Haywire

by Brooke Hayward

  My heart ached for him. Oklahoma oil fields would have been much better than this.

  “I mean, I would have been happier,” Bill was saying, “they never asked me—going to a public school, living at home. This is my fourth consecutive year in boarding school. There’s something creepy about all these Eastern prep schools anyway. But I’ve always envied the kids who go to public school and drive their own cars and go on dates and live at home, and I never have seen why I couldn’t do that.”

  “Didn’t you ever ask?”

  “No. I guess not. We’re programmed to the idea that boarding school is the only way to get into a good college, and that’s what you have to do to survive.” He smiled at me ruefully.

  “When are they going to let you out of here? What do you want me to say to Father? Tell me what to do.” Terrible, I thought; this place was enough to drive anyone crazy. Even if the idea of running away had never occurred to Bill before, this experience would take care of that. Run! I wanted to yell.

  “Tell him—” Bill looked away. “Tell him to set me free. Tell him to call off Kubie. Tell him I’d understand it if I’d tried to kill someone or—No, it’s useless. Don’t tell him anything.”

  When I left Regent Hospital, I called Father and told him that I was very angry. I said that whatever Bill’s problem was, it didn’t warrant the extremes that were being taken to correct it, that just because he was going through his own brand of nonconformity didn’t mean he should be locked up like a lunatic.

  “He’s acting like one,” replied Father. “He’s got a behavior problem neither Nan nor I is equipped to deal with. He’s broken every rule at Lawrenceville: drinking, smoking, television sets under the sheets at night, Christ knows what else. They can’t keep him. What am I supposed to do with him? He won’t speak to your mother, he refuses to speak to me. His attitude is just awful.”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling ill equipped myself to deal with the situation. “He thinks you’re displeased with him—at the very least, unfriendly. He’s discovered the most effective way to return hostility is by ignoring you.”

  “What do you mean?” snapped Father. “That just makes me angrier.”

  “That’s the point. It’s a good attention-getter. Why don’t you just ignore him, too? If you stop trying to bend him to your own vision of what he should be doing with his life—”

  “Brooke,” responded Father impatiently. “Don’t be a buttinsky. I have to tell you something. I’ve lived a lot longer than you and I’m a lot smarter. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  A week later, Dr. Kubie told Bill they had finally found the perfect place for him: a clinic in Topeka, Kansas, named Menninger’s, founded in 1920 by the illustrious psychiatrist Karl Menninger. Kubie showed Bill some fancy architectural drawings of the place that made it look very posh and luxurious, and told him there were no bars on the windows, that he could leave if he wanted to, but he wouldn’t want to because it was really nice. Nan borrowed Bill Paley’s DC-3, an executive plane with comfortable seats and a bar, hired two male nurses, and flew Bill out to Topeka. That’s how my brother came to be at Menninger’s.

  Truman Capote:

  “I had been with Slim and Leland at the feria in Spain and we came back to Paris.…

  “Bridget had come down from school to visit them. They had to leave for New York one day before she was due back, and Leland said, well, why didn’t Bridget just stay with me? And I was delighted. I thought she was so beautiful, like some extraordinary Eastern enamel I had just met her, and immediately responded to her more than I ever have to any girl that age. I loved her looks, I loved the way her mind worked, I loved her humor. She was a very straightforward person, a little shy, but not really. She had a wonderful directness once you made contact with her; then she trusted you. I did feel there was some kind of permanent sadness about her, which was curious because she was so radiant-looking. I often wondered if she knew how good-looking she was.…

