By that time, the whole biz was starting to wind down. After Annie Hall, I could tell that Jonathan had had it. Delores sent him up for the lead in My Bodyguard, directed by Tony Bill. Coming off the film that won the Oscar for Best Picture, he was a shoo-in for the part until, that is, he told the director that he had had amblyopia and that his eye still, on occasion, wandered all over his face. This of course was no longer true, but it was enough to scare the director and lose him the part.
After Stardust Memories, Rob had had it also. It was the repeated takes of the elephant scene on the beach that did it for Rob. He hated being hoisted up on wires. He was frightened. I wasn’t on the set that day, but I was told that they had to do a number of takes. I felt terrible. After all my protective efforts, my child still ended up traumatized.
Around that time, David had finished shooting several spots in a series of Honeycomb cereal commercials. Everybody had gotten his turn in front of the camera. They had all gone to summer camp five years in a row. I’d graduated from college and socked money away for their future—it was the perfect time to quit the biz.
Woody Allen and Jonathan on the set of Annie Hall (1977), a United Artist release
Little Alvy Singer: scene in doctor’s office.
running it over again
The Lindbergh Road, a narrow, sparsely populated ribbon of road where the aviator and his family once lived, serpentines over and through the Sour Grass Mountains. Three times a week, I drove that road to get to my analyst Nancy’s office. On this particularly beautiful Monday morning, it had rained during the night, but by the time I got into my car, the sun was peeking through the clouds, reflecting off the wet gravel, and casting striped shadows across the road. Usually when I passed the Lindberg house, I’d look up with morbid fascination, as if I might see the ghost of the kidnapped baby hovering over the stone walls. This time I was in a hurry. Shortly after I’d awoken—lying in that hypnogogic state between sleep and wakefulness—a dream came into my consciousness that had filled me with dread. I was anxious to tell Nancy about it.
I was driving like a racer, accelerating into the curves, slaloming right and left, when a black squirrel ran out in front of the car. I swerved and nearly lost control of the wheel, sure that the thump I had felt was the tire going over the animal. I jammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt—had there been a car anywhere behind me, I’d surely have been rear-ended.
I looked in the rearview mirror, scanning the road behind me, but saw nothing. There was no carcass. Maybe I hadn’t hit it after all, yet that thump was unmistakable. My mind raced. What if the animal was caught up in the treads of the tire, and, if I drove away, with each turn of the wheel, I’d be running it over again? I got out of the car and ran around examining the tires, expecting to see a fuzzy tail sticking out from under the fender—there was none. Well, that’s that then. I got back in the car and started pulling away when a very unsettling thought took root: What if the injured squirrel had limped to the side of the road and was lying, writhing in a ditch? What then? I should go over and do the humane thing—hit it on the head with a rock and smash it out of its misery. I felt sick to my stomach and started gulping for air. I was having an anxiety attack. I sat there with my head on the steering wheel till I could get control of my breath, and then I drove off, realizing with self-loathing and great shame that I’d rather have left a small animal to die in agony in a ditch than to be late for my forty-five-minute therapy session.
I hadn’t had anxiety attacks since I was twenty years old, when Howard and I moved to Boston. It was the year after we’d married. Howard’s job at the time took us to Walpole, Massachusetts—an unremarkable suburb of Boston known for its maximum-security prison. It was a joy to be away from Brooklyn. My mother had a stranglehold on my life, and I’d hoped that the move would get her to loosen her grip, but no sooner had I settled into our new apartment than I started having severe anxiety attacks. I didn’t know what they were. I’d start gasping for air, sure that I was dying. A physician checked me out, said I was fine, and referred me to a psychotherapist. Oh my God, I thought, I’m crazy like my mother.
I put off making the appointment until the morning I started hyperventilating at work and had to hide in a bathroom stall for a half hour until I caught my breath. I sheepishly returned to my desk, picked up the phone, and called the therapist.
His name was Donald Stern—a short Jewish guy with a scruffy beard and an office that I’d later realize he’d modeled after Freud’s office in Vienna. Instead of a couch, it had a chaise lounge that was covered with a small Persian rug. Artifacts were scattered around the room. He was telling the world that he was a psychoanalyst, but I was too naive to know what that meant. When he asked me to come three times a week and to lie on the chaise, I figured that he too thought I was crazy. In my own defense, I agreed to once-a-week sessions.
It didn’t take Donald long to understand the panic attacks.
“You are having grave doubts about your marriage,” he said, “and you are consumed with guilt over your separation from your mother.”
Donald’s interpretation was right. My mother’s suicide threats haunted me—the happier I was being away from her, the guiltier I felt and the more frightened I became.
When he explained what was happening to me, the attacks stopped as precipitously as they had begun. I’d started to trust him and agreed to increase the frequency of the sessions. I even took the risk of telling him about the recurring dream I’d had throughout my adolescence.
Every day after school I had to go to this large, gray, limestone building and enter a room where instruments of torture hung on the walls: leather straps, handcuffs, paddles, etc. I had to select one with which I’d be punished.
