Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  The phone clatters to life. “Pops!” It’s Aaron, his voice infused with a delight that I immediately find myself clutching at while trying to conceal the weight in mine. He’s calling from a motel in Youngstown, Ohio, where, for his fellowship, he is studying the economic depression that has befallen the city since its steel mill shut down.

  “I had lunch with the mayor. The mayor, Pops. He couldn’t wait to see me. It’s the same with everyone here—they want to talk, they need to talk, partly because they have so much time.”

  He describes the city, people wandering the streets day and night, in a hell of idleness. Like on the psych ward, I think. But I don’t say so. I’m too busy soaking up the lifeline of his voice, the casual nature of his closeness to me, his observations, his engagement. His sanity.

  After we’ve talked for several minutes, I still haven’t told him about Sally. Why cast a pall over his excitement? He can’t do anything to help her right now; he’ll find out soon enough…

  “How’s the motel?” I ask.

  “It’s another casualty of the steel mill. I’m the only guest. It used to be a Ramada Inn. A Bangladeshi family owns it now. They’re closing down at the end of the month.”

  As soon as our conversation ends, I realize the mistake I have made: Aaron won’t feel “protected” from the news I’ve withheld, he’ll feel lied to and fooled. You let me chatter about Youngstown while my sister was being declared insane? How would I explain to him that I had been protecting myself from having to relive the shock of Sally’s crack-up through her brother’s eyes?

  I have turned out the lights so as not to overburden the wiring while the air conditioner is on, and the apartment is lit solely from the street: the tall halogen lampposts below and the pale lunar blueness seeping down from Times Square.

  It’s after one o’clock when Pat comes home.

  “I fell asleep,” she explains. “In the studio. We’ve been hit by a hammer, Michael.”

  “Did you get any work done?”

  “I managed to persuade two dancers to show up on short notice. I had no idea what I was doing. If the dancers could tell, they were polite enough not to let on. How’s Sally?”

  I fill her in on the day’s events: Sally’s sudden stiffness, and her belief, on waking, that she had brought Robin and me back together.

  “That’s what she really wants. The three of you together. It’s why I left you alone.”

  “We’ve decided to visit her separately from now on.”

  “That’s entirely your call. Like everything else about this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t see why. I’m not angry with you, Michael.”

  She looks exhausted and unusually pale.

  “I called earlier to see if you were home. Eric answered. He didn’t sound overjoyed to hear my voice. I asked him if any messages had come in. I was thinking of Sally. I wanted to know if she called—what a hopeful sign it would be if she had! Or if you called with news. Eric acted like I was asking him for a loan. He doesn’t like me.”

  “You didn’t tell him about Sally, I hope.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I wouldn’t want him to know about her. It’s not that I’m ashamed of what’s happened. But he wouldn’t understand.”

  “No one understands. We don’t understand.”

  “He’d tell our friends. It would make life more difficult for her. People would start thinking of her as weird. Stained.”

  I wake before five, Pat lying next to me on her side, Eric snoring on the fold-out bed in the living room.

  I tiptoe out of the apartment, carrying my shoes and putting them on in the hall. At a twenty-four-hour vegetable stand on Greenwich Avenue, I buy artichokes and a bar of dark chocolate, then kill time walking the streets while daylight seeps into the city like smoke and the coffee bar on Eighth Avenue opens, and a few people straggle out of their buildings searching for cabs.

  Later, I steam the artichokes and wrap them in tinfoil for Sally.

  The moment I enter the hospital lobby, the shoteh’s brother rushes over as if he has been waiting for me to come through the door. I brace myself for a fresh barrage of complaints about Sally, but he surprises me by thrusting out his hand and introducing himself by name: Yankel.

  “They’re telling me that Noah is in the Quiet Room,” he says, referring to his brother. “They won’t let us up to see him. Not me, not even his mother. Like we are the cause of Noah’s tsorres. This ‘Quiet Room,’ you know what it is?”

  I hear myself trying to describe it in benign terms, without believing them myself.

