“Yes, Mom.”
“Why are you being so cruel to me, Lillian? Why do you do things like this?”
“I’m not being cruel,” Lilly said.
“Yes, you are very cruel, Lillian. Not even telling me you are in trouble. You are trying to punish all of us, aren’t you, little girl?”
“Mom—”
“I spoke to your doctor. How old is he? Is he married?”
“I really didn’t ask.”
“He said you weren’t telling him anything either. I don’t understand, Lillian. What are you trying to do to me?”
“Look, I’m fine. I’m not going to be here much longer.”
“But why are you there at all? Did you eat sugar, Lillian? I told you your body cannot take sugar in the food. Is there sugar in what they feed you there? Don’t touch it, you hear me? It can make you act this way. I read this in a magazine.”
“I’m not here because I ate sugar.”
“Then why? Why are you there?”
“As I said, it’s not for very long.”
“You are not going to tell anyone? If you can’t tell me, you can tell that doctor. What did I ever do that makes you act like this to me? You are the one that did this to me, Lilly.”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“Is it your father?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know. It’s not the sugar. I know what is happening to us, Lilly. You are sorry for what you did to me. It doesn’t mean for you to suffer. It does not mean for you to go into a mental hospital.”
“I have to go now, Mom.”
“Lilly, listen to me. He’s a sick man. He didn’t call you again, did he?”
“Mom, I’m in a hospital—”
“There is nothing to do for him. I already told you your father can’t be put in a hospital. It is brain damage that he has and no one can fix him, Lilly. You haven’t heard this enough?”
“I have to go now, Mom—”
“Let me come there and help you with this. Darling, I want to come. Let me come—”
Lilly let the receiver drop. Then she pulled up the coiled cord and slammed the receiver back into its cradle.
Lilly bumped her way down the corridor through a flow of staring faces. The door of the phone booth was still swinging as she moved, tightening her lips into the most completely formed smile she could make. But she had to stay composed. She had to.
Finally, she turned inside the opened door of her room through its threshold. Into safety.
In her hospital room, Lilly lifted her T-shirt and pulled it up, off her neck.
She tried to shake off her thoughts as she finished undressing. Lilly missed her alchemy books and her notebooks.
Lilly’s room was spare and simple, like a 1920s hotel room on Gramercy Park—all chestnut and rosewood and tranquil beauty. Just a lovely bureau, a bed, a small braided rug on the wooden floor, and then a small writing table by the window. The walls were bare, but polished and pure as white enamel.
In the corner—as was the case with old rooms constructed long ago—was a small washing sink, along with a tiny bar of olive-colored soap and two wash towels hanging neatly on a brass ring under the sink.
Even after Jane and she scrubbed the cracked tile and plaster floors, the Little Italy apartment was mildewed. The hallway of their slum tenement in Little Italy smelled of cats and bacon. The bums camping inside it stretched on newspapers for bedding, on the cracked Florentine tiles of the hallways.
Now a filled shopping bag was perched against the clean hospital room’s closet door. She recognized Jane’s handwriting on a note Scotch taped on the bag. Lilly found the plain blue nightshirt Jane had stuffed into the bag with other unfolded, random clothes, and she pulled the nightshirt out. Then she let it drape on her. Somehow it had maintained its light but certain shape inside the messy spill of the bag.
Lilly tried to get ready to go to sleep. She folded her dirty blue jeans and T-shirt. Then she pushed her worn panties into a plastic bag provided for laundry, and she put it inside the closet. She opened the paper-lined bureau drawers and started putting the clothes Jane had packed inside them, folding, arranging them until the shopping bag was finally empty.
She was here now, Lilly thought, surrounded by polished corridors, soft yellow lamplight, and settees, in a clean hospital room filled with expensive furnishings. Every hope she had left was in this hospital, this room.
There could be refuge here. And maybe the states would get better so she could write again. She hadn’t been able to write anything for so long.
“This is called the Salt of Alchemy,” Lilly remembered the text inside an alchemy book. “The Salt is divided into fixed Salt and volatile Salt….”
