They eloped and they went to live with his family. Her father came and made a scene at his new in-laws' house, begging Ruth to come home. She refused. Not long afterward Ruth's mother wrote her a letter telling of her cancer. Ruth had not known her mother was sick and would never have left if she had. Within a month of marrying Edmonds she knew she'd made a mistake, but was now pregnant. She said she wished she had returned to Vassar instead of getting married. Three years later her mother died.

At age 21, Ruth continued her education at Barnard. After graduation she entered Columbia Medical School. At the end of her first year, she decided to divorce her husband. She said the divorce agreement was very favorable to him and that she had limited access to her children, Francis and Ruth. Ruth said Edmonds was hard on the children following her visits, so she stopped going. She renewed her relationship with her daughter when she was in college, but she never reconciled with her son.

Not long after her divorce, Ruth met fellow medical student William Beuscher. She fell in love with him immediately. "He looked like Clark Gable, only blond," she said. They both went into psychiatry and did their residencies at McLean. She had five more children with Beuscher, but their marriage was anything but blissful. Ruth volunteered that she "was not the easiest person to live with," but quickly added that her husband was "pretty mean to me." I asked for an example. "Little things," she said. "I would come in with a new dress and he would say things like, 'That's a nice dress. I'm surprised you had the sense to pick it out.'" Ruth said she realized after marrying him that her husband had a drinking problem. "When a man has to have four martinis within 20 minutes of getting home, you begin to wonder."

Yet Ruth remained empathetic toward her ex-husband, recalling his "perfectly dreadful childhood," a mother who ran off with another man, and his own analysis with a therapist who had a psychotic break during his treatment. She said, "I don't think of him as a son of a bitch. I think of him as a tragic hero."

As Ruth and I sat in her apartment, reliving her life, I asked what impact Sylvia's death had on her. She said she was deeply shaken and saddened. And she felt guilty. The day after her husband broke the news to her, she went to see a McLean staff psychiatrist who supervised her on the case. She said he assured her that Sylvia's suicide was not her fault. "You did good work with her, and gave her five or six years more than she would have had -- and she did all this writing. You can feel good about that," he said. And she did.

I asked Ruth if she had worried about Sylvia committing suicide when her condition worsened. She said, "I sort of was when she wrote those very depressed letters in the couple of months before she died. Because she said it was like the way she had felt before when she had done that" -- referring to her attempted suicide -- "and, so, of course I began to worry about it then. That's why I knew I ought to bring her home." When I asked Ruth how many letters she had received from Sylvia, she spread her hands apart indicating about a foot. I asked her why she burned them. "I don't know," she said. "It was after my divorce and I burned a lot of things. I was starting over." She said later she regretted burning the letters.

Ruth said that Sylvia wanted to return to America after Ted left her, but did not have the money. She anguished over whether to wire her the money and find her a job in Boston. Ruth knew she couldn't treat her again if she did, but saving Sylvia was more important. Yet she knew it was not accepted for a psychiatrist to intervene in a patient's life, even one who would no longer be in treatment. And, she said, her husband "would have exploded." Ruth regretted deciding against it.

In two separate letters written to Sylvia in September 1962, months before her suicide, Ruth gave her specific advice on how to handle her divorce. One letter is so directive it conveys an air of desperation. She advised Sylvia to get a good lawyer, and to ban Ted from her bed and the house. This letter reads more like one from a close friend or relative than a therapist.

Ted Hughes, who clearly read at least some of Ruth's correspondence to Sylvia, retaliated years later in his volume "Howls & Whispers" where he quotes directly from one of the letters in the eponymous poem, "And from your analyst: 'Keep him out of your bed. Above all, keep him out of your bed.'" Hughes goes on to suggest the "analyst" was among those who were really to blame for his wife's suicide ("What did they plug into your ears/ That had killed you by daylight on Monday?" he wrote). Hughes, of course, having left Sylvia for another woman shortly before her death, had been widely criticized in the wake of her suicide. For her part, Ruth told me that while she initially liked Hughes, she eventually grew to view him as "evil."

The impact of Ruth's advice on Sylvia remains part of the mystery surrounding the last days of her life. But Ruth's devotion to Sylvia is unlikely to be disputed. Ruth closes one letter with these words: "I have often thought, if I 'cure' no one else in my whole career, you are enough. I love you. Good luck, --Ruth B."

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