“What… ?” I leaned closer. Her eyes dulled. Presumably Halston or Bernie or Sadie were checking on us.
Ruth resumed her lifeless pose, but she did whisper with unmoving lips: “Hamlet by Shakespeare. ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.’”
“Rafe, honey,” Aunt Sadie called. “Come on. Kiss your Mom goodbye. You’ll see her soon.”
“What!” I shouted, startled. Ruth instantly returned to her impression of catatonic depression. (A very good impression if my memory is accurate; good, but no mimicry should fool a careful—or, at least un-dogmatic—doctor’s examination.)
“We have to go, honey,” Sadie said. She came near and beckoned me off the couch with an offer of her worried hand. I made sure to kiss my mother goodbye since the real her was present, entombed in her imitation of a corpse.
After I got up, Sadie bent down and kissed her little sister on top of her head, pressing her lips into my mother’s thick mass of black hair. Sadie almost broke down again. Her plump torso heaved and she gasped out, “Get better, Ruthie. I miss you.”
I wish I could report that my mother’s eyes flickered, that she gave a signal she had heard her sister’s loving if stupid plea for a happy ending, something that wouldn’t have risked exposure of her performance and yet could have eased Sadie’s pain. [I learned later how rigid, how tyrannical paranoia can be, especially when it is fueled by traumatic and therefore confirming events. My mother could no more feel pity for Sadie or trust her love than she could decide to discard her delusional and grandiose fantasies because they were interfering with her ability to be a good mother. There is no prison guard more alert or more tireless than mental illness. If Ruth could have trusted Sadie, then she could have trusted anyone; if she could have broken the wall of her terrible secrets just once then it would have crumbled altogether. There is no such thing as being a part-time paranoid psychotic]
I glanced back as Sadie led me out. The mannequin of my mother was still propped up on the couch, dead. While we walked to my uncle’s limousine, I marveled—silently, of course—at how she could possibly keep it up; hour after hour, pretending not to hear what was said to her, pretending to have no needs or desires.
“Is she like that all the time?” I asked Uncle Bernie, breaking the heavy silence of our ride home.
Aunt Sadie covered her face, overwhelmed by my pathetic question. Her reaction surprised me. We had no common ground: I was awed by my mother’s strength of will; Sadie thought I was in agony about Ruth’s condition, suffering from that vision of her as a zombie.
Bernie squinted at the view out his window. “No, not all the time.”
A long silence.
“It’s like she’s dreaming,” Aunt Sadie said, uncovering. She showed me a tired, but brave smile. “She’s awake but she’s dreaming. She wakes up sometimes, asks for things she likes. And she asks about you. She’s not in pain. That’s what the doctor said, right Bernie?”
“Yes,” Uncle hissed. The farther we got from the sanitarium, the angrier he seemed.
He hated my mother, I knew that. They hated each other. I had to remind myself over and over: my uncle was bad. No, not bad. My mother herself had made the distinction to me: he was a good man who believed in a bad system.
There was another long silence. I shut my eyes somewhere in the middle of it and pretended to sleep. My aunt brushed the top of my head after a while and mumbled, “Poor baby.”
“Sleeping?” Uncle asked. Sadie indicated yes. “What a mother,” he mumbled with surprising bitterness, as if he were the son who had suffered.
“When will they start the treatments?” Sadie said.
“Tomorrow.” Bernie’s music was a single note, low and angry. “They’ll do a series often and see if there’s improvement.”
“They put her out, right?”
“Of course! This is one of the most expensive and advanced psychiatric hospitals in the country.”
“I know. It’s wonderful of you, Bernie—”
“I’m not looking for thanks, that’s not what I mean. I mean they know what they’re doing. They use anesthesia and the voltage is set lower … Anyway, she won’t know a thing about it. He said it lifts them out of the severe depression so they can begin treatment. You can’t deal with her the way she is now. How can Dr. Halston talk to her? She’s unreachable.”
“I pray it works, that’s all.”
“Look. Anything is better than how she is now. It’s a living death. It’s worse than death.”
