“No one will write my biography,” he’d said more than once since we’d moved to the farm, the last time we’d transported the growing lifelong collection of books and documents, photographs and even a few film reels. He’d resented the burden of all those files. He made it known he didn’t expect them to be moved again. “When I’m gone, I want it all burned.”
Splayed and snoring, John was still dressed, and anytime I touched him or tried to pull off a half-dangling sock, he grunted and shifted about. The paperback that had slipped from his chest to the bed fell onto the floor, waking him enough to make him grumble.
“Do you want something? An aspirin at least? You’d be more comfortable under the covers—and over on your side.”
No answer. No matter. I couldn’t sleep anyway.
Plagued by insomnia that night, I did what a woman married to a two-decades-older man does at some point in her middle years, whether she cares to admit it or not: I began to imagine his obituary.
John Broadus Watson, of Travelers Rest, South Carolina, January 9, 1878, to—well, to whenever it would happen to be, and neither of us believed in any kind of providential interference or afterlife. Son of Pickens Butler Watson and Emma Roe Watson, father of four children, and did one mention a former wife? I supposed one did. John’s secretary—she’d become “right-hand Ruth” in the last two and a half years, and why didn’t that bother me as it would have a few years earlier?—would put the basic details in the right order. I was simply reviewing, and pressing on to what mattered most. Graduate of Furman University and the University of Chicago, founder of Behaviorism, former Johns Hopkins professor, advertising pioneer.
I continued, thinking about which of his studies and views would last. All those early bird and rat studies from well before he thought to study humans, most likely forgotten. The earliest infant studies, published and perhaps still notable. An open attitude to discussing women and marriage and sex, removing taboos. The manipulation of people by advertising via their fears, sexual desires, and loyalties—that might last longer even than the academic contributions. And then there were other things he’d cared so much about and had tried to influence: the fight against eugenics, against racism cloaked in pseudoscientific jargon. Consider what was happening in Germany, with Hitler taking over the Reichstag. John had always warned against leaders like Hitler, though he had also pointed out that America was in just as much danger of being taken over by white supremacists. If it were up to me, my father’s daughter and my senator-uncle’s niece, I’d wish for John to be remembered for his watchfulness on those forgotten fronts—standing up to superstitious bigots, whether in Europe or at Princeton or Harvard.
Instead, based on that morning’s call from Elsie Bregman, he’d be remembered for little Albert. For his experiment with a single infant, which formed his views on conditioning, which informed his views on parenting, which informed his—our—authoritative book on the psychological health of all babies, all children, our own and millions of others. One infant. One “perfectly normal” infant, but only one. How much had rested on those limited sessions, some of them clear in my mind, and others fogged by the competing dramas of those days: kissing and heavy breathing whenever nurses’ backs were turned, guilt about Mary and Polly, the thrill of illicit love and the shame of the scandal that followed.
But it was morbid to be eulogizing a man still very much in his prime, to be imagining the headlines in the newspapers, the respectful letters from colleagues, the special conferences to be held in his honor, the posthumous awards that might undo the erosion of respect over the years; wrong to imagine our stoic sons, in their suits and with their forelocks combed into place, at the graveside, and the widow, thirty-five years old, geriatric by the flapper standards of yore, but not so very old, really.
What would I do with my life? How would I live, and where? I had no more idea than my own mother had, only a few years ago. She’d mentioned California, something I’d never imagined coming from the lips of a Jewish second-generation Baltimorean—California! I didn’t see how she’d make such a radical transition, and I was half her age. It was wrong to even think about. John wasn’t going anywhere. It probably hadn’t been his heart, just a spell of heat exhaustion, followed by an even more powerful spell of stubbornness. Yet someone had to think of it, because he would not: how to guarantee that his contributions would be remembered, his mistakes forgotten or at least considered in a fair light.
Late that night, I managed to undress John, and to push him to his side of the bed, though he tossed and turned, and therefore so did I. One never sleeps as easily again, once it’s become fully plain that a spouse won’t live forever. It is the nature of life that there will nearly always be one person who leaves before the other, and much left undecided, and much left undone.
Chapter 33
1935
Whip-Poor-Will Farm
“Why are you doing this?” John asks, coming home to the farm from Manhattan, finding me out of bed, at the corner desk, typing.
There is an irony, I am aware, in being the young, ill wife, who not so long ago—only last summer—prematurely eulogized her middle-aged husband. Now, our roles are reversed. I worried and philosophized in response to his brief physical lapse. In response to mine, he has gone about his normal business, racing off to New York on the train, putting in long hours at JWT before coming home, the scent of bourbon evidence that he did not rush home too quickly.
Which is not to say he’s been inactive or unsympathetic. If anything, he is upset beyond articulation. He is relying on routine, as men often do, using the familiar as an emotional crutch. My sudden sickness and refusal, despite a period of hospitalization, to get completely better has irritated his logical faculties. There is no reason I should have contracted dysentery in the first place, and no reason why I—thirty-six years old, fond of tennis and swimming—should not be healing at a better-than-average rate. I’d fume too, if I had the physical energy. Instead, I’ve turned inward.
