Sheppard Pratt. It sounds like a cozy liberal arts college where students take two languages and volunteer in the organic garden. Not the looneybinpsychwardbughousemadhousenuthousefunnyhousefunnyfarmlaughingacademycuckoonestrubberroompaddedcellsanatorium. The asylum. Hooking the obvious cliché of the authentic-rebel-against-the-man, I conjure Milos Forman’s Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy faking madness and wreaking havoc on the ward as the quietly sadistic Nurse Mildred Ratched and her accomplice Big Nurse draw the life out of every patient within reach, their sticky coercion effortless as the draw of a hypodermic needle. But Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital is no Oregon State Hospital, nor is it a low-level mental health facility like the grave in Menlo Park, California, where Kesey volunteered. Noooooooo … I’m destined for a private, expensive institution. “One of the best.” Dr. Kohl said so. Twice. Once to my father before he flew out from California and once to me when he discovered it had “a vacant bed.” I don’t like the sound of it.
Dr. Kohl had called McLean first, but it had no immediate openings so he decided on Sheppard Pratt. I wish I’d drawn McLean. At least it can boast literary cred—I’m not sure Sheppard Pratt has anything of the sort to offer. I’m certainly not putting its most famous inmate, Zelda Fitzgerald, up against the brilliance of McLean’s infamous Sylvia Plath.
The best I can claim is F. Scott’s pseudo proximity to Sheppard Pratt. He wrote Tender Is the Night right next door in Towson, Maryland, while managing Zelda’s first institutionalization. He tentatively spelled out that grim time in the apology-cum-rationalization that is Dick Diver. Zelda tried to have her say with Save Me the Waltz but ended up crushed by horrendous reviews and poor sales. I hardly blame her for taking it so hard. Setting aside the reviews and sales, recovering from your famous writer husband publicly calling you “a third-rate writer” and a “plagiarist” would do in many robust writers, never mind a mentally fragile first-time novelist. Not everyone can be Günter Grass. The “first-rate writers” club admits new members reluctantly, and only when forced.
With a charter from the Maryland authorities, in 1853 Moses Sheppard supervised and funded the transformation of a 340-acre farm known locally as Mount Airy into his vision of a mental hospital. Sheppard and his money were likely marks for social reformer extraordinaire Dorothea Lynde Dix, whose distaste for the inhumane treatment of the insane was well established by then. Sheppard fell in step with Dix’s long-standing crusade to call, as she put it in her 1843 “Memorial to the Massachusetts Legislature,” “attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined in the commonwealth in cages, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience.”
As compassionate and ambitious as Sheppard was, he was also a fiscal conservative. Like any WASP worth his dry martini, he refused to touch the principal of his generous endowment. (Ah that my father had been so careful with his principal.) The interest generated, plus any gifts received over the course of the years, were the only funds put toward the construction of the buildings and grounds. Progress was slow. (Never touch the principal.)
In 1891 Edmund N. Brush, M.D., became the first physician-in-chief and superintendent. The asylum began a course of enlightened, benign care, guided by the principle that “no anger, no severity, no revenge, and no disregard would ever be shown the insane.” Environmental determinism would have it that the place itself was enough to cure most. So although Dr. Brush knew there would be “unmanageable tempers, some violent and sullen patients” he hopes “much of the ill humor, almost all the disposition to meditate mischievous or fatal revenge or self-destruction would disappear” amid the “attractive corridors, parlors and bedrooms.” The patients will enjoy a civilized ambience where “the table furniture, silver, and general service will resemble that of a well-conducted hotel.” It was Dr. Brush’s hope to “cure” most patients and then restore them to their “home and friends.” For the untreatable, terminally insane patient the hospital would provide a long-term “refuge, a protection from himself and the world.” After all, he reflected, “despair can itself sometimes be found to give place to cheerfulness.”
I’m to arrive on the centennial. Perhaps there will be cake.
CHAPTER 17
Politesse
“I can never understand how anyone can NOT smoke,” Mann wrote in The Magic Mountain. “When I wake in the morning, I feel glad at the thought of being able to smoke all day, and when I eat, I look forward to smoking afterwards; I might almost say I eat for the sake of being able to smoke.”
