Hovermale has taken a yellow highlighter to her copy of Annie’s records, and her markings prompt my next question. “Did the report’s description of Annie strike you as contradictory?” I ask. “I mean, she has this low IQ score and Dr. Bohn wants to send her to Lapeer, to the institution for the feeble-minded, but at the same time, Annie’s insightful enough to say she won’t ever have a ‘normal’ life or be independent.”
The same thought had occurred to Hovermale, who warns against relying on IQ test results too heavily. “We know nothing about how they were administered and what was going on with Annie when she took them,” she points out. “Besides, IQ suggests how you do in school, not how you do in life.”
That’s not just a clever line. Those who study mental impairment have concluded that IQ doesn’t measure “adaptive ability”—that is, how well someone like Annie might adapt to the complexities of life, including living independently and holding a job.
“What do you think,” I ask, “would happen to Annie today? Could she work?”
“Very possible,” Hovermale answers. “The intellectual capacity is there, but this”—she points to the page that says the Girls’ Vocational School had dismissed nineteen-year-old Annie because she was “too disturbing” to the other students—“could be a significant problem. If she’s disturbing to others, her coworkers might not tolerate her. But that may just reflect the onset of her mental illness, not her ability. Today, we might do a better job of recognizing the difference. Back then, it was the Freudian era, and if you were a Freudian, you didn’t believe that you could be both MR and mentally ill—a ‘true’ MR didn’t have any inner psychic conflict.”
I let that thought sink in. “You mean, Annie’s mental illness would be seen as evidence that she couldn’t be mentally retarded?”
She smiles. “It was more complicated than that, of course. But as far as the system was concerned in those days, she would be either one or the other.”
Even though Annie had exhibited symptoms of mental illness before her institutionalization, I wonder if she ever belonged at Eloise. Howard Peirce didn’t think so after examining her at the probate court’s request, concluding that her mental retardation and amputated leg played a more significant role in her state of mind than mental illness. Neither did Dr. Bohn, who suggested commitment to Eloise in the first place, but preferred Lapeer. Lapeer’s lengthy waiting list—a year, if not more—left Hyman and Tillie with only two choices, either Eloise or home, and for a family that was “all going crazy,” Eloise offered at least the illusion of treatment, of doing something rather than nothing. My grandparents—bewildered by the system, trapped by their poverty—did not know where else to turn. “They had no options,” is how Gerald Grob, a leading scholar on the evolution of U.S. mental health treatment, put it when I interviewed him. “They had to rely on the system.”
Bohn undoubtedly felt that he was offering the better option by advising Tillie to commit Annie to Eloise, and he might have been right, but there’s no question that his recommendation defined Annie’s infirmity and her future. Sending Annie to Eloise rather than Lapeer was not like choosing the Oakman School for Crippled Children rather than nearby Hastings Junior High. While Eloise would take into account Annie’s impairment and low IQ score, the county hospital’s mission and orientation, from its examining rooms to its hydrotherapy tubs to its shock treatment units, dictated that once Annie came to Eloise, her symptoms of mental illness would take precedence.
Not that going to Lapeer would have improved Annie’s life. Opened in 1895 as the state’s first institution for the “feeble-minded,” Lapeer grew from two hundred “inmates” that year to forty-five hundred in the 1940s. Many were sent to jobs in the community—girls and women as domestic workers, boys and men as farmhands. Lapeer’s superintendents also embraced the state’s sterilization law, one of the nation’s first and an early victory for the American eugenics movement. Lapeer sought and received court approval, as the law required, for 2,339 of the 3,786 confirmed sterilizations done in Michigan, the fourth highest total in the nation behind California, Virginia, and North Carolina.
Given Tillie’s fears about Annie’s emerging sexuality, as reported in the Routine History—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—a stay at Lapeer might well have made Annie a candidate for sterilization.
