Not really knowing what chinos or cordovan penny loafers or Brooks Brothers was, I called my bewildered mother in Brooklyn and begged her to go to Brooks Brothers and buy chinos and loafers for me. A week later a new outfit was delivered at the front desk. Deedee made me check on the sole of the shoes to see if “Brooks Brothers” was stamped in the leather, just in front of the heel, to be sure they were the real deal.
All the other patients thought I looked spiffy in my new duds, and now Mr. Halliday suggested I get rid of my tortured pompadour. He said that while fashion was important, haircuts could be transformative. He explained that when he and Mother were in New Haven with South Pacific, Josh Logan didn’t want Bill Tabbert as Lieutenant Cable, the second lead, because he didn’t think he was sexy enough. Mr. Halliday and Mother cut and dyed Tabbert’s hair in the hotel one night and the next day Josh Logan didn’t even recognize Tabbert at rehearsals, and he became a big hit in the show. “It wasn’t just a disguise,” Halliday said. “It gave him confidence.” So the next time the hospital barber came by our floor he gave me what would have amounted to a crew cut had my hair had not been so silky that it didn’t stand up. Instead, it coated my head like the blond fuzz on a baby chick. The haircut peeled away a layer. Without all that carefully combed hair, my face was less childishly rounded, and there was a rakish cleft in my chin that had hardly been an indentation ten pounds before.
In the afternoons Alessandra came and sat with us. We watched the boats go by on the river as the setting sun turned Queens and Roosevelt Island into gold and orange landscapes. Alessandra told us about private school in Switzerland, and lesbian affairs she had, and Mr. Halliday told us stories about being on the road with South Pacific and how Mother suggested she actually wash her hair onstage every night, but she regretted it because it dried her hair out. And once she cartwheeled off the stage right into the orchestra pit and nearly killed herself, so they cut the cartwheel, but I don’t remember what show that was from. In May we started a new puzzle together, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and I was the happiest I had been in a long time.
I felt like Eliza Doolittle at the psycho country club. I quietly appreciated that Payne Whitney was my chrysalis, and that I was evolving in unexpected ways. I began to think of it even more as a hotel, perhaps a cruise ship, afloat. Maybe it was a ship of crazies, but I had embarked on a voyage where almost anything was possible.
Peter Pan and the Lost Boy
Finally, Peter Pan was going to alight on the third floor.
On the day of her visit I wore a long-sleeve madras shirt and sat in a chair within sight of the front door, reading an old book that I got from the hospital library cart that came around once a week, A Stone for Danny Fisher, by Harold Robbins, my mother’s favorite author. I read the book so intently while I waited for Peter Pan that the words blurred and my eyes began to ache. I had to pee but I dared not abandon my post. Finally the doorbell rang and a nurse came from the office to unlock the big oak door. Then there she was, Mother. My foolish heart, be still! She was wearing a scarf, tweed overcoat with a fur collar, and boots. I expected Mr. Halliday to come out of his room, sweep down the hallway, and cry, “Mother!” and Mary Martin to sigh, “Father!” and then sink into each other’s arms. Instead, there was a demure peck on the cheek from Mr. Halliday, a coy look from Mother, a sly smile back from him, a lingering hug for both of them during which she put her head on his chest and closed her eyes. Sweet. I got the feeling it was the shy embrace of a couple making up after a long, bad argument. Arm in arm, they walked down the hall to his room without even glancing in my direction and shut the door behind them. He forgot to introduce me! I groaned aloud in frustration.
The nurse who had unlocked the door for Mother gave me a big smile, like, “Wasn’t that exciting?”
No, it was only half-exciting because he didn’t introduce me. The days leading up to Mary Martin’s visit I fawned so on Mr. Halliday lest he forget his promise to introduce me that I can’t imagine how he endured it. I rehearsed in my head the scene of my introduction hundreds of times—what she would say, what I would say, how she would take a shine to me and invite me to sit with them during her visit, and then Mr. Halliday would give me a role in his next Broadway show.
