Evil Genes

by Barbara Oakley

  Reticular activating system lesions caused by poliovirus infection can leave adult polio survivors with a perpetual feeling of fatigue, and children who had polio with difficulty staying awake, paying attention, and concentrating. Psychologist Edith Meyer described these effects quite clearly in her 1947 study of fifty-two polio survivors aged eighteen months to fourteen years old. As related in Dr. Bruno's The Polio Paradox:

  For three years, Meyer followed these children's performance in school and measured their mental abilities. She discovered that “a high percentage of children clinically recovered from poliomyelitis insofar as motor disability is concerned, had qualitative difficulties in mental functioning which, as a rule, do not appear in the conventional type of intelligence test.” Through special psychological tests, or merely by observing their performance in school, Meyer found that the children had “fatigability and fleeting attention” for months after the polio attack. When tested, she discovered that the children had short attention spans, difficulty concentrating, and poor memory for visual designs. These problems were “present in cases in which the medical history notes drowsiness, severe headache, and, in some cases, only nausea during the polio attack.” Meyer found that even children who had “non-paralytic” polio, who had no paralysis or even weakness, had symptoms of poliovirus damage to the brain activating system.

  Fig. 5.1. Poliovirus attacks neurons in very specific locations. It particularly likes to attack the reticular formation—the pivotal area of the reticular activating system that is responsible for focusing attention, arousal, and vigilance. Neurotransmitters released by the reticular activating system (represented by the gray arrows and crosshatched areas) “turn on” the brain.

  Bruno further notes, “Children who'd had polio had the equivalent of what today would be diagnosed as attention deficit disorder.”4 He suspects that poliovirus-damaged neurons recovered to some extent and eventually were able to send out new sprouts, which compensated for the widespread damage in the reticular activating system.

  Strangely enough, although the poliovirus invades the reticular activating system along with the cortical region motor neurons, it never invades the nonmotor “thinking” neurons in the cortex. Thus, polio leaves higher-order cognitive processes intact, which is why polio survivors often attain “social, educational, and professional achievement as high or higher than those of the general population.”5

  As far as I could determine then, polio could influence personality, if only in its effect on alertness and one's ability to pay attention. But there was an occasional hint there might be something more going on. Edith Meyer's study, for example, revealed that nine of fourteen mothers of three- to five-year-old polio survivors were certain that their child had become more irritable and disobedient since the illness. “Unsatisfactory emotional adjustment was observed,” noted researcher Edith Meyer, “which improved gradually after the child's discharge to the home, but in most cases left some marks upon the patient's personality development.”6

  Overall, however, I could find little evidence that polio produced the kind of dysfunctional, Machiavellian traits Carolyn showed. In fact, most research shows just the opposite effect: “Polio survivors from around the world have transcended mere normalcy to become the world's best and brightest,” writes Richard Bruno, going on to cite polio survivors who are chief executives of international corporations, artists, sport heroes, members of the British and Canadian parliaments, the US Supreme Court, as well as an American president.7

  But my father had raised an interesting point. In the years after his passing, I would continue to scour emerging research. Aside from polio's understandable link to disorders such as depression and anxiety, however, few new studies emerged related to polio and psychiatric dysfunction.8

  Perhaps this was because there was little real relationship to be found.

  THE MISSING DECADE

  The dust from the carton sets me to coughing. I place Carolyn's last diary down among the packets and randomly grab a black-edged photo album with the words “Polaroid Land Camera” printed in gold on the cover. The album appears to be from Carolyn's late twenties—she's with people, partying. There she is on a seedy orange couch, wine glass in hand, cozily holding hands with a dark-haired man who is leaning toward her—more as if he wants to know her than as if he actually does.

  There she is in a virginal white dress, bouffant blonde wig perfectly coiffed, dwarfed beside a gigantic bouquet of red roses. There she is smiling alluringly again from a bed—a companion picture shows a look-alike for Steve McQueen grinning from under the same set of sheets.

  There's a gray cat with a little bow around its neck. The cat walking along the floor. Cat. Cat. Cat.

  Fig. 5.2. Carolyn in her midtwenties, dressed to impress in virginal white.

  Next she's in a bikini by the pool, lounging with a drink in one hand, cigarette in another, obviously relaxed and in her element. Her leg is positioned so that the withering from polio is nearly unnoticeable.

  Fig. 5.3. Carolyn as Mona Lisa—drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, eyes a cipher.

  It's strange, glancing through the pictures. Sometimes Carolyn is a ringer for my mother, hands splayed out and head tilted back in a gesture my mother frequently made. Carolyn's features reveal the expressive lips, deep-set eyes, porcelain skin, and high cheekbones of our mother's Welsh blood. Then, with a slight change of camera angle and sunlight, Carolyn is suddenly a feminine version of our father, with the dark hair, smooth olive skin, and slanted elfin eyes of what is known in Scandinavia as the “black Norwegian”—my father's father's people. It's like one of those novelty lenticular photographs—move the image slightly, and you see something completely different.

