A book should be a silent dialogue; the reader, I hope, is ready to burst out in exclamation (if he has not already done so): ‘But all psychiatrists aren’t like this!’
I know it. I have told this story in such detail because many are, and of these many are good ones. But such was our good fortune that before the next eight months were past we had found out that they need not be. When, in its place, I record our next experience with psychiatry, it will be in a very different tone. Elly’s next examination was in England, at the world-famous Hampstead Clinic. The Institute had suggested it as soon as they had learned we were going abroad. They had said they would send us the address, though they hadn’t done it. When we saw Dr Blank again we mentioned their suggestion. His face lighted. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Take her there. As a rule, as you know, I don’t have high expectations of psychotherapy. But Anna Freud is different. I’ll write her for you. Anna Freud — whatever language you speak, she will speak it too.’
10. To Retrieve the Past
Elly’s fourth birthday was as uneventful as all the rest, except that it took place in a household marshalling itself for a major removal. Two days later we were to fly to England.
For weeks trunks and suitcases had been accumulating in the hall. Elly played unconcernedly around them. Most of our conversation dealt with England and what we would find there. Elly did not hear it. Her father had been gone a month. Elly did not notice his absence. We made no special effort to prepare her for the trip. I knew no way to do it, no words to do it in. Nor did it seem necessary. I had some minor misgivings about the effect of the move, but no more, really, than today’s mother, well schooled in up-to-date anxieties, has about the effect of a new house on any young child. Elly showed no unusual attachment to places, and she had been away before. We had never tried to shelter her or hide her. She had always come with us when we visited; we had stayed with her overnight, a week, ten days, in many different houses. No new surroundings had ever upset her. Why should they? Her strange imperviousness protected her. Only a very few aspects of the environment seemed important to Elly, after all. It was not hard to keep them constant. A few special foods, a few routines that could not bear changing — and everywhere she went, we made sure there was a crib, to become her new citadel. Recently, in one of her frequent shifts, in which overnight a new routine would become a settled habit, she had taken to wanting a spread draped over her bed. Enclosed on all four sides and above, it made a fine redoubt. Ordinarily I would have tried to limit or modify such a tangible symbol of withdrawal, but now I fostered it. It would be handy for the coming move, for converting the unfamiliar atmosphere of a new house and country into the unchanging ambience of Elly’s inner world.
The logistics of the trip were minutely worked out. Every stage was planned to minimize disruption, hesitation, delay — the normal hazards of travel. It had become second nature to think ahead, so that movement could be sure and firm, environment smooth and orderly. The reason that my husband had gone before us was to find and make ready a house for seven — the six of us and Jill, the young girl who was to help out; a house which, whatever chaos it might otherwise present, must provide in good order a separate room and a crib for Elly.
Kind friends drove us one hundred and eighty miles to meet the transatlantic plane. We flew alone; the girl was not expected for another month. The trip went well. Elly let no unfamiliar substance pass her lips, but it was possible this once to give her a pill, artfully concealed in a Hershey kiss, and under her spread, dramamined and doped, she accepted the unfamiliar bedding down beside me in the plane seat. The three older children rose to the occasion, cheerfully enjoyed their dinners, brought me what I needed so I never had to leave Elly’s side. No plans miscarried; no emergencies arose. David was at London Airport to meet us and decanted us into a rented car. Ten hours after we left Boston we arrived in the new English house, where Elly, exhausted like the rest of us from the strange night which had lasted only five hours as we flew against the earth’s rotation, settled serenely into the old white iron hospital crib that David had picked up secondhand. The slot was still there at the foot to hold the fever chart — for Elly, whose illness was so deep and who never had a fever.
The pink spread worked its magic. Nothing had changed. Elly settled in the new crib and began to rock, back and forth, back and forth. At home she had moved her crib all round the room with her rocking; finally we had nailed strips of wood on the floor and boxed it in. It made more noise here, very much more. The floor shook with the impact of the iron. Soon, however, Elly was asleep and the crashing stopped.
Things went well for the next week. There was the usual chaos of unpacking and settling in, and the beginning of a long apprenticeship in a difficult and unrewarding art — shopping in England. There was no one, as yet, to leave Elly with, so she came with me as she had at home. The new sights and sounds brought no visible reaction. She seemed undisturbed.
There were minor difficulties. The Danish Salami looked Italian but didn’t taste it, and Elly refused it. There were no hot dogs. She would not drink the delicious English apple juice. The foods Elly would taste were as rigidly self-limited as all the other elements of her world and the elimination of any of them was immediately felt. She had drunk no milk for months; with apple juice gone, she was down to water. But she had turned against foods before and it had passed. Lean, pale, she was tough and resistant, ineluctably healthy. Elly was adjusting to England at least as well as we were. We felt we had come off very well.
Then one day she was healthy no longer. Suddenly, without warning, she whimpered, vomited, relaxed, and in ten minutes vomited again. No one is surprised, though, when a small child throws up, especially after a change of food and water. I patted her, sat by her crib, and waited. Not long; almost at once she was gagging and coughing, her empty stomach convulsed, trying to bring up what was by now only saliva and a little bile. It passed and she lay down exhausted.
This went on for five days. Elly ate nothing and drank nothing. At first she played a little between attacks, but soon she was too weak for that. She had no reserves of fat. Her flesh melted before our eyes. Her new lightness as I lifted her took my breath away. Under her pale skin her ribs and joints showed like those of the children on famine posters. Oddly enough, she did not take refuge in her crib. It was, perhaps, her rigid sense of propriety that told her that she could not spend the day in a place reserved for sleep. Instead, like the old Prince Bolkonski, gathering her weakness for the effort, she would drag herself from one room to another, there to collapse on a bed or rug, passive until the fit seized her and she threw up again.