“I’ve kept the plants watered,” Helen said. “You didn’t get any mail worth bringing.”
The three of us talked while my fingers twisted and knotted the yarn in a frenzy of motion. At each change in the mass of yarn I searched it with my fingertips as if I were a blind woman trying desperately to identify a shape. There.
Finally, my heart relaxed in my chest. I took a long breath. Then another. Reverently my fingers caressed the shape in my hand, the sculpture of yarn, the end of my search, even though I’d not known what I was searching for or why. But there—finally—in my hand was a tiny replica of the face of Jesus. It was not the Jesus of the Mexican straw crucifixes with their open and sometimes almost smiling mouths. It was not the face of the stained-glass Jesus in the Baptist church of my childhood. The Jesus face of many colors was very long and thin, and its eyes were closed. Feeling his shape, I thought of the Shroud of Turin. It felt most like that image of Jesus. In knots and twists of yarn in my hand I had found Jesus and was comforted. My eyes filled with tears, and I took several deep breaths before I spoke again.
“Thank you so much for bringing the yarn,” I said to June. “That was such a thoughtful thing for you to do.” I didn’t tell her how deeply grateful I was for the comforting Jesus of many colors. “Thank you so much for the yarn,” I said.
“You’re welcome, Margaret. I wish I could do more to ease your pain.” Her dark hair glistened in the sunlight.
“And thanks to me, too, Margaret,” Helen said indignantly.
“Always thanks to you, Helen.”
Then my tears began again and I looked down at the peaceful Jesus resting in my palm.
Helen said something to June, and June responded. I was relieved to not have to talk now. Looking at the Jesus was making me remember how when rocking with pain the previous night, I had seen that the veil between the living and the dead was thinner than gauze. It was nothing at all but a veil in our minds. We are all here now, I knew, the living and the dead. You just had to have enough pain or need—or what?—and the mind’s veil falls away and there you are with whomever you most need at the moment.
As I had sat on the side of my bed in the locked room, shaking with a deep, inner sobbing, my old friend Joan of Arc was suddenly there beside me, her strong arms around me. I recognized her immediately, though she looked nothing at all like the Joan of Arc that the tall and aristocratic Ingrid Bergman played in the forties movie. She was a short peasant woman with a plain, cleared-eyed face. Still I recognized her and felt her essence. Bernadette of Lourdes was there also, both women capable and compassionate, calm and accepting. Then Saint Francis of Assisi came and knelt before us. He placed his weathered hands on ours while smiling his generous smile, wit and wisdom shining in his eyes. When my own pain was so great I thought I’d be unable to bear it, I was suddenly among those who’d accepted the pain and the unfathomable sorrow so completely that they had grown beyond all human boundaries. I was being comforted by those who had developed compassion and love like nothing I’d experienced in my sane mind. Strengthened by the saints, I no longer found my pain unbearable. What mattered was that I—so flawed and broken a woman, so exhausted and depleted—rested then in the arms of saints.
I say I saw them, but I saw no one at all with my eyes. I saw with an inner vision, but a vision just as real. After I had accepted what was happening to me, the majesty and the mystery of it, I looked up and around me. As far as I could see were suffering human beings ministered to by saints devoted to the duties of love.
Then I saw my own mind as a blossom forever opening. Then I saw a Christ being taken from a cross, comforted and caressed by saints. And through this scene of Christ—a transparency like a slide—I could see another Christ being taken from a cross, and through the transparency of that image was another, then another. For as far as I could see, Christ after Christ was being taken off a cross and comforted. And still the blossom of my mind was opening.
IV
Waking or sleeping? Dream or vision? When I tried to pull it into full consciousness, it floated just beyond my grasp. Vaporous. Tantalizing. In it, we were all words—our entire lives, past, present, and future, were contained in the letters of our names and in the spaces between them. Each name was a living entity. But our names had been shattered, had exploded into millions of letters flung out into the universe like the stars that light the night sky. There were millions of As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Es, Fs, and every other letter of the alphabet. And all alphabets. Each letter had the pulse of an individual, and all the letters of that individual pulsated together. All were filled with the sole purpose of reuniting.
