Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  Alicia looked me over more closely now, her eyes narrowed to slits as she took in my gray wool cape and pretty boots, French, too, and my pregnancy.

  “Ah,” she said. “I suppose you want money. Well, you won’t get it from me. In fact, I’d like to get back just half of what my father paid to get rid of you—but that’s long gone, I suspect. And now look at you, just like your mother! I’d hope you’d have more sense, that you’d have thought of the child, at least. How can you do this to another child? But I suppose you people just can’t restrain yourselves, can you?”

  Turning to leave, I had to ask: “What do you mean, about the child?” pulling my cape close about us.

  “Why, it will be a monster, won’t it? Just like you, Evalina—the child of your mother and her own father, don’t you know that? Don’t you know anything?”

  CHAPTER 6

  THUS I FOUND MYSELF in the place I had perhaps been heading all along, the top floor of the Central Building of Highland Hospital, being administered a course of insulin shock treatments, which I did not resist. How could I? for during that time, I was nobody—a husk of a person, the shape and shell of a person, the skin of a salamander girl—all emptied out. Nobody home. Shock treatments do that, they rob you of your immediate memory, and in my case, this was a blessing.

  I knew Dr. Carroll immediately, though now I am not certain how long I had been back in the hospital when he arrived; perhaps it was hours, perhaps days. I was in a little cubicle of a room, coming out of a treatment, when I heard the deep, familiar voice rolling in from a great distance somewhere above me, like thunder.

  “Evalina, Evalina, can you hear me?”

  I fought to open my eyes, which seemed to be glued together, and tried to raise my hand, but this I could not accomplish either, even though the restraints had been removed.

  “Evalina, this is Dr. Carroll.”

  I know it, I thought furiously, heart pounding. I know you—with a curious mixture of dread and relief as I struggled to come back to myself. I tried but could not control the muscles of my mouth.

  He laid his hand, dry as paper, lightly on my forehead.

  “Now, now,” Dr. Carroll said. “Your job here is to relax, Evalina. To rest. You may leave everything else to us. You have been very ill, but you are safe now. You are here, you are home.” His voice came down to me through shifting layers of fog. “We do not intend to let you go again. We do not intend to lose you.” Threat or promise, the words sank in.

  Suddenly my eyes popped open and there he was above me, blocking the light, his head a dark shape I would have recognized anywhere—those big ears sticking out! I could not see his face. Was it day or night? I could never tell, in that place. I struggled to gain a slight purchase on one elbow and tried to speak to him, but only horrible sounds would issue forth from my mouth.

  “Never mind.” His words floated like clouds above me, out of reach. “Trust me, Evalina. It is better this way.”

  What way? What is better? What did he mean? But I could not speak.

  The door closed. I heard steps and voices outside in the hall, then nothing. I lay exhausted in utter darkness and finally slept, to wake much later upon a cold wet sheet, humiliated. Yet somewhat restored—now I could open my eyes, sit up, even get up and stagger to the door to call the night attendant, who came running. She was a strong, bouncy Negro girl who clucked and cajoled and went to work on me immediately: “Why my goodness, look a here at you, poor thing, ain’t nobody put you to bed proper nor took you to the toilet neither one. I tell you what, you come along with me now. Just come on—” half carrying me down the hall to the communal bathroom, though it was still pitch black outside the windows.

  This girl, whose name was Gloria, ran the big, old-fashioned claw-footed tub in the corner full of hot water and put me in it, then ducked out briefly to reappear with a little blue bottle of Evening in Paris bath salts, which she sprinkled liberally all about me, so that soon I was surrounded by iridescent bubbles up to my chin. “Now just lay back,” she commanded, and I did so, each cell of my body letting go. “Ain’t that better now?”

  It felt wonderful. I had never seen this tub in use before. Usually we were led into the washroom by the nurses, who sometimes had to assist—or force—those in the worst conditions into the showers. Often I had to look away. Now I reveled in the luxury and warmth of my bubble bath, with time to notice the pink and maroon tile rosettes on the floor, repeated on the border running around the pink tile walls, halfway up. Out the barred window, I saw the first light fall upon the autumn foliage outside.

