Love at Goon Park (19 page)

Goldfarb believed that foundling children had a “never sated craving for affection.” Because no one cared about them, they buffered themselves by not caring either. They withdrew from others and they withdrew from tasks and challenges, including those that you might consider intelligent life skills such as reading, and math, and those analytical challenges built into the Stanford-Binet IQ test. So what did their test scores reveal? Mental deficiency or intellectual despondency?

That question was taken up at the University of Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station. In the late 1930s, the Iowa psychologists were focusing—ahead of their time—on the interaction of genes and environment. Perhaps Goldfarb's closest counterpoint there was a famously gentle-mannered psychologist named Harold Skeels. His research had started with a focus on language development. Skeels had also been following children raised in foundling homes and testing them on the Stanford-Binet scale, tracking their language skills, as they grew older. What intrigued—and worried—him was the same thing that had troubled Goldfarb. Skeels wasn't seeing the normal rising curve of language skills that he had expected. The longer children stayed in the homes, the more their verbal IQ scores dragged downward.

No matter how he turned those results around, the one constant was that the foundlings felt desperately unwanted. Skeels also began to wonder whether a lack of loving attention could impair intellectual functioning. He tried a simple test. He took a group of preschool children from a warehouse-style orphanage and sent them to a friendly nursery school for several hours a day. Skeels then compared them to toddlers who stayed at the foundling home entirely during the next year. The children who did not attend nursery school outside the foundling home suffered the usual IQ drop. As he reported, those who went to preschool didn't suddenly leap upward in verbal
IQ. But they didn't tumble, either. Their scores held steady. Compared to the foundlings, still sliding down the scale, the preschool group thus looked a lot smarter.

The nursery school, Skeels reasoned, provided only casual affection. What he needed—if he was right and affection mattered—was to provide something like mothering. Because the children's mothers had long vanished, he needed a good loving substitute. This led to Skeels's most unusual—some might say risky—experiment. He took thirteen children, all under the age of two and a half, from an orphanage and put them in a home for older “feebleminded” girls, those who fell below the razor wire Stanford-Binet line of 80. Skeels carefully selected girls who were clearly functional and warm in nature. Each child was “adopted” by one of the older girls, a few by an attendant, who took over mothering functions. And mother they did: They cuddled and kissed, played with and comforted the children in their care. Over nineteen months, the average IQ of the mothered toddlers rose from 64 to 92 on the Stanford-Binet, in other words, from feeble-minded to measurable intelligence. There was indeed something, still mysterious, about isolation that seemed to make the brain falter.

But what was it? Later in his career, Harry Harlow would take on the effects of social isolation as directly as anyone in psychology. For the moment, the issue merely hummed at the edges of his awareness. The power of love and loneliness was an interesting academic question, even a troubling one. He wasn't ready to take it on; he was still obsessed with questions of working intelligence. But, as it turned out, the effects of isolation were about to gain his attention in a personal sense. He might not be ready to study loneliness—although that, too, would come—but he was heading for a sharp lesson in the shape of life without love.

We can create isolation in institutions. We can, it seems, also create it while still surrounded by family. At this moment, Harry's professional life seemed to him to be the best thing in his life—his intelligence studies were gaining recognition. Terman was finally
impressed, even predicting that his former student would rise to the top of the American Psychological Association. It would be many years before Harry would admit that he might have been wrong about what was best in his life. After he retired, he would talk about how hard it was to get love right. We could be told, we could be educated, but we still had to fumble our way through the lessons of the heart. The challenge would lead him to the rare admission that it might take a greater power than even science. “People have to learn quite a bit by themselves,” Harry said simply. “Christ passed on to people quite a few tantalizing tidbits about the importance of love and left the rest of us to learn, little by little, as God sees fit.”

