Read an Excerpt

Part I
Little Albert

1935
Whip Poor Will Farm, Connecticut

“Why are you doing this?” John asks, coming home to the farm from Manhattan, finding me out of bed, at the corner desk, typing in my nightgown at 8 p.m., the boys already asleep and my dinner, a bowl of chicken soup, ignored at my elbow. Prescription for dysentery: hydrate relentlessly. And I’m trying. But it becomes tiresome, all these bowls of broth and cups of sugar water, and the inevitable visceral responses that become more painful, day and night. The stomach, regardless of what any other organ has to say, does not want nutrition. The stomach and the bowels and all those layers of unstriped, smooth muscle with their associated glands (how John loves to talk of those invisible places and their powerful relationships to our visible physical behaviors) want only to be left alone.
     “Doing what?” I say, tugging out the paper, turning it over, neatening the edges of a growing pile.
     “Working so hard when you’re supposed to be recuperating.”
     I shield the paper with my forearm, like a teenage girl hiding her diary. We have been married close to fifteen years now, we have survived scandal, infidelities, and depressions (his, mine, the nation’s), and mostly I feel we know each other as well as anyone can. And still, every human seems to remain to every other a mystery—despite John’s strenuous disavowal of all things intangible.
     It is the one thing any human can truly own: her private thoughts. But what do you do when you’re married to a man who says “thought,” as we generally refer to it, and the mind, and consciousness, and especially the soul, don’t exist?
     John runs a hand through his hair—now silver but as thick as when we first met. He remains as handsome to me now as when he was forty, and I was—well—half that age. I can smell the city on him. The stale cigarette funk of the train car, but also cologne, kept in his desk drawer, reapplied before leaving the Graybar Building. And the drink—bourbon, invariably—he stopped to have with a fellow ad man or behavior consultant. Even when he—we—worked in the lab with babies, he made it a point not to smell of sour milk. There are opportunities to be missed if you don’t send out the right stimuli.
     “Who’s it for?” he asks finally, gesturing to the overturned pile.
     He means which popular magazine. Cosmopolitan? Parents? John has written for most of them. I’ve had my own luck a couple of times. But this pile of fifty pages I’ve managed to accumulate in a week isn’t meant for any magazine.
     When I don’t answer, he fidgets with his cuff links. A gift from Stanley, when John made VP. And still, he misses the days when he earned a fraction of what he earns now, but commanded the respect of real scientists and scholars, instead of salesmen and radio announcers.
     “I heard you asked Ray to bring down some old Johns Hopkins boxes from the attic,” he says. “I’ve always said I should get rid of all that stuff up there.”
     “Not the lab files, surely.”
     He starts to nod grudgingly, then shakes his head. “What’s important is already published. I can’t see the point in keeping every scrap of paper.”
     “I suppose that’s true.”
      “And no one’s ever going to have a need for my private papers, or yours. Burn it all.”
     “Burn it all,” I repeat, making him smile. Haven’t I heard him say that a hundred times? And he’ll do it someday, I know he will, regardless of my own thoughts about posterity, or my own occasional desires to look back and see what we did, whether we’re remembering things correctly, why our very own publications offer one version here and another slightly different one there, whether there are facts I overlooked in my youthful desire to be his indispensable assistant.
     “When you’re dead, you’re all dead,” he says.
     “No proof to the contrary.”
     He’s relieved by my pretense of agreeability, and yet he can see past it. Perhaps he knows me better than I know myself. John has always maintained that we are unable to observe our own behaviors, which is why others’ behaviors are so much easier to predict and control. Which is always an “out” of sorts, if one chooses to take it. He certainly did.
     “What were you looking for, Rar?”

