by Julie Klam
I wasn’t sure if “Sali” was Selma or Sam, but clearly the sisters weren’t listed with them, though I had no doubt that they came together.
I had a few addresses in St. Louis that I wanted to visit: their first home from the census, the asylum where Clara was committed, and now this C. Morris. I was sure I would find more when I got there.
Before I left I made appointments to meet Viki Fagyal of the St. Louis Genealogical Society and emailed Larry Harmon, an amateur historian who worked at the Missouri Institute of Mental Health, about giving us a tour of the Dome, the former insane asylum.
The day before Barbara and I were to leave, I got an email from the archivist at the St. Louis Jewish Community Archives:
Well, well, well. I found them—at least I found Ruth, Marcella and Malvina. The other two, Samuel & Selma, are not listed in the minutes I have. It appears that Ruth & Marcella entered the Jewish Shelter Home Nov. 25, 1910 (at least they are mentioned in the minutes for that date on p.1).
There are actually several entries about Malvina. She entered the home later than Ruth & Marcella, on Feb. 23, 1911 (p.1). They note specifically that she was lame. There are 5 other entries for her 1911 through 1913.
I looked all the way up to 1930, and they weren’t mentioned again.
These are just entries in the minutes, not their actual records, which is why I have anything about them at all. I’ll see about getting you copies of the pages.
I couldn’t believe it. I read the email over and over, each time more excited about what was found. I emailed back a gushing thank you. Getting copies of the minutes was such great news that I did a little dance that I now think of as the Morris Jubilee.
I also heard back from Larry Harmon about setting up a time:
I would love to meet with you and hopefully be able to help. I used to give informal tours of the Dome building of which you speak. My tour was mainly about the architecture, amenities, surrounding area and fun facts. Like just across the street is a crematory and columbarium where Frank James, the brother of the infamous Jesse James, was cremated and kept. I mentioned little about the specific treatment of patients as I found most people were interested in the other facts. We would go from the very bottom basement where the “worst” patients were kept, to the tip top inside the dome. I still have my notes from when those tours were given including photographs of various documents.
Attached is a photo of a document stating reasons one might be admitted to the hospital. The other attachment is a photo of what the hospital would have looked like in 1910. It had just been expanded to accommodate 2000 patients and 300 employees. This facility was constantly over populated. I believe that I can get us in for a tour if you are interested.
If you are interested more in the history of specific treatment of patients, I may be able to set up a meeting with the COO of the current St. Louis Psychiatric Rehab Center during your time here in St. Louis.
The Dome building is in an historic neighborhood called The Hill. As the name suggests, it is built on the highest elevation in St. Louis and is famous for a traditional collection of authentic Italian bakeries, grocery stores, restaurants and mom-and-pop trattorias. It would be a shame for you to visit the area without eating at one of the restaurants. I hope you like Italian food!
I wrote to Barbara about the plans and also included the attachment Larry Harmon had sent me called “Reasons of Admission 1864 to 1889,” which listed reasons why people were admitted to an insane asylum. (It turned out to be compiled from the logbook of the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane.)
“Okay, I’m in for the first item on the list,” Barbara said.
“Yes,” I said, “put me down for the third.”
“Wait,” she said, “ ‘marriage of a son’? ‘Gathering in the head’?”
“Hmm,” I said, “is wearing a tampon ‘suppression of menses’?”
“Oy.”
“Do you get more points if you have more than one?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s sergeant’s stripes or teardrop tattoos,” she said.
“Why is ‘shooting of daughter’ a whole category?” I asked, and then said, “Ooh, ‘dropsy.’ My kid has that.”
“ ‘Bad company’! You could be committed for being in the seventies band?”
“ ‘Uterine derangement’ sounds very messy!”
“And ‘fell from a horse in war,’ not just any fall from a horse.”
“Yeah, unless there’s a war, you’re just clumsy. ‘Rumor of husband murder’ seems constitutionally sound.”
* * *
• • •
Once I had the list and did more research on it, I saw that a lot of people were making jokes about it, as we had, and then I realized: This list of reasons was the extent of the knowledge of psychology and mental health at the time. Suddenly it wasn’t all that funny anymore.
As someone who has her share of neuroses, I was horrified to think that someone (probably a man) could diagnose another person’s (probably a woman’s) depression and determine that the reason for institutionalizing her was “novel reading.” No wonder the Morris sisters never married: Most of the men they encountered over the course of their lives were disappointing to say the least.
