“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.”