Madeleine (15 page)

Around this time, Edward Mason offered Madeleine a part-time clerical job at the Mason unit. She leapt at the chance. The Tillams moved into an apartment at 10 Agassiz Street, just a three-minute trolley ride from Harvard Square. Across the street they had ready-made friends—Tomas Kalmar, who had been at school with Madeleine in Sydney and was now doing graduate work at Harvard, and his Australian girlfriend, Jennifer Kemp. Tomas was an exuberant man and a talented pianist and guitar player, and the friends made music and sang together. Sometimes Madeleine played the piano. The group read novels aloud, and there was always plenty of talk—of politics and society and education and of the new world that seemed about to emerge at the end of the 1960s.

A few weeks after she arrived, Madeleine dashed off a note to Joan to thank her for a gift. On the surface, there was no hint of her feeling that the move to Harvard had been a mistake:

We're terribly behind in our mail; there simply hasn't been a minute for anything lately. All very exciting however. I adore Cambridge. And Boston. Horribly cold but really I rather like it. We're buying me high boots next Saturday as preparation for the real cold which will come with the snow, probably soon.
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Chris told Joan that life was ‘pretty good'. The couple listened to Bach and Mozart on Harvard Radio and the thick Irish accents of the streets of Boston. There was a Rembrandt exhibition in town and Madeleine had a ‘spate of cake making'.
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But they were not as happy as they made out. The weather was appalling. Feiga visited, and Madeleine panicked: she felt she was in no state to entertain her grandmother. Her fears about Allegra May had returned. She told Annabel that Allegra was ‘very mad and dreadful'.
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Working at the Mason unit, she saw the rapport between Chris and Allegra. The tension built until one day Madeleine tore strips off Allegra in a very public display, then locked herself in the bathroom.
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The situation was irretrievable. Madeleine knew she could never return. She had done herself out of a good job.

Chris tolerated the outburst—her behaviour was nothing new. ‘It was obvious her eruptions right from the beginning were coming from a fire that preceded our relationship,' he recalled.
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Madeleine and Chris went to the edge then retreated from the abyss, knowing they could not live at that level for more than a few minutes at a time and understanding that they had to get on with their lives. ‘There would not be reconciliations,' Chris recalled. ‘They weren't needed.'
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The Tillams stopped socialising with Allegra, although she and Chris continued to work together. But Madeleine remained suspicious. Once or twice she was physically violent towards Chris. He recalled that her ‘curved fingers and nails' once left a mark. It was enough for one of their friends to remark that Madeleine was not behaving well.
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Chris did not always trust himself when Madeleine flared up, sometimes screaming abuse at him. He retreated to the boiler room below the apartment, waiting in the dark till her outburst subsided and he was calm enough to go back. He did not confront her about her behaviour: ‘I just felt, well, here's another volcano to deal with…I retreat, I don't stop her, I just ride it out somehow. I go out for a breather.'

After an eruption, they would click back into familiar patterns, each of them trying to create a domestic calm of work and shopping and cooking meals and attending cultural events. Looking back, Chris said that he ‘must have been terribly unaware of Madeleine's angst…I don't think I was terribly sensitive when you think about it. I almost literally rolled with the punches.'
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Madeleine was in severe distress. She had known in San Francisco that she needed professional help. But now she was far worse. Looking back, she said that she had a complete nervous breakdown when she lived in Cambridge and had been ‘more or less incapable of a normal life'. She felt she should have been treated in hospital.
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As Madeleine spiralled out of control, her father began one of the most exciting times of his life. Ted had long harboured a desire to go into politics, but what he later described as ‘family problems' prevented him from doing so earlier. A decade after Sylvette's death, with a supportive second wife in Val, he won the safe Liberal seat of Warringah at the 1966 federal election. Ted was ambivalent about party politics; he always said he had first made a decision to go into politics and only then decided to join the Liberals rather than Labor. He felt that he could not support Labor because he believed unions were too heavily influenced by Communists, although he was not ‘whole heartedly in sympathy with the Liberal Party or everything it stood for'. As a private citizen, he had campaigned against apartheid, and he conceded he was ‘an odd bod, with my small l liberal views, so they [the Liberals] were distrustful of me'.
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He was stubborn when it came to politics, and intensely emotional on the floor of the House of Representatives. His parliamentary career was a high point in his life.

