"The Lady Vanishes and My Absent Mother"
by
Sharon Dolin
You'll excuse me if l run away?—Miss Froy in The
Lady Vanishes
Sometimes I find it easier to remember
things by not thinking about them directly. I call this method peripheral memory. The way I can see a
star in the sky better by letting my gaze veer to the side of it, I can recall
a name only when I turn my mind to something else.
I find myself drawn to Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Lady Vanishes (1938) because of what it might trigger in my
peripheral memory about absence, which I lived with my entire childhood, when
my mother would periodically disappear from my life. When I attempt to remember
these scenes too directly, they stay hidden in the cloudy night sky of
childhood memories. So I drift my gaze over to Hitchcock intermittently in
order to allow certain early childhood scenes to come into focus.
*
The enigmatic Miss Froy: Who is she?
She writes her name with her finger on the steamy club car window and shortly
afterwards she vanishes. In The Lady Vanishes, Iris Henderson
(Margaret Lockwood), the pretty young brunette, becomes frantic when she
realizes that Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), has disappeared. Everyone in her
compartment denies having seen her. As Iris goes running through the cars
searching for Miss Froy, she bumps into Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), the young
folk musicologist she had scuffled with the night before in the inn. Now
smitten with Iris, he still does not believe there is a missing Miss Froy, since all the other passengers are in on
the cover-up and insist Miss Froy never existed.
Iris had begun to
doubt her own sanity until she sees
the trace of the letters FROY that Miss Froy had written with her finger on the
steamy glass of the club car window. That peculiar name. But as luck would have
it, the writing disappears when the train enters the tunnel—before she can show
it to Gilbert. Another lady—her name this time—who
vanishes!
*
A summer day in Brooklyn in the
late-1940s. A young woman in her twenties boldly leans back against the
boardwalk railing, flaunting her body in a provocative two-piece outfit:
high-waisted flowered shorts that reveal most of her upper thigh and a
matching, flowered cap-sleeved top that shows off her midriff and ties between
her voluptuous breasts. Her light-brown hair, parted on the right above her
high forehead, is gathered in a rush of waves to the side, highlighting her
prominent Polish cheekbones. She has planted her sandaled right foot on the ground,
bent the other leg back at the knee to rest on the bottom crossbar of the
railing. Joyfully at ease and squinting up into the bright sun of Manhattan
Beach, a few blocks from where she grew up on Dover Street, Selma gives Irving
a full, toothy smile as he snaps the picture.
Selma snaps the companion photograph of
Irving wearing a navy cap, in a pair of loose-fitting khaki shorts that
highlight his slender thighs. He is bare-chested with a slim torso he enjoys
showing off. Like her, he stands posed, back to the railing, one foot resting
on the lower bar as he squints into the sun, grinning at her.
Wintertime. Selma beams with Irving,
self-possessed, on the front lawn of her parents’ home on Dover Street in
Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. She wears an ankle-length lambs-wool coat, strap-on
heels with a peephole at the toe, a sheer scarf thrown over the back of her
hat, tied gracefully under the chin. Irving has a winter coat on over a suit
and tie and he wears a hat whose large brim shades his face from the sun. He is
smiling broadly as he grips her around the waist with his right arm.
Early Spring, 1949. Now they are on
their honeymoon, skiing in the Laurentian Mountains in Canada. Wearing a ski
sweater, Selma chuckles as she makes a show of rubbing snow into Irving’s
bare chest as he leans in toward her, both of them hamming it up for the
camera. Selma, so at ease in touching her new husband, and equally at ease in
being touched by him.
I study these
photographs as though they are movie stills because that is what remains of my
mother’s past before I was born. Looking at these snapshots reminds me that my
mother was not always as I knew her. By the time I came into the world and
throughout my childhood in the 1960s and early Seventies, she was a woman who
frequently disappeared, who stopped being Mommy every time she had to enter the
psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital. The label she wore for life was paranoid
schizophrenic.
She would receive electroshock treatments and high doses of
anti-psychotics before she came back home to be Mommy.
She is my lady
who vanished.
