The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  In time, Latha was summoned to Dr. Silverstein’s office. He did not serve any food or drink. He was a man who looked like he must have lived in Europe for years and studied with big-name doctors. He looked like a big-name doctor himself, and was almost handsome. He shook hands with her, and told her his name. She could see his name printed on a whole bunch of diplomas hanging on the walls. “Nurse Richter tells me you can actually talk,” he said to her. She nodded but was unable to demonstrate the power of speech. There was something about him that intimidated her. He wasn’t unkind, but just too commanding. If he had asked her for fellatio right then and there she would have done her best to act upon his request. He tapped the folder on his desk and said, “I know all the basic facts about you, so I won’t bother with questions you’ve already answered for my colleague Dr. Meddler. Did you make any progress in your therapy with him?” Latha shook her head. “No? He says that he was able to get you to say a few words one time. So there’s nothing organically wrong with your tongue or vocal chords. The reason you were transferred to D Ward was not your muteness but the opposite: following a visit from your sister, you began to shout and roar in a disturbing manner.”

  When she said nothing, he gave her a pencil and tablet, on which she wrote, “I begged my sister to get me out of this place, but she wouldn’t.”

  “The reason,” Dr. Silverstein said, “was that she felt you would be frightening to her baby.”

  “SHE’S NOT HER BABY!” Latha shrieked. “SHE’S MY BABY!”

  The doctor smiled, which wasn’t an appropriate thing to do. “Can you lower your voice and tell me why you think it’s your baby?”

  Latha pointed at the folder on his desk and shouted, “IT’S ALL IN THERE! THE WHOLE SAD STORY!” She wanted to keep her voice down, but she was angry and upset. At least she prompted the doctor to open her folder and leaf through it, reading here and there. Latha realized that she was breathing too fast and too hard and she tried to gain control of herself. But her nerves were frayed, and Nurse Richter came to her cot to tell her that she would have to keep on wearing the camisole for several more days, at least.

  Chapter twenty-one

  Even Rachel, who thought it wasn’t nice to restrain Latha in that strait-jacket, had to be restrained, but with thick ropes tying her down to her cot, where she could lift her head enough to carry on a constant conversation with camisoled Latha. One of the orderlies who tied the ropes on Rachel, or held her down while others tied the ropes on her, was a male, clearly, and Rachel began to regale her new friend with stories about Stud Stanley, as she called him. He was the ward’s handyman and jack of all trades. Several women who had tried to seduce him had learned that he had been told never to yield to any approaches, on penalty of being sent back to the men’s Ward B, from whence he had originated. But he had a key to the utility closet, and could arrange assignations therein, making his partners promise never to tell, on penalty of being sent to E Ward, where mythomaniacs were kept. Of course they had told, at least to their sisters, but the news had never got back to the staff, except to Nurse Auel, the night nurse, who was one of his steadies. Latha got a good look at him when he was helping tie Rachel to her cot. Stanley wasn’t bad looking, but he was heavy-lidded and seemed to be enormously tired, as if any expenditure of energy would collapse him. Latha couldn’t help having fantasies about him and about that utility closet. As far as she was concerned, he was the only man in the world, except for Dr. Silverstein, and her experience with Dr. Meddler had made her swear off all doctors.

  Nurse Auel was something else. Where the day nurse, Alice Richter, was a pretty redhead with a pleasant demeanor, Nurse Auel was, as they would say up home at Stay More, forked, meaning not just feisty but white-livered and brazen. She thought the world revolved around her and belonged to her. In her first conversation with Latha, she had said, “Just keep out of my way. You may think you’re a beauty queen, but you’re just shit to me.” Latha had no intention of getting in her way. Even though the frigid winter nights made her yearn for another blanket, she didn’t convey this wish to the nurse.

  Latha had no intention of anything, come to think of it. She didn’t even have any notion of coming to think of anything. Back in the autumn in B Ward she had learned the best way to make the days pass was simply to cease thinking. She remembered seeing folks at Stay More sitting for hours on their porches and she had wondered if any thoughts were going through their heads—she had long since discovered that it is quite possible and convenient to keep any thought from passing through your head, all the livelong day.