  I reach for a second photo album in the same dark, peeling style. The party theme continues. There's Carolyn in a rainbow-colored shirt, seated on a couch, body turned away from a bearded man who is hugging her. She has a satisfied, feral smile as she glances over her shoulder toward him. Her hands are clasped over his, as if to help his hands hug her more tightly.

  I flip through quickly. There are many pictures of this bearded man.

  Incongruously, there are several pictures of children—a boy of five and a girl of perhaps fourteen. Obviously brother and sister. The boy has the wide-eyed, frenzied glee of overstimulation; the girl has the long, straight hairstyle of the ’70s. She gazes forlornly toward the camera and Carolyn—a lost look that makes me want to reach through the years to hug her. But I can't see what the girl sees on Carolyn's face—my sister's back is to the camera.

  Here's Carolyn by a pool with four scruffy-looking men in their mid-thirties smiling uncertainly into the sun. There's Carolyn braless in a revealing white dress, legs straddled around a man as she sits on his lap facing him. In the background sits a beautiful blonde—clearly a friend—with a cigarette, drink, and flaming red pantsuit with black choke collar. Some of the photos are dated: November 1971.

  The obvious finally occurs to me: These are pictures from the lost years.

  My sister had vanished for a decade immediately after my father had accidentally discovered that she hadn't been earning the straight A's she'd been reporting from her studies at Berkeley. Instead, Carolyn had dropped out of college early on with nary a word to anyone, and had spent the next two years living an unfettered life on the money Dad was sending. Despite the subterfuge that preceded Carolyn's disappearance, my parents had agonized for the ten years of her absence, not knowing whether she was alive or dead. My aunt eventually tracked her down to a seedy “escort service” in Las Vegas.

  MEMORIES OF CAROLYN

  I was twenty when I first remember having a conversation with Carolyn. After my aunt had found her, Carolyn had called my father and asked for the money to come and visit. After sending money twice, which she spent on other things, he sent her an actual plane ticket, which did the trick.

  Carolyn planned to visit for a week, to get to know the family again. Apparently she regr
etted her decade-long disappearance from our lives. I remember greeting her as she limped past my father to give a hug, smiling that broad, artificial smile, enveloping me in the smell of cigarettes and perfume. Her false eyelashes were so large her eyelids looked like roaches. She spoke slowly, enunciating clearly in that melodious voice of hers as we stumbled through our greetings.

  Later that day, when the others had left, she confided with a sultry, intimate whisper: “God, I feel so lucky you are my sister. You are the real reason I came all the way here—just to spend this week with you. You're the special one. This will be so fun spending time together.”

  Actually, I didn't think it was much fun, sitting beside this feeble brown-nosing stranger inside the chinked log walls of the cabin my father had built from scratch. But it was morbidly interesting. If nothing else, I figured, over the coming week I could perhaps learn about Carolyn's perspective on her early years, and what life was like in my family before I was born. And there was something else, something I could barely admit to myself. What if she really did want to rejoin the family? Maybe something had changed because of the hard years away, and the big sister I had admired was finally, really and truly, coming home.

  After a few minutes of chitchat, my sister excused herself to go downtown to pick up a few things. Actually, it must have turned into quite a few things, because I didn't see Carolyn again for another five years. Later, we found she'd spent the rest of the week living with a man she'd bumped into at the grocery store.

  THE LETTERS

  The rain resumes outside, drops slapping gently against the skylights. I close the albums and my memories and move on within the carton, randomly sampling to get a feel for how everything is organized. Each of the smaller boxes, each large envelope, each packet, seems to revolve around one man: whoever was obsessed with her at that period of her life. Added to each packet are assorted extra mementos from other admirers, like condiments with a main course.

  I take a deep breath of the musty air and begin to carefully pick through each piece.

  At the top of a thick packet of poems accompanied by dried flowers, I find a sheaf of thick parchmentlike double-sized paper:

  March 18th, 1969

  My Darling,

  I am a lucky guy! I have searched for you all these years, slowly dying little by little and more and more. Now finally to find you and to know you exist. The distillation of my yearnings, the well of never-failing interest and awareness.

  You command my attention at all times. Though we may be physically apart, I think of you, your vibrancy and zest, your cool calm. Your moods, gay, somber, in all their degrees of intensity, are a part of me, a part of you that is always with me. I am so very lucky to have found you…

  Do I pursue you overmuch? Could I having been loved by a Goddess, feel love again with a mortal woman?…I have only my love to offer you at this time, but that is total and eternal for I shall never stop loving you darling.

  Forever yours,

  Ross

  Several days later, Ross had apparently thought of some amendments. On the next page—neatly labeled “Part II,” he continues:

  We have an intellectual and philosophical compatibility that I have never experienced before and almost despaired of finding. How precious and wonderful it is, Miss Wonderful! You are inscrutable to most people and perplexing to the rest. Yet we are so much in rapport. It is “natural” and reasonable that you should hesitate to live with me and share your life…. Also it is “natural” that you should be hesitant from the standpoint of possible feelings of responsibility for placing my children elsewhere.

  Interesting. Ross appears not only to be head over heels for Carolyn—he's ditching his kids to clear the path. I check the dates. His children must be the kids in the photographs. The bearded man must be Ross.