Eloise, on the other hand, avoided the sterilization practice. A spot check of the Wayne County Probate Court—the place where Eloise would have filed for the necessary legal approval to carry the procedures out—produced no record of any such cases. Ed Missavage recalls no sterilizations during his early days in the late 1940s, and Eloise does not appear in any of the recent newspaper or historical accounts on the state’s sterilization policies.
So that’s one indignity that Dr. Bohn probably averted for Annie when he suggested a commitment to Eloise “for the interim.”
Finding Julie Reisner, the only possible surviving member of Mom’s inner circle of female friends from the 1930s, is proving difficult. No one in Detroit seems to know her whereabouts and, unfortunately, her ex-husband has such a common last name that it could take months to run down the possibilities, even if I restrict my research to California. One afternoon, after one more frustrating foray, I console myself by remembering the quip I heard from that researcher at the Library of Congress months ago: If I were in charge of the world, I would forbid any woman from changing her name when she marries.
But wait—instead of getting wrapped up in the name change, why not go with the facts at hand? I knew Julie’s maiden name—I had confirmed it as Reisner, rather than Reisler. If she had a brother, his name would still be the same.
I check the 1930 census records, and sure enough: Sam, brother, age three. He would be eighty now. Instead of looking for her, I look for him.
When I reach Sam Reisner at his home several days later, he’s not inclined to tell some stranger the whereabouts of his sister. But yes, her name is Julie, yes, they grew up in Detroit, and yes, she’s still alive.
“I’d like to talk with her, if I could,” I tell him.
“I’ll get my son to call you,” he says. “He’s a journalist. If he says it’s okay, we’ll go from there.”
The years haven’t changed Toby Hazan much at all. He might be a bit more stooped and a bit grayer at the temples since our last encounter a decade ago, but his handshake still has the same firm warmth and his eyes still have the flinty twinkle that I remember. He’s read Annie’s records, and like Lisa Hovermale and others I’ve interviewed, he’s convinced that if she were alive today, her diagnosis and treatment would be “totally different.”
“How?” I ask, thinking that he’s referring to the events that led to her involuntary commitment to Eloise.
His answer surprises me. When he says totally different, he means totally.
“It would have been different from the start,” he says. “We know much more about orthopedic problems, and the emotional effects. Her mother wouldn’t have been alone on this. She would have been in therapy herself by the time Annie was two or three.”
Later, he says, when Annie became morbidly concerned with death, she would have been treated with antidepressants, perhaps mood stabilizers. “Institutionalization isn’t even on the list” of options, he says, “not unless she showed herself to be a danger to herself or others.” That phrase—“a danger to herself or others”—has been the legal standard for involuntary commitment since a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court ruling usurped the longstanding doctrine that states owed care and treatment to their mentally ill.
“Institutionalization hasn’t been on the list of options for a very long time,” I say. “Some people think we’ve gone too far, that many of the homeless and many people in jail are the mental patients of the past.” I cite a few books that advance that argument.
/> He nods. “Trade-offs,” he says.
I turn the conversation toward Mom. I tell him about her breakdown in 1960, which she hadn’t mentioned to him, and that as far as I knew, mentioning Annie as part of her family history was a first. “I checked with her regular doctor,” I say. “When she gave her family background to him, she didn’t say anything about having a sister.”
He shakes his head, perhaps a kind of half-apology for not exploring these issues with her. “My focus was the present, not the past,” he says.
I want to make clear that I think that was Mom’s doing, not his failing. “It might have been helpful if she had told you what she had been hiding all these years,” I say.
He smiles. “I can’t disagree with that.”
“Do you remember what you wrote in her Botsford records, that you had lengthy therapy sessions with Mom to deal with her”—I read aloud from his discharge summary—“‘feelings of betrayal at being hospitalized in this unit and then abandoned’? That word, ‘abandoned,’ is a strong word. Is it fair for me to focus on it? Was she thinking that we were treating her just like Annie had been treated?”
He chooses his words carefully, or at least that’s how it seems to me. “I think it’s fair to focus on it,” he says, finally. “Her situation is different, of course. She had plenty of family support. But she certainly felt alone at that moment.”
