She hangs back in the dark of the little theater. The bright stage under the proscenium reminds her of something she saw once in a Stewart Granger movie, a bonfire blazing in the maw of a stone god. She seems to be seeing faces everywhere today. Maybe she ought to take her mother’s place here in this creepy joint. Above the proscenium, two more faces: masks representing the poles of mania. A woman in a gold-and-black-striped leotard looks out from the wings, her painted face as hectic as a ballerina’s. A fat man in a bathrobe plays glassy ostinatos on a Wurlitzer organ, shards of waltz from some half-familiar whole. Rocking back and forth on the bench, wildly out of tempo with his music. Later, she will learn that the fat man was really a fat woman.
There is something awful about this cave of make-believe with its smell of velvet and dust. It has the magic weirdness of the old amusement halls on Uncle Ray’s nine-ball circuit, the back rooms beyond the pool tables and pinball machines. The penny catacombs of entertainment. Live chickens in glass music boxes that dance when subjected to mild electrocution through the feet. Coin-operated beheadings of tiny queens, lynchings of tiny clockwork Negroes. A lifesize Little Egypt automaton enacting a creaky seizure of a hoochie-koochie dance. A clockwork Lucifer with a clockwork leer who makes predictions about your love life in racy slang rendered incomprehensible by time.
She stands unnerved by the bright mouth of the stage as if it is about to render prophecy.
* * *
“It’s all right,” the woman in the white cardigan says. “Do you see your mother, sweetheart?”
“No.”
Here and there among the seats she sees the outlined heads of other people in the audience, but none of them is right. She cannot imagine and will never discover the nature or identities of these other people. Doctors. Attendants. Napoleons and mothers of Christ. She hears the clunk of a switch. In the sudden total dark, a ghostly half-moon slews across her retinae.
The lights come up again on a field of clover. Trefoil hands, faces uplifted toward a shiny sun that hangs above their spiky pink and white heads. A swarm of fat-bottomed bees careen in and out among the flowers. Wordlessly, they quarrel with the flowers. They dip into the flowers’ faces with the bowls of big wooden spoons.
George Washington appears, dressed in knee britches, a powdered wig, a greatcoat, hatchet slung from his belt. He stomps around abusing the flowers and exhorting the bees to molest them for their nectar. This is not George Washington, it turns out, but a herdsman of bees. The purpose or significance of the hatchet, apparently not intended for the chopping down of a cherry tree, remains unclear. The bee herder watches contentedly as his bees fly back and forth with their ladles full of nectar from the looted flowers to their unseen hive. All of this is routine for the bee herder. He lounges on a hummock and fights to stay awake. The sun with its metallic glow goes down. Evening hoists a silvery moon into the heavens.
A pair of bears, unseen by the bee herder, shamble on from stage left. They swing their heads in unison from side to side as they advance. They are shabby-looking bears, a couple of ruffians with patchy coats. They observe the traffic in nectar. When the bee herder’s back is turned, they accost the plumpest of his bees. They threaten it with violence and confiscate its wooden spoon. With bearish ardor, they guzzle up every drop. At last the cries of the assaulted bee attract the attention of the drowsing bee herder. He leaps to his feet and throws his silver hatchet at the bears. But instead of striking them, it just keeps rising, all the way to the Moon overhead, where it lodges with a soft thump like a dictionary falling onto a pillow.
The bee herder studies the problem. He fidgets with his wig. Then he remembers his rope. He makes a lariat, swings it over his head with an audible whirr, and then launches the loop toward the hatchet with its handle protruding from the Moon. The loop misses the handle and the rope falls back to earth. He windmills it and launches it moonward again. This time the eye of the rope snags the wooden handle. He gives it a tug and then starts to pull himself up the rope hand over hand. Bees, bears, and flowers raise their heads and gawp in amazement. The bee herder climbs unamazed.
Darkness falls over the field of clover, dawn breaks on the Moon. Jagged moon mountains glow cool and silvery blue in the background as the bee herder, hatchet restored, strolls along unfazed by his new surroundings. He passes silver moon trees like the skeletons of cacti. He picks a bouquet of silver moonflowers. As he turns, he notices a small silver ball rolling toward his feet. A woman comes running in after it but stops when she sees him. She wears a silver gown and a silver crown. A large pair of silver wings rise up behind her, a moth’s wings, billowing gently in a lunar breeze. He picks up the ball, and for a moment they regard each other. Then he tosses her the ball, and she catches it.
