He Wanted the Moon (7 page)

I wrote several letters to my friends among Boston physicians and described the conditions at Westborough. None of these physicians seemed to show either interest or sympathy.

One wrote: “The sooner you start cooperating with the Westborough authorities, the sooner we’ll be seeing you again.”

Another wrote that the abusive treatment I received from attendants was probably due to my own attitude towards them.

Several times I wrote to Bob Fleming, the new psychiatrist who had taken over my case when my former psychiatrist, Dr. Tillotson, gave it up. Since I had been unceremoniously dumped into a cell at Westborough, I had had
no communication from Bob. I wrote him several times. I received no reply. I wrote asking that he give up my case unless he was willing to do something to help me out. I wrote my lawyer and asked him to consult other friends of mine among Boston psychiatrists, and see if one of them would take over. I also wrote directly to the following psychiatrists: Dr. Donald J. Macpherson and Dr. Colket Carver. Colket wrote me, “I’d rather be your friend than your psychiatrist.”

My lawyer consulted with Dr. Donald Macpherson about several matters. Donald promised to come out to see me—and did so at the end of eight or nine weeks. I wrote to a close friend, Paul Chandler, and asked him to come to see me. He wrote and said that he would, but he never did. I wrote Dr. Ben Ragle and asked him if he’d take over my care. He replied that he made it a rule not to accept close friends as patients.

I cast about in every direction for whatever help I could find. I found none.

I pray to God that in the future I shall be able to remember that once one has crossed the line from the normal walks of life into a psychopathic hospital, one is separated from friends and relatives by walls thicker than stone; walls of prejudice and superstition. It may be hoped that psychopathic hospitals will someday become a refuge for the mentally ill, and a place where they may hope to recover through channels of wise and gentle care. But the modern psychopathic hospitals I have known are direct descendants of ancient jails like Bedlam, and I believe that they do harm, not good. The brutalities that one encounters in state and city psychopathic hospitals must be the by-product of the
fear and superstition with which mentally ill patients are regarded. For the present, the best one can hope to do is to stay out of these places, pity those confined there, and to do what one can to accelerate the slow process of mental hospital reorganization.

With several friends, my secretary, Gretta, and a few relatives, the correspondence was regular and strenuous. The almost daily arrival of one to a half dozen letters brought me a great deal of comfort. Possibly this correspondence created a wider spread of gossip concerning my illness, and it may have done me a bit of harm in various ways, but it was a gratifying experience at the time of the illness, and it did much to reestablish normality.

DURING perhaps my seventh week at Westborough, Corny Trowbridge—our Chestnut Hill minister—paid me a visit. I did not expect him and I don’t know why he came, but I shall never forget his visit. Naturally we talked about spiritual values. I told him that bible teachings had been much impressed on me in childhood days. He spoke of Christ.

“Surrender to Him,” Corny told me. “It isn’t as weak as it sounds. Surrender to Him.”

Corny went on to say that by following closely the teachings and the example of Christ, one could realize so much more in the line of success and happiness.

“Christ lived these 1,944 years ago,” I said. “There must be some spiritual viewpoint more adapted to our modern age. In place of surrendering completely to Him, might there not be some way of just going along with Him, beside Him?”

I spoke of my marital troubles and my hunger for a satisfactory sexual life. I narrated my love for dogs, horses, and birds at some length. I gave Corny two letters about some difficult bareback riding I’d done. I explained that my deep love of horses enabled me to understand them better and to do with them things that most people could not accomplish.

As I talked about my love of animals, Corny was reminded of St. Francis.

“St. Francis must have been a manic depressive,” he said. “Have you ever heard about his sermon to the birds?”

He went on, telling me the historic account of St. Francis and the birds he loved.

“Haven’t you read
The Life of St. Francis
?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

“I shall send you the book if you’d like to read it.”

As Corny and I talked, I believe pleasantly, he let me have some of his cigarettes. We both smoked. It came time for him to leave and I walked with him from my room to the visitor’s waiting room where he had his hat and coat. As he picked up his hat and coat, I could see that his eyes were moist and his voice betrayed emotional tension. He said that he’d come again to see me. I wrote him several times asking him to come and wrote my wife several times to ask her to request that he visit me again. He never returned.

Soon after Corny’s visit, a book entitled
In the Steps of St. Francis
arrived in the mail. It was the story of St. Francis’s life blended with a description of travels through Italy and other countries where he had wandered with his followers. As judged by a card I found in the book, it must have
been a Christmas present to Corny from some relative. I read it through the first time, rather haltingly, because I did not enjoy the travelogue part, but later as I reached the end, I was so deeply interested that I immediately went back to the beginning and read the entire book over again, consuming in detail all the description of the author’s travels in the steps of St. Francis. As I went along, I underscored passages and made marginal notes. It was my intention to send Corny a new copy of the book, and I wrote asking my wife to arrange this for me. She never did so and eventually she returned to Corny his own copy, somewhat worn from much use and considerably altered by underscoring and marginal notes in pencil.

