Riding Fury Home (2 page)

I interrupted his discourse. “Dad, what's ‘mental' mean?”

“It means how you think in your head. Understand?”

I nodded, even though I didn't really get it.

“Anyway, the doctors are using electricity to cure her. It will help her. It will fix her head.”

I stared at him, blinking hard, but said nothing.

During the day, I tried to be very good and not complain. But sometimes I would wake in the night, crying, “Mommy, I want
Mommy! Where's Mommy? I want my mommy.” Dad would come to my bedroom and try to comfort me, but I would not be consoled.

My mother came home two and a half years later, her New Jersey accent thickly slurred from psychiatric drugs, her eyes dark with desolation. The electroshock treatments had wiped out her knowledge of Yiddish, German, French, and Latin. She told me no stories, sang me no songs. And I had tucked away my daily stories, my longings and need of her, tucked it all far away into some wordless place.

BEFORE OUR FIRST VISIT to Carrier Clinic, Dad sat me down at the dining room table.

“Do you remember what I told you about Mom's treatments at the hospital? How the doctors are helping Mom by connecting her head to electricity?”

I nodded, fidgeting. My hands picked at the woven place mat.

My father paused, looked at me, and then away. He looked back and cleared his throat. “Sometimes after the electricity, people don't remember things too well. It probably won't happen, but when we go to see Mom today, she may not know who you are.”

I stared at my father while what he had said seeped into my body. Then I leapt up and ran. “Karen!” I heard my father call after me, but I didn't stop as I raced up the stairs and down the hall to my parents' bedroom. I flung open their closet door and stood facing myself in their full-length mirror. Yes, there was my reflection. I looked into my eyes, amazed and puzzled; I was still there
. But how can I be? How can I be here if Mom doesn't know who I am?

 

 

CARRIER CLINIC WAS A modern building, with double doors leading to long white corridors smelling of disinfectant. Dad held my hand as we walked down the hall, until we got to a room where Mom was waiting in a chair. I held back, grabbing onto Dad's pants leg. Mom rose, and exclaimed, “My darling girl!” Dad's hand was on my back, pushing me toward her. Mom enveloped me in a hug, but she smelled wrong; instead of her usual flowery scent of Chanel No. 5, she was sour with sweat and stale smoke.

Mom always remembered who I was during those four months of her electroshock treatments. We weren't allowed to bring anything for her, but sometimes I would show her pictures I had drawn in my first-grade class: a yellow sun shining gold rays between purple mountains, or a box house with a triangle roof, smoke spiraling from its chimney. “Wonderful, sweetheart, wonderful,” she praised me, but quietly, like she was very tired.

On our visits, Mom, Dad, and I would go out onto the wide green front lawn and walk around the building. Out back, there were horses belonging to one of the doctors. The long wooden row of box stalls smelled sweetly of manure and hay. We walked along to the thumps of hooves against wood as the high-strung horses kicked the walls, until we found a horse to our liking, ears flicked forward in curiosity. Dad carried a bag of carrots he had brought from home. He handed me a carrot. I gingerly held it up to the big gnashing teeth, entranced by the huge face with deep brown eyes, the chestnut coat, the long thick neck, the gigantic musky animal-ness so close at hand.

On one visit, Mom gave me a pin she had made in occupational therapy. It was a turtle, created out of a circle of alligator skin, with a round leather head that had two glass beads for eyes. Mom had glued a pin clasp to its underbelly. I wore it to school every day until
one of its glass eyes fell off, and then I carefully stored it in my pink jewelry box.

I have no memory of our goodbyes. Each visit must have ended in some kind of parting. Did Mom hug me so tight I could barely breathe? Or did she just let me go, waving a limp farewell?

 

 

WHEN I WAS IN MY TWENTIES, my mother told me what Carrier Clinic had been like for her. After each electroshock treatment, when she had recovered enough to move her stiff and sore body down the hall to the pay phone, when she wasn't so disoriented that she couldn't remember the names of friends, my mother would call anyone she could think of—my father, her parents, her friends—and beg, “Please, my God, they're killing me—you have to get me out of here!”

