Memoir From Antproof Case Read online

  He threw a textbook of physiology at me, and as it flew through the air—easily dodged, I might add—a red and blue diagram of the circulatory system flashed from the flipping pages. Thus, I decided to stab him in his Psoas Quadratus Anastimositum. The sadness, loneliness, and determination of my eyes half-closed against the roaring sunlight convinced him that I was going to reach him and that I really was going to kill him, and he climbed the bookshelves in an attempt to escape through the narrow windows above. This exposed his Psoas and I felt the surge of grace and rage that is the mark of a warrior. As I closed for the kill, the door was smashed open by our rotund headmaster, whose expression I shall never forget.

  As I grew older I grew subtler, recognizing the need to balance decisive action with the possibility of escape. In the eighth grade, just before we entered the war, I was molested by a pederast, the so-called dean of men, who pushed me down and grabbed for my private parts. Though we were alone in a deserted hallway, we were not quite alone, for the school dog, an old Labrador named Cabot, lay in the corner like a shadow.

  In our biology class we had been studying muscle power, and as an illustration the instructor had used Cabot to bite upon a compression-meter. Evolution, he explained, had favored those dogs who could crack the bone and get the marrow. The compression-meter had been the handle of Lewis Teschner's tennis racquet, sliced in half, with a stiff spring between the two parts. To hold the apparatus together, the biology instructor had used the tape that we wrapped around our wrists in boxing class. Cabot was a sweet-tempered and unassuming dog who had never bitten anyone in his life, but for several years he had been rewarded with kisses, pats, and dog biscuits for sinking his teeth deeper and deeper into the compression-meter. As the object was to increase the force and tighten the hold, he had been trained to bite, to bear down, and never to give up.

  I thought I had had it. The dean of men was 6'5" tall, 250 pounds, a natural-born fighter, and the boxing coach. As he pummeled and grappled me in unspeakable combinations, I saw, through the fog of rape, that his wrists were taped. He had either just taught a boxing class or was about to teach one.

  Another second and I had made the connection. "Bless you, Cabot!" I screamed. This, somehow, excited the dean of men, but it also got Cabot to his graying feet, tail swinging back and forth. I looked at his smiling dog's face, and, hardly able to speak, I said, "Test, Cabot, test!"

  Cabot lifted his head in readiness, as dogs will, and looked about for the compression-meter. He found it—he thought—and approached, just as he had been taught to do in class. He wagged his tail. "Bite, Cabot, bite!" I commanded. And he did.

  This dean of men immediately disengaged from me, the object of his affection, and rolled onto the floor. "Bite, bite, bite!" I chanted, just as we had done in class. "Bite, bite, and never give in!" And that dear dog cracked the bone, got to the marrow, and did not ever have to pay for it, because, to my never-ending satisfaction, the dean of men implicated a phantom bulldog that he claimed, to universal astonishment, had been lying in ambush near the urinals.

  On the way from the Tombs to Château Parfilage I was accompanied by a New York City homicide detective, a nineteenth-century Irishman by the name of Grays Spinney. The judge knew that a straitjacket and certain requirements of nature do not go well together, and, mindful of the cruel and unusual punishment clause in the Constitution, had provided both himself and me with a way out. As soon as we were beyond the three-mile limit, Spinney sized me up and took off the restraints, though he replaced them for transit through Paris, Geneva, and the other cities of my eternal humiliation.

  On the Hudson and in the valley of the Shenandoah, spring was rising. The angle of the sun was perfect, the light not overbearing, the young grass short and uniformly green, the night euphoric with blooms and warm breezes. And the beautiful sights of spring were punctuated by banks of red and yellow flowers that looked like distant strokes of oil paint laid upon forest and field.

  But on the North Atlantic the waves were combat gray, the sky a miasma of spray and fog. Tiny icebergs the size of polar bears blew across the sea like marshmallows, and Spinney, who had spent his life dipping into the Tenderloin in pursuit of derbied gunmen, got me to the porthole a hundred times with sudden exclamations such as, "Jaysus Christ! A neked Iskimo woman ant a blooody fookin' kangaroo!"