“Shh!” Sadie was in pain. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth, God damn it.”
“No, it’s not. There’s always hope.”
I did not understand the implications of their conversation. Since I intend this to be read by a lay audience I should state what is obvious to any professional: although electroshock therapy is advocated today as an effective symptomatic treatment to major depression and is in use on roughly twenty percent of its sufferers, nevertheless, no one, including its admirers, considers it to be appropriate in a case of paranoid psychosis or posttraumatic stress, the two indicated diagnoses of my mother’s condition. [Readers of my book The Soft-Headed Animal know that I do not believe in the use of the electroshock under any circumstances, including major depression. Evidence that prolonged use of electroshock therapy causes permanent brain damage is plentiful and there is no scientific proof that it cures depression itself. However, as stated above, even ECT’s advocates would not recommend its use on a patient with my mother’s problems.]
My mother received the wrong treatment. Nine-year-old Rafe did not know that. He did not know that keeping his mother’s secret was doing her harm. Nor is the mature Rafe confident that had I been less skillful at deception, had I been found out and forced to confess that my mother wasn’t really withdrawn—that she spoke to me and said she was deliberately fooling her doctors—I am not confident that I would have been believed. I hope I am not overstating Dr. Halston’s error. All doctors make honest mistakes, especially when a clever patient is deliberately deceptive. But I am sure that, having made his diagnosis, Dr. Halston would not have been quick to overrule himself because of the account of a child, a child who could easily have made it up out of his own fantasies. Moreover, I understood my mother’s motive and I respected it. What is madness to a normal adult made sense to me as a traumatized child: my mother, acting out of her paranoia, meant to be loving by her injunction that I should keep silent and not identify myself with her and her “cause.” That would only have landed me in the care of the same monsters who tormented her. It is hard to understand, but Ruth’s actions, which seem heartless and unconscionable to a normal person, were, by her lights, the actions of a loving mother.
I found Hamlet in one of the red leather-bound volumes in Uncle Bernie’s study. I had permission to take any of those books. I was a precocious reader and I enjoyed being one. My father encouraged and praised such behavior and Uncle Bernie was in awe of it. The desire to please my absent father and to dazzle my prideful uncle got me to open the classics, but the power of their narratives kept me going. (With apologies to Alice Miller, I’m not sure anyone would develop a taste for culture without what she characterizes as abusive parental behavior, namely the narcissistic parent who demands precocity as a precondition for love. She’s right, it isn’t a recipe for happiness; but without it, Mozart wouldn’t have existed.) I had already read Plutarch’s Lives and a volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire out of Uncle’s library. I had avoided Shakespeare because verse, much less verse in the form of dialogue, was discouraging. That same afternoon, after my tennis lesson, dressed in sweaty shorts, I pulled the second of the two-volume set of Shakespeare down from its high shelf and propped the book on my naked thighs. I remember the leather sticking to my skin. It took a while but I found the speech Ruth had quoted. Along the way there were other lines that lured me into reading scenes out of order. (To this day I
have never read a Shakespeare play from beginning to end, but always out of sequence, as if I were assembling a jigsaw puzzle.) I was struck by lines that still resonate with meaning for me. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” might well be on every psychiatrist’s wall, for whether it is good philosophy or no, it is a necessary premise of the therapeutic process.
I loved the play. How could I not? Indeed, it is an indication of my mother’s intelligence that she knew provoking me to read it would continue and extend her influence despite being held prisoner in the sanitarium. Think of it from her paranoid point of view: Hamlet has been separated from his noble father—a warrior king—by an evil and powerful uncle who has robbed Hamlet of his mother’s love, his father’s life, and his own claim to the throne of Denmark. There is, additionally, especially when read during the Freudian literary atmosphere of the early sixties, the incestuousness of Hamlet’s relationship to his mother combined with a political rebel’s philosophy, born of alienation. Hamlet is keenly aware of the world’s hypocrisies and corruption: he is the disenfranchised child of a social system in the hands of the cowardly and murderous uncle. And this analogous predicament is delivered with poetic genius, its despair and rage sung so beautifully that the most painful moments also inspire delight in the sheer elegance of Hamlet’s mind. Indeed, I found the Prince’s situation—including his death—enviable. What to the normal adult mind is a tragedy seemed almost a triumph to nine-year-old Rafe.
