Yes.
Neither says anything. The moment is pulled flat and taut with opposing tensions, like the surface of a trampoline.
Yes, Frederick repeats. I understand.
Canon scrutinizes Frederick for a long moment. And then, quite suddenly, the architecture of Canon’s face gives way, requiring his hands for buttress.
Things are much more complicated than you think, Canon says. Just because people work here does not mean they don’t have problems of their own.
Frederick wants to rise from his mattress and beat Canon until Canon joins Frederick in his senselessness. He wants to embrace Canon and say, Yes, see? We are all flawed. I no more than you. Yes, I have also strayed as you have strayed. Yes, see? We are all subject to forces we cannot entirely explain. He wants to rage at Canon for the long months Frederick has already lost to Canon’s delusions.
But Frederick knows Canon cannot allow revelations of his own. No. All Frederick can do to restore his progress to freedom is to restore Canon to his simple story of doctor and patient, which Canon insists upon. And so, Frederick will later congratulate himself for what he says next, will later feel it was a significant accomplishment, given his state, drugged and shocked and thrown into solitary. Having lost Rita.
We were making progress, Frederick manages through the buzz of his emptied mind. But I think we can make even more.
Well. I’m glad that we agree.
5
Canon has fired one of his new employees for the first time: the orderly who, against protocol, allowed Frederick to come back to his office, a convenient excuse to dismiss the only other (half) witness. But still, Canon tells himself, that kid broke the rules, and in a place like this, rules are everything.
In The Mental Asylum, his near-canonical textbook, Canon writes at length of how strong leadership demands earnest contemplation of the worst possible outcomes. And so Canon now thinks, He will tell. Despite what he says, he will tell. Will people believe him? Likely, even the other men on Ingersoll will not. They will hear his story, spread his gossip, but everyone will know how Frederick enjoys undermining Canon. Still, even the rumor could be damaging, even an accusation like that could grant entropy traction, and then—as Canon has observed time and again in other institutions—chaos could spread with its own mad determination.
Canon returns to the office, which is still shameful with the memory of Frederick in the doorway, looking upon Canon with Rita. He will tell, Canon thinks. Or maybe not. And, anyway, no one here would believe him. Not entirely believe him, at least. The only people he could convince are well beyond the walls of Mayflower. In the two conversations Canon has had with Mrs. Merrill, he senses that she remains nearly as doubtful as her husband of Frederick’s need for hospitalization.
One of the sturdiest precepts in guiding delusional patients to reason is never to allow the delusion to be considered seriously by another. Any notion, given enough time and disregard, withers.
It is for the sake of the hospital, for all Canon hopes for his patients, but also for Merrill’s sake. His therapy, Canon now thinks, is not going as well as he has believed. In truth, he still senses a placating disingenuousness in Merrill’s confessions, senses that perhaps Frederick Merrill does not yet truly believe in this, the only way back to sanity, his family, his life.
Canon, the Freudian, the talker, has shot electricity through his patient. But is it not true that, when therapy is stalemated, as theirs has clearly become, the research suggests that electroconvulsive therapy can be profoundly helpful? Yes. There is still much work to be done. Merrill must continue here, until his delusions have withered.
And then there is Rita. The administrative maneuver is simple and obvious: he will transfer her to South Webster, a women’s hall. It was strange of him, perhaps a lapse of proper judgment, to allow her to remain the only woman assigned to Ingersoll. That is where she had wanted to be, Ingersoll housing her literary hero, Robert Lowell, and once the math genius John Nash as well. But Canon can no longer accommodate her fascination with poetry and genius; he has far greater concerns.
She did not look back, Canon thinks. When she fled Canon’s office, she did not turn back to read Canon’s face. Was this finality? She did not look back. She only, like Eve cast from the Garden, covered herself, worried with her own shame.
6
Two more rounds of ECT, another night in solitary. All a smeared perception of vague pain, the ECT performing a kind consideration, obliterating the memory of nearly all of it. It is two days later and, to his gratitude, Frederick has been restored to Ingersoll.
