Nurse Ratched

By Stephen Mark Hoffman

With grateful acknowledgement to Ken Kesey and Louise Fletcher

Nurse Ratched. The resentful little girl who got revenge on the world by damaging and retarding–mentally, emotionally, physically–every human being she ever contaminated with her prolonged presence, including the large brood of experimental victims (i.e. children) she bore specifically for that purpose. Who honed her terrifying skills of spiritual amputation first in Canadian psychiatric hospitals during her stint as a nurse there, in the days when lobotomy was still practiced and shock therapy was induced by insulin (and where Little Shadow Nelly with the Button on her Belly resided, an little elderly “shadow” woman who picked “shadow” flowers off her bedcovers, and whose natural aversion to bath water was easily countered by enlisting the help of her own mania: “It isn’t real water, Nelly, it’s shadow water!”) then during her long “saintly” life as the Old Woman Who Lived In the Shoe. A practical, down-to-earth woman, the farmer’s wife with a carving knife.

Her father (James Charles Brady, born Dublin, 1876–four years before James Joyce) was a professor of Classics–Latin and ancient Greek, the language of poets, thinkers and statesmen–the persisting and sustaining soil of every live word that still speaks or sings in our throttled, affrighted, darkening, lackluster world. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin University, a majestic institution, Bishop Berkeley’s alma mater, founded in 1517 by the Anglo-Irish, Roman Catholics–like my grandfather–excluded until the late eighteenth century. The equal of Oxford and Cambridge. Elected to Canadian Parliament. Afterwards served until his retirement as director of the National Bureau of Records and Statistics. “He modernized record keeping in Canadian hospitals and prisons” says his obituary.  Heraclitus, Sophocles, Pindar...Michel Foucault?

She read indistinguishable pulp murder-mystery fiction checked out from the public library–strictly on the pot–to ease her digestion, because there was no TV in the bathroom. At least those miserable books were more challenging than Newsweek magazine, which she also devoured on the pot, along with a clear-cut mountainside’s-worth of glossy women’s magazines–Redbook, Lady’s Home Journal, Woman’s Wear Daily–always a slippery sheaf of them as thick as your arm propped on the laundry hamper. Life, Time, Look–the whole spectrum of human experience.

The preponderance of her large brood of children struggle today with Newsweek magazine. Our household contained exactly two sets of hardcover books: the Time-Life picture-book series of glossy nature-“science” photos–cloth-bound magazines really–and my father’s worthy contribution to the family library, the twenty-four volume Encyclopedia Britannica, with its 200-page treatise on the cultivation, production and distribution of cotton and cotton textiles, and its one-inch half-column biographical thumbnail sketch of the poet Charles Cotton, 1630-1687, a contemporary of Andrew Marvell: “Her pitch-black hair, her raven eyes/And a black beauty twixt her thighs....” Here is a strophe from “Epitaph upon M.H.,” a Restoration prostitute:

                                          Pretty she was, and young, and wise,
                                          And in her Calling so precise,
                                          That Industry had made her prove
                                          The sucking School-Mistress  of Love.

Amply larded with pithy apothegms–queer, fussy old grandfather saws. Rare apothegms of pith and airy delicacy: “A glass of curaçao sec is an excellent digestive after a substantial repast.” (See the article “Curaçao,” Encyclopedia Britannica,  Vol. VII–“Constantine Pavlovich” to “Demidov.”)

Who perfected the art of passive-aggressorship and self-lobotomy (inculcated in her children to splendid effect) to nightmare proportions. Who once told me (as I stood, appalled, on the threshold of adulthood and surveyed the ruins, past and future, of all my dreams) with a look of triumphant accomplishment, and yet sincerely and in all friendliness, as if dispensing with a touching gesture of maternal tenderness the most potent remedy in her secret herb chest: “Your problem is that you think too much, Mark. You should get a job where you work so hard you don’t have time to think.” Like nursing, her own prescription for good mental hygiene, or any of the other menial, service-sector jobs to which I and my other siblings were pre-ordained and condemned by her sweet foresight and thoughtfulness, and by her “healthy,” humorous, carefree and dismissive attitude toward comical parents who obsess about “getting their children into the right kindergarten” (as reported by Newsweek). Confident in her absolute, cunningly submissive, sway over my storming, doting, constantly thwarted father, who eventually gave up and submitted to her Senior-Care nursing ministrations. Always ready with a band-aid or a warm bottle to minister to–and encourage–a person’s infantile needs, but stonily silent, and even ruthlessly, tyrannically obtuse and obstructive, to those in whom, tragically, the shy need awoke to gleen more from life than the rec-room amenities, complete with 24-hour TV, and cheap, fattening food she provided to tranquilize as Head Nurse and “meds” dispenser the infantile “patients” of her own little psychiatric ward, diabolically constructed and populated to preserve her own sanity at others expense.

Kathleen Marie Hoffman, née Brady: born October 26, 1919, Prince Rupert, British Columbia; died July 23, 2006, Chadron, NE.