She wanted to stay here in the hospital, where people couldn’t swallow her, she thought, or ignite her into flames and ash. She just wanted to be able to write in her notebook again, to feel the lightness she used to feel when she packed the outside world up and put it away somewhere so it couldn’t hurt her anymore.
Chapter Five
Two weeks before, Lilly had taken the 10:30 a.m. off-peak train out of Grand Central and visited her parents for the last time. Glints of sun had speared through the train compartment, shimmered. The stations out her window had seemed like visual echoes as the train clipped past them. “White Plains, North White Plains, Valhalla…”
Three students were on the opposite aisle, smelling of cheap wine and the packages of trail mix they still held opened on their laps. She used to be them, she thought, once riding the train from Bedford to the city, without a care. Now there was no worse place to be than rolling through the same beautiful Westchester hills, remembering herself in other faces.
Outside the train window, Lilly had watched the starched white houses of the wealthy Westchester suburbs pass, thinking that everything inside her other world before her father’s accident was not real: the old school dresses her mother picked out for her and the curtains over the colonial windows, the night sounds of her mother and father sleeping in their bedroom upstairs, the birthing dusks of Bedford and the hours she could make the world of attachments fall away.
Her past life had seemed a muddle, a clutter; feelings were all mixed up in it. It was still her life in her dreams and in waking life when she remembered something that happened—a place or a person—but she had to strain to identify what or whom.
Faint newspaper prints were on the inside of her father’s thumb when Lilly saw him in her memory sometimes before his accident, and he was walking to catch the train home in her recollections, passing the Roosevelt Hotel on Fortieth Street, walking through a long inside passageway filled with shoeshine stands and newspaper stands in Grand Central Station, a tiny curl of black and gray hair under his felt hat, the newspaper under his arm that he would fold, column by column, like beautiful pressed leaves, on the New York Central railroad train seat. His journals of Commentary and the Columbia University Law Review were piled up on the sill of his office in New York City with Broadway theater Playbills: She Loves Me, Camelot, Oliver!… Broadway theater marquees were visible and glittering through its dingy glass windows.
“Do you want something more, sweetheart?” he asked her once when she accompanied him through the bronze-gilded building on Fifth Avenue. His office was on the thirty-fifth floor, and she was playing with the water cooler, pressing the tap up and down to watch the water bubble inside the glass tank. “How about a date? Will you go with me to the Cattleman? We’ll make a treat out of it.” His question had come after a long silence. He had been staring at her as she was flapping the tap up and down, the water spilling onto his beige and pink marble floor. Lilly was a small girl for her age then, eleven years old.
Under the sultry light, the piano bar in the Cattleman had looked like a mahogany pool. He did not tell her the young actress would be waiting for him, by the coat check. The actress had simply emerged in the dim light, her hair unpinned, her eyel
ashes like miniature tents. Ushered to a table through the half-empty dining room, her father had sat under a painting of a cowboy riding a bucking horse— the cowboy was whipping a lasso out into the sky. The actress, following him, took the seat directly opposite him so that Lilly was left to the side seat where there was no place setting laid for a third diner. The actress took a file out of her purse and began to file her thumbnails, waiting for the menus. David threw his own cloth napkin across his lap. He had straightened the manila folder of a contract and fingered the sharpened no. 2 pencils he drew from his attaché case. He put on his half-glasses and drummed a pencil on the folder. By then he had forgotten Lilly.
They were never beautiful, the “girls,” as he called them, the clients from Broadway shows, or TV situation comedies, or movies in Los Angeles. They looked foolish against his long, intelligent face, his hypercritical eyes, and he did not have affairs with them, Lilly believed, resenting the opulent show he put on around the actress that evening. She was filling with the uncomfortable mix of feelings she had for her father, a part of her wanting to spurn everything around him, wanting her mother to return. She could walk out into the anonymous bustle and traffic of the city, she had thought. The fragrance of cognac and liqueurs from the bar wafted through the restaurant air, and even her glass of Coca-Cola seemed—like her father—extravagant, a little reckless and grand. She would resist him, but she could not hate him.
