Unlike Annie, however, Bell had a forceful advocate who saw himself as part of a movement. Kaimowitz interceded on Bell’s behalf, requesting a meeting with the hospital’s hierarchy and winning Bell’s release. It didn’t last. Six weeks later, Bell’s frantic parents brought her back, saying she was refusing to take her medication, that they didn’t know what else to do. Bell agreed to enter the hospital voluntarily, then changed her mind and begged a friend to phone Kaimowitz again.
This time, Eloise rebuffed the lawyer’s efforts, asserting that Bell’s family was no longer willing to take responsibility for her. Two weeks later, Kaimowitz filed the lawsuit, which like many in its day, used a specific case as a launching point for a broad-based attack on the entire system. It not only alleged that Bell was being held against her will and presented no danger to anyone, but that the entire commitment process was unconstitutional—that Michigan law deprived patients of their fundamental rights, that patients were being confined without a formal diagnosis, and that mental health officials routinely ignored the few protections that the law provided. If the court accepted the premise of the sweeping lawsuit, it would essentially have to shut down the involuntary commitment process and order the Michigan mental health system to start over.
“Annette Bell was committed simply because she was ‘inconvenient,’ “Kaimowitz says from Florida, where he now lives. He’s still the tilter at windmills, well known for his years of civil rights work, his zeal, his dogged cantankerousness, and his legal crusades against a variety of Florida agencies. After interviewing him, I would add to those qualities a nimble mind and an encyclopedic memory for Supreme Court cases he hasn’t read in years.
When Bell called him that day in 1971, he was in the middle of a one-year fellowship at Michigan Legal Services, working mostly on cases involving juveniles. Bell was a “circular” patient, cycling in and out of treatment. “She smoked incessantly,” he remembers. “Paced up and down. Her parents were older, couldn’t deal with her, felt guilty about it. One time, they dumped her on my lawn, said ‘You take care of her.’”
Bell v. Wayne County General Hospital turned into an epic legal battle, requiring three years to resolve and, midway through, merging with a second case from the state’s psychiatric hospital in Newberry. The arguments on both sides embodied the stark extremes of the national debate: Kaimowitz declared that the state had no right to force medication on Bell if she didn’t want it; the state responded that Bell’s illness prevented her from making a rational choice. The state said Bell deserved treatment for her illness; Kaimowitz alleged that the hospital itself was making Bell sick—“Who wouldn’t be depressed after being subjected to unwarranted confinement?” he asked, rhetorically.
The case also foreshadowed the future. The Michigan Psychiatric Society, fearing that the court might endorse Kaimowitz’s argument that Bell could refuse treatment altogether, warned the court not to go down that road—a road that other courts would, eventually, choose to travel. Allowing mental illness to go untreated, the Society said, was itself cruel and inhumane; hospitals and doctors needed discretion to provide treatment—including medication and shock therapy—to its patients, especially those too mentally impaired to give valid consent. Otherwise, doctors would be caught in an impossible position: liable for not treating a patient who needed it, and liable for treating a patient who didn’t want it.
Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t, the society’s lawyer, William H. Dance, said in court. Is that, Dance asked, where we want our doctors to be?
Annie was still alive when U.S. District Judge Fred W. Kaess ruled against Annette Bell in July 1971, finding no constitutional defects in Michigan law, but she had died by the time a panel of three federal judges declared the opposite in May 1974, invalidating major sections of the involuntary commitment process that, thirty years apart, had sent both Annie and Annette Bell to Eloise. Unlike the Michigan Supreme Court rulings of the 1930s, however, the 1974 ruling was no slap on the wrist, no minor rebuke that could be ignored. From now on, the three-judge panel said, patients would have lawyers, full hearings, and the chance to offer evidence showing why confinement wasn’t necessary. The panel agreed with every major charge in the lawsuit, but chose not to throw out the entire law because, it said, “both the Michigan legislature and the Michigan Supreme Court are pursuing efforts to enact new laws and rules.” Instead, the panel would be watching to make sure the reforms took the court’s ruling into account, and would retain jurisdiction in case the reforms fell short.
