Because I Come from a Crazy Family

by Edward M. Hallowell

  Lyn

  76.

  A year or so after Sue and I made out in the parking lot, and some three months after my mother died, I went to Shreve, Crump & Low in the Chestnut Hill Mall to buy a sapphire and diamond engagement ring. I chose that jewelry store because my mother had almost married Dick Shreve, turning him down at the last minute for my father.

  A week after that, Sue and I sat at a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris called Jacqueline Fenix in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Between the fish course and the meat course, our waiter handed Sue the following note he’d written at my request. She took it, thinking it was another wine list, and read the following message written in elegant script:

  PAR CE DÎNER DU 2 MAI 1988 AU

  RESTAURANT J. FENIX, À NEUILLY, J’OSE AVEC

  UN PEU D’APPRÉHENSION VOUS DEMANDER EN

  MARIAGE.

  Sue doesn’t read French, but when she got to “Mariage” she got the message, jumped up from her seat, and practically leaped over the table to hug me. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  The other diners in this small—maybe six tables—restaurant quickly picked up what was going on and started to clap. Eating came to a brief halt.

  Our waiter would have none of this, however, and quickly came to our table. “Madame, le poisson devient froid!” (Madam, the fish is getting cold!) In France, gastronomy trumps love, so Sue and I dutifully returned to our remarkable meal.

  When I had told Jamie that I planned to ask Sue to marry me in Paris, it was his idea that I ask the waiter to write the proposal. Even though he was grumpy about the fish being ignored, the waiter had enthusiastically written the actual proposal.

  Our wedding took place September 17 in Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, Preston Hannibal officiating because Peter Gomes wasn’t available. But Preston, whom we’d not known before, was great. At the start of the ceremony he asked that the doors be kept open, since just about everyone in Cambridge had been invited.

  We had eight bridesmaids, fourteen ushers, and 250 guests. I paid for it all—the ring, the trip, the wedding, the reception, and the honeymoon—with the advance I received on my first book, which was about the psychology of money. I co-wrote it with Bill Grace, a broker and the brother of Susan Galassi, who was married to my friend Jon.

  Everything went according to plan, with one added adornment. Lyn dressed Ned, the youngest of her five children, the ringbearer, in a Red Sox shirt. Leave it to Lyn. As Ned proceeded down the aisle, ring neatly tied to a cushion, a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin crept across his face because he knew Sue and I would be surprised at his outfit. It was the perfect touch, added by the master of unexpected perfect touches.

  At the reception, which was held at my old school, Fessenden, Lyn took me aside, gave me a kiss on my cheek, and said, “You finally did it. I love you, and I am so happy for you!”

  Sue and I have been married for twenty-eight years. Lucy was born July 16, 1989. Jack came May 12, 1992, and Tucker on June 14, 1995. They were all baptized at Christ Church in Cambridge.

  In addition to filling our house with children, Sue and I took various outsiders in. Maybe because Duckie and Uncle Jimmy so automatically took me in as a kid, and maybe because Sue is such a born sharer and caretaker, with the MMHC DNA in her bones, we both love to throw open our doors.

  When one of our close friends was having difficulty with his young adult daughter, she stayed with us a few fun months, then went home with the mission accomplished of giving both herself and her parents a break. The son of another friend lived with us for a few months when he was looking for a job, and when Lucy graduated from college, stayed about six months. He was a football player, a three-hundred-pound jolly guy, who I worried might break the bed, but he didn’t. We took in a man who goes to our church when he was having both medical and relationship problems and had to leave where he was living. He was a really smart man, interesting, raised Jewish but converted to Episcopal, and he was getting old. I think he stayed maybe a month or so. We were sad to see him leave, but happy he’d found both a new place to live and a new love.

  But the longest stay with us, by far, was by a man I hadn’t known at all nor had any connection with until we met. One day he came to my door looking for help with his ADD. I told him I had an office where he could see me, but he asked, since he’d come all this way, couldn’t I just see him now at home. I told him I couldn’t see him as a patient in my home, but I could talk to him as a fellow traveler on the road of life, or something like that.