I couldn’t agree more. Nicotine, plus the 7,357 compounds identifiable in the smoke of a burning cigarette, is the least of the appeal. There’s no hope of reducing the magic of inhaling and exhaling cigarette smoke to mere chemistry. The portion of the nicotine molecule that so effectively mimics the tasty neurotransmitter acetylcholine is a brief footnote to the nearly bottomless pleasures of smoking. Science will have to do better. I’ve found no satisfactory explanation for the way my mind and body agree to call a brief détente as I smoke. For the three or so minutes it takes to draw and exhale approximately 22 times until the paper and tobacco find the Camel Light’s spongy, flameproof cellulose acetate filter, the idea of myself and the experience of being in my body align. I can always have another, because if there’s relatively cheap magic for sale in the world, I find it time and again in the ritual of burning the fragile white paper-covered sticks.
So I smoke. Look at the clock. Smoke some more. How many hours? How many minutes before I leave 77½ Intervale Avenue to disappear behind the double, soundproof doors at 112 Church Street? For the last time? The sun hasn’t even risen on Burlington, Vermont, latitude 44.49°N, longitude 73.23°W. September 10 sunrise: 6:24 A.M. I have so few hours to burn.
I wish instead of going to my 8:00 A.M. appointment at Dr. Kohl’s office, where I’ll meet my father and pick up whatever information he needs to get me where I’m going, I could go now, passing like a wraith through the brick walls in the predawn gloom. I’d sit silently in the darkness of the politely tasteful reception area, waiting for Dr. Kohl. I’m safe there. Eventually he’d unlock the outer door, check the answering machine, unlock his office, and disappear into his space. He wouldn’t indicate he’d seen me but he’d know—we would know—he’d seen me there. Hell, instead of going to Baltimore I could occupy the same chair there all day, unobtrusively observing as he came and went, collecting and discharging patients. I could pretend, as I always do when I spot one of his patients either waiting for the next appointment or leaving the one before me, that those other people don’t exist. Fakes. Liars. Nothing to him. Quiet as I would be, virtually invisible, he would care only for me.
Sadly, I do have an 8:00 A.M. appointment to keep. There will be no sitting in the waiting room all day. Long has that first appointment of the day been mine, Mondays and Thursdays. First. One more time. Best. In my mind lurks the suggestion that if I’m being hospitalized I must be exceptional—although maybe not in the way I’d like.
For a year and some that feels like the entirety of my fucking life I’ve been waiting to feel the charged moment when the door opens and he looks at me, taking me in, deliciously assessing, deciding about me as I step through the public door frame into privacy, drop my bag by the chair, and turn to face him. Once in the chair I’m excited as a blooming girl set before her birthday cake with bow-tied gifts piled around awaiting eager hands. Six months ago he noted as much to himself: “Almost every time she sits down here she looks like a contented child settling in to be doted upon.” Now, for the first time, I don’t want time to pass—I just want to sit here in the safety of my apartment.
Why can’t time move now as it did for the past year, the hours between appointments stumbling, slow as redemption in a 1950s western you’re watching because you might as well fuck that two and a half hours into oblivion with an overfilled bowl of salty, cheesy popcorn—as not. Like a lizard I take popped kernels hand to mouth, lifting them as they stick to the wet
of my protruding tongue, carefully measured time dripping. One by one. Minutes. Slow as the progression of nine-point type marching in tight, mean lines down the longest, most boring book. Title Page. Dedication. Table of Contents. Introduction. Preface. Chapters. Notes. Glossary. Appendix. Index. Addendum. Margins half an inch all around. For so long I urged the days until Monday away and then cursed Tuesday and Wednesday, as if their only purpose was blocking passage until Thursday rolled in.
