“I don’t think you’re bad, Tony. You did some bad deeds, but I think in fact you are very good.”
“Thanks, Doc,” he said. “I think you’re good, too. How come you want to work with crazy people? This hospital is for crazy people, and don’t tell me it isn’t, because I know it is. Why you want to work with people like us?”
“You’re not crazy at all, Tony. You know that. When you came into the hospital two years ago, you were crazy, but that’s long gone.”
“Yes, it is,” Tony said with a smile. “Thanks to you.”
“And to a whole lot of other people,” I said, “mostly you.”
“But you didn’t answer my question,” Tony persisted. “Why do you like being a doctor for crazy people?”
“Well, to tell you the truth,” I said, making a decision on the spot, “lots of people in my own family were crazy, so I felt a special closeness with them and wanted to learn how to help them.”
“Wow!” Tony said. “That’s pretty cool, Doc.”
“Thanks, Tony. I think you’re pretty cool yourself.”
When it was time for me to leave my fellowship, Tony and I had to say goodbye. One of the rules on the Children’s Unit was that clinicians are not supposed to touch the kids. Since so many of them have been sexually or physically abused, touch can be dangerous, and so it was deemed “inappropriate”—the buzzword for anything forbidden.
When we were wrapping up our last session, before I turned Tony’s care over to a new child fellow, I said to Tony, “We’ve really come to like each other, haven’t we?”
“Like each other?” he replied. “We love each other! I would kiss you on the mouth, but that would be inappropro.”
74.
I knew I wanted to have children one day. As I’ve said, my most treasured dream was to create for my own children the happy and stable childhood that had eluded me. When I reached my late thirties and still had not found the right person to have kids with, I wondered if I ever would. Then a strange thing happened.
I’d always dated people for the reasons most people do: I found a person attractive, interesting, she caught my eye—the usual prompts. But this time I looked to someone else to show me the way. I didn’t do it in quite as deliberate a way as that might sound, but I did do it, no doubt about that. I looked to Pam Peck to be my guide.
Pam Peck was a tall and beautiful redhead who was an occupational therapist on Service One when I was a first-year resident. Over the years I got to know her well enough to respect her a lot. Not only was she smart, she possessed a keen intuition as well as a large dose of sanity and humor, which were in rather short supply at MMHC, among both patients and staff.
She fell in love with a tall Cuban named Fernando, who was an attending psychiatrist at MMHC. Fernando fell for Pam as much as Pam for Fernando. I think it was that they were both so tall that set off the first spark. Pam just wasn’t going to find many men who measured up, literally.
Attraction turned to love, which turned to commitment, and before you knew it they were married. Pam went and got a Ph.D. in psychology while Fernando advanced in the Harvard system of academic psychiatry.
Since Pam seemed to me to be one of the savviest, most stable people I knew, I looked at who she was friends with. One of her very best friends was a woman at MMHC named Sue George. I don’t know how I knew this, but I did. Such is the way in institutions, relationships of all kinds become common knowledge.
I’d noticed Sue before, mainly because she walked really fast, scampering across the marble floor in the lobby like a sandpiper on the beach. Her nickname among the admin staff was Speedy. It occurred to me that if Pam Peck liked Sue George so much, maybe I ought to ask Sue George out. On the other hand, I knew Sue had just broken up with a man who’d been a resident a year behind me, and I didn’t want to compete with history.
With these thoughts swirling around my mind, one day I walked past a car in the MMHC parking lot and saw a straw hat with a red band around it sitting on the shelf in the back beneath the rear window. The red band caught my attention. I want to ask out whoever owns that hat, I said to myself.
MMHC had a system by which each car that used the parking lot had to display a sticker with a number on it. If a car was blocking another car, you wrote down the number, went inside, and looked in a directory to find out whose car it was. I took down the number of this beat-up Datsun with the red-banded hat in the back and went inside to find out who owned it. Wouldn’t you know, it turned out to be Sue George’s car.