Life was not so satisfactory for his eldest daughter. Madeleine's first few months in Cambridge were terrible although once again she dissembled in letters home. She told Annabel that Harvard was:

all very American-colonial; puritanical, high minded and quaint. The newer buildings are just as much of the best of their times—the Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts is the most beautiful and exciting building I have ever been in; it was designed by Le Corbusier. There are other buildings by World Famous Masters but I have forgotten their names…
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Madeleine was reading her way through Proust and was busy writing. Chris admired her work. It was original, he told Joan, and had been influenced by her reading of the French writer. But the calm did not last. Madeleine wrote to Colette in London, telling her she was low. Colette did not reply and Madeleine wrote again asking what she had done to ‘cause this freeze'. In mid-May, Colette sent a postcard and promised a letter. On 30 June, when no letter arrived, Madeleine complained to her cousin Felicity:

Meanwhile I hear she [Colette] is writing to various people, has a nice flat and everything is going well. So I concluded that sympathy from the family was quite out of the question if my own sister could be so indifferent.
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Madeleine, as always, was quick to arrive at negative conclusions. Colette had been through a tough period. Her adult years were plagued by bouts of suicidal depression. A few months before Madeleine's letter, she had gone to Henley, on the river outside London, had lunch and drinks at a local pub and then sat for hours near the water. She wanted to kill herself but was not quite sure how to do it. Eventually a local bobby took her back to the station and called a psychiatric institution. She was admitted and had to be ‘rescued' from it a few days later by her friend Philip Hedley.
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Madeleine, too, was desperate to get help. Unable to afford private care, she went to the outpatients departments at two big public hospitals. At one, they wanted to admit her immediately, but she could not face it. At the other, her name was added to a waiting list for therapy. But she would not be seen for three months and the therapy would cost $10 a session. Madeleine wondered where she and Chris would find the money.
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Chris wrote to Ted, asking for help. Ted was supporting a young family, including ten-year-old Oliver who had been diagnosed as intellectually handicapped, as well as coping with the demands of a political life. The St Johns were finding that Ted's parliamentary salary was not a fortune, and Ted wrote to Chris declining to send money and saying that Madeleine's condition was inevitable, given her mother's history.

Ted wanted the letter kept secret but Chris revealed its contents to Madeleine. She knew her mother had been mentally ill. Now Ted was saying she was on the same path. It was a devastating judgment. Madeleine told Felicity, in a letter in June 1967, that Ted had written that he ‘couldn't spare anything for psychotherapy—nor did he feel it in any way to be his duty. He did express some sympathy for Chris.'
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Chris was knocked by Ted's response, but for Madeleine, it was just another rejection by her father. She realised she would simply have to wait her turn at Beth Israel public hospital.

Madeleine had worked for a time at the Co-op Book Shop in Harvard Square, but she found her mental state improved after she stopped working. ‘The mess is still there [but] I can control it,' she told Felicity:

When I start therapy, I hope to get that mess cleaned up. I want to be a good person, even a wonderful person, if that is possible & I hope I can do it. In some way, I hope eventually to come to terms with my mother's death and to make up for that terrible loss; to stop mourning for her & to keep her memory alive in me, not as the wound of having lost her, but as the spring of having spent 10 perfect years as her daughter, and 2 years, which tho' marred, were redeemed entirely by her good periods.
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More than a decade after Sylvette's death, Madeleine's wounds were still raw. Her grief was almost overwhelming, and she had identified her mother's story as central to her own mental health. However, she blamed her father, telling Felicity that she now understood that:

since I was about twelve years old [when Sylvette died] my father's feeling for me has been hatred shading into indifference. Once I put this horrible fact down, everything falls into place—all his vicious cruelty, all his rages, everything down to the fact that he didn't want to give me away when I was married & had to be persuaded into it by Val.
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Madeleine had always accused Ted of siding with Val and rejecting her, but now her anger was white-hot. She had expected love from Ted, she told Felicity, but now realised she had ‘got something else, repeatedly & repeatedly & it has taken me all this time to learn'. Ted, she said, had ‘died about the time that my mother did'. Madeleine wanted to become ‘as indifferent to him as he is to me'. Indifference would stop the horrifying disappointments she had suffered over the years. ‘When I learn to stop cringing before him I hope I shall learn to stop cringing before the rest of the world. All the years I have wasted, that what talents I have have been dissipated, I hope to make them up.'
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She was equally unforgiving of her stepmother:

