He Wanted the Moon

by Mimi Baird,Eve Claxton

  Somehow the interview ended.

  He spoke one last time about my revoked license.

  “Of course, you know, it will take months to get it back.”

  I had never listened to advice less welcome.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Westborough State Hospital, 1944

  July 3

  The patient carries on a good conversation that is relevant and coherent. He did show a little grandiose trend in his flow of thoughts, namely about his practice being $50,000 or $60,000 gross and carrying approximately that amount of life insurance, talked of his debts of $18,000, all of which figures he spoke of, not fully realizing their true value. However, at the present time, he has a much better sense of values in general, talking more of supporting his children, and paying his alimony. Also he listened when being spoken to, he is not as talkative as he was preceding going to Baldpate and for a short time after his return to Westborough. His conversation is good. He shows no gross abnormalities of mood. He does tend to joke a little more than he did. He seems to see things in a more humorous sense but he is not euphoric. He did show a little tenseness for the week or two after returning from Baldpate, but this too has subsided. He is showing no depression.

  THE days at Westborough State Hospital were now growing more and more oppressive. The food was becoming increasingly distasteful to me. The full reality of what it meant to have my license revoked began to gnaw away great raw holes in my soul. The usual seven and a half hours of sleep that we were permitted did not seem enough. It felt good to lie down for a little while after breakfast and again after lunch. The first day I did this, Miss Hayward, the nurse, was off-duty and no one seemed to object to my taking this extra rest. The next morning, I ate breakfast, swept the upper floor, collected the dirt in dustpans and disposed of it, then washed up and went to lie down. I had scarcely closed the door to my room when in came Miss Hayward’s voice and footsteps.

  “Where is Dr. Baird?” she asked. “I miss him!”

  I went to the door and told her that I’d be out in just a moment.

  During subsequent days, I tried to get a little extra rest. Every time I made the attempt, Miss Hayward came storming to my door (a three-bed room) and, without knocking, opened it loudly and commanded me to come downstairs. At every provocation she would behave as if I were some juvenile delinquent and she an officer empowered to treat me as roughly as possible. These experiences with Miss Hayward were very upsetting, although I admit I shouldn’t have let her or anything she said bother me—no matter how she said it.

  One hot day, I was lying there after lunch, trousers off.

  “Get on your pants and come downstairs!” she barked at me.

  This desire for extra sleep was probably based upon the severe strain I was under. The revocation of my license itself had not made me ill, but the actual procedure of notifying hospitals and medical societies—so that they could eliminate my name as a physician connected with them—and all the details of this humiliating procedure were an ordeal ranking as a horror with death itself.

  It seemed so absurd to revoke my license. I was locked up securely at Westborough and couldn’t get a release to return to my practice until every proof of my recovery was at hand. All they accomplished by revoking my license was to:

  1. Make it difficult for my assistant to hold my practice together.

  2. Create publicity unfavorable to the continuation of my practice.

  3. Make it impossible for my assistant to carry on in my name.

  4. Jeopardize the future of my practice by causing undesirable publicity regarding my illness.

  5. Create difficulties carrying medical protection insurance and resuming it, after recovery.

  6. Hardships and embarrassments, but not an iota accomplished in the direction of protecting the public from getting my services while sick.

  What pain to have your name as a practicing physician removed from the roster of all Massachusetts hospitals, directories, medical societies and other institutions. To have your old reliable secretary who was holding things together discharged by another doctor. What pain to have your assistant discontinue using your prescription pads and stationery, and instead to use his own.

  The days seemed long. I read my mail and kept up my correspondence, enjoying the daily newspapers and reading books. There were visitors only rarely and the few who came stayed only for short periods of time. There was no opportunity for any real exercise. During certain hours of the morning and afternoon, we were allowed to sit outside in front of the dormitory. There was a stone bench beneath a day shade tree and chairs were available. You were permitted to amuse yourself by putting rubber horseshoes (quoits), throwing a baseball or walking around a small plot of grass. The rules required that you confine your activities to very small space with clear vision of the nurse or attendant in charge. If you tried to walk enough to get any real exercise, you would appear to be over-active. Most patients just sat around or lay on the grass. There was no amusement of any regular sort. Once or twice a week, some of us were taken to the auditorium for music and dancing. These excursions were irregular and brief. There was no bowling.

  In this atmosphere of boredom, loneliness, uselessness, my own little world had come to an end. I was divorced from my wife. I was coming to the realization of what it meant to have a family broken up. I hadn’t seen my children even once since I came to Westborough. My own profession had been taken away from me. The clouds were black and I saw no silver lining.

  In a moment of intense concentration upon phases of marital unhappiness past and present, I could look upon divorce as a logical solution. But as my mind took time to consider all details of the situation, I realized that divorce meant the loss of certain things mutually possible in marriage, not otherwise available to either marital partner. No longer a home with children, moments enjoyed with mutual friends now to be discarded; the meaning of Christmas, birthdays, just a warm and welcome place to return at the end of the day; a wife to plan parties at home and to accept invitations elsewhere, talks with my wife at the end of the day, local gossip, kissing the children goodnight and tickling them to make them laugh, bedtime stories; the question of little comforts, laundry, dry cleaning, all the little things which make up a home, the club we enjoyed together.

