House-wives in house-dresses, their arms loaded with groceries in brown-paper sacks, on their way home to prepare dinner for their working husbands. How long had it been since I had had a home? I had never had a home.
I saw non-objective designs created with charm and simplicity on every wall, every fence, every puddle of water we passed; the designs of unconscious forms and colors, patterns waiting to be untrapped by an artist’s hand. The many-hued spot of oil and water surrounded by blue-black macadam. The tattered, blistered, peeling ochre paint, stripping limply from a redwood wall of an untenanted house. The clean, black spikes of ornamental iron-work fronting a narrow stucco beauty-shop. Arranged for composition and drawn in soft pastels, what delicate pictures these would be for a young girl’s bedroom. For Helen’s bedroom. For our bedroom. If we had a house and a bedroom and a kitchen and a living-room and a dining-room and maybe another bedroom and I had a job and I was among the living once again and I was painting again and neither one of us was drinking . . .
In a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom.
“Let’s sit down for a while, Harry,” Helen said wearily. There was a bus passenger’s waiting bench nearby, and we both sat down. I took the shaving kit out of Helen’s lap and put it inside the suitcase. No reason for her to carry it when there was room inside the suitcase. She was more tired than I was. She smiled wanly and patted my hand.
“Do you know what I’ve been thinking about, Harry?”
“No, but I’ve been thinking all kinds of things.”
“It may be too early to make plans, Harry, but after we get out of the hospital and get some money again I’m going to get a divorce. It didn’t make any difference before and it still doesn’t—not the way I feel about you, I mean—but I’d like to be married to you. Legally, I mean.”
“Why legally?”
“There isn’t any real reason. I feel that I’d like it better and so would you.”
“I like things better the way they are,” I said, trying to discourage her. “Marriage wouldn’t make me feel any different. But if it would make you any happier, that’s what we’ll do. But now is no time to talk about it.”
“I know. First off, I’ll have to get a divorce.”
“That isn’t hard. Where’s your husband now?” “Somewhere in San Diego, I think. I could find him. His parents are still living in San Sienna.”
“Well, let’s not talk about it now, baby. We’ve got plenty of time. Right now I’m concerned with getting hospital treatment for whatever’s the matter with me, if there is such a thing, and there’s anything the matter with me. What do you say?”
“I’m rested.” Helen got to her feet. “Want me to carry the suitcase a while?”
“Of course not.”
Saint Paul’s Hospital is a six-story building set well back from the street and surrounded by an eight-foot cyclone wire fence. In front of the hospital a small park of unkempt grass, several rows of geraniums, and a few antlered, unpruned elms are the only greenery to be seen for several blocks. The hospital stands like a red, sore finger in the center of a residential district; a section devoted to four-unit duplexes and a fringe of new ranch-style apartment hotels. Across the street from the entrance-way a new shopping-center and parking lot stretches half-way down the block. As we entered the unraked gravel path leading across the park to the receiving entrance, Helen’s tired feet lagged. When we reached the thick, glass double-doors leading into the lobby, she stopped and squeezed my hand.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this, Harry?” she asked me anxiously. “We didn’t really have a chance to talk it over much. It was a kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision and we don’t have to go through with it. Not if you don’t want to,” she finished lamely.
“I’m not going to walk the three miles back to the roominghouse,” I said. I could see the tiny cylinders clicking inside her head. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“A little bit,” she admitted. Her voice was husky. “Sure I am.”
“They won’t hurt us. It’ll be a nice week’s vacation,” I assured her.
“Well . . . we’ve come this far . . .”
I pushed open the door and we timidly entered. The lobby was large and deep and the air was filled with a sharp, antiseptic odor that made my nose burn. There were many well-worn leather chairs scattered over the brown linoleum floor, most of them occupied with in-coming and out-going patients, with their poverty showing in their faces and eyes. In the left corner of the room there was a waist-high circular counter encircling two green, steel desks. Standing behind the desk, instead of the usual bald hotel clerk, was a gray-faced nurse in a white uniform so stiff with starch she couldn’t have bent down to tie her shoe-laces. The austere expression on her face was so stern, a man with a broken leg would have denied having it; he would have been afraid she might want to minister to it. We crossed the room to the counter.
