by Noah Gordon
Two nights later he went to a prepledge stag at a fraternity house on 114th street. He had four drinks and decided he didn’t want to join, because he would be living at home and anyway the fraters didn’t look particularly interesting. He left the party and walked until he came to a small bar and he went inside and ordered a straight shot of V.O. He had two more, remembering Zaydeh’s bottle in the lima-bean barrel. Then he wandered outside and walked until he was on the campus. He circled the Butler Library and sat down on a stone bench next to a splashing fountain. All the buildings were dark except the library behind him and the journalism building. Below him the statue of John Jay loomed like a golem. He took the letter from his pocket and tore it carefully in half, then in quarters, then into little pieces that lay on the cement at his feet. Somebody was sobbing. Pretty soon he realized it was he. Two girls came walking down the library stairs. They stopped and goggled at him.
“Is he sick?” one of them asked. “Shall I go for a cop?”
The other one came toward him. “Evelyn,” the first one said. “Be careful.” How embarrassing, he thought.
The girl stuck her face into his. She wore glasses. She had buck teeth and freckles. Her sweater was blue and fuzzy. She sniffed and then grimaced. “Drunk as a skunk,” she said. “A crying jag.” Their heels clicked righteously into the darkness.
He knew she was right. There were no tears on his cheeks. He did not weep because Zaydeh was below the ground or because he was afraid to love Ellen Trowbridge. He gulped and sobbed because he wanted the wind to blow the scraps of letter toward Amsterdam Avenue, and instead they were being blown toward Broadway. Then the wind changed and the scraps fluttered quickly in the right direction. But he kept on sobbing. It felt so good.
BOOK II:
Wandering in
the Wilderness
12
Woodborough, Massachusetts
November 1964
Mary Margaret Sullivan, R.N., eased her huge hips into the chair behind the desk in the head nurse’s office and sighed. She reached over and took a metal-covered file from the records stand. For several minutes her pen scratched, recording a disturbance in Templeton Ward caused by a Mrs. Felicia Serapin, who had struck another woman in the face with the heel of her shoe.
When she was through she gazed thoughtfully at the coffee kettle and the hotplate on top of a file cabinet across the room. She had decided that coffee would not be worth the effort required to heave her body from its resting place when Rabbi Kind stuck his head through the door.
“Ah, the Jewish padre,” she said.
“How are you doing, Maggie?” He came into the office and stood there with a pile of books in his hands.
She stood with great effort and walked to the cabinet for two cups, plugging in the hotplate as she passed it. She set the cups on her desk and spooned in brown powder from a jar she kept in the top drawer.
“I can’t have coffee. I want to give these to my wife.”
“She’s over at occupational therapy. Most of them are.” She sat again joltingly. “We’ve got a new Jewish patient here in the ward you might try saying hello to. Her name is Hazel Birnbaum. Mrs. Birnbaum. Poor thing thinks we’re all conspiring to get her. Schiz.”
“Where is she?”
“Seventeen. Don’t you want some coffee first?”
“Thanks, but I’ll look in on her. If there’s time afterwards you can sell me a cup.”
“It’ll be gone. See the chaplain.”
Smiling, he walked through the nearly deserted ward. Everything was so depressingly clean: the mark of patient labor.
In room seventeen a woman lay on the bed.
Her hair splashed dark and tangled against the white pillow. My God, he thought, this one looks very much like my sister Ruthie.
“Mrs. Birnbaum?” he said, smiling. “I’m Rabbi Kind.”
Large blue eyes flicked at him for one damning moment and then switched their gaze back to the ceiling.
“I just wanted to say hello. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Go away,” she said. “I won’t bother anybody.”
“All right, I won’t stay. I come through the ward regularly. I’ll see you again.”
“Morty sent you,” she said.
“No. No, I don’t even know him.”
“Tell him to leave me ALO-O-ONE!”
No screams, he thought, I am defenseless against screams. “I’ll see you again soon, Mrs. Birnbaum.” Her legs and feet were bare and the ward was chilly. He took the gray blanket at the foot of the bed and covered her, but she kicked it off like a petulant child. He left hurriedly.
Leslie’s room was down the corridor and around the corner. He put the books in the middle of the bed and then ripped a page from his notebook and printed a note: I’ll come back this afternoon. You were at O.T. I hope what you’re making is useful, like a pair of men’s socks with no holes.
On the way out he looked into Maggie’s office to say good-by. But the head nurse was gone. The water in the kettle was sending a pillar of steam to wet the ceiling. He pulled the hotplate plug and, deciding that he had time, poured water into one of the cups.
Drinking the coffee slowly, he wrote a list:
THINGS TO DO
At Woodborough General Hosp—
Susan Wreshinsky in maternity (boy, gl?) Wish mazel tov.
Lois Gurwitz (Mrs. Leibling grnd-dtr), apndx.
Jerry Mendelsohn, leg
At public libr—
Order Bialik biog
Microfilm of NY Times stories on Jewish vigilantes in racially-torn nbrhoods, for sermon.
His eyes saw his wife’s name on one of the metal covers in the records rack and of their volition his hands lifted the file. He hesitated only a moment and then he opened it. Shuffling through the papers, he took another swallow from the coffee cup and began to read.