I’m looking, I suppose, for how it all started: our love, his most important theories, our biggest contributions, our biggest mistakes. And at the same time, I find myself looking away, making excuses, as if I were too immature and impressionable to have known any better.
     The most difficult part, you would think, is realizing that the person you idealized, whom you regarded as infallible, was imperfect all along. Instead, the hardest part is stopping to wonder what was so imperfect or unfinished within oneself as to impede comprehension of the obvious. There wouldn’t be any experts telling us all what to do if we thought for ourselves, if we held our ground and asked the right questions. That’s the most important thing a scientist can do, isn’t it? Ask the right questions?
     It’s tricky for any woman to sort out her feelings, but most of all when her husband is a national expert on feelings, especially the unconditioned ones we are born with, which create the foundation for everything else. John always said there are only three: fear, rage, and love, the latter really only a reaction to erotic stimulation. The first and perhaps most powerful—fear—was the one that obsessed him, and the one we worked on together in the early years, by kindling small newspaper fires in front of babies, by letting our tender subjects touch candle flames, by sending rats scurrying across their laps, and rabbits, monkeys, and dogs jumping and lunging all over the place. (None of which frightened most infants, which was the point.) Only two things seem to stimulate an unconditioned fear response: sudden loud noises, or a sudden loss of stability. Having the rug pulled out from under you, in other words. Which is how I’m feeling now.
     Don’t blame him, I remind myself. He was more honest, even in his errors and duplicities, than any man I have ever known.
     I’m not making sense of it yet.
     There is one remembered image (John doesn’t believe in mental images at all, but I can’t find a better term) that refuses to leave me. It has always been playing on some forbidden film screen of my mind, but it has flashed with a particular insistency during the last two weeks of fevers and gastric distress.

The windowless psychological testing room is warm, as we wait for our camera man to return and to record the footage that will advance—so Dr. Watson hopes—the immature field of psychology. The first thousand feet of film alone costs $450, a considerable expenditure in 1919. Our nine-month-old subject—“Albert B.”—is being remarkably stoic about all the fuss. His round head, bald except for a few flossy, sweat dampened strands, swivels slowly in the direction of the closed door, though his eyes remain unfocused, lids heavy. A thin line of drool runs from his slick, ruby lips to the top of his velvet-smooth chest. As he tires, his chest settles closer to mine, so that I can feel his heat, and his heartbeat, through my blouse.
     Dr. Watson’s face turns toward mine. What do you think?
What I want at that moment is simply to avoid seeming incompetent, to avoid falling out of this swift-moving roadster in which I’ve managed, with great luck, to gain a seat. Drawing on everything I know as a budding scientist, I try to sound merely clinical.
     “He seems . . . healthy.”
     “Yes,” Dr. Watson says, inhaling deeply. He seems relieved. It is one of the few times I have witnessed him betraying any doubt. It is one of the first times he has seemed to need me. Good.
     The little monkey, of the organ grinder’s type, is penned up, outside the door. As is the dog. Somewhere there is a rabbit, too—it shows up on the film, later—but I can’t recall where it’s kept. (I don’t trust myself, in other words. But that has always been part of the problem.)
     In a corner basket, a rat scuffles, and next to it, in a large brown bag, a confined pigeon tries to lift its wings, making the bag shudder and jump. I pull Albert closer, muffling my racing pulse against his soft chest: pride, relief, adult desire, and an infant’s vulnerability all mixed together in that moment which I can feel in my memory as damp heat in a small room thrumming, waiting. Later, he will be in tears, shuddering and terrified. Not from pain—we never hurt them physically, of course. (Does that make it all right? Would I be asking if it did?) For now, our uncomplaining subject releases a bubbling sigh and settles ever deeper, drowsy and trusting, in my arms.
     Was Albert healthy? Was he normal? They are not the only questions— not by a long shot.
     Perhaps none of the questions would even matter, except for what followed: years upon years of consequences for one silly, poorly executed experiment I’d much rather forget, no chance to temper or improve upon it and—no, I am understating things already, I am being a coward, it is bigger than all that—no chance to turn back a tide that washed a great many of us out to sea. If everything had stayed in the lab, it would be different. The lab was only where it started, I realize now.
     One thunderclap of truth.
     And now I am like one of those hundreds of babies we studied: grip loosening, falling with a pure and unconditioned panic, through the air.


