Here Schultz smiles broadly. Frederick now considers that this aspect of his face—his linear, eggshell teeth—is perhaps what lends him a half-credibility denied the other schizophrenics. Toothless, Schultz seems a madman indeed.
Only, shere wash one flaw. Or, better to shay, one idioshyncrashy. Usually I wait until you leaf or shleep to remofe it, but now we are broshersh is shecretsh, nu?
Now Schultz flips his false teeth, revealing a small cavity within, just perfectly cradling two pills. Schultz taps the dentures, and the pills tumble into his palm. He looks at them quizzically.
Wish theesh pillsh, never can I hhocus. And to hhocus, hish ish she mosht important shing of all.
But what do you do with them all?
Ah, much eashier shish wash in she old howsh. Here, I haff had to improfishe, yesh?
Schultz restores his upper teeth and smiles a sane, proud smile. He makes a mock-shushing gesture and presses one palm to the leg of his desk, the other to the surface, and the two pieces separate, just a few inches, enough to reveal the hollow shaft of one of the table’s steel legs.
Frederick approaches Schultz’s desk, peers into the hollow to discover a masterwork of concealment. In cheery pharmaceutical colors, the leg is filled nearly to the top. Hundreds of pills. Within Mayflower’s nascent anarchy, pills are already an appreciating currency, and here is an unwanted fortune.
Soon, I must find some way to dispose, Schultz says with a laugh and knocks on the table. Or else, how to get into these other legs.
2
Generally, in the first months of the new administration, Canon’s staff has successfully concealed potentially disruptive news from the patients. Often, reports that would have been of no small interest—suicidal gestures, sexual congress, narcotics found in staff offices—were kept entirely from patients, even from most of the staff. Though two days have passed since Marvin Foulds’s suicide attempt, and the psychiatrist in chief has yet to return, the structures he established, though besieged, are still in place. Once more, Canon’s echelons, like Schultz with his desk, manage a major feat of concealment.
For there has been another suicide attempt, a fact that will be kept entirely from the men of Ingersoll, the women of South Webster, the girls of South House. But perhaps suicide attempt is too certain a term for what has occurred. It is perhaps the ineffectual nature of this particular gesture that makes it seem no compelling news to spread. Certainly, it seems to the few who learn of the attempt that the boy—one of the new admissions to North Webster—had meant to fail with such a slapdash act. Either he meant to fail, they believe, or else he had resolved to make his quietus so suddenly that he had not time to devise a halfway decent scheme.
A passing motorist found the boy, apparently unconscious, in a tangle of bedsheets, with which he had attempted to hang himself from the high oak post of the elaborate road sign for the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, down on Mill Street. The boy had failed in his attempt, but his successful absconding down the hill, suicidal linens in hand, is perhaps the most salient portent yet of the dangerously accumulating chaos.
The boy had remained conscious for the entire episode. Perhaps wanting only to taste death’s flavorlessness, he simply lay there, beneath the sign, within the sheets, trying not to move or breathe.
He looked enviously up at the trees, displaying their modest late season brilliance against the pitiless late afternoon light. I could be happy right here, he thought. I could be a tree, a shrub, a blade of grass. It might feel quite nice to have people walk through me, to watch them drive past, all day long. Maybe what I want is not to die. Maybe what I want is only not to be human. He shut his eyes tightly and tried to will his flesh to grow roots.
The possibility of his dendriform future, however, was soon disrupted. Squad cars and ambulances, responding to the motorist’s call, split the grim quiet of the afternoon with their manic squawking, bearing the boy away, at emergency speed, denying him his wish of stillness. Put me down, the boy requested, repeatedly and to no avail. Please. Just leave me at the side of the road.
