Free Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg Page A

Twain. The selection of that play resonated especially for Tom, then fifteen and a half, who attended the Kingswood School in West Hartford, the campus of which had been one of Twain’s former homes.
    Tom was growing up to be tall and handsome, but he had been a diffident boy—in many ways not his father’s son. He lacked the swagger. As a young boy he developed facial tics and later suffered from St. Vitus’s dance, an ailment then attributed to stress. Dr. Hepburn expressed no great concern, noting simply that his father had walked through life with a shaking head. Mrs. Hepburn came to believe that perhaps the pressures of so dominant a father, one who seldom parceled out praise, might have been difficult for Tom. In time, however, Tom outgrew the condition, becoming confident at school—popular, athletic, and a very good student. As many of the neighborhood kids still considered the Hepburns outsiders, a colony unto themselves, Kate felt unusually close to her older brother. “Jimmy” even wore his clothes.
    On the Saturday of their spring break in New York, the children went to bed around ten, after Tom had entertained Kate and his godmother, playing banjo for them. The next morning he did not come down from his attic bedroom for breakfast. At nine, Kate went to inquire. When he did not answer her calls, she went into the unfinished studio—only to find him, next to the bed, hanging from some torn sheeting that had been tied to a rafter. Kate ripped down the sheet and felt her brother’s skin. It was cold.
    The thirteen-year-old was in too much shock to remember precisely what happened next. In her memory, she ran to a doctor across the street, shouting that her brother was dead. A woman at the doctor’s house said that if he was dead, he didn’t really need a doctor. In time, adults wandered onto the scene; Kate’s parents came down to New York. She sailed with them on a ferry to New Jersey, where they had her brother’s body cremated. During the crossing she saw, for the first time, her mother cry. She never saw as much from her father.
    For days, people grasped at explanations. Kate recalled that there had been a hanging incident in A Connecticut Yankee that had intrigued Tom; and Dr. Hepburn recalled that Tom had been fascinated with a story the doctor had told of being able to fake a hanging, by tightening up one’s neck. But the more she thought about the theories, the less likely they seemed. The truth was this family had already been plagued with three suicides. And even considering Tom’s eventual success at school, Kate suggested, “He was never really charged up quite like the rest of us. I had heard that maybe a girl had rejected him—who knows, maybe a boy. Whatever it was, he simply could not cope.”
    Whatever it was, nobody in the family talked about the incident for years. Whether it was accidental or intentional, over lost love or newfound feelings, young Tom Hepburn was dead and not all the deliberating in the world could bring him back. Nor, I was to see, would he ever be completely laid to rest. His ashes were buried in the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, but there were no family visits. Tom would haunt Kate for the rest of her life, and she argued one scenario then another in search of an explanation. While she simply could not understand why he would take his own life, she was willing to accept that he had. “There’s just so much about people,” she concluded, “that we can ever really know.”
    Dr. and Mrs. Hepburn refused to allow gloom to permeate their lives. Previous generations on both sides of the family had treated disappointments and depression, indeed, mental illness, simply by forcing themselves above it or swiftly succumbing. Moaning and complaining had never played in their house; and now it was simply not tolerated. All the Hepburns were encouraged to move on with their lives with even greater