AN IMPERFECT UNION

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

Not so very long ago, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris were a literary love match of nearly mythic proportions. Married since 1981, they were best-selling and award-winning authors who were raising six children together; they gave interview upon interview describing how they critiqued each other's work, never allowing a single manuscript to leave their home without, as Dorris once put it, "consensus on every word." While some authors vary the dedications in their books, ticking off family and friends as the years go by, for Erdrich and Dorris, it seemed, there was only one Muse--the other. "To Michael, Complice in every word, essential as air," Erdrich wrote at the front of her best-selling The Beet Queen. "For Louise, Companion through every page, through every day. Compeer," read the dedication in Dorris' A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. In 1991 they even collaborated on a novel, Crown of Columbus. That book, too, became a best seller. "They were like a twin star system," says a friend, author Martin Cruz Smith. "I can't think of another pair of writers who work like that." Another good friend, Ruth Coughlin, almost breathless at the memory of seeing the couple on the dance floor, went even further, recalling the pair as "Scott and Zelda without the alcohol."

Yet beneath that high gloss of professional success lay struggle and intense self-doubt; behind their united front lurked dissatisfactions and secrets that eventually unraveled the whole idyllic package. And on April 11, Dorris, 52, was found dead in a Concord, New Hampshire, motel room. He had swallowed a lethal combination of pills and vodka and had tied a plastic bag over his head--a suicide method reminiscent of that used by the Heaven's Gate cultists weeks before. "To whomever finds me, sorry for the inconvenience," his suicide note read in part. "I was desperate. I love my family and my friends and will be peaceful at last."

In short order, the curtains of Dorris' and Erdrich's charmed lives were drawn back. It turned out the couple had separated about a year ago, and were in the middle of difficult divorce proceedings. The three Native American children the couple had adopted had led troubled lives to varying degrees--one had even been charged with trying to extort money from Dorris and Erdrich. And Dorris was living under another cloud: he was being investigated by the Minneapolis police department on charges that he had sexually abused one or more of his young daughters. Just nine days before his death, police had searched his Minneapolis home for evidence.

Did his suicidal impulse come suddenly, or build secretly for years? Late last week Erdrich stepped forward in an attempt to dispel speculation. She told the New York Times that she ended the 15-year marriage in large part because she had grown weary of supporting Dorris through his chronic depression. She had lived with his talk of suicide "from the second year of our marriage," she said. "He descended inch by inch, fighting all the way."

But a coterie of close friends who were in constant contact with Dorris in recent months saw a different side of the man--and cannot believe he was a child abuser. According to Douglas Foster, director of school affairs for the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Dorris was a "relatively cheerful, even-keeled, generous, outgoing person," whose anguish stemmed directly from recent events--the end of his marriage and the sex-abuse allegations. "Michael saw taking his own life as a rational way out," said Jeanne Friedman, a fund raiser in Berkeley who was close to Dorris for 26 years. "He felt that the charges would destroy his family, would destroy the body of work he had built up over his lifetime. He kept saying, 'All across the country, my books are in schools with young people. What do you think they're going to do when they hear about these charges?'"

The child-abuse allegations were reportedly made last December, after one of the couple's three biological daughters--Persia, 13, Pallas, 12, and Aza, 8--told her mother of abuse. Erdrich reported this to a health-care professional, who was obliged by law to tell police. Although such charges have become an increasingly frequent ploy in custody battles, Erdrich denied last week that she and Dorris were fighting over custody. With Dorris' death, the case is closed, and Erdrich's lawyers have filed a motion to keep the files sealed.

Dorris had made an earlier suicide attempt on Good Friday, ingesting pills and alcohol at a cottage on the farm he and Erdrich used to share in Cornish, New Hampshire. At that moment, his friend Foster called. During the conversation, Dorris said he had "activated the kit," and he then passed out. Foster alerted state police, who broke in and saved Dorris' life. After that, the author checked into a psychiatric facility. For a brief while, his friend Coughlin, who spoke to him many times a day, felt hopeful that Dorris was on the mend. He even talked excitedly about a new children's book he had started to write. Then on Thursday, April 10, he left the facility on a pass. He rented a car and registered at a motel under a false name and address. His body was discovered by police after the facility registered a missing person's report.