“Hello,” I said tentatively to her unsmiling face, as I set the suitcase on the floor. “We’d like to see a doctor about admittance to the hospital . . . a psychiatrist, if possible.”
“Been here before?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Which one of you is entering the hospital?”
“Both of us.” I took another look at her gray face. “Maybe we are, I mean. We don’t have a dime.”
“The money isn’t the important thing. If you can pay, we charge, naturally, but if you can’t, that’s something else again. What seems to be the trouble?”
I looked at Helen, but she looked away, examined the yellowing leaves of a sickly potted plant with great interest. I was embarrassed. It was such a silly thing we had done I hated to blurt it out to the nurse, especially such a practical-minded nurse. I was afraid to tell her for fear she would deliver a lecture of some sort. I forced myself to say it.
“We attempted suicide. We cut our wrists.” I stretched my arms over the counter so she could see my bandaged wrists.
“And now you want to see a psychiatrist? Is that right?”
“Yes, ma’am. We thought we would. We need help.”
“Come here, dear,” the nurse said to Helen, with a sudden change in manner. “Let me see your wrists.”
Helen, blushing furiously, pulled the sleeves of her jacket back and held out her wrists to the nurse. At that moment I didn’t like myself very well. It was my fault Helen was going through this degrading experience. I had practically forced her into the stupid suicide pact. The nurse deftly unwrapped the clumsy bandages I had affixed to Helen’s wrists. She gave me an amused, professional smile.
“Did: you fix these?”
“Yes, ma’am. You see, we were in a hurry to get here and I wrapped them rather hastily,” I explained.
The nurse puckered her lips and examined the raw wounds on Helen’s slender wrists. She clucked sympathetically and handed each of us a three-by-five card and pencils. “Suppose you two sit over there and fill in these cards,” she waved us to a decrepit lounge, “and we’ll see what we shall see.”
We sat down with the cards and Helen asked me in a whisper whether we should use our right names or not. I nodded and we filled in the cards with our names, addresses, etc. The nurse talked on her telephone, so quietly we couldn’t hear the conversation from where we were sitting. In a few minutes a young, earnest-faced man, wearing white trousers and a short-sleeved white jacket, got out of the elevator and walked directly to the desk. His feet, much too large for his short, squat body, looked larger than they were in heavy white shoes. He held a whispered conversation with the nurse, nodding his head gravely up and down in agreement. He crossed to our lounge and pulled a straight chair around so it faced us. He sat down on the edge of the chair.
“I am Doctor Davidson,” he said briskly, unsmilingly. “We’re going to admit you both to the hospital. But first of all you will have to sign some papers. The nurse t
ells me you have no money. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that is correct,” I said. Helen said nothing. She kept her eyes averted from the doctor’s face.
“The papers will be a mere formality, then.” His face was quite expressionless. I had a hunch that he practiced his blank expression in the mirror whenever he had the chance. He held out his hand for our filled-in cards. “Come with me, please,” he ordered. He arose from his chair, dropped the cards on the counter, and marched quickly to the elevator without looking back. We trailed in his wake. At the sixth floor we got out of the elevator, walked to the end of the corridor, and he told us to sit down in two metal folding chairs against the wall. We sat for a solid hour, not talking, and afraid to smoke because there weren’t any ashtrays. A young, dark-haired nurse came to Helen, crooked her finger.
“I want you to come with me, dear,” she said to Helen.
“Where am I going?” Helen asked nervously.
“To the women’s ward.” The nurse smiled pleasantly.
“I thought we were going to be together—” Helen tried to protest.
“I’m sorry, dear, but that’s impossible.”
“What’ll I do, Harry?” Helen turned to me helplessly.
“You’d better go with her, I guess. Let me get my shaving kit out of the bag.” I opened the suitcase, retrieved my shaving kit, snapped the bag shut. “Go on with her, sweetheart, we’ve come this far, we might as well go through with it.”
