by Lee Smith
“I know what little girls like.” She was smiling at me. “Paper dolls!”
Inadvertently I clapped my hands, for I had never had any paper dolls, though I had always fancied them. “I would love that,” I said sincerely. “But I’m afraid I am too old for them now.”
“Well then, we shall make some very sophisticated older paper dolls for you,” she said, “with very exciting lives. Look here.” She hauled a leather portfolio onto the table and began pulling out big sheets of paper, all the colors of the rainbow. “Scissors?” she said to Miss Malone, who produced them without a word.
“Get the glue,” she said to me, and I ran to do so, while the studio emptied out around us. She pulled up her chair; I pulled up mine, all thought of the swimming pool vanished.
Now the scissors began to flash in earnest as the silhouettes of girls—three, four, five, six, ten girls! emerged, fluttering out onto the table. They had very, very long legs and arms, big feet and hands, and breasts like tennis balls, which appeared to be just stuck onto their bodies, as if glued to their chests. Many of them seemed to be dancing, like ballerinas. Some of them had bobbed hair, some not, but all their little heads were tilted back, looking up. What are they looking at? I wondered, glancing up myself at the high, vaulted ceiling and wrought-iron light fixtures of the art room.
“Well, make them some clothes, then!” Mrs. Fitzgerald shot at me, and I did, clumsily at first, tailoring their skirts and jackets as best I could, Miss Malone appearing with bits of lace and cloth and sequins to glue on. Soon the table was filled with these girls and their rudimentary clothing, as the dappled sunlight shifted outside and the sounds of a faraway game floated in the window.
“Now look,” she said, folding the biggest sheet of paper just so, then snipping quickly, expertly, before pulling them out suddenly—a string of six girls, then twelve more after that, holding hands, dancing. I was blissfully happy. It was all the chums I had ever wanted.
“But where will they all live?” I blurted out, for this was the question I worried about all the time.
“Draw them some houses, then,” she said imperiously, pushing over another of the largest sheets, and I did so, an entire street of houses, something I was very good at, drawing houses with two stories, houses with three stories, houses with pointed windows in the eaves, some with balconies, some with chimneys, some little houses with picket fences surrounding them. I drew a grand house with a crenellated roofline, like Homewood, where we were, and then another, a real castle with a similar roofline and a tower with a flag flying from it. I cut out a piece of blue cloth for the flag, and glued it onto the flagpole. Then I took up one of our paper dolls and gave her a smiling face and blue eyes and a long blue dress and a yellow crown—this took quite a while; it was by far the most detail I had yet lavished upon any of my chums—I was working so hard, concentrating so intently, that I did not at first realize that Mrs. Fitzgerald had ceased her own fierce population of our town and sat quite still, observing me.
“Now she has been chosen princess by everyone in the country,” I said, gluing the crown on her head, “and now she is going to claim her kingdom.” I placed her up on the top of the tower, next to the flag, and drew a happy, smiling yellow sun in the sky above. “There now!” I said. “Ta-da!” imitating trumpets.
Mrs. Fitzgerald, saying not a word, reached forward in a lightning stroke to grab up my beautiful princess and crumple her into a ball, which she tossed under the table. I sat paralyzed, like a paper doll myself, feeling my own blood and all my volition draining out of my body.
“You have killed her,” I whispered.
“Don’t be such a silly little pie-face, Patricia,” she said abruptly. Who was Patricia? “It is far better to be dead than to be a princess in a tower, for you can never get out once they put you up there, you’ll see. You’ll see. You must live on the earth and mix with the hoi polloi.” At this she began gathering up all our other paper dolls and crumpling them up, throwing them into the air, where they were caught by the breeze and fluttered everywhere.
“Now, now, Mrs. Fitzgerald, let’s save these. Perhaps you and your young friend could create a fine collage,” came the reassuring voice of Miss Malone, but I did not stay to see whether this suggestion had any effect or not. I grabbed up my chains of hand-holding chums and ran for dear life out the door, heart pounding, and did not look back.
