Clear Springs

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  According to my diary, I saw one hundred and forty-three movies in 1962. I saw Mondo Cane, Hatari!, Lolita, Jumbo. Sometimes I went alone to a double feature at the Apollo on Forty-second Street. Once, I sat in the balcony in an empty row; a man sat snugly next to me, and he followed as I kept moving away. The romantic alienation of Antonioni and Fellini was hip. I wallowed vicariously in all the European angst. Fellini caricatures swarmed around me on the streets of New York. I was drawn to the fabulous hairdos of the vacuous, elegant women in La Dolce Vita. People kept calling to the main character, “Marcello!”—as if he could be retrieved, but he could not get a toehold out of the orgy. It was the way I felt in high school, that sense of being swept along in a current and wanting so much to attain something better. Maybe it was the way Fabian felt about wanting to go to college. The music in La Dolce Vita was lilting and sad and sweet, the perfect tone for the haunting feel of the sweet life and its hidden sorrow. “Marcello!” they called from the street.

  Kyra and I wanted the sweet life, but we felt disqualified. Once, we were booted out of Bergdorf Goodman’s soon after we entered. We just didn’t look right. We had no money and no class. Besides, we were giggling, knowing how out of place we were. We were always self-conscious about our Southern accent, even though people seemed to like it. When I interviewed Ann-Margret at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, she said to me, “What a sweet little accent.” She was starring in the movie of Bye Bye Birdie, and she was preparing to make Viva Las Vegas with Elvis Presley. She was wearing a smashing kelly-green outfit with an overskirt. Immediately, I went straight to Bloomingdale’s and bought two dresses with overskirts. Both Kyra and I, and some of our Kentucky friends, kept searching for the sweet life. On New Year’s Eve we drank champagne out of our shoes. In subzero weather, we clattered along the streets in our champagne-soaked spike heels. Some of our friends who stayed out later than we did crashed a party where some Broadway stars were present.

  I borrowed a typewriter from a U.K. graduate, and from time to time I filled up pages with Thomas Wolfe–inspired meditations. I thought about Big Tom—striding through the city, brooding and spewing adjectives. I tended to write in jerky fragments that I had to knit together. One day I lost a large manila envelope of typed pages, including notes for a story about a young woman—smart and tall and attractive, with a sense of fun—who comes from the South to New York and works on a fan magazine. I didn’t miss the envelope until I got a call at work from a public relations director at a midtown firm. He had found it, with my work address on it.

  “I found it on a bench in Washington Square,” he said. “I realized you’d really want to have it back,” he said pleasantly.

  “Oh, that’s where I was last night after work,” I said. “I hadn’t even missed it.”

  “It sounds as though you’re a long way from home.”

  He had read everything. He knew my intimate thoughts. I tried to remember what I had written. After work the day before, Kyra and I had wandered through the Village before going to see The Eclipse at the Waverly. I remembered sitting on the bench in the park and sucking Italian ice from a fluted paper cup. The bench was so near the checkers tables that we could hear the players, old men in wide-brimmed hats, speaking what sounded like Portuguese.

  The man on the telephone sounded nice, like someone I might want to know, but I didn’t have the nerve to strike up an acquaintance. So he mailed the envelope to me. When I reviewed its contents I was mortified. I had written “Her tears flowed over the hot earth like rain” and “O, lost, and the wind lost, and the typewriter lost, and gone is the music.” And “She glinted like strewn money.”

  Whenever I passed Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue, I glided virtually on tiptoe, out of reverence for Wolfe and Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

