A Life Revisited

A rumpled human form occupied an old, tattered, once plush leather chair near the security windows of the ward. The lump looked like a gnarled ball of old clothes. The nurse explained to me that each morning they carried Rose Stark from her room and put her in this chair. I asked if I might talk to her. The attendant laughed and said, “She hasn’t uttered a word in years. Sure. You can talk to her, but don’t expect her to talk to you. She’s been catatonic for years.”

I pulled up a chair and sat down beside the patient and spoke to her thick mat of gray hair, imagining where an ear should be.

“Mrs. Stark. I’m Chaplain Rubel. I’m here for the summer and want very much for us to talk. I’ve read some of your writing and I’m very interested in the injustices you’ve described for so many years. I’m going to be coming to see you twice a day for the next few weeks, if that’s okay with you.” No acknowledgment came. I watched for changes in her breathing, any sign of conscious life, perhaps even a twitch. The scrunched rumpled clothes pile gave no visible response. I picked up an old copy of Look magazine and thumbed through it, reading aloud phrases from one article and another. Timing my half-hour first visit, I said, “So long for now, Mrs. Stark. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

The bemused attendant smiled at me as I sorted through my keys for the ward door.

“You really think your visit will make any difference?”

“I have no idea. But, I’ll keep on coming and I’m looking forward to just being with her,” I said, having heard the critical tone in her voice. I assumed she was thinking that I was a trainee in mental health and my amusing naiveté would soon whither.

Mrs. Stark had been a patient at St. Elizabeth Hospital since 1934 and this was the summer of 1963. Twenty-nine years of being on a locked ward of a mental hospital might be the only option for some psychotic people, but for others it would contribute to their mental illness. But, the attendant, hardened by life in a mental hospital, was also right. I was naïve, or at least, innocent, involved, and hopeful.

That afternoon, the third day of my beginning the summer training in Clinical/Pastoral Education at St. Elizabeth Hospital, Washington, D. C., I returned to the ward and the chair beside Mrs. Stark. This particular ward was home for about forty women diagnosed with various psychoses. For some, like Rose Stark, it had been their home for many years. With each new psychiatrist in charge of the ward, the diagnoses would change or be augmented, usually accompanied by new or different medications. Her chart currently carried the label “clinical depression with paranoid schizophrenic complications.” Previously, the labels had been “paranoia” and “depression” and at one time “psychopathic personality disorder.”

As far as I could discern at the time of my second visit, she had not moved since the morning. She had been fed her usual fare by an impatient, bored attendant. It interested me that she would not change her position even when eating. Whoever fed her had to search for her mouth, almost hidden behind an oddly configured tense hand held against her face. But, once the spoon found her lips, the obscured target, she would open enough to take it in and swallow the food. For me, that was a sign of hope in itself. There is life here, I thought silently. For the next five days, Monday through Friday, I repeated the ritual of sitting beside her for half an hour twice per day, arriving and leaving at the same times. Sometimes I read to her or just talked about the day, the weather— small talk. At other times, I simply sat silently. Each time I left, I affirmed I would return and gave her the time of day for my coming back. So, when I left her that Friday afternoon, I touched her on the shoulder, as I had done each time before, and said, “Mrs. Stark, I’ll be back to see you Monday morning about 9:00 o’clock. I’ll be thinking about you this weekend.” I rose to leave. As I turned away, a delicate voice said, “Don’t call me Mrs. Stark anymore.”

Surprised, I turned to looked at her. She remained in her usual catatonic, rigid state. I said, “Why not?” There was no response. So, I simply said, “I won’t call you Mrs. Stark anymore. May I call you Rose?” Still, no response. So I repeated my “so long” and re-stated I’d see her Monday morning. Adrenalin suddenly recharged me and with it I felt optimistic about having chosen this patient as my project person. She would be the subject of an important part of my training. I had taken a good deal of criticism from Stan, my supervisor, and the ward’s several attendants for my foolish choice of her. We as chaplains in an intense experiential educational program had an assignment of choosing several patients during our residential program to develop what was called “A Religious Life History” on at least three patients. The other two patients I had chosen were easy and unremarkable, especially in comparison to Mrs. Stark, I mean, Rose.

Eagerly, I stuck the key into the ward lock and opened the door to the long hall. (Sometimes I thought the only difference between myself and the psychotics is that I have a ring of keys and can come and go as I wish.) It was a few minutes before the nine o’clock appointed time. I walked down the hall to the wardroom. There sat Rose, in her familiar, tangled ball of clothes. She wore a dress with a high collar and buttoned shoes. Her gray hair was more arranged than usual and mostly tucked under a round, maroon hat with a lace fringe around it. Her eyes were tightly closed. She seemed somehow different this morning. Then I noticed she wore lipstick. As I approached, I said, “Good morning, Rose. It’s Chaplain Rubel here to see you. I like your hat. I’ve not seen you wearing a hat before.”

