The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  But in a sudden change of mind, Roz kept driving. She drove right through town and kept going, heading out into the countryside, where the road narrowed as it climbed upward into the mountains. She knew this route well, had driven it many times since she and Jack had moved to Saratoga Springs. It was the same road she’d driven with her parents when she was a child, though back then it had been unpaved and lacking all these bright warning signs of deer that might leap into the path of your car, or the variety of sudden hairpin turns awaiting you. By the time she reached the front entrance of what was now the Mount Arcadia Yoga and Wellness Center, the sky was dark and Roz Mellow pulled her car into the parking lot, took out a pack of cigarettes, and began to smoke.

  In the distance was the enormous mansion that was the center’s main building. Roz rolled down her window to let the smoke out, and as she did, she could smell food. It was almost dinnertime, and inside the mansion a cook was probably preparing a dinner that made use of millet or quinoa or other, more obscure grains that the guests who paid a great deal of money to come here for a week-long stay seemed to like.

  Often, when she was a girl, Roz had walked these grounds at twilight. For she had been born right here in 1936, on the property of what had then been the Mount Arcadia Hospital for the Insane. Her father, Phillip Woodman, was chief of psychiatry, and because of this, Roz grew accustomed to the sounds of misery before she went to sleep at night. She would lie in bed upstairs in her family’s house, which was situated one hundred yards from the main building, and after lights-out she would hear shrieking and weeping as though animals were being slaughtered. No, no, it’s nothing like that, her father assured her, coming into the bedroom. These patients are in psychic anguish, he said, and no one is laying a hand on them.

  But every night the gates were padlocked at dusk by an aging groundskeeper, and those nighttime shrieks echoed through the surrounding hills, frightening the locals and waking the deer.

  “Is anyone being beaten?” she asked her father before bed.

  “No one is being beaten,” he answered.

  “Is anyone being whipped?”

  “No one is being whipped.”

  “Slapped?”

  “No one is being slapped, Roz.”

  “Throttled?”

  “Where did you learn that word?” asked her father. And so it went, this bedtime ritual, and though many of the patients stayed up weeping and howling throughout the long night, she was able to sleep the fluent sleep of children. To the patients, this place was a hospital, a prison, but to her it was home.

  During the Depression and throughout the Second World War, a small, elite population remained at Mount Arcadia, and these patients were Dr. Phillip Woodman’s bread and butter. They were an unlikely assortment of men and women whose families had secret, inexplicable reserves of money, and who seemed untouched by dark times. Here was the nucleus of unassailably rich America: shrewd bankers who could afford to keep unbalanced, yammering wives confined to the mountaintop for as long as it took, sometimes forever.

  Over the years, seeing the same faces in the windows of the hospital, the same figures in soft robes lumbering down the gravel footpath, Roz became comforted by how little anything changed. The faces were as familiar as those of relatives seen year after year at holiday dinners. There was Harry Beeman, a financier who had jumped from his fifteenth-floor office in the Bankers’ Equity Building, only to bounce twice on the striped tarp of the building’s awning, crushing several ribs and both legs. Now he limped through the halls of Mount Arcadia with a copy of The Financial Times in front of his face, muttering about bonds and interest rates as though they mattered to him. There was Mildred Vell, a society matron with milky cataracts and a delusion about being Eleanor Roosevelt, which none of the nurses really minded because it made Mildred a great help on the ward, always volunteering for some project or other. The core group of patients never grew worse, never seemed to get better, and never asked when they could leave. The world stayed stubbornly shut for these people, an aperture that let in no outside light.

  The same was true, in a way, for the Woodman family. They seemed separated from the world, at least the world as it revealed itself through the large rosewood radio that sat in the living room. The war, when it began, took Phillip Woodman away from home for a period of months, but soon he was sent back, for a unit in his hospital had been designated a place of recovery for GIs with trauma disorder. Though the world outside Mount Arcadia had been shifting and convulsing, Roz Woodman felt very little of it.