  Divorce is a horrible nightmare, but just a part of the great general nightmare of failure, frustration, loss of license to practice, a long and expensive illness, the torrent of disgrace and loss of prestige in the community, so many things that in retrospect now seem preventable, yet actually could they have been?

  The longings of the human heart are changeable and elusive. The good fortune we enjoy today may not be appreciated until it has been taken away and we have to fight and try to get it back.

  AFTER my return to Westborough from Baldpate, I stayed there quietly, peacefully in perfect cooperation and in quite normal health for a month. During these weeks, I experienced the torment and realization that I had been transferred to a decent private hospital, Baldpate, and had had a chance to finish my sentence under comfortable circumstances. As I look back on that experience I can find no meaning in what happened. It was at Baldpate that I had been subjected to strange treatment by the other patients. There must have been some purpose in the upsetting situation to which I was subjected in inconsiderate fashion, but I cannot fathom it. I had foreseen that upsetting experiences would arise at Baldpate. I intended to ignore them, to be calm, courteous and cooperative. It was depressing to realize that my foresight and my conscious effort had come to nothing. I should not have permitted anything that happened to interfere with my peace of mind and I really don’t know why I did not maintain spiritual equanimity.

  For a while I helped dry the dishes. I was at first glad to have something to do. Gradually it became a disgusting experience. Many of the dishes came through with large amounts of food adhering to them. The usual procedure was just to wipe off the food with the towel. Knives, forks, and spoons came through in
a similar condition and were treated in the same way. The food itself was sickening and my ability to eat it grew less each day. After wiping dishes for a while and finding how filthy they really were, it became increasingly difficult to face a meal.

  My hands began to develop dryness and a beginning rash from the soap left on the dishes. I asked permission to stop helping with dishes.

  “No one is compelled to do any work at all around here,” the attendant replied.

  And yet it was obviously true that it is the patients mostly that run the hospital.

  The whole chain of events from February 20 to early July, almost five months of unending disasters, was a little more than I could view without feeling appalled. On days when I smoked too much, I became deeply depressed. During these weeks at Westborough, remorse and discontent ran deeply. There were few visitors. Letters continued to arrive, though in much less volume than before. They brought scant comfort and my few brief visitors did not relieve my loneliness and sense of failure.

  I CONTINUED my duties: sweeping the upstairs floor, drying the dishes during the men’s week for this, sitting around, minding my own business.

  The desire to escape became strong, but I did not give into it without weighing all the considerations and precautions. I gathered as much information as I could get. I was quiet, said very little except what was expected of me from a viewpoint of common courtesy. My activities were restricted to a peaceful and unobtrusive walking about. I read a great deal and slept as much as the hospital would allow. Without complaint I had swept the floors and dried the dishes. I had showed no upsets such as anger and was at peace with everyone. I was in perfectly normal shape, maintaining absolutely normal activities in all respects. Yet I knew that they had strange ways of judging your condition.

  One day, Dr. Boyd stopped to talk with me.

  “You are less active than you were,” he commented.

  He seemed to imply that I was still manic. Actually I was normal, but if anything else, slightly depressed. To find yourself so carelessly misjudged in matters so vital to your future welfare is a source of much misgiving. You are at the mercy of the most casual, ruthless doctors who have it within their power to destroy your entire career on the basis of judgments entirely whimsical in nature, opinions arrived at by the most casual and haphazard lines of observation and reasoning: an unhappy set-up for the poor defenseless patient.

  I began to reason about the problem of escape:

  1. It would be difficult to accomplish. Recapture was likely and incarceration would be greatly prolonged. While on the grounds it would be easy to start running, but with other patients, nurses, and attendants watching constantly, it would be rather easy for them to catch you before you left the grounds or got far beyond them.

  2. Escape would complicate matters in many ways, handicap my friends in their efforts to help me, create a problem of making peace with Westborough again, put off longer the day of returning to my practice.

  3. Escape might turn friends, relatives and professional associates against me.

  On the other side of the ledger I was able to marshal a formidable and convincing array of thoughts:

  1. Dr. Lang—both stupid and conservative—seemed to be afraid to let me leave, unwilling to take the responsibility. If I departed, behaved normally, got checkups with other psychiatrists as well as friends and relatives, proved by my conduct outside that I was entirely normal, it would be easier for Lang. As long as I stayed at Westborough, it would remain impossible for him to predict what would happen to me after discharge. If I returned, supported by evidence of recovery, he would have no reasonable alternative but to release me. I could, in other words, get approbation and protection from agents and agencies outside of Westborough and then return in hope of getting things straightened out.

  2. Dr. Boyd had implied that my further stay might be a matter of months in spite of my good recovery.

  3. Miss Hayward had given me the hint that I might be kept there a long time, merely because I could pay the maximum of $10 weekly.

