The Case of Miss Violeta Louise Stokes
by
Walter E. Myers, Ph.D.
September 1953
Introduction
In order to reconcile the events surrounding Miss Violeta Louise Stokes’s disappearance, I have undertaken a preliminary fact-finding case history. My intention is to uncover the root causes of my seeming obsession with patient. This is intended as a private, unofficial document only.
Preliminary Statement
Miss Violeta Louise Stokes, twenty-three years old and a voluntary patient at the State Hospital for two-months (during which her intensive psychoanalysis took place, two hours at a time — sometimes more — six days a week), was a victim of parental neglect. She demonstrated significant indications of a persistent Electra complex, exhibiting itself in her self-destructive promiscuity (“I decided that the way to a man’s heart was not through his stomach, as my Home Economics teacher indicated, but through his penis”).
For six months she was the mistress of a bandleader, an incurable alcoholic, more than twice her age, and a degenerate with a wife and two children. After his accidental death (hit and killed by a Chrysler Imperial), she became distressed by suicidal thoughts, and she committed herself to the hospital and to my care.
I was at her intake, though she couldn’t see me watching from behind a mirror — an observation post. She wore a turtleneck sweater, beige pencil skirt, wide leather belt, and flat ballerina-style shoes. She had one suitcase. I noticed its clasp was broken, held together with twine.
While she answered the nurse’s questions, she touched the neck of her sweater, and periodically, she gazed out the window. A thin rain marked the sky. For the most part, she kept her gaze not on the nurse, but on the wall behind the nurse, as if she thought by staring hard enough, she might find a solution.
At one point, while the nurse was occupied with her note taking, the patient picked up a Life magazine at a side table. She studied the cover carefully, with interest, but then she set the magazine down and forgot about it.
I continued to watch her, trying to isolate what drew me to her — but it was impossible to identify. When she shifted, fingered her sweater — everything changed, entire new possibilities opened.
A first admission of a possible connection between patient and myself took place near the end of the first month.
“You’re young,” she says. “You have no idea.”
“I’m your age.”
No answer.
“I’m your age.”
“Maybe but you’re young.”
Her progressive defective judgment caused me to demand extended treatment, and in the last days, patient became hostile, held against her will. She disappeared eleven days ago, presumably during the chaos and distraction of lunch hour, aided by an El Salvadorian janitor who has since gone missing.
The last event recited in her psychoanalytic narrative (an estimated one hour and fifteen minutes preceding her escape through a side-window, as indicated by a ladder found underneath window) was a vitriolic attack — directed at me — the results of which have not only caused me a great deal of distressful introspection, but also a mandatory three-week “vacation” (day two, Bimini Island) in which I’ve been instructed to “relax” and “take it easy” and “not let that crazy damn bitch get to you and ruin the promise of a long career.”
While I’m fairly certain that a private (for my eyes only!) case study was not what my superiors had in mind, it is my hope that the very nature of its structure will both clear my head and provide some kind of meaning in what has very clearly become my own existentialist-like crisis.
Side note: “Good God, man! What the hell is wrong with you?” These were the exact words of Doctor Robert H. Lockney, my superior, on finding me near the dining hall, prostrate, crushed, conscious of nothing but patient’s escape through window, groaning. It was like a full blow to my chest.
Side note: Patient is of mixed parentage, half-English, half-Irish — maybe a dash of Dutch and German. I remember her features more distinctly than when I was in her physical presence, although my powers of imagination might be recreating a more enhanced and idealized image.
Her hips are wide, in a disarmingly feminine and candid sense, and they rock as she walks, as if without her permission. I close my eyes, and her face appears. Large expressive mouth, long eyelashes, light freckles. She laughs, and a bubble of joy rides my throat. She scrutinizes — she blinks — and my insides tighten. “Never grow up,” she says. “That’s my motto” — wide smile, and then, when she closes her lips, I’m there, at the edge of her mouth, lips pressed together. Awe and exhilaration.