Determined to meet her, I stayed glued to my chair for the entire two hours of visiting time. It was agony. I was dying to pee but I couldn’t give up my post. I plowed through A Stone for Danny Fisher until a chime rang signaling visiting time was up. Presently Mr. Halliday and Mother emerged from his room and walked down the hall toward the big oak door, holding hands. Finally he noticed me sitting there, looking like a starved dog, and beckoned me over. I bounded up to them and he introduced me to Mother as “a new acquaintance,” which made me glow.
I stared at Mary Martin goofily. She was a middle-aged woman. Not a trace of Peter Pan. She had a pointy chin, a big nose for her little face, dark brown eyes, and the whitest teeth I had ever seen in a mouth. She smiled apprehensively, as if perhaps I might be an axe murderer, then she offered me her hand and said brightly, “It’s so nice to meet you!” I was relieved to hear it was Peter Pan’s voice when she spoke.
I made my toady speech about how thrilled I was to meet her, and that she was “greaaat” in The Sound of Music, and how I watched Peter Pan every time it was on TV. I nearly curtsied. She waited for me to say something more, but I had used up my prepared material so I just beamed at her.
“What is that you’re reading?” she asked, pointing to the book I was holding. I held up my Harold Robbins paperback. “He’s my mother’s favorite author.”
“He’s very entertaining,” she said politely.
“But that stuff is junk,” Mr. Halliday sniffed. “It’s not literature.” He asked Mother, “What can we give my friend to read that’s worth the paper it’s printed on?”
Mother cocked her head and said, “You know what he should read? He should read To Kill a Mockingbird. Have you heard of that book?” she asked me.
I said I hadn’t.
Mr. Halliday concurred that To Kill a Mockingbird would be a perfect book for me to read; it had won the Pulitzer Prize, and the movie of the book, starring Gregory Peck, was coming out next December. Mother said she’d drop off their copy of the book at the front desk later in the week. She wiggled her finger goodbye at me and I stumbled into my room in a daze. I sat in a chair, thrilled to my core, going over and over in my mind in slow motion the twenty seconds I was with her.
When To Kill a Mockingbird arrived I could hardly look up from its pages, pages that Saint Mary touched with her own hands. It wouldn’t have mattered. I was enrapt from the first page. Reading it felt the way junkies must feel about heroin: there was no better sensation; nothing else mattered, except to get back to it. I fretted that I was reading it too fast, piggy in my pleasure, so I tried to allot myself only twenty pages a day, but it was hopeless, and I gulped it down in four or five sittings. I sobbed when I finished, to have to leave the people and world that Harper Lee had created, and I reluctantly returned the book to Mr. Halliday.
We talked about it for days. He was great to talk with about books. His years as a film critic and story editor in Hollywood had given him a keen sense of character development and storytelling. He said that the author, Harper Lee, was Scout, the tomboy. He asked me who I thought was the book’s real hero, Atticus Finch or Boo Radley? He asked if I found it satisfying that Boo saves the children from the real villain. What about Dill, the character based on Truman Capote? Couldn’t I just see how that boy would grow up to be Truman Capote?
Capote who?
A week later Breakfast at Tiffany’s arrived at the front desk. I knew all about the movie because I had seen it at the Culver Theater, and I loved Audrey Hepburn’s madcap version of Holly Golightly, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. But Holly Golightly in the novella Truman Capote wrote was more like a hooker, and I hated the ambiguous endi
ng, that she might have ended up in Africa somewhere. I slogged through it, though, and Mr. Halliday was a bit annoyed when I admitted I didn’t like it. He explained why sometimes a movie needs to be different from the book, and that I could like them both on their own merits, so I changed my tune and pretended I liked the book much more on second thought. I should have kept my mouth shut, because he ordered up another Capote book for me to read—Other Voices, Other Rooms, a swampy, melancholy novel about a lost twelve-year-old in a strange household in Alabama. Mr. Halliday said the book was about self-acceptance being part of growing up, and I should take its message to heart.
