“It doesn’t mean she descended from the first U.S. president,” Jim said. “It doesn’t mean anything. You taught yourself tennis, didn’t you?”
“As an adult,” I said. “An adult with time and money. It took time and money to become great at tennis, Jim.”
My husband didn’t answer.
“I don’t know the first thing about my own heritage,” I said. “I need to find out whatever I can before she dies. I’m going to visit her again tomorrow.”
IT WAS RAINING when I drove to St. Vincent’s the next morning, the kind of cold driving rain that falls relentlessly throughout the winter season in Portland. I was cold inside my car, though I was wearing a coat and the heat was on. I was filled with dread, the old icy dread of visiting my mother in a psych ward, though I knew this one would be better than other places she had been. After all, she’d been in the Oregon State Hospital, perhaps the most infamous psych ward in the country, the place where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed.
Many years later, I would read an exposé of OSH in The Oregonian—a series of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize. Of the facility’s maximum security ward, the reporters wrote: “This bleak stretch of dark cells built more than a century ago is more frightening, more inhumane, than any place still in use in Oregon’s prisons.” Elsewhere the writers referred to OSH as “a haunted house of a hospital.”
I felt vindicated when I read those articles, as if my horror had been verified by an official source. But the truth is that no haunted house, no ghost story, no horror movie could be more ghastly than that place.
* * *
THE YEAR WAS 1986. I was nineteen and a newlywed, taking classes at Portland Community College. Jim and I were renting a modest apartment, and the simple daily fact of living with him instead of with my mother or a foster family still felt like a miracle to me.
My mother had come to the attention of the local police that wintry February after showing up at her neighborhood coffeehouse in a bikini. And the next day she pulled a knife on her boss, the man who ran the dry cleaning company where she was employed for six weeks. She was committed to the Oregon State Hospital, formerly named the Oregon Insane Asylum.
I drove from Portland to Salem to see her, alone in my little red Datsun. Jim offered to come, but I didn’t want to subject him to such a place or let him see my mother that way. My siblings wouldn’t help either. Isabella was just getting out of her foster home and she was estranged from my mom. I really never saw her after she was taken from the home after the assault. Pablo was incarcerated. Allan could not handle seeing his mother sick and in a psych ward and would turn to alcohol. Walter was in a foster home, and I didn’t know where he was at the time.
It didn’t look bad from the outside. It was a vast, three-story red brick building with a white spire at the center, immense and stately. A wide cement pathway led to a central entrance, and a trim green lawn carpeted the grounds on either side.
The matronly woman at the antechamber table barely looked up when I came in.
“Purse,” she said.
“What?”
“Give me your purse. And your coat.”
Wordlessly I complied, slipping my purse from my shoulder and pushing it across the surface of the desk. The motion felt deeply and dreadfully familiar. Where had I done this before? It took a moment for the answer to come: when I was being admitted to the dependent unit, surrendering the black plastic bag that held my meager possessions. Now, as then, I felt a sense of panic as the woman stashed my bag and coat in one of the lockers behind her desk before handing me the plastic tag that bore my locker number. What if I never got my belongings back? What if, once inside this place and stripped of my identity, the trappings of my regular life, they didn’t let me go?
In one of my current college classes was a young man whose mother was among the first American women to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. Just a few days before, he’d told a story about his mother’s visit, as a chaplain, to a psych ward in her city. Afterward, as she tried to leave, she was stopped by the guard manning the exit.
“No patients beyond this point,” his mother was told.
“But I’m a priest!” she exclaimed.
“There, there.”
Everyone laughed at this story, even me, but I could feel her fear, the claustrophobic unease that descended at the threshold of these places. I felt it grip me every time I stepped foot into one: What if they don’t let me out again? What if they know I’m her daughter and they think I’m just like her, that I belong here and they don’t let me out?
I pushed this thought from my mind as the woman spoke again.
“Empty your pockets,” she said.
“I don’t have anything in them.”
“Turn them inside out.”
I plunged my hands into the front pockets of my jeans and pulled the empty cotton lining into view.
“All right then,” she told me. “Now, by law I have to do a body search on you.”
Here I felt another flutter of panic, wondering if she was telling me to strip. If I had to be naked—even momentarily—to get into this place, I wasn’t going in. She just came around the table and proceeded to pat me down, like a policewoman frisking a suspect.
“Okay, you’re good to go,” she finally said. “I’ll have a guard bring you in.”
She spoke into a radio, and a moment later a man in uniform appeared and motioned for me to come with him. I followed him to the set of sliding metal sally port doors leading into my mother’s ward. It wasn’t until the first door locked behind my back that he was able to unlock the second. The space between was like a cage in purgatory. Once I’d stepped across the threshold of the second door, the metal clanging shut, the patients on the unit seemed to appear from every corner.
Outside the ward, they probably wouldn’t have looked alike, but in here their faces took on a terrible sameness. Even the younger ones looked wizened somehow: pale and slack, with pinched faces and sunken eyes, their hair hanging in limp and greasy strings. Several of the women were as skeletal as concentration camp victims. Each patient’s body seemed to bear the marks of trauma and mutilation, ancient scars faded to white, cuttings and slashes and cigarette burns and gouges and bruises.
