The strange light cut across the darkness.
After a while, it was as if Lilly hadn’t been with her father at all. When Lilly awoke in the morning, she could see the ice and glinting slivers on the branches of the outside trees, on the window ledge and frame, but it felt watery and warm inside, as if they were floating in a strange lake all night inside a tower.
Chapter Six
In her hospital room now, Lilly stopped her thoughts from pulling at her. Voices inside her were telling her that being there in the house for her parents, a part of their sorrow, had been her own catastrophe.
She drew out a fresh pair of panties from the paper-lined drawer of the bureau she had just filled with the clothes Jane had brought her—a nice, clean cotton pair, which smelled like their apartment in Little Italy. Jane even went to the all-night Laundromat on Mott Street for her after leaving the emergency room, Lilly realized. Sat among the Italian single men with their slices of Genoa salami, white cheese, and flasks of bourbon, as the washing machines spun into the night. Lilly envisioned the Laundromat now again, set amid the Italian bread bakeries and an old, run-down medical clinic where a sign read, “Health Clinic for Bad Spines and Feet.” The neighborhood mothers would be there by early morning in their hairnets and slippers, wearing winter coats, and doing their chores, transistors playing Frank Sinatra ballads from some radio station in New Jersey. They washed and folded for their large families as if by inner nature. The floor of the Laundromat was mopped glistening clean after the men left in the dawn, garbage emptied into the street cans, a morning of busy cleanups and mending, where the doings of Little Italy’s private male circles in their secret meetings and the Bowery’s wandering homeless plagued the neighborhood, littering its blocks of family tenements. When the women appeared on the block in the evening twilight, their bracelets looked like Egyptian amulets, black eyeliner with silver studs streaked their eyelids, and their breasts were big as tires. How different it was than the house of Lilly’s parents, she thought now.
The taillights from cars in the hospital parking lot were flashing in a distance out the window now, and Lilly wondered what the mornings would be like in the hospital—if she would dream differently here, under the clean white sheets.
She remembered how slowly the morning sun rose in Little Italy, shaking out light over Elizabeth Street. Lilly was dreaming horrible dreams these weeks. The basement with her mother’s bookbinding table was a prison in one of her dreams, a place of barred doors and windows, her mother’s bookbinding tools implements of cruelty. And when she awoke, frightened and shaken, to the empty darkness of her Little Italy bedroom, the morning sky was so vast and cloudless she thought it would take hours for the sun to light it. The April wind was sweeping bits of Bowery refuse around the street.
All late winter the television sets were blaring from inside the Italian Florentine tenements. The news was all about Patty Hearst in February, the kidnapped nineteen-year-old daughter of the millionaire William Randolph Hearst Jr., a sylph of a girl. The kidnappers asked whether could they use the phone when they first burst into her apartment. Forced to the floor, Patty was gagged while her fiancé was beaten with a wine bottle. In the pictures of her fiancé, his tufts of brown hair and fair skin were like Mitchell’s. The leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army stood over Patty. Maybe Patty had felt him the way Lilly felt Dr. Burkert in the seclusion room tonight, entering through her terrified pores. Then kidnappers started firing machine guns, and Patty was blindfolded, put into the trunk of a car outside the Berkeley apartment, and whisked away. Lilly remembered watching the activity on the streets from her balcony in Little Italy. The asphalt-scented wind became stronger once the sun rose, tickling the wet garments the Italian mothers pinned on their clotheslines in the dawn. The garments they abandoned to watch the details of the Patty Hearst story flew like flags of feminine armies high above the littered streets. Three or four TVs were blaring the news about the kidnapped girl by 10 a.m. that morning. The Italian mothers were at their kitchen tables early for their group coffee break. Lilly could hear them:
“She’s just a girl.”
“They want money.”
“Nah, she’s going to get herself raped.”
“What’re ya talking?
