I don’t like losing things. I keep a list of books I know I once had, and know I’ve read, that I have somehow misplaced; “The Magic Mountain,” Loren Eiseley’s “The Star Thrower,” “The Complete Claudine” by Colette are on it, along with at least 40 other titles. Even when I lose a pair of pants, a sense of vexation, a confusion arises in me that seems out of all proportion to the loss, and if the pants are suddenly presented to me apologetically at the dry cleaners I feel a strange giddiness, a tincture of the kind of joy displayed by reunited families in movies about Mormon heaven. It is strange that in this world in which everything is sooner or later lost, where losing is the only certainty, one gets attached to even the smallest things and wants to be able to say goodbye even to a pair of pants, rather than have it simply disappear. One wants to see a logic in disappearances, and to know when one is losing things. Even if, in the end, we get to keep nothing.
Mary disappeared from my daily life when we were 8 years old, when my parents placed her in an institution for the mentally disabled. It took me painfully long even to recognize that the event had left a kind of ocean of disquiet in me that manifested itself in panic attacks and a lifelong struggle with agoraphobia, and in my difficulties negotiating some aspects of public life, as well as in my reactions to trivial losses. I suppose that as her twin, it was doubly hard for me to know how and where to draw the boundary line between her nature and mine, between the inherent strangeness of being a person and the kind of strangeness that led to what I saw as banishment from normal human society. Yet I wasn’t aware of any of this when I was growing up. It wasn’t until I reached late middle age that I could even begin to acknowledge that being Mary’s twin was a central fact, perhaps the central fact, of my life. All I did feel was a kind of blank place inside, where memories and feelings should have been.
Summer 1948, Aug. 27: 12:57 a.m., Mary is born; 1:02 a.m., I am born. We are six weeks premature. Our mother had lost two babies in previous pregnancies, one a few years before, and the other a few years after my brother’s birth. She is ecstatic. Our father is home with a cold. He and our 5-year-old brother receive the news of the twin births over the phone — “Twins! A boy and a girl!” Twins were usually a surprise in those days, and they are astonished. We are tiny by ancestry, by being twins, and by being born so early. We weigh four pounds each. We are put in incubators, and stay there for six weeks. After all of these many days in the hospital we are home. Our father, who had once thought that the world was too difficult a place to bring more people into it, but who after 18 years of marriage had finally changed his mind, is now lifting us over his head in joy and amazement. Our brother, dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and corduroy dungarees, is posing for pictures holding the two of us, one in each arm.
In third or fourth grade, asked to write our “autobiographies,” I recalled an early memory: my sister and I were in adjoining cribs, and we were rocking backwards and forwards in unison. We were knocking our heads gently but repeatedly on the headboards. I wrote about this “nightly ritual” at some length, innocent of sex, but still cognizant that the experience was private, collaborative and even intense. That I called it a “ritual” shows that I instinctively knew the activity to be stabilizing, soothing and necessary. This was a nightly routine in the period before my sister and I slept in separate rooms. If I close my eyes to my current world and responsibilities, I can imagine that I am back there, on all fours, peering through the white slats of my crib at Mary’s rocking form, blurry in the dark, but still visible by the Manhattan streetlights coming through the Venetian blinds. I can even hear the squeaking of the beds, hear the sound of the headboards being struck, and feel the mattress under my knees.
I don’t remember Mary starting to show any distress at this age. While I remember her screaming and running through the halls of the apartment as a 5- or 6-year-old, I have no sense of her unhappiness, if she did display it, as an infant or toddler. Sharing a room with her remains only the vaguest memory, more a feeling of textures and sensations — like the proximity of her small warm form in frilly outfits — than a memory per se. I remember the comforting feeling of having her nearby, as if her presence was central, a point of rest. But I would only strain the limits of language trying to describe the sensation. Even now I am more relaxed in her company than at any other time.
I know now that sometime during her first year my parents started to worry about Mary. Apparently she did not smile until she was 6 months old, and did not engage in play with adults when I did. She seemed entranced by objects, but not particularly responsive to or curious about people. Sometime in our second year her comparative unresponsiveness made them worry that she had a hearing impairment.
I also remember the inwardness and inner-directed quality of her speech, her muttered dialogue with herself; her constant preoccupation with her right arm, which she would repeatedly kiss and then pause to look at, smiling to herself, before resuming to kiss it; her sometimes raw, chewed-on fingers; the start-and-stop quality her walking sometimes had, as if she were always reconsidering where she was going. I remember her tranquillity, but also how it would shift unexpectedly. Sometimes the cause of her frustration would be apparent, like a plastic pearl falling from her grasp under the bed. And when the situation was righted, she would be contented again. But at other times a tension would seem to mount inside her that had more the character of a meteorological event.
