The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  But after I read in the newspaper on October 4, 1974, that she’d eaten a tuna fish sandwich with Maxine Kumin and gone home and killed herself with carbon monoxide from her car, I decided that I wouldn’t run the risk of becoming another professional “crazy lady” poet who committed suicide. I decided that I wouldn’t write more about my psychotic experiences until I could look back on them from a stable place.

  Now, instead, I wrote about my childhood. I began to be invited to give poetry readings and was always surprised when listeners were so supportive and emotionally moved. I hadn’t realized that by writing honestly and openly about my own childhood feelings and experiences, I would touch something in their lives as well.

  I also wrote about my marriage, my relationships with friends. I wrote a poem about standing “in a tense embrace” with Suzanne in front of the fireplace in her study. Remembering both poem and embrace after all these years, I can see the obvious passion between us. One poetry workshop leader said to me: “Margaret, write more poems about your relationships with women. There’s a hell of a lot of feeling in those words.”

  One afternoon, when I arrived early for my prose workshop, Suzanne was sitting at the table alone, sobbing. I sat down beside her while she told me of a criticism another workshop leader had made of her work, and what he suggested she do. I disagreed with him, and made a totally different suggestion. She said she would try to do as I suggested. A week later she came to my home in Shutesbury to share what she’d written.

  Suzanne and I sat on the couch in my study while she read aloud the chapter I’d encouraged her to write. After she finished, she hurled her notebook across the room, slamming it hard against the closed door. “This is the worst writing I’ve ever done. It’s just awful! I’m ashamed I read it to you.”

  The notebook lay open on the floor, loose pages scattered around it. Suzanne burst into tears.

  I walked over, gathered the loose papers, picked up the notebook, and brought them back to the couch. I sat down again. “This is your very best writing that I’ve read, Suzanne.”

  Her eyes were red from crying, and she was blowing her nose on a tissue pulled from her purse. She fumbled at the loose papers. “Do you really believe that?” She folded the tissue and blew her nose again.

  “I know so,” I said, lighting a cigarette, taking a slow drag, then exhaling just as slowly. Smoke swirled in the room’s still air. The writing was bone solid and real. It had that strength that only comes from authenticity.

  What she’d written about was terrible. It was about living in horrible circumstances when she was a child, about living in shame. Hearing of Suzanne’s childhood pain evoked feelings of my own childhood. Our circumstances were different, but we shared the feelings of shame. In order to write about her childhood, she’d moved so close to it that the adult Suzanne, still carrying that shame, couldn’t see through it to the fine quality of the writing. She couldn’t distinguish between her terrible experiences and terrible writing.

  “This is wonderful writing,” I said again. “This is damn important writing. It really is.”

  IV

  Suzanne and I were seated in the balcony of the theater in the Fine Arts Building at the University of Massachusetts, watching a production of West Side Story. Sometime during the musical, I realized we were holding hands.

  Afterward, we walked to her house, hand in hand. Then we got into my car to drive someplace where we could be alone. A hard downpour began. We parked beside the Amherst Common and talked, all the while caressing each other’s hands.

  “This isn’t sex,” Suzanne stumbled, shocked and confused by the intimacy that we shared. “And is,” she contradicted herself.

  We talked for hours, our hands making love to each other, while the rain streamed unceasingly down the windshield. There was no one else on the common that night. Only the drenched trees and the darkened storefronts across South Pleasant and Main streets bore witness to our presence, while a couple of blocks away stood the house where Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry—Oh, Future! thou secreted / Or subterranean woe—and the only visible moon was the glowing clock face on the town-hall tower.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I

  1976

  “TO DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM,” DR. TURCOTTE BOOMED AS HE rummaged through the stacks of papers on his table like a blundering, boisterous Don Quixote. His shirt pockets bulged with his underlining markers of many colors. The front of his shirt was covered with so many slogan buttons that he looked like a caricature of a brigadier general displaying a chest full of war medals. However, Dr. Turcotte’s buttons had nothing to do with war; they were peace signs, rainbows, and smiley faces. One supported Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams and their work for peace in Northern Ireland. He greatly respected the two women and their work.

  Betty Williams was the housewife who had rushed from her home when she heard the shot that mortally wounded an IRA gunman, causing him to lose control of his car. The driverless car killed three children and critically injured their mother, the four of them out for a leisurely walk in Belfast on that August day in 1976. The sight of the broken and bloody bodies of the dead children changed her forever, and she was moved to take a dramatic stand against violence. She and Mairead Corrigan, aunt of the dead children, worked together, and in 1976 they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  In honor of the women, Dr. Turcotte began to walk many miles a day. He carried an umbrella as a reminder of the umbrellas the women had used as shields against stones thrown at them as they walked for peace. Often he carried a bouquet of helium-filled pink-and-blue balloons for the children.

