Hurry Down Sunshine

by Michael Greenberg

  She begins with the sudden, devastating blow of her father’s death when she was thirteen (“How I wish you could have met him, Michael. He would have changed your life, I’m sure of it”) and her marriage nine years later to Bernie, who had come charging onto the scene, and into her affections, as an irresistible force.

  “My father was a physician, a literary man, a man of science. You’ll understand me when I tell you that if he hadn’t died I probably would never have met Bernie. We traveled in different circles. Bernie was—how shall I put it…”

  “Primitive,” I offer.

  “That’s your word, Michael. You thought we were all vulgar. You had a false notion of sophistication. Your father wasn’t primitive, he was volatile, impatient—you of all people should know the difference.”

  And yet in the next breath she grows nostalgic for the cosmopolitanism and intellectual stimulation that were abruptly withdrawn from her when her father died.

  “It doesn’t make me swell with pride to admit that during my first years with Bernie I felt I had made a grave mistake. We were miserable.”

  Her in-laws, Yetta and Louie, were illiterate, immigrants from the shtetl world of Eastern Europe, Louie a welder and ironmonger who had been fending for himself since he landed alone in New York at the age of fifteen. “Sally’s age, if you can imagine it.”

  Newlyweds during the housing shortage of the midforties when masses of GIs were returning home from the Second World War, Helen and Bernie had no choice but to move in with them. “We weren’t millionaires. There was no place else to live.”

  But Helen’s misery wasn’t the result of any residual snobbism she may have felt or the fact that Yetta was a ferocious balabusta who, with Helen’s agitated assistance, did nothing but chop and boil and roast and polish and scrub and mop—no, what made her life unbearable in her in-laws’ apartment in Brighton Beach Brooklyn was the continuous war between Bernie and his father.

  The war was for the scrap metal business that Louie had squandered his health building from scratch. “It wasn’t US Steel,” says Helen, “but it was Louie’s, it was a temple to him, and it was just coming into its own when Bernie came aboard.” By the time Louie was fifty he couldn’t walk to the corner without stopping to catch his breath with his hands on his knees. He had ruined his lungs as a young man welding trash cans in a windowless basement on Grand Street. And he could see it was all going to be Bernie’s, the easy money, the American boon, Bernie didn’t have to give up a damn thing for it, and Louie was going to make him pay, he wasn’t going to let him have it for nothing.

  “He wouldn’t forgive your father for taking what was simply there for him to take. So you see, Michael, when I tell you it was war, I mean it in the most literal sense. He loved Bernie as a son and hated him as a rival, hated him, I sometimes thought, the way an immigrant hates a privileged native.”

  They tore each other to pieces at that scrap metal yard, and when they returned home they’d pick up where they left off. “Bernie would be just seething with emotion, battered and charged up, but depressed too, if you can imagine this combination.” Once, he came home with blood dribbling out of the corner of his mouth where Louie had slugged him. “It was a nightmare for both of them, and it was a nightmare for Yetta and me too. I wanted to comfort Bernie, to make it easier for him, to soothe him, I wanted to bring him closer to me, but it was impossible, we were lost to each other, your father and I, and as a matter of fact, we were lost in ourselves.”

  She falls silent for a moment.

  “Am I talking too much? I just want to give you a picture of how it was, Michael, the atmosphere of those years, the unhappiness. I was twenty-two.”

  It was into this atmosphere that my eldest brother Jay was born, giving Helen a reason to feel alive again.

  “I can’t tell you how much I adored that baby. He saved my life, there’s no other way to put it. He was my life.” And after describing her glorious days with Jay in that embattled home, she says flatly: “And then I became pregnant with Steve.”

  She felt something was wrong the minute she started carrying him. “It was like this crushed weight in me, Michael. Does that sound crazy? I was sick with the idea of having another child under those circumstances, I wanted to enjoy the one I had. Obviously something was wrong with me, not Steve. I mean, what could be at the heart of such dislike for an unborn child but contempt for myself?”