What befalls the bee herder and the Queen of the Moon after this first encounter—how the pantomime is meant to end—will remain forever unknown by my mother.*
* * *
The mountains of the Moon glowing under the light of a blue gel at the back of the stage were tinfoil balls, massed and squashed into cake-frosting peaks. The moon trees were a couple of branching coat racks wrapped in more foil—“silver paper,” my grandmother always called it. The moonflowers were clusters of eggbeaters, whisks, and serving spoons planted in cake pans. It was all so ridiculous and sad. It was pathetic. And yet the foil shone in the subaqueous light. The coat racks raising their jubilant arms and the bouquets of kitchen implements had the incongruous dignity of homely things.
Looking into the radiant mouth of the stage, my mother felt a strong sense of recognition, as if she had visited this world in a dream. As if, when she was a child, the fog of her mother’s dreams had rolled through the house every night and left this sparkling residue on her memory. There was no way the baffling history of a spacefaring bee herder and his visit to the Moon had been dictated to her mother in some kind of bogus hand symbology by poor old lightning-addled Mr. Casamonaca. The Queen of the Moon entered, chasing the little ball of foil, in her tinfoil dress and crown, and her wobbling wings made from nylons stretched over coat hangers and glued with sequins. This was not the Moon at all. It was some other world—some other mother—uncharted and hitherto unknown.
It was just the most beautiful thing, my mother told me.
Then the bright glints seemed to startle from her the tinfoil crown and swarm the air between her mother and her, jigging and flittering, until they all flew away and left her in the dark.
* * *
She came to herself on the leather settee outside the theater door, sitting beside Mr. Casamonaca, her nose rife with the smell of mothballs oozing from his suit. Mrs. Outcault crouched in front of her, frowning as if watching a doubtful cake through the window of an oven. Behind Mrs. Outcault stood a bear, three clovers, two bees, and the fat pianist in his bathrobe and slippers. Behind them stretched an expanse of wall covered in the same wallpaper that was in the entry hall, which my grandfather had caught her staring at without understanding why. The thing was that if you looked at the wallpaper one way it was nothing special, a repeating pattern of carnation-pink escutcheons with white roundels, each shield supported by a pair of gold willow-leaf garlands. But if you looked at the wallpaper another way, you were confronted by a crowd of bloody-mouthed faces, ass-eared and staring.*
“Here she is!” Mrs. Outcault said. “You’re fine, honey, aren’t you?”
My mother nodded, though she was not entirely sure. She averted her eyes from the wallpaper and found Mr. Casamonaca beside her. He had his chin in the air and was looking down his long nose at her with an air of satisfaction and calm. Don’t worry, said his eyes, everything is unfolding just as I intended.
“I enjoyed your play,” my mother told him.
In reply, Mr. Casamonaca gravely unscrewed an invisible jar. My mother heard heels tapping, a rustling that was also a rattle. My grandmother came running into the small lobby minus her wings, with her crown askew, pressing it against her head with one hand. Mrs. Outcault stood up, and everyone stepped back and looked at my grandmother except Mr. Casamonaca, who seemed not to notice. My mother got up too fast. Her pulse drummed its fingers along the hinge of her jaw.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” my mother said. It was the first thing she could think of to say.
My mother went to her mother, who slid her cool bare arms alongside my mother’s neck and scissored her between them. It was an awkward but sincere embrace. My mother’s gaze strayed again to the wallpaper with its thousand gaping, long-eared faces, and my grandmother knew without following it what there was to see. “You don’t have to look,” she said.
My mother turned her face from the wallpaper for good.
* * *
“You have been in prison,” Dr. Medved said.
“Wallkill,” my grandfather said. “Thirteen months.”
“For a violent crime.”
