Dead Crazy

by Nancy Pickard

  I was confused; I couldn’t figure out why she’d called me.

  “I’m not sure I understand, MaryDell. Do you want us to help you find emergency shelter for them? Is that it?”

  “No,” she cried, “I want to know where he is! I lost him again, he got out of the car and ran off, and I don’t know where he is! I’ve just got to find him—he’ll freeze to death in this weather.”

  “I wouldn’t know where—”

  “Did you see him at the church basement?” she interrupted. “I thought maybe he went back there—”

  “I don’t know him, MaryDell, I wouldn’t recognize—”

  “You’d know him! He looks different.”

  “Well, I don’t think I saw-”

  “I offered to bring him home with me, give him a warm bed, but he wouldn’t have it, heavens no, it was only starting to snow, it was only freezing outside, but he had to be dropped off on a street corner, like some … some hitchhiker, some bum that I’d picked up off—”

  I interrupted her this time, in a firm voice, trying to exert some control over the conversation. “He’s probably used to this, MaryDell.”

  “He’s … what?” She came to such a screeching halt it was almost funny.

  “Used to it. Listen to me. From what you’ve told me, I’d guess that it’s nothing new for your brother to be on the streets. If he has to find shelter, he will, because he knows where to look. Assuming he’s rational enough at the moment to do it. Do you think he is?”

  She reluctantly agreed that he had seemed to be.

  “Okay, then. Here’s what I would do. Call the police department. Tell them he’s on the streets, that you’re concerned about him, and ask them to keep an eye out for him and to take him to the mission if they see him. You might even call the mission tonight and ask if he’s there, to put your mind at ease about him. Chances are, he’ll go there. Your only other choice is to go out in the snow and drive around and look for him yourself—and take the chance of getting stuck or having an accident. So make the calls, do that, but then let it go, MaryDell. He has survived other nights like this, hasn’t he? In all likelihood, he’ll survive this one, too.”

  I knew I sounded cold-blooded, but I was not unfamiliar with reality.

  “Yes,” she said doubtfully but fairly calmly. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “MaryDell?” I wanted to distract her, but I was also thinking of my “pig lady” and of the pretty redhead’s concerns about her children. “Tell me again about how harmless these people will be.”

  “Oh, well.” She sounded more like her authoritarian, arrogant self now. “They will be like my brother, which is to say different, definitely a little different from you and me, but not violently so. Jenny, these are extraordinarily sweet and docile people we are trying to help.”

  “Why? Are they drugged?”

  “Oh, well, yes, I guess you’d have to say most of them are on medication of one sort or another.”

  “What sorts? Lithium for your basic manic-depressive is one thing, MaryDell, but Thorazine for your basic raving psychotic is quite another.”

  There was a slight pause before she said, “You seem to know an unusual amount about this subject, Jenny.”

  “As I think I told you, my mother—”

  “Your mother?”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you. Well, MaryDell, would you prepare a report that answers the following questions. Hold on.” I put down the phone long enough to reach for my briefcase and to remove from it a small notebook in which I’d been hastily jotting notes to myself at odd moments throughout the day, ever since my meeting with her. “MaryDell? Ready? Average age of the clients who’ll use the recreation hall—”

  “Wait! All right, now I have a pen.”

  “Percentage male, female; percentage white, black, other minorities; average age at onset of mental illness; average frequency of hospitalization; average total lifetime duration of hospitalization; percentage schizophrenics, personality disorders, affective disorders, etc; present living situations—that is, do they live with family, friends, in group homes, alone, on the streets, whatever; average financial capability; average employment history; how many clients you expect the hall to serve at any one time, and try to project that into the third year; specifically what services the hall will provide for the clients; describe the staff that will be required; hours of operation; start-up cost; yearly cost of continued operation.” I had read upside down and sideways from my notes, and now I put them away. “That’s all I could think of immediately, but please add any other information you think we’ll need. Can you possibly do this for me, MaryDell?”

  “Oh, of course,” she said easily, as if I had only asked her to step outside to see if it was still snowing. I was not dealing with your average volunteer here, that was obvious. “We gathered that information and wrote it up before we searched for a site, Jenny.”

  “I’m impressed.” Truly. “Now, this is important. I know you’ll be as objective as you can, MaryDell, but I’d better warn you that my trustees will want to be informed about all sides of the situation. If there are disadvantages to this project or this site, be honest about them. Don’t be afraid to mention them in your report. They won’t necessarily militate against approval. The important thing is that if we anticipate them, we can deal with them. But if we get surprised by them, my trustees will be exceedingly unhappy with you and with me. So give me the warts as well as the beauty marks, agreed?”

  “Oh, of course, Jenny.”

  Her voice throbbed with a deep, rich sincerity that should have alerted me but didn’t. I was too eager to get off the phone, change clothes, fix supper, open a beer.

  MaryDell Paine seemed much calmer when we hung up than she had been when I first answered the phone. I, on the other hand, was haunted by the image of a ragged, crazy man scuttling through the night, the cold, the snow. I wished he had an old church basement to repair to, a warm and well-lighted place that might stay open late on evenings like these, so he’d have some place to huddle until the mission opened its doors and offered its beds for the night.