Woodborough State Hospital
Patient: Mrs. Leslie (Rawlings) Kind
Case history presented at
Staff Conference
Dec. 21, 1964
Diagnosis: Involutional Melancholia
The patient is an attractive, well-formed white female, forty years of age, who has the appearance of good health habits. Her hair is dark blonde. Her height is 5′ 7″, her weight is 143 lbs.
She was brought to the hospital August 28, 1964, by her husband. Pre-admission symptoms were those of a “neurasthenic” state, during which she complained that things had been too heavy for her, that she was easily tired both mentally and physically, that she was irritable, restless, and unable to sleep.
For the first eleven weeks of hospitalization the patient remained mute. Frequently she had the appearance of wanting to weep without being able to achieve relief by doing so.
Speaking was resumed at the conclusion of the second in a course of twelve electroconvulsive treatments, nine of which have been administered to date. Thorazine seems to have given her good symptomatic relief. Its use is being supplanted with Pyrrolazote in a gradually increasing dose up to 200 mg. q.i.d.
Amnesia resulting from the treatment appears to be minimal. In interviews with her psychiatrist during the past week the patient has told the therapist that she recalls maintaining silence because of a disinclination to share with anyone her guilt arising from an estrangement from her father and from the supposition that she was an unfit wife and mother because of a premarital sexual experience while she was a college student more than two decades ago. Her husband was made aware of this experience before their marriage, and the patient does not remember being bothered by any further remorse—or even thinking about the incident—until several months ago. While she clearly recollects the recent advent of guilt feelings regarding both the youthful sexual incident and the loss of her father’s love, these feelings of guilt no longer plague her. The patient now appears calm and optimistic.
She described her sexual relationship with her husband as a good one. Her menstrual cycle has been irregular f
or almost a year. Her present illness apparently is an anxious, agitated delusional depression of the menopause.
The daughter of a Congregational minister, the patient converted to Judaism prior to her marriage to her rabbi husband eighteen years ago. Her commitment to the Jewish religion appears strong, and her guilt feelings appear not to be centered upon her abandonment of her Christian beliefs, but rather upon what she considered as the betrayal of her father. The patient, reared in a home where biblical lore was an integral part of the environment, since her marriage has become a Talmudic student who has the friendship and admiration of recognized authorities at the rabbinical schools, according to her husband.
Their life has been the intermittently transient existence of the family of a clergyman with somewhat rigid ideas concerning the behavior of his congregation. This apparently has placed certain emotional burdens upon both the patient and upon her husband.
Despite these burdens the prognosis in this case is good.
I would recommend that the patient be considered for release from the care of the hospital following the twelfth electroconvulsive shock treatment. It is recommended that treatment be continued by a psychiatrist from whom she can receive intermittent psychotherapy, possibly with supportive therapy to be arranged for her husband.
(signed) Daniel L. Bernstein, M.D.
Senior Psychiatrist
He was beginning the next psychiatric report when he saw Maggie standing in the doorway looking at him.
“You walk as if you’re wearing sneakers,” he said.
She moved heavily to her desk and took Leslie’s file from his hands and returned it to the rack.
“You know better, Rabbi. You want to know something about your wife’s condition, you ask her psychiatrist.”
“You’re right, Maggie,” he said. She nodded silently when he said good-by. He put his notes into his pocket and left her office, walking quickly down the hollow-sounding, too-clean corridor.
The letter came four days later.
My Michael,
When you visit the chaplain’s office again, you will notice that your copy of the Cabala is missing from your desk. I talked Dr. Bernstein into utilizing a passkey so that he could open the door and get it for me. He did the actual stealing, but I’m the brains of the mob. Dear Max Gross always insisted that a man should be 40 years old before attempting to assimilate the cabalistic mysticism. How shocked Max would be to know that I have been struggling with it for ten years now—I, a mere woman!
I have been meeting regularly with Dr. Bernstein for what you used to call “pscho-shmyko” sessions. Alas, I will never again feel so smug as to be able to sneer at psychotherapy. Oddly, I remember almost everything about the period of illness. I want very strongly to tell you about it. I think that it would be easiest to do so in a letter—not because I don’t love you enough to discuss these things while looking into your eyes, but because I’m such a coward that I don’t know if I would speak all the necessary words.
So I will write them, now, before I lose my courage.
As you know too well, for the past year I have been in trouble. What you could not know, because I could not tell you, was that for almost a month before you took me to the hospital I slept scarcely at all. I was afraid to sleep, afraid of two dreams that I had over and over again, as if I were on one of those amusement park rides through some mad House of Horrors and couldn’t get off.
