In notes from a psychotherapy session after the treatments, Ronnie argued insightfully that electroshock was hardly likely to help: “They can keep me here for fifty years or shock me one thousand times and I’ll still have the problem to solve when I get home.” Presumably, he meant the friction between him and his mother.
Earlier that month, he’d appeared for an interview before a roomful of hospital officials, including six physicians and three psychologists. Ronnie told them he came to Western State because of disagreements with his parents:
I didn’t get along with them too well, and things were going from bad to worse. I went out one night and came in about midnight and was accused of stealing some things. Two of the charges got proved against me. Things seemed to just get worse and worse, and they finally decided to put me in this place.
I have a sister who is 7 years old; that’s another thing. She is actually their child, and I guess that made them want to do more for her than they did for me. I just got fed up with that, got to running around, and got into trouble. I never took any dope of any kind in my life. I have drunk some—just a little.
Throughout the records, Ronnie refers variously to Mom as his cousin, his aunt, his grandmother, and his guardian. He said she wasn’t his “real” mother. Ronnie admitted that he’d threatened to kill her, “but she knew I didn’t mean it. It was about the only thing I could think of to keep her from picking on me. If you let me out to go back home, I’ll prove to you that I wouldn’t hurt her.”
Toward the end of the interview, Ronnie said he thought our mother would be glad if he left home forever, but “at my age and with no high school education, I couldn’t make a go of it, I don’t think.”
In a transcript of the post-interview discussion, panel members disagreed on whether Ronnie was psychotic, borderline psychotic, or understandably distraught over the way his life had panned out. Some considered him dangerously hostile. Another, a Polish-born psychiatrist new to the hospital, offered this opinion: “I don’t think he’s psychotic, but just reacting to everything like a boy would do. He’s just an unhappy boy who has had a difficult life.”
The psychologist who wrote the main reports on Ronnie’s mental condition thought Ronnie was “just a little psychotic, and maybe still salvageable.” They finally compromised by calling his condition a “schizophrenic reaction,” unspecified, with a passive-aggressive personality. They noted Ronnie’s extreme stress—“rejection by mother; poor home situation.”
Ronnie didn’t tell me much about Western State—only that there were no other kids in his building, just a bunch of loony grown-ups. To pass the time, he washed staff members’ cars. They told him he had no business being there. A psychologist there lectured Mom on her role in Ronnie’s behavior, which incensed her. Forever after, she had a low regard for mental health workers of all kinds.
Four months after Ronnie’s admission, the hospital bosses sent him to a barber school at nearby Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center, a state-run center that Ronnie recalled also trained disabled and wayward citizens in welding, clock and watch repair, and other employable trades. “Three square meals and they didn’t shock you”—a welcome change for Ronnie.
When his Western State psychotherapist called him in for a final assessment, Ronnie told him that he was contented at barber school and that he was going to dances and picnics on the weekends. “When I think of the way I behaved for a while there, I blush. I thought everybody was against me; that everybody was my enemy and I had to get them before they got me. I sure was mixed up.” To me, this sounds like Ronnie spoon-feeding the big dogs what they wanted to hear, but hey, whatever worked.
I don’t know if Mom and Daddy visited Ronnie. Hospital notes make no mention of it.
I don’t remember ever seeing him at Western State. I was there only once, as far as I recall, and it was disturbing. It was my college psychology class field trip, in the sixties. All I remember is crazed men with grimaced faces, their tongues wagging out, leering and raving from behind caged windows as I and my female classmates minced nervously into the auditorium for a show-and-tell about mental illness. When I saw the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, it reminded me of Western State with all its mad people warehoused in forbidding old buildings and dragged off to shock treatments. I had no idea my own brother had been one of them.
I asked two senior mental health professionals—a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist—to read Ronnie’s records. Neither saw the slightest indication that Ronnie was schizophrenic. The extensive hospital notes mention no visions, voices, or hallucinations, which are typical with schizophrenia. Both clinicians said the productive track of Ronnie’s life, which began the moment he was released and continued unabated until his death thirty-eight years later, disproved the diagnosis.