  “Each step I take,” he said, “is a prayer for world peace.”

  On Sundays I sometimes joined him, his daughter June, Ethel, Jim, and other group members on his walk. June, in her late twenties, usually carried a sign that said something about world peace. She also sometimes carried things her father found along the way—a bent hubcap, a matchbook, a twig, or a tattered piece of fabric worn by weather and faded. Mona, a young woman with long greasy hair and large unbrushed teeth thick with a film the color of nicotine, occasionally joined the group. The small, straggling parade could have been lifted whole from a Fellini film.

  Dr. Turcotte always led the way. In his eyes, everything that he found, from a discarded gum wrapper to a half-eaten sandwich, seemed to be a sign from God. He would stop and expound on the sacred and personal meaning of each discovery. He crammed his pockets full of his precious findings. A used tea bag could seem as significant to him as the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

  Occasionally the doctor stopped walking to look up at a formation of clouds, reading a message from God in it as one might read the leaves at the bottom of a cup of tea, or in the toss of coins for the I Ching.

  I remember with special vividness the Sunday he saw Winnie-the-Pooh among the other puffy white cloud shapes. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t see any shape that reminded me even remotely of Winnie-the-Pooh. Furthermore, I would never have given the image the meaning—long forgotten—that he gave it. Looking skyward, I felt spiritually inadequate, as if I should have seen what he saw in the sky that day. I felt like an ignorant patient in great need of Dr. Turcotte’s spiritual and emotional guidance.

  I only have to look at the one instance of Winnie-the-Pooh in the clouds to see with painful clarity how insecure I was with my own mind. If I’d been insecure before the psychotic break, my new label of mental patient had further eroded my self-confidence, even as the psychotic experience itself continued to expand and intensify my understanding of myself and life.

  Now Dr. Turcotte finally found the article he’d been looking for in the chaos on his table. It was a copy of the sermon he’d written for Father Gray to deliver to his congregation that Sunday. He wanted to give it to Ethel when she joined the group in its walk from Northampton to Florence; though he’d dictated it to her, he wanted her to have a typed copy. He folded it and put it in the insid
e pocket of his jacket. Then we walked through the waiting room, where a poster of Albert Einstein hung. Under the portrait were Einstein’s words: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

  The doctor locked the office door behind us, and we walked down the stairs, out of the building, and to my car. I drove past Smith College and parked across the street from John M. Greene Hall, where we were to meet the other participants for the peace walk. Ethel was slamming the door to her car and turning to meet us. Mona was standing on the curb looking down absentmindedly as she blew an enormous bubble with the wad of bubble gum crammed in her mouth. Jim was talking with Al and a couple of new patients with puzzled looks on their faces, as if they’d somehow been transported to a foreign land where they knew neither customs nor language.

  “Ho!” the doctor yelled in greeting as he got out of the car. He opened the back door and took out his umbrella, which he snapped open before getting the large bunch of balloons that had hovered on the car’s ceiling.

  June, almost always late to everything, came running down the sidewalk, breathless, her peace sign flapping against her legs.

  The doctor gave Ethel the copy of the sermon and took his place along with her at the head of the group. Then we began to walk. Dry brown leaves made a scratching noise as a gentle October breeze tumbled them at our feet.

  Gustav Barth was the first to follow the doctor. A brilliant and scholarly old man, he’d grown so compulsive and fearful over the years that, until recently, he had rarely left his room over a store in Northampton. He spent his days studying William Blake and D. H. Lawrence and writing copious notes on his interpretation of the whole of Blake’s theology as he understood it. He also spent hours each day scrubbing and scrubbing his tiny efficiency kitchen. After Dr. Turcotte’s faithful daily visits to his room for three years, Gustav had dared to go out in the light of day. Many people said it was nothing short of a miracle that the doctor had been able to get Gustav out of his room and able to buy his groceries in a grocery store rather than sneaking out at night to a convenience store for potato chips and sandwiches from a vending machine. Sometimes he even sat on a park bench and discussed poetry with some of the other writers who lived on Social Security and sat outside writing in little pocket notebooks.

  Now, though this was the first and only time he joined the peace walk, he was participating in the most social event he’d been involved in since his wife had died thirty years before. In preparation, he’d Scotch-taped his glasses to his face and put on white surgical gloves so his hands wouldn’t become contaminated by touching an unclean surface.

  He walked as closely behind the doctor as he could without actually running into him. His tall, thin frame was bent permanently like a birch tree shaped by many New England winters of ice on its bowed trunk. In an almost inaudible whisper he repeated Blake’s lines as he walked:

  Each Man is in his Spectre’s power

  Until the arrival of that hour,

  When his Humanity awake,

  And cast his Spectre into the Lake.

  Perhaps Gustav’s humanity was waking to throw his ghosts into the lake forever. I’ll never know. In December, only a block from where we were walking, a car slid on a sheet of ice and hit Gustav, dragging his injured body yards before he was crushed against a tree.

