Carol Hebald

SPINSTER BY THE SEA
THE ACTRESS

Liar crammed in closets,
I played, a ruined child,
to bright, phantom eyes:
If this sleeve were Papa’s hand,
that dress of silk my mama’s breast,
this coat of fur my papa’s chest. . .
Her quiet breast, his hand.

Saturdays at Loews Delancey
grinning baldies
bidding their Milky Ways
along the Children’s Section
always found me
sitting a little apart;
the candy was for later:
“Let’s be pals, mister, ‘kay?”
“Cross your leg over mine.”
Senses flicking like lizards
a wild sob rose to my throat:
Stay a little while longer—
Bastard, be my friend.

If in darkness I must want
then from darkness would I get:
To act: I had to act,
to wish by order--to behave.
Who lives in me beside myself
can grieve beyond the grave
and in that grief rejoice
at hearts I choose to break.
I beckon, entice, kiss, chase away,
I mourn, dance, serve, pray.
Offstage I seldom speak.
I act because I’d rather
do other things.

FIRST PRAYER

The heart too long suppressed
cannot come forth,
finds comfort in memories of snow,
in poems that grieve to grow.
Then stir my slow conception,
quiet, oh how quiet,
the tides resume in me,
thrust me back to see
the soul outside my mind,
thrice-blessed,
released from what it longs for
to something it has.
I live in a dreamworld by choice;
I am sorry,
slightly embarrassed
and ravished.

SONG

He shall ravish me in the wineshed
casting grapes about my head
and sweetly I’ll mottle--
an unblithe bird--
until he is sprung.
Give me bread, my lord,
for I am drunk on wormwood
and the elders have ceased their music.
I dream of dragons in pleasant places;
my belly is mingled with lilies.

LITTLE MONOLOGS
LETTER TO AN ARTIST
ABOARD SHIP
SOMEWHERE NEAR STOCKHOLM

You were so different
from your words
and so proud--well, proud!--
The ripe, indolent women adored you.
On the last night you danced
an aging countess tried to comfort me.
It was your grace that hurt.
So innocent you were
of what you gave to me.
Come to the hearth, be seated;
permit me to press your hand.
Our needs are not concerned
with the Ten Commandments.
Tell me who you are,
I often think of you.
Our work should cut,
it shouldn’t bleed.
It’s as necessary to us as breathing.
How passionately we spoke, how well!
We had a moment there
but it was off-camera.

FANTASY IN A FLOATING CAFÉ
ABOARD SHIP
SOMEWHERE NEAR SOUTHAMPTON
1
The sea is breathing now
and a gull, drunk on the wind,
bares a nerve in me.
The sea is breathing now
and my lord is dancing--
severe, proud, clear as the skies.
Still the music of those lips,
that radiant form.
The sea is breathing
and my lord is dancing.
2
The Austrian countess
is laughing;
her husband
was buried at sea.
They say his corpse
slid into the waves
just as the sea monster
drew out her breast
and gave suck to her young.
The Countess drinks
with an aging queen
who praises flowers
for responding blandly
to the onset of frost.
And my lord
skips like a calf
among the evening flowers.

OUR LADY DUSE
To the memory of Uta Hagen

We remember her as from a dream
when, in La Dame Aux Camélias
she, by an imperceptible movement
of the hand, caused her flower to die
of Marguerite’s grief:
Touched by frost, her leaves sighed
for the crying of the wind
that pinched her blossom white
and flung it into the winter night.
Duse loved a poet,
a lesser soul than she,
so enamored of his own
he nourished it on hers,
drained it in a poem and fell asleep
on tour in the frozen Midwest,
let her wait alone
on some windy corner after the show.
She bowed to the silence,
obeyed his absence,
and walked briskly home.
Acute misery of mind
from careless circumstance--
how it blossomed, how it bore
past bliss to bless and cheek to turn
in striking purity that week
Marguerite petal by petal blew
the flower of her lord
delicately down to death.
When the devil stormed in her,
they say she stepped on him.