  Though he was a detective of exalted rank, he was not literate enough to read the Police Gazette without assistance and, after hundreds of inquiries—"Does L-I-V-E-R spell Lady Gaudoyva?"—I became his private secretary and amanuensis. In a process that confirmed the genius of Isaac Newton, my every effort was repaid as he recounted to me in equal measure his years, begun in "Eteen-hundert ant soventy-soven," as a cop.

  He was near retirement and full of regrets. "Murther is entoyerly uninthirestin," he said. "The raysult is alwess the sim—a did boody. If Oy ware you, a tinder farteen-yar-olt buy, Oy'd be inthirested in the bonks."

  "The bonks?"

  "The bonks. Killin is amurl, but ayven assa paylease afficer, Oy don't see anythin amurl about robin bonks. Ya know, we hod a fellah who wint boy the name of 'Robin Bonks,' ant he would git himself al dresst oop ant walk into a bonk. 'Gut marnin,' he'd say, 'Oy'm inthirested in oopinin an accoont.' 'Whot's yir nim?' they'd osk. 'Robin Bonks,' he't reploy, ant see how lang he coot tayke it befar he hot to tayke oot his gon."

  Spinney leaned over the top bunk rail as if to confide in me the secret of the universe. "The bonks," he said, "iss whar payple kip thir minny. Ya dawn't haf ta goo lookin far it. It's al in one playce. If Oy ware you, gooin oover ta lam Frinch ant Chairman ant al thot, Oy'd figger oot how ta git meself inta Harberd or Yell, and thin grotchulee warm me woy inta sum infistmint bonk or sumthin. Ya folia?"

  I did, but I tabled it.

  I cannot remember anything worse than being confined within a straitjacket—even going down into the sea, my windshield covered with oil and blood, the engines dying and the wind whistling death—except perhaps for shock "therapy," something to which I was subjected before I was sent abroad, a thing more terrible than I can describe, inflicted upon me by that coffee-drinking bastard who called himself a judge.

  With great economy of means, a straitjacket inflicts semiperfect paralysis upon someone whose most pressing need is to thrash. Without exit through despairing limbs, the pain of the interior is the greatest torturer. Of the two types of straitjacket, the worse is the kind that pins your arms in front of you. Supposedly this is more humane, and better for the circulation, but it leads to a feeling of suffocation and powerlessness that is hard to convey.

  Electroshock is somewhat more apprehensible to the general public, for most people have learned to dread the electric chair merely through its description. Can you imagine an instrument that, while offering every pain and terror of death by electrocution, denies the holy rest that one earns in suffering through the experience, so that one is preserved to be electrocuted again and again? I believe "electrotherapy" is still debated. Those who, quite insanely, advocate it, claim that the patient benefits. I'll tell you how you benefit. When you finish you're half dead (something that could be accomplished with a severe beating or by a simple toss off a low cliff) and therefore quite tranquil. One is grateful to be alive, that the torture has passed, that the pain is gone. Lesser details appear almost insignificant. After my electrocutions I was even able to sit next to a coffee pot.

  For a fourteen-year-old boy who grew up within the shadow of Sing Sing, straitjackets and, particularly, electroshock were difficult to bear. Picture going to the top of the Eiffel Tower, visiting the Louvre, and strolling down the Champs Élysées—in a straitjacket. I did this. I sat with Spinney at the Café de l'Opéra, he with his mustache and watch-chain and nickel-plated pistol, and I in my white encumbrance. He was charitable enough to place me as far from the expresso machine as possible, and when the wind was right I was relatively untortured. With winks, glances, and devil-may-care expressions, I tried to meet women. And when they al
l looked away, I assumed that it was because my skin was bad or they thought I was too boyish. It never occurred to me that most women might not be interested in getting to know a boy in a straitjacket who sat at a table at the Café de l'Opéra winking, blinking, and raising his eyebrows at them.

  Many soldiers were still in uniform, no longer burdened with the immediate fear of death, well rested, sunburned, some not too much older than I—all heroes and victors. The streets sang with wonderful green buses and trolleys that had yellow tops, and open-air platforms at the back. I would have loved to have jumped on and off them as they were moving. I would have loved to have held a French girl in my arms and kissed her. It would have been the first time I had kissed a girl.

