by Vanda
“I don’t know how many pairs of underpants to put in.” He leaned over one of the open dresser drawers.
“I think we should call his grandmother,” I said.
“I guess three will do for now. They can’t keep him longer than—”
“Max, did you hear me?’
“I heard you.” He stuck the underpants in Scott’s bag. “Let’s see, undershirts.” He went back to the drawer and gathered up three undershirts. “One short sleeve and two sleeveless. The sleeveless shows off his muscles. I love those muscles in his shoulders and upper arms. Oh, and that chest. Pure art. When I touch him, hold him close, I feel such a … It’s difficult to put into words. It’s not only about sex. I mean, it sort of is, but it’s also something more, a closeness, a—”
“I know what you mean, Max.”
“I suppose you do.”
“Max, Scott’s in real trouble. He attempted to kill himself.”
“Half-heartedly. A couple scrapes. What’s that?”
“He drank a fifth of scotch, and he doesn’t drink. What if he gets better at it? Tries again? Uses a more lethal method? That’s what my mother did. It was like she was practicing.”
“That was your mother, not Scott.”
“Neither one of us knows a thing about this. He’s her grandson. They’re family.”
“I’m Scott’s family. I thought you were, too.”
“She should know. She’s the one who should speak to the psychiatrist. What if there are papers to sign?”
“Don’t sign anything.”
“I don’t intend to. I don’t look good in stripes.”
“Stripes?”
“Prison uniform. But his grandmother may have to sign.”
“Scott can call her if he wants.”
“He won’t. He’s ashamed. He’s not in his right mind to make that decision. Don’t you think, if we love him, we should pick up the slack and make the call for him? She’s very important to him. I don’t feel right leaving her out of this. What if it gets worse?”
“It won’t. He’s gonna be okay.”
“Max, we don’t know that. My mother—”
“Your mother was crazy!” he yelled. “Don’t compare Scott to your crazy … I’m sorry. This cologne.” He picked up a small crystal bottle. “Caron’s Poive. He likes this on me. One night, I took him to Birdland to hear Charlie Parker. He was so impressed I knew Bird. Scott’s more cornpone than you were when you first came to the city. He loved listening to jazz even though that religion of his didn’t want him to. That night, Gary Cooper stopped by; I got to be a big shot and introduce Scott to him. Scott was so excited. Such a wide-eyed kid.” Max opened the bag and put in the bottle of cologne. “Be careful with this. It costs $3421 a bottle.”
“What? What if I drop it?”
“I’ll have your head. Maybe … if he wears it he’ll remember that night, and …” A tear slid onto his cheek and he quickly wiped it away with the back of his hand. “When will you call her?”
“Now. Can I have the number please?” I held my hand out.
Max opened Scott’s top bureau drawer. “He keeps his important numbers in this book.” He took the book into his hands and ran his palm over its rough leather cover. “I’m in here, you know.”
“Of course you are.”
He held out the book for me to take. “It’s under Martha Bond. She’s his grandmother on his mother’s side.”
* * *
“Well, she’s coming,” I told Max, as I placed my handbag on the couch and started pulling on my gloves.
“Don’t put your handbag on the sofa.” He stood near the piano, looking out at the skyline, a glass of sherry in his hand.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said, putting it on top of the mantel. I stood in front of the fireplace and used the mirror above the mantel to adjust my round hat to the center of my head. I hoped it made me seem like somebody’s wife. My diploma hung framed under the mirror. “She’s getting the first bus out of Lake Ambrosia. Actually, they don’t have buses in Lake Ambrosia. She’s making arrangements to get to Mount Hyatt. She thinks Mr. Stubbs, the owner of the General Store—that’s the guy whose son drove out in his pick-up to get her when I called because she doesn’t have a phone in her house—she thinks he’ll drive her. Anyway, after she gets to Mount Hyatt I’m not sure what she has to do. It sounded complicated, but she said she’d wire us with her exact time of arrival when she knows it so we can pick her up.”
