He Wanted the Moon

by Mimi Baird,Eve Claxton

  “I was ten years old when he went away,” she told me. “He spent the rest of his life in a hospital in Norristown, Pennsylvania.”

  Growing up, I had always been informed that my grandfather was deceased and that my grandmother was a widow. No one spoke of him. The family simply behaved as if he didn’t exist. Only later did I learn from my mother that—for most of my childhood—my grandfather Henry had been very much alive and locked away in a psychiatric institution.

  In other words, my mother and I had an extraordinary bond, however unspoken. We had both lost our fathers to mental illness. This might have brought us closer together. Instead, the opposite was true. My mother’s refusal to talk about what had happened to my father was a direct echo of the events of her own childhood. Her father, Henry, had been hidden away; therefore my father’s circumstances must also be hidden. This was simply the way things were done. Silence was an inheritance.

  Even so, as the years went on, I still held out hope that I would be able to open the lines of communication with my mother. Every now and again, I would make another overture, to no avail. My sister, meanwhile, followed my mother’s lead. Catherine had little interest in talking about the past. She had been a toddler when our father was taken away. As far as she was concerned, he had simply never featured in her life, and that was that.

  It was different for me. I could remember being with my father at his doctor’s offices on Commonwealth Avenue, the familiar scent of sterile instruments in the air. I could recall him proudly taking a photograph of me wearing a cowgirl outfit that my grandmother had given me for my birthday. In another memory, I could remember looking for my father, going upstairs to the little bathroom adjacent to my parents’ bedroom to find him stepping out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his middle. To me, he seemed as tall as the giants in my fairytale book. My memories of my father’s presence came back to me in bright flashes.

  After my stepfather passed away, and the Woodstock summer house was sold, I moved to that same Vermont village, a place I had always loved. It was 1979. My children were teenagers, and I had decided to return to work. I applied for a job at the prominent teaching hospital across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire, where I started in an entry-level secretarial job. Some months later, I was hired as the office manager in the department of plastic surgery.

  During the move to Vermont, as I packed up my possessions, I came across a box of my father’s belongings that my mother had given me when I went to college. These included some of his old books, photograph albums, and other mementoes, including two silver Paul Revere bowls my father had inscribed to celebrate his riding victories and a gold pin he had given my mother as a present. In the same box were two tin canisters of home movies marked “Perry/Gretta wedding, 1931.” With the holidays approaching, I decided to have the old film converted to VCR format, so I could give my mother the video for Christmas. I assumed the wedding film would be a nice surprise for her and might prompt some much-needed discussion between us.

  Before I put the videotape in the mail, I sat in my living room to watch it. The grainy, black-and-white footage clearly showed my father and mother on their wedding day. They were standing next to one another in the receiving line against a dark background, from which their figures seemed to emerge like ghosts. My girlish mother was giddy with love and excitement. My father was tall and proud, if a little dazed. Toward the end of the video, my father bent down to give my mother a long, lingering kiss. I caught my breath. Later that day, I put the tape in a box and mailed it to my mother with great anticipation. I told my family members who would be with her on Christmas day not to reveal the contents of the tape until it began to play in the video machine.

  I learned later that when my mother realized it was her wedding footage, she got up and left the room. No further mention of the tape was ever made. After this episode, I resolved never to bring up my father’s name in my mother’s presence again.

  It was another ten years before I heard anyone speak of him. I continued my work at the hospital, surrounded by doctors and nurses each day, feeling a great sense of purpose in my job and appreciation for the medical environment. Then, one bright fall day in October 1991, I was scheduled to attend an opening event at our new hospital building. We had just moved in and were celebrating.

  The day of the reception, I was in good spirits. I’d been out of the office for a few weeks, and so spent most of that afternoon catching up with my colleagues on the latest news from around the department. Later, I went over to speak to the guest of honor, a pioneering plastic surgeon named Dr. Radford Tanzer, after whom our new space was being named. I had worked with Dr. Tanzer for a time and had always admired him. He was now in his mid-eighties, and had the same compassionate and intelligent eyes that must have reassured many generations of patients.

  During the course of our brief conversation, I mentioned to Dr. Tanzer that my father had been a doctor.

  “What was your father’s name?” the surgeon asked.

  “Perry Baird,” I replied.

  Dr. Tanzer looked at me and paused.

  “I knew your father,” he said quietly. “We were at Harvard Medical School together.”

  The noise of the party seemed to ebb away in the wake of his words.

  “I graduated the year after him, in 1929,” Dr. Tanzer went on. “We both attended lectures at the St. Botolph’s Club in Boston.”

  It was the first time in my life anyone had spoken to me about my father in this way, as if he were an actual person, someone who went to Harvard, attended lectures at a club, and who knew people. Moments later, Dr. Tanzer was led away to speak with another party guest. I wasn’t able to ask him for any more information. Nonetheless, the effect of this short exchange on my life was profound: it validated my feeling that something significant was missing from my understanding of my early years.

