Susan Ross, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts 28/1, Fall 2023
When Polly disappeared, she wore a straitjacket over her light cotton housedress. The yellow shirtwaist was strewn with wildflowers. She wore it often around the house, with her black penny loafers and white ankle socks, but she never wore it outside, at least not beyond the backyard.
The sky hung like dirty laundry and the temperature clung to freezing, with the day’s gray light blurring and foreshortening the distance between the cookie-cutter homes of the new postwar subdivision. Blasts from the west threatened snow, and I imagine her dress like a spot of sunshine between two men dressed in white who led her down the two front steps of our little house in Mahopac Falls. She moved across the concrete path into the waiting sedan as if sleepwalking, as if the ground shifted under her or something might break. The car door stood open, and one of the men put his hand on her head as he folded her into the back seat. He lay her black winter coat beside her and closed the door.
Polly didn’t look back. She didn’t say a word or wave. If she worried that the man’s hand had mussed her almost-black hair and wanted to pat it into place, to make certain her bangs were straight and the flip curled evenly right at the bottom of her ears, she couldn’t. She couldn’t move her hands. Perhaps her mother Doris came to mind: how horrified prim, tidy Doris would be if she knew that Polly had left the house dressed as she was.
To arrive at the sprawling complex of brick buildings that formed Harlem Valley Insane Asylum in Wingdale, New York, took an hour, more. In the middle of miles of woods, rows of barred windows glowed jack-o-lantern bright out of the darkness. Some reflected the smoking stack of the power plant. The place looked deserted although it held hundreds of staff and more than five thousand patients. Many of the patients were locked in cells or restrained. The staff navigated through a complex of underground tunnels, invisible to outsiders. Polly knew none of this.
I have just turned two when my mother disappears for what must seem forever. I don’t remember, but when my grandmother Doris deems her daughter unfit to care for her children, her home, or her husband, the men deposit Polly like cargo at Harlem Valley asylum. My father keeps my older brother and sister with him. They are school age. His relatives likely are ecstatic to watch them for the interval between school and his return from work, but a toddler is too much for them to manage, I imagine.
So, he sends me off. No one remembers where. It will be four months before I see my family again. During those weeks when my vocabulary is exploding and my mobility introduces me to a wider new world, none of my relatives is my custodian. When my growing curiosity fills me with night terrors, these people who say they love me are not there. I imagine myself alone in the dark. Crying out in the night. Wandering with no one beside me.
The decision to commit frail, timid Polly was not without merit. She was thirty-one years old. The mother of three. For most of the twenty-four months following the birth of her youngest, me, she had been incapable of sleeping or performing routine tasks. She alternated between bouts of crying, anxiety, near catatonia, and jubilation. She hallucinated, heard voices. In the 1700s, she might have been called a witch and put to death. In the mid-twentieth century, Polly was committed indefinitely to a mental asylum.
Sending daughters away always has been quite simple, particularly for wealthy or prominent families like my mother’s. For centuries doctors have locked up women as mentally unfit for complaints so diverse and diffuse that it seems every unhappy, disrespectful, argumentative, disruptive, independent, strong-willed, or even passive daughter may be labelled crazy and committed to a mental hospital. In the 1950s, half of the women in asylums were there for “nervous exhaustion,” a garbage-bag diagnosis of so many imprecise symptoms it surely included the vast number of women suffering postpartum depression.
Even today, women’s psychic pain remains, at best, only partly understood. Since before the days of European settlers, men have lured women away from family and friends to promised utopias only to leave them isolated in the colonies, the West, the suburbs. Tethered to a man, women are expected to find life purpose in duty and service. Some may have chemical or genetic traits that predispose them to mental instability. For many, though, what is dubbed mental illness arises from dislocation and disconnection, systemic injustices of gender and class, pervasive violence and its threat, the depression produced by chronic abuse and trauma, and the silence of the powerless. The label of madness transforms trauma into lunatic ravings.
For centuries, male doctors have addressed women’s existential suffering with concern for the difficulties it poses to men. In the 1950s, doctors created new diagnoses and prescriptions to tranquilize “emasculating women.” Psychiatrists initiated lifelong treatment regimens to bring about women’s compliance with lives bound by detached, single-family homes, new cars they did not drive, and household gadgets that multiplied expectations and unfulfilling busyness.