I remember nothing of my parents’ concerns about Mary, only that they told me that she was “slow.” At a certain point I began hearing the term “mentally retarded” used about her. There were moments when the word “autism” was used too. Because I now have the documents my mother saved about her, I see that she was first officially diagnosed in June 1955 when she was 6 by Dr. William Langford of Columbia University, a renowned child psychiatrist and pediatrician, an expert in children’s “emotional problems,” who worked at Presbyterian Medical Center.
The stereotypical description of the autistic child does not quite jibe with my recollections of Mary at the age of 7. If she did not communicate verbally at her age level, she did connect to others through the piercingly direct look she could give with her brown eyes; her memory of everyone’s names; her unexpected smiles and laughter; her looks of amusement; her responsiveness to pictures and movies and music; her way of laying claim to us by gripping our arms and clasping our hands. Even now, in middle age, while she accepts a hug only rather stiffly and grudgingly, she will still grab my chin in her characteristic way and plant a kiss on my cheek.
As children we rode tricycles together, we danced when our father played the piano. On Christmas (which we celebrated for its décor, food and sense of magic, despite our Jewish ancestry), Mary and I and our brother sat on the living room floor under the tree opening our presents. Although I cannot remember a single one of our joint birthday parties in any detail, I still remember the fun of the three of us sitting under the tree with its sparkling lights and tearing through the colorful wrappings, and carefully taking each item out of the stockings we had hung the night before.
I don’t remember ever consciously wishing for Mary to be other than as she was. In our different ways both my brother and I were as used to Mary’s companionship as we were to each other’s. Tormented as our parents were about what to do about Mary, they made every effort not to place this burden on us. Even if we intuited the strain of it, we knew nothing about the decisions they had to confront. Mary was simply our sister, her “deficits” inevitable, and her various moods just a part of daily life, no more under anyone’s control than the weather.
When I close my eyes and try to walk through the blank space in my mind, trying to remember the summer Mary and I turned 9, I can dimly make out my mother telling us — my brother and myself — that Mary would be going to a summer camp for retarded children. After that, I remember neither the trip in which we all presumably accompanied her there — to Sandpiper — nor the moment at the end of the summer when our parents told us that the camp had become a year-round school, and that Mary would be staying there from now on.
But Mary’s departure from our daily life was like an unmourned death. Her absence, the fact that she was elsewhere and would remain so, was not incorporated into our reality, and we all rarely referred to it. After she left, the fact that I was her twin became close to unmentionable. Her picture sat next to mine and my brother’s in a framed triptych in the living room; we still referred to “Mary’s room,” even after it had accumulated our mother’s exercise bike, innumerable boxes of old shoes, and shopping bags filled with saved newspapers and magazines. In most ways it felt almost as if Mary had never been a part of our lives, as if the lie I had sometimes spoken when I said I was one of two children, instead of three, had turned out to be true.
Short letters and cards arrived with painstakingly scripted sentences from Mary and sometimes crayon drawings made, it appeared, from a template provided by a teacher. The letters were written in pen, in a regular handwriting that, while dutiful, was at least Mary’s own:
Dear Mommy and daddy—
How are you I went swimming yesterday. I am learning how to swim we went to holiday lake we had a picnic supper
write soon
Love
Mary
And the contents were true, even if coaxed and corrected. (Mary always referred to herself in the third person. She would not have written or said, “I went swimming.”) All in all she showed impressive progress. In her first year at the school she learned enough to become ready for first-grade work, and in the ensuing years reached a fourth- to fifth-grade level in arithmetic, spelling, writing and the mechanics of reading.
Mary sometimes seemed to live within a grid of holidays, often anticipating the entire year’s calendar out loud in terms of the upcoming celebrations and the foods associated with them. “October, Mary wants a pumpkin. Easter is coming — Easter egg. November — Turkey.” Mary’s intense need for predictability was gratified by the school routine, but was always under threat. She was intensely vigilant about her environment. While she pursued most recreational activities alone — bicycling, swimming, playing the piano, knitting, crafts — she still wanted people and things to stay in their proper places, and always knew what all the other children were doing, whether or not they had received phone calls, and where they were going on a trip or a visit home.
In Mary’s absence, my parents would always give my brother and me — and each other — presents in her name, which they signed, in block capital letters, “M A R Y.” Our father wrote our mother short notes in Mary’s behalf (“I Love you, dear Mommy — from Mary”). Many years later my mother said to me that he had given Mary a “voice.”
But even though she was very much alive, in the family Mary became a poignant symbol of loss, and was referred to, if at all, wistfully, nostalgically — not as our living sister. If comments about her current life were rare, those about her own subjective experience of the world were virtually nonexistent.
