One of the reporters was particularly abrasive. Three days after Nancy’s funeral he’d shown up with a copy from a page of an English newspaper carrying the banner headline NANCY WAS A WITCH. He told me if I didn’t deny it people would assume it was true. I said “No comment” and closed the door.
Somehow he managed to shove the page inside the door before it shut, then told the police I’d stolen it.
■■■
Once I had been happy. I had known how to laugh. I had known how to cry. I hadn’t cried in twenty years. There had never been any time to cry since the day Nancy was born. No time for the luxury of tears.
■■■
My obstetrician’s office was right in the midst of the Penn campus, which spreads across several blocks in West Philadelphia. As I waddled across the campus, I convinced myself that this would be the day I would have an office talk with him. I would not be intimidated.
I was quite a sight now in my maternity dress, knee socks, and saddle shoes, and I got some funny looks from the other students. You didn’t see many pregnant students on campus in 1958. At Penn, in fact, you saw only one – me.
■■■
“I’m nauseated in the morning,” I said quietly.
She said nothing.
“Were you?” I asked.
“A couple of times. When I had my coffee.” She put her brush down, looked at me. “We should buy you some maternity clothes.”
That was the only conversation we had about my pregnancy.
■■■
I took my list home with me from the doctor’s office and added to it
“How will I know if the baby is dead?”
■■■
They gave me another shot and I went under again.
Sometime during the night I thought I saw Frank standing next to me, holding my hand. I dreamed that—he told me later he hadn’t been there. I also thought I saw my mother standing over me, wearing a white doctor’s coat and stethoscope, her cool hand on my forehead. That actually did happen. She was working as an administrative secretary in the medical school and had “borrowed” her boss’s coat to check up on me.
Very early in the morning they gave me a needle in the spine. I don’t remember anything after that.
Nancy was born at 6:52 a.m. on Thursday, February 27, 1958. I slept through the entire birth.
■■■
I didn’t know what to think. I was confused and afraid. I didn’t know what any of this meant. I didn’t know if she was actually going to die and nobody was telling me so as not to upset me. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to exist. Maybe she didn’t exist. I didn’t know. I still hadn’t been allowed to see her.
“Where did you have to stop?”
“I went to the store where we bought the crib. I changed everything to pink instead of yellow.”
“What’s wrong with yellow?”
“She’s yellow. I just thought … I don’t know what I thought.”
■■■
We never knew for certain what effect Nancy’s traumatic birth-the oxygen deprivation, the ABO incompatibility, the blood exchange had on her later behavior. There were simply too many unknowns.
But we do know that children who face great life-threatening traumas at birth share many of the same personality characteristics. They spend much of their lives angry. Their behavior is often violent, much of it self-directed, like Nancy’s was. I have seen some of these other children and talked to their parents. A common thread exists.
This syndrome is presently acknowledged by the medical community and is being dealt with. This was not so in 1958.
■■■
I put Nancy back in her crib. She didn’t stop screaming and crying. She cried the whole day. She cried when I diapered her, bathed her, fed her. She screamed when I came in the room.
I took it very personally. I prided myself on doing things well. I was a good student. I had taught myself to be a good cook. But I was already a total failure as a mother.
Nancy began screaming the second she saw me. I almost cried at that moment. Seeing and hearing her reminded me of how much time and energy she demanded. I honestly wasn’t sure I’d have enough strength and love for another child.
■■■
One time she was quietly coloring with crayons on the living room floor, then suddenly exploded into a frenzied screaming attack. Later I looked at the coloring book and saw that she’d accidentally colored outside one of the lines. This was enough to trigger a fit. I was powerless to prevent the fits, and once they started I was powerless to stop them.
I waited for her to outgrow them. As far as I knew, there was nothing else for me to do but wait. One day I thought she finally had done that. I was reading on the living room sofa when she came up the stairs from the basement and walked past me with this strange, glazed look in her eyes.
“Where are you going, Nancy?”
“I’m g-g-going to my r-room. I f-f-feel funny, Mommy.”
“How do you feel funny?”
She twisted her face, as if she were in pain. “I’m g-going to my room.
I’ll come o-o-out wh-when I’m better.”
She walked slowly upstairs to her room. I followed her up there a minute later and found her sitting up on her bed, staring into space. She didn’t notice me, and I left. An hour later she came bounding down the steps, her dark brown eyes all sparkly and alive again, and went back down to the basement to play.