  “In Paris, she hadn’t really been around too much, so that first night I said, ‘I’m going to take you to Maxim’s.’ She had never been to Maxim’s, and the whole idea flattered and flustered and pleased her all at the same time. She went through all kinds of little-girl antics like ‘I haven’t anything to wear,’ and she wasn’t really a little girl, she was sixteen, but no ordinary sixteen-year-old girl by any means—not that I mean she was sophisticated—way beyond anything like that; I just think she was intelligent. We went into Maxim’s and we had a very, very grand dinner. She loved the whole thing. We talked a lot about diaries. Curiously enough, she had read a lot of diaries. And she asked me if I had ever read any of the diaries of Anaïs Nin, which was odd because at that time nobody had heard of Anaïs Nin. She said she’d heard of these extraordinary diaries, had I read them? And I remember being quite startled, especially since they hadn’t been published. I knew Anaïs Nin, had known her for about ten years, and I said, ‘No, they haven’t any of them been published yet; how do you know about them?’ And she said, ‘Well, I read a book of hers called A Spy in the House of Love.’ I was quite startled by that, too.…

  “And then, one day, I went over to Gstaad. I wrote her a note and told her I was coming. It was February, wintry, a dreary day. We had lunch at a nice little place in town near the Palace Hotel and went for a long walk. There was a school there, Le Rosay, and all these boys were out playing hockey. We stood and watched them and discussed which ones were attractive and which ones weren’t, and why. And she was very expert. ‘Oh, no, no,’ she said, ‘he looks attractive—wait until he runs; you’ll see it’s all very odd, the way he runs.’ She had a good time that day. We laughed a lot.

  “After that, I was living abroad for four or five years and when she—when that happened, I hadn’t seen her in such a long time. And I must say I really was stunned.…”

  A few months later, I was told that Bridget was now at Austen Riggs. The reasons for her hospitalization were not entirely clear. She had spent that year as a freshman at Swarthmore. She’d been doing very well there and had a roommate she’d liked enormously. Father and Nan had gone to visit her several times, but on their last visit they had found her in a room by herself. When they asked her why, she said she didn’t know, she just preferred to be alone. She didn’t want anyone around her. And finally, she didn’t want to go back at all. The only place she did want to go was to Europe, although when pressed for details, she was vague. She appealed to Father and said she needed help; there was something the matter with her. She was vague about that, too.

  Once again the old family retainer, Dr. Kubie, was called in to advise. Once again he advised Riggs. Mother supported him. Father did not. He contended that he couldn’t possibly afford it; Bill’s expenses at Menninger’s alone were driving him to wrack and ruin. (And what’s more, he wasn’t at all sure he was getting his money’s worth. Bill certainly didn’t seem to be appreciative; he’d just cut his way to freedom through a steel-mesh window screen with his cuticle scissors.) Mother said she felt so strongly about the positive benefits of Riggs that she would like to finance Bridget’s stay there by selling her own securities. Father said okay; what did Bridget think? Bridget said she thought it might be a good idea.

  I, too, was asked what I thought. I said I was sorry; it bore out the old domino theory, which, for obvious reasons, I didn’t want to believe in.

  At the point when Bridget made the decision to go to Riggs, nobody knew there was anything physically the matter with her. Later, when they reconstructed events, Father and Nan realized that she’d had seizures they’d never known about. There had been indications. When she’d come home at Christmas vacation, she’d sent word down on Christmas morning that she didn’t feel well and couldn’t get out of bed. They’d brought her presents up to her and had had a Christmas party in her room. Afterward, she’d slept for two or three days. Looking back, it even seemed possible that her fanatic secretiveness was in some way related. Perhaps she didn’t want he
r illness discovered; perhaps, for a while, she thought it might go away on its own.

  After several incidents at Riggs in which she passed out and remained unconscious for forty-five minutes to an hour, she was transferred to the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General. Everyone was alarmed; Mass. General was a closed hospital, and we thought if she ended up there she would be scarred for life. The results of the electroencephalogram and other tests were not conclusive. Bridget returned to Riggs.

  I drove there twice to see her. The first time, she was living at the center itself; the second, in Stockbridge as an outpatient. On both occasions she seemed cheerful. Our past differences were overshadowed by the present situation; we did not discuss them. She introduced me to her friends and to several doctors, showed me around, asked me to stay to lunch.

