Joannie’s house was exactly as I had imagined it: a charming Victorian surrounded by trees. On the porch steps her cat, Selena, an old lady in the reckoning of cat years, stretched on the warm stone. Upstairs, her bedroom had been kept as it was: a pretty room of nooks and windows, flooded with sunlight, the green plants she tended still thriving under her mother’s care. In a brilliantly lit window alcove stood her desk—her writing desk.
I imagined her there, in late August 1968—a just-turned thirteen-year-old, tanned from a summer at the beach. Hiding her shyness behind a flimsy airmail sheet, she wrote: “I’d like to be your pen-pal. I have several others in Austria. People often confuse Austria with Australia. They’ll ask me why I can speak German, or why I’ve got a slight European accent, and I’ll answer that I spent some time in Austria. Then, they will say brightly, ‘Oh, did you see any kangaroos there?’ ”
Downstairs, at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, Joannie’s mother Elizabeth served me tea and homemade cake, and we began the conversation that we would continue for years, off and on, changing the subject when it became too painful to continue. The subject, of course, was Joannie.
That afternoon we filled yawning gaps in my knowledge of the family, driving stakes through the heart of my fevered adolescent fantasies. Joannie’s parents were CIO, not CIA: they met at a Congress of Industrial Organizations conference. Before her marriage, Elizabeth worked for John L. Lewis, the legendary trade unionist and CIO leader. Later she taught poetry and became chair of a state college English department. Joannie’s father was an English professor. They were in Austria as Fulbrights, not spies. Joannie’s left-wing views were part of the family consensus, not a source of friction.
According to Elizabeth, Joannie’s conflicts with her father were of the common or garden variety: he was demanding, especially academically—“it was a real blot on the escutcheon to get a low grade”—and he was puritanical about relations with the opposite sex. These areas of friction were exacerbated by his day-to-day distance. Forty-six years old when Joannie was born, he was preoccupied with his teaching and research. So Joannie lived mostly in her mother’s orbit, a close relationship that sounded just like the one I’d had with my mother.
Joannie’s father had died earlier that year. If I had left it any longer to write, I would not have found Elizabeth in Maplewood. The house was for sale, and she planned to move to a retirement community in another state. She had started the chore of packing up a lifetime’s memories. “It’s so hard to throw anything away,” she said. Especially anything of Joannie’s.
I had an evening plane to catch from Newark airport. I was on the steps, heading for my cab, when Elizabeth disappeared into the kitchen and returned with an apple. “In case you get hungry on the plane,” she said, tucking it in the pocket of my coat. It was exactly the kind of thing my mother would do.
The Martha’s Vineyard house “has a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, a bedroom, a study with a bed in it, plus couches in various places that convert to beds,” Joannie wrote in 1972. It had been built a hundred years earlier as a fisherman’s cottage. Her uncle had bought it as a writer’s retreat. His books still lined the walls of the cabin—faded hardbacks titled Mission to Moscow by Joseph E. Davies or The Un-Americans by Frank J. Donne. Because he used the small barn by the house as a place to produce a left-wing magazine, the knoll on which it sat, just behind Dutcher Dock, had become known locally as Socialist Hill. Joannie’s father inherited the property on his brother’s death in 1968. Now, with the surrounding cottages rented out for ten thousand dollars a month to summer vacationers, the name “Socialist Hill” is one of those local oddities inscrutable to all but old-timers.
Over the years, the winding track up from the port has carved its way closer and closer to the house, until the tiny front porch almost seems to topple into the roadway. When Joannie’s mother rises from her rocking chair to greet me, her white hair almost brushes the low porch ceiling. At eighty, she is tall and straight as a poplar.
When I visit Elizabeth on Martha’s Vineyard, there is always a fresh-baked pie cooling on the counter of the cabin’s tiny, dollhouse kitchen. Something wholesome and good—fresh-picked corn or new potatoes, the local farmer’s broccoli or ruby-red tomatoes—waits to be prepared for dinner.
