Rough Magic Page 16

  7

  In the theatre, Aurelia could hardly watch the coronation’s slow, plotless ceremony unfold on the screen. An indefinable dread filled her so completely that she began to perspire. She forced herself to stay until the movie ended, then asked her friend to drive her straight home. As soon as Aurelia entered the house and discovered Sylvia’s note on the table, she was certain that something bad had happened. Once she related recent events to her parents, who had been vacationing on the Cape and did not know how sick Sylvia was, they, like Aurelia, feared she had not gone on a walk at all. Telephoning Sylvia’s friends, Laurie Totten among them, Aurelia learned that none had seen her. By five o’clock, Aurelia imagined the worst. She contacted the police, who, on hearing about Sylvia’s medical history, placed a missing-person bulletin on the radio. In the radio spot, Sylvia was described as five feet nine inches tall, brown-haired, brown-eyed, and 140 pounds. When last seen, the police said, she wore a light-blue skirt and a white sleeveless blouse.

  At twilight, Sylvia had not come back. The police had searched 26 Elmwood Road from attic to cellar without discovering any clues. Hoping that they might locate her at one of her favorite haunts in Boston, Aurelia, Warren, and Colonel Rex Gary, a friend of the family who had been affiliated with United States Army Intelligence, drove into Boston and searched predictable areas. They eventually gave up and returned to Wellesley, as rain began to fall. After a sleepless night, the Plaths and the Schobers awoke on Tuesday morning to the sound of the telephone ringing. Friends and neighbors had read stories about Sylvia in the newspapers and wanted to know more. The Boston Globe morning edition printed a front-page story under the headline BEAUTIFUL SMITH GIRL MISSING AT WELLESLEY; the Boston Herald named its story TOP RANKING STUDENT AT SMITH MISSING FROM WELLESLEY HOME. As the telephone continued to ring—soon the newspapers started calling for comments from Aurelia—police officials and volunteers mounted an all-out manhunt, though they were hampered by the night’s rain. Search parties scoured the shores of Morse’s Pond and Lake Waban as well as the woods near Elmwood Road. Post 80, the Explorer Scouts, lead by Bradford Gove, a neighbor of the Plaths, combed the area between Dover Road and the Sudbury River aqueduct. Perhaps due to the rain, the Andover State Police bloodhound, Lieutenant Sid, could not turn up Sylvia’s scent in the area off Worcester Turnpike, where search squads made up of police, neighbors, and members of the American Legion conducted a foot-by-foot examination of the grounds. At its peak, the dragnet included at least one hundred people.

  The afternoon editions of the newspapers updated the story that the Associated Press now sent out over its nationwide wire. The Globe’s evening edition published a front-page article, boy scouts hunt missing smith student, in which Aurelia Plath was quoted. “It sounds peculiar,” Aurelia said, “but [Sylvia] has set standards for herself that are almost unattainable. She’s made almost a minor obsession of fulfilling what she believes to be her responsibility to her sponsors, and I am gravely concerned for her.” By the end of Tuesday, Aurelia’s fear heightened when, searching the house yet again, she discovered that the metal lockbox had been pried open and the sleeping pills were gone. The steady flow of friends through 26 Elmwood Road—William Rice, the Unitarian church minister, and Max Gaebler, a family friend, were two of many—tried to console Aurelia without success. She decided that Sylvia had stolen the sleeping pills, sneaked away from the house, and, finding some appropriate hidden place, overdosed. If she was not found soon, it would be too late. Perhaps it already was.

  On Wednesday, Aurelia’s outlook was not helped by the Globe morning edition, which ran the front-page article DAY-LONG SEARCH FAILS TO LOCATE PLATH GIRL. Illustrated by a photograph of the Plath family— Sylvia, Warren, Aurelia—in hopes that it might prompt Sylvia to “report her whereabouts,” the article contained another quote from Aurelia. “For some time [Sylvia] has been unable to write either fiction, or her more recent love, poetry. Instead of regarding this as just an arid period that every writer faces at times, she believed something had happened to her mind, that it was unable to produce creatively any more. . . . Although her doctor assured us this was simply due to nervous exhaustion, Sylvia was constantly seeking for ways in which to blame herself for the failure, and became increasingly despondent.” That same morning, the Globes front-page SLEEPING PILLS MISSING WITH WELLESLEY GIRL added a new twist to the story for the public. “It doesn’t look good,” Wellesley Police Chief McBey declared in the article.

