The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  Now and then I brought my students to my parents’ home as well, and, after my grandmother died, I did this more and more. My mother grew attached to certain children and would sometimes take the girls on shopping trips, then bring them home for tea. My father later helped some of my students go to college.

  Many of my friends during the 1960s were political rebels and seemed to turn against their families for a time. Like them, I often had strong disagreements with my father, and I sometimes caused him needless worries and hurt him unintendingly; now and then, he could be harsh with me as well. But even in the last years of the 1960s and the first years of the 1970s, when my political beliefs became most heated and most radical and, I’m sure, more than a trifle grandiose, I found that I would turn to him when I was feeling insecure. He had a steadying hand.

  As the years went by, however, and I found myself increasingly caught up in policy debates and in political forensics and was forced to travel a great deal, there were periods of time in which I didn’t see my parents very much. Those were also years when I was writing books with a determined productivity that left me little time (or gave me an excuse to think that I had little time) to give them the attention they deserved.

  Now, with my father in the nursing home and with my mother more and more confined to her apartment, with attendants to look after her, I felt angry at myself for all the opportunities I’d missed to be with them in the preceding years. As my father lost his wonderful proficiency with words, I wanted most to talk with him. As his memory failed and recollections of significant events that had taken place within the recent past appeared to have been lost for good, I wanted most to draw him out about the things he did remember.

  My father had led a fascinating life that had involved dramatic changes in direction and, at one important moment, in the choice of his career. He spent much of his boyhood in South Boston, where his parents settled first after they arrived from Russia, and his later teenage years in Roxbury. He went to Boston English High, was admitted to Harvard in 1923, and earned enough to pay for his expenses by working at South Station as a soda jerk in his freshman year. He couldn’t afford to live at college in a student dorm, so he was commuting from his home in Roxbury that year. Starting in his sophomore year, he lived at Stoughton Hall in Harvard Yard and tutored wealthy classmates who, he said, often didn’t go to class and “drank more than they should” and, it seems, relied on him to get through their exams.

  During his college years, he immersed himself in literature. He told me he had been especially attracted to Elizabethan poetry and theater; but he majored in psychology and spent much of his senior year working at a psychiatric institution called McLean and wrote his honors thesis—its title was “Religion and Insanity”—on the basis of his conversations with a schizophrenic patient he had helped to care for there.

  In spite of his wish to continue with his interest in psychiatry, he went directly into Harvard Law School after college, pressured by his mother, who had wanted him to emulate his older brother, who had finished with his legal studies one year earlier. Only after traveling to Europe on a fellowship one summer to investigate the work of specialists in schizophrenia and meeting the man who coined the term, the great physician Eugen Bleuler, at his sanatorium in Switzerland, and later talking with the elderly neurologist Pierre Janet, an iconic figure in the study of hysteria, at the Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris, did he make up his mind to give up law school and go back to Harvard College for two difficult semesters of chemistry, biology, and organic chemistry. By the end of that year, he entered Harvard Medical School, which was the start of yet another long and sometimes convoluted journey.

  It had been hard for him to turn his back on expectations after he had been at law school for two years. To give that up because he had been stirred by his acquaintance with two elderly and eminent European doctors and was fascinated by the theories they discussed with him about psychopathology—and to do this at a time when he had yet to take the basic science courses that would be required for admission to the school of medicine—seemed very risky to his teachers and his mother. He did it anyway. Somehow the sheer bravado of this choice helped to fire up his energies and intellect enough so that he did it, not just with success but, as the years ahead would prove, with honor and distinction.

  My father’s life intensifies my feelings of respect for people who do not insist on too much certitude about the maps they’re using and do not insist on knowing in advance what destination they’ll arrive at in the ends of days. For many years he worked primarily in diagnosis of brain injuries and tumors, while he also grew involved with the brilliant Stanley Cobb, a pioneering figure in modern neuroscience, and the famously autocratic Derek Denny-Brown, a New Zealand-born neurologist, during trial periods of a medication called Dilantin, which proved to be a major breakthrough in prevention of the seizures undergone by epileptics. Later, he gravitated more and more into the practice of psychiatry. He was, according to his former colleagues, a sensitive clinician with unusual capacity to diagnose and to identify the separate elements of neurological and psychiatric illnesses in highly complicated and sophisticated people.

  Some of these were well-known people—artists, writers, intellectuals, for instance. In Eugene O’Neill’s last years, the playwright and his wife, a former actress named Carlotta Monterey, moved to Boston so that they could live close to my father’s office. Beginning in the spring of 1951, they took a suite of rooms in a small hotel on Bay State Road diagonally across the street from the handsome town house where my father practiced. He saw O’Neill, who suffered from a neurological disorder, a tremor that had been misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease, as well as from severe bouts of depression, at least once almost every day until O’Neill died of pneumonia in 1953.

