One of These Things First

by Steven Gaines

  So I waded in further. “There’s something else I wanted to ask,” I said.

  My father gave me an “I dare you!” look.

  “It’s hard to ask,” I said. “I need to know … when we lived on Foster Avenue … and we all slept in the same bedroom … where did you have sex?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Now his eyebrows sprang up like a dog’s hackles.

  “Where did you and Mom have sex?” I repeated. I looked toward my mother for help, but she only shook her head in wonder. “When we lived on Foster Avenue, and we all slept in the same room, where did you have sex?”

  “Stevie, Stevie,” my mother implored. “Please don’t.”

  “But I need to know,” I insisted. “You’ve got to understand, I need to know this for my analysis.”

  “Is this the kind of crap the doctor is asking you?” my father demanded, his eyebrows now signaling an impending eruption. I was wondering how big an eruption he would dare to have in the hospital, lest they put him in the Quiet Room.

  “I was rambling on in session one day,” I explained. “It’s called ‘free association.’ Whatever comes to your mind. It’s Freud.” I looked to my father for recognition. “He’s a psychiatrist from Vienna—”

  “I know who Freud is!” my father bellowed. “It’s all about sex.” He glared at me so hard when he said “sex” that his head trembled. “My personal life with your mother is none of your business,” he went on, red and blustery. “And if this is the kind of crap that the doctor is feeding you, I’ll pull you right out of here, mister.”

  “If you didn’t have sex in front of me just say so,” I challenged him.

  “I don’t have to say anything!” he said, standing up and putting on his coat. “Let’s go, Ruthie,” he ordered my mother.

  My mother remained seated. “Why this?” she asked. “What’s the point of this?”

  “The doctor said it might matter,” I told her.

  “Ruthie, I said let’s go!” my father demanded.

  I held my mother’s gaze like he wasn’t even in the room. It was telepathy; I needed to know the truth and she needed to tell me.

  “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes we made love while you were asleep.”

  “You must stop this!” my father erupted, trying to lift her by her arm, but she resisted being pulled up. “Ruthie, let’s go!” he pleaded, in a panic now.

  I was stupefied. “While I was asleep?”

  “We turned on the radio so you wouldn’t hear,” she said. “We played music sometimes next to your bed.”

  “You played music?” I asked, mystified that they could think that the radio would be some sort of screen. “How many times did this happen?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, starting to cry.

  “Ten times?” I asked her. “A hundred times?”

  “As many times as we wanted!” my father shouted. He was trembling with rage and I thought he might cry too.

  A nurse appeared at the door. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “No, it is not all right,” my father said.

  “Then perhaps visiting time is over and you should leave,” the nurse suggested.

  I ignored her. “And I never woke up?” I begged my mother. “All the times you were just a few feet away in the next bed, I never woke up?”

  “Once,” my mother said, standing up, fumbling with her coat. “You woke up once. You were in your crib, maybe three years old, and I realized you had pulled yourself up and you were standing and shaking the side of the crib and crying.”

  I woke up. I saw them.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said. “We didn’t mean to do anything that would hurt you.”

  “Ruthie, I’m leaving without you,” my father threatened, bolting out the door.

  “We didn’t know any better,” my mother said. “But the Puerto Ricans all sleep ten in a room and it doesn’t hurt them.” Then she went down the hall after him, and the nurse followed to let them out.

  Dr. Myers said it didn’t matter if my father denied the things about his mother jumping over rooftops or having lamb tendons put in his groin. What mattered more was that they were my beliefs, they were totems, and if they weren’t true, why I made up those specific things was just as important. But what mattered most, he said, was that I had seen them have sex, and I had been an unwilling partner in a forbidden ménage à trois. It was possible that it made me homosexual, and I had made a giant step confirming it. Now the real work in curing me could proceed.

  Small Slam

  “Who fucking did this?”

