He Wanted the Moon Read online

  With several friends, my secretary, Gretta, and a few relatives, the correspondence was regular and strenuous. The almost daily arrival of one to a half dozen letters brought me a great deal of comfort. Possibly this correspondence created a wider spread of gossip concerning my illness, and it may have done me a bit of harm in various ways, but it was a gratifying experience at the time of the illness, and it did much to reestablish normality.

  DURING perhaps my seventh week at Westborough, Corny Trowbridge—our Chestnut Hill minister—paid me a visit. I did not expect him and I don’t know why he came, but I shall never forget his visit. Naturally we talked about spiritual values. I told him that bible teachings had been much impressed on me in childhood days. He spoke of Christ.

  “Surrender to Him,” Corny told me. “It isn’t as weak as it sounds. Surrender to Him.”

  Corny went on to say that by following closely the teachings and the example of Christ, one could realize so much more in the line of success and happiness.

  “Christ lived these 1,944 years ago,” I said. “There must be some spiritual viewpoint more adapted to our modern age. In place of surrendering completely to Him, might there not be some way of just going along with Him, beside Him?”

  I spoke of my marital troubles and my hunger for a satisfactory sexual life. I narrated my love for dogs, horses, and birds at some length. I gave Corny two letters about some difficult bareback riding I’d done. I explained that my deep love of horses enabled me to understand them better and to do with them things that most people could not accomplish.

  As I talked about my love of animals, Corny was reminded of St. Francis.

  “St. Francis must have been a manic depressive,” he said. “Have you ever heard about his sermon to the birds?”

  He went on, telling me the historic account of St. Francis and the birds he loved.

  “Haven’t you read The Life of St. Francis?” he asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  “I shall send you the book if you’d like to read it.”

  As Corny and I talked, I believe pleasantly, he let me have some of his cigarettes. We both smoked. It came time for him to leave and I walked with him from my room to the visitor’s waiting room where he had his hat and coat. As he picked up his hat and coat, I could see that his eyes were moist and his voice betrayed emotional tension. He said that he’d come again to see me. I wrote him several times asking him to come and wrote my wife several times to ask her to request that he visit me again. He never returned.

  Soon after Corny’s visit, a book entitled In the Steps of St. Francis arrived in the mail. It was the story of St. Francis’s life blended with a description of travels through Italy and other countries where he had wandered with his followers. As judged by a card I found in the book, it must have been a Christmas present to Corny from some relative. I read it through the first time, rather haltingly, because I did not enjoy the travelogue part, but later as I reached the end, I was so deeply interested that I immediately went back to the beginning and read the entire book over again, consuming in detail all the description of the author’s travels in the steps of St. Francis. As I went along, I underscored passages and made marginal notes. It was my intention to send Corny a new copy of the book, and I wrote asking my wife to arrange this for me. She never did so and eventually she returned to Corny his own copy, somewhat worn from much use and considerably altered by underscoring and marginal notes in pencil.

  FROM my window looking out over the hills in back of the hospital there were small illuminated crosses that could be seen near the tuberculosis unit and also in the woods to my right and occasionally on a hilltop. During the daytime, on this same hilltop, I could see three objects sitting in a row. I could never make out exactly what they were. They corresponded closely with the location of crosses seen at night and sometimes flashes of light came from them. These flashes of light were quite baffling, as were the crosses. I never really understood how these crosses happened to appear. Other patients could see them, and one was visible from the porch to the right of the women’s active wards in an easterly direction.

  Someone told me—perhaps a patient—that some women from Chestnut Hill were living in nearby dormitories. For a day or two, I fell into the delusion that they were women I knew. One night, I lay with my head in the ventilator shaft in my room and talked, thinking my voice might reach a particular woman I imagined might be in an adjoining dormitory. I quickly lost these amorous impressions.