  He later entrusted to me many carefully packaged volumes of his daily observations of the playwright’s state of mind and records of their conversations with each other, which reveal the growing sense of fondness that evolved between them. My father was, of course, much younger than O’Neill, and he looked even younger than he was. As unexpected as this may appear in the relationship between a patient and his doctor, and in particular in the case of someone as allegedly austere and undemonstrative in the display of his affections as O’Neill, it strikes me that he looked upon my father somewhat in the way a person might have looked upon a younger brother or a son. O’Neill had lost one of his sons to suicide about eight months before he had become my father’s patient and had long been distanced from his other son and from his only daughter. Perhaps there was some kind of compensation in the close attachment he developed with my father.

  I still have vivid recollections of the warm but often anguished references my father made to me about O’Neill, as well as his frustration with the playwright’s wife, who, as I recall, competed with her husband for my father’s time and loyalty.

  I also remember the December day on which O’Neill was buried at a cemetery close to Boston. There were only three mourners at the grave site: the playwright’s nurse, my father, and Carlotta. None of O’Neill’s close colleagues from New York was present at the burial. My father later told me that they hadn’t been invited by Carlotta, in keeping with her husband’s wish that he be buried with simplicity and privacy.

  After the playwright’s death, my father underwent a period of grief that my mother felt was almost clinical in its duration and intensity. “I held his wrist within my hand as his pulse was failing and his heart stopped beating,” as he recollected in one of the memos he was writing at the time. “I didn’t want to let him go. I had a sense of desperation….” He later brought me and one of my college friends to see Long Day’s Journey into Night when it began its run in Boston, but he grew distraught during the play and had to leave the theater to recover his composure.

  His memories of O’Neill and other patients he had treated were fading in and out, and growing less reliable, by the early 1990s; but his memory of what he did during the 1
930s and the 1940s in the area of neurological impairment remained almost crystal-clear until the episode of injury and anesthesia that marked a sharp dividing line between the early phases of his illness and the onset of a deepening dementia.

  Some of the most moving conversations that I had with him prior to his injury involved his effort to explain to me why memories of relatively recent happenings were beginning to be less and less accessible while others, such as memories of boys he knew and played with in first grade, and of the teachers he admired most at Harvard in the 1920s—Alfred North Whitehead, William McDougall, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who was the president of Harvard at the time but also taught a government course my father took in sophomore year—were not only easy to recall but fresh and vivid, as if these were people he’d just seen or things he had just done.

  “Lowell,” he said, “had a little dog, maybe twelve or fifteen pounds. He’d walk with him in Harvard Square. At the curb, he’d hook his cane under the dog, lift him up, and carry him across the street….”

  When he mentioned once that he’d studied with George Lyman Kittredge, whose annotated Shakespeare I relied upon when I wrote my thesis in my senior year, I naturally asked if he had had a chance to grow acquainted with him. “No,” he said. “It was a large lecture class and, as I recall, I was just a sophomore. Or, now that I think of it, I might have been a freshman. I would not have dared to try to talk with him. I can’t imagine what I would have said.”

  But some years later, when he was in Geneva with my mother on the way to Zurich to meet Dr. Bleuler, he said he saw “the great professor” walking by the lake. “He was just in front of us. I guess I must have stared at him, but I didn’t have the nerve to introduce myself. ‘Speak up, young man!’ he said to me. I told him, ‘When I was an undergraduate, you were my professor.’ He was very kind to us and took us to have coffee. He even recommended a good place for us to eat. He said, ‘The price won’t kill you!’ But when we looked into the window we could see that it was too expensive….”

  My father took a lot of pleasure in recapturing these details, even while he recognized that he was losing track of many more important things that had happened recently. But it was the memories of his years of medical instruction and his retention of the terminology of neurological evaluation—because he used that terminology to describe his own condition—that I found to be particularly stirring.

  Even after he had moved into the nursing home, he continued to retain some partial capability to speak about brain function. When he could not find a word he needed, he did not appear to be especially annoyed so much as curious and interested, like a scientist, to recognize in himself the same phenomenon he’d observed in others through the years. I could imagine him in the 1950s bringing young physicians with him on his rounds at Boston City Hospital or at the Massachusetts General, which was usually spoken of in Boston simply as the MGH, stopping at one bed, and then another, to discuss each case, and then arriving at a patient who presented the most perfect case of all to illustrate a point that he was making, even though the patient in this instance was himself.

  Experiences like these had two effects on me. They heightened my respect for his capacity to reach beyond immediate predicament and find at least some elements of dignity and intellectual engagement in a situation in which others might have settled for self-pity. But they also were, of course, reminders of the probable prognosis for the future. The observations on brain function, as I knew, could not go on forever. Soon he would cease to be the doctor and remain only a case for other doctors to describe.