I went to see Laura Rood in the Quarterway Unit. As its name implies, the Quarterway was a unit for patients who weren’t ready for a halfway house but didn’t need to be full inpatients. The Quarterway oversaw some of MMHC’s most interesting, chronic patients. Laura, the imposing, brainy, down-to-earth woman who took care of them, was a true crazy-whisperer. She “got” people with a chronic mental illness. She also got people in general, knew just about everyone at MMHC, and had a strong opinion of all of them. A lesbian in her midthirties, she was one of my dearest friends at the hospital.
“So, Laura,” I asked, as she was calling to one of the patients down the hallway to pull up his trousers, “what would you think if I asked out Sue George?”
“Great idea,” Laura said. “She’s the best. Be careful with her, though, ’cuz she just broke up with that total snooze, but she seemed to love him, can’t figure out why. Most of you men are so fucking boring, have you noticed that? Not you, of course, sweetums.”
“Thanks, Laura. Coming from you, that’s high praise indeed.”
“Anyway, she’s hurting. Just be nice.”
“I’m nice to all the people I date.”
“I know, I know. Don’t get defensive.”
Later that day, when Sue dropped by the Quarterway to talk about the family of one of the patients, Laura announced, “So, honey, Ned Hallowell wants to ask you out.” According to Laura, Sue dropped her keys. “Well, that’s ridiculous,” she said, picking them up. “I just broke up. I’m not interested in dating.”
“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Laura said.
So runs the grapevine at MMHC. Later that same day, Laura spoke with Chris Bullock, the man who ran the inpatient unit. “Ned Hallowell wants to go out with Sue George. Why don’t you have a dinner party and invite them both?”
“Excellent idea,” Chris said.
Chris was good friends with Sue, as she had worked on his unit. The next day, Sue confided in Chris, “Can you believe this, Ned Hallowell wants to ask me out? I can’t go out with him. I just broke up with Paul.”
“You’re not ready? I bet you are. Give it a try.” I’ll always be grateful to Chris for sticking up for me. “I think it’s a great idea for you to go out with him. And it just so happens that Annie and I are having a dinner party Saturday and we want to invite Ned and you. Don’t worry, Laura and a bunch of other people will be there, too.”
I tried to make eyes at Sue throughout the dinner party, but she ignored me, sitting at the opposite end of the table. We didn’t exchange more than two words, maybe hello and goodbye. I had done my best to talk to her before we sat down for dinner, but she kept moving away from me. Whenever I tried to get her attention, she’d look the other way.
I couldn’t leave it at that. Monday morning, I walked to her office just off the main lobby and knocked on her closed door.
Sue opened the door. “Ned? What do you want?”
“Well, I’ll get right to the point, I’d like to ask you out.”
Sue took a seat at her desk and started shuffling papers. “I don’t think so. I’m done dating doctors here.”
“Oh,” I said. Awkward silence. “No more doctors here.”
“I just mean I’m pretty vulnerable right now.”
“OK, I understand.” I paused, hoping some words would come to mind, but they didn’t. “Well, see you around,” was all I could muster.
“No hard feelings?”
“Of
course not. No hard feelings in the least … I hear from Pam Peck you’re a real foodie. Is that true?”
“We’re in a dinner group together, her and Phyllis Nobel and Sue Gorny and me.”
“Sounds like fun. You meet every month?”
“Yes, and sometimes we go out for a glass of wine at lunchtime.”
There was something about her. It wasn’t innocence—you couldn’t be innocent and work at MMHC—but she just seemed so very genuine. I said, “Well, OK, thanks for considering my invitation.”
“Thanks for asking,” Sue said. I bet she wanted to add, “And please do not ask again.”
But I had to try once more. The next day I knocked on her door again. Again, she opened it. “Ned?”
“May I come in?”
“I guess so.” Sue sat down in the chair behind her desk and I sat down as well, in the chair next to her desk, where I imagined her patients sat. I was beginning to understand what Bill Alfred meant by “the cut of her jib.” I liked the cut of Sue’s.