The response was always the same: murmurs of sympathy, and “The doctors say you need to be there. This will help you in the long run. I'm sorry, Gloria.”

My father recounted to me a time she called him between her weekly electroshocks. “Abe, Abe, get me out of here,” she pleaded. “I can't bear this . . . please, PLEASE!”

He tried to placate her. “Gloria, only the doctor can do that. But it will be all right, you'll see.” Somewhere in the midst of speaking, he found he was talking to an empty phone. “Gloria . . . GLORIA . . . ?”

“Mr. Wilson?” The voice of a male orderly came on the phone. “Your wife has climbed out the window of her room onto the roof. She says she will jump unless we agree not to give her any more treatments, but don't worry. We'll get her in. We'll call you back.”

In spite of her depression, in defiance of all that was bearing down on her, there were moments when my mother's feistiness and
leftist politics rallied. One time, my father was in the hospital administration office straightening out some insurance paperwork. He was startled when Gloria marched resolutely into the office. It was several days after her latest treatment, so she was at her pinnacle of alertness.

“What are you doing here?” Abe asked.

“Oh, hi, Abe, don't have time to talk,” she replied. “I'm here to let these people know that the food is atrocious! If they don't do something to improve it, I plan to organize the patients to demonstrate.”

 

 

SOMETIME DURING THE SUMMER at Carrier Clinic, my mother discovered she was pregnant. She had come home on a weekend pass and been with my father. Years later, I'd learn that by then my parents' sex life was practically nonexistent, so perhaps she reached for him in a desperate need of comfort, or maybe she hoped that if they connected sexually, he'd relent and help her get out. When the psychiatrists found out, they had a conference with my father and mother. The doctors were adamant: She was not competent, not in a state to have another child. My mother wanted that baby, but she went for the abortion, beaten. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where they dilated her and scraped her uterus. That summer, I lost my chance for a sister or brother.

After the abortion, more electroshocks. She had one after the other—until they had given her eighteen. But she was not cured. In fact, she was more severely depressed than ever. They could do no more for her because electroshock was the only treatment at Carrier Clinic. That fall of 1958, she was transferred to a private mental hospital in upstate New York, about two hours from our house.

BEFORE SHE MET MY FATHER, my mother was feeling age pressing against her with its looming horror of spinsterhood. At twenty-seven, she was living in her parents' attic. She had moved back home after a brief, failed marriage to her college boyfriend. Since her return, she had immersed herself in photography, spending hours in the basement darkroom she'd set up during high school.

One day, her sister, Rita, called. “Gloria, come to dinner tonight. Monte is bringing this guy Abe over after the Rutgers football game.”

“Nah, I'm in the middle of a good book.”

“Oh, come on, Glor! He's supposed to be a nice guy, and
really
smart. He's getting a doctorate in chemistry.”

My mother pushed herself against her own reluctance. “Oh, what the heck, okay.”

After that, Gloria and Abe started going out. They had quite a bit in common: Both were children of Jewish immigrants, both were first in their families to go to college, both were science majors and lovers of music and art. Their dates evolved from awkward to companionable. They wandered the Museum of Modern Art, went to
free concerts in Central Park, sometimes splurged on the symphony. He made no moves to kiss. Neither did she.

When Abe met Gloria, his experiences with women consisted of a few disastrous interludes during his military service in World War II. Short, terribly shy with girls, and cerebral, he'd met his first girlfriend on weekend leave from the army. He'd gone to a concert and fallen asleep, and was startled awake when an attractive, young woman in the next seat poked him and smiled. They started dating. Once, they took a boat ride up the Hudson River, necking against the deck rail, wind in their hair. He felt wildly exhilarated, dizzy almost. But when she wrote and suggested he rent them a hotel room for the night, he was so terrified he never wrote her back.