“Pick her up? I have no intention of even looking at that bitch.”
“Max! You’re speaking about Scott’s grandmother. I can’t do this alone.”
“I told you I’ve been picturing myself killing her. If I see her, there’s no telling what I’ll do. It was your idea to call her. You deal with her.”
“I will. I’m bringing her here.”
“No.”
“I pay a third of the rent. A third of this place is mine. We can put her in my part of the apartment.”
“She can stay in a damn hotel.”
“You can’t stick a woman like her—someone who doesn’t even have a phone—in a New York hotel by herself. Have a heart.”
“Did she have a heart when she did what she did to Scott?”
“I’m leaving now to see him. I don’t want to be late for visiting hours. We’ll talk about this more when we get the wire.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
I stood at the door. The Christmas tree Scott and Max had bought together still lay off to the side of the room, tied up in twine. “Why don’t you put up the tree? It might make everyone feel a little lighter. She’s going to be in a lot of pain; maybe a little Christmas—”
“Good. I hope she is in pain. I’m not putting up our tree for her. That’s Scott's and my tree. Our very first Christmas living together.”
“I know,” I said as I walked out the door.
* * *
I stood outside of the reception room, a few steps in front of the locked door that would lead me to Scott. It was almost 2 p.m., the visiting hour. I waited with a few others, wondering if I looked wifely enough in my pastel-blue skirt with the slight flare and the cardigan sweater covering my white blouse. I threw my sensible cloth coat over my arm as I entered the over-heated reception area. My heart beat in my stomach as I waited, facing the locked ward. I didn’t like locked doors. Mom had locked me out too many times. Standing in the cold rain, I’d stare at our locked door, hoping she’d …
Then there were the days and months when the doctors locked her in. Dad never made me visit her when I was little, but when I got to be thirteen, I had to go. I hated it. Shrill screams behind curtains, the smell of loose bowel movements, excrement thrown against walls. Each time I went—and I went a lot between thirteen and fifteen—I walked close beside my father. One time, they were moving a bunch of patients down the hall past us, Dad and I got separated. I was alone in that place, and everywhere I looked I saw toothless ladies in loose hospital gowns hardly covering them. I ran in no special direction, yelling, “Daddy, Daddy, help!”
My father slapped me hard across the face. He’d never hit me before. “Don’t yell in public,” he scolded. He dragged me to my mother’s bed, where she was tied up in a strait jacket. She looked like a witch, her hair a matted mess, babbling words that made no sense. I prayed to God he’d give me another mother, but I knew I was too old to be praying for things like that.
The woman behind the desk collected Scott’s overnight bag. She rummaged through it and removed the bottle of cologne. My heart leapt. “Hey! Be careful.” She shook the bottle at me. “He can’t have this.” I thrust my hands out, ready to catch the most expensive bottle of perfume I’d ever heard of. “After all, Mrs. Elkins, he did try to kill himself.” Did she have to say it in front of all these people? She handed me the bag. “You can collect the cologne after your visit.”
“You will treat it gently, won’t you?” I said, unable to hide my anxiety.
I joined the
throng who followed the muscular young Negro in a green uniform who brandished a large circular set of keys. We waited as he unlocked the door and held it aside to let us pass. “They’re in the recreation room, down that hall,” the Negro orderly said, pointing. Then he locked us inside. My stomach tightened.
I followed the others down a brightly lit hallway—brighter than the hospital where they’d put my mother. An old man, his pink scalp peeking out of strands of gray hair, walked by. You could see the outline of his bones pressing against his paper-like skin. He held his calloused fingers close to his dry lips as he mumbled something to himself.
The recreation room was crowded with men in pajamas and hospital gowns sitting at tables in twos and fours, some playing board games, others sleeping. Some sat in corners alone with blank faces, drool oozing from their mouths. There was a steady din of voices and pounding on tabletops. I scanned the room, but I didn’t see Scott. A Negro orderly with a towel in his hand breezed by me. “Excuse me,” I said. “Scott Elkins?”
