“Well, they have you anyway, Mac,” Anne said, her tentative laugh defeating the remark.
“That’s true,” Mac said, and grinned obligingly. Between her fingers a permanent cigarette, goaded by a mannish thumb, flicked up and down like the tail of a nervous bird.
“I’ve got to get over to the Monkey House,” Harry Marvin said. Harry worked in the children’s wards and, like Dr. Sobel, had given his task a name. Anne had once thought that the term referred to the usual clamor of children, or that it bore, perhaps, a cute-as-monkeys context. But on her first visit there, her senses explained it far more harshly. And its aptness breached a strict staff code by which all inmates were thought of, and referred to, as “patients,” though the majority were beyond all aid and went untreated, even by Dr. Sobel.
Mac’s wry wrinkled face winced openly at that name, but she said nothing. She was a practical woman, and clearly she knew that Harry Marvin did his work and, however flippant, did it very well. Nevertheless Mac disapproved. She seemed to sense a danger that Anne, too, had recognized already—that if, even for one moment, they were to acknowledge the degradation of their charges, to regard them openly as unworthy of respect and love, to regard them as subhuman, if once, in short, they succumbed to uneasy laughter, then all pretense would disappear, and the hospital would no longer be a hospital but a prison.
Harry Marvin knew this, too. Glancing at them, he frowned, discomfited. “Well, I’m off,” he said, after a moment. “You, too, Anne?”
“She hasn’t had her coffee,” Mac rebuked him.
“No, I don’t need it, Mac.” Anne’s tone of breathless apology, abetted by a startled, mournful look, was characteristic of her manner. Inviting protection, it drew people to her, yet she felt at times that she spoke too loudly, even bumptiously, and was conscious of a certain coarseness in her stance and gait more becoming, her mother had told her pointedly, to a tall boy of thirteen. Though pretty in an impermanent way, she had not yet learned to show herself to best advantage.
Or so said Harry Marvin, the very first time she had spoken with him alone. Shyly, she had sought him out because he was her generation and might supply the friendship essential to her in this place. But Harry had no time for frivolity. His was the clinical approach, and during their second talk, he made a number of observations on her sexual patterns, or rather, the absence of them. Disguised in his white frock, his fingertips together, he had lured her into admission of inexperience. As a cure he prescribed his own caress, and when she refused it without quite meaning to, accused her of being neurotic. His astonishment suggested that any girl resisting him might well end her days as a patient in Lime Rock State Mental Hospital. He went on to discuss her appetites, sublimated, he assured her, because as an only child she needed to dominate her widowed mother. Anne sought for the missing link in his diagnosis, which seemed a rash non sequitur and was, besides, inaccurate. Her mother, poor but proud, clung to her good family name and had never been dominated by anybody. But Anne, embarrassed by his use of the word “appetites,” nodded meekly in agreement. Too insecure to spy insecurity in another, she was anxious only to change the subject.
Anne and Harry walked in silence up the stairs and out the front door and along the driveway toward Anne’s building. The driveway continued down the slope to the front gate, which hid in the maple trees off the highway. So as to draw less attention to the hospital and its unwelcome presence in the township, the staff and the rare visitors were encouraged to use the back road through the woods. The precaution seemed foolish, since the mass of raw structures, like a glacial deposit on its hillside, was a landmark for miles around. Yet its approaches were obscure, there were few signs. Though bald and exposed on its terrain of broken, rocky fields, the hospital, as one came nearer, sank out of sight into the woods.
“I suppose Mac took offense at my reference to the Monkey House.” They had paused at the door of Anne’s occupational therapy unit, which formed part of the ground floor of one of the buildings.
“Oh, I don’t think so. She knows you were only joking.”
“Listen, if you don’t want to get like Sobel, you have to relax once in a while, that’s all. And the Monkey House is the most depressing ward in the place. I mean, you always hope in there, and you’re always disappointed. So many of those kids are basically sound, or would be if only—”
“I know!” Anne said. “Have you met Ernest Hamlin?”
Interrupted, Harry shook his head in irritation. “Who’s Ernest?” he said.
