Because I Come from a Crazy Family

by Edward M. Hallowell

  How often I’d imagined this, when I could start in earnest, a knight in training, to learn how to do battle with the demons of the mind, including my own. Like Stephen Dedalus, I was ready to forge in the smithy of my soul …

  I harked back to a moment in Mr. Tremallo’s class at Exeter. One morning Mr. T. suggested there was parody in Stephen Dedalus’s words that come at the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

  “Do you think Joyce meant us to take that proclamation at face value?” Mr. T. asked the class, fourteen sixteen-year-old males sitting around a massive oaken table. “Or was he poking a bit of fun at Stephen?”

  “How could he be poking fun?” I piped up. “How can it be parody? This is Stephen’s big moment. It’s like his battle cry. Stephen meant those words with all his heart!”

  “Why?” Mr. T. asked, in typical Socratic fashion.

  “He meant it with all his heart,” I repeated. “I think he believed in his dream and now he was announcing it for all the world to hear. I don’t believe there was a drop of irony or parody in it at all.”

  Mr. T. paused, then replied, “I agree with you that Stephen meant it. He meant it the way you would have meant it”—Mr. T. paused and smiled, gentle as always when he challenged us—“in a totally sincere, young man’s way. And since you’re a young man, and all of you are young men, it’s easy to miss how embarrassingly, ridiculously self-serious those words ring to an older person’s ear. But do you think perhaps the author, the very clever James Joyce, was employing some artifice and making a little bit of fun of Stephen’s ultra-grandiose vision? Not in a mean way, of course, but in a sympathetic way, parodying the grand dreams of the young. From the older person’s vantage point of knowing such dreams rarely come true?”

  “How can you say that, Mr. Tremallo?” I countered, almost shocked. The rest of the class watched as Fred and I engaged. “Dreams don’t come true? How can you be so cynical? Dreams do come true! Why are we here, getting all this education, if not to make dreams come true?”

  “You tell me,” Mr. T. said with his characteristically wry smile.

  “You want me to say something like dreams are just an illusion and self-deception, and we’re here to learn that lesson, like we just learned it reading Gatsby, but I’m not going to say that,” I replied.

  “Any more than Stephen Dedalus would!” Mr. T. said, slapping the table to drive home the idea. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Joyce has enough distance on his hero, who is himself after all, don’t forget that fact, to appreciate the incredibly jejune nature of his statement.”

  “What does ‘jejune’ mean?” I asked.

  “Look it up,” Mr. T. said.

  While I was discovering in the gigantic brown hardbound Webster’s Third New International Dictionary that “jejune” meant “naïve, simplistic,” another student, Julian Connelly, spoke up, helping me out. “So he wants us to like Stephen for being such a dreamer and thinking so big, but he also wants us to see that Stephen is still young and has a lot to learn.”

  “So what happens when you learn a lot?” I asked. “You give up on your dreams and become a cynical old man?”

  “No,” piped in Rob Shapiro, the smartest kid in the school, “you become wise.”

  “So what’s the difference between being wise and being depressed?” asked my friend Paul Zevnik.

  “If you’re depressed, you don’t think,” chimed in Paul Goldenheim, who was headed for medical school one day. “You just feel. And you feel like crap. But if you’re wise, you also think.”

  “What’s the good of that?” asked another kid, Eli Robertson, both poet and super-jock. “What’s so good about thinking? Thinking is overrated. It’s all anyone does around here. At this place, emotions are forbidden; all you can do is think. Thinking and being smart; what’s the good of it if you’re not happy?”

  Mr. T. now chimed back in. “So was Stephen thinking when he wrote those words?”

  “No way,” someone else said. “He was like on a date—dreaming big, trying to get lucky. He’d lost touch with reality.”

  I remember not wanting to agree with Fred Tremallo back then (or now), even though I knew a sophisticated reader would agree with him.