  Her family inhabited the large house across the lawn from the hospital, her mother and father taking as their bedroom the room that overlooked the road out front. Sometimes, especially in the daylight, it was almost possible for her to forget that she lived on the grounds of a psychiatric facility, and to imagine that she lived in a normal home, on a real street. But at night, when the howling started, she remembered.

  Dr. Phillip Woodman was a big hit with the nurses and orderlies. He strode the shining halls of the hospital as though he had been running the place since birth. Even his memos were praised. (“Re: Hospital gowns. It has come to my attention that the dung-colored gowns worn by our patients are perhaps no good for morale. Might we find something with a bit more dash—perhaps peach or sky-blue?”)

  Roz’s mother was less graceful in her role as the chief psychiatrist’s wife. Before the Depression, her job had largely entailed standing in the middle of her kitchen, conferring with a mute Negro hospital cook about upcoming dinner parties at the house. She would wave her pale hands vaguely, opening drawers and pointing to spoons and knives, saying, “Now, there are the spoons. Oh, and the knives.”

  Both of Roz’s parents were aimless, rolling around in this huge house together, anxious to populate the rooms with children. By the time their daughter was born, they were tired of seeing only mentally ill people, eager for an infant’s simple and understandable cry. But when the obstetrician told Mrs. Woodman that she could bear no more children, her husband let his only daughter into his life in a way that no one, not even his wife, had been allowed.

  Every few months Phillip Woodman took Roz on a whirlwind tour of the hospital: the dining room, which smelled perennially of fried flounder; the Occupational Therapy room, where dead-eyed patients pressed images of dogs and presidents onto copper sheeting; the solarium; the visitors’ lounge. They breezed past doors with doctors’ names stenciled onto the grain, and past doors with signs that read “Warning: Electricity in Use.” These doors were always shut, and she longed to see what electricity looked like when it was “in use.” And she also longed to see where the patients actually lived, where they showered and dressed and bathed. But the wards themselves, their heavy doors with chicken wire laced into the glass, were off-limits.

  Roz was permitted to see hospital life only from a distance, watching as patients slogged through the halls in their dung-colored gowns and flannel robes. Once she made prolonged eye contact with a former naval officer whose face was blue with stubble, until she was whisked off into the nurses’ lounge, where big-band music emanated from the radio, and she was given a handful of sourballs by a trio of fussing women.

  Although Roz was allowed into the hospital only at her father’s invitation, she was free to explore the grounds whenever she liked. With the sun sinking and the air aromatic with pine and earth and Salisbury steak, the whole place smelled like a summer camp. One day, at the rear entrance of the building, she saw deliverymen unloading drums of institutional disinfectant. As they rolled them up a ramp and into the service entrance, she could read the words “Whispering Pines,” and even though the name referred to nothing more than a rancid fluid that would be swabbed across the floors and walls at dawn, it sounded like the perfect alias for the hospital, the ideal name for a splendid summer camp.

  Whispering Pines, she whispered to herself as she stepped into the thicket that continued until the edges of the grounds, where it was held back by the iron fence. Vines
flourished along that fence, wound around the spokes like a cat winding around a human leg; just as the patients sometimes wanted out, so did the vegetation. Everything grew frantically at the farthest reaches of the property. The most tangible signs of the times could be found there, at the edges of the land, where nobody had bothered to prune or clip or chop away at the excess. Sometimes a group of patients would sit on Adirondack chairs on the lawn, taking in a chilly hour of sun, and sometimes a nurse would take a patient on a supervised stroll, but only along the circular path closest to the hospital, and never into the woods. The woods were hers, at least for a while.

  When Roz turned nine, her father implemented a program he called “Tea at the House.” This involved inviting a promising patient to join him and her mother for afternoon tea in their living room. The patient was always someone at least a little bit appealing, someone who wouldn’t make any sudden moves. Someone very close to health, who needed a bit of encouragement to get to the other side.

