I turned my palms up and held them before my eyes, transfixed. The thought went through my head: My father put this lead on these papers, now it has come away on my hands. The connection I’d always felt between us was tangible.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was clear that my father was writing about the events of 1944, the last year I’d lived with him. Emerging before me was the story of what had happened to him during those first months of his absence. Although my father’s descriptions of his time in the hospital were horrifying to read, my work was spurred on by a sense of duty. As I typed each sentence, watching the words appear on the computer screen, it was further proof that he had existed.
As I tried to absorb the meaning of his experiences, instinctively, I turned to books for help and guidance. What did it even mean that my father was “manic”? I found a copy of The Bell Jar and read Sylvia Plath’s novelized account of her breakdown and electric shock treatment. I read psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, about her own experiences of manic depression. I read William Styron’s startling memoir of his descent into madness, Darkness Visible. Over the next few months, I read as many books on mental illness and manic depression as I could find.
I kept a notebook and created page after page of quotes, looking for clues with which to plot some kind of map. I became a student of the condition, its violent and disruptive mood swings, the intense highs followed by the terrifying lows. I came to understand that, despite the menace of the disorder, manic depression is often closely allied with genius. Many of our greatest artists have been sufferers, “touched with fire,” as Jamison has written of Lord Byron, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, among many others.
The work progressed slowly. My inclination was to conduct my research a little at a time. The material I was uncovering was so unsettling that after all these years of not knowing, each discovery had to be assimilated slowly, piece by piece.
I found other traces of him, beyond the manuscript. There was the pink cloth-covered baby book where my mother recorded the small milestones of my early years, pages that are filled with references to me with my father. My mother writes that the first time I put words together in a sentence, it was to ask, “Where’s Daddy?” At the age of three, it is noted, I’d sit on my father’s lap while he read to me his favorite poems from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Before long, I could quote the first lines back to him: “Awake! For morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.”
Somewhere in my house, I knew, there was a cache of albums containing photographs and letters of his, given to me by my mother. I was a teenager when I’d first inherited them, and I had dismissed them as relics. Now I felt certain they could help me become a better student of my father’s life. I eventually located two albums tucked away in the back of one of my bookcases. The first was his baby book, its delicately worn, light blue leather covers embossed with gold. Inside, each page was decorated in the Victorian style, with golden curlicues, and images of flowers and baby faces. I found sepia studio photographs of father as a handsome toddler in overalls, his hair a mass of shining curls. In careful, steady script, my grandmother had noted the date of his first smile, his first steps, his first word. She had even preserved a lock of his baby hair. I tentatively ran my finger over the soft and glossy strands, marveling at their survival.
A second album kept by my grandmother contained my father’s school reports and photographs of him as a schoolboy. There were high school newspaper clippings indicating his many academic achievements. One article reported that he was “highly motivated and always looking toward the next goal at top speed.” He played football and was elected president of his senior class.
A letter, from 1921, contained news that he had been accepted to the University of Texas. The next letter confirmed that, after only the first semester, he had made the college honor roll. The following year, he wrote home to tell his parents he had been given a coveted assistantship by the chemistry department, and that he wished to take it, to “put me in a better position to be elected to Phi Beta Kapa in the fall.” He graduated that year summa cum laude, having completed the university’s four-year curriculum in three years. I imagined my grandmother’s pride as she received these letters, each one signed, affectionately, “Perry Boy.”
The photographs from his time at the University of Texas showed a confident, handsome young man. His hair was light reddish brown, his nose somewhat prominent, and his ears slightly large, but it was the intense determination of his gaze that held my attention. After graduation my father set his sights on Harvard Medical School. When he received his letter of acceptance, he gave it to his mother, who dutifully pasted it in her scrapbook.
The senior members of the Harvard Medical School faculty soon began to take notice of my father’s talents. In the summer of 1927, my father sent a telegram home saying that he had been invited to join Dr. Walter B. Cannon’s Harvard laboratory as a research assistant in physiology for one year. He had quickly accepted the prestigious offer.
I kept waiting for some indication of my father’s mental troubles. Finally, I found a letter from September of 1927. My father was writing home after a brief visit to Texas:
The invariable consequences of quickly changing surroundings from a pleasant southern atmosphere to the cool, grim, business-like and ultra-progressive atmosphere of Boston—is a siege of depression, from which one recovers.
Such sieges had little effect on his extraordinary academic career. By the time he graduated from Harvard in 1928, he had coauthored five scientific papers that were accepted for publication in the American Journal of Physiology. He received his medical degree in 1928, magna cum laude, which was awarded not only for his high academic standing but also for his excellent work on his thesis in physiology. It was the highest academic honor ever awarded up to that time to any Harvard Medical School graduate.
I continued to keep notes, writing them down on random slips of paper, large and small, yellow lined legal pads, and even on the backs of bank deposit slips, whatever was handy.