  I could hear Mr. Halliday shouting from all the way down the hall. He had just gone into the sunroom and found an empty card table. His puzzle had vanished. He stomped down the hall to the nurses’ office, where he was told to calm down. He was informed that his doctor had ordered the puzzle confiscated because the puzzle was interfering with his therapy. He was focusing too much attention on it, using it as a distraction to avoid dealing with his problems.

  I knew immediately that they were wrong. The puzzle kept him sane, and it was therapeutic, because all the time he was fitting jigsaw pieces together he was certainly thinking, thinking, thinking about his life.

  Halliday was beside himself. He cursed and paced and called his doctor a “cocksucker,” and went back to his room to sulk.

  Later that morning, gossip had it that Harold Kellogg had instigated the confiscation by complaining to the nurses that Mr. Halliday and his puzzle had appropriated the card table in the sunroom. When Halliday heard this he marched over to Kellogg’s room to confront him. The door was open and Mr. Halliday stood in the threshold and glowered at him so fiercely that it was no wonder bolts of lightning didn’t come out of his eyes. Kellogg glared right back, his bushy white eyebrows standing out like the quills on a porcupine.

  Mr. Halliday wasn’t without a diversion for long. Soon after his puzzle was confiscated, Mother dropped off a square piece of canvas mesh from a fancy needlepoint shop on Lexington Avenue with three fat avocados airbrushed on it, and Mr. Halliday began to needlepoint a throw-pillow cover. He needlepointed as much as he had worked on the jigsaw puzzle. It was just as mindlessly hypnotic—even more mindless—so I don’t know what the nurses and doctors thought they’d accomplished.

  “Come on,” he said with a resigned sigh, when he saw me longingly watching him doing his needlepoint in the lounge. “Pull up a chair and I’ll show you how to do it.” He pulled a single strand of soft green yarn from a tangle of wool, threaded his needle, and began to stitch on the mesh, just the right tension, not too tight or loose or all the stitches wouldn’t match, an exacting repetition that was soothing to watch. Mr. Halliday said that he and Mother loved to needlepoint, and that their Manhattan apartment was full of pillows. He said that when he got out of the hospital he was going to put this particular pillow in their house in South America, where they were going to retire. He talked to me wistfully about Buenos Aires and how beautiful and calm it was, and how soon they would spend all of their time on the farm, with Broadway far away.

  I hoped Mr. Halliday appreciated that I didn’t abandon him because the puzzle was gone, but without the puzzle there was nothing for me to do except listen. I decided that I should learn to needlepoint, so we could sit together and stitch and chat. I called home and asked them to send me a canvas and yarn, thinking I would surprise Mr. Halliday. My mother and father were again mystified, but they soldiered on and sent me a needlepoint canvas of strawberries and brightly colored pink and red yarn.

  I expected Mr. Halliday to be flattered when he discovered me sitting in a chair next to his with my own needlepoint, but he was aghast. “What do you think you’re doing?” he gagged. He said that if I continued to do the needlepoint he would stop talking to me forever. I was so scared I hid it in my bottom drawer. I couldn’t understand what I had done
wrong. After that he was distant from me. I guessed my fawning embarrassed him.

  Harold Kellogg had taken over the sunroom with his bridge game, which he played as obsessively as Mr. Halliday worked on his jigsaw puzzle. With Mr. Kellogg now presiding over the lounge, it turned very formal in that room. Mr. Halliday’s favorite album, Peter, Paul and Mary, was turned off, the café conversation about theater and books was shut down, the most frequent words spoken were contract-bridge bids, and everybody called each other “partner” instead of their names. One afternoon I was hanging out in the lounge reading a magazine when I heard Mr. Kellogg at the card table complaining that there had been some sort of rift with a regular player and they were short a fourth. There was quiet discussion followed by muffled laughter and Kellogg said, “Any port in a storm.” Then he called to me in his patrician voice, “Do you, by any chance, know how to play bridge?”

  “Is bridge like canasta?” I asked hopefully.

  There was more muffled laughter and further discussion, and then Kellogg asked, “Well, young man, would you fucking like to learn how to play bridge?”