Polly arrived at Harlem Valley among the first wave of patients being treated with Serpasil, Thorazine, and Miltown, which everyone called Mother’s Little Helper. With a patient headcount that exceeded capacity by almost forty percent, the asylum was severely understaffed. Patients lay in the endless, ear-splitting din of open wards with beds packed so tightly a person could barely slither through. The sting of pine disinfectant could not mask the smell of patients strapped in their own filth on unwashed bedclothes soiled with blood, vomit, human waste, and menstrual fluid, though women often stopped menstruating, regardless of age. Almost ninety percent of patients had been committed involuntarily.
Under these conditions, it is small wonder that the asylum’s primary job was not to care for patients but to warehouse the loonies, to lock the crazies away from the good and normal folks. My mother was among them.
For uncounted decades, doctors had tested drugs and therapies on those deemed mentally ill or unable to refuse. Throughout the postwar and Cold War periods, Nazi medical experts opened private medical practices, trained mental health providers, and published influential Nazi-inflected strategies to make “mental defectives” conform to societal norms in this country. Recruited by the CIA’s Operation Paperclip, they continued experiments with plant extracts, barbiturates, amphetamines, heroin, and electric and insulin shock.
Harlem Valley stood at the vanguard. A national leader in the early adoption of drugs manufactured by German companies no longer producing chemical weapons of war, the asylum found the new psychopharmaceuticals “quite beneficial in lessening excitement, tension, and aggressiveness,” according to annual reports. Local neurosurgeon Dr. Kenneth M. Gang performed weekly radical “ice pick” lobotomies to scar the prefrontal cortex of the brain and reduce violence in patients and “improve hospital adjustment.” Undertrained staff dispensed drugs from heavy stock bottles, and excessive doses caused “medical lobotomies” in nearly one in ten patients. An equal number received daily electric shock. Many became permanently catatonic, disabled but easy to manage. One in ten died.
Alongside new therapies, Harlem Valley relied on treatments that had changed little since the Middle Ages. Submersion in freezing water for up to twenty-four hours was used to subdue overexcited individuals, flush away impurities, and kill mad ideas. Hydrotherapy induced calm and sometimes coma or death.
Records of what happened to Polly during her commitment have disappeared, but she told me she was tightly bound in rubber sheets and strapped into a large, galvanized tub almost daily. Frigid water poured in so hard and cold that it hurt. It burned. Icy needles stabbed everywhere. The workers moved on as the water rose quickly toward her mouth. She panicked. She struggled and screamed for help. She knew she would drown. It hurt until she grew numb. Her brain slowed. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. She knew they would kill her this time.
Later, she would wake, strapped in a bed in the open ward, unable to move or think clearly. This happened again and again and again.
Polly also was among the six hundred Harlem Valley patients who received electric shock treatment more than once a week, perhaps more than once a day, without anesthesia. Each time, she was bound to a wood table and told to bite down on a hard, rubber rod. Electricity coursed through her. Her body seized, snapped, went rigid. Unlike many, she did not bite through her tongue or break bones before she lost consciousness.
When she awoke, she was immobilized, strapped in a bed in the ward. She rarely recovered fully before the next treatment.
Unlike the unnumbered who lie buried in unmarked graves on the asylum grounds, Polly was released after slightly more than four months as the trees began to bud in the spring of 1957. “The asylum would release me only to my parents,” she said. “That was the deal they struck when they committed me. To come home, I had to agree never to go back to my husband. I had to leave your father.”
Five years later, when my mother remarries, the transition is abrupt. I am seven years old, the smallest and most timid of the seven children under the age of thirteen in our combined family. Without careful adult supervision, we run wild. The eldest among us, especially my big brother Peter, develop a pecking order, using threats, physical intimidation, and measured pain to govern. I am their favored target.
When I seek help from my mother, she says: “They are only playing, Susie. Learn to ignore them and it will stop.”
