Perhaps these weren’t contradictions at all, but merely the normal twists and turns of one girl’s troubled life. Evans wrote her report from a wealth of information but limited first-hand knowledge; she had to rely primarily on Tillie (“our informant,” as my grandmother is called frequently in the report), and on hospital charts, social service records, and social worker Jean Powell, the family’s primary contact at Harper Hospital for the four years before the crisis that sent Annie to Eloise.
The dominant voice is my grandmother’s, that “complaining, whining Jewish woman” whose antagonism toward “the Welfare” and the hospital mixes with her guilt and anxiety to produce…more contradictions. On the one hand, Tillie wants to get help for her ailing daughter and escape the unrelenting anxiety that has made her family into virtual prisoners of Annie’s behavior, so she portrays her daughter as very sick, so sick that she and Hyman cannot possibly help her, sick enough to justify sending Annie to a hospital for the mentally ill. This is the Tillie who says she “realized quite early that Annie ‘didn’t learn as she should,’” and tries, unsuccessfully, to place Annie in the state’s home for the feeble-minded.
At the same time, Tillie is a proud woman, and she does not want the world, as represented by Mona Evans and all those people at “the Welfare,” to think that she and her family have done anything other than their best, or that her younger daughter is defective beyond repair. This is the Tillie who tells Evans that Annie “always” liked to read (spending a great deal of time with fairy books, Evans noted), that Annie loved to sew, embroider, and knit, that she had been “very much interested” in millinery until her problems began the year before. This is the Tillie who asserts that Annie “has always enjoyed mingling with the other children, was very happy in school, participating fully in all the activities there, and being deliriously happy going to the Grace Bentley Camp”—a camp for disabled children—“the past two or three summers.”
What to believe?
The central mystery in Evans’s report revolves around Annie’s state of mind. Here there is no contradiction—everyone agrees that she has undergone some sort of transformation and that life in apartment 203 at 2205 West Euclid Street has become a nightmare—but there is no agreement about when it happened or why. For the first two decades of her life, as far as anyone knew, Annie showed no signs of mental illness. Her leg problems made her a candidate for the Leland School for Crippled Children, spending five years there before moving up to junior high school at the Oakman School for Crippled Children, where she lost ground academically. When she finally graduated from the ninth grade in June 1937, at age eighteen, she “was given a diploma because it was felt that this would encourage her, not because she had actually completed this level of work.”
This faux diploma capped a difficult year. The fall of 1936 began with the amputation of her right leg, and the next six months brought rehabilitation and readjustment as Annie learned the ups and downs of walking with an artificial limb. More setbacks followed graduation from Oakman: A stint at the Girls’ Vocational School, where she went to learn the basics of millinery so she could get a job, ended prematurely because the high school’s administrators felt she was “too disturbing” to other students.
Disappointment turned to discouragement, then to depression. “During the winter of 1939 and 1940,” Evans wrote, “patient seemed to be suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that she would never be able to live a normal life like other girls have. She began to display interest in boys and yet she could not look forward to marriage…She began to lose all interest in activities inside and outside the home, no longer finding consolation in books, in sewing, or attending movies, or listening to the radio, and would spend all her time sitting in a chair, refusing to even go out of the house. At first, the family had to coax her to eat. She would not take a bath unless she was continually reminded” to do so.
Annie’s interest in boys worried her mother, Evans wrote. “It was our impression, as the mother talked, that she was alarmed over the patient’s very evident interest in the opposite sex and has done everything she could to repress any expression of these interests.” Bertha described her sister as “boy crazy,” and told Evans that Annie “likes to talk to strange men.”
There is one startling claim in the report, stated but also discounted, that might explain Annie’s withdrawal from the world in the winter of 1939 and her fear of anyone outside her family. No one gave it much credence at the time, and I have no basis for giving it greater weight now. Knowing the impact of these words, and the scant evidence to support them, I even find it hard to repeat them.
