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Several aspects of the deaths contributed to my stupefaction.
Another was the mens prominence.
Had these men actually been seeing patients perhaps even performing operations while already on their route to disintegration?
(Such was the case, as it turned out.)
Yes, they were that much alike.
But I got so I could tell which was which.
Stewarts neck was thicker.
Other patients could tell which twin was which because they detected a difference not in anatomy but in personality.
Their doctor, kindly on one visit, would be strangely inaccessible on the next.
Thus, the story grew that one was a good twin, the other a bad twin.
But there was widespread disagreement as to which was the good one, which the bad.
Eventually I left off seeing him.
This was about eight years ago.
I had found him/them distant, remote, incapable of or unwilling to engage in discussion or explanation.
Hardly what one wants in a doctor.
His/their reputations were good.
Perhaps because of having felt so stronglymyDr.
Marcuss distance from life, I wasnt really surprised when I read of his and his brothers deaths.
The initial police reaction was that they were victims of a suicide pact.
Stewart had died several days before Cyril.
No cancer: no heart condition.
It is not easy to portray the Marcuses.
The relatives are loath to talk about them, for obvious reasons.
The wife from whom Cyril was divorced has children whom he sired.
She feels an enormous, brooding compassion for her ex-husband.
I went first to the building in which the Marcuses had been found dead.
Because the two doctors eschewed small talk.
no one talked to them much after a while.
But when Sich reached his side, the twin recovered his balance and said in an icy tone.
Inside the apartment that day, the other brother Stewart already lay dead.
The newspapers described the apartment in which the bodies were found as messy.
Stronger words were used by building employees and policemen who went into the rooms.
Neighbors had been complaining for two days that there was a smell emanating from 10H.
Terrell says, I knew what the smell meant.
I was in combat, you see.
Once before he had been called upon to break initiate the door to 10H.
It sounded like a phone off the hook.
This time he rang the doorbell and began to pound loudly on the door.
Terrell said to Stewart, Theres something not quite kosher at your brothers place.
I think your brother needs help.
What happened next amazed and intrigued Terrell.
There was, he says, a long silence.
He does need help.
Ill be right over.
In Stewarts presence, Terrell took apart the door lock.
When they entered the apartment, they saw Cyril lying unconscious in the foyer.
Terrell said, Give him artificial respiration.
I cant touch my brother.
I cant, said Terrell.
But in the end, neither of them did it.
Stewart was too shaken and Terrell went to call help and an ambulance.
Hes just about had it.
There is still, I think, some primitive terror of twins that lurks in us.
It arouses in us an almost primordial anxiety.Howcan it happen?
It cant, and yet it does.
And yet sometimes there was humor connected with the Marcuses twinship.
Sometimes this caused distress in people around them.
They did this twice.
It was painful enough to have two people do it.
I finally had to have my husband demand that they stop this.
It was as if one couldnt have an experience without sharing it with his brother.
At the same time, the brothers seem to have feared alienating each other.
Or at least Stewart feared alienating Cyril.
The friend called Stewart and said she had been recommended to him by a patient of Cyrils.
Stewart refused to see her.
I cant take patients away from my brother, he explained.
The woman argued with him.
I am not Cyrils patient; my friend was Cyrils patient and she has recommended you.
Stewart, this woman recalled, grew apoplectic and he said he would never see my friend or me.
Sometimes that feeling was expressed in harsh, cruel ways.
Gross had said to me that afternoon, I didnt know I was going to have twins.
Still, I suspected it.
There are twins in both my husbands and my own families.
But no one believed me.
The obstetrician a Dr. Marcus certainly didnt.
Ill never forget it.
He stared at me and he said, You pregnant women are all alike.
Just because you overeat and get fat, you think you are going to have twins.
He spoke to me with such contempt.
Which was funny, sincehewas a twin.
It is that they were frequently hostile, even hurtful, to their women patients.
Curiously, in view of their ultimate gaunt condition, they often seemed to insult women about their weight.
And there is another common thread in the accounts patients give of the Marcuses.
It is that they could not abide disagreement.
They seem to have grown paranoid and angry whenever they were questioned.
The woman accepted the explanation.
Again, still reasonable, he explained with some solicitude that he could not perform the operation.
He would do it the next morning.
And this was the odd part, said the woman.
I had always before found him pleasant, nice.
But once we began questioning him he flew off the handle, became overwrought.
He couldnt brook being questioned.
And he spoke so strangely that my husband decided I should just leave the hospital and seek another gynecologist.
I had the operation.
And I never went back to Cyril.
Most of the time I saw him, I was working full time as well as writing.
My time was very important to me.
And it wasnt as if the secretary had made a mistake.
I could see she was embarrassed.
She had no idea where he was.
Shed just been told to answer calls that way.
Id have to wait and eventually hed show up.
Despite these provocations, Ms. Baer continued seeing Stewart Marcus.
No one has ever spoken to me that way in my life.
This is not true in medicine with its private-practice secrecy and the unwillingness of doctors to criticize their peers.
Patients can, of course, leave doctors.
Nor had the kind of excitable, angry behavior which Ms. Baer describes arisen in the twins only recently.
What of their colleagues?
While they speak less freely than do the patients, they too reveal a dark side of the doctors.
Another doctor at New York Hospital with whom I spoke said, No one was shocked at their deaths.
They were isolates and had always kept to themselves.
It is common for identical twins to share psychological traits and capabilities as well as physical similarities.
Nor is it necessary or even sensible to ask, What made them die?
if the implication of the question is, Who did it?
What woman or man?
For many years the brothers had been withdrawn, isolated, suspicious.
But why hadnt they shared their suspicions, blazoned them about town?
I find I keep asking myself, Who was that woman whose anesthesia mask was removed?
It might have been me or you.
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