The men were out in the streets, still drunk from the night before, walking in pairs, returning from their haunts. The storefronts in Little Italy were draped in dull green curtains, the secret recesses between them filled with cigarette smoke rank with gin, floating out of forbidden windows. Lilly had watched the polyester-trousered men move to their shiny parked Cadillacs, shaking out their legs, pinching up the creases on their department-store pants, their physiques bulky as the bloody beef and pork carcasses hanging in the butcher shops off Houston Street. They were gathering for their usual morning conferences inside their closed cars while the sun sparkled from the cars’ windows. Sometimes Lilly heard gunshots in the dank morning air, the noises muted and sounding like soda bottle tops popping off. There was a small gun shop on Mulberry Street. But that morning, the air was silent, except for the voices of those men.
All of it was so far away now, like Mitchell. But hadn’t Patty Hearst escaped her other life? Lilly wondered now. Maybe Patty found herself alone, too, in a sequestered room like this. William Randolph Hearst had held his press conferences on his front lawn a few hours later, and then the NBC special report played a tape of Patty’s voice: “Mom, Dad—I’m okay. I had a few scrapes and stuff, but they’ve washed them up, and they’re getting okay. I think it was just a way of confirming that I was alive.” Lilly thought she sounded strangely happy, as if she had been abducted into a state of inexpressible bliss.
Lilly went to the window to look at the night expanding outside her room now. She didn’t know whether she could change her life by being here. She peered down, into the gray cobblestones of the formal hospital walkway. She was five stories high.
Below the barred window, the moon lit a garden of lush, high-stemmed tulips—red as a woman’s lipstick— festooned like elaborate embroidery around the trim building. Lilly could see all the way to the parking lot where the attendants held their stations, directing guests and visitors, their green jumpsuits well kept as the neo-Gothic hospital. She watched a taxicab pull up, and one of its doors opened; a well-dressed woman extended some shining bills to a driver. Suddenly the world outside felt threatening to Lilly again. The moonlight was an enemy light to her, illuminating the difference between the confident woman and Lilly. The dollar bills looked important as tickets back to a life that Lilly may never possess again.
Lilly lay down on the flossy mattress, exhausted. Again she felt too fragile. She was barely awake enough to feel the new dream moving under her thoughts. First, it felt pure and warm, in which she was young and pressed onto a nurturing mother’s lap, a weight of no more than a butterfly. But a piece of the fantasy flickered in her imagination, and she made out the lips and cheekbones of the nurse Beverly gazing down at her.
Then it suddenly shifted, and Lilly was gagged and bound on a cellar floor, as if for punishment from a tall man who looked like the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was filling with anguish but it mixed with desire. Her body was shot into a terrible darkness, orgasming. Her hands tried to break loose from her bondage, to go to Beverly, yearning for the nurse’s protection, for Beverly’s lap, which appeared large and soft as a rescuing beach from a wild storm. But as the nurse drew close and Lilly felt Beverly against her, the same warm sexual drumming began again inside Lilly’s flesh. Terror rippled through her, and Lilly lurched, panicked, from the bed.
Outside her hospital door she heard someone playing a country station. Patsy Cline, she thought, or someone like that. For a few moments, the woman’s voice calmed her. The rest of the hall was quiet, as if shut down for the night.
But then Lilly had to stand by the window where even the radio sound couldn’t reach her. She peered down at the parking lot again. The woman and the tax
i were gone. Lilly watched the cloak of night lay over the grassy bank separating the hospital parking lot and its grounds. Trying to calm herself further from the dream, she gazed for a long time out the window.
She was glad Mitchell and everyone were gone, she thought. Hadn’t she really wanted it this way? she asked herself.
The room was cooling. Lilly felt her overwhelming tiredness again. She unwrapped the two graham crackers she had taken from the snack tray in the lounge, laying them on top of her bureau. Her mouth was moistening. Her appetite was returning. She could trace the skeletal edges of her self-neglect with her fingers roaming under her hipbones, all over the thinner corners of her entire person.
It will be better now, she thought, finishing the graham crackers.
