Concrete Angel

by Patricia Abbott

  Later, Mother claimed to remember nothing between exiting the Buick after her mischief at John D. Wanamaker’s and finding herself standing in the rather grand entrance hall at The Terraces. She also forgot Hank had known about some of her misadventures in South Carolina, had paid people off there.

  The Regimen. It was the cusp of a new era of treatment for the mentally ill. No more lobotomies or electric or insulin shock treatments. No more straight-jackets or wrapping patients in wet cloths. Instead it was the era of talk therapy.

  Patients in 1962 at an institution like The Terraces talked to their therapist on a daily basis, like it or not. There were group meetings, sessions with residents, chats with the interns. A weekly conference on the patient’s individual recovery process was de rigueur. Patients had to talk their head off to be released, remembering or inventing dreams, thoughts, fixations, grievances, childhood traumas—all of this to feed the doctors’ need to probe their minds.

  “Tell me how you feel,” employees of The Terraces demanded. “What did you dream about last night? How do you feel about your mother, your father, your fourth-grade teacher? When you hear the word “tree” what’s the first word you think of? Do you believe in God? Do you have evil thoughts? Ever contemplated killing yourself? Anyone else? Has anyone beaten you? Made you stay in the cellar? Sent you to bed hungry? Did your father come into your room at night and touch you? Ask you to touch him?”

  The last questions, ones to which Mother’s doctors constantly returned, were laughable. Her father never touched her—period. No hugs, kisses, no sitting on his lap—as far back as she could remember.

  “We weren’t a terribly physical family,” she told them.

  And as her daughter, I can vouch for it.

  When she told a therapist this after several weeks at The Terraces, he’d nodded sagely as if they’d finally arrived at the truth.

  “Repressed desire on the part of your father,” he murmured aloud, noting it on her chart. “Afraid to touch you, which is just as lethal as sexual desire acted upon. Either way, the child senses himself at fault for a parent’s actions or inactions. Is he still alive?”

  Eve nodded.

  They sat quietly for a moment, contemplating this piece of information. The doctor raised his head, smiling. “How about your mother? Adele, is it?” He looked at this chart. “Kiss you, hug you?”

  Eve shrugged, unwilling to disclose any more information.

  “Did my mother kiss me?” Mother wondered aloud years later. She remembered stiff little embraces, a peck on the cheek, but nothing more.

  “Did your parents’ religion advise such treatment?” the doctor at The Terraces had wanted to know. “What sect were they in?”

  At first, she though he’d said sex, and this idea shook her out of her inertia for a moment. No, sect. Did their horrid little church with its clear glass windows and hard wooden pews set her on this course? Was it the responsibility of that unbearably thin minister, Mr. Peeley, who’d refused to wear a collar or any adornment and sauntered up and down the aisle to yell at them at close hand? Had he been significant? Had their barren church and bleak life led to a need for adornment?”

  “It wasn’t a regular church,” she told the doctor. “Nothing like Episcopalian, I mean.”

  Yes, a patient had to talk herself hoarse to be released from The Terraces. Had to find some way to gain the upper hand through a pretense of cooperation, gratitude, trust.

  “Mrs. Moran, wouldn’t you like to join our little group?” a nurse or doctor or social worker might say. It took Mother some time to learn such an invitation wasn’t optional. Refusals only lengthened the stay. Eve Moran’s chart was soon peppered with words like “unresponsive,” “uncooperative,” “negative.” Oh yes, she sneaked a look more than once.

  Talk therapy wasn’t the preferred treatment for a case like Mother’s. Freud said “talking” worked best on garden-variety neurotics, and there were plenty of those to practice on at The Terraces. Rich older women, running wild on the huge boost of adrenaline accompanying menopause loved to talk, and they sustained The Terraces. In the afternoon, it was hard to differentiate the group chattering enthusiastically on the back patio from a Bucks County gardening club.

