Crescent Street, Northampton, Massachusetts
One Sunday in spring 1977, I met the Crescent Street residents for the first time. Most of them had gathered in the living room, but two voices drifted in from the kitchen.
“Okay, potatoes, get in the oven.” The first was an actorly speaker, deep and stern.
“No, no!” came a high-pitched squeal in return.
Someone in the kitchen, unseen, was playing make-believe.
“Yep, time to roast you,” the deep voice said.
“No, no, no!” squealed the potato collective.
The drama went back and forth, several rounds. Deep voice against hapless potatoes. I walked across the living room, through the dining room with its long table set for ten, to turn the corner into the kitchen where I found Robert Rhodes. Bob.
I believe he was expecting me. He picked up a potato piece and with a mischievous smile, said, “These little ‘tatoes do not want to go in the oven!” His own voice was neither deep and actorly nor squealy like the potatoes. It was a warm, craggy sound, the kind you get with old men and lifelong smokers. And no, this photo was not taken on the occasion of our first meeting, but another Sunday several months after I moved into the house. A believer not so much in God but in the tradition of a Sunday roast, Bob claimed Sunday as his slot on the cooking rota, serving chicken every week. And he loved to be photographed.
He was a master of the everyday. By which I mean he had an understanding that the ‘everydayness’ of a photograph is often what gives it a resting pulse, a sense of being, a slowed clock, biographical traces. Chopping potatoes, smoking a cigarette on the front porch at Crescent Street, holding up a bar of soap just purchased: these were the photographs of himself that Bob liked.
Bob always bought Irish Spring soap. In this photograph, he is celebrating both his favorite soap bar and the planful purchase of it. He lived on a small allowance provided by state benefits and would have saved carefully for the soap pictured here, marking every aspect of its purchase. Walking into town, counting the change on the shop counter, carrying the soap bar back up to the house — these were rituals. To record them in photographs offered Bob a visual archive of his presence in the world, one that had long been denied him. For more than two decades, there were no photographs of Bob; there were only psychiatric case notes and medication logs. Photography and Bob became great friends during my time at Crescent Street. I can recall only one photograph that, immediately upon printing it, I regretted. But that is for later.
I moved into the group home on Crescent Street in summer 1977. There, with my dear co-workers, Michael Tillyer and Ricardo, I would be employed as a live-in mental health support worker for the next two years. Bob was one of several residents who came from Northampton State Hospital. His dates are not certain, but I can give the following approximation: Bob was born in 1929, the year the stock market crashed; he was committed to Northampton State at the age of 23 in 1952. He was one of some 2000 patients that year. It also happened to be the year the anti-psychotic drug, Thorazine, was introduced. Bob would remain there for the next 23 years of his life, on various Thorazine cocktails, as the hospital population grew to 2500 patients, the highest recorded number in its history. Following the passage of the Northampton Decree (also known as the Brewster Consent Decree) in 1978, the hospital saw a gradual reduction in its numbers over the next fourteen years until its closure in 1993.
(For a brief, illustrated history of Northampton State Hospital, see Northampton State Hospital — For Posterity. This includes a useful account of the Brewster Decree and the history of ‘dehospitalization’. Some readers may also recall Northampton State for its association with Sylvia Plath, who attended Smith College in Northampton. In a 1952 letter, Plath wrote, “We changed then, for the cocktail party, and walked over to the professor’s house. On the way we decided to keep on walking for a while longer, and so we walked up to the mental hospital, among the buildings, listening to the people screaming. It was a most terrifying, holy experience, with the sun setting red and cold over the black hills, and the inhuman, echoing howls coming from the barred windows.” See J. Michael Moore & Anna Schuleit Haber, Northampton State Hospital, Arcadia Publishing, 2014.)
Bob was released to Crescent Street in 1975, just ahead of the Brewster Decree, making him one of the first long-stay patients to leave. He once told me that at first, he wanted only to go back. He said he walked to the hospital every day and begged to be let back in. Every day, they said no. Finally, he resolved to “end it all” and throw himself into the Mill River. “But Amy,” he said plaintively, “The water only came up to my ankles. So, I walked back to Crescent Street. My shoes and socks were wet through and my feet got cold. After that, I didn’t go back up to State no more.”
