Dave Tomlian meets me near the cemetery’s front gate. He’s the superintendent (“and foreman, and grave-digger, and whatever else needs to be done”), one of four full-time employees. He’s standing next to a pickup truck with its snow plow still attached, but he’s dressed for warmer weather: plaid shirt, no jacket, no gloves. It’s cold enough that I find it hard to take notes with my numb fingers.
Dave has worked at Hebrew Memorial for more than twenty years, going back to summers during college. “We’ve got about twenty-five thousand buried here, and room for another twenty-five thousand,” he says, pointing at a grassy vacant area toward Fourteen Mile. “The summer is the busy time. We put on twenty workers to do cleanup, planting, etc.”
“How many burials a day this time of year?” I ask.
“One, maybe two,” he replies.
The rows each have metal signs, embossed with the section number, letter of the row, and the gravesite numbers. He escorts me to Section 19, Row J. A single headstone lies between my grandparents’ side-by-side plots. On the headstone’s left side, it says, “Beloved Mother, Tillie, 1891–1966.” On the right, it reads, “Beloved Father, Hyman, 1887–1964.” This is the first time I’ve seen it, I think; looking at it now brings back no memory of an earlier visit.
As we walk over to Annie’s resting place in Section 18, Row B, he explains why Annie isn’t buried next to her parents: “There was no provision made for her at the time that her parents died, so our records show that we put her as close to them as we could.”
I have no expectations as I approach her grave, but I’m still unprepared for what I see. The site is unmarked, a simple cement frame containing a smoothed-over rectangle of earth where the flowers could be planted later in the spring. I feel the chill wind as I stare at the vacant space, acutely aware that it says nothing, reveals nothing. No gravestone to match the one I just saw, no “Beloved Daughter, Annie, 1919–1972.”
Anonymous in life, and still anonymous in death. Mom, if you could have a rabbi bid her farewell, why not a headstone that says, if nothing else, “Annie Cohen”?
But perhaps it wasn’t that simple. The gravestone business was a small world, and if Mom tried to order a headstone through one of her contacts, she would inevitably be asked about the deceased. Sympathy was a reflex in her line of work; I could even imagine the conversation: “So sorry about your loss, Beth. And just how are you related to the deceased? A distant relative? What shall we put on the headstone? Just ‘Annie Cohen.’ Nothing else? You sure?”
No, if the secret was paramount, better not to raise any eyebrows. Anonymous in life, so why not anonymous in death?
Still, why continue to keep the secret at all? Now that Annie was dead, did it really matter anymore? Of course it did. By 1972, I’m certain, the secret had become larger than Annie, had taken on a significance that went far beyond shame and stigma. Having pretended all these years to be an only child, how could Mom now explain herself to her unknowing friends and family? Burying Annie did not mean that Mom could now banish the secret, consign it to a grave of its own, not unless she was willing to bare her soul, and that she obviously wasn’t prepared to do. Mom, I wish you had. We wouldn’t have loved you any less.
Dave interrupts my reverie, reading a part of my mind. “I could make a temporary sign, put her name on it,” he says.
I’m touched, and I tell him so. But somehow, a temporary sign doesn’t seem appropriate, either. I tell him I’ll think about it, but I know that’s not what I want to do.
As I make a few notes in the car, I get a cell phone call from my twenty-year-old daughter, Jill. I describe to her what I’ve just seen. “I think we should put a marker of some kind on Annie’s grave,” I say. She immediately responds: “I think Grandma would like that.”
I laugh out loud at the very idea. “Why on earth would you say that?” I ask.
“Remember Grandma’s last wish?” Jill says. She’s talking about the letter that Mom left behind, the one we opened after her death. “She told us that what she wanted, more than anything, was for all of us to stay together. This is something we can do together, as a family, and that would make Grandma happy.”
It’s a nice thought—no, it’s more than that, it’s a kind thought, a charitable thought—and I wonder if there’s any harm in thinking that it might even be true.