  But, as I search and shuffle through the materials, aside from the small stack of sweet love poems, there is nothing more from Ross. No notes, no letters, no memos. No more photographs of the bearded man or his children.

  Another letter, in an envelope inscribed “Ki.” That was Carolyn's self-chosen nickname. Inside the card is a velvet heart with an arrow through it. Preprinted inside are the words: For My Wife. A handwritten poem followed.

  I'd forgotten she'd once had a husband.

  There is one other brief card professing love from him. That's all. No wedding photo album. No marriage license. No mention of him in her will. After all these years, only these two tantalizing bits of paper give witness to the marriage, like bits of flotsam after a ship has foundered.

  I go back to the albums, paging. There's my father, holding the infant Carolyn. He looks almost surly, but I know what that look really means: he's sneaking into an easy grin. And my mother stands shyly on a porch, toddler Carolyn smiling in the foreground. Two parents who obviously loved my sister deeply, who were at that point in their lives, and for many years to come, a loving, stable couple.

  For an outsider, it may be difficult to believe that my sister was able to bilk my parents of college money and live an unbroken life of deception and subterfuge without my parents having done something—anything—to intervene. Yet the way Carolyn interacted with my own parents was probably little different from the way other similarly afflicted children have interacted with their parents.

  Was Carolyn's skewed temperament congenital? Certainly our family has had its share of troubled characters: My mother had her problems with alcohol—she would eventually escape suicide through a hairbreadth rescue. One great-uncle, proudly dry now for nearly three decades, let slip that mom's father—my grandfather—was probably drunk when he steered into a rocky embankment and died. (All four of Grandpa's brothers were apparently alcoholics.) Mom's oldest brother, who I never met, hip-hopped from place to place as an offbeat, charismatic flimflam man.

  Fig. 5.4. Dad holding Carolyn on his lap.

  On my father's side, there was the pair of great-uncles who, legend has it, stalked each other for three days with pitchforks before being banished from the household and disappearing forever. And the great-grandfather who only spoke one sentence in his entire adult life (the absurdly inconsequential “Bring me my pipe.”). Both my father's brother and his father—my paternal grandfather—were alcoholics. Dad's sister was a gorgeous, eccentric slip of a woman who refused all of her many suitors. Instead, she walked the equivalent of a marathon each day in her work as a postwoman, then came home to continue her strange, unending exercise routine—jogging, playing tennis, bicycling—and to consume the gallons of spiked coffee that left her slurring and twitching. I spent the day before her death with her in the unventilated basement room she'd chosen for her final days. The air was woozy with smoke as she lit cigarette after cigarette—she paused our reminiscences to reassure me that her decades of chain-smoking had nothing to do with her terminal lung cancer.

  Fig. 5.5. Mom stands demurely on the porch while Carolyn frolics in the foreground.

  This aunt came by her odd behavior naturally. Her mother—my grandmother—was a whale-sized Valkyrie with nearly supernatural shrewish powers. Grandma spoiled us grandkids with sugar-laced tea, knäckebröd, and mounds of Swedish meatballs. I loved her very much and, since I was only five years old when I last saw her, was oblivious to the insidious Ragnarök she enjoyed creating in my parents’ marriage. (Grandma refused, for example, to even speak to my mother for the first years after my parents had wed, despite the fact that she was living in my parents’ house with them at the time.)

  My family is large—there are twenty-one maternal cousins in my generation alone. Thus, although the eccentrics tend to create legends, both sides of the family are also filled with loving, talented, larger-than-life inventors, artists, writers, doctors, and businessmen, who run the gamut from flamboyant public figures to reclusive hermits. In my family, at least, the seeds of the eccentric, not to mention those of the successfully sinister, seem closely related to the seeds of success.

  But what about Carolyn herse
lf? What was life like for her—the once bright-eyed toddler who spent helpless weeks poised on the edge of death in an iron lung? Carolyn's earliest years—literally years—were spent living in hospitals. For months after the time of the initial infection, she, like many other young polio victims, was undoubtedly terrorized—stringently isolated from my parents and others, and totally dependent on the care of strangers.9 At the time, hospitals were frequently overwhelmed with polio patients—little thought was given to including children on treatment decisions, which were often simply imposed, like torture. Questions or complaints could often bring on punishment. Some polio patients felt that, if they did not develop a non-childlike servility in every aspect of their behavior, their lives could be placed in jeopardy by a sometimes arbitrarily cruel staff. Even after Carolyn arrived home from the hospital, there would have been little improvement in her quality of life—she was shuttled back to the hospital for operation after painful operation, and frightening, almost medieval therapies. And when she was able to at last play with other children, she would have suddenly found herself with a new identity—the little crippled girl who other children no doubt bullied and teased. Many polio survivors became pariahs—others feared that they somehow remained infectious. All of this would have further stressed Carolyn's already tormented psyche.10

  Fig. 5.6. The overflowing iron lung ward at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, Downey, California, around 1953. With the climbing number of polio cases in the 1940s and the differing standards of health care of the time, three-year-old Carolyn would have received scant attention during one of the most terrifying periods of her life.