My eyes were dazzled by light from stars strewn across the deep blue-black sky, an enormous net to hold the letters of our names, each star a knot in that net. I stretched my arm, my fingers, as far as muscle, bone, and sinew allowed, but couldn’t reach even one letter of my name.
“Margaret!” a nurse called sharply. “Margaret! Keep your mind on what you’re doing. You almost spilled your milk. Eat up now before the aide comes to take the trays away.”
I looked down at my plate with its boiled potatoes and gravy, slices of baked chicken, carrots, and peas. I thought of all the human beings who’d died and rotted in the earth, feeding the earthworms, the searching roots of trees and grasses. I remembered the painting by Diego Rivera in which you can see a corpse under the earth and the roots of the corn plants searching that corpse for sustenance. Life from death. My head was spinning. I could no longer tell life from death or death from life, plant from person. I could no longer tell human flesh from that of the chicken on my plate, or the boiled potatoes from boiled bones of martyrs.
“I can’t eat,” I told the nurse. “I feel sick to my stomach.”
I pushed the tray aside.
I felt vertigo. My mind was spinning like a kaleidoscope spins before the eye until the hand stops it and a new pattern emerges. But no new pattern had yet appeared. There was only the confusion, the tumbling chaos of my mind.
V
What was I doing to make the nurse look at me with such contempt? Perhaps I was arranging things on the table in some ritualistic way like the artist Joseph Cornell arranged objects in boxes. Or like Carl Jung arranged stones in the sand. Whatever creative thing I was doing, I was doing it in order to guide my mind in its journey back to sanity.
But the nurse knew nothing of my mental, emotional, and creative processes. “Stop your foolishness,” she snarled, “and clean up this mess. I’ve got better things to do than deal with the likes of you.”
“Crazy bitch,” she muttered under her breath.
I knew that it wasn’t what I was doing that made her speak to me with such contempt. She spoke to me that way because to her I was a crazy woman acting crazy. I was crazy and therefore worthless.
My guts churned. I felt that I was about to lose my footing and be swept into a sea of what felt like sheer hatred. How could I endure any more of her belittling behavior and maintain any feeling of self-confidence and self-respect? After days of relating to her I had reached the limits of my endurance.
It was then that I suddenly felt the presence of Grace Clemons. Memories of her came rushing back, filling my mind and heart. I remembered her black satin slippers and her large-knuckled hands. I remembered the many stories of her life she had told me when I was a child. I’d sat in her apartment in Mrs. Forbes’s house across the street from Paradise Park in Thomasville, Georgia, eating cookies and listening to her during breaks from drawing and painting with Mrs. Forbes. But in the psychiatric hospital I was no longer a child. I was a woman who, like Grace Clemons, had faced loss and betrayal, and loss again.
There was no time for the old drama, nothing of the theatrical. The woman beside me was straightforward, strong, and capable. She was there because I needed her. Without words, but clearly—mind speaking to mind—she told me that I could not afford the luxury of self-pity or self-condemnation. I could not afford the waste of guilt, the destructive
power of shame. She told me that I must be strong, that no matter the obstacles in my way, no matter the losses and the grief, there was life and I must be about the business and privilege of living it.
Then I felt her strong, confident hands pressing firmly against my back, causing me to stand upright and tall. She was no longer only a presence. She was a physical force. I felt my dignity return.
Again without words, Mrs. Clemons reminded me that she would always be with me. “Remember the touch of my hands on your back. When you feel weak, my hands will be there to remind you of your own inner strength. Walk with dignity, my dear. No matter what anyone ever says, remember that the most important thing you can do is to solidly and forevermore be, to simply and profoundly be Margaret.”