  I invited him into our living room where we sat and talked for an hour or so. His name was Rex. He was in his late thirties and had moved east from his family home in Chicago to stay with his sister near Boston. A skilled handyman, he planned to move in with his sister and her husband and help renovate their house.

  Rex was a tall, good-looking guy with angular features. He looked the part of a carpenter—jeans, old work shoes, faded work shirt—and he had the natural buoyancy and joie-de-vivre that so many people with ADD exude. He’d found me because he’d read one of my books. While working for his sister, he also did some odd jobs for a family in Winthrop, and as payment they’d given him an old beat-up car, which is what he drove to my house.

  Turned out his sister had given him $10,000 when he started working for them, which Rex used to pay off bills he owed. Now, seven months later, his sister had not paid him any more, even though he’d been working twelve-hour days renovating her house. The friend he worked for in Winthrop told him he thought he was getting shafted.

  “I had this teacher,” I said to Rex, “who used to tell us a Russian proverb. ‘Be a sheep, and a wolf will appear.’ ”

  Rex laughed. “Well, I’ve been being a sheep for sure. The problem is, I don’t have anywhere else to live.”

  “So you have to let her exploit you like this? Tell you what, if you can’t make a better deal with her, and if my wife agrees, which I am pretty sure she will, you can live here until you find a steady job and can afford a place on your own.”

  I knew Sue would agree, but I didn’t expect Rex to follow up, for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that he had ADD. However, I was wrong. He moved in with us, lived in our third-floor bedroom, which has its own bath, and stayed for a year. He did odd jobs around the house in exchange for his room. He moved out when he found a job that paid him well enough to rent a place to live, but in a few months he lost that job, so he moved back in with us for another six months.

  Now, nine years after I first met him, he’s been employed steadily for the past seven years, is living with a woman whom he loves and who loves him back, and has saved enough money to buy a house.

  Maybe Sue and I are just part shepherd. Les Havens—who “got it” when it comes to being human better than any teacher I had—told me this quality would make me a valuable human being but also put me at great risk in this world. He said not to worry, though, because there was nothing I could do to change it anyway, and the world, which would never pay me back for any good I might do, and very well might punish me for it instead, was better off having me just like I was. Havens, who believed in God but rarely spoke of his faith, said to me, “You give, they receive. But St. Francis got it right. In giving, we receive. That’s why this is the best job in the world. But don’t you dare tell anyone I said that or I will lose my reputation as a sophisticated, cynical Harvard academic.”

  77.

  After my child psychiatry fellowship ended, I was offered a job as an attending physician on one of MMHC’s inpatient units. The position had been called superchief when I first arrived. Bill Beuscher had been my superchief; I thought I could pass along to others what he’d given to me. Though the pay was low, I’d long since bought into the romance and mission of this jalopy of a hospital, so I gratefully accepted the job.

  The man who hired me, Dr. Miles Shore, became head of the hospital in 1975. He had two titles, reflecting the dual oversight of MMHC. The Massachusetts Department of Mental Health named him supe
rintendent for running a state hospital; Harvard Medical School gave him an academic title, Bullard Professor of Psychiatry.

  As head of a psychiatric hospital, as well as a professor at Harvard, Miles was loved, hated, admired, scorned, envied, pitied, relied upon, competed with, or ignored, depending on who you were. Dr. Benaron said to me, “Miles killed Semrad.” It’s true he did not put Elvin Semrad on the pedestal Dr. Benaron did, but Miles was also trying to bring MMHC into the contemporary world of psychiatry, with its emphasis on the diagnostic manual, medication, community-based interventions, biology, genetics, epidemiology, social psychiatry, and a variety of other topics Dr. Benaron was less interested in. She championed the heart, and innovative ways of reaching people who were hard to reach. I actually don’t think Miles disagreed with her. He was just trying to bring the hospital up to date.

  Les Havens was not as blunt as Dr. Benaron—few were—but he also didn’t love Miles. When he’d had enough, he left his beloved MMHC for Cambridge Hospital. In a one-for-one trade, MMHC acquired the estimable George Vaillant from Cambridge.

