Wallace hands Frederick the two tablets in a paper cup and waits for him to swallow.
5
Professor Schultz did not always hear the sounds that he now catalogs in his room at the Harvard Club: his daily work, his life’s great labor. As a child, like any, he assumed his parents’ tongue was the only way to speak. Perhaps he heard fragments of things, just faint whisperings. Perhaps he turned his head to a sound he thought he had heard, but on second thought realized he had not. In his whole, happy childhood in Bolbirosok, Lithuania (or Poland or Germany, depending on the year, or one’s perspective), Schultz perhaps discerned just the faintest rumblings of this hidden language at the edges of his perception. But it was not until his mother’s death that, for the first time, Schultz perceived a tongue unlike any other, the sounds that things made to him directly, unobscured by human speech.
When he was a boy, Schultz and his mother had a closeness that other mothers envied and other boys ridiculed. Schultz and his mother had been as two parallel lobes of a single functioning mind, until, one June day, the half that was his mother vanished. That afternoon, on a walk back from the well in the rain, Schultz’s mother had carelessly crossed the Milavetz Road, a dirt path primarily used by farmers and their horses. She had crossed the road, oblivious to the motorist from Vilnius, out for a weekend joyride with his girlfriend, exploring the back roads with teenage velocity. It had been as simple and stupid as that: she was struck. She was killed.
The sounds had begun almost immediately, at her funeral, the torn pockets of the grieving crying out with their own sh-rook, the rabbi’s beard emitting a ffff. Schultz had not been worried, not for his sanity, and not for his hearing. Whatever these sounds were, they sutured, at least temporarily, the unbearable gap that had suddenly opened, with his mother’s death, between the world and him. The vast distance of his mourning, a vast silence that separated him from others. Cococo, the wooden slats of a floor called out to him. Bleee, a crow’s abandoned feather said. He had not yet begun to comprehend what he heard; he was simply glad for the sounds, the small compensation. Four months later, his father, Moshe, finding no equal compensation, one morning left for work at the bookshop he owned, bypassed the shop, and walked instead to the river, to the tree under which his wife and he had first kissed, and hanged himself from a wide, low branch.
Thereafter, when the people of Bolbirosok tried to speak with the seventeen-year-old orphan, they grew increasingly concerned as Schultz would either not answer them or answer them with words that were not quite words. But how could Schultz be expected to attend to conversation in that restrained language? The world had begun its own conversation with him; daily, more things revealed their sounds. With each step, his pants told him of their motion. Each sympathetic face spoke with something other than its human voice. The hair of Irit Mendelsohn, the girl he had always loved from afar, made a string of vowels, like wind passing through barley.
As fate or chance would have it, over the years that followed, Schultz lost a great many things, more than one might expect any person to bear. Each loss, however, seemed to allow more and more sounds. And it was not until he had lost everything—his parents, his wife, the town of his childhood, his career, his freedom—that he could begin to perceive the true names of all things. He has suffered greatly, he knows, but he also suspects that this suffering was absolutely necessary, that if he still maintained all his human relations, with all those exchanges spinning out in their common words, noise would have obscured the other language he is now able to catalog.
The universe is a text, Irit’s father once told him. An unending text, in which all is written in living words.
Schultz remains uncertain if the language he perceives is a part of a text authored by some higher mind, or if it is merely the true and natural sound of things; he does not know if it is fate or chance that has brought him this far. But he knows all that has happened to him has been essential for his revelation.
Schultz has focused his morning energy on the specific sounds emitted by each pen in his jar, tuning out, as much as he can, the sound rising from the east. But now he lets himself listen. It is like a single syllable screamed by a baby who is just learning the word for want. WAWAWAWA, the storm says.
6
Instead of circumnavigating the Depression’s lip, as the senescent and catatonic do, Frederick and his escort, one of the interchangeable old ladies, pass straight through the center, climbing the slope that ascends to Ingersoll. At the far side of the Depression, Frederick asks if they could pause for a cigarette, and the nurse agrees, but only if she can have one too. As Frederick leans over to offer her a light, he is careful to avoid the fresh dollop of cow excrement deposited there, an offering from a sacred bovine.
