The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

by Milton Rokeach

  At the time of his commitment, Clyde was fifty-three. Diagnois: schizophrenia, paranoid type. Prognosis for recovery: poor. He had been hospitalized seventeen years when he, Joseph, and Leon were brought together.

  Joseph Cassel

  Joseph was born Josephine Cassel in a city in the province of Quebec, Canada. He was the first of nine children, seven of whom are still living. Josephine disliked his name intensely and changed it to Joseph. He had been given the girl’s name, Josephine, by his father in memory of a young woman, already dead, whom the older man admired.

  The community in which Joseph grew up was almost entirely French-Canadian. His father would not allow English to be spoken in the home, even though he himself had been born in Canada of French parents and had been taught English in school. The schools emphasized English rather than French history and literature, but Joseph’s father was insistent in preserving his French origins and cultural patterns. Among his ancestors had been a famous historian and a poet.

  Joseph’s birth and early development were apparently normal. He completed the eighth grade in parochial school at the age of twelve. He was a good student, and at an early age acquired an unusual interest in English literature. His father did not approve of his interest in books and got him a job as grocery boy as soon as he finished the eighth grade.

  Although the entire family attended the Catholic Church, neither of Joseph’s parents were particularly religious. His grandmother, however, was and often appealed to God on a personal level. When Joseph’s mother died (the boy was then sixteen), she took him to live with her.

  Joseph’s father was described by those close to him as independent, quick-tempered, and cruel to his wife. In later years he is said to have become very nervous and so fearful at night that he always slept with the lights on. He worked as an inspector for the city in which he lived. Joseph’s mother, who died while giving birth to a ninth child at the age of thirty-six, was described by Joseph and others as a good woman and mother. Joseph cannot easily be made to speak of his early life, although he did say once that his father had picked him up bodily in a rage and thrown him down. Joseph was afraid of his father as a boy, and he did not get over his fear even as a grown man. His father had remarried and was still living, now on a small farm.

  All the children left home as soon as they could. Two of the brothers refused to let their father know their whereabouts for several years. The other children—four boys and two girls—are now married and doing well. None has any history of mental illness.

  As a young man, Joseph immigrated to Detroit with high hopes of getting a better job. He wanted money for more education and for travel. He had always wanted to be a writer, and he read voraciously late into the night—novels, dramas, biographies, philosophy, history, and current events. He enjoyed sports and liked to attend the theater.

  He showed little interest in women until he met Beatrice, whom he married when he was twenty-four. During the first year of their marriage Joseph was cold and undemonstrative. He said it was unhealthy to kiss and would not let his wife touch his face. He did not want children and tried to persuade Beatrice to share this view. Nevertheless, she remembers the early years of their marriage as happy. Joseph was sexually adequate as long as they were careful about “rituals”; that is, everything had to be clean—the sheets, the clothes, herself. Beatrice wanted children on religious grounds and because, she said, “you get married to have children.”

  Joseph preferred his books to an active social life. At parties he would often retire to the bedroom to read. He was described as lacking a sense of humor and as taking things too seriously. He felt intellectually superior and was arrogant to his friends. Neither friends, relatives, nor wife shared his literary interests, and Joseph complained of his lack of companionship, and withdrew more and more into himself.

  All his life he had worked as a clerk. Finally, he managed to be promoted to foreman on the night shift in the postal-delivery department of a railroad company. He left this job at Beatrice’s insistence; although she later regretted her choice, she had urged him to quit because she did not want him to work at night. Joseph got another job as a clerk in a department store and worked there for the ten years preceding his admission to a mental hospital. He did not enjoy this work; it made him feel like a servant, he said. And moreover, he was easily embarrassed, and did not like to talk to customers. During this period Beatrice gave birth to three daughters. Nevertheless, Joseph tried several times to get her to go out to work so that he could stay home and write. This was foolish, she told him. He would not know how to take care of the children. It was his job to go out and earn a living. Beatrice never knew anything about the book Joseph said he was working on late at night, and she did not see what good all this writing would do him anyway. She complained that he spent money on books when they did not have even enough to pay household bills.

  When their second daughter was born, in 1935, Joseph asked: “Where did she come from?” and accused Beatrice of being intimate with other men. The child was a neighbor’s, he said, not his. Beatrice was deeply hurt, and when a third daughter was born two years later, she was ready for him. Joseph came in to look at the baby and repeated his earlier accusation. “It’s not yours,” Beatrice replied. “I had her with Dr. Jones.” “I was mad and had a temper,” she added.

  Beatrice thinks Joseph’s illness had its onset after an automobile accident in the summer of 1938. When his car was about to crash into another one, he turned off the ignition (because he was afraid of fire) and did not even try to avoid the other car. As a result, everyone was badly hurt except Joseph. The worry and medical bills, and possibly guilt over having been responsible for the accident, were a great strain on Joseph.

  Despite all these family tensions, the children have pleasant memories of their father. They remember him as a gentle man who always had sweets in his coat pocket when he came home from work. Before bedtime he told them stories, most of which he made up as he went along.