  Miles did not have what so many of the prior greats at MMHC had in spades: charisma. Like his name, Miles was nerdy, tidy, and—to use a word I deplore—appropriate. I found him to be exactly what MMHC needed. Just as my family had found a welcome dose of normality in Tom Bliss, MMHC needed a dose of stable, by-the-book, research-based psychiatry. Above all else, Miles was sane. It is better to have a sane and stable person in charge of a mental hospital than a charismatic, unpredictable star.

  Dr. Shore gave me the job, but that didn’t mean he loved everything I did. For example, there was the cat.

  First, some background. When I took over the unit, Alan Brown was chief resident, overseeing a group of six residents and two psych interns in their first year. Alan was a gifted, brilliant man. Tall and thin, with a dark beard, Harvard undergrad and Yale medical school, Jewish parents and a stunningly beautiful WASPy blonde nurse practitioner wife and two little kids at home. Knowing suffering in the Jewish tradition, he knew humor even better.

  More by-the-book than me, Alan was nevertheless willing to try new approaches. I had been one of his supervisors the previous year, and we often laughed about a married couple, Marcia and Jay, he presented to me. “They say they feel uncomfortable meeting in my office,” Alan told me. “They’re both pretty thought-disordered, and the confines of my office make them paranoid.”

  “Have you tried leaving the door open?” I asked. “That can help.”

  “Yup, tried that,” Alan said, shaking his head.

  “Have they said where they might feel more comfortable?”

  “Well, yes,” Alan replied, “they said they’d like to meet in the main cafeteria up the hill at the Brigham. But that’s out of the question, of course.”

  “Why?” I asked, as usual pushing the bounds of conventional wisdom in favor of innovative treatment. “I know it sounds off the wall, but why not go where they feel most comfortable?”

  Alan laughed. He pulled on his beard. He always tried to treat me with respect, but I could tell this idea was putting his forbearance to the test. “You want me to meet with these two thought-disordered patients in the Brigham cafeteria? Surrounded by the general public? You actually think that’s a good idea?”

  “I know it’s unusual, but why not give it a try?” I replied. “What’s the downside? Are they at risk for becoming violent?”

  “Well, they never have been violent, but then again, we’ve never met in the Brigham cafeteria surrounded by total strangers!” he replied, slapping his knee for emphasis as he laughed.

  The following week Alan and I met again in my office for supervision. He had reluctantly taken my suggestion and met with the couple in the Brigham cafeteria. It turned out not to have been such a great idea. His description of it still makes me laugh out loud.

  “So there we are at a table, just the three of us, right in the middle of the hubbub of the Brigham cafeteria. Right off the bat, some cardiology fellow comes by, I could tell by her ID, and asks if she could sit down with us. ‘Sure!’ Marcia says. I practically tackle the cardiology fellow trying to stop her, saying, ‘I’m really sorry, but we are having kind of a private meeting right now.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ says the fellow, looking quite nonplussed by my near assault, and goes away shaking her head, like what is this world coming to, looking for another table. ‘Why did you do that?’ Marcia demands of me.

  “ ‘Well, I thought we needed some privacy for our session, don’t you agree? Do you both feel more comfortable here than in my office? Should we just move back to my office, maybe?’ I ask, almost pleading.

  “ ‘Feels way better here,’ Jay responds, ‘way better,’ and then in a full, loud voice announces, ‘Marcia won’t give me as much sex as I need! I need more sex!’

  “ ‘You’re just a fucking machine,’ Marcia replies, in an equally loud voice. ‘Sex, sex, sex, it’s all you ever want!’

  “Of course, I am looking around like I have ants in my pants, praying no one is hearing this, but knowing that they couldn’t not be hearing it. I’m about to crawl under the table when Jay suddenly blurts out, ‘Marcia, why don’t we do it right here, right here on the floor in the cafeteria? Wouldn’t that be far out?’