My love affair with Hamlet caused trouble for me with Uncle Bernie’s son, Aaron. It happened during a family brunch held shortly after his graduation from college, about a month after my visit to the sanitarium. Sadie’s and Harry’s clans were all there. It was a bon voyage meal: Aaron would be living on a kibbutz for the summer. After he returned, it would be decided whether he would go for his MBA, as his father wished, or try his hand as a painter, as he wanted. (I doubt my uncle believed there was anything to settle. But Aunt Charlotte, who was on the board of two museums, who frequented art galleries and bought Impressionist paintings, was a wavering ally for her son’s artistic ambition.) His sister, Helen, was upstairs, supposedly suffering from a stomach virus, one of the convenient illnesses she contracted to avoid family occasions. My near calamity developed when Uncle bragged one time too many about me, in particular when he bragged about my reading Hamlet. He knew I had because the same day I visited my mother at Hillside, I asked permission to take the two-volume Shakespeare set into my room. I made the request both to read Hamlet and to make the point that I was doing so. (My pleasure in the play was real; so was my vanity.) So far, Aaron had suffered silently through itemizations of my brilliance on his visits home. He had already been tortured last night with my various school accomplishments. When Uncle remarked over brunch that I knew Hamlet so well I could quote long passages from memory, Aaron gave up his stoicism.
“So what?” Aaron snorted. “He’s nine.”
“That’s what makes it remarkable!” Uncle dropped his forkful of Nova, en route to a bagel. The heavy silver tines struck the equally heavy silver serving dish and resulted in a vibrating chord that harmonized with his remark.
“Enough!” Aunt Charlotte shouted. “We all admire Rafael, but enough is enough!” She pushed a stiff hair-sprayed lock off her brow. Its unloosed presence on her forehead was a novelty, caused by her exceptionally vehement movement. She managed her emotions carefully: that outburst was unmanaged and unique.
Bernie ignored her, nevertheless. He pressed Aaron. “How can you say he’s nine as though that makes it nothing?”
“I mean …” Aaron was understandably aggrieved. His eyes stayed down, staring at the linen and his Limoges plate. His tone, although whiny, was not loud. “All I mean is—what difference does it make if he memorizes it? He can’t understand it. He’s memorizing the way a monkey memorizes.”
This time Julie, my old defender, didn’t speak up. She sighed loudly, a habit she has to this day when confronted with a situation that she wishes were different but that she has given up trying to change. At the time I gave her no credit; I concluded she was reacting with a girl’s cowardice and hypocrisy. (My new understanding of male-female relations came from Hamlet’s scenes with Ophelia. I had gloomily ignored Julie during brunch, ready to send her packing to a nunnery—that seemed an especially harsh punishment for a Jewish girl—if she dared to bring up the subject of my earlier rash declaration of love.) Despite my newfound contempt for the ways of women (“You jig, you amble and you lisp. You nickname God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance.”), I spoke up for myself mostly to impress Julie. “I know what it means!” I shrieked in outrage.
“Oh yeah, right,” Aaron said.
“Ask me any line in the play!”
“All right, all right,” Uncle said. Other adults were groaning or mumbling to Aaron or to each other. They were sick and tired of this punishing dance Bernie made me and his children perform. I thought their disgust and unhappiness was directed solely at me. I believed they envied me. I didn’t understand that besides Aaron, whose envy was merely a reflex triggered by his father, the others mostly felt pity for me—I was a sad little boy whose mother was crazy and whose father was worse, a Communist.
But I thought I was the noble Dane. I got to my feet, towering over the table at my height of four feet eleven inches, and brandished an elaborate silver spoon. “Go ahead. Ask me. What do you want to know? You want to know what quietus means? You want to know what bodkin means? Or fardels? Do you know what it means when Hamlet says to Horatio, ‘If he but blanch, I’ll tent him to the quick?’”