  Distraught, the Plaths and the Schobers gathered for lunch. Then, because they had to get on with their lives, Grammy went down to the cellar to do laundry. It was while she stood at the washing machine that she heard a low moan from behind the stack of firewood. Immediately, she summoned Warren, who raced down the steps and, at her direction, unpiled the logs. As she and Warren peered into the dark crawl space, they saw Sylvia—wrapped in a blanket, covered with her own dried vomit, dazed but alive. Hurrying upstairs, Warren and Grammy told the news to Aurelia and Grampy. The police were called, and Officer Theodore McGlone, who happened to be in the neighborhood searching for Sylvia in garages, arrived within minutes. After he and Warren pulled Sylvia from under the porch, she was taken by ambulance to the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, the very place she had worked earlier in the summer. While Sylvia received medical treatment, Chief McBey, now at Elmwood Road, recovered from the crawl space an empty water jar and a medicine bottle containing eight sleeping pills. From this evidence, and from Aurelia’s testimony that Sylvia had previously taken only two of the pills, McBey concluded that Sylvia had swallowed forty pills before she had passed out. Which had saved her life: she had consumed so many that she became ill and threw up a significant number of them.

  Back in the hospital emergency room, doctors described Sylvia as being “semicomatose,” her condition “fair.” Externally, her only visible deformity was an open wound on the upper right cheek, which she had apparently inflicted by bashing her face into a slab of concrete in the crawl space when she roused from her drugged state and tried to sit up. Later, doctors placed her in her own room and allowed only four people—Aurelia, Warren, Grammy, and Reverend Rice—to see her. By then the updated story had already hit the newsstands. The Globe evening edition announced: SMITH STUDENT FOUND ALIVE IN CELLAR. FOUND AT HOME, SMITH SENIOR IN ‘FAIR’ CONDITION, read the headline with which the Associated Press began the article that it broadcast over its wire service to newspapers all across the country. More front-page articles appeared on Thursday. The Globe pronounced, wellesley girl found in cellar; the Wellesley Townsman, sylvia plath found in good condition. Also, Aurelia was besieged by telephone calls, letters, and telegrams. No communication was more cherished than the one from Olive Higgins Prouty, who the day before, while vacationing at the Spruce Point Inn in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, had accidentally run across an article about Sylvia’s disappearance in the morning edition of the Boston Herald. Telephoning the Wellesley Police Department, Prouty had discovered that after that story ran Sylvia was located, “HAVE JUST LEARNED SYLVIA HAS BEEN FOUND AND IS RECOVERING AT HOSPITAL,” Prouty wired, “I WANT TO HELP. AM WRITING.”

  Doom of Exiles

  1

  In late August, letters continued to pour in to Aurelia at 26 Elmwood Road. “She demanded. . . far too much of herself. But plenty of people have been through such crises, and come out of them strengthened,” wrote R. G. Davis, adding that he would be willing to do “anything [that] would in any way be helpful” in assisting Sylvia’s rapid return to Smith, from which she was now on medical leave. On the 28th, Elizabeth Drew confessed: “Had I known she was in this veiy serious depression, of course I should have written differently to her before. . . . I did think it was a bit odd that she sent me a special delivery letter about her long paper topic, but students so often get panicky about their subjects . . . that I didn’t think anything of it.” But the most welcome letter came from Olive Higgins Prouty. At that time, Aurelia’s Boston University annual salary was thirty-nine hundre
d dollars, a sum that barely covered her family’s living expenses. The Plaths had a total cash “emergency” savings of only six hundred dollars. Once Aurelia had forwarded her this information, at Prouty’s request, Sylvia’s sponsor responded by offering to pay up to five hundred dollars for Sylvia’s hospitalization at Newton-Wellesley. This was merely a first step, she wanted Aurelia to know. Prouty, who sympathized with Sylvia in part because she herself had had a breakdown twenty-five years ago, would continue to give her full support—both financial and emotional. Already Prouty had requested that her own psychiatrist, Dr. Donald McPherson, consult on the case at her expense. Naturally, Prouty would be available to help as soon as she returned to Brookline, the day after Labor Day. With this letter, Aurelia saw two burdens lift from her shoulders: she would not have to endure the ordeal of Sylvia’s recovery alone, nor would that recovery bankrupt her financially.

