“Who are the people in the paintings?” Penelope asked the first time she came for a session.
“My parents.”
“And the ocean?”
“No, Lake Michigan. It looks like the ocean, though, doesn’t it? Have you been?”
“I went to Washington a few times before the seizures started. After that, my parents deemed me unfit to travel. They still go out pretty regularly with Genevieve.”
“Your sister. Tell me about her.”
“She’s the perfect one.”
Ed wishes he could send Penelope to the ocean as part of her treatment. Penelope needs to partake in activities that were a regular part of her life before epilepsy, he’d tell her parents. You must take her to the coast.
He has tried to convince her parents to become an active part of her therapy, but they are quick to dismiss him on the phone, and his letters mostly go unanswered. When he does get one of her parents to talk, it’s always: “You’re the doctor. Whatever you think is best. We’re swamped right now. Tell Penelope a package is on its way.” He can’t get them to visit, let alone take her to the ocean.
“What are some things you used to do before you started having seizures?”
Ed watches Penelope write the question in her journal. She stares at it for a while before she speaks. “I went to school. I played volleyball. I rode my bike. I walked to the library and checked out books. I ate lunch in my English teacher’s room and talked to her about literature. I drove my dad’s car once. I went roller-skating. There’s more, but that’s all I can think of right now. Why?”
“We’re going to bring some of those back.”
“Again: Why?”
“It’s a new therapeutic model. It’s supposed to interrupt your brain, confuse it into thinking it isn’t epileptic.” Penelope is the only patient of Ed’s who can understand the explanations of her treatment. The others live in the concrete world of stimuli and response, little more.
“I like the idea of tricking my brain.”
They both smile, and Ed looks at the list he’s written down as Penelope talked. Much of it is impossible within the confines of the institution—school, libraries, cars, roller-skating—but he can get her a bike. That’s easy enough. She needs something intellectual, too, something to feed the school piece she so clearly misses—not the peers but the coursework. She’s walked into this perfectly, just as he thought she would.
“What about that reading group I suggested?” he asks. “For the higher-functioning patients? It’d get you talking about literature again. Granted, it wouldn’t be with nerd friends, but it might be an even better trick on your brain if you became a teacher.” His left hand worries a new stone in his pocket.
Penelope looks at her lap, and Ed sees her again in that first individual session, after they talked about the paintings and her perfect sister.
“Can you tell me about your first seizure?” he’d asked.
“I was thirteen, and we were all at our family cabin up on the Flathead. Gen and I slept on the sofa bed, my parents in the loft.” She’d pointed to the lake painting. “Flathead isn’t that big, but it’s beautiful. Anyway, Gen woke up to my thrashing in the middle of the night and started shouting for Mom and Dad. They gathered around me. Supposedly, my mother said, ‘Put a wooden spoon in her mouth or she’ll bite off her tongue,’ but the seizure passed before anyone did anything. They say I was awake for an hour before I was really awake. The first thing I remember is the blankets—how thick they felt. And then the wetness. I pulled the covers back to see that I’d pissed myself. I started stripping the bed. My mother tried to stop me, but I wouldn’t let her, so Gen helped instead, and we got everything off, and my father hauled the mattress to the porch, where he hosed it down. I took a long bath, and then they loaded me in the car and took me to the hospital. And that’s it—the day Penelope Gatson got sick.”
“Not the word I’d choose.”
“It doesn’t matter what word you choose, Doctor. The definition is the same.”
He expects her to show the same resignation now. Instead, she asks, “What would I teach them?”
“Shorter pieces, relatively simple. Other than that, whatever you want.”
Ed imagines her paging through the library of her mind, all the titles and authors. He doesn’t read the way she does, for pleasure and temporary transcendence. Words for him are simply tools to explain theories and studies and policy.
“Maybe I’ll start with Keats,” she says.
Skinner spoke of Keats, Ed remembers, quoting him in the discussion of “Reporting Things Felt.” It’s a nice omen, but Ed knows it doesn’t matter where Penelope starts; it matters only that she does. The girl is on her fourth medication, and so far it’s proving as ineffective as the first three. The existing behavioral modifications don’t seem to be performing much better. And as much as Ed believes Penelope belongs outside the walls of the institution, he knows he can’t deliver her there without marked improvement. Societal expectations fall on the side of her parents: Epileptics belong with the disabled.
These are the exact expectations he’s trying to break down for the benefit of all his patients, but the injustice of institutionalization is especially pronounced in someone like Penelope, whose brain is brilliant whenever it isn’t seizing.
“That’s not what they see, though,” she said to him once. “It doesn’t matter how brilliant I can be. Once someone sees me fall on the ground and piss myself, I’m an imbecile, and once an imbecile . . .”
She had a seizure in the school library her freshman year of high school and has been at Boulder ever since.
He says, “How about you start next Monday? I’ll supply the students. You provide the reading.”