“Well, so I am here to try again. If you really mean no, I’ll leave you alone.”
Once again, Sue occupied herself with the papers on her desk. “I spoke to my dinner group about you and I was sure they’d tell me I was right, but they said I was crazy not to give it a shot.”
“Good dinner group.”
“But why me?” Sue asked.
“Because you’re friends with Pam Peck and I think Pam Peck is about as rock solid as they come around here. That, and you have a red band around your hat in the back of your car.”
“Oh, that hat,” Sue said with a laugh. “How’d you know I have a hat like that?”
“It’s in the back of your car.”
“How’d you know what my car looks like?”
“Because I walked by this car, saw the hat with the red band, and said to myself, I have to go out with the woman who owns that hat.”
“You looked my car up in the directory?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very advanced detective work.”
“You want to go out with me because you like my hat? I hate to tell you, but this is what I am afraid of. What happens when you discover there’s more to me than a red band around a straw hat and I am not some romantic preppy type?”
“Wow,” I said. “Where’d that come from?”
“It comes from dating too many men at Mass Mental and getting hurt too many times. I’m a country girl from rural Virginia, and I don’t want to get hurt again by some snob who wants to be a professor at Harvard and talks circles around me.”
“Seems to me like you’re the one talking circles around me. Did you ever consider maybe I don’t want to get hurt either? Or do you have a monopoly on getting hurt?”
That made her laugh. “Touché. OK, dinner. Tonight?”
“You’re on!”
We went to one of the worst restaurants we could have found, ironic for two foodies, but we were rushed to find a place and a now defunct joint over the Mass Pike called Oscar’s was the first place that came to mind. Burger King would have served better food.
But that night wasn’t about food. We talked and talked, as people do when they are falling under each other’s spell. Her mom had died of kidney disease when she was ten, so she kept her father and three siblings organized until her dad married again and another baby was born. She worked hard to get out of rural Virginia, she went to a mostly black school because her dad, even though he was a staunch Republican, didn’t believe in segregation, she got in to UVA and then came to Boston for social work school. We ended up closing the restaurant and then making out in the parking lot like teenagers.
75.
My mother spent the final years of her life in a nursing home near Chatham. Between the damage done to her brain by alcohol and the falls she’d taken, she was confined to a wheelchair and was no longer herself mentally. She was still cheerful and upbeat but didn’t make all that much sense.
When she died, February 9, 1988, I felt a sense of relief. I also felt guilty, as if I had somehow failed her for years. Duckie and Lyn each sent me a letter the day after Mom died.
“Dearest Ned,” Duckie wrote,
After someone you have loved and has been a real part of your life for 72 years dies, it leaves a large empty space and a sense of loss that can’t be filled. Her indomitable spirit will always be with us + the unhappy parts will fade away leaving us with the good memories that will never die … Even though, in quotes, she couldn’t stand me, because I ran her life, took her children away from her + cut her down whenever we met, I felt she needed me + loved me + when the chips were down she always came to me. I was always there with open arms + tried, not very successfully, to put the pieces together again. Our relationship was hard for others to understand. It was based on love + withstood many dramatic scenes. I stayed a second fiddle to her + Uncle Jimmy for years, just to mention one + yet we kept on loving each other. If I could write a book, as thee can, the story of those brothers marrying those sisters would be more than a miniseries on TV …
With love from thy ever loving aunt, Duck …
P.S. My letter sounds mostly about me + it’s thee I’m thinking about. You tried all through your growing up years to have a loving mother-son relationship. Don’t blame yourself that it didn’t turn out as you hoped it would until toward the end. What a good feeling you must have when you think back on some of the lovely visits you had with her. Your love for each other healed all the hurts + it had always been there waiting for the right time to show itself. It meant a happy ending for her + rewarding feelings for thee. I love thee very much. D.