  In October of 1938 Joseph quit his job in the department store and flatly refused to get another, insisting that his wife go out to work so he could write. He said that the work made him “ill,” and that he wanted to go back to Canada to live on a farm. They sold their house and furniture and returned to Canada, moving in with Beatrice’s family. The depression was still on, jobs were scarce, and Joseph did not try very hard to get one. Beatrice’s family was far from cordial to him and subjected him to great pressure to assume his responsibility as head of the family. On one occasion Beatrice’s brothers beat him up.

  At about this time Joseph began to say that people were poisoning his food and tobacco. He made Beatrice trade teacups with him to make sure she was not poisoning him.

  After only a few weeks with Beatrice’s family, the couple went to live with Joseph’s father. Now Joseph’s condition became worse. He accused Beatrice of no longer loving him, of pretending to be going through a menstrual period in order to forestall intercourse. Once he sat on her chest and twisted her arms. He accused her of deliberately making her breath smell bad so that he would not want to kiss her and of feeding him something to make his hair fall out. He bought huge quantities of books and hid them from her. At the same time, he needed her more and was very passionate with her, in contrast to his usual coldness. But he continued to accuse her of being unfaithful and of making him suffer.

  Joseph was committed to a Canadian hospital in March 1939. Beatrice returned to Detroit, got a job in a department store, and placed their three little girls in Catholic institutions. She threw out Joseph’s manuscripts, two cartons full, because she had no place to store them. Joseph, a naturalized American citizen, was returned—or, more accurately, deported—placed in Detroit Receiving Hospital, and finally committed to Ypsilanti State Hospital, where he has been ever since.

  The records show that Joseph made many impulsive attacks on other patients during his early stay in the hospital. In addition to suffering from various paranoid delu
sions, he believed that other patients were plotting against him and would therefore attack him. He also had hallucinations and heard disagreeable voices accusing him of incest. He was loud in his speech, careless in his personal appearance, and generally hostile toward others. His diagnosis, like Clyde’s: schizophrenia, paranoid type.

  The hospital records show two additional matters of interest about Joseph. The first, relating to sexual difficulties, is illustrated by a letter Joseph wrote to his ward physician in 1941, and by the ward notes of October of the same year:

  Letter:

  For instance there is the abnormality of homosexuality. I am sure that prior to coming to the hospital I never had any subconscious urge or half urge to commit such an abnormality. It is true that whenever such a thought entered my mind that I turn around and do something to knock it out of my head and that I know in my mind then that I will not succumb to such a sin. But it certainly is a hindrance to have such an abnormal thought.

  Ward notes:

  Patient states that he had repeatedly asked his wife for a divorce and has given up the Catholic religion to show his sincerity that he wishes a divorce, since he doesn’t love his wife and his wife doesn’t love him. This is evidenced by her cessation of visits. Patient adds that he has completely lost faith in his wife as far as sexual love is concerned, and he states that he is locked in the hospital because his wife has had three children with other men and was found out.

  The second matter concerns Joseph’s delusion that he is God, about which there is no record until ten years after his initial hospitalization. Then, in 1949, Joseph wrote to one of his daughters: “My wife is Binnie Barnes, movie actress. I am prince and God and keeper of the courts. This is the truth. I have civilized the whole world. I am aeons and aeons of years old. I’m the richest man in the world and England. I was the strongest and mastered psychiatry. It came out just beautifully, charming and nice.” Sometime after he had written this letter, a hospital psychiatrist asked Joseph if he had ever seen God. To this he replied “I can’t very well see God when I am God.” Concerning his wife, he said: “My wife was always under my command. I sanctioned that she could go out with other men because she could not do otherwise.”

  Since then there have been no further references to Binnie Barnes but, of course, many references to his being God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost. When his oldest daughter learned of this delusion, she commented: “He always wanted to be important, better than other people, but he just wasn’t aggressive enough.”

  Leon Gabor

  Leon’s parents, Mary and Leon, Senior, were married in 1916 in Detroit. Their first child, Stanley, was born in 1919. In 1921 the family returned to their homeland in Eastern Europe for a year’s visit. While they were there, Mary gave birth to Leon. Leon, Senior, returned alone to Detroit after only six months in Europe. He had become interested in another woman before leaving Detroit, and he went back to live with her. Mary, Stanley, and Leon returned to the United States in 1923. Mary tried to persuade her husband to come back to her but he refused. He divorced her the following year on grounds of cruelty and on the ground that “she was not a wife to him.” He promptly married the other woman.

  Following her return to Detroit, Mary rented a house three blocks from a Catholic church in a neighborhood composed almost entirely of people from the Old Country. She spoke in her native tongue and could barely make herself understood in English. She would lock her two little boys in a room when she went out to work as a scrubwoman, leaving them instructions to stay in bed since there was no heat in the house during the day.

  Mary was a religious fanatic and was reported to hear voices. Her own priest, whom we interviewed, said she spent too much time in church. In a broken accent he told us: “I tell her, ‘Go home.’ I say to her, ‘See me, Father, I say Mass half hour; see the Sisters, they go to Mass half hour. Then we go work—it’s enough.’ And then I look and she back saying rosaries. Leon, every day worse. She not cooking for boy, crackers and tea, not food for a boy growing. She not cleaning her house, praying, praying, all the time praying.”