There was no motion and no visible response except her left hand, clutched against her neck, slowly relaxed and turned outward. It seemed like a very subtle wave gesture, but I could not be sure. Sitting beside her, I began to describe today’s hot, humid D. C. weather and how glad I was see her this morning. Fully fifteen minutes later, Rose began to move her small body into nearly an actual sitting position, but keeping her legs tucked under her in the big chair. Her eyes remained closed when she uttered, “You don’t have to come see me.” Her words were distinct and just loud enough for me to hear.

“I come here because I want to, Rose. I’m hoping we can get to know one another,” I said, hoping I would not frighten her by being too intrusive or threatening.

“What do you want?” she asked, her eyes still closed.

“I want you to open your eyes, when you feel like it. I want us to talk,” I said.

Rose at that very moment opened her eyes and looked right at me. Her brown eyes showed signs of her medication, with enlarged pupils, but other than that, she was almost attractive. I didn’t want to comment on her lipstick, but I was sure she was pleased wearing it this morning. I imagine she had gotten one of the attendants to put it on and that was later confirmed. One of the attendants, Zelda, a black woman who had worked on this ward for ten or so years, had combed Rose’s hair and put on her lipstick. Zelda told me, after this morning’s ward breakfast, Rose asked her for lipstick when she went to bring her into the day room. It was the first time Zelda had heard an actual word spoken by this patient.

“Maybe I was wrong to tease you about talking to her last week, Chaplain,” Zelda said.

That morning, I spent a full hour sitting beside Rose. We did not have a conversation, but bits of sentences issued from her painted lips. The most significant words I copied for my notes that day, and Rose looked right at me when she asked, “Will you come this afternoon?”

It seemed this question broke the ice between us. I assured her I would be back about two-thirty this afternoon. We were beginning a journey with one another, a sacred journey, from my point of view. I was excited, but my supervisor was cautious and disbelieving, which added to my commitment to continue working with Rose. Perhaps I wanted to prove to myself I could reach someone so psychotic and closed. It was a training summer and I was a new extern, after all.

Unlocking the ward door, I saw her sitting in her chair at the end of the hallway. She looked up the minute I entered the room, as if she sensed my presence. Her hair was combed back into a bun. For the first time, I could see her face without her hiding behind her hair. She didn’t smile, but she did look right at me for a second before turning away for the rest of the time we were together.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want to be your friend, if you’ll let me. I want to know your story.”

“You said you read my story,” she said, staring at the floor.

“I read what is in your file, but I want to hear your story from you and I want to be able to clarify some of the details. There are lots of questions I have from reading your file, Rose.”

“You can’t get me out of here. You’re just like the rest. You don’t care about me. You care about what the doctors say.”

“Give me a chance, Rose. You don’t know me either. So how can you be sure you’re right that I don’t care? Give me a chance. What have you got to lose?”

There was a long, long pause, fully ten minutes.

“They think I’m crazy. You know that? That’s why I’m a captive here.”

“That’s their job, Rose. That’s what they do here. They judge people crazy and lock them up here and that’s so they can have jobs,” I said. In a sense I was being truthful.

She pulled her legs up into the chair and buried her face in her hands, withdrawing. We spent the rest of an hour with her in silence. At the end of our time, I told her goodbye for today and affirmed I’d be back in the morning.

“Why?” is all she said.

“I told you why, Rose. I’m looking forward to tomorrow with you.” I left without further ado. As I locked the ward door behind me and stepped into the main foyer, I felt very tired and sad. I recognized this reaction as a function of transference and I knew I was overly involved already. It was clear I needed to regain my perspective and detach from any outcomes and expectations with Rose.

Within a few days, Rose seemed to anticipate my visits. She was more quickly responsive and our conversations at times began to flow. There was no emotion evident, but at times her voice became more expressive, less flat. My notes indicate that it was on the tenth visit that she asked if I would come to her room and see her photographs. This was the opening of a long story that began to tumble out of an increasingly alive Rose Stark. In her room, under her bed, there was an unlocked footlocker filled with trinkets, jewelry, clothes, old letters, and several shoe boxes of photographs. One by one, we began to go through those snapshots and she told me her story or stories. The stories changed, sometimes in minor details and sometimes entirely.

