People ask me how I wound up on death row.
Once, in a maximum security prison, a guard approached me. “Ma’am, can I ask you a question?” Guards, especially in the South, can be very polite.
“Sure.”
“Ma’am, how come you’re …” he paused, looking from me to the large shackled figure, shuffling toward me. The death row inmate I was about to interview had decapitated one of his female victims, an act that had led to his own current precarious hold on life.
“How come … I mean, why do you come to talk with them?” He nodded in the direction of the hulking figure moving in my direction.
“You mean, what’s a nice girl like me doing in a ‘joint’ like this?”
He didn’t get it.
Another time I was lecturing about our research on violence at a scientific symposium. I was nervous. I am used to presenting our work at psychiatric meetings. I know what to expect: the audience and I speak the same language. But I had no idea what kinds of questions this group of basic researchers would throw at me. The moment I finished the talk, a hand went up toward the back of the room. I nodded in that direction. A man rose—an academic type, tweeds, beard, horn-rims. He strode toward the microphone in the center aisle.
“Doctor Lewis,” he began. The voice was low and confident. When this man spoke, people listened.
“Doctor Lewis,” he repeated, “I am a statistician by trade.” My heart sank. I am a clinician. I waited to be told that the statistics of the study I had just presented were in error, that I had used too many variables for the number of subjects in the study, that I had conducted a multiple regression analysis when it obviously should have been a log linear analysis.
“Doctor Lewis.” This academic seemed to enjoy repeating my name and watching me squirm. “How is it that a …” (he paused, seeking the proper words) “that a … petite woman like you, that a child psychiatrist, came to work with such violent individuals?”
My husband, an Englishman and a psychoanalyst, has put the question more pithily. On more than one occasion, as he has watched me trundle off to death row, briefcase slung over one shoulder, large black canvas bag weighing down the other, dragging a carry-on behind me, he has called out, “Dorothy, with two basic drives, how come you chose to study aggression?”
I have asked myself the same question. Certainly when I entered medical school, had anyone even suggested that I would someday spend a fair proportion of my waking hours behind bars, in the company of rapists and murderers, I would have thought the notion delusional.
I never intended to work with violent patients. I expected to become a psychoanalyst. As a premed student in college, I wrote my physics term paper on the influence of physics on Freud. I was flabbergasted when Professor LeCorbusier liked it. I’m sure he had never before had anyone turn in a paper quite like mine. My senior thesis was about Freud and the poet Valéry. It asked: who influenced whom?
Medical school was a lonely experience. French majors and biochem majors are rarely on the same wavelength, and I was surrounded by a forest of tall, blond biochem majors. One way I coped with my loneliness was to embark on my own psychoanalysis; that way I had at least one person who was willing to listen to me for an hour (actually fifty minutes) a day. Of course, I had to pay him.
Yale Medical School required a thesis on an original piece of research. The title of mine was: “The Development of an Abstract Design Test to Measure the Capacity for Intimacy.” Freud had hypothesized two basic forces operating within human beings: sex and aggression, love and death. I would study the former. I set myself the task of devising a way to assess an individual’s capacity to love. I had no inkling then that, twenty years hence, Jonathan Pincus and I would find ourselves periodically locked up on death row together, studying the causes and consequences of the capacity to hate.
Medical school was not my first taste of loneliness. In fact, as far back as I can remember I have always felt lonely. I remember lying in bed at night in the dark, wondering whether the world beyond the four walls of my bedroom was really there. Did it disappear when I turned off the light or closed my eyes? Maybe it materialized just for me each time I opened them. Sometimes I used to try to fool it, to catch the world “disappeared.” I would keep my eyes closed and pretend to be asleep, then suddenly open them, expecting to see a void where the world as I knew it had been. Once or twice I am convinced I caught it “disappeared.” That’s pretty lonely.
I struggled throughout my analysis to understand the source of my loneliness. I know that when I was brought home from the hospital, I received an ambivalent reception. My mother (a former socialist), my father (a former dead-end kid from the Lower East Side of New York City), and my sister, a blonde, blue-eyed (former only child), all looked forward to the birth of a boy. My mother had twice miscarried sons. Not only was I a girl, but also I arrived prematurely and spent my first days of life imprisoned in an incubator. I was scrawny, with dark eyes and a shock of pitch-black hair. I was ugly. This is not false modesty; I have photographs. Try as my family might, they could not conceal their disappointment. My sister, just four and a half when I came on the scene, had an especially hard time.
If home was not a haven, school was no better. In fact it was worse. I was reasonably intelligent and I worked hard. But the good grades I received, though they pleased my parents, did not endear me to my classmates. They were merciless. One day, as I came in from gym, a girl in my class spat on me. At our twenty-fifth reunion, another girl apologized for saying some pretty awful things in fifth grade. I was grateful to her, but the words would have been more healing had they come four decades earlier.
I frequently admit to my young patients—children who are presently enduring the casual maliciousness of their classmates and siblings—that I would not be a child again for anything in the world. The pain is too intense and, as a child, one is helpless to do much about it. My patients look at me suspiciously. You mean you were picked last for the team? I nod yes. They feel better. I remember sitting on a concrete ledge in Central Park and whispering to myself, “Dear God, please let me be picked second to last, not last.” I must have been something of a believer in those days. My identification with the underdog is no accident.
As a child, I yearned to get even, to destroy my tormenters. At the same time, I wondered what kept me from acting on those homicidal wishes and fantasies. How come some people punched out their enemies, even killed them, while others—like me—walked away, went home, and cried?
