An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (3 page)

Once, my father having read that George Bernard Shaw had left money in his will to develop a phonetic alphabet and that he had specified that
Androcles and the Lion
should be the first of his plays to be translated, we all received multiple copies of
Androcles
, as did anyone else who got in my father’s flight path. Indeed, family rumor had it that almost a hundred books had been bought and distributed. There was a contagious magic to his expansiveness, which I loved, and I still smile when I remember my father reading aloud about Androcles treating the lion’s wounded paw, the soldiers singing “Throw them to the lions” to the tune of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and my father’s interspersed editorial remarks about the vital—one could not stress enough
how
vital—importance of phonetic and international languages. To this day, I keep a large ceramic bumblebee in my office, and it, too, makes me laugh when I remember my father picking it up, filled to the brim with honey, and flying it through the air in various jet maneuvers including, favoritely and appropriately, a cloverleaf pattern. Naturally, when the bee
was turned upside down on its flight, the honey would pour down all over the kitchen table, leaving my mother to say, “Marshall, is this
really
necessary? You’re egging on the children.” We would giggle approvingly, thus ensuring a few more minutes of the flight of the bumblebee.

It was enchanting, really, rather like having Mary Poppins for a father. Years later, he gave me a bracelet inscribed with words from Michael Faraday that were engraved over the physics building at UCLA: “Nothing is too wonderful to be true.” Needless to say, Faraday had repeated breakdowns, and the remark is palpably untrue, but the thought and mood are lovely ones, and very much as my father could be, in his wondrous moments. My mother has said, many times, that she always felt she was in the shadow of my father’s wit, charm, intensity, and imagination. Her observation that he was a Pied Piper with children certainly was borne out by his charismatic effect upon my friends and the other children in whatever neighborhood we found ourselves. My mother, however, was always the one my friends wanted to sit down and talk with: we played with my father; we talked with my mother.

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt. Kind, fair, and generous, she has the type of self-confidence that comes from having been brought up by parents who not only loved her deeply and well, but who were themselves kind, fair, and generous people. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was a college professor and physicist by training. By all accounts, he was a witty man, as well as inordinately kind to both his students
and colleagues. My grandmother, whom I knew well, was a warm and caring woman who, like Mother, had a deep and genuine interest in people; this, in turn, translated into a tremendous capacity for friendship and a remarkable ability to put people at their ease. People always came first with her, as they did with my mother, and a lack of time or a busy schedule was never an excuse for being thoughtless or unavailable.

She was by no means an intellectual; unlike my grandfather, who spent his time reading, and rereading, Shakespeare and Twain, she joined clubs instead. Being both well liked and a natural organizer, she unfailingly was elected president of whatever group in which she became involved. She was disconcertingly conservative in many ways—a Republican, a Daughter of the American Revolution, and very inclined to tea parties, all of which gave my father apoplexy—but she was a gentle yet resolute woman, who wore flowered dresses, buffed her nails, set a perfect table, and smelled always of flowered soaps. She was incapable of being unkind, and she was a wonderful grandmother.

My mother—tall, thin, and pretty—was a popular student in both high school and college. Pictures in her photograph albums show an obviously happy young woman, usually surrounded by friends, playing tennis, swimming, fencing, riding horses, caught up in sorority activities, or looking slightly Gibson-girlish with a series of good-looking boyfriends. The photographs capture the extraordinary innocence of a different kind of time and world, but they were a time and a world in which my mother looked very comfortable. There were no foreboding shadows, no pensive or melancholic faces, no questions of internal darkness or instability.
Her belief that a certain predictability was something that one ought to be able to count upon must have had its roots in the utter normality of the people and events captured in these pictures, as well as in the preceding generations of her ancestors who were reliable, stable, honorable, and saw things through.

Centuries of such seeming steadiness in the genes could only very partially prepare my mother for all of the turmoil and difficulties that were to face her once she left her parents’ home to begin a family of her own. But it has been precisely that persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, that helped keep me alive through all of the years of pain and nightmare that were to come. She could not have known how difficult it would be to deal with madness; had no preparation for what to do with madness—none of us did—but consistent with her ability to love, and her native will, she handled it with empathy and intelligence. It never occurred to her to give up.

B
oth my mother and father strongly encouraged my interests in writing poetry and school plays, as well as in science and medicine. Neither of them tried to limit my dreams, and they had the sense and sensitivity to tell the difference between a phase I was going through and more serious commitments. Even my phases, however, were for the most part tolerated with kindness and imagination. Being particularly given to strong and absolute passions, I was at one point desperately convinced that we had to have a sloth as a pet. My mother, who had been pushed about as far
as possible by allowing me to keep dogs, cats, birds, fish, turtles, lizards, frogs, and mice, was less than wildly enthusiastic. My father convinced me to put together a detailed scientific and literary notebook about sloths. He suggested that, in addition to providing practical information about their dietary needs, living space, and veterinary requirements, I also write a series of poems about sloths and essays about what they meant to me, design a habitat for them that would work within our current house, and make detailed observations of their behavior at the zoo; if I did all this, he said, my parents would then consider finding a sloth for me.