■■■
It was this way with all things – Nancy’s way. When she wanted something, no matter how big or small, she hollered and screamed and backed us into a corner until we were the ones to back down. We gave in to her. Why? Because there was absolutely no peace in the house until she got what she wanted. And she was impossible to discipline. She was not afraid of us, had no respect for us. Traditional channels like shutting off her allowance were far too puny. Smacking her was pointless and accomplished nothing except to make us feel terrible for losing control of the situation-and to make that situation more intense. So we gave in to her demands, one by one. It was easier that way. Was it really worth enduring a major tantrum just because she wanted to watch a different show on TV than Suzy did? It wasn’t – believe me it wasn’t, not day in and day out.
And that’s how a seven-year-old ran our household. It was not pleasant.
In fact, it was so unpleasant it took its toll on our marriage.
■■■
She started reading Rolling Stone because it dealt with rock music, and quickly jumped to popular counterculture books I didn’t think she could possibly understand, but did. At ten she was devoted to Sylvia Plath’s poetry and her memoir, The Bell Jar. She devoured Kurt Vonnegut, Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, J. D. Salinger. She read and reread several times Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was another of Nancy’s favorites – not only his novels but the numerous biographies about the author’s troubled life and turbulent marriage to Zelda.
■■■
Again, we thought she was disturbed and should be getting some kind of treatment. Again, we wavered.
Until later that week, when I found Nancy standing at the top of the stairs, holding a brown paper bag over the bannister. She was about to drop it to the floor of the entry hall. Her eyes were glazed. She had That Look on her face.
“Nancy, what’s in the bag?” I asked.
“Aquarius,” she replied woodenly.
She loved the cat, loved all animals. I couldn’t imagine her wanting to harm him.
“But why is Aquarius in the bag, Nancy?”
“I’m gonna throw him downstairs and see if he still lands on his feet, even if he’s inside the bag.”
“But Nancy, you’ll hurt Aquarius.”
“No!” I wrestled the bag from her. In response, she tried to smack me in the face. I overpowered her in time, shook her.
She blinked, looked around, looked at me, looked at the bag.
“Mommy, where are we going?”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“Why are we standing here?”
I looked deeply into my daughter’s eyes. She wasn’t playing a game.
She really had forgotten why we were at the top of the stairs, forgotten what she’d been about to do.
“You wanted to hurt Aquarius,” I explained.
She frowned, took the bag from me, and opened it. The cat jumped and darted away.
Then Nancy turned and went into her new room. She stared out the window for an hour, then sobbed uncontrollably for another hour.
■■■
In response, Nancy ran upstairs to her room, pulled the window screen off, and jumped out on the roof of the garage in her bathrobe and slippers.
She began to scream at the top of her lungs, “I wanna die! I wanna die!
I’m gonna kill myself! I wanna die!”
Everyone in the neighborhood could hear her.
Mother and the sitter tried to coax her back into her room from the window. Nancy finally agreed to come back in when the sitter apologized for what she’d said to her at the table. That seemed to satisfy her.
No sooner had Nancy climbed back in the window, though, than she grabbed a pair of scissors from her desk drawer, brandished them over her head, and hissed to the sitter, “I’m gonna stab you to death, you fucking bitch.”
The sitter screamed and ran from the room.
Nancy ran after her. She chased her down the hall, down the stairs, around the living room, hissing at her, “Fucking bitch, fucking bitch.” She chased her back up the stairs, then back down again.
Finally Mother got Nancy to the floor by tripping her. She pried the scissors from Nancy before she could recover. The sitter ran home, terrified.
Then Nancy’s eyes glazed over. When Mother released her, she wandered out the front door and sat on her bike until we got home.
“I didn’t know she was this bad,” Mother said to me. “I didn’t know she was this bad.”
■■■
She rarely went outside. Mostly, she read and listened to raw, hard rock albums in her room. Once, when I was cleaning up he. room, I found a piece of paper on the floor that she’d scrawled a note on. Evidently, it held significance for her:
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. – e.e. cummings.
She was still fighting, just like the day I saw her in her isolette in the hospital nursery, screaming and kicking at some unseen enemy. I wished I could help her, but I didn’t know how.
The shark nightmares were becoming a regular occurrence now. I sat with her practically every night when she woke up screaming. Then they began to spill over into the daylight. She began to see sharks all over the house, even when she was wide-awake.
Once I found her in the den, trying to crawl under the couch.
“They wanna eat me!” she screamed. “They wanna eat me!”
I sat her down on the couch and tried to calm her. She began to bang her head against the wall and pull her hair out. She was wild-eyed. I pinned her arms down and spoke to her. After a few minutes she came out of her hallucination. She looked at me gravely.
“Mommy,” she said, “I want to die. Let me die. Please.”
“I love you, Nancy,” I said. “I don’t want you to die.”
