Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  “Who’s that?” Dixie asked me, just as Dr. Schwartz said, “Oh dear, he’s not here right now. I imagine he is still escorting Mrs. Fitzgerald up to her room.”

  “Mrs. Sayre is her mother,” I told Dixie. “Mrs. Fitzgerald’s mother. The one she lives with when she’s in Montgomery.”

  “Lord, she must be a hundred then,” Dixie whispered back.

  “Well, Minnie Sayre called me up on the long-distance tel-e-phone just as I was finishing up my breakfast this morning,” Mrs. Hodges announced loudly and importantly to any who might be listening, “with some important information, and so you’d best give him this message, Miss—” which was what she always called Dr. Schwartz.

  Dr. Schwartz hid a smile, nodding. “I’m all ears, Mrs. Hodges, please do go on.”

  Mrs. Hodges put a gloved hand to her heaving breast as she continued dramatically: “Well, Minnie Sayre wanted me to know that Zelda—Mrs. Fitzgerald—had suffered a pre-mo-nition just as she was leaving Montgomery, and she wanted us all to know the circumstances of it, and what it was exactly.”

  “Yes?” Dr. Schwartz said as we all drew around, Dr. Sledge leaning in, too.

  “Apparently they were all gathered together on the porch of Rabbit Run—now that’s Minnie Sayre’s little house down there in Montgomery, that’s what they call it, don’t you know, on account of it’s so small, all those little rooms right in a row. Well they were all gathered there on the porch to wait for the taxicab to come for Miss Zelda—now this is Mrs. Minnie Sayre herself, and Miss Marjorie, she’s the other daughter, Miss Zelda’s sister, don’t you know, and yet another one of their friends down there, a lady named Livvie Hart, I believe it was.” She stopped to catch her breath.

  “So what happened, ma’am?”Dr. Sledge asked gently.

  “I’m telling you, don’t rush me, I’m getting to it in my own sweet time. Just kindly remember that you wouldn’t know one thing about it if it wasn’t me telling you, for she never would have called the rest of ye, Minnie Sayre would not, what with the Carrolls gone off to Florida and all of the rest of ye perfect strangers to her, of course. So! Of course it is me she’d call, Mrs. Hodges, that she has known all these years. She knew she could depend upon me. So! It seems that they was all gathered on the little porch there, and the taxi pulls up, and Miss Zelda she begins walking down the walk toward the taxi and she was almost in it when suddenly she runs back and throws her arms around Minnie and says, very composed, ‘Don’t worry, Mama, I’m not afraid to die.’ Just like that. ‘Don’t worry, Mama, I’m not afraid to die.’ ”

  The color drained right out of Dr. Schwartz’s cheeks, and Dixie’s hand on my arm suddenly felt like a claw.

  “And then? What happened next, ma’am?” from Dr. Sledge.

  “Well, then, she turned around and composed herself like the fine lady she is, and walked back down the walk and got in the taxi and thence the train, and here she is. A trip she has made a hundred times. But her mother wanted you to know this, don’t you see, Miss Zelda’s pre-mo-nition and all the circumstances of it.”

  “Yes, I can see that. We thank you so much, Mrs. Hodges,” Dr. Schwartz said. “But now, won’t you come and join us for lunch? Our new Dr. Sledge will be your escort.”

  Dr. Sledge smiled and nodded, extending his arm like a dance partner.

  “Well, he’s a big un, ain’t he? But ah, no, I’ve got God’s own amount of work to do over at the Grove Park. They cannot exist for long without me, don’t you know. My daughter is a-waiting for me right now, she drove me in the car there.”

  “Oh yes, I see her now,” Dr. Schwartz said.

  I turned and waved at redheaded Ruthie, who waved back.

  “We certainly do appreciate your making this visit, then, and I will be sure that Dr. Pine receives the information,” Dr. Schwartz called out to Mrs. Hodges as Dr. Sledge walked her over to Ruthie’s car and put her in it.

  “My goodness!” he said, coming back. “And that was—?”

  “Mrs. Hodges!” we chorused, laughing, and then all went in to lunch except for me. Pleading ill health, I excused myself and went to my own room instead. I sat on my bed, unable to get this odd little scene out of my mind, where it has remained as clear as if I had seen it myself. My palm itched fiercely and I remembered what Ella Jean’s granny had told me about “the sight.” Perhaps it is true that I have always had “too much i-mag-i-nation for my own good,” as Mrs. Hodges once claimed, but her report unsettled me, all the same.