Penelope agrees, her face clouded with the same concentration she shows when she’s writing lyrics for the hallways’ sounds. Maybe just thinking about teaching a piece of literature to a group of disabled people will be enough to reorient her brain.
— —
After Penelope leaves, Ed calls Taylor Dean, the director of state institutions. He was the one who picked Ed up from the airport and first introduced him to Boulder. Ed remembers that drive clearly, how taken he’d been with the beauty outside the car’s windows.
“You stop seeing it after a while,” Dean said. “Here’s the thing, Ed—all right if I call you Ed? Well, here’s the thing. Boulder’s up to its goddamned tits in negative PR right now. Don’t know how much you’ve heard out there in Michigan, but it’s a real mess. And my superintendent just walked out. You know that much, at least. That’s why you’re here. We need someone with your expertise, Ed. You’re walking into a goddamned predicament, but it’s one you can save. That’s the thing—there’s a place for heroics here, and if you’re into that, then you’re our guy. But heroes have to wade through shit, you know? So if you’re squeamish around shit—and I’m talking both kinds here, the kind you deal with on paper and the kind you fucking step in—well, then this probably ain’t gonna work.”
Lots of shit.
Dean’s secretary patches Ed through.
“Edmund! How’s my favorite superintendent?”
“Not great, Taylor.”
“Ah, come on, Ed. I know you’re calling to complain. At least give me a moment to pretend otherwise. I know you have some good news for me somewhere.”
“My wife is starting an art class, and one of our high-functioning patients is starting a reading group.”
“There we go! See? That’s the magic I hired you for.”
“Really? I’m using a patient and my own wife to deliver services we should be paying professionals for. I need more staff, Dean. We’re still at twenty-five percent.”
“I’m working it from every angle, Ed, but I’ve got to tell you there’s just no spare money. We’ll try again next session, but for now we have to work with what we have.”
“That’s not what you promised when I took the job.”
“Don’t preten
d you didn’t know how government works, Ed. You took the job knowing damn well how full of shit I am.”
Ed smiles. He both hates and loves Taylor Dean. The man is a bastard and full of bullshit that somehow mixes well with his candor. He laughed like a salesman that first day, willing to paint himself any color to get Ed to sign. But then in the next breath, he led Ed down to the former superintendent’s office, talking about the staffing shortage. “Inadequate pay, long hours, remote location. Nothing to do about the location, but we’re working on the other two. Every legislative session, we see another appropriations bill go through, and then we see it slashed by the governor. It’s been tough to make the top of his list of priorities, but we have his ear now. Get enough bad press, and your demands finally get heard.” Ed didn’t know what he was talking about. “You haven’t heard, then. Might as well get that piece done with.” Dean pointed to a thick manila folder sitting on the desk. “Not enough to make national news, but we’ve been dragged across the state. This is what you’re up against.”
Ed read about the nine patients who had died at the Boulder River School and Hospital over the previous year. A thirteen-year-old boy prone to seizures had been left alone in a bathtub, where he drowned. Another woman had drowned in the Boulder River. A bedridden patient died in surgery after swallowing a spoon that another patient had shoved down her throat. The article quoted the former superintendent saying, “The woman was being fed by another patient because she might otherwise not have been fed at all.”
A mute retarded boy was found hiding under one of the buildings after he’d been missing for over forty-eight hours. He’d survived, at least, but not without extreme trauma.
Stories reported the strikes Dean had mentioned. The National Guard had been called in to staff the hospital during one of them—using soldiers as aides made patients prisoners of a war they didn’t understand.
Dean had known what he was doing. Even if Ed had gone directly to the airport, he’d have known Boulder’s stories and taken them back with him to Howell, which felt utopic in contrast. He’d take the woman in the river and the boy in the bath, the patient on the surgical table, bleeding around a well-intentioned spoon. He’d sit in the dark with that mute boy, two days of hunger gnawing his stomach. He’d take them, and he’d want to save them.
Dean is a bastard and a bullshitter and also pretty damn smart.
“You’ve got to get me something, Dean. If you want to keep the current news trends, you better get me more money.”
“Ooh, making threats now, Dr. Malinowski?”
“I’m not making threats, Dean. But I’m not making guarantees, either. I can’t stop every potential accident myself.”
“Fair enough. I’ll see what I can do.”
It’s essentially the same conversation they have every time Ed calls. He likes to think Dean actually does something afterward—takes a meeting with the governor, writes a memo, contacts a few senators—but Ed knows he just hangs up, rubs his face, and gets back to work. Warm Springs is even worse off than Boulder. And the state prisons aren’t much better. They’re all under Dean’s jurisdiction.
The Montana legislature meets every other year, and Ed missed the ’71 meeting, too overwhelmed with his new world to make time for policy. But he’ll be ready next time. He’ll bring patients to testify. He’ll produce success story after success story of former patients living healthy lives outside this institution, and he’ll do what he was hired to do—fix this place. Change it.
Chapter 5
— Laura —
Summer is here, and Ed is finally taking me to Boulder.