  I couldn’t seem to prevent myself from performing pranks. I loved to hide forks and spoons inside the large metal sleeve through which the ceiling light hung down. This bronze-colored, conical sleeve was broad at its base next to the ceiling and could be unscrewed and lowered, leaving a fairly large space. Quite a good many small objects could be put in here, and the sleeve could then be put back in place. When my spoons and forks disappeared, the attendants searched my room but could never find them until I revealed the secret. All this seems childish in retrospect, but at the time it seemed to relieve monotony. I felt that my wits were pitted against those of doctors, nurses, and attendants, and I loved to tease them in many ways. The large safety pins, used to help bind the patients in cold packs, could be concealed in the electric light fixture or could be hidden by hooking them on an iron pipe concealed about a foot up the ventilation shaft. Through a small hole in the mattress, small articles could also be concealed.

  I made many attempts to find ways of unlocking my door, usually with crude keys made from bedsprings or by using sound vibration produced by hammering on the doorknob. I also tried the scheme of hooking the iron crossbar at the foot of the bed over the doorknob, then manipulating the bed to produce various types of torsion, stress and strain. One day, I succeeded in breaking the steel rod connecting the inside and outside knob. Another day I took the inside knob off and hid it in my left upper jaw. As I did so, Tiny Hayes came suddenly into the room.

  “Where is the doorknob, Perry?” he asked.

  I took the doorknob out of my mouth and handed it to him.

  TO ease the pain of incarceration, I sang and whistled many tunes day and night: “Rose Marie,” “Desert Song,” “Indian Love Call,” “Intermezzo,” and many others.

  While whistling and singing at night, I stood in my window and tapped in rhythm on the panes. One night, as I was tapping on the windowpanes leading to the porch (quite gently it seemed), one of the panes suddenly broke. It wasn’t at all like the break that comes after a powerful direct blow, where big pieces of broken glass are produced. It was more like physical forces together with sound were creating the effects, shattering the glass into thousands of small pieces. On the same evening, a pane of glass in the window with outside views broke in the same manner, and under the same circumstance. I recall going to great pains to help attendants pick up every tiniest piece of glass.

  For many days during this time, the light bulb held my interest. I never knew what type of bulb it was, but it seemed to contain a gas, perhaps a mercury vapor, which took on a kidney shape when the light was turned on. As I found my eyes persistently upon this bulb, the kidney-shaped vapor would slowly change with other shapes, round and oval, and sometimes it looked like false teeth, opening and closing slowly as in laughter or conversation.

  Westborough State Hospital, 1944

  The patient became very destructive, completely destroyed several iron hospital beds, broke the panels from the door of his room, broke the sashes from the window, dismantled the window casing and with a window weight in each hand was very threatening toward the employees but did not strike them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DURING the course of my time at Westborough, I became convinced that many patients entered Westborough in a state of mild mental illness but were made critically ill, or even hopelessly ill, by the procedures employed and the rough handling by nurses and attendants. The doctors play an inconsequential part. There are so many patients that it is impossible to give adequate attentio
n to any patient. Everything is run on a crude, general plan. The keynote of the place is incarceration. Movies are available to the convalescent patients twice weekly during certain months of the year and small groups meet together to sing and dance. A small orchestra made up of patients functions periodically. There is a department of occupational therapy. But so far as I could see during my stay, these sources of distraction formed an insignificant part of the care of the patient. Perhaps before the war—and before there arose such a difficult problem of funding adequate trained nurses, attendants and occupational therapists—the whole set up might have been quite different. What I saw with my own eyes during a trying wartime period was ghastly.

  There were many patients who came and went and many who were with me from start to finish. Old Mr. Sullivan, who drooled at the mouth, sat in his filthy clothes and smoked a corncob pipe. He was mostly rather quiet but sometimes cried out as others pushed him around. He didn’t like to be shaven so would avoid shaves if possible. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why. Being blind, he had to rely upon Tiny Hayes to shave him. I witnessed one such shave. Tiny delivered the shave while an assortment of nurses and attendants held Old Mr. Sullivan down. He groaned and cried out in pain. His head was jerked around quite roughly and held in strained and uncomfortable positions while Tiny scraped with brutal violence, leaving the skin red and excoriated.

  Mr. Sullivan was a frequent companion to Mr. Clark, also senile and mischievous. They often sat on the bench outside my window, talking and growling, Mr. Sullivan smoking and drooling from the mouth and Mr. Clark performing constant pranks. One day I saw Mr. Clark blow a red balloon out of his right nostril like a clown in a circus. Where he got the balloon and how he learned to blow it, I do not know. He and Sullivan often wrestled on the concrete floor, foolishly and clumsily. It afforded much amusement to many of the patients. I could never get much kick out of the exhibition, however.

  The age range of patients was from about eight years old to eighty. There were two youngsters, one very young and attractive, around eight, and the other about ten or eleven. They were both profane and mischievous. These youngsters wrestled on the concrete floor and amused us in many ways. One of them, the redhead, made it a specialty to steal up to my window and spit in my face. One day I called him to my window and threw a glass of cold water in his face. This was the only revenge I took, except to spank him and give him a little gentle jiu-jitsu.

  One day the attractive Italian lad, Angelo Cephalo, whom I had met the year before, arrived on our ward. I was in the office as he was brought in to surrender his clothing and go through the usual routine. I observed that he seemed about the same except that his shoes, in contrast to last year, were quite shapely and stylish. They were small and fit him well, whereas the preceding year, he had worn large shoes that gave his feet a whole appearance of bourgeois effect. He was now good looking from head to foot, neatly built and well proportioned, very athletic. When I was allowed out of my room, we competed in every respect: wrestling, boxing with open hands, tumbling. I got the best of him in every competition.

  One of my special tricks was climbing the steel posts on the porch. I could jump from the floor, grasp the steel post with one hand and knee, and climb like a monkey, quickly touching the ceiling and sliding quickly back down. I could do this easily while manic but with great difficulty while normal. Another patient, Clare Johnson, would be the coach in some of our competitions. He’d give the signal and we would both leap to a steel pole (there were two of them). I could usually touch the ceiling before Angelo had left the floor. We did it again and again. Both Angelo and Clare seemed amused at the speed with which I could get to the ceiling.

  Peter F. Perry was the most colorful character on the ward. He had been a favorite patient of mine when he was working regularly and had a little money. I treated him for syphilis. I remember doing a spinal fluid exam and finding it normal. Evidently he developed central nervous system syphilis of the paretic type and was sent to Grafton State Hospital, another psychiatric institution. After seeing him at Westborough, I could recall his letters from Grafton. He owed me some money and could not pay. He had asked me to wait. He never admitted he was at the hospital in Grafton. I had finally cancelled his debt, never knowing why he couldn’t pay.

  Pedro was a nice-looking, middle-aged man, a Portuguese. He had handsome well-chiseled features and a full head of hair. His skin was swarthy, his figure trim and powerful. Evidently he had boxed professionally and wrestled. His hands were exceptionally powerful. He could bend steel bars with his teeth. After extracting a steel bar from a bed, he would wrap a piece of cloth around it, put it between his teeth and pull on each end with his hand, bending the bar slowly, to a sharp angle. I tried the trick. With my limited experience, I could make no progress. Pedro also had his own shorthand, a peculiar variety of the Morse code, and he had mathematical tricks for adding and otherwise dealing with large sets of figures. His voice was fairly good, he sang fairly well. One night I heard him give an informal oration on the porch. His elocution was surprisingly effective. Every morning he would be kept quiet in a straightjacket or tub bath and before lunch he would be released. He then would take a shower, if he’d been in a straightjacket, and dress. He came regularly to the porch, singing and tap dancing for us, often dancing with some other patients. He seemed to sleep very little. Pedro usually spent every night, most all nights, in the bathroom, writing and smoking and composing music, and probably living in some dreamlike imaginary world.