  I was thrilled to be asked, yet even more terrified. I took my place at the table opposite a former stockbroker who had endured two cycles of shock therapy that wiped out his knowledge of the stock market, to his dismay, yet his mind was sharp and clear when it came to cards. He didn’t look up at me once that entire afternoon and hardly said a word except to bid.

  “Now pay attention!” Kellogg ordered me. “What makes bridge so civilized is that it is only partially a game of intelligence and skill. It’s also a game of rules and conventions in which people who enjoy playing bridge take pleasure.” He rattled off a canon of incomprehensible rules, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of asking him to repeat anything, so I just nodded and murmured fake “ahh”s like I understood. Of course I was a risible player, but I was good at remembering what cards had been played. I played for two hours with them that afternoon, slowly getting more adept, soaking all of it in, even playing out a hand of three hearts and winning my bid, cheered on by the others. At the end of the rubber Mr. Kellogg practically had to force out the words, “Well done, neophyte.”

  The next day Mr. Kellogg made up with the regular fourth player and I was no longer needed. It hurt only a little. I never expected to become a regular. What mattered was that Harold Kellogg got to see that I was smart, and I earned his respect. After that he was civil enough to say hello to me when he passed me in the hall. It was as therapeutic as almost anything that happened at Payne Whitney.

  A bad thing came out of it too. While I was engrossed in playing bridge that day, Mr. Halliday came down to the lounge and saw me playing with them. He was already annoyed with me about the copycat needlepoint, and he perceived my bridge game with Kellogg as a serious betrayal. From then on Mr. Halliday looked right through me, like Lily Williams used to do. “What’s wrong?” I begged him.

  “Why, nothing is wrong,” he said airily.

  I was sick at heart over it. Everybody on the floor noticed that he cut me off. One morning Miss Moneybags sneered at me in the dining room, “You boys break up?”

  Six

  Dog Days

  That summer Payne Whitney was like a furnace. There was no air conditioning and the casement windows opened only halfway so nobody could jump out. I was moved up to the fourth floor and assigned a corner room with my own bath and a 1930s claw-footed tub, in which I took lukewarm bubble baths to cool off. When I lay in bed at night the leaves on the trees below my window rustled in the breezes coming off the East River, and I dreamed Payne Whitney would always be my home, and that I would live forever above the FDR Drive with the rich and neurasthenic.

  Marilyn Monroe died early that August and her death hung over us, as oppressive as the heat. The whole nation was in shock, but inside Payne Whitney we were in emotional turmoil. There was a sense of despair among the patients, and two copycat suicides were attempted in the days after her death. It was all anybody could talk about. Did she overdose or was it an accident? We understood Monroe was in Payne Whitney for only a few days, but nevertheless she was ours. How could any of us ever be happy, if she had all that fame and money, and she killed herself? A little over a year before, she had signed herself out of the seventh floor and now she was dead. Some people said that if she had stayed she wouldn’t be dead now; others said it was inevitable, people like her were doomed. We each quietly worried about what would happen to us when we got out, with our own potential suicides to contemplate.

  Four was a big floor, twenty-four patients, a transitional unit from which people incrementally returned to the outside world—like dipping your toe into the reality pool before you took the plunge. The first dip was “walk privileges,” daily promenades around the neighborhood. Some of the patients hadn’t been outside the building in five or six months except for walks in the garden. Every afternoon at 4 p.m. groups of us would emerge from the doors of the psychiatric clinic looking like a Gahan Wilson cartoon, squinting in the sunlight, and set out on a meandering stroll through the local streets. Not everybody on the floor had walk privileges, assigned according to what kind of escape risk you were. If they let you outside, your doctor needed to believe with some certainty that you were going to return. There were cardinal rules about these walks. Patients had to stay with their prearranged group and not go off alone. We could wander only as far as we could walk—no taxis or car rides were permitted. It was forbidden to return to your home, even if it was just around the corner from the hospital. A patient could go into a store, if the group came with you, to purchase toiletries permitted in the hospital, but not prescription drugs or razor blades. The group had to be back on the fourth floor by the sixty-minute mark. If you broke any of the rules you turned not into a pumpkin but into a patient with no walk privileges, perhaps even a patient who was moved to another floor, or worse, not a patient at all, but discharged, banished.