In November 1939, Annie said, she was sexually assaulted. “The patient tells the story that she met a strange man on the street and he took her into an alleyway, assaulting her,” Evans reported, under “Psychosexual History.” “There seems to be a good deal of doubt among the members of the family as to whether this event actually took place.”
That’s all Evans wrote. She didn’t describe the severity of the assault, or whether Annie told her family about it right away, or whether the family reported the attack to the police. Evans didn’t say whether a physical examination was done or contemplated. Maybe she didn’t think those details mattered to the psychiatrists reading her report; what mattered was describing Annie’s state of mind, what Annie believed.
But what do I believe?
On March 19, 1940, something happened at the Harper Hospital clinic that sent Annie’s state of mind tumbling from fearful to something worse. Or maybe nothing much happened—maybe my family, mystified by Annie’s accelerating decline and looking for an explanation for the inexplicable, fastened on a minor incident and gave it significance beyond its meaning, perhaps because they had not known how much significance to give Annie’s account of being sexually assaulted.
The Evans report supports either possibility. It describes how Annie went by herself to the clinic, as Jean Powell had been encouraging her to do. Tillie had made the appointment, concerned that Annie, who suffered from bouts of severe constipation, had gone a week without a bowel movement. Tillie was reluctant to allow her daughter to make the trip alone, but bowing to Mrs. Powell’s desire to promote Annie’s sense of independence, Tillie stayed home, and “has blamed herself ever since.”
Why did Annie agree to go? What forces, internal or external, convinced her to give up the familiar confines of her chair, the one where she had been holding herself hostage, refusing to eat unless coaxed or bathe unless asked? Did she resist? Ask her mother to come with her? If she did any of these things, the report doesn’t say so. In fact, it says nothing at all about Annie’s journey to the clinic, as if such a trip were as routine as, say, eating or bathing.
Annie arrived at the clinic to find a long line of patients. “It was necessary,” Evans wrote, “for her to remain in the waiting room for an hour or two, and during that time, she made every effort to call attention to herself, particularly by pulling up her dress to show her artificial leg. Then she fainted.”
That must have caused quite a stir, a young woman with a wooden leg collapsing in a crowded waiting room. Whatever the cause of her swoon—“it was later determined that she had come to the clinic without eating breakfast”—Annie “had to be put to bed for several hours.” The staff examined her, found nothing alarming, and sent her home.
When she showed up, hours later than expected, she was, in the words of her family, “an entirely different girl.” Evans put these words between quotation marks. Not just different, but “entirely” different? Different how? Different from the girl who had been refusing for months to eat? Different from the girl who wouldn’t leave the house? Different from the girl who wouldn’t cross the street?
Evans does not attempt to calibrate the difference. She merely reports the family’s alarm at Annie’s altered state—she appeared pale and sallow, believed that “the world was a different place,” and said “everyone was laughing at her, wishing to see her in her g
rave.” She even asked her mother what kind of casket she intended to buy for her. “She thought no one could see it as she did,” Evans wrote. “She screamed during the night, kept wanting to get up, and seemed to think that she would die if she stayed in bed.”
She insisted, though, that she wanted to live. She wouldn’t let “them” get her.
No one could say what, if anything, had happened to her, including Annie. When Bertha saw her sister after that clinic visit, she immediately called Jean Powell, saying that Annie was “out of her head” and acting “crazy.” Bertha was so upset that Powell arranged for Annie to see Dr. Stephen Bohn, a neurologist at Harper, who issued a diagnosis on April 4: “Congenital cerebral anomaly.” Translation: brain damage at birth.
How that diagnosis related to mental illness is yet another mystery to pursue. Evans’s report does not say what name the Eloise doctors gave to Annie’s condition. The 1972 report from Northville, offering a “final diagnosis,” gives two: “Mental Deficiency (moderate) and Schizophrenia (chronic) Undifferentiated Type.” Was she also regarded as moderately retarded in 1940? Was schizophrenia the initial diagnosis as well? Did that word, schizophrenia, describe the same symptoms in 1972 or 1940 as it does now?