VI
The river could have been the creation of Hieronymus Bosch. As I looked into it, I saw that the dark, choppy water was filled with pieces of human beings—streams of bloody entrails, a heart throbbing rapidly in a cold current, a leg, an arm, a wild-eyed head bobbing in the murky water, and many hands and feet propelled frantically by the innate impulse to reunite.
I watched the reunion of parts of people as they struggled to find ways to fit together again. Others required the services of doctors and their attendants from the enormous hospital on the riverbank. The doctors and associates went about their awful, miraculous work with calm, intelligent dedication.
Piece by piece the parts of me found one another.
An aide set my lunch tray on the table before me, a low table stacked with old magazines and boxes of games, not a regular dining table like the patients permitted to leave the locked ward ate at in the dining room. I poked at my food but ate nothing. Looking at it made me feel as sick as looking into the river.
“You’ve not eaten your lunch,” the aide said when she came back to remove the tray. “Do you want to keep it for a while longer?”
“No,” I replied. “But thank you for asking.” I did not tell her that I couldn’t eat because each bite felt like taking a bite out of a human being. All life felt like human life. Or maybe all life was God, and everything had consciousness. Then it seemed to me that I was groping for something too vast for my brain to comprehend. When I tried to grasp it, to articulate it, my thoughts felt like only a snarl of confusion, like the snarl of yarn I’d knotted. But what about the many-colored face of Jesus in the yarn? Focus, I told myself, on the many-colored face of Jesus.
Experiences in dreams and experiences while awake were beginning to differentiate themselves. My shattered self was starting to come together once more. But I still had a distance to go before I had the clarity and strength necessary to face the doctors and demand that I be released, even against their orders.
PART FOUR
“Hold Fast to Dreams”
Chapter Twenty
I
1981
DR. TURCOTTE USHERED ME INTO HIS OFFICE, WHERE I SAT IN MY USUAL chair across from him. The coffee table, with its clutter of old magazines, books, candles, papers, and boxes of Kleenex, stood between us.
Before taking his seat, the doctor went to the door and called Helen to join us. She came in and sat in the chair next to mine. Dr. Turcotte sat down in his usual chair and reached to pick up a burgundy-colored candle from the floor. He handed it across the table to Helen while looking at me.
“I’ve given Helen a gift, but I have nothing for you. Are you jealous?”
Why was he trying to provoke me? I remembered how a person who knew him well once told me that she believed he had always wanted to orchestrate a crime of passion. Maybe she was right. He certainly was trying to upset me.
Helen looked at the candle.
“A gift for Helen and nothing for you. What do you think about that?” he asked.
“I suppose it depends on where she lights it.”
I understood his game then, his intent to upset me by showing me that he had gained firm control over Helen; that he had wiped out any loyalty she might have had toward me. Even before it happened, I knew the outcome.
He reached across the table and handed Helen a star-shaped candleholder. “Light the candle here, Helen,” he said in the same commanding tone he’d used with me in Newport when he’d gestured with his arm and ordered me to come to his bed.
Without hesitation Helen put the candle in the holder, picked up a book of matches from the table, tore one off, struck it, and lit the candle.
“I see, Dr. Turcotte,” I said, knowing that he knew that I’d seen through his manipulations, that the veil of denial had finally dropped from my eyes. I crushed my cigarette in an ashtray and got up. Glancing briefly at his self-satisfied face, I left the office.
I knew my relationship with Helen was over. Driving back to Amherst, I thought about it. When Helen had come to stay with me in 1980, shortly after Chris and I moved to the apartment on Dickinson Street, she’d complained constantly of being cold. Even in the warm apartment she wore a wool scarf around her neck.