As it always does, however far my faith slips, the hour eventually comes. At least I can trust that and now, here it is, September 10. The ritual. First, Henry’s Diner, where I’m useless, acting like a fool without a book at midnight and a delayed flight twelve hours out. Before I have time to put myself in order over coffee and toast the ugly 8:00 A.M. is nearly upon me; time to walk around the block to his office, where I’m supposed to see myself off to an unknown that once done can’t be undone. I’ve been caught in a self-made snare so effective escape requires self-annihilation. I won’t say good-bye.
His car is there, hot and slick as always. I make my way past the reception desk and the empty chairs. A fresh benefaction. But not this time. I’ve just arrived and we’re nearly done. There are three of us. It’s all business with my father there. Unforgivably steady, the clock’s tick-free modesty can’t be blamed this time—or ever. But I do blame it. However politely, it has silently betrayed me by signaling me out the door twice a week—sometimes more often. Who made the rule that fifty-five minutes is enough? I’ll blame the whipping boy, Freud, but for now it’s the clock that keeps his terms. I wonder if I could shatter it with a toss, small and large gold-plated hands, heart-points flying. Would it grace the air, detached, spraying seconds in droplets as it fell to the floor? If that didn’t work I could go inside, where it keeps its purpose behind a churning mechanical hum, to bend and break the pieces. Or I could simply smash it down on the shiny table to stop it. But what of the masterful electricity, arguably the true culprit? Clip, cut, pull the plug? However it’s done, I’d like to dismantle the whole with the violence it’s due, at least temporarily eliminating the mechanism of my departure.
But the send-off is in motion. Dr. Kohl’s hand extends to offer his grasp. A shake? What can he mean? Shake hands as if we’ve completed a deal? Met politely at a conference and hope to see each other again, knowing we won’t shake? Thanks for dinner and I’m sorry I’m fucking your wife shake? You’re a little shit and I’ll crush you, but people are watching so I’ll follow convention shake? Surely it’s the good-bye and we have a deal shake? I’m numb.
I’ve never shaken his hand; I’ve hardly ever touched him, except for those riveting moments when he wheeled his analyst’s chair close to me to examine, clean, and bandage my burned arm. That was touch.
But this? Out of years of polite training—“politesse,” my Dad would prompt at the least impudent glimmer—I extend my hand. Skin to skin. His unblemished, callus-free office fingers graze the freshly laid Band-Aid covering last night’s handiwork on my palm. He’s close enough to see my cheek. I’d chosen the most obvious, most visible spot. Fuck you. It didn’t matter anymore. The game was up. More fresh work there, more fresh work on my feet. How can Dr. Kohl let go, sending me off with nothing more than this stale ritual of a formal good-bye?
Willing time to release the warp speed it takes on in this room, I won’t yield. I’m walking out that door? That door I’ve walked out of so many times with the greatest regret for a two- or three-day absence? Now this? Weeks? Months? Years? Forever? He releases my hand as I petition the moment to show some sign of promise. Anything, really, will do.
PART II
Ya know, I ain’t never been in an institution of psychology before.
—Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Do you like plum cake, Monster?
—Lion from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass
But I was feeling febrile even then—for the air up here is not only good against the illness, you know, it is also good for it, it sometimes brings it to the surface—which is of course a necessary step in the cure.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
CHAPTER 18
Humiliation Olympics
As humiliating experiences go, third-place ranking goes to the time I confessed to my father over a Tanqueray and tonic while perched on a stool at the Oak Room in the Plaza Hotel that I was pregnant and getting an abortion and sure, I could use the extra cash. Then taking the bills and feeling like a sexual being and therefore like a big, slutty whore dumb enough to get knocked up and greedy to boot. The honorable second-place ranking in my humiliation Olympics goes to a discussion I had with my father about whether or not I was sexually molested as a child, including speculation about who it might have been—the boys at the end of the driveway in Woody Creek, who always seemed creepy? Or that babysitter’s older boyfriend? Or lovely Hester, the foreman at the Ranch, whom I adored but got confused about? As if that weren’t bad enough, I said, “Yes, I’m sexually functional,” leaving the conversation knowing I’d said too much, more than necessary, because in what universe does anyone other than the person you’re fucking, your doctor, or your best friend care if you do or do not achieve orgasm during sex? But surely in first place, the gold secure, is being escorted by my father onto and off an American Airlines flight from Burlington, Vermont, to Baltimore, Maryland, to be checked into a hotel where I will be kept under guard for the night only to be delivered up to a psych ward the next day.