THE HEART TOO LONG SUPPRESSED
Prologue
In the summer of 1978, while accompanying my mother and her third husband on a ten-week pleasure cruise to Leningrad, I threw overboard the following medications: the psychotropic tranquilizers Haldol and Thorazine; and the antidepressants, Imipramine Daytime and Tofranil P.M. A psychiatric patient in and out of hospitals for thirty years, I’d been on massive doses of medication for twenty. I was forty-four.

The previous fall I’d begun my job as assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Kansas, at Lawrence. It had become my habit, as a visiting university lecturer, to register upon arriving in town at the nearest medical facility with a note from my former therapist indicating the pills I was taking. It was up to me to find a doctor who’d consent to rewrite my prescriptions and to take me on as a patient. Given my medical history, not everyone would.

The nearest facility to Lawrence is the renowned Menninger Clinic, in Topeka, where I was promptly scheduled for a morning-long battery of psychological tests. One of the reasons I’d accepted the job in Kansas was that at Menninger’s I hoped to find a lasting cure for whatever it was that ailed me.

The administering psychologist, Dr. Sheila Skollar, summoned me from the waiting area at 8:30 a.m. and began with a brief apology for having to ask me, as a mere formality, some rather stupid routine questions. I smiled.

“Who is the President of the United States?” she asked.

I opened my mouth to speak.--Carter’s name escaped my mind. I froze, then laughed or tried to, as I explained that I had just arrived in this blistering August heat from the MacDowell Artists’ Colony in New Hampshire, where I’d been working round the clock on a novel that was beginning finally, finally to take shape... I laughed again... Just one second more and I’d remember... Dr. Skollar suggested we get on with the Rorschach and word-association tests. I answered carefully, thoroughly--too thoroughly perhaps to compensate for my memory lapse because twice she admonished sharply, “Just say what you see!”

By lunchtime we had finished. “I’ll be straight with you,” she said. “You seem extremely disorganized.”

“I’m tired!”

“I think it’s more than that. Look: I don’t think you can give a coherent lecture. I’m recommending your hospitalization.”

“What? For what?” I was shocked. “Dr. Skollar, I’m starting a new job next week! Teaching’s how I support myself. Please! I’ve just been overworking. I can rest at home.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

Then, “How am I supposed to pay a hospital bill without the medical insurance the job provides?”

She assured me that something could be worked out.

“You really think I need... ?” A lump in my throat stopped me. “I don’t know what to do first,” I said finally: “to go home and pack, or telephone my chairman immediately.” The tears welled up.

Appeased, she seemed at once kinder. “Look, you have my opinion,” she said sensibly. “I’ll pass it on to Dr. Sampson” (the psychiatrist to whom I’d been assigned). “You’re seeing him tomorrow?” I nodded. “Then just do nothing until tomorrow. If he agrees with me, we’ll take it from there.”

It was lunchtime. Since I didn’t drive, I had to take the Lawrence bus, which didn’t leave for a couple of hours. I asked her where I could get a bite to eat.

“They’re eating downstairs right now,” she said. “I’ll arrange for you to join them, as a visitor.”

I stood in line with the inpatients, pleasant-looking, mostly young--none recognizably ill. But few mental patients at the elite retreats are. It struck me that no one bothered to ask if I was new. There were no locked doors. I was visiting today, that’s all. But in a day or two I’d be “in again”. I felt discouraged and so horribly tired, that were it not for my teaching contract, and the probability of a ruined career which Dr. Skollar dismissed so very lightly (“Your health comes first!”), I’d have taken her advice without question.

Horribly tired, did I say? Then why suddenly on that lunch queue did my heart begin to pound, my muscles to freeze? My arms grew stiff--one began lifting of its own accord--when I turned around, mounted the stairs and ran far, far down the road as fast as I could until I reached the bus stop. I sat down to rest.