“Oh, he’s a patient. He comes to O.T. now. But I mean, he’s basically sound. I’ve talked to him,” Anne offered as proof, speaking faster and faster. “He says—”
“Maybe they all are,” Harry said, and turned his back on her.
“Ernest Hamlin really is, though,” Anne called after him.
She watched him go, then turned and entered the outside door, unhappy. The inner door required a key, and she paused to hunt for it in her purse. As usual, she was very nervous, and today, upset by Harry Marvin, she dropped the key upon the floor.
On her first visit to the occupational therapy unit—and surely this unit was the least threatening in all of Lime Rock, since only patients in control of themselves were allowed here without special supervision—she had felt a revulsion based on fear which passed immediately to vertigo and nausea. She had had to sit down, perspiring and cold. It had frightened her, that revulsion, since it was so baseless. There was nothing fearsome about the patients at O.T. Perhaps if they hadn’t gazed at her in that wide-eyed way, perhaps if the ward hadn’t smelled of children, of crude clay bowls and varnish, paint, of balsa wood and cardboard games, of apples and faint urine in the makeshift clothes …
Thus she was grateful for Ernest Hamlin.
Ernest had come the previous Tuesday at the hour of the weekly square dance, which was for Anne the most upsetting occasion of her week. Though eliciting a forlorn gaiety in the patients, it was grotesque in its laughter without merriment, in the heavy aimless prancing, in the pairing off of illness and of age. Here a wan old woman clutched a dreaming black man; there a smiling student nurse propped up a bashful moron. Beyond, a lank-haired catatonic in a knee-length twenties frock performed wild stumbling pirouettes all by herself. Along the walls the others watched, despairing, giggling, excited by the din, some clapping vaguely out of time with the piano.
“Don’t you want to dance?” Anne cried.
“No, thank you, miss,” said a big fair boyish man poised for escape by the door to the room where some played shuffleboard, and for a moment Anne imagined him a visitor.
“I haven’t seen you here before,” she ventured. He faced her then and smiled.
“Oh, I’m a patient all right, miss,” he said.
“I see,” she said and, ineffectual, flushed. “My name is Anne.”
“Mine’s Ernest Hamlin.” He enclosed her outstretched hand in his. “I come down to do something with my hands”—he held them out and gazed at them—“so’s I wouldn’t go nuts.” He smiled again at her involuntary start, then sat down carefully on the edge of a folding chair.
She seated herself beside him.
“I ain’t really nuts, you see, miss, not yet, anyways.” He glanced pointedly at the dancers. “I guess these poor dopes claim that quite a lot.”
“Nobody here is really ‘nuts,’ Mr. Hamlin,” she blurted dutifully. “They only—”
“You know what I mean, Miss,” Ernest told her. “Mentally ill. I ain’t really mentally ill, not yet, anyways.” Again he observed the dancers, wincing. “I’ll make the grade, though, one of these fine days.”
“You mustn’t feel sorry for yourself,” Anne said. “You mustn’t—”
“No?” he said. His heavy face turned to her once again. It was an intelligent face, rueful, perceptive, alight with quiet humor, quite different from the gallery of faces in the room. He was not yet dead in the way that people died here, their hair first, then the mouth and eyes, all
but the hands. At Lime Rock the hands, like infants’ hands, or those of the old man frozen in his chair beside them, clung to life, whether clenched or groping. “No, maybe I shouldn’t,” Ernest said and, frowning, changed the subject.
“Do most of these folks know why they’re here?” he said.
“The ones aware of anything do. They don’t believe it, most of them.” She waited for him.
“Oh, I believe it, all right,” he told her quickly. “There ain’t no doubt about what I got. I got a piece of shrapnel sitting too close in to my brain to operate, understand? They can’t operate. And every once in a while this shrapnel sort of acts up, like, and drives me nuts with pain—mentally ill with pain,” he corrected himself. “I get so’s I don’t know what I’m doing even. I get destructive. I’m supposed to be dangerous, miss, because I don’t know what’s going on. So this vets hospital, they give up on that piece of shrapnel after a while, they classify me a mental case, they got no provisions for guys like me, they send me here. I didn’t even get no chance to go on home and see my folks, or the boys in my shop, or nothing. And I got a mother waiting home, and sisters, and I got a part interest in this machine shop home. I’m a machinist.” He gazed at his hands again, big useful hands sitting idle on his knees. “A damn good one, too,” he muttered angrily. “I worked for them there at the hospital sometimes, and the guy running the shop, the super there, he said he never seen better work.” He shook his head. “Which is why I come down here this afternoon, I thought maybe you had some tools and stuff, a lathe, maybe, but there ain’t nothing here but shuffleboard, and knitting needles, and games for kids.”
