He Wanted the Moon

by Mimi Baird,Eve Claxton

  “What kind of a letter do you want and how would you like to have it worded?” Tom inquired. Whereupon I recited for him the kind of a letter I needed. He called his secretary and dictated to her a letter exactly corresponding to the one that I had detailed to him.

  Tom was most hospitable in every respect. He arranged for me to stay at the University Club and he gave me a personal introduction so that use of a draft card would not be necessary. He requested that I be extended the usual check-cashing service of the University Club but finding that this had been discontinued he was very gracious in cashing me a check for fifty dollars. We had a most pleasant luncheon together at the University Club and we sat talking until the middle of the afternoon about many subjects of mutual interest. We discussed certain problems in neuropsychiatry. We discussed several phases of the treatment of the manic psychosis and the depressive psychosis. I was deeply interested to hear his views and he seemed very attentive to mine. We talked about schizophrenia in special reference to a classmate who has suffered from this disease.

  By good fortune I succeeded in getting a reservation on one of the evening planes to St. Louis and I arrived there about 4 a.m. I was beginning to suffer intensely from one of the worst attacks of poison ivy I have ever seen. The weather was hot and I felt sticky and grimy from head to foot. The airport limousine took me to The Coronado Hotel and I was most pleased to be able to obtain a very comfortable room. I took a bath, using much soap and water on all areas of poison ivy and feeling much refreshed, I went to bed, sleeping soundly until about 10 a.m.

  From my room at The Coronado Hotel in St. Louis I called my old friend Betty Bruce by telephone. She has known of my illnesses and she has seemed to understand them and forgive them more fully than anyone I know. It was good to hear Betty Bruce’s voice and to have a personal conversation. I had written her from Westborough a long letter portraying the picture of my recent illness, relating the events leading up to the illness and depicting the sordid details of hospital conditions. She had not answered this letter and it had been some three months since I wrote to her. It was the kind of letter that a layman might not be able to digest and I feared that Betty must have been shocked, disillusioned or merely confused by the picture I painted.

  “I didn’t answer your letter because I didn’t know whether I was supposed to write you or not,” she explained. “Had I written I wouldn’t have known what to say.”

  “The best way would have been just to write in a perfectly natural way, saying whatever you wanted to say,” I replied. But I did not go on to make a long speech about letters to mentally ill people.

  It was easy to discover that Betty Bruce had been deeply affected by my illness and our relations had been changed, perhaps passingly, perhaps forever. She did not invite me to Kansas City as she had done under similar conditions the year before.

  After talking with Betty Bruce, a deep feeling of melancholia swept over me. I knew that something very dear to me had changed. The accumulated superstitions of our civilization in regard to insanity are very much still with us all and they can breed a devastating effect upon friendships, love and all relationships influenced by mental illness. I have been lucky in having suffered less than many from these superstitions. My attacks have usually been short and I have returned normal, healthy and able to make a living. By returning quickly to the normal associations with my friends, I have usually regained their confidence and respect before deep and lasting changes could take place. With Betty Bruce opportunities to see her are so few, that I can never hope to have a chance to rebuild our friendship upon the stable formation it has previously enjoyed.

  And so I put down the telephone receiver with a heavy feeling in regard to the consciousness of a great loss, just part of the price to pay for this type of illness. The mentally ill patient is often treated like a criminal. His imprisonment and his case have many parallels to the situation of a criminal. Also he pays a similar price when he returns to society. He finds many things changed. With patience and courage he can earn back what he has lost, if time and circumstance do not operate too forcefully against him.

  Most of my skin was a sorry mixture of a hideous, oozing poison ivy, cuts, splinters, bruises and deep excoriations, a reflection of the violence of my flight and the intrepid manner in which a soul desperate for freedom had dragged a body over miles of rough country. Yet I had obtained not the freedom I wanted but a sort of exile from the country I’d chosen to live in, woven with a new kind of loneliness, a longing for my family, my children, my home in Chestnut Hill, my practice, and all the things which I had to leave behind me in order to gain freedom from Westborough State Hospital.

  The road ahead for me was going to be steeper than ever. I prayed for strength and courage to face the return trip, to face Lang and the Department of Mental Health, my friends, the Board of Registration, my practice, the people who saw me going into my last attack, the people who merely heard about the attack.

  Later in the day, I was able to get comfortable Pullman accommodations on a train to Dallas. I was at this stage greatly fatigued, as a consequence of the accumulated experience of the journey, the inflammation of my skin, the constant burning and itching from my poison ivy. I boarded the train just after luncheon and arrived in Dallas on the following morning.

  I telephoned my father. He had been notified of my escape and seemed relieved to hear my voice. He seemed glad to see me when I appeared at his office and he spoke in understanding terms of my escape. He had a certain comprehension of the difficulties that I had been through and he even seemed to admire my spirit in doing what I had done. He called Mother and told her happily of my arrival. I talked with Mother and arrangements were made for me to stay at home. Father commented upon how well I looked and how calm and stable I seemed. He seemed to think that I was more calm and stable than he had seen me in years.

