The Professor and the Prostitute (20 page)

To gain some insight into the sort of life Gerry had ultimately led, I went over to Coe Memorial Park and hung around for a while. I wasn't frightened, even though quite a few of the benches near me were filled with scruffy, unkempt youths who seemed stoned. Perhaps it was because, as a city-dweller, I still couldn't rid myself of the notion that anything that looked as idyllic as this verdant park simply couldn't be dangerous, no matter its denizens. Or perhaps it was because I'd been told that ever since the Coury story had broken, the Torrington police were keeping a close eye on the park.

Whatever the reason, I sat in the park and quietly observed my neighbors. They were, for the most part, barefoot and wearing nothing but jeans—just the way Gerry had been dressed, wandering about midtown Manhattan. After a while, I began to strike up a conversation with some of the young men. Had they known Gerry Coury? I wanted to know.

It turned out that quite a few of them had, and soon we were talking. Yes, Gerry had hung out here a lot, they told me. Yes, for the most part they'd liked him. “He was real mellow,” one young man said. But another, a gaunt, sad-eyed man, interrupted, “Except when he got funny.”

“What do you mean, funny?” I asked.

“Paranoid. When he got high, he'd get paranoid. He'd shout and scream.”

Then the man began to nod and smile to himself. He shut his pained-looking eyes and began to look happier, and faraway. It was as if I suddenly wasn't there, as if no one was there, and he was alone with his daydreams. I tried to bring him back to reality by asking him some more questions. But I think he truly didn't hear me. He began laughing and cackling.

That night as I drove home I began to understand what had happened to Coury in New York City—and why the tale had seemed so mysterious. Coury hadn't lost his shoes and shirt in a mugging. He'd just been wandering around the city in the same garb he and his Torrington cronies were accustomed to wearing. He hadn't waited in Grand Central for his parents to send someone to “rescue” him, perhaps because he knew that after years of his erratic behavior they wouldn't do so, or perhaps simply because he was just too stoned to remember to wait. And as to the Forty-second Street crowd's having stripped him of his trousers and subsequently taunted him, it seemed just as likely that he himself, deep in some dazed, drug-induced daydream of his own, had begun to take off his own pants, thereby arousing the crowd's jeering.

No drug traces were found in Coury's body. But there are some drugs, notably LSD, that are difficult to detect. From Coury's behavior earlier in the day—the confused laughing and talking to himself that police who'd seen him in Midtown and at Grand Central had reported—it seemed plausible indeed that he'd taken, or perhaps unknowingly been given, some sort of a hallucinogen such as LSD. A bad trip on a hallucinogen would have made him frightened of everyone—not just of the crowd, but of the police who tried to help him. A bad trip would have enmeshed him thoroughly in a monstrous private nightmare.

Certainly, observers who'd seen Coury in the last few minutes of his life had seen a man lost in a nightmare. “He was just bugged out,” a thirteen-year-old Forty-second Street hanger-on said. “He never spoke,” said the transit officer who'd tried to protect him from the jeering crowd behind him. “He never said a word! We tried to hold him, but he pulled away and ducked into the subway.”

I felt sure, as I reached the city, that Coury had not so much been frightened to death by the crowd as that he'd been frightened to death by a drug overdose. For witness the precise details of that death: he touched the third rail
twice;
after touching it the first time, he flipped backward, took six deep breaths, reached over, and touched it again. Most likely, he'd been so thoroughly, so inutterably panicked that he could imagine no help, no relief from his terror, save the relief of death.

Why had the story in the papers and the national magazine seemed so bewildering? Well, the reporters hadn't used any information about Coury that came from the Torrington police or press. They'd relied on his mother. And she, as mothers will, had offered a glowing picture of her son. It was easy, now that he was dead. So, denying his problems to the world at large, possibly even denying them to herself, she'd gone ahead and painted him, not as the man he had become, but as the boy, the high school star, he'd once been.

That was the end of the puzzle, but for me it was the beginning of a period of anger. I was indignant at all the people who were blaming New York for what had happened to Coury.

