Through the kitchen window, I could see my husband, Rick, in the back yard, his expression grim, his phone pressed against his ear. He was walking in tight circles as he talked, the way he does when he’s stressed. I opened the back door and heard a smattering of ominous, dreary words: Stroke. Fall. Hospital.
Rick’s parents were dead. My father was dead. Our aunts and uncles, nearly all dead. The only possible subject of the conversation was my 94-year-old mother, Adele Angier, who lived in Manhattan, a four-hour drive north of us. Having failed to reach me, my older brother Joe had called Rick. My mother had suffered a stroke while standing in the kitchen. She’d collapsed onto the tile floor and cracked open the back of her skull. Now she was in the hospital and mostly unresponsive. We’d have to go to New York as soon as possible.
Which hospital is she in? I asked.
Rick wasn’t sure, but he thought Joe had said something about Bellevue.
I am not superstitious. I don’t believe in gods or demons, kismet or curses. But come on, Universe: Bellevue Hospital again? Was that absolutely necessary? New York City has many hospitals, including several that are closer to my mother’s neighborhood than Bellevue. Our family has had little to do with any of them, but in the spring of 1977, when I was 19, I spent two devastating weeks at Bellevue, watching my 51-year-old father die of a malignant melanoma that had spread to his brain. I remembered the sight of his corpse in the hospital morgue, the pale violet tinge of his skin, the slight gape of his mouth, the fact that he looked so profoundly dead, he might never have been alive. For me, Bellevue became an embodied nightmare, and over the years, I avoided going anywhere near it. But now Bellevue was yanking me back. It was one nightmare nested within another: Just when you think you’re safely awake, you find it’s time for another round of fear.
It was Bellevue’s decision, in 1879, to open a pavilion for the insane that made its name a synonym for the loony bin. Its Manhattan location guaranteed that it would draw some marquee mental patients.
As one of America’s oldest and largest public hospitals, Bellevue carries tropes and metaphors handily. It opened in 1736 in a two-story brick building in Lower Manhattan as New York’s first permanent almshouse to shelter and treat the poor. After 60 years, its operations moved north to a property called Belle Vue Farm, where victims of yellow fever could be safely quarantined. The hospital adopted the name Bellevue in 1824.
Since then, Bellevue has claimed a string of medical firsts—the site of the nation’s first children’s clinic, the first emergency center, the first serious nursing school. Because the hospital served the city’s growing immigrant population, which brought a global panoply of illnesses, Bellevue attracted the nation’s top doctors and medical students. But it was Bellevue’s decision, in 1879, to open a pavilion for the insane that made its name a synonym for the loony bin. Its Manhattan location guaranteed that Bellevue would draw in some marquee mental patients, among them Eugene O’Neill, Delmore Schwartz, William Burroughs, Charlie Parker, and Allen Ginsberg, who cited Bellevue in his beat classic, Howl. The jazz bassist Charles Mingus wrote a song about his time in the asylum called “Lock ’Em Up (Hellview of Bellevue),” a fact I was unaware of when I thought I was so clever referring to Bellevue as Hellview.
It was the loony-bin link that first brought our family to Bellevue, in 1977. My father had been acting oddly for several weeks: He was no napper, but there he was, falling asleep during the day while sitting on the couch. He walked with his head bent over, dragging his feet on the ground. “Keith, you’re shuffling!” my mother cried. “You never shuffle!” But it wasn’t until my father hung up the phone on my younger brother mid-conversation, twice, that we knew something was wrong. We hurried over to his apartment and found him laid out on his bed, staring at the ceiling. We called an ambulance, but when the paramedics asked him whether he wanted to go to a hospital, he said no, so they left. We walked him out to the street and tried to hail a cab, but no cab would take a man who seemed slightly deranged. Slowly, step by mincing step, we shepherded him to the closest hospital. The doctor on duty asked us what was wrong with my father. We said we had no idea. He had always been emotionally volatile, we said. Could he be having what was then called a nervous breakdown? Without checking further, the doctor told us to take him to Bellevue. “It’s a good hospital,” he said, “and if your father needs mental care, he can get it there.”
At Bellevue, the emergency room doctor took one look in my father’s eyes and knew what was wrong. Some sort of tumor was pressing against his optic nerve. My father had been treated for a malignant melanoma on his back four years earlier, and the cancer had spread to his brain. A surgeon operated on my father the next day, excising a tumor the size of a lemon, but smaller malignancies scattered throughout his brain could not be removed. Chemotherapy would be useless. All we could do was wait.
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