Someone, I think it was Uncle Harry, laughed. I must have made quite a sight. Some of my relatives were staring at me, open-mouthed. I didn’t look at Julie, the real object of the performance, but I was sure she must be impressed. I stayed on Aaron, who was not shocked or amused. He was humiliated. His cheeks were red and his eyes were downcast.
“Well, wiseguy,” Uncle Bernie asked him. “You started it. Do you know what it means?”
I was huffing from the exertion of my outrage, but I maintained my pose of challenge and contempt.
Aaron raised his eyes to me. There was hate in his look; the cornered kind, the hatred of a wounded animal for its tormentor. “No. But I know what ‘the incestuous pleasure of his bed’ means. Do you?”
It was an accident, of course. Aaron was attacking my presumed ignorance of sex. However, I had looked up incest in the dictionary, along with all those other words, and I understood very well what it meant. Indeed, I didn’t have knowledge; I had experience without knowledge. For a ghastly moment I thought Aaron wasn’t merely challenging my vocabulary, I thought he was exposing my secret. It took no more than a second for me to realize he couldn’t be. Then my vanity was tormented. It longed for me to shout out that I not only knew what was meant by “the incestuous pleasure of his bed,” I had lived it—though not as a pleasure. I was a merciless competitor in those days. I didn’t shy from delivering the final killing stroke and that certainly would have been a coup de grace. Don’t misunderstand. I didn’t come close to a confession about the incest. But I was transfixed by the prospect, at how it would be a perfect victory. I suppose I could have said I knew what incest meant; that wouldn’t have been considered suspicious. And yet I felt merely saying the word was an admission I understood its meaning in an immoral way.
I didn’t have to solve my dilemma. No one gave me a chance to answer. Aaron’s vocabulary comprehension challenge was considered inappropriate by the adults. While I stared at him, stuck with my wheels spinning, he was rebuked. He lost even his mother’s support; she was particularly outraged and ordered him out of the room. Aaron stormed off and I was brought a hot chocolate as either a compensation or a sedative. I drank this in silence, temporarily afraid of cultural arguments. They were more dangerous than their surface made them seem. I peeked out at Julie from time to time. She looked unhappy, but beautiful. Her long hair, black, shiny
and very straight, trailed down the shape her new breasts made against her white angora sweater. I told myself she was sad because she had lost my love, in the same way that I thought Ophelia was tormented by Hamlet’s abrupt coldness.
“My lord, I have remembrances of yours that I have longed long to re-deliver.”
“No, not I. I never gave you aught.”
“My honored lord, you know right well you did; / And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed / As made the things more rich: their perfume lost, / Take these again; for to the noble mind / Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”
I thought our situations weren’t so different than the noble Dane and the fair Ophelia. Her father was a Polonius to Bernie’s Claudius. I was in a fight to the death with the usurpers and couldn’t risk exposing my cause to her for fear she would betray me. I had to pretend hostility and, like the Prince, I felt a generic disappointment in her sex. She was weak, after all. “Frailty, thy name is woman.” And my brave mother was weak. Her weakness was manifested differently than that of Hamlet’s mother, but at the source, Ruth was just as weak and just as useless.
When the brunch ended, Julie got up and moved behind my chair. I ignored her. She tapped my shoulder. “You said you were going to teach me chess.” She spoke softly.
“Aren’t you going home?” I said in my new guise as the ungracious Hamlet.
“No, Dad and Bernie have work to do. You’re stuck with us all afternoon. Come on, teach me how to play.” She took my hand and urged me out of the chair. We went to my wing of the mansion the quick way, through the kitchen and the maid’s quarters.
Entering my room, Julie halted, put her hands on her hips, and swiveled her torso to survey it. There was a maternal attitude in this pose. I had a flash of insight: she was being my big sister, a sort of halfway mother. She didn’t love me the way my grandiose imagination wished. I hadn’t discouraged her with my new gruff tone. There was no romantic interest to discourage because she saw me as a little boy, not a tragic prince.
Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil Page 15