Elizabeth vividly remembers when Joannie became picky about such meals. “She had a friend staying with her that summer and they marched into the kitchen together one day and announced they were going to go on a diet,” she says. “I laughed. Everyone was going on a diet at that time.”
We take our coffee out into the neat little garden between the house and the cabin. Bright-faced cosmos bob in the breeze; Elizabeth made a special trip in June to plant annuals so that the garden would bloom through the month of August, when the family comes. All the children visit—Jack, the onetime conscientious objector, now an electrical engineer in Santa Fe; Jamie, Joannie’s older sister from Berkeley, who takes pictures and works on archeological digs; Joel, the biochemist, a cancer researcher in Buffalo. And now, as August draws to a close, I have come, with my husband and new baby. We bathe him on the kitchen table in an old plastic tub that has seen service as baby bath for Elizabeth’s grandchildren. And at night, sleeping in the cabin where Joannie should be sleeping, I’m overwhelmed again with the feeling that I am having her life.
Sitting in banana chairs as our damp swimsuits flap on the clothesline, Elizabeth explains one of Joannie’s failed attempts to get her own apartment in Boston while she went to university there. “She was going to BU, at the time,” is what Elizabeth says. But what I hear is: “She was going to be you, at the time.” She was going to be me, at the time—content in my little flat in Glebe, Sydney, heading happily toward career, marriage, family.
But, of course, she wasn’t going to be me at all.
When Joannie returned to Maplewood with her parents in the fall of 1972, it took three months for anyone to acknowledge that the summer diet had gone too far. “I noticed she was eating less, but she was also wearing loose clothes, so I hadn’t realized the extent of it,” Elizabeth says. “I had been concerned that she seemed to be withdrawing again.”
As a child and young teenager, Joannie had been painfully shy. For Halloween, she would dress up as Mr. Spock. “In the costume—with the pointed ears and so on—she looked just like him. But even without it, she was so perfect at imitating him, it concerned me—that affectless expression—it seemed part of her extreme withdrawal. It worried me, but I thought, ‘I was shy too: I got over it.’ ”
Elizabeth had been relieved when Joannie, in her junior year, burst from her cocoon to run for class president, win parts in local plays. Then, in early summer, she went off to Salzburg to the American Institute for Foreign Study. Something happened there. She had written to me that the program wasn’t what she’d hoped for, and that she was “eating far too much.” Elizabeth knows that Joannie was extremely lonely, but beyond that, she isn’t sure what went wrong. She only knows that the daughter who came home wasn’t the emerging butterfly who left.
It was just before Thanksgiving when Joannie confided to her mother that her diet was out of control. The next day the two of them went to the family doctor. “When I saw her stripped, I was appalled. The doctor said she must be anorectic, and I said, ‘What’s that?’ ”
The late August sunshine is strong, but that isn’t the reason Elizabeth shades her eyes with a long-fingered hand. Now, she knows as much as any lay person about anorexia. She has read all the textbooks, all the scholarly articles. She knows that anorectics tend to come predominantly from higher-social-class families, that their parents are described as overprotective, over-concerned and overambitious; that the typical anorectic’s family is dominated by the mother, with the father an emotional absentee.
Elizabeth was forty when Joannie was born, at a time when giving birth at forty was far less common than it is now. Everyone assumed the pregnancy was accidental. “It wasn’t. She was wante
d.”
Over the years Elizabeth has had plenty of time to reflect on whether the gap in their ages caused problems, and to examine minutely every facet of her mothering. “Sometimes, when I read about the role of the anorectic’s mother, I see some of my traits described there. But I also see some that are not mine at all.”