{ SIX }
Actually Insane
The records office of the Wayne County Probate Court, on the thirteenth floor of the downtown Coleman A. Young Municipal Building, could serve without much modification as a movie set for a modern-day version of Bleak House, Charles Dickens’s novel about an endless lawsuit in the English probate courts—the stained linoleum floors, the worn counter tops, the crowded hallways, the weary faces of the people waiting, numbers in hand, to file papers in this estate or that.
Eurick, a tall, fresh-faced clerk, frowns when I tell him that I’m looking for a case from 1940. I know that look: It means that I represent trouble. Finding ancient cases can be time-consuming and costly. Sure enough, Eurick tells me that files from that long ago must be retrieved from a warehouse, supervised by a private contractor that charges the court for each search request. If I’m lucky, and the file can be found, it will take at least two weeks before it’s available to read.
First things first, though: Eurick cheerfully says he can’t request the records without a case number, so he takes my yellow request slip with “Annie Cohen” written on it and disappears, murmuring something about needing an index upstairs. I can’t go with him—the inner workings of the public records department are off-limits to the public. Half an hour later, he returns, my request slip in hand. Across the back, he has scrawled three file numbers and names: Anne Cohen, Ann Cohen, and Annie Cohen.
“Which one do you think is yours?” he asks.
I don’t answer immediately. I’m mesmerized by the words he’s written next to the third name.
“Annie Cohen, #280396, 4/13/40, Insane.”
A week later, aided by a friendly supervisor who had agreed to expedite the search, I take the three legal-sized folders for Ann, Anne, and Annie Cohen and find a vacant desk in one of the Probate Court offices. I take a deep breath and open the thinnest one, the one marked “Annie Cohen Insane.”
There’s no docket sheet or index, just a dozen pages, none later than May 1940, primarily affidavits from five physicians attesting to Annie’s state of mind, and a standardized “Application for Admission to Hospital of Alleged Insane Person,” dated the 12th day of April 1940 and signed in a shaky hand by “Mrs. Tillie Cohen.”
My grandmother’s petition consists of a single page, but it speaks volumes about the process. It provides four lines for recounting the facts of Annie’s alleged insanity, less than the space devoted to the section for the required signatures and notarization. Someone used a typewriter to complete the form, which means that someone helped Tillie to fill it out, because my grandmother had no access to a typewriter and no clue about how to use one. I’m not surprised that she received assistance; Evans’s Routine History makes clear that the petition idea came from discussions with Dr. Bohn at Harper Hospital about Annie’s increasingly bizarre behavior.
The typed words of explanation sound more like those of a medical person than a mother. “Patient imagines that someone wants to do her bodily harm. She talks to herself. She laughs and cries for no apparent reason. She cannot carry on a coherent conversation. She assumes one position for long periods.”
Those thirty-six words triggered a whirlwind of legal activity, evidence of the speed built into the process once a petition had been filed. The next day, Wayne County Probate Judge Patrick K. O’Brien appointed two doctors, Benjamin W. Clark and Howard W. Peirce, to examine Annie. Three days later, a sheriff’s deputy arrived at 2205 West Euclid Street to serve Annie and her father with a copy of the petition and notify them of a hearing date in May. When sheriff deputy John Marshick presented Annie with the petition, Annie insisted that s
he wasn’t insane, according to what Mona Evans wrote in her Routine History.
Within a week, both Clark and Peirce had visited Annie to decide that question for themselves. By April 22, both had filed their reports. Like the petition, the physicians’ form was short on facts and long on brevity, providing just eleven lines of space for the doctors to justify their findings, the opposite of the robust evidentiary detail I’m used to seeing in legal proceedings.
Clark used just seven of his lines to concur, in the form’s preprinted words, that Annie was “actually insane” and required “care and treatment” in a mental institution. Annie, he wrote in his fifty-five-word explanation, “is an adult white girl, 21 years of age, physically deformed with an artificial right leg. She is oriented normally but has many vague fears and ideas of influences. She feels that people and things are conspiring against her and she places phantastic interpretations upon the simplest things about her. I would recommend commitment.”
