A year ago at a dinner party a colleague brought up the idea that, inasmuch as the hard pesticides are in the fatty tissues of all of us to a degree which would render us inedible were we a cannibal nation, a certain amount might well get past the blood-brain barrier, enough to be revealed by quantitative and qualitative analysis of macerated brain tissue. He said that it is, after all, a nerve poison. He suggested that those of us who have achieved an emotional stability and a stable identity might be immune to the nerve-poison effects on our thought processes or might be influenced only to the point of having repressible urges to indulge in freakish, senseless behavior. The young, however, still involved in identity searches, in search of understandable and relevant ethics, might be far more susceptible to the influence of such poison. Then, of course, they would have the very human need to find a justification for their erratic, violent, meaningless acts, and would cast about and decide that their chemical-induced idiocies and self-destructive tendencies were in reality merely rebellion against the Establishment.
At the time I thought it an amusing mental game. But lately I am beginning to wonder if it might be useful to our society were a foundation grant given to explore that possibility, if only to eliminate it as a possible cause of those actions which of late are becoming even more incomprehensible to the participants themselves.
At any rate, the administration at Coulter was reluctant to send for the parents. Administrations are caught in a curious trap these days. The student body demands permissiveness because they claim a basic human right to do what they wish to do with themselves. The school takes the money of the parents and has an implied obligation to protect student victims not only from student predators but from the predators outside the borders of the campus. Just a few years ago there would have been a great hue and cry had the Ames girl been missing from her dormitory overnight. But ten days had passed without any alarm being sounded, any search instituted. When you give children the rights, freedoms, and responsibilities of adults, a higher attrition rate is the inevitable result. One need only imagine the analogy of a kindergarten group demanding the right to cross the busy highway at any time and in any manner and at any place they might desire.
The human race does not suddenly become brighter or more aware or more mature in one generation any more than would a single generation of horses, crickets, or penguins make some vast evolutionary step without warning.
These children are more glib because they have grown up in an audiovisual world. They are more articulate, because this has been encouraged in all their waking hours. A glibness, an expanded vocabulary, a knowledge through electronic transmission of what Cairo and New Delhi look like, is merely an expansion of an ability to communicate. The basics of what to communicate remains unchanged. Amplification and diversity of input can mean amplification and diversity of output. But the processing of the data is not improved. Maturation is not enhanced. The effect can be a spurious simulation of higher intelligence or earlier maturity, which then imposes the responsibilities of the fraudulent condition upon the individual. And more of them break, as did the Ames girl.
One might even argue that instant and massive communications plus an increasing compulsion to herd together might well reduce both intelligence and maturity.
I ordered and supervised tube-feeding of the patient, gave her massive vitamin injections, and dictated a note to go with her, on her departure, for the information of her doctors.
In such cases one cannot make any prognosis without a great deal more knowledge than I possessed two years and more ago. I can express a personal and unprofessional conviction, however, that no young person comes out of such episodes unmarked. They can learn to survive in the world on the basis of a series of accommodations, provided they are brought back from the dangerous area of withdrawal.
But, like soldiers home from the wars after surviving wounds that used to always be fatal, they cannot exist again on the same plane and in the same context as the rest of us.
As I am not qualified in the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology, it would be presumptuous of me to pass any opinion on the treatment she was given, on the way she was handled. I would only say this, that it is not at all surprising to me that it all ended so sadly and tragically.
My name is Amelia Ames. Mrs. Jonathan Ames. Norrie is my middle child, my only daughter. We have always lived near Paoli, my husband’s people and mine. There have been people named Norris and people named Ames in this area for two hundred years.
When the people at Coulter phoned us and told us over two years ago that Norrie was not well, that she seemed to be in a state of nervous exhaustion, I found it most irritating that I could not speak to her on the telephone. We were having perfectly horrible March weather, and both Jonathan and myself had engagements we could not easily break. It did not seem feasible to either fly to Boston or drive up.
So I phoned Corrine Hallowill in Cambridge and asked her if it would be too much trouble for her to go over to Coulter and give me some sort of report on Norrie. She was glad to do it. We were roommates at Smith, and though we do not see each other as often as we would like, we exchange letters often.
Corrine phoned me back at cocktail time, just as we were dressing to go to the club. She was hesitant at first and then she finally told me that Norrie was actually in frightful shape. But I had to press her for several minutes before she finally said it seemed to be some kind of complete mental breakdown. Why couldn’t those people at the school have told me that in the first place?
Once I learned some of the ugly details, I could understand why they were concerned only with having my daughter taken off their hands. Certainly they were quite conscious of their culpability in the whole affair. They could have kept far better track of my daughter. Apparently her erratic behavior began when she went back there after her Christmas vacation at home.
We did not notice anything out of the ordinary about Norrie during the Christmas holidays. She seemed happy. And quite healthy. I might say that we did not pay as much attention to the children that Christmas as we had in prior years. Jonathan and I were under severe emotional strain. We were trying to pretend to our friends and our relatives and our children that everything was well between us. But Jonathan had managed to get himself seriously involved with that wretched Warrington woman. Tom Warrington died suddenly of heart disease that summer, and Phyllis had prevailed upon Jonathan to advise her regarding the readjustment of the portfolio of securities Tom had left her in the marital trust. I suspect that there were more meetings than necessary. In the beginning she perhaps invented excuses for asking him to call and explain things to her. And later I imagine he came up with his share of imaginary necessities.
We had both always liked Tom but thought Phyllis a bit of an ass, quite attractive in a brassy fashion, a horsewoman of great ability, and a spendid sailor and tennis player. But inclined to have the one drink too many, to be too loud in public places, and to use the usual four-syllable words too often.