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5 The 1960s: Stony Brook, Stanford, and Spectrometers Scientific research is a very odd occupation. —John Rowan Wilson Paul left Pittsburgh in 1963 for the nascent chemistry faculty of Stony Brook. Shortly after Rose Mary followed, and their marriage ran into trouble. Rose Mary and Paul’s fifth wedding anniversary took place the day President Kennedy was shot. Rose Mary dates the beginning of her marriage problems and her illness from that time. Paul told her he had found a job on a new campus of the State University of New York, or SUNY, then located in Oyster Bay. She looked on the map: well, Oyster Bay was not Manhattan, where as a city girl she would have liked to live, but it was reasonably close to civilization. Then Paul said they would be going to Stony Brook because a new campus was being built there. She looked at the map again. Her finger kept moving east and east and east, past all the little towns and out into nothing. There she found Stony Brook. Rural life simply did not suit her. Paul tried to help. He called the Drama Department at Stony Brook and said he noticed they were doing Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit in the new community theater. His wife had just finished working on a production of No Exit in Pittsburgh. Did they need help? Yes, they did need someone with her experience. Rose Mary began to feel that Paul was married to his work and not to her. From their earliest times together, when Paul was working at the Mellon Institute, she was lonely for his company. This feeling was only magnified after the move to Stony Brook. They were living in parallel worlds, she thought. She had always known that they were “opposites,” but hoped that they would balance in some way. It never happened. They 68 Chapter 5 would go out to dinner, and she would expect to then take in a movie or some other entertainment. But no: Paul would drop her off and go back to the laboratory. Looking back, she feels she should have known much earlier that the marriage could not work. Did Paul love his lab more than his family? How could a man care more about incomprehensible science than about his family? And then the illness began to manifest. Rose Mary still had wonderful times during which she felt like superwoman . She was the life of the party; she could do no wrong; she needed no sleep. “I still miss my highs,” she told me years later. At first the cycles were more an inconvenience than anything else. But she became less and less able to function in the times between those glorious, exuberant dancing moods. And during the highs, she gradually found herself “doing crazy things.” She was diagnosed as having manic-depression, what we now call bipolar disorder. In the beginning the cycles were absolutely predictable: two weeks high, two weeks low, almost like a menstrual cycle. Maybe, she and her husband figured, she was suffering from postpartum depression. Rose Mary and Paul went first to an internist , then to an endocrinologist, and then to a psychiatrist. Because the cycles were monthly, the first efforts at treatment were hormonal. This strategy proved ineffective. The psychiatrist was not encouraging. He told Paul that people with such behavioral patterns wear out their caregivers . There were three periods of major illness, 1963–64, 1966–67, and 1970–72. At first Paul was very attentive and solicitous. He would look after the kids during her depressive episodes and make her breakfast. The second wave of severe illness was even worse than the first. A manic phase resulted in a full ninety days of sleeplessness. In the following depression she could not eat, had no appetite for food or life, and couldn’t get out of bed. Paul was again the perfect attendant, but while he cared for her tenderly, he just could not deal with her manic crises. At one point, without telling her husband, she went off to a conference in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “I was dancing and singing,” she said, “and people called Paul because I was acting so strangely.” Paul retrieved her and “I hid in a closet because I didn’t want to be with him. I went to N. Nassau Psychiatric hospital within a couple of days.” The family was in crisis, and Paul took the two children to his sister, who had five...

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