The doctor explained that she was so cold because she’d been denied affection from her parents. He encouraged me to put my arms around her and hold her as much as possible. Which I did. Eventually she began to sleep in my bed with me. After sleeping with me for over a year, she began to try to seduce me. One night, during a brief psychotic episode, I gave in to her. I can’t say whether or not I would have given in to her had I not been psychotic. I can say that, looking back, I sometimes struggle with deep feelings of regret, though I am well aware that regret is a not helpful feeling to nurture.
At the time, our age difference wasn’t a problem for me. I was a fan of Charlie Chaplin, who had married Oona O’Neill when she was eighteen and he was fifty-four. And when I was fifteen my boyfriend was nearly twice my age. Then there were Chris and Jim.
I had grown to love Helen, though not in the way I’d loved and still loved Suzanne. The doctor told me that Helen had seduced me into a sexual relationship as an act of revenge toward Suzanne. They had known each other before I had met either, and Helen harbored hurt feelings toward Suzanne, who hadn’t given her the support she’d needed when Helen was in high school.
II
I sat at the dining room table and worked on a large watercolor I was painting from sketches I’d done from the roof garden of the hotel where Chris and I had stayed in Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico, in 1969. I still remember the exquisite pleasure of mixing the paints, pigment and water pooling on the white enamel palette of my paint box. The skyline of the city is filled with domes of churches, most of which are topped by crosses. At least my painting is filled with them, and after all these years, the painting is more real to me than any image of the city I might hold someplace in my memory. In my painting, the volcano Popocatépetl rises in the distance, while inside the volcano lies a sleeping woman with long hair made of flames. In a pale purple and indigo sky stands a transparent cross with a transparent angel blowing its trumpet toward the woman as if to wake her.
I no longer remember which of us began to destroy my things first. I only remember the night as the end of our lives together in Amherst.
Helen and I were both psychotic.
There was shattered glass everywhere. I pushed the living Christmas tree in its redwood planter out the door, tumbling it down the back steps onto the snow. Helen picked up the TV from the kitchen counter, lugged it to the back door, and heaved it out, shattering its screen. I took the expensive vase that Chris and Dr. Turcotte’s daughter Amy had given me for Christmas and hurled it out the door, sending it skidding across the ice-encrusted snow to rest unbroken against the hedge that marked the end of the backyard.
Then Helen and I stood facing each other in the kitchen. Looking into my eyes, she said that she saw vision after vision unrolling. “My life!” she screamed. “My whole life is in your eyes!”
Not only was Helen psychotic, she was also sick of my depression as well as of me. Now that she had the relationship with Dr. Turcotte that she wanted, I no longer mattered.
I picked up a large stone from my collection in a wooden bowl on the dining table. I hurled it at my pen-and-ink drawing of Emily Dickinson that hung over the dining table. The glass over it shattered to small jagged shards, which scattered on the table and floor. I took another stone and slung it at a framed etching of my father, done by the artist who did the drawings for my first book. Another stone shattered the glass covering an O’Keeffe print of an iris.
When Chris walked into the room and looked at me with disgust, I took one of the Wedgwood cups that my beloved Aunt Curtis had given me and threw it against the wall next to him—not at him—with all the strength of my adrenaline-flooded body.
Did Helen or I rip the painting of the woman in a volcano down the middle and throw it on the dining room floor with all my other ripped and shattered possessions?
I wasn’t aware when Chris and Amy had left the house to call Dr. Turcotte, who made out the papers to have me committed to the state hospital. He called the Amherst police to take me there. I was too absorbed in shattering glass and destroying my paintings and drawings.
Shortly the police arrived.
A policeman put handcuffs on me, while a policewoman silently watched. The doctor had evidently asked June to come with them. She stood beside me in the living room. When the policeman tried to get me out the door and into his car, my body went rigid as a steel rod. He dragged me across the street and tried to force me into the car. I struggled against him as hard as I could.
Of course he won. I gave up and sat down on the backseat. June went around to the other side and got in beside me. She sat upright and silent, hands folded in her lap, eyes straight ahead.
The Long Journey Home Page 26