I have just had a letter from Val that so upset me that I am going to go on trembling all day unless I write about it to the only person who is likely to preserve some discretion on hearing what I have to say…I do not think I will write to Val…It is really impossible for me to deal with people who I don't trust and who don't understand me—that sounds very egotistical but it isn't really, it is a matter of my keeping calm, it really is something that I have to work at, and it is something I have learnt here in this country; for all its faults, I've found wonderful friends who really accept me & I try to give people the trust and affection that I like to get & so cannot cope with other relationships at the moment.
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It is impossible to know what it was in Val's letter that so upset Madeleine, but by now almost everything Val said or did was interpreted as an attack. Madeleine sent her letter to Felicity, complete with criticisms of Val, care of Clifton Gardens. Val sent it on, unopened, to Felicity.

On the surface, life went on in the Tillams' apartment in Agassiz Street. As usual, their letters to Joan were cheerful. Chris was busy repairing their kitchen chairs and a rocker they had bought for $5.
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He and Madeleine regularly shopped for food at the North End Italian section of Boston on Saturday afternoons, and they planned a trip to Long Island Sound in September for the America's Cup races—Chris had loved sailing ever since he was a boy. They had been to the Royal Ballet. And they socialised regularly with Tomas Kalmar and Jennifer Kemp. Madeleine was upbeat, but Tomas could see it was an act.
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Then came a calamity that swept aside concerns about Madeleine's mental state. In Sydney, Roger Tillam, now separated from Elvira and living at his club, suffered a severe stroke. Chris worried about how he could afford to go home, and decided against it. But his financial worries ran deeper than that. Since his departure from Australia, he had lived in part on an overdraft guaranteed by his father. Now he would be solely responsible for repaying those funds.
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It was the start of a stressful time for Chris as he tried to help his mother and his father over the long distance.

It was a hot and humid summer in Boston and the roses were in full bloom. The Tillams walked in the evenings, and Madeleine became adept at stealing flowers for her vases. Chris had three weeks' leave while the Mason unit worked out some funding issues, but he was concerned about how he would complete the thesis film for his Stanford degree.

Roger Tillam died on 22 July 1967. Chris took a day off work but felt disconnected from the event. He recalled that Madeleine could not bring herself to comfort him because she feared it would unleash grief over her mother's death. ‘It wasn't that she wasn't concerned,' he said.
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Chris was preoccupied over the next few weeks with the impact on his mother's alimony and her living arrangements. But by September, with Joan sorted, Chris spent a ‘fantastic week' at the Flaherty Film Seminar for documentary makers, held at the Harriman estate outside New York. Allegra May also attended. It was a week of wall-to-wall movie-watching and film discussions. There was a swimming pool and copious amounts of alcohol for the eighty filmmakers attending.

Madeleine, back home in Cambridge, finally started psychotherapy. She was probably on medication but, after Chris's overdose at Stanford, she kept her pills well away from her husband. She was upbeat in a letter to Felicity, who was about to start a lectureship at the University of Pennsylvania. Madeleine invited her cousin to Cambridge. She was open about her therapy, joking that she was not ‘greatly boring on the subject of myself for I HAVE STARTED, LIKE, PSYCHOTHERAPY at last. So after my weekly hour I am more than ready to change the subject.' Felicity should arrive in Cambridge after about 11 a.m. on a Friday, ‘this being the hour I exit from Beth Israel Psychiatric Clinic'. Madeleine wrote that her shrink was ‘wonderful' and even after three weeks, she felt she was making progress and not going around in the same circle.
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