In the new year of 1995, I applied for my father’s medical records. The process was familiar to me from my job at the hospital, where I was often asked to obtain patient records. The copies of my father’s records arrived in the mail in batches. At the end of the application process, I had hundreds of documents, some typed, some handwritten, some in the form of graphs and charts. I could learn what my father had eaten, his temperature, and the quality of his blood and urine work. The records also gave me dates—dates of hospitalizations, dates of release, dates of escapes, dates of treatment—enabling me to put my father’s story in context and in order.
Using the medical records as a guide, I went back to my father’s letters to Dr. Cannon and Dr. Means, looking for connections. Reading them closely, I learned that my father’s medical career was compromised by his illness only three years after his graduation from Harvard. In 1931, the same year he married my mother, he wrote to Dr. Cannon that it was his wish to follow him into the specialty of physiology. Dr. Cannon responded immediately this might prove to be “too stressful” for someone with my father’s “sensibilities.” Dr. Cannon agreed with Dr. Means that my father would be the ideal man to help spearhead a soon-to-be-revamped department of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital. They voted my father a stipend to support his training, and Means arranged for him to interview with the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he was quickly offered a position.
My father began his one-year residency in Philadelphia. Not long after, he resumed research work he had initially undertaken at Massachusetts General Hospital under the auspices of Dr. Fuller Albright of the Harvard Medical School faculty. Dr. Albright was one of the guiding lights in the field of endocrinology (the study of diseases relating to the hormones), and my father was invited to coauthor a paper with him on Addison’s disease, a disorder of the adrenal glands tha
t caused abnormal pigmentation of the skin.
Again, the rapid advancement of my father’s career was stalled by his illness.
Soon after the paper on Addison’s Disease was completed, my father had his first severe manic episode and was hospitalized at the Philadelphia Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases. After his release, he had to take a two-week break from his work, during which time he became profoundly depressed. His medical records state: “He slept on an average of fourteen hours a day. It was at this time that he was told that, because of the manic episode, he could not be appointed Professor of Dermatology at Harvard.” It was a devastating blow.
His mentors raised the idea that he should go into private practice, to better suit his unpredictable mental state. In late June of 1933, my father wrote to Dr. Means that he was considering an offer from Drs. Lane and Greenwood, dermatologists in Boston. He stressed that he felt “thoroughly rested and perfectly fit for a long period of good hard work.” Days later, he accepted the offer and my parents moved to Boston.
I interviewed family friends who had known my father during his Boston years. I first visited Dr. Marshall Bartlett and his wife, Barbara, at their retirement community in Westwood, just outside the city. Dr. Bartlett had been at Harvard Medical School with my father, had even been present the night my parents first met. He had remained a close family friend ever since. The Bartletts were elderly, but much as I remembered them—Dr. Bartlett had the same distinguished features of his younger years, and Mrs. Bartlett was as gracious as ever.
I told them that I hoped to learn more about my father’s professional life.
Dr. Bartlett informed me that although my father had started out at the offices of Lane and Greenwood, he was soon overbooked and ready to open his own practice.
“Word got around through other doctors that ‘the best person to go to is Dr. Baird,’ ” Barbara added.
“I went to him as a patient,” Dr. Bartlett told me. “I thought he was the best in town.”
Socially, my father was equally successful. The Bartletts remembered him at that time as charismatic and attractive, always at the center of attention, drink in his hand, sometimes playing the piano. No one among my father’s social set identified him as having a mental problem in those early days.
“We all thought he had this giant personality,” Dr. Bartlett told me. “He didn’t hide the fact he was a Texan, a bit of a wild man. He enjoyed his reputation—he could get a little crazy, but people loved him for it. Your father once rented a whole floor of the Copley Plaza for a party—that was the talk of the town.”
“When did the problems begin?”
“The first time I noticed he was becoming unstable was after we’d had a conversation about cars,” Dr. Bartlett recalled. “Cadillac had just come out with the LaSalle. The next thing I knew, your father had bought two. His moods began to change. You never knew when you went to see him if you were going to get the old Perry or the difficult one.”
After leaving the Bartletts, I drove to Chestnut Hill to visit with two of our old neighbors. Frank Shaw still lived two doors down from the house I had shared with my mother and stepfather. His house was so familiar to me—with its dark brown clapboards and thick metal separating the windowpanes, it had the austere aura of a church rectory.
Mr. Shaw was tall, confident, and friendly. He reminded me that he had been one of my father’s riding partners. The success of my father’s practice allowed him to indulge in one of his favorite sports, riding. He purchased three horses: Viking, Sea Gull, and Country Boy. They were kept at Powers Stable, in Dover, not far from our home.
“We lived like kings in those days,” Frank recalled rather wistfully. “Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, we’d get up at five for morning hunts. Then we’d be at our offices in Boston by 9:30 a.m. for a day’s work. Perry always had lunch at the Ritz.”
“He never relaxed,” Shaw remembered. “He was supercharged with energy. He wasn’t a good ride, in the sense of hands and skill, but when he got in the saddle, he stayed in the saddle. He wanted to beat everyone—other riders didn’t care for him, but he was a great athlete.”