  Yankel interrupts me.

  “What do they know from ‘mental illness’ in this place? Maybe you can explain to me what such an expression means. I took Noah to the rebbe who said that he has become lost in his pleading to God. ‘I can’t help you with this,’ he told me. ‘Go see a psychiatrist.’ Our own rebbe! He should know better. There is no medicine for this. Not for Noah or for your daughter either.”

  Sitting a few feet away in a plastic eggcup chair is the stout babushka woman whom I’ve noticed before: Noah and Yankel’s mother. Next to her is the madman’s bride, ripely pregnant and no older than eighteen. She seems timid and bewildered, her wig a luminous bundle of black human hair, shorn from the head of a woman in India, no doubt, Hindu hair being the Orthodox wigmaker’s main source of supply.

  The mother begins to cry. Yankel ignores her but looks on the point of tears himself. The girl stares determinedly at her hands in her lap.

  “Maybe this was our own doing,” says Yankel. “We encouraged Noah to be aloof because he had such a gift. You know what means ‘aloof’? Existing in the spirit world, the higher realms. When he was fifteen he went through the entire cycle of the Talmud in a single year. Five thousand pages. The most revered scholars take seven years to do this. People think he’s meshugah. But this is not the case. I’m not ashamed to tell you, he talks directly with his phantoms. There was a time when I believed it was the Creator he was speaking to. And I’m still not convinced it isn’t so.”

  He looks to his mother for encouragement, her legs crossed at the ankles, her stockings sagging slightly, her feet clad in slablike orthopedic shoes.

  “He sees what other people don’t see,” he continues, “including some in our own community, God protect them, I won’t mention any names. They’ve been taught the mysteries but they haven’t comprehended them like Noah. Now they’ll brand him a hefker. You know what is a hefker? An animal. A person outside the fold.”

  “Chances are he won’t be in the Quiet Room for long,” I say. “In fact, it may actually protect him.”

  “You think my brother needs protection from himself? Does it occur to you that Noah is alone in a sea of bliss while the rest of us are mere islands of misery?” He pauses, softening his voice with visible effort. “Noah’s problem is that he is not acquainted with the mundane. ‘When you feel ripped from the ground go build something,’ says the wise man. ‘Work with wood. Lay brick and mortar. Get on your hands and knees and scrub the floor.’ When Moses sent spies to scout the Promised Land, some of them didn’t like what they found. They preferred life in the desert, with its miracles and manna from heaven, where they could meditate and live free. They didn’t want to enter the land ‘that consumes its inhabitants,’ as the psalm says. The land with all its troubles, God help us. But one must enter the land. The land is where life is.”

  He clasps my arm, moving us out of earshot of the women. “Will you check on him when you go upstairs? I’ll wait for you down here. You’d be performing a mitzvah. I just want to know he’s okay.”

  I have to stand on my toes in order to look through the netted glass slit near the top of the Quiet Room door. Noah is sitting just as Sally must have sat, cross-legged on the rubber mattress. He is rocking back and forth—the hypnotic davening of the Hasidim—in what appears to be a state of ecstatic prayer. His yarmulke has fallen off and lies inside out, its stit
ching showing, drained of significance. The fluorescent ceiling light burns in its flat, saturating way. Noah’s prayer book is in shreds, its pages strewn on the floor. His payess have lost their buoyant twist. I am struck by his bare feet, his awkward boyish beauty, long-limbed and oddly refined. He looks nothing like his brother. He is nineteen, Yankel told me, four years older than Sally. A paper cup filled with water is by his side. In a delicate choreographed manner, he dips his fingertips into the cup and rubs the water on his eyelids with their faint blue veins. He seems to relish his solitude, conversing without interruption with his living God, like Elijah in his cave talking to the birds. I try to imagine Sally in this room, writing as fast as she could on the floor with the felt-tip pen that the nurses had permitted her to have, bending their own rules, I now realize, taking a chance that she would not swallow it or use it to poke out her eyes. What inner crumble must she have experienced, with her terrified grandiosity, throwing herself against the beige walls. “What purpose is there in madness?” King David asked God after he had gone incognito about the city and beheld the mad among the crowds in the marketplace. “When a man goes about and rends his garments, and children mock him—is this beautiful in Thine eyes?”

