Ceremony of the Innocent (70 page)

The gentle and insidious questions persisted. Ellen replied with faltering hesitations. But they were so kind to her, so anxious to help her. She began to relax. She became confiding. They questioned her about her childhood and girlhood, and they saw the raw pain on her exhausted face. They made more copious notes.

“Heavily preoccupied. Speaks in a dreamlike voice, as if repeating nightmares. Ideas of reference. Ruminations. Fantasizes. Introversion. Depersonalization. Flight of ideas. Stereotype affectations; grimaces. Apathetic, even when speaking of painful past memories. From conversations with relatives, a close friend, and her husband, grave personality changes over the past ten years or so. Evidences of premature senility. Falls into short and stuporous states in the midst of answering questions. Speech incoherent. Emotional reactions shallow. Interest withdrawn. Poverty of ideas. Inaccessible. Blotchy skin. Inactivity. Repetition of words. Defense mechanisms against disavowed environment. Ambivalent attitude towards present husband, sometimes hostile, sometimes with guilty manifestations. Diminished response to social demands…”

The questioning went on and on, inexorably. The snowy day darkened. Dr. Enright, moving soundlessly, turned on more lamps. Ellen’s exhaustion increased. She knew she had been speaking as she never did these days, but she kept forgetting what she had said. She craved the solace of alcohol. At times she was extremely frightened by these men, and then admonished herself that they were so very kind and only wanted to help her, and she must assist them, if only to please her worried children. Besides, she felt a far-off sense of alleviation, as if an abscess had been opened. If only she didn’t feel so tired! Her legs ached with her tiredness, and spread.

Nearly two hours had passed. Then Dr. Lubish nodded to his colleague and they both rose and went into the waiting room. Ellen’s son and daughter stood up, eagerly searching the physicians’ faces.

Dr. Lubish was very grave. “It is too early yet to reach a definite prognosis, I am afraid. We will need an extended period of time—of treatment, for our conclusion. We should like to see Mrs. Porter every week—”

Dr. Enright studied the two young people shrewdly and knew them perfectly.

“We should also like to have a discussion with Mrs. Porter’s servants—”

Gabrielle’s eyes were very vivid when she turned to her brother, and she smiled, and Dr. Enright saw that smile and knew its wickedness. He nodded to himself.

“In the meantime I have written a prescription for Mrs. Porter. A light sedative. A quieting influence.”

“Should we try to persuade her to give up drinking?” asked Christian with bluntness.

Dr. Lubish appeared to hesitate. He delicately scratched his chin. “No,” he said at last. “She is not an alcoholic—as yet. She drinks because she is mentally ill, I am afraid. At least, that is what we suspect. We need more time.”

Time, time! thought Christian. He was disappointed. “How much time?” he demanded.

Dr. Lubish shrugged. “That is something I cannot tell you, Mr. Porter. It may be several months. But we must be certain—there may be conflicting interests—we must be certain.”

“Do you think you can help my mother, Doctor?” asked Gabrielle in a very sad and childish voice. He smiled at her broadly.

“Oh, I am sure we can help—everybody,” he said. “But it will take time. We—er—must have a firm foundation. I am sure you understand that?”

There began, for Ellen, chaotic months of concentrated probing, of tears, of bewildered terrors, of distorted nightmares, of despair, of induced stupefaction, of drugged yet unrefreshing sleep. She knew nothing of the way of psychiatrists and did not even know that she was “being treated” by them. They always pretended to give her a physical examination three times a week, and they talked of blood pressure, kidney disorders, liver dysfunction, anemia, menopause.

They suggested that she indulged in bizarre ideas and assumed unnatural attitudes, and when she protested they patted her arm or shoulder as if she was insane and needed humoring. They insisted on her confidences and listened critically, and sometimes brutally disputed with her and feigned anger at her replies. This frightened her more and more; she guiltily felt she ought to please them with “good” answers, but what those answers were she did not know. Sometimes she became hysterical when they chided her that she was not “helping them” to help her, and that her children were becoming extremely anxious. At this she would lapse into incoherences—which were duly recorded.