“If you loved me you’d let me.”
I hugged her helplessly. She pushed me away.
“I wish I’d never been born,” she said.
A few minutes later I found her going through my medicine chest, collecting what was left of some old prescriptions for muscle relaxants, cold pills, painkillers.
“Nancy, what are you doing?” I cried. “Give me those.”
She gave them up without a struggle. She’d collected about eight or nine pills.
“You don’t love me,” she said woodenly. She walked away. I threw out all of the pills in the house.
She spoke to her psychiatrist that week about the sharks. “They want to kill me,” she explained to him, simply.
He asked her why. She had no explanation.
But verbalizing the hallucination to her psychiatrist did seem to have an effect. The shark attacks seemed to diminish over the next few days—only to be replaced by something far worse.
■■■
It was a Sunday afternoon. Suzy and David were playing in the living room. Nancy and I were watching TV in the den. Frank had gone out on an errand.
“This is a dumb movie,” Nancy said abruptly. “Let’s go to the Franklin Institute.”
“It’s too late,” I pointed out. “The science museum closes in half an hour.”
“I want to go,” she repeated.
“No,” I repeated.
At that moment I looked down at the coffee table. David had been trying to fix something and had left a hammer there. Nancy saw me looking at it, grabbed it before I could stop her. She hefted it in her hand and smirked. “Take me or I’ll kill you.”
“Give me the hammer, Nancy,” I said sternly, trying hard not to let her know that I was afraid, for the first time, that she might actually hurt me.
“Take me or I’ll kill you,” she said.
“You won’t.”
“I will!”
“You won’t.”
She struck me hard on the shoulder with the hammer. It gave me a jolt down to my fingertips. Then she did it again.
“Stop that! Give me that hammer!”
She struck me on the arm. I fought the pain and went for her. I tried to wrench the hammer away from her, but I couldn’t get it out of her grasp.
She may have been five inches shorter than I was, but she outweighed me by ten pounds and was filled with animal fury. We began to wrestle. She struck me repeatedly on the shoulders and arms. I couldn’t overpower her. It took both my hands to grab hold of the arm that was striking me with the hammer, and when I did grab it she began to punch me in the chest with the other fist. I wouldn’t let go. I didn’t know if she was capable of killing me or not, but I didn’t want to find out. She was in a blind rage. She didn’t see me.
Far away, I could hear the sound of Suzy and David playing and giggling innocently. I thought about calling them for help, but they were smaller than I was-they could be seriously hurt. I didn’t call.
I held her off for an hour or longer. She just wouldn’t quit. I was reaching the point of exhaustion. My battered arms were losing their strength. But I had to hold out just a little longer, until Frank got home. I just had to hold on, hold on.
At last I heard Frank’s car pull up. His car door closed. The front door opened.
“I’m home!” he yelled cheerfully.
“Frank!” I screamed.
He rushed in, wrestled the hammer away from her, and threw it into the hall. She began to punch and claw and kick at him, totally out of control.
He overpowered her, put her down on the floor in a wrestling hold, face down. He put his knee in her back to contain her. She continued to whip around and curse and snarl.
Suzy and David watched from the doorway, cowering in fear. I just lay there on the floor, panting.
“Are you okay?” Frank asked me, straining to hold her down.
“Uh-huh,” I gasped. “Just in …. just in time.”
“Can you phone?”
I nodded, crawled over to the telephone, and dialed the psychiatrist at home. I hoarsely related what happened. He could barely hear me over Nancy’s screams.
“Lock her in a room,” he advised. “Lock her somewhere where she can’t hurt herself and let her get all of that anger out.”
“None of the bedrooms lock from the outside,” I said.
“Oh… how about a punching bag? You got a punching bag?”
“A what?”
“Something she can punch.”
“Just me.”
“How about the basement? Can she hurt herself down there?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Put her down there. Call me when she quiets down.”
Frank pulled Nancy kicking and screaming to her feet and into the kitchen. He took her halfway down the basement steps, released her, ran up the steps, and locked the door. We stood in the kitchen, watching the door and waiting. She ran up the steps and began to pound on it with her fists.
“Let me out, you motherfuckers!” she screamed through the locked door. “Don’t do this to me! Don’t do this to me, you bastards! You motherfucking bastards!”
She kept pounding and kicking at the door. She began to slam at it with her shoulder. The frame strained against her weight and I was afraid it might give way.
She gave up on the door. She ran screaming down the steps and began to throw open the storage cupboards down there. She pulled out cartons and suitcases and the lawn furniture and hurled all of it to the floor. She destroyed the furniture, broke lamps, broke the luggage, ripped our winter coats into shreds, ripped the boxes up. She destroyed the entire basement.
