An architecture aficionado, Professor? Lowell asks.
For this tower, we all should be, Schultz says.
Schultz’s wonder for the tower puzzles Frederick. Sure, the new tower is an impressive architectural feat. Impressive, like their new psychiatrist in chief, in its arrogance, in its steely confidence of its soaring newness, history be damned. But to Frederick, as he suspects it must be to a great number of New Englanders, it is also a great disrespect of glass and steel to the city of decorative curlicues and Colonial ornamentation that has taken four hundred years of development, and continues to reward one strolling its streets with strange surprises, architectural oddities both miniature and major. The tower, in the new International Style, rises over the town houses, cobblestones, and esplanades like an ascending middle finger, courtesy of the new postwar America. It is the insane vision of academics, dreaming of conceptual cities that bear almost no relation to the cities in which people actually live. Frederick does not see how Schultz could love it.
Making it, by a large margin, the tallest building in New England—the television says.
Schultz watches, his pen temporarily still over the journal he clutches. Then the segment ends, shifts to weather, and again Schultz’s fountain tip skates with its normal velocity as he ambles back to his room, several times nearly colliding with the wall.
• • •
The afternoon rather suddenly gives way to night—fall is here, unmistakably now—and the trees out the window become moody charcoal sketches of themselves; the Colonial grandeur of the other halls reduces to a constellation of tungsten lamps, burning dimly. The lunchtime dosing of Miltown has begun to dissipate, and it feels to Frederick that something in him has suddenly come uncoiled. In his journal, Frederick manages two paragraphs before he feels himself tripping over language, accelerating in nervous energy. He writes:
All I wanted was to convince you and the girls, that something was possible. That hard work and love and reason would be enough to make of our lives something that nothing could ever take from us entirely. I tried to be as you pleaded with me to be, as parents must be. Consistent. I tried never to betray my faltering.
I remember one night, in Graveton, I had been drinking. You had told the girls I was at work, but the truth was that some darkness had opened again, as it always opens. And so I had tried to fill the chasm in my common, cowardly way, with bourbon. I don’t know when I came home, but I know it was not a normal hour. I had crashed the car, and I was bloody from it. It did not seem relevant to me. In fact maybe I wanted the pain, eclipsing what it did. But then it was Susie who came to the door. She pulled it open, and the father she had known had vanished. In Daddy’s place was a monstrous thing. It was the first time I knew, entirely, that I had failed. She looked at me and I knew she saw I was not myself, that there was no myself.
The two Crew Crew boys end their shift, switching off with a comically indolent boy—still a part-time philosophy student at Boston University, The Meaning of Meaning nearly always clutched in his left hand—and young Rita Weld, the only member of the staff to whom Frederick feels any human form of relation. Why deny it? It helps that she’s beautiful. Maybe not beautiful in a common way, not a photographical beauty, but one that yields and alters to the object of her engagement, her expressions mirroring with youthful empathy feelings you have become so accustomed to carrying around privately, unspeakably, that you had forgotten they might be known by others.
Well, hello there, Rita greets Frederick. You’re looking energetic.
Frederick realizes that he has been pacing, again and again, the few steps between the corridor walls.
Just feeling a little nervous, he surprises himself to admit. I don’t know what it is. Something about the night.
Unlike the cool, doltish Crew Crew boys, who seem to have taken the job for the simple sake of employment and the power their positions carry, Rita, Frederick suspects, has come to Mayflower for that other reason. She is that other breed of mental health worker, much more common among the old administration, quite common, Frederick remembers from friendships with aspiring psychiatrists when he was in graduate school, to the profession at large. Rita, he thinks, has come here for this proximity to madness. Maybe to learn something from madness but also, and more important, to learn how to keep herself from it. This, he thinks, is why she is the best nurse here, and also why she will not last.
Lucky for you, Rita says and lays a hand on his shoulder, as if that is simply how the staff touch patients, soon, you’ll get to swallow the knockout pill.
3
The Morlock call, the slop line, a silent and repellent dinner. And then the pills, with their unrefusable soporific demands.
