The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (15 page)

After an interview with the hospital director, I signed myself in to avoid the degradation of involuntary commitment. I was assigned to Nichols Cottage, a fancy name for the ward for disturbed patients and, I soon learned, the lowest rung of the long ladder out.

Every time they visit, Betty, I beg them to allow me to come home. I swear I’ll be good. But Daddy is adamant. I have to do everything the doctors and nurses tell me to so that I will get well, he says. If you truly love me, I say to Mother, you will get me out of this place. But Daddy cuts me off. I am here for my own good and because they only want what is best for me. He reminds me of how impossible the situation at home had become, for all of us. Until they left for a six-week holiday in Trinidad and Tobago, each visit has ended with everyone in tears.

I am denied any rest during the day, even if I haven’t slept a wink the night before. I am kept to a strict and unvarying schedule, scolded for minute infractions like a naughty child. Books and writing materials are forbidden. I can’t get over the idea that though my captivity is as rigidly enforced as in any prison, I am expected to be grateful. If I don’t at least pretend I love it here, that I harbor no ill will toward my wardens, my doctors will decree that I require more time in their care. This makes no sense whatsoever. What sane person would enjoy a mental hospital, no matter how fancy it was? Not even a prisoner is expected to be grateful to his jailer.

We rise at seven and a nurse watches while we take baths, watches us while we get dressed in clothes they have chosen for us. Breakfast is served promptly at eight, in a fancy dining room set with white tablecloths. In the walled courtyard where there is a small lawn and some trees I read the
New York Times
until it is time for the gym. Patients on the convalescent wards are allowed full use of the grounds and have access to tennis courts and a golf green, but the offerings for Nichols Cottage inmates are limited to badminton and Ping-Pong. Twice-weekly “hydrotherapy” takes place in a room that looks like an exclusive beauty salon. There we receive water massage and then get packed off to occupational therapy. Between woodwork and basket weaving and ceramics, I have made a number of nice things for the apartment that I hope will go some way toward replacing all the things I broke. In the evenings we have our only free time before lights-out.

We are always under surveillance. The jangling of keys locking and unlocking doors and cupboards sets my teeth on edge. As the months go by, the world outside has begun to take on a dreamlike quality. Only the
Times
keeps me grounded in the awareness that it is life in the hospital that is unreal. Even painting, something I have always enjoyed, has lost its meaning. It has become just one more way to keep us occupied, to distract us from the paralysis of our lives. Those too afflicted to understand that any attempt to escape is pointless find themselves returned in handcuffs to solitary confinement.

Of course Mother and Daddy say they want me to get well, but though they would deny it bitterly, the truth is they can no longer stand my company. It is hard for me to acknowledge just how much trouble I have caused in the four years since my nervous breakdown. The conflicts over lifestyle and values have made the Larchmont Acres apartment a battlefield. When I am not overcome with self-pity, I try to view Daddy’s decision objectively. What if I had a daughter who made my life miserable? Could I honestly say I wouldn’t do the same thing? No.

When the time came for my staff conference, I dressed in my very best clothes, fixed my hair, and followed the student nurse to the committee room. The hospital director met me at the door and seated me at the head of a long raised table. After my case was presented to the hospital’s staff of psychiatrists, the questioning began. Why hadn’t I tried to earn a promotion to a convalescent ward? I said that I preferred to stay behind at Nichols Cottage. There was security in knowing that I could fall no further, I explained. At Nichols there were no demands made of me, no expectations I might disappoint. I pleaded with them to free me. My only desire was to be released to find my place in society and do something productive with my life, I told them.

None of them looked me in the eye. They didn’t even seem to register what I had to say, occupying themselves with taking notes on those pads of paper they were never without and talking to each other in low voices. Two weeks later, still waiting to hear what would happen to me, I had a serious breakdown and was packed off to an isolation cell. I don’t know how long I was there. Then I was taken to the treatment room.