  Eventually they untied Rachel and took the camisole off Latha, and the two girls were able to stand together at a window and watch a snowfall. It was a heavy snowfall, almost a blizzard, which covered everything in no time, and the whiteness seemed to purify the gray solemnity of the world.

  “Almost makes you think there might be some kind of a God up there,” Rachel said, “who wants to cover up his mess now and then.”

  “Covering it up don’t make it better,” Latha said. She noticed the pond, a sizeable body of water at the lower end of the asylum’s campus, which had iced up and was now covered with a smooth blanket of snow. She wondered if it was stocked with fish, and whether the inmates could fish in it. It had been so very long since she’d gone fishing, she’d probably forgotten how to thread a hook with a worm.

  As she stared longingly at the pond, the snow and ice melted and the trees burst into leaf, and flowers shot up all along the banks of the pond. White was replaced with green. If white is pure, green is fresh. She shook her head to clear it.

  Rachel said, “Welcome to D, which is for Demented. You don’t look demented to me, but you probably drowned your kid brother, didn’t you?” Latha shook her head. “Then you must’ve peed in the punchbowl at the prom? No? Then you must’ve tried to jack off the minister of your church during a baptism. No, wait, that’s what I did. So it wasn’t you. But just what did you do to get yourself declared demented, darling?”

  “I lost my voice in the presence of unkind people,” Latha said, feeling dizzy. She needed to sit down, so she sat on the nearest unoccupied cot and thought, At last I really have lost my mind. She asked Rachel, “What day is this, do you know?”

  “Unlike some people I could name, I don’t have a calendar, so I couldn’t tell you exactly, but I would guess it’s the somewhere around the middle of May.”

  “But just a moment ago that pond out there was frozen over,” Latha said.

  “And if you’ll wait a minute, it will freeze over again. That’s the way the world works, or refuses to work.”

  “But hadn’t you already asked me what I had done to get myself declared demented?”

  “Just a moment ago,” Rachel said. “And if you’ll wait a minute, I will ask it again.”

  “But I think I really am demented, now,” Latha said. “I don’t know what time of year it is, or what day, or what hour, or whether I’m going or coming.”

  “Take it up with Dr. Kaplan,” Rachel said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Our sweet busybody nutcracker,” Rachel said.

  “What happened to Dr. Silverstein?”

  Rachel stared at her. “You really have been out of it. Silverstein was fired several months ago. Don’t you remember how heart-broken I was?”

  Latha was sorry that she would have to keep reminding herself that her dear friend Rachel was not of sound mind herself. But she was at least right about the doctor and about the month, which Dr. Kaplan told her was May. The twentieth. Dr. Kaplan reminded her that it was the day of her monthly appointment with him. She was sorry she had forgotten. He had the same office that Dr. Silverstein had had, and on the wall were the same diplomas that Dr. Silverstein had had, only they had Dr. Kaplan’s name on them. And he too did not serve anything to eat or drink, other than a glass of water, but he wanted to be sure that she was comfortable. “Let’s pick up where we left off last time,” he said. “You were telling
me about your cleithrophobia.”

  “My what?” she wrote.

  “Cleithrophobia. Fear of being locked in an enclosed place. In my study of phobias, I find that very interesting in view of the fact that you say the people of your town never locked doors or anything.”

  “I don’t recall telling you that,” she wrote. “In fact, I don’t recall telling you anything. I don’t recall ever meeting you before.”

  He laughed and gestured at her folder. “Well, we’ve already determined your doxophobia, your acousticophobia, your harpaxophobia, and your agateophobia.”

  “The only one I caught was the one with the harp in it. What’s that?”

  “Fear of being robbed. Understandable in view of your dreadful experience in the hold-up at the bank.”

  “I told you about that?”