Peirce reached a different conclusion. “This young woman of 21 years has had an inferior complex due to a deformed (shortened) leg,” he wrote. After amputation, she “has had difficulty getting a proper fitting wooden leg and has had difficulty learning to walk with it. She has also been unable to procure employment. Although she finished the ninth grade, she was slow in school and a mental test in November 1937 gave her age as 5 years, 11 months. Since being picked up by a man last Nov., she has been very nervous, has crying and screaming spells, disturbing the neighbors. Parents say she is afraid to be left alone.” At this point, he ran over his allotted space, so he scrawled his last and perhaps most important sentence in between the lines of the next section: “While this girl is feeble-minded and extremely nervous, I do not believe her actually insane.”
“Since being picked up by a man last Nov.” Why did Peirce treat the alleged assault as fact? Did he have other information not contained in the Routine History? Or had Annie told him about the assault during his examination? And why did Peirce describe her as having a mental age of 5 years, 11 months, at age 18? Nowhere had I seen that specific test result before. That would be considered, then and now, severe retardation. Was it accurate? Mona Evans had noted Annie’s “poor intelligence” and her difficulty in school, but Evans had also described Annie’s desire for a job and the independence that came with it, as well as her fears that she would never get one. Did that sort of insight, that level of sophistication about how the world works, square with a mental age equivalent to kindergarten or first grade?
To underscore his unambiguous view of Annie’s mental state, Peirce penned the word “not” in two places, modifying the form to state that Annie “is NOT actually insane,” and that her condition “is such as NOT to require care and treatment in an institution.” Only then did it strike me: The form presumed insanity. This was the usual presumption turned inside out—insane until proven otherwise.
Peirce’s contrary conclusion temporarily derailed the fast-moving process. Michigan law required two certifications of insanity before commitment to an institution, so until a third physician could examine Annie, the case was stuck in limbo. But Annie and her family weren’t in limbo, the documents suggest; they were still in their nightmare on Euclid Street, where Annie’s fears and paranoia, her screaming and crying, were driving the family crazy.
Sometime over the next four days, between Peirce’s examination of Annie on April 20 and the morning of April 25, something must have happened, perhaps something dramatic, to change that. The scene shifted from Euclid Street to Detroit’s Receiving Hospital, a downtown facility that served, in those days, as the city’s first option for emergency psychiatric care and the place where police would take someone behaving erratically. There, on April 25, under court order from Judge O’Brien, two more physicians examined Annie.
Annie’s file doesn’t say how she ended up at Receiving, but when Dr. David Leach and Dr. Ivan Berlien arrived to evaluate Annie, they had a different mission than Clark and Peirce. Their job was to decide whether Annie needed to be confined immediately, on what the law called a “temporary detention”; if they concurred that she was insane and in need of treatment right away, then she would be transferred to Eloise and remain there, pending the outcome of her case. For the moment, the disagreement between Clark and Peirce about Annie’s sanity had no bearing on her status.
Leach and Berlien had no such dispute, and no legal obligation to explain their unanimity. The temporary detention form they signed, certifying Annie’s insanity, didn’t even offer a space to explain their conclusions. Later that day, O’Brien ordered that “Annie Cohen be removed to and restrained in Eloise Hospital” to await the examination of yet another physician, Wayne County Court psychiatrist Peter E. Bolewicki, appointed by O’Brien to resolve the Clark-Peirce stalemate.
By the time Bolewicki met with Annie on May 13, she had been at Eloise for eighteen days, away from her family and the tense atmosphere on Euclid Street. On May 3, Mona Evans had interviewed Tillie at the Eloise Parole Clinic, and the “poorly dressed, middle-aged Jewish woman” with the “whiny, complaining voice” had provided Evans with information for her report—which Evans was still writing when Bolewicki had his session with Annie, so he couldn’t have seen it.
