All day long in the open wards, filled with smoke, there was an impromptu theater, a floorshow of the disenfranchised. On display were the ten percenters (remember that old ad? One in every ten Americans is mentally ill), the unlucky elect who’d spent their lives being just the type of person kinfolk, and many others, can’t abide. The attendants were few and far between, and they had the defeated air of workers who were putting in time for money—and not much at that. The day staff complained, “You know nights. Nights don’t care about nothing.” And the night staff had the same high regard for the day workers. The odor was foul and stale, like that of an overcrowded, over-heated kennel.
An old man lay on the floor, kicking his legs, writhing, saying the baby was coming any minute.
A woman kept asking if anyone had found her ticket. She carried a soiled tote bag with the names of world capitals written all over it: London, Tokyo, Rome. She walked in a continuous circle, addressing imaginary porters: “No, no, I’ll carry my own bags, thank you.”
A tall, pale, thin man of indeterminate age also circulated throughout the room, pausing in front of one patient, then another, holding still, making his eyes bulge, and finally moving on.
He was a camera.
Someone else kept trying to eat cigarette butts. No one tried to stop him, though everyone must have wondered, in a mild uninvolved way, what would happen if one of the butts turned out to be lit. An ancient woman, whose wrinkles had wrinkles, said her mother would be here “to spring her loose” any minute. The man with the butts said, “Your mother’s still alive, I’m calling Ripley’s.”
“I’m on fire,” said the human camera, moving his hands quickly, as if to douse the flames, but of course the blaze was all in his head.
The staff, such as it was, muttered over charts. We learned to decipher their private vocabulary.
“Elopement precautions” meant someone might try to escape.
“Watch out for sharps” referred to the fear that a patient might possess a pencil or scissors or even a plastic fork and use it as a weapon.
“Vitamin H” was the nickname for Haldol, the psychotropic drug administered in big-time doses with big-time results. The patient is calmed but often afflicted with side effects such as impotence, dry mouth, drowsiness, and tardive dyskinesia, a shaking condition similar to Parkinson’s.
“Everyone here is nuts,” Raymond said to us in a whisper. “Shrinks too. The one this morning thinks he’s so smart, he didn’t even know today’s date, the month, the year. Had to ask me. Idiot didn’t even know the name of today’s president. You know what else he didn’t know? He didn’t know what it means, ‘Don’t cry over spilled milk.’ Has to ask me to explain it. Has to ask me ‘How are a cat and a dog alike?’ Wants to know if I’m walking down the street and I find an envelope addressed to someone else, all sealed up and stamped, what would I do? Another thing this joker wants to know: do I ever hear things or see things that other people can’t hear or see.”
“So what did you say?”
“I told him time doesn’t matter. By the way, Einstein agrees with me, and he was no slouch in the genius department. President’s probably Eisenhower and he’s probably out playing golf. Thing about milk is, so what if it spills. Just pick it up, for Christ’s sake. That’s how I got to be king.”
“King of what?”
“Oh, you can’t trap me. Listen”—his voice slowed down, became almost confidential—“I want to make a phone call, but they wouldn’t let me, especially after they found out where to.”
“Well, where to?”
“Where else? The moon.”
He began the frantic pacing that often preceded a shower of fists on whomever or whatever happened to be in his orbit. The eyes lit up with a fierce red glow. The speech was pressured and quick and interlocking, the words spewing out in chunks, stuck together like pieces of a cheap jigsaw puzzle.
“I haven’t slept in three days. I can’t sleep at night. Here are the facts. Everyone here has a pillow. I’m in a loony bin. Anyone could suffocate me, and whenever I bring it up, they call me paranoid.”
When Jacqueline visited, he said to her, “These people think I’m crackers. Fine. Bring me some crackers.”
She made the ill-advised error of doing his bidding and, worse, doing it incorrectly, bringing him the wrong kind, Triscuits, not Wheat Thins.
He was livid, opening the box, dumping its contents on the floor and on her.
She brushed the crumbs off and backed away.
Raymond started screaming about how he was going to have her name removed from the visiting list. The notion that at that point in its history Northampton State Hospital, overwhelmed as it was, was capable of maintaining and monitoring visiting lists was further proof of his disorientation.
The doctors tended to be foreigners who didn’t speak much English, only compounding the problem. There is no blood test for what was wrong with Raymond. Diagnosis was made through observation and through listening. But how could doctors with a limited command of the language being spoken by their patients distinguish a word salad from a legitimate complaint from a bizarre delusion? In any event, they rarely agreed on what was wrong with Raymond, acting as people do at the concession stand at the movies, immobilized over whether they should choose M&M’s or Twizzlers. They went from one opinion to another. They had a flavor of the month. He was schizophrenic. He was borderline. He was manic depressive. He was schizoaffective. With all the labels, it would have been a lot more convenient if he had had multiple personalities as well.
