THE NERVOUSLY DAMAGED MOTHER
His name is not Lawrence Adams Abbott. The surname really is that of
one of America's first families. He, himself, is among the few living
of a third generation of large wealth.
It was an early-summer afternoon and Dr. Abbott--for he was a graduate
of Cornell Medical--was standing at one of the train gates of the
Grand Central Station in New York. As he waits apart from the small
crowd assembled to welcome, he attracts observing attention. His face
appears thirty; he is thirty-six. The features are finely cut, the
chin is especially good. The eyes are blue-gray, and a slight pallor
probably adds to his apparent distinction. His attitude is languid,
the handling of his cane gracefully indolent, the almost habitual
twisting of his chestnut-brown mustache attractively self-satisfied.
His clothing is handsome, of distinctive materials, and tailored to
the day. So much for an observing estimate. The critical observer
would note more. He would detect a sluggishness in the responses of
the pupils, as the eyes listlessly travel from face to face, producing
an effect of haunting dulness. Mumbling movements of the lips, a
slightly incoordinate swaying of the body, might speak for short
periods of more than absent-mindedness.
But the gates open and after the eager, intense meetings, and the more
matter-of-fact assumption of babies and bundles, the red-capped
porters, with their lucky burdens of fashionable traveling-cases,
pilot or follow the sirs and mesdames of fortune. Among these is one
whose handsome face is mellowed by softening, early-gray hair, and
whose perfect attire and tenderness in greeting our doctor at once
associate mother and son. She has just come down the Hudson on one of
the few seriously difficult errands of her fifty-six years.
Two weeks have passed. The room is stark bare, save for two
mattresses, a heap of disheveled bed clothes, and two men. The hours
are small and the dim, guarded light, intended to soften, probably
intensifies the weirdness of the picture. The suspiciously plain
woodwork is enameled in a dull monochrome. The windows are guarded
with protecting screens. One man, an attendant, lies orderly on his
pallet; the other, a slender figure in pajamas, crouches in a corner.
His hair is bestraggled; his face is livid; his pupils, widely
dilated; his dry lips part now and then as he mutters and mumbles
inarticulately or chuckles inanely. Now starting, again abstracted, he
is capable of responding for a moment only, as the attendant offers
him his nourishment. A few seconds later he is groaning and twisting,
obviously in pain, pain which is forgotten as quickly, as he reaches
here and there for imaginary, flying, floating things. Real sleep has
not closed his eyes for now nearly three nights. He is delirious in an
artificial, merciful semi-stupor, which is saving him the untold
sufferings of morphine denial. Before this unhappy Dr. Abbott stretch
long, wearisome weeks of readjustment, weeks of physical pain and
mental discomfort, weeks, let us hope, of soul-prodding remorse. His
only chance for a future worth spending lies in months of physical
reeducation, of teaching his femininely soft body the hardness which
stands for manliness; for him must be multiplied days of mental
reorganization to change the will of a weakling into saving
masterfulness; nor will these suffice unless, in the white heat of a
moral revelation, the false tinsel woven into the fabric of his
character be consumed. For months he must deny himself the luxuries,
even many of the comforts, his mother's wealth is eager to give. Yet
these weeks and months of development may never be, for in a short
time he will again be legally accountable, and probably will resent
and refuse constructive discipline, and return to a satin-upholstered
life--his cigarettes, his wine-dinners, his liquors, and his "rotten
feeling" mornings after--then to his morphin and to his certain
degradation. And why should this be? Time must turn back the hands on
her dial thirty-three years that we may know.
The fine Abbott home was surrounded by a small suburban estate near
Philadelphia, a generation ago; we have met the then young mistress of
the mansion, at the Grand Central Station. It was a home of richness,
a home of discriminating wealth, a home of artistic beauty; it was a
home of nervous tension. This neurotic intensity was not of the cheap
helter-skelter, melodramatic sort; there was a splendid veneer of
control. But all the mother's plans and activities depended on the
moods, whims and impulses of little Lawrence, the only child, then
glorying in the hey-day of his three-year-old babyhood. It was a
household kept in dignified turmoil by this child of wealth, who
needed a poor boy's chance to be a lovable, hearty, normal chap. It
was overattention to his health, with its hundreds of impending
possibilities; to his food, with the unsolvable perplexity of what the
doctor advised and of what the young sire wanted. More of
satisfaction, perhaps, was found in clothing the youth, as he cared
less about these details; still, an unending variety of weights and
materials was provided that all hygienic and social requirements might
be adequately met. Anxious thought was daily spent that his play and
playmates might be equally pleasing and free from danger. Almost
prayerful investigation was made of the servants who ministered, and
tense, sleepless hours were spent by this nervous mother striving to
wisely decide between the dangers to her child of travel and those
other dangers of heated summers and bleak winters at home. Frequent
trips into the city and frequent visitations from the city were made,
that expert advice be obtained. Consultations were followed by counter
consultations and conferences which but added the mocking counsel of
indecision. And the marble of her beauty began to show faint marrings
chiseled by tension and anxiety--for was not Lawrence her only son!