Whatever Canon’s intentions, an unintended consequence: the jolt has proved clarifying. Whereas, just days before, Frederick had calmed into the psychic fog that often precedes the boundless dark plains of his depression, he is energetic once more. His body is exhausted from the discomforts, from the dosages and the anxiety, but back in his room, he perceives his heightened sensitivities returning. An evening bird coos out the window; the breeze of the ceiling fan touches his flesh; his roommate scribbles his strange notions. The soft cries of Marvin Foulds, four doors down, are no ignorable madhouse ambience now; the cries transfer through the night, enter Frederick as agony. He is returning to his energy, but now it is tainted. It is like the lights in Times Square: electric and luminous, but also smeared and tarnished. The filthy streaks more prominent by contrast.
Frederick is grateful for the familiar chemical veil of the evening’s postprandial dosage settling over his awareness, is happy to surrender the lights and the tarnish, both growing more vivid. He is grateful that after his mind has been flushed with one hundred fifty volts, after he has spent forty-two hours in solitude, after he has spent two days considering that his time at Mayflower has again become interminable, that there in the Miltown and the darkness is his Katharine’s face, saying something to him.
What? he tries to ask. What’s that? She is muffled, but he knows what she has to say is urgent.
Louder, he says. It’s too noisy in here. I said it’s too loud! It’s too loud!
7
Schultz’s roommate has turned off the lights. Again, Schultz finds himself not tired, not in the slightest. How could he be? He is so close now.
• • •
When Schultz was eighteen, the world had begun to quiet again. Or else, at least, he had learned how to coexist with both human language and the other, truer language. The people of Bolbirosok smiled at his attempts at conversation, limited though they might have been. The other language continued to call to Schultz, but he knew that, if he wanted ever to capture the affection of Irit Mendelsohn, he couldn’t come to her muttering in some unknown tongue. For love, he would have to speak as she spoke.
This was still Bolbirosok as it once was; there were rules in place for such things. Schultz knew that the only way to Irit was through her father. And so, young Schultz, in the summer before he would leave for the University of Vilnius, accepted Reb Menachem Mendelsohn’s invitation, with the pretense of curiosity about his strange mode of Torah studies. More truly, he wanted only the proximity to Irit that an audience with Reb Mendelsohn would afford. To this end, Schultz found great success, for Irit was her father’s daughter, their fascinations shared. Each time he visited the Mendelsohn house, he was led to the study, where father and daughter sat, marking Torah scrolls with red pens.
The Torah we have is not the True Torah, Reb Mendelsohn told Schultz. The True Torah has been lost to us, but it is concealed within this text we are given. The True Torah would be illegible to us, written in the language that was lost at the fall of Babel. And it is up to us, the Chosen People, to resurrect it.
Reb Mendelsohn and Irit showed Schultz how the two of them sought strange numerical connections between Hebrew characters, how they tried rolling around the Hebrew words in their mouths, seeking a revelation of the true lost language. The True Torah, Reb Mendelsohn said, is not just a text, or at least not as you would think of a text. The True Torah is
the universe, or rather, the mold from which the universe was formed. The language of the True Torah is the opposite of how we think of language. Instead of words attached inadequately to the things they try and fail to describe, the things themselves—you, me, Irit, this house, Bolbirosok, this entire world—try and fail to grasp at this lost, true language. The division and incompleteness we feel is all things yearning for the words that made us, but are now lost to us. When this language is resurrected it will be tikkun olam, the universe will be healed.
When Reb Mendelsohn and Irit told him these things, Schultz and the Mendelsohns feigned a purely intellectual curiosity; none discussed the subtext for the invitation, the language that spoke only to Schultz. They let that truth remain, like the true and lost language, just behind the words they actually spoke.
The parallels between Schultz’s strange form of awareness and the language Mendelsohn described might be uncanny, but even to this day, even now as Schultz sits at his desk in the Mayflower Home, he does not know if the sounds that he discerns have any godly derivation, or whether they are simply a hidden truth of the physical universe, like Newton’s laws of motion, or Einstein’s relativity. He cannot know, but Schultz hopes that, once the full language is in place, once his work is complete, this truth will be obvious to him.
