6.
I was born into that lull, at least as it seemed to my family, if not to many others. After the war, Roxbury’s three-deckers filled up with new people with strange accents; refugees, my mother explained, who had to leave other countries and come here to us. Down the street, in an apartment where a room had been turned into a ballet studio, I took dance classes with Alda Marova, a curly-haired young woman who was rumored to have danced
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with one of the great ballet companies of Russia. Her mother sat at the piano, foreign in a long black dress, beating out the time as we little girls tried to rise en pointe. Practicing at home, I stood at the door to our living room; my mother dropped a needle onto the record—bump bump ba bump bump ba bump—and on the beat of the Waltz of The Flowers, I came whirling into the room. Then there was Mrs. Landsman, the Polish refugee who lost her children in Auschwitz and came to clean our house once a week, even though we didn’t have the money to afford a cleaning woman and my mother always worked alongside her. As Mrs. Landsman bent down over a soap bucket, she smelled of steam and sweat. After Mrs. Landsman left my mother would say, “We washed the floor with our tears.” It was confusing and excitingL new people were arriving, we children were dancing, our grownups were crying, and I was standing on the back porch waiting for my mother to call me in for dinner. Out on that back porch something came over me. I called it THE FEELING, seeing the capital letters in my mind’s eye. It would begin at the end of the day as I stood out on the porch and watched people across the way come home from work. I felt a grip around my heart, squeezing it. Now I know that it wasn’t my heart at all; it was my esophagus. But at six or seven
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years old, which was when THE FEELING started, I assumed it was my heart because that was the place where feelings happened. I stuck it out as twilight turned to dusk and dusk almost
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turned to night. I went back to the kitchen, where my mother was making dinner. She looked at me as she went about adjusting the flame under the pea soup and opening the oven door to check on a leg of lamb my father brought home from his market. I didn’t say anything to her about THE FEELING. I couldn’t explain what I felt, and besides, I didn’t want her to think that I was becoming like Bennie. Already I knew he was the phantom of the family, someone sick who had been turned into a zombie. Even though I didn’t confess to THE FEELING, my mother must have seen something in my expression night after night that made her decide I needed help. Her fear of Bennie’s illness overtaking me was stronger than…than what? Common sense, which may have kept her from reacting so quickly? But what was good parenting then, if not vigilance? Now, when parents are keen eyed to catch a warning glimpse of a child’s distress, my mother’s recourse would be seen as progressive. But back then I didn’t understand anything, except that maybe something was wrong with me. One day we took the streetcar together, changing at Grove Hall and getting off at the
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Arlington Street stop. Walking hand in hand down Marlborough Street, we found the right brownstone. My mother pressed a button on the brass nameplate. We rode up to the doctor’s office in a small iron-grilled elevator big enough only for the two of us, a birdcage through which we could see the accompanying sweeping staircase with its Oriental runner that my mother remarked upon. In the waiting room, a loud clock ticked on mantelpiece.
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The psychiatrist, recommended by a colleague of the same Abraham Myerson who had recommended Bennie’s lobotomy but by then was too ill to give his direct advice, is nameless and faceless to me now. I do remember he gave me a pad of paper and a box of crayons, and asked me to draw a picture for him. This was exciting. I’d fallen in love with images in the book, Famous Paintings for Young People: little Saint Ursula sweetly dreaming under the covers as an angel approaches her canopied bed; Saint Francis standing outside a cave in a landscape of
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golden light, his arms outstretched to receive something glorious that could not be seen. For my subject, I chose a maple leaf, familiar to me because, like most New England children, I’d scuff through piles of them each autumn. I sketched the leaf’s jagged outline then filled in its central spine and branching veins. Carefully looking through the box, I drew out reds and yellows, then I shaded one color into another. I stopped, considered, then added a touch of flame orange to the pointed tips. As I colored, I worried: did the psychiatrist think my choice of subject matter too ordinary, my execution too tame? Lacking imagination? I really did feel like that, although I didn’t know those words until much later. We didn’t go back. I never knew why. Was it because we didn’t have the money to continue, or because the doctor said that everything was okay and I wasn’t sick after all? I was a little sorry because I was intrigued by his box of forty-eight Crayola crayons, their points
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standing at attention— Burnt Sienna, Magenta, Pine Green—and the chance they offered to do better. Back home, I went out to the back porch again. I did this every, almost as though I were courting THE FEELING. I was lured by a blue-violet melancholy, tinged darker now with worry that I would become another Bennie.
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I had no idea that anyone had ever felt anything like THE FEELING. But, in the mid-thirties, an eight-year-old boy lay in his bed on Haledon Avenue in Passaic, New Jersey, watching the shadows of cars swoop across the ceiling of his room. His biographer wrote the boy was “in awe of the immensity of the universe. He would consider the inconceivable distances to the nearest stars and ponder the problems of infinity and the end of space. He was lonely.”
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I know that little boy, as I know all children who grow up lonely, with feelings they have to make sense of by themselves. This boy also knew mental illness in his family. His mother, a teacher, poet, and political activist, was sick for much of her adult life Diagnosed with
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schizophrenia, she was in and out of hospitals, treated first with electric shock and later with a lobotomy. After her surgery, the little boy, now grown up, mailed his mother the draft of a new poem he’d written; he called it Howl. Allen Ginsberg sent it from Seattle, where he was about to ship out on a freighter through the Bering Straits. Naomi Ginsberg wrote back a letter that clearly showed her diminished self: “This going to the North Pole, who supplies the wearing material? They say when you visit the Eskimos you need a double coat of fur.” She wrote of her
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hallucinations, which continued even after the lobotomy: “I still have the wire on my head. The doctors know about it. They are still cutting the flesh & bone.” But the letter also bears the mark of the human being Naomi was before she became ill. Responding to her son’s poem, she wrote: “It seemed to me your wording was a little too hard. Do tell me what father thinks of it.” She
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added a postscript: “I hope you are not taking any drugs as suggested by your poetry. That would hurt me. Don’t go for ridiculous things.” The letter was signed,” With love and good news. [Mother] Naomi.”
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The day after writing that letter, Naomi Ginsberg died. Allen didn’t return for her funeral. His absence meant there were not enough men to say Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead. Later, he would find Naomi waiting for him in his poetry: I made a mistake I thought in following the doctors’ rules, or where’d I get the idea she was screaming and banging her head on the wall in neural agony? Was that just my thought
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or hadn’t others told me so? Why’d I do it so abrupt
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without consulting the World or the rest of the family –
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Her last look so tranquil and true made me wonder
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why I’d covered her so early with black shroud.
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Had I been insane myself and hasty?”
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Naomi’s letter to Allen raises questions I find compelling. How had she been able to write it?
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write it? After forty rounds of electric shock therapy and a radical lobotomy, the person that was
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Naomi persisted, responding to her son’s poem as the teacher, poet, and wife she’d once been,
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and the mother she still was. What of a person is left after damage to the frontal lobes? In his
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book, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind, neurologist Elkhonen
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Goldberg says “The lobes are where our humanness resides.” But however damaged Naomi’s
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lobes were—and it must have been extensive given that she had one of the early lobotomies—it
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seems me that she was writing to her son from inside a human residence.
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