My grandfather had anticipated that from time to time, over the course of his life to come, he would be expected to give some account of events between August 1957 and September 1958. He would do so, he had decided, only when asked directly by someone who had a reasonable right to know. Employers, inevitably; though in his present situation, since he’d been recruited by Sam Chabon—who was filled in by the warden—on the very grounds of the prison, nothing had needed to be said. He would tell my grandmother about his time served, provided she asked; the details were nothing he felt a need to volunteer. As for my mother, What was it like in prison? had been among the few spontaneous questions aimed his way during their drive down from New York City, and she had seemed content—or, according to her version, she had been obliged to content herself—with a one-word answer: Interesting. Beyond these moments, my grandfather had estimated that he was likely to be forced into, and had therefore budgeted, ballpark three to five discussions of his incarceration between now and the day he died. He decided to spend one of them now.
“I attacked a man. My employer. I tried to strangle him with a telephone cord.”
“I see. And what had he done to deserve such treatment?”
“Nothing,” my grandfather said. “As far as I know.”
“Ha,” the doctor said. “And to provoke it?”
“I got fired.”
“Ah.”
“It was the day after the first time she tried to burn the tree. I was, you know. I was agitated.”
“Because she had set fire to this tree. After a period of more than a year—”
“Almost two years.”
“—during which her illness appeared largely to have disappeared. The hallucinations abated.”
“Yes. Only looking back, I could see . . . I realized they . . . It had been there all along. It was just that somehow we all managed to ignore it for a while.”
“And then it came charging back that night. In a great fiery rush. That must have been terrifying.”
“It definitely seemed to invalidate the sense of relief, I’ll tell you that.”
“And the next day. The attack. How much of the anger that led you to try to strangle your employer do you feel was really misdirected anger toward your—”
“All of it. I didn’t even really know the man.”
“Ah.”
“It wasn’t her, exactly, I was angry at. I didn’t blame her, and I don’t now. I knew she couldn’t help it. I knew she had no way to stop herself.”
“Which is why you felt you had to take your anger out on someone else.”
“It’s not impossible.”
“I’d say it’s quite likely.”
“It has a certain logic.”
“And what if—well. What if you had not been so clear in your own mind about her fundamental lack of culpability due to mental instability? What if you did feel that somehow she was to blame for her actions? Do you think your anger would have directed itself more, ah, more appropriately? In the sense that you would have tried to take it out on her and not a relative stranger.”
“What are we talking about here? Is there something that I don’t know about? How could she be to blame?” My grandfather caught himself before the next logical question slipped out: Was the Skinless Horse real? Then he saw a look in Medved’s face that made his heart want to rephrase the unasked question, come at it from the opposite side: Or had she been making the whole thing up?
Medved sat without saying anything for an uncomfortably long time. He gripped the arms of his chair and pushed himself to his feet. He went to a large steel cabinet in the corner. Inside it on steel shelves were rows of thin cardboard boxes, lined up like books with their spines outward, five or six dozen. The spines of the boxes had blank white rectangles on each of which a patient’s name had been written, along with some dates. Each patient had at least three boxes; my grandmother had seven. Medved pointed to a chunky gray machine sitting on a low steel typing table beside the cabinet. “Know what that is?”
“A tape recorder. Looks like a Wollensak.”
“It is. I use it to record my sessions with patients.” He pointed to the boxes in the cabinet that had my grandmother’s name on them. “These are my sessions with your wife. I can’t share them with you, of course. I am not really supposed to characterize or paraphrase or even discuss them with you at all.”
He closed the cabinet and sat back down. He grabbed hold of his cheeks and pulled on them, worked them between his fingers. “At first there was not much of interest that she wanted to tell me. Her guard was up, not against me and my questions so much as against her tormentor. But once we began the Premarin treatment . . . Well, it has had a profound effect on her symptoms and behavior. On the pattern of her thoughts and the way she expresses them. The effect has been so considerable that I am forced to question the earlier diagnosis of trauma-induced schizophrenia and consider that all along your wife has been suffering from some kind of acute hormonal imbalance, some deficiency in the production of estradiol by her ovaries.”
“Unless that is schizophrenia.”
