Look, her father says. This is not a hopeless situation. I would never let anything happen to you and the girls. But he just isn’t getting better, at least not in that cushy hotel.
There is literal red in Katharine’s eyes now. She briefly imagines slapping her father’s face. The morning after Frederick was first hospitalized, when she called her parents, had her father not delighted in rising so nobly, declaring that he would make sure Frederick got the best treatment, that he would make sure Katharine and his grandchildren were safe and cared for?
This, he had said, is what money is for.
Just such a catastrophe had, in that moment, validated his years of prudence and denied pleasures. Had there not been a barely suppressed delight in his tone when he called Katharine to discuss the paperwork sent to him by Mayflower, paperwork that would ensure—should his money keep coming—that his daughter would remain separated from that mistake of a husband?
It’s no hotel, Daddy.
Your husband is ill, her father declares. But maybe what he needs is not the comfort of Mayflower, but the harsh reality of a public hospital. A hospital that, I might add, we wouldn’t have to pay for.
At the mention of the state hospital, which her father now invariably brings up in these discussions, the face again materializes: the face of Oakey, the face of—let’s call a spade a spade—the village idiot. As a child, Oakey was the placid town’s one spot of mayhem, positively supervillainous by tranquil Graveton’s standards, with a short criminal career that included two bridges set on fire, a dozen dead rabbits hanged from the school yard trees, and one schoolteacher’s calf permanently disfigured by hotfoot. At seventeen, Oakey had been taken to the Kirkbride State Hospital following his expression, via fifteen stones hurled through a bedroom window, of his dissatisfaction that Molly Mitchell, a Graveton High sophomore, had not returned his affections. Three weeks later, Oakey returned to Graveton, the adolescent slumping of his shoulders straightened, his beatnik black outfits exchanged for khakis and collars, his formerly devious face slackened into the sack of features that will now forever hang from his skull. The state of New Hampshire, in balancing the costs and benefits of long-term psychotherapy against the simple application of an ice pick to his frontal lobe, chose lobotomy.
It is worse than death, Katharine thinks. In ways, what the state does to those it cannot fathom is worse than murder.
Do you know what they do in those places? If you become too much of a burden? They stick a pick in your brain.
I don’t think that’s so. Not always, certainly. And, anyway, from what I’ve read, those procedures can have remarkable success. There was a story in the Globe about one young man—
I’m not going to argue with you the merits of a lobotomy. I’m just asking for you to help me.
And now the fire passes and flares in my great-grandfather. A fury so immaculate that it cannot, for ten, fifteen seconds, catch to language. He stutters angrily for a long moment before finding the words: Help? Help? Do I need to remind you of all I have—
When they hang up soon thereafter, agreeing they both need to calm, again nothing has been decided. Will he simply stop paying the bills? And then what? Frederick was checked in by the state police; he can come home only when his doctors decide he is ready. Without her father’s money, Katharine knows the only possibility is that he will end up in state care, the ice pick poised. His failures and her burdens aside, doesn’t Frederick at least deserve her defense?
Mustn’t there be another possibility? Couldn’t they all—all those doctors, and nurses and psychiatrists and police—be convinced they are wrong? Who says their understanding of sanity is sane?
These are the kinds of thoughts that Dr. Canon, among many others, has told Katharine can be greatly detrimental to a loved one’s progress. But isn’t this how indoctrination always works, an entire deferral of your own judgment to a higher authority, whom you are instructed not to question?
But surely, Katharine tells herself. Surely they must be right in some degree. The minds in that hospital are some of the country’s greatest. The poet Robert Lowell and the mathematician John Nash, among many others, choose Mayflower for their breakdowns.
No, no, of course they are right, she tells herself, pulling a box of Lorna Doones from the pantry, taking a bite. His drinking, his women, his tirades, the anorexic failed sailor in her bed. Katharine thinks, He is sick.
Katharine looks at the phone on its cradle and considers making the call she has told herself, many times today, that she will not make.