  4. I knew that my psychiatrist friends, Drs. Fleming and MacPherson, might come to see me soon and would try to get me out or get me transferred elsewhere. I felt that, despite their efforts, further delays would ensue.

  5. I was influenced by a desire to get away from everything, to escape not only from Westborough but also from the whole world that I’d known, to start anew, anywhere, doing anything, vanish forever. I did not want to die. I was just tired of pain, force, jail, rough treatment. The story I’ve told so far contains an account of the usual modern care of my condition. I believe such measures are destructive. They contribute handicaps, they hurt, they insult, they injure, they shackle, they take away freedom, they impair recovery; they are barbaric products of pure force; they are uncivilized, they reek, they stink.

  6. I was growing depressed, less and less able to endure the food, the boredom, the limitless accumulation of disasters. I feared a real depression might take hold of me; that my stay at Westborough would go on from one year to the next and that I would never get a chance to get back to normal life and make an adjustment to it. I was being harmed badly by two little men, Boyd and Lang. I felt that there was grave danger to my sanity if I stayed here. If I fled it would be in self-defense.

  7. As I took account of my position, it was clear that everything had been taken away: my profession, my family, I’d lost many friends, my money was gone. It didn’t seem that I could make matters much worse by leaving. There was a chance that I might make them better. There was nothing very great to lose; everything to gain. The gods seemed to beckon to me. I could hear the answer in the wind that seemed to call me to take matters into my own hands.

  8. Remarks by both patients and nurses suggested that some of them hoped I would run away. They knew so much that they’d never tell. It was sometimes impossible to abide by their hints and suggestions.

  The instant planned for escape seemed to be at hand. It was after suppertime and everything was relatively quiescent. The doctors had gone home and the day shift of nurses and attendants had departed, to be replaced by the relatively smaller night shift. Clearly there was no automobile that could be used to pursue me and there were no state patrol cars in sight. The coast seemed clear and entirely favorable, but it might change at any minute.

  The attendant in charge was sitting at the edge of the lawn with his back to me. He was completely diverted by his conversation with other patients and some hospital employees. An elderly patient on parole, one of those trusted with supervising groups of patients while they were on the lawn, was sitting quietly in his chair, his left side toward me. He was looking off in the distance. I was standing about twenty-five yards away, walking casually among a group of six or eight patients.

  The weather was favorable. I had figured out a reasonable plan. For many days, I gauged distances and studied every detail of the hospital routine that might play a part. I had made a careful mental calculation and had charted a course to include running between two particular trees, crossing a road, then going to the right of a small brick building and then to the main highway by going along the rear of a row of houses located along the driveway leading to the hospital. I knew that immediately after I started running, my intentions would become evident to many others and the machinery for capturing me would be put into effect. This would include sending out a searching party of attendants and male nurses and would involve notification of the state police who would surround and search the section of woods into which I had disappeared. It seemed wise not to plan more than a few hours ahead. It would be necessary to feel my way along, step by step.

  I had been walking in a circle for about ten minutes trying to formulate final plans and to observe every detail of the surrounding circumstances of the moment. I came to a stop at the top of the lawn, next to the driveway in front of the brick dormitory. I turned around to make one last careful inspection and then I moved slowly toward the two trees marking the line of trav
el that I had chosen. I stopped for a moment beneath a large tree. My heart was racing and pounding as I have seldom felt it do before. I wondered: am I afraid of some unseen development that my intuition knows about but my mind does not grasp? Does my heart tell me that I am about to do a foolish and risky thing? At this moment of indecision, I reacted emotionally against the sense of fear and a feeling of proud defiance rose in my breast.

  A sudden gust of wind blew through the branches above me and made two successive coughing sounds that seemed to say to me, “Go ahead!”

  Instantly I broke into a run, as fast as I was capable of. I felt as if I were traveling on winged feet. The distance between the start and my destination in the woods seemed to fly by in an instant.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Westborough State Hospital, 1944

  Escaped. It was reported to the writer today that this patient left from the lawn in front of Talbot West. He was not actually seen going but was reported missing about an hour later. Search of the grounds and highways was unsuccessful. A telegram was later sent to his wife. The Superintendent was notified, he advised this. The police were not notified at this time. A telegram was also sent the following day notifying the father of the escape. Dr. Lang in turn received a reply from this. The writer received calls from the patient’s Secretary, who stated that the telegram had been sent to her, and she in turn would contact the wife who was in Maine for the summer.

  AFTER crossing the highway, I ran down an embankment and into the wooded area. I was breathless, heart pounding wildly, weak from overexertion. My feet sank into the soft earth beneath me and slowed my progress to a walk. Ahead of me lay a mass of underbrush, fallen trees, pools of mud and water, a hopeless tangle of vegetation so dense that travel through it was tedious, slow, painful and fatiguing. To save time I climbed upon fallen tree trunks and would run the length of them unless they gave way beneath my weight.