The Flock

by Joan Frances Casey

  By the time Ray had completed high school, the family depended on the income of the children to survive. Ray’s father was killed in a factory accident, and two of Ray’s older brothers died fighting in World War II. One brother left the family for the priesthood; a sister became a nun. Two other brothers moved to Richmond, Virginia. Ray was the only man in the house.

  Ray’s sisters Christine, Cathy, and Marie, who were also still living at home, worked as store clerks while they waited to get married. Ray worked in his uncle’s hardware store and brought most of his salary home to Mother.

  He lived another life as well. “Me and Tom Clancy,” he later boasted, “broke into them places that I worked once fixing pinball machines. I knew them machines real good. We just jiggled the slots and took out all the money.”

  Ray told stories of how he and Tom set up bar bets that provoked brawls. When the others fought, Ray and Tom made for the door with the money. There were stories of wild car chases and equally wild women.

  Ray made it clear that the women in his life were objects. His friendships were with men, Tom in particular. In his early twenties, Ray felt restless and bored; he wanted to get out of town for a while but couldn’t just walk away. Ray decided that he would get married and join the Navy.

  Ray chose Nancy Fitzgerald, the sister of his friend John. Nancy was a farm girl from the other side of the tracks. She was young, pretty, and shy.

  Nancy’s parents were also immigrants, and she had been raised by strict Catholic rules. There, however, the similarity with Ray’s large, protective family ended. Nancy had spent most of her childhood watching her mother go through a succession of stepfathers. Nancy never knew her biological father. The men who shared her mother’s bed—each of them for no more than a few years—either abused Nancy or ignored her.

  Nancy found solace at the local convent, where she felt love and security that seemed absent at home. On her thirteenth birthday, Nancy asked to join the order. Although some girls were admitted at that age, Nancy was denied and counseled to ask again in five years. She decided that she was wanted at the convent no more than at home.

  She turned her attention toward school, and there her brilliance was rewarded. She finished high school early and began to study blood chemistry at the local college. While in school, she worked as a lab technician at a nearby hospital.

  On her eighteenth birthday, a year of college-level biology courses behind her, she married Ray, with little thought as to other options. Nancy felt trapped by her family’s poverty. She was grateful to this man who, in his own words, “picked her up out of the gutter.”

  “She was some baby doll,” Ray said of Nancy. Pregnant with their first child, Nancy stayed in Syracuse while Ray left for his adventures at sea. She didn’t mind: being Mrs. Ray Casey gave her a ticket to the right side of town. She moved in with her mother-in-law, worked at the lab, and gratefully brought her salary home to her new family. She grew close to Ray’s sister Marie, who also had a husband in the service.

  Ray loved his three years in the Navy. “Stole an A-rab’s horses once,” he later confided; “turned out they was owned by some damn sheik or something, and me and my buddy got sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. We was sure lucky the U.S. government got us out.

  “Seen every country in this world except Russia,” he later reminisced. Ray claimed to have gotten drunk in a bar in every port. He said Argentina was the most beautiful country, Australia the friendliest. He loved those years so much that, whenever he felt particularly trapped, he’d pull out his wrinkled maritime certifications and sigh: “Maybe I’ll just go back to sea.”

  It was to meet his “family responsibilities” that Ray left the Navy. He returned to Syracuse, packed up Nancy and his three-year-old daughter, Carol, and headed for Richmond, where his older brother had gotten him a job in a garment factory. Ray bought a small house outside of the city and settled into “doing right by his family.” Nancy felt terribly homesick for the life she had known in Syracuse, but eventually loneliness overcame shyness, and she made friends with the other young mothers in the neighborhood.

  Soon Nancy recognized that her new life had its advantages. Here no one knew about her past. Her wise, well-traveled husband taught her city manners. Since Ray said he could support his family, Nancy stayed home to raise Carol, and to wait for the baby boy who would complete her family.

