The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  There was nothing unusual about the contents of the bag. I found an old blood-pressure gauge with an inflatable purple band attached, neatly folded in a dark blue case, a stack of about a dozen wooden throat sticks held together by elastics, a box of Band-Aids, sterile dressing sponges, packages of alcohol wipes, a metal reflex hammer with a rubber head, and a two-pronged metal fork, resembling a tuning fork about six inches long, that was used to test a patient’s hearing by holding it first at a distance from the ear, then moving it closer by small degrees until the patient heard it. There was also an impressive-looking Fleischer stethoscope with the name of the manufacturer, “Dickinson and Co.,” printed on the back side of the metal piece my father placed against a patient’s chest.

  When I took out that stethoscope and held it in my hands, a memory I’d long forgotten came into my mind of a time when I was very young, not more than six or seven, and my father on an impulse took me with him to McLean one night when the resident on duty called him at our home to tell him that one of his patients had become unusually distraught and was talking about suicide. I remember he had just come home and begun to have his dinner, and, as usual when a call for him came in at night, my mother put her hand across the mouthpiece of the phone and asked him, “Harry, are you here?” And, as almost always, my father nodded yes to her and got up to take the call.

  A moment later, his dinner was forgotten. He plunked me down beside him in his car, my mother watching from the doorway, and before long we were far away in Belmont (it seemed like far away to me), going up the driveway to the hospital.

  My father had a likable and, I would guess, somewhat unconventional way of initiating conversations with his patients. He spoke, from the start, with a friendly informality. He joked with his patients. He could make them laugh sometimes even when they felt they had been drowning in depression or anxiety. So it probably did not surprise a patient, or the nurses at a hospital, when he showed up now and then with his son in tow.

  In any case, he said to the patient, “You are going to be examined first”—or something to the same effect—“by my chief assistant.” Then he lifted me up and put me on the bed and handed me the stethoscope and put the black plugs in my ears and showed me where to hold the metal disk against the patient’s chest. I listened as carefully as I could and probably tried to give a knowledgeable look, as children will do when they’ve been placed for a moment or two in a position that seems terribly important. While I was doing this, my father was studying the patient’s hands and eyes and his expression. Then he took the stethoscope and began to give the man a full examination. That’s all I remember.

  The reason I was looking at the stethoscope so closely, and holding it so carefully, was that I was thinking of how many times—thousands of times, I suppose—he must have put those plugs into his ears and listened to the heartbeats and the respiration of his patients, doing what his training as a doctor taught him he must do even before he began to ask the probing questions he had learned to ask as a psychiatrist. But I was also thinking of how many nights my father had to get up from his dinner because emergencies like this came up so often and because he’d grow uneasy, and feel negligent, if he remained there at the table while a patient was disconsolate.

  Most nights, naturally, when these calls came in, he would not impulsively decide to bring me with him. He would simply leave us there and head straight for the door. If I wasn’t sleeping deeply, I might hear him when he got home late at night and might hear my mother talking with him as she heated up his dinner.

  I know the time has long since passed when doctors, no matter what their specialty might be, would interrupt their private lives so willingly in order to fulfill their sense of obligation to a patient. Maybe it’s beyond all reason to regret the passing of that era. Still, I wished the doctor at the nursing home had retained a little more of that tradition of attentiveness. I would come to have the same wish later on about another geriatrician my father would rely upon. I never felt they gave him back in full, or even in small part, what he had given once unstintingly to people who had placed their trust in him.

  —

  One further memory, which holds less personal significance for me but which I find intriguing as a kind of window into the psychiatric world of Boston more than half a century ago, will come here as a sidenote to a longer story I have touched upon already. In one of the crates that contained some legal documents pertaining to Eugene O’Neill, I found a folder of remarkable materials about a confrontation into which my father had been drawn with one of his longtime friends and colleagues, a psychiatrist named Merrill Moore, who had grown involved with the O’Neills before O’Neill became my father’s patient.

  Moore was one of Boston’s preeminent psychiatrists and also was a literary person with close associations in the world of theater. He had been selected to examine the playwright’s wife, Carlotta, at a time when she herself was ill—the initial diagnosis had identified her illness as “hysteria”—and had been transported to McLean. Moore had been retained, as I discovered now, by a close acquaintance of O’Neill, the prominent New York producer Lawrence Langner, who was also a director of the Theatre Guild. But Moore had managed to mishandle the case in a way that did a grave injustice to Carlotta.

  Dr. Moore, to whom my father introduced me once years later at the Harvard Club in Boston, was a brilliant man but also widely viewed as a lovable eccentric. He wrote poetry—sonnets exclusively, and apparently in great profusion (several thousand, as he claimed), which he was more than willing to recite to friends and patients. For a time, he liked to carry bean seeds in his pocket and would hand them out to people in a jovial manner. “Harry,” he once said when he shook hands with my father, “plant these in your garden,” and he left a couple bean seeds in my father’s palm, for which my father thanked him in good humor.