Family visits to Sandpiper were momentous for me. For a brief moment we were reconstituted as a family of five, but in an alien context, and surrounded by strangers. We ate tuna fish sandwiches with the children at one of the shiny wooden tables in the combined dining room-kitchen and watched as they did their chores of cleaning up and washing the dishes. Sometimes a child would get upset, cry or complain in a strange whiny voice. Sometimes an older child would go and sit on one of the teachers’ laps, as if he were still a 4-year-old.
Trips to see Mary and to visit the schools my brother and I attended were the only true “vacations” we ever took as a family. In order to get to Chatham, Mass., my parents would hire a limousine and driver. (Or perhaps in fact The New Yorker paid for this.)
Both my brother and I were discomfited by the lack of intimacy this imposed, and mortified by the impression it gave of family wealth. We arrived in a vehicle fit for royalty — or so it seemed to me then — and once there I rarely had a moment alone with Mary, or even had a chance to realize that I wished to have one.
Whether because of instinctively sensing the shrillness in my mother’s assertions of family togetherness, or because of the loss of Mary in our daily routine, I started becoming almost obsessively concerned with the idea of truthfulness, with locating a firm basis beneath everything that was being said around me. I became aware that our last name was misleadingly Irish-sounding, that we celebrated Christian holidays despite our Jewish ancestry. The limousine seemed one more instance of a false appearance. In addition to not being truly wealthy ourselves, we descended from people of humble means. In that era traveling by limousine instantly conveyed a message of complacent affluence, perhaps of money going back generations. I found the distance between that message and the way I saw myself jarring. I was already touchy enough about my privileged childhood without having the extent of its advantages exaggerated.
However, trips out to the Cape were indeed preceded by a night of glittering sumptuousness in Boston, where we stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, across from Boston Common and the Swan Boats. At night we had dinner in the dining room, where I ordered lamb chops and my brother lobster and oysters and we drank Shirley Temples. We sometimes went to musicals in pre-Broadway previews (“Mr. President,” “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever”), or to a jazz club. My brother and I shared a plush bedroom adjoining that of our parents. The memory of such enjoyable extravagance seems almost unreal to me today.
The visits to Mary stirred a mystifying mix of emotions, at the bottom of which was intense sadness. Folded into this was the tension traveling caused our parents, which somehow adhered to all of their travel routines: the stops at the side of the highway for my father to call the magazine or, unbeknownst to me then, his second family, from a pay phone; my mother’s obsessive consulting of the map showing the way; the manuscripts being read and edited in the car.
When we would arrive, Mary would usually be dressed in a skirt or sweater that my mother had bought. She would come over to us and say all of our names; she would accept our hugs; she might take our mother’s hand, or our father’s hand, or mine, or my brother’s, and walk us over to a place to sit down. But essentially this would all be done in one motion, as she primarily focused on the shopping bag of presents that she was so eager to open. She might narrate the features of the event in progress — “Mary Shawn’s parents are coming”; “Mary has presents”; “chicken salad, iced tea, ice cream and cake, peanut butter cups for dessert” — and she would sometimes laugh looking at us (“Hi, Allen”), as if in recognition that we were actually in fact there. “Wallace came for a visit.” “Mommy brought presents.” “Wallace, Mary and Allen will have ice cream and cake.” All in all, there was no comparison between the way she had seemed in New York and the way she appeared to be here. She looked wonderfully well. One almost could imagine seeing on her face that she was with people who had a way of understanding her.
In retrospect I see my parents as having been in radically different gears during these visits. My father, agoraphobic, bundled in his overcoat as he tended to be in most seasons, and surely was when near the ocean, was vulnerable so far from New York and, still further out on a limb, far from Boston, deeply emotional about seeing Mary, moved by the plight of the children at the school and by its idyllic and to him exotic locale, must have felt almost overwhelmed by the effort of the trip, the poignancy of the family story, and the burden of the decisions they had made and would continue to have to make about Mary. My mother, who formed extraordinarily personal attachments with everyone connected to the family, was engaged and active, carrying packages for Mary, visiting Mary’s room, chatting with Josie — Mary’s roommate — asking if the winter clothes she had mailed Mary fit her.
The mood of the return trip was always deeply different, as if we had been cleansed somehow: a kind of wasted, tender exhaustion and calm. On the way home we always talked about Mary and about little else, and my mother invariably said that Mary had seemed so much better, that she had spoken more, or seemed calmer, or more grown up, or for the first time had done something she had never done before. For several years at Chatham, this was actually true. Once my father put it this way: “She’s happier than we are.”
Adapted from “Twin,” to be published in January by Viking.