  Something was very beautiful as Paris awakened from war. Life from every quarter had begun to flood in. The trees were the softest green I had ever seen, greener than in the valleys of the Shenandoah or the Hudson, an ancient and delicate color that I will never forget.

  Château Parfilage maintained a small office in Montreux purely for prestige. For the English-speaking world and the French, a lakeside address, with red tulips in well tended beds by the water, was ideal for a mental institution. The Germans preferred the mountains, the Italians the sea, and famous and rich people a place where noxious gasses bubble up through the mud.

  Château Parfilage was very much in the mountains, but the Germans had become disenchanted with its methods, so, to attract the English and the French, who, after the war, were extraordinarily crazed, the directors rented office space in Montreux. "Oy nivir seen a newt hotch ass shmal ant affice-like ass this," Spinney said, looking around. "Oy've bratcha anuther newt, Sisther, boot whar iss he supposed ta sleep?"

  A tiny nun, no less than my age now, unbuckled my jacket and set me free forever, explaining that it was a sin to put anyone, much less a child, in such a thing.

  "Sisther, whot if the divil's in 'im, ant he's throshin like to kill himsolf ar soomeone alse?"

  "You put him in the middle of a wide meadow," she said, "where he will be alone with God and the ants."

  Within twenty minutes she and I were on a small train winding through the hills above the lake. It was. a bright, blue day. We opened the window, and I leaned out to feel the wind and smell the sun-warmed vegetation. What could be better than to be on a train crawling steadily through sunlit uplands, with open windows, and mountain air gusting in, pulsing with the rhythm of the rails? On the climb to Château Parfilage we were lifted into a world of brilliant white—the white of snowfields, ice, and clouds.

  When Sister Jacob de Meunière saw that I was content with the Alpine sun that glinted across high prairies of clean ice, shf said, "If once you were insane, you are probably insane no longer, but you must stay with us for time enough to convince those who cannot believe, or see, or know, that you have achieved by long and painful labor what God has just given you in a burst and in a flash."

  After the train, we went by pony cart. When the pony wanted to eat, he stopped to graze, and Sister Jacob knitted. I jumped out of the cart at these times and often as it was moving (during most of my life, and certainly in my boyhood, I thought it better to be able to jump on and off a moving conveyance than to be the richest man in the world). I ran to the edge of steep defiles, to see the view. As I remember it, my stepping on and off and circling the slow-moving pony was something close to the movements of a foal or a kid. Funio does this, and he breaks into spontaneous dances. A child moving freely is one of the most beautiful things one can behold. When my father took me surfcasting at Amagansett I would go ahead on the beach road, stooping to grind the heather between my fingers for the scent, rising to run on soft sandy stretches that led to the cold blue sea.

  So high that you could see France straight to the west and the Black Forest to the north, the château sat on a small rise in the middle of a great meadow walled in at its edges by palisades of evergreens as dense as the teeth of a fine-toothed comb and cooler and more fragrant than I can convey from a garden in the hot sun.

  The building itself was a graceful construction of monastic stone, with a courtyard in which were fifty thousand geraniums and a round fountain filled to the brim with frigid water newly liberated from the not-so-distant glaciers.

  I had never seen a field so wide. I had never been in air so clear. I had never seen snow so pure and white, for as white as is the snow on the Hudson, it is always tinted by the blue of Canada. I had never seen so many wildflowers jealously and proudly guarding their high posts in colors both bright and apoplectic. France was so distant and purple as it fled to the Atlantic that looking at the world was like gazing through a prism. And I had never been as high as I stood at 3,000 meters, nor so close to the sun, nor so unprotected from its benevolent glory.

  I alighted from the cart and went up near the plodding pony so as to walk the rest of the way, to feel every inch of the road that led to a mental institution that I now believe may have been one of the few refuges of sanity in a world everywhere insane.

