Then she was sent to us. After she had been instructed the tension lessened and the domestic situation was remedied.
In another family of six children, the husband, part Italian and part some other nationality, was affectionate and irresponsible. Every time he walked in the door, wreathed in smiles, his wife greeted him with frowns and scowls. She threw dishes and pots at him. He thought she was crazy and asked to have her committed. A psychiatrist talked to her and found she was in deadly fear of being pregnant again. When we saw her she really appeared to be demented.
One forenoon, six months later, as I passed through the waiting room, the nurse at the desk tendered her usual, “Good morning, Mrs. Sanger.” Immediately a neat, trim woman came over to me.
“Look at me,” she beamed. “You don’t know me. I was the one who sat there and they said I was crazy. I don’t look crazy now, do I? I wasn’t crazy then—just worried to death.”
For four years we went along in the clinic, working steadily, straightening mental tangles and relieving physical distress when we could. Then, early in the morning of April 15, 1929, the telephone in my apartment rang, startling me. I was pretty nervous, having been up all night with Stuart, who had mastoiditis. His temperature was running high, and he was suffering with terrible, indescribable pain.
I took off the receiver. “Hello. This is Anna. The police are here at the clinic.” Briefly she related how they had descended without warning, stamped into the basement, and were at that moment tearing things to pieces.
With this meager information pounding through my brain I hastened to the street, hailed a taxi, and urged the driver to go as fast as he could to West Fifteenth Street.
The shade to the glass door was pulled down; the door itself was locked. I knocked and a plain-clothes man of the Vice Squad opened it. “Well, who are you?”
“I’m Mrs. Sanger and I want to come in.”
My request was passed on to a superior and I heard someone answer, “Let her in.”