She nodded, mute.
“So that’s about it: they sent me up here, and I ain’t mentally ill. My fiancée wrote me a letter already. She said it would be better to make a clean break. She said it hurt her worse’n it did me.” Ernest Hamlin almost smiled. “But I’m just a young guy, I got a long life ahead of me, and guess where it looks like I’m going to spend it—” He stopped short, as if shocked anew by the realization. “Jesus,” he whispered, “I can’t believe it.”
He set back gently upon her feet a fat, loose-lipped girl in baggy dungarees who had square-danced into him and fallen. The girl put her hands on her hips and swaggered with gross coyness away from him. Her dancing partner was a scraggy female who carried her head shot forward like a turkey and seemed on the point of tears.
“So I feel sorry for myself,” he concluded.
Anne nodded, overcome.
He cocked his head, alert to her emotion. “I didn’t want to trouble you, miss. You were just being nice listening to all that stuff, doing your job. A lot of the staff around here are pretty tough,” he added.
“They have to be tough,” Anne said. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not nice.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right. Like this guy they got in charge of the disturbed ward. This guy is out of this world. I mean, they put me in there at first, with all them foul balls. Maybe you ain’t never seen that ward. They got about fifteen nuts in there, the dangerous ones, except they ain’t dangerous all the time, not most of them. He’s got some beauties in there, this guy.
“The first day he takes me by the arm, like a priest or something, and he says, ‘C’mon, Ernest, I want you to meet the boys.’ The boys are sitting around a table shelling peas, all but one. ‘That’s Phil,’ the guy says. ‘Phil’s a nice fellow, but he bites. You let Phil get his teeth into you, and you’re in trouble. He has to be pried off. So you’d better keep a little distance when you talk to Phil.’ This Phil is sitting in the corner making a lot of racket, moaning and grunting and all. I didn’t feel much like talking to him, then or later, although I did give it a whirl one day. Some conversation! I don’t think he could talk, if you want to know the truth, he was in pretty bad shape. I mean, he looked bad, like some loony in the movies or something, like the way I thought they all looked here before I come. Anyway, this superintendent or whatever you call him, he chats with Phil all the time. You’d think they was buddies from way back. And he talks to them other birds the same way. The others don’t look as bad as Phil, they can mostly talk and all. They gave me the creeps, though.
“When I was introduced, I said, ‘Hi, boys.’ Not a peep out of them, not one of them. They all just watch me, sitting at the table with them peas. The super acts like everything is hunky-dory. ‘Pull up a chair,’ he says to me, ‘and get acquainted.’ Then one of these guys picks up a pea and rolls it across the table at me. I catch it as it goes over the edge. ‘Thanks a lot, Bill,’ I says—I’d caught his name, see—and I eat the goddam pea. This Bill flashes me a kind of smile. Then another guy starts hollering that I’m eating up all his peas, he wants to know why he’s shelling in the first place, he pays his taxes, don’t he, he ain’t no lousy kitchen help. So this Bill gives me a big wink and knocks the other guy’s bowl of peas into his lap and all over the floor. Just like that. And winks again. He likes me, see. And this other guy—I expected all hell to break loose, but it didn’t—this other guy, he gets down on his knees and picks up all his peas one by one, and when he comes up for air he’s grinning. Not really grinning, but watching this Bill in kind of a crafty way, like, and humming and nodding his head, and you could tell he was going to fix Bill for keeps, later on, he had it all figured out, only he never did. And then—listen, do you want to hear about all this, or do you want me to shut up?”
“No, please go on, Mr. Hamlin. I’ve never been in that ward, it’s interesting.”