  “Where in the world did you get this bubble bath stuff?” I asked Gloria.

  “Kress’s,” she said, “on Patton Avenue, you know?”

  I did know, as suddenly Asheville itself came flooding back to me—Pack Square, with the Vance Monument in the center of it, the lunch counter at Woolworth’s on Haywood Street where they made the vanilla cokes, the Grove Park Inn up on its mountain, and us up on our own, at the end of Montford Avenue, at Highland Hospital. Highland Hospital. I remembered the crenellated roofline of Homewood, the greenhouse gardens behind Brushwood. I knew exactly where I was.

  I lay back in my bubbles and swore not to tell as Gloria opened one of the windows and lit an illegal cigarette, blowing smoke out into the rosy dawn. She ran some more hot water into my tub and left me again while she raced over to escort an older woman into one of the toilet stalls, a thin, gray woman bent into the shape of a question mark, who shuffled along looking down all the while and mumbled to herself and did not notice me. By then I would have been glad to get out of the tub, but as my soiled gown had disappeared, thank goodness, and there was not a towel within reach, I resisted the idea of walking naked and dripping down the hall past all those others who were undoubtedly waking up now, too.

  So I was still there when a truly frightening woman stomped in. Wild, red-gray hair stuck out in clumps all over her head, huge breasts swung to her waist beneath her hospital-issue gown. She wore big, dirty, untied men’s brogans, shoelaces flapping on the white tile floor. Her eyes darted everywhere, fastening upon me. She approached my tub, hands on hips, then began jabbing at the air with a fat, pointing finger.

  “Get out! Get out!” she screamed. “Who do you think you are?”

  I shrank back, alarmed—for she was strong, this woman, I could tell, and suddenly Gloria was nowhere in sight. But then the woman made a disgusting sound with her mouth and rushed out, the open back of the hospital gown exposing her huge red buttocks, such a sight that I couldn’t help laughing.

  “Good grief!”

  For the first time, I noticed the pretty, dark-haired woman about my own age standing before one of the stalls. She was laughing, too, though gingerly, as if it hurt her.

  “What are you doing in that tub, anyway?” she asked. “How’d you rate that bubble bath? You’d better get out of there, or we’ll have an insurrection.”

  “I’d love to get out,” I said, “if I had a towel. Do you see one anyplace?”

  Bath towels were always in short supply, given out carefully by a nurse or attendant when one entered the bathroom for a shower, then taken up again afterward. Apparently they feared that we might somehow hang ourselves with them.

  “Oh Lord.” Now she was giggling, for all the world as if this were a dormitory at Peabody instead of the locked floor of a mental institution. Was she a patient, too? This seemed highly unlikely, especially as she wore a pretty two-piece “sleep set,” a lavender gown and matching robe sprigged with violets, instead of a hospital gown. “Just a minute.” She darted around the maroon and pink tile wall divider into the shower area and came back with a damp bath towel, which she handed me none too soon, as the heavy door opened again. I wrapped myself up in it entirely, easy to do since I was very thin.

  “Thanks so much,” I said.

  “It’s okay, it was nothing.” She had a soft, Southern voice.

  Then she smiled and I could see it, what was wro
ng with her. Beneath the perfect, arched brows, her wide violet eyes were flat and dead. Nobody home there, either.

  Her eyes were like the eyes of the fish laid out in rows on ice in the French Market in New Orleans, down by the river, where I went with my mother in the past, some time ago. In the past. My who? My mother, in the past, some time ago. My mind wavered, then stilled.

  “What’s your name?” she was asking.

  “Evalina Toussaint,” I said automatically, though I didn’t feel I owned it anymore. I didn’t feel connected to it in any way. It could have been something I’d just picked up from the basket of toiletries by the door, like a little green bar of soap.

  “What a pretty name,” the woman said. “My name is Mary Margaret Stovall.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “No. Mary Margaret Stovall Calhoun. Dixie, for short. My name is Dixie Calhoun.”