  I HAVE now been home in Dallas for over two months. During this time I have allowed myself to become rather lazy. I have developed the habit of sleeping from midnight to ten or eleven in the morning, even as late as two in the afternoon. Once or twice I have slept all night and all the following day. Last night I worked until ten thirty, writing the account of my experiences—February 20 to July 8.

  Here in Dallas, my thoughts grow reflective. They toil with past events that cannot be changed. I eat, but I remain both hungry and thirsty. So many errors in judgment and behavior collect together to form a formable array of enemies striving to destroy the whole self, including that which is good, useful, honorable and loyal. How can we separate the bad self from the good without destroying both?

  A phase of great strength, an ability to see things in light of their happier aspects, the ability to rise above disgrace, hardships, every type of defeat, to carry on with true courage, stamina, and fortitude, for months. And then again a sort of lagging, warning a newer insight into events and people, an increased ability to see the distasteful side of certain past events, and a compulsion to dwell upon them.

  Despair—that mood which paralyzes thought and action and makes eternal sleep a goal and a prayer. I long for the things I cannot have and for things that once were mine and that have been taken away. I am a stranger in a foreign land and I long to return to my home, my work, my friends. What plan will fate unfold? To stay here idle, to waste valuable time, to be caught in the locks of a trap whose fabrication I took part in? Oh save me, God, from despair and hopelessness, save me for a happy and useful life, spare me from uselessness and boredom, give me a job, a home, my children.

  Oh God, what new destinies lie ahead, what new hardship, disappointments, tragedies, success are in store? Surely happiness will come again and depart again. Oh God, I need your help. I do not want to die. I want to push on to new goals, to new contributions. I beg that you save me from the crushing effects of the present circumstances. I must struggle with new vigor, new hope, and new faith—and I need your help.

  Oh God I don’t know what strange meaning lies in the
awful consequences of recent events. I curse the stupid course that my trail has followed. I cannot feel the meaning of it. I am lost. I wander in heavy darkness, not one guiding star in hand, and then I return to reality and to my yearnings for a normal day of work, fatigue, sleep, and the simple pleasures of life.

  One must resist so many things when one cannot fight: laziness, unproductiveness, melancholia, despair, loss of strength—mental, physical, and moral. To be held free and yet a prisoner, to have problems and yet not be able to attack them. Oh this, dear God, is the worst cross to bear. Oh, I want to be back in the swing, back in the fight. I want to be spared the endless hours of waiting. I want to be liberated from this banishment, this exile, and I pray, oh God, I pray for guidance, forgiveness.

  Give me judgment, coolness, patience, wisdom, courage. Out of this pain, this agony, this despair will come some added knowledge of life, of the world, of myself. But, now, I need the occasion for action, an outlet for energies. I am caught, hemmed in, held back from the things I want to do. I am unhappy but that is unimportant. I want my work, my office, my patients, my life and way of living.

  I have fears, yes, and yet I am not wholly afraid. However, I sense how easy it will be for me to coast along, far out at sea and far away from home, family—so many things that I love. I shall dream of them and yearn for them, and they will take on a luster a little beyond their normal brilliance. Perhaps I shall miss them more than I should, but maybe find some escape into some kind of occupation that will live from each corner of my heart.

  There is a turning point in the mad stream of time, waves curling and churning around a rock jutting from the shore.

  exile

  loss of profession

  divorce

  courts

  escape

  finances

  So what do we search for—pleasure, destiny, fulfillment, love, freedom? We search to right wrongs and to help others, to live a full and complete life. To see one’s destiny and not to obey the call is bitter. One must struggle to deserve happiness. One cannot enjoy real happiness without struggling to fulfill the dictates of destiny. We pay the price of pain, of arduous labor, for that which we accomplish. The reward is relief from strain and a sense of accomplishment.

  I must become more active. I must struggle harder, more desperately, if not more valiantly. Write, yes, I will write more and more each day. Dreams to be fulfilled, enterprises to complete, ambition to burst into new flame.

  One of the goals I seek is to learn to write in a style readable, clear and captivating. I must learn to write and then find out that which I want to express, the stories or books I want to write, the characters to bring to life, which spiritual and intellectual forces to compel into action.

  The trail to follow will be long and rough, narrow and winding, vertiginous, as has been the trail that lies behind. You see, luck gave out for a while, just for a few minutes, back in the winter of 1944 and that short luckless period gave my heart many burdens to carry for the rest of my life. I do not read the future, I cannot, but I must guess as best I can and be guided by the dictation of forces and facts.

  Somehow I cling to a feeling of confidence in the belief that my own personal destiny has some strange meaning beyond that which I can see in the past or predict for the future. This faint confidence keeps alive within my heart a desire to live, and the desire fights off another yearning: to die, to escape from a world that holds me as a slave, a servant, a prisoner.

  I believe in destiny and I believe that fortune and misfortune can be a part of some great plan by which we live and die. Only a few short months ago, I felt triumphant entering a phase of unusual success, triumph, happiness, and then suddenly came a vortex of disasters, suffering, frustration beyond almost anything conceivable, the horrible debacle of being picked up by the police at The Country Club, that painful memory.

