Deviant (3 page)

2

SILVANO ARIETI,
Interpretation of Schizophrenia

“
Although it is the mother who contributes mostly in producing the conditions which we are going to describe, we usually find in the history of schizophrenics that both parents have failed the child, often for different reasons. Frequently the combination is as follows: A domineering, nagging, and hostile mother, who gives the child no chance to assert himself, is married to a dependent, weak man, too weak to help the child. A father who dares not protect the child … because he is not able to oppose her strong personality is just as crippling to the child as the mother is
. ”

F
rom the very beginning, it was a family that fate seemed to have singled out for tragedy.

The first struck in 1879, the kind of calamity that can blight a man’s life, poison his future, and, indeed, leave its ruinous mark on the destiny of his children.

At the time, George Gein’s family was living on a farm in Coon Valley, Wisconsin, about fifteen miles outside of La Crosse. One overcast morning, George’s mother, father, and older sister climbed into the buckboard and set off for town on an errand.

They never returned.

The Mississippi River was at high water, and the wagon was caught in a flash flood. The elder Gein, his wife, and his firstborn child drowned in the dark, bitter torrent, and George was left orphaned and alone. He was three years old.

His maternal grandparents, stern, Scottish immigrants who lived on a nearby farm, took him into their home. There are few available details about this or any other stage of George Gein’s life. He was, after all, just an obscure Midwestern provincial, unluckier than most, whom history has no reason at all to remember, except as the father of an authentic American monster. Indeed, the most notable fact about George Gein’s life is how utterly insignificant, how much of a nonentity, he appeared to be, even (perhaps especially) in the eyes of the family he later established.

Following his elementary-school education, George Gein apprenticed himself to a local blacksmith. He spent several years laboring over the anvil and forge. And then one day during his early twenties, he left his grandparents’ farm for good and, like so many country people before and after him, headed off for the nearest city.

Within a short time of his arrival in La Crosse, he seems to have established a pattern of drifting from one occupation to another. He sold insurance for a while, tried his hand at carpentry, and worked in a tannery, at the city power plant, and on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. Perhaps his difficulty in holding down a job had something to do with his growing attachment to the bottle. Increasingly, George would repair to a saloon after work and drink up much of his pay. Red-eyed and befuddled, he would sink into black moods of anger and self-pity, brooding on the rotten hand life had dealt him. The world was against him. He’d been made into an orphan when he was just a baby and brought up in a grim and loveless home. It was enough to make a man lose faith in the goodness of God. At other times, he would lapse into bitter self-recrimination. His misfortunes were his own fault. He would never amount to anything. He was worthless, incompetent, a complete and hopeless failure—as a worker, a provider, and a man.

Given the genuine hardships he’d had to deal with from the time he was a toddler, most people would have regarded George Gein’s low opinion of himself as far too harsh a judgment. But in this respect—as in so many others—George Gein’s wife was not like most people.

Her name was Augusta, and she came from a large and industrious family whose dour, demanding patriarch had emigrated from Germany in 1870 and settled in La Crosse. George Gein was twenty-four when he met her; Augusta was nineteen. Even then, she was a person to be reckoned with—a thickset, buxom woman with a broad, coarse-featured face permanently fixed in a look of fierce determination and complete self-assurance. Devoutly—even fanatically—religious, she had been brought up to obey a rigid code of conduct, which her father had not hesitated to reinforce with regular beatings. Augusta was continuously outraged by the flagrant immorality of the modern world. Wherever she looked, she saw a looseness of behavior that seemed shockingly, sinfully at variance with the strict Old World values of her household. Life, she knew, was serious business—a matter of endless hard work, unwavering thrift, and extreme self-denial.

She was, in the end, her father’s daughter—a stern disciplinarian, self-righteous, domineering, and inflexible, who never doubted for a moment the absolute correctness of her beliefs or her right to impose them, by whatever means possible, on the people around her.

What she and George saw in each other is mostly a matter of conjecture. George would have been marrying into a large and, in many ways, close-knit family. Augusta had half a dozen siblings at home, with other relatives living nearby, including a cousin named Fred who was a coworker of George’s at the David, Medary & Platz Tannery. To a man who had been bereft of his own family at such an early age, there must have been something powerfully appealing about becoming a member of so sizable a clan. And George could hardly have helped being impressed by Augusta’s imposing personality, her formidable energies, and her evident capabilities in practical affairs.