What they both knew, I am sure, was that I was simply in love with the idea of a strange idea, and that given some other way of expressing my enthusiasms, I would be quite content. They were right, of course, and this was only further driven home by actually watching the sloths at the National Zoo. If there is anything more boring than watching a sloth—other than watching cricket, perhaps, or the House Appropriations Committee meetings on C-SPAN—I have yet to come across it. I had never been so grateful to return to the prosaic world of my dog, who, by comparison, seemed Newtonian in her complexity.

My interest in medicine, however, was lasting, and my parents fully encouraged it. When I was about twelve years old, they bought me dissecting tools, a microscope, and a copy of
Gray’s Anatomy;
the latter turned out to be inordinately complicated, but its presence gave me a sense of what I imagined real Medicine to be. The Ping-Pong table in our basement was my laboratory, and I spent endless late afternoons dissecting frogs, fish, worms, and turtles; only when I moved up the evolutionary
ladder in my choice of subjects and was given a fetal pig—whose tiny snout and perfect little whiskers finally did me in—was I repelled from the world of dissection. Doctors at the hospital at Andrews Air Force Base, where I volunteered as a candy striper, or nurse’s aide, on weekends, gave me scalpels, hemostats, and, among other things, bottles of blood for one of my many homemade experiments. Far more important, they took me and my interests very seriously. They never tried to discourage me from becoming a doctor, even though it was an era that breathed, If woman, be a nurse. They took me on rounds with them and let me observe and even assist at minor surgical procedures. I carefully watched them take out sutures, change dressings, and do lumbar punctures. I held instruments, peered into wounds, and, on one occasion, actually removed stitches from a patient’s abdominal incision.

I would arrive at the hospital early, leave late, and bring books and questions with me: What was it like to be a medical student? To deliver babies? To be around death? I must have been particularly convincing about my interest on the latter point because one of the doctors allowed me to attend part of an autopsy, which was extraordinary and horrifying. I stood at the side of the steel autopsy table, trying hard not to look at the dead child’s small, naked body, but being incapable of not doing so. The smell in the room was vile and saturating, and for a long while only the sloshing of water and the quickness of the pathologist’s hands were saving distractions. Eventually, in order to keep from seeing what I was seeing, I reverted back to a more cerebral, curious self, asking question after question, following each answer with yet another question. Why did the pathologist
make the cuts he did? Why did he wear gloves? Where did all the body parts go? Why were some parts weighed and others not?

Initially it was a way of avoiding the awfulness of what was going on in front of me; after a while, however, curiosity became a compelling force in its own right. I focused on the questions and stopped seeing the body. As has been true a thousand times since, my curiosity and temperament had taken me to places I was not really able to handle emotionally, but the same curiosity, and the scientific side of my mind, generated enough distance and structure to allow me to manage, deflect, reflect, and move on.

W
hen I was fifteen, I went with my fellow candy stripers on a group outing to St. Elizabeths, the federal psychiatric hospital in the District of Columbia. It was, in its own way, a far more horrifying experience than attending the autopsy. All of us were nervous during the bus ride over to the hospital, giggling and making terribly insensitive school-girlish remarks in a vain effort to allay our anxieties about the unknown and what we imagined to be the world of the mad. I think we were afraid of the strangeness, of possible violence, and what it would be like to see someone completely out of control. “You’ll end up in St. Elizabeths” was one of our childhood taunts, and, despite the fact I had no obvious reason to believe that I was anything else but passably sane, irrational fears began to poke away at my mind. I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter.
It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior. God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.

The hospital itself was not at all the grim place I had imagined it would be: the grounds were vast, quite beautiful, and filled with magnificent old trees; at several places there were extraordinary views of the city and its rivers, and the lovely antebellum buildings conveyed the Southern graciousness that once was such an integral part of Washington. Entering the wards, however, abolished the illusion created by the genteel architecture and landscaping. There was, immediately, the dreadful reality of the sights and sounds and smells of insanity. At Andrews I was used to seeing relatively large numbers of nurses on the medical and surgical wards, but the head nurse who was taking us around explained that at St. Elizabeths there were ninety patients for each psychiatric attendant. Fascinated by the idea that one person would be expected to control so many potentially violent patients, I asked how the staff protected themselves. There were, she said, drugs that could control most of the patients, but, now and again, it became necessary to “hose them down.”
“Hose them down”?!
How could anyone be so out of control that they would require such a brute method of restraint? It was something I couldn’t get out of my mind.

Far worse, though, was going into the dayroom of one of the women’s wards, standing dead still, and looking around me at the bizarre clothes, the odd mannerisms, the agitated pacing, strange laughter, and
occasional heartbreaking screams. One woman stood like a stork, one leg tucked up; she giggled inanely to herself the whole time I was there. Another patient, who at one time must have been quite beautiful, stood in the middle of the dayroom talking to herself and braiding and unbraiding her long reddish hair. All the while, she was tracking, with her quick eyes, the movements of anyone who attempted to come anywhere near her. At first I was frightened by her, but I was also intrigued, somehow captivated. I slowly walked toward her. Finally, after standing several feet away from her for a few minutes, I gathered up my nerve to ask her why she was in the hospital. By this time I noticed out of the corner of my eye that all of the other candy stripers were huddled together, talking among themselves, at the far end of the room. I decided to stay put, however; my curiosity had made strong inroads on my fears.

The patient, in the meantime, stared through me for a very long time. Then turning sideways so she would not see me directly, she explained why she was in St. Elizabeths. Her parents, she said, had put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into
space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant.