Ruth resumed her lifeless pose, but she did whisper with unmoving lips: “Hamlet by Shakespeare. ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.’”
“Rafe, honey,” Aunt Sadie called. “Come on. Kiss your Mom goodbye. You’ll see her soon.”
“What!” I shouted, startled. Ruth instantly returned to her impression of catatonic depression. (A very good impression if my memory is accurate; good, but no mimicry should fool a careful — or, at least un-dogmatic — doctor’s examination.)
“We have to go, honey,” Sadie said. She came near and beckoned me off the couch with an offer of her worried hand. I made sure to kiss my mother goodbye since the real her was present, entombed in her imitation of a corpse.
After I got up, Sadie bent down and kissed her little sister on top of her head, pressing her lips into my mother’s thick mass of black hair. Sadie almost broke down again. Her plump torso heaved and she gasped out, “Get better, Ruthie. I miss you.”
I wish I could report that my mother’s eyes flickered, that she gave a signal she had heard her sister’s loving if stupid plea for a happy ending, something that wouldn’t have risked exposure of her performance and yet could have eased Sadie’s pain. [I learned later how rigid, how tyrannical paranoia can be, especially when it is fueled by traumatic and therefore confirming events. My mother could no more feel pity for Sadie or trust her love than she could decide to discard her delusional and grandiose fantasies because they were interfering with her ability to be a good mother. There is no prison guard more alert or more tireless than mental illness. If Ruth could have trusted Sadie, then she could have trusted anyone; if she could have broken the wall of her terrible secrets just once then it would have crumbled altogether. There is no such thing as being a part-time paranoid psychotic]
I glanced back as Sadie led me out. The mannequin of my mother was still propped up on the couch, dead. While we walked to my uncle’s limousine, I marveled — silently, of course — at how she could possibly keep it up; hour after hour, pretending not to hear what was said to her, pretending to have no needs or desires.
“Is she like that all the time?” I asked Uncle Bernie, breaking the heavy silence of our ride home.
Aunt Sadie covered her face, overwhelmed by my pathetic question. Her reaction surprised me. We had no common ground: I was awed by my mother’s strength of will; Sadie thought I was in agony about Ruth’s condition, suffering from that vision of her as a zombie.
Bernie squinted at the view out his window. “No, not all the time.”
A long silence.
“It’s like she’s dreaming,” Aunt Sadie said, uncovering. She showed me a tired, but brave smile. “She’s awake but she’s dreaming. She wakes up sometimes, asks for things she likes. And she asks about you. She’s not in pain. That’s what the doctor said, right Bernie?”
“Yes,” Uncle hissed. The farther we got from the sanitarium, the angrier he seemed.
He hated my mother, I knew that. They hated each other. I had to remind myself over and over: my uncle was bad. No, not bad. My mother herself had made the distinction to me: he was a good man who believed in a bad system.
There was another long silence. I shut my eyes somewhere in the middle of it and pretended to sleep. My aunt brushed the top of my head after a while and mumbled, “Poor baby.”
“Sleeping?” Uncle asked. Sadie indicated yes. “What a mother,” he mumbled with surprising bitterness, as if he were the son who had suffered.
“When will they start the treatments?” Sadie said.
“Tomorrow.” Bernie’s music was a single note, low and angry. “They’ll do a series often and see if there’s improvement.”
“They put her out, right?”
“Of course! This is one of the most expensive and advanced psychiatric hospitals in the country.”
“I know. It’s wonderful of you, Bernie—”
“I’m not looking for thanks, that’s not what I mean. I mean they know what they’re doing. They use anesthesia and the voltage is set lower … Anyway, she won’t know a thing about it. He said it lifts them out of the severe depression so they can begin treatment. You can’t deal with her the way she is now. How can Dr. Halston talk to her? She’s unreachable.”
“I pray it works, that’s all.”
“Look. Anything is better than how she is now. It’s a living death. It’s worse than death.”
“Shh!” Sadie was in pain. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth, God damn it.”
“No, it’s not. There’s always hope.”
I did not understand the implications of their conversation. Since I intend this to be read by a lay audience I should state what is obvious to any professionaclass="underline" although electroshock therapy is advocated today as an effective symptomatic treatment to major depression and is in use on roughly twenty percent of its sufferers, nevertheless, no one, including its admirers, considers it to be appropriate in a case of paranoid psychosis or posttraumatic stress, the two indicated diagnoses of my mother’s condition. [Readers of my book The Soft-Headed Animal know that I do not believe in the use of the electroshock under any circumstances, including major depression. Evidence that prolonged use of electroshock therapy causes permanent brain damage is plentiful and there is no scientific proof that it cures depression itself. However, as stated above, even ECT’s advocates would not recommend its use on a patient with my mother’s problems.]
My mother received the wrong treatment. Nine-year-old Rafe did not know that. He did not know that keeping his mother’s secret was doing her harm. Nor is the mature Rafe confident that had I been less skillful at deception, had I been found out and forced to confess that my mother wasn’t really withdrawn — that she spoke to me and said she was deliberately fooling her doctors — I am not confident that I would have been believed. I hope I am not overstating Dr. Halston’s error. All doctors make honest mistakes, especially when a clever patient is deliberately deceptive. But I am sure that, having made his diagnosis, Dr. Halston would not have been quick to overrule himself because of the account of a child, a child who could easily have made it up out of his own fantasies. Moreover, I understood my mother’s motive and I respected it. What is madness to a normal adult made sense to me as a traumatized child: my mother, acting out of her paranoia, meant to be loving by her injunction that I should keep silent and not identify myself with her and her “cause.” That would only have landed me in the care of the same monsters who tormented her. It is hard to understand, but Ruth’s actions, which seem heartless and unconscionable to a normal person, were, by her lights, the actions of a loving mother.
I found Hamlet in one of the red leather-bound volumes in Uncle Bernie’s study. I had permission to take any of those books. I was a precocious reader and I enjoyed being one. My father encouraged and praised such behavior and Uncle Bernie was in awe of it. The desire to please my absent father and to dazzle my prideful uncle got me to open the classics, but the power of their narratives kept me going. (With apologies to Alice Miller, I’m not sure anyone would develop a taste for culture without what she characterizes as abusive parental behavior, namely the narcissistic parent who demands precocity as a precondition for love. She’s right, it isn’t a recipe for happiness; but without it, Mozart wouldn’t have existed.) I had already read Plutarch’s Lives and a volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire out of Uncle’s library. I had avoided Shakespeare because verse, much less verse in the form of dialogue, was discouraging. That same afternoon, after my tennis lesson, dressed in sweaty shorts, I pulled the second of the two-volume set of Shakespeare down from its high shelf and propped the book on my naked thighs. I remember the leather sticking to my skin. It took a while but I found the speech Ruth had quoted. Along the way there were other lines that lured me into reading scenes out of order. (To this day I have never read a Shakespeare play from beginning to end, but always out of sequence, as if I were assembling a jigsaw puzzle.) I was struck by lines that still resonate with meaning for me. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” might well be on every psychiatrist’s wall, for whether it is good philosophy or no, it is a necessary premise of the therapeutic process.