  Her eyes are bright and determined, with the moist intensity I remember in them as a boy.

  “If you feel like having another drink, I might decide to join you,” she says.

  I order another round. Our notion of having dinner has been forgotten. I am speechless and thankful and oddly ashamed.

  “I just had no love for him,” she continues. “Isn’t that remarkable? All I felt was resentment—resentment for this tiny thing that was going to invade my paradise.”

  She prayed that her feelings would change when he was born, that with the flesh-and-blood reality of her baby something would shift inside her and nature would come to her aid. But the actuality of Steve only made matters worse.

  “The fact is, he was an exceptionally beautiful child. Large-eyed, handsome, God help us, you wouldn’t know it to look at him now. Total strangers would stop us on the street, other mothers, Michael, pushing their own babies, they’d stop and tell me how beautiful Steve was, ‘Like a painting,’ they’d say, ‘a perfect angel.’ And harsh judges those mothers were, every one of them an expert. Believe me, child rearing in Brooklyn was a highly competitive business.”

  What they didn’t know was how unresponsive Steve was. “Sometimes he just went limp. I swear to you, he seemed as good as dead, except for his eyes looking up at me, intent and wide. He just lay there—not gloomy or depressed or unhappy or even crying out to me—just blankly watching me play with his older brother.”

  And I think: for Steve, watching them must have been like looking in at some paradisiacal garden through a crack in the wall.

  “I’ve gone over it in my head a thousand times, and I believe that Steve went limp in that way because he thought it would please me. I’m under no illusions, it was also a survival tactic, I’ve no doubt about it. He knew what it did to me when he made a fuss. It angered me, it distracted me from his older brother. And he knew it. His invisibility was a way of accommodating me. He was tuned in. He knew how I felt. Though I didn’t realize this at the time.”

  And she tells me of leaving him out in the cold, in his carriage. “Two, three hours. I’d completely forget about him. Then I’d remember! My God! And there he would be, right in front of our building, his lips blue, his mittened fingers like ice. And he still didn’t make a peep.”

  When Steve did cry it was a sick frightened dry cackle that was almost like being scratched. “It should have broke my heart. But what I felt was this pure rage at him for doing this to me, for turning me into this unloving monster. It got to the point where his very existence was an indictment of mine.”

  She drinks the melted ice that is what is left of her second gin and tonic and sets the glass down carefully, as if to make sure not to disrupt some imaginary arrangement.

  “You couldn’t help yourself,” I say. “It wasn’t intentional. It was an impossible situation. For both of you. What you had may well have been a classic case of postpartum depression.”

  “That’s sweet of you to say, Michael. But I’m not looking to get off the hook.”

  Things didn’t stay bad forever. The spell broke when Helen and Bernie moved into their own home in Rockaway, a narrow spit of coastland across a drawbridge from Brooklyn. It was a middle-class neighborhood, with other young families. “We made new friends, lifelong friends.” Louie grew too sick to work and the scrap metal business passed on to Bernie. “That feeling of being cornered, of being walled in, lifted, thank goodness. Larry was born, and then you, and Danny. I loved my boys. And I loved your father. Even in the darkest days, it never occurred to me to leave him.” />
  She rests her hand on my arm.

  “You see, Michael, Sally is nothing like Steve. Whatever is happening to her, it isn’t inherited from your brother. So please, please strike that from your list of worries. Steve is the way he is because of me.”

  The next day Helen skips her visit, and the day after that she comes only for an hour. “My dog has been missing me,” she explains. Her confession has left us unsure of where to pick up again, even as a new ease develops between us, an unexpected gift of Sally’s illness, I think.

  I try to bring up the rupture that took place between us when I was a boy—an attempt to make amends. Helen pretends not to know what I’m talking about. Then, switching gears, she says: “Don’t you think I understood your behavior, Michael? ‘There’s no winning,’ I said to myself. ‘This is what he has to do to believe he can be a man.’ The truth is, I indulged myself with you, just like I did with your brother Jay. It’s a weakness of mine. But you know, you didn’t have to tear things apart so completely.”