  And it was the oddest thing—not only we few, but everyone at Highland Hospital seemed to know that Mrs. Fitzgerald had returned, in that indefinable yet immediate way that knowledge travels in even the most carefully guarded of institutions. And somehow, this knowledge was exciting—even gratifying—to the rest of us. I know there is something wrong with this—and I am stating it badly—yet it is a fact, an uncomfortable truth. Mrs. Fitzgerald completed us, perhaps. And now she was back, one of us again.

  I DREADED GROUP therapy, even with the very popular Dr. Sledge. Perhaps due to the solitary, almost secretive nature of my own childhood, I have always been uncomfortable speaking about personal matters, especially in groups. I’d rather listen to others. I do not wish to have the spotlight focused upon me; I really do prefer to be the accompanist. It was not that I could not remember—many things, as time went on—it was simply that I did not wish to divulge these things to perfect strangers whom I would not see again, I knew, once the kaleidoscope had made another quarter turn. I had a longer perspective on this process than the others.

  I tried to explain all this to Dr. Sledge when he characterized me as “resistant to therapy.” He said he understood my feelings, and I felt he did, for he seemed shy himself, smiling hesitantly in his gentle way behind his thick glasses. He was a very large young man, nonathletic, with curly brown hair. (“Mama’s boy,” Jinx pronounced scornfully, and “pansy”—though even she liked him.) But for a psychiatrist, Dr. Sledge seemed oddly lacking in communication skills, a failing that was almost a technique. Often he seemed at a loss for words, letting a silence fall and extend itself if no one volunteered an immediate answer. These long silences settled upon us like snow, producing sudden, explosive, surprising results.

  I remember one session when the announced topic was “home.” No one spoke. Blushing determinedly, Dr. Sledge did not push us; instead he got comfortable, stretching out his long legs, crossing his ankles and putting his hands behind his head, looking out the window toward the snowy peaks. The moment grew, expanding.

  Suddenly Dixie burst out. “I didn’t have a home at all, it was just a shell, a doll’s house, and I was Mama’s doll, that’s all, just a pretty doll to dress up and sew for . . .” Dr. Sledge continued to lean back, nodding, listening.

  Charles Winston, a young veteran, spoke about the cruelty of his father, a tobacco magnate who had shot the family dog to death right in front of the children when it misbehaved, and then in the next breath announced that this was nothing, because he himself had shot a child during the war, a girl about eight years old, as she ran from a barn in France. “She fell over and crumpled up like a rag doll and her blood made the snow red all around her.” Charles choked it out. “They were shooting at us from the farmhouse.” He put his head down between his knees, rocking and sobbing.

  Jinx told about the little drawers in the tinker truck, then went on, “You can give me a truck anytime, over a house, I mean. I ain’t kidding. Once somebody gets you in a house, they can lock you up in there and do all kinds of things to you, and nobody knows it. You can just forget about home. I don’t want no home.” For once, I felt she was telling the truth. But her outburst caused a kind of eruption in the entire group. When we had quieted down, Dr. Sledge turned to me.

  “Evalina?” he asked gently, and I was amazed to find my own face wet with tears.

  “This is my home,” I said.

  “It is not, either,” Jinx said. “It’s a mental institution, in case you ain’t notice
d.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “I’M SORRY.” I went to Dr. Sledge’s office later that day to apologize. “I just can’t talk about these things in the group, that’s all. But Dr. Carroll put my entire childhood in the record, I’m sure. You can look me up if you want to. My mother was an exotic dancer in New Orleans, a courtesan, and my father was a rich man who sent me here after her death. That’s all.”

  Dr. Sledge put a large, soft hand on each of my shoulders, and looked me in the eye. “Thank you, Evalina,” he said gravely. “Thank you.” He acted as if I had given him a gift, and I felt, oddly, as if I had, though it turned out to be a gift for me, too, as that very afternoon I took the bus downtown to Woolworth’s, where I purchased the first of these notebooks and began jotting down all the details that suddenly came into my mind—the big bed, the mirror, the beignets, and the neon GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS sign outside the window, for instance.

  I took a deep breath. “Dr. Schwartz says you play clarinet. Would you like to play with us sometime? We have a little jazz group here—me, and Phoebe Dean, and Mr. Pugh, and whoever else wants to play, really. Sometimes we have Louis Lagrande on drums—when he’s well enough, that is. He’s a patient here.”