She expressed her instinctive fears to Kitty Wilder, and Kitty always listened with apparent sympathy—and Kitty always reported, with mendacious regret, to Dr. Lubish. “The poor girl is becoming more and more confused, I am afraid. Why, yesterday, she looked at me for a long time before recognizing me, her dearest and oldest friend! Then she could not remember my name at first! Later, she mumbled that she felt she was ‘living in a dream,’ and stared around her blankly. I don’t think she is improving at all; I know it isn’t your fault. She has been this way for a long time, though she is steadily getting much worse.”

Dr. Lubish asked Kitty to bring Ellen’s housekeeper with her the next time she had a secret conference with him. This Kitty did, in late November 1928. Dr. Lubish knew Mrs. Akins exactly for what she was—malevolent, envious, and hypocritically meek and “worried.” This long and sallow woman with the damp nose would make an excellent witness, and Dr. Lubish called in his secretary to take down her remarks, concerning Ellen, verbatim.

“The poor Madam,” she sniffled, wiping her blinking eyes, “she gets worse every day.” The woman clutched her purse, in which was hidden a fifty-dollar gold bill, discreetly pushed into her hand by Kitty. (“There will be more, later.”) She went on: “Only yesterday she said to Joey—he’s the handyman—‘Who are you?’ And he’s worked for her for years! When he reminded her that he was Joey, she asked about her ‘kitten.’ She never had a kitten. I keep having to remind her to take a bath or comb her hair or change her spotted dress. Really, the smell sometimes! And she prowls around the house at night and calling for her dead husband. It gives us all chills, and we lock our bedroom doors. Never can tell about people in her condition. If I didn’t really love the poor thing I’d leave, bag and baggage, I’m that scared sometimes. She creeps up behind me, without a sound—”

There was much more, all lies and distortions. Joey was called in, and gave his own colorful interpretations, forgetting, of course, to mention that he pilfered regularly in Ellen’s house and had taken some of her lesser pieces of jewelry. He, too, had been properly bribed. “Honest to God, sir, she puts her arms around me and even asked me to marry her, her with a husband! And she called me Jeremy, many times. Her eyes look queer all the time. I’m scared.”

“Ah, but you mustn’t leave the poor lady,” said Dr. Lubish in a virtuous tone. “She needs every friend she has.” Not that she has any, he added to himself with some bitter amusement. Well, she’s a natural victim, and victims deserve to be victimized.

“She don’t have any visitors any more,” said Mrs. Akins. “Not that I blame them. She can’t talk sensible to anybody, and she won’t answer any phone calls and then only when her kids call, and then she cries and cries and begs them to come to her, and she forgets they come at least three, four times a week to see her.”

“Sad, sad,” said Dr. Lubish with satisfaction.

Only one was deeply concerned, and that was Francis Porter, and he was beginning to despair. Sometimes, when he was alone at night, he would weep. Ellen was no wife to him, but he loved her, though she now would look at him startled and afraid, when she infrequently saw him. The doctors gave him little hope for the recovery of his wife, “unless she is institutionalized, and we must arrange that as soon as possible.” When Francis was not counting the cost of the psychiatrists he was calculating the fee of Dr. Lubish’s private sanitarium, and pacing his bedroom floor.

Ellen had been induced not to mention her “therapy” to Charles Godfrey. “You know how he is, Mama,” Gabrielle would say. “He hates to part with a cent. And you’ve never liked his wife, either—that servant. She’s sly, and a plotter. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that he has been robbing Papa’s estate.”

As Charles Godfrey always scrutinized Ellen’s bills and expenditures, Dr. Lubish and his colleague discreetly sent her no bill. They were reimbursed by Christian and his sister.

The drugs which Ellen had been given made her more and more disoriented. She declined rapidly in health and in appearance, and her red hair was thickly streaked with gray. Her face was haunted, old, or blank, and heavily lined and dry.

C H A P T E R   37

IN NOVEMBER 1928, Herbert Hoover was elected President of the United States, “by a landslide.”