  “Yes indeed,” he said, and lifted a thick sheaf of papers from her folder. “You’ve written down most of the major events of your life so far. We’ve established almost all your phobias and eliminated the rest. I think you’ve probably got hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is simply fear of long words.”

  “I’ve also got a fear of psychotherapists,” she wrote.

  “Ah, iatrophobia,” he said. “I suspected that.”

  “But I’m telling you, I can’t remember anything that has happened to me since last January.”

  “Amnesia is a common side effect of your condition.”

  “What is my condition?” she wanted to know.

  He sighed. “If you don’t remember anything we talked about for the past several months, then it would be hard for me to repeat over again my explanation of your diagnosis.”

  “Well, whatever it is, how long do I have to stay in D Ward?”

  “You don’t like it here?”

  “Nurse Richter is nice,” she allowed.

  “Nurse Richter left us in February. With Dr. Silverstein.” He reported this news distastefully, as if there had been a scandal involved.

  “Too bad. Then Rachel Rafferty is the only person here I care about.”

  He stared at her. “I thought we had established that this ‘Rachel Rafferty’ is just someone you had invented, and you have agreed to let go of her.”

  “Wait a minute,” she wrote. “I might have a great imagination, but I couldn’t imagine a woman this tall—” she held her hand high above her head “—who gave her preacher a knob job!”

  Dr. Kaplan chuckled. “Imagination is a compelling thing. Especially in the minds of the delusional.”

  Latha hung her head and began to cry. “Please don’t kill Rachel.”

  He held out his hands as if he’d never touched Rachel. “I don’t have the power to do that,” he said. “All I can do is help you overcome figments who interfere with your grasp of reality.”

  Latha jumped up and ran out of the office, determined to find Rachel and prove to the stupid psychotherapist that she very much existed. She went all over D Ward, and whenever she saw an inmate who looked reasonably lucid, she asked if she had seen Rachel Rafferty. But all she got was an assortment of very blank looks. On one floor of the D Ward building, she discovered a chapel, which she had not known existed. She went inside and found a minister, or priest, or whatever, and asked him. He said, “My child, there is no such person in D Ward.” Latha decided he might be the same preacher that Rachel had given the hand job to, and thus he wasn’t going to admit she existed. She found herself crying again. The minister took her arm and said, “Let’s get you back to where you belong.” And he led her back to the dormitory. She sat on the edge of her cot for days, weeks, months and pondered just how it could be that someone as real as Rachel had been only make-believe. The day came when she realized that if she had been persuaded to do away with her best friend, then she could just as easily re-create Rachel, and she said aloud, “Rachel, where are you? Please come back.” She waited for days, weeks, months, but Rachel did not return. She decided she would just have to try to find another woman to replace Rachel as her best friend. She got up from the cot and went around to all the other cots, and into the dining hall and kitchen and laundry room, and back into that chapel, and looked closely at each and every person, and even spoke to several. Not a blessed one of them looked as sound and sensible as Rachel. Many of them were in strait-jackets and were foaming at the mouth and inclined to curse her. Others looked as if they didn’t know she was there. Others looked at her with homicide in their eyes. A teenaged girl mistook her for her sister. An even younger girl thought Latha was her mother. At Christmastime, Latha joined in the singing of carols, but most of the others could not carry a tune. A group of well-dressed ladies from the Little Rock Civic Club appeared with armloads of presents, mostly cast-off clothes and various cosmetics that the nurses instantly confiscated, and the Club ladies looked very uncomfortable, even afraid, and they did not remain very long. One lady said to Latha, giving her a gift, “Here. This ought to make you look as lovely as you are.” Latha thanked her and took the gift out of its wrappings and opened it. It was a taffeta ball gown. Latha had never seen a dress so fancy, nor ever gone to a ball, so she took off her gray gown with the stenciled letters PROPERTY OF ARKANSAS STATE LUNATIC ASYLUM on the back, and put on the ball gown. There were no mirrors in the place, so she couldn’t see what she looked like, but she felt like stepping out to a fancy dance. An idea suddenly struck her, and she caught up with the group of Civic Club ladies as they were leaving the building, and walked along behind them, right out of the building! But it was freezing out there. “Aren’t you cold, dear?” a lady said to her. “And you don’t even have any shoes.”