Family Situation
She remembers being a “real tomboy, climbing fences and trees, not afraid, able to stand up to the mean boys.” Characteristic of her adventurous spirit, she wanted to grow up to be a “spy or an actress.”
Her brother David told her that she “was so ugly, with a large ass and skin that was so white he could see right through it.” (Her skin is delicate and pale, accentuating her long black hair and deep brown eyes — wounded eyes — and she does have a noticeable backside, but in congruence and alignment with her bust and hips. Her lack of judgment in all matters has extended to her inability to recognize her physical attributes.)
David also told her that she’d been adopted, and for a long while, she consoled herself with the thought, until she could no longer deny her physical resemblance to both parents.
Her favorite relative, Uncle Lou, was a severe alcoholic who died in his late forties (a mysterious event, never fully explained, involving a rainstorm, the climbing of a telephone pole, and his subsequent electrocution).
Uncle Lou gave her a slim, delicate gold wristwatch on her fifteenth birthday, a slight gold chain at the latch, pearlized, dime-sized watch face — her most prized possession — and despite the recklessness of her life, she exhibited great pride in not having ever misplaced it. (In fact, patient became quite upset when the nurse tried to unlatch it, and I was called to the room. So insistent was patient on not removing the wristwatch in accordance with the hospital’s no jewelry rule, I understood immediately that by allowing patient to wear the wristwatch, she would trust me. I convinced the staff to make an exception; they agreed on account of my trust theory based on the wristwatch’s emotional significance.)
Patient doesn’t know when she began to feel “unloved and unwanted” and as if a “great gaping hole was expanding and fluttering in my chest” but thinks that she was around five or six. She believes that the feelings “didn’t come on suddenly but just kept growing bigger and bigger over time.”
A hostile form of penis envy was demonstrated at a young age, while taking a bath with her brother: “David started screaming and when Mamma ran in, she saw that I was trying to pull his penis off. I was leaned forward in the bathtub, my hands gripped around it, wouldn’t let go. I wanted it off — it looked like some ugly outgrowth, like a long, skinny wart. Mamma finally had to slap me.”
Her father was remote and a severe disciplinarian. She sought his attention and was met with indifference. She remembers being overjoyed one night when he “held my hand. He was interested in me! His hand was so big and mine was so small — it made me feel protected and loved.”
Later that same night, her father beat her with his leather belt for an infraction she can’t remember.
“All that closeness,” she says, “didn’t mean the same thing to him and seemed random. I cried bitterly and he told me if I didn’t stop crying, he’d whip me again.”
Afterwards, she rarely exhibited manifestations of emotion — most of her suffering was done in silence — an example of “still waters running deep.”
One night, when patient was sixteen, she “came home after drinking with friends. Papa was waiting, and Mamma and David were in my parents’ bedroom, hiding from what they knew would happen. Papa had been fuming all evening.”
When she stumbled through the door, he was leaned against the wall, watching. “I made it to my room, but each step was a struggle.”
She started to change her clothes, but her father grabbed her arm. He was yelling and hitting her, and she ran into her parents’ bedroom, wearing her blouse and underwear, her father trailing behind her.
“I had a welt on my arm, and I was showing it to Mamma and David, but they didn’t know what to do.”
She left home three days later.
She admits that her subsequent pursuit of men seems an undisguised attempt at replacing her alienated father.
“A girl’s desire to please her father,” I tell her, “becomes a sort of guide map to all her other relationships with men.”
“Whatever you say,” she says, jocularly. And then, with sincerity: “You’re probably right.”
A certain unconscious destructiveness entered into her behavior, what I believe to be the initial seed of alcoholism.
Side note: When I try to analyze my own motives, I tend to brood on unrelated minutiae. I see an apron my mother used to wear, with vines forking across it in an unnerving pattern; she leans over to kiss me when I’m in bed, her head over mine, her lips. Sleepy, soft lips — an intake of breath as she comes closer to my face. The caress of her breathing on my cheek.
The backs of her knees — pale and veined — as she walks to the lake’s edge, to swim. Her large backside sways in a black-skirted bathing suit.