Equally puzzling was Bohn’s recommendation about what to do next. According to Evans, Bohn thought that Annie “should be placed in an institution such as Lapeer and that she should be hospitalized at Eloise in the interim.” The interim? I didn’t know much about the Michigan mental health system, but I knew enough to wonder about the logic of this recommendation. Lapeer served the “feeble-minded”; Eloise treated the mentally ill. Two different problems, two different populations. If Bohn saw Annie as a candidate for Lapeer, why send her to Eloise? And if he meant for her to stay there “in the interim,” how did that interim turn into thirty-one years?
Almost in passing, the 1940 report mentions that Bohn’s course of action required the family to file a petition seeking Annie’s commitment to Eloise, and that when Annie was “served notice of the court hearing,” she insisted that she wasn’t insane.
A court hearing. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be an official record. Perhaps it would shed light on why Annie’s claim of sanity had failed to keep her out of Eloise. But did the court record still exist? All I have is Annie’s name—no file number, no date, no judge’s name. Would that be enough? And even if the court could find it, would they let me look at it? Are involuntary commitments an open record? I know, from my inquiries in 2000, that getting access to mental health records is never easy.
Back then, when my Lansing contact told me that Michigan’s 1974 mental health code—the “Hospital Protection Act,” as she had sarcastically called it—did not allow me access to Annie’s medical records without a court order, I couldn’t believe it. Thinking there must be other options for a surviving next of kin, I consulted a former director of Michigan’s mental health department (someone I knew slightly), who consulted a friend in the attorney general’s office. Sorry, the former director reported, but it was true, I needed a court order; under Michigan law, nephews don’t have the same rights as spouses or direct descendants. At the time, I wasn’t prepared to go that route, which promised legal hearings, lawyers, family drama, traveling back and forth to Detroit, and a significant investment of time as well as money.
Like many legal debates, both sides have their points, and neither side is wrong. Openness destroys privacy, but privacy prevents openness. The rights of individuals and the rights of family members aren’t the same, and favoring one can undermine the other. Still, in the matter of Annie Cohen vs. the State of Michigan, I can’t see how the state’s position has much to do with Annie or her privacy. She’s dead, as are her parents and her sister. But the family’s genetic heirs are alive, blood relatives who might benefit from knowing something about the origins of Annie’s ailments. Mona Evans’s report had yielded some clues, including the hieroglyphic “congenital cerebral anomaly” diagnosis. Was there a genetic basis for that? Maybe it’s impossible to get a definitive answer, but without more information, we wouldn’t even know that.
Beyond that, there’s this question: How can we, as a society, overcome the shame long associated with the mentally ill if state laws mandate that their history be kept in the shadows?
On a bleak day in March, I visit the National Archives and the Library of Congress to make a list of every family living on the same block as Mom and Annie in the 1930s, using census records and Detroit city directories. I’m on the lookout for a few names that I found in Mom’s effects, including a woman known to me only by her first name: Faye. Mom had written Faye’s name in the margins of several photos from 1943, giving her a status not shared by other friends. If I can find Faye, perhaps she will be my guide to the life that Mom and Annie had before Eloise. But I’ll need to move quickly—if Faye (or anyone else from Mom’s crowd) is still alive, she’ll be in her mid-eighties at least, older if she was born in the same year as Mom.
It’s my first visit to the Archives, and I’m surprised that the entire collection of microfilmed census rolls, all the way back to the first set from 1790, fits along one wall in a large room, millions upon millions upon millions of names housed in just thirty-five cabinets of eleven drawers each. By federal law, original census records—the handwritten collection sheets with every street address, and every person living there—become public seventy-two years after the count. Unfortunately for me, that means the census clock stops at the Fifteenth Census in 1930; the 1940 census, the one that would list all of Mom’s neighbors in the very month when Annie is “going crazy,” won’t be released until 2012.
