My career path, like the paths of the killers Jonathan and I have come to know, was charted in childhood, long before I met Sidney. Hitler, and my curiosity about the differences between us, drew me toward the study of violence. But it was Sidney’s defiant—one would have to say delinquent—act that catapulted me from a low, kiddie-size chair at the Yale Child Study Center’s model nursery to the benches at the back of the juvenile court in New Haven.
Psychiatrists must understand normal child development. Therefore, during my training at the Yale Child Study Center, I was required to spend a morning a week—Mondays—in nursery school. There I observed normal preschoolers at normal play. It was a busman’s holiday.
By the time I reached the nursery-school stage of my psychiatric training, I was already a wife and the mother of a four-year-old daughter, Gillian, who, my husband and I liked to believe, was a relatively normal preschooler.
We were selfish parents, an appalling admission for a child psychiatrist. We worked hard all day, then came home and played with Gillian. In order to accommodate our schedules, we modified hers. During the day, while in the care of her nanny, Gillian took long afternoon naps. Then, from six in the evening when we got home until eleven thirty at night when we flicked off the eleven o’clock news and went to bed, Gillian was forced to play with us.
Between the hours of six and eleven our house was a preschool. We finger painted; we sang nursery rhymes; we blew soap bubbles; we read The Cat in the Hat. Over and over, we read The Cat in the Hat. Watching the eleven o’clock news was the only concession to the adult world (except, of course, for her sleep pattern) that Gillian was required to make. Therefore, Monday mornings at the nursery school, watching other people’s children do exactly what my daughter had done the night before, were a drag. Worse, the chairs in the nursery school were so low that just straightening up after a morning’s observation was excruciating.
One Monday morning, as I sat on a Lilliputian chair, my knees almost touching my chin, I was propelled into the first stage of my career in violence. I witnessed a violent act. In retrospect it was an act of desperation, as are so many acts of violence. Furthermore, it was committed by a normal preschool boy, Sidney, thus demonstrating that violent acts can be perpetrated by normal individuals under sufficiently frustrating circumstances.
As bored with his soapsuds play as I was with watching it, Sidney informed the assistant teacher that he wanted to go to the costume corner, play soldier, and kill people. Three times he politely made his homicidal wishes known. Each time, in response, the large assistant teacher smiled, ignored his request, and encouraged him to continue making beautiful bubbles. After several unsuccessful attempts to negotiate peacefully, Sidney felt obliged to resort to violence: he simply upended his large basin of beautiful bubbles. Not once looking backward, he slogged through the soapsuds toward the costume corner, creating in his wake, I noticed, an abstract design of puddles and foam. I smiled.
My pleasure was short-lived. “Mrs. Lewis, get the mop,” bellowed the large assistant teacher. She could at least have said Doctor Lewis, I thought. That very afternoon I prevailed on the director of the Yale Child Study Center to accept my evenings at home—finger painting, reading Dr. Seuss, and mopping my own floors—as adequate training in normal early child development and to allow me to spend Monday mornings at the juvenile court instead of in nursery school. That I asked to spend my time at the court with angry, aggressive children, rather than at a school for the gifted, was obviously not accidental. The questions about rage, violence, self-control, and responsibility that since childhood had intruded on my thoughts were still alive and active. I did not realize it then, but when I set foot in the juvenile court I took my first step on the path that would eventually lead to death row.
As I have said, reading is slow-going for me. Furthermore, when I trained, most of the psychiatric literature was anecdotal and impressionistic. For both of these reasons, I read little of it. I compensated for my lack of written information by becoming a fairly astute observer of human behavior. I learned to rely on my own perceptions and believe my own eyes. However, I was not totally unprepared for juvenile court. I absorb information easily if I hear it. I was familiar with Trial by Jury, knew much of the Mikado by heart, and had almost perfect recall for the words of West Side Story. According to the familiar lyrics of the Broadway show, I could expect to encounter a bunch of engaging, pugnacious, streetwise kids.
I had also attended lectures in medical school, and had absorbed the prevailing psychoanalytic wisdom regarding delinquency. Children became delinquent because they acted out their parents’ unconscious antisocial impulses. These children, I was taught, suffered from what were called superego lacunae. That is, as a result of parental moral failings, delinquent children had large holes in their consciences through which their sociopathic behaviors oozed.
Those professors who did not buy into the theory of the transmission of delinquent vibes from parent to child or the notion of leaky consciences stressed instead the consequences of social inequality. They taught that poor people who lacked legitimate ways to obtain the good things in life that people like me had were obliged to resort to illegal methods to acquire them. Sometimes this required violence. According to my professors, in impoverished “subcultures of violence” the use of knives and other weapons was no big deal. Criminality, they said, was just an alternative lifestyle. Once again, West Side Story, with its poverty, its gangs, its ethnic and racial tensions, its motto “We’re depraved ’cause we’re deprived,” seemed to portray better than any textbook the forces that my professors at medical school were convinced bred violence. I knew the words and music backwards and forwards.
Every Monday morning for almost a year I sat in the back of the Juvenile Court of the Second District of Connecticut and watched as a parade of awkward, unkempt adolescents and befuddled parents made their way to the front of the courtroom and stood cowed before the bench. Where were those smart-ass teens whose exploits Bernstein and Sondheim had us all singing about? For that matter, where were those devious mothers and fathers with their subliminal antisocial messages my professors had described? The parents who actually made it to court for their children’s hearings stood by helplessly as the judge pronounced sentence. Uncomprehending, inarticulate, most of them didn’t even seem to understand what was going on. “What? You’re sending my kid away?” The discrepancies between what I had been taught and what I actually saw were irreconcilable.