  There were two messages on the telephone answering machine; one informed me that my husband would be working late at the office. He was, I knew, up to his lieutenant’s bars in paperwork, one of the prices he paid for his last promotion. When he had agreed to move from being a detective into administration, I’d hoped it would give him more time to spend at home. Silly, optimistic me.

  The other message was an apology.

  “Hello, Mrs. Bushfield.” The speaker had a hearty, jocular tone that immediately set my teeth on edge. “This is Nordic Development calling to apologize for our little misunderstanding this afternoon. We would certainly like to be able to help the foundation, and I hope you’ll let us know if we can at any time in the future. In the meantime, thanks for dropping by our office. Come again.”

  It was Michael, of course. It was also history repeating itself—he used to call me all the time to apologize for behavior that he later regretted. But why was he taking such a formal, anonymous tone this time? Just to be amusing, or maybe to fool a husband who might be listening? Damn. I had liked Michael, nearly loved him, in fact, and I expected better of him—or my memory of him—than this.

  My stomach growled. I opened a can of lentil soup and a light Beck’s beer and grilled a ham-and-cheese sandwich, all of which I downed while slouched in front of the television, in a terrycloth bathrobe and sweat socks. I watched a detective show, the last influence in the world I needed.

  8

  It was on nights like this that I missed my mother’s house, where I’d lived after dad had remarried, and she’d gone into the hospital. In their house, I could light the fireplace in the den, curl up in a chintz rocking chair with an afghan—the blanket, not the dog—on my lap and a good mystery in my hands. All it had lacked was a cat. Here, in the ultramodern house Geof had when I met him, the coziest room was the bathroom.

  So, partly it was the d
etective show, but partly it was the house that drove me back into my clothes—coat, hat, boots, and gloves—and out into the snowy night.

  I’d called ahead, so I was expected where I was going.

  As I kicked my way down the street, making fresh prints in the snow and sticking out my tongue to catch flakes on it, I thought how there are a couple of nice things about marriage—or at least some marriages—that nobody ever confides beforehand. One is that you don’t have to worry about dating anymore, or about whether you’re ever going to marry. A decision has been made. There’s less turmoil. And all that emotional and mental energy that you used to pour into dating—or into hoping to—you can now apply to other, more interesting things in life. Your job. Your garden. Your computer. Your slug collection. Whatever it is that you feel you neglected for so long. I was trying to devote more time to my women friends.

  One of them, going clear back to grade school days, lived three blocks over, in a house a little like my mother’s. Marsha Sandy greeted me at the door with a bear hug. There was a man standing behind her—her current beau, evidently—who looked bearish himself.

  “I’m glad the doctor is in,” I said to her, sighing.

  “This is Joe Fabian.” Marsha took one of her date’s hands and one of mine, briefly, as if to join us. “Joe, this is my buddy, Jenny.”

  He had the sort of looks that Marsha and I, had we been alone, would have insufferably called cute—average height; losing a little of his curly brown hair on top; full beard and mustache; warm, intelligent, lively brown eyes; the kind of build that was made for cuddling up against. He exuded energy and purpose. At the moment, judging from his grin, his purpose seemed to be to ingratiate himself with me, Marsha’s oldest friend. And who could blame him? Marsha, dressed in a burgundy-colored jogging suit that brought out the color in her cheeks and didn’t hide her figure, was well worth whatever effort he put into wooing her.

  Joe Fabian followed us into her recreation room, where there was a bowl of popcorn on her coffee table and a fire in the fireplace. He immediately endeared himself to me by excusing himself from the room.

  “Marsha says she hasn’t had a chance to see you for a while, Jenny,” he said, “so I’ll leave you two alone while I wash up in the kitchen.”

  I felt my eyebrows rising.

  “Thanks, Joe,” Marsha said, straight-faced.

  When his back was turned, she grinned at me.

  I whispered, “Does he do windows?”

  Her smile turned lascivious. “He doesn’t have to.”

  We settled ourselves at opposite ends of her chintz couch. Marsha was already in her stocking feet, and I had removed my boots at the door. Now we sat back against our respective ends of the couch, and stretched out our feet toward each other, with Marsha’s legs on the outside, mine inside. We had sat this way as teenage girls, giggling at the slightest provocation. In those days, she’d been a big, plain, smart girl about whom adults said, “You wait, you’ll come into your own when you’re older, and then the boys will flock around.” She had, and they did. The one she married had eventually left, however. Now he shared with her the care of their adolescent children. He had them this week, so we had the house to ourselves. And Joe.

  “Here’s your apple for today, Jenny.” Marsha, who was a psychiatrist in private practice, raised her mug of hot apple cider in a toast. “So”—she put on a thick Viennese accent—“vat’z new vit you, kid?”

  “Michael’s back in town.”

  She leaned her head back against the armrest and laughed out loud, an irresistible sound. Once I realized why she was so amused by my simple announcement, I guffawed, too.

  “Oh, God,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Do you think we fool anybody? Forget the briefcases and the suits. Let’s talk about what’s really interesting—men!”

