My Heart Laid Bare (47 page)

I
am not ill—I am well.”

“I am not
ill
—I am
well.
”

“I am not ill—I am well.”

This mantra the patients of the Parris Clinic, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, are instructed to chant one hundred or more times a day; silently or together in a swelling communal orison; with eyes open or tightly shut. The discipline is known as Autogenic Self-Mastery, the discovery of Dr. Felix Bies, cofounder with Dr. Moses Liebknecht of the Parris Clinic. Here, the infirm are taught that as the physical being can be cured of affliction by way of elixirs, diet, hot baths, hydrotherapy, herbal medicines and the like, so too can the spiritual being be cured of its more insidious afflictions by way of Self-Mastery. It's an Eastern discipline descended from ancient yogic practices and Buddhist teachings yet as Dr. Bies and Dr. Liebknecht insist it's a discipline uniquely suited to North America—“Where
will
and
destiny
are one.”

Paralysis, cancer, nervous disorders; feebleness of intellect and of personality; anemia, otalgia, migraine, multiple sclerosis, myxedema; se
nility, aging—these are but symptoms of spiritual disequilibrium that can be treated at the Parris Clinic; with the contractual understanding beforehand, fully documented and notarized, that only by way of the patient's “active volition” can a true cure be effected. Among the permanent residents of the Parris community are an eighty-seven-year-old woman cured of glaucoma and ileitis; a ninety-three-year-old woman once crippled by arthritis and now capable of hiking on the Clinic's fifty-acre grounds, and of playing lawn tennis; an eighty-six-year-old man wounded in the chest in the Battle of Bull Run and subsequently subject to numerous ailments—heart trouble, dyspepsia, fatigue, asthma—until recently, by way of a strict diet, hot baths and Autogenic Self-Mastery, he declared himself one hundred percent cured, and a candidate for remarriage. The Clinic's most renowned patient is an elderly man said to be one hundred nineteen years old who suffers intermittently from the usual infirmities of age (arthritis, gum disease, vertigo, etc.) but as a result of Autogenic Self-Mastery and other Parris disciplines, he not only recently married for the eighth time but sired his twenty-first child, a healthy baby boy—an event written up in the New York newspapers. The Clinic's former patients include a chess grand master, a youth of nineteen who'd once suffered from extreme melancholia; numerous veterans of the Great War now entirely cured and returned to active life; and numerous women—neurasthenic, hysterical, melancholic, amenorrheic, abnormally willful or will-less—also cured to various degrees and returned to the world as well-adjusted daughters, wives and mothers.

The Parris Clinic was founded in 1922, by way of a generous gift from a convert to Dr. Bies's teachings, an elderly woman named Mrs. Flaxman Potter who willed her estate, including a spacious Georgian house and numerous outbuildings, to the controversial physician-researcher. There have been numerous other gifts from cured, grateful patients; for the servicing of the physical dimension of being (the maintenance of the forty-room mansion, the grounds, the baths, etc.) is recognized as no less necessary than the maintenance of the spiritual. It is the promise of the
Parris Clinic's directors that none who enter through its wrought-iron gate will come to grief from any mortal affliction including age itself; yet such are the vicissitudes of natural and human frailty, a certain percentage of patients do occasionally fall short of this goal and come to unfortunate ends, with the result that the Clinic is often being sued, or is threatened with lawsuits, by relatives of the deceased, disinherited children, former physicians and the like. In addition, the goodwill of county and state officials is frequently costly. Financial solvency, therefore, is required—that's to say a healthy cash flow. The Parris Clinic, despite the idealism of its directors, can't open its doors to all who have need but only to those who can afford its high fees.