And so it went. Every week a new book arrived, some of which I only politely pretended to like; others, like Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, made me ache with the beauty of its writing. “How does Carson McCullers do that?” I asked myself every few pages, parsing the words in each sentence, trying to figure out how she was able to take me into that kitchen in Georgia, inside Frankie’s head, and imbue in me all the shadows and sounds and smells of her world. Mr. Halliday said that although you can learn to write, what Carson McCullers does is genius, which can’t be learned, and that another genius was the actress Julie Harris—a friend of his and Mother’s from the theater world—who had captured Frankie right off the pages of the book in the play and the movie, and was nominated for an Oscar for the movie version, which came out when I was only six years old, too young to see it at the Culver.
“You’ll be interested to know that Carson McCullers was a graduate of Payne Whitney University,” Mr. Halliday said.
“Not really!”
“Oh yes, she was right here, probably on this floor. Maybe she slept in your bed.”
Maybe she did. They sure hadn’t replaced the mattresses since McCullers signed herself in after a suicide attempt in 1948. As I would discover, Payne Whitney had impressive alumni, including notable writers and members of the arts, probably thousands over its history. Not unexpectedly, William S. Burroughs spent time there in 1940 after cutting off his finger, despondent over the infidelities of his lover. Jean Stafford, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and short-story writer, was a Payne Whitney patient two weeks short of a year in 1946–47, treated for depression and alcoholism. She had nicknamed the tiny park in which we walked every day “Luna Park.” While she was hospitalized Stafford wrote to a friend describing “a most gruesome dance in the gymnasium where all the crazy men met up with all the crazy women and danced to the music of a sedate four piece orchestra. Some of the ladies’ husbands came and it did seem sad and most touchingly sincere.” She continued writing from the hospital, and the doctors gave her an afternoon pass to have her author’s photo taken at the Central Park Zoo for The Mountain Lion. Publisher Robert Giroux was on her approved visitors’ list. In 1954 her husband, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Robert Lowell, signed himself into PWC (a “thorough and solid place,” he called it), where he was diagnosed as manic-depressive and given shock treatment. In 1975 novelist Mary McCarthy would re-create a stay in the hospital in her book The Group, when one of her characters is tricked into signing herself into the hospital by a scheming husband. In the 1970s the New York poet James Schuyler wrote several poems while in residence titled, “The Payne Whitney Poems.”
The last book Mr. Halliday gave me to read was a bestseller of the moment, Youngblood Hawke, a novel by Herman Wouk, whose work I knew from the movie of his novel, Marjorie Morningstar. Hawke was about a writer from Kentucky who comes to New York to publish his first book; it was set in the glamorous and romantic world of New York publishing, of editors and agents and smart dinner parties, and when Hawke writes a bestseller he buys a townhouse on West 11th Street, which turned out to be as prophetic as you can get.
In April thousands of tulips planted along the driveways and paths of the New York Hospital campus all came into bloom the same week, and there was a spectacular display of colors below my windows, a few warm days and a promise of renewal, and New York and I began to shake off the winter and slide into spring.
Music Soothes the Savage Breast
Although I talked to my mom and dad on the phone an allotted ten minutes, three times a week, from a claustrophobic phone booth near the nurses’ station that reeked of chain-smoked cigarettes, I hadn’t seen them in over two months. When they walked through the big oak door on the third floor for the first time, I could see by the look on their faces they were surprised to find a sleeker, metropolitan version of me. I was stunned to see their shellacked provincialism.
I was a traitorous piece of shit. If I was in a Fanny Hurst novel I would have denied them and pretended they were there to see another patient, as in the movie Imitation of Life, when light-skinned Susan Kohner, who was nominated for an Oscar, runs away from home to be a showgirl in Las Vegas, and pretends Juanita Moore (who was also nominated) isn’t her mother when she comes to find her backstage because she’s a “Negro.” I was mortified by my mother’s blue-black dyed hair, teased into a beehive with a wave-like shape coming out of the right side of her head, by her two-piece wool suit and big pocketbook, her costume jewelry with beads the size of lightbulbs, and my dad’s glen plaid sport jacket from Wallachs that fit him as though he had left the hanger in it.