Patients are sent to the treatment room to be force-fed. There are a number of girls who look like Nazi concentration camp survivors because they have basically stopped eating. There was one girl who told me she had gone on a fad diet she’d read about in a women’s magazine while she was at a fancy Florida resort. Ever since then she’d tried to stop losing weight, but she couldn’t. When I first met her she weighed fifty-nine pounds and all her teeth had rotted away. Twice a day she would lie next to me on the table while the tube was stuffed down her throat. I always clean my dinner plate.

Electroshock is another therapy taking place in the treatment room. There is no more terrifying prospect than electroshock, which, like forced feedings, is done in full view. For some unknown reason, though Daddy signed the release forms, I have yet to receive shock treatment. Instead, for twelve to fifteen hours a day I am tightly wrapped in icy cloths and left on a table unable to move anything but my toes and fingers. They call this hydrotherapy.

An annual bulletin of the Westchester Division of New York Hospital from the 1950s claimed that 80 percent of the patients treated there were discharged within a year of admission. The glossy photographs accompanying the mission statement show impeccably kept grounds dotted with relaxed-looking clientele. The hospital was reminiscent of Larchmont mansions with sweeping views of Long Island Sound.

In letters she managed to smuggle out to Betty, Peggy described a procession of good-looking, lively, and intelligent girls from privileged families who, for a period at least, joined her at Nichols Cottage. She had known girls like them at Mamaroneck High School, had watched them from a distance. She even met a girl at the hospital who had been in her class at Ethical Culture. They weren’t the kind of girls who had sought out her friendship in school, but at Nichols Cottage the usual class hierarchies and religious tensions were held in abeyance until the hospital’s ward system, rewarding obedience with perks and promises of promotion, kicked in.

Margaret described how, after being treated with electroshock or a forced feeding, such a girl might begin her progress through the ward system, playing by the rules, finishing the food on her plate, smiling for the nurses, and taking her medications. And the day would come when she would be discharged. A big car would come up the drive, bringing her parents, and after hugs and handshaking they would set off. And if this girl’s illness went into permanent remission, the hospital would take credit. Either way, another girl, equally good-looking, equally privileged and starving to death, would soon take her place.

Reflecting on her fifteen-month stay at the New York Psychiatric Institute from her quiet sunny room in the Paagal Khanaah, Peggy wrote her parents that such remissions were essentially inexplicable, answering only to the vagaries of mental illness, and as likely to happen outside the hospital as in it. They certainly couldn’t be ascribed to the therapeutic wonders of basket weaving. The restorative effects of electroshock and insulin therapies, she insisted, were at best temporary. Even a steadfast belief in God, she admitted, wouldn’t make a difference in a patient’s prognosis. Of all the treatment options, however, she felt the sessions of endless psychoanalysis had to be the most futile.

Because Margaret was never promoted to Ward 8, she saw firsthand that the chance of complete remission was small. She calculated that two out of three girls would be back in the hospital before the year was out to go through the entire rigmarole again. In Nichols Cottage she learned that many of her fellow patients had already spent years cycling in and out of mental institutions. She also knew that this would continue until their families could no longer afford to pay the bill. Once the money was gone, these girls would inevitably end up on the back wards of a state institution. Even as her own fate remained unclear, Peggy had felt sorry for them.

Reading Peggy’s descriptions of her psychiatric hospital stay, I found something unnerving about the enthusiasm for psychiatry in postwar America. Perhaps it was the flip side of the drill to conform. Why the sudden need to know the exact parameters of normal? It was as if the entire nation had acquired the insecurity of a sharp-eyed social climber, alert for any challenge to American domestic bliss, any evidence of foreignness, or simple eccentricity. Margaret Marcus was not the sole misfit in the 1950s asylum. Artists, poets, homosexuals, communists, and unhappy housewives joined her.

Like them, Margaret found it impossible to comply with those little understandings, those slippery accommodations that made the world she was born into run smoothly. The success story America had been telling itself as the richest nation in the history of the world never rang true, focused as misfits tend to be on the unspoken lies, the rank hypocrisies and the inequities of power. Within a decade the voices of the housewives and homosexuals and political dissidents would begin to be heard. These voices would demand more freedoms; they aimed to escape the straitjacket of society, not fit themselves for a new one. But like those wayward girls who sought perfection in their bodies, Margaret sought perfection in the world. She dreamed of a regime as rigidly determined and rulebound with rewards and punishments as the hospital she had been in such a hurry to leave.

