He Wanted the Moon

by Mimi Baird,Eve Claxton

  My uncles signed the consent form, with my grandparents’ approval.

  They must have felt they had no other choice. My father’s medical records during the weeks leading up to his surgery make clear that his mental state was as compromised as ever.

  Galveston State Hospital, 1949

  September 18—Can tell very interesting but slightly fantastic tales. Seems eager to display medical knowledge but in most of discussion will suddenly switch conversation to Aztec history.

  October 23—Apparently having delusions. “There was a great catastrophe last night. There is water everywhere and Galveston is apparently floating away. It has broken away from its foundation, you know it is only an island, and we are floating away out to the sea.” Patient is very upset about this. He is very disarrayed in his dress and is very concerned about us floating away.

  December 7—Very confused this morning. Has talked about being on a boat, various different sports, asking us to make arrangements for a racehorse so he could enter a jumping contest in New England.

  December 19—Playing dominoes with other patients. Quiet today. Apologetic to excess at every mistake he makes. Wrote prescription for rash on another patient. Patient was playing dominoes with another patient when he started crying quietly.

  December 20—Patient is confused and appears agitated. Doubles up his fist as if he’d like to hit someone. He threatened attendants in kitchen this a.m. Chases attendant with a fork.

  December 22—Helped nurse make beds.

  On December 23, 1949, my father underwent a prefrontal bilateral lobotomy. His records contain copies of both the permits for treatment and the operation notes, and go on to describe a good but gradual recovery, until he was discharged to his brother Philip on February 23, 1950.

  After my father’s release from Galveston, I have no other records, no manuscript notes, and no more letters to or from friends. He seems to have stopped writing altogether. When I interviewed my father’s friend Frank Shaw, he told me he had seen Perry only once after his lobotomy, when my father returned to Boston for his sole visit to me. “We were all shocked,” Shaw told me. “He really wasn’t Perry anymore. All the fire had gone out of him.”

  My father spent the next few years recuperating in Texas. Early in 1959, a colleague of his from medical school found him a job as an ambulance attendant in Detroit and my uncle helped finance a move there. My father was living in a small room in a low-rent boardinghouse when, six weeks after his arrival in Detroit, one of the other tenants found him, drowned in his bathtub, after a seizure most likely brought on by his brain surgery.

  I applied for his death certificate. The date of his death was May 4, 1959. The cause of death was listed as “asphyxia by drowning.” On the same certificate his occupation is listed as “Doctor.” He was fifty-five years old.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I resolved to write a book about my father’s life and work that would include his manuscript and the information I had uncovered about his research on manic depression. There were many times when I retreated from the task, overwhelmed. At other times, I simply came to a halt, assuming I had progressed as far as was possible. But the writing process was also marked by many moments of great fortune and coincidence, each event giving the arduous work an irresistible momentum.

  A lucky break came in the summer of 1996. Early in the year, I’d arranged to have a synopsis of my father’s manuscript published in Psychiatric Services, a journal of the American Psychiatric Association. To my delight, I was able to include the first citation of my father’s article on manic depression ever to appear in print. That same July, I received a letter from Dr. Elliot S. Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan and a reader of Psychiatric Services.

  “After finishing reading your synopsis,” he told me, “I walked over to our medical library and read a copy of your father’s paper on a possible ‘biochemical component of manic-depressive psychosis.’ Your father’s paper was published five years ahead of John Cade’s paper about lithium treatment of mania. You may know that John Cade who was a virtually unknown Australian physician at the time, had injected urine from manic patients into guinea pigs, believing as your father did that he would find a biochemical explanation of mania.”

  Enclosed with the letter was Dr. Valenstein’s book Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments. Spurred on by our correspondence, I soon located a short biography of John Cade in a book on mental illness and its treatment. While my father was being held at Westborough, Cade began his famous series of experiments, working out of a disused hospital kitchen that he converted into a makeshift laboratory. As Dr. Valenstein had noted, Cade’s breakthrough came when he began to inject urine samples from manic patients into guinea pigs. After taking the urine and adding lithium urate—a naturally occurring mineral similar to salt—in the hope of reducing toxicity, Cade noticed a remarkable side effect. Not only did the lithium reduce toxicity, it also seemed to have a calming effect on his laboratory animals. Perhaps the same would be true if lithium were given to human subjects. Cade ingested small amounts of lithium to observe any adverse side effects before beginning trials on ten patients at the hospital who were manic depressive. The results were extraordinary. The lithium had the same calming effect on his patients that he had seen in his laboratory animals. Cade now ventured that mania was caused by a deficiency in lithium. His results were detailed in his paper “Lithium Salts in the Treatment of Psychotic Excitement,” published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1949. After a series of more extensive trials, lithium was later heralded as the first truly effective medication for mental illness.