Harry's oldest son, Robert, remembers those years when his parents' marriage began to break as almost a crazy quilt, a patchwork of good times and bad. The Harlows had built their house on Lake Mendota, a rectangular building made beautiful by windows filled with the glimmer of light on water. On weekend mornings, Harry and Clara would have coffee together. Bobby, as Robert was called then, would sit near his parents in a little wooden chair that had belonged to his mother and had her name painted on the back. Robert still calls it the Clara chair. He would hold as still as he could, a small, fair-haired five-year-old in the Clara chair, listening to his parents. “If I was good, they'd let me come over and each give me a spoonful of coffee. It must have been full of cream because it was very mild.” He was a quiet little boy, undemanding, good enough to get coffee regularly, and his mother used to call him her perfect child.

Clara was still a lover of friends and company. The Harlows hosted bridge and dinner parties. Bobby would sit on the stairs, “listening to the sound of bridge cards getting shuffled.” He holds onto other memories besides the dry whisper of cards. He recalls swimming in the lake during the summer months; making his mother an ashtray out of tar from the driveway, which melted into a black sticky puddle; of his dad's aversion to house and lawn work. There was one week when the whole family was felled by illness. Paul Settlage
wrote to his friend Abe Maslow, back in New York, that “recently, Harry has been having a tough time of it. Bobby had the mumps, and then Clara caught it, and then Bobby became sick twice more, and during this time, Harry discharged the domestic duties while being more or less in the toils of flu himself. The other day he could hardly stand up. The man always has had a certain dogged persistence.”

On December 10, 1942, Harry and Clara's second son, Richard Frederick, was born. Bobby's memories become less happy after that point. It was as if that change, just the one more child, pushed Harry past what he could handle. He had no spare energy. His research was becoming an obsession, the laboratory seemed to be his home of the moment. Settlage saw this as a visible change, a shift into total absorption. “Harry,” he told Maslow, “is working harder than ever.” There was a new driven intensity. And with new demands at home, Harry seemed to feel stretched too far—like a fine wire, thinning as it pulled. It was barely six months after Rick was born, according to Clara, that Harry began to withdraw from the family. He “increasingly immersed himself in his work and became silent and uncommunicative” at home. He was up early and gone, home late, off to the lab every day, weekends included.

Finally, Clara began insisting that, at least, Harry should take Bobby with him on weekends. He should have some time with his son, she argued. Even lab time was better than no time. Now grown, a father himself, Robert Israel still remembers those visits to the box factory lab: “He'd take me over there and I'd watch him do experiments, slide the door up and down, arrange the puzzles. I loved being there. I could wander around and anytime I wanted I could feed the monkeys. There was a container of dried fruit and another of peanuts and I'd get a handful. He taught me how to hold the food so I wouldn't get scratched.” They didn't really do the father-son thing that Clara had envisioned. At the lab, even with his small son in tow, Harry's mind was only on the research. “He didn't talk to me. When he was at the lab, he was focused on his work. But I was comfortable because Dad was there. I was happy in his world. My
brother, who's three years younger, I don't think he has a single memory of Dad from his childhood.”

In a furious, and later regretted moment, Harry told Clara that he didn't know whether he loved her anymore. He wasn't sure that she loved him, either. He wasn't sure she ever had. He threw the question at her, suddenly angry over the fourteen years of their marriage. He seemed like a stranger to her, she said. The house on the lake was becoming a place that anyone would want to avoid. Harry and Clara were barely speaking to each other; quiet little Bobby was tiptoeing around the house and Rick, now a toddler, was studying his father as if he couldn't quite remember who he was. Around his friends and colleagues, Harry suddenly became silent about his marriage. His conversations were only about work. His letters were bright and talked only of professional issues and achievements. After a series of such communications, a puzzled Lewis Terman wrote and asked him why he never mentioned Clara in his letters any more. Had she left him? Harry replied with another letter full of psychology news.

Clara filed for divorce on August 14, 1946. Her pleading with the district court is a litany of bewilderment and grief: Harry was coming home later and later, skipping dinner with the children, even when she begged him to give them some time. He was showing up late for social engagements, embarrassing her. He was impatient with her and impatient with Bobby and Rick. He had “developed a practice of ignoring and rebuffing” inquiries made of him by Clara or by either of the two small boys. She was living in silence and hostility; she was worrying constantly; she couldn't watch her children being pushed away like this by their father. It wasn't that she wanted out so much as that she couldn't stay.