  Kyra was bright and hopeful, and she had flair. She embraced New York with a Southern innocence that was bolder than mine. It made me fear for her safety. She was friendly with everyone, attracting men easily. She would go out with a construction worker she met on the street, but she was just as likely to fall in with a company vice president. She met a man who sent his chauffeur to bring both of us to his penthouse for a visit. Kyra called him “the Prince.” He claimed to know President Kennedy, and he supplied details of campaign trips he said he had been on with J.F.K., whom he called “Jack.” The chauffeur brought us a load of takeout cartons from an expensive Chinese eatery; we ate amid the Prince’s statue-and-greenery decor, viewing the East River. The Prince told us that Jack Kennedy often left the White House in secret and traveled by helicopter to the Carlyle Hotel in New York, where he would surround himself with “girls.” The Prince talked as if everyone knew about Kennedy’s affairs. I did not know what to make of the Prince’s revelations. At work, Kyra and I had written a special issue about the Kennedys. It was called a Kennedy “one-shot,” the magazine equivalent of a TV special. We wrote stories about the tragic older brother; the sad, hidden Rosemary; heroic Jack the sailor; Rose the matriarch; fashion-box Jackie.

  Kyra and I got our notions of meeting men directly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where Audrey Hepburn casually paraded around in elegant dresses and jewels provided by rich men she met and innocently entertained. (They gave her fifty-dollar bills for the powder room.) I didn’t meet guys easily, being reserved and careful, but I met one man who took me for a drink at a midtown place called the Pink Poodle. He told me I could be a glove model because I had nice hands. He claimed he had a contact. I didn’t follow up. Then I met a self-described millionaire named Fred, who took me to lunch. He said he had a sort of harem of models and a yacht and a place in what he called “the islands,” wherever those were. He talked like the synthetic-textiles man who had hired me and then fired me. He said he liked all his girls—he meant his models—to wear girdles. He asked me to meet him for a drink at a certain bar with a nautical theme on Madison Avenue, so I went there after work, trussed in my girdle. Apprehensive, I waited about ten minutes, eyeing the porthole view of the street, then split.

  I always chickened out. Something would stop me. I led a charmed life. Mr. Cotton, the publisher I worked for, took Kyra and me under his wing. He was a Southerner who flew home to Tennessee each weekend in his own airplane. Snarling heads studded the walls of his office, which sported a tiger rug and footstools made from elephant feet. Mr. Cotton had personally bagged all these himself in Africa. In his chauffeured car, he took Kyra and me to dinner at the Eden Roc, where he dined nightly. We ordered filet mignon and green turtle soup because we had never had either. We felt safe and privileged with Mr. Cotton, an older gentleman.

  I behaved myself in New York. But I knew four women there who had illegal abortions by the same doctor. One nearly died from infection; another would have had twins. The doctor was arrested eventually. While I was in the city, a transient was arrested in Central Park in connection with a crime that had occurred in Lexington while I was still at U.K. A student had been murdered, strangled with her bra. Clippings about the case were found in the transient’s possession. And while I was in New York, a young career woman named Janice Wylie was murdered by an intruder into her apartment. The case was sensationalized because she was writer Philip Wylie’s niece and she had worked at Newsweek.

  Granny got sick with her nerves as soon as I left home. Late that summer, when I had been in New York a few months, she wrote me in a halting hand:

  I thought I would try to write you a little. I don’t seem to get much better, not able to help your Mama do the work or anything, she has practically spent the summer in the garden. I can’t see to read much and the days are all so long. LaNelle and I watch the mail for your letters and we are always so glad to get one. She usually reads them to me, and I think she is a bit disappointed when you fail to mention her. She is precious anyway, and so good to me.

  Well, you seem to be having a very exciting time. How many days do you work a week, and how many hours a day? I think we were all disappointed because you took that job instead o
f some of the others. There is just so much sin, strife, and immorality in movie business. We hate for you to be making a study of it or even remotely connected with any of it in any way. I wish you would take time to go to some of those churches there so you could tell me about them when you come home, you know the book says “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it Holy,” and staying up all night before and sleeping all day is not doing that you know.

  Janice makes good grades in her school and keeps the little car on the road between times, LaNelle will start to school 5th Sept. Then I am going to miss her I know. Bob has been sick but is better now, I don’t know whether you can read this or not. I can’t see much but thought I would try. Don’t forget us here at home and be good always. I pray to Him every day to guide your thinking and your heart in the right way. We love you. Granny.