Bob loved numbers and 23 recurs again. I was 23 when I met Bob; his age at the time he was committed. Nearly all the years of my life up to that point, he had spent on a locked ward. How naïve I was upon my arrival at Crescent Street. I really knew nothing. I couldn’t hope to grasp what he had been through up there, the courage it took to live on the outside, or the disturbances in his mind. I could only listen, back him in his battles where possible, and value his company. But Bob was a forgiving soul most of the time. Not all the time, but most of the time.
Bob possessed only two photographs from his life before Northampton State and Crescent Street. His mother had written on the back of them:
At some later date that I cannot recall, Bob gave me the two pictures and asked me to keep them safe. He did not ask to see them again or have them returned. I still have them. He never spoke of the hurtful lines written by his mother, but clearly, he intended the photos to be preserved. Bob knew he was prone to regular purges during which he destroyed his possessions, methodically taking scissors to his papers, pictures, magazines, and clothes before bagging them up for trash collection. At such times, Bob was not forgiving. But mostly, it was himself he could not forgive. During the purge periods, he became darkly angry, despairing, and delusional. He said his father lived in his stomach and had ordered the purge. Bob, his dead father told him at such times, was worthless. He was not a worker; not a soldier. Bob was nothing.
In between purges, the ghost of his father retreated. Bob replenished his soap, tobacco, a jar of instant coffee, and other sundries. We helped him replace lost socks, underwear, shirts, and trousers. He saved his pennies — or Ham Lincolns — as he called our smallest denomination — and always knew exactly how many he possessed at any given time.
Money was a nagging thing for Bob: having it, counting it, not having it, resenting not having it, disrespected by the boss who had underpaid him during his few years of working life, distrustful of all bosses (had things gone better for him, Bob might have made a great union organizer), feeling worthless on account of not earning it, drawing pictures of it, making pretend money because he could not get hold of the real thing.
When he had saved enough (real) change, Bob strolled to Lizotte’s, the tobacco shop, or Dunkin Donuts. To see Bob walking past the old wood-framed houses of Northampton as he headed downtown was to follow the footsteps of a long-tall, skinny tree. Bowed, broken here and there, but still going. He was not yet 60, yet he seemed an old man. Old like the line in a Dylan song: “I’ve heard newborn babies wailing like a mournin’ dove. And old men with broken teeth stranded without love.” Old, like those Massachusetts houses he passed. But tenacious too, like the trees and houses. Sometimes I had the feeling Bob had been there before the trees and houses, and that he always would be. The people who worked in Bob’s favorite shops knew him by name. He was a regular for two decades. At Lizotte’s, where the interior suggested something out of Bob’s own memory box, they kept his chosen tobacco and rolling papers.
If particularly flush, Bob might purchase a mechanical rolling device at Lizotte’s. Rows of neatly rolled cigarettes would soon appear on the little desk in his room, each one counted and recorded on a pad of paper, and assigned a value in Ham Lincolns. If the rolling device and notepad were destroyed during a purge, they would eventually be replaced in better times. These were reliable cycles in Bob’s life when I knew him.
There were long, happier periods in between purges. Bob was warm, funny, clever, flirtatious at times. He cast a spell on me at that first meeting over the potatoes, and the magic never lifted. I loved nothing more than to join him for coffee at Dunkin Donuts or treat him to a glass of red wine at Packard’s, a trendy drinking spot downtown Northampton. Bob took the local hipsters in stride, left them in a blur beyond our booth in Packard’s, told his life stories and his wisdom — over a glass of red wine — or dark wine, as Bob preferred to call it.
