family, keep up payments on the house, and do something out in the world that he got some pats on the back for; on the other, his sudden termination of all function, his drop into a total vacuum, his loss, as they like to say these days, of identity, as much as he had.
Overnight he’d been broken to pieces and he had no desire to juggle the fragments. Any world that would do that to a man, he was profoundly convinced, was just not worth bothering with. He resigned from the human race and all its doings. He went into the bedroom, pulled down the shades, and there in the darkness sat on a chair facing the wall.
I can’t say I altogether blamed him. The way things were going, there really wasn’t much worth looking at Out There.
Still, you have to make the effort. Those are the rules of the game, the only one in town. If you don’t obey the rules they won’t call you a sensitive soul, a man with esthetic of such high order that you can’t take the vulgarities and obscenities out there on the street—no, they’ll pin the label of psychotic on you and lock you up.
They pinned the label on my old man not without reason, though I must say if they wanted to get a full picture of his sickness they would have had to look into the sickness of American capitalism too. They took him away and locked him up in Yale’s Institute of Human Relations where they had a psychiatric division devoted to the study of interesting cases. They judged my old man to be an interesting case. You don’t get many factory workers who are devoted to the violin.
He entered Yale’s Institute not long after I entered Yale. That gave my academic career a certain focus.
I’d been at a loss as to what field to do my honors work in. I definitely didn’t want to major in literature in an English Department that did not recognize the existence of James Joyce when he was knocking the whole literary world on its ear. Now, however, I saw a course of study that would make sense. I would concentrate on psychology, more specifically, abnormal psychology. At the same time I would fulfill all the pre-med requirements, and after graduation go on to medical school and become a psychiatrist, maybe a psychoanalyst.
If I couldn’t find out in Yale’s curricula what was wrong with the world or at least with literature, I could bone up on what was wrong with my old man. I could in fact make an occupation out of it.
The Psychology Department headquartered in the Institute of Human Relations, was, if I remember rightly, part of it. I visited there often to talk with this or that professor. On my side the conversation was often a little forced because I was aware of my father’s presence in another wing of the building and discussions of the mind’s gnarlings were therefore a lot less academic for me than the professor could guess. The professor, I mean, could speculate freely as to how the mind gets twisted one way or another—if he was wrong that was O.K.; he had no stakes in this. My stakes were high; if he didn’t know what he was talking about my old man was going to be cooped up in that locked room with his violin for a long, long time.
One of my instructors was a first-rate fellow named Florian Heiser. I took to him because my Marxism didn’t bother him, as a matter of fact he was something of a Marxist too, enough of one that after a while Yale told him to move on. I visited with him often. One day he packed up his briefcase and walked outside with me after our business was done with.
We went along Davenport Avenue toward the spot where he had his car parked. I happened to look up at the row of barred windows that marked the psychiatric wards. Behind one set of bars was my old man, just standing there testing, I suppose, if there was anything besides walls worth looking at. I don’t know if my memory is writing additional dialogue for the facts here but as I recall the scene he had his violin tucked under his arm.
Florian Heiser didn’t notice anything. He went on talking about some exciting experiments somebody was just then doing in conditioning aggression out of rats with electric shocks—socialization through traumatization, I think it was called. That was Florian’s field, experimental psychology. It’s the same snap-to treatment they’ve been using more recently on autistic children, who I suppose can be seen as rats for being so unsocial.
Florian was an instructor in why some people get things done and some get undone, and in general a right and sympathetic sort of guy, pretty much on my side, certainly not on the enemy’s, but there was no way to break into his impassioned talk about the new Pavlovian traumatizings of rats to say, “I don’t mean to change the subject, I’m really interested in all these things they’re doing to rats, but that skinny old geezer up there, he’s my father, he’s had some shocks recently too—they didn’t socialize him much—would have had more, in fact, they’d decided to give him electric-shock therapy and were wheeling him into the jolt room but at the last minute somebody thought to check his blood pressure, it was way up and they found he had an advanced case of arteriosclerosis, the voltage they’d been about to run through him might have killed him.” Nope, there was no way to work this information in, which, it seemed to me, said just about everything there was to be said, between clenched teeth and with gorge that wouldn’t stay down, about the discipline of psychology, the University, the country, the system, and the human how of it all down the line, some (only some) of which, to be sure the system’s not responsible for.
Outside there on the avenue, I slowed down a bit. Then I did the only thing I could think of under the circumstances, raised my hand in a snappy military salute.
My old man made the effort to smile. He returned the salute with the closest thing to jauntiness he could muster, like a man on his deathbed trying to go through the motions of the Charleston or the Suzie-Q. I got his message—carry on, trooper. He on his fronts would do his level best to carry on. He was issuing orders to me to keep the battle going on as many fronts as I could get to, and to make sure none of them was anywhere around his.
Sometime after this the psychiatrists at the Institute decided they’d exhausted all the interesting aspects of my old man’s case and he was accordingly transferred to the state mental hospital in Middletown. You can see what’s coming, you’ve watched enough television dramas to know all the plot twists, the crazy crossings of paths, the O. Henry surprises that life dishes out so much more ingeniously than do the television dramatists and the O. Henrys in general.
It was arranged for our class in abnormal psychology to make a field hip to Middletown to observe some of the more interesting cases they had up there. In anticipation of that outing, I suddenly recall after a lapse of 37 years, I sat down and wrote a short story, not exactly light-handed, about a college student whose class in abnormal psychology visits a mental hospital to have some of the weirder cases trotted out for their inspection, and one of them turns out to be his father.
It was a failure of my dreamery centers. Life is not that cliché-ridden. It simply has more imagination and far subtler turnings than television will ever have the good grace to acknowledge. When life decides to write a soap opera, as it does over and over, the thing may turn into grand opera, and not a posy, swoony one either.
My father was not one of the shells of human beings dragged into that amphitheater for the edification of Yale students in between weekends at Vassar. My father made no appearance in that vaudeville at all. But after the show, as we were walking back to our cars, I spotted him on a bench on the grounds, with his violin case across his knees. I went over and sat down.
“How you doing, Pop. Get to play the violin much.”
“Plenty, son. I keep busy here, don’t you worry about me. I’m even giving lessons, I’ve got five patients signed up already. One’s a very interesting man, he used to be an engineer and he has a plan to float icebergs down from the North Pole and melt them to make more water, he says the reason for the Depression is too damn many frozen assets and this is his scheme for straightening things out, unfreeze the water assets. He’s got a real knack for the fiddle,