But she isn’t there. She’s never there. Like the time teen-aged Peter pins me against the Formica counter of our shotgun kitchen and says, “I bet I can swing you around in here by your feet. Wanna bet?”
The corners of the counter are sharp. The cabinet and drawer pulls – rectangles of metal with pointy squared ends – stick out half an inch. As I try to squirm free, Peter leans over and grabs my ankles, swinging me off the floor. My head nearly smashes the floor.
“No, Peter. NO!”
He begins to spin, waving my body up and down as he turns. The pulls, the corners, the handle of the refrigerator approach and recede. Faster. Faster.
“Stop!” Closer, closer they come. I scream. I beg. I give in to the fear, close my eyes, go limp. Tears wash my face. Peter drops me to the floor with a withering look. That look. A mixture of contempt, disgust, hatred.
“What a baby! Jesus. Christ. You. Are. Such. A. Cry. Baby. Get over it!” He stalks away.
Another night I cringe in the darkened hallway, plastering myself against the wall beside the stairs, a few steps shy of my bedroom. Peter’s muscled body blocks my way. His face is so red, the freckles have disappeared. His vibrating left hand clamps over my mouth. His right fist is cocked back. Spit splatters my face. His words explode.
“If You Ever Tell Mom On Me Again … I … Will … KILL YOU. Get It?”
Then he slowly wraps his right hand around my throat, stares flatly into my eyes, and squeezes. Tighter and tighter. One moment. Two. His pupils narrow. His lips curl into a sneer. He breathes faster. Another squeeze. Hard. He drops his hands, turns, and walks up the stairs. Quietly but firmly, he closes the door of his bedroom right beside mine. That night my hands begin to shake, and I lock my bedroom door for the first time.
I’m almost ten the first time I find my mother in a puddle of urine and blood beneath the living room hearthstone. It is the smell that leads me to her, the stench of a filthy gas station bathroom, the rotting carcass of a deer, the reek of long unbathed bodies. She is crumpled on the oak-planked living room floor, having stumbled and fallen, face first, against the heavy stone. An unmoving heap, she mumbles, incoherent from drink or drugs or both.
Moonlight filters through the windows, and dust dances between the shadows of the trees. I shake her gently, and her gashed, partially toothless face lolls toward me, wheezing. Blood is smeared across her left cheek and down her pink-and-white-striped shirtwaist dress. One of her shoes is missing. I fight the instinct to gag. I drag her up to sit and prop her against the fireplace.
The nannies and au pairs fled long ago. I am in charge. Polly complies like a child as I put her in clean clothes and two shoes, do my best to wash her face, and fetch my stepfather, Jack, to take her to the hospital. She leans heavily on him as they walk in silence to the car. She doesn’t wave or say goodbye as he accordions her into the passenger seat and drives off. She will be back. This will happen again. And again.
A month after my mother finds me fucking my brother’s best friend on the living room sofa, all of us girls have prescriptions to the Pill. It’s too late for me. I begin each day vomiting in the girls’ room at school. Weeks tick by as I refuse to know. I refuse to do or say anything. I hold fast to the magical thinking that I will become unpregnant.
Night after night I cry and stumble from bed to my plastic turntable to play The Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” over and over. I stare the blackness into colors. My hands shake. Purple shadows grow beneath my eyes. My cheeks sink.
Numb and unthinking, I trudge blindly through school, handing in poor work and avoiding friends. Weeks run together as my future looms. I stash razor blades in paper wrappers beneath my mattress, gather handfuls of my mother’s Valium. Night after night I unwrap the razor blades and lay them on my bed. One night, I tie socks around my arms, pump my fists, and trace a blade slowly across the distended veins. How hard will I need to push to cut them open? I’ll have to cut the right one first. If not, the left won’t be strong enough to do the right.
Another night I pour out the pills. I begin. The first and second go down. The next two stick in my throat. I gag. I gulp water, but they don’t go down. I shove a finger down and throw them up. You’re worthless. You can’t even do this right. I have no options. Abortion is illegal.
Back in the ‘40s, when my mother had her own accidental pregnancy, loopholes in anti-abortion laws allowed well-connected women to obtain safe “therapeutic” terminations, a category the laws did not define. But my mother never told her parents. Instead, she ran away, married the man she was seeing, kept the baby, and changed her life forever.