I have summarized this tale and added my views to make sense of what she gave me. It is my intent to represent Rose’s biography as fairly as possible. She told me initially she had come from Boston, but that later changed to Kansas City. Her father had left her mother when she was a baby and she didn’t know him. But, when her mother took in another man, Rose recalled him with angry memories. He had been mean, she said. He had yelled at her and she was afraid of him. He probably was a drinker and it seemed she might have experienced her first abuse by his actions. But, nothing was clear to her about him and she claimed her mother became mean, too.

When she was about ten or eleven, she ran away from home and found her father in Indian territory in Oklahoma. She lived with him for several years, but the times changed whenever she repeated this part of the story. Her father slept with her regularly and seemed to take her in as his mistress or wife. Initially, when she first told me this, she had no emotion, but each time her story included the time with her father, she became more animated and toward the last mention of him, she expressed how much she hated him.

She was about fourteen when she ran away from him and went to a railroad station in Oklahoma. She didn’t know where that was, but she had a picture postcard of a station in Oklahoma City and claimed that was where she escaped from him. He apparently came looking for her. But, by the time he saw her she was with a woman getting on a train. She remembered seeing him on the station platform. He was very angry and screaming at the woman who had Rose by the hand as they boarded the departing train. I had no reason to question these memories or her need to construct them out of her imagination. It didn’t make any difference to me. I valued her stories just because she seemed to more energetically share them with me. Of course, any indication I might be doubting her, she would of course clam up. I would simply be one more person on the side of the hospital who did not believe her.

The woman companion took her on a long railroad trip to San Francisco. Rose first said the woman was helping to build a hospital in San Francisco and she offered Rose employment. Rose was pretty and fourteen. Later I saw photographs that confirmed the description of herself. The next time this story came up, at another sitting, Rose told me the woman owned a brothel and offered Rose employment. What I enjoyed about this change in a detail was how blithely Rose switched without any explanation. I wondered why the first story had Rose’s new benefactor companion to be almost a philanthropist, while the next time the subject arose the woman was a business woman, for sure, but in a different kind of philanthropy.

Rose and her woman “friend” arrived in San Francisco. Rose described her first time in the Barbary Coast, about 1884, as very exciting. The woman took her shopping and provided her with new street clothes, but mostly an assortment of lingerie. After a few weeks of tutoring, Rose was proud of being one of the Madam’s most wanted girls and she liked the other girls’ envying her. The stories of her various tricks seemed to mostly be funny as Rose told them. But, once in a while a dark memory arose and she became quiet, pensive, and it seemed she was afraid to continue. I remained quiet during her story telling times, which was easy to do, because Rose’s free-flowing tales needed no prompting. She had been abused a number of times, but she did not call her treatment abuse. She said some of her customers seemed to need to hit her or hurt her in order to be satisfied and it was her job to be sure they were satisfied.

The timing of the next chapter was unclear. But one of her “Johns” became a regular customer. He was wealthy and paid enough to the Madam so that Rose was his exclusive partner, available at a moment’s notice, whenever he showed up at the brothel. He began to buy clothes for Rose and took her to plays, concerts, and out to dinners. I tried to determine how old she was when this fellow, I’ll call him Sir Edward, first discovered her. It seemed, from my estimates and the stories and some of the photographs she shared, she had been working at the brothel for at least a couple of years, making her sixteen or seventeen when Sir Edward fell for her. Rose said they had a wedding in San Francisco, but later she said the wedding was at his plantation in Hawaii. Once she said a San Francisco politician did their ceremony. Another time, she told me they had a huge luau and a wedding on the beach in Hawaii in 1889.

In my free time, I attempted to find a record of her marrying in San Francisco, using the her name and the name she had for her suitor. I found nothing. There were no computers in those days and research in 1963 was much more difficult than it is today. When I Googled names in order to verify her stories for this writing, I found only fragments that may have been related, but nothing conclusive.

One time, sitting alongside her in her room, she opened up several shoe boxes filled with photographs. They were fascinating to me. Indeed, she had been a beauty and there were photographs of Rose with the other girls or women in the brothel, usually with Rose at the center of a group picture. Most of the women looked somber, but Rose wore a generous smile in nearly all of them. As we dug through the photos, eventually she came to those taken of Rose and her fiancé, maybe later her husband. He was indeed a dashing figure of a man. Striped pants, a blue blazer, spats, black shoes, and a several hats either on his head or in his hand, cradled against his chest. In every photograph with him, his arm was around her or they were holding hands. One picture, with Rose’s most happy, somewhat sultry pose, was with her sitting on his lap.