Toward her father, Lilly could not remember when she didn’t feel resentment and emptiness. That abyss was unbearable, a hole within her he refused to assert his will enough to fill, charming her playfully as he neglected her—a rattlesnake dance over the fire of desires. The pushing desperation for his attention, she remembered it all now on the train, but had she wanted to harm him? Is that why she had left him on the floor that night of the accident? What secret did her amnesia about what really happened that night, three years ago, protect her from ever knowing?
Whatever her father did before his accident seemed to Lilly mysterious, too. The way her mother and she both had to wait for him to finish his dinner most evenings. Watching him butter his bread with soft, imported Danish cheeses and gaze at the lawn or the swimming pool down the driveway, and then suddenly turn back to notice what both of them were wearing, a dress or slacks. Perusing their legs with one of his eyebrows raised. There were large, gold-sculpted cigar humidifiers on her father’s mahogany desk in his study, along with racks of meerschaum and virgin briar pipes and his closet full of his stylish attorneys’ tweed and gray flannel suits that he wore to his successful entertainment law practice in the city. David was medium-height with a long nose and thin, quiet lips. His chest was wide. His attractive arms—athletic and strong. But he had been as remote and ethereal as the granite Bedford cliffs and the woods.
On her train seat that last visit home, Lilly drew out two letters she had pulled from her desk drawer before she left the apartment in Little Italy. She read again:
Re: David Weill.
Dear Dr. Spiegal,
…As per your request for more background on Mr. Weill, we are sending you a copy of our findings and the discharge summary on this patient from June 15, 1971. Copies of this letter have been sent to Mrs. Weill at her Westchester address. As we stated previously, the original medical summary was sent to Dr. Sacci at the time the patient was discharged into his care three years ago.
Lilly had been keeping the letter to give to her mother, received in the day’s mail when she took her father in for a checkup at the local medical center a few weeks ago. Some voice inside her told her that Helen would lose it in the stack of papers her mother now continually mis-handled, piles on top of the dusty desk in her father’s study off the master bedroom. Helen tossed mail there now that she didn’t open for days, sometimes weeks. The neglected bulk of mail got mixed in with all unopened subscription magazines and other sundry mail packets in tall, thick, un-sorted batches. Lilly had meant to tell her mother about it that evening weeks ago. Then Lilly just kept the letter to herself.
She continued reading:
It seems possible at this point to assume that Mr. Weill had a stroke at the top of the stairway which made him fall, or perhaps he lost his footing for another reason, and suffered a cerebral insult in his fall. However, it seems more clear that he suffered a stroke, possibly another stroke in the kitchen which rendered him unconscious for several hours until his wife found him.
His daughter reported in several interviews with our neurologists here that her memory of this night is vague. She went out of her bedroom to check if Mr. Weill were all right after she heard his initial fall, but she cannot remember if she heard his second fall in the kitchen. She was still upstairs. Mrs. Weill walked into the kitchen an hour later and found him.
Mr. Weill was known to complain of migraines and there were noted stress factors, both psychologically and medically that contributed to his emotional and physical state.
Unfortunately, the insurance situation does present a problem for future care here in the rehabilitation unit. We understand that Mr. Weill had been planning to change his insurance plan but since he was in the process of completing divorce proceedings with his wife, he did not attend to this before his strokes, and he currently has no coverage. We have, of course, tried to bring this to the attention of social services but it has not yielded positive results. Regardless of Mr. Weill’s intentions before his illness, the legal documents would be necessary. Therefore, I’m afraid our department can no longer accommodate Mr. Weill’s medical needs. However, we are guarded in our opinion as to an effective rehabilitative treatment for Mr. Weill’s condition regardless of his financial situation. Recommendations for several home nursing services were given to Mrs. Weill who has, to my knowledge, procured some employment to pay for her husband’s long stay as an inpatient in Northern Westchester Hospital.
