I walked, weeping, down the hall. Our small den was walled with bookshelves and had a window that faced east, where the yard was in dusk. There were no soft last beams of light here. Just a shaggy hedge, friendly, settling in for the night beneath a cover of gnats. Maybe I was wrong—maybe what terrified me was not darkness but the relinquishing of light, the letting go. I stood for a moment watching the cool yard, and then I searched the shelves for Huis Clos so I could get this death thing sorted out.
The bookcases were terrain I knew well. My father’s sections: photography, physics, chess openings. My mother’s: fiction, classics, theology. Half a wall of Encyclopædia Britannica, an ancient family Bible, and, in the cabinet beneath, my mother’s portfolio from her days as a model, in London, before she married my dad. She’d been a ringer for Kate Moss, but with better teeth. I’d lie on the carpet and turn pages of her. This was the only room in our house where I was allowed to roam. Every new discovery introduced a complication, but it’s ever thus with knowledge: I’d read Roots in the fifth grade and spent weeks feeling almost betrayed that my mustachioed science teacher used the word flux to refer to simple scientific variability when, in this magnificent book, it meant diarrhea suffered by slaves. Everything I knew about sex came from the Clan of the Cave Bear series, the orphaned white woman raised by Neanderthals finally finding the lone white man who is wandering prehistoric Earth, looking for her. In a somewhat related investigation, I’d stolen the instructions from a box of Tampax in my mother’s bathroom cabinet and, finding no correlation between the illustration and my own body, snuck the page into the den to look for clues in the anatomical transparencies in the A volume of the Encyclopædia.
Sartre was not present on my parents’ shelves, but (in the French section now) I thought Les Fleurs du Mal sounded right. For the next few days I worked the poems with my French-English dictionary. Baudelaire did not help. “I find comfort in knowing that I will be with my Lord in heaven,” said my father, which also did not help. Sitting in my lit closet with the door closed while the night murdered the day sometimes helped.
This season of fear when I was thirteen lifted as mysteriously as it had lowered. I was able to eat again. I took new comfort in the way my mother left radios on in various rooms and switched on the network news every night promptly at five-thirty. Other adult things began to make sense: cocktails, fast cars, the prattle of gossip. I reshelved Baudelaire.
I knew it marked me, to be this vulnerable, but I couldn’t stop the questions from coming into my mind, nor the sadness that followed them like fish on a line. My only hope had been to bury it all beneath sweetness and hard work. I was resigned to be a pretender.
But St. Paul’s was shrewd. The wheels of the school’s fates picked out my darkness and assigned me a lonely old girl and a lonely dorm room and a lonely and angry roommate, and the stone library offered up not dates but death scenes. There was a shaking out to the place, a reckoning of the sort that spiritually dynamic spots—mountains, graveyards—are known to deliver. I could not thrive, I thought that first fall, and my parents would not let me come home.
At the airport, I thanked Stewart and then walked purposefully alone into the terminal so Gaby could kiss him goodbye. I didn’t see her again, not checking in for our flight or on the plane to O’Hare, not in the terminal, not at the curb where my mother waited in the car. How did Gaby do that, just disappear into the world like any other adult on her way home? If I was going to stay at St. Paul’s, something would have to change.
I found my answer in my parents’ house the afternoon I arrived for Thanksgiving break, in a glossy magazine on the kitchen counter. This was the year Vanity Fair ran William Styron’s essay about his suicidal depression, and the headline, “Darkness Visible,” spoke to me as if by name. I snatched the magazine and took it into my closet and closed the door.
Mom had warned, looking at the magazine in my hand: “Styron writes about a woman who has to choose which of her children will die in the Holocaust.”
I knew he was my guy. In particular I was struck by this:
The fading evening light—akin to that famous “slant of light” of Emily Dickinson’s, which spoke to her of death, of chill extinction—had none of its familiar autumnal loveliness, but ensnared me in a suffocating gloom.
Solemnly, so as to preserve credibility, I waved the magazine at my mother and said, “This is me. I’m chemically depressed.”
I am not surprised that she agreed. My sobbing phone calls from St. Paul’s would have exhausted and unnerved her. Within days I had an appointment with a top adolescent psychiatrist who was—my luck!—enrolling patients for a study. How convenient it would have been to determine that my brain was the problem. I wished this, too: much easier to take a drug than give up our dream of my schooling. And it was an interesting problem I’d introduced—chemical depression was then still new, still a bit fancy. “Maybe things are starting to turn around for you,” said Mom, after securing the appointment at Northwestern Memorial, in downtown Chicago. “Things are looking up.”
Dr. Derek Miller was British and had worked alongside Anna Freud in London. His accent alone would have sunk me, but