  Just as in psychiatric training when I would be cautioned that we have few cures, only salves, I would bristle, just as I would when told not to cheerlead but rather allow the sadness to flow and despair to fill the room. When told early on that every trainee comes to Mass Mental seeking the Holy Grail of human nature but no one finds it, I would take umbrage. It was years before I gave up (sort of) what the seasoned pros in mental health call rescue fantasies, naïve dreams of cures, and instead reluctantly settled for what minimal good I could do.

  I was not, at heart, a sophisticate, at Exeter, or now, on the doorstep of residency. I was too much of a poso for that. I was as foolishly bold and naïve as Stephen Dedalus. When it came to sophistication, I always kept in mind the words of Samuel Johnson, who described sophisticates as people who are “too refined ever to be pleased.”

  I wanted none of that. I was an all-in type of guy, a man of, in my friend Jon Galassi’s words, “wretched excess,” intemperate, full of enthusiasm and a tendency to overdo, masking pockets of loneliness, depression, pessimism, and darkness.

  Of course, through all my grand dreams of saving others surged a selfish desire, the crazy wish that I could have saved my father, that I could have kept the storybook romance he had with my mother from ending, that the five of us could have lived happily ever after.

  50.

  The first baby I fell in love with was Lyn and Tom’s first child, Mary Josselyn, aka Molly. Being in college when she was born and nowhere near a baby-making age, I still knew, just from watching Molly and seeing the joy Lyn and Tom took in her (despite all the work!), that someday I absolutely wanted to create a family. It became my most cherished goal: someday to create a family and give my kids the happy childhood I wasn’t able to have.

  Years later Molly enrolled in the pre-med program at Bryn Mawr, got into Brown Medical School, and became an E.R. doctor, which she is today.

  When Molly finished her training, Lyn decided she wanted to throw a graduation party for her daughter and her fellow graduates. Since the gardens at the Blisses’ beautiful country house would be in full bloom, they decided to have the party at home.

  Although from all external appearances the Bliss family was as WASPy and preppy as could be, Lyn really hated being typecast. She did not want to be just another photo in Town & Country.

  She set up the party just as one would expect—passed hors d’oeuvres prepared by a top Providence caterer, formally dressed servers and bar staff, full open bar, music, everything you could ask for, and we even got beautiful weather. All just as it would have been drawn up.

  With one exception. One detail set this party apart from all others of its kind. One element imprinted this event with the mark of Lyn, of Josselyn Hallowell Bliss. One of the waiters was naked. Well, not entirely naked. He wore sneakers, and a red bow tie around his bare neck. Otherwise, he was as naked as the day he was born.

  Since I grew up in boarding schools and was in male locker rooms just about every day, male nudity does not grab my attention. Penises do not stick in my mind after I’ve seen them. But this one did. I can see it now, hanging there in all its full, flaccid glory, not too big, not too small, just right, a living tribute to Lyn’s absolute insistence on being herself, convention be damned.

  Here was where politeness got trumped by something bigger. Lyn was indeed a stickler for manners, as all of her children could tell you. She’d sit at the head of the dining room table at family dinner with a knife in her hand, one kid on one side, one on the other. They took turns for who was forced to sit next to Mom. Should one of them make the mistake of putting an elbow on the
table, whack! came the handle of the knife, inflicting serious, memorable pain. Thank-you letters after birthdays and Christmas were to be written within forty-eight hours, and read over by Mom; they had to include at least one interesting detail. Napkins went onto laps the minute you sat down, pleases and thank-yous became as automatic as breathing by age five, and handshakes were rehearsed until perfect. Lyn deeply believed in manners.

  Hiring a naked waiter to staff your party is not exactly out of Emily Post. However, it is out of the book by which all of us Hallowells were raised, the book that scorns hypocrisy more than anything else, and that values being genuine most of all.

