Authors: Thomas Cater
“So that is Elinore’s father,” I murmured.
“Did you know Elinore?” She asked.
“I know about her, but I didn’t know her personally,”
I said, which I realized was a lie. I probably knew her better than her father
did.
“You know she went mad.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Several times,” she continued.
I stopped nodding and stared. “Can you do that? Go
mad several times?”
“I can’t, but she did,” she said. “Elinore would trip
off and come back two or three times a year. She spent lots of time in this
hospital, in and out for several years.”
“Was she ever cured?” I asked.
She smiled doubtfully and shrugged. “Not in the
popular sense of the word. She was, I don’t know, was rather old when she was permanently
discharged.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “You’re obviously not
old enough to have been here.”
“We have files,” she said confidently.
“And you read them?”
“Of course!”
“I don’t suppose you’d let me read them, would you?” I
asked hopefully.
The request created a moral dilemma. She was shaking
her head and I could see the wrong words forming on her lips. I pleaded with my
eyes.
“We can’t allow the public to walk in and read our
files, but if you are a student, I might be able to let you take a ’historical’
look
. S
he’s been deceased for
many
years,
”
“I wish I could be sure of that,” I muttered.
“Hmmm?” She said in a playful way.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Tell me what happened when Elinore
was a patient?”
“We had a really famous head surgeon, no pun
intended,” she repeated, “someone Samuel Ryder employed. He was one of the
early pioneers in psychosurgery. You have to remember, this was in the 1920s
and 30s when most people thought mental illness meant demon possession, or
someone was just looking for a place to dump troublesome relatives. Anyhow,
this Dr. Ezekiel Grier was one of the greatest living, et cetera, et cetera, to
attempt behavioral
modification
on a human being by drilling holes in his head. We have
hundreds of cases he worked on.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“I’m a grad student in psychology,” she said. “I
intern here and go to school at night and on weekends. I also get extra credit
and pay for counseling.
“Grier was into lobotomy; only it was called
“leucotomy’ or ‘trephining.’ Lobotomies became accepted surgical procedures in the
40s, and that was in Europe. The first one wasn’t ‘officially’ performed in the
United States until 1956 by Freeman and Watts in Washington D.C.”
“Then you’re saying…”
Yes, Elinore’s father brought her in and had her…”
“Lobotomized?” I said.
“A leucotomy, or trephining,” she corrected.
“Ouch,” I said, for lack of greater understanding.
“I know what you mean, but we don’t do that anymore,
not even to the really hairy cases. But in the 30s, 40s and 50s, they did it to
those who had bad headaches and back pain.”
“You are doing a study, aren’t you?”
“The books and the case studies are all here,” she
said, “why not read them?”
“Is there anything in her file to suggest why they did
it? Was she hallucinating, or violent?”
“I don’t know. She has a file, but it’s not complete. I
have never read it, only a glanced at it for a few minutes; it is background
material. She was a celebrity, you know, because she was the boss's daughter.
“The students use the historical data in their papers,
that’s why most of the papers are missing, or misplaced. If you like, I'’ll
show you where we store them. If anyone asks, you can say you are a graduate
student researching a paper. They’ll know you came to the right place.”
“I will be forever in your debt, Miss….”
“Constance Pennington, but you can call me Connie.”
“Thank you Connie. If you’re free, I’d like to buy you
lunch…someday.”
She was effusive, almost too eager.
“That sounds great. I don’t get out much. Dr. Weismann
wants me in the office at all times. I’m to call him immediately if anyone from
the state tries to make contact. I’m not supposed to say where he is only that
he will be in touch.”
By the time she finished explaining, we had descended
to the basement, or the catacombs, as she called them. It was similar to an abandoned
railroad system, miles of shadowy hallways full of dark, unoccupied rooms
gathering gloom and dust.
“In the ‘30s and ‘40s there were nearly 2,500 patients
in this hospital, but now three are less than 100. Three, sometimes four people
at a time occupied all of these rooms. In the mid 1940’s, the population peaked.
There were only two full-time psychiatrists, four psychologists and about 200
nurses and aids. It was a genuine ‘crazy house’ then. There was more confusion
in these halls than in a Chinese restaurant. No one knew what to do with, or
how to care of crazies in those days. The caretakers just locked them up and
threw away the keys.”
“How long have you been here, Connie?”
“The hospital has been here over 175 years, I’m a
newcomer,” she said, “only three years. Some of the aides have been here longer
than the mice. There are a few cooks and maintenance people who have been here
longer, and the three guys in the boiler room have been here forever. I know as
much about this place as anyone. It’s not as if it has its own private historian,
not like some famous hotel.”
“I imagine some strange and unusual cases have come
through those doors.”
“From every walk of life,” she said, “now it’s mostly men
and women with addiction problems.”
Chapter Seventeen
At the end of the hall, we reached a pair of double
doors with small glass windows at eye level. It was the only room on the
basement level that had a light inside. She unlocked the door and pushed it
open. There were several dozen filing cabinets lined up against the walls and
forming narrow aisles. Library tables were scattered between the cabinets. Identically
shaded lamps were standing at each table.
“
It’s not the sexiest
place in town, but it is quiet, and if you came to read, you won’t be
disturbed.”
“Do any of your patients ever wander down here?” I
asked, fearing the worst.
“It’s off limits to them, and they know it.”
I examined the dates on a row of filing cabinets. I
would have to find files for the appropriate year to start looking for
Elinore’s records.