They were trapped within this catacomb, and each new person to come in might as well have been a visitor from another realm. They drew near in fascination, forming a silent ring around me like spirits of the underworld. And there within this cluster of wraiths was the figure of my own mother. To stand in their midst was to feel grief closing like a hand around my throat, choking me like floodwater in a clogged gutter.
It was a force of will to move to my mother’s side and touch her arm.
“Mom,” I managed to say.
She jerked away as if I’d burned her. “What do you want?”
“Florence!” said an orderly standing nearby. “You never told me you had such a beautiful daughter. Would you like to visit with her in the dayroom?”
My mother stood rooted to the spot, eyeing me with suspicion.
“Come,” the orderly went on in a bright voice. “I’ll walk over with you.”
Reluctantly my mother detached herself from the throng, and together we trailed the orderly down the hall, through the patients’ quarters and past the baths. I looked around at the decor that clearly hailed from another decade.
The ward was in a state of decay. The walls were buckling from water damage, and everything was peeling: the paint on the walls, the ceiling plaster, the surfaces of the sinks. All the hospital fixtures, it seemed, were leaking and corroded and rusted. Metal pipes ran in every direction: up the walls and along the ceiling and parallel to the floor.
Every aspect of the interior was industrial: the white bathtubs surrounded by dingy tile, the trough-like sinks. In the communal washroom, the toilet stalls had no doors. Just outside it, human excrement was smeared all over the water fountain.
The corridor housing the patients�
� rooms was long and narrow, with wheelchairs strewn here and there like wreckage. The windows were covered not only with bars but a layer of mesh as well, the kind that might be used to create the high fencing around outdoor tennis courts.
Each room was as small and spare as a cell. On every bed was a rough brown blanket with the words Oregon State Hospital in black capital letters. In some of these beds were patients who were strapped down, bound at the wrists and ankles with leather restraints. Some were thrashing in these bonds, and others lay as still as the dead.
Outside the rooms too were patients at every turn, some of them in palpable agony. One woman was sitting on the floor, plowing furrows into the underside of her own forearm with her fingernails. Another was wandering the halls, clutching her head and moaning. From time to time, a scream would ricochet down the corridor—another echo of the dependent unit.
Other patients were shuffling around in their hospital shrouds and slippers, and some looked as if they had just given up, slumped in chairs or on their beds as if their spirits had vacated their bodies altogether. How else to escape the sodden misery, the stagnancy of this place, with its reek of mildew and urine and canned cafeteria food?
As we rounded the corner, a young patient grabbed my arm, and it was all I could do not to shriek and recoil. Her dark hair was filthy and matted, sticking out around her face. She wore a hospital gown and oversized shades. The exposed part of her face was heavily and grotesquely painted. Her cheeks looked as if they’d been slapped with rouge she hadn’t bothered to rub in. Bright magenta lipstick was smeared not only on her lips but all around them.
“Are you here to interview me?” she demanded.
“Not today, Judy,” the orderly said. “Please stand back.” To me, she said in a lowered tone: “She thinks she’s a movie star.”
Grudgingly the girl released me. My heart was pounding as I hurried away from her.
Finally, the orderly turned into the dayroom, and my mother and I followed. The walls were made of brick that had been painted white. The floor was covered with cheap linoleum patterned with dark and light squares. Tables and chairs were scattered around the space.
My mother and I sat down at one of the tables. I crossed my arms in front of me, clasping my own shoulders in an effort to stop shaking.
“What’s the matter with you?” my mother sneered.
“It’s hard to see you here,” I told her. “I don’t like it here, Mom.”
“You put me in here,” she said. “You and your husband.”
“Mom! We had nothing to do with it. You pulled a freaking knife on your boss. We weren’t even around.”
“You two were in on it,” she said. “You want me out of the way.”
“That’s not true at all,” I said, starting to cry.
“You used to belong to me,” she fretted, “but Jim took you away. Now you show up pretending to care, but you’re just here to spy on me. So get out,” she said, her voice rising to a scream. “Get the hell out of here and don’t come back!”
She jumped up, tipping the table toward me with both hands. I scrambled up too, managing to dart out of the way before it crashed to the floor. Two nurses appeared in the doorway.
“Florence!” one of them called. “What’s the trouble? You need to calm down.”
“Get out!” she screeched again. The cords stood out in her neck. She came around the fallen table and lunged at me, both hands reaching for my throat.
I twisted away as the two nurses ran over and another stood out in the hall, calling for security. Within seconds, it seemed, a team of white-jacketed men closed in on my mother. She was howling and kicking and thrashing with her usual formidable strength. It took all of them to wrestle her arms behind her back and drag her from the room.
I crept along behind them, trembling uncontrollably, wanting to know what they would do with her. They made their tortured way down the long corridor, my mother’s howls echoing off the walls, and disappeared into a room on the far end of it, a room they needed to unlock.