  The first person invited to Tea at the House was a woman named Grace Allenby, a young mother who had had a nervous breakdown and was unable to complete any action, even dressing herself in the morning, without dissolving into hysterical, gulping sobs. At the hospital she had made a slow but admirable recovery. She came to Tea on the Friday before her husband was to bring her home, and Roz sat watching at the top of the stairs. Both Mrs. Allenby and Roz’s mother were lovely-looking and uncertain, like the deer that occasionally made a wrong turn in the woods and wound up stunned and confused and frightened on the hospital lawn. The women shyly traded recipes, while Phillip Woodman sat between them, nodding with benevolence.

  “What you want to do is this,” Mrs. Allenby kept saying, and as she spoke she blinked rapidly, as if to remove a speck from her eye. “You take an egg and you beat it very hard in a bowl with a whisk. Then what you want to do is this. . . .” The living room smelled strongly of oolong tea, Dr. Woodman’s favorite. He liked it because it was the closest thing to drinking pipe tobacco.

  Roz eavesdropped on several Teas at the House over the year, and she came to understand that mental patients could be divided into two groups: those who wore their affliction outright like a bold political stance, and those who actively and industriously hid it.

  Warren Keyes was of the second variety. He was a GI, a twenty-two-year-old former Harvard undergraduate who had been decorated for his flying missions in the war, and who had tried to kill himself with a razor blade the day he came home. Now he was close to leaving Mount Arcadia and finally returning to college. Over dinner, her parents discussed this boy who would be coming to Tea at the House the following day. “He’s young,” her father said, “and good-looking, in that Harvard way.”

  Warren Keyes registered in Roz’s mind in that moment, was locked into place even before she had met him. Here was a Harvard man. That went over well with her father, who often fantasized about the privileged upbringing he himself had lacked.

  The next afternoon at 4 P.M., Warren sat in the living room gripping the fragile handle of a teacup. He had trooped across the lawn with a squat nurse, who now sat in the foyer, dully knitting like Madame du Farge. Roz knew that he had been invited to the house as a reward for getting well, but casting a critical eye on him from the top of the stairs, even she could see that he was not well.

  “Warren plans on returning to Harvard next semester,” her father said. Her mother cooed a response. “Leverett House, isn’t it?” her father went on.

  “No, Adams,” said Warren. His voice was relaxed, although his cup jitterbugged in its saucer.

  Conversation pushed on about Harvard in general, football season, and New England weather, dipping only lightly and tentatively into the war and exactly how many missions he’d flown. At the end of the hour, Warren Keyes looked exhausted. Roz imagined that he would go back to his hospital bed and sleep for thirty-six hours straight, regaining his strength.

  Breaking his own tradition but questioned by no one, Dr. Woodman invited Warren Keyes back for a second Tea at the House, and then a third. On his fourth tea, he was unaccompanied by the dour-faced nurse. Instead, he made a solo flight across the lawn, his coat-tails floating out behind him. That afternoon, Roz had been strategically sitting on the porch doing her homework before taking a walk in the woods. Her hair was sloppily bound up behind her head with elastic, and there was ink on her fingers, for she had not yet mastered the fountain pen. But even so, Warren Keyes climbed onto the porch and gave her a good hard look. Although it was not the first time she had seen Warren Keyes, it was the first time he saw her.

  “I’m the daughter,” Roz said. He nodded. “They’re inside,” she told him, inclining her head toward the screen door. Deep in the house, the teakettle shrilled.

  “Do you like tea?” Warren asked. It was the kind of question that her father’s colleagues often asked her when they came to dinner: well-meaning and uninteresting probings from people who had no idea of what to say to children, yet somehow, maddeningly, meant to be answered.

  “I like it okay,” she said.

  “Your mother makes good tea,” Warren said. “It’s Chinese, you know.”

  Roz slid off the railing. “I have to go,” she said.

  His eyes widened slightly. “Where?” he asked.