Still, Schultz sometimes now wishes that he had told Reb Mendelsohn the full truth about his private noises; likely the great scholar would have understood. Perhaps he would even have been proud to have his daughter become the wife of a man who was thus gifted. But at least Reb Mendelsohn had known another, more commonplace pride: that, after all their conversations about texts and language, Schultz had set off for the university, wanting only to study linguistics. A study that would lead him, in postgraduate years, to a thesis that would revolutionize the scholarly pursuit of linguistics. With Irit as his wife in Vilnius and, later, in Cambridge, Schultz performed research that upended standard linguistic practices, research that sought out that which is essential and common to all languages, that which all languages, and thus all human minds, require. Research that, Schultz now realizes, had merely been the groundwork to prepare the field, the world, for his true study. His study of the fundamental language, the one true language, to which all lesser languages, every tongue of the world, aspire and fail to reach.
It may be the fundamental language, but learning it is like learning any other. Once one builds a decent vocabulary and grasps the basic principles—the derivations, the conjugations, the syntax, and the grammar—sentences can start to come to the lips when they must. Just the other week in group therapy, for example, in an unexpected moment of passion, words came to Schultz and conveyed what they sought to convey. The words served their purpose fully, at least for a moment. For a moment, there was a part of her name, a part of her face, and she—Well, he cannot yet even allow himself to think it. What is important is not his personal needs. For example, Schultz knows people think him mad. He knows he is in a home for the mad, but those perceptions will soon enough be irrelevant when people realize the true scope of his work.
But Schultz does not delight in the importance assigned to him. He is merely an instrument, a sort of human radio tower. Simply, it took a man like Schultz, a man informed by the long tradition of his people’s linguistic scholarship, a man who has lost everything and thus expects, like a true bodhisattva, absolutely nothing, to receive this truth.
• • •
All around him, each of the bricks of which Ingersoll House is constructed sighs in a low register, dully performing its task. Outside, each of the particles of the atmosphere—O2, H2O, CO2—is a faint, unique soprano, each singing a sound like the English sound ah, which is further dividable into subparticles, some contributing to the a, some the h, all the way down to the vibrating wavelengths, at the base of everything, modulated into different notes, but all, as the Vedic mystics gleaned long before there was such a thing as a Jew, constituted of the sound Om. Beyond are planets and stars, galaxies birthing, galaxies dying. Schultz receives them all, coming so quickly in the diverse chorus he has no time to differentiate and transcribe them. They all come together to make a sound identical to the tiniest wavelength, om, but at mighty volume. Om!
Schultz turns from his journal, tilts his head toward the shut door, the sonic texture of night in this hospital. Somewhere, not so far away, a cigarette lighter speaks a sprightly galooop. A lighter that was carelessly dropped as a fired orderly (kanoowa) sucked an angry cigarette (carooo) in the main corridor of Ingersoll (booloo).
There is a hand, drrrr, as it lights the lighter with a cheery song in E-flat. Eeee. The hand holds the flame, drrr-eee, as it moves in a deliberate inward arc, toward the hospital gown, drr-eee-who. As it harmonizes with the flame’s song, the hospital gown cries, who-eeeee. And then the sound of the body, a shriek cried out amid the low hum of night, rushing down the hall in flames, a guttural cheeee sound, gaining volume.
The sounds of the other men, startling awake. And the voice, which speaks that dreadful name, the inverse, the cancellation of om. It is a terrible voice, the familiar voice that is death, yet Schultz tries to remind himself that the death-voice may be a destroyer but it is also a creator. Birth and death: complex things, each neither entirely just birth nor entirely just death, each always holding the other. The death-voice is speaking, and so Schultz senses that the change is coming, that soon his project will reach its completion.
