Cage's Bend

by Carter Coleman

  Cage

  Taunton. No walls. No dogs. No armed guards. Shady trees turning yellow and orange. Tall, gabled red-brick Victorian buildings laid out like a college campus. The most famous “mental health consumer” to matriculate here:

  Lizzie Borden took an ax

  And gave her mother forty whacks.

  When she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one.

  The oldest wing, where she stayed, which has huge long glass conservatories and puts me in mind somehow of London’s Crystal Palace, is an alluring ruin, encircled by a high chain-link fence, a nest of rats and ravens. These days Lizzie wouldn’t be here but forty miles away in the women’s wing of Bridgewater, just one of many homicidal maniacs. I haven’t seen Nick in a while, but if he visits me here, I want to ask him if he can find Lizzie in the afterlife. Ask her if she did it.

  I feel extremely lucky to be at this gloomy, peaceful haven, one of a few hundred residents out of thousands of indigent mental health consumers in the state of Massachusetts. I can see clearly now how I was out of control in May. Full-blown manic. Woke up in Nantucket and took off like a harpooned sperm whale, Moby-Dick, ramming speed right off the pillow. Woke up in Nantucket with a sense of endless possibility, gigantic optimism. It started off as simply feeling good for the first time in so long. After feeling sad for years, even before Nick’s crash, back to Grandfather Cage’s death and further, the anger Dad quietly carried around in him, the background melancholy of living in such a sad, fucked-up world. At first there was the elation that came with the decision to forget corporate America and become a boatbuilder. I would be a craftsman, an artisan. I could be happy doing that. It would take the family some time to accept it, after all the years of saving and borrowing to put me through Sewanee and Vanderbilt. But they would come to appreciate a quiet life on a beautiful island.

  For the first time in eleven years I felt I had a purpose and a tempting destiny, since I was the Louisiana state champion miler and headed off to a Tennessee mountaintop to run and write poetry, wear a black gown at the pseudo-Oxford University of the South. The real darkness began on the cold Sewanee mountain the first winter, a few weeks of dark depression, which, the next winter, grew into two months of lassitude. I dropped off the cross-country team in November and in February failed to show up at track practice. The next winter, junior year, Meriwether, my housemate, had to pick me up and shake me sometimes to get me to the dining hall. I wasn’t suicidal. I was just paralyzed. The world seemed too sad and pointless.

  My last winter was saved by a woman, Carlin Heather, a tall premed lacrosse player from Connecticut who could quote Yeats. If love can’t conquer depression, it can at least keep it at bay for a while. She was a year younger and I hung around Sewanee after graduating, working as a carpenter and studying for the LSAT. When Carlin graduated, we traveled through Central America, then came back to the States, stayed with Nick in San Francisco the spring of his first year of grad school. Carlin decided I was too unfocused on my future, which was true. I hadn’t a clue. Though everyone expected me to get an M.B.A. or a law degree, I knew that simply wasn’t me. Carlin went back East to med school at Yale and I stayed on in San Francisco, working as a carpenter. Nick kept telling me to buck up, that I’d find another Carlin. In the fall I went to Vanderbilt to appease my parents, who were exasperated at my aimlessness.

  The first couple of years went okay; just the structure kept me occupied. I was building decks on the side to partly pay my way. Spent a fair amount of time visiting my grandmother outside Nashville. After Nick’s death I slowly came unglued. I was going through the motions but every day feeling more distant and alienated from my peers. I didn’t know then that my mind was already chemically unbalanced. I was deep in a clinical depression and I thought it was because of Nick’s death, my broken heart, the discontent with the course of my life. I had no idea that it was a built-in dysfunction, some cross-wired part of my own mind, something inherited, that was plunging me deeper and deeper into a black hole. No doubt it was both brain chemistry and experience.