  Dr. Sledge turned bright red, like a child. “I’d like that very much,” he said.

  He turned out to be good, too, adding a great deal to our group, which got together every Wednesday evening in the great room at Homewood, something I always looked forward to. Often, as I played, I’d feel Dr. Sledge’s eyes upon me; several times I turned abruptly and found him staring at me.

  “He likes you,” Dixie said after attending one of these sessions. “He’s going to ask you out, just wait and see.”

  “Oh, he is not,” I said, “They’re not allowed to get involved with the patients, anyhow. He’s just being friendly.” But when Dr. Sledge stopped me in the hall and said, “Evalina, you know you’re right, you’ve been here longer than anybody. I wonder if you’d like to be my tour guide around Asheville one afternoon?” I was quick to accept, to the subsequent crowing delight of my roommates at Graystone, who hid behind the curtains to watch us leave, exactly as if we were all thirteen. Illness infantilizes everybody, even if it doesn’t paralyze or wreck us forever. It holds us back, it keeps us from being adults. I believe this is especially true when children are ill, or have been damaged during their childhood or adolescence—all those crucial stages of development are missed. But I am thinking aloud now, thinking of us all upon our snowy mountain, and wandering from the moment of my story.

  Doctor Sledge is picking me up. He parks at the curb in front of Graystone and gets out wearing a red muffler, a huge tweed coat, and a plaid cap with earflaps. He’s driving a blue station wagon, the kind with wood along the sides. It is meticulously cared for, scrupulously clean. It looks like the family car of some family in the Midwest, the kind of family you see in advertisements. This is not far from the truth, actually.

  On this and subsequent rides, I learned all about this family, consisting of Mrs. Sledge, the mother whom he adored, his three older sisters, and his identical twin brother, Rupert. Two key facts drove this narrative. The first was that Mr. Sledge, a businessman, had dropped dead from a heart attack soon after the twins were born. The second was that Dr. Sledge’s twin had turned out to be schizophrenic, though “the sweetest and gentlest of men,” thus determining Dr. Sledge’s own story—his empathy, his gravity, his eventual vocation. Dr. Sledge postponed college and took a job at home in order to help his mother take care of Rupert, until Rupert killed himself at twenty. Then Dr. Sledge enrolled at Ball State, followed by medical school at the university, and an internship at the Mayo Clinic. This story also explained Dr. Sledge’s somewhat princelike aura, for he was not only loved but virtually worshipped by his mother and all those sisters back in Indiana. This was of course a burden, though a gift. It explained everything. If ever a man were trustworthy, it would be Dr. Sledge.

  I took him to see the Biltmore House; the French Broad River; Thomas Wolfe’s grave at Riverside cemetery, which has a regular tombstone, not the angel everybody expects; and the Old Kentucky Home, his mother’s boardinghouse downtown, which Wolfe had made famous in Look Homeward, Angel. The following Sunday we went for a drive along the breath-taking Blue Ridge Parkway, built by the WPA. We stopped at an overlook to look out at the dreamy, quiltlike landscape below, then stopped again at Mabry Mill to watch dried corn being ground up into meal by the giant turning stone water wheels. It was a very cold day, I remember. Dr. Sledge’s red muffler exactly matched the red spots on his cheeks. He bought a cloth bag of the freshly ground cornmeal to send to his mother, Dorothy—called “Dot”—back in Indiana. While he paid the mountain girl at the counter, I checked my watch. “Too late,” I announced, for I had been planning to take him by Fat Daddy’s for a barbecue sandwich before our return to Highland, where I had to play for the glee club concert late that afternoon.

  “You know, you weren’t kidding, were you?” Dr. Sledge said when we got back into the station wagon. “Asheville actually is home for you, isn’t it? I certainly picked the right tour guide.”

  “Oh, I was just talking, I guess. But I’ve certainly lived here a long while, off and on—exactly like Mrs. Fitzgerald.” I realized this only as I said it. “We even arrived at Highland about the same time, a little over ten years ago. Of course I was scarcely more than a child myself, and she was a grown woman . . .”