Over these last weeks, Katharine has spoken with Lars Jensen many times. Last time, she nearly wept and said things that still feel impossible to attribute to herself.
Lars again asked to see her. I don’t have any intentions, he swore.
She has denied his offers to meet four or five times over, but each time less assuredly. Lars, playing sensitive, is also persistent. Lars senses an opening, as does Katharine. They both sense that all it will take is one or two more sessions of Lars’s sweetened assertiveness.
For Katharine has begun to wonder exactly why she resists Lars’s advances. Frederick has taken other women many times over; is it not simply pathetic, her fidelity to some notion that her husband clearly abandoned years ago? Just two and a half years into their marriage, when Katharine had discovered Frederick in the first of his affairs, she still had never considered the possibility she now considers. Lars never had Frederick’s charms, but she has begun to consider what else, more enduring, Lars might have given her in that now vanished, other life. Katharine knows Frederick has taken many other women, but she also knows that for her an affair would mean something entirely different. Frederick discarded women like scrap paper while brainstorming. Trying to rewrite himself, he wrote on them until inspiration dimmed, or another notion redirected his consideration. One kiss at a dance nearly twenty years ago, and Katharine has never kissed another man. She cannot lie to herself about what meeting Lars would mean.
This could still go away, Katharine thinks as she climbs the steps of her house on the way to the bathroom upstairs. Simply, Frederick needs to come home.
She has no need for the toilet but sits on it anyway. She simply needs the smallness and the quiet of this room. She breathes in the smells of toothpaste and vague mildew; she wonders about a leak under the sink. She examines the tiny tiles of the floor; she thinks of the impossible patience required to lay them all there, one by one. Her marriage is failing; the possibility of another future is opening. But still, doesn’t their past—the one-time simplicity of it, the life that was, occasionally, what they wanted it to be—deserve at least one more fight?
Perhaps all the doctors are right. It is even likely that they are right. But she must see for herself. Frederick’s treatment, Dr. Canon and Dr. Wallace have explained, requires complete removal from his normal life, absolutely no contact at all, until he is ready. But it has already been months since she had that single, terse conversation with Frederick. Shouldn’t she at last be allowed to speak with her husband once more?
2
Just this, just this, Canon thinks.
Rita is wriggling against him on the psychoanalytic divan. Canon feels himself now joined with her, speaking a nonsense lascivious language with two tongues.
When the phone rings, Canon immediately decides to ignore it. Rita, beneath him, slows a bit, and on the fourth ring, she speaks in plain English.
Shouldn’t you?
Not now, Canon says.
It could be important.
If it is, they’ll call back.
The phone silences, but only for a moment, then obstinately begins ringing again.
Christ, Canon says.
You need to get that.
As he crawls off and toward the phone, Rita grasps for her discarded uniform. Shit, Canon whispers.
It might be an emergency, Rita says.
Yes? Canon mutters into the phone, and turns to the window. Katharine Merrill?
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Of course Canon convinces Katharine. After her stubborn insistence with the operator and with Higgins, when Katharine finally succeeds in getting Canon on the line, she is no longer certain if she has called to plead for her husband’s release, if she has called to demand to speak with Frederick, or if she has called only to seek Canon’s reassurance.
Of course, I understand, he tells her. Of course she is plagued by doubt. It is an element of Frederick’s illness that allows him to open this doubt in others.
Canon, in the persuasive, authoritative voice he has honed through years of study and months of practice, remains as vague and hopeful as a fortune cookie’s fortune. Even I did not expect for him to need to stay here so long. Frederick’s condition is much more complex than I anticipated, but it shouldn’t be so much longer, he says. Not so long at all. I am quite confident.