She took one hand and touched the top of her head, which seemed too hot an hour ago, as if some fever had begun. But even her hair felt cooler. And she went to turn off the lamplight over her tiny desk.
A few days ago, Lilly thought, she wasn’t in this room. She had stood instead at the window of her flat in Little Italy and looked down on the streets. She had seen a shadow from a balcony next door, and the glass front from the delicatessen below glowed yellow as gold. The floor of her apartment bedroom was littered, too, and it could have been a street. She had yearned to join the shadows in their alternate world. To lie with them, behind a veil of life. Death seemed so beautiful, she had thought, like the feathers on the antique hats inside the stores on West Broadway.
Chapter Seven
The next morning, the light coming into Lilly’s hospital room was a thick, warm arrow.
“This is Lilly Weill,” Lilly heard a nurse say to somebody out in the hall, and then Lilly saw that her bedroom door was wide open to the same source of light spreading and scrolling off the hall tables, the bone walls.
“Could you please come with me?” A lab technician, wearing a salmon-colored uniform and holding a tray of carefully lined-up glass test tubes, was leaning into the room. “I’m here to draw bloods this morning,” she said to Lilly. “Heard about you coming in this Monday night, so I guess you don’t know the routine yet. Just put a robe on, then you can follow me down to the exam room. It won’t take long, don’t worry.”
The woman was smiling at her, and Lilly run a hand through her hair, pulling down on its tangles and knots. Her hair seemed to have grown almost an inch in the few days she had been in the hospital.
Lilly slipped a thin bathrobe on over her nightshirt. She tried to swallow away her morning breath. Then, stepping into paper slippers, she followed the technician down the hall.
Lilly joined the seated line of patients waiting to have their blood drawn. She tried not to feel like a captive in this sullen world of weird people and rules. When, after a few minutes of waiting in her armchair, the line to the examination room thinned—patients walking out, pressing cotton swabs to the inside of their elbow—Lilly suddenly worried that Helen might have called in the night and demanded to them that Lilly must come home now. This was why she was getting a blood test—because they were under orders to discharge her today.
The technician called Lilly’s name, smiling at her again, and holding open for her the door to the examination room.
The metal exam table under the squares of unlit fluorescent light brought back—for a moment—her falling apart that first night of admission. But now in the morning sunlight the room seemed very different; it was as ordinary as a family doctor’s consulting room. No ominous instruments or probing lights were loaded on the cabinet table, and Lilly wondered whether she had imagined them that night. It could have been part of a dream, she told herself, but then she felt a dull throb in her groin and suddenly thought she recognized a small flashlight and metal speculum.
“You looked frightened,” the technician was saying. “It’s just routine for every patient here.” The technician pulled up one sleeve of Lilly’s bathrobe. Lilly’s mind glided into an easy blankness, feeling the technician’s fingers patting down a vein inside her right arm as Lilly tried to stay perfectly calm, gazing up at the cool-white tiles of the ceiling, as if she were treading water.
That morning when they were drawing bloods, Lilly had been a patient in the hospital for one whole night and morning. The spring rose like a deep green haze inside the ward. From the sky outside the hospital’s windows, warm winds periodically blew in when an attendant allowed a window to be jarred open.
For the next, beginning days, Lilly worked herself through the group of milling patients regularly, accepting their sympathy, answering questions about who she was again.
Lilly quietly watched the other patients as she sat in a lounge chair, silent but observant, waiting for the chiming bells that signaled meals and community meetings. She studied her own dislocation through their reflecting faces and movements.
The electronic chimes also rang from amplifiers inside the nursing stations at 7 a.m. every morning on the ward, rousing the patients for compulsory showers and then breakfast. Through the windows the sun—just rising—seemed to exhale breaths of light all across the green hall carpet.
Observing the other patients, Lilly put them into two categories: those who seemed like mourners on a long stretch of night, lost in their memories, and those who looked like they were enjoying a vacation from outside influences, stretching themselves noisily into limitless freedoms of thoughts and feelings, vocal and un-self-consciously unhinged.