At the far side of the Depression, Frederick glimpses Marvin Foulds, descending from his cabin. Today, it appears, Marvin has taken perhaps his most outrageous persona, a Carmen Miranda–inspired Latin singer, supposedly named Mango Diablo. Marvin has tied a bedsheet about his slouching fifty-year-old body, tethered coconut shells over his sagging breasts, and now makes his way toward his daily meeting with Wallace by leading an imagined conga line—his fourteen other personae, perhaps? Frederick turns to the nurse, who peers at Mango, scrutinizing without apparent judgment, as if he is a television melodrama set before her.
Frederick whistles, cigarette smoke corkscrewing from his lips.
Geez. Talk about setting the bar, he says. Next time I go nuts, I’ll have to get more creative about it.
A fascinating case, isn’t it? the nurse says evenly.
Mango Diablo disappears into Upshire, and Frederick turns his attention eastward. From that height, he can see beyond the treetops, beyond the squat, complacent buildings of Belmont to the sleepy, tweedy city of Boston. Frederick thinks of when his parents drove him into Boston for the first time. He will never forget his first glimpse of it. At that distance, similar to the distance from Mayflower, the city had appeared before him as metonymy for his entire adult future: a place of human industry and sophistication waiting to receive him. But here, from this canted, elevated angle, it seems a different city.
Frederick looks to the horizon beyond Boston’s harbor. The regal day proceeds spectacularly, unaware of the wretched throngs it passes. It was a day much like this one, every bit as obliviously flawless, three weeks before, that ended with this hospitalization. Dr. Wallace often tries to speak with Frederick of what may have led to that night: of his stresses, of his failures, of his frustrations in both marriage and career. Yes, Frederick acknowledges, perhaps they all played some role, all part of that invisible calculus of motive and explanation that we cannot ever entirely deduce. Wallace and the other men of Ingersoll have asked Frederick to recall that night many times, but the truth is that he has little to say about it. The truth is that his actions that night felt no more serious—perhaps even less serious—than those of the hundred nights that had preceded it. That night had culminated, as had so many nights, in an electric two or three hours, in which the bourbon he used to medicate his agitation conflated with the energy his agitation opened.
In the long history of his electric states, Frederick has been seized by many notions; much of what he has thought and done has felt to him—still feels to him, even in sober states—poetic, radiant. Some nights, he would insist Katharine put on a dress, and he would take her dancing. Other nights, he would gather the men from his office for an impromptu poker game, which rapidly transformed into an impromptu concert, with him singing to them all. That night, the one with which his present is so obsessed, was merely another notion that he persists—no matter what anyone says—in finding, in a profound way, hilarious. He had been bored, with all those dull and self-righteous relatives and friends, and he had wanted to scandalize them, entertain the few among them who thrilled to such transgressions. Once, such behavior had thrilled even Katharine, hadn’t it?
That night, drunk, he had remembered one of the most popular spectacle
s he’d performed for his friends in college: without warning, one sophomore evening, he had stripped himself of all clothes and run a lap around fraternity row. Electric and seduced by this memory, Frederick had done it again, or something like it. Out he marched, from the cottage that night, wearing nothing but George Carlyle’s raincoat. And then up Providence Road to Route 109, where he opened the coat to each passing car, making of his body a carnal punch line.
He had done it again, assuming it would conclude as it had twenty years before: with hysterical laughter and a few comical expressions of disdain. Perhaps, at worst, the memory of the incident would earn a placement at the top of his regretful, hung-over inventory of misdeeds the next morning. Instead, as the next morning came, Frederick was bound, literally and figuratively, for the Mayflower Home, spending the final hour of the night and the first of the day in the backseat of a New Hampshire state police vehicle. But it was only after Frederick had sobered and arrived at Mayflower that every moment began to feel gravid with consequence. He had been perplexed then, wanted only to accommodate, to downplay, to be amenable. He had simply believed, even when they arrived at the Mayflower Home, even when he signed his own admission papers, that all could be and would be reversed. Frederick could not have imagined an act as inconsequential, as utterly frivolous, as flashing two old ladies on a small country road in New Hampshire would have a resonance measured in years (indeed, in generations). How could he have? A few inches of a raincoat’s material held one direction at one moment, it seems, has permanently altered his remaining years on this planet.
