“What are you thinking?” Dr. Myers asked gently.
I blinked back from my time travel. “I don’t remember,” I lied. He cocked his head dubiously, so I figured what the hell. “I was thinking about how when my father was a little boy, his mother jumped from one roof to another to keep an eye on him walking to school, to make sure he was safe,” I said.
“She did?” the doctor asked. “Jumping from one rooftop to another? How’d she do that? Was she an acrobat?”
Um, how could she have done that? I heard it repeated so many times I never gave it a second thought. But now that he mentioned it, Leah was a portly woman who never jumped over anything in her life. How could she jump from rooftop to rooftop? It seemed odd.
“What did your father think was going to happen to you in the schoolyard?” Dr. Myers asked.
“That I’d be hurt, like he was.”
“How was he hurt?”
“Another boy kicked him in the testicles. Something was torn. He called it a ‘rupture.’ I’m not sure what that is, but they had to take him to the hospital and replace it with tendons from a lamb.”
“From a lamb?” the doctor asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It was tendons, I think.”
“But you can’t transfer tissue from one species to another,” he said. “Do you understand that you can’t put tendons from a lamb into a human?”
“But my dad told me dozens of times. Whenever I was a little boy and I tried to climb up on his lap he always flinched, and said ‘Ooops!’ He made me climb up gently because of the operation he had when he was a kid.”
“Did it ever cross your mind that perhaps your father had an erection and he was trying to hide it from you?”
I was speechless. “No,” I said.
“Don’t you think your father had erections?” he asked.
“No,” I said stubbornly.
“And why were they afraid you’d be kidnapped?” he asked. “Were there kidnappings in your area?”
I didn’t think so, I told him. But it seemed an imminent danger, the way my father rehearsed me for hours about what to do if a stranger tried try to abduct me on the street (I should scream and run away), or if someone that I already knew, like a neighbor, or a customer in the store, should show up on the street and lie that my parents were sick and they would take me to the hospital if I got in their car (I should scream and run away), and that only certain relatives could be trusted in case of dire emergency. “What if Uncle Harry comes to school and says the store burned down and to come with him, what will you do?” I was quizzed. (Don’t go, make the teacher call the store.)
Dr. Myers cocked his head, rapt. Nobody seemed interested in what I had to say before and I was intrigued, so I went on. I told him that when I went to the Culver Theater on the corner they made me sit in the same seat, seventh row down on the left aisle. It didn’t matter if the whole theater was empty, that was the only seat I could occupy; it was near the candy counter, next to the fire exit door in case of fire, and my mother would tip the matron to keep an eye on me. I was never to go to the men’s room behind the projection booth. This was crucial, for scary reasons I couldn’t quite understand. If I had to pee I was required to leave the theater and walk back to the store to use the bathroom.
“Curious they worried that all this harm might come to you,” Dr. Myers said. “How did these precautions make you feel?”
Hmm. Suddenly it seemed unreasonable, all these precautions. “It made me feel scared,” I said.
“I bet. How else?”
“I dunno.”
“Special?”
I guess it did make me special, come to think of it. None of the other kids at school seemed likely to be repaired with lamb tendon. None of the other kids were targets of some unspeakable horror that would happen to them in the movie theater men’s room, nor were they important enough that a kidnapper was coming for them. It wasn’t as if my father was Charles Lindbergh, after all.
“It’s interesting,” Myers said, “that at the same time you were made to feel fearful, it also made you feel special in some way.”
But I was special, wasn’t I? Of course I needed protection. We were special, the Goldberg-Gaines hybrid. At that moment something began to coalesce in my head. Our family was special among all the other families far and wide of 18th Avenue. There was some unspoken purpose to my life that was yet to be revealed. The counting, the crazy thoughts, they were all signs. Even if it was a horrible thing to be a homo, it made me unique. That horrible part of me also made me special. I saw the world differently. Maybe the way I saw it was askew from the way most people saw it, but I had a separate sensibility that only homos knew. In some convoluted way, this realization that my homosexuality gave me a gift was like the moment in the movie The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller realized that Annie Sullivan’s hand symbol meant “water.” My curse in some ways made me . . . superior.
Dr. Myers watched my expression as this train of thought played out in my head. Special. Different. Something I’d chew on for a long while. He had managed to pull off a clever psychological sleight of hand by producing epiphanies out of a hat. Self-examination with a good shrink is like an opiate.
“What are you thinking?” he asked me.
“What are you thinking?” I challenged him, unable to suppress a small smile.
“I was thinking that you shouldn’t go home,” he said. “I was thinking that we can help you here, and that you’re smart enough to benefit from analysis. I’d like you to hang in for another few days, at least until a bed opens up on a lower floor. You’ll like the lower floors a lot better, there are many fewer restrictions, and the patients are healthier. But every patient who comes to Payne Whitney starts here on the seventh floor for observation. I’ll help you get through this first week. We’ll talk every day, and if you have an emergency you can tell the nurse and she’ll come find me. But you can’t lose your temper and kick things.”
“Will you make me take medication and turn me into a zombie, like Mrs. DeSantis?”