There is a distance that we tend to put between ourselves and the awful things that happened a long time ago—it’s history, after all, not life today. But the little details you notice spark your attention, and you realize that the citizens of Pompeii were not cartoon characters or lines in history textbooks. They were real people who lived and loved and suffered and died. I understand it’s self-protective to not embrace every horror that has ever happened in the world by processing them today as events that happened a long time ago. After I graduated from college, I spent about a year immersed in the history of the Holocaust: I felt I needed to identify with my people’s suffering and also self-flagellate for being privileged and lucky to have been spared such horrors. My father, who grew up during the Depression in Harlem and was beaten up on his way home from school every day, did not understand my fascination. He somewhat angrily challenged me and my obsession. I think he felt that he’d done everything he could to give my brothers and me a lovely, bucolic, and very safe childhood so that those monstrous images could be kept out of my head, so my life would be happier than his. It’s this search for a happy life, a good outcome, that defines my father to me. As long as I’ve known him, he has always only watched movies that he knew had happy endings. He won’t even watch his sports teams play live: He records the games, and if they lose, he won’t watch. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand that tendency, that need for good outcomes, but when I was younger I thought he was just out of touch.
Just before we departed, I did receive the scans of the minutes about the Morris sisters in the orphanage:
Minutes-Meeting Shelter Home.
Nov. 25, 1910
Two Morris children (Ruth and Marcella) entered. Father Photographer, and mother in Insane Asylum.
There it was, in black and white.
Minutes of Meeting
Feb. 23, 1911
At Columbian Club at 8:15.
Mr. Ittleson occupied the chair, and Mrs. Friedman noted as Secretary.
Minutes read and approved. Mrs. Arnstein Ch. Of Admissions Committee reported that five (5) children were admitted, one (1) removed to C.O.A. The two (2) Levitt children, the children of the cook, Malvina Morris, a lame girl, Mamie Sollenbaum and Sarah Rosen. Names of children entered.
Report of The Jewish Shelter Home for July–August–September.
Malvina Morris was in the Cripples’ Home at Kirkwood during the entire summer. I have asked our secretary to make the proper acknowledgements to these institutions.
Up to September 6th two more children were admitted.
Malvina Morris had returned from Kirkwood, and according
to the last list of names submitted to me, there are now thirty-five children in the home.
All admissions were investigated up to September 6th.
Minutes of Jewish Shelter Home for Children
May 30th, 1912
Mrs. Goldstein’s reports through Mrs. Friedman that:
1. An operation should be performed on Malvina Morris. Secretary asked to write to Dr. Horowitz, the Doctor in charge to ask him to write a letter to the father, stating briefly the need of the operation, so that we may get the father’s permission.
Minutes of Jewish Shelter Home for Children
October 31st, 1912
Malvina Morris removed to the Jewish Hospital, where Dr. Hoffman and Dr. Horowitz will operate on her.
Minutes of the Jewish Shelter Home for Children
February 27th, 1913
Malvina Morris returned to the Home after a 4 month’s stay in the hospital.
* * *
• • •
Thinking about what these women had been through as children shattered me. Selma was seventeen, and too old to go into the orphanage. Marcella, eight, and Ruth, six, went into the home and a few months later were joined by Malvina. Then Malvina was sent to a “cripples home” and then to a hospital—by herself—for four months, before returning to her sisters in the orphanage.
I had so many questions and was so glad to be heading to where I prayed I’d find answers.
Nine
Needle in a Graveyard
It was a crisp November morning when Barb and I met at our St. Louis hotel. Sitting in the lobby waiting for her, I saw a woman walk through with four Boston terriers, my favorite breed—one for each Morris sister. I took it as a good omen.
The office of the St. Louis Genealogical Society was located in a business park in a suburb of St. Louis called Maplewood, and when we arrived, Viki Fagyal came out to meet us. She was a warm, affable retiree who seemed to be constantly on the go, searching for answers to people’s questions through genealogy. I immediately loved her and hoped we would be friends forever.
The genealogical society was a cluster of rooms and offices, and one large room where volunteers sat at dozens of computers with information from all of the records they were continually uncovering. Viki introduced us and showed us where we could look for information about the Morrises.
Barbara and I sat at a big table and Viki brought us several books that looked like St. Louis phone books, but I wasn’t sure what they were.
It felt as if someone had put a body on the table in front of us and said, “This patient needs an appendectomy. Go.” Neither one of us knew where to start. Barbara picked a book at random and opened it while I looked over her shoulder. I don’t recall what was on the page because the lines of information looked like another language to me.
Viki sensed that we had absolutely no idea what to do or where to start and took pity on us.
“These are cemetery books,” she said. “They tell who is buried where. Look for the Morrises!” she directed.
The books were surveys of the St. Louis cemeteries. They weren’t just lists of names in alphabetical order. There were maps and descriptions of areas and of course who was buried there. The books had to be regularly updated so it wasn’t just a clean, alphabetical list. So we looked for the Morrises. One volume at a time, each of us scanning the names in the books. As the three of us settled in to the job, it suddenly occurred to me that everyone in the cemetery book was dead. Probably even a lot of the people who worked on the cemetery book. So. Many. Dead. People. How were we to find one family in all of these names?
After about a half an hour Viki said, “Found Clara.” And a few minutes later, “And Guerson.” They were buried in the same cemetery.
She suggested that we should visit the graves. And after that, we should head to the St. Louis Historical Society and Library, where there were more records for us to look through.
