Evan Hunter: The Moment She Was Gone

The cops tossed Annie into a cell, and locked the door, and kept her there until nine the next morning, when the local magistrate came to work, at which time they informed him that they had a crazy American here who was threatening to kill herself. My sister repeated the entire story to the magistrate, who listened carefully, especially when she told him she would kill herself if he did not immediately issue an arrest warrant for the seven men who had accosted her. Instead, the magistrate had her remanded to the nearest hospital, a place named Ospedale Santa Chiara, perched on a mountaintop overlooking the verdant plains.

A man named Gianfreddo Mazzoni called my mother from Naples to say that her daughter had been confined to “a mental hospital” in Sicily, and then asked at once if Annie’s father was really a famous painter. Apparently, the people at Santa Chiara were used to patients claiming their fathers were Pablo Picasso, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Prince Albert, or even Jesus Christ. My mother informed Mr. Mazzoni that she and Mr. Gulliver had been divorced for thirty-one years now (but who was counting), however, yes, he was rather well-known in art circles. “If that’s why you’ve put my daughter in a mental hospital...” she started to say, but Mazzoni informed her at once that Annie had been admitted in a violent state and had been medicated and restrained, and did someone want to come to Italy to arrange for her release and transportation home?

Annie had indeed been restrained and medicated. She reported this to me on the phone after I got past a multitude of Sicilians who could not speak English, and then a social worker whose English was faulty at best, and at last got through to Annie herself, who seemed bemused by it all and who insisted there was no need for me to travel all the way from America, she was learning a lot of Italian songs, everyone was being very nice to her, everyone liked her a lot, everyone smiled at her all the time.

On the phone, Annie told me the hospital had a small mental ward, to which she’d been transferred on her second day there, after she refused medication and was put in a strait jacket. That was when Mama found out she’d been hospitalized. Before then, it was all a lark to Annie. The hospital was crowded and so they put her on a wheeled bed in the corridor outside the maternity ward. She could see women coming in bloated with pregnancy and leaving days later with babies in their arms. The women taught her Italian songs. She could walk down the hall and look in at the newborn babies row on row, “like pink flowers in a garden,” she told me. She felt safe here. Her little ruse had worked. “I never intended killing myself,” she told me on the phone. “That was a trick to get away from the guys who were chasing me. I knew if I threatened suicide, they’d send me to a hospital.” She did not tell me why they thought she’d needed medication — which, of course, she’d refused — or why, if she was so calm and serene and singing Italian songs and looking in at little pink-faced Italian babies, they’d felt compelled to move her to the mental ward, in a strait jacket, no less. But the situation must have suddenly stopped looking like The Wizard of Oz along about then, must have seemed threatening enough, in fact (“One of the orderlies began fondling me while I was tied to the bed”), for her to have requested a telephone call to the American Consulate in Naples.

The medication they’d given her was Risperdal.

“This is the brand name for risperidone,” Bertuzzi tells me. “It is an antipsychotic agent used for the management of acute psychotic episodes and accompanying violent behavior in patients with schizophrenia.”

This is the first time he has mentioned the word “schizophrenia.” We are sitting in his office at the hospital, a high-ceilinged room in what once used to be a nunnery, huge windows overlooking the green hills beyond. It is a beautiful day at the end of June, but the good doctor is telling me my sister is psychotic. He sits behind a large oaken desk strewn with case folders. He sports a gray Vandyke beard that matches the color of his wrinkled linen suit. His English is accented, but impeccable. His eyes are so brown they appear black. He never smiles. I notice he never smiles. He is obviously not kidding when he tells me he knows for sure my sister is nuts.

“That is to say, she hears voices,” he tells me. “Which means she’s hallucinatory. And yes, she’s delusional, as well, in that she believes the FBI is following her around in blue windbreakers that have the letters FBI printed on them in bright yellow.”

I look at him.

But I say nothing.

“In the literature,” he says, “delusions and hallucinations are called Criterion-A symptoms, and only one of them is required for a diagnosis of schizophrenia if the delusions are bizarre. Or if the hallucinations consist of a single voice keeping up a running commentary on the person’s behavior. Or if two or more voices are conversing with each other.”

“I don’t know why you think my sister is hearing...”

“It would be comforting to think of her as suffering from a mere delusional disorder,” he says, blithely unaware that I am listening to his talk of voices in total disbelief, “rather than a serious mental illness like schizophrenia, except for the fact that two of the A criteria for schizophrenia have been met, and her delusions are not simple non-bizarre delusions like being followed, or poisoned, or infected...”

“Any of your everyday, garden-variety delusions,” I say, but he does not smile.

“Your sister’s delusions involve full scale investigations by the FBI, whose agents follow her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She thinks it’s because she once had a roommate who was a translator for the UN. Has she never mentioned...?”

“Dr. Bertuzzi, I think you’re making a terrible mistake here. I don’t know what sort of medication you’ve been giving her...”

“I told you. Risperdal.”

“Well, it seems to have inspired...”

“On the contrary, it has subdued the voices for the time being. I know it would be more comfortable to accept a less significant diagnosis like paranoid personality disorder,” he says, “but the literature specifically states that paranoid personality disorder must be ruled out as a diagnosis if the pattern of behavior — persistent delusions and hallucinations — occurs exclusively during the course of schizophrenia, which is most certainly the case here.”

“Thank you, Doctor, but I hope you won’t mind if I ask for a second opinion, hmm?”

“Yes, I would in fact suggest you do that as soon as you get back to America. The injection we gave her should wear off relatively soon, but I’ll prescribe medication that should keep your sister stable for a month or so. However, Mr. Gulliver, believe me, è rotto,” he says, suddenly reverting to his native Italian. “Her brain, do you understand? È rotto. Her brain is broken.”

My sister has been in trouble since she was sixteen, I can’t pretend she hasn’t. In fact, from the first time she ran off to Europe alone, Annie has been the star of our little family show. A day does not go by without our discussing Annie’s whereabouts, or her well-being, or her finances. Not a single day. Annie has been the central concern in our lives for the past eternity now. Or perhaps longer.

But before Sicily, no one ever told us she was mentally ill.

So now the family gathers in the empty hours of the night, and wonders what on earth we are to do.

July 5, 2002

Andy: I know I promised you and Mom that I’d join you for the big sit-down today, but something’s come up, and I’m afraid I’ll have to bow out. In fact, I’ll be leaving for New Orleans almost as soon as I fire off this e-mail; a car to the airport is picking me up at eleven. Sorry for the late notice, but this just came up late yesterday afternoon.