“One day, your father and mother, myself, and my wife, together with another couple, went for a picnic beside Mount Chocorua,” Shaw went on, referring to a summit in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. “It was very pleasant, leaves in full colors. I brought along some wine and we had a picnic. Then the rest of us started to walk up the mountain. But Perry didn’t walk up anything. He ran up that mountain, full tilt.”
Only as the afternoon wore on did Mr. Shaw drift closer to the subject of my father’s illness.
“He went to the Ritz whenever he felt himself becoming manic,” Mr. Shaw recalled. “He’d stay there drinking large amounts of Coca-Cola, sometimes alcohol. I learned to steer clear when he got in that state.”
That was as far as Mr. Shaw seemed to wish to venture. I didn’t press further. I thanked him and we said our goodbyes.
Finally I drove to the nearby home of Mrs. Virginia Fenno, another riding partner of my father’s. She had been our neighbor then and still lived next door to the house on Clovelly Road. Mrs. Fenno was an elegant-looking woman, tall, with excellent posture, not a hair out of place. She asked after my mother and my children, and I told her that all was well, and that I hoped to learn more about my father.
“Your father was an exceptional man,” Mrs. Fenno observed. “He was very competitive and hated to lose. We had a friend, Maynard Johnson, who was much bigger than him. Maynard had rowed for Harvard and was strong as an ox. Your father kept challenging him to a wrestling match. One night, they were at a party and Maynard finally agreed. They wrestled to an absolute draw. It wouldn’t have ended but the other doctors pulled them apart.”
She also recalled the times she spent riding with my father.
“I always rode with a group of doctors every Sunday morning. Your father was one of them. Then we’d stop and have drinks at someone’s house. After Pearl Harbor, all the doctors went away, serving overseas. Your father was very disappointed. He so wanted to go. We still rode once a week. He seemed very depressed at the time. He would often talk about how a ‘friend’ of his was very depressed and how difficult it was. I felt sure he was speaking about himself.
“The second year of the war, he was becoming more manic. He had this big crush on a friend of mine. He was always trying to persuade her to ride with him. One time, when all of us were out riding together, he convinced her to ride on ahead with him. I stayed back with her husband. Finally her husband, who was a poor ride, said, ‘Don’t you think you should catch them? Please see what is going on.’ I did. Perry was furious. He got his horse excited. We raced up the hill. I realized I couldn’t stop my horse. I rode deliberately for the bushes and the horse stopped dead. I was thrown but not hurt. I never rode with Perry again.”
The afternoon light was fading and I sensed it was time for me to go. Before I left, I thanked Mrs. Fenno for her time. She took my hand.
“Your father, he couldn’t help himself. You know, Mimi, he wanted the moon.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
As I continued to study the letters and medical records, another startling facet of my father’s story revealed itself. Not only was he suffering from manic depression. He had been studying it, too.
In 1933, while my father was establishing his dermatology practice in Boston, Dr. Cannon wrote to inform him that space in his laboratory at Massachusetts General had become available. Dr. Cannon was now able to offer my father a minor appointment as a graduate assistant in research. My father didn’t hesitate to accept. Despite the interruption of his breakdown, his article on Addison’s disease had been accepted for publication in the American Journal of Physiology and he was buoyed up by its success. Together with Dr. Albright, he had proven that patients with Addison’s disease were deficient in cortin, a natural hormone secreted by the body’s adrenal glands. This discovery would later contribute to the development
of the steroid cortisone.
It was time for him to find a new research subject, and he knew exactly where his interests lay. Only a few months earlier, he had experienced his first stay in a mental institution, in Philadelphia. Here he had been held in straight jackets and subjected to a week and a half of narcosis “sleep therapy.” He felt certain there had to be a more sophisticated approach to the treatment of manic depression. Could there be a connection between the adrenal glands and his illness, just as there had been a link between Addison’s disease and the adrenal hormones? Dr. Cannon thought my father’s ideas had sufficient enough merit to approve the research.
True to his training with Albright and Cannon, my father was looking for a physiological basis to his illness. He was seeking a biochemical explanation for his intense and terrifying moods.
I pictured him in his white coat, absorbed in his work at his laboratory. By then he knew the physiology of the adrenal glands very well. The glands sit at the top of the kidneys. Together, they weigh only a fraction of an ounce, but they can have a tremendous effect on a person’s well-being. They are responsible for releasing hormones into the bloodstream in response to fear, stress, anger, or other excitement—the same hormones that cause the heart to race and the blood pressure to rise when we feel under threat. During his manic episodes, my father had experienced near ecstatic surges of excitement. He felt certain this could be connected to those glands, specifically the adrenal cortex—that part of the gland that mediates the rush of adrenaline, keeping it within normal range. My father reasoned that it was possible the adrenal cortex was malfunctioning in patients who were manic, causing uncontrolled and abnormal rushes of energy.
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