YET MRS. FITZGERALD was perfectly friendly the next time I saw her in the art studio, and we did end up making that collage with the paper dolls Miss Malone had carefully saved, and also, miracle of miracles! a dollhouse, beginning with a cardboard shipping box and adding cardboard floors and walls, which we painted and papered, painstakingly. Everyone—patients and staff alike—got into the act on the dollhouse, fashioning little pieces of furniture for us. Mrs. Carroll brought in a fancy gold compact mirror from France; we hung it in the front hall.
Mrs. Fitzgerald often called me “Patricia” during the construction of the dollhouse, but I grew used to this and did not mind, once Mrs. Malone had explained to me that it was the original name of her daughter, now called Scottie, far away. I was happy to be a stand-in for anyone’s daughter, though I remained a bit wary after the incident of the princess in the tower.
But some of the things she said have stayed with me still, the sanest advice imaginable, though it came from a crazy woman. Or was she? Usually she hummed mindlessly, under her breath, as we worked on our dollhouse, but one summer morning she turned to me and said suddenly, rather formally, “It is excellent to have an interest in the arts, and to begin it early. The saddest thing in my life is that I am no good at it, having begun everything too late.”
“Of course that isn’t true,” soothed the ever-present Miss Malone. “Why, Mrs. Fitzgerald is preparing an exhibition of her paintings right now, isn’t that so? She is an extraordinary artist.” Miss Malone always spoke slowly and with great conviction, after long consideration. She absolutely believed in Mrs. Fitzgerald’s “genius,” the word she used. I am sure that she did not agree with Dr. C’s idea that women patients in general should be urged to give up their “unrealistic ambitions” and be “re-educated toward femininity, good mothering, and the revaluing of marriage and domesticity,” as I would read later in his books.
Privately I went along with Mrs. Fitzgerald’s own assessment of her talents. To me, her paintings were sort of scary, people’s bodies that did not look like bodies mostly, with big blobs of muscles and mean faces. No one was smiling, not even the nursing mothers who seemed scariest of all, their tiny weird babies jammed into their huge breasts with no love, or even affection, evident. I preferred Mrs. Fitzgerald’s floral compositions, for she truly loved flowers, and though these flowers did not look real either, at least they were better than those mothers. And I actually liked one painting of the pink and purple hollyhocks that grew along the stone wall by the entrance to Homewood itself. Perhaps Mrs. Fitzgerald had more aptitude for dancing—she was said to be a dancer—or for writing. She was forever scribbling in a black notebook, which she closed up immediately when anyone drew near.
Still, I loved the dollhouse, continuing to play with it long after Mrs. Fitzgerald had turned against it; for once it was done, she did not want to allow the dolls to live there, finally, rather like the princess in the tower. “This house will be the end of them!” she said, darkening in that way she had, leaving our table abruptly to go outside and smoke cigarette after cigarette on the stone bench under the blooming crepe myrtle.
“Why don’t you go ahead and take the dollhouse to your own room now?” Miss Malone surprised me by asking, and surprised me further by helping to carry it over there herself that very afternoon, since it was too heavy for me alone. Later I wondered if perhaps she feared its destruction by Mrs. Fitzgerald—but in any case, its possession was a kind of turning point for me. It was the most splendid thing—the only splendid thing—I had ever owned.
The dollhouse stayed in my room, and Mrs. C
arroll continued to bring me little items for it: tiny lamps, silverware and china, little scraps of carpet, from all their travels. I was totally devoted to her, and to my studies on the piano. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s advice had sunk in.
MRS. FITZGERALD WAS one of the few adults frequenting the large stone swimming pool that summer, one of Highland’s true delights. Here we “children” could splash and swim without so much direction and regimentation as was found in all other areas of hospital life. We had the pool mostly to ourselves. Some of the staff were always on duty as lifeguards, but laps were not required of anyone. I have the fondest memories of this pool, for I had never been in one before, and was delighted by the sensation of floating, once our vigorous young Miss Quinn showed me how. Soon she had me swimming, too, kicking and flailing away in the shallow end. The huge trees arched over us; sunlight dappled the water. Here we all seemed less like patients than like regular kids, dunking each other and playing Duck Duck Goose.
On the hottest days even the shyest, quietest patients came, too, such as the frighteningly skinny Gould twin sisters from Baltimore, who appeared in huge black jerseys, so cumbersome when wet that they couldn’t even swim. They sat on the stone steps submerged to their chins and spoke only to each other, in a private language.
