I'll Cry Tomorrrow Page 18

  Minutes passed. “Where’s what he ordered,” I implored her. “For God’s sake, where is it?”

  It came, a colorless liquid in a whiskey glass, and I gulped it. I had molten fire in my mouth, exploding through my nose. I choked, but got most of it down. Then the nurse helped me into bed. I lay there, tossing. I’ll go out of my mind, this time I will!

  I tried to keep my voice steady when Dr. Head arrived on his night rounds. “I don’t think I can stand it here, Doctor. But please, don’t lock me up, no matter what I do! I’m trying so hard to control myself.”

  “I’ll give you more paraldehyde,” he said. I shook my head and sobbed, “It’s ghastly.”

  “You’ll be crying for it if this thing keeps up,” he said, and shuddering, I took it down. Before he left he gave me two pills. “We don’t like medicine here, but I’ll give you these for the first few nights. They’ll help you.”

  They helped: but that night was one of the lonehest, most wretched, I had ever known. It was impossible to sleep: every 15 minutes a blinding light flashed in my face. A nurse with a flashlight made her rounds four times an hour. Almost as frequently an embarrassing weakness came over me, dating back to the lecherous old man who had painted me as a child, an urge to run to the bathroom like a little girl. Each time my nurse noted my visit in her book. The fifth time she asked, “What is the matter with you, Miss Roth?”

  “I can’t help it,” I said miserably.

  I lay on my cot, staring at the ceiling. The moon was out: the cold-blue white moonlight streamed in through the barred window. I counted the bars, over and over again: six of them. They made a sharply defined pattern on the floor, and as the long night went on, the six-barred moon-made shadow slowly crept across the floor. I turned to the wall and wept.

  Finally morning came, and it was the second day Bells rang, people emerged from their rooms, and a nurse appeared, carrying a tray of orange juice and tea. I lay exhausted in sheets damp with perspiration. My mouth was swollen: I tried to run my tongue across my blistered, lips.

  “You had a rough time of it last night,” the nurse said, “but this orange juice will help that burning throat Paraldehyde always does that to your mouth.”

  As I was to learn later, all an alcoholic receives in a hospital, or even in jail, is a cursory sobering up treatment. However in an institution like Bloomingdale’s, which rarely takes alcoholics, the chronic drinker receives psychiatric and medical treatment similar to that afforded regular mental patients.

  Dr. Head gave me additional tests. I was asked to name the Presidents of the United States. I took ink-blot tests, interblocking tests, maze tests, association of ideas tests.

  I thought, he is handsome. Looks a little like the judge, only younger. Undoubtedly they assigned a handsome doctor to me because they expected me to fall in love with him. Everyone knows you fail in love with your psychiatrist. I could make myself halfway presentable if I had a brush and comb…

  Somehow I got through the second day. I was left alone to wander about. I learned I was on an observation floor: virtually every move I had made from the moment I entered had been under scrutiny.

  On the third day my nurse said, “You may dress yourself this morning.” I was allowed slippers, underclothes, and a simple cotton dress. She combed my tangled hair, but kept the comb. She allowed me to put on a dab of lipstick, but kept the lipstick. I have no cold cream, my skin is dry, I’ve bitten my nails down to the quick; and then, a sudden lift: there must be a tiny spark of self respect left in me if I want to look better.

  The nurse said, “Make your bed.”

  “Make my bed?” I echoed. “You don’t make beds here, do you?”

  “You certainly do. That’s part of your therapy.”

  I had been without alcohol since my arrival. The paraldehyde, vitamin injections and other medication helped tide me over what otherwise would have been an unbearable period. For 16 years I had been drinking; for at least 12 years I had taken at least a quart of liquor almost every day and nearly that much each night; for much of that time I had never gone more than three or four hours without a drink. Now I had been dry for more than 50 hours.