  It was fun to watch the various reactions people had when the naked waiter approached. Most laughed, and, playing along with the joke, took from his tray whatever he was passing around. But some people scurried the other direction, refusing any sort of interaction. Since Lyn invited the families of the graduates, not just the graduates, there were many older people there, some of whom harrumphed about the “tastelessness” of this “display.” But others openly marveled at how daring Lyn, Tom, and Molly were to do this, making a standard party unique and most certainly unforgettable.

  I’m pretty sure Tom would not have chosen to do it this way, but he always let Lyn be Lyn (he really had no choice), and he did love her for who she was. Molly took more after her father as well, in that, as fiercely competitive as she was, she was naturally reserved. But she also loved her mother for who she was. As much as Lyn could be bossy, manipulative, moody, erratic, and at times just plain impossible, we not only loved her but also felt grateful that she took big chances and added so much pizzazz to our lives.

  She was the glue that held the family together. Once Gammy Hallowell died, there was no one else to bring us all together, at just about gunpoint if need be, until Lyn assumed that role. Every family needs such a person if they want to stay close and actually care about each other.

  51.

  A month into internship I decided to take the plunge and get psychoanalyzed. This was 1978. Psychoanalysis was no longer a requirement for psychiatrists in training, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, but neither was it considered the impractical and obsolescent step it would become by the turn of the millennium.

  Ever since I first learned in vague terms what psychoanalysis was back at Exeter, I had wanted to “get analyzed,” as people put it. It seemed like that mysterious process might hold the keys to the kingdom, the keys to unlocking the secrets of the psyche. Maybe it was just the twentieth century’s version of phrenology, or the theory of the humours, but I was hooked. I wanted in, even though I knew nothing substantive about it except that it was time-consuming, expensive, and not guaranteed to do any good.

  Then why in the world did I so want to do it? I had two compelling, unshakable reasons: desperation and curiosity. I felt compelled to do it, as if getting analyzed were my best, if not only, hope of gaining release from my insecurities, depressions, and doubts and becoming a happy, well-adjusted adult. Reason number two, I absolutely had to satisfy my curiosity as to what this mysterious process that gripped the imagination of the world’s intelligentsia was all about.

  A swarm of cynics couldn’t have held me back, not that any tried. In fact, almost all of my friends and colleagues, including all the people who were headed into the practice of medicine, encouraged me and told me they wished they could do it as well. Most intelligent people want to know what makes them tick.

  Since I was doing my internship through the VA system, and the VA insurance still covered psychoanalysis, my first eight months or so would largely be paid for by the feds. Once residency started, that coverage would end, so I’d have to moonlight to pay for it.

  The only question I had was how to find the right psychoanalyst. In Boston there were a few psychiatrists who had a reputation within the professional community as being adept matchmakers, able to pair a potential analysand, as the patient was called, with the ideal analyst.

  One such reputed matchmaker was an analyst named Max Day. Having no idea what to expect or how I was supposed to approach “the great Max Day,” as some people in Boston referred to him, I impulsively called Information one day, got his number, and rang him up. He actually answered the phone himself. Somewhat surprised, I sputtered ahead and nervously told him what I was looking for. He said he had time to see me, so I booked an appointment to meet him in his home office in Newton.

  With that one spur-of-the-moment phone call, I set in motion a process that would last twenty years, and actually, to this day, has not formally ended. It would cost me upwards of $200,000 and well over a thousand hours, if you include travel time. For such an enormous commitment of money, time, and energy, I did no research, unquestioningly took what the grapevine gave me as the man to see to get a referral, and with enormous hope, excitement, and faith burst into the unique, unpredictable, and enigmatic world of psychoanalysis all but blind.

  Max Day’s house was on a lake, and I thought to myself that first afternoon that he must make a lot of money doing this work to afford such a fine house in Newton.

  The next thing I knew I was sitting in a ladder-back chair at the corner of his desk. Max sat behind the desk with a yellow legal pad and a pen in front of him. He wore beige polyester trousers, a blue-and-pink-checked short-sleeved shirt that looked as if it were bought at Sears Roebuck, and a garish, mismatched ultrawide tie that was one step short of being part of a clown’s costume. He wore pale yellow eyeglasses, and his face looked like a pie. He might as well have been named Max Bialystock.