8
It isn’t until well after they put out the fire—one of the night-shift orderlies rushing in with blankets—that the men can calm enough to comprehend what has happened. In the dissipating smoke that still lingers after the ambulance has left, the men of Ingersoll agree that it was no accident. The fact of what has happened is as astonishing as it is obvious: Marvin Foulds, the celebrated creator of Mango Diablo, the Admiral, Guy DeVille, and so many others, has invented yet another identity, has put on a new costume and a new persona, when his old wardrobe was denied him. Out of a forced hospital gown and a dropped lighter, he has made a costume of fire. Out of the ashes of the hospital that Mayflower had just recently been, the lost hospital that had done so much to foster his creative development, Marvin has risen in his most daring persona yet. The Phoenix. The avenger. Marvin may have had a short run in this particular role, the costume may have been extinguished within moments of its creation, but the men have seen the Phoenix, just as Schultz has heard its name. In the ammoniated linoleum halls of Canon’s Mayflower, a sound, a notion, the principle of entropy performed. The Phoenix may be extinguished, but what had birthed it will only continue to spread, as fire.
1
It is Columbus Day, 1962, and my grandmother is back at Echo Cottage, pulling the horsehair mattresses from the upstairs sleeping porch to the front bedroom, to protect them from the winter. This weekend will be their last at Echo for the year, and Katharine has a list of such chores to complete. In past years, they have hired a woman from town to help with these tasks, but with Frederick at Mayflower, her family’s savings have dwindled to alarming balances, and so she must do all this by herself. Katharine moves quickly to check off her list, rushing to return to her daughters and her cousins, out sailing the whitecapped lake on the Pea-quod, the aging family boat, a relic of a more prosperous time.
Between the screen windows of the sleeping porch and the vast wind-furred plain of the lake is a curtain of autumn, a riotous pointillism of leaves. It is a cliché, Katharine knows, to talk of how autumn is her favorite season, and yet, this weekend, she often finds herself spontaneously rhapsodizing about the fall. It is perhaps also a cliché to speak of a figurative autumn, how things become most beautiful just before they end. Still, Katharine cannot help but think that the atmosphere along Barvel Bay, this weekend, is like that too: a temporary revival of summer revelry, heightened and giddy in the autumn chill, the knowledge this will be the last time at Winnipesaukee for a long while.
A temporary revival, an autumnal blush to distract fro
m the daylight’s dimming. Almost daily now, she and her father fight about money. Her relatives, all those men who were so confident in Mayflower on that night now nearly four months ago, who that night pledged their allegiance to Katharine and to Frederick’s therapy, seem to have swayed to the perspective of Katharine’s father. Just this morning, Lieutenant General Pointer and George Carlyle came to the porch, where Katharine and her father argued the possibility of Frederick’s transfer to a cheaper hospital, and the two men gently bolstered her father’s thesis.
Frederick seems no closer to a return; her father seems only days away from refusing all payment; her daughters have begun frequently to ask, in more worried tones, when their father will return. A lovely weekend now, but it won’t hold.
As she removes and folds sheets, Katharine thinks of another figurative autumn. She thinks of that one night in Boston, a year after she and her great teenage love, Lars Jensen, had split up. That night, with no letter or telephone call to prepare her for his visit, Lars presented himself at her door. It was the last time they would be together, but in the other sense of the word together, it was also the first. Futureless, that night, they allowed themselves new freedoms.
But, as it has turned out, they were not then futureless together, not entirely.
Katharine has a secret. Four weeks ago, in mid-September, Lars Jensen phoned her. Lars Jensen, to whom she had given all of herself, just once. One day, while the girls were at school, the phone had rung, and she had lifted it to hear the voice of a man so distant from this life she has made, he had come nearly to seem abstract, only a character from a film she had once seen.
Had Lars, now living two hours away in Exeter, somehow learned of her situation? Lars called just as she had become truly desperate, as she no longer could imagine an escape from her present circumstance, as she had begun to comprehend that they were now one of those failed families about whom gossip filled every Graveton living room. He called her, and she talked. He asked for nothing, and listened. She told herself, many times during that two-hour conversation, not to give away too much. And yet, she told him everything: her foiled ambitions, her fears for her daughters, her financial despair. She even told him about Frederick, everything about Frederick. In return, Lars offered little of his own story. Things aren’t working out with Anna, he said glibly, but at least work is keeping me stable, and that couldn’t be going better.
The Storm at the Door Page 13