Judge Lindsey, the senior judge of the Juvenile Court, but for the absence of a wig, could have stepped out of a D’Oyly Carte production. Silvery white hair. Wire-rimmed glasses. Black robe with just a touch of white collar showing. He even had the voice. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether it was what he said or the tone in which he said it that froze children and parents in their tracks and rendered them mute.
Judge Lindsey had no children of his own. He had never finger painted on refrigerator doors or read Dr. Seuss. He knew nothing of Horton and his egg or The Cat in the Hat. No one had ever said, “Mr. Lindsey, get the mop.” Nor had he sat on low chairs and observed other people’s children at play. His view of children came strictly from on high, from the bench.
Judge Lindsey once took me to dinner at his club. There at the Quinnipiac Club, over a copita of sherry, he confided to me that he considered his childless state a decided advantage, at least in terms of his work.
“How is that?” I asked.
“It enables me to be completely unbiased,” he explained, nibbling a cashew and washing it down with a sip of Amontillado. His ignorance of normal child development never fazed him. Justice was supposed to be blind.
Everyone at court had a favorite Judge Lindsey story. My favorite was the tale of Rodney, a thirteen-year-old black child who, after being flogged by his psychotic mother, set fire to a wastebasket in his kitchen. He immediately put out the fire, throwing the wastebasket into the kitchen sink and dousing it. Nevertheless, his mother called the police and Rodney was hauled off to court. In truth, Rodney had wanted to go to court. It was the only way he knew to get out of his home and away from his abusive, unpredictable, crazy mother. The fire was a flare in the night, an S.O.S., a signal that life with mother was intolerable. Rodney wanted out.
In Judge Lindsey’s courtroom, justice was also deaf. Judge Lindsey listened to the probation officer’s detailed account of Rodney’s tortured relationship with his schizophrenic mother, but he heard nothing. After being told of Rodney’s wish to get out of the home and away from the crazy lady, Judge Lindsey pointed a stern forefinger at the youth. In a voice that shook the chamber, Judge Lindsey intoned his inevitable, “Don’t you love your mother?” Rodney, like the hundreds of children who had preceded him and the hundreds who would follow, was speechless.
My most uncomfortable moments before Judge Lindsey occurred on the stand. I had started to work at the court, evaluating children for the probation officers. Consequently, I had to testify about the mental condition of Donna, an adolescent girl whom I had examined.
Donna had killed her boyfriend; my assignment had been to figure out why. It seemed that Donna, who had been going out with Ramón for at least three weeks, and who considered him her “steady,” discovered that Ramón had been keeping company with someone else as well. During an argument that took place in the kitchen (in New Haven, the kitchen is by far the most dangerous room in the house), Donna grabbed a carving knife, swung around with her arm outstretched, and slashed the faithless Ramón in the abdomen, nicking his aorta. She hadn’t meant to kill him. “I just wanted to hurt him like he hurt me, Doctor Lewis,” she explained. But when Donna’s temper got going, it was best to steer clear.
Donna was retarded. Not severely retarded, but retarded nevertheless. She had been in special classes since first grade. To make matters worse, she was also brain damaged. I could never quite figure out whether her brain damage was caused by her premature birth, by an injury incurred at age four when her brother turned over a set of dresser drawers on her head, or by the dozens of blows to her head inflicted by her volatile, alcoholic father. Whatever the cause, Donna had the fiery temper, poor judgment, and impulsiveness of many brain-injured children who have been raised in violent homes. Her lethal act was similar to dozens of her previous violent outbursts. The only difference was that this time the knife she held was a little longer and the victim a few inches closer.
Since I had performed the psychiatric evaluation, it fell to me to explain to Judge Lindsey that Donna was retarded, brain damaged, and abused, and that these problems made her less able to control her rage than other fifteen-year-olds. When I entered the courtroom I found, to my dismay, that Donna and her alcoholic father were sitting in the first pew, directly in front of the witness stand. As I began my testimony, I was aware of Donna’s presence as she stretched forward, struggling to take in every word that came out of my mouth.
During our interviews I had shown Donna a kind of courteous attention she was unused to receiving. She had learned to trust me. I could not betray her now. I could not destroy what little self-respect she had gained. I had to convey to the court the extent of her limitations without using the word retarded. What circumlocutions could I use to explain to Judge Lindsey the behavioral consequences of Donna’s head injuries and avoid the words brain damaged?
I took a deep breath and began. “Your Honor, this child has an I.Q. of 67, which puts her reasoning capacity just a little below normal. She also has sustained injury to her cerebrum from trauma incurred at age four, when a set of drawers fell on her head and rendered her unconscious. What is more, she has also been the target of severe physical abuse. The combination of borderline cognitive functioning, severe head injury, and an upbringing in a violent household is often associated with poor judgment, impulsivity and …”
“Doctor,” roared Judge Lindsey, “is she or is she not a Defective Delinquent?” At that moment I wished with all my heart that I had been succinct, to the point, dispensed with professional terms, and had settled for retarded and brain damaged.
Donna was no Maria, Ramón no Tony. In fact, even Leonard Bernstein would have been hard pressed to find anything to sing about in the lives of the hundreds of adolescents who traipsed through Judge Lindsey’s courtroom each year. But for me the seats at court were more comfortable than those at the nursery school; and, of course, the puzzles were infinitely more challenging. So I started a small clinic at the Juvenile Court of the Second District of Connecticut and stayed on, part time, as its director. It was the first and only court clinic in Connecticut. There I met Lee Anne.