  The “talking cure” continued to be highly thought of at The Terraces although it was losing popularity elsewhere as a new generation of drugs came along. The Terraces was meant to function like the expensive spa of a generation later, or the tuberculosis sanatorium of a generation earlier, not as a dispenser of quick-fix medication. Doctors hired by the management were slow to make any changes depriving them of their greatest strength. What were those doctors to do once their patients were jerked or smoothed into normalcy by pharmaceuticals?

  Talking’s efficacy at The Terraces was also somewhat negatively affected by the sanitarium’s continuing reliance on the one drug they liberally dispensed to the least cooperative patients—Thorazine. An antipsychotic drug of the time, it stifled its partakers more effectively than a gag. The only thing coming out of their mouths was drool. So the principal drug and the principal philosophy were at cross-purposes, but the drug still got prescribed. Residents on Thorazine were often sequestered when visitors arrived. A scare—such as seeing a loved one or even a stranger on Thorazine—was to be avoided at all costs.

  Talk. The rest of a patient’s day was spent outdoors when possible, taking exercise, doing the array of activities (volleyball, badminton, swimming) one would do on a restful retreat. Walking was especially prized as a therapeutic tool, and the grounds were lovely. Stay on the gravel path and you were neurotic; drift from it and you were manic. Someone was always taking notes, filming the patients at play with their large, obtrusive movie cameras, recording individual and group sessions.

  Eventually The Terraces existed only in a documentary film, hours long—which was shown as amusement for students at medical schools half a century later. The patients often waved to the camera man, making it clear the footage couldn’t be taken as credible. It was similar to the newsreels shown of the royal family at leisure.

  Visitors, especially those viewing the facility briefly or those viewing patients not on Thorazine, went away thinking that spending some time there—perhaps a few weeks—wasn’t such a bad idea. And what if their loved one complained about his treatment? Well, they weren’t to be trusted, were they? This was why Aunt Mildred, Cousin Arthur, or Eve Moran was at The Terraces. Because their words and impressions were cockeyed, their analysis of a situation, unreliable.

  “Hank, you got to get me out of this place,” Mother told him the first time he visited, her teeth chattering like a gag gift.

  Some staff member had chosen her clothes—and badly. Her hair was scraped back with barrettes—like a fifth grader.

  “Be patient, Eve,” Daddy said, patting her. “The good people here are going to get you back on track.”

  Daddy’s clichés, his bon vivant speech, wasn’t convincing, Mother later said. Wouldn’t they see easy compliance as a superficial solution to her problems?

  “I’ve seen a sample of that track, Hank—the way people walk on it. In lock-step.” She gazed meaningfully around the terrace, where most of the residents had the same flattened-out look on their faces.

  Despite Mother’s harsh assessment, institutional life turned out to be pleasant for many residents. Constant comments on their little oddities came to a halt; no worrisome access to the weapons available in the average house; someone handy to make sure they were out of bed and dressed; a kindly hand to adjust the water temperature in the shower; a hand on the elbow should they begin to slip (the affect again of Thorazine) when walking the hills; if requested, a goodnight kiss on the forehead. Nothing untoward, but a level of care no longer—if ever—received at the hands of their loved ones. Touch and talk. This was the way to treat mental illness.

  Eve shunned much of this regime. Giving the staff the idea she was going to be difficult. A hostile patient—no scratch that—a hos
tile resident who might make life hard would need certain handling. Information like this snaked down the hallways within hours.

  Hobbies were encouraged at The Terraces: music, painting, dance, writing poetry to read aloud to other residents, after-dinner, skits. Walk, eat, talk—what’s so terrible about that? Mother had no interest in spending time on these pursuits. Once she shook off her initial torpor, she was usually engaged in active revolt toward attempts to include her.

  “I was a regular activist. Someone needed to remind the patients they were being handled, not treated.”

  A few centuries earlier, “residents” at a facility like The Terraces, eager to be free of the awfulness of their lives, would have gone to a nunnery or the army instead. The Terraces was quite a bit nicer and demanded no fealty to God or Country. It was the Self which needed elevating, developing, defending, exalting. Love Thy Self and the rest would follow.