The rampage went on for two hours, interrupted only by an occasional run up the steps to throw herself against the door.
Then it was quiet.
We unlocked the door and tiptoed warily down the steps. Nancy was sprawled across the rubble of our belongings, spent. She was gasping for breath, her body quivering. Frank carried her to her room and put her to bed.
I called the psychiatrist. “We have to do something.” I cried. “We can’t live like this.”
“Calm down,” he said. “I know that. I’ve been on the phone trying to find a hospital for her. But she’s too young-none of the psychiatric hospitals take children, not even the one I’m on staff at.”
“So what do we do?”
“I’ll keep working on them. In the meantime our only alternative is to put her on heavy medication to keep her calm.”
I drove to the drugstore, the bruises on my arms beginning to throb. I picked up a prescription for Thorazine, a very powerful tranquilizer. Then I came home and collapsed.
The Thorazine did the job, if you call turning Nancy into a vegetable doing the job. The drug put her in a perpetual zombie state, neither awake nor asleep.
During the day she just sat on the den couch and stared at the TV, absorbing none of it. Occasionally her head would droop over to the side and she would be asleep.
■■■
At night she wandered around the house in a stupor. I slept with one eye open. I could see her doorway from my side of the bed. When she was up, I was up. One night she went in the kitchen. I heard the kitchen drawers being opened and shut. I followed her in there. She was calmly gathering up all of the knives.
“Where are you going with those, Nancy?”
“To stab them,” she replied dreamily.
“Stab who?”
“Them. The brother and the sister.”
I took the knives away from her—she was so stoned that she was really quite docile. I suggested she go back to bed. She obeyed.
From that night on I ordered Suzy and David to sleep with their bedroom doors locked from the inside.
Another night I found her in the den, slowly collecting things and piling them onto one another in the middle of the den floor—a few encyclopedia volumes, a lampshade, some paintings off the wall. She hummed while she worked, eerily humming in a singsong manner those exact same melodies she’d sung the night of her Atarax attack, songs like “Happy Birthday” and
“We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
“What are you doing, Nancy?”
“They don’t like me,” she explained softly.
“Let’s put them back. Then maybe they’ll like you.”
“Gee, you think so, Mommy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay.” She began to put everything back.
“And then we’ll go back to bed.”
“Okay,” she said meekly.
This was a stranger. This wasn’t Nancy.
Whenever she came out of her stupor and became herself again, she immediately began to pull her hair out, bang her head, and scream, “Help me! Help me! Put me somewhere! Help me!” After fifteen minutes of this she would fall asleep.
Our family had died that night, too.
■■■
The next day there were visiting hours at the mental hospital. Frank and I went to see Nancy. We were issued passes at the front desk and took them to the adolescent ward. The nurse there checked our passes, led us down the hall to a different door—the one that led to the locked women’s ward. She began to unlock the outer door with a key attached to her belt.
“Wait,” I said. “There must be a mistake. Our daughter is in the adolescent ward.”
“Your daughter is in here,” she replied calmly.
“No she’s not,” I insisted.
“Please follow me,” she said.
She took us through one locked door, then another and another until we arrived in a large, central room with several doorways that led off to the lockup rooms. The room was dark and dingy and there were benches running along the walls. One woman was sitting on a bench, staring straight ahead. Several sat there shouting to themselves. One woman was standing and urinating on the floor. Another lay face down on the tile floor, mumbling. It was like something out of the Middle Ages.
In the midst of all this stood our eleven-year-old child.
She ran to me and hugged me hard. She was shaking. “Mommy, get me out of here,” she begged. “I’m not like them … I swear I’m not. Take me away. I’ll go to the psychiatrist. I’go to school. I’ll be good. I’ll do whatever you want. Just get me out of here. Mommy. Oh, please.” I held her tightly to me, as if to prott her from the madness around her. I believed her. I wanted to believe her.
“We’re getting her out of here,” I said to Frank.
He agreed, his face registering the horror of the ward.
We left, promising Nancy we’d get her out of that awful place at once.
We didn’t tell her we had no idea what she was doing in there in the first place.
I found a pay phone in the hospital lobby and called her psychiatrist. I demanded to know what she was doing in the locked women’s ward.
“The hospital people called me,” he said. “They said they didn’t think the adolescent ward would be safe for her. They’ve got sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds in there with criminal behavior-drugs, rape. They weren’t sure she’d be safe. They were worried about homosexuality. I told them to go ahead.”
“Don’t you know what it’s like in there?” I protested.