A cow walks before Frederick and the nurse, offers a skeptical gaze, and moves on. The nurse tells Frederick she needs to get back to help out with checks.
Frederick knows what awaits him in Ingersoll: another Miltown haze, men’s screams, and the smoky, greasy drabness, like a bowling alley in the midafternoon. When he is inside his room, when his mind has adjusted to his place, he will be able to bear it. But still, each time he returns, it is an only slightly dulled reenactment of the morning he was first led into Ingersoll. For there they are now, passing through the ward’s front doors, confronted with the same screams that greeted Frederick that first morning. The same catatonics clutching the common room’s corners, either silenced by or enraged at their private sounds and visions. The same airless corridor; to open a window a massive undertaking, given the cages, the locks. The same cigarette vapors, clinging to the men like their madness, always visible, harmful, emanating. Once back to his room, the same crush of solitude, loneliness not merely a concept or a feeling, but a palpable physical presence. It is all the same, except for the awareness he possesses now that he did not, somehow, when he was first admitted.
The morning he had signed those forms, Frederick had seen his admission as a simple, if embarrassing, way to avoid police charges. It then seemed a choice between a stint at the local lockup or a few days in the nuthouse. He did not understand—no, not for another week, until Wallace, after Frederick’s repeated demands, finally put his questions about Frederick’s marriage and his mother on hold to answer him directly. Because the police had brought him there, Frederick had signed a modified version of the voluntary admission form. A modification that meant that his leaving Mayflower would require the approval of the psychiatrist in chief, who presently seemed to have no interest in his speedy exit. Frederick had given his freedom over to something far worse than the judicial system. Here, his psychiatrist was judge and jury, the case on trial, his sanity. And what recourse? Other patients have told Frederick that he could attempt a plea for his release from the board of directors, a patrician-aloof set that mindlessly defers to the judgments of the psychiatrists they have hired. Frustrated with their legal obligation to attend these hearings, the board reportedly accomplishes nothing more than an ongoing demonstration of their annoyance: a nearly flawless record of denied appeals.
Frederick is drowsy again; the Miltown has settled into the crevices of his brain, and he shifts back to his bed, for the afternoon sequel to the morning’s Miltown paralysis. For a while, even with twenty milligrams of tranquilizer cycling through him, it is hard to drift to sleep. Every time his eyelids begin to descend, he is jolted back into grinding awareness by another scream.
7
It is night now. The men have had their final meal of the day. In an hour, during the final checks of their shift, the nurses will dispense the nightly dosing, sleeping pills for all, mixed with stronger sedatives for some. Most of the men in Ingersoll register this as merely another night, cannot know the horror that awaits them, a horror that will alter, in significant ways, the texture of their daily lives on the ward. The most observant, however, have noticed that the rain has begun, softly, to tick at the windows, beyond the cages that separate window from room. But even they cannot know the storm’s magnitude or what it will deliver. The storm clouds, like surreptitious Trojans, have slipped in under the cover of night, no one suspicious after the gift of that complacently beautiful day. For the most part, the men are restful now, some even in a rare festive mood, plotting a small improvised party that will soon commence in Lowell’s room, marking the occasion of the four bottles of scotch a few visiting students brought him as a gift.
(Cocktails on the men’s ward of the mental hospital! This is how it is, in this era that now draws to a close.)
The first bolt of lightning to reach Belmont speaks its name. Stanley peals manic laughter. Lowell says something in a language the others cannot understand. A limb of an oak tree snaps near Upshire Hall, the Harvard Club, where Professor Schultz registers the sound with normal human perception, and also with his strange form of awareness, the sound cracking through both. The gabbing electricity in the clouds above, each raindrop a fading scream, the wind murmuring like Jews reading the Torah, but garbled and at much greater volumes. All of this, nearly deafening, will soon find echo in the normal human register. But this is not what concerns Schultz. The tumult is not what prompts Schultz to relinquish his pen, not what drives him to clutch his ears, forgetting it is not his ears that receive these sounds.