An hour later, my grandfather has returned to his bed. He looks down at the length of his pitiful self. His pajama pants are hospital-issued; his socks poof awkwardly at the toes. A pathetic, moribund sight. A priest ought to be coming by any moment now to administer last rites. These are not the legs, not the feet, of a man in the middle of his life, at the peak of his responsibilities. These are the legs of an invalid.
Out the window, crows call faintly. Above the trees in screaming parabolas, bats arc through the twilight, angry for lack of flies. Condensation pearls on the window, foreshadowing the blinding fog that will claim Boston tomorrow, a prefiguration of winter.
Behind each thing is a demand for his attention, each thing pregnant with dark implications. Faced with the dark implications of everything, down to droplets of condensation, Frederick must think of something else.
He looks to Professor Schultz, muttering to himself, as ever. Frederick has deliberated for days now, even jotted down potential approaches in his notebook, carefully worded questions about linguistics and semiotics with which he might cajole his roommate into revealing something of his possibly deranged, possibly brilliant project, which might, in turn, reveal something of him. But now Frederick forgets his notes and just asks Schultz outright.
Shlomi, Frederick says, can I ask you what it is you’re working on?
Oh, just experimentation, mostly.
Frederick can see Schultz means this as an earnest reply, and wonders whether Schultz would be so forthright if not for Frederick’s intervention on his behalf in group that day. Frederick, proud of his little rebellion against Canon, likes to think that, before that afternoon, Schultz would have remained even more cryptic, flapping his hands and saying, Oh, work, work.
Experimentation for what exactly?
Ah, right, well—Schultz says, turning to Frederick. Frederick scrutinizes Schultz’s face for traces of his earlier despair. Perhaps it is there. Perhaps, but Frederick cannot find it behind his roommate’s sprightly, almost juvenile enthusiasm. Maybe Canon is onto something, at least when it comes to Schultz and his denials.
Soon I will be ready to make a formal explanation for everything, yes? Schultz says. For now, I can say it is a combined pursuit of linguistics and anthropology. A sort of verbal excavation, yes?
And then Schultz turns back to his journal. Like an exhausted toddler placed horizontally and falling immediately unconscious, he instantly resumes his work.
Frederick thinks of Schultz’s outburst in the group session. He thinks of Schultz standing there, like a strange conjurer, and wonders if truly he does conjure visions, wonders if now, in his scribblings and murmurs, Schultz is conjuring still. Maybe, Frederick thinks, it’s his family. Maybe they should all leave Schultz be, in this, this asylum he has found, one that looks like madness to others but allows him to impose another world, spoken in strange tongues, onto this unbearable one of time’s passage, chaos, irreversible loss.
Frederick closes his eyes and tries willfully to push the Miltown and the sleep medicine out of his awareness, and to pretend that the second pillow, between his elbows and curled knees, is his wife. For a moment, it seems he is nearly successful, and a wistful bliss tugs at his periphery.
4
There was some irony, Schultz re
cognized—or, rather, had recognized, back when such thoughts still interested him—that he managed to ascend into the rarefied airs of academe, and yet he never truly graduated from Bolbirosok’s humble yeshiva. Schultz had been only months from graduating when his father made of himself a gruesome fruit, dangling from the riverbank tree. Thereafter, Schultz’s private language grew louder by the day, muting the common words of his schoolwork. But Schultz had for so long excelled so far beyond his classmates that he had accumulated a certain academic currency at his yeshiva, sufficient, his empathic rabbi concluded, to purchase his early graduation. Schultz’s rebbe falsified the balance of Schultz’s grades, and when Schultz was recognized with the highest honors at the graduation ceremony, his classmates had to discipline themselves, with willful recollections of the horrors that had befallen him, in order to hold aside their jealousy and bitterness.