What, in particular, seemed to bother the panel about the process, beyond the constitutional question? I’d say the imbalance of power between the system and the patient, especially given the nebulous nature of mental illness. “The Michigan act,” the panel wrote, “sets forth a process under which a person whose affliction, in the view of a given court, falls anywhere within a vast, uncontoured description of mental ills, is subject to both temporary and indefinite commitment, whether his particular ill presents a realistic threat of harm to himself or others. In our opinion, the standard of commitment for mental illness is fatally vague and overbroad.”
More than thirty years later, Kaimowitz says the country still hasn’t gotten it right. “I used to believe it was best to empty out all the hospitals, but I have to agree, I think we went too far, that some portion of the homeless today are the mentally ill of yesterday.” Still, he says, he’s not in favor of forcing people into treatment. “Confinement changes behavior, and taking someone away from society for a year or two means they miss a year or two of learning and experience. You also can’t evaluate patients under duress. Refusal to take medication or accept treatment is seen as evidence of insanity. But wanting to get out of a mental hospital can’t be seen as an irrational act. Isn’t a desire to be free the most rational act of all?”
Rational, and rarely uncomplicated, in desire or reality.
{ NINETEEN }
Always the Bridesmaid
Here come the bridesmaids: Mom, far left, and Julie Reisner, far right, at the Pierce wedding, 1941 (courtesy of Milton Pierce and Julie Reisner)
The four women, absorbed in their bridge game and their cigarettes, hardly pay attention to me. It’s sometime in 1963 or 1964, and when it’s Mom’s turn to host the weekly game with Marilyn, Ann, and Ethel, I’m sometimes allowed to observe. I feel important, as if I’ve been given a special passport to this country of adults. I’m ten or eleven years old, and this is how Mom teaches me her favorite pastime.
They chatter on, but I’m too busy studying the cards and trying to decipher the bidding to follow what they’re talking about. Ethel lives nearby and is Mom’s closest friend; they play Scrabble together frequently and I know I can always go to her house if I’m locked out. Marilyn and Ann are sisters-in-law, and Mom has just started doing bookkeeping work for the monument company partly owned by Marilyn’s husband, Sid. Marilyn is a redhead with the sort of easy, welcoming smile that makes me feel that it’s okay to sit at the table while they play. Ann, on the other hand, scares me. Her dark hair frames her long, thin face, and there’s an intimidating elegance about her. She’s quick-witted and sharp-tongued, un-afraid to say exactly what she thinks, and that makes me wonder if I might end up on the receiving end of one of her comments. When she’s trying to make her bid, I take care not to say a single word.
After the game, when her friends have left, Mom lets me go over the hands I saw, as best as I can remember them. She’s a good teacher, patient and encouraging, and never seems to tire of my questions. If my interest in this adult game seems strange to her, she doesn’t show it; instead, she seems pleased, even proud, as if I’m her prodigy and she’s the grandmaster. For me, it’s just another form of competition, like basketball or baseball, my favorite sports; for Mom, it’s another way to be close, although that’s not something that crosses my mind, not even for an instant, as she instructs me on counting cards and the finer points of ruffing and finessing.
Bri
dge, she explains, is a game of skill, but also of deception. Fool the competing players into believing that you hold certain cards, and they might make a mistake that allows you to win.
That, she says, is what makes the game interesting.
I stare out the restaurant window at the smogless, cloudless California sky. Los Angeles has outdone itself today, temperatures in the low eighties on the coast, warmer here in the San Fernando Valley, with just enough of a breeze to take the edge off the sun’s heat. This is the southern California of Dad’s letters after his brief visit in 1944, just before reporting for duty in Monterey; this is the southern California of his dreams, his castle in the air. Honey—Hollywood for you and I after the war—and I don’t mean perhaps—it’s the most loveliest place—ideal for you and I—real paradise.
I’m waiting at the restaurant for Neil Reisner, Julie’s nephew, and we’re going together to the Jewish Home for the Aging, where Julie lives. Driving on the clogged freeways to get here, I found myself thinking that Los Angeles and its suburbs remind me—seriously—of Detroit and its suburbs. Both exude the car culture, nurturing mythologies that depend on the style and mobility of the automobile. Detroit built itself by turning out hundreds of millions of cars, and then L.A. built itself by erecting several hundred miles of freeways for the cars that Detroit was turning out. It’s a pipeline, from one power center to the other, from the Motor City to the Mobile City.