  She told me that she was making progress. At first she’d refused to talk to the doctors; she would sit in silence until the scheduled hour was up. Now she had a wonderful doctor, a woman, Margaret Brenman, who was the foremost hypnotherapist in the country. Margaret Brenman, incidentally, was married to Bill Gibson, the playwright (Two for the Seesaw), who had written a novel, The Cobweb, about a mental institution. Bridget said Dr. Brenman was the only person in the world she completely trusted. She had come to like Riggs and its routine; she was so busy she rarely had any time. She had become involved with local theatre production as a stage manager. One of her friends took me aside and praised Bridget’s efficiency; everyone was amazed that a girl with such a delicate air about her could be so immensely practical.

  Bridget confided in me that the main reason she had wanted to come there was her fainting spells. They frightened her terribly, particularly now that there seemed to be no conclusive medical explanation for them. The first one had occurred while she had been at school in Switzerland. The Swiss doctors’ original diagnosis had been that she had a possible dietary deficiency; after all, as I knew (only too well), she had peculiar eating habits. She would go on hunger strikes. At one point, much to the school’s consternation, she had lived on nothing but cheese and chocolate for a month; at another, Pablum. However, the recent tests indicated that these spells might be caused by stress. But there was no way to predict them, to prevent them, or, once under way, to control them. In fact they had become more violent with time.

  Because of this, she was glad to be at Riggs. She knew she had emotional problems as well, but the doctors couldn’t say which caused what. Did emotions precipitate the seizures, or did the seizures affect her mental stability? As long as she stayed at Riggs, at least, she felt protected from herself. If she collapsed and went into a comatose state, Riggs could handle it. And privately. She was pathological about privacy. She didn’t want people to know about her sickness, to discuss it, to witness it. She didn’t want to talk to Mother or Father about it, and she didn’t want me to, either. For the time being, she didn’t want to return to the outside world. She felt more vulnerable there, and if she should have another attack—she lived in terror of that.

  Her relationship with Mother fluctuated. Mother and Kenneth had bought another, smaller house in Greenwich, overlooking the Byram River. Occasionally Bridget would drive down for a weekend. These weekends were sometimes comfortable, sometimes strained. By now, Mother had been told that Bridget’s fainting spells were more serious than she had supposed, that they were really seizures. Still, our understanding was confused. As it was explained to us, a convulsive seizure is the physical evidence of an electrical storm within the brain. This abnormal electrical activity is a phenomenon caused by the physical and chemical make-up of the discharging nerve cells in the brain. The overactivity of these cells produces disturbances in consciousness and in muscular coordination. Therefore, the fundamental or primary cause is chemical (or really electrophysicochemical). But the chain of events leading up to the brain’s chemical reaction can be infinitely varied. That variety was what made all the doctors evasive about giving pat answers when asked what Bridget really had. They told us that about 10 percent of the population had a predisposition to seizures but would never know it unless one or more of the contributing causes were also present. Some doctors believed that the causes were hereditary, some believed that they were symptomatic or acquired—by, for instance, some injury to the brain. Bridget remembered a concussion she’d had after a skiing accident; perhaps that had triggered the seizures. In any case, at the top of the list of contributing causes was emotional stress. Most seizures occur, we were told, immediately after some unpleasant or terrifying experience. There might be an increase of seizures during periods of worry or unhappiness. In Bridget’s case, the possibilities were endless.

  The shame and the fear she felt about her seizures were as old as history itself. The very word “epilepsy” comes from the Greek word meaning “to be seized.” Martin Luther called it the “demon disease.” The supernatural interpretation of seizures is centuries old. And over the centuries, the casting out of the responsible devils took many forms. In Christ’s time, people spat on epileptics as a precaution against being possessed themselves; from this custom arose the name “morbus insputatus” or “the spitting disease.” In the Middle Ages, openings were sawed in the skulls of those suffering from unbearable headaches or convulsive seizures to let the evil spirits escape. Not until the eighteenth century did leading European physicians abandon a belief in demon possession. In many parts of the earth, men still continue to treat seizures by exorcism. And even now, when the image of the demon as an evil force is no longer valid, the most civilized and educated man still fears being rendered unconscious by something that seems irrational and uncontrollable.

