by Lee Smith
I should not have worried so, I realized then, nor expected less; for above all, Mrs. Carroll was a public person, as was Dr. Carroll himself. Appearances would be kept up, civility maintained.
“And I am so very glad to see you!” I had practiced saying this again and again in my room before leaving. “Please let me introduce my good friend, Dixie Calhoun, who is also a patient at Highland—”
“A guest,” Mrs. Carroll interjected.
“. . . a guest at Highland as well,” I concluded.
Dixie offered her hand and inclined her head in a little bow. “Oh Mrs. Carroll, I have seen you play the piano, and I have heard so much about you and Dr. Carroll, and I am just so happy to make your acquaintance at last. It is a real honor!” The hundred-watt smile, the widening of the violet eyes that said, Yes. You. You are special.
Mrs. Carroll narrowed her own eyes ever so slightly, registering Dixie, as she smiled back. “Well, my goodness, it is so lovely to have you both here on such a cold, dreary afternoon. Come in, come in, let’s just hang up your coats right here in the hall so that they can dry out, and you must come in and sit by the fire . . .” leading the way into the drawing room.
“Oh heavens, what gorgeous roses!” Dixie exclaimed, for there they were, the famous yellow roses, beautifully arranged on their round marble top table. Inadvertently I wondered what Robert’s tally would be now, after ten more years? How many roses, how many thousands of dollars . . . a fortune in roses. So many roses, so much love—or perhaps not. For if I had learned anything at Highland in my youth, it was how mysterious love is in all its ways, its guises and disguises. In fact, I had loved the Carrolls deeply, and I thought they had loved me . . . I had believed that they loved me . . . but perhaps not. In my mind’s eye, I saw the cast of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” disappearing into the forest, only to reemerge all changed and new, shining and smiling, each with a new partner.
The special drop-leaf table had been brought in and laid for tea, which Mrs. Carroll poured from a silver teapot into fragile rose china cups, meanwhile entranced by Dixie who oohed and ahhed over all the beautiful and unusual furnishings and art. Mrs. Carroll told about purchasing the carousel clock on their honeymoon in Italy forty years ago, and how the African masks had been presented to her, a gift, after a concert in Johannesburg. We sat before a leaping fire that crackled merrily behind a most unusual fire screen, a golden peacock spreading its wings. Now that was new, I believed, wondering where it had come from, and with what miraculous story attached. I glanced all about the spacious room searching for the crystal Viennese punchbowl, which had disappeared from its spot on the sideboard.
Noticing my silence Ms. Carroll turned to me. “And how are you, Evalina?” she inquired kindly. “Beginning to feel better, I trust?”
To my horror, I suddenly collapsed into wracking sobs. “Oh, Mrs. Carroll, I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry—” I upset my teacup onto the pink linen tablecloth. Dixie leapt up to rectify the damage with her own napkin, while Mrs. Carroll came over and knelt to hug me. I stiffened instinctively; she had not touched me in many years.
“Now then, dry those big eyes, dear.” Mrs. Carroll dabbed at them herself. “Your eyes have always been your best feature, you know.”
They had? I didn’t think I’d ever had a best feature.
Mrs. Carroll touched my cheek and gave my shoulders another squeeze before returning to her chair, where she crossed her legs at the ankle and composed herself again. She fixed her regard upon me directly. “It is not the end of the world, you know. You are not the first, my dear, nor shall you be the last, to have an adventure. Even I—even I—” but here she stopped herself, and poured the last of the tea all around. “Of course you must have been to Europe, as well,” she said, turning to Dixie, who launched into a description of her own art tour in France, with private sketching lessons and lectures at the Louvre.
I sat looking into the fire—an adventure, rather than a debacle?
Mrs. Carroll seemed genuinely kind now, no longer jealous or competitive, perhaps because I had turned out to be such a failure. And who knew? Perhaps she had had a European adventure herself, perhaps Dr. C had saved her from something, too, perhaps even from herself. There must be some reason she had stayed at Highland with him instead of seeking out the fame and fortune that clearly could have been hers. For the first time I saw the battlements of Homewood as a fort instead of a castle, though I also remembered what Mrs. Fitzgerald had said about the princess in the tower. But now, at Dixie’s urging, Mrs. Carroll was enumerating the famous people in the framed photographs on the piano, including herself with the great Busoni, beside the Danube. Looking at the dark, polished Steinway, it seemed improbable to me that I had once played four-hand arrangements on it with her, “Mountain Tune” and Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.”