Across the street was an empty payphone. I had with me the number of a fellow artist in whom I’d confided at MacDowell. A prominent critic and novelist, she had attended an after-dinner reading I’d given from my novella Asylum, about a mental patient’s struggle for self-possession. When my friend asked its source, I answered, personal experience. She then read the complete novella and claimed to be deeply moved by it. I was honored. We swam together, ate together, and talked intimately.

I told her, because she asked, that aside from a brief year of marriage, I’d lived my adult life alone, and that I was on heavy medication because I was troubled by visions of Jesus. In fact, the previous year, when I taught at the University of Wisconsin, my visions were followed by a searing pain in one eye, and temporary blindness.

But why did I admit this to a stranger? Because I was in desperate need of a friend. And because in such states of desperation, we trust whomever we need. Half expecting to be betrayed, we are sometimes wonderfully surprised. Before the onset of my blindness I had shared my terror of these visions with my former dean at Utica College, a trained psychologist, who advised me wisely not to be afraid, that they might portend something positive. It occurred to me then that it was my fear of insanity, and not the visions themselves, that had caused my blindness and pain.

But I must have frightened my friend from MacDowell, whose interest in me soon after cooled. I was really a bit heartbroken, but I was used to it. Another deposit for the memory bank, I thought; or as Emerson more aptly put it: “Pearls and rubies to [his] discourse.” Once, I had fallen in love with someone whose best friend told me, confidentially of course, “He doesn’t want anyone that sick.”

My friend picked up the phone with a gracious hello. I got quickly to the point about my recommended hospitalization. “So I’ll probably be writing to you from Topeka, not Lawrence,” I said. “I’m really sorry to lay this on you.”

“You’re not laying anything on me,” she replied, “because there’s nothing I can do.”

It was then I decided to fight.

I knew that the next day my psychiatrist, Dr. Sampson, hearing the customary factual rundown of my life, would be on the lookout for “disorganized thinking.” So with nothing to do that night, I prepared my life history. Never deviating from facts, I would pause at strategic places and toss in a few insights into the probable causes of my illness. I began with the death of my father when I was four, followed by my inability to listen in school, or to read until I was nine.

“Where were you?” asked the doctor next day.

“I can’t say for sure... probably in an unconscious fantasy of heaven. Or at least knocking at the gate. I do remember thinking ‘Our father, who art in Heaven’ was my father in particular.”

“And you were his special child?”

“Well, I liked to think so,” I answered modestly.

Dr. Sampson smiled. I had passed, I assumed splendidly, since he disagreed with Dr. Skollar’s recommendation, and backed my decision to go home and prepare my classes.

I traveled to Topeka weekly to see him, took my medications faithfully, and began teaching at the University of Kansas. At the end of the academic year, I received a note from my chairman: my student evaluations for fall and spring semesters had been outstanding. If I wanted to be considered for early promotion and tenure, he’d be happy to support me.

Dr. Sampson was delighted by my chairman’s encouragement. “We’re doing very well,” he beamed.

All year my feelings of loneliness had been acute. I’d call him--not often but from time to time. “Get a dog,” he told me. “There’s nothing wrong with loving a dog!”

“Can I call you again?” I asked him.

“What do you want me to tell you?” he joked. “Get a cat?”

But what did I expect? I had wanted above all to write. If romantic relationships weren’t possible for me, close friendships were. And if there was no one yet within shouting distance, I’d nourish myself on books and music. I worked beyond endurance. Nothing was happening! I was harping on the same old subjects. Thoughts spun on the wheels of thought. I clutched at possibilities. And the train ground down to a halt. My mind was in a groove.

Shortly before summer recess, when I agreed to join my parents on their cruise, I asked Dr. Sampson if he thought I’d ever be well enough to function without therapy and medication. He answered that I’d probably have to continue the former indefinitely; I’d need the pills for the rest of my life.