  And for some reason, she told him. She told him where she went every afternoon; she practically drew him a treasure map with an X. Later, she sat in the woods reading The Red Badge of Courage, and suddenly there was a parting of branches. Warren Keyes came through, stooped and stumbling. He had in his hand a familiar folded linen napkin with scalloped edges. He squatted down beside her, this handsome, ruined GI and Harvard student, and he opened the napkin, which contained three golden circles: her mother’s butter cookies. She ate them silently, while Warren watched.

  “So what’s it like to live here?” he asked.

  She shrugged. How she wanted to ask him a similar question: What was it like to live there, inside a hospital for the insane? What was it like to be insane? Did you know you were insane? Did you long to crawl out of your body? Did you actually see things—shapes and animals and flames frolicking across the walls of your room at night? But she couldn’t bring herself to ask him anything at all. Light was draining from the patch of woods, and suddenly Warren said, “May I ask you something?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Could I maybe touch you?” the boy asked.

  She nodded solemnly, really believing, in that moment, that he was referring to her hand, or her arm. He wanted to touch her to see if she was real, the same way, years earlier, she herself had surreptitiously touched the bloodless face of her cousin’s beloved china doll, who had been named Princess La Vanilla. He wanted to touch her in order to have the experience of touching someone who wasn’t insane—someone who had a normal life and lived with her parents in a real house without bars on the windows.

  Warren came closer, sliding across the dirt floor to where she sat with her book. “I won’t hurt you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. When his hand came down on her shirt front, on one of her pre-breasts, those very slightly swollen nipples, she could not have been more shocked. She didn’t know how to stop this, and she felt at once hurled out of her own realm and into his. “Wait,” she said, but his hands were already moving freely above her clothes. He seemed not to have heard her. He sat in front of her, touching her breasts, her neck, her shoulders, and in fact he wasn’t hurting her. So what was she upset about? She didn’t know what to call this activity, this casual exploration. His face frightened Roz—the intense and worshipful expression on his features, as though he were kneeling and lighting candles. His mouth hung open, but his eyes were focused.

  “I’m not hurting you,” he kept repeating. “I’m not hurting you.”

  And all she could answer was, “No. You’re not.”

  Roz closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see his face. She closed them as if to block out strong sunlight. She
felt herself grow dizzy, but she thought it would be worse if she fainted, because who knew what would happen then? She made herself stay conscious, and she felt each motion he made, the starfish movements of his fingers as they slipped beneath her blouse and headed downward.

  He moved against her as if in a trance, and Roz felt like a wall, something for others to rub against; she was a cat-scratching post, a solid block. She felt his large hand inside her underwear, so out of place. The elastic waistband was pulled taut against his knuckles. Just that morning she had chosen the underwear from a drawer, where it lay with the others, ironed, white, floral, and touched only by her and by Lena, who did the Woodman family’s laundry. No one else was meant to touch it, but now Warren’s hand was trapped inside it, like an animal that had run into a tent.

  Now one of his fingers was separating itself from the other fingers and pushing into her, sliding up into her body. She felt a shiver of pain, and then something that wasn’t pain at all, but surprise. She sat straight up, and started to cry. His big finger, which had held on to her mother’s teacup, which probably wore a Harvard ring sometimes, which had a flat fingernail that he trimmed in his cubicle in the hospital for the insane—if they let him have nail scissors—was deeply embedded in her, like something drilled into the ground to test for water or crude oil. Like a machine, a spike, testing the earth for vibrations or for moisture. The finger felt all these things, but she felt nothing.

  After some endless time, Warren Keyes made a small sound like a lamb bleating or a hinge groaning open, and she knew that it was over. She sank back onto the surface of leaves, her body returning to itself, small, flexible, a skater’s body, while Warren turned away from her, wiping his face and the front of his trousers with her mother’s napkin.

  In a quaking voice, he told Roz it was better if they left the woods separately, and, of course, if she told no one about what had happened. “There’s nothing to tell, anyway,” he added casually. “I didn’t hurt you.” And it was true; he hadn’t hurt her in any discernible way.