He looked hurt. “Mrs. DeSantis is my patient, and she’s not a zombie,” he said. “You don’t fit the profile of a patient who needs Thorazine, but if that was the best treatment for you, we’d talk about it.”
“No. We’re not even going to even talk about it. Because I’m telling you now. No zombie. And no shock treatment.”
“Okay. You told me,” he said. “So, do we have a deal?”
“One week,” I said, holding up my index finger. “One week, and then I’m going home.”
Five
Mr. Halliday
The third floor of Payne Whitney reminded me of the Beauregard, the small residential hotel in Bournemouth, England, in the movie Separate Tables. The hotel is a little worn, but clean and comfortable, with Irish lace window curtains. All the seemingly respectable, long time residents have secrets and surprises that reveal themselves over the winter. For instance, David Niven’s character isn’t really a major; he’s a lonely man who had been arrested for feeling up women in the local movie theater. (Niven won the Best Actor Oscar for it in 1958.) And the hotel’s manager, played by Rita Hayworth, is secretly engaged to Burt Lancaster’s character, an ex-alcoholic. The people on the third floor of Payne Whitney had secrets like that. Only I think our peccadilloes were more interesting.
Three was only half a floor. There was a wall down the middle separating our side from twelve patients on the south side who were in an experimental six-month dietary study for which they ate the same exact meal three times a day—each portion weighed out to the gram so they had to eat every last scrap. The patients chose one favorite meal when they started the program. I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit down at breakfast for my ninety-fourth meal of shrimp in lobster sauce with house-special fried rice. We weren’t allowed any contact with the patients in the study, and when I sp
ied them walking in the manicured hospital garden ahead of us, or being herded into one of the large elevators, I wanted to try to slip one of them a stick of gum. What this dietary experiment achieved, I have no idea.
I was the only youngster with eleven adults on the third floor. Almost all the patients chain-smoked, and a layer of gauzy smoke collected a foot below the hallway ceiling under an unbroken line of ghastly fluorescent lights encased in a plastic shield. Audubon prints in plastic frames were screwed into the walls, in a smoking lounge with frumpy slipcovered sofas and a console television on which was glued a plaque that read “Donated by Arthur Murray.” I was greatly impressed with Arthur Murray’s generosity, but no one could explain why he would donate a television to a psychiatric hospital. I assumed he wanted crazy people to watch his show.
The night I was moved to the third floor I changed into a cocoa-brown pants and eggplant shirt ensemble before dinner and thought I looked very spiffy. A nurse brought me to a small dining room where the patients were eating dinner at tables set with white tablecloths and tiny ceramic vases with sprigs of flowers. If it weren’t so brightly lighted it might have been an English tearoom. When I was ushered in by a nurse, the patients turned in unison to gape, a gallery of dour neurotics. Only one of them mumbled hello to me. An older man, with half-glasses down his nose and silver hair combed back like a bust of Beethoven, gave me a quick once-over and sneered, “Oh brother.”
I guess he didn’t know eggplant was the big color that season.
Ten minutes later I was seated at a table enjoying my dinner—pot roast, dumplings, red cabbage, and mashed potatoes—hunched over my food, eating like we always did at home, with the fork in my right fist and the knife in my left, when the white-haired man whispered sotto voce, “Barbara Ann,” and everybody giggled.
I was crestfallen. Why was he calling me by a girl’s name? I would mull this moment over in my mind for many years before it finally dawned on me that what he actually said was “barbarian.” I guess I was a barbarian to them. I didn’t eat like them, sound like them, dress like them, or behave like them. My clothing was the height of 18th Avenue fashion, and also they could see from the fresh wounds on my arms that I had clearly done something really nuts to myself.
After dinner I wandered down the hall to the main lounge where patients were watching television or playing cards. Off to the right there was a small, semicircular card room, dark and moody with all the lamps turned off except for a funnel of light from a low-hanging fixture over a card table. Lazy tendrils of smoke rose from a cigarette lying in an ashtray. Behind the table was a tall, elegant, middle-aged man, wearing pleated tan slacks and an ivory silk shirt buttoned to his neck, like a Mandarin. He was lost in thought, staring at a jigsaw puzzle on the table before him. He was holding puzzle pieces in his hand, caressing them as if to memorize their shapes. Behind him was an apse-shaped wall of leaded-glass windows overlooking the busy East River Drive, the passing automobiles streaks of headlights and taillights on the highway.
I must have been staring because without looking up he said testily, “Well, come in. It’s rude to stand there gawking.” I walked tentatively into the card room and introduced myself. He said his name was Richard Holiday.
“I never met anybody whose name was ‘holiday’ before,” I said.
He made a short “Hah!” laughing sound, like I had amused him. “That’s what Mother thought when I introduced myself—that my name was ‘Holiday.’”
He was speaking gibberish, I thought. He picked up his cigarette from the ashtray and inhaled deeply before putting it back. “Take some puzzle pieces and make yourself useful,” he ordered, exhaling a plume of smoke. I took a few pieces from the pile on the table and pretended to be looking for a fit. “This is a thousand-piece puzzle Mother sent to me,” he said. “The nubs are almost all the same. It’s better to concentrate on the picture and color of the piece, not the shape.”
