I wasn’t sure I wanted to read Facing the Wind, knowing that it concerned the impact “imperfect” children can have on families into which they’re born, and more specifically, a man who slaughtered his disabled son, two “normal” siblings, and his wife with a baseball bat. On occasion, I’ve been accused of preferring explorations spotlighting sinister aspects of the human species. Some couldn’t see, for example, how I’d gotten through an excruciatingly detailed account of the genocide in Rwanda. Answer: grotesque, appalling subject matter, but elegant writing.
The same can be said about Facing the Wind by Julie Salamon. I first noticed her byline when she turned out film criticism for The Wall Street Journal. (She later had a television column in The New York Times).
Then, I read 1991’s The Devil’s Candy, an impeccably researched, compellingly written dissection of the movie industry. No matter how grim the current tale, I knew I’d be in the hands of a masterful journalist.
Salamon didn’t initially intend to cover this territory. She started out sniffing around support groups for parents of handicapped kids, including the Industrial Home for the Blind in Brooklyn. There, she was told the story of Mary and Robert Rowe.
Their second son, Christopher, had multiple congenital disabilities, including blindness. Salamon suggests such a birth can induce a similar sequence of emotions as those following death of a loved one “shock, disappointment, grief, sorrow, and remorse” and finally, with any luck, acceptance.
The author tersely describes in the Foreword the announcement of Mary Rowe’s murder (and her children). “The killer was her husband, and he had always been an exemplary father, a lawyer, a man the women knew and admired. Robert Rowe was declared not guilty by reason of insanity in 1978, spent two and a half years in mental hospitals before being released, and then tried to resume normal life.”
As Salamon astutely notes, “The country would eventually overdose on support group intimacy as special interests multiplied in number and kind and as revelation, no matter how gross or outrageous or insipid, became a staple of television talk shows.” In the early 1970s, however, these beleaguered mothers found it “astonishing to be able to talk openly about the grief and guilt that terrorized them.”
Bob Rowe was a popular, charismatic speaker when he appeared before the group, viewed as an “unusually engaged” father. The Rowes, though they had joined late, began to emerge as role models.
And then… well, the title of Chapter 10 sums it up: “Unraveling.” Bob was 45 and experiencing career crises, but those were the least of his problems. He called a neighbor with a bizarre request.
“Tie me up, Murray,” he demanded desperately. “Before I do something terrible.”
Three weeks prior to pleading for restraint from Murray, Bob had had a vision.
“He woke up in the middle of the night,” Salamon reports, “and saw the face of his mother, who had died two years earlier. He heard her whisper, ‘Kill your family’.”
Not long afterward, Rowe began consulting a therapist, and was prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs. Ultimately, it was determined he should seek more intensive treatment at a psychiatric hospital.
Though diagnosed by one doctor as “grossly psychotic,” he was nonetheless discharged by the institution. He found it “harder and harder to distinguish himself from his damaged son. Both of them were cripples.”
Rowe’s fantasies involved “fixing things” for Mary and their unimpaired children by killing himself and Christopher. As we know, Bob’s solution went hideously farther than that.
Salamon goes on to present a lucid explanation of the insanity defense, which resulted in Rowe’s not guilty verdict, and a fascinating chronology of his incarceration, interspersed with contemporary notes by ward workers.
The final third of Rowe’s journey is not a violent one, but many will find it the most shocking and perverse.
Facing the Wind tackles a range of critical, disturbing issues. It reveals the fragility inherent in familial relationships, and can certainly be seen as an indictment, exposing this country’s woeful medical, psychiatric and judicial systems.
Those who say they read books, or watch movies, strictly for entertainment, should avoid this tale. Those willing to absorb harrowing scenes as part of a search for understanding won’t soon forget it.
Salamon scrupulously shuns sensationalism, but her style is by no means bland. Facing the Wind does exactly what great journalism is meant to do: lay out the facts, and challenge the reader to reexamine perceptions, assumptions and beliefs.
(Facing the Wind: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation, by Julie Salamon. Random House; 306 pp.; $24.95)
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