For the year that followed graduation, however, Schultz inspired no further envy. He sequestered himself in the little office in the rear of the bookshop. The shop was Schultz’s now, but only nominally. It was, more truly, now the domain of his father’s once part-time assistant, the aging widow Abrams, who had come out of her semiretirement to see to the store and to its babbling heir. Rarely traveling beyond the distance between his desk and bed, young Schultz required little physically from Abrams. But she did all she could, making him the meals he would half or one-third eat, changing his linens far more often than they needed changing. There seemed, to the widow, an inverse relationship between the physical and the emotional burdens Schultz imposed. Worried for Schultz’s welfare, she wished she had more to do for him with her hands. But Schultz required nearly nothing, had whittled his existence to a lean simplicity that exceeded monastic. While his former classmates caroused and drank and generally caused the sort of mischief of which the older generation is half-proud, the whole of young Schultz’s existence was now confined to the eighteen square meters of the shop’s back office, from which the widow could sometimes hear him speak in his nonsense language. His own private universe, bound in a stockroom.
At least he still reads, Abrams would reply when others inquired after Schultz’s well-being. And yet, the truth was what she witnessed rarely resembled reading. It is true that Schultz would sit before books, but he was often stooped over them so closely his eyelashes must have touched the pages. Sometimes, Schultz would hold the side of his head just over a book, as if reading with his ear rather than his eyes. And most disturbing of all: Schultz dissected the books with the blade of a letter opener and then tacked the excised pages to the walls of his room. When Abrams opened the door, the pages would rustle in waves, like the scales of some mythical, ineffable beast. It seemed Schultz was assembling a living thing, a room-creature that might, one morning, spring suddenly to life and devour them both.
Abrams solicited her fellow Bolbirosokers for help, and they tried their earnest best. The Mohel, Isaiah Kogen, of the generation that still believed in things such as the Evil Eye, performed a heartfelt round of rituals. Marion Levine, matriarch of Bolbirosok’s wealthiest family, concluded that the boy just needed some familial company, and several times brought Schultz along on her family’s outings. But as the teenage Levine children drank purloined wine, narrated their invented sexual escapades, and chased one another in the forest, Schultz only sat like Buddha upon a picnic blanket, muttering at whatever happened to be set before him. The Levine children begged their mother to cease her insistence upon the eerie boy’s company, and she soon capitulated. Of course Abrams brought Schultz to the town physician, but Dr. Dreyfuss’s efforts proved as unhelpful as any. Schultz, in his febrile enthusiasms, had always had a slightly elevated basal temperature, which Dr. Dreyfuss interpreted as a fever that refused to cease. The doctor had seen fever dreams provoke similar babble in others, and so he concluded, in his pseudoscientific way, that Schultz’s body had misinterpreted his grief as a foreign thing, an infection that must be fought against. Dreyfuss tried various measures to suppress Schultz’s fever—cold compresses, long immersions in the Bobir River, radical quantities of aspirin—all of which temporarily succeeded in bringing down Schultz’s temperature, but still his babble persisted. Schultz neither objected nor consented to these efforts; these external events were irrelevant, eclipsed by what engaged him within.
Dr. Dreyfuss, at least, was humble enough to recognize his failure. Dreyfuss summoned a young psychiatrist from Vilnius, who conducted with Schultz whatever semblance of an interview two men speaking in incompatible languages can have. After, it took some time for the physician to clearly delineate for Abrams the difference between the Evil Eye and schizophrenia.
Most Bolbirosokers, however, accepted Schultz’s condition as tragic, but natural in its way. Many were old enough to remember how the famine, in the last century, had displayed grief’s remarkable variety. Irretrievable loss, they knew, rendered some sullen, some perverse, some ecstatic, some psychotic. Grief was the floodwater that carved to a ravine whatever inherent strangeness creeked through a mind. Most accepted Schultz’s muttering as strange grieving, and said the boy needed only time.
Only Reb Menachem Mendelsohn, the peculiar Torah scholar, considered a grander explanation for Schultz’s strange obsessions and utterances. Intrigued by the young man’s behavior, Reb Mendelsohn went by the bookshop one afternoon. His daughter Irit, always curious about her complex and sullen classmate, came along for the visit and pretended to peruse the bookshelves as she stole furtive glances into the paper-shingled back room, where her father sat on the floor and attempted to converse with the boy.