“Not out of the question, in females, at any rate. Clearly, it’s possible that estradiol played some critical role. We really know nothing at all about it. At any rate, as soon as the voice began to recede . . . as soon as her guard could be let down . . . She began to talk, during our sessions, with a freedom she had never had or felt before. Naturally, I listened. And not only because that is what I am obligated and paid to do. The account she gave. Of her experiences. During the war. It was . . .” Medved settled his chin in his left palm, his left elbow resting on the desk. He looked out the window of his office at the sky turning black in the east. “I will be honest. I really don’t know how to finish that sentence,” he said.
“I’ve heard it,” my grandfather said. “I know.”
“You have heard something. Have you heard everything?”
“I would have no way of knowing that.”
“True. But let me ask you. When she talked about her family, her experiences during the war. The circumstances of your daughter’s birth. Or set that to one side. Generally speaking, in the course of your life with her, in her expressions of emotion and the patterns of her thought, would you say that there was a . . . coherence to her? What we might call her presentation of self—did it feel consistent?”
It was like when you climbed a stairway with the lights out, reached for the top step, and lurched into a hole in the dark. From that long-ago Sunday afternoon outside the doors of Ahavas Sholom synagogue when, from one day to the next, my grandmother seemed to have forgotten or switched off a supposedly acute aversion to the touch of animal skin, the answer to Dr. Medved’s question had always been No.
“Here’s what worries me,” Medved said gently when my grandfather didn’t say anything. “Because of the incident with the tree and your response to it. What if she were to tell you something or you learned something about her, her account of who she is, her history, that caused you to question everything she had told you before?”
“Sounds like I ought to tell her not to tell me,” my grandfather said.
“Really.” Dr. Medved looked surprised. Maybe he was even a little disappointed.
“If she’s feeling better, that’s all I care about.”
“But as I suggested, I hope I made it clear—of course we’ll continue her on the Premarin, but there’s no history or precedent here. I’ve never seen a case like hers, and there’s no way of knowing whether the effects we’re seeing will be durable, let alone permanent.* If she should stop feeling better . . .”
“Whatever bad or ugly thing it is, Doc. Whatever’s at the bottom of whatever’s the matter with my wife? I’ve already seen and heard it. I know it’s ugly and she hates herself for it—”
“I doubt it’s quite as simple as that. It isn’t something she did or didn’t do but the action of her particular hormonal, ah, situation on a set of circumstances—”
“Doc, I’m an engineer, an electrical engineer. That’s my training. Engineers spend a lot of time on what’s called failure analysis. Whether you’re designing, or testing, or building, you . . . because, you know, things break. They fail, they explode, collapse, burn out, there’s stress, fatigue, fracture. And you want to find out why it failed, that’s part of your job. You want to figure out what’s wrong so you can fix it. Maybe I used to look at my wife in that regard. At the beginning, maybe for a long time. Wanting to know what went wrong. Thinking I could fix her. But I don’t want to think of her like that anymore, you know, looking for the bad capacitor. I just want to, I mean . . . I accept her and I . . .” He was going to say that he loved my grandmother, but that didn’t feel like something one man ought to bother another man with. “She’s broken, I’m broken,” he said. “Everybody’s broken. If she’s not in misery anymore, I’ll take it.”
Dr. Medved blinked. It looked like he was organizing an argument in his thoughts. “I— All right,” he said. “You know yourself better than I do.”
“Don’t be too sure,” my grandfather said.
There was a soft tap, and then the door swung open and my grandmother was there. Hair curled, looking into him from somewhere on the far side of those damaged eyes, blue as the Monte Carlo night. Her face, all the angles of beauty and torment he had fallen for then, in spite of combat fatigue and a blanket disdain for sentimental conventions, at first sight. She was wearing the navy dress, the one she’d been wearing on admission to Greystone Park. It had a wide belt that cinched her waist very much to the advantage of her breasts and hips. She had put on a little weight, and that also proved advantageous.
“Hello, darling,” my grandfather said. He got up and went to put his arms around her. He kissed her. It was meant only to be a kiss hello, but it lasted a while and ended with her giving his lower lip the gentlest of bites. If the damn doctor were not there with his diplomas and his Bromo-Seltzer and his useless addiction to the truth, my grandfather would have laid my grandmother on her belly across the desk in a shower of pens and paperclips. Testing the connection that never seemed to fail. They parted. She looked at Dr. Medved. Hopeful, afraid, wanting to know: “It’s okay?”