In New Jersey in 1969, when I am a pregnant fourteen-year-old, the law permits doctors to consider a range of physical, emotional, and psychological factors to decide whether a woman’s well-being makes termination of a pregnancy “medically necessary.” Under law, the procedure must not be for the woman’s convenience, and she must be diagnosed with a documented mental disorder that can be improved through treatment.
My sister worms my secret out of me and tells my mother. “Thank you for letting me know,” is all Polly says before she knocks and opens the door to my sacred, private bedroom without waiting for a reply. She leans hard on the door frame staring in silence. “Is it true?” she asks. “Are you having a baby?”
“No,” I snap back. “No. I am NOT having a baby. What the hell? I’m not that stupid. It was an accident. You know about those. Right?”
She stares in silence and takes a swig from her ever-present vodka.
“Hey, I’m not you; I’m not fucking up MY whole life,” I shout with the fury of a cornered rabbit. I have good reason for fear. Rumor has it abortions are impossible unless you seek out back alleys.
She takes another gulp of vodka. What is that? Her third? Her fourth? Something I don’t recognize flickers across her slack features. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her.
Days later she takes me to her psychiatrist, Dr. Hatcher. The meeting is perfunctory. She has briefed him, and he has agreed for a hefty price to declare me “not mentally competent.” Having a child will endanger my life. They talk over me while I press handprints into my lap to stop my hands from shaking. I am lucky. With his quick signature, he makes me eligible for a legal abortion. He also makes me officially insane, like my mother.
What he doesn’t say, what no one says, is that I need to hurry if I want to have the simple procedure. Already having missed two periods, hospitals won’t use the safer and quicker dilation and extraction method after another month or so. Then I’ll have to be induced. Without consulting me, he and my mother arrange for my abortion eight weeks later, during my winter school break, to maximize “convenience and discretion,” she later says.
In the last week of December, she checks me into Morristown Memorial Hospital, where twenty years earlier she gave birth to her accident, my brother Peter. A nurse appears with a wheelchair, and my mother stands. “I’ll be back when they call to tell me you’re done.”
The nurse wheels me wordlessly to my room. She places a gown on the bed. “Put this on and get into bed. I’ll be back.” She returns with a razor and shaves my abdomen and privates. Then, without warning, she administers an enema. “Hold it as long as you can,” she says and walks out.
I rush to the toilet and my bowels explode. A different nurse appears, swabs my left forearm with alcohol, jabs in an IV line, and hangs a bottle that says glucose. She says nothing and leaves.
I lie in bed, sweating and clammy, staring at the ceiling tiles. My hands shake uncontrollably. I want to rip the IV out and run. Run far away. Run forever. I begin to shiver. I press the nurses’ buzzer. No response. I hear my neighbor and turn toward her. She glares and yanks the curtain closed.
I hear footfalls in the hall and hope someone is coming, but they pass by. I wait as the light shifts and the sounds and odors of food trays filter into the room. Someone places a tray at the end of the bed next to me, where the woman dozes behind a curtain. I do not get a tray. My bladder fills. I buzz for the nurse. Nothing. I buzz again.
“What?” an angry voice demands over the intercom.
“I need to pee.”
“So, get up and do it.”
More activity from the hall sounds like a shift change. A strange nurse comes in with an IV bottle, hangs it, and adjusts the drip without a word. “What’s that?” I ask. “Saline.” She is gone.
My neighbor’s lunch tray is cleared. Her doctor comes, glances briefly at my chart, and gives me a sour look. Her dinner tray arrives. Another nurse appears with another IV bottle. “What’s that? What’s that for?” I asked quickly before she can leave. “Oxytocin. It’ll take a while.” That’s it. No explanation. No advice.
I now know that oxytocin-induced labor typically begins about six hours after the drip is introduced, is hard labor, and may last twenty-four hours or more. The patient proceeds through all the stages of labor and delivery, but the contractions are sharp, hard, frequent, and slow to cause the necessary dilation. As an abortion technique, it is highly effective, cheap, and quite safe when well monitored.