  “She’s one of them!” another lady said.

  “Let’s help her escape,” another lady said, and several other ladies said, “Yes!” and “Let’s!”

  “Let’s get the poor thing into a car before she freezes to death.”

  “That would be against the law, to help her escape.”

  “But it’s Christmastime!”

  “Let’s hurry.”

  “No, we’d better just take her back where she belongs.”

  “Imogene, you are a heartless wretch!”

  “Where’s your sense of propriety?”

  “Where’s your sense of kindness?”

  The whole group of ladies stood there in the freezing breeze arguing about whether or not to take Latha with them. Latha kept herself warm by figmenting in detail the scenario of being taken to live in a fine mansion in Little Rock, meeting and falling in love with the handsome son, becoming his bride and bedmate and lover, lover, lover. His name was Ronald. She called him Ronny. The debating ladies were almost equally divided between those who wanted Latha to live happily ever after and meet Ronald, and those who wanted to return her to D Ward. One of the latter said, “Let me remind you that we undertook this mission with the clear understanding that we would not intermingle with the lunatics or become involved with them.” By her dress and demeanor Latha determined that she was probably the president of the club.

  Ronny died in an automobile accident, and in her grief Latha was committed to the state asylum, where she languished in D Ward.

  Her bad case of sniffles she attributed to her mourning for poor Ronny, or poor Rachel, or both, but as it turned out her sniffles were the result of being exposed to subfreezing wind during her brief spell of freedom in the company of the Civic Club ladies. The sniffles developed into a fever, which Nurse Auel reluctantly took with a thermometer and gleefully declared that her temperature was 108° and that she had better go to the infirmary. Latha had not been aware that there was an infirmary when she was in B and C Wards. It was a huge room occupying nearly an entire floor, and every bed was filled. Latha had to wait a whole day until one of the patients died and was carted off before she could have a bed. And then she waited another day before a nurse came and took her temperature and declared it was 109° and another day after that before a doctor finally looked at her and listened to her chest with a stethoscope and d
eclared that she had a severe case of pneumonia. He didn’t hold out much hope for her, but gave her some pills to take, and told her to stay in her bed until she died or got better, whichever came first. Her fellow patients, the hundreds of them, were too physically sick to be mentally sick, so there wasn’t a lot of howling, moaning, screeching, or cursing. Latha reflected that they might be crazy but they were smart enough to figure out that by being committed to the infirmary you escaped commitment to the nuthouse.

  The assistants to the nurses were imbeciles, who brought the patients their food twice a day and emptied their bedpans once a day, and bathed them once a week. Latha discovered that the imbecile assigned to her was able to talk, and her name was Susie. She reminded Latha of Rindy, not the grown-up Rindy who had eloped to Pettigrew with that Tuttle boy but the Rindy she’d known in the first grade, very pretty and smiley but dumb as a post. Latha told Susie the story of finding the kitten she’d called “Cutie-Pie Face” in C Ward, and Susie was delighted. “I had a kitty when I was…when I was…when I was…” Susie tried to say, but Latha never learned when she was what.

  Whenever Susie brought her food on a tray or came to empty the bedpan, she would hang around, and sometimes sit on the floor beside Latha’s bed. Susie was twenty-eight, some years older than Latha, but she had never been to school, and she really didn’t know much. Latha told her stories, not ghost stories because those greatly distressed her, but tall tales from the Ozarks, and fables, and simple yarns. Latha’s temperature had steadily gone back to normal, and after a couple of weeks she was feeling fine, but nobody said anything about sending her back to the D dormitory, and even the food was better in the infirmary than in D’s dining hall, so Latha made the best of it, and enjoyed the daily visits from Susie.