I scan the microfilmed pages, column after column listing “place of birth” as Russia or Poland and “mother tongue” as Yiddish or Polish or Russian, and I spot a dozen Fayes. Which, if any, is her? I know almost nothing about her, nothing that helps me distinguish one from another. Without other identifying clues—the first name of a brother, her father’s occupation—this search isn’t just time-consuming, it’s time wasted.
I also don’t see my grandparents’ name. Do I have the wrong address? Did the census-taker miss them altogether, another immigrant family uncounted? Then I see the problem: Enumerator Henry J. Lingohr had written “Hyman, Hyman” for the family living at 1026 Medbury and then, realizing his error, crossed out the first Hyman, but failed to substitute any last name. How appropriate. Without the Medbury address, gleaned from Annie’s Eloise records, their entry would have remained invisible to me as well.
I peer through this window into the past, thinking how simply it reveals what my mother sought so assiduously to hide: Hyman, 42, Tillie, 39, Bertha, 13, Annie, 10. A family of four, not three; two sisters, not an only child. Seeing Annie’s name is no surprise at this point, but it’s still a relief, another confirmation of her existence.
What I don’t expect, what makes me stop and readjust the microfilm reader’s focus, is a fifth name at 1026 Medbury: Nathan Shlien, boarder, age 34. Who’s that? Mom never mentioned anyone by that name. He must be Tillie’s relative; Shlien is a close spelling of her maiden name, Schlein. Maybe he was visiting for a few days, and happened to be there when the census-taker made his rounds. Nathan would be dead by now, but maybe he had children, and maybe I could find them to see if they knew Mom and Annie.
Find them? What makes me think I can find anyone? I can’t interview Mom, or Annie, I don’t know Faye’s last name, I don’t know where to start looking for Nathan Shlien’s children, or even if he had any children. Am I pursuing a fool’s errand?
As I leave the Archives, I smile ruefully at the inscription on a statue that stands sentry at the researchers’ entrance: “What Is Past Is Prologue.”
Not in my family. Not yet.
{ FOUR }
Unlocking the Door
Mom and her “Duke”: Ft. Lewis, Washington, 1944
It’s the 1960–61 school year. I’m in trouble with my third-grade teacher at Alex Dow Eleme
ntary, although I don’t know it. Whenever I finish my classwork ahead of time, I’m supposed to occupy myself by choosing a book from the “library” shelf in our portable classroom, a trailer set up on the school’s gravel playground to deal with the baby-boom enrollment bulge. But it’s February now and I’ve read all the good ones—not so much because I’m a fast reader, but because the shelf doesn’t hold that many books; for months, the teacher has let me take them home to finish them.
With no books left to read, I’m following the teacher’s instructions for what to do when I have nothing to do: I’m sitting quietly at my desk, arms folded, lips zipped, unaware that my teacher thinks I’m lying about my reading progress and mocking her by assuming the folded-arms position. She complains to the principal, who calls Mom, who questions me casually, never letting on that she and the principal have been conferring. What am I reading? Mom asks me. Do I read a lot in class? What do I want to read next? Oh, my, really? You’ve finished all those books? Have you told your teacher? You did?
A few weeks later, we get a new teacher. I never learn what happened to her predecessor.
Sash tells me to call her aunt Medji in California. Medji, she says, knows something.
Medji, now in her seventies, comes from Sash’s other family—she and Sash’s mom, Esther, are sisters. Medji is the youngest of the three Golde girls; Esther was the oldest. Sash had been telling Medji about Annie, and my detective work, and Medji remembered something from long ago, a few words overheard while babysitting for Mom in the mid–1940s. Sash cut short the conversation, mindful of my concern about creating false memories by telling people too much of what we already know.
Annie's Ghosts Page 6