We were changed, too, by Raymond’s hospitalization, changed utterly. No longer could we pretend to ourselves that his behavior was the result of some gargantuan streak of obstinacy. He was sick, and if we weren’t careful, he’d make us sick too. The world took on a different cast, even the news, which now seemed filled with the spectacle of mental illness in action. People whose judgment is flawed and whose sense of reality is fractured are often thrust into split-second fame. Sometimes the spotlight is due to a display of goofiness or bad luck on a world-class scale. They stand naked in the middle of the road giving away money. They stalk the wrong celebrity. Their bright idea is often everyone else’s worst nightmare.
A woman is arrested in a botched scheme to trade her tot for a car.
One day a mild-mannered loner with a shotgun decides to thin out the cat population in his barn; next thing you know, it’s police officers in our nation’s capital.
A social worker is stabbed by a distraught client on a city street as she heads to work at eight in the morning.
A man pushes a woman he has never met into the path of an oncoming subway.
A passenger tries to break down the door of a cockpit on a crowded plane so he can prove that he, too, can fly.
If you have a brother like my brother, you develop cop sonar. You bristle at and quickly decode even the slightest skirmish on a street corner. You register tone and nuance in the voices of strangers. You become an automatic compendium of dreadful occurrences.
The prejudice against people like my brother is both extreme and widely countenanced. At one point a few years back, some homeless people took to sleeping on heating grates outside a dorm at Harvard. The students often brought them food from their dining halls, free falafel wadded up in napkins, distributed in a spirit of charity. An administrator thought of a clever way to evict the interlopers, and he enacted his plan in the middle of a cold snap in January. He ordered the installation of high, curved bars over the grates, ensuring that no human being could ever again panhandle that warmth. What few objections were raised died down quickly.
For our mother, the most painful part, beyond the facts of Raymond’s illness and his hospitalization, was the lack of money for a better placement. She thought that if she had the cash to send him to a posh private facility, his prospects would improve. She heard about one in New York where each patient had his own room and every day there was a structured event: “Monday’s bingo, Tuesday’
s card games, Wednesday’s crafts, Thursday’s self-esteem, Friday’s movies, Saturday is in-town privileges, and Sunday’s chicken.” It was nothing like Northampton, where every day was a unique excursion into the abyss.
It was not always that way.
When the Northampton Lunatic Hospital for the Insane opened in 1858, it occupied 172 acres of the best real estate in town, with views of the Holyoke Mountain Range. It was conceived with the highest of intentions and out of the noblest of motives. Everything was top of the line: fireproof masonry, steam heating, running water, and gas lighting.
An address that was delivered at the laying of the cornerstone by Dr. Edward Jarvis could not have been more humane or more high-minded. Occasionally, portions are reprinted in local newspapers and magazines, and I have no quarrel with his words:
Many are in the highest state of bodily health and vigor, most are strong enough to care to provide their own sustenance, while some are sick and need the care of others.
There is a general and acknowledged obligation resting on mankind for the strong to protect and aid the weak,— the rich to provide for the poor, the wise to guide the foolish,—the healthy to nurse the sick,—and the sound in mind to cure and care for the insane.
The higher the state of civilization, the more these obligations are recognized …
The hospital would be a haven, he said.
If the fallen house, the broken fence, the rusty implements, the weedy field are monuments to the improvidence of the proprietor or occupant, how much more should neglected and permanent insanity be deemed a monument to the faithlessness or inhumanity of those who should have provided the means of healing.
You of this town and these counties can and will do much for the prosperity and comfort of this new Institution. You can cheer, support and strengthen it, you can pour the oil of joy on its machinery and give the power of confidence to its operations, and we doubt not, you will do so, and then this Hospital will ever have reason to rejoice, that it is placed in the midst of an enlightened and a generous community.
During its early days, the hospital offered bowling, billiards, religious worship, classes in rug and basket making, and boating on the Connecticut River. There was a reading and smoking room, and assemblies were held on a daily basis. The hospital had its own football and baseball team.
It would have been wonderful if Dr. Jarvis’s high-flying sentiments had reigned indefinitely, but the history of the treatment of the mentally ill in this country is one of slow, downward-spiraling neglect and abuse, culminating in the state hospital that gave my brother such a terrifying experience.
In Raymond’s Northampton, patients in disjointed, sad outfits roamed the room. Velour caftans were teamed with hiking boots, sneakers with evening gowns, pajamas with formal wool vests. At Northampton, patients were not allowed to keep their own clothes. Every few days or so a huge pile of laundry would be hauled into the ward, so that each person could pick through the mound anew for something to wear. This policy only aggravated the loss of identity that patients were experiencing by the very nature of their sickness.
Raymond used to write about what happened, over and over in letters, as if to crack the puzzle of the depth of the betrayal he felt:
When you arrive at Northampton, you are told when you ask to make a call, you have no rights. You are stripped of your clothes which are gone forever and given state clothes which are worse than the Salvation Army rejects. They are rags.
They give the same drugs they use to put a race horse to sleep. You go around in a daze and can hardly talk. If you do speak out, you are put in a seclusion unit, a small cement room with a small window, no toilet, you excrete on the floor and then you eat your food from a tray on the same floor. The board of health should investigate these people.
Chapter Eleven
“Quiet, the Mustard Is Boiling!”
JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU’VE HAD YOUR LAST LAST HURRAH, THINK again.