“I do. But you have to keep in mind, Mrs. Spungen, Nancy’s in a mental hospital, not the Holiday Inn.”
“But don’t you think you should have discussed this with us before going ahead?”
“It was for her own safety,” he repeated.
“We want her discharged immediately.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“It takes at least two days to process the papers. Besides, what are you going to do with her when she’s discharged?”
“I don’t know. That’s not important. The important thing is to get her out of this place.”
He sighed. “You’ll have to keep her on the Thorazine.”
“Fine.”
“Very well, Mrs. Spungen. I’ll arrange to have her discharged.” He was right—it did take time to process the discharge papers. Nancy was stuck there for the entire weekend. We picked her up on Monday morning. She hugged me again and held my arm tightly until we were out of there. She breathed the fresh air deeply and gratefully. We got in the car and Frank started the engine. Nancy started to giggle.
“What’s so funny, Nancy?” I smiled, happy to see her laughing.
“I’m not gonna do any of those things I promised.” She giggled. “I only said them so you’d get me out of there. Tricked ya. Ha ha ha.”
She laughed all the way home.
I was back on twenty-four-hour duty.
■■■
The drive to Barton was a silent one, each of us lost in our thoughts. I knew we were doing the right thing, but I wondered. I wondered who would get up in the middle of the night to sit with her when she had her nightmares. I wondered who would hold her. I wondered who would love her. She was only eleven years old. My heart ached at having to separate from her. It is so impossibly hard to finally admit to yourself that your child must leave you. You’re admitting that no matter how much love you’ve given her, it hasn’t been enough. It won’t be enough. It means you’re not enough to make your child happy and well.
But this was the only alternative. And part of me was still optimistic.
■■■
She shrugged, popped a pickle into her mouth. “He’s still an asshole.” She simply didn’t care about Frank’s problems, didn’t care about anyone but herself. I wished she hadn’t come home. As soon as she walked in, the house revolved around her. She ruled us. She also created an immediate rift between Frank and me. I deeply resented it.
He resented it, too. His reponse had been to blow up at her. On the one hand, I was glad he had. I wanted to myself, but I couldn’t. Why? Because I was afraid that once I started, once I let the lid off, I’d not be able to stop.
I’d shake that meanness out of her; I’d slam her against the wall; I’d beat at her with my fists. I couldn’t let that lid off, not only because I was afraid of myself but for myself. She had attacked me once with a hammer. Who knew what she was capable of doing if provoked?
■■■
She also found an interest in photography. She joined the school photography club and learned how to work a 35 millimeter camera and develop pictures in the school darkroom. I still have some of Nancy’s black and white photographs. They are all very dark and brooding, interesting in a grotesque way. Perhaps they show what was going on inside her mind better than her words did at the time. One picture, for instance, is of a log smoldering in the middle of a barren field. Another is of an old bathroom sink that someone had abandoned in a cornfield. I think Nancy had a gift for photography. She might have gotten pretty good at it, if someone hadn’t stolen the school’s cameras and darkroom equipment.
■■■
Looking back, I believe it was Nancy’s own way of trying to make Frank and me love her more. By turning Suzy on, she was hoping she’d tarnish Suzy so we’d love Suzy less and give that love to her. There was never enough love to satisfy her.
I didn’t see it that way then, though. All I saw was a child who was making it so impossibly painful for me to love her.
■■■
Two weeks later Nancy tried to kill herself again. This time she almost succeeded.
She had gone up to her room to listen to records. One of the girls found her in there, sitting on the edge of the bed bleeding all over the floor. A razor blade was in her left hand. She’d slashed her right forearm this time.
She was just sitting there, staring at the blood.
They rushed her to the hospital in serious condition. The surgeon who treated her reported that she was about five minutes away from bleeding to death. The wound required twenty-one stitches-fifteen on the outside of her arm, six on the inside.
Brooke relayed the story to me over the phone, obviously shaken.
Nancy was not playing games anymore.
For the first time it hit me – the sickening realization that Nancy was going to die before I was. I’d battled so hard for her life. Now she was against me in that fight. She wanted death. She was reaching out to it and I could do nothing to stop her.
She was not a little girl anymore, a baby I could hold in my arms, protect. She was fifteen years old. She was making a choice. She was choosing death.
I felt empty inside. There was nothing in me.
I was not going to live to sit around the fire with my Nancy and her husband and their babies. The natural order of the generations was not going to apply to this child. She had a terminal disease. She was going to die. I was going to see her die. I was going to bury her.
She wanted to die. She would die.
I was overwhelmed by dread and horror. Little did I know that within three years I would be praying for her to succeed.
■■■
hexafu 