  The problem, however, according to my father, was that Moore, for all of his unquestioned psychiatric expertise, had been perfunctory and hasty in his observation of Carlotta and had overlooked the fact that what appeared to be psychosis was actually the temporary consequence of bromides she’d been taking in excessive doses. Even after he had been alerted to her bromide poisoning, he continued to dismiss it as the reason for her illness. Instead, he insisted that she was psychotic and told officials at McLean that he intended to declare her “legally insane.” He further recommended that the playwright and his wife should permanently separate. It appeared that he had come to this conclusion before he had examined her.

  Both Carlotta and O’Neill would later suffer greatly for this misguided intervention, because O’Neill had been sufficiently unwise as to acquiesce at first in Dr. Moore’s advice and agreed to sign a paper, known as a “petition,” prepared by a lawyer in New York and cosigned by Dr. Moore, alleging that she was insane and incapable of managing her own affairs. Carlotta never forgave her husband for this “act of treachery,” as she would refer to it repeatedly.

  By this time, in any case, officials at McLean became alarmed at Dr. Moore’s intention to arrange a permanent commitment for Carlotta—“involuntary mental hospitalization” was the term—which they considered medically unjustifiable. My father was asked to enter the case, examine Carlotta neurologically as well as psychiatrically, and present them with a diagnosis, as he’d done for other patients at McLean over a period of years. My father did the examination, as requested, and concluded that Carlotta was most definitely not insane and therefore not committable.

  When this information was relayed to Moore, his response was adversarial. “One day in April,” my father wrote in a long and detailed memo, “I got a telephone call from Merrill Moore. He said that he was in New York” and that he “and some of the playwright’s friends,” whom he did not name, were convinced that both Carlotta and O’Neill were legally insane, that their marriage ought to be dissolved, and that separate guardianships should be established. In the playwright’s case, his affairs would then be handled by a group of people in
New York, presumably the people who believed he was insane, who would make decisions, for example, on the uses of his literary properties.

  In spite of my father’s affectionate relationship with Dr. Moore, his behavior in this instance struck my father as not only unprofessional but legally quite dangerous. He said he was compelled to challenge him directly.

  “I crackled out the following: ‘Your patient [meaning O’Neill, whom Daddy had not yet examined] may be crazy. Mine is not. I’ll have nothing to do with such a scheme,’ ” and, he added, he’d do everything he could “to frustrate and prevent it.” When Moore persisted, Daddy said, “Merrill, are you out of your mind?” And he cautioned him that he was being drawn into a situation that might be regarded by a legal body as “a criminal conspiracy.” Moore, he wrote, “sort of backed off,” and the conversation ended.

  Shortly thereafter, my father was approached by one of O’Neill’s most trusted friends, a powerful theatrical figure and level-headed man named Russel Crouse, who asked if he would travel to New York to talk directly with O’Neill and try to provide whatever help he could in clearing up the medical morass and personal misunderstandings Moore had left behind. At the request of Mr. Crouse, my father also gave O’Neill the kind of classic psychiatric interview and neurological examination he had given to Carlotta.

  He came to the conclusion that, while psychiatric factors and the maddening obstruction of his creative powers by his physical debilitation obviously played a major role in his unhappiness, O’Neill was clearly not insane from any medical or legal point of view. His right to make his own decisions, even if decisions he might make were to be affected to a large degree by the strong will and protective judgment of his wife, could not be taken from him.

  During the course of this examination, O’Neill made it apparent that he now regretted having given in to Dr. Moore’s advice and that he wanted to be reunited with his wife. I don’t know the rest of this—my father’s notes are incomplete, or there may be others I have yet to find. But I gather that O’Neill found something that he liked and trusted in the way my father spoke with him and questioned him and, as I’ve said, there seemed to be a comfortable rapport between the two of them. This is a long way of explaining in more detail than before the somewhat convoluted pattern of events that led O’Neill to ask my father to become his doctor.

  Carlotta, meanwhile, who had left McLean about a month before, now made arrangements for a suite of rooms that overlooked the river in the small but very nice hotel opposite my father’s office. My father met O’Neill when he arrived at Back Bay Station with a nurse who had traveled with him from New York, and brought him to Carlotta, who treated him, at least at first, forgivingly and lovingly. Although they would have bitter quarrels, which, according to my father, had been a pattern in their lives for many years, the final truth, in his belief, is that the two of them were totally dependent on each other.

  O’Neill told my father that, for all the miseries they underwent together and the many cruelties they never ceased inflicting on each other, he could not live without Carlotta and he knew she would protect him and his interests, as she had done with fierceness and fidelity throughout the decades of his greatest productivity. And, certainly, in terms of his physical well-being during the time when he was in my father’s care, she did protect him patiently and tirelessly, following instructions that my father gave her, phoning him repeatedly when she thought that there might be a reason for concern.

  Sometimes, too, she would call my father, at O’Neill’s request, on an evening, often very late, when O’Neill became unusually depressed and told her he’d feel better if he had a chance “to talk with Harry” for a while. The sight of my father rushing in and taking out his stethoscope to do a quick check of his vital signs, and then remaining there to chat with him for ten or fifteen minutes before he went to bed, apparently provided him with a sense of reassurance that enabled him to get to sleep more easily.