When Ronnie first arrived at the hospital, staffers thought he had delusions of persecution. But was he imagining that his mother had cast him aside? Was he imagining that he was an embarrassment to her? Ronnie was angry with Mom, and how, really, could he not have been? She rejected him. She tore him away from Polly and Roy and sent him to an orphanage, then a reform school, then a mental hospital.
As terrifying as Ronnie’s electroshock treatments must have been, he was lucky he didn’t have a lobotomy while at Western State, as did many patients during that time.
The last item in Ronnie’s file is a letter from Mom to hospital administrators early in 1954. She wanted them to know that late the preceding August, after ten months in state custody, Ronnie went to work at the American Barber Shop in downtown Roanoke. “As far as I know,” she wrote, “he is doing all right.”
11
Truth at the Kitchen Stove
Photos found among Ronnie’s possessions after his death show the change in his spirits from his happy, bountiful years with Polly and Roy to, a few years later, his untrusting gaze as he stood a few miles from the orphanage where our mother sent him in 1942.
Over the next many years, with Ronnie gone, my folks made a long, hard climb, me in tow, to a fingertip’s touch on the lowest rung of the middle class. Ronnie benefited not one iota. I don’t remember asking where he’d gone.
He was right about Granddaddy Bishop being a grand old man. He entertained me with his merry ice-blue eyes and that thick silver mustache I tugged on, making him yowl in comic pain. Eventually, he moved out of our house and into town for the most implausible of jobs for an old blind man—that of night watchman.
Every month or two, Mom, Daddy, and I rode the pickup to Moneta to see my other grandpa and Miss Belle, now in a farmhouse Belle’s better-off sister rented for them. All I recall is a rickety back porch, a corncrib, the purr of contented chickens pecking at the ground, a lonely clock ticking in the sparsely furnished parlor, and more love than they ever offered Ronnie.
Moneta was a revelation to Daddy and to me. All we’d ever known were rich landowners and poor grunts like Daddy who wrestled vast geographies into idyllic showplaces. In Moneta, small farmers fed themselves out of their own rugged slices of earth. They prayed for more rain or less rain, and other than that, answered to no one.
My folks made the most of our dependent circumstances. They painted our tenant house white. Daddy refloored and screened the front porch. They planted lilacs, maples, mimosas, and an elm, creating a lush oasis in the middle of pastureland. Mom culled impatiens seeds from friends’ yards, and within a few years her flowers shimmered in a thigh-high bank of purple, pink, and red in the shadow of our porch. We put tables out there, and as lightning bugs blinked across the fields, our church friends dined on Mom’s just-decapitated-on-the-stump fried chicken, and biscuits made with hand-churned buttermilk. They nibbled cobs of Daddy’s hybrid yellow-and-white corn, which he called “cream and sugar.” Mom made peach ice cream and spiked her sweet iced tea with mint snipped from our creek out back.
Except for hungry black men asking permission to hunt groundhogs on the farm, we had hundreds of acres to ourselves
most days after Daddy’s farm crew went home. Nothing lay between us and the mountains. No power lines, no buildings, nothing but wind, weather, and natural spectacle playing across the bumble-buzzed fields.
When I was nine, we watched from our front porch as Hurricane Hazel bent, but did not break, the giant trees a pasture away that made possible Mommy’s trademark brown-sugar pecan cookies. Another night we stepped into our front yard for a rare Southern aurora borealis that billowed pink and green curtains of light above the Southwest Mountains.
When I was little, Mom and Daddy began a practice that would later make my knocking on strangers’ doors as a reporter feel like old times. She delivered slices of pound cake or pecan cookies whenever she heard people were sick, lonely, or grieving. I tagged along to worn plantation cabins where kitchen doorways were so low even I at an early age ducked my head. At one house, a couple’s three drooling, moaning teenaged sons’ muscular dystrophy had turned their living room into a field hospital. The boys flopped their long limbs wildly on their beds as their feet contracted from muscle spasms, and I felt lucky.