  The jagged pieces of the puzzle fall in place in Taunton in group. While Bridgewater is a rabid menagerie of wild dogs and feral cats, Taunton is a big warren of damaged hamsters so harmless and shy there is no need for cages. Veterans of many groups, everyone listens attentively, respectfully, and adds their considered remarks to the sad life story of the day. Seems like seventy percent of them were sexually abused by fathers, uncles, or neighbors, who were sexually abused by their daddies, granddads, or great-uncles, who were sexually abused by . . . ad infinitum. The meek victims of two thousand years of perversion. Surrounded by them in group, I feel like a member of the privileged minority of the undefiled.

  So I tell them my story a couple of times over the next month in group and one-to-one with a psychologist, rooting out more details, gaining perspective. At last I understand the pattern, the cycle down, down, down into darkness, followed by the mania which arrived at first in Mexico after I quit grad school as if to save myself from the black hole. A pleasant light breeze, the first feelings of simple joy in such a long time, a year ahead of the coming hurricane of rapture, hubris, delusions of grandeur. Now I am back, somewhere in between, tenuously balanced between the two poles on the fulcrum of a simple salt, lithium.

  Nick never visits me at Taunton. I want him to. He would like the huge trees, the old buildings, and the access to the therapists. In high school he was sort of envious of his friends who saw psychiatrists regularly. He wanted to explore his psyche with a pro but thought that it was too much to ask of Mom and Dad. Of course I’m not sure if I really saw Nick’s ghost. Maybe he was a construct of my mind created to comfort me in that house of horror. He surely seemed real but he might have been a dream. A dream within a dream.

  Harper

  The island empties the first week in September. Twenty thousand people shut up their houses and fly out, spread across America like migrating birds. Savanna goes to Boston. Even Jack, my therapist, leaves. I stay on with two thousand local souls, move into the big free house on the edge of the bluff, and settle in the converted attic, the warmest room in the house. The windows are portals. I stick my head out in the morning and feel the spray from the sea crashing on the rocks a hundred feet below. I look east over the Atlantic. With the sloping walls and round windows, the sound of the waves, it’s like being in a big ship.

  I signed contracts to paint two big houses. At least two months of work. One of the owners joked, Don’t let me come back in June and find the yard full of boats, Harper.

  You might find it full of tombstones, I said to freak him out. He just laughed.

  I take on two part-time helpers, Bob, a tenth grader who is keen to work after school and weekends, and Sean, a blue-collar kid from Boston who’s working as a waiter five nights a week, saving up money to go back to college. I clear it with the owner, the doctor down in Charleston, and let Sean move into one of the five bedrooms. I only see him the days we paint together.

  Most weekends I leave instructions for Bob and Sean and go to Boston. Savanna shares a small two-bedroom apartment with a girl named Lindsey from Atlanta. Three young southerners in the North, we feel slightly superior to the Yankees, more gracious, better mannered, slummers from a more exotic locale. Since I’m averaging thirty bucks an hour, I treat them to movies and dinners. Sometimes we go to college parties. Watching the pointless revelry, listening to the students talking about what they were studying as if it’s a waste of time, makes me glad I’m not just burning through college on a long ecstasy rave.

  On the island I am alone most of the time. Bob and Sean cover all the tedious scraping, so I’m free to paint, roll it on and then touch up with a brush. Easy, rhythmic work, conducive to morbid introspection. If you died today, I wonder, what would be the epigraph on your tombstone?

  Harper Henley Rutledge

  1970-1989

  An Angry Young Man

  In middle school I
had a pugnacious reputation. When I was thirteen, I broke a kid’s nose when he cut the lunch line. I wasn’t particularly big, pretty skinny really, but my fist packed a lot of fury. Where does that come from?

  Just last spring I was walking down Bourbon Street with a date. Two Cajuns slowed down beside us in a pickup. One made a V with his fingers and stuck his tongue through it, then said, I’d like to suck your lady’s cunt. Reflexively I spit a glob of snot that splatted right on his forehead. The guy jumped out and came running at me. Cool as a Popsicle, I reared back and flattened his nose. He hit the ground, out cold. By this time his friend was rounding the front of the pickup. I had grown into a fair-size boy, six-two, one ninety-five, but this guy was much bigger than his friend, thirty pounds bigger than me. I panicked. If I’d stayed cool, I might have punched him out, too, but instead I grabbed him and we rolled around until some cops broke it up and sent us in opposite directions. That anger is as old as I am.