Neil’s not hard to pick out as he comes through the glass door. Ponytail, earring, mustache, just as he described himself on the phone when we arranged where and when to meet. He’s a journalist with twenty-five years in daily newspapers, now working as a professor and pursuing freelance projects, so when I briefed him on my quest and told him that I’m hoping Julie might have specific knowledge of why Mom created the secret, he asked to come along. “I want to see how it turns out,” he said.
It’s not a great time for him; he’s here for the family wedding, but over the last few days, his dad’s emphysema has taken a clear turn for the worse. Last night on the phone, Neil said, “We’re moving into the hospice phase.” As we ride in his car to the Jewish Home, he warns me that Julie’s on edge about his dad’s failing health. “She’s pretty upset at the idea of losing him,” he says. “Her little brother, you know?”
But Julie looks great. A walker rests next to the bed, but when she rises to greet me, she stands tall and erect, her cheeks have a rosy glow, and her white hair frames a face that looks nowhere close to eighty-six years old. She and her daughter, Ellen, were talking about my visit when Neil and I arrive, and I can see that Ellen has been rooting through Julie’s closet, hauling out photo albums and other artifacts.
When I explain to Julie that I’m researching a book about my mom’s family, she gazes at me, her eyes alert, a little wary perhaps about why someone would fly across the country to talk about the old days in Detroit. If I’m lucky, though, she could be a fount of information: She wasn’t as close to Mom as Faye, but she knew Mom longer and better than Fran—and, most important, she knew Mom before Annie went to Eloise, before Annie turned into a secret.
“You’re the first person I’ve been able to interview from my mom’s inner circle of female friends,” I say, trying to put her at ease. “I wonder how you met. Wasn’t Mom a few years older than everyone else?”
“Through Faye,” she says. “Faye and Sylvia.” Faye, she says, was the group’s hub and its glue. I tell her that I’ve spoken to Marty Moss, and she smiles. “He was a nice guy,” she says.
As Julie and I talk, Ellen keeps up her archeological dig; at one point, she brings over Julie’s 1938 yearbook from Northern, the same high school that Mom attended, and Julie dons the glasses that hang from a lanyard around her neck, closing one eye to get a better focus on her black-and-white graduation photo. She points to her entry, which unlike most others, shows only her name. “No extracurricular activities,” she says. “I had to work in my dad’s shop after school.” I can hear the resentment in her voice, how this still rankles her, nearly seventy years later.
I ask her about Mom’s family. Did she spend much time with them?
No, she says. “She had a little sister who limped,” she says. “She was small. Your mom was tall, right?” I press her for more on Annie, but she doesn’t remember much more. It was a delicate subject, she says, and when Annie went to Eloise, it became a subject they could avoid.
Either Julie’s not a natural storyteller, or I’m asking the wrong questions, because I’m having trouble getting her to relax and just reminisce. I don’t think it’s a memory issue—she occasionally repeats something she said a few minutes earlier, but her long-term recall seems good, just not very expansive. I’m glad Ellen is there; she chimes in with helpful prompts—“Mom, tell him the story about what you were doing when Pearl Harbor was hit”—that get Julie talking, but I begin to worry that I may have come a long way for very little. This member of the inner circle may know less than I had hoped.
“Other than Faye, what held the group together?” I ask, searching for a springboard rather than a dead end. “What did you talk about?”
“Boys,” she says, laughing. “We talked mostly about boys.”
That turns out to be Julie’s answer to many questions. They went bowling to meet boys. They went to the movies to meet boys. They still lived at home, most of them, and meeting a boy was the first step toward getting away from their parents, away from the possibility—in her case—that she might end up working in her dad’s locksmith business.
The guys, she says, were anxious to get married, too.
“Why?” I ask.
She grins. “To stay out of the service.”
“What about my mom?” I say. “Was she anxious to get married, too?”
