He Wanted the Moon (2 page)

Although
Echoes from a Dungeon Cell
was never published in my father’s lifetime, it was his great hope that it would one day find publication. In letters written after he departed Westborough, he explained:

Last year when I was ill, I went through a series of adventures both colorful and painful. At that time I was asked to write the story of some of my strange travels and so, out of the cauldron of despair, came forth my manuscript. It is a long-continued account of every kind of suffering and disaster—February 20 to July 8, 1944. By going along slowly, depicting in detail the intricate succession of events, perhaps I can unravel and clarify the sequence of events and the relative importance of the various connecting links and contributing episodes …

I believe that the inadequate understanding of manic-depression as displayed by friends and relatives imposes unnecessary hardships on the manic-depressive. I have read widely about manic depression, I have lived through five prolonged suicidal depressions, four acute manic episodes and many hypo-manic phases. I have learned by experience how all the treatments feel: straight-jackets, wristlets, anklets, paraldehyde injections, hot and cold packs, continuous tub, close confinement to small spaces, and all the many inventions that man has created for the manic-psychosis. As a patient, I have studied many other patients at four psychopathic hospitals, including one city and one state hospital.

Out of my recent agonies came a dauntless
furor scribendi and I have written a very readable book. It is my conviction and I know you’ll agree that artistic creativeness finds its best expression after it has been fashioned by the agonies and tortures that life imposes.

CHAPTER ONE

Dr. Perry Baird at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Boston

When my father’s manuscript begins, he is forty years old and has lived with the diagnosis of manic depression for more than ten years. By now, he knows very well the symptoms of his disease, its dangerous, ecstatic highs followed by pitch-dark depressions. It is February 1944, and he has retreated to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, as he often did when he felt himself becoming manic, in order to protect his family from his increasingly erratic behavior.

Although he had informed my mother that he was going to the Ritz to work on his book, he soon became distracted from his work. My sister, Catherine, and I stayed with our mother in Chestnut Hill, just outside the city, oblivious to events unfolding around us.

THE morning of February 20, 1944, I slept deeply but awoke at the Ritz after only three or four hours of sleep, feeling that strange manic exuberance. I bathed, shaved and dressed, had breakfast, and then started out for a walk across the Boston Public Gardens. I ran short distances and leaped wildly over the broad flowerbeds. Anyone who might have seen me from the hotel would have thought my behavior a little unrestrained. I felt wonderful but restless, feverishly overactive, impatient. After walking for about ten minutes, I located a taxi and drove to my home in Chestnut Hill. I felt possessed with demoniacal energy. I was acutely manic.

When I arrived at my home, no one seemed to be there. I wandered around to the backyard and on impulse, climbed over the twelve-foot wire fence surrounding the deer park. I broke into a run. As I ran up and over an elevation of land in the deer park I saw a group of deer standing in the clearing. I wondered if I could run as fast as a deer and if I could catch one. I increased my pace by a sudden burst
of speed. All of the deer except one turned and ran. This one deer stood her ground a few moments, wagging her funny little short white tail. Then she too turned and ran away. I hid behind a large boulder, and as the deer ran around in a circle they came past the boulder, and once again I tried to overtake them. The small herd of deer was led by a large stag that, as I jumped into his path, might have turned upon me, guided by his protective interest. Instead, he merely led his flock around me and they soon outdistanced me.

After wandering around the deer park for a while and finding all the gates locked, I climbed back over the fence and went into the back door of my house. I found Nona, our maid, sitting at a table, her head in the crook of her arm, evidently crying. She must have known I felt upset. I went through the kitchen hurriedly, going into the dining room and through the living room, then out the front door.

As I walked along without my topcoat or overcoat, I felt quite hot even though it was a rather cold day. The sun was shining brightly. I looked into the sun but was not dazzled by its glare. Soon, the sun changed its appearance. It was gradually transformed from a fuzzy ball of fire with a shapely outline into a round silver-like disc with a clear halo around it. I looked away from the sun and, as my eyes turned upon the snow in front of me, I could see smoothly outlined, deep yellow spots upon the snow.

Soon, I arrived at the home of my good friend, the psychiatrist Dr. Reginald Smithwick. I walked across his lawn; then I stopped at his living room window. As was usual for him on Sunday morning, he was sitting in his armchair by the side of
the fire, working on tables and texts of a scientific paper. I knocked and, without waiting long, went in.

“Good morning, Reg,” I said.

“Hi, Perry,” he replied. “Come and sit down.”

I sat on the sofa and then lay down for a moment. I cannot recall the context of our conversation, but I admitted that I was somewhat manic and spoke of a feeling of greatly augmented physical strength. Saying this, I rose from my position, walked across the room, and picked up a poker by the fireplace. It was an iron instrument with a shiny copper sheath.

“Just as an experiment, let me see if I can bend this poker into a figure eight or a bow knot,” I said.

I started to twist the poker.

“Don’t!” Reg said in a high-pitched and nervous voice, as if some important decision rested upon what was about to transpire. Paying little attention to what might have been interpreted as a very important warning, I went ahead and twisted the copper poker into the shape of a double circle.

I could see that Reg was a little upset.