3
When Mass General phones Mayflower, the receptionist transfers the call to Higgins, who thanks the presiding emergency room doctor. Then Higgins places the phone on its receiver, leaves his office, swiftly traverses the campus, and passes through the three doors of South Webster to find Rita. Rita is standing in the common area of the women’s ward, discussing one of her new patients’ plans to write an opera. Rita excuses herself and walks outside with the doctor to hear his news.
As Higgins explains what has happened, Rita wonders what it might suggest that, in Canon’s absence, Higgins has sought her out first. Undoubtedly, the staff has seen Rita talking to Canon with an unrivaled intimacy and frequency. Is it simply that Higgins thinks she has the boss’s ear? By her proximity to the psychiatrist in chief, has she become the de facto number two, her response to a situation more determinative than that of Dr. Higgins, the de jure number two? And might this unspoken hierarchical arrangement imply that they know?
Maybe that would be for the best; the thought is dizzying and darkly thrilling. So many times, in the on-and-off two years—how, my god, two years already?—of their affair, Rita has imagined it, the freedom to at last relinquish the shameful secrecy that Canon and she have held tightly to themselves.
It is likely, she thinks, that there are whispers, whiffs of suspicion. She and Canon, hardly able to speak of their situation between themselves, have told no one. But there are other ways in which such knowledge transfers; lovers exude some hormonal plume, received by others in a place before language. Something as felt as her affair with Canon cannot be contained endlessly, can it?
Rita tries to calm Higgins, but he continues to fidget, continues to clutch at his hair, seems to be beyond her words. A tide of red rises radially from the rosy protuberance of his nose, as if Higgins’s nose is a thing to which his face has become suddenly allergic. Rita senses, from her months spent overseeing similarly agitated men, that simply he needs to be touched. She lays one hand on the old doctor’s shoulder, rubs the soft flesh of what was once a bicep, tells Higgins that she has to go find Canon. And that, in the meanwhile, they must try to keep this news to themselves.
We can be many things, Rita thinks. A twenty-four-year-old girl, with little faith in modern psychiatry, can suddenly become the chief authority at the nation’s premier mental hospital.
Perhaps, she has sometimes thought, she is capable in this hospital, in this position, because she does not want it, has never aspired to it. Unbothered by ambition or by possible censure, she is lucid.
But she isn’t just here for Albert, she thinks now, as she will still believe, years from now. Though, of course, it had been Albert Canon who first seduced her into the profession, flattering her with his inordinate attention in his abnormal psychology course, which she had signed up for simply to fulfill a curriculum requirement at Radcliffe. One day, in the third week of the semester, Albert had asked her to stay after class to discuss the first paper she had turned in. Rita had braced for his criticisms, but as soon as her classmates left, Albert spoke to her in an excited whisper, lauding her brilliance, asking her if she had considered psychology as a career. As she warmed to his flattery, Albert’s compliments grew hyperbolic; he proclaimed the loss to the field of psychology should she choose a different career.
As that summer turned to fall, her after-class meetings with Albert became more frequent and more impassioned. She felt herself become pliable to his visions for her.
Albert, making a display of intellectual worship, excitedly received whatever came from her lips as if she perpetually revealed the hidden truths others had spent entire careers seeking but never finding. When, for example, Rita spoke of her tendency to blame others for her own failures, while seeing others’ failures as no one’s fault but their own, Albert remarked that she had just deduced one of the basic principles of social cognition, which had taken experimental psychologist
s years to describe. When Rita told Albert of her own inconsistencies, of her inability to see herself as she saw others, in any singular way, he told her of the exciting new theories of identity construction, and how her unique perspective could spur major theoretical advances, if she chose to apply herself in that field. Albert turned her abstract, ambivalent notions into his certainties: a great comfort to Rita, who at twenty-two had felt ambivalent about nearly everything.