He’s been asking me to reconsider since he made the suggestion that I teach. He makes all kinds of excuses—no supplies, no aides, no experience—but I always refuse. He took me to dinner last night at Dorothy’s. We sat in our regular spot, and he insisted I order a steak: an obvious bribe. We do burgers on weeknights.
“Reconsider?” he asked as I started eating.
“I didn’t go back on my offer to move to Montana with you, even when I wanted to.” That was my final argument, and here we are.
I don’t even know if I want to teach art classes at Ed’s institution, but I know I want to claim a piece of his workday. I want him to feel me in that place, to remember he has a wife.
“That’s Strawberry Creek feeding in from the east there,” he says, always a tour guide. He’s still trying to sell me this state. “Strawberry Butte up above it—see? Dutchman Creek comes in right ahead. Most everything to the east is Forest Service. Miles and miles of trails. I’ve scouted some new camping spots for us.”
The mountains and creeks and valleys don’t comfort me like they do Ed. They’re too big and grand, too empty of people, too wild. This landscape doesn’t want us here.
We crest a mountain pass and look down into a great sweep of grasses, giant stones dotting the fields.
“You should paint this,” Ed says, and I nod. I’m sure I will, even though the grasses will become one more flat canvas stacked in my studio. The room will be a nursery soon enough, and I will throw away everything I’ve painted of this state so far.
“You are with child,” his mother would say in her thick accent every time we saw each other. A statement, never a question.
“Not yet, Mother.” Ed would put his hand on my flat stomach, as though giving it his all, my damn womb simply refusing to do its job.
I’d say, “You realize I can’t start making a grandchild for your mother if you insist I stay on the pill, right?”
We fought about it after every dinner with his parents, and he would say, “Baby, I’m not ready to share you,” and I’d let him convince me I wasn’t ready to share him, either.
He thinks we’ve been trying since the move, but I’m still on the pill. I needed time to settle in, and I knew he wouldn’t give it to me. He was so adamant that it was time to have a child, so happy with his decision—always his decision, like the job and the move and the house. And then so damn naive sometimes. Even with his all-consuming schedule, we find a way to make love at least a couple times a week, and he hasn’t once questioned the arrival of my period. “We’ll just have to work harder,” he says, or “It’ll happen next month, I’m sure.” He’s so consumed by his work that he can’t see anything I don’t blatantly show him.
— —
We pull into a dirt parking lot.
Ed has warned me about what I’ll encounter at his institution, but I’m not ready for the playground I see. There are patients everywhere. One boy pushes another’s face against the ground. A girl slaps herself. Some stand in clumps. Many stand alone. They rock and moan, a great herd of sadness. It’s more sickness than I’ve ever seen in one place, and of such a different kind. My mother suffered through stomach cancer that spread everywhere within months of diagnosis, its seeds blown into every corner. My father’s cancer was in his lungs; he refused treatment, and every breath became a gasp. For them, death was a relief. But the people in front of me will never heal from their afflictions, and their afflictions won’t kill them, either. They will simply remain.
In the distance, I see a girl riding a bicycle. She is such a contrast to the yard’s disorder. And I’m starting to point her out, when Ed takes my hand and leads me into the main building.
Inside, he introduces me to his secretary, Martha, in the front office. We’ve spoken on the phone many times, and she gives me a hug instead of shaking my hand. “Thanks for sharing Edmund with us, dear. He’s desperately needed out here, and we’re tickled that we get to have you now, too.”
“Once a week, Martha.”
She smiles at me. “We’ll take what we can get. You let me know if I can help with anything.”
Martha is one of the few people on Ed’s staff whom he talks about with respect. There’s also Sheila, his favorite nurse, and then there are the boys—Pete and Gerald and Henry. We have regular dinners with them and their wives. Pete’s wife, Bonnie, is the closest thing to a f
riend I have here.
Ed leads me up to a classroom on the third floor, again playing tour guide with his story about the 1963 fire that destroyed the fourth floor. “The damage was mostly contained, so the administration decided to shorten the building rather than tear it down. They rebuilt the roof and left the third floor as it was.” We can see our footsteps in the floor’s dust.
He unlocks a door and flips on the light. The tall windows need a cleaning, but they are south-facing. There are six wide tables, perfect for projects. Cupboards line one wall, over a counter and a sink.
“You’re okay doing the cleaning yourself?” Ed points to a broom and dustpan in a corner. I nod. “I’ll come back at lunch.” He kisses me deeply, a kiss that feels wrong in this place.
I stand in the door and watch him disappear down the stairs. A breeze touches my arm. Skittering steps—mice, most likely—but maybe ghosts of those poor drowned patients Ed has told me about, slopping back and forth.
This shorn building with its soot and sadness is something to paint.
— —
When Ed comes to retrieve me at noon, I’ve gotten the floors swept and the cupboards cleaned out. For supplies, I have a stack of thin yellowed paper and a handful of pencils.
“I told you,” Ed says.
The Behavior of Love Page 3