“I only wish we had known the truth about Annie,” I say. “It would have been a lot less painful for Mom, and for me.”
As I get ready to leave, he says, “One more thing. Be kind to my notes.”
I look at him quizzically.
“I’m only giving them to you because you have legal authority.” He smiles wanly, and points upward. “I’m not sure whether Beth would want me to let you see them.”
Deborah Cohen thinks about the repercussions of family secrets more than most people. She’s a professor of British history at Brown University, where she’s working on a book with the tentative title Family Secrets: The Rise of Confessional Culture in Britain, 1840–1990. She wants to understand how and when the boundaries shifted in that country of the stiff upper lip, what freed family members to discuss publicly what they (or their ancestors) had once viewed as shameful and private. It’s an intriguing and original idea, and when I ask Cohen to debate my family secret’s place on the confessional spectrum, she readily agrees.
I don’t think of my project as fitting the confessional category, I say, but am I fooling myself? Should Mom’s secret remain buried? Is it my place to tell it? If Mom were alive, I would hope she would want to tell her story, to kill the secret once and for all by revealing it, but I would not put my hopes ahead of her wishes. Her death, and the secret’s reappearance in a form that opened the door to learning about Annie’s life, changed that calculus. Disclosing the secret couldn’t hurt Mom any longer—at least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself and that’s what I tell Cohen when we meet at her house near the university’s main campus.
Cohen’s thinking mirrors mine, up to a point. “As a historian,” she says, “I think secrets shouldn’t be allowed to survive the people who kept them. As a historian, I see nothing wrong, at all, with the notion of revealing. But you come along with a particular stake, and that’s the complicated part to me. I suppose I started thinking about writing my book because…well, why is it that we have a compulsion to reveal? Shouldn’t some things be allowed to be secrets? What’s the relationship between secrecy and the ability to keep secrets, and the integrity of the family?”
“Do you think it matters what the secret-keeper might have wanted?” I ask.
Cohen has her own stake in that question: If that were the standard, she says, much history would go unwritten. She points out that in my case, only a family member could tell this particular story. “These records are generally impossible for historians to get,” she says. “Often, only family members have a right to them.”
I tell Cohen about the state’s routine destruction of Annie’s records and how—in Michigan, at least—being a family member isn’t enough, that it takes persistence, determination, and help from other people who see the current laws as unnecessarily restrictive and an impediment to telling stories like mine. But I don’t want our conversation to end on that note, so I steer the conversation back to family secrets.
“Do you see what I’m doing as part of the confessional culture?” I ask.
She laughs, then says, “It’s not confessional in the sense that you’re saying ‘I’m an alcoholic, and this is how I came through it.’ But yes, in the sense that you, and also historians, have this disciplinary position that it’s better for secrecy to be unmasked.”
Afterward, I find myself dwelling on what Cohen had said at the beginning of our conversation: You come along with a particular stake. That’s the heart of it. I’m a writer, but in this case, I’m also a son.
As Cohen said: That’s the complicated part.
Neil Reisner loves the idea that his aunt has turned up in the middle of my family secret, and he’s delighted to play intermediary with Julie, who’s eighty-six and living in a Jewish Home for the Aging outside Los Angeles. His dad, as promised, had briefed him about my call, and within a week, Neil has put me in touch with Julie’s daughter, Ellen. A family wedding would soon bring Neil and Ellen to southern California, and they suggested that if I could wait six weeks, they would join me at the interview. They seem to think that it will put Julie more at ease.
They set a date with Julie, and I make plane reservations, crossing my fingers that nothing will go wrong between now and then. I think we have a lot to talk about, or at the very least, I have a lot of questions, and she’s the only one still alive who might be able to answer them.