Ambivalence: Rita felt forces at all times pulling her in their contrapuntal directions, had always experienced argument and counterargument in simultaneity, had seemed always to want everything: to be pure and base, to make love to boys and to resist all boys; to join up with the communists, the anarchists, and also to deliver tirades on the absurdity of children of comfort and privilege dabbling in communism and anarchy. She wanted to impress her practical parents with a practical application of her degree and become a lawyer; she wanted to shrug off all the expectations of her parents and move to Morocco to write poetry. She wanted to marry young, raise a family, prosper in the common ways; she craved absolute solitude, life nearest the bone, to sort things out for herself.
Often, she wondered how some of her classmates could speak of their futures with such certainty. She wondered if anyone actually experienced such certainty or if all lives were merely the midpoints between opposing impulses, carried forward.
And then there was Albert. Not only certain, but certain about all the things she was not. Certain, in fact, about her uncertainty. This uncertainty you always tell me about, he said, half-lover, half-therapist, this fear of being no one. What you can’t see, what is abundantly clear to me, is that this is simply the burden of a receptive and thoughtful intelligence. It is precisely this ability to see all the angles that will make you one of our most brilliant therapists.
Our most brilliant therapists, Albert had said, as if he were on the ruling council of some exalted society.
But now two years have passed, and for all the grand visions Albert has presented her, Rita knows his limitations as plainly as she knows the coarseness of his hands, the hairs that sprout from his shoulders. For example, despite his dumbly persistent claims to the contrary, Rita knows Albert will never leave his wife, will never make his love for Rita public. Not for lack of love for Rita, or for any moralistic belief in the inviolable bonds of marriage. And certainly not out of any great sense of devotion to his wife. Simply, Albert would never make public this or any secret that might jeopardize his position, embarrass him, or—worst of all—thwart his ambitions.
Over time, Rita’s tenderness for Albert has become rather the inverse of when they first began two years ago. When Albert speaks to her now, with all his familiar ambitions and certainty, it strikes Rita as not unlike a little boy dreaming of becoming a professional athlete or a superhero: in its optimism, its grandiosity, holding a kind of tender purity. But it isn’t enough, this tenderness, for her to continue her affair, for her to continue in the strange position she has never felt fit her.
No, the truth is she is fascinated by something else, what psychiatry seeks to eliminate. Why could some people endure wars, famines, holocausts, while others lost their sanity in a comfortable world in which people spoke things that were not always true? Why, for some, does plain silence provoke such horror that profound, intricate hallucinations are required to compensate? And why, too, are poets so often mad?
Poetry, Rita wrote in her journal last week, is Promethean. Madness is the fire poetry brings back to earth.
Rita feels close to something essential about madness and about herself, about madness and something that madness conceals.
An intimacy with chaos: not just in her position, but in her affair as well. Something compulsive in her closeness to catastrophe is why she has allowed herself to continue with this man, who occasionally, as now, repels her.
Repels her. When Frederick came into the office and found the two of them, Rita could not quite read Frederick’s face, silhouetted against the hallway light, but she projected into that dark oval her own repulsion, received the shame of the scene through his imagined eyes. And, in the days that have followed, that shame has only deepened. Canon had not come to find her after she ran from his office, had not told her himself of her transfer to the women’s ward. He had let the orders come through Higgins, as if she were any other employee. The coward.
And, though Rita does not know the extent of it, does not know that Canon ordered not one but three sessions of ECT for Frederick, this far more dastardly act does not provoke fury, as does her transfer. Simply, she is ashamed, for her part in what has happened to Frederick, for her relationship with a man capable of such actions. Her shame of Canon’s cowardice conflating with the shame of her affair; many times she has wanted to go to Frederick, in Ingersoll, and plead with him to forgive her. But what would she say? It isn’t a rational thing, an entirely explainable thing, this affair, her need to remain here. Her need, most shameful of all, for Canon. Repulsion, but also—no denying it—need: two years (my god!) of her ambivalence, incarnate.
But there are more important considerations now. In the two days Canon has been gone, something has ruptured within Mayflower. It began with the first true horror she has known here. That night, one of the most fascinating, most tormented, and kindest of the Ingersoll men had found a lighter and done to himself something impossible to consider.