Chapter One

But I need to start before I ever knew John, and well before motherhood, if only to prove to myself that I rose to challenges and coped with larger-than-life personalities before. I need to remember that I did have an earlier life, and my own ideas, too.
     Vassar College, 1916.
     The Vassar Brothers Labs.
     Outside: that glorious musty smell of leaves starting to dry and color, shrivel and drop. Scarlet and amber brightening our world of brick and stone, skies fresh and blue overhead. September, that most hopeful month. Some people prefer May—lilies and hyacinths, white gloves and pearls—but I’ve always preferred autumn, the season of rededication, when one experiences that same thrill in the breast that one gets walking into a vast library with its smells of old pages and oiled banisters. All those books still to be read. All those centuries of knowledge. Feeling humbled within the context of all that intelligence— but at the same time, elevated. Made part of something larger.
     Inside the labs: standing at attention in front of a microscope, paired with my dear friend Mary, waiting for our professor to enter the room—Margaret Floy Washburn, the first woman in the entire country to receive a PhD in psychology, from Cornell, four years before I was born. The author of a textbook, The Animal Mind, written just around the time I was first learning to read.
     Mary was also a sophomore, but older than me, because I’d entered Vassar early. We’d missed crossing paths for most of freshman year— each lurkers in our ways, with noses in our books. But then we’d finally noticed each other—I recall the first time I saw her stiff corona of curls bouncing as she strode with an enviable sense of determination through Main—and I’d found someone with whom I could discuss Wilhelm Wundt and John Dewey all the way back to Rousseau and Locke, from whose work on education Mary paraphrased the very first day we met: “We are like chameleons; we take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.” Being always a chameleon of sorts and one who took pride in picking the right creature to emulate, I determined that she would be my study and lab partner, whenever possible.
     On this particular morning in September, across the Atlantic, scores of French and German men (no one we knew) were probably off dying at the Battle of the Somme, while we girls rubbed tired eyes and rebraided loose hair, expecting class to begin. Mary, too restless to wait, was fixing an unlabeled slide under the microscope clip.
     “What do you see?”
     “It looks like a blob.” She wrinkled her nose, turning the dials.
     “An amoeba,” I corrected her—though of course, she knew as much, and was only being flip. “I was just reading a paper about the periodic appearance and disappearance of the gastric vacuole . . .”
     “Are you sure we’re in the right class?” she interrupted without looking up from the eyepiece. “Because  I didn’t sign up for zoology. I thought we were here to study the complexities of the human mind.”
     The room, already hushed—girls in drab cardigans and ankle length skirts, whispering in twos and threes—had become uniformly silent, but Mary was too engrossed in her slide to notice. Loudly, she said, “Our teacher may be one of Cavell’s ‘thousand most important men in science,’ but perhaps she’s mixed us up with some other class. How long are we going to have to wait, anyway?”
     From the doorway across the room, through which she had entered on low-heeled, sensible black shoes, Miss Washburn answered. “You don’t have to wait at all. You may be dismissed now, if you’d prefer.”
     A long pause, allowing us to behold her: firm helmet of wavy hair, just starting to silver, with a tiny, darker knot at the nape; deep lines around her mouth formed by years of rigorous concentration. “Name?”
     “Cover. Mary Cover.”
     “And you’re partnered with . . . ?”
     I took a half step away from the microscope, chin up. “Rosalie
Rayner.”
     “Rayner. Good.” Miss Washburn took her time looking over the registration sheet in her hand. “Rayner, you don’t have an objection to studying animals, do you?”
     “No, Miss Washburn.”
     “Not even amoebas?”
     “No, not at all.”
     “Do you think an amoeba has a mind?”
     The back of my knees softened into jelly. “I’m sorry, Miss Washburn, but I don’t know.”
     Miss Washburn pulled out a high stool and settled herself onto it, legs crossed at the ankle. A delicate chain of swinging black beads shifted against her broad chest and then settled, as we watched, listened, and faintly perspired.
     “Don’t be sorry, Miss Rayner. You don’t know. We don’t precisely know. Not knowing is a perfectly appropriate place to start. Sometimes it’s even the right place to end.”
     Another pause, the tinkling of water in the plumbing, running in another lab over our heads. The distant, purring jet of a Bunsen burner. A faint sniff of some sulfurous chemical. I loved those sounds and smells. Even in my embarrassed concern for Mary, and for myself, I couldn’t be anything but deliriously happy at that moment.
     “Go ahead, everyone,” Miss Washburn said. “Take your seats.”
     We did, and I could feel Mary holding her breath next to me, waiting to discover whether she had been merely warned or actually expelled from the class. But Miss Washburn was not interested in making things clear. Mary’s cheeks held onto their red flush for most of that first hour. Turning the focus knob, her hand shook.