  In 1955, Nancy was pregnant again. This was the third time since she and Ray had moved to Richmond; she had miscarried twice before. Nancy felt a bond with this pregnancy, different from what she had felt at the same point with the last two. This time she knew she would carry the baby full-term. Nancy would give Ray his son.

  In July, Ray drove Nancy and Carol back to Syracuse, where Nancy would be cared for by family before and after the baby’s birth. When she was strong enough, she would return to Virginia with her daughter and longed-for son.

  Nancy felt indulged by being back in New York. Despite an uncomfortable pregnancy—“I threw up for nine months,” she said—her big belly gave her status, which she shared with her sister-in-law. Christine and Nancy, whose babies were due the same day, stayed with Ray’s mother; they went to the hospital hours apart on the morning of August 22, 1955. Later that evening, Christine gave birth to a son; and Nancy returned home, for her labor pains had subsided. When Nancy visited newborn Matthew a few days later, she smiled at Christine over her rippling stomach. “It will be such fun for our boys to grow up together,” she said.

  Nancy never wavered in her belief that she was carrying Ray’s son. She fancied that her miscarriages had been girl babies, and that her womb would reject all except the baby fit to carry the name she had picked out years ago—Joseph Raymond Casey.

  Nancy awoke in agony on August 31, the day before her twenty-eighth birthday. The intermittent contractions she had experienced for ten days were nothing like this. Brother-in-law Jack took her back to the hospital and called Ray, who was still in Richmond. “You better come up,” Jack said; “the doctors say it’s the real thing.”

  The doctor and nurses kept close to Nancy’s side, listening to the baby’s heartbeat and trying to calm her. Although she had given birth before, she was more anxious than most first-time mothers, and her anxiety was working against her body. After she had been in labor a full twenty-four hours, and the fetal heart rate had become noticeably weaker, the doctor performed an emergency cesarean. He carefully uncoiled the umbilical cord, which was wrapped around the baby’s neck, and got the slightly blue infant into oxygen.

  “You have a beautiful baby girl,” the doctor told Ray. “She’s in some distress, but I think she’s going to make it.” The doctor gave Nancy the news in the recovery room. Nancy began to protest, then realized that she didn’t have the strength. A girl. That wasn’t possible. “Somebody made a mistake,” Nancy said, and drifted back to sleep.

  The next day, Nancy had to accept the truth. No other babies had been born September 1. No mistake, no chance for a mix-up. She had given birth to a girl. It was hard for Nancy to believe, harder still since she hadn’t seen the baby yet. The baby was small, only five pounds, and not breathing well. Nancy hoped it would die. She had no need for another girl.

  Nancy hurt from surgery, from the ordeal of labor, and from the knowledge that she had failed Ray. Even though Ray acted happy with the baby, she knew her husband well enough to recognize the undertone of bitter disappointment.

  Nancy had no interest in naming the child, so Ray did it on his own. He named her Joan—because that was close to the “Joseph” Nancy had selected—and Frances because Saint Francis was a particular favorite of his. Joan Frances Casey. Even as he watched the baby struggle to breathe, Ray saw, through the glass wall of the newborn nursery, a resemblance to him that was less evident in Carol.

  Ray willed his strength into the incubator. “Come on, peanut, get strong,” he muttered, and watched through the night to make sure she did just that. This kid, Ray decided, was his specia
l kid. Maybe a girl of his own would be OK.

  Within a few days, the baby was out of danger, but Nancy’s recovery was slow.

  Three weeks after the baby’s birth, Nancy took her new daughter home to Richmond.

  She had to admit that the hospital nurses were right to say this was an easy baby. It slept through the night, ate on schedule, and rarely cried. Sometimes when she fed the baby, she pretended that it was a boy; she felt some love for the child then. “Joey, my little Joey,” she crooned while the infant’s hand played in her long brown hair, “are you my big boy?”

  Other times Nancy felt nothing toward it. She would stare at the baby as it lay still, not crying, not moving, not sleeping. The infant seemed content to study objects or the movement of light on the wall for hours at a time. Nancy felt unnerved by this abnormal behavior.