  “This isn’t a sideshow, Mr. Greenberg.”

  Cynthia Phillips has caught me with my face pressed to the glass.

  “I’m on a mission for Yankel,” I explain. “Is it common for a patient to be in isolation after an entire week on the ward?”

  “I’m told Noah was shouting at your daughter last night, but I wasn’t here.”

  I go to Sally’s room. She’s on her bed, out cold. I set the artichoke on her bedside table, with a plastic container filled with lemon and olive oil dressing, Sally’s favorite. I’ll have to make a special plea to Nurse Phillips for a knife sharper than the plastic ones to cut out its heart.

  I brush a mutinous lock of hair from Sally’s cheek and lightly shake her arm.

  “I brought you an artichoke.”

  “Art makes you choke, Father. You should give it up. It’s a false god who causes you nothing but pain.”

  Another oracular pronouncement. Blinking at me, she emits one of her mighty yawns, then slips back into the River Lethe. The nurses have assured me that this lethargy is merely a phase, but no one will venture to say how long it is expected to last.

  Rufus lets me off the ward with a curt nod, and I take the elevator back down to the lobby where Yankel is waiting, anxious for news.

  “When will they let us see him?”

  “Probably tomorrow. When Sally was in isolation we were able to visit her the next day. Other than that, I’ve nothing to go on.”

  “You think I do?”

  “He isn’t suffering,” I say, though I have no way of knowing this for certain. “He looked well.”

  I glance at his mother and young sister-in-law, sitting where I left them in their broiling wigs and ankle-length Orthodox garb. The girl assiduously avoids my eyes, looking like a child in a dentist’s chair.

  “Did he have his prayer book?” asks Yankel.

  “Yes.”

  “Idiots! They think they’re doing him a favor by letting him have it, they’re being sensitive to his special cultural needs. They understand nothing. Heaven knows what sin he’ll bring down on himself with that book. I should have taken it from him myself. I only pray that the One Above isn’t paying attention.”

  “If He is paying attention, we can assume that He understands the situation perfectly. Since He created it Himself.”

  “He is attention,” says Yankel stiffly.

  “Have you been married long?” I ask the girl.

  “Eight months.” Yankel’s mother answers for her. “Noah never raised a hand against her. There will be no divorce unless he decides to grant one. And as long as he is in no condition to decide such a thing, they will remain wed. The rebbe knows this perfectly well. It’s the law.”

  The girl maintains her bewildered silence, either unable to speak or prohibited from doing so. She is saddled with a husband whose devoutness was probably presented to her family as an asset when the marriage was arranged.

  She watches her fidgeting hands as if they were two small pets in her lap.

  The following afternoon, Sally and Noah are ensconced in the dayroom talking intensely. Noah seems transfixed by her. His feet are still bare, his Quiet Room joyousness undiminished.

  “They have a way of finding each other,” says Yankel, resigned, it seems, to the effect on Noah of Sally’s she-devil allure. Noah’s prayer book is gone; I hope Yankel didn’t see what he did to it.

  “Do you find that you can’t sleep?” he asks. “I keep Noah in my head. I try to make the best of it. If only I knew the song young David played to soothe Saul.”

  “It didn’t soothe him for long,” I say.

  “All I ask for is the miracle of a few hours.”

  Yankel watches his brother closely, but when Noah looks in his direction, he quickly drops his eyes, wary of setting off a fresh spark, perhaps, or too stricken to engage him.

  At six o’clock Yankel announces that he must leave. Every Thursday he delivers food to the homes of the poorer members of his sect in Brooklyn. “We all chip in. They would do the same for me, heaven forbid I should need it.” The vans are disguised as commercial delivery trucks with the names of actual grocery stores on them. “So no one is humiliated. No one feels singled out for having less.”

