Patient H.M. (29 page)

This was, for me, a big opportunity, a chance to break out from local to national magazines. I spent a couple of days thinking up pitches. The first one I came up with was about a guy named William Furman, who was both an important historical figure and virtually anonymous. Furman was a onetime death row inmate whose case was overturned, leading to the temporary abolishment of the death penalty in America. He was a murderer who had paradoxically saved the lives of hundreds of other people slated to die.

Terry, the editor at
Esquire,
rejected the pitch. He did so nicely, though, and offered some advice: “Think about stories that you are uniquely qualified to deliver—either because of your passion, your access, your perspective, maybe even your own experience. Think about stories that are potentially rich, with multiple layers that will resonate with readers.”

A few days later, a new story idea occurred to me, one that seemed to tick all of Terry's boxes. A story with a personal thread, but one that might resonate with other people. A profile of a man I'd always been deeply curious about. In a sense, he was a man very much like William Furman: a historic but anonymous figure.

And, crucially, he was a man I imagined I could gain unprecedented access to.

After all, my mother's oldest friend was his gatekeeper.

I sent Terry a pitch about Patient H.M., describing him as “perhaps the only man alive that literally lives in the moment. The moment has lasted fifty years.” The pitch was straightforward, presenting the basics of Henry's story, and my grandfather's, as I understood them at the time.

Terry quickly sent me back a seven-word response: “I love this idea. Let's do it.”

So I sent Suzanne Corkin a letter. A real one, on paper, express mail. I told her that I'd like to profile Patient H.M. for
Esquire
and that the magazine had expressed interest in my doing so. I also enclosed a copy of the pitch I'd sent to Terry. The next day I used the tracking number to make sure the letter had been delivered. It had. Then I waited.

I didn't hear back. Not that day, or the next day, or the day after that.

I emailed Suzanne, and then I phoned her, at work and at home. I got her cell number from my mom and left a voicemail there, too.

Finally, a week after I sent the letter, my own cell rang.

I recognized Suzanne's voice, though her tone, cold and sharp, was new to me.

“I really wish you'd approached me before sending that pitch off,” she said. “Would it be possible to get
Esquire
to return the pitch to you, or destroy it?”

I'd last seen Corkin about a year before, when she and her son and my mom and I went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Cambridge. I don't remember much about the night, except that Corkin's son was planning to go out tango dancing a little later and that Corkin had sent back both a drink and an entrée because neither had been made to her liking. If we'd had a conversation during that dinner, it would have been a superficial one. She was my mom's friend, not mine.

But still. She may not have been a friend, but she'd always been friendly.

On the phone, though, that didn't seem to be the case. She told me, in the same cold tone she began with, that it would be impossible for me to meet Henry. First of all, there was the matter of his name: Henry. I had referred to him in my pitch by his first name and that bothered her. I had to understand, she said, that Patient H.M.'s real name, first and last, was a secret. She acknowledged that his first name had been made public multiple times already, including in her own classroom lectures. For example, one book about Henry called
Memory's Ghost,
released just a few years before, regularly referred to him as “Henry M.” But the fact that I'd used his first name still bothered her. Also, she said my pitch had “lots of errors.” It bothered her that I'd focused on the hippocampus, for example, when “the latest research shows that it's not just the hippocampus involved.”

“That's why I won't be able to share any of his records with you,” she said, “and for the same reason, you can't meet with him. Not that you would get much from such a meeting. I think he may have had a stroke recently.”

She gave a curt apology for taking so long to respond to my letter, said she was busy and had to go. Then she hung up.

Over the next several weeks, I exchanged a series of emails and phone calls with Corkin, trying to convince her to change her mind and let me meet Henry. I also sent her another letter, making it clear that I was going to start reporting this story with or without her cooperation. After receiving that letter, Corkin suddenly seemed to relent. She called and told me that it might in fact be possible for me to meet with Henry after all. She'd discussed the matter with Henry's conservator, or court-appointed guardian, and the conservator had given provisional permission. Corkin said she'd need to be present for the interview and to discuss it with the MIT lawyer first, and perhaps have me sign something before the meeting. She even gave me a tentative window during which the interview might take place: November or December, during Henry's next visit to the laboratories at MIT.

This was followed by more silence. I repeatedly followed up, trying to lock down a date, and she repeatedly told me that she hadn't yet had a chance to speak with the lawyer but would soon.

I got the feeling that she might be stalling, hoping I'd go away once enough time and, presumably, deadlines had passed.

Then, more than two months after I'd first pitched the story, Corkin sent me an email containing a legal contract.

C
ONFIDENTIALITY
A
GREEMENT

The undersigned, Luke Dittrich (hereinafter called “RECEIVING PARTY”), in consideration for the use of certain information, knowledge, related to an M.I.T. research project entitled “The Amnesic Patient H.M.,” conducted by Suzanne Corkin, Ph.D. (hereinafter called “INFORMATION”) made available to it by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (hereinafter called “M.I.T.”), hereby agrees as follows:

1. RECEIVING PARTY agrees to keep in confidence and not to use the INFORMATION for its commercial benefit (except for technical evaluation internal to RECEIVING PARTY). RECEIVING PARTY further understands that the INFORMATION includes personally identifiable health information, through a patient interview, which is subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and agrees that it shall keep in confidence and not disclose any part of the INFORMATION to a third party or parties in perpetuity.