“Yeah, it is.” Ernest was pleased. “It’s interesting. But I appreciate you listening. I ain’t had much chance to talk to nobody I could talk to. I talked some to that super, though. What a guy. He spoke to me like I was the only one in there who could understand. That’s the way he talked to all of them, even Phil—as if they were the only normal ones in the outfit. I don’t know what he said to the others about me. He probably said, ‘Watch out for that goddam Ernest, boys, he’s mentally ill, he’ll break your back as quick as look at you!’ ”
Ernest burst out laughing, and the sound rose high and loud against the clamor of feet and music and broken voices. Anne stared at him, dismayed. He was laughing so violently that in the animal closeness of the room he had to loosen his collar. But now he coughed and stopped, as quickly as he had started. “No,” he murmured, “I ain’t the kind to hurt nobody if I can help it. Even in Korea, I didn’t like it.” He sat there for a moment in silence, then got to his feet. “Goodbye,” he said, and went through the door of the shuffleboard room before she could think to call him back.
When he appeared the following afternoon, Anne felt unaccountably relieved. He wore a tie this time, of a deep green cheap material which bulged and twisted the collar of his denim shirt. Though the tie flew in her honor, he did not approach until he saw she was unoccupied. Then he came immediately and said, “I been thinking about what you told me, about how I hadn’t ought to feel sorry for myself—”
And she wanted to say, Oh, I didn’t mean it, I was talking foolishly, you have every right …
“—and that’s true, what you said, but I still do.” He was clearly ashamed but continued doggedly, as if making a compulsory address. “Why I feel sorry is, I’m so damned useless. I can’t do nothing, even for somebody else. I just got to sit here until I rot!”
“No, listen, Mr. Hamlin—”
“Jesus, call me Ernie, will you, Anne!” he cried, throwing his big hands into the air in a gesture of pain. Sheepish, he followed her to a seat at the side of the room.
“Listen, Ernie, maybe you can help us here. The staff needs help, it’s much too small. Look, I’m in O.T. with one nurse today, and two wards coming in. We can’t handle everybody properly. If you could—”
“Sure, sure, I know. I already talked to that super in the disturbed ward, before he got me transferred. I asked him if there wasn’t something around for me to do, and he said, no, they couldn’t pay me nothing, there wasn’t enough salary
to go around as it was. Can you beat that? For a job like that, locked up twelve months a year with those foul balls? Knowing they might jump him every time he turns his back? And that ain’t why he’s nice to them, either, he’s just nice, that guy, and he’s got guts!” Ernie, excited in his admiration, had forgotten momentarily about himself. “If I ever get out of here, I’m going to talk to somebody about that pay he gets! He ain’t complaining, but he says himself he wouldn’t do it only he’s leery what kind of a creep would replace him for that kind of money. So he keeps on doing it, year after lousy year!”
Anne nodded, watching him. He was pounding his fist into his palm, beside himself. After a moment, she murmured, “Ernie, I wasn’t thinking about a salaried job. I just thought you might be interested in helping out when you felt like it. It would keep you busy, and be a real contribution.”
“Oh, sure. I mean, I’d be glad to help, Anne. I was thinking about a job, though, maybe outside, mowing lawns or something. That way, if I got a little money I could send it home. That way, I could kid myself I was helping to support my mother or something, see?” He turned to her, his big face pale. “Because another thing I figured out last night was that the best thing that could happen to me if I’m going to have to stay in this place”—and his tone suggested that he had yet to face this fact—“is that I go nuts. I mean, really honest-to-God mentally ill. Then maybe I won’t care no more, and get a big bang out of square dancing with all my buddies.”
“Ernie, please listen.”
He shook his head, masochistic now, determined to have it out with himself. “It wouldn’t be so hard,” he muttered. “If people ain’t nuts when they come in to this place, they sure as hell must be by the time they get out. You can’t keep company like this and not have some of it rub off.” He nodded bitterly at an old woman across the room who was remarking at the top of her voice upon the fact that staff members had no right to occupy themselves with just one patient, when other patients such as herself needed their pillows straightened behind their heads. “See that,” he said. “She knows I like to talk to you, need to talk to you just to keep from going under, and she’s going to do her best to pull me down there with the rest of them. Well, she’ll make it yet.”
On the River Styx Page 10