  “I miss jogging through the streets of Nantucket town. The roads’re so bumpy and uneven it’s like running on a dry riverbed,” Cage says as we walk the smooth winding asphalt between the red-brick buildings of Taunton in October. He’s been here for a couple of weeks. He looks far better than he had in Bridgewater, where he must have forgotten to brush his teeth or the bathroom was too scary or someone stole his toothpaste, something. He refuses to speak of Bridgewater, not a word. Now he can look you calmly in the eye. “They let me run here. I’m running every day again. But the meds make me sluggish.” He pokes me in the belly. “You’re getting a beer belly, boy. You better start running yourself. You let that injury beat you, you know.”

  He’s talking about when I was a junior at Louisiana Episcopal in Baton Rouge. I pulled a hamstring my sophomore year, which kept me out much of the season, and even as a sophomore I never got back to the times I was running as a freshman. Cage’s records in the mile, half-mile, and two-mile were still hanging over the bleachers in the gym. Midway through my junior season, when it was clear that I was no longer a star, that I couldn’t compete with Cage’s ghost, I quit.

  “Why am I so angry, Cage?” I ask. “Why have I always been angry?”

  “Dad carried around a lot of anger. I remember once when he took Nick and me to a fair before you were born. In one of those booths with a pop gun that shot corks, Nick knocked over a cigarette box with a five-dollar bill, which was a lot back then. The carny running the booth said that you had to knock the cigarette box completely off the shelf, which was impossible. Dad was irate. He looked ready to leap over the counter and wallop the guy. Instead he said, ‘This is a farce!’ Nick and I both cracked up because we thought that he said, ‘This is a fart!’”

  “Why was Dad angry?” Tree limbs, trickling orange and yellow leaves, track overhead.

  “You should ask Dad,” Cage says. “I think maybe he thought he was being misled. Every time we went to a new church the search committee led him to believe that there was a lot more going on at the church than there was.”

  Cage is quiet for a time. We walk by a greenhouse where a few residents are potting plants. Cage suddenly starts riffing on Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” which Dad would recite to us as we walked along the beach in South Carolina, me on his shoulders and Nick and Cage wingmen on either side:

  In Taunton’s sunny clime,

  Where I us’d to spend me time

  In service of her majesty, the brain,

  There was greenhouse therapy,

  A fine activity we all agree,

  For those of us headed down the drain.

  I start laughing, then he joins in, and we both fall over howling on the lawn outside the greenhouse. Blurry behind the glass, a resident comes to the steamed-up wall and smiles. We lie on our backs in the grass, looking up at the sky, getting our breath back. After a long silence Cage says, “Dad was angry because he didn’t have a dad.”

  I impose a new routine on the days when I’m painting alone. An hour when I have a large space to roll out becomes my own private therapy session, where I play shrink and client.

  Visualize the family member who pisses you off. Picture him in a memory that makes you feel angry. Picture it until you feel the anger. See what you can dig up. Then let him have it. Everything you’ve always held back.

  Her thick black hair showing lots of gray, sweeping high off her forehead, long waves framing her face. Her wide, kind, constant smile. Lipstick. Pearls. White hose stockings. Dressed up for church. She’s holding a purse and car keys.

  Hurry up, Harper, she shouts up the stairs. We’re late. We’re late again because you dawdled in the shower. You do this deliberately.

  You’d never be late if you didn’t make me go to church, I say, coming down slowly.

  As long as you live in this house you’re going to church. You’re twelve years old. You’ve got six to go.

  I reach the bottom of the stairs and we walk together into the kitchen. I stop and open a cabinet and pull out a glass.

  Dammit, Harper, don’t do this now. Please, you’ve made us twenty minutes late already.

  I ignore her and turn on the faucet.

  She reaches over and turns it off.

  I turn it back on.

