“Then?”
“He may have had it since birth.”
“May have?”
“Probably had.”
“But you saw all his medical records. You chose him and we knew everything about him, down to the measles he got right before the first trial.”
“Rosalie, this is the least important thing in the world right now.”
He has turned back from the dresser now, facing me.
“To you, maybe, John. It’s not the least important thing to me.”
Outside, wheels crunch on gravel. Car doors open. I hear the voices of Billy and Jimmy, piling out, giddy about camp, naming off the cabins and guessing where they’ll be assigned once they arrive.
John says, “I’ve asked Ray to drive them up early. I called the camp and they say it’s fine. That way we can get you to town tomorrow, or if they want to bring you to a bigger hospital. Whatever’s best. Your mother called me at work. She’s in a fit of worry now and thinks I’m the devil. But you’ll be proud of me. I gave her no indication that she’s not welcome here. She can stay here all week, if it makes you feel better.”
For the first time in his life, he’s probably glad to know that my mother will be attached to my side. It will make it impossible for John and me to have any private conversations at all.
“Normal—that’s what you called Albert every time. John, you called him perfectly normal. Perfectly healthy. Until we experimented on him, he didn’t cry. We couldn’t even make him cry. John, that’s not a normal baby!”
But now Billy and Jimmy are in the house, and I can hear them rushing into their bedroom, pushing to get in, like a pair of tumbling puppies.
I know they can manage. But it’s those last hours when you want to make sure they have what they need and aren’t going to forget entirely everything you’ve taught them, that they’ll learn everything you wished you’d taught them. It’s those last hours when you wish you could change everything, and do everything all over again, so that you’d make no mistakes, and they’d understand how much you really loved them. But of course, you never can. You can only do your imperfect best.
“You were wrong not to tell me.”
“So that what, you would feel bad about it? It doesn’t change anything.”
Has he lost sight of everything, even the most basic experimental principles? I knew he’d made mistakes, many of them. I had no idea that he’d played with a fixed deck from the very beginning.
“It changes more than one paper. It changes everything, John. You must know better than that.”
Chapter 34
Three things happened to our family after we moved to Connecticut. First was the farm itself, with its animals and liveliness, its combined gifts of outdoor freedom and work duties, which gave everyone a sense of combined purpose. Second was John’s aging—the impotence, and the scare he gave me that day by the fieldstone wall, and the night I first started to imagine life without him, wondering how he’d be remembered and giving myself permission to recall things I hadn’t thought clearly about for some time. And third was the woman I’ve mentioned several times already, who ended up being important to John and me, both.
The first time, I came across her last name only, written at the top of a telephone message: Lieb. It was just after my breakdown, actually, and just before we moved to the farm, so I was still tense and suspicious.
Lieb. Meine Liebe. I’d heard some of my own German cousins in Baltimore use that phrase: “my love, my sweetheart, my dear.” I’d imagined, after my breakdown and John’s subsequent depression, that there might be a change in his habits. And then that word scrawled in pencil. I thought: here we go again.
But then, a few months later, I heard John talking to a houseguest about his new secretary, Ruth Lieb. He was talking about her in such a no-nonsense way—her typing speed and her way of handling grouchy clients and how much common sense she had compared to the younger girls at JWT—and though any kind of complimentary talk about another woman might have made me jealous in the old days, it didn’t make me jealous now. She was Jewish, and I could only hope she was a little matronly. She was certainly nice on the telephone, when I first talked to her, trying to reach John at work.
“You’re not sleeping with her, are you?” I asked John later that month, against my better judgment.
“Dames are a dime a dozen,” he said, imitating the detective novels that had replaced his Westerns as commuter reading. “But a good secretary is too important to be messed with.”
“I’m glad you see it that way.”
Billy got to meet her before I did, when he went with John to work one day, to write a school paper about advertising. When Ruth was introduced to him, Billy told me later, she brought out some chocolates from her desk drawer and proceeded to hug him until he couldn’t breathe. She pinched his cheek and then planted a lipsticky kiss on the very same spot.