The nurse picked up the light over-nighter and Helen followed reluctantly, looking back at me all the way down the corridor. They turned a corner, disappeared from view, and I was alone on my metal folding chair.
In a few minutes Dr. Davidson returned for me and we went down the hall in the opposite direction. We entered his office and he handed me a printed form and told me to sign ft. I glanced through the fine print perfunctorily, without reading it in detail. It was a form declaring that I was a pauper. There was no denying that. I signed the paper and shoved it across the desk.
“You’re entering the hospital voluntarily, aren’t you?” he asked.
“That’s about it.”
“Fill out these forms then.” He handed me three different forms in three different colors. “You can use my office to fill them out.” He left the office and I looked at the printed forms. There were questions about everything; my life’s history, my health, my relative’s health, my schooling, and anything else the hospital would never need to know. For a moment I considered filling them in, but not seriously. I took the desk pen and made a check mark beside each of the numbered questions on all of the forms. That would show that I had read the questions, and if they didn’t like it the hell with them. I didn’t want to enter the hospital anyway. The doctor returned in about a half an hour and I signed the forms in his presence. Without looking at them he shoved them into a brown manila folder.
“I’m going to be your doctor while you’re here,” he told me in his well-rehearsed impersonal manner, “but it’ll be a couple of days before I can get to you. Let me see your wrists.”
I extended my arms and he snipped the bandages loose with a pair of scissors, dropped the soiled sheeting into the waste-basket by his desk.
“What exactly brought this on, Jordan, or do you know?”
“We’ve been drinking for quite a while and we ran out of money. I suppose that’s the main reason. Not that I’m an alcoholic or anything like that, but I’m out of work at present and I got depressed. Helen, more or less—”
“You mean, Mrs. Jordan?”
“No. Mrs. Meredith. Helen Meredith. We don’t happen to be married, we’re just living together, but we’re going to be married later on. As I was saying, Helen takes my moods as hard as I do. If it hadn’t been for me—well, this is all strictly my fault.”
“We aren’t concerned with whose fault it is, Jordan. Our job is to make you well. Do you want a drink now?”
“I could stand one all right.”
“Do you feel like you need one?”
“No. I guess not.”
“We’ll let the drink go then. Hungry?”
“No. Not a bit.”
He stood up, patted me on the shoulder, trying to be friendly. “After we take care of those cuts we’ll give you some soup, and I’ll have the nurse give you a little something that’ll make you sleep.”
We left his office and I followed him down the corridor to Ward 3-C. There was a heavy, mesh-wire entrance door and a buzzer set into the wall at the right. Dr. Davidson pressed the buzzer and turned me over to an orderly he addressed as Conrad. Conrad dressed my wrists and assigned me to a bed. He issued me a pair of gray flannel pajamas, a blue corduroy robe, and a pair of skivvy slippers. The skivvy slippers were too large for me and the only way I could keep them on was to shuffle my feet without lifting them from the floor. He kept my shaving kit, locked it in a metal cupboard by his desk, which was at the end of the ward.
I sat down on the edge of my bed and looked around the ward. There were twenty-six beds and eleven men including myself. They all looked normal enough to me; none of them looked or acted crazy. The windows were all barred, however, with one-inch bars. I knew I was locked in, but I didn’t feel like a prisoner. It was more frightening than jail. A man in jail knows what to expect. Here, I didn’t.
Conrad brought me a bowl of weak vegetable soup, a piece of bread and an apple on a tray. He set the tray on my bedside stand.
“See what you can do to this,” he said.
I spooned the soup down, not wanting it, but because I thought the doctor wanted me to have it. I ignored the apple and the piece of bread. When he came for the tray, he brought me some foul-tasting lavender medicine in a shot glass and I drank it. He took the tray, and said over his shoulder as he left, “You’d better hop into bed, boy. That stuff ‘ll hit you fast. It’s a legitimate Mickey.”