However, Canon’s success, in this moment, is not what matters. Or, rather, it is not what is important now, from my vantage, nearly five decades later. For the history of my family, the important moment is not this conversation, but what occurs just next to it. A simple awareness dawning upon the woman slipping into her underwear on the divan. From where she sits, Rita can discern the tones of Katharine’s desperation. Not the words themselves, but the way in which Katharine speaks them. The quality of Mrs. Merrill’s voice transmits that desperation into Rita’s receptive shame. Maybe, Rita had tried to convince herself, her inexplicable need for Albert was justification enough. But now Rita thinks of Frederick, and she turns her back to Albert.
1
Each man in the ward has his own name in the language that speaks only to Schultz. Unlike the failing languages, no two names are the same. Canon’s name is similar to the sounds produced by a hungry stomach. Frederick’s is a sharp sustained note, with bass beating beneath it, a sound Schultz has not yet been able to get his own tongue to replicate.
It is strange, how the names of random others suddenly come to him; Schultz has not yet entirely deciphered the system by which they are revealed. It makes some sense that the revelation of certain names is a result of their close physical proximity or of their constant, background presence. President Kennedy (a wistful grunt) or Khrushchev (like an elongated cough). Each of the patients in the neighboring boys’ ward contributes a whine to that kitten’s cry that the building always emits. But why do certain other seemingly random names—a grocer he has never met in Back Bay, a construction worker downtown, a lady selling gloves in a department store in Danvers—suddenly reach his perception? Why do these living names speak to him, suddenly revealing the entirety of these men and women he has never met? And also, why, recently, have the names of the dead begun to speak? Thomas Edison (lalaaa), Lincoln (ca-oola), the hospital’s namesake, the merchant John Mayflower (haaaaahaaaa).
From the graveyard down the hill in Belmont, the names of the dead sometimes speak in chorus, a sound coincidentally close to the trill rustle that often accompanies graveyard scenes in films.
Schultz chides himself for occasionally diverting his studies to a personal end, but he cannot help scrutinizing the sonic matrix for her name, his murdered Irit. Alas, he still has not heard it. Not entirely, at least.
But if the names of the dead can speak to him, then that further complicates the vexing question of this language’s origin. If the dead can speak in it too, then does that lend credence to the theory of the True Torah in which Reb Mendelsohn believed? A text that dictates the universe, written at all times by a High Author? Schultz likes to think of himself as a man of science, but he feels at the precipice of something else. Is it courage or is it foolishness to believe in what he cannot know for certain?
For the most part, Schultz has remained as skeptical of the kitsch and claptrap of the Bible and its notions as he was as a boy in Bolbirosok, studying the Torah.
You are telling me, he would ask Rabbi Grossman, that Baruch HaShem smote this man, Onan, for spilling seed? Rabbi, I don’t know how much time you spend talking to boys my age, but by this logic there shouldn’t be a Jew left in all of Lithuania.
But, over the years, has Schultz begun to revise his position? Perhaps it is in no small part the influence of Irit, always contextualizing present issues with biblical parables, embarrassing Schultz in front of their Harvard friends, who scowled at her persistent faith and counterquoted from Kant, Marx, Nietzsche. Still, Schultz believes so little of the Torah. Not literally, at least. He has always seen that book as a series of metaphors, at the same distance from the truth of things as the languages men speak are distanced from the true language. But perhaps, in that way, it’s all true. That which cannot be perceived by those without this form of perception must be explained in details people can understand. Though Schultz has not yet made the proverbial leap, the notion still occurs to him: perhaps each story within the Torah is molded after another, truer story, that can be told only in the lost, true language.
2
Nothing. Not one thing we don’t know about.
It is Monday morning and Canon has ordered every one of his employees, all the way down to the kitchen staff, to an emergency meeting. He gesticulates dramatically, speaks vehemently, does not allow himself to sit, produces a performance perhaps subconsciously imitative of that of Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
We have to be better than accidents, Canon tells them. We have to search, every day, in every drawer, under every mattress, so that not even an accident will give a patient the kind of possibility that that lighter gave Mr. Foulds. We must know about everything. What the patients track in on their shoes.