It was the final Christmas eve in the house across from the library, and all of us were on hand for what Jacqueline called “the body count.”
Our next-door neighbor, a retired schoolteacher named Miss Gertrude Taylor, dropped by, as she did every year. And this year, as in all the others, she was offered a cordial, and she accepted it with madcap glee, a spinster on a prim binge. In retirement, her two passions were African violets, which she grew in boxes on tables throughout the house, and making her own fudge and homemade candy using unlikely ingredients like mashed potatoes to great effect. She was one of those reticent Yankees whose idea of an expansive conversation, one in which all parties are engaged in what she considered to be a heated exchange, was to say, “Least said, soonest mended.”
Dermot stood by the fire, his white hair adding an air of distinction and his square black glasses giving him a disconcerting resemblance to Barry Goldwater. Like a politician, Dermot loved to expound, and this evening, with its high quotient of built-in emotion, was a perfect opportunity to launch into one of his “what this country needs” speeches.
“Remember that Christmas about eight years ago when it was sixty degrees out? Nobody appreciated it because oil was still cheap. People aren’t waiting in line anymore for gasoline, and they are taking it for granted. What this country needs is a good strong energy policy, and I don’t think Ford is the one to give it to us. He has to spend too much of his own energy living down Watergate.” Then, turning to our neighbor, “Wasn’t Watergate something?”
“Least said, soonest mended.”
He looked back at the rest of us. “I blame it all on these kids and their peace candidate, McGovern. What we really needed in 1972 was someone like Humphrey. You can trust Humphrey.”
“The reason Mom and Uncle like him,” said Jacqueline, under her breath, to me, “is because he’s always giving speeches about how his family had to sell their house during the depression.”
“I heard that,” she said. Our mother’s eavesdropping skills were finely tuned. “You joke about it, but I’ve been wondering what Rose Kennedy would do if she had to sell her house,” our mother said. “The hitch, of course, is that Rose Kennedy wouldn’t be able to understand. She has had too much practice with national tragedies, and not enough with normal problems, like money.”
That January, she called our neighbor Mr. Brooks, who had left the shoe business for real estate, and asked him to put the house on the market. She let him pick a fair price, and he could show the house anytime as long as he gave reasonable notice. She threw up only one barricade. She could not bear the thought of any scoundrel in a vehicle who just happened to be chugging by on Route 202 being able to observe that the house where comfort and happiness abounded was now on the chopping block. She refused, in a gesture as maddening and impractical as it was admirable and steel willed, to permit a sign in front of the house that said FOR SALE.
The house sold for about three times as much as we paid for it in 1950. The new owners had young children, and they put a pool in the big backyard. We were told that the man was going to use the barn as the showcase for his electric train.
After we paid taxes and a large heating bill, the sum from the sale was not such a windfall. And there was no financial redemption on the horizon, no publishers panting for Bubblelini. Our mother and Raymond moved to the woodsy outskirts of town to a raised ranch with a sump pump to keep the lower level from getting too damp. Raymond’s room had belonged to a child, and the wallpaper still had a drummer boy theme. “If anything went wrong in this house, that’s just the kind of detail,” said Christina, “that would be snatched up by a certain kind of reporter.”
Raymond continued to have “episodes,” as we came to call them, and the family that took notes on itself continued to document them. I had relocated to Florida, and a letter dated April 25, 1979, from Jacqueline shows how hard she and our brother Michael were trying to get him help.
Dear Madeleine,
It all began Easter weekend. Michael spotted a breakdown while Mot
her and I could have easily seen it as just a new lease on life. Ray went on a diet, gave up drinking etc. Then he stopped eating and sleeping. Mike wisely banished Mother from the household and next we heard Ray was up in Rutland, Vermont. Mike called Tim Murray and Mike arranged for Medicaid. We got up to Rutland, and everyone agreed at that point that it was the best breakdown Ray ever had. Ray said this himself upon getting into the car. Ray and Michael did not talk at Ray’s insistence.
Unfortunately, the Mercy hospital was inadequate to the care Ray needed at that point. His psychiatrist recommended shock therapy, and Ray became totally angry at the suggestion.
Anyway, Ray got transported to Northampton, which has changed. For one thing the recreation room is co-ed. We saw Ray’s social worker, who looks like Rhonda Meister [a petite friend from Ursuline who joined the convent for a spell] and is just as conscientious. They’ve diagnosed Ray as manic-depressive of the manic kind. Mother is relieved to think it’s genetic. She was glad to get some concrete information on Ray, a whole lot better than a Freudian approach (“Your husband died, Mrs. Blais. Hmmmmm.”). Secondly, Mother was saying last night, “I think things are going to work out and don’t think I’m acting manic about everything, because I’m not.” She must have excused herself from a manic frame of mind at least five times. Also, Ray looks great, honestly, handsome. He grew a mustache sometime between Rutland and The Mercy and got his hair cut. His mustache is a nice full semi-circle and very trim. He did say one or two genuinely funny things when I saw him yesterday, e.g., when he got married he’d rent the biggest (manic) cathedral and Mother and I could sit alone in the back.
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