FROM my window looking out over the hills in back of the hospital there were small illuminated crosses that could be seen near the tuberculosis unit and also in the woods to my right and occasionally on a hilltop. During the daytime, on this same hilltop, I could see three objects sitting in a row. I could never make out exactly what they were. They corresponded closely with the location of crosses seen at night and sometimes flashes of light came from them. These flashes of light were quite baffling, as were the crosses. I never really understood how these crosses happened to appear. Other patients could see them, and one was visible from the porch to the right of the women’s active wards in an easterly direction.

Someone told me—perhaps a patient—that some women from Chestnut Hill were living in nearby dormitories.
For a day or two, I fell into the delusion that they were women I knew. One night, I lay with my head in the ventilator shaft in my room and talked, thinking my voice might reach a particular woman I imagined might be in an adjoining dormitory. I quickly lost these amorous impressions.

I couldn’t seem to prevent myself from performing pranks. I loved to hide forks and spoons inside the large metal sleeve through which the ceiling light hung down. This bronze-colored, conical sleeve was broad at its base next to the ceiling and could be unscrewed and lowered, leaving a fairly large space. Quite a good many small objects could be put in here, and the sleeve could then be put back in place. When my spoons and forks disappeared, the attendants searched my room but could never find them until I revealed the secret. All this seems childish in retrospect, but at the time it seemed to relieve monotony. I felt that my wits were pitted against those of doctors, nurses, and attendants, and I loved to tease them in many ways. The large safety pins, used to help bind the patients in cold packs, could be concealed in the electric light fixture or could be hidden by hooking them on an iron pipe concealed about a foot up the ventilation shaft. Through a small hole in the mattress, small articles could also be concealed.

I made many attempts to find ways of unlocking my door, usually with crude keys made from bedsprings or by using sound vibration produced by hammering on the doorknob. I also tried the scheme of hooking the iron crossbar at the foot of the bed over the doorknob, then manipulating the bed to produce various types of torsion, stress and
strain. One day, I succeeded in breaking the steel rod connecting the inside and outside knob. Another day I took the inside knob off and hid it in my left upper jaw. As I did so, Tiny Hayes came suddenly into the room.

“Where is the doorknob, Perry?” he asked.

I took the doorknob out of my mouth and handed it to him.

TO ease the pain of incarceration, I sang and whistled many tunes day and night: “Rose Marie,” “Desert Song,” “Indian Love Call,” “Intermezzo,” and many others.

While whistling and singing at night, I stood in my window and tapped in rhythm on the panes. One night, as I was tapping on the windowpanes leading to the porch (quite gently it seemed), one of the panes suddenly broke. It wasn’t at all like the break that comes after a powerful direct blow, where big pieces of broken glass are produced. It was more like physical forces together with sound were creating the effects, shattering the glass into thousands of small pieces. On the same evening, a pane of glass in the window with outside views broke in the same manner, and under the same circumstance. I recall going to great pains to help attendants pick up every tiniest piece of glass.

For many days during this time, the light bulb held my interest. I never knew what type of bulb it was, but it seemed to contain a gas, perhaps a mercury vapor, which took on a kidney shape when the light was turned on. As I found my eyes persistently upon this bulb, the kidney-shaped vapor
would slowly change with other shapes, round and oval, and sometimes it looked like false teeth, opening and closing slowly as in laughter or conversation.

Westborough State Hospital, 1944

The patient became very destructive, completely destroyed several iron hospital beds, broke the panels from the door of his room, broke the sashes from the window, dismantled the window casing and with a window weight in each hand was very threatening toward the employees but did not strike them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

DURING the course of my time at Westborough, I became convinced that many patients entered Westborough in a state of mild mental illness but were made critically ill, or even hopelessly ill, by the procedures employed and the rough handling by nurses and attendants. The doctors play an inconsequential part. There are so many patients that it is impossible to give adequate attention to any patient. Everything is run on a crude, general plan. The keynote of the place is incarceration. Movies are available to the convalescent patients twice weekly during certain months of the year and small groups meet together to sing and dance. A small orchestra made up of patients functions periodically. There is a department of occupational therapy. But so far as I could see during my stay, these sources of distraction formed an insignificant part of the care of the patient. Perhaps before the war—and before there arose such a difficult problem of funding adequate trained nurses, attendants and occupational therapists—the whole set up might have been quite different. What I saw with my own eyes during a trying wartime period was ghastly.

There were many patients who came and went and many
who were with me from start to finish. Old Mr. Sullivan, who drooled at the mouth, sat in his filthy clothes and smoked a corncob pipe. He was mostly rather quiet but sometimes cried out as others pushed him around. He didn’t like to be shaven so would avoid shaves if possible. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why. Being blind, he had to rely upon Tiny Hayes to shave him. I witnessed one such shave. Tiny delivered the shave while an assortment of nurses and attendants held Old Mr. Sullivan down. He groaned and cried out in pain. His head was jerked around quite roughly and held in strained and uncomfortable positions while Tiny scraped with brutal violence, leaving the skin red and excoriated.