He met another woman as his unit was in training to ship out to Japan, and they became engaged. There was one condition: She insisted that he wear Adler's Elevated Shoes to pump up his height. He went as far as going to the shoe store and trying them on. As he clomped around the store, the thought of living like that was humiliating.
I'd be living a lie
, he said to himself. When he told her he wouldn't wear them, she called off the engagement. He left for Japan with a stunned heart.

With Gloria, Abe didn't run into the same problems: At five foot two, she was slightly shorter than he was, and she'd been married, meaning she'd had sexual experiences, and could show him what to do.

Gloria pondered: Here was Abe, a nice guy, a decent, educated guy. As someone to marry, he seemed her best bet. She knew he was shy, and a virgin. She invited him to her attic, where she lit candles and put Frank Sinatra on the portable record player. She took his hand, and they rolled onto her twin bed. The act was simple and quick, without lingering foreplay or delighted exploration.

A few days later, Gloria blurted, “So, what are your intentions? What do you plan to do with me?”

Abe stared at her, and then stammered, “Well . . . um . . . I guess I'll ask you to marry me.”

“Okay,” she said. It was done.

A few weeks later, during a classical concert, Gloria stared over at Abe in the dim light of the hall, assaulted by a panic of second thoughts. His head tipped forward as he nodded, half-asleep, his glasses having slipped partway down his nose.
What the hell have I done?

The next weekend, she drove alone to a Jewish resort in the Catskill Mountains where singles gathered. She flirted with men over breakfast, at the pool, in the bar at night. But she found no one that she felt any real connection with, and she returned home, resigned.

 

 

GLORIA DIDN'T WANT A BIG deal made about the wedding, her second. They invited no friends, and had no reception. Their only witnesses were her sister, Rita, and Rita's husband, Monte, Abe's younger sister, Sophie, and both sets of parents. Afterward, the group ate dinner at a nearby restaurant.

The humid summer air was stifling as Gloria and Abe checked into a Newark motel on their wedding night. Fans were blowing in the lobby. It wasn't until they got to their room and unlocked the door to a blast of heat that they realized their terrible error: They'd never checked whether the motel was air-conditioned. They turned on the ceiling fan, which circulated the steamy air round and round.

Just before clicking the bedside light off, Abe had reached over, tentatively, and touched Gloria's shoulder. “It's too damn hot for
anything,” she said. He pulled his hand back. They lay on their backs in the motel bed with the lights out, naked and sweating.

Sleep was impossible. The hours ticked by. In Gloria's chest, a heavyweight gathered. She thought of her mother's bitterness about being stuck with a husband she considered an uneducated Polish greenhorn, and beneath her. She hadn't made her mother's mistake: Abe was bright and educated. But she felt no spark. His insecurity, the thing that had made him so reachable, now repelled her. Rage at her stupidity collected along with her sweat.

At 4:00 AM, Gloria announced in the sweltering dark, “Let's get the hell out of here!” They threw back the sheet and gathered their things. For their honeymoon they were going to Tanglewood in Massachusetts, where the Boston Symphony played outdoor concerts.

They rented a housekeeping cabin in a row of dilapidated motel bungalows. For their first dinner, Gloria was inside making a salad as Abe leaned over a hibachi on the cabin's porch, grilling a steak. He stepped inside for a moment to grab a potholder. As he came back out, he caught a blur of movement. A scruffy mutt was trotting across the lawn, steak in its mouth. “Shit!” he yelled.
This thing is just going from bad to worse
. His shoulders sagged with yet another failure

The best moments of the honeymoon were the concerts, the great swell of music uplifting them. The worst were their nights in bed. My mother offered my father no further assistance after that first time. She lay there, waiting for him to act, her frustration that he wasn't satisfying her more and more apparent. Gloria's angry disappointment and Abe's sense of inadequacy pooled in the bed's hollow between them.

After the honeymoon, they moved into University Heights, where, as a GI, my father was eligible for married-student housing. Two-unit wooden cottages formed a rectangle around a common grassy area. In the evenings, they gathered with the other chemistry
students and their wives, dipping cubes of French bread into pots of fondue, and getting smashed on alcohol my father distilled on the sly in the school lab.