She’s in her brassiere, and her breasts seem like gobs of contained dough.
She argues with my father: fight, reconciliation; fight, reconciliation; fight, reconciliation.
One night from my bedroom I listen to the thump and thud of my father throwing her against a wall. My subconscious desire for her, my obsession — a childhood romance? I will protect you, Mother! I am yours! And she comes to my bedroom, reveals a bruise on her thigh the size of my father’s fist.
My heart is unreliable. My mother incarnates into every woman — I am physically and spiritually connected to my maternal source. I have all the characteristics of a classically Freudian childhood. I did want to kill my father, marry my mother.
With age, both my mother and father have become complacent, placid — long games of bridge, walks around the neighborhood.
Sex Life
I, more than anyone, am fully aware of the dilemma — What came first: patient’s promiscuity or patient’s alcoholism? I might as well be asking, What came first: the chicken or the egg? Much time was spent on the topic (I considered it a rare opportunity. Patient was keen to observe that my attention seemed manic and obsessive).
I’m inclined to believe that the neurotic factors that produced her sexual promiscuity were aggravated and extended by alcohol, and that the continued use of the latter led to the progressive deterioration of her sexual morals.
Patient’s first incident of sexual intercourse was a profound disappointment: “The second his penis entered me, I thought, There must be more.”
At eighteen, patient was already experiencing blocks of time that she could not remember, what have been referred to as “blackouts,” but what patient prefers to call “time smears.”
On one such occasion, she had been drinking steadily, and found herself coming to “staggering at a sidewalk, near my parents’ home.” She “caught a ride” with a group of men in a car, two that she recognized — local policemen. “I was glad to see Jack and Frank because Jack always had something to drink. I was already quite drunk, having trouble talking.”
There were two other men in the car and she got into the backseat with them. “They were passing around a bottle and one of them had to hold it to my mouth and help me drink.”
They drove her to a hotel, and “someone opened the door and I went in. No lights were turned on. I didn’t know what was going to happen but had an idea, and for some reason, I put Uncle Lou’s wristwatch on the dresser by the bed. All the time I was crying and begging and pleading. I was shoved on to the bed. One man held my arms; I couldn’t see in the dark; another man held my ankles and pulled my legs apart. I had on my jacket and hat, which they didn’t bother to remove. The door opened and some more men came in, and someone called, ‘Hey, Les! We’re having ourselves a party’ and Les said, ‘Oh yeah?’ and I recognized his voice — he was Lester Mansfield, a friend of Papa’s. I used to go to his farm when I was a kid and I would help him feed the chickens. Although I had never called him anything but Mr. Mansfield, I cried out, ‘Les, Les!’ He recognized my voice because there was a thick sudden horrible silence. Then my feet and arms were released and I got up. As I was running to the door, I fell down and cut my knee. Then I remembered Uncle Lou’s wristwatch, and I ran back and got it. I didn’t look at Les.”
It occurred to me — as she pulled up her jumpsuit pant cuff to reveal the scar at her knee — that if and when released, patient would drink again, and more such occasions would happen. A terrible responsibility came upon me, a tightening around my temples. Patient moved her gaze to the fichus tree and a shock passed through me, like an electric current: Patient probably had other dealings that she wasn’t telling, similar to the one she had just described. How many? What wasn’t she telling me? I saw clearly her insanity and believed that I must not let her out of the hospital.
There is a connection between the idea of irrevocable ruin and the ease with which she submitted to men. While patient insists that “I never went out with the idea of having relations with a man — I wanted someone to understand me; I wanted to wake up in a different world where I was appreciated, and I wouldn’t have to be me.”
But she would inevitably find herself in rapid succession with various men. She seems to place less value on her sex than many women do on blowing their noses or applying lipstick. There are deeper unconscious motives at work — a masochistic self-revenge.
One of these men was a foreigner who practiced cunnilingus, and she felt that his willingness to perform such an action was a promise of “something more hopeful” between the sexes.
On another occasion, a salesman gave her a necklace after she permitted him to “put his penis in my mouth.”