“Over there, Ma’am.”
I followed his pointing finger to a man who had Scott’s general features and dark hair. But the man sitting behind the table, his mouth hanging open slack, couldn’t be Scott, not the Scott I knew.
I ran to him. “Scott? It’s me.”
He didn’t look up. I took his head in my hands and forced him to look at me. “Scott?”
He blinked. “Al?”
“Yeah. What’s the matter? You look strange.”
“Uh, noth, nothing.” There was slight slur to his speech. I sat at the table opposite him.
“How are you?” What a dumb question. Look where he is. “Max sent you some things.” I pushed the bag across the table toward him.
A tiny half-smile creased his face. He pulled the bag into his arms like Max had done with the robe. “He didn’t want you to look dowdy. You know Max.”
Scott laid his head on top of the bag and fell asleep.
“No. Don’t sleep, Scott. Where’s your Doctor?”
“Doctor?” Scott repeated as if he were trying to figure out what the word meant. “Doctor?”
“You’ve talked to a doctor, haven’t you?”
“No. I—don’t think so, but—Al, it’s hard to think.”
“I’m going to try to find him. I’ll be back.”
I left Scott to find the doctor, but nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. I ran to a male nurse I found at the end of the hallway leaning against the wall having a smoke. “Excuse me,” I looked closely to read his nametag. “Mr. Donahue. I’d like to see Scott Elkin’s doctor.”
“His what?” He coughed out a cloud of smoke.
“I want to see his psychiatrist.”
He laughed, waving his cigarette through the air. “Hey, Murch, get this one," he said in a falsetto voice, “Little Miss Muffet here wants to see the psychiatrist on a Saturd’y. Ain’t that a scream?” Murch, behind the desk, got a good laugh at that one too. “Look, sweetie,” Mr. Donahue said with a cock of his hip and a few more puffs of smoke. He pulled a piece of tobacco from his tongue and delicately flicked it from his fingers. “We’d like to see that man, too, dearie. But it’s the weekend. You ain’t gonna find that one nowheres near here today, tomorrow or—”
I rummaged in my bag for a paper and pen. “Give me a number where I can call him for an appointment?”
That was a signal for another fit of phlegmy laughing and swishy arm waving. “If you find that phone number, you be sure to let me and Murch know ’cause we got quite a few bones we’d like to pick with that man.” He licked his finger and ran it across his eyebrow. “Well, I’ll be gosh darned, you must be some sorta magician, honey.” He threw the cigarette down on the floor and twisted his foot on it as a man with graying hair and wide shoulders hurried toward the locked door like a bank robber trying to make his getaway.
“That’s him?”
He nodded and I tore after him. “Doctor. Doctor.”
“Yes?” He stopped his dash for the door and smiled pleasantly.
“I’m, uh, Al—Alice Elkins.” I got it out without choking. “I believe my, uh, my husband, is under your care, and I’d like to speak with you.”
He glanced at his watch and sighed. “You know, it is the weekend? I only came in for a book I forgot.” He sighed again. “Certainly, Mrs. Elkins. Come this way.” I followed him down a corridor. “My name is Dr. George Shim,” he said as we walked, “and I oversee this floor of about five hundred men.”
“Five hundred!”
“Less than usual. Makes it hard to get around to everyone.” Dr. Shim took out a key and pushed through his office door. He turned on the light and motioned toward the chair across from his desk. “Have a seat, Mrs. Elkins. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your husband’s case. Allow me a few moments.” He took a slim folder from a file cabinet and sat behind his wooden desk. “Well, let’s see.” He thumbed through the few pages in the folder. “Ah, yes. The homosexual. I heard something about him at our meeting. He attempted suicide by drinking himself to death.”
“Scott is not a homosexual. He’s my husband. And I can assure you everything’s just fine in that department.”
Dr. Shim chuckled. “I see.”
“Why is he so groggy?”
“It’s the medicine. A brand-new drug. We’ve been getting miraculous results. Some seriously mentally ill patients used to spend their whole lives in a hospital before this new medicine, but now we’ve been sending more of the mentally ill back to their homes to lead productive lives.”
