Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  Finally I slept, waking later in the night to see a crack of unaccustomed light beneath my door and hear voices—Dr. Carroll’s, Mrs. Carroll’s, and another man’s voice which I did not immediately recognize. They had been checking on me. I was surprised by this, as the Carrolls normally retired to their own apartment unless they had an engagement. The voices continued, now coming from the sitting room down the short hall. Some instinct made me get up, open the door, and creep in darkness, shrinking against the wall, right down to the corner where I could hear them clearly. The other man was Dr. Raymond Levy, a young doctor newly arrived from Duke University.

  “But the rest cure was successful before, darling.” Mrs. Carroll’s voice had an argumentative edge to it. “Don’t you remember what sort of shape she was in, the little waif, when she arrived?”

  Me! They were talking about me.

  “I’ve told you, Grace. There just isn’t time now for the rest cure.” Dr. Carroll spoke impatiently. “It takes several weeks, as you well know, at a minimum. Evalina has to go to Peabody, and she has to go now. Within a fortnight.”

  “But surely her matriculation could be postponed,” ventured the young Dr. Levy, “under these circumstances. This kind of thing must happen with some frequency, I’d imagine, due to illness, or a death in the family. Schools have to make allowances. Evalina is very young, anyway. Can’t she go next year, or at the beginning of the winter term?”

  “Yes, Robert.” Mrs. Carroll had a note of pleading in her voice. “Let’s keep her here with us, darling, until she is stronger.”

  “No,” Dr. Carroll said. Instantly I could see his craggy face in my mind’s eye, the big nose, the jut of the chin. “Absolutely not. I am in the business of discouraging weakness, and encouraging strength. Banishing illness and enabling wellness, this is what we are about here at Highland Hospital.” Dr. Carroll spoke for the benefit of Dr. Levy, I could tell. “Coddling is not kind. Coddling fosters neurasthenia, hypochondriasis, hysteria, and paralysis of the will.”

  “But darling . . .” I could imagine Mrs. Carroll’s beautiful, pained face, how she would be leaning forward in her chair.

  “Enough!” I knew Dr. Carroll had held up his hand in the familiar traffic-cop gesture. “Sometimes a physician must simply make a judgment call. I take full responsibility for my decision. Evalina is the most fortunate of children, for she has a true talent, and the capacity for real and important work. Thus, despite her unfortunate birth and the sorrows of her youth, Evalina possesses every capacity for achieving that highest of all our goals here at Highland, that which I refer to as the Victorious Self. But timing is all, as we are well aware.”

  “Robert, I implore you. At this moment, Evalina is scarcely speaking. She can neither practice nor eat. Who knows whether or not we shall even get her out of bed in the morning?”

  “This is precisely why I am prescribing a course of metrazol convulsion therapy for our Evalina, beginning as soon as possible. I shall speak with Wilfred Terhune about it first thing in the morning. One or two may do the trick.”

  “Oh, I just don’t know, dear.” Now Mrs. Carroll sounded really worried.

  “You need not know, dear, nor worry your pretty head about it. But your participation will be important—crucial, in fact. Do not allow the faintest shadow of doubt, or indecision, to cross your face or enter your voice as you discuss this with her. We must be in concert on this, Grace. We must act as one.”

  “But what about Evelyn?”

  “Don’t worry. I will put the fear of God into Evelyn Hodges,” Dr. Carroll said grimly. “She shall not scotch this project, I can promise you that. And she is not to tell anyone outside this hospital—anyone—about Evalina’s treatments. Mrs. Grady is not to know, nor are Evalina’s friends, nor their parents. This moment, too, will disappear into Evalina’s buried past, and she will go forward into the useful future which awaits her.”

  “Well, if you are sure, then . . .”

  I could tell by Mrs. Carroll’s voice that the conversation was over. She always did whatever Dr. Carroll suggested—or decreed. “Good night, then, dear,” she said. “Good night, Dr. Levy.”

  Trembling, I pressed myself flat against the wall, but she took the other hallway, thank goodness.