When we first started working together and Donald took my history, I’d told him about experimental medical treatments I’d had when I was thirteen.
“When I was three years old,” I said, “I had a severe ear infection that burst my eardrum and left me mostly deaf in my left ear. I was staying with my grandmother at the time. Had she called the doctor and had I been given penicillin, it might have been all right, but, like many immigrants, Grandma was intimidated by doctors. She held me to her breast all night. I remember the pain and how I cried.”
“Anyway, when I was thirteen, I ended up getting radium treatments to burn out the scar tissue. It was at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in the Bronx. The doctor said if the radium didn’t work, he would operate. Once a week we went up to the hospital, where for one hour I’d lie alone on a table with a stick of radium up my nose and into the middle of my ear. I was repeatedly warned that it would be dangerous if I moved. I stayed stock-still. I don’t know how I did it,” I told Donald.
“I had thirteen treatments. When they were done, and I still couldn’t hear out of my left ear, the treatments were declared a failure, and I was scheduled for surgery. That,” I said to Donald, “was another nightmare.”
Because I was thirteen, it was uncertain if I should be in the adult or the children’s wing. I’m not sure who made the decision, but I was humiliated when I was put on the pediatric floor and when they wheeled me down to surgery, feet hanging off the child-sized gurney—reminding me of when I was too big for my crib. I welcomed the ether.
“You should know,” I continued, “the surgery didn’t work either. My hearing is still dependent on my ability to read lips and my superior right ear. But mostly what stayed with me from those dark days was my mother’s misery at having to get out of bed so early, schlep me from New Jersey to the Bronx, and then sit around for an hour waiting for me to get off the table. I’d lie there, imagining her smoking cigarettes, pacing the floor, looking at her watch, and wishing I’d be done already. Intent on not having her suffer any more than was necessary, I did not complain. I climbed up on the table, lifted my chin, and presented my nose without a whimper.”
When we analyzed the dream, it became obvious that the limestone building was Columbia Presbyte
rian Hospital and that, deep down, I felt less the cooperative child and more like one of Mengele’s Holocaust victims—keeping my mouth shut and determined to stay alive. What I’d gone through was torture. And my mother hadn’t been forthcoming with anything resembling compassion or maternal support. In fact, I’d worried about her more than myself.
Howard had left Boston, eager to be back in Brooklyn and near his mother. I was living on my own, reveling in the single life. Had I not gotten pregnant and had the Boston Strangler not been creating terror, I might have stayed in Walpole, gotten a divorce, and finished my analysis with Donald. But my mother was calling me every day and railing at me.
“What kind of woman are you? You leave your husband to live alone and who knows who he’ll hook up with?”
“Ma, who are you talking about, Howard or Dad?”
“Don’t start on your father. I’m talking about you.”
“Howard’s fine on his own,” I told her, “and so am I.”
When the strangler killed a woman a mile away from my apartment, he gave my mother the ammunition she needed to lure me back.
“It’s not just you that you have to think about now—it’s your baby. You are responsible for another life. Come home right now.”
I very reluctantly left Donald and the small taste I’d had of the single life. I returned to Brooklyn to resume my marriage and have my baby.
It was many years later, when, consumed by guilt over my mother’s suicide, I went back into therapy.
Nancy, my analyst, lived in a Federalist house with a red brick façade and wide columns. It looked like the courthouse buildings you see in the center of old New England towns. The entrance to the office was behind the house and up a wooden staircase. Many times, I’d wished that I could have entered through the front door and seen her “personal quarters” but they were off limits, allowing my imagination free rein.
I pictured a dark, wood-paneled Dickensian library with sconces of light illuminating leather-bound books neatly kept in glass cabinets. On Christmas holidays—Nancy was not Jewish—I imagined little children playing under the tree, while friends and family sat around a large mahogany table, laden with ham and turkey and white mounds of mashed potatoes. I pictured myself, shivering in the cold, peering in through the frosted window, hungry for the warmth of the fire and a bite to eat, like the Little Match Girl.
I was, at thirty-eight years old, a divorced mother of three and a full-time graduate student, but when I lay down on Nancy’s couch, I regressed to the troubled age of four. My literary references shifted away from Winnicott, Freud, and the other psychology texts, and returned to the Grimm and Anderson fairy tales of my childhood. I was particularly obsessed with stories with rescue themes—Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella. Heidi had special appeal—the whole idea of adoption was tantalizing, not because I wanted to be adopted, but because I imagined I had been. How was it possible that this man and woman with whom I lived were my real parents? I pretended that at any moment there would be a knock at the door and the original set would appear, see me sitting alone in my room talking to my Tiny Tears doll, grab me by the arm, and yank me into the life I was meant to be living. My parents would be crying as I left, bereft over what they had lost.
The end of each therapy session was so wrenching that I suggested taking up residency in Nancy’s attic or, even more fancifully, that I simply become lint in her pocket.
“You wouldn’t even know I was there,” I said.
These pathetic supplications stand as testimony to my desperation at that time.