  My mother believed in this credo on some level, or would have if she’d given it any thought. She wasn’t at The Terraces for more than a week of her forty-five-day observation period when she began placing telephone orders to various stores for “the sort of things I needed to make my room homey. I hate an institutional look.”

  She had a stack of fat catalogs sitting on her lap. No theory about where such catalogs came from was ever voiced.

  Eve was now occupied—had found a way to tolerate if not enjoy life at The Terraces. No more would she roam the halls, bitching about this or that. By then, no one would give too much thought to what had sated her. The people “in charge of her” were relieved the period of wrestling over various issues had ended, happy her incitement of dissatisfaction in other patients was done.

  The cavalcade of incoming merchandise kept the attendants busy, and Mrs. Hank Moran soon had a personal Candy Striper. Her doctors didn’t like to admit to Hank, or themselves, that the “daily talks” and the “group activities” and the “incessant walking outdoors” wasn’t making a dent in Eve’s acquisitive ways. So the influx of goods continued for some time before my father found out.

  Most of the medical staff openly or secretly disapproved of her shopping—knowing acquisitiveness was the principal manifestation of Eve’s mental illness, the reason she was being treated at The Terraces. But when deprived of the excitement of opening the newest purchase, she could turn ugly. Sending her goods into storage was much like depositing money in a bank for her.

  An occasional shopping spree was a small price to pay for tranquility, and The Terraces wasn’t footing the bill for her purchases: Daddy was. The nurses and attendants frankly enjoyed opening the packages with her. She never gave a single item away but was willing to share the excitement of seeing what was inside with her staff. Sometimes she let them choose the colored tissue paper to wrap it in. It made for a break from finding vases for flowers, the only gift most patients received.

  Normally, Daddy met Mother on the lawn or sunroom at preordained times, but one day, he unexpectedly swept into her room, charge plate and invoices in hand, and found stacks of purchases on every surface, some still unopened.

  “Is this it?” he asked the flummoxed nurse by his side, waving his hand. She stood mute, her stockinged legs crinkling unhappily. “Is this all of it?” He turned toward Mother, who was in the midst of wrapping a bud vase in yellow tissue paper. She’d taken to color-coding her merchandise. Yellow for household goods, pink for personal items, blue for the rest.

  Eve gave him a measured smile. She hadn’t stolen any of the merchandise filling her room and couldn’t see why he was so angry. He could easily afford a few trifles to make her stay bearable. It was he who’d put her in here after all. Committed her. She hated that word. Hank needed to be taught the price of her imprisonment.

  And she, well, she needed these things. Did he expect her to live like Mrs. Rochester in her lonely attic, stalking the floors at night, weeping and wailing? She wasn’t athletic or crafty. She couldn’t act in their little shows. Couldn’t sing. Didn’t read newspapers or play cards. She had to do something. Flirting with the better-looking aides and saner male residents wasn’t enough for a healthy young woman.

  “Really, Hank, you take all the fun out of life. There’s a lot of your mother in you—and it isn’t a good thing. Hey, could someone put their finger right here?” She was trying to tie a knot on her wrapped article.

  “I think there might be more items in the storage rooms,” the nurse admitted. “We assign each patient a unit when they arrive. A place to put gifts they haven’t the space for, out-of-season clothes, you know. Furniture they don’t care to have around,” she continued, evoking an increasingly angrier gaze from the resident. “Some of our guests stay for longer periods.” Silence. The nurse glanced around the room for help, but there was only the three of them. Daddy drew himself up and charged out the door—Mother and the nurse following mutely.

  The three descended to the basement, the nurse leading the way to one of the lettered storage rooms. Inside Room C was a series of surprisingly large individual storage units. Eve Moran’s was half-filled after only seven weeks at The Terraces.