My father is worried and doing the right thing because he figures on a vague, paternal level it’s all his fault and he should have seen this coming and how could he let this happen to his daughter and now he’d better do whatever the shrink says to fix it because he doesn’t know what to do and maybe he never did. His endearing chatter is awkward. This is an emergency. And he can’t possibly talk about it because the chance of saying the right thing is close to zero.
So he doesn’t say shit and the air is as thick as the pillowed clouds sliding in appalling stillness past the oval frame of the scratched acrylic airplane window. The red-white-and-blue of the American Airlines logo on the blade of the wing cuts through them without disturbance and yet each one appears substantive enough to walk on, like the massive thunderclouds from James and the Giant Peach the Cloud-Men cavort upon, “huge hairy ghosts” chucking hailstones at the peach as it sails through the sky under power of hundreds of seagulls harnessed by Silkworm’s rope. Dad read me the book before I read it myself. Dad, here in the next seat adroitly folding and turning his way through today’s New York Times—“Strawberry Comes to Rescue as Dodgers Remain in First … Cuba Rationing Cigarette Sales … Police Seek Missing 8-Year-Old Bronx Girl …”
When I get there, will there be leisurely days spent padding around in tasteful pajamas or will muscle-bound, tattoo-sheathed orderlies watch patients wander the hall clad in paper slippers and flimsy mint-green hospital gowns opening at the back? Both options are false, lousy with film and fiction, derivatives of too much culture. Likely, patients will wear their own contemptible clothes just as I will. Still, the idea of spending all day—possibly a week, two tops—in pajamas is a pet I can’t quite release. My PJs must kill.
We’re at “Harborplace, Baltimore’s Exciting, Dynamic Waterfront.” That night before I go in I locate them, brazenly offering themselves to me, dangling from the tidy rack of like Persian-style pajamas in Men’s. I can’t fail to recognize them. Their lonely occupation of the grubby mall in the bowels of the Marriott doesn’t help. Surrounded by the aura of hopeful emptiness defining all unprofitable retail locations, this Brooks Brothers’ simulacrum of upper-class privilege gleaned from its 346 Madison Avenue flagship has been further corroded by its location across from the Piercing Pagoda, offering a two-for-one special: “Nose and Navel $55.” This is my final hit of in situ consumer transformation before I go in.
They are my unforeseen denouement with their pl
acket front, five fat tortoiseshell buttons, finely hemmed length of identical material as drawstring, slim fit, and gaping fly with no buttons—not like I have a dick to stick out of it in the middle of the night in the dark, but if you locate navy and hunter-green plaid pajamas in madras so fine you want to lick it, and it’s the last shopping day before the big event, you lay down the card. “Sign here.” These are the pajamas.
My father has exchanged pleasantries and credit card information with the desk clerk in the hopelessly empty lobby of the Marriott. The key to room 335 in hand, we’re soon in it, pulling open the heavy draperies. Baltimore’s harbor spins beneath, animated by the movement of boats, water, and wind. I press the red power button on the sleepy remote. The generic hotel room attempts a degree of self-importance with the uncluttered right angles of the desk, table, door, window frame, heater, and full-length mirror doing most of the work. Accurately matching one another, two immaculate queen-size beds add to the effect, while the chrome luggage rack announces the impermanence of our presence. The affected gentility will be demolished as soon as clothing, toiletries, shoes, and unmade beds blur the edges, spoiling the symmetry. Leaving the flickering television light to fill the vacuum, I go to pee.
My dad sounds as though he’d rather drown himself than speak when he says, “You have to leave the door open.” The volume and tone read timid, his voice overlaid with embarrassment I can identify without seeing his face or gestures. Before this moment, the two of us have hardly spoken about what I’ve done or what I’m doing, and then only in the presence of Dr. Kohl, preferring instead to focus on the process of getting where we’re going fast.
Lights On, Rats Out Page 10