I lie alone in my bed and wait. Hours go by, but I cannot sleep. Long after the room is dark and the hallway lights have dimmed, I feel a cramp. It hurts, makes my abdomen rock hard, and releases. I buzz. Nothing. Another cramp. Then another and another. I buzz and buzz. Nothing. I call out, terrified. I buzz. I cry out. I buzz. Then a hard contraction, and I scream in pain. I hear my neighbor buzz. “Get her out of here,” she hisses over the intercom.
An unfamiliar nurse appears at the door. She does not come in. “Keep it down,” she whispers harshly. “You’re disturbing the others. You made this bed. Now lie in it.” She closes the door and is gone.
I barely catch my breath between contractions. I’m being ripped apart from the inside. I’m going to die. Alone. I cry and scream and beg and buzz. And buzz. No one comes. I cry out. I buzz and buzz.
A new nurse flings open the door. It bangs the wall.
“Be quiet!” she nearly screams. “No one wants to hear you. If I had my way, we’d throw you out with the other trash.”
She turns to leave, and my neighbor hisses, “Take her out of here. I don’t want the likes of her near me.”
The nurse’s rubber-soled shoes squeak away. She and another nurse return, yank my bed out from the wall, bang it against the door jam, and wheel me down the hall without a word. Panels of humming fluorescent lights pass above me. I think, I should count them. They maneuver my bed behind the nurses’ station, wrestle it into the storage room. It barely fits, but they jostle it around the door.
“Keep it down,” one says as she slams the door. Dim light leaks through the meshed window in the door. Alone among stacks of bed pans, swabs, cotton balls, and supplies, I have no call button. The volume of the nurses’ radio increases until it is very loud, much louder than before. “…darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again …”
The contractions come harder and faster. I cry. I beg. I scream myself hoarse. No one comes. The contractions grow stronger. Harder. It goes on and on. I’m sure I’ll die. After forever, the door opens. A nurse shoves hard on my abdomen once, twice, then lifts a bloody bundle in her hands.
“It was a girl,” she says and walks out.
I am exhausted. One month beyond my fifteenth birthday, I lie alone shaking.
The next morning, I startle awake in an unfamiliar hospital room. Standing at the foot of my bed in the candy-striped uniform of a hospital volunteer is Miss White, my high school French teacher, reading my medical chart. One perfectly lacquered nail taps the clipboard. Beneath her teased bouffant of bleached straw, her flawlessly mascaraed eyes look up slowly. She smiles a tight curl.
“May I get you something,” she asks in a syrupy voice. “Magazine? Candy? A snack?” She waves toward her cart. “Anything?” She stares into my eyes and replaces my chart. I press my shaking hands against the sheets and turn toward the windows as her cart squeaks away.
At graduation two and a half years later, I am the only one not surprised when Miss White confers the French prize I have earned upon someone else. Nor am I surprised, really, on some random afternoon when my grandmother Doris pauses her needlepoint and says, “You know, it was I who loaned Polly the money needed to pay for your ‘procedure.’” She stops to evaluate her work then looks straight at me. “I simply thought you should be aware of the debt. The sum is recorded with the other amounts your grandfather Philip and I spent on your mother and her care. It too will be deducted from her inheritance when the time comes.
“That is as it should be. Don’t you agree?”
Doris kept records of every penny she and her husband doled out to their children after they left home. For Polly, the expenses were largely medical and psychiatric, or for rent and household essentials and my abortion. For her brother Pete – after whom my tormenting brother Peter was named – they ran toward bail and attorneys and the cost to replace items he damaged or “freed” from their owners. Doris and Philip finally cut him off sometime after thirty, after he was arrested for drunk driving, driving without a license or registration, resisting arrest, carrying an illegal concealed weapon, and malicious damage. He and a Princeton University undergraduate more than a decade his junior were convicted for driving through a plush Princeton neighborhood at two a.m. shooting out streetlamps just months before Polly was committed to Harlem Valley Insane Asylum.