“Scott isn’t mentally ill.”
“Well, he is diagnosed with homosexuality, which is a mental illness. But, I can take him off the medication. I don’t think he needs that. Will that make you happy?”
“Very.”
“Good,” Dr. Shim started to rise.
“Then you’ll be sending him home soon? When?”
“I’m afraid, Mrs. Elkins, he won’t be going home for quite a while.” He sat down again.
“Why?” I thought of Max and his pain if I didn’t return with something hopeful. I remembered Moshe being locked up in one of these places for three years! “You can’t keep him here. I need him home with me today. You can’t do this.”
“Mrs. Elkins, I’m not doing anything to your husband. He committed himself.”
“What?”
“I have his signature here on this paper.” He pushed the form across the desk toward me. “He admitted to being homosexual and asked us to cure him.”
“Then have him fill out the form to un-commit himself so we can leave.”
“There is no such form,” Dr. Shim said. “In New York State, you can commit yourself, but you cannot un-commit yourself. That has to be done by a doctor.”
“Then do it.”
“I understand your anguish, but your husband wants to be cured.”
“He’d been drinking when he signed that. He wasn’t in his right mind.”
“Exactly. All the more reason he shouldn’t be released. Mrs. Elkins, I know this is painful,”—he leaned toward me in a fatherly way— “but your husband is not only dangerous to himself. Suicide sometimes becomes homicide, and homosexuality does pose a threat to society. What if your husband were to force himself on a young boy?”
“Scott would never!”
“But we can’t take that chance, can we? And obviously, your husband doesn’t want to take the chance either. That’s why he committed himself.”
“I told you, my husband is not a homosexual.”
“Your husband seems to disagree with you. Perhaps you should accept the wisdom of his decision. The sexual psychopath law allows us to keep all potentially violent sexual perverts confined to the hospital until we deem them cured.”
“Scott’s not violent. He’s the gentlest, kindest—”
“He was found in a hotel room with a broken … I believe it was a scotch bottle.” He picked up Scott’s folder and nodded. “Yes, a scotch bottl
e. There were broken bottles all around his bed and there were scratches on his body. He tried to drink himself to death. You don’t consider these things violent? As soon as your husband is cured we will send him back to your loving arms.”
“What cure?” My head felt light and I feared the room would spin.
“A daily regimen of psychoanalysis—except, of course, on weekends. Next week we have a new doctor arriving to share the load. He has a national reputation. New methods, new research—very exciting. I’m sure he’ll be of great assistance to your husband.”
“How long will it take?”
“It’s difficult to say. Much depends on your husband’s cooperation. It isn’t a speedy procedure, but it is effective. Still, under the best of conditions, it could take a few years.”
“Years? No. Please, you can’t do this.” A grasping desperation rose in me. I was fighting for my mother. I was fighting for myself. I had to calm down; I had to … what? Keep up my demure housewife pose. I put on my sweet, ultra-female smile. “There must be some other way, Doctor. Surely a strong, intelligent man of science like yourself knows a quicker way.” Mrs. Cramden was right. You never knew what part you’d be called upon to play. Of course, she meant on the stage. “I just don’t know how I will ever manage without him.” I wondered if I should faint?
“Well, there may be something else we could try,” he said.
“Yes?”
“The latest research studies are showing positive results. In one study, fifty-eight percent of homosexuals were completely cured.”
“What is it?” I couldn’t keep up my helpless pose. I was too excited.
“We’re setting up a new program. The psychoanalyst I told you we’re expecting next week, Dr. Krimsky, a bright young buck, is trained in this other approach. Besides doing the usual psychoanalysis, he will be training a few of our residents in this new procedure. But he plans on starting small. With only a very few patients in the beginning. Those who show the most promise.”
“How long will it take to get started?”
“It’s hard to say.” He touched his pencil to his lips. “Perhaps a week, perhaps less.”
“And this way would be faster?”