  But that day in October, Gustav walked with more freedom and determination than I’d ever seen in him. Whatever else Dr. Turcotte did in his life, both positive and negative, he’d wakened in Gustav the strength and fearlessness to take a walk for peace with us on that Sunday afternoon, and for that I always loved him.

  I loved his stubborn determination; his blatant disregard for criticism hurled his way, his defiance of any social amenities that stood in the way of his intentions. I loved his support of the underdog, the scapegoat, the misfit, those who, like him, lived on society’s fringes, some of whom, like Gustav, would never—without his help—have known sunlight on their faces and fall leaves at their feet.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I

  1977

  WHEN PAULA BEGAN TO FACE THE POSSIBILITY OF HER MARRIAGE ENDING, she once again turned to me for friendship and support. For years we’d lived down the road from each other, with trees, ponds, the hill, and a deep—for me—painful silence between us. Now we were talking as if nothing had ever happened. I was grateful to have her back in my life.

  I say she was beginning to face the end of her marriage, but that’s not quite accurate; I have no idea what she was conscious of facing. What I did know was that, as her marriage to Tom grew more and more difficult, her rouge grew redder. The intensity of her rouge was always the most accurate barometer I had of both her feelings and her degree of denial, or simply her lack of awareness of her feelings.

  I remember her coming to my door one morning and excitedly announcing that she and Tom were headed to New York City for the weekend. They were going to a play and out to dinner. Everything between them felt better than it had in ages. In fact, they were going to two plays. Wasn’t it wonderful! She stood defiantly at my front door, a beautiful woman who carried herself with a rigidity that could pass as dignity. Her rouge was more intense than ever. It hurt to see her looking so unconsciously vulnerable.

  “I hope you have a good weekend,” I said, while Tom waited for her, the car engine running.

  She would hold on to the illusion of her marriage for months to come, but my own marriage was rapidly coming to an end.

  The closer I got to completing work for my MFA, the more John reverted to his old jealousies and feelings of being threatened by my painting and writing. And now there was the new possibility that I might get a job and leave him. Much of the progress he’d made while working with Dr. Turcotte for so many years seemed to have been erased overnight.

  When John saw that I was doing a watercolor of the family of Dee’s husband, Bob, he angrily picked up my watercolor box and brushes and threw them, as well as the photographs from which I was working, across the room.

  After years of struggling, I felt hope suddenly grow thin as a thread. I was painfully tired. Paula and I went away together; we spent two days and a night talking in a motel before returning to husbands and children, and me to the end of my marriage.

  Over the years, Paula and I had raised our sons together, critiqued each other’s writing, exchanged and discussed favorite books. We’d talked about our lives to each other so often that images from her childhood were almost as familiar as images from my own. But we’d never touched. Or rather, we’d only touched once, when, in a moment of lonely despair, I’d reached across her breakfast table to take her hand. For a minute we sat, our clasped hands resting on the table’s gray Formica surface, while she whispered nervously: “I would never hold any woman’s hand except yours.”

  I understood clearly then—as I’d intuited earlier—that even touching another woman upset and threatened her. After that, no matter the intensity of emotion between us, I never embraced or touched her, not even after long absences. At those times we stood, facing each other awkwardly, our words rushing to fill the space between us like ocean water rushes to fill a hole dug in the sand.

  Which is why her touch that night in the motel surprised me so.

  We were in our separate beds talking when, beginning to cry, I turned away from her. She came and sat on the edge of my bed. My nightgown had narrow straps, and I remember even after all these years the shock of feeling her hand on my naked shoulder, her hair brushing against me as she lay her head on my back. Then she jerked away, stood, and looked down at me. “If anything sexual were to happen between us, I couldn’t live with myself,” she said, and quickly climbed into her bed, where she lay on her side staring at me, wide-eyed, the sheet pulled tight under her chin.

  I looked at her and laughed inside at us, laughed at life’s absurdities. My friend, who’d had sex with several men after her first husband’s death and before her marriage to Tom, lay frozen with fear at
the thought of sex with a woman. Paula mirrored my lifelong fears and questions about my own sexuality. Even as I looked into the mirror of her love and fear, my questions dissolved while my expanding heart embraced us both.

  Who one loved was what was important, not the sex of that person. It was that simple. I remembered the pain I’d experienced all of my life because I was so afraid to let myself know who I loved if that person was another girl or woman. If Paula looked ridiculous with her rouge circles of denial, I was ridiculous with my denial of my feelings for fear of Mother’s disapproval. Mother’s disapproval, and the disapproval of most of the people I knew.

  All my life I worked to deny that under the intense emotion I felt for other women, I’d often felt a sexual attraction as well. Somehow, with constant effort, I’d managed to keep one of the most important secrets of my life from myself.