  Stanley, Leon’s older brother, was sent back to the Old Country to study for the priesthood and eventually left for New Zealand, where he started a successful business. Leon went to parochial school. There he was an above-average student, “a good boy, nothing wrong, a quiet boy.” After he graduated he went to the Catholic high school for a year, and then his mother somehow managed without the assistance of the parish church to get Leon accepted in a pre-seminary school in another state. Leon attended for about two and a half years, and then when he was seventeen was expelled for reasons unknown to our informants.

  At about this time, Leon’s father came to see him and tried to persuade him to come to live with him. Leon refused. He went to work and held various jobs as paper-cutter, laborer, and finally as an industrial electrician in a large corporation. Mary quit working and now spent all her time in church or tending her flower garden. Leon gave her all his earnings. His mother described him as “a very nice boy. He did everything I told him to.” Things went this way until he volunteered for the army, an action his mother strongly opposed, of course. During his three years in the army he was in excellent health, except for an attack of dengue fever, which lasted a couple of weeks. He served in the Signal Corps, working on radar reconnaissance. In four theaters of war, he earned four ribbons and four combat stars for exposure to enemy fire. There is no record that he had any difficulties adjusting in the army. He received an honorable discharge in 1945 as a private first class.

  Leon was described by his mother as being an entirely different type of person after his service in the army. She complained that he now attended dances, ran around, and in general refused to obey her. He had a photograph of a girl in New York with whom he corresponded, though they had not met. He announced his intention of marrying this girl, and when his mother was away, packed a suitcase and left for New York. He returned to Detroit in a few days, refusing to say what had occurred. He was later to tell us that the girl was a “prostitute.”

  He resumed his old job as an industrial electrician in 1945 and remained on the job until 1950. During this period he completed his education at a technical high school in the evenings and in the fall of 1948 entered a university. The vocational advisor in the V.A. commented as follows about Leon: “Veteran appears sincere, co-operative, ambitious, expressive, and emotionally stable.” Leon was interested in going into medicine but listed as alternative vocational choices: radio operator or repairman, social worker, psychologist. But his performance in college was very poor. He dropped two of his three courses, and completed only one satisfactorily. This ended his educational career.

  In the meantime Leon’s absenteeism from work became more frequent, and he was fired in 1950. The pattern was repeated on the next job, which he held for about two years and left in 1953. He had begun to complain of chronic exhaustion and thoracic spine pain. The V.A. diagnosis was “neurasthenia.” Leon was now unemployed and continued to be so for about ten months, until he was committed in April of 1954. During the period of his unemployment he was supported by his mother’s old-age assistance. There were many occasions during this time when there was insufficient money for food, clothing, and fuel, and the Gabors had to be helped out by neighbors and friends.

  According to one of our informants, Leon was “polite” to his mother and did not put up any overt resistance, although she was too strict with him. Only once did he show any signs of rebellion. One week in 1950, when he was still working, he refused to give his mother any of his earnings unless she cleaned up the house and cooked for him, instead of spending all her time praying or tending her flowers in the yard. Mary refused, for example, to let him buy a radio. Not only was it wrong, it would keep her from hearing the voices she must listen to. She felt sure Leon would get into trouble, that almost everything was sinful or led to sin. Originally she had wanted him to be a priest, but later she told him that he was not good enough. />
  The evidence is overwhelming that Mary understood neither herself nor her son and was probably psychotic.

  While Leon was still in the service, Mary had made a down payment on a house across from the churchyard. She rented out the whole house except for the two rooms in which she lived with Leon, and shared the kitchen and bath with the tenants. Every inch of wall space was filled with crosses and pictures of saints, Mary, and Jesus. Her priest said she had “too much religion, not healthy religion. Catholics like strong, healthy religion. Mary not have the healthy conscience, not what Catholic religion wants.” Concerning the wall decorations, he said: “Always more pictures, crucifix, saints—all over the walls. Is good, one, two, not so many.” And of the relationship between Leon and his mother, he said: “She was saying, ‘Leon this, Leon that.’ I say, ‘A young man has to do, can’t sit, can’t pray all the time.’ Two, three hours I see her praying. I try, she never listen. I not wise enough to see he is going”—the priest thumped his head—“worse every day.”

  Approximately a year before his admission to the hospital, Leon began to hear voices: God was speaking to him; the voices were telling him he was Jesus. His first commitment in 1954 followed after he locked himself in the bathroom and refused all pleas to come out. His mother sent for the priest and the priest sent for the doctor. After being hospitalized for two months, Leon was released, and stayed home for another six months. The final commitment came when Leon became violent, and smashed and destroyed all the religious relics in the house. While he was in the middle of this destructive rampage, his mother came home from church. When she tried to stop him, he threatened to strangle her. He finished the destruction he had started and then turned to his mother, saying there would be no more false images around the house and that she could now start worshipping him as Jesus. His mother was afraid he would kill her. He was taken to the hospital under guard.