The conspirators had done well. Here was a gentleman of the most impeccable character and credentials. There was not a single stain on his reputation. Moreover, he was no Jacobin, no follower of Rousseau, who had always been erratic at the best and mad at the worst. In fact, Mr. Hoover was the very antithesis of Rousseau. He admired excellence, unlike Rousseau, and did not believe that all men were born “equally endowed with intelligence and good character”; he also did not believe that if a man was poor he, per se, was sanctified. Mr. Hoover doubted that “the naked savage,” so eulogized by Rousseau, was superior to civilized man. He was firmly convinced that a man should earn his “rights” as a man, in all areas of society. Property, in the main, except for that inherited, was the just reward of superiority.

Mr. Hoover had long been a student of the frightful French Revolution, and particularly of Maximilien Robespierre. He was becoming alarmed at a new and insidious tendency in the thoughts of Americans: Once classless in the true meaning of the word, with no established aristocracy and no authoritarian overlords and nobles, the American people had long known that it was the intrinsic worth of a man which was important, whatever his income. But now they were being deceived into believing that a class, amorphous, faceless, called “the Masses,” existed and had sovereign rights above the rights of others. As no American felt that he himself was a part of that strange classification, it gave him a pleasant sensation of virtue to shout that “the Masses” must have something “done” in their behalf. However, he believed that they lived in another part of the country and not in his vicinity, no matter how poor his own resources. He had pride.

But the conspirators understood, and through their allies, the Communists and the vociferous Socialists, they began to invade the innocent American mind. In addition, they stealthily insinuated that America should no longer boast of her accomplishments, her freedoms, her form of government, her traditions and manliness. Like the France of Robespierre, Americans should, in all sincerity, become ashamed of their country’s genius and drive. This perfidious idea was adopted, not by the workers of America, but by the self-designated “intelligentsia,” and the upper classes. It became quite fashionable to hold this view, and it was earnestly argued in the best parlors, while the speakers sipped, delicately, the illegal wine. For the first time in American history the educated but mentally illiterate, and the effete, began to wonder, soberly, in conversations and periodicals, “if Washington should not intervene to bring about social justice.” This alien thought spread assiduously in the colleges. The average American, however, still preferred that his central government remain far from him and his private concerns and hopeful ambitions, for instinctively he knew, as did the ancient Chinese, that “government is more to be feared than the audacious tiger.”

He did not know, this sensible American, that his government was being invaded by Robespierres who were already in his banks and were active among the enormously wealthy. He did not know that he was about to become the victim of revolutions, planned economy, academic theorists, panics, and of “radical social change,” as the assassin Robespierre had called it. He did not know that it was plotted that America commit suicide. He only knew that he was living in “an exciting time,” as the newspapers proclaimed, though his own life was usually grim and dull. His entertainment and titillations came from moving pictures out of Hollywood, full of “glamour,” and of reports of rich and murderous gangsters and bootleggers, and their “molls,” and of the money to be acquired overnight in the Stock Market. He hardly believed any of it; inflation was devouring his poor wages; those he saw on screen or in photographs and police reports were part of a world beyond his comprehension, and it was his only source of color. If the “intelligentsia” were calling themselves “the lost generation,” as they drank coffee in French cafes and mourned that they were expatriates from “American vulgarity, materialism, and exigency,” the average American was unaware of their very existence. He did not know that they were part of the legions of death gathering together to assault the battlements of his very life, and overthrow all his dreams and sanctities.

Americans were hearing more and more about psychiatrists, and their hedonistic attacks on something they called “Puritanism and maladjustment.” This was strange and foreign to Americans, but curiously interesting. It was not so interesting to American parents, however, that their children were already being corrupted in their schools by advocates of “sex freedom,” and were craftily being induced to despise their parents for “suppressing” them or inhibiting them. They did not know that their children were subtly being taught that authority was evil, and that they should be “free souls.” The seduction of children had begun.

Mr. Hoover heard all these things, but he thought them abstractions. He was more concerned with “keeping America prosperous—a car in every garage, two chickens in every pot.” He had an uneasy and instinctive suspicion at times, but he was carefully insulated by his enemies. Moreover, he had faith in the sturdy American character. He thought the majority of men were as forthright and honorable as himself. That is why he had been chosen by the conspirators to be President of the United States. He was their ambush.