The contract's next item conceded that my contractual obligations to MIT would not extend to information that MIT had not provided me or that I possessed prior to signing the contract. The item after that warned that if I had any employees, they, too, would be bound by the contract to “protect the confidential and proprietary nature of INFORMATION.” Then the contract ended with a final point:

4. M.I.T. understands that RECEIVING PARTY will be free to publish the results of the technical evaluation after providing M.I.T. with a thirty- (30) day period in which to review each publication to identify any inadvertent disclosure of M.I.T.'s INFORMATION. If any INFORMATION is found in such publication, RECEIVING PARTY agrees to remove such INFORMATION prior to publication.

The contract struck me as bizarre and somewhat unsettling. There was the description of Henry, a human being, as “an MIT research project entitled ‘The Amnesic Patient H.M.' ” There was the nebulous definition of the “INFORMATION” about said project/person, which I would apparently be allowed to receive but never use, and the demand that MIT have final editorial say over any “technical evaluation” that I wanted to publish. There was the strange use of the word
proprietary
in regard to Patient H.M. I wasn't a lawyer, though, so I forwarded the document to
Esquire
's lawyer, who bounced it right back, telling me not to sign, since it was clearly “incompatible with journalism.”

I thought back to something Corkin had said to me during that curt conversation we had after she received my initial letter. She was explaining why my use of Henry's first name had upset her.

“We never refer to him as anything other than H.M.,” she said. “That's important. Because otherwise, people could find him.”

It was time to see if she was right.

On November 8, 2004, I took an early flight from Atlanta to Hartford, determined to find Patient H.M. My plan was to first figure out his last name and then, armed with that information, to find Henry himself. (What I'd do after that, I had no idea.) In my notebook, I made a list of all the stray bits of biographical detail I'd been able to gather about him so far. The scientists who wrote about him were careful not to reveal too much, and in general they were successful. There wasn't a single paper, out of the hundreds that had been written about him since 1957, that revealed much in the way of identifying information. But if you read a lot of them, you could piece together a fragmentary portrait.

I knew he was born on February 26, 1926.

I knew his father's name was Gustave, and that Gustave was born in Thibodaux, in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, in 1892.

I knew his grandfather had been a deputy sheriff in that same town.

I knew Henry had attended St. Peter's Church, on Main Street in downtown Hartford, and was baptized and received his first communion there.

I knew that he had once worked at the Underwood Typewriter factory.

That was about all I knew.

I arrived at Bradley International Airport before noon, picked up my rental car, and then headed out to start reporting.

I began at the Hartford Bureau of Vital Records, told the woman behind the counter that I was trying to find Henry's last name, and gave her the information I had. She told me their databases weren't set up like that. She suggested I contact the Connecticut Department of Public Health's records department. I told her I'd already called it the day before and had come up empty.

She gave it some thought.

“Maybe you should try the Connecticut State Library?” she said.

The Connecticut State Library sat on Main Street across from the state capitol. It had a wide façade flanked by big marble columns topped with classical sculptures of robed women, and the entrance doors were copper-plated, with handsome red leather panels. I asked a security guard where the library's history and geneaology department was, and he pointed me down a set of curved marble stairs leading to the basement.

The department was an expansive series of rooms at the end of a long, cramped, white-tiled hallway. There were old card catalogs, microfilms of newspapers, bound volumes of censuses, annual reports, property transactions, family histories. A compendium of local lives and the traces they left. I took a walk around. There were a handful of other people there that day, sitting at reading tables, hunched over documents. I had no idea where to start. The department's chief archivist, Mel Smith, sat behind a bleak, fluorescent-lit desk near the entrance. I noticed a fistful of orange number-two pencils in a wire-mesh cup beside a Dell computer that looked old even in 2004. I introduced myself, told him what I was looking for, and laid out the facts I knew for sure. He leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers on his armrest. Then he swiveled to a computer workstation.

“What did you say his father's first name was?” he asked.

“Gustave,” I said.

Mel pulled up a program that gave him access to a digitized version of the 1930 Federal Census.

“And his last name began with an M?” he said.

“Almost definitely,” I said. (I did worry that the “M” in “Patient H.M.” might be a red herring, meant to throw people like me off.)

He typed a few words into a search box.

“And where did you say Gustave was born?”

“Louisiana.”

He typed in one more word and pressed enter with a little flourish. He tilted the screen so I could see it, and we both leaned in close.

We were looking at a scan of a photograph of a page from the census. The page was a yellowed old-fashioned spreadsheet, dense with cramped blue-ink handwriting. The handwriting, however, had been fed through an optical character recognition program, which made it searchable, just like digital text. About two-thirds of the way down the page, a cell on the far-left corner was highlighted.

There was only one Louisiana-born Gustave residing in Hartford in 1930. He'd lived on Main Street, with his wife, Elizabeth.

They had a single child, a son.

Their son was four years old. He'd been born on February 26, 1926.

His name was Henry.

Henry Molaison.

There are rare moments in reporting when something trips a wire in your head and you feel a genuine physical rush, almost a dizziness, like taking a first drag on a cigarette when you haven't had one in years. I left the library coasting on that feeling. Walking down the steps outside, I stopped and turned and took another good look at the façade. Above the columns, on a wide frieze flanked by the statues of the robed Muses, there were three words etched into the marble in foot-high letters:
KNOWLEDGE. HISTORY. JUSTICE.
I made some notes, already imagining how I would write this scene.

I tried to find Henry Molaison.

I thought with his name it would be easy.

I started, of course, with Google.

“Patient H.M.” gave me thousands of results.

“Henry Molaison” gave me nothing. No address, no history, nothing at all.

I knew he had a conservator, a court-appointed guardian, and that the records relating to his conservatorship should be held at the probate court of whatever municipality he resided in. I visited several probate courts around Hartford, came up empty.