Given the stakes, Bolewicki’s report seems most notable for its hedged observations. Unlike Clark, Bolewicki pointed to no particular symptom or behavior to justify a finding of insanity. If he saw any evidence of the fears that Tillie cited in her petition or the paranoia described in Clark’s report, he took no note of it. He suggested that she suffered from depression, but on balance, his evaluation seems as positive as it does negative.
Annie, he wrote, “is a fairly well developed young lady about 21 years old. She appears somewhat moody and self-centered. She is fairly well-oriented as to time, place and person. But she does not take an active interest in life. She is now at Eloise Hospital and wants to get well here. She likes to live by herself and shuns company. She does not care to mingle socially. At times, her imagination works faster than her mind. Her calculations are fair.”
Moodiness and shunning company? Imagination working faster than her mind? That describes about a half dozen people I know.
Bolewicki’s recommendation? “A little treatment in an institution may help her somewhat.”
A little treatment? Might help her somewhat? What would Bolewicki think if he knew that on the basis of that tentative judgment, Annie would spend the next thirty-one years as a resident of Eloise?
I’m also puzzled by what’s not in the file: There’s no final order from O’Brien, no piece of paper changing Annie’s status from temporary to permanent, and no transcript or summary of what was said at her hearing—in fact, nothing to show that a hearing took place at all, or that O’Brien had committed her permanently. There is only a cryptic notation on the outside of the original petition that says “Eloise or Ypsi Public” (a reference to the state-run hospital in Ypsilanti), along with O’Brien’s initials and the faint stamp of a date, “June 12, 1940.”
It strikes me as strange that the paper trail ends there. Wouldn’t Annie’s case have gone back to the court at some point? Is it really possible that she spent three decades at Eloise with no outside review of her status, not even a report about whether the “little treatment” recommended by Bolewicki had done her any good?
I grab the other two folders, one dated 1944 and the other 1946, thinking they must be continuations of Annie’s original case. But the folders have nothing to do with Annie; instead, they offer a glimpse into the lives of two other troubled women with their own stories and journeys through the probate court system. No, what I’m seeing, according to the probate court staff, is Annie’s complete file.
I didn’t have any doubt, even after my visit at the probate court, that Annie was severely ill. The Routine History, and Tillie’s description of Annie’s behavior—screaming all night, waiting on the curb for an hour before crossing the street, refusing to eat or bathe, as
king what sort of casket Tillie intended to buy for her—had persuaded me of that. But I was having a hard time getting my head around the notion of insanity, and the vastly different views of Clark, Peirce, and Bolewicki. I’m living in 2006, and Annie was living in 1940, and I need to understand better how her doctors saw her in their time, with their understanding of mental illness. Whether she displayed symptoms of paranoia or depression or schizophrenia, was she truly insane? What did the word mean?
Whatever insanity meant to me, that wasn’t the meaning that mattered. Like most legal proceedings, the court case that sent Annie to Eloise would not turn on a layman’s understanding. Michigan’s rules about insanity had evolved from a set of laws and court rulings going back to the nineteenth century, and that record shows that in calibrating this particular scale of justice, the state legislature put a heavy finger on the side of the courts, the medical profession, the asylum, and the family.
Under the law in effect in 1940, “The father, mother, husband, wife, brother, sister, child, or guardian” could petition the court to have a family member declared insane, but the legislature didn’t stop there. It specifically allowed a sheriff, a superintendent of the poor, a “county agent,” or anyone that a judge deemed a “proper person to make such a petition” to come before the court and swear that a fellow citizen was “mentally defective”—insane, or “feeble-minded,” or epileptic—and needed to be confined in an institution. Presented with such a petition, the judge’s course of action was clear: The law required the appointment of two “reputable physicians,” who did not need to be psychiatrists or neurologists, to do separate examinations. The judge then had to hold a hearing and collect evidence—“take proofs,” as the law put it—but the patient could be prevented from attending the hearing, had no right to a lawyer, and no opportunity for remaining at home while appealing a judge’s ruling (not that the law mentioned anything about a right of appeal or how an appeal might be made).
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