Then came the Hawaii photographs. There were pictures of a large, white mansion, with columns. Some photographs were taken in what seemed to be well-manicured, lush gardens. But, the one I liked the best was with Rose and Sir Edward in a carriage, complete with a driver and Rose’s white parasol, an impressive picket fence behind the carriage, and the mansion in the distance. I asked her if I could have a copy of that photograph, but she declined my request, insisting she needed all of her photographs to prove her story and to gain her eventual release from this “madhouse.”

Soon, the plot thickened. Rose told of meeting Lord and Lady Astor when they came to stay for a time with Sir Edward and Rose. She was impressed with them and gleaned enough of their lives to begin to write a book about them. Sir Edward (not Rose’s husband’s real name) raised race horses on his Hawaii plantation and, from Rose’s story, which seems true to the Astor history, Waldorf Astor was a horse-racing enthusiast with his own horses. There was no reason for me to doubt Rose about the Astors. This was early in the 1900's, and Rose and Lord Astor were nearly the same age.

He was born in 1879 and, if her records were correct, she was born in 1870. Rose was immensely impressed with the Astors, their wealth, class, nobility, and I imagine the contrast or comparison of their lives with her own must have been beyond imagination.

In all of Rose’s memorabilia, I saw no manuscript or book that she had written. But, she insisted, often raising her voice, stamping her feet for emphasis, or pounding one fist into her open hand in anger, she told how her book had been stolen from her, made into a movie, and she had not gotten any recognition, royalties, or credit. It was this injustice that eventually landed Rose in St. Elizabeth Hospital. Rose pursued the rights to her book, writing letters galore, to attorneys, politicians, and to the publisher of “her” book. There were reams of letters she had written in a one-drawer, cardboard file box. I read one after another. The later letters and copies of telegrams began to plead for help, often making threats to the addressee if something were not done to rectify the theft of her book by the unscrupulous frauds. It was these threats to Congressmen that caused Rose to be picked up, diagnosed, and kept warehoused at St. Elizabeth Hospital for all the years, since 1934.

From what I gathered, Sir Edward divorced Rose or gave up on her, probably worn out by her obsession to punish the thieves and to gain recognized authorship of the book she claimed to have written. As with paranoid stories, everything was plausible and I had no reason to doubt what had happened. It did seem a tragedy for Rose, coming from her difficult childhood to the life of a beautiful society woman on an Hawaii plantation at the turn of the century, that she was not given notoriety, not celebrated as the author of the Astor biographical work.

It came time for me to leave my clinical-pastoral training tenure at St. Elizabeth. At least two weeks prior to my leaving, I began to prepare Rose for my departure. This was the most difficult experience for me, because Rose did not accept my needing to leave. She cried. She shouted, “Don’t leave me.” At one point, she clung to my sleeve and pleaded with me to take her with me. I was caught in a personal nightmare leaving this dear woman. No longer was I an objective pastoral visitor. I had become part of her life and she was definitely a part of mine.

The final day came for me to say goodbye. I unlocked the door to the ward and walked down the hall. In her chair, covered in a blanket and her clothes, scrunched up in a collection of knots, was Rose. I told her goodbye and that I’d never forget her. There was no indication she was even alive, short of the steady, subtle rise and fall of her clothes from her breathing. I touched her shoulder and whispered into her hair, where her ear was hidden, “Rose, thank you for sharing so much of your life with me. I’ll never forget you. God bless you, Rose. Goodbye.”

Before I left the ward I looked back at the clump of assorted material in Rose’s chair. I felt guilty leaving her this way. It seemed cruel to pry into Rose’s life, witness her coming alive again, and then abandoning her, giving her back to the institutional pill pushers and custodians, the psychiatrists and the nursing people who come and go. It was only later, when my CPE supervisor attempted to comfort me, that I could see a possible way of accepting what had transpired between Rose and myself. She had opened up, shared intimately, freely, with increasing liveliness and affect, and just as suddenly had shut down, crawling back into her ultimate catatonic, paranoid defenses. As far as I know, Rose never talked again and she died soon after, in 1965, at 95. Stan, my supervisor’s words did help to some degree. He simply said, “Had you not spent those days with Rose, she never would have opened up her life to anyone. Your time with her was a gift to both of you.” The confirmation of this “gift” for me is to revisit Rose and the parts of her life she so bravely shared with me.

Goodbye, Rose. Thank you for sharing your story with me. I’ll never forget you.

Note: Any associations with actual persons are purely coincidental.

Christopher Rubel is a writer, a retired psychotherapist and an Episcopal Priest, having served in The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.