“And this is one of my own students, the jazz singer Nina Simone. She is making quite a name for herself.” Mrs. Carroll held up a framed photograph of the little girl I had played for, now all grown up and beautiful.
“Dixie made her debut at the Gone with the Wind Ball in Atlanta,” I blurted out.
“Really!” Mrs. Carroll focused her formidable attention upon Dixie. “And did you see Clark Gable?”
“I danced with him,” Dixie said. “But he couldn’t get very close to me because of my hoop skirts, nobody could—”
Mrs. Carroll put the picture of Nina Simone back on top off the piano, then drew Dixie down upon the curvy horsehair loveseat. “Describe your dress,” she breathed.
“Well, it was a rose taffeta evening gown with jet beading at the neckline. The skirt went over crinoline petticoats and hoops and it was trimmed with black velvet bows and black net lace and streamers all around. Oh, and I wore jet earrings, too, and a black velvet ribbon around my neck, this was all my idea. And I wore my flowers in my hair.”
“What kind of flowers?”
“Camellias. I didn’t want to wear a hat,” she added. “A lot of the girls wore big hats.”
Mrs. Carroll had her eyes closed. “No,” she said. “Quite right. Not for evening. And what did your mother wear?”
“My mother wasn’t there,” Dixie said simply.
We both stared at her.
“Oh, but there were fifty of us, the debutantes,” she said. “We sat up on stage before the dancing began, with our escorts standing behind us. We filled up the whole stage! And Vivian Leigh wore a special gown that the costume designer for the movie had created just for her to wear to the Gone with the Wind Ball, though I didn’t like it much. It had cap sleeves made of feathers, if you can imagine that! She looked as though she might just fly away.” Dixie rattled on, with all Mrs. Carroll’s attention trained upon her like a spotlight. I found this to be a relief, I realized, rather than a loss—perhaps I could get out of my role now, in this cast in this play that I had never auditioned for in the first place, for I had never, ever, wanted to be a star. While Mrs. Carroll and Dixie talked on—vividly, exaggeratedly—I looked around the room until I spotted the crystal Viennese punchbowl sitting at the foot of the petticoat mirror, filled with little hand puppets. From Czechoslovakia, I guessed.
AS WE WERE leaving, Mrs. Carroll pressed a packet into my hands, wrapped in newspaper, tied firmly with twine.
“What a character! What an old bat!” Dixie said the minute the door had closed behind us.
I started laughing and couldn’t stop as we ran down Merriman Avenue to catch the bus. It was already dark by the time we reached the Highland stop.
“Oooh, what’s this?” Dixie grabbed at my package as we set off up Zillicoa Avenue.
I shrugged and shook my head.
“Well, let’s open it up, then!” she exclaimed.
I pulled the parcel back, sticking it firmly under my arm. “Not yet,” I said. I knew it contained my postcards. A vision of Joey Nero came to me then as real as the very flesh, Joey with his sad dark eyes and sloppy grin hanging onto one of these holiday streetl
ights, arm flung out in a grand gesture. Dixie and I walked back up the hill through cone after cone of falling light.
THAT AFTERNOON MARKED the real beginning of my recovery. My sense of welcome release continued into the next day, and the next, and the next, as I followed my appointed schedule. Plus the required walking and gardening, everyone had to take at least two kinds of occupational therapy. Several new sorts were available at Highland now: hairdressing, for instance, which doubled as a free beauty salon where “students” could practice on other patients, sometimes with hilarious results, all under the supervision of a wise-cracking, gum-chewing beautician named Brenda Ray. Dixie loved working at the Beauty Box and had become Brenda’s unofficial assistant; she was a “natural,” Brenda said. Most of the men took Woodworking, where they hammered, sawed, planed, and polished away earnestly in the big basement workroom under the low-hanging lights and close supervision of old Cal Green, who had been at Highland for years, working as a caretaker. Cooking classes took place three afternoons a week in a workroom next to the big industrial kitchen in the Central Building. This class was very popular, for the cooks got to sit down and gobble up the results of their labor, or sometimes serve it publicly.