Joannie’s troubled relationship with her father hadn’t seemed any worse than the usual frictions between a strict parent and a child entering adulthood. The irrationality of her anorectic behavior—insisting on making elaborate, rich meals, then refusing to eat them, exercising compulsively despite her skeletal frailness—aggravated her father intensely. “I know it hurt him, when she chose to take my name and abandon his,” Elizabeth says. It took years before “he realized that the things that got on his nerves were part of her illness, and he became more loving and pliable.” Joannie had written to me, toward the end, that she and her father were getting along better, “and that’s nice.” By then, she had resumed using his surname.
But there was one other way in which she had rejected him. Both Joannie and I, as girls, had thrown ourselves into obsessive interests. Talking about this trait with Elizabeth, I mention that my Mr. Spock mania had been replaced by an absorption with Israel and Jews. I tell Elizabeth how I’d hoped that Joannie might be Jewish, or at least share my fascination, and how disappointed I’d been when she’d dismissed my outpourings on the subject with a few uninterested sentences.
Elizabeth’s eyes widen. “Joannie never told you that her father was Jewish?”
After the family doctor diagnosed her anorexia, Joannie told him she was anxious about the approach of Thanksgiving, with its compulsory feasting. “He said, ‘Just relax and let your mother make you a turkey sandwich,’ ” Elizabeth recalls.
But Joannie couldn’t relax. She couldn’t sleep. Her refusal to eat and her exhausted state convinced her parents that she needed hospitalization. But Joannie became distraught at the suggestion. They gave her Thorazine to calm her. “We must have given her too much,” Elizabeth says, because by the time they arrived at the emergency room her blood pressure had plummeted. Joannie was admitted for the months-long treatment about which she’d written to me in early 1973.
And so the pattern began that would continue for the next eight years. Joannie thrived in the protected environment of the hospital, gained weight and pulled out of depression. But with each release came relapse. Elizabeth remembered getting Joannie ready to go to Vassar—making the Indian-print bedspread and curtains for the single room she’d wanted, but had written to me that she disliked and found too lonely. “Her balance was precarious—the hope was that she’d find herself if everything went perfectly.”
But it didn’t. And on a weekend trip home she binged, felt guilty and took the overdose of antidepressant she’d written about in her letter of November 1973. She told her parents she’d taken the Tofranil. They rushed her to the bathroom and induced vomiting. Elizabeth was stunned by the amount of food that came up—the magnitude of the binge. Because she’d vomited so much, they thought she’d surely eliminated the drug from her system. “She went to take a nap, and then I couldn’t wake her up,” Elizabeth recalls. And so began the nightmare weeks of emergency room, followed by intensive care, coronary care and psychiatric hospital again.
Joannie realized that she wasn’t psychologically strong enough for Vassar, but the fact that she couldn’t go back threw her into despair. For weeks, Elizabeth said, “She’d just sit with her head in her hands.”
Determined to find the best therapist, the family searched out Hilde Bruch, the eating-disorders specialist in Texas. She remembers the relief with which she left Joannie in Dr. Bruch’s care, feeling that for once she would be safe. Joannie did so well that Elizabeth urged her to stay on in Texas and enroll in university there, so that she could remain close to the therapist. But Joannie chose to come home. Once back, “all the old stresses and temptations” seized her again.
In her long search for answers, Elizabeth has wondered if Joannie’s voices and fears indicated a schizophrenia-like disorder. She feels reasonably sure that fear of growing up and unease with emerging sexuality were a large part of the problem.
Joannie had been just sixteen in the summer of 1971, when she became involved with Dolfi in Switzerland. (“He’s what I guess would be called my summer boyfriend,” she had written to me when she went back to visit him the following year, “and would be my winter boyfriend too, if only possible!”) But it wasn’t possible, and so back in Maplewood there was another boy, and a relationship that ended in his rejection of her. That rebuff seemed to speed her withdrawal. “I often think that if she’d just been able to be with Dolfi it would have been all right,” Elizabeth says. “He had the sensitivity that was needed to deal with her sexual fears.”