Reb Mendelsohn asked Schultz many questions, which Schultz could not hear. To Reb Mendelsohn, Schultz occasionally seemed to attempt a reply, but the boy was not even aware he was speaking. Reb Mendelsohn, however, shuddered at the sounds that came from the boy’s lips. What was it, Mendelsohn had to wonder, that made him tremble? Was it simple pity for this grief-stricken boy, as cut off from words as an animal? Or was it the sounds themselves? What the boy muttered was obvious nonsense, and yet each noise seemed to resonate in some chamber deep within Mendelsohn’s own skull, like when the congregation chanted the Shema at Shul.
Can you try to tell me what you mean? Do you hear voices? Can you hear me? Mendelsohn asked. Schultz looked at Mendelsohn, and then, seemingly at random, mighty syllables suddenly burst forth, as if from laryngeal church bells hung in Schultz’s throat. At the end of his interview, Mendelsohn invited Schultz to his house as soon as he was feeling a little better. Schultz managed what seemed a shrug.
Then Reb Mendelsohn braced himself by the knees, stood, and turned from Schultz’s paper-flesh room. Schultz stood behind him and watched a warped vision of Reb Mendelsohn leave through the sagging, uneven glass of the stockroom window. The bookshop’s main room, as ever, chimed with its cleeeeeep name.
And then Schultz saw her. She belonged to his past, to that other territory he had left, populated by people who no longer resembled him. That other territory: he knew, abstractly, that he was from there, but he felt now that he had already spent a lifetime as an expatriate in his other place. But the sight of Irit, the girl he had loved once, was a door thrown open to some internal attic. In there, he was surprised to discover, the intricacies of his past were still stored. In this moment, it seemed possible to Schultz to return.
Schultz did not then need any word from the truer language that spoke only to him. There was only one word now, sufficient for what he felt. And it was only an ordinary word.
Irit, Schultz called, and she turned to him.
5
Halfway down Madhouse Hill, Canon pilots his Ford Edsel along the winding path that leads from his grand hospital to the squat postwar prefabs of middle-class Belmont. This moment in his evening is much like the first molecules of Miltown to reach his patients’ awareness: with stunning swiftness, the exhilaration of the day is undone. No chief of Mayflower now; he is just a man in a suit commuting home from work. At the far side of Belmont, w
here the land begins to rise again—he has been told that when the trees are bare in the winter he will be able to see his asylum—Canon will arrive at his new house. The home will be lit with the dim lamps his wife insists upon—Tiffany, they are lovely to look at, but transmit saloon light. His wife will make a display of her carelessness at his return, hardly nodding at him from her novel or from a telephone conversation. He will make a display of kindness, cheerily asking how he might help with dinner. She will flash him an angry glare. Both will know he makes these displays only to demonstrate supposed goodness; if she does not know, exactly, she must sense something of the affair by now, mustn’t she? The children will show little interest in Canon beyond his ability to fulfill their wants: did he bring any treats? Can they watch TV if they finish homework? Can they stay up until ten? In his high office on the high hill, Canon is, at all times, deliberate and decisive. All problems are identified, named, considered, and acted upon for swift resolution. In his home, intentions will remain unspoken, motives mystifying, and discussions always, always agitating.
The dim Tiffany light, the wifely glare, the children arguing over nothing. In anticipation of all this, Canon performs the mental act of transcendence he has nearly perfected since taking the office at Mayflower. As when he lies far from his wife in the bed they hardly share, as when his wife instructs him to watch (endure) The Mickey Mouse Club with his children, Canon resolves to be silently productive, considering potential problems presented in the day, and how he might resolve them. He thinks of how Truman in the boys’ ward was able to resume his self-mutilation with a cafeteria knife, and he decides to consider cardboard flatware. He thinks of the unending headache of the rusting Victorian pipes in Upshire and wonders if it might make more financial sense to gut the whole system and rebuild with proper plumbing.
The Storm at the Door Page 10