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.”
I sat beside the bed with an uncomfortable sensation, a kind of premonition of shock, about whatever it was that my grandmother had told Dr. Medved. I had already made the disquieting connection between the play my mother had told me about the night before, in which my grandmother had featured as Queen of the Moon, and a story my grandmother had told me when I was little. I had long since rediscovered the source of that story of my grandmother’s in the pages of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, an edition with the Doré illustrations, which she had given to me as a gift.
“Look, Mike,” my grandfather said, “it took your mom a long time to get over some of the things about Mamie that . . . that were hard on her. I mean, your grandmother always felt like she had been a bad mother, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t see it that way. The way I see it is she lived, she got your mother out of there, she loved her, so in my book that’s mother enough. But I don’t want to give Mom a reason to doubt. So do me a favor. Don’t say anything to your mother about this.”
“Don’t say anything to me about what?” said my mother, entering the room. She looked at me, then at my grandfather, suspicious.
“Grandpa had a beer,” I said. “I think he’s a little bit drunk.”
32
When I was little and we still lived in Flushing, the Whip used to come shambling down our block, a hectic fanfare blowing from its loudspeaker horn. The Whip was a truck with a carnival ride in a wire cage mounted on its flatbed, painted red and yellow like a circus tent. The music that attended its migrations and advertised its arrival had a slapstick wooziness and in hindsight may have been a tarantella. It seemed as long and as looming as a tractor-trailer to me, but it was probably no bigger than a moving van. If you were already in the street playing when the Whip rolled up, you ran in to beg for a quarter. If you were indoors, you heard the drunken music and ran out to meet it with a quarter sweating against your palm.