“Will you call me a taxi?” I asked.

Obligingly he went to the telephone immediately and called me a taxi.

“Please take me to the Ritz hotel,” I said to the driver.

As we drove to the Ritz, it seemed to me that the streets were singularly deserted for a fairly advanced hour of Sunday morning. When the taxi pulled up in front of the Ritz there was no other car in sight.

In the far corner of the lobby, one of my secretaries, Charlotte Richards, was waiting. I had called my office
earlier and asked for someone to come. Charlotte seemed quite nervous.

We stepped into the elevator and went to my room. There was another luscious copper and iron poker by the fireplace. I picked it up and went into my steel-bending performance.

“I am the only one who would come,” Charlotte commented. “The rest were afraid.”

During the following two hours or so, I dictated large amounts to Charlotte, drank enormous quantities of Coca Cola, and smoked Kool cigarettes almost constantly. The waiter brought up Coca Cola by the dozen bottles. I believe that the combination of Coca Colas and Kool cigarettes aggravated my state of excitation. My thoughts seemed to travel with the speed and clearness of light. I dictated and talked continuously.

Why so much happiness in the manic state? Perhaps an ability to dwell upon only the pleasing phases of one’s past experiences and current problems, combined with an ability to shut out disturbing considerations; the process of thought seems not only clear and logical but powerful and penetrating, features made possible by focusing all attention upon the major facts, leaving out distracting details. Perhaps the euphoria is also in part physiological in nature, representing a spastic sudden flushing of areas of the vascular-bed long idle but now overactive; the escape is a transition from long phases of inactivity to a state characterized by an easy and abundant flow of energy.

The phone rang in the bedroom. It was my wife, Gretta.

“Good morning, Perry, how are you?” she asked.

“Oh, just fine, dear,” I replied. “How are you? I’m here giving some dictation to Charlotte.”

“Dr. Lang wants you to call him,” Gretta informed me.

At this point I should have had every reason to realize the hazardous nature of my position. A call from Dr. Lang—the superintendent of Westborough State Hospital—should have indicated the possibility of my return to that psychiatric institution, a prospect that had long filled me with a sense of miserable apprehension.

In my wallet, I had about six hundred dollars. I could have walked out of my room on the pretext of going to the drug store and could have managed to get out of the state. If I had done so, I might have saved myself months of grief and despair. But—by some cruel stroke of fate, by some strange absence of any sense of caution—I went right on with what I was doing, paying slight heed to the dark cloud hanging low over me.

At my request, Charlotte called Dr. Reg Smithwick and asked him to see whether he could get a room at Massachusetts General Hospital for a few days of careful chemical studies of blood and urine. There were no rooms available.

As I dictated to Charlotte, I began collecting urine specimens in empty Coca Cola bottles, placing the specimens on the window ledge to keep them cool. I recall that the output of urine was quite large and seemed to be controlled by thought and emotion. When pleasurable ideas came to mind, I could seem to feel my bladder filling up. But when I felt anxiety, the flow of urine seemed to cease. I wonder whether the renal arteries and arterioles were expanding
and contracting under the influence of nervous stress and nervous relaxation.

During these activities I made occasional trips to the bathroom and rubbed olive oil into my skin and hair. For some weeks my hair had been exceedingly dry, so much so that it would not stay in place after being combed and showed a tendency to stick up in all directions. It looked and felt like straw. This condition had developed at the end of a three- or four-month period of time during which I had followed a successful weight-reducing program cutting out all butter. Though I had continued to consume cod liver oil capsules containing vitamin A, this source did not evidently replace the loss from omission of butter. I feel sure that I was suffering from real vitamin A deficiency.

My food arrived. I had ordered an enormous meal consisting of about six eggs, two steaks and other items. My behavior was certainly unrestrained, to say the least. Charlotte left.

Soon after, my wife Gretta arrived with the children. She remained standing and began to make preparation to leave almost immediately after arriving.

Our eldest daughter, Mimi, was standing near me.

“I want to stay with Daddy,” she said.

Instantly, Gretta found some excuse for taking Mimi with her and they left. Gretta’s final remark was that they were going to The Country Club to skate.

I went to the bar, consuming another Coca Cola. I decided to follow Gretta to The Country Club and went out to get a taxi. At The Country Club, I walked towards the skating
pond, but I couldn’t find Gretta and the children and so returned to the clubhouse. As I came to the door, they were just leaving.

“I’ll come back for you,” Gretta said.

“Don’t bother,” I replied.

Gretta left to go home; I remained to face the tragedy of a lifetime.

Inside the clubhouse, I sat on the large divan looking out over the racetrack and golf course, and ordered a Coca Cola. The large old majestic trees and vast expanse of snow-covered lawn that can be seen from the side of the clubhouse form a beautiful and restful view. Very few people were around. I went over and spoke to a few friends. One of them refused to have a drink with me. (Could he have known that I was trying to keep my promise to my psychiatrist not to drink?) He acted a little strangely. Later he departed.

I ordered a martini that I sipped slowly. At this stage of events other friends began to file in, including Storer Baldwin, who walked up to me in a friendly manner, shaking my hand.