Harry did not defend himself. It was a rare moment for him—he refused to fight back. Clara won custody of both boys—not unusual in the 1940s or even today—and a less usual uncontested division of property. The lake house was appraised at $20,000 and put on the market, the proceeds to be split equally. After the mortgage was paid off, and closing costs deducted, they each had $7,473.46, to the
penny. Take whatever else you want, he told her; and in her anger, her worry and grief, she wanted all of it. She took the furniture and lamps and cushions and rugs and artwork, the stove, refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, dishes, glassware, silverware, everything, according to the divorce settlement, except Harry's clothes and personal effects, such as hairbrushes and handkerchiefs. They owned $1,000 worth of AT&T stock and an $800 war bond; he sold all of it and gave her half the cash. He agreed to take over a $5,000 life insurance policy and to continue paying the premiums on it. He agreed to pay all legal costs. He agreed to pay $150 a month child support for three years and then $100 a month until the boys came of age. He agreed that the children could visit him each year. He agreed to pay the costs of the visit. He agreed to accommodate her schedule in the visit. He agreed to work with her on making the journey safe from parent to parent. The divorce went through in a flat three weeks; it was final on September 6, 1946. Clara left Madison almost immediately and moved to Rhode Island with the boys to stay with her brother, Leon.

“Dear Abe,” wrote Settlage to Maslow. “Did you know that the Harlows were divorced recently? It was quite a shock—totally unexpected by us but apparently suspected by others for some time. I had the impression that the Harlows were getting along more congenially as time went on. Quite a psychologist, am I not?”

Harry was alone, for the moment, with psychology as mistress and wife and family. No inconvenient children, no messy marriage cluttering up his life. It didn't take him long to realize that he hated it. Up close and personal, the field of psychology was a less than rewarding companion. There was nothing in it, especially at the moment, to help a man come to terms with a failed marriage and a silent home. Harry had a small apartment again and plenty of time, in these bright, open, empty days, to pursue his research and to realize just how chilly his profession had become. Perhaps nothing exemplified that better, at the moment, than his own department at the University of Wisconsin.

It had been a long time since Harry's department was crammed into the basement of Bascom Hall. The psychologists now occupied a premium place on the shores of Lake Mendota, thus commanding a glittering view and some of the leakiest, dampest facilities on campus. They had rat labs now and those were in a basement that “flooded with every rainstorm, so you had to wade to your equipment. Not that deep but it wasn't great to be standing in water with all that electrical work,” recalls psychology professor Richard Keesey.

Perhaps the chronic damp affected the mood at 600 N. Park, the department's slightly unfortunate address. If a sender had scrawled the direction at all, the address on the envelope tended to look like GOON Park. It seemed to the occupants that the mistake happened frequently. “The mailman always knew right where to deliver it though,” Keesey says, raising an eyebrow with deliberate irony. Goon Park became the department's unofficial nickname, partly because it seemed to reflect the uneasy politics of the place. There were faculty members who didn't speak to each other, faculty members who accused their colleagues of academic theft, faculty members who spent their days making sure that everyone else knew their places in the hierarchy, who made sure that only those on the approved list could even have coffee in the department lounge.

The famed psychologist Carl Rogers is still remembered, decades later, as one of the unhappiest members of the old Wisconsin department. Rogers created the idea of client-centered therapy. His point was straightforward: Psychologists don't always know more than their clients; therefore, therapists should actually listen to their clients. Widely accepted now, it was initially a strange and unwelcome idea. Many psychologists resisted Roger's call for open-minded counseling. They were the ones who had trained as experts in human behavior, after all. At Wisconsin, a department of dedicated experts, Rogers sinned further by aligning himself with the humanist psychology movement. By the 1960s, Rogers and Harry's former graduate student, Abraham Maslow, would both be leaders in that movement,
arguing that in psychology the emphasis should always be on human potential rather than negative emotions and neuroses.