  The baby perked up when Ray was around. Ray headed straight for the crib the minute he walked in the door from work. He lifted the baby high in the air and told her in animated ways what had happened to him that day. She listened intently to her father’s voice and made noises right back. The baby’s first smiles were for Daddy.

  The more the baby responded to her father, the more distant Nancy became. “It’s not fair. I’m her mother. She should like me best.” Nancy didn’t see that the infant was sensing her mother’s disappointment as surely as she felt her father’s acceptance.

  Nancy picked the baby up only when Joan Frances needed to be fed or changed. And she told Carol to keep away from the crib. “You leave that baby alone. You’ll make her cry,” she told the eight-year-old.

  Nancy had to admit that Ray loved the baby, even if it wasn’t a boy. He referred to the baby as Jo or Joan Frances as she did, but also called her Missy or Pixie or other crazy baby names. Nancy thought Ray looked very unmanly playing with the baby. It irked her to see him babbling baby talk or rocking the baby to sleep. She wished he would pay some attention to her and to Carol. “You’ve got two daughters, you know,” she snapped.

  Nancy saw innumerable differences between Joan Frances and the infant Carol had been. Carol was a screaming, colicky baby. This one was quiet, too quiet. Carol’s constant crying had driven Nancy crazy, but at least she had known there was a baby in the house. This one didn’t seem to care about anything except her father. She even refused to crawl.

  One morning, in the baby’s sixth month, while Ray was at work and Carol at school, Nancy placed the baby in the middle of a yellow blanket on the kitchen floor. She set an assortment of toys on the blanket, just out of the infant’s reach, then picked up the jack-in-the-box and turned the crank. The baby responded to the sound by looking up at Mommy, who was crouched down, long hair hanging over her shoulder.

  “That’s right, Joan Frances,” Nancy said, “come get your toy. Come to Mommy.” The baby gurgled and reached. She could see the soft cloud of Mommy’s hair; her fingers remembered its softness. She reached and felt only air. Mommy and the toy were too far away. She made no move to crawl.

  Mommy picked up the child’s favorite stuffed monkey and shook it so the monkey’s head waved from side to side. The baby liked her monkey. The monkey’s fur tickled her skin, and the hard plastic hat and monkey face felt good in her mouth. She stretched her arm out, but couldn’t reach the monkey. She began to cry. But still she wouldn’t crawl.

  “Come on, you can do it.” Hands picked her up. When the baby opened her eyes, she was on her hands and knees.

  She froze. Whenever she got on her hands and knees in the crib and rocked so that the crib hit the wall, Mommy or Daddy came in to put her on her back. Now she didn’t move, waiting for Mommy to act. When nothing happened, she pushed with her hands and tucked her legs until she was sitting again.

  “Look, I’ll move the jack-in-the-box closer.” Mommy’s voice dripped sweetness from an angry edge. The box played its tune and the baby reached out. This time she reached too far and threw herself off balance. Her hands hit the floor at the edge of the blanket. Now she was on her hands and knees.

  The sticky, cold linoleum caught her interest, and she slapped a hand on the floor. It made a nice noise. She did it again, chortling at her new discovery. A brown shoe with a skinny sharp heel flattened her hand to the floor, and pain shattered the baby’s being.

  Her first internal struggle took place. The part that was becoming the Jo personality wanted to think about this turn of events and determine what had happened to cause the pain. Was it the floor? Was it the shoe? The jack-in-the-box? She had better avoid all three until she could figure it out….

  The part that was becoming the Joan Frances personality howled in anger and pain. She hurt. She wanted Mommy to fix it….

  The part that was becoming the Missy personality longed for the safety of her crib, lined with pastel beads that she could differentiate but not yet name. She could look at the beads and feel safe….