At this point in the meeting, much of the staff undertakes the imaginative act that everywhere joins psychiatric patients with their caretakers: with enough will and creativity, what object is entirely safe? What thing could a determined man or woman not use to bring about his or her end? If one had the will, a book’s pages could be crumpled and jammed into the trachea; a pen could be driven deep into an eye socket; a simple wall could crush a skull’s contents.
3
The Crew Crew, Visigothic in their late teens and early twenties, pillage room after room, per the new protocols. They do not pause if the patients they find inside are sleeping or engaged in some private act, they merely walk to the patients’ desks, as if the desks were their own, and then search every drawer, hold every book by its cover, shaking the binding loose in an attempt to dislodge potential contraband.
These things are not yours to rifle through, Schultz informs the two boys rattling his journals.
The Crew Crew boys don’t respond but turn to each other and share a supercilious smile. Frederick, observing the scene, composes a thought to write later in his own tussled journal: The history of catastrophe is populated by such young men, empowered by leaders with frightful ideology. We should be glad they carry only charts and reports, not guns.
4
The men of Ingersoll are assembled now for group therapy, and the session opens with clamor, vociferous protests of the Crew Crew’s raids. Canon attempts to evade the questions, deflecting them back to his patients—but why is it that authority bothers you so?—until the group’s protests resolve into the familiar rallying cry, furious questions and invectives about the fate of Marvin Foulds.
Why in God’s name won’t you just tell us what has happened—
Though he does not join in with the others, Frederick smiles. He is glad for the cacophony that, for the moment, is louder than his own agony.
Something in Canon nearly rises to the surface, but he catches it. He crosses his legs and watches the scene with a decent imitation of dispassion. He pulls his cigarettes from his white coat, lights one, and then takes a long Bogart pull. Then Canon gestures to the Crew Crew at the periphery, who remove each protesting man, one by one, as Canon—beneath the clamor—consults his notes and makes his normal therapeutic inquiries: Bobbie, perhaps it would be more productive to talk about your feelings of alienation … It is only in the session’s last mom
ents—when Lowell, Stanley, Bobbie, and three of the catatonics have been pulled away—that Canon can be heard.
Mr. Merrill, Canon says, meeting Frederick’s eyes directly for the first time since that night in solitary. How are you feeling today?
Frederick smiles an inscrutable smile.
Welcome back, Frederick says.
Canon must catch himself once more. And then, once more, he performs his well-practiced act of transcendence.
5
Frederick has known a variety of insomnias. There is the ecstatic insomnia, the universe too brightly electric and too loud to admit sleep. There is the insomnia of dread, the possibility of impending horror requiring nightlong vigilance, a febrile, inextinguishable wakefulness. And then there is this insomnia, similar to the dreadful, but somehow more archetypal, insomnia in its purest form. This is the insomnia of the meaninglessness of things, which includes the meaninglessness of sleep. Every object, room, and person is pregnant with the promise of decay. The mind is kept awake for the same reasons it is kept alive, arbitrarily. A happenstance of nature, electrons gathered to animate the inanimate for a time, to carry the dim flickering flame, day and night, until inevitably it goes out.
Every five minutes, the door swings open with a dull utterance of checks, which seems a dark existential metaphor, in some way Frederick is too exhausted entirely to grasp. And so Frederick lies in bed now, the darkness of the ceiling the only truth, as his roommate persists in his scribbling. It doesn’t matter, he wants to tell Schultz. Sane or mad, what you are doing does not matter. Go to bed. Relinquish. Relinquish.
But Frederick’s contemplation of the blackness above him is soon punctured by light, opening at an angle wider than the Crew Crew’s routine checks. Frederick turns to find Rita in the doorway, raising a hand to greet him. Schultz hardly looks up from his notebook, offers a friendly Hello, his pen barely pausing on the page. Rita comes to Frederick’s bed and sits.
The Storm at the Door Page 17