I grew up with Hitler. At least it felt that way—he seemed like a next-door neighbor. My mother worked for Youth Aliyah, an organization that rescued children from Hitler’s gas chambers. She raised money to sneak them out of Germany and ship them to safety in Palestine. My mother went to lectures by Goldie Myerson and Aubrey Eban (before they became Golda Meir and Abba Eban) and brought home the news. She knew (and hence I knew) what went on in the concentration camps of Germany years before the American government and decades before the German people. Remarkable.
Hitler was a source of fascination and fear. How, I wondered, could any human being do the things he did? I shrieked when I saw my uncle chop off the head of a chicken. When the bird appeared later on the dinner table, no one in the family would eat it. How, then, could Hitler torture and kill human beings? There had to be something wrong with him. He had to be crazy. I think I was the only one at school, if not on the face of the earth, who did not rejoice upon hearing of Hitler’s suicide. Now I would never know what made him tick. What mysterious forces could turn a human being into a monster? I was convinced, even as a child, that Hitler could not have been born that way. No one could be born that way. I still believe that.
After the war, I listened to the radio and heard about the Nuremberg trials. What confused me most was the fate of the defendants: If it was not all right for the Nazis to kill people, how come it was O.K. to hang the Nazis?
I remember the Rosenbergs.
What really concerned me, of course, was my own fate. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep. I would lie in bed, eyes wide open, worrying. How could I be sure that someday I would not do something violent? Then people would want to kill me. Already the kids at school were not too fond of me. From day one, it was clear that my sister would gladly have had me out of the way. She would lure me into her darkened room, then jump out of her lighted closet, shrieking, “The Green Witch will get you!” Once, when I was four or five and frustrated beyond endurance, I ran at her and bit her in the stomach, which was as high as I could reach. How could I be certain that one night, in my sleep, I would not wander into the kitchen, secure a cleaver, and wreak vengeance? Just last week I read an article about several people who actually did commit murder in their sleep. Lucky I did not know about that when I was small. That information would really have messed me up.
My father’s favorite saying was, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Well, didn’t that mean me? I knew the intensity of my fury. What prevented me from killing someone and winding up dangling from a noose like Goebbels or Goering, or sizzling in the electric chair like the Rosenbergs? I suspect that my need to answer these kinds of questions explains at least in part how I eventually wound up on death row.
I did not expect to marry. My mother was convinced that the combination of my brains, my seriousness, and my predilection for tailored suits, Liberty of London cotton blouses, and black dresses would render me an old maid. When I did start going out on dates (we did that in those days), she would caution, “Do you have to let them know how smart you are?” Her other words of advice: “Shorten your skirts” and “Be a butterfly.” I did not know how to sew (nor did she) and hadn’t the foggiest idea what it meant to be a butterfly. I knew only, I was not one.
In spite of her misgivings about me, my mother and I were extremely close. In fact, she loved me passionately. I was her favorite, which no doubt sheds light on my relationship with my sister. At night, after my father had gone to sleep, my mother and I would stay up late, talking. Over and over again she would tell me how she had wanted to be a journalist, but she met my father and got married instead. In those days, if a man made a good living, his wife did not work. It did not look right. For her to have worked would have meant to her friends that my father could not support her. That’s what she said. Occasionally, when we stayed up late talking, she cried. During one of those midnight conversations, when she was about the age I am now, she said, a certain determination in her voice, “Don’t do what I did. Have a career.”
I did not shorten my skirts. Nor did I molt. I could not and would not. But I did listen to this last piece of advice. I think her other admonitions were what she thought she was supposed to say. She must have figured that I would not be able to have both a career and a husband. Nobody did. Nobody in her world.
Meeting my husband during my senior year at medical school was not just a surprise, it was a miracle. Melvin Lewis—to my mind the brightest, handsomest, most desirable single male on the psychiatry faculty at Yale—wanted me; me with my long skirts and Liberty of London blouses. Two weeks after our first date we were engaged. When I told my family, they were so astounded and relieved that they failed even to ask if he was Jewish.
When news of my engagement filtered out to my classmates, they too were surprised. The other four women in my class had long since found partners. One of my classmates, a boy I had known since kindergarten at Ethical Culture, accosted me outside the hospital. “I hear you’re engaged to Melvin Lewis. Is it true?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Really?” My classmate sounded puzzled. “He’s a great guy. What does he see in you?”
Instantly the old hurt and rage from grade school rose within me. I could have slaughtered him on the spot. Shortly after graduation I learned that he had died in Vietnam, shot down in a helicopter. I was shaken. Since childhood I had worried that my very thoughts could kill. Had I been right? Had my flash of anger at his cruel words done him in? Intellectually, of course, I knew that was not so. Nonetheless it reminded me of the old question that for years had flickered in my mind: Why could I feel homicidal and not kill while others acted on their impulses?
My marriage to Mel and the subsequent birth of our children convinced me that the world probably did exist, even when I closed my eyes. What is more, it was not half bad. Life clearly had improved with age. It does. I tell that to my adult patients who look with anxiety, even dread, upon forthcoming fortieth and fiftieth birthdays. The older we are, the more control we have of our lives, the less buffeted we are by the casual or deliberate maliciousness of those around us. I guess as we mature we also don’t need to be loved by everybody—one or two people will do. Still, the question had been planted and remained: Why do some people when hurt or angry, just lose it while others don’t?
Back in the lecture hall, as I stood before the scientific symposium, I was not about to share these intimacies with the tweedy statistician in the back of the room: they were none of his business. I smiled at him, then turned to another hand in the audience.