  Then she smiled, and I realized how beautiful she was, really beautiful. Even that morning, in a hospital where she was undergoing a course of shock treatments, Dixie looked like a lingerie model who had just stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine, with her jet-black hair curling naturally all around her heart-shaped face. Perfect skin. Though it wasn’t quite adequate, just like mine. Dixie, too, needed a carapace. A what? A carapace. This word, straight out of Robert’s vocabulary, came into my head from no place. Nowhere. Who knew what else was out there?

  “Now girls, really! This is not a gab session.” An older attendant, all business, had taken over for Gloria. The new shift—morning in the asylum.

  “Bye,” Dixie said, with a fluttery little wave of the hand. Instinctively I knew that she had learned that wave from riding on floats, in parades. I could hear a parade in my head, with a Dixieland brass band. A krewe. At Mardi Gras. Glancing back toward my claw-foot tub, I saw day stealing in though the bathroom windows—pink clouds in the sky and golden sunshine on the mountaintops, reflected in the iridescent bubbles fast disappearing in the tub. Only a few were left. Now I could smell breakfast—and I was starving.

  GRADUALLY, OVER THE next few weeks, the world kept coming back to me in halting, unrelated images or words or even sudden overwhelming feelings for which I had neither name nor cause. The sweet taste of a sugary doughnut in my mouth, for instance; or a vision of white dogwood blossoms all around me as I sat in the open somewhere, in some city; the majestic swell of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on a cathedral organ, filling me with exaltation and then shame as I woke in orgasm to find the young lady physician, Dr. Gail Schwartz, patting my arm.

  “It’s all right, Evalina,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed. This is all right—this is normal. You are beginning to recover.”

  But the next morning I woke up racked by sobs and could not stop weeping for hours, though I did not know the source of my sorrow. If this was recovery, I wanted no part of it. Why couldn’t I just simply remember?

  “Because the insulin shock treatments cause coma and convulsions, which are scrambling the connections in your brain, Evalina,” Dr. Schwartz told me. “This is how they work. Nobody knows exactly why they work—and any of these doctors who tell you they do is lying—but they do work. They are working now. You are better. You were sent to us in a virtually catatonic state, the result of severe trauma, injury, illness—who knows? We don’t know exactly what happened—we have only a few pieces of your story. Our first task has been to jolt you out of the condition in which we found you. Next, we may be able to help you form new connections and ways of thinking that are not so painful for you, not overwhelming. So don’t worry, you will remember when you are ready to remember. The brain is an astonishing organism in which nothing is ever lost. Nothing! Not even you.”

  I liked Dr. Schwartz’s calm, quiet manner, the little gold glasses perched down on the end of her long, thin nose, her tidy bun of dark, frizzy hair, even her practical, let’s-get-down-to-business Northern accent. She seemed very young to be a doctor.

  “This may take some time, but what else do you have on your calendar right now?” She smiled at me, and I smiled ruefully back, knowing already that this was so; for in the world of the mad, time is not a continuum but a fluid, shifting place, relative to nothing.

  “Don’t try to remember,” Dr. Schwartz said. “Concentrate on the day at hand. Just do what we tell you.” She flashed me a quick grin, and I imagined being her friend, her chum, in other circumstances.

  Dr. Schwartz vanished, carrying her clipboard, to be succeeded by a host of others, each with an agenda. Thus I found myself walking up and down the long halls several times a day with a fresh-faced young man wearing a whistle who said, “How ya doin’ now, honey? How ya doin’?” unnervingly, at every lap; making bead necklaces with an art group in the day room; tossing a large red medicine ball about a room in which one woman screamed and dived for the floor whenever the ball came in her direction; and singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” lustily in a music therapy group led by Phoebe Dean, who was still on the staff, wider in the hips but just as enthusiastic as ever.

  “Why, Evalina!” she cried in her ridiculously cheery way. “I’m so glad to see you. Now let’s do it again, everybody, but this time as a round—Evalina, will you lead the second group, please? Here, come on up here to do it.”