  As my mother had explained to me, my father didn’t like the mediating role in which he was often placed when Carlotta and O’Neill were at odds with one another, and I have described his discontent at being placed by other families in a similarly difficult position. In all of his cases, nonetheless, whether those involving people who were privileged and famous or those of the very poor or marginally middle class to whom he attended for long periods of his career, he never ceased to be the medical doctor he’d been trained to be. The old black doctor’s bag accompanied him everywhere.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Sentimental Longing

  Throughout the end of autumn and the winter of 2001, and well into the spring and summer of 2002, Daddy kept on asking whether it was time yet for me to take him home—whether to my mother’s home or to my own was never really clear. Or sometimes, as we’ve seen, he would simply ask me whether he could come with me wherever I was going when he saw me getting up to leave. The wistfulness with which he asked these questions brought back to me a memory from nearly sixty years before.

  When I was a child around the age of seven my mother and father sent me to a summer camp in Maine. They had been uncertain whether I was old enough to be away from home, but Daddy had decided that it would be good for me to see if I could overcome my shyness and manage for a short time on my own. He was also confident that making friends with the other campers and getting caught up in the camp’s activities, like “color wars,” which were a familiar part of summer camp for children in those days, would probably distract me from missing him and my mother quite as badly as my mother feared. He discovered quickly he was wrong.

  “The letters you sent us were universally unhappy. They ranged from pitiful to plaintive. ‘When are you going to come to visit? When are you going to take me home?’ ” But, he said, “every time we got in the car and drove up to the camp—we must have done this several times, because your letters were like little masterpieces of unqualified despair—you would look amazed and you would want to know what we were doing there.” So, after talking with some of the counselors or the camp director, “your mother and I would feel relieved and we’d go back to Boston.” But then, he said, “as soon as we got home, there would be another letter, even sadder than the one before!

  “I think, in the end, we brought you home before the session ended. Those letters of yours, which you must have written almost every day, were too much for us to bear….”

  That was in 1943 or 1944. I could still remember going up the steps to the camp director’s office every afternoon to buy another postage stamp so I could tell my parents just how horrible it was that they had abandoned me. Now my father was the child and I was the grown-up he depended on. And this time it was he who kept on asking how much longer it would be before I brought him home.

  There were also times, of course, when I would arrive and he would appear to be entirely caught up in the company of Silvia or Alejandro or Lucinda and I would, maybe for the first few minutes, feel as if my presence was almost superfluous. That didn’t last long, however, and when it was time for me to leave, even if he didn’t ask if he could come with me, my father’s eyes would follow me as I was heading for my car.

  I could not take my father home with me, not to the small and isolated village where I had been living. I did wonder now and then whether there was any way at all, if I put a very solid system of support in place, that he might be able to return to the apartment where he had been living with my mother up until six years before. His needs, however, were so great, and the questions of logistics I would have to face seemed so complex—if any plan like this were even feasible in medical respects—that I would promptly put it out of mind. It would return, a lingering thought, a kind of daydream, off and on; but, as much as his repeated pleas would sadden me and tear at me, the whole idea remained within a realm of the implausible.

  Then one evening in the end of winter—it was late in March 2002—I mentioned this to Silvia. To my surprise, she said that she had recently begun to have the s
ame thoughts too. “You know,” she said, “he’s always asking the same question now. ‘Is it time yet to go home?’ ” Selecting her words carefully, because she didn’t want to seem presumptuous, she said that she’d begun to wonder if he really needed to remain here any longer. “If you want to bring him home to live there with your mother, I think I could care for him if I had some other people I could count on to take turns with me.”

  I was grateful for her offer, but I told her I would need to think about it more and would want to talk with Alejandro and Lucinda. I also wondered if I ought to bring it up with my father’s trust attorney, since he shared with me, theoretically at least, some responsibility for decision making for my father.

  I turned first to Alejandro, who had observed my father closely now for several years. I didn’t ask him, at this point, about the medical considerations that would have to be addressed or about the question of arrangements for my father’s care that Silvia had raised. There was a different question in my mind—one that I already sensed would be the hardest to resolve.

  Alejandro was, of course, familiar with my father’s frequent voicing of his wish, or at times almost peremptory demand, to be permitted to “go home.” What I didn’t know, however, was the way it might affect him to return, no matter how much he insisted that he wanted this, to a place he hadn’t seen for several years and which, I thought, he might not even recognize to be his “home” at all.

  Even though there was a beautiful apartment in a high-rise building, with a view of the Charles River and the Cambridge skyline, in which he had lived for more than twenty years, and even though the handsome desk at which he’d worked for most of his career remained there by one of the windows with his pads of paper and manila folders and his medical desk references exactly where they’d been before, what meaning would this place, this desk, and all the objects it contained, not even to speak of my mother’s presence in the same apartment, hold for him at this stage of his illness? In this respect, I had to ask myself, was there a home in any sense—would there ever be a home again—my father could return to?