  “For god’s sake,” Daddy said, rattling the door like a monkey trying to escape. “Why do you allow such a thing?” He whipped around and confronted the nurse. “You’re feeding her sickness. When you carry a box down here, you’re abetting her. A shopping compulsion brought her here and you’re allowing her to shop—encouraging even by giving her a room to fill. Filling rooms is her specialty. Does her doctor know about this?” He gestured to Mother’s unit, shaking the metal harder. Both women blanched at the noise and force of his actions.

  The nurse shook her head. “Not the precise extent.”

  She looked to Mother for help—but found none in her patient’s immobile face. “I might as well tell you, Mr. Moran. We sent some of the more perishable items to a children’s home in the City. Candy, fruit, a few baked items.”

  Her voice tailed off. Clearly the ridiculous nature of the entire venture had become clear to her. Had she thought about it earlier, everyone might have been saved this scene.

  Mother was grateful the turncoat had forgotten a thing or two. “Those were gifts silly people sent me,” she said prissily, after a few seconds. “Not things I bought myself. Stuff from members of my parents’ church—people who don’t know me at all. I don’t know why my parents told people I was… here.”

  “There’s no disgrace in needing a rest, Eve,” Daddy said, calmer suddenly. “I hope you’ve kept some kind of record of the gifts so we can thank the folks who remembered you.”

  “It’s nothing worth writing a thank you card for. Cans of Planter’s Peanuts—like you can buy at the A & P, small jars of Pennsylvania Dutch stuff.”

  “Chow-chow?” the nurse said. “Apple butter?”

  “See what I mean,” Mother said.

  “And a few boxes of out-of-season clothing and accessories went to her parents’ house,” the nurse added. “I spoke with Mrs. Hobart before sending them. She said it was quite all right.” Her voice had tapered off to a whisper. “She had some extra space. Not much but a bit…”

  “Of course, it’s all right. I told you not to bother asking her.” Mother’s voice was a whiplash, and the nurse’s neck jerked accordingly. “I’ve always stored things there. Items I wasn’t using. Off-season goods.”

  Her husband was already marching back to the elevator, preparing to confront her doctors on their decision to look the other way, getting ready to remind them what fees were being handed over to The Terraces each month, asking how Eve’s enterprise fit in with the therapy they’d discussed.

  Mother didn’t feel guilty. That was the thing about her—the characteristic it was difficult to understand. If she’d felt guilty, how would it change things? She’d still have made her purchases but perhaps not enjoyed them as much.

  “Do you get it?” she asked me. “Does anyone understand?”

  Eve Moran was released from The Terraces three months
later. Once the ability to shop was taken away, she bore down and did what was needed, talking to the therapists, seeking out groups who’d help her appear compliant, involved, sane. There were so many women like Mother there—the bored wives of rich men, the aging wives of rich men, the drug-addicted wives of rich men.

  The rich men themselves saw their therapists after work in the city. Few men were guests at The Terraces because they needed to earn the money necessary to keep their wives, or sometimes children, inside, out of harm’s way they might’ve said.

  The lack of such males at The Terraces was a contributing factor in Mother’s rush toward release. Women rarely found her charming and, second only to the shopping, she needed the boost being found charming and desirable gave her. She hadn’t gone without sex since her early teens. She could sense herself dehydrating, day by day.

  Mother saw what was needed to escape from The Terraces. There was no reason for her to remain there once her room returned to the dull four walls the institution and her husband deemed acceptable. No reason to hang around the billiards table, the screening room, the indoor bowling alley. She didn’t dance, paint, write poetry, or act in skits. She only liked to shop.

  So she came home. She came home to shop.

  Things weren’t the same for a long time between Mother and Daddy after her vigil at The Terraces. He was embarrassed their problems had become town gossip in Doylestown despite his precautions, spreading well beyond the tight circle of the Moran clan.

  If her parents’ little enclave in Philly knew about her breakdown, so be it. But if someone Hank played golf or did business with found out, it was another issue. Nervous breakdowns, compulsions, or whatever it was Eve suffered from, were not publicly spoken of in 1962. Her absence had already got him strange looks at the country club, and the family doctor probed more than his throat when he went in with a fever.