  Her tone suggests that she’d just as soon forget it; it’s old news.

  Sensing that she is ready to return to her life as it was before, I promise to phone regularly with reports of Sally’s progress.

  “If something important happens, I can be there in twenty minutes,” Helen says.

  Although I have noticed little change in Sally, I am informed by Dr. Mason that “the most acute phase” of her mania has passed. The nurses look in on her less often and in general seem to be less worried about her taking a turn for the worse—the psychiatric equivalent of being removed from intensive care. I wonder if she is improving in increments too small for me to measure, like a caterpillar climbing a giant pole. The essence of Sally’s illness, I suspect, is as unknown to Dr. Mason as it is to me. Sally’s “essence,” however, is not Dr. Mason’s concern, the practical steps of her recovery are, and I do my best to keep up with them as we go along.

  Sally sleeps less and spends more time in the dayroom, convinced that she is a great social success there. “Have you noticed how people want to be around me?” she asks. “I feel that I’m helping them. That’s why Dr. Mason won’t send me home. I bring hope to them, especially to the depressives. I’m their shining star.”

  She certainly acts like one, holding court in her gleaming pajamas. Her audience includes Mitchell, who appears to be slightly in love with her, and Fabulosa, who is covered in crumbs from tearing open packets of soup crackers with her teeth. The man with the Beethovenian forehead whom Helen mistook for a visitor eyes Sally with amusement. He is obviously in his own manic orbit, a daunting figure, electrified and bored, wearing L.L. Bean moccasins and a midnight blue pajama suit with white piping down the middle that looks as if it belonged to Cary Grant.

  “Your daughter is touched by the gods,” he says to me. “The Greeks called madness ‘the sacred disease,’ so you can rest assured she is in good company.”

  He exudes a crackling fanatical aliveness that makes my heart race. It reminds me of Sally’s emanations, but more mature and formed. Indeed, the similarities between them astonishes me—their clenched grin, their narrow movie-villain stares. He is bear-like and imposing, and separated from Sally in age by at least forty years.

  Seeing that I am drawn to him, Sally exhorts me to pay even closer heed. “He never lost touch with his genius. This is the way you could be too.” But he and Sally avoid actual contact with each other, as if repelled by their competing intensities.

  A young man enters the room and introduces himself to me as Dexter. “I see you’ve been talking with my father. I hope he didn’t force himself on you. He’s used to speaking to a captive audience. He’s a classics professor, if he hasn’t already told you as much.” He names the university where his father is employed. “He’ll only be here for a couple of days.”

  Noticing that his father is trembling slightly, Dexter leads him to a quiet corner of the dayroom. The professor, in an agony of restiveness, tightens and untightens his fists and runs both hands through his hair. He appears to be racing at full tilt. Dexter talks to him in a low voice, settling him down, I think, whispering what I imagine to be a series of private calming phrases.

  Later, I run into Dexter in the hall. I find myself looking to him for news of my own future. He is a cognoscente of madness, I think, he grew up with it, to him, perhaps, it’s a natural element of existence. When I tell him the story of Sally’s crack-up, he nods knowingly. He’s lived it a dozen times. His father and Sally have been struck by the same lightning. “I saw your daughter at full throttle the other day. They both know how to dish it out. But when he’s himself,” he says of his father, “there’s no gentler more considerate person in the world.”

  I feel a rush of hope. The professor is in a cycle, the wheel turns, he comes back to where he started. If they are really alike, then Sally will come back too, at least for a while.

  Later in the afternoon, I catch sight of the professor in his room, looking blander and older. Dexter is reading to him in the same calming voice he employed in the dayroom. The professor’s eyes are closed, and I have the impression that he is listening to the sound of the words, not their meaning.

  A couple of days later, the professor is standing by the nurses’ station wearing a silvery gray suit, newly pressed. His brogues have been freshly polished. His shirt is buttoned to the top of his neck. He is being discharged.