  More often than not a few of the groups would end up in the same coffee shop, called the Poacher’s Den, on the corner of East 68th Street and First Avenue, where we crowded into adjoining booths and drank coffee and chain-smoked cigarettes, trading gossip about other patients and nurses and doctors. Within a few weeks I knew everybody’s history, family traumas, suicide attempts, drug addictions, and alcohol problems. There were inside jokes about what the other customers would think if they knew this motley crew of characters was on a stroll from the local asylum. There was an easy sense of camaraderie in our shared nuttiness, and those lighthearted moments in the coffee shop made me feel less ashamed that I had wound up in a psychiatric clinic.

  As the walk groups got more adventuresome we discovered that if we walked fast enough we could reach the edge of Central Park by the thirty-minute mark for a quick fix of trees and grass. After months of being cooped up in the stolid limestone fortress, just to look at the beauty of Central Park for two minutes and suck up the verdant energy it gave off was soul restoring. Then we made a U-turn and scurried back to the hospital like mice.

  It was Mr. Kellogg who intimidated a walk group into breaking the rules, with some help from a gorgeous blue-sky afternoon. It startled me that the straitlaced Mr. Kellogg was the first to break the rules, but I suppose it was that kind of blustery impatience with life that made him who he was. One Sunday he bullied me, Ellen the editor, and Agnes Charant, a pleasant but stiff Radcliffe grad whose family owned a newspaper in Montreal, into taking a Yellow cab ride through Central Park, and then to the Plaza hotel so he could have a “proper tea.” His treat. All of it was a capital offense, and we were taking an awful chance, but Mr. Kellogg seemed to have such a craving for tea at the Plaza that we took an oath of secrecy and went along.

  Kellogg was wearing a baby-blue seersucker suit, and a straw skimmer with Harvard’s colors on the hat band. He hailed a Checker on the corner of East 68th Street and I sat on the jump seat while we toured through the park drive, th
e taxi windows open and the warm air blowing in my face. That ride through Central Park was like a cupid’s arrow. It was a vivid moment, the first time I’d ever been on the winding, elegant drive, with the castle-like turrets of Central Park West towering over the park’s edges. It was like being inside the drawings of a storybook. I had seen Central Park in many movies, but now, with a famous architect and the daughter of a publisher and an editor of books, I was in it, on my way to the Plaza hotel, where Eloise lived.

  My infatuation with Manhattan grew even more intense when the cab pulled up in front of the hotel. The chaos itself was glamorous: mobs of dapper people in the street, a tangle of cars and limousines and taxis, and calliope music playing next to the Pulitzer fountain, where a semicircle of black hansom cabs was lined up, drawn by huge horses, impatiently pawing at the asphalt.

  Kellogg led the way up the red carpet on the front steps of the hotel and through the gilded lobby to the marble-floored Palm Court, where we followed him like courtiers. He informed the maître d’ in a clipped New England accent that we wanted tea and we were on a tight schedule. In a few moments we were seated at a table with white linen and a spray of pink roses in a tiny vase. On the other side of the room a string quartet was playing a waltz, and Mr. Kellogg hummed along. When our tea was slow to arrive, he lost his temper. “How long does it take to heat water?” he demanded of the poor waiter, and he was mean to the maître d’ who came to the table to offer apologies. They brought out a scrumptious display of cakes and jams, with whipped cream in a big silver bowl. I wanted to taste every one of them, but I wasn’t sure what to do so I mimicked the rest of our group, daintily drinking tea and munching on a scone. Mr. Kellogg paid the check and we raced outside, jumped into a cab, and made it back to the hospital exactly at our curfew. I was so thrilled with the experience that I must have thanked Mr. Kellogg ten times until he told me, “Enough already.”