We’d started attending South Plains Presbyterian Church, a 130-year-old congregation up the road from Bridlespur. A one-room church with clear blown-glass windows and a plain interior, South Plains steeped my folks in a rigid, hardworking Calvinism—key to Mom’s plan to make us respectable. She and Daddy gave up liquor and didn’t drink again until I was out of college. (At least four of Daddy’s six brothers and sisters were alcoholics. Mom’s drunken brother died when he fell, or was conked on the head, outside his favorite Ohio bar; the ninety dollars he’d flaunted was missing from his shirt pocket.)
South Plains was a cozy little white working-class congregation, where sun-scorched farmhands bowed their lily-white foreheads in their only hatless waking hour of the week. Every Sunday morning, Mom ironed Daddy’s shirt and parted his hair, which she’d shampooed the night before as he soaked off the farm dirt in our cast-iron tub. Daddy became the church’s top elected layman.
Mom was recruited for top roles, but she declined. She didn’t tell them why, but it was Ronnie. “I wasn’t worthy. I sinned,” she explained later. Still, she’d slip into her brown-and-white spectator pumps to lead the church women and the local home economics club. In the years following Ronnie’s departure, she was finally recovering from the taint of having had him.
Daddy was mentored by our minister, a progressive, pipe-puffing intellectual of Scottish descent, the fifth generation in his family to minister to humble farmers. The two men leaned on Bridlespur’s fences for hours to talk about nature, God, and agriculture. I was mentored by his wife, Fanny, a college-trained biologist who showed me the design of spiderwebs and the life cycle of Lunaria annua, the money plant, with seedpods like silver dollars. She introduced me to National Geographic, cranked up her Metropolitan Opera records, and encouraged my folks to think about piano lessons and college for me. Before my teens, I was banging out an off-tune “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” on the church’s tinny upright.
Fanny was the first woman I knew who shunned permanents, girdles, and stockings. Ladylike, with her bare knees together and her skirt tucked around them, her shiny brown hair carefully pinned into a bun, she was lovely without makeup. I’d sit by her in church and watch as she observed birds through the windows during her husband’s long prayers.
The women of South Plains found her odd. They whispered as she slipped their home-baked ham biscuits into her purse at potlucks so she wouldn’t have to cook that night. Farm wives took pride in fattening their husbands; a man’s beefy frame advertised his wife’s good cooking. Fanny was so thrifty that she’d cut a slice of Wonder Bread in two—the long way—for a sandwich so thin the tomato showed pink through the bread. Her husband was skinny. Visiting a friend’s bathroom, she once sprinkled powder into her shoes, only to discover, as the skin of her soles began to pucker, that it wasn’t talcum; it was dental adhesive.
I wanted to be like Fanny—my own authentic, quirky self, not so concerned with what people thought. This plan didn’t align with Mom’s for me.
She and I would wrestle for the next sixty years over the tension represented by the church ladies and Fanny—between behaving conventionally and feeling free to be our own true selves. Mom needed people, especially other women, to approve of her, and as part of that, she needed me to be a docile yes-ma’am kind of girl. I strained at that leash. I was Exhibit A of her attentive mothering. She was forever straightening my collar and fussing with my hair. Couldn’t she see that all that self-consciousness was no way to live?
* * *
CHRISTMAS MORNINGS, WE’D put on our Sunday best and ride the pickup over to the McIntyres’ to admire their tree and sip eggnog from silver cups. They might give us a jar of kumquats from their new winter place in Florida, or in the heyday of John F. Kennedy, an authentic Massachusetts rocker like his. Later on, they shocked us with the gift of a hundred shares of General Motors stock, millions of which, because of an antitrust controversy, were being divested by du Pont descendants like Anne McIntyre.
Mom was trying to squelch her self-doubts, but she never learned to drive. She practiced in the stick-shift pickup on the farm road until she crashed through a gate. A dog leapt out the back and ran away. Daddy and I teased her: Even the dog’s scared of your driving. She quit. We robbed her of self-respect. Driving would have done wonders for her confidence.