  “ ‘Jay, you are such a romantic,’ Marcia replies, ‘it’s what I love about you, but no, honey, I don’t think we should do it right here, we could get arrested, and I’m pretty sure Dr. Brown wouldn’t approve, am I right about that, Dr. Brown?’

  “Of course, at that moment I want to hug Marcia, but I don’t. I’m racking my brain trying to think of a nice, quiet topic we could discuss to calm down this conversation, so I ask, ‘Are your meds at the right level for each of you?’ I knew they were because I’d just checked, so I figured this was safe.

  “ ‘Fuck the meds!’ Jay said, slamming his palm down on the table. ‘Fuck the fucking meds. I want to fuck on the floor.’

  “ ‘Honey, Jay, calm down, OK, we gotta be presentable here, or Dr. Brown won’t meet with us here anymore.’

  “ ‘That’s right. Inside voices,’ I said reflexively, as if I were talking to one of my kids. Anyway, with Marcia’s help we survived without getting thrown out by security. We talked about meds, and then I bribed them with an offer of buying each of them a coffee and a hot dog if we could take the session back to my office. I know we’re not supposed to bribe patients, but desperate times, y’know.”

  In my office, I apologized through tears of laughter. “That was my mistake. I just thought if they wanted to meet in the cafeteria, why not?”

  With a wide smile, Alan said, “I guess we found out why not. I’m glad I did it, though. Truly I am. I will never forget it, and I never would have done it without your encouragement.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” I said with a slightly apologetic smile.

  So when Alan and I started running the unit together, we already knew each other well. We did our best to teach the residents what we thought they needed to know, and to help them get along with the staff. Alan did a great job.

  We both liked to innovate. For example, Alan started a “No” group. This was for all the patients who rejected out of hand the idea of psychotherapy of any kind. It quickly became the best-attended group on the ward. Without knowing it, the patients were getting the benefit of a group—sitting with other people and communicating—while protesting the usefulness of a group, or any other form of therapy. The “No” group was a huge success.

  Back to the cat. For my part, I’d always wanted to bring an animal onto the ward. My preference would have been a dog, but dogs need too much care and attention for a psych unit.

  I thought an animal could connect with the many cut-off patients we had—the schizophrenics, the quietly psychotic—as well as pretty much everyone else, including staff.

  But when the people in charge of risk management got wind of my idea, you’d have thought I was proposing bringin
g in Ebola-infected bats.

  The objections began with medical issues, and escalated from there. “What if a patient is allergic? What if the cat brings in a dead mouse and the patients freak out? Do our insurance policies cover cats? What about cat-scratch fever? What if the cat dies? What if patients get jealous over who the cat loves most?” The objections went on and on … and on.

  Finally I just went out and got a cat. Alan and I announced at Community Meeting that we now had a cat on the unit. Jake, the man in admin who’d raised the most objections, said to me, “You had no right to do it and you will regret this. Mark my words.”

  We had a contest among the patients and staff to name the cat. I liked Alan’s suggestion best: Eddie-puss. But another name, Mister Fenwood, won, after Fenwood Road, the road the hospital was on. Unimaginative, but serviceable.

  The patients loved Mister Fenwood so much that the cat quickly got fat from being overfed. Patients took turns emptying the kitty litter; they held bake sales to raise money to pay for the litter, cat food, and vet bills. Later, they helped supervise each other to prevent overfeeding.

  One day, however, despite the patients’ supervision, the cat fell out a window that had been inadvertently left open. The unit was on the third floor. Luckily, Mister Fenwood did not die, but he did break his hip. We had two options: We could either put the cat down or pay three hundred dollars to have the hip surgically repaired. The patients’ bake sale fund had a balance of only about twenty dollars.

  Jake, the chief admin, could hardly conceal his delight. “I told you this cat would lead to no good. Now you have a bunch of unhappy patients on your hands and you have a cat that has to be put down. What are you gonna tell them? That you got carried away with another cockamamie idea of yours and weren’t smart enough to say no when you should have? I’m tellin’ ya, Hallowell, this never should have happened. It’s all on you.”