  But that night my alcoholic dreams, which I had warded off for so many years, returned. Sometime after midnight it seemed that I was awake. I had escaped from the hospital. I had hidden a bottle in my room, and become drunk on it. I ran out the doors and through the bolted gate, and the doctors, their white coats floating after them in the wind pursued me down a dark, lonely street, now hiding behind trees and bushes to pounce on me, now looming wild and gigantic before me. They caught me, they forced me into scalding hot and freezing cold baths, and tied me in a straightjacket. Or it seemed to me that just as I stealthily put out my hand for the bottle I’d hidden far back on the closet shelf, behind the school books with the questions I had to answer—just then the bottle rolled toward me of its own accord, slipped out of my paralyzed hands, and crashed thunderously to the floor. The nurses rushed in, their outstretched hands pawing at me, their eyes accusing, converging upon me from all directions—or was it the judge’s wrathful face which slowly came into focus?—and I stood transfixed, utterly abject, shamed, humiliated…

  I awoke with a start. The dream had been so vivid I could have sworn I smelled the fumes from the broken bottle. My nurse entered, I choked down an ounce of paraldehyde, and the long night went on.

  On the fifth day, Dr. Head came in with a smile. “Good morning, Lillian. I’ve got a surprise for you. You’re going to be moved today.”

  I had a moment of fright. “For better or worse?”

  “For better, naturally. You’re going to the convalescent floor. That’s pretty good. Most patients aren’t moved off this floor for two or three weeks.”

  I perked up. “Oh, I am getting better. Does that mean that I won’t have to stay a year or even six months?”

  “Now, don’t start counting your days. You’d better adjust yourself to the idea that you’re going to be here with me a long time. You’ll get used to it. You don’t get well over night.”

  Now I had a room with a door, although regulations required that it be half open at all times. The window was barred, but on the dresser lay my lipstick, my comb, my brushes and bobby pins. There was even a mirror on the wall.

  A new routine began. I rose, made my bed when the morning bell rang, washed, went into breakfast A community therapeutic shower followed breakfast, to relax us. We sat in a line, naked but for a sheet, while nurses sprayed us with hot water, then tepid, then icewater needles. Gym and dancing followed. After showers and a rest period, another bell was the signal to put on hats and coats, wait in line for an attendant to unlock the door and lead us out, perhaps fifty in a group with a nurse shepherding us like schoolgirls in ribbons with a nun in charge, into the lovely grounds surrounding the buildings. After a little fresh air, we were taken to mental therapy rooms.

  Some painted, some sanded boxes, some made leather goods. I worked in leather, making cigarette cases for my mother, for Ann, for Minna and Edna. My special project was a large leather wallet—my “hope wallet”—and as I explained in a letter to Minna, I hoped someday to fill it so I could repay those who were taking care-of my bills at Bloomingdale’s.

  “Why don’t you try painting?” the nurse in charge asked one day, as she admired my leather designs.

  “Did you ever see me paint?” I demanded. “I still draw the same face I drew when I was four years old.”

  She smiled. “Keep up that good humor, Lillian. It means you’re getting better.”

  After therapy, we were lined up again, the door was unlocked, and we were led out.

  In the afternoons we were taken on long walks. As we trudged along, I saw buildings in the gray distance. I thought: there, far away, is an apartment house. There is an elevator in it. Men and women are going home, or going out to dinner, or to the theatre. People are living warm, complete lives. A sense of loneliness so shattering as to be unbearable, to
re at my heart, and I wept.

  It was usually a silent walk. Each of my companions was alone. One girl, a lovely, fragile blonde, keeping step with me, suddenly spoke. “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “No, why?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, and lapsed into silence.

  The following day she asked: “Do you know why I’m in here?”

  I shook my head. “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, and became silent again.

  The next day she came up to me and uttered one word: “Horses.”

  “What about horses?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, and was silent.

  The following day she began, “I told you I’d tell you about horses.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong in liking horses, you know. Everybody has a weakness. You like to gamble. I used to like to drink.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t gamble, but my husband is divorcing me on account of horses.”

