I wasn’t kidding when I wrote it. Or so I gather; I don’t remember writing it at all. What I know of that period I’ve had to piece together after the fact—à la that clever Lieutenant Columbo—from journals, letters, medical bills, interviews with eyewitnesses, and the few odd flashes that have come back to me over the years. Filling in, bit by bit, an ugly picture of myself. At once the detective, the victim, and the murderer.
The people around me, Max and Johnny particularly, had come to notice signs of trouble: my drinking, my distraction, my utter lack of pleasure in things—this last, I learned, called anhedonia, which to me sounded like the name of a flower Max never planted in the garden I never wanted. Max tried, in his graceless way, to snap me out of it with a series of increasingly tin-eared and desperate inducements that culminated in our second ocean voyage to Italy, about which the less said the better, but none of it was any use. I had become a stranger—dark and frightening—to the people I most loved.
Or so I gather.
So in I went.
Max checked me into Silver Hill, a residential treatment facility in the tranquil hinterland of bucolic Connecticut.
Severe depression, alcoholism, and menopause on top of it all: that was Dr. R’s tripartite diagnosis, a three-pronged stab to Max’s heart and pride. I, evidently, was so far beyond caring by that point that I took in this assessment without interest, as though they were speaking of someone else—which, in a sense, I suppose they were.
Comprehensive psychiatric and addiction treatment services, those were what Silver Hill provided. I remember, for some reason, holding their brochure, which Max gave me to browse on the ride down from Manhattan that white morning in early February; it apparently declared that they had been restoring mental health since 1931—the same year that I became the highest-paid advertising woman in America. Or so Max told me; I had no appetite for reading and simply took his word for it. I don’t think he cared. I think he mostly wanted to give me something to hold that was not his hand.
Silver Hill was meant to be a hospital that didn’t feel like a hospital but rather like a comfortable retreat in the New England countryside: quaint and comforting as a house in a snow globe. But only if one had really lost one’s mind—only if it were gone completely, never to return—could one forget what it really was and why one was there.
February is the shortest month, and thank whomever for small blessings, because I’ve never been lower in my life. The Silver Hill staff tried their damnedest to fix me, with talk therapy, occupational therapy, and drugs—Miltown, Luminal, Thorazine—but I was so far down the well that they could not even reach me, let alone pull me up.
So they farmed me out. On the first of March they sent me to Greenwich Hospital—twenty miles southwest, almost to the state line—where I stayed for ten days. The location felt like an improvement: Even bedridden in my drab gown, brain scrubbed of every good and bad thought, I could feel myself closer to the city. Closer to the ocean, too; at night the open window sighed the cool breath of Long Island Sound.
The drawback was that they’d sent me there for electric shock treatments.
They didn’t administer such therapy at Silver Hill.
Electroshock treatments are horrible—even though, indeed because, I can’t remember having them. To their credit, the staff at Greenwich Hospital was advanced in its methods: scrupulous about strapping me down and fixing my mouth with a rubber bit to keep the seizures from breaking my bones or making me bite my tongue, considerate enough to give me a muscle relaxant—and a more sophisticated formulation, at that, than the blowgun poison some doctors still favored—along with a general anesthetic to spare me the suffocating horror of the muscle relaxant. Such, I’m told, are the measures they took for my comfort; I’m sure it’s all true. But the treatments purged themselves from my mind even as they did their work—the way that cranes create and then erase themselves from the skyline, one might say—leaving me with only the faint nightmare recollection of lying in bed afterward, every muscle sore, with no notion of who I was, who I’d ever been, why I was in a hospital, how I’d gotten there, or what I’d be returning to when I left. If I ever left. If I’d ever been anywhere else.
But the treatments helped me when nothing else did. In time—and not much time, really—almost everything came back: my address and my phone number, the fact that I was married and had a child, Max’s and Johnny’s faces and names, my books, my fame, all my years at R.H. Macy’s.