“Good thing your father wasn’t there,” I said.
“But he was.”
“And did he say anything?”
“Oh, you know,” Billy said. I was embarrassing him now. John always said something.
“And what did Ruth do?”
“She gave me another kiss on the other cheek, even messier than the first.”
Good for her, I remember thinking. Good for Ruth Lieb.
By the summer after John’s little sunstroke episode, she was writing letters to Billy. Not all the time—only when he was at camp. I found a few of them in the back of his dresser drawer, hidden behind his socks. There was nothing inappropriate. She asked him about camp, what he was doing, how he got along with the other boys. She reminded him of his strengths and showered him in endearments.
Once I asked him what he thought about the letters. Anything could embarrass a twelve-year-old boy, but this question didn’t seem to bother him in particular.
“Oh, it’s just all that mother stuff, like the other boys get.”
I might have been offended, but I wasn’t.
I could tell he liked the letters, or he wouldn’t have saved them. I doubt that he saved the notes I wrote to him at camp, which were mostly about what was happening on the farm, which houseguests were coming for the weekend, how the animals were faring. I suppose I’d been so objective for so long that I simply couldn’t mimic, even in print, the caring voice in Ruth’s letters, even when I threw off caution and tried to be more playful. But playful wasn’t the same as tender, I knew. Maybe it wasn’t the letters at all, but the letters in combination with how she treated him whenever she saw him in person, with extravagant hugs and kisses. My son was missing something, and he’d stumbled upon a woman outside the family who was willing to provide it, someone who seemed able to work closely with John while disregarding his fiercest convictions, as I should have been able to do. No scientific study was needed to prove there was a hole in my son’s life, and one small way to begin filling it.
One of the best things I ever did as a mother—maybe the only truly good thing—was to not get in the way of that.
Chapter 35
It is harder than it’s ever been to say goodbye to Billy and Jimmy. I insist on coming out to the car and shutting the door for them after they climb into the backseat. Billy is thirteen years old, or almost fourteen, as he’d prefer to say. Jimmy is twelve and sitting with his knees up and his feet resting on his small suitcase, because he doesn’t want it out of his sight. No doubt he has packed some contraband about which I am unaware: a slingshot or bar of chocolate. I would not take it away from him even if I knew.
I am thinking about the fact that I’ll be in the hospital tomorrow and don’t know when I’ll get out or whether I’ll get to come along at the end of camp to pick them up and get a peek at whittled woodcrafts, teepees built from stripped branches, and other camp treasures on display for the parents who’ll arrive to cart home their progeny in a month. They are thinking, of co
urse, about something less serious. Learning the backstroke, or racing frogs.
Even if I were less shaky on my feet, and even if our family was the most typical one in the world, raised to worship instead of condemn sentimentality, I wouldn’t manage to hold Jimmy long enough for a proper hug. As it is, I sort of tap their shoulders as they hop into the backseat. I reach out a last time to ruffle the hair on their heads, one after the other, while John remains inside the house, having dispensed his advice and shaken hands with both boys a half hour earlier. He expects our private conversation to continue when all the farewelling is done, and no doubt he’s opened a bottle of bourbon and poured himself a few inches, and is numbing himself already to the difficulty of what I might ask or say, now that this illness has freed some witchy impulse in me, turning me into a nag who will not leave him with his secrets. What he doesn’t know is that I’m not going to ask him anything more. What he doesn’t know is that he has told me enough and there is nothing more for us to do or say.
“More light,” Goethe supposedly said on his deathbed, or so our Vassar teachers told us. More light and more truth, indeed. You can keep calling out for it heedlessly, even when it’s shining in your face, making you shield your eyes and squint into that fiery horizon.
Sunset, now.