His emission reminded her of “warm, yucky mud.”
She speculates that her promiscuity was a “desire for knowledge and understanding — a searching” and that she “hoped someday I would find a man who would help me reach a higher spiritual plane. He would discover that I was sensitive, desirable, intelligent — he would recognize me and I would recognize him.”
“What do you mean by recognize?”
“He would discover himself in my presence, that’s the thing. And I would recognize myself in him.”
During her six-month relationship with the bandleader, patient was able to remain monogamous. It must be said for this cowardly man — a chronic alcoholic prone to extreme bouts of jealousy — that at the very least, he put an end to patient’s promiscuity.
Patient, at times, felt impelled to quiz me on my sex life.
“How many girlfriends have you had?”
“Three.” This is a lie. I’ve had one girlfriend. Technically, I’m a virgin.
Patient nods her head, doesn’t challenge me.
“I was busy,” I say, “with school.” I sit more upright; cough into my fist. I compose my facial features, hoping to express virility. “I’m the youngest doctor in the history of the hospital.”
“You’ve done very well for yourself,” she says.
She claims to have rarely experienced orgasms in connection with intercourse, instead relying on masturbation for gratification. Describing her current masturbation practice: “I use my fingers to arouse desire and an irresistible urge comes along with it, originating inside, something like an itching sensation that longs for touch and friction — moist and slightly open. When this urge comes, I press harder, until I can hardly stand it. Afterwards, it throbs and pulsates, decreasing to calmness.”
Her experimentations began at age eight or nine, by using a pillow to “rub against” at night, before falling asleep. “I thought I was very sinful and ugly and that if my parents ever found out, they’d disown me, maybe even kill me. I felt so guilty and ashamed, but even though I suffered, I continued. At night, with the lights off, I wanted to feel that pleasure again.”
Despite hearing that masturbation led to such problems as insanity and an extended, deformed vagina, she also experimented with a toothbrush handle, a Popsicle stick, and the eraser side of a pencil — but she soon realized that “nothing works quite as well as my fingers.” (Statement made while looking directly at me.)
“I used to think I would go blind,” I say.
Patient laughs, not unkindly.
Side note: I am now faced with the indelicate, discouraging, and distasteful task of admission. I lied. I lied to patient, invented a story about the loss of my virginity. In retrospect, I was discouraged by her sexual knowledge and wanted to appear more seasoned.
As I told her, she fiddled with the chain on Uncle Lou’s wristwatch. Reality and fantasy merged — there was a maid, Hannah, and she did let me in her small bed when my parents were out late, which was often, because my father’s political career was on the rise and they had many nighttime engagements.
Hannah insisted we keep it a secret — but she didn’t have to convince me. As a secret, it became more valuable. The thrill of running back to my bedroom when we heard the stirrings of my parents coming home—once as close as a key turning in the lock of the front door — “Go, go, go!” Hannah would say.
Can you blame Hannah? I was young and scared and lonely. She was my savior.
She was not young, my Hannah, having been widowed in her late thirties, and come to work for us a few years after that, no children of her own — but she was small breasted and thin, so that she seemed young, like a boy almost, with curly dark hair and a mischievous face.
She smelled of milk and bread and all things from my childhood; and I would press against her in her bed, and she would let me, as if it were a game, and it was a game — a cuddling game.
But then I got older, and my pressing became more fervent. And when she felt my hardness against the back of her, she said, “Oh, my! You are getting to be a big boy, aren’t you?”
And about the sixth or seventh time it happened, she reached behind her with her hand and touched between my legs, stroked me — the weight of her fingers against the flannel of my pajama bottoms.
It was almost a curious gesture, as if she were checking to see how tall I had become, or looking inside my ear to decide whether the wax needed to be cleaned, but the feel of my pajama material lightly scratching against the skin — well, it was too much.
Within seconds, I had an eruption, and she must have felt it against her, because she sat up, a little startled. She took a cloth rag, and patted it against the side of my damp pajama leg.
“Don’t worry,” she said, probably because my face was hot with shame.