In spring 1926 when a Wall Street investor named Arthur Grille arranged for his neurasthenic daughter Rosamund to be admitted to the Clinic, on the eve of his departure for Naples with his new bride, he was initially shocked by the price quoted by Dr. Bies; yet came around to the doctor's position as in such matters where health and peace of mind are concerned, money should be of secondary significance. Mr. Grille was a recent widower who'd come into prosperity like so many investors and speculators following the Armistice; he'd seen an investment of $400,000 in various stocks soar to $2.3 million in a whirlwind eighteen-month period in the early 1920's, and was now a millionaire many times over. Yet it was his tragedy that, simultaneously, he lost his wife to a premature death and his only child Rosamund to numerous mysterious ailments—fainting spells, tachycardia, migraine, anemia, loss of appetite, chronic melancholia and the like. Rosamund was an ethereal girl with a fondness for poetry, professing a morbid obsession with the work of such poets as Keats, Shelley, Chatterton, Byron—poets who'd all come to tragic or shameful ends. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty Rosamund experimented with poetry of her own, so caught up in writing verse that the family was forced to intervene and forbid her to continue, to prevent a complete mental breakdown; which provoked the rebellious girl to burn her poetry in a roaring
blaze on the front lawn of the Grille estate on Long Island, and to lapse into a near-catatonic state afterward. Rosamund's coming out at the Cotillion Club was cancelled, to her mother's grief; and the New York City
débutante
season of 1920 passed her by gaily and indifferently.

Eventually, when Rosamund emerged from her lethargy to try her hand at sculpting small figures in clay under the tutelage of a prominent society sculptor, she again became so involved with her work, as she called it, that she had to be chastened a second time, with more extreme results, for now the unstable girl broke out of seclusion with a manic zeal, attending jazz parties in Manhattan where drinking, only just prohibited by federal law, took place, as well as dancing of a wild, abandoned, lascivious kind; she became engaged to a young entrepreneur of whom the Grilles disapproved and, after breaking up with him in a tumultuous scene at the Plaza Hotel, she became engaged to a young tap dancer and Broadway actor whom the Grilles liked even less; at the height of her hysteria, as her condition was diagnosed by the family physician, Rosamund frequented such notorious Manhattan speakeasies as the Marlboro Club, the Stork Club, and Helen Morgan's, where she was once swept up and arrested in a police raid. And all her antics were performed, as observers noted, without pleasure; indeed, in defiance of pleasure.

As if the new generation sought pain, humiliation, defeat and even death through the forms of “pleasure”—to spite their elders.

In his interview with Dr. Bies and Dr. Liebknecht, Arthur Grille explained that his daughter had been inclined since infancy to a certain degree of willfulness; but beyond the age of thirteen, when her mother first took ill, she became very difficult indeed. “All that was sweet in my little girl curdled; all that was soft and yielding turned hard, cunning and stubborn; she gave the impression of being
stalled
—caught up in the maladies and malaises I've told you about from which, as she said, striking terror into the hearts of her mother and me, ‘Only Death could release her.'” Following this, Rosamund was never well. She often threatened
to do injury to herself, setting afire her beautiful black hair or raking her skin with her nails or, like Ophelia, who was one of her morbid heroines, drowning herself in a stream. She wasn't loved by anyone, she charged; or she was loved too much, and didn't deserve it. She despaired of God and of being “saved”; then, abruptly, declared the idea of God “supremely silly” and announced herself content to be the descendant of African apes. After her mother's death, when Rosamund was, in her own words, an old maid of twenty-four, she took to her bed and slept in a fevered state for as long as eighteen hours at a time; she ceased speaking except in sibylline utterances—“Where tragedy would ennoble, farce intervenes”—“Eternity despises the productions of Time”—which puzzled and angered her grieving father. Mr. Grille took her to specialist after specialist, admitted her to clinic after clinic, begged her, and commanded her, to behave in a manner suitable for a young woman of her rank and family background; and all without success.

For she
was
ill, beneath her hysteria and histrionics—seriously ill.

Following the advice of a Wall Street associate, Arthur Grille made the decision to commit Rosamund to the care of Doctors Bies and Liebknecht, before sailing for Europe on his honeymoon. (In despair of his life, Mr. Grille had suddenly fallen in love with a young woman twenty years his junior, whose soldier husband had died in France.) Dozens of physicians had failed with her; perhaps they would succeed; in any case, he told them somberly, since his daughter was more troubled now at the age of twenty-seven than she'd been before in her life, they could hardly do her harm. “If I were a superstitious person, which I am not,” Mr. Grille told the doctors, “I might almost believe that a . . . demon of some kind inhabited my poor girl.”

“A DEMON! WHAT
a laugh. Rather more, the absence of a demon.
There's
the loss.”

