In the 1950s my father was married
for five years to a writer and poet.
It was his first marriage.
Before and during their marriage
she suffered several
breakdowns and eventually
was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
They didn’t have any children.
They divorced, but remained in touch until
the end of her life in the 1980s.
At some point, he wrote the
following semi-autobiographical story,
based largely on
his experiences with her when
she was institutionalized at Sheppard-Pratt,
a psychiatric hospital in Baltimore.
Early Marriage
by Byron Dobell
(undated)
In the silence, he said, “There’s the tiniest bird just hatched that’s stumbling across the lawn.”
“Can a bird fly badly?” Jane asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Just a thought. Like, can a fish swim badly? You know, flies like a bird, swims like a fish. Can a bird or fish
be incompetent?”
“I suppose if it’s been injured,” he said.
“Or had a breakdown.”
Exactly. It was a very sane conversation, saner than any he had had with her for a long time. Jane had
been at Sheppard-Pratt for almost two years now, except for the month at the end of the first year when
doctors said she could “manage” at home – which, of course, she couldn’t. Her first crack-up had come
during her senior year at Wellesley, before he had met her, and she had been in and out since then.
At 25, hers was a path very familiar to the psychiatric profession. “Once you find a way, it’s easy to
find again,” her doctor told him a few months after he married her.
But why marry someone with such a history?
Ignorance, sheer ignorance. She had told him of her breakdowns, had spent much of their courtship
discussing them with him, but he thought you got over them once and for all, like pneumonia or
a broken leg. And neither her doctor nor her family had acted as if this was not so. Besides, in those days,
among his friends, it was not considered polite or humane to hold afflictions against their victims.
He wrote in his journal at the time, “I’ll take my chances on love.”
Now they were ready to send her home again. She was on an open ward, up four or five stages from
the padded cell where he had once spent his visiting hour feeding her slices of orange as she lay rigid on a cot in a straitjacket, accepting a slice every few minutes, mute and deaf, tears streaming from her eyes. Electric shock, chemical shock – she had been through total war. If there were medals for what the mad endure, she would have the Distinguished Service Cross with oak leaves by now. She had said so herself.
As the months passed, she was transferred to the “better” wards. “She’s doing better,” he had told her parents. She allowed her father to visit once a month, her mother not at all. Jane was doing so well, lately, that he had been taking her into Baltimore overnight on Saturdays. There, when they were not embracing hopelessly in a hotel room, they walked the streets and went to the movies. By three o’clock on Sunday afternoon he would return her to the country-club grounds of the hospital, leave her in the ward, and start back to New York.
There was an hour remaining today before he had to leave to catch his train, and he girded himself for the little confrontation he had been having with her over the past few weeks.
“I really think you should sign the Power of Attorney. Your father needs it.”
“I’m coming out soon. He does not need it.”
“He simply wants to pay your bills from the trust – otherwise it complicates his life.”
“Won’t it complicate mine?”
“I don’t think so – it’s all a technicality in any case.”
“If I were to give anyone Power of Attorney, shouldn’t it be my own husband?”
“That’s very nice of you and fine with me. But you know it isn’t in the cards. I don’t want your mother or sister thinking I had control.”
“Hell with them.”
“You know your father will protect your interests.”
“Okay, whatever you say.”
He was surprised it had been so easy.
“I’ll sign it,” she said.
Jane stood up and called to a young woman, another patient, who was reading on the porch. “Meg, dear, do you have a pen?”
“Here. Use mine,” he said.
“No. I want to sign it with a pen from someone of my own class.”
Turning back with the pen, Jane uncapped it, then walked toward him with its point first. He began to flinch, but covered it by rising quickly.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Sit down and we’ll do this right.”
She turned around and called to her friend, “He thinks I’m going to attack him because we have a small difference of opinion.”
“Controversy, controversy. America was built on controversy,” Meg replied.
Jane laughed. “She always says that.”
***
In the instant that Jane turned the pen towards him, he recalled the end of the day of her first breakdown – the first one he witnessed – when he had finally, after excruciating delays, gotten her to her doctor’s office on Park Avenue. On the way she tried twice to open the cab door and throw herself into the traffic. At the office her parents were waiting for them.
While Jane was behind the closed door with the doctor, they had heard the sound of breaking glass. Suddenly the door was opened by the ashen-faced psychiatrist, followed by an almost serene Jane. Wide-eyed and smiling, she approached her young husband and quietly said, “They’re sending me to Sheppard-Pratt. That’s the good news.” Then she threw a punch so fast he hardly felt the blow against his jaw. He always thought that if he had known the punch was coming, he would have been knocked out cold; as it is, he only discovered later that one of his teeth had been loosened. They drove a heavily sedated Jane to the hospital the same night, arriving at one in the morning.
***
Now, two years later, he was sitting on the screened-in porch of the hospital with the legal paper open on a low table in front of them.
When Jane signed, she said, “I don’t think this is legal, Eagle.”
“I’m sure it is,” he said, not quite sure.
“Maybe my mother put him up to it, Eagle.”
“I doubt it. God knows she doesn’t need your money.”
“It’s not my money I’m thinking about.”
“You’re too hard on her. She’s miserable that she can’t see you.”
“I don’t want her to see me here – it would give her too much satisfaction.”
The picture of the girl I get. But who is this guy?
A poor boy from the country, the Finger Lakes region of New York. Upstate. His name is Robert Keller. He has just passed his 26th birthday, but he seems older; it was a characteristic of his generation. He had read a lot and graduated in the top tenth of his class at Columbia, but hadn’t learned much about women, money, marriage. He’d been absent from class on those days.
On the train back to New York that night, he read the Power of Attorney carefully; it still looked fine to him. Someone had to make sure that Jane wouldn’t come out of the hospital and just give it all away, he guessed. Rich people like Jane’s family knew how to take care of things like this. As for himself, Robert knew he barely would be able to afford an appendectomy, let alone a breakdown.
It was ten o’clock in the old Pennsylvania Station as he walked across the great concourse heading for the phone booths. He had been making this trip back and forth to Baltimore every weekend for most of his married life. His friends and parents saw only what must be his grim, lonely existence. Their hearts went out to him; so did those of the few friends at the office who knew about Jane. But they all missed the point. As he dialed Ann’s number, he knew he had never been happier in his life.
…