The news of the kidnapped Patty Hearst—who had by April transformed into a bank robber for the Symbionese army —was in all the newspapers lying around the ward, broadcasted on the morning and evening news as if an unhealthy obsession had taken over the outside world as Lilly and the other mental patients were tucked away, inside the hospital. On the six o’clock news, they again played the tape of Patty Hearst speaking to her parents from a tape recording made in the house of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Mr. Hearst’s appearance in front of microphones on his lawn—explaining to the press he did not know who or what group had taken his daughter, but he was sure she was being forced to rob banks for them— was replayed over and over again, like a trailer for a lurid action movie.
One dawn, Lilly woke hearing voices outside her door. The sunlight was warming her room early. Though the air was still stuffy, it contained the faint scents of the lilac and spruce trees outside in the grassy dirt beds.
“For he’s a jolly good fellow—” A male voice was singing outside the door.
“Which nobody can deny—”
“Which nobody can deny—”
Lilly put her robe on. It was early, but breakfast might have started and she may have slept through the chimes. She didn’t keep track of time with a clock in her room. She ventured out into the hall, barefoot and tentative.
Leonard, in blue pajamas, was seated in the huge armchair by the hall table, which held an empty vase. He had swung one of his big legs over the arm of the chair. There was a graham cracker cake on his lap he hadn’t touched, frosted with what looked like Hershey’s syrup. He seemed to be humoring those around him. There was another male patient eating graham crackers from a cardboard box, cross-legged on the carpet runner. He stared up at Leonard admiringly as a third man continued to sing.
“Which nobody can deny—which nobody can deny—,” the third man droned on.
“Do another song,” the seated patient suddenly exclaimed. “That one really sucks.”
A nurse poked her head from the nurses’ station. “Keep your voices down. Patients are still in bed,” she said.
“It’s the man’s frigging birthday,” the singer said.
“Happy birthday, Leonard,” the nurse said as she came abruptly out from the station. “How about singing real softly? Celebrate, but do it really softly.”
“It’s the man’s birthday.”
“There are people sleeping,” the nurse said. “This isn’t your living room.”
Lilly felt the steady, firm gaze of Leonard’s eyes on her face. He looked c
alm and unfazed, even as the nurse continued to direct the group on how to celebrate his birthday. A beard had started on his chin that was thick and sparkled with reddish strands. His pajama shirt was open, and she could see the fullness of the same strands on his chest, oddly soft and long. He smelled of something basic and masculine; it could have been a smoky peat. He seemed impervious to the infantilizing situation in which Lilly found herself. His imperturbability fascinated and shook her. She was barefoot, she suddenly remembered, feeling naked. And she was in her nightgown, a thin, in-substantial robe. What was she thinking coming out here? She started to tremble.
“You need to take better care,” Leonard said, half-chastising her as he ignored the nurse. “This is all just stupid stuff. They wanted to celebrate in the middle of the night.” He placed the paper plate on the carpet, and she realized she was glad he hadn’t touched it. There was nothing childish about the man who was talking to her now, and for the time being she wouldn’t have to feel let down and opened to the belittling nurse. Leonard’s largeness and his intense, curious face allowed her feelings to grow increasingly warmer toward him. Lilly lost track of where the nurse and the two other patients were.
“Please don’t worry. I’m sorry if we woke you.” The lamplight seemed to climb up his neck, to make his face the center of the brightness. She expected to feel that awful state—as when she thought she was becoming part of other people—but she felt, instead, as if she were reforming into the person Leonard was examining now so intensely with his gray eyes. Her body was present.
“Don’t worry,” he said to her. “They won’t keep you here a long time. I can tell you’re someone they won’t keep in this hospital.”
“I didn’t mean to come here at all,” she said. “I hope they’ll let me out soon.”
“I hope so, too.”
“Thank you,” she said. And then she quickly turned from him, still feeling him watch her. His gaze pressed into her as she went back into her private room, and whether from his stare or her attraction, she was relieved she didn’t have to talk to him anymore.
Hystera Page 8