For her part, Augusta, who had never been besieged by suitors, may well have been taken by George’s prepossessing appearance. He was a strong, straight man with a reserved, even dignified, manner. Indeed, later in life, his neighbors would take him for a retired minister. And, like Augusta, he was a practicing Lutheran (though of a decidedly less fervid stripe). From his rather formal bearing and quiet behavior, she would have had no way of knowing about his growing alcoholism or about those deeper, unhealed wounds that would increasingly incapacitate him. Or perhaps his fundamental weaknesses were, in fact, evident to her and only served to make him more attractive. From all accounts, she was a woman who may well have preferred the kind of husband she could bend easily to her own will.

They were wed on December 4, 1899. Like almost everything else in the lives of these ill-fated people, their marriage, from all available evidence, had the quality of a particularly lacerating nightmare.

In charge of her own household and joined to a man of feckless and increasingly unreliable character, Augusta quickly assumed the role of domestic tyrant. Her own deformities of character—her harshness, rigidity, and fierce intolerance—became ever more pronounced. Her husband was worthless, good for nothing. She sneered at him openly, called him a lazy dog and worse. In spite of his broad back and blacksmith’s muscles, he was a weakling, afraid of hard work. It was she who possessed all the strength. He had no spirit, no ambition. Worst of all, he could not seem to hold on to a job. And when she discovered, as she quickly did, how much of his meager earnings disappeared inside the local taverns, her fury—inflamed even more by her religious beliefs—was immeasurable. Her husband became an object unworthy of even her contempt.

George responded to his wife’s undisguised hatred by withdrawing more deeply into himself. He refused to speak. When Augusta was not ordering him about or deriding his inadequacies, a poisonous silence prevailed in their house. Occasionally, however, after returning from the tavern and being greeted with an especially vicious tongue-lashing, he would lose control and flail out at Augusta’s face, hitting her open-handed again and again. Augusta would sink to the floor, wailing and shouting insults. Afterward, she would draw herself to her knees and pray fervently for her husband’s death.

Perhaps, she thought, a child would comfort her in her trials, even serve as an ally in her struggles with George. About sexual matters, Augusta’s views were characteristically extreme. Sex unsanctified by marriage was an unpardonable sin, an abomination. Between husband and wife, carnal relations were a loathsome duty to be tolerated for the sake of procreation. She was revolted by the very thought of the act. Increasingly, Augusta’s perceptions were becoming warped into something very much like madness. The world was a sink of corruption, La Crosse a city of Babylonian excess. The women she saw on the streets, with their brazen airs and shameless smiles, were no better than harlots. Still, she craved the solace of a child. And so she allowed her despised husband to come to her bed.

The fruit of that loveless union was a robust boy, Henry, born on January 17, 1902. His life would be hard and isolated, and his death, forty years later, in the prime of his manhood, would be only one of the many dark mysteries that would come to surround the offspring of George and Augusta Gein.

Once again, George found himself out of a job. Augusta decided that there was only one possible solution, one chance for the family to avert economic disaster—George must work for himself. Two of her brothers were successful merchants in La Crosse, purveyors of “staple and fancy groceries.” Business increased every year, and the city could easily accommodate another such store. In 1909, George Gein became proprietor of a small meat and grocery shop at 914 Caledonia Street.

It didn’t take long, however, for problems to manifest themselves. George clearly could not make it on his own. Augusta knew what had to be done. She already had complete charge of their domestic life. Now she must take total control of their business affairs as well. The entries in the 1909 and 1911 La Crosse City Directories speak volumes, not only about George’s increasingly pitiable position in the world but also about the nature of his and Augusta’s relationship. In the earlier volume, George Gein is listed as the owner of the store. Two years later, Augusta is named as the proprietor. The entry for George Gein reads “clerk.”

In the meantime, they had had another child. Though Augusta did not feel especially close to her firstborn, she attributed her detachment to the child’s gender. It was, after all, a boy. Things would be different with a daughter. And so she clenched her teeth and allowed her husband to commit the foul deed upon her again. During the weeks that followed, she prayed every night for the Lord to bless her with a baby girl.

On August 27, 1906, Augusta gave birth to her second child. He was a boy, and they named him Edward Theodore. When Augusta first heard she had delivered a second male child, she felt bitter, betrayed. But Augusta was not the kind to give in to despair. She was made of stronger stuff. And so she took the swaddled newborn in her arms and made a sacred vow.