There were many such people. One of them, a Torrington friend of Coury's, wrote a letter to the
New York Times
in which he raged against the “mob of underdogs” who'd run after Gerry, “those nameless punks who live on trash and broken homes.” The letterwriter spoke of being disillusioned, of having once cared and worried about the “disadvantaged,” but of having become convinced, as a result of what happened to Gerry, that the disadvantaged should be “kept away, at almost any cost,” from the rest of society. “I want government, which is charged with our general welfare, to step in, with Federal Troops if necessary, and protect my life as I walk the streets of America's cities,” he wrote. Big cities was what he meant. “I have three brothers who live in big cities, and I don't want to lose any of them.”

I felt that what had happened to Coury wasn't a New York tragedy or even a big-city tragedy. It was an American tragedy. All over the country, hundreds of thousands of youths were suffering from the disorder that had afflicted Gerry Coury. There is an epidemic of downward drifters in America, I kept thinking, and Forty-second Street is only one gathering place for these restless souls. There are also—I couldn't put it out of my mind—Coe Memorial Parks in innumerable American towns.

A TRAGEDY ON EIGHTY-NINTH STREET

New York, New York

1980

O
N A SEPTEMBER SATURDAY
when summer vacation was drawing to a close and the school term just about to begin, a thirty-four-year-old New Yorker named Irene Schwartz drove her two children out to the Great Adventure amusement park, in New Jersey. On Sunday, she took them to Central Park. On Monday and Tuesday, she made preparations for their return to their classrooms, scheduling a dentist's appointment for seven-year-old Joshua and a nursery teacher's home visit for five-year-old Judy. Then, sometime on Tuesday, she left her co-op on East Eighty-ninth Street in Manhattan, drove out to Farmingdale, Long Island, and purchased a shotgun. That night, or early Wednesday morning, she went into the bedrooms where Joshua and Judy lay sleeping, shot them in the head, carried their lifeless bodies into her own bedroom, lay down between them on her big bed, and shot herself.

Why? The mind recoils, the imagination stumbles, particularly since Irene Schwartz had been a well-educated, well-off, and, above all,
motherly
woman.

Her friends and neighbors were numb with disbelief. One said to me, “One of the most awful things about what happened is that it makes you feel that if a woman like
that
could kill her kids, then none of us is safe. It could happen to anyone. You see, she seemed to have all the pieces of her life in place. There just weren't any warning signs.” Another said, “I used to watch her as she went about her chores and think to myself,
God, I wish I could be more like her
. Now I feel not just sad but scared.” And a third said, “She was so loving. If she did something like this, could I? Could I flip right out one day when I'm stuck home with the kids and they're screaming and my husband's away and school hasn't started yet? Could I just up and shoot them?”

To these women, what happened to Irene Schwartz appeared so incomprehensible that it brought them not only sorrow but terror—the terror that always explodes when life seems arbitrary and one can fathom no cause and effect in the universe. It was largely to still this terror, to explain that there was some cause and effect in the story of Irene Schwartz, that I undertook writing about her.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote in
The White Album
. “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the moral or social lesson in the murder of five.… We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

In the case of Irene Schwartz, there was no moral or social lesson to satisfy our need to find patterns in the world and thus feel safe. But there was a psychiatric lesson. There
were
warning signs, however Irene Schwartz's life may have looked to the outside world.

Certainly her life appeared temperate, comfortable, even enviable. Irene and her husband, forty-three-year-old Robert Schwartz, a professor of economics at New York University's Graduate School of Business Administration, lived in one of Manhattan's most fashionable, most placid neighborhoods, the East Eighties, just off Park Avenue. There they had, as Irene's father, Alfred Schwarzchild, president of the Royal Mills textile firm, told me, “no financial worries. None at all.” Their valuable co-op was large, with separate bedrooms for each of the children, and when a smaller studio apartment adjacent to their own had become available, they bought it, too, breaking through the wall so that Robert could have a study at home.