  The following Monday, I told another surgeon at the hospital, Dr. Morain, about the extraordinary coincidence. Dr. Morain asked me some questions, and I shared with him the very little I knew. Although my mother had always been more or less mute on the subject of her first husband, she had once told me that Dr. Walter B. Cannon was one of my father’s mentors. Dr. Morain responded that Dr. Cannon was one of the most important physiologists of the twentieth century.

  A week later, Dr. Morain walked into my office, proudly holding a large manila envelope in his hands. He explained that he had been in Boston that weekend for a meeting and had decided to look in Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library of Medicine for any trace of my father. In the Walter B. Cannon archive, he had found a cache of my father’s letters to Dr. Cannon and copies of Dr. Cannon’s replies. Incredibly, the elderly lady librarian—about to retire—remembered my father and refused to charge for copying the file. I thanked Dr. Morain profusely.

  Later that evening, I sat leafing through the many dozens of pages inside the envelope. Most of the correspondence was typewritten, but some of the letters were in my father’s handwriting, a large looping script. As I flipped from page to page, my eyes froze at one of the letterheads: 32 Clovelly Road, Chestnut Hill—the little white clapboard where I’d lived with my father and mother all those years ago.

  I imagined my father sitting there at his writing desk in the house, the promising young doctor corresponding with one of the most famous physicians of the times. The earliest letters were written in 1928, during the period when my father had been a research assistant to Dr. Cannon. The two men discussed my father’s career, the appointments he should seek, and how he should move forward with his work.

  Throughout the letters, I found repeated mention of Dr. James Howard Means, Chief of Medical Services at Massachusetts General Hospital. So I decided to visit Harvard’s Countway Library to see if Dr. Means’s archive might hold further letters from my father. The library is housed in a modern concrete structure on the outskirts of Boston, and as I walked into its large entry area, I was struck by the quiet solemnity of the place.
I placed my request with the librarian and waited, as she disappeared behind two large wooden doors. Before long, she returned with a large folder of correspondence between my father and Dr. Means. I sat at one of the long wooden tables, alongside students and researchers, running my eyes across page after page. The letters spanned the early 1920s to the late 1940s. As far as I could ascertain, Dr. Means’s tone was very similar to that of Dr. Cannon: warm, friendly, and encouraging to his younger protégé.

  “A man of the finest type of character,” Dr. Means wrote of my father in a letter of recommendation from 1933, “upright and sincere in every way, unselfish, brilliant and delightful, very loyal to his friends and principles. His integrity is beyond question. There is no doubt whatever but that Dr. Baird is an internist of superior ability.”

  As I read, shadows from the afternoon light rippled across the pages. My father’s story was emerging from the silence.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The discovery of the letters emboldened me. Some months after that, I was scheduled to attend a plastic surgery conference in Dallas, Texas, for my work. I decided that while I was there, I would look up my uncle Philip, my father’s brother. I had no information as to his whereabouts except that he lived in Dallas. As soon as I arrived at my hotel, I opened up the telephone book and looked for his name, fearing I would lose my nerve if I didn’t call right away. There were three Philip Bairds listed. I quickly dialed one of the numbers. A woman answered. No, she had never heard of me. I dialed the second number. A man who evidently was not my uncle answered and I hung up quickly. I was about to give up, but instead decided to try the last number.

  “Hello,” came the voice from the other end of the line. A slow Texas “hello” with the “o” drawn out. I recognized his tone immediately.

  “Hello, this is Mimi Baird,” I announced.

  My uncle’s response was immediate: “Why didn’t you write back?”

  I felt a pang of shame. When I was a child, Uncle Philip had written me a number of letters. I had taped them to the inside of my closet door, the secret place where I stored my treasures. They were extremely precious to me, as one of my only connections to my father. I’d just never known how to respond, and so they had always gone unanswered. My uncle had been waiting for a reply for over forty years.

  I told him, truthfully, that I didn’t know why, I just never felt able to write.

  “I was so young,” I told him. “I wish I had.”

  We agreed to meet the next day.

  Philip came to my hotel. As I waited for him in the foyer, I tried to picture him. We must have met at my father’s funeral, but I couldn’t recall his face. Would he look like my father? After a few minutes, an older man, rather disheveled, wearing white baggy shorts and a faded blue sports shirt, appeared on the other side of the lobby. In the back of my mind I remembered that Uncle Philip had played tennis. I stood up and walked toward him.

  “Uncle Philip?” I asked.

  He immediately enfolded me in a hug.

  We went to take a seat in the little café next to the lobby. Philip sat down. It was clear he was uninterested in polite chitchat.

  “Your mother neglected her responsibilities as a wife,” he told me, his face folding into a frown. “She deserted your father.”

  Despite my own reservations about my mother’s actions, I felt myself wanting to leap to her defense. I knew that my great-aunt Martha had contributed a considerable amount of money for my father to stay in a private mental institution. I offered this information to Philip, noting that my mother had two young children to think about.

  “We were the ones who had to pick up the pieces after your mother divorced him,” he responded sternly. “Everything fell to us.”

  Philip explained that he and his wife—along with my father’s elderly parents—shouldered the burden of caring for my father.