“Why won’t they take off those big sweaters?” I asked Miss Quinn. “Are they embarrassed because they’re so skinny?”
“No,” she said, “It’s because they think they’re too fat.”
I looked down at my own legs, wavy and white and insubstantial in the water. Everything seemed changed at the pool, by the light and the breeze and the water—even my own legs, even my own body, for I felt different suddenly and had begun to suspect that I might be on the verge of developing breasts.
“Watch now,” Miss Quinn said suddenly, quietly, and I looked up to see, of all people, Mrs. Fitzgerald alone at the deep end, wearing a white bathing suit, pulling a cap over her glorious hair, fastening the strap beneath her chin. Her body was long and deeply tanned, like a girl’s, and as I watched—we all watched, in perfect silence—she climbed up the ladder to the high board where she stood poised for an instant, outlined against a patch of blue sky.
I gripped Miss Quinn’s muscular arm.
“Ssshh,” she said. “It’s all right,” just as Mrs. Fitzgerald went up on tiptoe, lifted her arms, and executed a perfect swan dive high into the air, then disappeared into the water below without a ripple, without a trace. She was down way too long, I thought, my heart in my throat, but then the rubber cap popped up, quite close to us now, and we all burst into spontaneous applause, Mrs. Fitzgerald then favoring us with one of her rare radiant smiles. She swam back to the ladder, climbed up and dove again, several more times, from the lower board. Though we all moved about in the water again, no one joined her at the deep end. It was as if she owned it. Finally she toweled off, removed her cap, shook out her hair, and lay back in the sun on a towel, smoking, at a distance from the rest of us. She was always smoking.
“They do say she was quite a swimmer in her youth,” Mrs. Hodges remarked another day that summer, as she sat by the pool fully clothed and knitting. “And I’d believe it, for sure. Then she married and they took to gal-i-van-ting all over Europe, mind you, her and Mister Scott Fitzgerald—France and Italy, la-ti-dah, oh my! Look there, how she loves the sun!”
In fact, Mrs. Fitzgerald was the only grown-up who came to the pool regularly, and the only person who lay in the sun like that, for hours on end. What was she thinking? I wondered. Why did she love it so much?
ONE BEAUTIFUL JULY day Mrs. Fitzgerald brought a notebook to the pool and sat writing furiously at one of the old round cement tables before flinging down her pen and rushing over to the unoccupied deep end where she made dive after dive off the board. I shall not forget the last swan dive that day when she was momentarily poised in nothing but the air—arms open, head up, looking out at the trees and the sky beyond with wide fixed eyes. Then she wrapped her towel around herself and exited the pool area abruptly, her pen and the notebook abandoned upon the table. Before I left, I picked them up and saw that she had been writing a letter to her husband. To my shame, I read what she’d written:
Dearest Goofo,
Summer has come round like a yellow cat sleeping heavily in the sunshine, purring and rubbing against our legs slow and inexorable in his passage, the purr and slink of days. Bright red burst of birdsong in the a.m. and the diamond counterpane of dew upon the grass punctuated by spiderweb cathedrals as insects go about their unfathomable tasks, complaining loudly. Then tennis that ridiculous game oh why does one love it so? To be followed by a wonderful sketching expedition down the hot white lane across the marching fields now filled with goldenrod and lavender asters and deep purple ironweed God’s summer palette as we climb into the billowy mountains and arching blue sky radiant with His unfolding promise up and up and up we go into the very air, the world but a dream below spread out like a marvelous feast a buffet for the senses and I am so greedy for it all, the lovely things of this world, for life unlived and summers past on the Riviera. I already have a fine tan I should love to place it upon your shoulder Dear Heart and lick the salt from the crook of your neck and lie sleeping through the long hot afternoon at Cannes with the murmuring sea so blue just there, in the open window.
I know this place must cost a lot of money and it is a strain upon you who have always been the kindest and most generous of souls so I do not wish to complain, yet I am so lonely here DoDo in spite of people everywhere they are not real people and I am not a real person either though you will recognize me right away I dare say by the light in my eye to see you. I am counting the days in French until you come again un deux trois quatre cinq though I know forever after will not come again. The halcyon days of love and youth shone like a row of soldiers impregnable in their golden armor but we have killed them DoDo, we would have killed anything
Here the letter ended abruptly in a long jagged mark. I was frightened, and took it over to Mrs. Hodges who sat in the shade knitting. She merely glanced at it and patted my head and stood up heavily. “I’ll see she gets it back. But not to fret too much, dear, it’s good for her, all the writing, you know. The walking. The art. The swimming. It’s good for her here.”
