Helen Hildreth was married while still finishing her surgical residency. Her husband, John Patterson, was a young chemist whom she’d met in a lecture hall. After finishing his dissertation and completing his doctorate at the University of Vermont, he was offered a job at a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia. The couple moved, and Helen found a position at Philadelphia General Hospital. She was the only female surgeon at the hospital—a groundbreaking role at the time.
There’s a photo of the two of them at a fund-raising dinner for the hospital, taken in 1934. They’re holding hands and he’s leaning into her, as if he’s just whispered something into her ear. She’s looking back at him with a smile that radiates trust and affection. I don’t know if love can be felt from a photograph taken almost fifty years ago, but it is impossible to look at this image and not conclude that Helen and John were very much in love.
A year and a half into their marriage, Helen gave birth to twins, two girls. Although by all accounts her pregnancy was unremarkable, tragically they were both stillborn, and doctors were unable to resuscitate them.
John was a thin man with a history of asthma who tired easily. After the loss of the twins, he seemed to have trouble getting out of bed.
His breathing worsened, and he began coughing blood.
Tuberculosis was suspected, but the cause was mitral valve stenosis, a narrowing of the mitral valve to the heart, likely from scarlet fever when he was a boy. His heart was enlarged and profoundly damaged by the time the diagnosis was made.
He was, quite literally, going to die of a broken heart.
He was dead within six months, making Helen a widow at thirty. According to letters written to her father, she blamed herself for the deaths of both of her daughters, and even more so for John’s death. “How could any competent physician miss such a diagnosis in someone with whom I spent so many hours, so many days?” she wrote. “There’s no excuse.”
She sold their house, gave notice at Philadelphia General, and spent the next ten months traveling in South America.
There are few surviving letters or journals from that time, but I was able to piece together that she spent the majority of her time in Peru and Colombia studying medicinal plants and shamanism. Though a disbeliever in the spirit world and all things supernatural, Helen took a keen interest in the role psychoactive plants played in healing the sick. The trip also, one would assume, sparked her interest in the role the mind and psyche played in overall health.
She returned to the States a changed person. She went back to using her maiden name and returned home to Vermont, where she’d grown up and attended medical school. She left surgery behind and began a residency in psychiatry.
“The tragedies we endure shape our lives: we carry them like shadows,” Dr. Hildreth wrote in a paper for the American Journal of Psychiatry in May of 1971.
One must wonder how Dr. Hildreth was changed by the stillbirth of the twins, the death of her husband; how much these events shaped her, what shadows she herself carried.
Lizzy
August 20, 2019
SKINK AND I crossed West Main and headed for the long pier that ran along the west side of the downtown area. There were dozens of boats moored there, a little shack selling fried seafood. We passed tables and kiosks selling keepsakes to tourists: jewelry, paintings of Vermont landscapes customized with your name, a guy who made funky animal sculptures out of cut-up old tires—a monkey hanging from the awning of his stand, a dragon the size of a Labrador retriever sprawled on the pavement. As we walked past, the rubber animals all seemed to watch.
At the end of the pier, beside the soft-serve ice cream shop (Best Maple Creemees in Vermont promised the sign), three kids were sitting at one of the picnic tables pounding energy drinks in huge black cans and smoking cigarettes: a thin boy with bleached-blond hair and bad skin, and two girls dressed in black with dyed black hair to match.
“Yo,” Skink called.
The blond guy nodded at him.
“This is Lizzy, the lady I told you about.”
“I’ve seen you on TV,” the guy said. He squinted at me. “You look different, though.”
I smiled. “This is me without a crew to do my makeup and hair,” I said, taking a seat at the table.
“Lizzy, this is Alex,” Skink said, nodding toward the blond kid. “And that’s Riley next to him, and Zoey in the trench coat on the end.”
“Hey,” they all said, almost in unison.
I guessed these kids were fifteen or sixteen maybe—a bit older than Lauren.
“And you, like, want to interview us? For real?” said Riley. She had a piercing in her upper lip. The skin around it was red and swollen like it had been done recently.
“I’d like to,” I said. “If you’re cool with it. We don’t have to use names or anything if you don’t want. But I’d love to hear your stories. Learn more about what you think happened to your friend Lauren.”
“So we’ll be, like, live on the air?” Alex asked.
“Not live. But you’ll be a part of the podcast. People all over the country listen. I can send Skink a link to it when it’s finished.”
“Cool,” Alex said.
Zoey said, “Do you think the TV show might come here? You know, like, do an episode on Rattling Jane next season or something?” Her lips were chapped. Her cheekbones protruded from her face, and she had dark circles under her eyes, giving her a skeletal look. Her dark hair was buzzed short and she wore a trench coat that could have fit two more Zoeys inside it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
“It would be cool if they did,” said Riley. “I mean, maybe we could all be on TV, you know? Tell our stories.”
I nodded. “That would be cool,” I said. “I know the producers pay attention to my podcast, so who knows. Maybe if they like what they hear. If they think it’s intriguing enough for a whole episode.” I got out my recorder and set up the two mics, one on each side of the table, and slipped on my headphones.
“It’s August twentieth, and I’m here at one of the docks in downtown Chickering Island, Vermont, talking with friends of missing teen Lauren Schumacher.” I looked up, smiled at the three kids on the other side of the table. “So how long have you all known Lauren?”
Alex shrugged. “Her family’s been coming here for years.”
“Just a week or two each summer,” Riley added.
“Tell me about her,” I said.
“She’s a poet,” Zoey said, lighting a cigarette. “And she draws too. Pen and ink. She wants to go to college to study art. She’s kind of a genius. Literally.”
“Like she could get into college.” Riley rolled her eyes.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Girl’s messed up,” said Alex.
“But not really. It’s, like, this total persona,” Zoey argued. “She acts all tough and crazy, but that’s not who she really is.”
Alex snorted. “She attacked a kid at school, back in Massachusetts! What about that? In what way is that not messed up?”
“Really?” I asked. “Like physically attacked someone?”
Alex nodded. “That’s what she said, and I believe her. She choked him and shit. Got kicked out of school. Lauren’s like that. A temper, moody.”
Riley shook her head. “Maybe she’s moody, but maybe that kid she choked shouldn’t have been messing with her. I wouldn’t put up with that shit, the things he called her. I say he deserved it. But she didn’t deserve to get sent to that place her parents sent her, the brainwashing place, that was messed up.”
“Shit like that happens,” Zoey said fiddling with the cuff of her trench coat. “I saw a thing on Netflix—people come in the night and get you, kidnap you, take you to a treatment place that’s more like a prison. And your parents okay the whole thing. It happened to that girl who was on TV all the time, the one from the really rich family, what’s her name?”
Alex shook his head. “That’s not what happened to Lauren. She wasn’t kidnapped or anything. Her parents brought her to the place.”
“What kind of place?” I asked.
“She said it was somewhere in Upstate New York,” Alex said. “It’s this rehab place for teens that’s like a cult or something—lots of meditation and practicing mindfulness—whatever that’s supposed to mean. And talking about your feelings and making collages and crap. She hated it. Was there for six weeks. She said she’d rather be in prison.”