  “A point of information, Dr. Carroll,” Dr. Levy began seriously. “At Duke, the insulin coma treatment is currently preferred; I am wondering why you have chosen metrazol for your ward.”

  Ward? I was thinking.

  Dr. Carroll said, “Here at Highland, we administer the insulin treatments—usually for longterm schizophrenia and depression—over an extensive period of time. Thirty or forty comas would not be uncommon. But with a trauma-induced state such as Evalina’s, I have found metrazol to be quicker and more effective. Sometimes a sudden jolt or two is all that’s needed. I am hoping that this will be the case here.”

  Dr. Levy went on to question Dr. Carroll about electroshock, a new treatment which “shows much promise,” as Dr. Carroll agreed.

  But I had heard enough. I crept back to my room and lay down in darkness. Something Dr. Carroll had said kept coming back to me. What did he mean, my “unfortunate birth”? What could he possibly mean by that? Finally I closed my eyes and surrendered to my terrible waking sleep, watching the film of Robert’s suicide over and over. There was a part of me that did not want to take the metrazol, that did not want to get better, that wanted to stay here in this darkness with Robert, no matter how hard it was, so long as I could see him at all. Yet there was another part that did want to leave Highland, to go to Peabody, to fly away, fly away like the butterflies, like Granny’s song, I’ll fly away, oh Lordy, I’ll fly away. When I get to Heaven by and by, I’ll fly away.

  IT WAS STILL early the following morning when I was awakened by one of my favorites, the pretty young nurse Dorothy Rich, and escorted up to the top floor of the Central Building, through double steel doors that clanged shut behind us, one after the other. “Oh, that’s for the patients’ safety,” she told me with her bright pink lipstick smile. “They are at first so disorienting, these treatments.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then they prove very helpful,” she said reassuringly, squeezing my shoulder as she led me into a tiny room where I was to take off my clothes and put on a terrycloth robe and some paper slippers and “rest” until my turn came.

  Another young nurse came in with two tablets and a glass of water on a tray. “Here, honey, go ahead and take these now,” she said, putting the bag down on the little table by my bed. “Then you can take a nap, and when you wake up, you’ll feel a lot better.”

  “Oh Diana, I tried to call you last night,” Dorothy said to her. “Some of us are going out to Lake Lure on Saturday, don’t you want to go with us? Bert is going,” she added, giggling.

  “Really?” Diana said. “But . . .”

  I turned my back and slipped the tablets into the pocket of my terrycloth robe, then faced them again, drained my glass of water, and lay down on the bed, surprising myself. I am still not sure exactly why I disobeyed. Hands at my sides, I lay flat on my back and closed my eyes. The two young nurses continued to whisper and giggle. I heard the words “big band.”

  Then Dorothy came over and put her cool hand on my forehead. “She’s gone,” she said, and the two left my cubicle.

  I sat up, possessed by nothing so much as a sudden terrific curiosity. I opened my door and went out into the narrow hallway to find the bathroom, where I flushed the tablets away immediately. Some of the doors along the long corridor were open, and some were closed; I knew that these rooms contained patients in varying stages of insulin and metrazol shock therapy, either drugged and waiting for their treatments to be administered, as I was supposed to be doing, or still “sleeping it off” from the day before. Nurses flitted in and out. The big door down at the end of the hall swung open as a patient, prone and still on his bed, was wheeled inside; the doors closed behind him. I ducked back into the bathroom as anoth
er gurney with a large sleeping man on it came down the hall past me, pushed by an intern I did not know. The metal doors clanged shut again behind the unconscious giant, then opened for yet another patient on a gurney. Soon they would come for me.

  I looked both ways, then walked quickly (and calmly, I hoped, though my heart was beating fast) down the hall. I turned the large knob, then pulled it; the door swung open easily. Without even thinking, I slipped inside, to hover just there, by the back wall.