My First-Grade Portrait
I must be around seven years old the
one time my father takes me and my sister to visit my mother in Kings County
Hospital’s psychiatric unit, where she often remained for
three or four weeks. My father leads us into a large visiting room with
grey-green walls. I quickly glance around to see other seated families visiting
patients. Oh. So I am not the only one with a mommy they have to take away. He
takes us over to a seated woman who looks like Mommy the way a wax figure
resembles a live figure, and I sit down opposite her.
Her thin, light-brown hair looks a
little greasy and is brushed and parted to the side. She is wearing her
hot-pink lipstick and her small blue eyes fix me with a maniacal, moist stare
before she comes to life, this usually quiet, slow-moving woman, the words
tumbling out of her faster than I have ever heard her speak. “Sharon
honey I missed yuh so much, ya know what they did to me tuhday, they stuck
something in my tushy so I could go to the bathroom and yestuhday they put
electric wires in my head and oh it was terrrrible. You can’t
bulieve what goes on here.”
I sit there frozen, not knowing what to
do or say. Mommy still sounds like my mommy, but speeded up, like a 45-record
played at 78.
She leans in towards me, fishing
something out of the pocket of the apron she wears over a green hospital gown.
She holds out her right hand, which curves in, as though her fingers have tight
webbing between them and are stuck together. “Here, Sharon, I made something
for yuh. I wan’cha to have it.”
She puts something in my hand. Cool to
the touch, the size of a Benjamin Franklin half-dollar but much thinner. I am
too frightened to speak, so I look down. A circular copper pendant with a muddy
enamel swirl of greens and pinks fired into it sits in my palm.
“I made it special for you. Yuh
know, I wanna get outta here and go home with you.” “All right. That’s
enough, Sel.” My dad steps between us. “We
all came to visit you. How ya doin’? Say hello to Marla.”
He prods my big sister in the back to get her to move forward. “How’s
the food? What’re they feeding ya here?”
I get up from the chair and step back,
and spend the rest of the time a bit dazed, half-listening and looking at her,
as I finger the gift she has just given me. Is this now my mommy? I feel
dizzy and nauseous as I turn the pendant over in my hand. Why is she making
this kid stuff?
Soon my dad tells us it is time to
leave. On the car ride back home, no one says a thing, as the radio wails: “Don’t
let the sun catch you cryin’ . . .”
He never takes us back to visit her in
the hospital.
*
For close to fifty
years, I have held on to this fired copper medallion, never able to wear it,
never able to throw it away. As an artifact from that time, it tells me that at
least once, I saw my mother at her most helpless and childlike and I
understood, however vaguely, that I could never go back to being the child
again. Like the end of “Toyland,”
a song my mother liked to play on the piano: Once you pass its borders you can never return again.
I vaguely understood
that things with electricity were done to her there. Though no one told me, I
knew I had to hide from my friends what had happened to my mother and where she
was. That there was shame in it. When the Rolling Stones came on AM radio, It’s just your 19th nervous
breakdown, I belted it out along with my friends.
My friends lived in
single-family homes their parents owned in Mill Basin and Bergen
Beach—middle-class neighborhoods a bus ride away from my working-class one that
had no particular name other than being near Canarsie. My parents rented the
downstairs apartment of a modest two-family brick home, where my sister and I
shared a cramped bedroom. Each night one of us pulled out a high-riser bed and
tucked it away each morning.
*
The Lady Vanishes. Why do I feel compelled to re-watch it? Each
time I am doing my own dreamwork of a woman in search of her mother,
identifying with Iris and casting off my childhood role of being in on the
cover-up.
At the outset of the
train journey, Iris briefly loses consciousness because of an accidental blow
to the head before boarding the train. When she awakens, she finds Miss Froy
sitting opposite her in the train compartment, who soothes her, offering her a
handkerchief daubed with eau de cologne to put to her forehead. Miss Froy
steadies Iris, who is still quite woozy, and leads her by the arm to the club
car for a cup of Miss Froy’s special tea. When they return
to their compartment, Miss Froy urges Iris to rest, and the concussed, dizzy
Iris dozes off.