I had been ready to give up, to settle. I even took a perverse pride, each time the dosage was increased, in how well I still could function. Despite Thorazine’s annoying side-effects, for me, a parched mouth and sandpaper tongue (students ribbed me about the two diet sodas always on my desk), I was seldom absent from class. My hospitalizations occurred between semesters and at holidays. I was remarkably well-controlled, really something of a wunderkind.

But that year things had changed. “Medications for the rest of my life?” I echoed.

“You’re doing very well,” he insisted.

“For a sick person?” He didn’t respond. “Tell me, do those pills inhibit the imagination?”

“They inhibit delusional thinking,” he replied.

“Which is seated in the imagination, no? Doctor, that’s my stock in trade,” I yelled.

“Just be grateful we have them.” Then, “Are you forgetting the night terrors, the hallucinations?”

“You’re absolutely certain they are hallucinations?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind.”

We ended the session.

Next day I called his secretary to cancel all future appointments. Two weeks later, on the high seas, I tossed my medications overboard. I’ve not taken a pill or seen a therapist since.

My terror and blindness are gone. And my visions, which abated in 1998, shortly before my mother’s death, I have since learned were “benign.” My former dean had hinted as much when she told me not to be frightened. But Dr. Sampson’s reminder of my terror served only to reinforce it. Hallucination is a frightening word. Psychopaths “ordered by God to kill” claim to suffer from them. Did Dr. Sampson have a stake in keeping me dependent? If I thought so, why didn’t I ask him? Because I was certain he’d assume the question symptomatic of my disease.

I was first hospitalized in the late fifties with paranoid schizophrenia, a psychosis characterized by intellectual deterioration, delusions, hallucinations, inattentiveness, and emotional dysfunction. Given that schizophrenia in its various subtypes was the psychiatric diagnosis of choice, with which a great many Americans were then hospitalized, I wondered why the possibility of my misdiagnosis was never raised. In 1978 I still wore the label. Whether I’d ever embodied it I don’t know. I knew only I had to shed it. But how?

You and I and most other people have only one foothold in the world and that is the truth. But to live exclusively in reality is as intolerable as it is incomprehensible. For me it was seldom possible. Why? Was the truth so appalling? It’s one thing to know it and another to tell it. Often I’d lie close to it. For example, my father died when I was four, but for many years I told people I was three. I thought if I exaggerated my early troubles, my amazed listener would think, “Look how well she’s done despite them!” But to make a liar of myself for the sake of one year? Wasn’t there another reason? To admit the facts surrounding my father’s death would force me to relive them. And this I could not do. But with the crusting over of painful memories my illness took root. Who was I? I was the name I was given. I had an age, a sex, a profession. But there was no self to fall back on. Others couldn’t relate to me.

Should I be ashamed to concede that people with worse beginnings than mine have fared better, when the converse is also true? We have different psychic strengths. I went crazy; you may not have. What’s crazy? Not seeing, not caring to see... What? The effects of our early abuses, or the abusers themselves? Those who punished us not for our misdeeds but from their own misery, or those who remained apathetic? But apathy is madness too: When we endure too many insults in silence we become indifferent to everything. And so gradually do we come to this condition we don’t realize the full horror of it.

“Carol, for God’s sake!” chided colleagues, sensing my despair. “They’re starving in India!” And I wondered whether starving together made it any easier.

Clearly I needed help. But from whom? A healthy, competent professional, strong and skillful enough to awaken in me a clear memory of all I had buried. In thirty years of therapy I’d had one. My difficulties shared were lessened by half. By then I was middle-aged. What remained was the painful realization that in my adult life I had been responsible for the cruelest self-neglect because I couldn’t help appeasing those in my early childhood who’d treated me precisely the same way.

THREE BLIND MICE:Two Short Novels
CLARA KLEINSCHMIDT: A former comedian with the Yiddish Theatre takes the reader on an intimate journey through memories recalled against the backdrop of New York in the 1920's.