  “I just needed to get back on track,” he says in a soft voice, as if he will be reprimanded if he’s overheard. “A periodic adjustment. It’s why I’m here—for that mallet blow to the brain.”

  Dexter, for his part, is stern with his father. Look what you’ve put us through again, he seems to be saying. I feel as if I am witnessing a ritual that they’ve repeated hundreds of times.

  The professor sits on a bench by the ward’s entrance, like a schoolboy waiting for class to begin, while Dexter collects his prescriptions from Nurse Phillips. He invites me to sit beside him. “Dexter wants my money. He won’t be satisfied until he has me declared permanently beside myself. My retirement account, the apartment. Don’t fool yourself. He has calculated to the penny how much he stands to gain.”

  Sally comes out of her room. “You’re going home! Good for you!”

  Dexter and I shake hands. He is bracing himself for the long pull back to recovery. He knows the drill: his father smashed to pieces after the sparkle of his mania has dimmed. “He hates the halting dullness that comes over him after an attack. He feels ashamed.” Dexter will remind him of what he’s made of his life: the students he’s inspired, the books he’s written, the great original intelligence that is his to call on whenever he feels the spirit. “The real joy he’s given to people. Including me. Especially me.”

  Neither of us suggests that we stay in touch. An acquaintance struck up on the psych ward doesn’t leave it.

  “Good luck, Sally,” he says.

  With one hand Dexter holds his father’s night bag, the other he rests on his shoulder, guiding him through the door which Rufus has unlocked.

  Sally is moved to a room that she will share with two other patients, at the end of a long hall, far from the command posts of the staff room and the nurse’s station. “A graduation,” Dr. Mason tells me with a strained smile. “A sign of her improving state of mind.”

  The new room is pleasant and large, renovated in the manner of a student dorm. Sally inhabits it as a starlet would her hotel suite, her voice powerful and distinct, but oddly unreal, like a recording of herself she is playing back to me. One of her roommates is a teenage girl from Harlem who lies inertly on her bed with the covers piled over her in a chaotic mound. Her mother has decorated the wall above her bed with yellow smiley faces and get well cards and happy crayon drawings that, the mother told me, the girl made as a child.

  Her inertia tugs at me like a magnet. Blues like this lives out of sight of the world, I think. It seems more a solid organic mass than a mood that can blow away or be lifted. It
lies there and says, Go ahead, try to budge me.

  I drop my voice so as not to disturb her, then realize that I am the only one bothering to make such an adjustment. No one else in the room pays her any mind. Blues like this doesn’t have ears. It can’t be disturbed. It has nothing to do with sadness or even grief—which at least are imaginable emotions.

  Sally has settled cheerfully into her new digs. She seems to regard the change as a coronation. “I’m a positive example,” she says, repeating words she has picked up during group therapy sessions on the ward. “I’m the kind of person they want around their clients.” She insists on her health, outlining her plans to join the hospital staff as a therapist, and also to become a nursery school teacher—one job to help adults refind themselves, the other to teach children to hold on to their perfect souls. “I’m going to enter a beauty pageant,” she says. “I’m going to become a dancer, like you, Pat.” My heart rises when she allows Pat to hold her for a few seconds, Pat reassuring her much as Dexter reassured his father.

  She strikes up an excited friendship with her second roommate, a garrulous woman from the suburbs of Long Island with two small children at home. The woman defies me to believe that just three months ago anorexia had brought her so close to death she was being fed through a tube. She makes her bed without a single crease, like the bunk of a marine, and she is surrounded by photographs of her rotund Italian-American clan. She offers us tiny plastic spoonfuls of tiramisu like someone giving away samples in a store. “A gift from my sister,” she says. “Isn’t it sublime?”

  On the day of her release her husband comes to take her home. Her cheerfulness seems to worry him, her repeated declarations that her life has been set straight, that what ailed her is over now, “a chapter from my past.” Her husband and I exchange thin apprehensive smiles, while Sally helps her pack, the two of them chattering like conspirators. He is a lineman for the Long Island Lighting Company and is exhausted from working long hours in the summer heat wave.