When Iris awakens,
she finds Miss Froy has vanished, and she becomes frantic. No one says they
have seen her—neither the sinister-looking woman in a black headdress by the
window, nor the magician. In the club car, the steward is adamant that she took
her tea alone. Iris must find Miss Froy. Miss Froy acted like a mother
to her before she disappeared. Now Iris is determined to act like her daughter.
*
Didn’t I spend my
entire childhood covering up my mother’s condition? And haven’t I spent my
adulthood searching for my mother? Who was she? Where was the lively, playful,
glamorous woman I saw in the photographs from before I was born? Who, before
she met my father, poses in several shots with different boyfriends. Who hams
it up in a bathing suit with her girlfriends. Who sits in the center of a
circle of teens, laughing into the camera.
Selma, the
nineteen-year-old, stands in Washington Square Park, a young coed at New York
University before she had to drop out when she had her first schizophrenic
episode. The young married woman who, in 1951, kept a diary and made lists of
the books she wanted to read, including Finnegan’s
Wake, who also wrote essays such as “The Value of Socialized Medicine to the
American Public.” The woman, I discover, who wrote poems in English and in
Spanish under a pseudonym before I was born. Who sent a poem called “Patience”
to Redbook Magazine and received a typed, one-page rejection letter. Where had
she gone?
8 years old
*
My mother’s breakdowns happened until I
was around ten years old. My dad must have worried that my mother might have a
breakdown while he was away on one of his month-long sales trips. At the advice
of a psychiatrist, my mother took pills daily and her breakdowns ceased.
From then on, I lived with a mother who
was no longer hospitalized. She became a zombie. She slept until 11:30 each
morning. She would buy some groceries and do a bit of dusting. Sometimes she
would pick me up from school in the car, bringing me a hot cocoa. When we got
home, she would lay down in bed in the late afternoon, with The New York
Post before resting, her right arm bent at the elbow to cover her face.
This was a different kind of vanishing
act.
Through my teen
years, I sought to hide who my mother was just as she had become hidden from
me. She moved slowly through the house like a sleepwalker. She gained a lot of
weight, though she continued to wear her bright pink lipstick. When she
undressed in her bedroom after dinner, I watched her deflated breasts slump out
of her brassiere before she slipped into one of her pastel, cotton nightgowns
and into bed once more to watch TV with my dad.
Now my mother moved in slow motion, as
though she were walking through water. In her drugged haze she spoke little,
and held her hands stiffly at her side with her thumbs lying like spatulate
spoons, limp and useless, in the palms of her hands. Her hands always unnerved
me, reminding me she was not normal. I was afraid it must be obvious.
My mother took Thorazine
(Chlorpromazine) for years. Now I discover that Thorazine was (and still is)
routinely given to schizophrenics starting in 1954. French researchers
discovered the drug and thought it would be a good sedative for surgery. It was commonly referred to as a chemical lobotomy because the doctors
were pleased to find it controlled and sedated patients, producing detachment, relaxation, and indifference,
according to clinical trials.
Chlorpromazine
(Thorazine) is still the first drug mentioned in
a list of Antipsychotic Medications on the National Institute of Mental Health’s online booklet Schizophrenia.
My mother
also took Stelazine (trifluoperazine hydrochloride), another strong
anti-psychotic, at the same time. The list of side effects characterize my
mother perfectly: She was sedated, drowsy, lethargic, emotionally dull, and
didn’t have
much to say because she probably had difficulty thinking, due to the
medications.
*
I return to Selma in her photo album
from before I was born: The woman in a white turtleneck who rode a bicycle. The
one who went fishing with Irving on the Dorothy B. from Sheepshead Bay. The
woman who occasionally wore her hair up in a turban like a Hollywood starlet.
The one who played show tunes like “Some Enchanted Evening”
on the piano. A lively, curvaceous woman with a broad smile who had several
boyfriends propose to her, she once told me.
This Selma had vanished. I would never
catch a glimpse of her again.
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