I tried to get directions from her but she shook her head. “No. I am taking you.”
Her hospitality was an answer to my prayers: Barbara and I were hugely relieved to be getting a local guide. Between the unfamiliar genealogy search and the strange topography of St. Louis—it’s not laid out on a grid the way much of New York is, and I don’t function well outside of Manhattan—I was kind of like a fish in a little plastic bag. I wasn’t going to die, but I wasn’t at my best. I was starting to panic that I’d get us hopelessly lost in St. Louis and we would never find anything useful about the Morrises and that our trip would be a complete failure. Viki, once again and not for the last time, saved the day.
* * *
• • •
We drove to the New Mount Sinai Cemetery. It is a Jewish cemetery southwest of downtown St. Louis and about a ten-minute drive from the genealogical society office. Viki parked by the door of the cemetery’s administration building and took us inside. An attractive woman in a black dress and pearls, her silver hair held in place with a grosgrain hair band, sat behind a desk as if she had been plucked from central casting for “midwestern cemetery receptionist.” She smiled at us, conveying kindness and a sense that she was respecting whatever it was that brought us there.
I waited for Viki to say something: It was like when you’re a kid and your mother takes you to the doctor’s office and you wait for her to tell the person behind the glass window your name and why you’re there, and then your mother tells you she wants you to do it. Viki pushed me toward the lady at the desk and said, “Ask your questions.”
With my hands dug deep in my pockets, I fumbled out some words that I hoped told the receptionist that we were looking for two gravestones—George or Guerson Morris and Clara Morris.
The woman wasn’t the least bit confused or dismissive. In fact, she couldn’t have been kinder. She went over to one of many metal file cabinets, this one with the letters Mo–N on the tab, and pulled out a manila folder. She found the information she was looking for, wrote down some numbers on a piece of paper, and handed it and several maps of the cemetery to me. She explained that each grave had a tiny number on it so that it could be identified. She showed us where we could find Clara’s grave—it was number 580, in section F—and Guerson’s number was 1336 in section Q.
I was so excited to have this information, and that I’d (kind of) done it myself. I had the overblown sense of accomplishment my neighbor has when he parallel parks particularly smoothly. We took our maps and confidently headed out through the fall leaves.
Most of the times that I’ve been to cemeteries I was there for a funeral, and it wasn’t hard to figure out where I should go: There was usually a tent over the open grave with chairs around it, a huge mound of dirt and some shovels. But shortly before I went to St. Louis I traveled to Paris with my boyfriend, where we visited both the Père Lachaise Cemetery (where Jim Morrison, Isadora Duncan, and Oscar Wilde are buried) and Montparnasse Cemetery (where Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett are buried). I can tell you honestly that despite the very clear maps and many markers to the final resting places of these celebrated artists, some of the graves were impossible to locate: We just couldn’t find them.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to locate specific graves in a cemetery, but a mapping system that makes sense to me seems like the least of a cemetery’s priorities.
So Barbara, Viki, and I looked and looked for the graves of Clara and Guerson, and none of us could find them. After a while we split up, each of us taking different sections of the cemetery to look in. The headstones throughout the cemetery were mostly flat in the grass or just small “pillow”-type graves.
* * *
• • •
Finally, after what seemed like hours, Viki called out, “I found her!” Of course it would be Viki.
The gravestone was a small granite rectangle set into the side of a low hill. All that was engraved into the stone was “clara morris” a
nd beneath her name “1875–1953.”
It was obvious that nobody had visited the grave for quite a while. And even though the cemetery was very well kept, Clara’s stone looked as if it had been forgotten—overlooked by those of us still around.
I cleared away the brown leaves, wiped away the dirt that had accumulated on it, and pulled out some weeds that had grown over the edges. I put a stone on the center of the grave and said a prayer to her. Jews put stones on graves for a variety of reasons, because unlike flowers they never die. The Talmud mentions that after a person dies, their soul continues to dwell for a while in the grave where they are buried. Putting stones on a grave keeps the soul down in this world, which some mourners find comforting. Another related interpretation suggests that the stones keep demons and golems from getting into the graves. Also the Hebrew word for pebble is tz’ror—and it happens that this word also means “bond.” When Jews pray we ask that the deceased be “bound up in the bond of life.” By placing a stone on a grave marker, we show that we have been there and that the individual’s memory continues to live on in and through us. When my boyfriend and I visited Gertrude Stein’s grave in Père Lachaise, it had a tiny pale pebble driveway leading up to it, and people put dark stones on it in the shape of hearts. My mother’s sisters’ and her parents’ graves are crowded with stones. There were none on Clara’s, except the one I placed there.
Clara had five children, and none of them had children, so there were no grandchildren or great-grandchildren to visit. Looking around, I couldn’t help but see that the entire section of the cemetery felt like that. The newer sections in the distance had graves festooned with flowers, balloons, stuffed animals, and plaques, but those buried in section F seemed to be a bit alone, as if life or the descendants of those buried here had forgotten them.