We own two automobiles and a truck, but it’s my old canary-yellow Bearcat that the boys wanted to take, with the top down, for their two-hour drive up to the camp. The sky is darkening, the air in a fast-moving car will be too cool, but they won’t listen, just as I wouldn’t have at their age, or even at my own age. The Bearcat isn’t the vehicle that Ray usually drives, and we haven’t had it out since last fall, but he is game to try, knowing I’ve been promising the boys a ride in the old machine for several weeks now and this is their best last chance for a while.
Billy and Jimmy both attempt to direct Ray from the backseat, warning him about the trickiness of the gearshift, but I know they’re just trying not to look back at me so they won’t have to see that my eyes have become red rimmed, my nose runny. At the last minute, I call to Ray not to back out yet, and as he keeps the car idling, I open the backdoor again and awkwardly lean across and plant a kiss on Jimmy’s cheek, then lean over his lap and, with even more effort and much buckling of knees and elbows, plant a kiss on Billy’s. They do not ask why. They do not look especially grateful or try to protest, either. Even they seem to realize it is a normal thing, to have to hold still for a mother’s kiss. How they could know that after so many years of so few kisses, I have no idea.
Now the car is driving away, and I’m left on the gravel road, my white nightshirt stirred by the light breeze. I am shaking. It occurs to me, when the dust settles and I can’t make out even a speck of yellow vanishing around the curve, that I haven’t stepped outside in five days and the fresh air smells heavenly, the sweet pepperbush that won’t be in full flower for several weeks seems to be blessing the air already with its fragrance, or perhaps my senses, brought alive by the onrush of night, are catching the scent of other trees and flowers, cultivated and wild, things beyond my knowing.
What little energy I have, I use to stand, to stay outside. John’s got his bourbon, and much as I will love him always, regardless of everything, still, he doesn’t need me as much as he thinks. We are all, in the end, responsible for ourselves.
I won’t ever know exactly what John was thinking when he chose an abnormal baby for his most famous experiment, the work upon which he built all of his successive ideas, the sandy foundation on which everything else he ever did unsoundly rests. I do know that he wanted—needed—a baby who was stolid and imperturbable. I had the very same thought, the moment I first held little Albert, with his heavy head, glazed expression, and scarlet cheeks: Don’t bawl. Please, just don’t bawl.
I’ll never know for sure whether John understood that his choice of Albert undermined his scientific premise, or if he rationalized it as somehow insignificant. Nor will I ever know if he understood the danger of what he was doing, to one child or later, with the impact of the parenting guide, to a million or more. He wanted proof so badly, and then he invested, and once he had invested a little, it was just too hard not to invest more, and before you knew it, he’d built an entire way of understanding the world on that one little investment, and the world’s most avowedly objective person lost his objectivity altogether.
John was wrong about many things but right about at least one: Fear determines so much. Fear of being in the dark. Being alone. Being wrong. Growing old. Losing potency. Losing control. It determined all that happened in response: the booze, the restlessness, the women, the things done to our own dear boys.
Oh John, the worst thing is not only that you created fear in others, but that you lived in so much fear yourself.
There it goes, or rather, it has gone: the sun. Lovely, distant, burning ball.
It’s fully dark now. I haven’t felt hunger for over two weeks. While my stomach is empty of both food and water, I don’t feel the pain that will pinch and stab again the moment anything tries to enter or exit. Better just to be empty for this rare pain-free moment, feeling so blissfully light. Listening to the serenade of insects. Listening to the rush of wind in the tall grasses beyond the barn. There is a glint at my side—I think I’m seeing things, since colors have intermittently flashed at the corners of my eyes over the last few days—but it is a real and welcome sight. Our greyhound, Gigi.
The moon has risen to glow on the grass, which looks oddly black, and on the short hair of Gigi, which in daylight is a grayish-brown but in this light shines like platinum. Silent, loyal, beautiful platinum beast.