  I cherished letters from home, but I wouldn’t take my grandmother’s warnings seriously. My job didn’t seem to threaten to plunge me into sin; instead, it offered me fresh glimpses of human nature. Letters came into the office, letters to movie and TV stars from fans. They were not forwarded, but dumped in the trash can. I rescued some of the letters, searching for topics to write about. They sobered me. Most were from harmless pubescents agog over Johnny Crawford (of The Rifleman) or Mike Landon or Richard Chamberlain. Others were from women—troubled, lonely, mistreated, empty. Widows wrote frequently. (“I was spiritually drawn to your magazine in a grocery store.”) They wrote that they kept pictures of Mike Landon or Lorne Greene of Bonanza because they reminded them of their dead husbands. The widows sent snapshots picturing the husband and the Bonanza substitute together on the mantelpiece or on top of the TV. Some wrote that they preferred the TV heroes to their late husbands.

  It was unsettling to get these glimpses into people’s hearts. Most of the letters were from people like those back home, people I knew who watched images on the screen and often confused the actor and the role. Most weren’t obsessive—they expressed an innocent if naive pleasure. I could see stories in these letters, like something I imagined writing one day—stories of disappointment and desire.

  At the office, for the first time I heard a woman say “fuck.” She said it as casually as if the word were perfectly normal to say. In her mouth, it was an angry word. That anger could be expressed so openly was as shocking to me as the word itself. Frequently, I saw people maundering in the street, like the precursors of nineties talk radio. In the city it was not clear to me what mental health was, much less good manners.

  I was thinking a lot about sanity, wondering what it would take to send someone out to rant along the streets or in letters flung haphazardly at the world. My grandmother had another nervous breakdown not long after I received her letter. This time Granddaddy committed her to the state mental hospital in Hopkinsville, what was loosely called the insane asylum. She had grown increasingly nervous and tearful, and my parents feared a relapse into the helpless condition of 1950 that had sent her to Memphis. Mama said in her letter that Granny was afraid she was going blind because she had cataracts. I imagine Granny was also worried about me. I had never seen her raving, and I could not truly think of her as crazy. But I could imagine her fears growing into a huge, paralyzing knot of worry. I remembered how she had loved learning and had once wanted to teach school. And I could picture her sitting in a corner, tortured by nightmarish visions of New York, the modern sister of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  The week Granny traveled to Hopkinsville, the Cuban missile crisis erupted. The day of the crisis, I was walking up Sixth Avenue in midtown among lighted skyscrapers, just about dark. It was milking time, I thought. It was a brisk October evening in that early-dark, melancholy preview of winter. I would find that after-work time of day depressing for as long as I held a nine-to-five job. I was cold. I identified with the moody isolation of Monica Vitti walking through a desolate landscape, often with her back to the camera, in another one of those Italian movies. My information about Cuba and Castro was spotty, but I had a feeling of hovering doom. The tabloids shouted nuclear war in 144-point type. I had known Cubans at U.K., students whose parents had been high government employees but were forced to work at menial jobs after coming to the United States. The Cuban woman who gave me a ride to New York early in the summer told me that her family had escaped a totalitarian evil, and now I could feel its threat palpably in the air. The Time-Life Building, which at that time had almost a block of elbow room, could fly apart in millions of pieces. As I walked past this blue tower, I imagined all those bright lights to be smithereens already—a foreshadowing of the horror. Still, I had a sense of detachment and disbelief, as if whatever might happen were all part of a show that I would be privileged to witness.

  The next day, another letter arrived from home. My sister Janice had gotten married. My mother’s letter seemed distracted and helpless. I saw marriage as a trap, especially in Kentucky, and I wondered which would be worse, marriage or the insane asylum. Janice and I were four years apart and had not shared interests since childhood. Now it was as though she had been spirited away, but I hoped she was happy. As the early cold spell chilled me that autumn, I felt my family shattering, the way Mama’s paperweight was supposed to have done when Daddy tried to crack it. Mama wrote little detail about Janice’s new life or about Granny’s condition.