  “Your father had a lobotomy,” Philip told me. “After that, he could barely tie his own shoelaces. We had to do everything for him. Brush his teeth, buckle his belt. He was never the same.”

  I remembered hearing the adults around me speaking about lobotomy once, but I had had no idea what they’d meant.

  Philip told me that after the surgery, my father was given medication to help with his recovery—but too much medication made him dizzy. When he forgot to take his pills, he would have seizures.

  “Even after the lobotomy, he still got into trouble,” Philip remembered, “especially if he drank. I’d be called out to rescue him from barroom fights or from the police station.”

  I sensed that, just as my uncle had been waiting for me to reply to his letters, he had been waiting to tell me my father’s story.

  “Maybe there’s still some way I can make amends,” I said, rather helplessly.

  Soon, he got up to leave. After we hugged goodbye, he offered me one last piece of information.

  “Your father was writing a book,” he said, scrawling a number on a paper napkin.

  “It’s your cousin’s number,” he explained. “My son Randy. He has the manuscript. Call him.”

  I walked Philip out to his car and watched him drive away, holding my cousin’s number in my hand.

  Later that evening, after my duties at the conference were completed and I was back in my hotel room, I dialed my cousin Randy’s number. He answered and I introduced myself. We’d never met, never as much as spoken, and yet for the duration of the conversation, we chatted easily and warmly, perhaps both trying to make up for lost time. I learned that Randy lived in Austin. Over the next two days, we spoke on the telephone as often as we could, catching up on family matters on both sides. Eventually, I brought up the subject of the manuscript.

  Randy confirmed that he had rescued it from his father’s house a few years back.

  “My father and mother didn’t want it. There used to be a typed version, but that disappeared a long time ago.”

  The manuscript was sitting in an old briefcase in his garage.

  The day before I left Dallas, my cousin telephoned to let me know he had spoken with his wife, Karen. They both felt the manuscript belonged with me.

  Several weeks later, I returned home from work to find the large carton on my doorstep with a return address in Austin. I called Texas the next day.

  “We’re so very happy,” Randy’s wife, Karen, told me. “At last, they’re where they belong. Perry’s little girl has his papers. We’ve only been the caretakers.”

  The pages of my father’s manuscript were completely out of sequence. I did my best to make sense of his words. On one page he was writing about having breakfast at the Ritz. On the next he was being violently restrained by hospital guards. If these pages held the key to the mystery of my father, they weren’t going to give up their secrets easily.

  I tried to match them into some kind of order, glancing at each line and looking for key words to group the writing according to subject. Much of the writing was clearly about his confinement in Westborough. I learned to look for the names of the various wards where he had been kept, then evidence of his transfer to Baldpate. I recognized names of old family friends; my mother’s name, Gretta, appeared frequently. I became familiar with sequences of events and made piles of paper, according to the names of people, events, and places.

  My father’s handwriting was another guide. On some pages the script was meticulously placed, with many straight lines on each page. In other instances, his handwriting became large and increasingly irregular, the background covered with dark smudges.

  In the coming weeks, I lived with the papers still stacked in their piles around my kitchen as I continued to rearrange them according to a tentative timeline. The process was complicated by the fact that my father often drafted the same passage more than once, in slightly differing versions. I kept working, trying to restore the manuscript to its intended order. I was constantly hunting for clues to help me reassemble the story, never knowing what I might find next.

  One day, reading th
rough pages, I saw a word I’d never noticed before.

  Mimi.

  I read the entire page. My father was writing about staying at the Ritz Hotel. My mother arrived at his room with my sister and me in tow. She wouldn’t sit down and got ready to leave almost immediately. Then I spoke:

  It wasn’t until I saw these words that the events of the manuscript became entirely real to me. I had been there. I had a voice. I had wanted to stay with my father.

  Once the pages were in some kind of order, I began typing up his words. Initially I struggled to decipher his handwriting, but before long, I became familiar with the shape of his b’s, his l’s, his f’s. Just as I became accustomed to the contours of his letters, I also became better at detecting the levels of his sanity. For entire pages, he appeared to be completely in control of his mind. He wrote as a man of science, observing the scene as if he were a doctor visiting the hospital, rather than a patient being held there. His handwriting in these passages was orderly and regular. Then, suddenly, it would become expansive, out of control, when his grip on his sanity was slipping. Then pages and pages of visions and delusions, his script slanting to the right, the handwriting ballooning, as the urgency to get his message down on the page superseded any other concern.

  After some weeks of working on the manuscript, I was handling the onionskin pages so much that I feared that they would become damaged. The pages were delicate, and were written on with pencil that smudged easily. I felt it was my great responsibility to protect my father’s words. The chances of his manuscript surviving were so slim, and yet it had ended up with my uncle in Dallas, then with my cousin in Austin, and now—so many years later—with me in Vermont. I was the caretaker now.

  I purchased a box of clear, acid-free folders. That evening, I sat in my living room, sliding the pages of the manuscript inside the folders, one at a time. I was so absorbed in my task that I didn’t notice my fingers becoming blackened by the pencil from the pages. Only when I was finished did I see that my fingertips were darkened with lead.