  As for Sylvia, after the Newton-Wellesley Hospital’s medical staff had stabilized her condition on the 26th, she was moved to a private room, turned over to Racioppi, and placed under a twenty-four-hour nurse’s watch. Her overriding physical ailment was an acute infection, caused by the open wound on her face, which made her run a fever that doctors held in check with penicillin injections. As soon as possible, Warren or Aurelia (who occasionally slept nearby, at the Cantors’ house) replaced nurses on the twenty-four-hour watch to cut expenses. Looking at her daughter lying in the hospital bed, Aurelia felt a blend of thankfulness and apprehension. Sylvia was alive—and for that Aurelia could not express her gratitude—yet she was also still seriously mentally sick. What, then, should Aurelia’s next move be? A friend offered the use of her Provincetown summer home for an extended convalescence. Finally, Sylvia’s condition was much too threatening to be cured by relaxation, so Aurelia decided to consult experts in the field. McPherson was available, but, at the suggestion of Reverend Rice, Aurelia also contacted Dr. Erich Lindemann, head of Massachusetts General Hospital’s psychiatric wing, who examined Sylvia on September 1. Without question, he believed, Sylvia should be transferred to a psychiatric facility—soon. He would be happy to admit her to Massachusetts General, if Aurelia approved.

  Lindemann had reached this conclusion even though Sylvia showed slight signs of improvement. Her spirits had been lifted in large part by the support of friends like Gordon, who, arriving in Wellesley on August 29, wrote her a long letter, which Aurelia delivered by hand. (Sylvia could still have no guests besides family and Reverend Rice.) Gordon ended his letter, which described an episode of disappointment he had endured at Amherst, by saying: “Talking to you makes living worthwhile. Sharing anything I have with you gives me the greatest pleasure, because I feel I have faith in you, and you speak my language—mine.” On the 31st, Sylvia answered Gordon’s with her own moving letter in which she said that she was unsure about her future but that she was sure that his was one of the most important letters she had ever received.

  Sylvia was coherent enough to write Gordon, but she remained very sick. So, on September 3, after her eighth night in the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, doctors transferred her to the psychiatric ward of the Massachusetts General Hospital. There Lindemann carried out an extensive psychiatric examination. By the 9th, when he met with Prouty, who was back from Maine (from now on, Aurelia involved Prouty in all discussions regarding Sylvia’s medical care), Lindemann stated that he believed Sylvia had no mental disease or psychosis but had suffered an adolescent nervous illness from which she should recover fully. Three days later, McPherson examined Sylvia to provide Prouty and Aurelia with a second opinion. “The symptoms suggest an acute schizophrenic episode in a highly endowed adolescent girl,” McPherson wrote Prouty. (At the time, “schizophrenia” did not imply an extreme pathological state, as the diagnosis later would in clinical usage; instead, it denoted a period of dissociation from which a patient usually emerged.) “This is not at all a hopeless situation as many recover with or without treatment. The time factor is unpredictable and it is greatly to her advantage to have intelligent supervision. Insulin and shock therapy are often indicated and seem to be of real value in this kind of trouble.”

