For Whom The Bell Tolls

This day is the only one on the calendar I spend on "What if...," with the subject my first wife, Carol Crosby.  We were married in 1960 and had eight years of marriage, six of which were as much as anyone could ever imagine with adventurous living taking us across the country, to Europe and back.  We went from ordinary incomes to wealth and notable accomplishments, all collapsing into a nightmare of schizophrenia.  Had I to do it over again would call a priest instead of psychiatrists who only gave her stupefying drugs while emptying our bank account expertly, efficiently and completely.

I have been at odds with doctors since I was two when one left me in the aftermath of an accident saying I would not make it through the night.  My mother sat with me till dawn, saving me with pure will. She was an amazing woman many in ways.  She was an RKO contract dancer for theaters and movies when the studios had the distribution and vaudeville was hot.   You may have seen her in a Buzby Berkeley extravaganza of the 30's dancing on the bow of a battleship or up a spiral staircase to Heaven, but she finished as a college Latin professor in a "battlefield" promotion; consistent with stories of our lives.  I'm from two families that never did anything ordinary ways, but always managed to survive and thrive through wars, revolutions, good times and bad only to find that great success only  gives you more fashionable problems.  It is amazing how many friends you get when the word is out, "He's rich!"  Well, medical science and two divorce lawyers fixed that.

Medical science has not found a cause for schizophrenia and from what I observed in Carol's case two souls were competing for her mind.  One was male and what a mind it was:  She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Illinois.  When she introduced me to three of her PBK friends they openly wondered what she saw in me!  They were high-born Chicago girls marrying young dons from similar backgrounds.  Nonetheless, I had fun with that meeting; she laughed and stuck with me anyway.  She once said she knew life with me would be a "roller coaster" and I was a curiosity as her parents were rather dour working-class people who thought I was from outer space. They much preferred one of the U of I princes Carol had been dating, but he would never marry her given her roots. Class and snobbery were then and today are very much alive in America.  

Carol divorced me when she knew she would never be well as she had not told me of her affliction.  Her sister and I concluded she had diagnosed herself at age nine from childhood remarks in a sandbox as they had an institutionalized schizophrenic uncle and she had an understanding of the disease at age nine!  That did not surprise me.  She read everything and had a reference or quote from literature for every occasion.  The last time I saw her she kissed me goodbye saying, "Go now, you have all the life we have left to live."  It was the poignant and stunningly appropriate ending of Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls."

Adrian Vance