One day last week when I was feeling sorry for myself, I happened to go to the bookshelf. Lifting a copy of Behaviorism, I flipped randomly open to this paragraph:
No quack can do it for you, no correspondence school can safely guide you. Almost any event or happening might start a change; a flood might do it, a death in the family, an earthquake, a conversion to the church, a breakdown in health, a fist fight—anything that would break up your present habit patterns, throw you out of your routine and put you in such a position that you would have to learn to react to objects and situations different from those to which you have had to react in the past—such happenings might start the process of building a new personality for you.
John’s words, not mine: No quack can do it for you. But other things can. A death, a fight, a breakdown in health.
I could see the truth in that—the way, until we have a shock to the system, we hide from ourselves, glued to our routines, unable to change habits. And then we are shoved onto a new set of tracks. The potential benefit of crisis: a new personality. Well, that would be nice. I’m not sure I want something that extreme. A little more truth would suit me fine. In my dysenteric state, I am desperately thirsty for something that no amount of water will quench.
“Why are you doing this?” John asked me a long moment ago.
“Doing what?”
“Working so hard when you’re supposed to be recuperating. Who’s it for?”
When I don’t answer, he says, “I heard you asked Ray to bring down some old Johns Hopkins boxes from the attic. I’ve always said I should get rid of all that stuff up there.”
“Not the lab files, surely.”
“What’s important is already published. I can’t see the point in keeping every scrap of paper.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“And no one’s ever going to have a need for my private papers, or yours. Burn it all.”
/> “Burn it all.”
“When you’re dead, you’re all dead.”
“No proof to the contrary.”
“What were you looking for, Rar?”
I wait, I think, I bite my tongue, I roam my memories freely. Rebelliously.
I don’t trust myself, and I have heard and read enough to be more confused about mind and soul than I ever was, even as an adolescent girl. Still, there is a private “me” inside my physical self, aside from my visible behaviors, that insists on guiding me somewhere.
Hours later, in the middle of the night, I shake John and say, “I’ve been thinking about the past.”
He startles and grunts, as any reasonable person would.
“Why did you let me work for you, at Hopkins?”
Half awake, he says, “Because you could catch.”
I wait, but I hear only shifting and finally, his low, rumbling snore.
“John,” I say. “John, I need to talk.”
“Tomorrow.”
It’s Tuesday morning, but John hasn’t left for work yet. The boys had their own breakfast alone, as usual, and are excited about leaving tomorrow for summer camp. Yesterday, every few hours, they came into my bedroom and asked me about the location of something they needed to pack, and sometimes now, drifting in and out of sleep, I’ll once again hear the door opening, the sigh of disappointed Billy or Jimmy, and the door closing as they return to finding the fifth pair of socks or the bandana or the flashlight or whatever is on the camp-provided list. I want to help. I fall back into fragmented sleep and dream about helping them, folding each last thing inside their suitcases, and closing them tight and turning to give kiss after kiss and a crushing hug.
John has been up for over an hour. When he comes into the bedroom, I prop myself up, a hot water bottle settled onto my stomach, under the covers.
“Fine,” he says.
“Fine, what?”
“Tell me where you were a month ago, and I’ll tell you something.”
This is not what I thought we were on the verge of discussing. “Where I was? In Baltimore.”
“And where else?”
“Let’s see. I didn’t stop in New York City. I didn’t care to. Just Baltimore to Connecticut. A long day’s drive.”
“No snooping around, no stopping in at places you might want to tell me about?”
I’m flustered and confused. All those years when John was the one to disappear suddenly, spending Sundays who knows where, and now I’m the one being questioned. He says, “I got to thinking. About the dysentery. Doc Fielding’s weird diagnosis.”
“He blames exotic fruit.”
“Fruit,” John says, shaking his head. He’s done his best. He even had our well tested twice, to no avail. “Remember how many times we had to cancel tests because of some small epidemic next door? The home for babies and children next to Johns Hopkins was always raging with diseases.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘raging.’ And no, John, I haven’t been to Hopkins, not in years.”
He says, “Lots of orphanages have the same problem. I wouldn’t recommend spending any time in those places.”
Well, this is almost funny. We’ve adopted a horse and a greyhound, but I haven’t thought of adopting any new children. It took me long enough to get used to my own.
He says, “You won’t find Albert in an orphanage.”
Albert?
John has succeeded in surprising me, finally. I wouldn’t have expected to find little Albert in an orphanage. He had a mother, last I’d known. I am stunned, most of all, to hear John say the name aloud, since he has avoided saying it whenever possible for the last few years.