  The large ward was in semidarkness. Six or seven patients already lay in place on the gurneys to which they were virtually bound, I realized, by carefully folded sheets and raised rails, so that they would not roll out. But it was only later that I would fully understand everything I saw. A little table holding a glass of orange juice, a bottle of dextrose, and several syringes filled with different amounts of insulin on a clean white cloth had been placed next to each. Patients just commencing their course of treatment were given low doses of insulin, which would increase with time until the dose was quite high by the end of therapy. Usually the injections were given in the buttocks, though I saw two patients receiving injections in their arms instead. The insulin shock treatment was given five days a week, with the weekend off, and might go on for weeks and weeks. On a few tables there lay only one syringe, which was destined for the metrazol shock patients such as myself. We, too, would be thrown into a spontaneous convulsion, like an epileptic fit.

  Some of the treatments were already in progress. They started early each morning, so that the patients could be carefully monitored all day long for any delayed reactions. Highland was a famous, progressive hospital, remember—this was the most effective and humane treatment for mental illness to be found in America at that time. While I watched, yet another patient—a woman I recognized from Art, a good sculptor—was wheeled in sound asleep and placed in an unoccupied space beside a table.

  Now the reactions were beginning all around the dim room. Soon after their first shot, the patients began to perspire and drool; already, as I watched, the ones who had had the higher doses went into coma and began to toss and moan, their muscles twitching. Some grabbed at the air—hands were shooting up all around the room. Four or five nurses moved among them continuously now, like fish in an aquarium, checking pulse and respiration. Dr. Terhune and an intern monitored them minutely as well; only Dr. Terhune could decide, on an individual basis, how long each coma should last. This decision was the key to the success or failure of the treatment. The coma must be long enough to be effective; yet patients left in coma too long could suffer brain damage or even death. Usually a treatment lasted for several hours before being terminated by a drink of glucose or by a glucose injection.

  I was not present long enough to witness the completion of any treatment, of course; for no sooner had the convulsions begun in earnest than Dr. Carroll himself stuck his head in the door, looking a great deal less calm than usual, and strode over to whisper something to one of the nurses, who went to speak to Dr. Terhune immediately. The large door closed.

  Realizing that I must make my escape, I waited only a moment or so before opening it myself and slipping out, despite a nurse’s cry from behind me as the door shut soundlessly. I was in luck! Dr. Carroll had gone elsewhere.

  I don’t know what I intended, really, as I ran blindly down the corridor toward, I hoped, freedom—only to collide with Mrs. Fitzgerald as she emerged from one of the rooms at the other end, dressed in regular clothes and carrying a little red leather overnight bag. I imagine that her course of treatment had been completed the day before, and she was then being released. In any case, I hit her head-on, pushing her up against the wall and knocking her bag to the floor where it fell open, spilling its contents at our feet.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” I gasped.

  “Why, Patricia Pie-Face!” she said immediately, her own face appearing puffier though prettier than I recalled, despite a large bruise on her cheekbone. Had she hit it on a guardrail, during a convulsion? She had a new haircut, too; I might not have recognized her. Mrs. Fitzgerald always looked different, and always younger than she was, as if caught back in some perpetual girlhood. It had been ages since I had seen her. And now suddenly here she was, hugging me tight, tight, sobbing into my hair.

  “I heard about the salamander boy,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

  I hugged her back.

  “There she is. Evalina!” called Dr. Carroll as he came flying through the double doors with Dr. Levy in tow. “Hold on to her, Zelda,” he instructed, which was completely unnecessary, for I wasn’t going anywhere. I stood still while Mrs. Fitzgerald hugged me, an embrace I recall vividly to this day. Mrs. Fitzgerald felt soft and warm and mommy-ish.

  Dr. Carroll halted, panting, a few feet from us.

  “Leave her alone, Robert,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said to him in a quiet yet commanding voice, oddly intimate. “Just you leave her alone.” They were facing each other.

  I raised my head to look at him, too. “I will go to Peabody,” I said. “I am ready to go now.” I bent to retrieve Mrs. Fitzgerald’s belongings—her black notebook, her colored pencils that had rolled everyplace, a few toiletries, and a fancy blue silk nightgown. I stuffed them all into her little red case and snapped it shut and handed it to her, and we walked down the hall together. Dr. Carroll shook his head as we went past him.