  Agnes was a nice-looking redheaded girl, living across the court. She often sat in the window. We exchanged a few letters by way of an attendant. She wrote me a poem or two. Someone said she was a manic depressive at only nineteen, and had been at Westborough for ten years. When I finally met her at close range, I found that although she was dressed in a very youthful garment, her face with its lines betrayed an age of thirty or more. I have often wondered who she really was. One day in the auditorium, where we had music, singing and dancing in small groups, I was dancing with her on the stage. There were only a few others around. She coaxed me into singing “Rose Marie.” I sang a few bars, felt greatly embarrassed, and quit.

  There was a man with a badly mangled hand. He had only a finger and thumb left on each hand. He was a middle-aged blond, very good looking, friendly, evidently paranoid; a patient who’ll be here a year or two. He’d been an engineer, seemed very sick when one tried to talk with him at any length, but for a brief conversation, was quite rational. He had told me that his hobby was constructing various types of engines. We talked about engines, drew diagrams and then tried to figure out a new and more efficient diesel motor. He developed a contact dermatitis of the front of the neck. This was treated in a rather unorthodox manner, and became abscessed. He had to go to the surgical ward for incision and drainage. Frequently his wife, son, sister and other relatives came to see him. He sat for long hours talking with them. He had a work assignment somewhere in the place. I never knew just what he did. I considered him a good friend.

  There was a dark-complexioned young Italian, thin and delicate, black hair, deep brown eyes, and small of stature. Once I shook his hand and found his palm hot and moist. He ate very little and what he did eat, he ate hurriedly, getting in and out of the dining room very quickly. He sat all day, in a corner alone, or at the window, talking to himself quite constantly. Perhaps he was conversing with some imaginary person. I never saw him speak with any other patient. No one ever paid any attention to him. He seemed to be beneath notice by any of the doctors. He was a pitiful figure. I imagined that he would go on for years, talking to himself, too poor to afford expensive therapy of the “total push” type. Perhaps “shock therapy” will reach Westborough someday and pull him out.

  One patient, a tall, good-looking blond, about twenty-five years of age, came up to see me a few times when I was extremely manic. We talked at great length. We played an imaginary game of chess, using a drawing of a chessboard, and relying upon our
memory of the plays. He conceded me the game.

  “That’s the easiest game I’ve ever won,” I commented.

  Later we played a real game of chess on a real checkerboard with good chess pieces. He defeated me in the one game we played.

  On the ward was a pitiful old man, of average height and trim, his hair silvery gray, his eyes blue. He always stood by himself in some corner away from the rest of us, dressed in underwear and a white bathrobe. He talked incessantly, repeating some monotonous succession of words, over and over again, literally for hours without end.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” he would say.

  Or, “Take it easy, Mister. Take it easy, Mister. Take it easy, Mister.”

  Obviously he was lonely, in great distress, but he talked rapidly and in a tone that had astonishing powers of annoyance. I never saw him have a visitor. He aroused my deepest sympathies, but, after weeks of hearing his loud and rasping murmurings, I too could understand why so many patients could not endure his, “Oh, God, what’ll I do? What’ll I do? What’ll I do,” by the hour. Often the poor old fellow would be put in a straightjacket and placed in a room by himself, behind closed doors, to shut out his voice. Almost daily, patients and attendants would drag him out of his corner, throw him on the bed, scold him and even beat him. He always showed fresh bruises and scratches. One morning his right ear was greatly swollen with subcutaneous hemorrhage, a typical boxer ear injury; the kind that frequently goes on to a cauliflower ear. Evidently someone struck him a vicious blow on the ear. So far as I could determine, the staff never paid any attention to the poor old man’s injuries, and they made no attempt to stop the beatings that he received.

  A young man, about thirty-eight, with soft, delicate skin and a heavy beard, spent some days with me on the violent ward. He never said much, but often he would look at me and remark: “What’s the story?” (pronounced “storree”). I used to show him how I could whistle to the robins and get them to hop up to the window on the south exposure of the porch. Several did what they could for me. Sometimes I whistled and brought robins up in pairs. They would hop around until they got near the porch, and then, as I continued to whistle, they would fly straight up into the air, heart-to-heart and beak-to-beak, in a mating flight. Soon after this, the young man was discharged and left the hospital.