  “Only in a manner of speaking, from what I understand,” Dr. Sledge said. “Remember that she was still in her teens, no real education, when she married Scott Fitzgerald and fell into that fast world of constant drinking and parties and travel—perhaps she never had a chance to grow up any further than that, emotionally. Alcoholism is an illness in itself, you know, and it’s amazing how much they drank, the two of them. I’ve been researching this since I got here and met her. But I think Mrs. Fitzgerald may have been misdiagnosed, too.” Dr. Sledge was warming to his topic. “Actually I think she may have had lupus, early on—there’s all that eczema in the records. I don’t think she was ever truly schizophrenic, though. With lifelong schizophrenia, there’s permanent damage from every big break. Brain lesions. Loss of affect, loss of IQ, what we call blank mind. Mrs. Fitzgerald has ‘come back’ too far, too often. Look at all her writing. Look at her art. It’s very impressive. Why, she’s still painting. I’m pretty sure it has always been manic-depressive illness, not that it matters now.” He bit his lip; I realized he was telling me too much.

  “But Mrs. Fitzgerald improves every time she comes back to Highland,” I said, and he nodded. “And she’s kept coming back, all these years. So maybe she thinks of it as home, too, like me. Just a little bit, anyway.”

  “Why don’t you ask her? She likes you.” Dr. Sledge was navigating his way so slowly around the hairpin curves down the mountain road that the cars behind us were all blowing their horns, which didn’t appear to bother him in the least, if he even noticed. I didn’t mention it. These Blue Ridge mountain roads were still new to him, of course.

  “Oh, she’d say Montgomery.” I was sure of it. “Because the house is still there, remember? Rabbit Run. With her mother still alive, still in it. So Mrs. Fitzgerald is stuck in Alabama, really, don’t you think? Still in the past. No matter how much she and Mr. Fitzgerald traveled the globe.”

  “Well, Mrs. Fitzgerald is a special case by now, of course,” Dr. Sledge said gently. “So many, many treatments at so many different clinics have undoubtedly harmed her as much as they have helped her, at this point. So much medication, so many different kinds of shock treatments. I think she’s suffered some serious brain damage. But it’s not that her earlier doctors were negligent, you understand. There’s a lot of new thinking on this now.” Sometimes I forgot that Dr. Sledge was part of the new regime. “Psychoanalysis would be wasted on Mrs. Fitzgerald now, of course. But for the rest of us,” he went on with some emphasis, “we must go back into the past, we must tr
y to process the trauma of our earlier lives, if we are to move forward at all.”

  I made a face at him. “Dr. Carroll didn’t even believe in therapy, except for gardening and walking. And remember what Thomas Wolfe said, ‘You can’t go home again.’ I’m with him. Because it’s all gone the minute you leave, even if it ever existed at all. Like New Orleans, or Montgomery, or wherever. It’s just the past. It’s all different. And we’re different, too,” I said almost to myself. “There’s no going back.”

  “Spoken like Thomas Wolfe’s dark angel, my brilliant Evalina,” Dr. Sledge said, reaching over suddenly to take my hand, which lay on the bag of cornmeal between us.

  The station wagon swerved suddenly to the right, almost hitting the vertical cliff, then rocked from side to side down the mountain as both of us burst into sudden laughter. I am still not sure why. But I’ll bet that Freddy Sledge was as astonished as I, though he did not relinquish my hand.

  MORE AND MORE, whenever I could get the time, I found myself haunting Hortitherapy, where Mrs. Morris was coming to depend upon me, too. One cold, bright morning in December, I went on the annual expedition to gather greenery for holiday decorating. A light frost lay on everything, for all the world like the silver spray we were using in Art to make Christmas ornaments. Fences and branches and weeds glistened in the sun as we walked back into the woods with our clippers, following Pan and old Cal, who carried a shotgun to shoot down mistletoe, if we encountered any. We were all encouraged to look for it, high in the tops of the hardwoods, as we walked along. Our breath made silver puffs in the air, like characters’ speech in the cartoons that Pan adored, which the Morrises saved for him (though it was somewhat unclear to me whether he could really read them, or just liked the pictures). In any case, here we all went, a goodly group of us, down into a ravine where fir and hemlock hung over the icy rushing waters of Balsam Creek; its song filled the glittering air. Soon we held armfuls of the fragrant greenery, including holly, two or three kinds of it, galax and grapevine, and a real find, the bright orange bittersweet berries on their long, bare stalks, almost Asian in appearance, which Mrs. Carroll loved. She used to keep a Chinese urn filled with bittersweet on her piano for the holidays.