some kind of charming mid-western naif, an aw-shucks-just-shook-the-hay-from-his-hair innocent.  He was hip to critters, but in London critters were not hip.

But then he'd wander the creative department and slip into offices unnoticed, as ideas were being battered around but progress remained elusive. Frustration and voices rose. Then he would quietly say something.

"You could always try..."

Suddenly people stopped talking, looked at each other, then looked at him. Dan Parfitt, my art director and I looked at each other, looked at Don, and thought the same thing: “That’s…good!” The word got out. Don couldn't walk down the hall without being invited into every office with an open door and a creative team with a knotty problem

Everyone wanted a piece of him. It became a competitive game: Capture Don. Get him in the morning before anyone else does, put him to work, then take him down the pub. Think Lawrence of Arabia in the scene where Lawrence, having survived the terrible Nephood desert, “God’s Anvil”, goes back into it to rescue a bedouin warrior the other tribesmen had given up for dead. One by one each man offers Lawrence their blanket and saddle, their hospitality.

“Come into my office, Don.” “Don, in here---got a minute?” Everyone wanted his eye and nod of approval. I was no different. At one point he turned to me and said, “Gerry, I voted for Nixon twice, and you want my opinion?”

Of course that became the cover of his leaving card.

Unlike Lawrence of Arabia, and any creative director you can think of, Don was self-effacing. His talent was bigger than his ego.

Then we discovered he could draw.

That was something not many art directors in London would admit to, because it meant they would have to do their own storyboards and miss time at the pub, instead of sending them to a studio for the equivalent of £200+ a frame. Don did his own. And they were not just an outline of the story. Looking at Don’s boards you could see the movie.

He drew the frames with points-of-view and camera angles and movement indications he had already thought about, as if he had pre-screened the spot in his mind. Because he had. The only other person I ever knew who did boards like that was Tony Scott. 

Drawing and painting, of course, was what he really wanted to do, what he trained to do at the Art Institute with the likes of Leroy Neiman and Claes Oldenburg. His house was filled with his art: paintings and drawings. But like many artists, he either had trouble letting them go---as gifts or sales---or too much enjoyed teasing me and Jenness and a few others with the promise of one. On the other hand, he gave Florence, our youngest daughter, a painting and a bunch of drawings. This was the same daughter he had carried sleeping and exhausted out of a hamburger restaurant on Oak Street 30+ years ago when we first moved to Chicago. Rebecca, our older daughter, still has her drawing of Tony inscribed with Art Director Spelling, “Rebbeca, You’re Grrreat!”

With talent, charm and generosity, he nurtured the spirit and talent of all of us.

An innocent abroad? Ha!

Figure it out.

You want to know what tough is, try being born in one place, leaving all familiar things as a young man, and learn to survive and support yourself in an alien world. Then move to another place (and language) and learn how to support yourself again. And then move to another place and another language and not just learn the local ropes all over again but become a giant in your chosen profession.

You don’t need to see one of his 76 films to understand the genius of Billy Wilder.

Wilder was one of those mid-century mittel-Europeans who knew how to survive and succeed.  They walked across Russia, they walked out of Auschwitz, they walked away from trouble and if it ever found them again they knew what to do.

Wilder tells the story: “If you ever wake up in a strange hotel room with a strange woman at your side and she is dead, call Sam Spiegel. He will know what to do.”

If you want to survive, ask a survivor. If you want to know how to succeed, figure it out. The story could be the opening scene from a film noir, but in Wilder’s life and in Spiegel’s it is just a dramatization of the danger and uncertainty that lurked around every corner of it until they hit Hollywood. 

In a tight spot? Buddy, the Gestapo aren’t even on the train yet. The thing is, figure it out: be smart, resourceful and work like hell. In other words, be “creative”. Immigrants have a great advantage over the rest of us. They are continually called on to reinvent themselves, to figure it out. While most of us have them given to us from birth, they have to write their own parts. That’s why they are often so good at it and do so well. That’s not a Mexican gardener in front of your house, that’s someone inventing himself.

He’s in good company. Endre Friedmann left Budapest, taught himself to take photographs, went to Paris, fell in love with Gerda Taro, went to the Spanish Civil War, rehearsed for the Second World War, invaded Normandy with the first landing craft, partied with Hemingway, made love to Ingrid Bergman, founded Magnum with Cartier-Bresson, went to China, went to Russia, went to Utah, worked in New York, became an American, went to IndoChina and before he died there, stepping on a landmine, Robert Capa reminded all war photographers that if their pictures weren’t good enough they weren’t close enough.

Immigrants are the quintessential Americans. Or rather they have what we would like to think are American essentials. Risk-takers because they have nothing to lose, full of innovation and energy because that’s what’s in their bank, investors in the future because they have no past to return to. Entrepreneurs, they have the potential to reinvent themselves, and us.

And we are afraid of letting too many in. Go figure.