  On the whole, Sylvia did not respond to her ward setting at Massachusetts General as well as Lindemann might have hoped. Her exposure to patients significantly more depressed than she tended to affect her negatively. Over time, it became clear that she needed to be in a private institution. Lindemann suggested McLean Hospital, a part of the Massachusetts General system that also enjoyed a reputation for being one of the country’s best mental facilities. On the other hand, Prouty wanted Sylvia to go to Silver Hill, a country-club-like sanitarium in New Canaan, Connecticut, where through the years both she and her husband had undergone treatment. Prouty had already contacted Dr. William Terhune, director of Silver Hill, who assured her that Sylvia would be admitted and that her expenses could be paid for by a foundation to which Prouty was a major contributor. In the end, Aurelia followed Lindemann’s advice, although her decision did not sway Prouty from her conviction to sponsor Sylvia’s recovery. On the 14th, Prouty drove with Aurelia and Sylvia from Massachusetts General to nearby Belmont, the small town in which McLean was situated atop a high wooded hill. Soon after checking into her private room, Sylvia met her personal psychiatrist, a brilliant and sympathetic twenty-nine-year-old woman named Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse. Related to the jewelry-store Tiflfanys, Barnhouse, who had been educated at Barnard College and Columbia Medical School, also claimed as a relative Philadelphia Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse, the first evangelist to broadcast a nationwide religious radio program. As a mother of two, the result of an elopement that ended in divorce, and the present wife of fellow doctor William Beuscher, Barnhouse was just what Sylvia needed—an Ivy League woman who had lived a life out of the “Ivy League.” For the first time in her brief but turbulent psychiatric history, Sylvia had found a doctor whom she could trust.

  Meanwhile, Prouty dealt with Sylvia’s medical expenses. Because of the Plaths’ financial straits, Prouty asked doctors and hospitals to reduce or waive their fees. Lindemann agreed to a reduction; Massachusetts General cut its fee in half. Tillotson, in charge of some of the ill-fated Valley Head electroshock treatments, waived his. And when Prouty approached Thornton, he halved his $155 bill (which broke down to twenty-five dollars for one house call, fifteen each for two office visits, and twenty-five each for four shock treatments). This gesture, however, did not satisfy Prouty. On the 26th, she wrote Thornton a stinging letter in which she boldly accused him of driving Sylvia to suicide.

  Unfortunately the shock treatments at Valley Head proved disastrous, as you know. Sylvia was not hospitalized during the treatments and her experience and memory of the shock treatments led to her desperate act. I realize that you left on a vacation during the course of the treatments, but the fact remains that she was not properly protected against the results of the treatments, which were so poorly given that the patient remembers the details with horror. I feel very strongly that Sylvia should have been guarded against what happened, while she was undergoing the shock treatments. I think her attempt at suicide was due largely to the horror of what she remembers of the shock treatments, and the fears aroused. . . . I would like to hear from you in regard to this. . . . Have you no interest in a case that had such a disaster following your treatment of her?

  On the 29th, Thornton shot back his reply. After he called Prouty “poorly misinformed” and “psychiatrically ignorant,” he defended his decision to administer the electroshock treatments on an outpatient basis and described Sylvia’s response to them as “favorable.” Calling Prouty’s opinions “worthless,” Thornton told her that he trusted his letter would “help” her with her dealings with doctors in the future and “stimulate” her to search out information about psychiatry. He closed his letter by admonishing Prouty not to “burden” his office with “any further communications.”

  During the last half of September, while Prouty squared away the cost of
Sylvia’s treatment (Prouty herself had put down the four-hundred-dollar deposit required by McLean for Sylvia’s admission), Barnhouse concentrated on becoming acquainted with Sylvia and her case. Barn-house remembers:

  She wouldn’t talk. She was furious. She was angry at her mother. She had too much plain living and high thinking—her words. She had been raised with this intense focus on the thinking function, on intellectual performance, which was not her nature. Using the Jung-ian categories of psychological types, she was an intuitive, feeling type; she just had an extremely high IQ, that’s all. Moreover, she had been traumatized by her month in New York. There had been all these girls who had been encouraged to use a more affective part of themselves than she had ever been encouraged to use—and yet what she saw was a low-level, stereotypical, superficial version of that. This left her with no place to go. She didn’t have any appropriate models; I was interested not only in her head and her performance but also how she felt. I wasn’t telling her how she was supposed to feel. This was the side I wanted to bring out in her—eventually.