We retired to my room, where for the next hour I boorishly lectured them about Mary Martin, table manners, badminton (not mitten), and delirium tremens. My mother, although perplexed, tried to be excited for my new sophistication and mental patient friends, but my father was threatened by what it all meant, and he got pricklier by the moment.
The gossip from 18th Avenue didn’t travel well. What might have enthralled me a few months ago paled against Deedee Conklin’s revelation about sleeping with John F. Kennedy. Gog didn’t come home one night and my grandmother and Katherine had to take the Long Island Rail Road to Freeport and the taxi from the train station to the house cost five dollars. My father got into an argument with the assistant principal of his school, who shook his fist at him, and my dad lodged a formal complaint with the Board of Education, another in a long trail of incidents that precipitated my dad’s transfer to a new school every few years. The rest of the news—the saleswomen, the store, the Culver Luncheonette—were all caught in stop-action from months ago. When I returned they would be in exactly the same place I had left them.
Meantime, my train had left the station. I realized that part of me didn’t ever want to go back to 18th Avenue. I wanted to be with the other patients in Payne Whitney. I belonged with them. I knew the other patients were eccentric, or crazy, but they were also accomplished and smart, and deliciously complicated, and I wanted to live in their world, for better or worse. So I decided to wade into troubled waters to get there.
“Dad, there are some things I talked about with the doctor that I need to ask you,” I said.
“Anything I can do to help,” he pledged gallantly.
“Remember you told me that your mother jumped from roof to roof so she could follow you to school, to make sure you were safe? How could momma jump from roof to roof?”
“I never said that,” he answered, looking surprised. “I told you that when I was a little boy she went up to the roof of the building where we lived and she watched me until I crossed the street safely.”
Surely he had told me about her jumping from roof to roof. “That’s funny,” I said. “I could have sworn …”
“No such thing ever happened,” he interrupted. “I don’t know where you got that from.”
I shrugged. I supposed I could have made up the part about her jumping from roof to roof. “Do you remember rehearsing me about what to do if somebody stopped me on the street and told me to get into their car?” I asked.
“What, am I on trial?”
“No, no. But you said you were going to help. I need to know this for my analysis. Did you think I was going to get kidnapped?”
“Parents talk to their children
about kidnappers,” my mother said.
“But we weren’t rich,” I said. “Why would I be kidnapped?”
My father looked grim. “There are people who take children for reasons other than money,” he said.
Ah. They were afraid I was going to be molested, not kidnapped. “Is that why you forbid me to use the bathroom at the Culver Theater?”
“Who knew who went up there?” my mother said. “You were a little boy alone in the movie theater. It was just as easy for you to come down the street and use the bathroom in the store.”
It sounded so reasonable now.
“Is that why you didn’t let me stay in the school yard after school? You were afraid that I’d get molested?”
My father snorted. “You could’ve stayed in the school yard,” he said. “You didn’t want to be in the school yard. You wanted to be in the store. In a box.”
“But you told me that you didn’t want me to go to the school yard because when you were a little boy you were kicked by another kid in the school yard. You had a rupture, and they fixed it with muscles from a lamb.”
“Where do all these stories come from?” he asked, shaking his head. He began to do that thing with his eyebrows going up and down when he was angry. “I was kicked when I was six years old,” he conceded, “but nobody ever said anything about an operation or a lamb.”
He was lying. I remembered him telling me about the operation. Or did I? I felt like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, for which she won the Oscar for best actress: her husband, the wonderful Charles Boyer, tries to drive her insane by playing tricks on her, including turning the gaslight up and down, up and down. Could I have been wrong about all these things I thought my father told me? If none of it was true, then Dr. Myers’s analysis and interpretations were a Freudian house of cards.
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