This one would not grow up to be like all the rest of them. Men. Those lustful, sweating, foul-mouthed creatures who made use of women’s bodies in such filthy ways. This one, she promised, would be different.

Augusta would see to that.

3

NORMAN BATES, in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho

“
A boy’s best friend is his mother
. ”

Y
ears later, he would be asked the same question, time and again: “Tell us something about her, Eddie. What was your mother like?”

As soon as he started to think about her, his eyes would fill with tears and his throat grow so swollen that he’d have trouble swallowing. She was pure goodness, he’d finally say. Not like the others. They got what was coming to them. But she didn’t deserve so much suffering.

All her life, she had slaved and prayed and struggled to save him from the evils of the world. And he had tried to be as good as possible. But somehow, he always seemed to fail her.

He remembered the time she had put a few coins in his hand and instructed him to go to the German bakery a block from their home to buy a loaf of bread. They were still living in La Crosse, so he couldn’t have been more than seven. Somehow, by the time he reached the shop, the coins were gone. For a long time, he stood on the street corner, fighting back tears, terrified to go home. When he finally did find the courage to return and confess, his voice convulsed by sobs, she looked down at him with that mixture of bitterness and sorrow that never failed to fill him with the deepest self-hatred. “You dreadful child,” she had said in a quiet, heartbroken voice more awful than any scream. “Only a mother could love you.”

She
would never have made such a stupid, unforgivable mistake. Whatever needed to be done, Augusta Gein could always be counted on to do it right, without foul-ups or complaints. She was, by far, the ablest one in the family. And the strongest.

When he thought back to his childhood, he usually pictured her standing in their old grocery shop, an immense, looming presence who did nearly all the work—waited on the customers, handled the cash register, kept the books. Meanwhile, her poor excuse of a husband—his father—shuffled about the store in that shrunken, defeated way of his, rearranging the goods on the shelves according to her directions and occasionally delivering groceries.

If Augusta had any flaws, her younger son wasn’t aware of them. He knew that it might be a sacrilege even to think it, but in his eyes she was no less infallible than God. He recalled a time (it was, in fact, his earliest memory of her) when he was just a toddler. He was standing at the top of the staircase in their old house on Gould Street. Somehow, he lost his balance and felt himself being pulled—or pushed?—down the steep flight of wooden steps by a powerful force. Panic turned his insides to ice. Suddenly, he felt a crushing grip close around his right arm. His mother was behind him, a wild look on her face, shaking him, shouting at him. He burst into clamorous tears, overcome by a rush of violently conflicting emotions—fright, relief, guilt. Why was she so angry with him? He had no idea, but he knew he must have done something terrible to make her so furious. Misery washed over him. It was all his fault.

From that point on—even into his middle age—he placed all his reliance on her. She alone could be counted on to rescue him from life’s dangers.

There was one other memory he had of his childhood in La Crosse.

Behind the meat and grocery store was a windowless, wooden outbuilding which he was forbidden to enter. As a result, it exerted a tremendous fascination. He had seen animals being led into the rear of the shack—big-eyed heifers and grunting pigs—and on several occasions had heard a fearful bellowing coming from behind its sagging boards. Curiosity blazed in him.

One day, when his parents weren’t around, he went out through the back door of the grocery and stepped quickly to the prohibited place. The door was opened a crack, enough for him to peer inside.

There, hanging upside down from a chain in the ceiling, was a slaughtered hog. His father stood to one side of the animal, holding it steady, while his mother slipped a long-bladed knife down the length of its belly, pulled open the flaps, reached inside, and began to work at the glistening ropes of its bowels, which slid out of the carcass and into a large metal tub at her feet. Both his parents had on long leather aprons spattered with blood.

He must have made some sort of noise, because his mother turned completely around to look at him.

For the rest of his life, he remembered the moment with an uncanny clarity: the dangling beast, its carcass split open, its guts slopping onto the ground; his mother standing beside it, blood and slime smeared down the length of her body.

Years later, when they asked him about Augusta, he would say, “She was like nobody else in the world.”

Then, like the rotting, reawakened corpses in those horror magazines he enjoyed reading so much, the wretchedness would rise up in him from some buried place deep inside, and, though he was by then a man in his early fifties, he would begin to cry as noisily and helplessly as a baby.