  As we walked we passed several truck horses used on the farm attached to the institution. “Well, if you like horses,” I said, “there are some over there—”

  She looked up, and turned away in disdain. “Oh, not those kind—I mean beautiful, handsome horses, the kind I ride—big, gleaming horses” She began to blush. “I can hardly wait until morning to be with them again. I’m just afraid I can’t be faithful to my husband.”

  I cudgelled my brain. A strange perversion? Hadn’t Catherine the Great developed a sex problem concerning horses? My companion went on blithely. “It’s amazing, my control over them. Tremendous as they are, I can take a horse and balance his four hoofs right in the palm of my hand.” She trotted the fingers of her right hand around the palm of her left hand.

  My table mate was another pretty young girl. At lunch one day she whispered, “Do you know what I am?”

  “A very nice girl,” I said encouragingly.

  She leaned closer and whispered. “No one’s supposed to know what they’re in here for, but I know what I am, I’m a manic depressive!” She said it proudly.

  Involuntarily I pulled back. I was sick, for I was in here, but I was not that sick.

  After dinner I smoked the one cigarette allowed, and played a few hands of bridge. Four of us sat at a table. I thought to myself: a dementia praecox, a manic depressive, a schizophrenic and an alcoholic. But women are women everywhere, even in an institution like Bloomingdale’s. They discuss the doctors, the nurses, the food, and the inevitable subject—men.

  I turned to my partner: “Do you play Blackwood?”

  She simpered. “Backward?”

  I said, “Oh, no. That’s all right.”

  The schizoid said, “Well, I play the common sense system.”

  In our games it was not unusual to bid three hearts, hear your partner bid two spades—and let it pass.

  In the middle of one hectic hand, the oldest woman at the table, about sixty, said, “Sh-sh…Keep it down. I have something to tell you girls.” We all bent close, lest the nurses hear. “This morning, when I went up for my shock treatment, my doctor raped me in the very middle of it.”

  I said, “Oh, he didn’t!”

  She said, “Yes! And that wasn’t the first time.” She blushed.

  I knew how incredible this was, because at least half a dozen attendants are required to carry out shock treatment.

  After bridge, bedtime came swiftly enough. At eight o’clock, a bell rang—preparation for bath—and at nine o’clock, another, signalling lights out. In the darkness I lay sobbing to myself. Now my sorrow was in search of a target. This time I cried for my father as bitterly as if he had died that day. How much I had to atone for….

  I was fifteen, and he and Katie had had a violent quarrel, and he had gone back to Boston, where many of his friends still lived. Through the years my parents’ fallings out had been interrupted when we left town, patched up when we returned; but as time went on, Arthur became more jealous, more uncontrollable when he drank. Now there was great bitterness between them.

  “Mom,” I asked, “do you really love Dad?”

  Tears came into her eyes, and she shook her head. “He’s killed any love I’ve had for him by his temper and his drinking. I just can’t take it any more.”

  Well, then, I said, from now on, I would take care of us. I packed my father’s trunk and sent it to him with a letter. “Daddy, I love you very much,” I wrote, “but it just seems we all can’t get along together.” I thought, maybe he is happier in Boston, and what I am doing, I am doing for both their sakes.

  Although he and Katie were together again at intervals, particularly when I returned to New York from Hollywood or from long tours, their real separation dated from that day. And the breakup of their marriage.

  Why had I taken things into my own hands so determinedly that day? If only I had understood my father and his alcoholic problem I would have been so much better a daughter to himl Why had he to die, forsaken and alone, in a hotel room? Why hadn’t I listened to his warnings against liquor? He was a weak man, but he knew his weakness and wanted me to be strong. Why had his last years to be filled with poverty, pain and failure? And with it all, my bottomless disgrace?

  Then my tears were shed for my mother. She and I had worked all our lives. I had reached the stage at which I should have been able to brighten her declining years by giving her everything she wanted…and what had she now? My heart broke for her.

  In those long nights relief came in the early morning, an hour before we were allowed to rise. At 7 a.m. I was able to turn on a small portable radio Edna had sent me to a station which featured the rough, rumbling voice of Arthur Godfrey, then a disk jockey.