  The aim is to hasten the appearance of the messiah on earth, an event that requires a measurable accretion of mitzvahs or righteous deeds. After enough mitzvahs have been performed, the cosmic scale will tip to the side of God, and humanity will be bathed in holy goodness.

  One such mitzvah would be to persuade me, a lapsed Jew, to pray with him. With this in mind, he removes a set of tefillin from his pocket: the black cubes containing minutely copied passages of Scripture that devout Jews fasten to themselves by means of a complicated array of leather straps. Would I allow him to tie me up in them? I decline politely. “It would be wasted on me. I’m sorry.” And right there, in the dayroom of the psychiatric ward, Yankel Mandelbaum proceeds to wind the leather straps around his own left arm and fingers while muttering a Hebrew prayer.

  Spotting him in the midst of this ritual, Rufus demands that Yankel put the tefillin away at once. “My patients could strangle themselves with that contraption!”

  Yankel rises to leave, dripping with sweat, “May you sleep like a baby tonight, Noah,” he says. “You and me both.”

  The dayroom door opens and Pat arrives from dance rehearsal, vibrant and spent.

  “I’ve shifted gears completely,” she says of her dance-in-progress. “It’s a different piece.”

  Sally and Noah huddle even closer. Noah disappears under his prayer shawl like a ghost in a sheet. Sally says that he is “inside a cloud.” Noah prays in a lisping voice that resembles soft giggling. Sally yanks the prayer shawl from his head. Noah calls her a “demon.” Rufus comes over barking, and steers them apart.

  Pat and I escort Sally to the opposite side of the dayroom. She spins around, seizes my arms, shivering through gritted teeth and shaking me violently. I have thwarted her again! I am the one who stands in the way, the one who douses the flames of her visions and prevents them from lighting the world.

  A tall, striking woman with cascading gray-blond hair commands Sally to release me: Dr. Elizabeth Mason, I read on her name tag. She caught sight of Sally’s little meltdown as she was passing along the hall. “We do not touch people here. We keep our hands to ourselves!” She towers over Sally and has to bend down to look her squarely in the eyes, her voice briefly crossing over to a manic cry of its own. “We have already discussed this, Sally. Hands to ourselves!”

  Sally obediently backs off.

  “She means no harm,” I say.

  “Here we have a different definition of ‘harm.’”

  I introduce myself as Sally’s father.

  “I gathered a
s much. On this ward we respect one another’s personal space. I’ve no doubt you can see the wisdom in this.”

  Sally shrugs as if to say, What can I do? This is the way they are.

  “While she’s here, your daughter will be under my care. We’ve already had a few interesting conversations, haven’t we, Sally?”

  A timid nod of the head in response.

  “I can assure you that she is as shocked by what has happened to her as you are. We’ll schedule a family meeting at some point. I have your number. Expect a call.”

  With that, she heads off toward the staff room: a command post enclosed in glass where a scene of muted busyness is played out among phones, computers, diagnostic manuals, drug promotions, medication schedules, and charts—a visible contrast to the aimless activity of the rest of the ward. It promises us that there is a higher intelligence at work. A strategy. A grand plan.

  Pat and I escort Sally back to her room.

  “She never learned to respect boundaries,” says Pat. “You and Robin weren’t able to teach her that.”

  “Maybe you should discuss it with the staff,” I snap.

  “Oh, I think they know all about it already.”

  Later, I spot Noah praying at maximum speed, his lisping voice growing louder. The next day he is moved to a different ward.

  Robin phones from her aunt’s apartment on Bethune Street to inform me that she must return to Vermont. “George is running the bakery alone. It’s too much for him. I hate to leave Sally, but my husband needs me too. I miss my home, Michael.” She pauses. “I just don’t feel like I can do anything for her while she’s behind those locked doors. She sleeps and sleeps. Like she’s reassembling herself in some way, with or without me. I would stay if I thought it would help her even the tiniest bit.”