Half a century later, I come upon Harlem Valley by surprise on a gray, drizzle-filled June day. Its physical existence hits me like a blow to the chest. I recognize the asylum’s power plant though I’ve never laid eyes on it. I’m terrified. The smokestack’s long finger points at me, as if accusing. I am face to face with the shadow that’s darkened my entire life.
I freeze and pull to the side of New York Highway 22. My heart is pounding. My breathing is fast and shallow. I cling to the steering wheel, staring. I desperately want to leave this place, to erase it from my mind. But I can’t. I stay and I stare and I clasp my hands tightly to stop their shaking.
Rain slashes the power plant’s brick face scarred by graffiti and pitted by decades of soot. Cracked and broken windows stare gap-toothed into the gloam. The asylum’s buildings appear to lean over the narrow road. It’s clear they are meant to keep some people in, others out. Razor wire fringes the grounds. Endless rows of sealed and barred windows. Blind eyes. Padlocked doors. Only the ornate front entrance permits exit.
I tell myself it’s the rain and the fear of trespass that keep me here across the road, but I’m paralyzed by an overwhelming sense of evil, something rotten, rotting. I will myself to move and slowly drive away.
Another day, when the sun is shining, I enter the grounds briefly, tentatively. I tiptoe as if fearful to disturb the tortured souls who linger, afraid to leave a footprint to mark my passing. I jump at the chhhhhttttttrrrrr of a squirrel and peer like a thief through dirt-streaked windows. I touch nothing. I leave no trace and leave quickly with a few photographs. This place will do me harm.
I drive away slowly. This time I don’t drink a bottle of wine alone, holed up in a fleabag motel room. I go to the Dover Plains Town Library and begin years of digging through archives and newspaper morgues to uncover sparse and incomplete shadows of Harlem Valley Insane Asylum. Though I investigate every imaginable type of material, I find only snippets, personal opinions, and clouded revisions of history. The reality of my mother’s mental illness remains veiled by generations of silence.
Whatever traumas Polly experienced during childhood, in Harlem Valley, and throughout life she buried deep to preserve the self-delusion of a perfect past. She told stories about her bullying brother but never more than the vaguest memories of the commitment that placed her forever under the close supervision of her parents, the psychiatric industry, and her abusive, second husband Jack. The combination of electric shocks and drugs produced new and lifelong hallucinations, psychosis, and schizophrenia, but she spoke of specific harms only hazily when very drunk.
Psychologists identify a pain that people don’t talk about because they carry it deep in their bones, like cancer. To acknowledge such pain brings tears to the eyes, prompts collapse, or initiates uncontrollable shaking like the hand tremor that marked me for twenty years. Therapy, personal growth, and forgiveness don’t eliminate the reek of fear and blood-stained sheets. They do not remove the bile of desertion or erase the sight of a drunken mother peeing in the kitchen sink in the summer light as a girlfriend looks on. They do not alter the abiding judgment and silence of friends and family, lovers and caretakers.
Experts say that traumas experienced in childhood endure. The shrapnel of trauma lodges in the part of the brain that sorts safe from dangerous things, and the fight-or-flight response malfunctions so that the individual is forever threatened by things that are not threatening. Even as adults, traumatized children overreact and misinterpret. They please and placate, trying to control the people and things around them. They withdraw or obsess and adopt repetitive, rote behaviors, like ordering items or counting everything. They pursue unhealthy relationships and traumatize their own children in patterns that pass down through generations as a physical and a learned legacy.
POSTSCRIPT
Somewhere after the bleeding begins while I work at my desk alone at home, after a diagnosis of placental abruption that puts my thirty-four-week fetus in danger and the doctors’ decision to move me from the county hospital to Duke University Medical Center, after my husband’s much-delayed appearance and his fainting on the operating room floor when an emergency caesarean section cuts through the placenta and cascades more than half of my blood onto the floor … my heart stops.
I die.
They declare it.
For a moment.
Then the doctors pump me full of all the matching blood at Duke and give me an emergency hysterectomy. They revive me. I come back and rebound. After five days in intensive care and ten days in the hospital, they release me.
“We don’t know why you survived,” each of a parade of medical experts says. “We can’t explain it. We just call it ‘good protoplasm.’ We say your protoplasm’s resilient. “It bounces back.”