  I stood up and went forward to face the group.

  “Okay. Now, let’s go!” Phoebe struck her tuning fork to get the key. I led my group lustily in song, remembering every word, to my surprise. Clearly, Phoebe’s high expectations of me had a therapeutic value. We did “Dona Nobis Pacem”and “Music Alone Shall Live” in rounds, too, with Phoebe mugging as our groups competed against each other. My friend Dixie, in Phoebe’s group, could scarcely sing for laughing.

  “Hurry up and get well,” Phoebe said to me when the others had left and she was gathering up her songbooks. “I could really use you to play piano for me. My assistant is going on maternity leave the first of the month.”

  What month? What month was it now, for that matter? I wasn’t even sure. But indeed, my fingers had been moving against my skirt as we sang; my fingers still knew every note of the songs.

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  Passing by in the hallway, Dr. Schwartz turned back to wink at me, amused.

  DR. SCHWARTZ WAS part of the new management that had gradually taken over Highland Hospital since Dr. Carroll had deeded it to Duke in 1939. Evidently this was the reason Dr. Carroll had not come to see me again while I was on the top floor; though still involved with the hospital, he no longer took an active role in patient care. A Dr. Basil T. Bennett was the medical director now. I studied his photograph on the cover of The Highland Fling, our weekly newspaper. Clearly, things had changed. I could not imagine this Dr. Bennett, with his cropped hair and upright, military bearing, ever donning tights and doublet, for instance, and acting in a play! The article about him said that since he had come to Highland directly from the army, Dr. Bennett was an expert at dealing with the many men who had suffered mental breakdowns as a result of their war experiences. I had already noted a number of such veterans receiving shock treatments along with me.

  Another article in The Highland Fling profiled Dr. Billig, who had replaced Dr. Terhune as the new clinical director of the shock treatment unit in complete charge of the top floor. He had worked with the great Dr. Sakel himself, the physician who had originated this “miraculous” new treatment in Vienna. Dr. Billig dealt directly with us all in a calm, businesslike fashion, asking quiet questions, monitoring us constantly as we went into and out of insulin shock, taking measurements and making notations and calculations in a series of numbered gray notebooks, rather like we were test tubes instead of human beings. Oddly enough, such minute documentation actually produced a comforting effect, for it made our bizarre, grotesque treatments seem scientific—more like common, everyday hospital procedure. Electroshock treatments were conducted on this floor as well, in another locked area, which I had never entered.

  And we were getting better, man
y of us. It is a funny thing but you can actually see improved mental health in the eyes, the face, the very gait and bearing. Even I could tell. Dixie, several weeks ahead of me, was moved out of our locked ward and onto the floor below, where patients were given more privileges, such as personal items in the rooms, permission to see visitors, and eventually a pass for the rest of the campus or even a trip into town—while finishing up our prescribed number of treatments, of course. We still had to spend one night on the top floor following each session.

  But it was heaven when I, too, was finally moved down to the next floor, to find myself in a lemon-yellow room with a lace-curtained window that had no bars—and a view! And even a painting of buttercups in a blue vase. I scarcely recognized myself in the bathroom mirror, the insulin had made me gain so much weight. I knew I had been too thin, but still . . . I peered at my round cheeks.

  “In the pink, I’d say!” crowed Mrs. Hodges, my first visitor.

  First there’d been a commotion out in the hall, as Mrs. Hodges had not signed in properly at the office below. “Oh bother!” Her accent was unmistakable. “Oh, rubbish!”

  I stuck my head out the door to watch in delight as she padded her way past two of the younger aides, swatting them aside like flies. Mrs. Hodges, too, had grown much larger in the intervening years. With the addition of a mammoth purple coat, she filled the whole corridor, wall to wall. But of course she was carrying several large, bulky bags as well.

  “There you are, God love you!” she exclaimed, dropping everything to surround me in a stifling hug. “My little Evalina, all grown up, but whatever did they do to you, child? And what’s become of your hair?” She made that familiar tsk-tsking sound as she took my face in her hands, turning my head side to side for a proper examination.