Regrettably, the cerebral insult Mr. Weill suffered as a result of his two strokes and accident on the stairs was diffuse, bilateral, and resulted in significant forebrain injury. Upon awakening from the coma, he appeared to have undergone a dramatic personality change as well as a loosening of affect and inhibition in the hospital, causing much inappropriate behavior on his part. Rage and severe agitation were notable. Loose and un-inhibited sexual behavior have also been observed, along with occasional flights of fancy and depression.
The staff here at Northern Westchester Medical Center was not surprised to hear the summary of Mr. Weill’s gradual deterioration these three years. After two months’ hospitalization here, the patient was well enough to be sent home but he continued to exhibit curious fits of anger and violence, a short attention span, impaired memory, perseveration of word and act, extreme personality change, uninhibited sexual behavior, salivary drooling and urinary dribbling.
Neurological examination had showed a blood pressure of 200/100. He exhibited a slow spastic gait. He also exhibited a defect of revisualization and conceptualization since he was unable to draw the face of a clock or reproduce a simple floor plan of his own home or even of his bedroom.
Librium was prescribed 10 mg four times a day. However the prognosis for Mr. Weill remains guarded. It was certain at this time that Mr. Weill would not be able to return to his law practice or any other form of his previous employment.
However, as stated earlier, without sufficient insurance, we cannot refer this case to our team here, and social services has explained future referrals can only be made if bankruptcy is declared which Mrs. Weill will not agree to. Her college-age daughter also doesn’t qualify for Medicaid benefits, as she is no longer a minor, and the family was well above the income level for welfare.
We hope that this letter will be useful in understanding the complications in this case.
Thank you for letting us share this interesting problem with you.
Sincerely,
Dr. Morton Vesell
Rehabilitation Unit
Northern Westchester Hospital
Lilly folded
the first letter, taking out from the same envelope another letter that Helen had written her from a Mind Dynamics retreat in Connecticut a few days ago, urging her to come home:
Lilly, my darling, I am coming home tomorrow. The people are very nice to me here. I will need you to come again to watch your father this Sunday. I must go to work this day because I have been away. In summer, perhaps it will be different, perhaps he will be well at last. Tell the tuition people not to call me at work, please. I will pay when I can. I’m sending you the check for the rent now. We both must try to keep up our appearances, no matter what the money situation is, darling. I have always looked nice. Next time, why don’t we go to the retreat together and get positive energy?
I know someday you will understand how much your mother has suffered with this man in the house. Let him sit in his room and watch the t.v. all day. He’s a baby, that’s the whole problem with this man and even before this he was a baby. He likes to ruin everything. Hate me if it makes you feel better, if you have less guilt for causing all this to happen to me.
I’m not trying to ruin your life, I have let you have your own apartment, haven’t I?
Love,
Your Mommy
Lilly folded the letters back into the envelope and put them under her Marlboro cigarettes, in the bottom scatter of the purse.
These past long months, the Bedford house was quiet with the tragic steps of her father holding onto his aluminum walker as he struggled to walk and move. When David came home from the hospital three years before, her mother moved him out of their bedroom into the mudroom—an extra guest room off the kitchen, with an old Magnavox TV, boxes of discarded clothes meant to be delivered to some charity or finally thrown away, and a bed that still smelled like the litter of puppies the dog had given birth to years ago. Not an unpleasant odor, but it wasn’t human. Upstairs, her mother’s part of the bedroom was messy, and there were drawers of nylons and girdles left pulled open in the dressers. Helen went to work at a small travel agency called Directions Unlimited. And Helen stopped her bookbinding. She received discount miles and hotel rates and left the house for “business trips.” Soon, Helen didn’t want to pay anymore for David’s private nurse. Besides, the money was running out. There was no insurance to help pay. And they were not covered for the months her father spent in the hospital. Tuition installments and Lilly’s rent were always late. Lilly was worried she would have to leave Sarah Lawrence and live at home again. Fifty-five years old when it happened, her father kept reminding Lilly, and not time enough to prepare for disaster.
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