Joannie last saw Dolfi just after her graduation, when she was well enough to take a trip to Europe. The reunion was warm, and may have helped her as she gathered herself together to apply for graduate school. Once, she had written to Dolfi’s mother about her pleasure in tending plants, and his mother had written back, saying, “Someday you will tend people.” In the study of social work, Joannie at last seemed to have found a way to subsume her own problems by looking for solutions to the problems of others. She also had an excellent new therapist and was eating much more normally. “She seemed at last to be winning the battle,” Elizabeth says. But Elizabeth also knew the dangers of too much optimism. Joannie had been active in the Anorexia Aid Society, writing for its journal. “She wrote a couple of articles that said she’d recovered,” says Elizabeth. “I’d cross my fingers because I could see it was not secure.”
Joannie moved into the apartment in New Brunswick and called her mother to ask advice about how to defrost the refrigerator. The next day she called again. She had misplaced the phone number of her therapist. “She said she needed to talk to her because she was anxious about a statistics course.” As Elizabeth put down the phone, the familiar fears for her daughter returned. Joannie was still rail-thin, and Elizabeth knew very well how easily an anxiety attack could trigger a dangerous eating episode.
The next day Joannie was found dead. The autopsy couldn’t say whether the direct cause was heart arrhythmia brought on by an electrolyte imbalance, or aspiration of vomit. The years of near starvation had taken a terrible toll on all of her organs, and that last binge was one insult more than her frail body could bear.
• • •
“We are still trying to recover our balance,” Elizabeth had written to me back in 1982 when she broke the news of Joannie’s death. Fifteen years later, she still is trying.
Joannie never wrote to tell me that she had become a Catholic in her final years, adopting the religion I’d cast aside. Hers was the Catholicism of the liberation theologians and the social-activist Maryknolls, very different from the rigid, conservative Church I’d known. Elizabeth had been drawn to the caring nuns and priests who had tried to help Joannie. After Joannie died, Elizabeth too had converted. And in the taking of the Eucharist she found a connection with her daughter.
But the questions have never stopped. Even after all the therapists and discussion groups and social workers, there remains no answer to the question of why Joannie became ill, or why, after she came so close, recovery in the end eluded her.
A relative of Joannie’s who is a psychiatric pharmacologist at Yale believes Joannie suffered an imbalance in her brain chemistry during the multiple hormonal changes of adolescence.
But Elizabeth is sure that “something much deeper than chemicals” was involved. She asks if I know the story of “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen. When the Snow Queen tosses a piece of ice, it lodges in a little boy’s heart and freezes it. He can no longer feel love. In the fairy tale, a little girl named Gerda searches the world for the boy and, when she finds him, her love melts the ice.
“Joannie’s heart was frozen,” Elizabeth says. “She was always trying desperately to war
m it. But for Joannie no love was warm enough.”
Alongside the tall stack of letters from my fifteen-year correspondence with Joannie there is a smaller, still growing pile that bears a similar handwriting. There are postcards from Menemsha, and letter-cards sold for the benefit of UNICEF or Catholic Relief Services or the League of Women Voters.
Elizabeth and I write to each other now. Her latest card has a pen-and-ink sketch of a Martha’s Vineyard townscape. “We had a brief thunderstorm a couple of days after you left, when the sky was spectacular—it seemed feathered with the soft gray breasts of countless doves.”
Elizabeth’s letters are a link with that other, long-ago correspondence. But they have become much more than that. “I suspect you realize how much your visits mean,” she writes in her latest letter, “because of course in my mind I’ve adopted you. How could it be otherwise?”
And in my mind I’ve adopted her. How could it be otherwise?
She was going to be you.
Joannie wasn’t going to be me. But I’m grateful for the ways in which my life has allowed me to be her.
10
Arab, Jew and Aussie
contact book (purged?)
passport & visa
$ + local currency + Amex
notebooks & pens
shortwave + extension aerial + batteries
Pocket Flight Guide
sunglasses, sunscreen, hat
½ doz. passport photos