“Let’s sign up for cooking,” I suggested to Dixie, as squares of gingerbread still warm from the oven were passed out to us all at the afternoon “social” on Halloween.
“Not me.” To my surprise, Dixie shook her head so vigorously that I could see the bluish shaved spots at each temple where they affixed the electrodes for her still-ongoing electroshock treatments—which had never been a part of my own prescribed regimen, though electroconvulsive therapy was usually alternated with insulin therapy for long-term patients. Dixie always arranged her pretty curls very carefully to hide those shaved spots. By now I was getting a sense that my own “case” was not deemed as serious as many others, though no one had actually told me this.
“Why not?” I was surprised by Dixie’s vehemence. I polished off the rest of my gingerbread, which was delicious, and took a dark chocolate “black cat” cookie with orange icing.
“Are you kidding? I had to cook all the time when I was a little girl, and that was enough. I swore I would never do it again, and I haven’t. Our Lilybelle does it all now, out at the farm. It’s her kitchen, really, not mine.”
I tried to pick through this information, which seemed to contradict itself. “Why didn’t your mother cook?” I asked finally.
“Never mind,” Dixie said, flushing. “Let’s just stick with Art.” Which we did, though my own personal favorite was Horticulture, as it had been called before, when old Gerhardt Otto was in charge. Now it was “Hortitherapy,” which Dixie avoided at all costs, save for the requisite two hours per week of grounds care required of all, which she could not get out of. “Who wants to muck around in the dirt?” she asked. “And ruin a perfectly good manicure?”
Yet she didn’t mind covering her hands in clay or paint as we worked at those familiar tables in Homewood under the calm tutelage of Rowena Malone, whose long braid was white now, her face softened by age but even more beautiful, with its strong features.
“And not one bit of makeup!” Dixie marveled. “Can you imagine?”
Dixie pooh-poohed her own artistic talent, which seemed remarkable to me as she turned out realistic rural landscapes of wide fields and fencerows, with towering thunderclouds in the distance, or still lifes, bowls of peaches and vase after vase of flowers. “They’re not original,” she said. “Now that is original!” She pointed her brush at Miss Malone’s ever-changing “gallery” wall, where the patients’ work was displayed. ”Look at those. My goodness!” A new exhibit had just gone up.
“All by Zelda Fitzgerald,” Miss Malone said proudly. “I have saved them over the years, everything I could, for her and her daughter. But this is just a tiny fraction of what she’s done. Most of it is gone now, sent off to art shows or taken by friends and relatives or destroyed by Zelda herself when the mood hit her. That’s the worst of it. Of course we at Highland have no right to any of these, but while they are in my keeping, I will keep them safe. I take it as a sacred trust.”
“Well, no wonder.” Dixie got up and walked slowly along the display of perhaps ten pictures. “These are just remarkable,” she said.
“Ah yes.” Miss Malone nodded. “She has real talent for art, a lucky thing, since her husband stole all her stories. Quite an original style, too, though of course her illness gets in the way. But then perhaps it contributes as well.”
I joined Dixie in perusing the exhibition. Most of the paintings were gouache or watercolor on paper, rather small. Hospital Slope, one was named, though I could not recognize the actual slope or location of the subject, two blowing apple trees loaded with fruit, approached by a dirt road that disappeared into a fanciful, cloud-filled sky. All the shapes were fluid, filled with wind and life. A vibrant blue and green watercolor entitled Mountain Landscape featured that same dirt road again, now running straight up a green mountain into the distant blue peaks and the sky beyond.
“Very impressionistic,” Dixie remarked. “Does she paint quickly?”
“Why, yes,” Miss Malone said, looking at her.
Several of the paintings of flowers reminded me of how much Mrs. Fitzgerald had liked gardening, way beyond Dr. Carroll’s requirements. I remembered her kneeling in the dirt for hours with old Gerhardt Otto, weeding or planting, tan and strong. The flowers in these paintings were close-up, pastel and glowing—blue morning glories, pale lilies on a salmon background, yellow roses.