  Sometimes he seemed to be in the room with me, talking in his easy, friendly manner. Perhaps I am getting better, I thought: here is one voice I’m surely not imagining. Often my nurse entered and chided me. “Don’t you know other patients are still asleep?”

  I pleaded with her. “It’s very soft and my friend’s talking—and it’s so nice to have a man around.”

  “Oh, Lillian, you’re incorrigible,’’ she would say, but she would permit me to keep the program tuned in softly.

  I had many interviews with Dr. Head, meeting with him two and three times a week. Together we went back through the years. As he saw it, I had an abnormal, unstable childhood. My mother had been overprotective, my relationship with my father unsatisfactory because it was incomplete. Even now my thinking was that of an adolescent. I had no sense of security: my constant anxiety about my parents, their quarrels, their separation; the lack of normal association with children my own age; the absence of a normal home life; the traumatic sex experience I had had as a child—all these played their part.

  My physical relationships with men had been unhappy. Disappointment became a pattern in my life: the death of David, the children that never were, the home that never materialized, the dramatic success that never came. I had not helped myself by driving myself before large audiences: I had always tried to be someone I was not. My sense of inferiority was intense; somehow I had the conviction that I was never good enough, even in my own work; I felt I never pleased my mother; my inferiority was even greater because I had not had a complete education. Whatever success came to me was always an empty Victory.

  “You were afraid of the world, and you always sought a buffer against it,” Dr. Head explained. “You married each time with a subconscious hope that your husband would protect you. Invariably you chose the wrong man.”

  Yes. I had married Willie because of loneliness, hoping he would help me forget David. Willie represented not love, but light heartedness, gaiety, simplicity, a happy soul with whom I might fly to the other end of the Milky Way.

  But it hadn’t worked out. I married the judge, then, for the respectability and normalcy other women possessed. That failed, too.

  Then I tinned to Mark, thinking a strong, even brutal man, who lived hard
and daringly, would provide the ballast I needed. And he proved to be, a drunken sadist.

  And Victor? I had not intended to marry him, and I had married him. There it was, period.

  Dr. Head observed: “You were attached to your father, but you grew up virtually without him. You wished desperately to look up to him, yet you were forced to protect him. And you haven’t forgiven yourself for what you think was your part in separating your parents.

  And my mother? Why did I feel such enormous guilt? I beseeched him. “When I think of her, I could cry my heart out. She wanted so much for me and I disintegrated before her eyes. Even a stranger couldn’t have endured seeing that happen to another human being. I blame myself and blame myself.”

  Dr. Head summed it up: “I think you’ve had this breakdown because you’ve reached the age of 34 and nobody loves you. In the back of your mind you’re not even sure your mother still loves you. You feel you can turn to no one. You have no children; you have no husband; you feel you’ve disappointed and utterly shamed your mother; you’ve lost your father; you’ve alienated yourself from your sister; finally, your pride is crushed by strangers giving you charity.”

  He went on slowly, choosing his words: “And you are tearing yourself apart, Lillian, because you try to hold your mother responsible for your being here.”

  He made absolutely no sense to me.

  “Whatever it is, I must see my mother,” I burst out “I’ve been here almost a month without seeing her. I must see her.”

  “You’ll become upset,” he warned.

  “Please, Doctor—I must see her.”

  Katie and Edna were my first visitors. Although it was wonderful to be with them for the short hour permitted me, the loneliness after they left was all but unbearable. Dr. Head spoke sternly: “No more visitors if you get like this, Lillian.”

  “Oh, Doctor, I’m from an emotional family,” I cried. “Please don’t say that to me—you make me feel awful.”

  “All right,” he said. “Don’t excite yourself. Minna can visit you next week and your mother the week after.”

  I no longer felt charged with electricity, but I developed a passion for oranges. I stole them from tables and from the rooms of other inmates. I begged Katie to bring them. I traded cookies, candy, gifts, for oranges, and I lay in bed, with oranges tucked under my pillow, peeling and eating them slowly, relishing each succulent section, piling the rinds neatly under my bed.