The same day, I got this letter from Lyn:
Dear Ned,
Today’s my father’s birthday. [Lyn’s dad, my uncle Jimmy, had died nine years before.] Sort of a weird day to write to you about your mother’s dying … What a complicated person she was. Or maybe it’s the people around her who made her seem complicated. I find that I think of her in little compartments. She and I did have our good times together, mainly when we would come up to Exeter to pick you up. I think we did that twice … I hung out with her when I was in high school. We would have “tea” together in her various houses. Now and then, the real Dode would come out, and I did like her. Who could help it? She was funny, nice, tough, but elegant. A good person to know … To be related to her was maybe not so good. I realize that I carry around the reputation of “having a thing about your mother,” to quote my mother. And it’s true, I sure did have a thing. But it wasn’t dislike. It was really more exasperation—if you knew what she could be, then why the hell didn’t she be that and stop being the person in one of those other compartments? Good question. I still haven’t figured that out … I think booze had a lot to do with the failure of her to end up living happily ever after. Also, I think my parents tried to run her life for her, to take care of her, whatever, for good and selfish reasons of their own. They weren’t particularly introspective. And then your father’s damn illness and everyone’s ignorance on that subject. Had they all lived in another time, say now, I imagine she would have had a very different life … How I felt about her really came from watching you try to protect her. You did a hell of a job. From the time you were a pain in the ass little kid with Uncle Unger, you protected her. During your vacations from Fessenden you were always putting up a front for all of us, who lived with her daily. You didn’t fool us, but that didn’t matter. You wouldn’t let anyone put her down. We came to feel that it was hopeless to discuss your mother with you—and I admired that. You sure as hell cared. She was lucky to have had a kid like you, Ned. You never gave up on her … It breaks my heart, and I mean that, to hear you say you feel guilty. That is what I wish I had been able to take away. You really tried. You loved her so much. But you couldn’t really ever reach the real Dode long enough to pull her out of those other compartments. If anyone could have, you would have been the one … What the hell was wrong with her, I wonder? I think basically she was incapable of really fe
eling anything deeply. She went through all the motions, that’s for sure. But she didn’t take seriously enough what most people think is most important, caring for her kids. That is the problem I have when I think of her. I just don’t understand that. It obviously wasn’t your fault, but I guess you’ll always carry around that feeling of not being quite lovable enough … My father did the same thing to me to a certain extent. I have no doubt that he loved me, but it sure was on his terms, not mine. We got that very clear near his end. And that turns out to be o.k. with me. I don’t want to feel much more for him. He did the best he would with what he had, emotionally. Most of it was for him. He couldn’t help it, and he wasn’t a bad guy … That’s how I feel about your mother. She couldn’t help it. She wasn’t a bad person. She just lacked something that seemed basic … It makes us a kind of weird family in that we have trouble trusting that other people like us. We know intellectually that our parents loved us, at least as much as they possibly could, but emotionally we know that they basically didn’t give a shit. I guess that’s grounds for uneasiness! … So, what I’m saying is, I will miss your mother, particularly the compartment I got along with so well. I don’t blame her for messing up. She played the deck she was dealt. I truly don’t think there was any meanness in her at all. When she did some damage, she didn’t really know what the heck she was doing. I don’t think she meant to hurt you, or Ben or John, or my parents—any more than any of us really ever meant to hurt her. That people were hurt, there is no doubt. It’s too bad, in a way, that we can’t finger a bad guy and say he’s who caused all the sadness. There just isn’t a bad guy here … I wish she could have dropped all the compartments and just gone on with what she was—a kind, gentle, pretty lady. I wish I could go figure out what was missing—for me as well as for you. I wish I could make it so that she would never make you feel sad again for any reason at all. I wish this didn’t make me cry! But I guess we are stuck with her, Ned. And there are lots of good memories, aren’t there? … There’s also this. You did a really good job of being a kid—you took care of her from the day you could walk! You really did. To feel any sort of guilt is wrong and a step backwards. Maybe feel frustrated, surely feel sad, but please don’t feel guilty … I love you very much …
Because I Come from a Crazy Family Page 33