I never would have thought I could become so dependent on a blonde, blue-eyed shiksa who dressed like a Bryn Mawr coed. After Donald, I’d wished for a haimisheh, grandmotherly type who would ladle out wisdom like chicken soup. How, I’d wondered, would a nice Protestant woman ever understand the depth of my Jewish guilt? Had she not come so highly recommended, I would have shaken her hand and run out the door, but I was in bad shape and needed help.
The very first session, in rushed and pressured speech, I put it all right out on the table, and waited to see how she’d react.
“I assisted in my mother’s suicide,” I told her. “That might sound like hyperbole to you, but it’s not to me. I know I didn’t pour the pills down her throat, but I might as well have handed her the bottle. Don’t even try to tell me that I didn’t push her hand, because I won’t believe you. Don’t tell me that if she hadn’t killed herself that day, she would have killed herself the day after, because the truth is you don’t really know that. You don’t really know that,” I reiterated. “At age fifty-two she was dead. She left me three things: five hundred dollars in a sugar bowl, which I gave to my husband Howard to buy a suit for the funeral; a diamond ring, which I stuck in a drawer; and a suicide note that read ‘You have Howard, Grandma has Sam, and I have no one.’”
“And,” my analyst added. “She also left you a legacy of guilt.”
“Right.”
Nancy didn’t flinch. I heard no platitudes or recriminations. And so we began…. She may not have been a Jew but she was a mensch, and for years she worked assiduously to find mitigating circumstances that would help disavow me of the belief that I had assisted in my mother’s murder. Nothing seemed to work until the day I killed the squirrel and remembered the dream.
I came running in the door just as the previous patient was descending the stairs. Psychoanalytic protocol suggests that one patient be respectful of the other’s privacy and avoid eye contact. I was too upset to care. I stared him right in the eye. He tried to avoid my gaze, but I wasn’t having it. He was an interloper, a pretender to my throne. He might as well know, then and there, who was the favored patient and whose couch he’d been warming.
There was a fire burning in the potbelly stove that stood in the corner of the office. It flickered light off the ceiling and cast soft shadows on the wood that paneled the walls. The blinds closed out the sun, and, although the room was warm, I was still chilled to the bone. A plaid blanket was folded at the end of the couch. I pulled it up to my neck and waited for Nancy to grab her notebook and settle back into the recliner—the cue that she was ready to start.
I had imbued Nancy with the heart of a saint. She would never in a million years let a squirrel die alone in a ditch. I was too ashamed to tell her what I had done. I began the session instead with a funny incident that had happened during the week.
“I was doing a practicum on the Emergency Psychiatric Service. Remember the woman I told you about who came in in an acute erotic psychosis? She got up on the table in the waiting room and began to strip.”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“Oh, come on, Nancy. Don’t you remember how Dr. Jones couldn’t talk her down, and how she grabbed his tie and pulled him close to her? All the interns were watching in fascination as he tried to unfurl her from his body.”
“Yes, I recall that story now,” she said, laughing.
“Well, I had a funny incident also. I was on duty Thursday night and they brought in a big, maybe six foot, four inch tall, African American prisoner from the county jail. The man was incarcerated, awaiting arraignment. They had stuck him in a cell with a bunch of guys, none of whom you’d want to invite home to dinner, and he went into a homosexual panic.
“The guard who brought him in stayed outside the door while I did the evaluation. It was my job to decide if he was suicidal and needed to be committed or if he was fit to await his arraignment. We were in a cement, windowless room the size of a closet. It was hard to keep our knees from touching.
“I started the mental status. I was having trouble getting him to focus on the questions until I tested him for his ability to comprehend metaphor. ‘What does this mean?’ I asked. ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?’
“His eyes darted around. ‘You look here, lady,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why you’re talking about your bush. I ain’t going anywhere near your bush. Where’s the officer? Get me out of here
. You’re crazy!’ he yelled.”
I laughed, Nancy laughed, and then, out of the blue, I started to cry. I had no conscious awareness that the stories I’d been relating about inappropriate sexual behavior were connected to the dream I hadn’t yet remembered to tell.
I kept picturing the squirrel, wondering if it was still writhing in the ditch or if it was already dead. I wondered if a hawk spotted it and started to eat it before it was even dead. My thoughts got more and more grotesque. I realized that I had to tell her what I had done, even if it meant her condemnation.
“I mangled a squirrel and left it to die on the side of a lonely road. I felt the thump under the wheels.”
“Did you see the carcass?” she asked.
“No, but I heard the thump. I think it must have limped off into a ditch. I just left it there,” I sobbed. “I left it to die alone in a ditch.”
“You don’t know that,” she countered. “You can’t be sure you hit it.”
“I didn’t see my mother’s corpse either,” I said annoyed, “so I suppose I couldn’t know for sure if it was she who was buried that day.”
“How quickly you associate to your mother,” Nancy said.
“Yeah, well, except I didn’t wish the squirrel dead.”
“You did not wish your mother dead, either,” she said. “You wished her to be well and to let you be your own woman.”
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