  Back at Homewood, I found Mrs. Carroll and Mrs. Hodges in my room, already putting linens into into my trunk—the same steamer trunk, with stickers all over it, that Mrs. Carroll had taken to Vienna as a student herself. She squealed like a girl now as she stood up to hug me. I still wore the terrycloth robe from the top floor of the Central Building.

  “What in the world has happened, then?” Mrs. Hodges asked, hands on her ample hips.

  “Dr. C changed his mind, and I did, too. I’m going. I’m ready to go to Peabody.”

  “Of course you are!” Mrs. Carroll clapped her hands. ”I knew you would not fail me, Evalina,” she said. “Go, go. Go—you must go, for me. Music is freedom, never forget it.” How many times had she repeated these words of “the great Busoni?” Yet she was not free, Mrs. Carroll, I realized, her grand career secondary to her famous husband’s. Nor was Ella Jean free, even with her own music, even up on her own wild mountaintop. Yet somehow, through nothing I had ever done to deserve it, I was being given this chance. Suddenly the voice of Matilda Bloom came into my mind clear as day, and the words she had said to me at Bellefleur years before: I know you, honey, and I know you are a smart girl, and you have gots to realize this is the chance of a lifetime here. Your mama would want you to take it. She would want you to grab that brass ring that she never got aholt of herself.

  I hugged them both, hard. “I’ll write to you,” I promised. “I’ll send postcards for your collection.”

  INTERMEZZO

  THE PEABODY INSTITUTE OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, FOUNDED 1857

  Sept. 10, 1940

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  As you see, this Institute is huge, like a grand monument! But inside all is lively, a beehive of music. I had no idea. This is a world. Thank you, thank you.

  Love from your overwhelmed yet happy student,

  Evalina

  THE PEABODY LIBRARY

  Sept. 12, 1940

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  This where I do my work study, for the Scholarship. They call it the “Cathedral of Books,” you can see why, with its wrought-iron stacks soaring many floors up to the skylight. It is a place like reading itself.

  Your inspired,

  Evalina

  SEAGULLS, CHESAPEAKE BAY

  Sept. 17, 1940

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  To answer yr. question in haste, I am taking Italian, humanities, music theory/musicology, ensemble arts, and piano of course. And no, thank you, I do not want for a thing. And yes, there are concerts, every day.

  Love from yr

  Evalina

  BALTIMORE HARBOR AT TWILIGHT
>
  Sept. 22, 1940

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  A group of us ate softshell crabs here in a café hanging right out over the water, lights everywhere. And guess what? Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald lived in Baltimore, too, quite near Peabody, in a house named La Paix. They are VERY famous here! I had no idea.

  Hello to All from your

  Evalina

  FORT MCHENRY, BALTIMORE, MD.

  Oct, 15, 1940

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  No everything is fine, I have just been so busy, that’s all. To answer yr question, my roommate is Susanah Knox (oboe) from Ohio. She is very serious. Today it is raining and I miss you, and Mrs. Hodges, and the mountains, and all.

  From Evalina

  P.S. It is very intense here.

  THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Oct. 18, 1940

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  I am sight-seeing! We came on the bus, we are having a picnic on the mall, ducks are swimming in the big pool. All this grass reminds me of Highland, say hi to Mrs. Hodges and Dr. C for me, and all.

  Your Evalina

  MOUNT VERNON

  Oct. 27, 1940

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  I went on a weekend visit with my friend Barbara Scott (clarinet) to Orange, Va., out in the countryside. Their house is very old. We rode horses! And gave a little concert in the parlor together for all her family and all the neighbors, like at Homewood.

  Love from yr

  Evalina

  THE PEABODY CONSERVATORY CHOIR

  Nov. 1, 1940

  Dear Mrs. Carroll,

  There are more crazy people here than HH! And Susannah Knox has had a nervous breakdown and gone back to Ohio. I hope I do not have to have another roommate. I stayed up all night reading Neitzsche for humanities, now I may have a nervous breakdown myself!