  Cade’s mood-stabilizing drug finally arrived in the United States in 1970—too late for my father—and remains one of the standard treatments for manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it is now more commonly known. Cade went on to a long and much-lauded career, becoming a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. In 1985 the National Institute of Mental Health estimated that Cade’s discovery had saved the world somewhere in the region of $17.5 billion in medical costs.

  I couldn’t help but hold up my father’s research alongside Dr. Cade’s. Like Cade, my father believed that some biochemical abnormality or deficiency might be in part responsible for manic depression. While Cade’s experiments led to one of the key scientific discoveries of our times, my father’s research was forever halted by his illness. It is impossible to know how my father’s work would have developed if he had been given more time, but I can’t help but feel that he had come tantalizingly close.

  I was, of course, excited by these revelations, but they also left me with a profound sense of loss. If my father had been born a few years later, he could have benefited from Dr. Cade’s discovery of lithium as an effective treatment for mania. And perhaps, for that golden time, I could have grown up with a father.

  I continued to make discoveries, small and large.

  Not all the revelations were welcome ones. It was difficult to conceive that the manic, raving patient I found in the medical records coexisted with a wife and two young children in the narrow confines of our home, with its thin wooden walls. Long-buried memories began to resurface. I could remember lying upstairs in my bed and hearing my father’s Victrola down below, a party in full swing, the music so loud that the walls of my bedroom vibrated. Then, the music faded and voices were raised in argument. I can recall the sound of my mother’s cries. My parents’ divorce papers cite “cruel and unusual treatment,” and my father’s medical records make clear that he was violent while held in hospitals. For years, I have carried with me a memory of ketchup splattered on the walls of our kitchen at Clovelly Road. Now I believe that my father likely attacked my mother during one of those arguments. I still find it very hard to reconcile the father that I loved with the terribly sick man who must have created such misery and havoc in our home.

  By
now, my mother was in her mid-eighties. As my work on the book progressed, I grew increasingly concerned about her health. She was forgetting basic information. She often repeated herself and was frequently confused. She found she needed to write a list to remind her of what was going to happen on any given day. Once, when visiting at her home, I went into the kitchen to make a telephone call. When I came back, she greeted me as though I had just arrived. Soon after that, she was diagnosed with early-stage senile dementia and agreed to move to an assisted-living facility just outside Boston.

  Before moving, she went through her house and reduced the number of her possessions. But she kept her many photograph albums, feeling that they would provide her a connection to the past. She stored these on the bottom shelf of her small bookcase in her new home, and each time I visited, we would sit on her living room couch and spread the albums out on the coffee table. The images went back to her childhood years. The momentary joy she experienced while remembering her youth was worth each visit. In the later albums there were only a few images of my father. One photograph was of him dressed in a well-tailored business suit. Another showed him in his handsome riding clothes, ready for a foxhunt. There was even a snapshot of my father and me together, riding his horse Viking. When we reached this particular album, my mother turned the pages as quickly as she could.

  Her health continued to deteriorate. Whereas in the past she could write lists of what to do each day, clutching them in her hand or placing them in the pocket of her skirt, she was no longer able to corral her thoughts. As often as possible, I would travel down from Vermont to visit with her. Despite her scattered attention, my mother was always neatly dressed. I can see her now in her usual round-collared blouse, wraparound skirt, and button-down sweater. Her stockings were a bit wrinkled, but she continued her weekly visit to the hairdresser.

  During this period of her decline, I found my mother was finally less resistant to talking about the past. One day, when I told her I had been investigating my father’s research, she turned to me.

  “He was so hoping to find the cause of his insanity,” she stated slowly. “He just didn’t succeed.”

  I pressed her further, but she only smiled and changed the subject.

  On my next visit, I asked her if my father had ever gotten into trouble with the police.

  “Oh yes,” she replied. “It wasn’t unusual for me to have to leave the house in the early-morning hours to bail him out of jail.”

  She went on to remember the time she had to buy new uniforms for the policemen who had fished my father out of the duck pond in the Boston Public Gardens.

  On another visit, I broached the subject of the noises I had heard from my bedroom upstairs in Clovelly Road.

  “Mother, you know that I often heard you and father fighting downstairs while you thought I was sleeping.”

  “Oh no, dear,” she insisted. “You couldn’t have done. The walls were well insulated.”

  One day I asked her to tell me how they met, which prompted one of our longer discussions.

  “I was a student at Boston’s Leland Powers School of Dramatic Art,” she remembered. “I was twenty years old. A friend called and asked me to go on a blind date. I said: ‘I never go on blind dates.’ My friend said, ‘I’ve got two doctors on my hands. We’re going dancing.’ I didn’t have anything to do, so I said, ‘Okay.’ ”

  One doctor was Marshall Bartlett, our old family friend whom I had visited to learn more about my father. The other was Perry Baird.