My grandfather glanced at the doctor. Dr. Medved, on his feet now, looked from my grandfather to my grandmother and then back. He offered his final judgment on the situation, on the failure in her circuitry that my grandfather chose not to analyze. “If it works for you,” he said. “I guess it’s okay.”
* * *
A widower like my grandfather, Dr. Leo Medved died of heart failure in 1979. His professional correspondence and the records, stored in marbleized cardboard boxes and still under seal of confidentiality, passed into the hands of his adult daughter and son. The Medved children tried to find an archive that might take their father’s documents and tapes: at the New Jersey Psychiatric Association, at Tulane and NYU, at the library of his synagogue in Fair Lawn. But there were an awful lot of boxes: “at least two hundred and fifty,” according to his eldest child, Lorraine Medved-Engel, a retired schoolteacher and holotropic breathwork facilitator in Mantoloking, New Jersey.
I tracked Lorraine down in early 2013. I had been thinking of writing a novel based on what I knew about my grandmother and her illness, and I was hoping I might find something useful in Dr. Medved’s records. By the time I found my way to Lorraine Medved-Engel, the number of boxes had been reduced to twenty-seven by vicissitude, disaster, and Dr. Medved’s son, Wayne. “Always sort of resentful-slash-worshipful about Dad,” according to Lorraine, Wayne Medved consigned most of the boxes to a landfill shortly before taking his own life on the tenth anniversary of his father’s death. Hurricane Sandy, on its way through Mantoloking and Lorraine’s basement in September 2012, had done for most of the rest of the boxes.
Two of the remaining twenty-seven boxes contained tape reels of treatment sessions from the mid-1960s, after Medved had left Greystone Park and gone into private practice in New York City. A few more held a small fraction of what must have been hundreds of Fisher scientific notebooks—black covers, numbered gridded pages—in which Medved set down treatment notes at the end of every workday. Unfortunately, none of these journals happened to coincide with my grandmother’s time at Greystone Park. As far as I could determine over the course of two days’ intrusion on Lorraine’s hospitality, the sole trace of my grandmother in the surviving Medved records were two paragraphs in an entry that filled out the back pages of the lab notebook in which the doctor had completed the writing of his unpublished memoir, “Greystone Notes.”
Dated 11 November 1979—two days before his fatal heart attack—and headed next project, the ten-page entry outlines a book that Medved intended to call either The Bathyscaphe or Rapture of the Deep. It was to be a series of extended case studies, modeled on Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour, culled from the pages of all those other Fisher notebooks consigned by poor Wayne Medved to molder in the Meadowlands. Medved laid out the narrative contours for five of a proposed nine memorable “dives” he planned to revisit in his literary bathyscaphe. After these, running out of pages and—did he sense it?—time, Medved jotted down a few more paragraphs, sketching the four other cases he saw as likely candidates for inclusion. Among these last words of Dr. Leo Medved I found this:
The Skinless Horse: Case of “N—” Foundling, b ≈ 1923. P* (given name at birth: Liliane) was married woman of French/Belgian-Jewish ancestry, mother of adolescent female. Prior diag. SCZD.* Experienced hallucinations after 1947, prim. auditory, some visual. Delusional persecutor: “Skinless Horse.”
P told her mother was Jewish mistress of married “businessman from Ostend.” Raised by Carmelite nuns outside Lille. Sporadic early hints of eventual symptomology, primarily aud.: “angry” or “critical” whispering voices. Reported having seen “burning angels in the fireplace,” “shadowy face” alongside her own in mirror, etc. Late 1941 experienced return of vivid early memory, sight of engorged “skinless” penis of stallion, flashed through her mind while P was engaged in sexual intercourse with a local SS captain, father of biological child (an act which P “only much later” came to recognize as non-consensual).
Prolonged, acute depression postpartum. Retrospective indic. persecution mania, paranoia at this time. However not marked (nor inappropriate to circumstances).
Recovery coincided with P forming close attachment to another Belgian Jewish girl, N—, slightly younger, taken into hiding late ’42 by nuns. P claimed friendship with N— “saved my life” at time of suicidal ideation. N— was the daughter of wealthy tanners: “maroquinnerie,” [sic] N— gave vivid accounts of slaughter, skinning, treatment of hides, stench, etc. Strong physical resemblance betw. girls led to elaborate fantasy of being sisters. N— betrayed, deported to Auschwitz. Presumed dead.