Warmed by wine, his reminiscences came effortlessly, some bright, some dark, some that seemed delusional. Stories about money, Rugg Manufacturing (maker of rakes and shovels, founded in 1842) in Greenfield, Massachusetts — the site of Bob’s only job before his detention in Northampton State. A girl named Barbara Ann Couture. Barbara was important — perhaps the only girlfriend in Bob’s younger life. I was certain that she was real, but his key memories of her seemed less reliable. Bob told me she had been struck and killed by lightning in 1952 and that there had also been a fire at the Rugg factory. I was never able to verify these accounts of his early years in Greenfield. I found that he was indeed employed by Rugg in 1948, but there is no history of a fire or catastrophic lightning strike that I can locate in that period.[1] Long after Bob died, I did find an obituary for Barbara Couture who lived to old age.[2]
Most of our conversations eventually got round to Bob’s favorite film, High Noon. As Marshal Will Kane, “a man who was too proud to run” (the film promotion claimed), Gary Cooper was Bob’s hero, his model of honorable masculinity. It is easy to see why Cooper’s character and performance would have appealed to Bob. Marshal Kane was the man he had wanted to be. I think many people have a film or two that pricks us, rouses some old regret about things that might have been, ways we might have lived but somehow never managed to achieve. High Noon was that film for Bob. To this day, I can hear him singing Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darling, the film’s theme song (also known as The Ballad of High Noon). His singing voice was raspy but almost as strong as Tex Ritter’s, and Bob knew all the words, giving each line greater fervor than the one before:
In 1979, Ricardo and I left the job at Crescent Street and moved to an apartment across town. We were finishing our studies and beginning to make other plans. I promised Bob I would keep in contact, but he was angry with me. Sometimes, he refused to meet me; other times, he would accept an invitation to coffee but refuse to speak. It was during this period that I took the one photo I instantly regretted. Bob was sullen and withdrawn that day, ill-tempered with me, yet he did not object to the photo. When I showed it to him later, during better times between us, he was unperturbed. He laughed a little and said, “Don’t worry, Amy. I was mad at you that day. I’m not mad no more.” So the photo entered our story and I share it here in the belief that Bob — accepting of his dark days — would approve:
Bob’s anger finally broke when I talked him into a glass of wine at Packard’s. Initially silent and unresponsive to my attempts at conversation, he finally interrupted me to ask, “Why did you move out, Amy? Didn’t you like us no more?” To ask it, and to have it answered, was a cloud lifted. Things eased further as I maintained contact, arranging to meet him often. And so, we became good friends, independent of the constraints of the job at Crescent Street. Just two people, an old guy and a young person who happened to know him, who lived across town, and enjoyed his company.
About a decade later, Ricardo and I decided to move back to the UK. Bob took the news well, as though he had always expected it. He shrugged his shoulders and said little. He asked if, before leaving, we would drive him up to Greenfield and take photographs of his important places and old haunts. We found his childhood house and school, Rugg Manufacturing, Main Street shops, and numerous other locations. These would be my last photos of Bob. And with Bob. He was pleased with all of them.
The last time I saw him, Bob said goodbye quickly and impassively. The only tears were mine. I was in the early months of pregnancy and told him that day. He said I would have a girl and should name her Tara. After Isaac was born, I phoned Bob from London to tell him. Upon learning the baby was a boy, there was a long pause. I held the phone and waited. Finally, and craggily as ever, he said, “Are ya’ sure?”
Over the years, Bob sent many letters to England. Some — I could tell — were written during disturbed and unhappy times. The old purge demons had reappeared. His father, the Rugg factory, Barbara Couture, lightning strikes. But mostly, the letters were generous reminiscences of our friendship. Occasionally, he told film stories, High Noon or The Wizard of Oz.
Finally, the letters stopped coming and I stopped replying. Bob had died.
But here, if he were looking over my shoulder now, is the photo he would love most:
Michael, Ricardo, and I had taken the Crescent Street residents camping on Cape Cod. Bob surprised us all that week, rising first each morning, putting on his camping hat, making a fire, brewing coffee, conversing. We had never seen him so competent, confident, and at ease with himself. All of himself. I think Gary Cooper — in that old cowboy film Bob loved — would have recognized a kindred spirit. The bravest and kindest of men.
[1] The original Rugg factory burned down in 1889. Though long before his time, Bob may well have known of this history and brought it into his own.