  With Bridget, we knew that after a seizure the length of time it took for her to return to normal was commensurate with the length of time she’d been out—which could be a matter of minutes or days. If, say, she passed out for half an hour, it might be six hours before she was herself again. We also knew that before one, she was given a warning that manifested itself by feelings of mental confusion or stupor, nausea and dizziness. During the time she was unconscious, her pulse rate was drastically lowered and her respiration slowed; muscular rigidity set in; her body became cold; all the symptoms of catatonia were present. Catatonia, or catalepsy, is a syndrome most often seen in schizophrenia, so Dr. Brenman asked that Bridget not be subjected to situations which might cause severe emotional agitation. On several occasions, therefore, when plans had been made for Bridget to drive down to Greenwich, Dr. Brenman telephoned Mother and canceled the visit; she suggested that Bridget might be in no state, at that moment, to risk any further emotional disturbance.

  These calls from Dr. Brenman left Mother depressed. She correctly interpreted them to mean that Bridget didn’t want to see her. The implication that Bridget’s seizures could be triggered by the vagaries of her relationship with her mother was a terrifying one. Dr. Brenman, positioned between Bridget and the outside world as a kind of intermediary, became, at these times, the object of Mother’s frustrated rage. Dr. Brenman religiously adhered to the sacred principle of the doctor-patient relationship and refused to reveal any of Bridget’s most intimate confidences. While Mother, on the one hand, expressed her endorsement of this principle, she was, on the other, subconsciously threatened by it. It placed her in competition for her daughter’s soul. As much as she truly believed in the process of psychoanalytic therapy, there were moments when she now came to doubt its efficacy. Maybe it was all a futile stab in the dark. Always haunted by the specter of failure—failure as a mother, and therefore as a human being—she began to alternate between periods of high elation and quiet but grave despair.

  Her letters to Bridget reflected these swings even more precisely than her spoken expression of them.

  Dearest Bridget,

  I want you to know that if I appeared cold to you today that it was because I was afraid of crying—and of having to leave the house. I love you as much as I ever have—which, my Brie, is as much as it is possible for me to lov
e anyone—and nothing can ever change this, not even if you go on hating me forever. No one in your whole life will ever love you as unselfishly as your mother. I want, at any cost to my personal happiness, your welfare and happiness. I hope that you will remember this no matter what happens.…

  Dearest Bridget,

  Perhaps you have noticed that my letters have pretty well stopped? It has finally occurred to me that if you don’t want to see me, or talk on the phone, or even answer my letters, you certainly can’t want to receive them. I am sorry, I hate for there to be no contact between us whatsoever.

  I have heard from several sources that you feel you have no home. Perhaps you only say this to people for dramatic effect. I hope so. But in case you are fooling yourself, too, I want to remind you that you chose to leave your home, that where I am I will always consider you belong, whether you want it or not. You can choose not to behave like a daughter, darling, but you can’t choose not to be one, just as I can’t choose the kind of behavior I would most like from a child, or the kinds of looks, or the size, or the personality.

  There is nothing you can do to stop my loving you, and worrying about you, and hoping always for your return. Perhaps you feel some guilt about going to live with your father three years ago, but please don’t delude yourself as to the reason you went.

  Have a lovely summer. I shall miss you as always.…

  Dearest Bridget,

  I’m glad you wrote that letter, and I know how hard it was for you. I’ve always known that you haven’t hated me, but that it was an excuse to cover up other feelings you couldn’t explain or couldn’t face. But so long as you believed it was hatred, the result was the same.