I removed my skivvy slippers and robe and climbed into bed. It was soft and high and the sheets were like warm snow. The sun was going down and its softly fading glow came through the windows like a warm good-night kiss. The light bulbs in the ceiling, covered with heavy wire shields, glowed dully, without brightness. I fell asleep almost at once, my head falling down and down into the depths of my pillow.
It was three days before I talked to Dr. Davidson again.
NINE
Shock Treatment
AFTER getting used to it, and it is easy, a neuro-psychiatric ward can be in its own fashion a rather satisfying world within a world. It is the security. Not the security of being locked in, but the security of having everything locked out. The security that comes from the sense of no responsibility for anything. In a way, it is kind of wonderful.
And there is the silence, the peace and the quiet of the ward. The other patients kept to themselves and so did I. One of the orderlies, Conrad or Jones, brought our razors in the morning and watched us while we shaved. I would take a long, hot shower and then make my bed. That left nothing to do but sit in my chair by the side of my bed and wait for breakfast. Breakfast on a cart, was wheeled in and eaten. After breakfast we were left alone until lunch time. Then lunch would be wheeled in.
Near the door to the latrine there was a huge oak table. Spaced around the table there were shiny chromium chairs with colorful, comfortable cushions that whooshed when you first sat down. Along the wall behind the table were stack after stack of old magazines. Except for the brief interruptions for meals and blood-tests I killed the entire first day by going through them. I considered it a pleasant day. I didn’t have to think about anything. I didn’t have to do anything, and I didn’t have anything to worry about. The first night following my admittance I slept like a dead man.
The next morning, after a plain but filling breakfast of mush, buttered toast, orange juice and coffee, I proceeded to the stacks of magazines again. I had a fresh package of king-sized cigarettes furnished by the Red Cross and I was set for another pleasant day. We were not allowed to keep matches and it was
inconvenient to get a light from the orderly every time I wanted to smoke, but I knew I couldn’t have everything.
Digging deeply into the stacks of magazines I ran across old copies of Art Digest, The American Artist and The Modern Painter. This was a find that pleased me. It had been a long time since I had done any reading and, although the magazines were old, I hadn’t read any of them. One at a time I read them through, cover to cover. I skipped nothing. I read the how-to-do’s, the criticism, the personality sketches and the advertisements. It all interested me. I spent considerable time studying the illustrations of the pictures in the recent one-man shows, dissecting pictures in my mind and putting them together again. It was all very nice until after lunch. I was jolted into reality. Really jolted.
There was an article in The Modern Artist by one of my old teachers at the Chicago Art Institute. It wasn’t an exceptional article: he was deploring at length the plight of the creative artist in America, and filling in with the old standby solution—Art must have subsidy to survive—when I read my name in the pages flat before me. It leaped off the pages, filling my eyes. Me. Harry Jordan. A would-be suicide, a resident of a free NP ward, and here was my name in a national magazine! Not that there was so much:
“. . . and what caused Harry Jordan to give up painting? Jordan was an artist who could do more with orange and brown than many painters can do with a full palette . . .”
Just that much, but it was enough to dissolve my detached feelings and bring me back to a solid awareness of my true situation. My old teacher was wrong, of course. I hadn’t given up painting for economic reasons. No real artist ever does. Van Gogh, Gauguin, Modigliani and a thousand others are the answer to that. But the mention of my name made me realize how far I had dropped from sight, from what I had been, and from what I might have been in my Chicago days. My depression returned full force. A nagging shred of doubt dangled in front of me. Maybe I could paint after all? Didn’t my portrait of Helen prove that to me? Certainly, no painter could have captured her as well as I had done. Was I wrong? Had I wasted the years I could have been painting? Wouldn’t it have been better to stay close to art, even as a teacher, where at least I would have had the urge to work from time to time? Maybe I would have overcome the block? The four early paintings I had done in orange-and-brown, the non-objective abstractions were still remembered by my old teacher—after all the elapsed time. It shook my convictions. Rocked me. My ruminations were rudely disturbed. My magazine was rudely jerked out of my hands.
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