  Though the rector of this institution was no bigger than a Saint Bernard dog, he had about him the aura of power that attaches to people who are gigantic. I immediately felt protective of him, and yet in awe, thinking that not only had he long before finished high school—which I had yet to enter, and never would—and, indeed, college, and then medical school, but the various layers of medical apprenticeship that give one a place on the links for the rest of one's life. It seemed that in Switzerland physicians were more monastic and scholarly, their social standing lower, their intellects better exercised, and their sense of humility sharper than that of their well tailored American brethren.

  I took a seat opposite him, hardly able to look away from the snowfields of the Jungfrau, which, though distant, managed to throw their fiery light through his narrow windows and directly into my eye.

  "American?" he asked in what I did not then know was a Danish accent.

  I nodded.

  "Then the first thing I must tell you is that nothing is expected of you."

  "Nothing?" I asked.

  "Only hard work, study, arising at five, and service in the fields. Nothing more than would be required of a monk, a Roman galley slave, or a virtuous king. In my experience, Americans have always felt the need to amaze everyone. Perhaps that is because the New World is less tired than the Old."

  "What about the psychological stuff?" I asked.

  "What psychological stuff?"

  "You know—jackets, shocks, expensive interviews."

  "We don't go for that sort of thing."

  "You don't?"

  "No, not at all. Ten years of that isn't worth a month of bringing in the hay."

  "You mean this is a 'keep-busy' sort of a place? We have one at the tip of Long Island. It's called the Butterworth sanitarium, and it doesn't work. They go in as walnuts, they exit as coconuts, and they die as pistachios."

  "I beg your pardon?" he said, failing to understand my schoolboy slang. I'm not sure I understood it either.

  "This isn't a 'keep-busy' place," he continued. "Here you work only five days a week. On weekends, if you wish, you can be overcome with terror,' lethargy, and regret. The idea is not to keep all your plates spinning, but to let them fall."

  "Is coffee here?"

  "No. Neither coffee, nor tea, nor alcohol, nor tobacco. No drugs of any kind. No excessively fatty or sugared foods. No motor vehicles. No chocolate. No electric lights, no Victrolas, no telephones, no telegraphs, no magazines."

  "No coffee?" My lungs felt as if each one had been freed of the intrusion of a cinder block. My neurasthenia began to clear.

  "Coffee is the work of the devil," he said. "I am a physician, and I know whereof I speak. That people actually drink this substance is one of the world's continuing tragedies, a pitiable opera of madness and self-immolation."

  I was astonished, and pleased of course. He went on. "A careful consideration of its chemical components shows why. Have you taken organic chemistry?" br />
  "I don't know what it is. I haven't even started high school."

  "Regardless of your academic progress, coffee, when steeped for more than a minute at or above ninety-five degrees centigrade, leaches tri-oxitan methyl parasorcinate, loxiphenyl-metasolicitous, oxipalmate dendrabucephalous chloride, indo-crapitus paraben, sulfuro-hydrogelous-exipon, moxibobulous-3 toxitol, and benzene esters of noquitol-soxitan.

  "Studies have shown that any of the de-ionized loxiphenyls is highly carcinogenic in the presence of a saturated oxitan. Even minimal exposure to the sulfuro-hydrogelous-exipons almost invariably causes cardiac atomatoxsis and aggravated renal palagromia."

  "Are you mocking me?" I asked.

  "Perhaps a little," he answered, "but certainly we have no coffee here. I detest coffee. I understand fully what drove you to do what you did, and will make no attempt to rid you of your anger and disgust. You don't have to live in the world. What they say when they want to drive the truth from the soul of an honest man is, You have to live in the world. Well, you don't. You can live in a place like this, you can live alone in nature, you can rise so high that nobody will dare make or drink a cup of coffee in your presence, you can kill yourself, or you can sleep.... One thing is sure. You simply do not have to adjust to that filthy, horrendous, addictive bean that has created a population of slaves spread throughout every part of the globe.

  "Not, anyway, for the next four years. These will be your anchor years. You'll remember them as years of freedom, responsibility, agonizingly hard work, love, and revelation."

  "You mean I won't be going to school?"

  "Your education will be entrusted to God, your own curiosity, and Father Bromeus."