“Would you call these still lifes?” I asked. “Because they are anything but still.” In fact, there was a great deal of movement in all of the paintings, a kind of rushing upward, out of the frame.
I paused before a fanciful pink watercolor of Paris at dusk, which appeared to be actually happy, I thought, in contrast to all the others. It gave me the strangest feeling to look at it.
“She did a whole series of these soon after her husband died,” Miss Malone told us. “Mainly European scenes, to remember all the traveling she did with him back in better times.”
I still hated the way Mrs. Fitzgerald drew people, especially these ballerinas, so tall and weird, with such large, ugly, muscular feet and legs. But everybody’s feet and legs were too big—even the characters in the fairy-tale pictures, such as Old Mother Hubbard or the Three Little Pigs. And all the figures were looking up, often with their eyes closed, and no ground at all beneath their feet.
“Why, they’re dancing,” Dixie said. “You can tell she was a dancer, can’t you?”
“Ah, that was her big dream,” Miss Malone said. “Yet she started too late and worked too hard and it broke her health.”
“I just read Save Me the Waltz, or tried to read it, I should say,” Dixie announced. “It’s impossible to buy it now, Tony told me at the bookstore. So I borrowed it from him. It’s obviously autobiographical, all about a girl who is training for the ballet.”
“And?” Miss Malone was looking at Dixie with great interest now.
“Well, it’s heartbreaking at the end. And very hard to follow because of the way she writes. The language is so unusual, the way she mixes everything up—flowers might think, for instance, or have emotions—but it’s wonderful, too. Finally it’s about obsession, which I envy.” Dixie sat back down with a grim face and resumed her own painting, and did not explain herself. Both Miss Malone and I stared at her, but she spoke no more until the end of the hour, when she laughed and tossed her head and said in the old way, “Oooh, I wish I could have met Zelda Fitzgerald, all the same!”
“You probably will,” Miss Malone said. “They often come back after the holidays, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I was not artistic. But Miss Malone had introduced me to the making of mosaic pottery using tiny brilliant glass tiles, which I enjoyed, as I have always enjoyed completing jigsaw puzzles. In general, I have always liked to fit things into things, to create a plea
sing order. Not for me the huge blank canvas, the tubes of oily brilliance. Working carefully, I finished a little bowl in shaded circles of red, ochre, and gold tiles, which Miss Malone placed upon a wooden stand. Everyone admired it.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked an intense skinny woman at my table.
“Maybe I’ll give it to somebody for Christmas.” I was thinking of Claudia and Richard Overholser, who had been very kind to me since my return.
“Ah yes,” Miss Malone said, “Bye and bye we shall turn into Santa’s workshop here, so that anyone who wants to make a gift can do so. I have ordered beads for necklaces already—and maybe we shall make some funny sock dolls for children? Tell me your ideas, everyone, please. And now it is time for us to put away our supplies for today—”
But Dixie was already gone, overturning her easel, running out the door without her coat, flashing past the window, leaving a half-done vase of roses on her canvas and her paints in a mess behind her, one jar overturned to make a vivid red spreading stain on the wooden floor. Miss Malone ignored it all, helping the rest of us to put our things away, bidding us all her customary calm, fond adieu. Nothing ever seemed to surprise the quietly smiling Miss Malone as she padded about in her great smock like some sort of nun or priestess.
Dixie vanished for a week, her room locked. She returned a bit paler, a bit thinner, and never mentioned this perplexing incident again, nor did I ask her about it.
CHAPTER 7
THOUGH AT FIRST I missed old Gerhardt Otto’s gruff presence terribly, I still loved “Hortitherapy” where there was more going on than ever, even in late autumn. It seemed that it had taken half a dozen people to replace Doc Otto! I had been watching them out my window for weeks. Under the direction of several experienced groundskeepers, teams of three or four patients were cutting back and mulching the perennials and roses; dividing and transplanting irises, daylilies, and the like; and planting the bulbs for spring. The greenhouse itself had been expanded, with a multipurpose activity building adjoining it.