A Place to Hide In

Mrs. Elsie Kowalsky could hardly believe her ears. She took another look at the hole in the chimney on the third floor of the dirty-yellow brick building at IO2A Nassau Avenue, in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Then she called again. A man's voice answered her from somewhere below. She cried: "Why don't you come out?" The reply came hollowly: "I want to stay."

Thoroughly frightened, Mrs. Kowalsky hurried to her home next door, thought it over for a while and called the cops. With axes and crowbars, policemen dug into a little closet-like room and brought to light the psychiatric mystery of the week.

Inside the cubbyhole they found a strange-looking man with a heavy reddish beard and hair hanging down to his shoulders. His clothes were ragged; torn gloves dangled from his filthy hands; he wore long underwear and no trousers. In a matter-of-fact voice he explained that he was Paul Makushak, 33. For ten years, or maybe it was eleven, he said, he had been living in the cramped cubbyhole. His mother, Anna, had fed him by lowering food through the chimney on a clothesline. When his mother became sick and had to be taken to Greenpoint Hospital, she had asked her neighbor, Mrs. Kowalsky, to take over.

Hiding was his own idea, Paul Makushak said: he had just not liked the way the world was going. Certainly no one should blame his mother. The police, who get used to strange things, looked hard at the small hideaway and sniffed. They were not sure Makushak had been living there for a decade, but someone had been living there messily for a long time.

Better to Be Alone. The room was a space just 30 inches wide, five feet long and nine feet high. The wall the police broke through was an amateur's job of lath and inch-thick cement. Half-inch ventilation holes were drilled through another wall into a hallway. The only other opening was a hole six by eight inches in the chimney that formed one wall; it was covered with a clean white cloth. The windowless room had electric lights, three radios, no chair. At about three feet below the ceiling a shelf cut down the head room so that Makushak, who is 6 ft. 1 in., could barely stand erect. The floor was cluttered with odds & ends of junk, cans of food, bottles of soda water, newspapers and books--Alexis Carrel's Man the Unknown, a Bible, dictionaries, a French grammar, textbooks on shorthand, mechanics and mathematics. Scraps of paper bore such scribbled mottoes as: "It is better to be alone than in bad company."

Paul Makushak had succeeded, as far as police could learn, in his desire to be alone. No one except his mother had known he was there. His father, Peter, had been told years ago to stay downstairs, and he had stayed, sleeping in the back of his jumbled first-floor tailor shop and dry-goods store. Peter Makushak rarely saw his wife and believed her story that their son had gone to Canada.

When police last week took Paul to Kings County Hospital, Chief Psychiatrist Samuel Parker first ordered a cleanup: shave, haircut, bath. Physically, Paul was in pretty good shape, except for weakness of the leg muscles and bad teeth. He had once weighed 200 pounds and was down to 170. His answers were intelligent: when asked whether he had registered for the 1940 draft, he said he would not talk until he had seen a lawyer.

Back to the Womb. Why would a man of 23 want to inflict such punishment on himself? At Bushwick High School Paul had been slow in his studies and finished last (237th) in the class of 1937. He was the school "fat boy" and the butt of jokes. His mother had been devoted and overprotective. In his arguments with other boys, she went to his defense with a baseball bat. When Paul's older brother George died 18 years ago, she became more & more attached to Paul.

Psychiatrists were quick to point out that Paul's case fitted neatly into present-day interpretation of Freudian doctrines. His retreat, they said, was ideal for someone driven by the unconscious desire to return to the womb, where all wants are taken care of by the mother. Makushak's mother had indeed taken care of all his wants, even disposed of his excretions, which were placed in cans and dropped through the hole in the chimney. He had slept in a fetal position, his knees drawn up. Even the food-carrying clothesline might be interpreted by psychiatrists as a symbolic umbilical cord. When found, Hermit Paul was wearing a brown wool stocking cap, just like his mother's.

Hermits, psychiatrists say, usually fall into one of three categories of mental illness. Schizophrenics are cut off from reality and just want to be left alone. Psychopaths who are seemingly born without normal emotions are often antisocial and hide out because they hate the world. Other hermits may be only senile--harmless, crotchety hoarders and string savers. Whether Paul Makushak belonged to one of these three classes--or to any at all--psychiatrists at Kings County Hospital were still trying to figure out at week's end.

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