THE SUN, THE water, and the mountain air were working their magic upon me, as well. I had never lived in the out-of-doors before. Nor had I lived in my own body, which continued its development apace, once begun. My legs grew stronger, sturdier—sometimes I held them out from a chair in wonder, just to look at them. I found myself standing with my arms crossed, or holding my bookbag up against my chest, to hide my developing breasts.
Robert Liebnitz, the genius boy from Boston, took to walking with me from place to place around the hospital grounds. “Ooh, he likes you,” Lily said, which threw me into a fit of embarrassment and discomfort, as well as a certain undeniable pleasure, for Robert was extremely odd. How can I explain it? He was caught back in his brain somehow, which was filled to bursting with strange facts and reams of history that he announced in his loud, halting voice at the most surprising moments. Even the shape of Robert’s head denoted his intelligence, with its huge white bulging forehead.
Once when we had pancakes at breakfast, Robert passed the maple syrup along to me and then proclaimed, “The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 was one of the worst disasters of modern times, when a giant vat of molasses in Boston exploded, sending an eight-to-fifteen-foot-high wave of molasses through the streets at thirty-five miles an hour, actually picking up a train and tossing trucks and streetcars everywhere. Twenty-one people were killed and a hundred and fifty were injured. Can you imagine what that would feel like, to drown in molasses? They say the whole city smelled sweet for days.” We sat with our forks in the air, looking at him. “My goodness,” Miss Tippin said. Another time, when we were served fish at dinner, Robert told us that King Henry I of England had died from overindulging on lampreys, a parasitic fish that was one of
his favorite foods. “But that’s nothing, in terms of weird deaths,” Robert went on, getting warmed up now. “Listen to this one! Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, died when a flying eagle mistook his bald head for a rock and dropped a tortoise down on top of him in an attempt to break its shell. That’s so the eagle could eat the turtle meat, see?”
I remember sitting with Robert beneath the great flowering smoke tree by Highland Hall, throwing out numbers at him one after the other, which he added up in his head. He could also do this with numbers on the license plates of passing vehicles on Montford Avenue. He had read everything, it seemed, though he disdained Nancy Drew. “Who are those silly people?” he’d ask. But in general he could not restrain himself from telling me the ending of whatever else I happened to be reading, so that finally I simply refused to tell him what book I was in, which drove him wild.
Dr. C’s theories did not entirely work with Robert, who was very awkward and resisted all physical activity rigorously. He could not even swim, though he did come out to the pool sometimes, perhaps to see all the girls. Here he slouched moodily, whitely, in one of the Adirondack chairs with some of the staff. He liked to talk about sports with the staff, especially baseball; he loved the statistics, and knew them all. That summer Robert was very excited about Joe DiMaggio’s hitting and Carl Hubbell’s pitching. He used to badger Mr. Axelrod. “So whaddya think about King Carl, huh? He’s got twenty-two games now—how much farther can he go? He hasn’t lost in two years—you think he’ll ever lose? Ty Cobb says Carl’s arm won’t last, throwing those screwballs. Whaddya think, huh?” Yet once when they had forced Robert to join in a big kickball game, I saw him crumple to the ground and writhe there wretchedly instead of simply kicking out at the red ball when it came his way.
He began bringing me odd presents at odd times, things he found on the grounds—a beautiful pebble from the creek, a silver baby spoon, an army medal, a piece of shiny white quartz, an animal skull, and once, after a rain, a huge, ruffled orange mushroom, which he plucked impulsively from the woods near Brushwood and presented to me with a little bow, as if it were a bouquet. He started coming on hikes with our group, wearing high black socks and baggy green shorts with many pockets in them, for putting things into, and a horrid plaid shirt. I adored and despised him. Once when Mr. Axelrod led us up a particularly steep trail, Robert reached back to take my hand, and did not release it once we reached the rocky promontory, where we stood catching our breath and looking out upon space.