  —

  Once the injury to my father’s hip was fully healed, he was able to stand and walk without assistance from the nurses and attendants. In nice weather I would take him out to walk along the road beside the nursing home. The road, which ran along a narrow stretch of water in a wooded and secluded area, ended at a tiny inlet in which ducks and ducklings floated back and forth and children would throw bits of bread onto the surface of the water just in front of them. In the other direction, we could walk along the woods and open fields for approximately half a mile to an elevation where there was an old stone chapel and a grove of apple trees.

  These pleasant and unhurried walks brought back to me nostalgic memories of a time when I was nine or ten years old and my father used to take me with him on long evening walks around the neighborhood in which we lived, about ten miles west of Boston. The area, now thoroughly suburban, had been like a country village when I was in kindergarten. There was a cow named Daisy grazing on a hill across the street from us. By the time I was seven Daisy’s meadow had been subdivided into lots for three brick houses. On several of the streets nearby, expensive-looking Tudor houses were constructed on the edges of tree-shaded properties that had been farms or large estates until the 1940s. Some of these houses were quite beautiful and stately and looked as if they had been built a hundred years before. On other streets, however, there were starkly modern mini-mansions, set on landscaped lawns with lighted terraces and pools, that looked too large and lavish for the lots on which they stood.

  My father had a walking stick, with tiny copper medals nailed into its sides, that he had gotten years before when he went to Switzerland to talk with Dr. Bleuler. He liked to tap it on the pavement as we walked. Sometimes he’d stop and point it at a house we passed and tell me anecdotes about the owner. He showed me once the mansion of a family that had been bootleggers in the 1920s—a member of the family had been “shot dead” by treasury agents on a beach near Marblehead, he said—but they had since achieved respectability as the owners of a liquor import company. My father didn’t speak about these people in demeaning ways; he simply found the twists and turns within their lives intriguing.

  More than a few of the people in the neighborhood had turned to my father for professional assistance during times of crisis in their own or in their children’s lives, and he knew a great deal more than he was able to divulge about the sometimes unconventional arrangements and relationships within some of their families. Perhaps because I was a child, though, he shared a little more with me than he would allow himself to share with people of his age.

  His observations on the private lives of certain of these families were presented to me, as I now remember this, in highly novelistic ways, as if these people were complex protagonists within a work of Thomas Mann, or Chekhov, or Flaubert. Disappointment, tragedy, and sometimes mild satire at a pretense of gentility in those who had amassed great wealth, but less refinement, in remarkably short periods of time, were commonly the richly woven strands of these narrations.

  In later years my mother would explain to me some of the background of my father’s state of mind at that point in his career. She said that he’d become increasingly ambivalent about the work that he was doing and the nature of the clientele he had attracted, which included many people who would travel here long distances from other cities to obtain his services.

  A number of these cases tended to involve at least two members of a family whose behavior to each other might appear to be protective and affectionate but would, at the same time, be covertly toxic or sadistic. Simultaneously, within the tangled web of these familial pathologies, there might lie a neurological disorder such as a brain tumor. My father’s diagnostic vigilance, as well as his gift for magisterial diplomacy in handling the tensions, for example, between children and their parents, or a husband and his wife, obviously served him well in these kinds of cases. Even so, according to my mother, he had grown uncomfortable about the role that he was asked to fill for many of these families, which seemed to him to be like that which in another age might have been filled by court physicians who had placed their expertise in subjugation to a very small and privileged elite.

  This is not to say that he had ever turned his back upon his sense of obligation to provide his services to people of low income—or, indeed, to indigent people in the wards of Boston City Hospital, which served the poorest neighborhoods of Boston, as
well as in the clinics of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, which was affiliated with the MGH. But, to the degree that he allowed a handful of his patients to commandeer a disproportionate amount of his attention, and the degree to which he was obliged to draw upon his social skills in meeting their complex demands, I think he felt he was the victim of his own eclectic competence. And it was this, my mother said, that seemed to underlie those surges of impatience that would make him restless in the evenings and impel him to invite me to go out on walks with him.

  My father’s treatment of O’Neill did not begin until I was a little older. And his attachment to O’Neill, and the sense of honor that he felt at being asked to bring to bear the skills he had acquired in caring for the most respected playwright of his times, obviously compensated greatly for the feelings of frustration that he underwent in coping with Carlotta. Nonetheless, the sense of being in subservient attendance, which was engendered in my father by her overbearing ways, was a source of great discomfort to him.

  I knew nothing of my father’s discontent during those early years. I simply knew he liked me to go with him on his evening walks and that he talked with me more openly during those walks than he would do at other times. There was never any destination for our walks. I liked the aimlessness. We walked until his restlessness was gone.

  Fifty years had passed since then. Now when we walked along the road beside the nursing home, he chatted with me off and on and usually made light-hearted observations about little things that captured his attention. He enjoyed the squawking of the ducks and ducklings and the sight of children who were feeding them. Sometimes I’d bring bread with me so he could feed them too. He liked to see how close they’d come before they grew afraid and circled off away from the embankment. But there were no more novelistic anecdotes. His ability to sustain a narrative of any length had now departed him.