  He looked at me and asked, “Why are you here?”

  He could have been the man behind the counter of a deli asking, “Whad’ll ya have?” I’ll have a psychoanalysis on rye, extra mustard, hold the mayo, I felt like saying. But instead, I dutifully replied, “As I said on the phone, I’m here because I want to go into psychoanalysis and I understand you are good at matching people like me with the best analyst.”

  Max heaved a sigh, all but saying “Oy vey.” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why do people keep saying that about me? I’ve never claimed any such thing. How could I? It’s impossible. How can anyone predict what will happen when two people meet? I can’t. Nobody can. If that’s why you’re here, I can’t help you.”

  “But I told you on the phone,” I protested.

  “I must not have understood you,” Max interrupted. “I would have said you’ve got the wrong guy if I’d understood you.”

  “So you don’t match people with the right analyst?” I responded, feeling lost.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice?” Max replied wistfully, almost rhetorically. “I would do it if I could, but I can’t. No one can. I can make a referral for you if you’d like me to, but that’s just because I know a lot of analysts. They’re always looking for business.”

  I felt confused. The man I was entrusting with one of the most important choices I’d ever make, whom to go to for my momentous, life-changing psychoanalysis, was telling me the choice was all luck of the draw. “Dr. Day, I was really hoping you could guide me on this. Picking the right analyst seems pretty important, don’t you agree?”

  Max raised both his hands, as if looking to heaven for help. “Yes, yes, of course it’s important, it’s very important, it’s just that there’s no good way to do it. I’ve seen people interview ten analysts before settling on one. So how could I possibly tell you who to go to see based on one meeting with you? You could hate me forever if I got it wrong.”

  “You’ve seen people interview ten analysts?” I asked, amazed.

  “Even more! Sometimes I’ve seen them interview twelve, fifteen, like trying on suits at Milton’s, and still not finding a single one they thought was right.”

  “That seems pretty ridiculous,” I responded. Of course it does, I could hear the naysayers saying. The whole process is bogus, like a cult.

  “Ridiculous is pretty common when it comes to the mind,” Max replied. “You’ll learn this, if you have
n’t already.”

  “Well, what should I do, then?” I asked. I felt like a big bubble was slowly getting burst. “I’d really feel more comfortable getting a referral from you rather than just blindly picking someone out of the Yellow Pages.”

  Max had a sweet, dimpled, old man’s smile. “I don’t think you’d find many of us in the Yellow Pages. But if we were there, that would probably be as good a way of finding the right analyst as any other. Still, you’ve driven all the way out here, you’ve come a long way, I assume you drove? You didn’t take the T, I hope I told you not to take the T, since you’ve gone to all this trouble, if you want me to make you a referral, of course I’d be glad to. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up too high.”

  Why the hell was he asking me how I got to his office, did I drive or take the T? Didn’t he understand the urgency that I was feeling? “To tell you the truth, Dr. Day, my hopes were up very high, but the way you’re talking, well, it’s not what I expected.”

  “Life usually isn’t, but I’m sure you’ve discovered that by now.”

  “Yes, I have,” I responded, doing my best not to get angry or show frustration.

  Max surprised me by saying, “I ought to get to know you a little bit if I am going to do this, don’t you think?”

  “But I thought you said it won’t make any difference.”

  “It won’t, but it’s always good to get to know someone. It’s a good thing to do. Not because it will determine who I refer you to—I’ll probably just refer you to the first guy I can find who’s in town and has time—but it’s just a good thing to do.”

  “I don’t know, Dr. Day, this is not what I’d expected. Are you testing me or something?”

  “You’ve come a long way out here to see me, and I’ve disappointed you, but you’re not getting mad at me. Do you have trouble with getting angry?”