Rosamund Grille was a willowy, fine-boned, alarmingly thin young woman who looked more seventeen than twenty-seven. She had damp green gemlike eyes narrowed in playfulness one moment and mistrust the next; an aquiline nose with a charming little bump—where it had been broken, as she explained, in a speakeasy raid; a sullen, but very pretty mouth; and a grainy skin that looked as if it were rarely exposed to the sun. The insides of both her forearms were scarred with tiny nicks and scratches—“Hieroglyphics,” as she called them. “Signifying nothing.” Her hair was fine and filmy, a smoky-black threaded with dead-white hairs; at the time of her admission to the Parris Clinic she'd carelessly bobbed it with a scissors, and refused to go to a hairdresser to repair the damage. Her manner was both skittish and lethargic, sometimes within the space of a few minutes. As Dr. Bies examined her (though he placed little emphasis upon the physical being, he knew it was necessary to consult it) she held herself stiff as a rod, resisting her impulse to recoil from a stranger's, or a man's, touch. Her elegant head high, her greeny eyes partly closed, Rosamund Grille gave no evidence of hearing the questions Dr. Bies asked, and no more cooperated with the physician than a dressmaker's dummy would have done. Dr. Liebknecht, looking on sympathetically, his pince-nez pressed against the bridge of his nose, asked the young woman questions of his own, “Do you comprehend, Miss Grille, that it's your own Wish turned against you that has made you ‘ill'?”—and appeared more annoyed than Dr. Bies when she ignored him.
A stubborn creature, as her father warned. Not to be easily cured, if cured at all.

Afterward, when they were alone, Dr. Bies observed in a languid voice to Dr. Liebknecht, unscrewing the top of his silver pocket flask, “We must hope for two things: that the wench doesn't do herself in too quickly and that the second Mrs. Grille doesn't spend her husband's money too quickly.” Dr. Liebknecht, who'd removed his pince-nez and was thoughtfully rubbing his eyes, sighed, and shrugged, and made no reply, as if he didn't trust himself, at the moment, to speak.

“I am not ill—I am well.”

“I am not
ill
—I am
well.
”

“I am not ill—I am well.”

Rosamund bites her lower lip to keep from laughing, and draws blood. Rosamund is racked with silent tears. Rosmund's clenched fists fly striking any available surface, causing such a disturbance in the Ladies' Sulfur Bath that a therapist will lead her back to her room.

“
Don't
touch. I can't bear it!”

Trying to explain that she can't continue, it's no one's fault but she can't continue, yet she's fearful of “crossing over” into the void, and so must continue; out of cowardice, not even pride.

“I am not well—I am ill.”

Her heart trips. On the verge of running wild. It can beat as many as two hundred fifty times a minute and her doctors have warned it might beat her to death if she didn't make an effort to calm herself.

Autogenic Self-Mastery does seem to her, despite the obvious charlatanry of the Parris Clinic (a haven for wealthy neurotics, misfits and failures), a basically sound idea. She accepts that her malaise is a malaise of the soul and that it creeps upon her from within. To master the malaise, she need only master the “self” that causes it—but how, precisely, is this done? Reciting the mantra
I am not ill I am well, I am not well I am ill
is like saying a rosary, numbing, hypnotic, silly, shameful. Laughter shades into a fit of coughing. Coughing shades into choking. Choking shades into heart palpitations. Heart palpitations shade into a fainting attack. And her swollen belly and bladder ache from the abnormal quantity of mineral water they've urged her to drink—twelve pints a day.

An insensible body sprawled in the hottest of the baths. Damp black hair in clots spread like a spider's legs across the chipped marble rim. Bruised eyes shut. In a chamois smock that clings to her thin body, her prominent collarbone and small hard breasts with nipples like berries.
Roughly she squeezes these breasts not out of sensuality but to determine if she's
there.
“
I
am not ill—
I
am well. Am I?” Thinking of Bies and Liebknecht, a vaudeville team. The one vague, false-fatherly, clammy-fat weighing beyond two hundred fifty pounds at five feet nine; sausage-neck tight to bursting; small squinting red-rimmed eyes; a bald dome of a head, tufts of gray hair in a cupid-fringe. A legitimate doctor, Mr. Grille ascertained, with a degree from a respectable medical school and a number of publicized cures, generally of wealthy patients, to boast of.