“The files you need are somewhere in that far corner,”
she said, pointing a polished nail,
I started walking slowly.
“Stop by the office before you leave,” she said. “I
wouldn’t want you to get locked in overnight.”
I obliged with a nod, thanked her again and started
down the narrow row to the corner. A thin layer of dust covered the filing
cabinets. My sneakers were creating impressions on the floor. The tables
I noticed were
similarly disposed to neglect. There were dry, dusty shredded rags and towels
in abundance for those who wished to engage the dust in a territorial battle. I
scooped one off the top of a cabinet, shook it out in my wake and set about
dusting off the aging tags and files.
I was searching for dates in the 1920s to 30s. The
dates kept receding back in time and into musty darkness: 1938, 37, 36. I was
surprised to discover how ignored things gathered about them an aura all their
own. The files acquired the composure of lost decades. It was as if by some
quirk of fate, they had memorialized the past lives of those forgotten men and
women.
The big wooden cabinets prominently displayed the
ghosts of cigarette burns and coffee rings beneath the dust.
I discovered the proper cabinet and files. They were dated:
March 1925 to March 1935. I started wiping dust from envelopes and folders with
a towel and unearthed stacks of nearly indiscernible pages. I began tracking
down names. It was disturbing to discover how many men and women died under the
mistaken belief they were getting help. There were, in one out of the way
mental institution, Raders, Reeds, Reeses, Ridenours, Rizzos, Rickles, Rudys,
Ruggles and of course, a lone Ryder: Elinore.
Seeing her name typewritten for the first time was gratifying,
but also unsettling. It was if she had not really existed, until something
official validated her troubled life. It was like learning what the high
priests of life and living claimed: ‘life is incredibly fragile and less
meaningful than any sonnet dared make you believe.’
It was not an exalting feeling. I pulled the file and
headed anxiously for the nearest table. The hard maple table and chair were thick
with a blanket of dust. I gave them a brisk rub down and cleared a working arena.
Unfortunately, the compulsion for bureaucratic accuracy
was no longer viable and much had been lost. I opened her file for what may
have been the hundredth time in as many years, and felt cursed.
Dr. Ezekiel Grier, the notorious lobotomist, made the
very last entry. Soon I would know his hand, and then his thoughts, and then the
measure of his soul. He had accounted the operation(s) a success.
The patient
is no longer lachrymose or depressed and her screams silenced. She is showing
an improved disposition and on several occasions seen to smile in the presence
of attendants
. That was a welcomed relief
.
I turned to the next page. It was indecipherable, a
language or script I was unable to fathom and signed by Grier. Incomplete notes
on clinical observations were perhaps in another language. The word
“Klikouchy”
was also underlined and there were several other confusing notations. In the
corner of the page, inscribed in tiny letters was the comment, “
a race of
men who knew all things and whose sight was unlimited by boundaries of time and
space.”
I suddenly gained a spectators respect for Ezekiel
Grier’s insight. I don’t know how he dealt with Elinore’s problems; he did
however take time and care to record her weight and body temperature, but very
little of what she said or did.
I turned another page. It was an admittance form and not
the first. There were notes and references to previous admissions. The
admitting physician recommended shock and hydrotherapy treatments. Instead,
Elinore may have had the nerve conduits in her brain severed. The right side of
her mind would never know what the left was thinking.
I kept shuffling through pages, looking for something
that might make me feel as if I were making progress. For several admissions,
spanning a period of years, the file was remarkably thin. It was as if records were
lost, misplaced, or borrowed. It seemed improbable that someone could spend
that much time in a hospital and accumulate a file less than a dozen pages. I
started poking into a few other files for comparison. They were all much
thicker.
There were intakes by physicians and psychologists,
social workers, families and friends, each describing in their own words the problems
and obsessions that seemed to haunt the troubled patients. The cure was always
the same: Leucotomy, hydrotherapy, shock. Words that were meant to be interchangeable
with damaged brains.
Grier was a tireless lobotomist. He sometimes
performed
30 operations in
a week. I read a description of an attendant, who
witnessed the operation on a disturbed patient.
“After the hammer shaft snapped, Grier threw the
instrument away, removed his shoe and proceeded to pound the pick through the
orbital plate with the heel of his shoe.”
I was reading a personal history that seemed as old as
the Dead Sea scrolls. I returned the files to the cabinet and thought about quitting,
going back to the sanctity of my RV, to the present and perceived sanity. I had
spent a few hours in the room and uncovered relatively little hard information
on Elinore or the house, only vague and irreconcilable dates that pointed to shadows
of the past.
I had forgotten my original intention, which was to inquire
about the contractor commissioned to build the wall. I began the perusal for
administrative contracts. I found several old files containing nearly every
contract the institution had entered into its 175-year history. There were
thousands of invoices with wholesale suppliers, linen services, furniture, maintenance
and other companies; but the dust was getting corrosive. It took up residence
in my throat and nostrils. I was inhaling history and eating time and all the
detritus that it had accumulated.
The man who constructed the wall did not leave a
marker advertising his name and date. After ten minutes, I learned to recognize
a service contract from a supplier’s bill. I flew though most of the files when
I recognized terms and written agreements that called for individual services. The
name of Samuel Ryder was on many of those sweetheart deals. I could not help
wonder why so many public figures conceived their fortunes in beds of
corruption. What was it about doing business that men loved more than life
itself? Ah, yes, profits.