It was a home of double standards. The father was a wholesome,
serious-minded, essentially reasonable, Cornell man. His ideas were
manly and from time to time he laid down certain principles, and when
at home, with apparently little effort, exacted and secured a ready
and certainly not unhappy, obedience from his son. But business
interests and responsibilities were large and the bracing tonic of his
association with the boy was all too passing to put much blood-
richness into the pallor of the child's developing character.
Moreover, this intermittent helpfulness was more than counteracted by
the mother's disloyal, though unconscious dishonesty. Hers was an
open, if need be a furtive, overattention and overstimulation, an
inveterate surrender to the sweet tyranny of her son's childish whims.
There was probably nothing malicious in her many little plans which
kept the father out of the nursery and ignorant of much of their boy's
tutelage. The mother was only repeating fully in principle, and
largely in detail, her own rearing; and had she not "turned out to be
one of the favored few?"
The suburban special went into a crash, and all that a fine father
might have done through future years to neutralize the unwholesome
training of a nervous mother was lost. In fact, her power for harm was
now multiplied. The large properties and business were hers through
life, and with husband gone, and so tragically, there was increased
opportunity, and unquestionably more reason, for the intensification
of her motherly care. So the fate of a fine man's son is left in the
hands of a servile mother.
It now became a home of restrained extravagance. The table was fairly
smothered with rare and rich foods. Fine wines and imported liquors
entered into sauces and seasonings. The boy's playroom was a veritable
toy-shop, with its hundreds of useless and unused playthings. Long
before any capacity for understanding enjoyment had come, this
unfortunate child had lost all love for the simple. With Mrs. Abbott,
it was always "the best that money can buy"--unwittingly, the worst
for her child's character. It was a home of formal morality. Sunday
morning services were religiously attended; charities of free giving,
the giving which did not cost personal effort, were never failing. It
was a home of selfish unselfishness. All weaknesses in the son
throughout the passing years were winked at. Never from his mother did
Lawrence know that sympathy, sometimes hard, often abrupt, never
pampering, which breeds self-help.
Lawrence went to the most painstakingly selected, private preparatory-
schools, and later, as good Abbotts had done for generations, entered
Cornell. He had no taste for business. For years he had been
associated with gifted and agreeable doctors; he liked the dignity of
the title; so, after two years of academic work, he entered the
medical department and graduated with his class. These were good
years. His was not a nature of active evil. Many of his impulses were
quite wholesome, and college fraternity camaraderie brought out much
that was worthy. In the face of maternal anxiety and protest, he went
out for track, made good, stuck to his training and in his senior year
represented the scarlet and white, getting a second in the
intercollegiate low hurdles. Another trolley crash now, and he might
have been saved!
All through his college days a morbid fear had shortened his mother's
sleep hours with its wretchedness. Her boy was everything that would
attract attractive women. Away from her influence he might marry
beneath him, so all the refinements of intrigue and diplomacy were
utilized that a certain daughter of blood and wealth might become her
daughter-in-law. The two women were clever, and woe it was that his
commencement-day was soon followed by his wedding-day. No more
sumptuous wedding-trip could have been arranged-to California, to the
Islands of the Pacific, to India, to Egypt, then a comfortable
meandering through Europe. A year of joy-living they planned that they
might learn to know each other, with all the ministers of happiness in
attendance. But the disagreements of two petted children made murky
many a day of their prolonged festal journey, and beclouded for them
both many days of the elaborate home-making after the home-coming. And
the murkiness and cloudiness were not dissipated when parenthood was
theirs. Neither had learned the first page in Life's text-book of
happiness, and as both, could not have their way at the same time,
rifts grew into chasms which widened and deepened. Then the wife
sought attentions she did not get at home in social circles and the
husband sought comforts his wife and his home did not give, in drink
and fast living, later with cocain and morphin. The ugliness of it all
could not be lessened by the divorce, which became inevitable. By
mutual agreement, the rearing of the child was intrusted to the
father's mother, who to-day shapes its destiny with the same
unwholesome solicitude which denied to her own son the heritage of
wholesome living.
We met father and grandmother as she arrived in New York to arrange
for the treatment, which even his beclouded brain recognized as
urgent; and we leave him with a darkening future, unless Fate snatches
away a great family's millions, or works the miracle of self-
revelation, or the greater miracle of late-life reformation in the son
of this nervously damaged mother.