Julie answers with a glint in her eye. “She was worried that she was getting too old. But then she met the boyfriend.”
The boyfriend?
“Your father,” she says. “That’s what I always called him.”
I love that she calls him “the boyfriend,” that she met him before he was “the husband” or “the father.” I dig into my bag and pull out the photo of Mom and Dad at Lake Michigan. “He sure was handsome, and your mom was crazy about him,” Julie says, her eyes taking on a faraway look. I try to imagine what she’s thinking. Does it conjure up pleasant memories? Or does it remind her of a bygone age she can’t revisit?
Finally, she says, “I envied them. So in love.”
As we look at several more photos from my collection, Neil suddenly interrupts. He needs to leave. He’s been on his cell phone for much of the time, talking to various family members and doctors about his dad, and something has come up. Could Ellen take me back to my car? While we make these arrangements, Julie lapses into silence until, unprompted, she volunteers:
“My feeling was that she didn’t want to let the boyfriend know about the sister.”
Neil and I both freeze. I hadn’t yet asked Julie directly about why Mom had kept the secret, and she had no way of knowing that her “feeling”—can’t tell the boyfriend—matched one of my working theories of the secret’s origin. Later, Neil would tell me that he couldn’t believe I didn’t show any sign of excitement. But at that moment, all I could think was: Go slow. Find out more. See if she can be more specific, if she can do better than a “feeling.” And, don’t lead the witness.
Why, I ask, would Mom not want to tell her boyfriend about Annie?
“Your mom was a little frustrated,” Julie said. “She wanted to get married. She didn’t need him to find out about the sister. That might ruin it.”
Neil’s gone, and Ellen has accompanied Julie to lunch—served promptly at noon, Julie says, and “if I don’t go now, I won’t get to eat. So I’m going.” I’m left alone with my thoughts for nearly an hour, and I welcome the chance to wrestle with the nuances of what Julie had said: My feeling was that she didn’t want to let the boyfriend know. She wanted to get married. She didn’t need hi
m to find out about the sister.
Not exactly definitive. Certainly not as definitive as “Your mom told me that she decided to keep Annie a secret from your dad because she was afraid, if he knew, that he wouldn’t marry her.” But perhaps this was as close as I could come, as close as I could expect from a time when friends understood that some things were better left unsaid.
“You’re still here?” Julie says, when she returns from lunch.
I like her directness. “Afraid so. Ready for a few more questions?” I try to pick up right where we left off, to recapture the moment. “You told me before lunch about your feeling, about why Mom kept Annie a secret. You said, ‘She didn’t need him—the boyfriend—to find out about the sister.’”
“Oh, yes,” Julie replies, “she didn’t want to upset anything.”
Did Mom specifically ask you and her other friends not to talk about Annie?
“I don’t think she actually did that,” Julie says. “It was just my feeling that she didn’t want us to talk about it. That was my impression. She was closer to Faye than she was to me, actually, so she and Faye might have talked about it.”
Faye. Ah, yes, I’d like to ask Faye, if only Faye were still alive.
I ask a few more questions, but Julie has told me as much as she knows, or at least, as much as she can remember. I’m glad she didn’t return from lunch with a more definitive answer; it makes her first memory seem credible. We chat about marriage a bit more—“We all wanted husbands,” Julie says—and then Ellen, equipped with a photo of Mom that I gave her so she can look for others, holds up an enlarged picture of the bridesmaids from Sylvia’s wedding and says, “Is this her?”
Mom stands at the end of the line of bridesmaids and the maid of honor, all gathered around the groom, resplendent in his white tuxedo. I’ve never seen the grainy photo before. “That’s my mom,” I say, elated at the discovery. Julie takes the photo in hand, closes one eye again, and peers at it. “Yes, there’s your mom,” she says, pointing to the woman on the left, “and that’s Faye next to her. That’s Sylvia’s sister, Irene, she was the maid of honor, and Milton Pierce—it was his wedding, he was marrying Sylvia—and Evelyn—what was her last name? oh, dear—and that’s me,” she says, pointing to a woman on the far right, who’s the same height as Mom.
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