     We would have to wait most of a week until Mary got back a graded lab report to know she hadn’t been banished. But in a way that was slower to reveal itself, she had. For two more years we both progressed well in our studies, each of us optimistic if uncertain about our futures, each of us distinctly skewed toward the sciences. And yet at the beginning of senior year, when Miss Washburn invited a select group of senior students to enroll in her Special Projects in Psychology seminar, Mary wasn’t invited. When Mary, intent on protesting, interrupted Miss Washburn on the way to one of her classes, Miss Washburn explained: “You weren’t satisfied with the lab you took with me before. I don’t imagine you’ll be satisfied with this class either.”
     We were both shocked. Mary was one of the best psychology students at Vassar.
     Mary thought that a private meeting in Washburn’s office might offer a better climate for persuasion, and I offered to tag along, waiting on a plump, tapestry-covered bench in the hall outside faculty offices. From my seat on the bench, I worked at deciphering a German publication of new lectures by Freud—Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse—missing every third or fourth word, and swung my shoes against the floor, softly tapping out the rhythm of a popular tune while I absentmindedly played with the charm bracelet on my left wrist. My mother had given me the bracelet, and Mary had given me my favorite charm, the little magnifying glass, symbolizing my love for science (evidently, no beaker- or brain-shaped charms were commonly available).
     As soon as I saw Mary emerge and walk right past me, I knew things had gone badly.
     “Don’t say it,” she said, intent on moving as quickly as possible away from the source of her humiliation, her pointed chin with its faint cleft just starting to tremble.
     “Oh, Mary,” I said, struggling to catch up. “You’ll be fine.”
     I took her arm so we could walk down the dark hall, past the sconce-lighted portraits and old windows. The wavy leaded glass of each window blurred the view of rust-colored trees outside. “You’re our best and brightest. You’ll be fine.”
     “How will I possibly be fine if I can’t even rise to the top within our own little college? Three years of paying my dues and I’m being excluded.”
“There will be a portrait of you hanging in the labs someday. ‘Mary Cover,’ our next famous psychologist.”
     “I don’t want to be famous. That has nothing to do with it.” Mary hurried our pace. Joined at the elbow, we bobbed out of sync, heels clicking and squeaking against the scuffed wooden floors. “I want to contribute. I want to understand. I’d just like to work with humans—if that’s not so much to ask—instead of worms and rats and color-blind fish.”
     “It was just . . . rotten luck. You rubbed her the wrong way. Calling  her one of Cavell’s ‘most important men,’ and all.”
     Mary snickered. “Your fault, for telling me about that.”
     I was the one who read every journal announcement, every newsletter, every history of the newer “scientific psychology,” from James and Hall to Titchener and Angell.
“Yes, my fault,” I said, feeling the happiness well up inside me, glad that Mary wasn’t feeling demolished at that moment.
     “Self-righteous bat,” Mary said.
     How old was Washburn really? Early forties. She seemed ancient to us both.
     “Cave-dwelling crone.”
     “Half-blind hermaphrodite.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, buoyed by the snicker in Mary’s voice. “We’ll fix it.”
     “I admire your optimism, Rosalie,” Mary said with faux formality, giving my elbow a grateful squeeze. Then she dropped into a huskie whisper, the sound of so many afternoon library conversations, so many sleepy picnics in the shade of ancient campus trees. “But don’t hold your breath.”
     Mary was the type of woman Vassar was intended to produce, the type who wouldn’t just run off and get married but would actually do something. She was needed. Goodness, we were all needed—and more than that, committed to making the world a better place.
     In Europe, the Great War dragged on. Society, government, and even religion seemed to offer few solutions to problems of an incomprehensible scale. And yet, still, my fellow students and I retained our idealism, an unspoken sense that whatever was dismantled or destroyed, something else newer and better would rise up to take its place. Scientists urged us to believe that with the help of new education methods and a commitment to societal improvements, reforming man’s worst habits was more than possible, it was inevitable. Look how much our own suffragette mothers had done to reform the world ahead of us, as they liked to remind us when we showed any sign of forgetting their labors and sacrifices.
     Mary Cover’s mother was more committed than my own. I was glad that my mother didn’t distribute pins and handbills when she came to visit, but of course, we all wanted the same thing: equality of opportunity. And weren’t we practically there already? A few more states to be persuaded, a few more legal details to be pinned down, but the battle had been won. Hadn’t it?
     We were meant to exceed our mothers’ ambitions. We were meant to walk down that cleared path into a new American century of progress and enlightenment. Relying on experimental science, not phrenology or philosophy or voodoo, we would understand what made people tick. We would understand—in addition to how to mix a Manhattan and dance the fox-trot—how to make people healthier, happier, better in character and in conduct from the very start.