{ SEVENTEEN }
Dad’s Secret
From the old country: Dad and Bubbe Ida, Russian empire, circa 1917
I’m embroiled in that rite of passage, introducing my girlfriend to my parents, and Mom and Dad have taken us to the Steak & Ale, where Dad can order either of his favorites, strip steak or red snapper. He’s in fine form, playing both host and raconteur, still able at sixty-two to turn on the charm that Mom spotted from her perch on that staircase long ago. It’s 1976, we’re in the Detroit suburb where my parents now have an apartment after nearly a lifetime in the city, and Dad is entertaining Mary Jo with stories from the furniture front lines, explaining how a salesman works a troublesome customer.
As Dad tells the tale, this particular shopper is a bargain hunter, a woman who comes to his store claiming that a competitor down the street will sell her a $300 couch for $150. Can Dad match that? “Sure,” he says, nonchalantly, directing her to a row of sofas tagged at $300. She picks one, asks how much of a discount he’s willing to give her, and is suspicious when Dad offers the magic number, half price, $150. “What’s wrong with it?” she says accusingly, and not waiting for an answer, she’s on her knees, examining the legs, tugging at the fabric, pushing here and pulling there, like a car buyer kicking the tires. Satisfied, she hauls herself up and says, “Okay, I’ll take it.”
Dad says, “Let’s write it up.” That line often shows up in his furniture war stories; it’s salesman code for sealing the deal, moving the customer from oral commitment to putting it down on paper. At the counter, Dad writes on the invoice, “one couch, $150,” then “three cushions, $50 each.” Total, $300. The bargain hunter explodes, calls Dad a liar and a cheat—those were the nicer words—before demanding an audience with his boss. Dad waits patiently for the torrent to end, and then says something like this: “Look, lady, you come in here, asking me to sell you a $300 couch for $150. I can’t make any money that way, and I don’t understand why you’re here. You already had a couch for $150, and you didn’t buy it, so something made you walk away from that deal. Now, if you want to buy a good couch, a couch that will last, a couch that will make you happy, I can sell you one for $300. That’s the best I can do.”
Mary Jo is in his thr
all. “So what happened?” she asks.
Dad waits a beat. “She bought the couch—for $300.”
Mary Jo splutters, “You’re, you’re, you’re…a con artist!”
Oh, this is going great, I think. No place to run, no place to hide, nothing to do except remain stock still, smile frozen on my face, and wish that I could disappear.
Dad, ever the salesman, looks at Mary Jo, and a beatific smile forms on his lips. “A con artist,” he says, lingering over the phrase. “Yes, that’s exactly what I am.”
Their marriage wasn’t perfect, by any means. The fairy-tale romance—the carefree, car-loving couple of the old black-and-white photos, the shared tenderness of those wartime letters, the over-the-top expressions of affection—gave way to something resembling real life. They didn’t argue much when I was a kid, but when they did, there was a weary repetitiveness to their disagreements. Dad often brought his work home with him—that is, he entered the house still steaming about some conflict with the boss at the furniture store du jour that employed him—and he would boil over at some point, shouting and red-faced about why I hadn’t taken out the garbage yet or some other small irritation. He made no secret of his belief that he could do his boss’s job better than the boss did, and after hearing some of his stories, I thought he was probably right.
He certainly could sell furniture. I went with him to work when I was about thirteen, and came away awed by his ability to win over even the most sullen customer. I had only the dimmest idea at the time that he wasn’t selling love seats and bedroom sets and kitchen tables, that his main product was himself, that he believed we’re all in sales, to one degree or another.
Did my parents love each other? I was sure that they did. I never worried that they might divorce, although I was aware that Mom treated Dad with kid gloves, and urged the rest of us to tiptoe around him as well. “Dad had a lousy day at work,” she would say, “so don’t do anything to make him mad.” Sometimes I thought Mom’s day revolved around Dad’s happiness—making him happy, keeping him happy, worrying about whether he was happy, preventing us from getting into any sort of mischief that would cause him to be unhappy. Mom didn’t tell us that we had to be perfect—she didn’t place that particular curse on us—but if she had possessed a working magic wand, she would have brought Dad home to a perfect house, a house without troubles.
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