(Was it only a coincidence it had happened just after she had been transferred off Ingersoll? Might Canon be right, at least in this regard, that the slightest disruption in care and authority can be devastating to patients?)
And though Marvin was taken, as per protocol, to Mass General, though the staff, as per protocol, have denied and obfuscated, she has witnessed the chaos pushing at the seams Canon so diligently tried to sew together with the sutures of his protocols. And now this, another suicide attempt, if halfhearted. Herself, the affair, Frederick, and her shame aside, Mayflower needs its psychiatrist in chief.
Rita knows, so well, Canon’s weaknesses. She knows, for example, that in Canon’s shame over Frederick’s discovery, in the dark outcomes of his childish overreactions, he is simply waiting there, at home, for his mistress to come and convince him of how absolutely necessary he is.
4
Do you think there’s anything you could have done differently?
What are you implying, exactly?
Nothing, I just wondered if you felt you should have done anything differently.
Of course not. Of course not! What could I have done? Differently? Differently? How differently?
Albert, Lara Canon said, already weary of the conversation. She is always so weary, his wife. Always so uncaring. Sometimes, though he’d never say it aloud and certainly never act upon it, Canon shames himself with a sudden impulse to shake her by the shoulders, strike her until she cares.
I was merely trying to suggest, Lara said, with the mock-formality she dons at any of Canon’s emotional outbursts, as if all this might be recorded for later referral in a court of law—this, he has thought, can’t be too far from her mind—I was merely trying to suggest that if you could not have done anything differently, then you have no cause for regret.
Regret? It’s not regret. I saw something horrific the other night, Lara. Something incomprehensibly bad. I am disturbed, dear. Regret!
Poor dear, she said, as if her husband were complaining about any other rough day at the office: an insubordinate orderly, difficulty finding enough financing for the new parking lot. Why couldn’t she understand? He had gone to the hospital and seen one of his patients with his face tattered, the flesh dangling and seared, still smelling of its own cooking. Poor dear!
The next morning, after dressing for tennis and making the boys pancakes, Lara came upstairs to discover her husband, awake but shiftless, still in bed.
Aren’t you going to work? she asked.
How can I? Canon said. His face. Christ, Lara, his face!
But haven’t
you seen terrible things before? Lara countered. In the war?
Canon sometimes forgets this, the embellishments he has made to his war stories. Yes, he had been sent to Europe as he has claimed, but he never left England, never left the small room in which he evaluated soldiers. In that room, Canon had been responsible for ensuring midlevel officers were ready for combat, had been responsible for little more than administering a set of standardized tests of psychological well-being. He had, in truth, been little more than a nurse, making his routine evaluations just as the other nurses probed, measured, and inoculated the new recruits before combat. He had not, as he has since claimed, worked with the soldiers just back from the front, traumatized with stories that made all our normal frustrations seem irrelevant. In the story he had told his wife in their early courtship—he had wanted only to impress her in the moment; he had not then considered he’d have to live with these fabrications forever—he had been an angelic figure, striding ruined battlefields, leading men lost in their tenebrous terror back up to daylight.
Well, Lara said. If you aren’t going to work anymore, you’ll have to start helping out around here. Then Canon’s wife looked to the apron she held in her fist, tossed it to the traumatized doctor, and informed him that today she was going to teach him how to knead meat loaf.
To his own surprise, Canon accepted her orders, like a child receiving his mother’s punishments. Later that afternoon, suffering what he had told Lara could well be a trauma-induced minor psychotic episode, he was made to pick the boys up from soccer practice, circumnavigating his asylum, perched over Belmont. When he returned home, he insisted no one answer the phone that periodically rang, explaining he was simply not ready to return, not yet. And then dinner passed; even the kids did not ask any questions, even when he mustered a tear.
The Storm at the Door Page 15