  A great mass of dark memories collect and whirl around madly, surrounding and engulfing consciousness. The revocation of license, every item and angle of The Country Club scene, every bit of disgrace, magnified and caught in the most intolerable slide, viewed through the high power of a microscope.

  Dr. and Mrs. Frothingham, my friends looking on. Around the corner to the police. Helen Webster, my head on her shoulder. We walk together to the bar. She kisses me. “All of Perry’s problems are sexual.” Handcuffs applied to my hands as I held them behind my back. Three plain-clothes policemen. Three state troopers.

  I run in circles. I sit at Mr. and Mrs. Frothingham’s table: “They’ve come to take me to Westborough.”

  Seen in the hallway, various friends talking with the officers, talking lengthily.

  I move down the corridor and into the main living room and there I find Helen.

  Seated on the back seat between two state troopers, my hands manacled behind me, two state troopers on the front seat, a long drive to Westborough. I smoke several cigarettes, talk very little. I am caught in a trance. I am shocked beyond sensation.

  And so the story unravels itself. A story predestined to take the course it has followed, a character on the stage of life, seemingly driven along by strange compulsions beyond his understanding. So much happened so quickly, so much to remember forever, so much to haunt the corridors of memory. Life moves along strange paths. We are only to such a limited degree the pilot of our soul, the captain of our ship.

  PART II

  ECHOES DOWN

  THE YEARS

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My own memories of the day my father was taken away to Westborough are scant. I was not quite six years old—my younger sister Catherine was four. From my small child’s perspective, it was a day much like any other. After visiting my father at the Ritz and The Country Club, we came home for dinner. My mother made no mention of what had happened that afternoon. The next morning, my sister and I got up, we got dressed, we had our breakfast, we left for school, and continued on with our daily routines.

  In the days to come, it took me a while to notice that my father had been gone from our home for a longer period than usual. I was accustomed to his absences—he was a doctor, and my mother always informed me that doctors worked long hours. He was a bear of a man, with square shoulders, reddish blond hair, and vivid brown eyes. My father exuded charisma—the walls of our house never seemed large enough to contain him. I longed for his homecomings.

  My mother, my sister, and me in the Boston Public Garden, March 1944, a month after my father entered Westborough State Hospital.

  My mother was a slender, dark-haired woman who moved about our home with nervous determination and rarely stopped to fully listen. When I finally asked her where my father might be, she paused.

  “Oh. He’s away,” she told me, waving her hand in the air dismissively.

  In the weeks and months that followed, my mother maintained her silence on the subject. My father was simply “away.” Each time I questioned her, she would perform the same routine, waving her hand, as if he had simply disappeared into the wide blue yonder. I had no idea he was being held in a mental institution. I didn’t know that she had filed for divorce. Her evasion was deliberate but, I think, well meaning. She was of the generation of parents who never spoke to their children about difficult subjects. My father’s “trouble” would have been considered an adult matter, inappropriate for my small child’s ears.

  After the school year ended in June, we went, as we always did, to Center Lovell, Maine, where my mother’s aunt kept a summer home on the shores of Kezar Lake. Here we stayed for the remainder of the summer, joined by an extended family of aunts and cousins. We were in Maine on July 8, when my father escaped from Westborough State Hospital.

  By that summer, my father had been gone from my life for half a year. I was old enough to begin questioning everything, to want to put the world’s puzzle pieces in order, but I was given very little information with which to construct any type of a picture. My mother continued to tell me that my father was simply “away,” an explanat
ion that cruelly left open the possibility of his return. I continued to wait. Every weekend, when the fathers of my playmates came up from the city, I would hope that, perhaps the following weekend, mine would finally appear.

  We returned to Chestnut Hill in time for the start of the school year. My school report from September indicates that I was struggling: “In most of her school life, Mimi seems very happy. Any new situation, however, upsets her. The first few days of lunch and the first time the nurse examined her, she burst into tears.”

  On March 9, 1945, I turned seven years old. My mother organized a small party for me at our home, and eight friends came, all of us decked out in our Sunday best. Our living room was festooned with St. Patrick’s Day decorations. We went over to the neighboring farm to see the animals, returning back to the house for pin-the-bone-in-the-dog’s-mouth. Much later, I learned from my father’s medical records that, the same week, he returned to Boston from Dallas, broke into our garage, stole our car, and tore his police cell to pieces.

  It is to my mother’s credit that our childhood routine remained as evenly regimented as ever. The days revolved around school, sports, and friends. I remember barely a ripple in the calm pool of our lives, until the following year of 1946. That spring, a new man entered my mother’s life. He was a Bostonian executive in a family-owned oil business. Initially, I was welcoming. He was attentive to my sister and me, and my mother’s mood improved in his presence. That summer, when he joined us for weekends on vacation in Maine, I was happy enough to see him, though too busy with my usual activities to notice that his relationship with my mother was becoming serious.