  The three desires, the three forming personalities, raged against one another, evenly matched. Then, abruptly, Missy won. She pushed the two new personalities into safe mental pockets and proceeded to follow the memory of her crib deep into her mind.

  Nancy put the limp child back in the crib and wondered why God had punished her with this.

  8.

  I helped Lynn and the other parts by showing up for the sessions. In return, Lynn inadvertently helped me by letting me see my life from a new perspective. I had some irrational fears. Now those phobias were shown to have causes, causes that made Lynn’s diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder more plausible to me.

  For example, if Nancy had really stepped on her infant daughter’s hand, it was not surprising that I would feel an irrational fear and disgust whenever I looked at high-heeled shoes. I told people that I didn’t wear high heels because at five ten I didn’t need to be any taller. But, truthfully, I loathed them.

  If Missy had felt confined to small dark places by fear or by physical incarceration, my terror of elevators made sense. No matter how long I scolded myself and paced in front of an elevator, I simply could not force myself to enter the small boxlike enclosure unless another passenger got on. I was late for many appointments because I had to wait in the lobby for someone to come along and ride with me. I never spoke to these stranger-guardians on elevators; their presence alone made me feel safe. But I broke out in a clammy sweat if my unknowing escort punched the button for a floor before my destination.

  In the past, I hadn’t thought much about my phobias. Now I was like a scientist attempting to find causes for newly recognized effects. Linking the early-childhood memories to the phobias didn’t stop the irrational fears, but it did give me new respect for Lynn. No therapist had even understood the voices, and Lynn was showing me how important they were. Their effect was more pervasive than occasional suicidal episodes. I recognized that they controlled my life even on good days. I was ready to exorcise these ghosts from my past, once and for all. It upset me that Lynn continued to tell the Jo part that she, Jo, would someday be less confused.

  Lynn often pointed out to me the contradictory feelings expressed by the different personalities. I couldn’t help noticing that Lynn was being inconsistent. How did she think that she was going to help me feel more comfortable—as she promised—and also help the Jo part feel more comfortable? Maybe it was just her inexperience in treating multiples.

  When professionals say that they don’t know what they’re going to do, it usually means they are not going to do anything. Nancy often said, “You help the patients you can and don’t worry about those you can’t.” But Lynn made a mistake in encouraging me to think that she really cared about me and about the other parts as well. She couldn’t suddenly become formal and cold, or pretend I was cured. Lynn’s only way out was by talking to someone who could say with certainty that I was not a multiple personality. If someone with authority told Lynn that she had been wrong, she could conveniently forget or reinterpret all she had seen. Then she could terminate treatment with a clear conscience.


  9.

  DIARY    June 8, 1981

  I’ve now been treating Ms. Casey for three months and have told her that I would be professionally irresponsible if I didn’t seek a consultation.

  Jo, who seems to be what the clinical literature refers to as the “core” or “host” personality, exploits my admitted ignorance about treating multiples when I try to tell her she was abused.

  Renee wavers but usually sides with her partner, Steve, in saying that the disorder doesn’t exist. She agrees that she’s not playing “a game” but doesn’t like hearing her condition labeled MPD.

  Joan Frances would betray her mother in accepting the diagnosis. That personality won’t even listen to me talk about it.

  Missy doesn’t care what I call it as long as she feels safe and loved.

  The Robin and Reagan personalities are probably the only ones who would have no trouble admitting the diagnosis, and I haven’t seen them in weeks!

  I have no doubt that the personalities are real; each behaves consistently, no matter how many days elapse between visits with them. I cannot question Jo’s claims that she often experiences no intervening time between sessions with me. For example, she has “come to” in my office, picking up the conversation that she left last time without realizing that days have passed. More than once, I’ve listened to Jo resume, in mid-thought, a week-old conversation. I’ve become scrambled and given up, unable to find my own thread of memory to lead me back to the previous discussion. When Jo realizes that time has passed, she’s humiliated by her faux pas but able and willing to provide enough details so that I too can pick up where that last conversation left off.