I paced the floor outside, shivering and weeping. I wanted to go home. I wanted Jim. But I couldn’t even leave on my own. I needed someone to escort me out. After many long minutes, the door opened and everyone filed back in the room. Everyone, that is, except my mother.
“Excuse me,” I asked. “Is my mom okay?”
One of the men turned to me. “Is Florence your mother? She’ll be all right. She’s in the seclusion room. We had to put her in restraint so she can settle down. You can look in if you want.” He indicated a small window at eye level on the door.
I stepped up to the little oblong of glass and peered through it. The room had padded white walls and was empty of everything except a mattress on the floor. My mother was inside, still agitated, standing upright and jerking as if having a seizure. She was in a straitjacket, cocooned and limbless inside the white expanse of it, arms crossed in front of her and tightly secured, still snarling and spitting but unable to strike.
The sight of my mother in that straitjacket has been seared into my memory. Buckled in from throat to ankle, folded into herself like an origami figure. The image has come to me countless times since, in my waking hours and in my nightmares. The helplessness, the humiliation, and the terror of it are indelible.
THE PSYCH WARD at St. Vincent’s was nothing like the Oregon State Hospital. The facility was modern and clean, the staff warm and welcoming. I still had to surrender my purse on my way in, but I didn’t feel as if I were entering a prison.
Still, a psych ward is a psych ward. Many of the people in it are bereft and broken. Some are unnerving and some are terrifying. This one was no different.
The dayroom, at least, was sunny and somewhat cheerful. I sat down with my mother on one of the sofas.
“How are you doing, Mom?”
“I don’t belong in here,” she rasped. “What am I doing here?”
“Well, you got yourself into some trouble,” I said. “I heard you threw a cup of coffee at another resident, back at home.”
“That bitch,” she spat. “I saw the way she was looking at me. It’s her fault I’m here.”
“I want to get you out of here, Mom, but we need to get your meds adjusted first. Then I hope like hell you can go back to your apartment. The manager isn’t too keen on having a tenant who attacks other residents.”
She eyed me sullenly from her corner of the sofa.
“How is it here, Mom? This is a nice place, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“Why not?”
“These people think I’m nothing but a commoner,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “But I’m a descendant of presidents and kings.”
She sat back against the armrest, brushing the hair from her face with one weakened claw. I looked at her, huddled there in her hospital gown. Never had she looked or sounded more lost. I locked eyes with her and leaned in, speaking low.
“Mom,” I said. “This royal heritage of yours.” I paused. “Of ours.”
She cocked her head to one side and waited.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I want to finally know who I came from. Tell me about our family, mom. Please.”
Chapter 19
MY MOTHER DREW herself up on the couch. For a moment, she seemed to puff up with importance.
“My grandfather,” she said, “was the most highly regarded and distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University.”
It felt ridiculous to put faith in these words, and yet there I was, leaning in, yearning. My whole life had been rootless. I wanted a connection to any past, any clan. They didn’t need to have a whiff of prestige about them. I just wanted to belong to a family, a place, a people.
“Who was he, Mom?” I asked. “What was his name?”
“His name was Thornton,” said my mother grandly. “Dr. William Mynn Thornton Jr.”
“Wait,” I said. “Let me write this down.” I fumbled in my purse for a scrap o
f paper and pen. “William . . . what’s his middle name?”
“Mynn,” my mother said. “M-y-n-n. Thornton. Junior.”
The skin prickled on the back of my neck. Just as when she had revealed the rape, she seemed ablaze with certainty and clarity.
“You said he was a professor,” I said. “What did he teach?”
“Chemistry,” she said. “But he lectured all over the country on all different subjects. He wrote a lot of published articles, and he even wrote a book.”
“I’ll look him up when I get home,” I said.
“You do that,” she said. “You’ll find him. He was a great man.”
“Tell me more,” I begged.
“He married an artist. My grandmother’s name was Florence Beall. She painted miniatures that were displayed in the Baltimore Museum of Art.”
“Her name was Florence also?”
“Yes,” she said. “My mother and I were her namesakes.”
I wrote down her name as well.
“She came from a great family too,” my mother went on. “The Bealls founded the Cotton Exchange. My grandmother and her sister had dazzling weddings. They were written up in all the society pages.”
And here my hope was outweighed again by skepticism. “Mom, how did you stray so far from this family?” I asked. “We had no money while I was growing up and no relatives in our lives, except that one time when we went to see your mother in Mexico.”
I flashed for a moment onto my memory of that strange old woman, with her single breast and her beer cans, sitting by the front window of her house most of the day. I could only remember her in fraying men’s undershirts. There was nothing fancy about her.
“They cut my mother off without a dime,” she said.
“Her parents? You mean they disowned her? Why?”
“She eloped with her chauffeur,” my mother said. “It was a terrible disgrace.”
And now hope disappeared altogether. Eloped with her chauffeur? It sounded like she was repeating the plot of a romance novel.
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