Freud’s theories held sway in American psychiatry not because they were effective at treating her afflictions, Maryam would write later, but because they fit so perfectly with a materialist worldview. In such a world a person has no essential dignity, has no certainty about right and wrong. In such a world people were free to do whatever they wanted, unrestrained by fears of what would happen in the hereafter. It was enough to simply enjoy good health, good food, the love of family and friends, and partake of those abundant amusements that distract everyone from serious questions.

In Western Civilization Condemned by Itself,
Maryam quoted Carl Jung writing in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
“I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions, not about anything really. I know only that I was born and exist and it seems to me that I have been carried along.” Maryam couldn’t understand how anyone might want to adopt such an empty outlook; she wanted moral judgments and certainty. But Jung wasn’t describing an empty outlook, merely a wistful and inconclusive one. Furthermore, he ends his reflection with an unquestioned conviction, if not a statement of belief: “I exist on the foundation of something I do not know.” Perhaps by this he meant his faith in a common humanity, or perhaps his idea of the collective unconscious. Whatever that foundation was, however one defined it, it seemed to me both an unquestionable fact and an unconditional one.

More than most, Jung seemed to grasp that in a wholly secular and materialist society, where human beings were too easily treated like moving parts in a great machinery, everyone was brutalized, but no one more than the most invisible and thoughtful. Was a mental institution the only place for them? If there was such a thing as a holy spark, a
ruh,
how long would it stay lit if there was no one there to look for it, or even guess that it was there?

When Margaret first learned she would be transferred to the Hudson River State Hospital, the prospect of even the briefest glimpse of the free world outside, of a ride in a car, was a matter of such immense excitement that I first thought her letter to Betty was describing her journey home. Herbert and Myra had spent all their money on a private hospital only to be told on June 9, 1958, that it had all been wasted. Margaret’s stay had been a tremendous mistake, the director told them. Westchester only wanted patients with bright prognoses; chronic schizophrenia did not respond to the available treatment options, they said, as if Dr. Kubie’s diagnosis had been kept secret from them.

Despite starting the journey on this grim note, Herbert Marcus did his best to see to it that his daughter’s trip to the public asylum in Poughkeepsie was as upbeat as possible. He and Myra took Peggy to the finest hotel in town for dinner and told her she could order whatever she liked. From her extensive descriptions of holiday meals in her letters to her grandparents, it was inescapably clear that Peggy had a healthy appetite. That evening she ordered chicken soup, a mammoth steak, and a side of peas and potatoes. A serving of butter pecan ice cream and a large glass of milk capped off the meal. Reading Peggy’s rapturous description of this menu, I was unaccountably moved. It was the most affecting evocation of a meat and potatoes dinner I could conceive of.

Hudson River State Hospital, now derelict, was once a sprawling Civil War–era collection of buildings that overlooked the Hudson River. Its massive main entrance was topped by an ungainly-looking clock tower. During Margaret’s stay the grounds were littered with garbage and in the evening bats flew about the turreted rooftops. However haunted and rundown in appearance it was, Peggy nonetheless found it a strangely comforting place. It was more an asylum than a prison or psychiatric institution. Most of the wards were unlocked, and not long before her arrival the hospital administration had discontinued the practice of lobotomies and insulin shock treatments.

After signing the papers, Peggy was fetched by an attendant in a blue-and-white uniform to be strip-searched, showered, and dressed in a shapeless hospital smock. Then, like a prisoner, she was photographed and fingerprinted. Finally, she was parked in the reception area of the admission ward with about forty other patients. This was Ward C. There were scattered chairs filled with senile old people and along the wall stood wild-looking adolescents whom she immediately identified as juvenile delinquents, dope addicts, and sexually promiscuous girls. After a few days’ observation she was given an honor card that enabled her to explore the grounds of the hospital unattended. There was no ward system of promotions, no basket weaving, no fears that she could fall any further.