I remember the day two years ago when Gigi barked to alert me that something was wrong with John, the day he was working on the fieldstone wall. Weeks later, he and the boys got back to it, but the project lost some of its appeal. Still, John talks about adding more to it each summer, making it longer and maybe a foot or two higher, and maybe he will, and maybe he won’t. All that effort: digging a ditch, and moving stone by heavy stone, finding the right pattern, and setting the stones into place in such a way that they won’t just topple, even without mortar. Destined to be permanent someday. John declared the first part of it finished, if not his best work, and on this warm, moonlit night before I’m consigned to a hospital ward and while John continues to add bourbon to his foul mood, I decide to go for the shortest of barefoot walks to see it.
Gigi seems to know exactly where I’m going.
I am so light and the air is so warm and fragrant and just a little humid, and I feel I’m hovering or swimming more than walking. We’re there in no time. We’re there, and it’s something less than I remembered. It’s surprisingly low to the ground, only a little higher than my knees. An impressive attempt, but no kind of solid barrier. Yet it would seem an insult to ignore its intent and purpose, to treat it as something small or incomplete, an overambitious mistake, a failure of any kind, when John wanted it to be something more, when it was in his nature to try and in all our natures to support with our lives and love and reputations his impassioned projects. Still, it is small. I can say that, can’t I? There is no harm, now, in just saying it?
There is a flash in the moonlight, as Gigi leaps and clears the stone wall easily, and then looks back at me with her long nose and serene expression, as if to say, Aren’t you coming across? What’s stopping you?
Epilogue
Rosalie Alberta Rayner Watson died June 18, 1935, at Norwalk Hospital of bacillary dysentery, with a recorded onset of the illness twenty-nine days prior. Her unexpected death at the age of thirty-six was reported in the press as being due to dysentery or pneumonia. After her death, her sons were called back home from camp. It was one of the only times, recalled James Watson as an adult, that he and his brother were embraced by their father.
Billy Watson fought often with his father in later years and became a Freudian psychiatrist, in opposition to his f
ather’s anti-Freudian views. He attempted suicide multiple times, was once discovered and saved by his brother James, and finally took his own life in 1954. James Watson reported that he and his half sister, Polly, also attempted suicide. Polly struggled with alcoholism and depression and was the mother of actress Mariette Harley, who wrote about her mother’s mental illness in a celebrity memoir, connecting it with her upbringing and the parenting style of John Watson, Mariette’s famous grandfather.
•••
After leaving the East Coast with her lifelong husband and research partner, Harold Jones, Mary Cover Jones worked at the Institute for Child Welfare at the University of California–Berkeley, where she became known for her decades-long contribution to the longitudinal Oakland Growth Study, designed to follow the psychological growth of nearly two hundred children through adolescence. Using this data, she published over a hundred studies. Known as the “the mother of behavioral therapy,” she received the G. Stanley Hall Award from the American Psychological Association in 1968. She died in Santa Barbara, California, in 1987 at the age of 89.
John B. Watson was deeply affected by Rosalie’s death. He switched to another advertising firm, then retired in 1946. Although still assisted by his secretary, Ruth Lieb, he nonetheless became increasingly reclusive over the years, and later sold Whip-Poor-Will Farm to live at a smaller farm, which he rarely left, spending his days drinking heavily. He was honored by the APA for his contributions to psychology in 1957, but embarrassed and emotional, declined at the last moment to attend the ceremony, according to his son James. He burned a large part of his collection of personal papers and letters, and died in 1958 at the age of eighty.
Author’s Note
I wrote this novel to give voice to a woman mostly forgotten by history. While much has been written about John Watson, by himself and others, Rosalie remains an enigma, with only a few publications to her name and surprisingly few sources of evidence for what she thought or others thought about her. Even her own adult children, when interviewed, reflected more about their father’s overbearing nature, sparing her the kind of scrutiny that might help us better understand their home and family dynamic. John’s penchant for destroying papers may be to blame for the scant record, but even before Rosalie met her future mentor and husband, she had a way of slipping between the cracks, staying out of photos and yearbook notices, for example, though she was clearly a bright woman with a promising future.
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