  Harper, dammit. Why do you do this to me? Don’t you think I have enough stress in my life? Nick would never do this. Why can’t you act more like Nick?

  “Why do you always compare me to Nick?” I yell, pushing the paint roller hard against the clapboard. “‘Nick was so sweet. Nick won a scholarship. Nick never complained. You can do better. You’ve got the same genes. You’re as bright as him. Cage and Nick always made the headmaster’s list. You can do it, Harper. Just try harder!’

  “Well, I studied until my head hurt but I never measured up!” I catch my breath and load the roller up with paint, slap it on the wall. “Get it, Mama? You made me feel ashamed that I didn’t make the headmaster’s list! You made me feel like I didn’t live up to your expectations. You made me feel like I wasn’t as good as them. They were the stars who got the glory and the attention and I was Mr. Average.”

  I glance around to see if anybody is looking—if they see me screaming at the wall they’ll think I’m as mad as Cage—then clean the mist of paint off my sunglasses. I climb a few steps up a ladder for the roller to reach the top of the wall. I’m leaning to one side, stretching as far as I can, when the ladder slips and I tumble from five feet, hit the ground, and stumble to my knees.

  Leaning over to reach for my shades, I see Dad ten years before, bending over to pick up his glasses. His hair was already turning gray. He was wearing a seersucker suit and dog collar. His eyes were furious. I had just pulled the glasses from his face and flung them on the floor. I can’t remember why. I was just angry. He had just gotten home from work. He was in a bad mood. When I was growing up, I’m not sure he was happy being a minister. He’s been happier since he became a bishop, maybe he was happy as a young minister, but he was in a bad mood a lot when he came home while I was growing up.

  Throwing his glasses, I must have broken the camel’s back.

  If it weren’t for you, he said, I could be doing what I want.

  A buried memory excavated! See, therapy works.

  A kid can’t understand those circumstances. Dad had a bad day at the office. He was trying to be the best dad he could, but he was remote, like most industrial dads. He was struggling to put his first two sons through college and his nine-year-old was always angry and out of control. No doubt biting his tongue later, in one short sentence he told me what a pain in the ass I’d been, how he’d sacrificed his own desires for me, and he confirmed what I’d known unconsciously but never understood all along: he didn’t want a third son. He wanted to focus on his career, become a bishop, get ahead in his profession. In anger he expressed the very source of my anger. He loved me—he was always at my track meets, took me hiking and fishing, made the effort—but he wasn’t a hundred percent behind conceiving me. I was a concession to my mother, who want
ed another child. Back then I knew unconsciously that he didn’t want me, and it fueled my anger.

  I lift the ladder, slide it a few feet down the wall, move the paint tray, load up the roller. Climbing up, I feel lighter, like I can fly.

  One night up in my attic in late October while I’m reading Robert Bly against the background of crashing waves, while I’m feeling pretty good about paying my own way, about my bank account, about starting to understand myself, about forgiving my parents for what they have done to me and what they have left undone, about my beautiful girlfriend and the coming weekend, my phone rings.

  “Harps,” she says in a voice I’ve never heard.

  “Hey, Savanna. I was just thinking about you.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  The sea pounds against the rocks as if it will shatter them into a thousand pieces.

  “I’m flying to Atlanta tomorrow. My mother has arranged everything.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Thanks for taking me into your decision.

  “It’s your fucking fault.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You knew I forgot my diaphragm the last time I came out to Nantucket. I begged you to come in my mouth. And you said, ‘I’ll pull out at the last second.’”

  “God, Savanna, I’m so sorry. I want to come to Atlanta.”

  “No. I’ve thought about it and I’ve made up my mind. You’re sweet. You’re cute. You’re a baby. You’re three years younger than I am. You need a lot of therapy. You’re lost. And my mother says you’ve got no prospects.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I told her that you would be successful one day. I love you, Harper.”

  The waves crash upon the cliffs.

  “Would you want me to keep it?”

  I hesitate. “I don’t know if I ever want children. I surely don’t need one right now.”