  When my parents and my grandfather committed Granny to the Western Kentucky State Hospital, the administrators told them to take her things back home. They would be stolen if she kept them there in the ward, where she would have two or three roommates. Granddaddy returned home with her good clothes, her brush and mirror and hair combs, her gloves and scarves.

  The doctors ordered shock treatments to blast Granny’s self-involvement into oblivion and uncoil her nerves. She pleaded with them not to do it, but they insisted. The following Sunday, the family went to visit her, carrying food to her because the meals at the hospital were unpalatable. Children weren’t allowed in the building, so Daddy brought Granny outside to visit with Don and LaNelle. The family sat with her on benches on the lawn while she ate biscuits and some cold fried chicken and vegetables Mama had cooked. She was calmer after her first treatment, and she was glad to see faces from home.

  The place spooked Don and LaNelle. Don, a mischievous and hyperactive child, gamboled across a flower bed and peeked in a barred window on the side of the building. He jumped back, screaming.

  “What did you see?” Daddy said, but Don could not stop bawling. He was trembling. Daddy peered through the window and saw a naked woman tied to a chair, howling.

  “Don’t look in there again,” Daddy told Don. “You oughtn’t to see that.”

  “What was it?” Mama asked, as she held Don close to her.

  “A crazy woman tied to a chair,” Daddy said. “Not in her right mind.”

  “One night I woke up and saw a mean fat woman standing over me,” Granny said. “It liked to scared me to death.”

  “But they told us they put people like that in quarantine,” said Mama. “They don’t let them out.”

  “I ain’t crazy,” said Granny, gazing at her lap.

  “Nobody said you were,” Mama said.

  “I’ve got to go home. The chickens need to be fed, and I need to do my washing.”

  She was frightened by the sensations assaulting her. The unfamiliar and the unbalanced were the same to her. But the doctors, one of them a woman, insisted to my parents that the environment—the erratic behavior of the patients, the noise, the misplaced identities—would shake Granny out of herself.

  The next time the family visited her, they found her more placid and open, but forgetful. She repeated herself and seemed not to remember that they had been to see her before. Again, they went outside, sitting in lawn chairs.

  “These young people that are locked up here,” Granny said sadly. “It’s such a waste.” She was almost seventy-five years old.

  Seeing the young people tore at her heart. She saw wild-headed, suicidal, babbling teenage
rs thrashing and flailing in straitjackets. She saw them herded into holding chambers and electric-shock rooms. She said they were tied up in their beds and could not get out to relieve themselves. She knew that people like that had once been kept in people’s attics, chained. She said it was better to have them at home, even in the attic, where they could be with their people, than in a public place, among strangers. She could not bear the pitiful sight of those raggedy-haired young people, thrust out of their homes, away from their parents and their brothers and sisters. She begged to go home. The shock treatments were so dreadful, she refused to complete the full course. Finally, she contrived to come home a few weeks earlier than recommended by insisting on having her cataract operation.

  “She came home a different person,” my mother wrote me. Mama worked closely with her to bring back her mind, just as she had done in 1950. Trying to stimulate her memory, Granddaddy talked with Granny endlessly about their life together when they were young. “Now, Ettie,” he would say. “Think back to that buggy ride down to Spence Chapel when we were late to the singing that time. It commenced to rain. And Old Peg eat up that ground like a twister.”

  14

  The literary life began to wink at me through the clouds. At the start of 1963, while I was still in the city, my creative-writing teacher from the University of Kentucky, Robert Hazel, accepted a teaching job at New York University. He had lived in New York during the forties, and now he returned with the fanfare of a homecoming. He summoned his Kentucky pals, inviting us to hang out at his “pad” on MacDougal Street, the center of Village bohemian life. At the San Remo Bar, he introduced us to noted poets and artists we’d never heard of. They talked over my head, while I sat mute and bewildered but eager to be in the scene. The allure of the literary life was as delicious as the rum-raisin ice cream at the Figaro. Bob Hazel had hobnobbed with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, names that sailed luxuriously through the air like winged maple seeds. “You can’t be a writer unless you work among, and associate with, other writers of your time,” Bob told me.