News of the suicide was a shock to the wide network of people Dorris and Erdrich had helped and writers whose work they encouraged. The couple met at Dartmouth, where Dorris, part Modoc Indian, had founded the Native American studies program, and Erdrich, also part Native American, was a student and later a writer-in-residence. While Erdrich won praise for her fiction, Dorris' most recognized achievement was his 1989 nonfiction book The Broken Cord. In it Dorris describes how, at age 26, he adopted a three-year-old Sioux boy, becoming one of the first single men in America to legally adopt a child. The child, Abel, had a constellation of mental and physical disabilities caused by the fact that his mother drank heavily during her pregnancy. Part memoir, part medical investigation into fetal-alcohol syndrome, especially among Native Americans, The Broken Cord was a best seller and became a 1992 made-for-TV movie. It also sparked congressional hearings into the syndrome and brought awareness of the dangers of drinking during pregnancy to a mass audience.

Anthony Rolo, editor of the Circle, a Native-American newspaper in Minneapolis and a friend of Erdrich's, says the couple's relationship began to founder as Dorris sought the spotlight and worked incessantly even as his depression worsened. Rolo says Dorris sometimes took out his depression on his wife: "I'm surprised [Louise] managed to keep her sense of self-worth and self-identity." Erdrich hoped that by separating from her husband, he would be spurred to seek the help he needed. "When she ended it," Rolo says, "she believed she was doing it for his benefit as well as for hers."

Their troubles with their children no doubt added to the marital burden. Abel died in a car accident in 1991, and their other two adopted children, Jeffrey, now around 25, and Madeline, 21, also struggled with fetal-alcohol problems and eventually became estranged from Dorris and Erdrich. "I don't think I was by any means the best parent my children could have found," Dorris acknowledged last month during a reading in Washington.

In 1995 Erdrich and Dorris pressed attempted-theft charges against Jeffrey, who had been working at odd jobs around the country, and was living in Denver. The charges stemmed from a rambling, five-page letter he wrote from the Denver County Jail, where he was awaiting prosecution on misdemeanor charges of beating his girlfriend. He wrote, "Think about what we put up with as helpless children. You beat us senseless, you terrorized us, you made us walk on eggshells, we feared you, and then Louise comes onto the picture. Instead of stopping his abuse, she kicks in." He blamed his own troubles with the law on having been abused and demanded $15,000 from Erdrich and help publishing a manuscript. "Very simple, people, you owe me!" he wrote. "You owe me a childhood, you owe me a life."

Lisa Wayne, the public defender who represented Jeffrey at the ensuing trials, contends that the letter, as well as letters written by Dorris to his son over the course of 10 years, is evidence that Dorris abused his children. She portrays the charges as an attempt by Dorris "to shut [Jeffrey] up." But according to people close to the couple, Jeffrey so frightened them that they essentially went into hiding, first in Montana, then in Minneapolis, where they moved in 1993 and where Erdrich and Dorris, on leave from Dartmouth, continued their writing. Their location, says a friend, was "a secret that had to be kept because they really believed someone in their lives would find them and hurt them."

In the end, the charges against Jeffrey didn't stick. His first trial ended with a hung jury. Pam Saunders, a television journalist who was forewoman of that jury, told TIME: "The letter could have been a form of acting out. It seemed like a nasty, emotional outburst rather than a real threat." At the second trial, Jeffrey was acquitted of the charge involving Dorris, and the jury hung in the charge involving Erdrich. The couple's lawyer in the case, Craig Truman, contends that Dorris made an unconvincing witness. "He was too sensitive to go through the hurly-burly world of the criminal-justice system. He was reaching out to Jeffrey [at the trial]. He was always worried--that he was too thin, not eating right, or whatever." According to Dorris' friends, the indignities of the trials were almost too much for the author to bear. Based on that experience, Dorris found it hard to have any hope that he would ever be exonerated of child-abuse charges.

For all that Dorris accomplished, there is much that his suicide leaves unfinished. There were the books in progress and the talks he was committed to give. And there was a creative-writing class at the University of Minnesota that he was supposed to teach this spring. In the school catalog he offered up an intimate, and prescient, course description: "The presumption in this seminar is that characters come to life line by line, experience by experience, and that after a certain point of accumulation their trajectory is, if not inevitable, at least out of the author's direct control." In the case of Michael Dorris' own story, fact and fiction may remain forever intertwined.

--Reported by Kevin Fedarko/Minneapolis, Rod Paul/Concord, Andrea Sachs/New York and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by KEVIN FEDARKO/MINNEAPOLIS, ROD PAUL/CONCORD, ANDREA SACHS/NEW YORK AND RICHARD WOODBURY/DENVER