She took charge anyway. There wouldn’t be enough money from Daddy’s check for my college tuition, so when I was eleven, she signed on as a department store clerk. Another downtown worker out our way drove her for a dollar a week. The cook at the big house who’d felt sorry for us because of our worn clothes cheered the new outfits bought with Mom’s store discount.
I’d linger along the aisles of the high-ceilinged main floor, inhale cologne spritzes wafting from the perfume counter, take in the pleasant chatter of women shoppers talking with the clerks, and savor this twinkly scene of midcentury commerce. Mom was doing so much better that she urged other Keswick women and their daughters to work there, giving them all a leg up.
After ten years, though, Mom was fed up with the low pay. She saw old women working there on wobbly legs because their meager Social Security wouldn’t allow them to retire. Mom became a medical records clerk at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, with health insurance, a pension plan, and a credit union. At lunch break on her first payday, she rode the bus all the way back to the store to show her friends her pay stub.
Because of Mom, I went to college—the first in her family—and because I went to college, I went to graduate school and earned two master’s degrees. Because of her, she and Daddy traveled to Canada, the Great Lakes, and New England, and because of her, they eventually bought their first home, paying it off in an astonishing six months.
* * *
IN THE MIDDLE of June 1978, I came home to Bridlespur. I was getting ready to wander around Europe for five months, something I don’t think even the McIntyres had done.
For all my misgivings about Keswick, once I moved to noisier, dirtier places like Washington, New York, and Philadelphia, I came to appreciate the place. I would return and collapse like everybody else into the peace of its calming hills.
I was at the top of my game. I was thirty-two and divorced, having saved myself from an unhappy marriage. I was an up-and-coming investigative reporter in the heady era after Woodward and Bernstein drove Richard Nixon from the White House. I’d earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and gone to work for the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, a paper dedicated to fearless journalism. Now the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Observer’s big sister in the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, wanted to hire me.
Newspapers had pushed through my shyness. Either I got out there and interviewed people, or I’d wind up in a secretarial pool. Before long, I liked nothing more than rapping on doors on backstreets and country roads, taking in the wr
inger washers on porches, the long johns on the clothesline, the linoleum worn to wood in front of the kitchen sink from a lifetime of dishwashing.
For the Observer, I’d written a biographical series on Charlotte’s favorite son, evangelist Billy Graham, and it was about to be made into a quickie hardback by a New York publisher. For a week’s worth of rewrites, they’d paid me $10,000, more than enough for Europe.
* * *
I ARRIVED AT Bridlespur late one evening, my Volkswagen Beetle stuffed with clothes to sort through for my trip. I hugged and kissed my folks, dropped my luggage at the bottom of the narrow stairs, and hurried up to my old room to bed.
Sleep at our house was limb-stretching bliss. Our two upstairs bedrooms, my folks’ and mine, shared a common chimney that pierced the middle of the century-old house. Each spring, Daddy installed fans in the fireplace of each bedroom. We opened windows at the heads of our beds, set the fans on reverse, and slept all summer with cool mountain air flowing across our mattresses while the day’s heat flew up the chimney. I’d wake up to the songs of meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds, descendants of the grassland nesters that scored my childhood’s soundtrack.
Over the next few days, I bragged to the folks that I would wander around whatever countries I spontaneously chose, and I would do this all alone. That I had the cash, the freedom, the guts, and especially the sense of worth to make this trip amazed them. They savored my supper-table bravado with tickled glances at each other, a wordless celebration: They’d helped their only child position herself to cross the Atlantic for no other reason than her own curiosity.
One reason I was there was that I needed a passport. It would take days for my application to clear, and what sweeter place to wait? I’d lost my birth certificate, a primary requirement for a passport, and Mom didn’t have a copy. So one pleasant Wednesday morning I headed out in my navy-blue Bug for an hour’s drive to Richmond and the state health department’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. The clerk took little time in making a certified copy for me.
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