  That set us to giggling again. It felt good and satisfying, like being best friends and teenagers again. I felt as if one of our mothers should walk into the room at that moment and say, “Now, girls.”

  We talked about Michael. We talked about Geof. I told her about firing Derek. We talked about her ex, and—quietly—about her present boyfriends, including the forty-year-old domesticated teddy bear in the kitchen. Then, having exhausted all the gossip, we played grown-up.

  “I don’t know if community placement is right, Jenny,” Marsha said in answer to a question. “I only know it is a fact of life these days. In another decade, trends will undoubtedly change, but now, morally and politically, community placement is the fashion.” She shifted herself into a more comfortable position at her end of the couch and inquired rhetorically, “Is it good for patients to be released from hospitals so soon?” She shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. You read the journals, and you’ll see a study one month that claims it is beneficial for them and another study the next month that says it screws them. Hell, Jenny, you know we used to warehouse the mentally ill for lifetimes, but now they’re in and out of hospitals like revolving doors. I know of state hospitals that ten years ago housed two thousand patients, and now those same hospitals are down to five or six hundred residents—”

  She shook her head and continued her lecture.

  “And where, you ask, because you are a concerned citizen, are those fourteen or fifteen hundred former patients now? I mean, hell, that’s a lot of crazy people to release from hospitals, to say, ‘Hey, good-bye, good-luck, write us when you get there.’ Well, we call it community placement, which sounds all warm and fuzzy, not to mention civically enlightened in the best Aristotelian sense, but the reality can be something quite different. The money hasn’t followed them out of the institutions. So, at best, they’re living with their families—although that is certainly not always in the best interests of the patient or the family—or in group homes, nursing homes, or their own apartments. At worst, the sickest ones are living in parks, cars, or doorways, and there are a good many of those people, too many.”

  She stared for a moment into her cup of apple cider. Joe Fabian had quietly come back into the room and taken a chair across from us during her last speech. When she looked up, it was at him first, and then over at me, with sadness and anger showing in her wide brown eyes.

  “There are no group homes in this town. At night, for the real down-and-outers, there’s only the mission. During the day, there’s nothing. If you don’t believe me—”

  “Of course I do.”

  “… ask Joe.”

  I looked over, inquiringly, at him.

  “Joe’s the director of the Wayne County mental health association,” Marsha explained. So he lived out of town, I thought, even out of our county. That explained why I didn’t already know him. Marsha smiled ironically at him. “Our friend here wants to finance a recreation hall for the folks who get released from psych wards. She wants to know if it’s a good idea. Tell her how it is, Joe. Let’s say she’s a thirty-four-year-old man, chronically mentally ill, unemployed, broke, recently released from the hospital, on medication, and she lives in Port Frederick, Massachusetts. What is there for her to do with her days and nights?”

  He looked from her to me, unsmiling now.

  “Let me say first that I’ll bet I know about this project of yours.” He had a gruff, growly voice, and an intensity, that suited his appearance. “I’m also on the state board of mental health. Mrs. Paine consulted with us about it when she first got the idea. We’re all for it, although I’d have to say that anybody who works with that woman is going to go bonkers himself.”

  He grimaced and shook his head.

  “But okay,” he continued. “So what do you do, if you’re the fellow that Marsha just described? You could jump off the Seventh Street Bridge.” He leaned forward, placed his forearms on his thighs, and radiated intensity. “If that doesn’t appeal to you, you could stare at the walls in your room, assuming you have a room. You could sit on a street corner until somebody moves you along, or you could find a stretch of shoreline and a pile of rocks to lie down on. If
it were me, I’d probably just walk, just keep walking, probably in circles, all day long. And then, when I got tired of all that deeply pleasurable and meaningful activity, then I’d do what I probably should have done in the first place, which is to go jump off the Seventh Street Bridge, an act of great and merciful savings to the taxpayers of the Commonwealth.”

  “Aren’t there any programs?” I asked.

  “Programs? What do you mean, programs?”

  “Organized activities, sheltered workshops, clubs …”

  “Clubs, Jenny?” He laughed harshly. “You’re talking maybe country clubs for the crazy? Rotary clubs? A fraternity of the fragile, a sorority of the insane? Not in Poor Fred, not lately.”

  “Joe …” Marsha said in a quiet tone.

  He looked at her, took a deep breath, and stared at the floor between his feet for a moment. “Sorry,” he said to me, looking up and smiling slightly. “I get a little carried away sometimes. My wife says I’m living proof that mental illness is contagious, Jenny. She says she has the evidence, which is that I’m obviously crazy to stay in a profession that takes so damned much out of us and pays so little of any sort of reward in return. Hell, she’s right.” He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to look at Marsha. “Isn’t she, Shrink?”

  Marsha only smiled benignly, like any good psychiatrist. But to me she said primly, as if he weren’t in the room, “Joe was separated from his wife before we started dating. They’re getting a divorce.” She didn’t have to tell me that; I knew her well enough to assume as much. Marsha returned to the previous subject and said in that same rather formal tone that told me she was feeling uncomfortable about something, probably him, “I think the recreation hall is a fine idea, Jenny. You can count on my support for it, mine and Joe’s. Isn’t that right, Joe?”