On an early summer night in 1944, on the wooded shoulder of a rural Massachusetts highway, a man in a rumpled brown suit wandered in the shadows. Whenever a car passed, he dropped to the ground and lay flat. His hair was matted, his face smeared with mud. He was a respectable Boston doctor on the lam, hungry, lost and ill.
He was Mimi Baird’s father, Dr. Perry Baird, a Texas-born, Harvard-trained physician whose severe bipolar disease ultimately destroyed his life and scarred his family with the usual wide-ranging cruelties of mental illness.
Dr. Baird vanished from Ms. Baird’s life when she was a little girl. She saw him once, briefly, when she was a teenager, then never again. He died in his mid-50s, in 1959. More than 30 years later, when Ms. Baird herself was in her 50s, a large package arrived on her doorstep and her father re-entered her world.
The box contained a manuscript long forgotten in a relative’s garage, written in smudged pencil on onionskin paper, a memoir her father had composed of five terrible months in his life. The story began the very day Dr. Baird said goodbye to 5-year-old Mimi and her sister, and permanently left the household.
Stunned and bereft all over again, Ms. Baird then spent two decades chasing down the rest of the story, talking to neighbors, colleagues and relatives about long-ago events and obtaining her father’s medical records. Now in her late 70s, a retired medical administrator, she has, with the help of a co-author, woven all this material into “He Wanted the Moon,” an extraordinary Möbius strip of a book. (Read an excerpt.)
Its core is the full text of her father’s manuscript, deftly annotated and explained. Around it she layers the voices of caretakers, friends, relatives and medical authorities. Events are revisited and reframed, turned inside out, then right side up again. The book is autobiography, biography, science, history and literature all in one, as instructive as any textbook and utterly impossible to put down.
Dr. Baird’s bipolar disease followed a common arc. He was a high-energy child, a stellar, indefatigable student, a charismatic doctor just finishing his postgraduate training when psychosis struck at age 29. From then until his death, things went downhill at an unsteady, stuttering pace. Dr. Baird had periods of stability during which he married and did some good medical work, but delusions and increasingly bizarre, sometimes violent behavior always intervened. He lost his medical license and was hospitalized repeatedly, never to any lasting effect.
All the barbaric psychiatric treatments of the time were summoned to help him: canvas straitjackets, cocoons of ice-cold wet sheets used to calm agitated patients, shock treatments, insulin injections and frontal lobotomy. None worked.
Among his friends and family, silence and denial reigned. No one explained her father’s disappearance to little Mimi. Even when Ms. Baird was an adult, her mother refused to discuss him. Many of her father’s medical colleagues seemed to believe he could settle down if he just put his mind to it. One of the research projects Dr. Baird managed to complete provided some of the first scientific evidence that mania results from aberrant brain chemistry rather than imperfect self-control.
The text of Dr. Baird’s manuscript is haunting. The tone is one a suspense writer might struggle to sustain: The most unreliable of narrators, Dr. Baird is objective, charming, humorous, then suddenly just a little off, and then flat-out gone, leaving an irrational stranger in his place. The reader can almost watch the circuits in his brain surge and dim just as, Ms. Baird reports, the handwriting in the manuscript morphed from disciplined to disorderly and back again.
He describes a happily manic morning in the Boston Public Garden: “I ran short distances and leapt wildly over the broad flower beds. I felt wonderful but restless, feverishly overactive, impatient.” He joyously took a taxi to the suburbs, where he saw a herd of deer: “I wondered if I could run as fast as a deer and if I could catch one.” (He couldn’t.)
As he became sicker, he saw signs and portents everywhere. The women among his fellow patients seemed to be signaling him by adjusting their bracelets and rotating their rings. The pool table in the hospital lounge held hidden messages: “Could the green pool ball mean the wealthy class, the blue ball the aristocrats and the red ball, communistic?” The lawn was fraught with meaning: “Two red chickens out in front. Danger danger danger.”
Dr. Baird escaped from one hospital, was retrieved, then in short order escaped from another one, spending that summer night of anxious freedom wandering in circles along local roads. After a kind stranger helped him, he actually managed to get himself by train and plane from Massachusetts all the way to his parents’ home in Dallas before the mania cycled back to despair.
“I curse the stupid course that my trail has followed,” he wrote, exhausted. “I cannot feel the meaning of it. I am lost.”
Yet through all the highs and lows that followed over the years, he worked diligently on his manuscript, convinced of its worth. He wrote to a friend: “I have written a very readable book.”
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