Tears squeezed from my eyes, hysteria built inside my chest. No one had warned me about emissions, and I was frightened.
“No,” Hannah said, gently admonishing me. “No, honey, no.”
She’d never called me honey before, and I quieted, wiped my tears with my palm.
“It’s natural,” she said. “Don’t cry, honey. You’re a big boy, and someday you’ll be a man.”
Hannah continued to allow me in her bed after that, but never again did we play the cuddling game, and never again did she touch my groin, though it did continue to get hard, and I wanted her to touch me there, and I believe she was lonely and wanted to as well.
And then a year or so later, Hannah left our family to live with a cousin, but it wasn’t because of me. Her cousin’s wife had passed away, and he needed Hannah to take care of his house and children.
In my telling version, Hannah is young, with a fiancé waiting for her, not a cousin, and she has apple-sized breasts and long straight hair; and she is lonely for her intended who lives far away; and she is sexually vibrant.
She teaches me about women, in the privacy of her bedroom, and the final lesson (intercourse — penetration) is repeated several times.
And then she leaves our home to be married.
This mirage of Hannah I had created for my private fantasy life, and the telling of it to the patient has since diminished its erotic powers.
Whether patient believed my story, she did me the service of listening with a mask of credulity.
My one relationship with a woman lasted three weeks; during that time, we adjusted ourselves to various modes of experimentation on a couch in the living room (I could never convince her to enter my bedroom).
She talked endlessly of the benefits of marriage: the sexual freedom, the shared spiritual and moral values, the regular meals and domestic rewards.
She was the daughter of a physician, and I would watch as she and her father played competitive games of chess; I was somewhat terrified of her, imagining her bringing those ruthless intellectual skills to matrimony.
In the heat of rock and grind on that couch, fully clothed, I might have easily proposed marriage, just for the removal of her undergarments, but she broke up with me before I had that chance.
Side note: Patient and I met in a window-less room with oatmeal-colored walls and a garish painting of a lighthouse, disturbingly large pelicans flying near purple-tinged water, signed in a yellow cursive by a Ms. Olga B. Johnson, a former patient with a diagnosis of severe depression, brought on, most likely, by her husband leaving her for his young secretary.
At the corner of the room was a fake fichus tree, plastic leaves coated with a light dust, in a wicker basket planter.
We often joked about this fake fichus — Violeta asking if I’d remembered to water it, and me replying, “Perhaps.”
It became a regular occurrence.
Violeta always chose the same position: sitting in a plastic chair, a few feet extended from oval-shaped table, her back to the painting. She wore a pastel blue jumpsuit assigned to female patients. Slight, pale brown birthmark at neck, near hollow of throat, in shape of swan. She managed to make jumpsuit her own by folding sleeves at three-quarter length and pants below her knees. After inquiry, I was informed that what I smelled was a perfume called L’air Du Temps.
As soon as she sat, she took off her slippers (“I prefer being barefoot. Don’t you?”), and throughout our conversations, she leaned forward and stared at me. Left eye slightly elevated above right, centimeter-sized scar at arch of eyebrow (she doesn’t remember how she got it).
She sat with legs crossed, switching up every fifteen minutes or so.
Twice she assumed a masculine posture, legs parted, taking up space (the first, taking offense at the standard question of whether she’d been dropped on her head as a baby; the second, during aggressive questioning by patient regarding my own rather uneventful sex life).
She had a marked sense of humor, but even when she laughed, she appeared sad (wounded eyes, as noted earlier).
Careful not to have physical contact with patient, I was decidedly unsuccessful, unprofessional: I held her hand across the table four times (her fingers were cold, she made no effort to remove my hand), and once I brushed hair from her face (a strand was caught between her eyelashes).
We watched movies in the recreation room, sitting side by side in foldout chairs, close enough so that our thighs sporadically touched. Singin’ in the Rain, The Searchers, Some Like it Hot. The movie reel spun and clanged and the other patients often slept and snored. But we stayed awake, and occasionally, during a funny scene, she would look at me, share it with me, and laugh — a naked, full laugh.