  “It was Prohibition,” my mother went on. “The doctors brought some alcohol from the hospital. We went to a hotel off Copley Square for dancing. I danced most of the night with Perry. I had a wonderful time. Perry called me right after I got home that night. I started seeing him, and Marsh stepped out of the picture.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Perry Baird was fascinating, just plain fun. He spoke softly, with a slight Texan accent. After I met your father, he was all I was interested in.”

  I asked if she remembered when my father asked her to marry him.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “It was on Newbury Street. He put a diamond ring on my finger. It was his grandmother’s. Afterward he slipped into a phone booth and called his grandmother. He said: ‘I just put your ring on my dear Gretta’s finger.’ I can hear those words just as plain now as then.”

  I sensed from her smiles that my parents had once, long ago, been very much in love and had been happy, for a time.

  As I grew ever more immersed in my research, I realized that in order to have the fullest picture of what had happened between my parents, I needed to have a better understanding of my grandfather’s mental illness. When my mother met Perry on a blind date in Boston, did she recognize something of her long-lost father in him?

  I applied for Henry’s—my grandfather’s—medical records from the mental institution in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where he spent most of his life, in the hopes that the records would offer additional insights. As I scanned the pages, the following entry stopped me in my tracks:

  Norristown State Hospital, 1943

  June 8: Patient, in a hypo-manic state, is visited today by his son-in-law, Dr. Perry Baird, who put him on a bus to visit his daughter in Massachusetts. Patient was returned on a train from Boston on June 24, 1943. He was most apologetic.

  So my father had helped his father-in-law escape and gain a few weeks of respite from his hospital cell. A year later, my own father was locked away at Westborough. At this point, my mother shut down, refusing to speak of what had happened, exactly as her own mother had done.

  Beginning in 1997, my mother experienced several mini-strokes, which further compromised the quality of her life and made her increasingly forgetful. Physically she looked just the same, but she became less careful about her appearance, and much slower in her motions. In 1999, I was called by the facility where she lived, Clark House, and told she had slipped into a semiconscious state. I traveled to see her, wondering if it would be the last of such journeys. Upon arrival, I went directly to her room and found her resting, unresponsive. The nurse told me that her heart was still strong and reassured me that I could return to Vermont later that afternoon.

  Early the following day, the nurse called again to say her condition had weakened and that I should return. My sister was on vacation, so I called my daughter and two nieces and asked them to meet me at Clark House. Although my mother was barely conscious, the four of us quietly spoke to her. We assured her that all was well in the family and that we understood it was time for her to go. Occasionally her eyes opened and she turned slightly on her bed. At times she appeared unsettled, restless.

  After a while, my daughter and her cousins went out of the room to find some nourishment. I sat at my mother’s side, continuing to quietly speak to her. Suddenly, she opened her eyes wide, looking directly into my own.

  “I apologize,” she said, her voice suddenly strong and direct. “I am very sorry.” Her eyes closed slowly. After that, her restlessness seemed to ease. Within an hour she was gone. It was January 17, 1999.

  In the weeks to come, I attempted to understand why she had apologized to me in those final hours. Could she have been acknowledging that she could have shared more of my father’s story with me, and that now it was too late?

  My mother’s death presented me with a stark choice. I could carry our family secrets to the grave, as she had done—like her mother before her—or I could attempt to hold them up to the light and air.

  For the next decade, I kept returning to this book. I had retired from my job at the hospital and was becoming ever more engrossed by new work with a local charitable foundation, and so the writing progressed in fits and starts. Then, in the winter of 2011, I received a call from my daughter, Meg. She had been assisting one of her sons with a homework assignment that required him to trace his family’s genealogy. Meg had described the various branches of our family and their history to my grandson, and then Google
d my father’s name for good measure. This was how she discovered that a book existed containing a reference to my father and his research. It was by Dr. Elliot Valenstein, and it was titled Blaming the Brain: The Truth about Drugs and Mental Health. Meg read Dr. Valenstein’s words aloud to me on the telephone: “John Cade was not the first person to search for a biochemical basis of mania by injecting experimental animals with fluids obtained from mental patients. Perry Baird, at the time a successful Boston dermatologist who suffered from a manic depressive disorder, injected blood from a manic patient into adrenalectomized animals.”

  Blaming the Brain had recently been reprinted with its references amended to include my father’s name and his achievement. Dr. Valenstein also cited my father’s 1944 article and my synopsis of his manuscript in Psychiatric Services in 1996.

  My daughter was jubilant. So was I. Perry Baird’s name had found its way into medical history, in a footnote, it’s true, but nonetheless his contribution had been recognized.

  During this same period, I came across a letter I had never noticed before, tucked among the pages of my father’s manuscript. It was written in August of 1944, soon after his escape from Westborough, and it was addressed to Reverend Corny Trowbridge, our minister at Chestnut Hill. I remembered Corny’s kindness to my father, visiting him while he was in the hospital and sending him a copy of a book about St. Francis. Evidently my father had begun a correspondence with the reverend soon after.