• • •
As every night, James Marshall carefully wheels himself toward the bureau drawer that contains his flag’s box, removes the box, sets it on his lap, and then, in deliberate vectors, points himself toward the door. He moves slowly, as he must, excited motion making his wheelchair veer to the walls. He must be deliberate now. Something foreign and unbearable has claimed an essential part of him.
In Lowell’s room, the last of Mayflower’s patient cocktail parties is at full tilt. The rich brown contents of the four bottles of Glenfiddich 12 splash around in each of the room’s fifteen glasses. Marvin Foulds, now in the persona of Guy DeVille, a foppish (perhaps, judging from his behavior around the men, homosexual) French poet, spouts off Rimbaud to Lowell, who corrects his French. A rarity: there are even women at this party, a special privilege before their release. Ruth, a pyromaniac housewife from Wenham, and the beautiful Brenda Logan, whose father patented some crucial alloy used on high-speed airplanes, whose reason for hospitalization seems little more than avid late-adolescent sexuality. Dr. Wallace is not present to witness the irony of Brenda celebrating her pronounced recovery by drinking too much whiskey and placing her hands upon Frederick and Lowell and others as well, in her masterful, just vaguely lascivious way. Other than the occasional glower as Brenda moves her attention among the men of the room—that and Stanley’s unintelligible conversation with invisible guests—the spirit is convivial, the cocktails temporarily eclipsing the men’s interminable, listless days.
Outside: the bluster, summertime cracking and breaking. The rain is driven horizontally and at such speeds one might not even recognize it as rain, one might perceive only a particularly lashing wind and come in wet and know there must have been rain.
Marshall wheels past the open door of the party. None but a nurse notices him. The nurse, however, only admires his dedication, seeing to the flag’s lowering in such h
ostile weather. She is glad to see he wears his poncho. She does not know that, underneath it, he conceals his folded bedsheet.
When Marshall cracks ajar the front door, it is an invitation for the wind, and the door slams open the rest of the way with a bang that makes the partygoers startle and giggle, would take the door clean from the hinges had it not been reinforced for the security of patients and staff. Marshall reaches the ramp, and descends.
As Marshall approaches the flagpole, rain glances off the curvature of his bald head. Marshall looks up: the flag at the pole’s top is nearly invisible in the storm.
Then, with the assistance of his mouth, Marshall pulls on the glove necessary to manipulate the thin, lacerating metal cable. Even though he is one-handed, the hospital must buy Marshall these gloves in pairs, and he has run through a considerable number, the wire having burned straight through and badly cut him several times.
Marshall is untouched by fear as he lowers the flag. Is this the calm of a man who has been blown apart by Nazi ammunition and survived, or only the calm of a man who has claimed that final power? Even in the chilling winds, he does not waver as he reaches his one arm to unhook the flag. Soon it is folded into the box in his lap.
With the dexterity born from years of one-limbed existence, Marshall locates the clip that binds the line’s two ends and unfastens it. In the wind, the unbound line comes to sudden life, bucking against the pole like a cobra grasped by its tail. It nearly lashes his cheek but just misses.
James Marshall, the Amputation Artist of Mayflower, has now settled into the execution of his masterwork, and he is careful to attend to all the details. With his one hand, he manages to pull the line through the loop at the pole’s summit and lets it fall next to him. He feeds the slack through the glove of his hand until again he locates, at its end, the two clips to which he has so devotedly fastened and unfastened his flag. He removes the folded bedsheet from beneath his poncho. With simple double knots—he pauses to wonder if he should spend the time on a knot more elaborate, then decides it is enough, it will hold—he ties the four corners of his sheet to the fasteners, two corners to each clip. And then what was a bedsheet and a slack flag line has become something between a kite and a sail.
The Storm at the Door Page 4