The first dream took place in the parlor of the old parsonage on Elm Street, in Hartford. I saw every detail as clearly as if I viewed it on a television screen. I saw the worn heavy plush scarlet sofa and the two matching cut-velour chairs, with the tatted antimacassars that Mrs. Payson donated yearly with regularity and belligerence. I saw the threadbare Oriental rug and the varnished mahogany coffee table bearing two chipped china canaries under a glass dome. I saw the things on the walls; a Wallace Nutting hand-tinted photograph of a tired little brook gamely struggling through a mustard-colored meadow, the Currier & Ives ice-skaters, a framed bouquet of artificial flowers made by my grandmother from the curls and clippings of my first haircut, and over the huge marble fireplace in which a fire never burned, a small-stitched sampler:
The Beauty of the House is Order
The Blessing of the House is Contentment
The Glory of the House is Hospitality
The Crown of the House is Godliness
The ugliest room ever put together by God-fearing but miserly parishioners.
And I could see the people.
My Aunt Sally, thin and gray-haired and worn from the task of taking care of us after my mother died, and full of so much love for her dead sister’s husband that everybody knew it except him, poor thing.
And my father. His hair was white even then, and he has always had the smoothest pink jowls of any man I’ve ever seen. I have never seen him needing a shave. I could see his eyes, light blue, that could bore their way right through you to the lie you were hiding in the middle of your head.
And I could see me, about twelve, my hair in long braids, gawky and skinny and wearing wire-framed spectacles because I was near-sighted until the year I entered high school.
And in every dream my father stood in front of the fireplace and looked me right in the eye and said the words that he must have said eight hundred times to us in that ugly room on Saturday evenings after supper.
“We believe in God, the Father, infinite in wisdom, goodness and love, and in Jesus Christ, his son, our Lord and Savior, who for us and our salvation lived and died, and rose again and liveth evermore, and in the holy spirit, who taketh of the things of Christ and revealeth them to us, renewing, comforting and inspiring the souls of men.”
Then the dream would fade into black as if my father were a TV preacher who had been interrupted for the commercial, and I would wake up in our bed, my body tingling and goose-fleshed the way it always got whenever my father looked right through my eyes and talked about how Jesus had died for me.
I didn’t think anything about the dream at first. Everybody has dreams, all sorts of dreams. But I began to have it every couple of nights, the same dream, the same room, the same words spoken by my father as he looked into my eyes.
It never shook my Jewishness. That was settled a long time ago. I converted for you, but I was one of the lucky ones and found something else besides. I don’t have to go into all that.
But I started thinking about what it must have been like for my father when I threw aside the things he had taught me and became a Jew. I began to think about how it would be for you if one of our children should decide to convert, to become Catholic, for instance. I would lie there and stare up at the dark ceiling and remember that my father and I were almost strangers. And I would remember how I had loved him when I was a little girl.
The dream lasted for a long time, and then I began having another one. This time I was twenty years old. I was in a convertible parked on a dark dirt road off the Wellesley campus, and I didn’t have any clothes on.
As in the first dream, every detail and impression came through to me clearly. I don’t remember the boy’s last name—his first name was Roger—but I saw his face, excited, young and a little frightened. He was a crewcut boy who wore a blue Leverett House football jersey with white numerals: 42. His tennis shorts and his underwear lay in a heap with my clothing on the floorboard. I looked at him with great interest; his was the first male body I had ever seen. What I felt was not love, or desire or even affection. The reason I had needed absolutely no persuasion to let him park his car in this dark place and undress me was that I felt a great curiosity and the conviction that there were things I wanted to know. And as I lay with my head jammed against the car door and my face pressed into the back of the cracked leather seat, and as I felt him engaging me with the same stupid diligence he would have used in an intramural football game, and as I felt myself painfully split open like a pod, my curiosity was satisfied. Somewhere far-off a dog barked, and in the car the boy made
a noise like a sigh and I could feel myself become a receptacle. And all I could do was listen to the faraway barking in the knowledge that I had been cheated, that this was nothing but a sad invasion of personal privacy.
And when I awoke in our dark room and found myself lying in our bed next to you, I wanted to wake you and ask your forgiveness, to tell you that the stupid girl in the convertible is dead and that the woman I have become had known only you in love. But instead I lay there through the long night, sleepless and trembling.
The dreams came again and again, sometimes one, sometimes another, so often that they became all mixed up with my wakeful life and at times I couldn’t tell what was dream and what was not. When my father looked into my eyes and talked of God and Jesus, even though I was only twelve years old I knew that he was seeing me as an adultress and I wanted to die. My period was five weeks late and one afternoon when I started to flow I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub and trembled because I couldn’t cry, and I didn’t know whether I was a college girl welcoming the curse or a fat, forty-year-old woman happy because I was not going to have a baby that didn’t belong to you.
During the day I could no longer meet your eyes or let the children kiss me. And at night I would lie rigid in bed, pinching the flesh of my arms to keep myself from falling asleep and dreaming.
And then you took me to the hospital and left me and I knew that it was as it should be, because I was evil and should be shut away and put to death. And I waited for them to kill me, until the shock treatments began and the fuzzy lines of my world began to snap into place once more.
Dr. Bernstein advised that I tell you about the dreams if I really wanted to. He believes that once I have done so they may never bother me again.
Don’t let them cause you pain, Michael. Help me wipe them from our world. You know that your God is my God, and that I am your wife and your woman, in body and mind and fact. I spend my time lying on my bed with my eyes closed, thinking about how it will be when I leave this place, about the so many good years that I have left with you.