Over the next year, we returned again and again to this story. It had many doors to the interior of Gene’s heart. The vomiting, for example, was an entrance to the basement where Gene hid his anger. It was a fierce struggle getting down there. Gene denied the vomiting had any significance for a long time, insisting it was a coincidence, although it was immediately preceded by Don blaming Gene’s illness for the shelf error.
Remember, we discovered that, in fact, there hadn’t been a mistake. Gene confirmed this for both of us by checking his memory with Don the same day he informed his father that he was in therapy. Much to Gene’s surprise (not to mine) Don didn’t object to his seeing me, although he was dismissive of its being useful. Once over that, Gene told his father that he remembered counting the tall and deep shelves and found them to be correct. Don, Gene reported, was delighted. “You remember that?” he said with a smile and they had a rare relaxed afternoon together. Don even showed Gene some recent photos he had taken. Being reminded of the shelf fiasco — given his current success as a photographer — was pleasant for Don. The bullying gallery owner was now fawning toward the newly successful photographer. Indeed, Don confided to Gene, a friend recently told Don that the gallery owner bragged to him that his shelves had been built and designed by the “brilliant Don Kenny.” Later that night, Don joked to Carol, with Gene present, that he should send the gallery owner a bill now. The adults laughed. This is, of course, the difference between adult and childhood experience. For them, it was a parody of their conflicts and neurosis; for Gene, it was the tragic original.
I knew Gene’s therapy was almost done the day he finally relived what he felt, not what his parents had told him to feel, at the moment he threw up on Bosch’s vision of hell. He had long since understood that he was desperate to believe his father’s lie. Given a choice between Don as a disingenuous opportunist, willing to blame his child rather than confront the gallery owner, or as a decent man who couldn’t juggle the dual responsibility of fatherhood and work, Gene much preferred the latter. Don’s cover-up was that Gene was ill, so Gene performed on cue. What had remained hidden from Gene was the deeper feeling, what in jargon we would call the introjection of Gene’s rage at the betrayal, the deep betrayal not only of himself by his father, but the much more terrible betrayal by Don of Gene’s cherished image of his father. It is fair to say, in psychological terms, that Gene would rather die than see his father as he really was, a man who would neglect his child, abandon his dignity, and lie, in order to get his work exhibited. And so the real Gene did die. But the rage at the murder was there and it erupted out of him, pieces of himself spilling on the art. Erupted, but in the safe way — with the marvelous self-defeating logic of neurosis — in a way that could punish his father, the gallery owner, and the alibiing Gene. From then on Gene was to despise himself, the child who was a willing accomplice to the death of Don the self-assured carpenter and his beloved apprentice son.
Gene wept the day he relived the incident as himself. In great silent drops, he mourned. First he said, “I knew he didn’t love me,” in a dreadful tone of conviction and the tears rolled. “I knew that he didn’t really care about anything but his pictures.”
“And you threw up on a picture,” I said, pedantically and with wrong-headed coolness, I’m sorry to report.
“Yeah …” There was a painful silence. “He didn’t care about himself. He didn’t even care about me.”
Of course, this was not a moment of common sense or realism. I know it is the melodramatic emotions therapy evokes from apparently simple events that makes it so easy to dismiss. In life, some would slap Gene and tell him to grow up. Others would hug him and say, “Of course, your father loves you. He was just confused and scared. We all make mistakes …” and so on. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way children experience life. It isn’t really the way we feel inside, either, in the softest and most hidden part of ourselves. People often confuse not having visited that interior with its not existing.
It took another year, our third, before Gene was able to accept both what it had meant to him as a child and what it meant in the real world. He was, at last, able to see his father as a whole man, not as a pair of extreme choices. And he was also able to see that a quarrel between his parents wasn’t somehow a by-product of his scarlet fever.
The last gain was useful. His parents split up during the third year of his therapy. It turned out that Don had been having an affair with one of the women painters in the Garage group for years. He broke it off and simultaneously left his wife. After several successful shows Don felt confident his career was launched successfully and he abruptly became unwilling to stay in a fractured marriage or continue a fractured love affair. Clearly, he was so driven by the outside world’s view of him that once Don was an acknowledged success he felt entitled to seek romantic happiness as well.
Gene understood the divorce’s cause and effect better than his parents. In fact, he had experienced their problems, covering up for them, years before they confronted them. (Actually, they never did confront the truth of their lives. Carol told herself the marriage was happy until Don became “swell-headed.” Don told himself that Carol had convinced him he was a worthless and unlovable man; thanks to his success he discovered that he was fine, and concluded she was the sick one.) It was this aspect of Gene’s neurosis, his willingness to be the fall guy for his parents’ conflicts, that I came to like. I never liked the Gene who pulled with his mother against his father’s ambitions, the Gene who vomited his rage on his father’s art. He was too much like the young Rafe I still did not approve of. But this Gene, the child who understood his parents’ need to pretend that their long dead marriage was still alive, that Gene I could feel sorry for. And I was proud of how patient and mature he was in dealing with the grandiose Don and his grief-stricken mother after the separation.
I have only covered a section of Gene’s analysis and his life. Therapy’s most encouraging and beautiful by-product, the flowering of personality once the bonds of illness are loosened, was quite vigorous and impressive when it came to Gene. The boy who had never shown a dedicated interest in anything — intensity for work and ambition being a betrayal of his mother and a frightening impersonation of the father who hurt him — quickly found an interest in electrical engineering and computers, then at the beginnings of the microchip revolution. Both mother and father were baffled by his scientific and mechanical interests. Carol was literary and Don visual. They were ignorant and hostile to technology’s pragmatism.
Gene, by sixteen, worked hard in school for the first time. I suggested he try for a summer program at Johns Hopkins offered to bright high school students. (I had him tested and found out he had extraordinary math aptitude, something that had been hidden by his attendance at a progressive non-testing school.) He qualified easily. There he discovered his love of computers and his knack for understanding not only their abstract logic but their mechanism as well. One Room, to their credit, allowed him to concentrate on this new interest. Our therapy ended when Gene graduated high school, got into his first choice, MIT, and left for Boston. There he hoped to learn how to build the machines that were already revolutionizing our world. The therapy was ready to terminate anyway. Gene had developed, emerging as a distinct and clear image from his parents’ darkroom.