Regardless of John’s paranoia, I haven’t been looking for Albert. Of course, yes, I’ve been thinking about him. His heavy body and soft limbs in my arms, his tears soaking my blouse, the devastated look in his eyes, the drop of his exhausted head. Even without thinking of him, I can still feel him—smell him. Motherhood has kept fresh in me what I otherwise might gladly have forgotten, that visceral connection to a baby who is fearful and hurting.
John says, “You won’t find Albert anywhere. It has nothing to do with our experiment, of course—he left our hands in the same condition as when he started. But you won’t find Albert.”
“My God, John, what are you saying? If there’s something you know, please tell me.”
He snaps, “Don’t use that surprised tone of voice. Why have you been pestering me unless you thought there was a good story to tell?”
But in truth, I wasn’t expecting a new story. Just the old one, told with more honesty, the kind that John always prided himself on, which became more partial and obscure over the years, the less it served him.
“I did want to discuss Albert with you,” I say. “But I certainly haven’t been looking for him. Isn’t he a grown man by now?” And then it occurs to me: “Are you thinking I want you to apologize to him?”
John’s face goes blank. I know him too well. There is something he isn’t telling me, something beyond my most basic scientific and ethical concerns.
He says, “I don’t appreciate the look you’re giving me.”
“What look?”
“Like you don’t trust me. As if you have any right to question me about professional choices I’ve made, or personal ones either. As if I’ve ever done anything to let you or the boys down.”
At that, I am speechless.
“I’ve said my piece for now . . .”
“But you haven’t explained.”
“. . . and now I’m going to work.”
When I hear the sound of the car that night, the closing of two doors, Ray’s gentle “good night” followed by John’s footsteps into the house, I can barely wait for him to enter the bedroom. All day, my heartbeat has been fast and irregular. Dehydration. Familiar to me from the last bad spell, three weeks ago now. With a shaky hand, I’ve actually dialed my mother and asked her to drive up tomorrow, will she, please? But only after the boys have left. Only after, so they don’t think her unexpected presence means something troubling. I’ve called Doc Fielding, too, hoping for a house call, but he wants me to come into town, and I think that’s a good idea now. The hospital. With Mother. After the boys have left for camp.
For days, I’ve been revisiting the past, in more or less orderly fashion. But today, my mind has darted and doubled back and spiraled in and out of the years, looking for whatever was lost or hidden. Forward again to that time when John had heatstroke building the wall; the unfamiliar purple folder in his hand. John’s irritation.
I say to John the moment he’s in the doorway, his gaze distracted by the empty overnight bag sitting now in the middle of the floor, “You’ve been thinking about Albert the last few years just as much as I have. It was Elsie Bregman calling you last year. Something made you start thinking about him again.”
“Bregman? For Pete’s sake, Rosalie. You are feverish.”
I won’t let him change the subject. “She couldn’t replicate the studies, and you were upset. No one has been able to. Something has been bothering you, about our results or our interpretations.” I’m only lukewarm, I can tell from his expression. “Or our choice of subject.”
“Subject? Why would you say that?”
Oh, John. So transparent.
“Is that it?” I ask. “It’s not wrong to question things later. Admit it, John. Please.” My heart feels ready to burst out of my chest. I should have relented earlier. An IV drip is the least I need. “And what did you mean this morning—I wouldn’t find him now if I looked?”
“I mean,” he says, “that Albert died.”
“Died?”
A thickening of the tongue. A slowing of the blood. I feel the same drained, hollow ache I felt after giving birth to Billy.
I hear myself asking again: “Died?”
I remember the first infant subject who ever died on our watch, and how we did not mourn him, how John taught me not to mourn him. Subjects die. But this is different. Albert was different.
I still can feel him in my arms. I can smell the top of his head, his breath. It took work to let him grow up in my mind, to imagine him as a boy, and often my mental imaginings regressed, making him an infant all over again, trapping him eternally in that vulnerable state. Of course, he would be more than a boy now. He would be almost a man. I want to feel him, still alive on this earth, outgrowing what we did to him, making his way forward, leaving behind that ridiculous experiment.
“Yes,” John says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect you to take it like this.”
“How, John? How did he die?”
“Let me help pack your hospital bag.”
John opens a drawer to take out two nightgowns, fresh undergarments. He closes the top drawer, face turned away from me.
“Hydrocephalus.”
“When?”
“He would have been six years old.”
A decade ago.
“No.”
“Why are you acting up?”
“No, John.”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
I want to hit him. I want to scream. “How did you find out?”
“Makes no difference.”
“When?”
“I said, when he was six.”
“No, when did you find out?”
“I was at the New School. Right after it happened, I suppose—’25 or ’26.”
That long ago. And during a difficult time, when we were barely speaking. But it wasn’t an excuse for not telling me. “He contracted it suddenly?”
A pause. “Which toiletries do you need packed?”
“In a moment, John. Did Albert contract hydrocephalus when he was older?”
“No.”
Behave Page 34