His mother must be very old, I thought. He had a twangy accent, like a western drawl, so I asked, “Are you from Texas?”
“Why, do I sound like a cowboy to you?” he grumped. “I was raised in Denver. I suppose that’s the West.”
“I’m from Brooklyn,” I offered.
“Hmm. And we both wound up here!” he said, gesturing at the room. “The loony bin is the great leveler.” He nodded at my bandages and asked if I had been in an accident, but I think he surmised what they were about. I gave him a brief rendition of my misadventures with the windowpanes, during which he interjected occasional “Oh my!”s and “My Lord!”s without actually taking his eyes off the puzzle. “There is a woman on this floor whose name is Letty,” he said, “and she took a bottle of pills and passed out on her bathroom floor with her leg underneath her, and when she woke up three days later she was lame. Now she’s got a lame leg to remind her for the rest of her life about her failed suicide.”
“I guess I’m lucky nothing like that happened to me.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “But it did happen to you,” he said, tightening his lips.
It took a second for this to sink in. People would see the scars and know. The mark of come to no good. Suddenly shame and regret for trying to kill myself filled me so profoundly I began to tremble. How would I ever be able to face anyone, to return home and see Lily and Katherine and Arnie and Irv? Mr. Holiday realized I was about to cry and said softly, “Now, now. Whoever said you have to lie in the bed you make was a fool. People are forever escaping their own caprice, and you will too.” He gave me an encouraging, albeit brief, smile. “Here, help me with this puzzle,” he said, handing me a sky-blue piece. “Take this piece and put it there.” He touched a spot on the puzzle. Miraculously, it fit.
“What’s this puzzle of?” I asked.
“It’s Van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles. Do you know what that is?”
I had seen the movie Lust for Life twice at the Culver Theater with Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, for which he was nominated Best Actor, so I told Mr. Holiday that Van Gogh was an artist who cut off his ear.
“You’re right,” he said, nodding. “He was an artist who cut off his ear. He also lived for a time in a city called Arles, in France, in a rented house they called the ‘Yellow House.’ He painted his bedroom, many, many times. It was in Arles that he cut off his ear. Why do you think he cut off his ear?”
“For attention?” I guessed. “Because nobody was buying his paintings?”
“Nobody hurts themselves just for attention,” Mr. Holiday said, eyeing me. “People hurt themselves because they’re nuts. Van Gogh was nuts. To wit, he painted his own madness. A self-portrait with a bandaged ear that only a madman could paint. Don’t you wish that you could paint your own madness?”
I didn’t understand any of that, but I didn’t want him to think I was stupid so I nodded.
“You know what they did with Van Gogh when he cut off his ear? They put him in a mental hospital.”
“I never knew that.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
“That’s a rude question,” he said.
“But I told you—”
“You told me nothing,” he said, cooling. “You told me you did something stupid, is all you told me.”
His mood had soured so much I thought perhaps I should leave, but then a nurse appeared in the doorway holding an elegant floral arrangement in a basket woven of green saplings. The flowers looked like they were made of tiny pieces of confetti glued together, baby blue and pink and mint, and some of the flowers were a maroon so dark the petals were like black velvet. The basket was tied with emerald grosgrain ribbon and a bow, to which was stapled a small white card. “Someone has sent you flowers,” the nurse said cheerily to Mr. Holiday. I was enthralled. It was so glamorous to receive flowers in a mental hospital. I wished somebody would send me flowers. Who could I enlist to send me flowe
rs? Fat Anna?
The nurse put the flowers down on the table but Mr. Holiday hardly gave them a glance. He went right back to his puzzle.
“What kind of flowers are they?” I asked.
“Bach-elor Buttons,” he drawled.
“Bachelor Buttons,” I repeated. Bachelor Buttons. “Aren’t you going to open the card?”
“You are annoying,” he said to me, snatching the envelope from the arrangement and opening it. “They’re from Dick Rodgers,” he said. “It says, ‘Come home soon.’” He made a sour face and tossed the card on the table. “He’s a little prick,” Mr. Holiday said, going back to his puzzle. “He was in Payne Whitney himself, and I sent him flowers, and I wrote a note that said ‘Come home soon.’ Only I didn’t mean it and he doesn’t mean it either. He’d love for me to rot here.” Mr. Holiday narrowed his eyes at me and asked, “Do you know who Richard Rodgers is?”
“A famous composer?”
He took a deep breath. “Richard Rodgers is one of the great geniuses of the American musical theater!” he said. “He wrote The Sound of Music! The King and I! Carousel! South Pacific! And he wrote incredibly beautiful songs, like ‘My Funny Valentine’! He’s also nuts. Nuts. He’s seeing five psychiatrists, and none of them know about each other.”
“How do you know Richard Rogers?” I asked.
Mr. Holiday drew himself up and looked down his nose at me. “How do I know him? I produced those shows.”
“Oh, I didn’t know …” I said, wide-eyed. Maybe this man was delusional. It was a mental hospital, after all.
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