He must have liked working at home. He was known as a fond husband and loving father. Some of Irene's friends told me that while they always gossiped about whose marriage was in what creaking condition, there was never any gossip about Irene and Robert, who had been married for ten years. And one of the family's baby-sitters, an eighteen-year-old who often worked for them, said, “They were extremely close. They were always holding hands.” Robert's hobby was amateur photography, and one of his favorite subjects was his family. His study walls were lined with pictures of the two smiling children and of Irene, a pretty woman who wore her curly hair to her shoulders and, eschewing makeup, had a natural, modest air.

She was utterly devoted to Joshua and Judy. She'd attended college, received an M.A. in education from New York University, and taught school for a while before she had the children. But once she became a mother, she gave up the notion of working outside her home. Instead, she channeled her skills at guiding and caring for the young into ministering to her own progeny.

It was an unusual choice in the early 1970s, when most women were clamoring to work. But certainly it was one with a long history of distinguished practitioners, and Irene, according to her friends, excelled at it. She spent virtually all her time with her children and was active in their schools. Both children attended private schools—different ones—and Irene participated regularly in the parents' groups at both. She was also enormously protective of her children. One friend said that what struck her most about Irene was that whenever she saw her out walking with her son and daughter, she was holding their hands tightly clasped in hers. Another said that at a swimming pool to which she and Irene belonged, Irene, unlike the other mothers, would never let her children swim with the lifeguard's supervision alone but would herself stand interminably and patiently in the shallow end of the pool until they had finished disporting themselves.

Among the other examples her friends gave to illustrate her painstaking mothering was the fact that she never failed to escort her children to and from school, never sloughed the task off onto maids and babysitters, though she could well have afforded to do so. They said further that unlike so many mothers of young children, she wasn't given to procrastination. She'd mail the children's tuition deposits to their schools well before the start of each semester and make appointments for their pediatric checkups in sufficient time for the required medical forms to reach their schools before, not on, the first day of classes.

Indeed, anticipating her son's and daughter's needs was second nature to Irene. Once, when she was to be away from home for a while, she warned her children's teachers weeks before her departure so that they could plan for the possibility that the children might miss her and thus act out or cut up or just behave differently.

But if she was protective of her own children, she was also greatly protective and fond of children in general. Whenever her friends had scheduling problems and couldn't pick up their children at school or couldn't be at home with them in the afternoons, it was always Irene to whom they would turn for help. She invariably came to their rescue, absorbing their kids into her own household for play and snacks. In fact, the very day before she took her own and her children's lives, she had arranged to care, the next day, for a child whose mother was preoccupied with a sick baby.

No wonder that to the outside world Irene Schwartz looked like Supermom.

It would have pleased her to be remembered this way. Apparently, she had set out to be a perfect mother, an available, responsive, uncomplaining maternal figure. No doubt it was because she knew what it was like to be deprived of such a bulwark. When she was a child, her own mother had often been away from home. She had suffered some kind of mental breakdown and was frequently hospitalized in psychiatric institutions.

After her mother died—it was in 1977—Irene grew extremely despondent. She saw a psychiatrist but became increasingly depressed. Ultimately, in the spring of 1980, she herself was hospitalized and given shock therapy—a treatment used frequently in cases where psychiatrists have established that a patient has suicidal yearnings. Most of her friends didn't know about her depression and its treatment.

It is here that the story of Irene Schwartz begins to take its tragic turn. After her hospitalization and as a result of the treatment, she began to improve. The summer before she died, she was no longer brooding, and on occasion she even worked as a volunteer at her children's day camp. To her doctors, she seemed well enough to be maintained on antidepressive medications as an outpatient; to her husband, well enough for him to leave her for a short while to go to Europe to attend an economics conference. But it is one of the commonplaces of psychiatry, and one of the aspects of the discipline that most demoralizes its practitioners, that it is often only when severely depressed, potentially suicidal patients are on the upswing, only when they show signs of being less melancholy and once again taking an interest in the world around them, that they can organize themselves sufficiently to carry out an exit from the earth. All psychiatrists dread this ironic fact and fear the responsibility of caring for the severely depressed.