Convent destroyed Oct. 1944 by V-2 rocket. P forced into months of vagrancy, cold, near-starvation. Stealing, prostitution for food and money. Experienced amenorrhea, hair loss. (Regular menses never resumed, P conceived only once postwar, 1952, see below.) P’s daughter spent part of time with Catholic family in Lille. War’s end, P and daughter in DP camp, Wittenau, Germany. P observed HIAS agents with brief to bring Jewish ex-camp inmates to US. P managed to persuade agents that she was N—. Adopted N—’s name and identity. Started as impulse, seized opportunity. Fabricated narrative based on fellow inmates’ accounts of internment at Auschwitz, liberation. US soldier w/ sewing needle and pen ink tattooed numbers on patient’s arm in return for sex.
Arr. US July 1946. Met husband, ex-GI, Baltimore. From hunger to plenty, illness to health. Father for child. At this moment of apparent safety symptoms begin to recur, worsen through circa September 1952 when P becomes pregnant. Experiences near-total remission of illness during pregnancy. First hospitalization triggered by miscarriage ca. 10 wks.
After that Medved gave some details about the nature of the Skinless Horse. He planned to conclude the case history with his own surprise when the routine administration of Premarin—“derived,” he noted, “from the urine of horses”—appeared to cure her delusions far more effectively than talk therapy had ever done. In the end, the chapter was to be a record of dumb luck and success through failure.
This discovery—that my genetic grandfather had been a Nazi, that my grandmother had been born to a life, with a biography, very different than the one I had always been told, that she had perpetrated such a charged deception on everyone for so long—messed me up for a long time. One by one I began to subject my memories of my grandmother, of the things she had told me and the way she had behaved, to a formal review, a kind of failure analysis, searching and testing them for their content of deceit, for the hidden presence in them of the truth. I kept what I had learned from my wife until I returned from Mantoloking. I kept it from my mother and the rest of the world until I began to research and write this memoir, abandoning—repudiating—a novelistic approach to the material. Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth. I felt like I needed to “get my story straight,” so to speak, in my mind and in my heart. I needed to work out, if I could, the relationship between the things I had heard and learned about my family and its history while growing up, and the things I now knew to be true.
“So what was it?” I asked my grandfather on an afternoon—it turned out to be the next-to-last afternoon of his life—a little over thirteen years before I found the answer in Dr. Medved’s notes. “What did Dr. Medved want to tell you about Mamie?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. You never asked?”
“I didn’t want to know. I still don’t.”
“Do you have any theories?”
“I did, probably, the first few years. It was nothing I enjoyed thinking about. So eventually, I stopped thinking about it.”
“But do you think . . . I mean, it seems like he was hinting that she was lying to you about something. Something from her past.”
“She probably was. It’s hardly unusual.”
His tongue darted out, retreated. I handed him a cup of apple juice and spotted it while he took a sip.
“Everything you’ve been telling me is true, though, right?”
“It’s all the way I remember it happening,” he said. “Beyond that I make no guarantees.”
I sat beside the bed with an uncomfortable sensation, a kind of premonition of shock, about whatever it was that my grandmother had told Dr. Medved. I had already made the disquieting connection between the play my mother had told me about the night before, in which my grandmother had featured as Queen of the Moon, and a story my grandmother had told me when I was little. I had long since rediscovered the source of that story of my grandmother’s in the pages of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, an edition with the Doré illustrations, which she had given to me as a gift.
“Look, Mike,” my grandfather said, “it took your mom a long time to get over some of the things about Mamie that . . . that were hard on her. I mean, your grandmother always felt like she had been a bad mother, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t see it that way. The way I see it is she lived, she got your mother out of there, she loved her, so in my book that’s mother enough. But I don’t want to give Mom a reason to doubt. So do me a favor. Don’t say anything to your mother about this.”
“Don’t say anything to me about what?” said my mother, entering the room. She looked at me, then at my grandfather, suspicious.
“Grandpa had a beer,” I said. “I think he’s a little bit drunk.”