Once, I placed my right hand beside her and left it there, hoping she might put hers in mine. Then I felt ashamed, and removed it.
“You think you understand me,” she says, “but you don’t.”
“I want to understand,” I say.
“I’m too much for you,” she says. “Too much for anyone.”
“I’m the doctor,” I say.
“I’m like water pouring too fast into a glass.”
“What do you mean?”
“The water goes so fast, you have to pull the glass away; and in the end, the glass holds less water than it can contain.”
Sometimes our conversations held a light-hearted quality — possibly as a natural escape from intensity of psychoanalysis.
We spoke of books and movies and other things, even of our childhoods, but in a carefree way.
We hummed songs, tried to remember lyrics. Her favorite song was “Stardust” and once, she sang part of the lyrics in an endearingly shaky voice, eyes downcast:
And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart.
High up in the sky the little stars climb,
Always reminding me that we’re apart.
Her intelligence and sensitivity were markedly superior. On one occasion, patient made observation regarding my appearance.
“You’re funny looking,” she says, fingering an earlobe.
“Thanks.”
She laughs, not unkindly.
“It’s the glasses,” I say.
More laughter.
“My haircut.”
Shakes her head, laughter.
“My nose.”
“You’re sweet,” she says.
Summary and Conclusion
Doctor Robert H. Lockney, on witnessing my despair, noted (off the record): “Every one of us has a case like this — that one case, that one woman, that gets to you. Maybe we think we’re in love. But it passes. And you go on, and your career goes on.”
Violeta was not incapable of sound reasoning — a woman of considerable intelligence and sensitivity. Alcohol alone furnishes insufficient explanation for such a lack of common sense.
“I need it,” she says. “I need it badly.”
A natural transference did not take place; she could not freely submit to me; therefore she couldn’t master her symptoms, which led to a further repression of her true feelings.
I am filled with confusion. Something of her hovers in the air—her presence lingers. Her disappearance strikes me as a violation, almost a breach of faith. However much I analyze this situation — to figure me out, to figure Violeta out — I have within me a vast chaos.
The trouble with my longing is that it gives me the habit of nonproductive long bouts of brooding.
Certain things I remember, but others things are discolored by my needs. Most of the details are already rearranging and transforming to suit me. What is counterfeit and what is real?
But there are certain details that hold fast, that won’t let me alter them, insistent.
As noted in my preliminary statement, Violeta’s final meeting included a “vitriolic attack” but on further consideration, it was more of a plaintive, philosophical speech.
“All I want,” she says, “is to be left alone. You’re keeping me here because you think you can control me. I already know all the reasons why I drink but it doesn’t stop me. I’m very self-aware, and it’s done nothing. I’m only going to let you down. You know nothing. Nothing! Looking at me with those eyes, thinking you’re helping. You’re only making me feel worse. Leave me alone!”
It was at this point that I noticed she wasn’t wearing Uncle Lou’s wristwatch but I was too distressed to ask why. I’m not sure what I said, caught in the adrenaline. I simply can’t remember.
In desperation, an offer of a possible future matrimony was made. (This information was not presented to my superiors, nor was it requested.)
“You can get better,” I say. “We could be happy.”
Did I mean it? Was it a last effort? Even now, my heart races at the opportunity, a sweat breaks at my temples. A flush of shame. By marrying me, could patient not thereby solve her alcoholic problem? Could she escape the binds of a society that offered her no solution? Could I recognize her, put an end to her search? Could she recognize me? To which patient exclaims, rightfully so, “Are you crazy?”
“But I love you,” I say. (I remember this part.)
No answer. Long pause.
“You’re lonely,” she says. “You need a girlfriend.”
“Maybe,” I concede. “Maybe.”
“I don’t love you,” she says, looking straight at me — cold, coldness.
And I believed her. A shameful relief passed through me, even as my throat constricted.
But later, after she disappeared, I found Uncle Lou’s wristwatch dangling off a branch in the fichus tree, where I wouldn’t miss it.
