Well, there, Frederick says.
Did I wake you?
What do you want?
Rita doesn’t say anything for the moment. She looks down at her hands, as if trying to devise the optimal configuration for her fingers.
I, well. For one, I came to tell you that they’re transferring Marvin from the hospital. To the infirmary here. He’s doing better.
It’s not that Frederick isn’t grateful for the news but, in the midst of this insomnia, the news seems to belong to a place that he has left.
I’m glad.
Better, but his burns are—
Forever.
Terrible.
A long silence now. But not the silence that Rita, walking to Frederick’s room, had imagined. Not a clenched silence, as she failed to find the words to explain herself, to apologize for what Frederick had witnessed, and the traumas that her ridiculous affair have caused him to suffer. That apology, at least in this moment, is subsumed into something else, a darkness that Frederick radiates, as powerfully as the hallway’s tubes fluoresce. Rita has always been unusually receptive to others’ moods; the energies of others transfer to her as cleanly as the motions of billiard balls.
Sometimes, Rita thinks, she is little but this: no person, merely a permeable membrane that absorbs the language, the passions, the glooms of others. Others are themselves; she is an amalgam of them. Frederick’s despair is so total, such a boundless, wordless thing, a smothering black oil spilling over her perception, that when she does begin to apologize, it is a relief to speak.
I also wanted to tell you I was sorry.
Frederick remains silent. If only for the comfort of her own voice, Rita speaks again.
It’s just, with Albert, I don’t know. It started back when I was only—I know how he can seem, but there’s so much about him you can’t know. You should have known him before. I know he doesn’t mean—I mean—
From the darkness before her, the place where the darkness collects into a human-size shape in the covers, Frederick’s voice emerges.
It doesn’t matter. Things happen. I understand. Rita gives a half-laugh of recognition, things happen. Frederick grunts, or perhaps it is just his breathing. Your wife called. I was, well, in the office, and she called. She’s worried about you.
Katharine?
Yeah. Rita says. Katharine.
Katharine. It’s not that her name cuts through his mental morass, or that this news in any way encourages him now. But amid that swampland—with its wicked desiccated trees, its noxious gases bubbling at all times from the turbid depths—her name is the promise of a house there in the distance. A door with a single warm bulb reflecting across the marsh. The marsh is tolerable if one joins it, if one kneels into its decay and waits for it to make its inevitable claims. But what the light of the house in the distance promises is, by contrast, heartbreaking. Katharine. This insomnia is an absence of feeling, or else agony reduced to its faintest, minimalist components. But Katharine’s name is pure feeling, even if, at this moment, plain torture. Frederick sits upright, for the first time in hours, and finds himself pleading with Rita.
I won’t tell anyone. Can’t you explain that to him? I’m not angry, not at you or him. Of course I understand. Who could understand better than I could? But you have to tell him. There is something dark now; it’s like exhaustion that you can’t resist. This darkness. I don’t know. And I don’t know. Will you just explain it to him? That I won’t tell. That I don’t care. That I must go? That I must leave? That Katharine is the only—
Rita finds herself nodding at Frederick’s pleas, not in agreement—she knows even she is nearly powerless to persuade Canon in that way—but in recognition. At this moment, she too knows the agony of the house in the distance, its impossibly distant promise.
The only what? Rita asks.
I’m not sure what the right word is.
6
It is the next morning: a rare fall day, the unfiltered sun surprising everyone with its announcement that warmth is still possible, inspiring Bostonians to plan one last sweatered weekend in the lakes and mountains to the north, while there is a chance of the weather holding.
Has Frederick too begun to switch once more? On the march back from breakfast, he feels, intensely, some nameless need. It is a strange, objectless demand; for a moment he even thinks it is the coming of a sneeze or else a sob, but none materializes. It is some need caught between his sinuses and lips, like a craving for a kiss, but then he decides that even an imagined kiss would not sate it. There is a panicking foreignness to it, like some new form of hunger. Like hunger, but it also seems to have something to do with violence. Frederick clenches his face as the line of men ascends to Ingersoll House, but the sensation doesn’t cease until he is inside, when it is replaced with other considerations.
Frederick is near the rear of the line, and so he does not learn of Canon’s new decision as soon as the others. By the time he enters the lobby of Ingersoll, he finds that some revelation has silenced the room, except for Stanley, shouting nonsense into his hands. The men are stooped curiously over a cot placed just behind the sofa. They lean in and rear back, like a pack of dogs trying to eat an overly heated dinner. Frederick approaches the cot, but already he senses what he will find there. Intravenous drips dangling above, bloodied bandages concealing most of his face, there is Marvin. Marvin’s one uncovered eye is closed as, in shame, he pretends to sleep.
Just then, like a play that was set to commence as soon as its audience was in place—has Canon planned it this way?—the infirmary’s doctor, Wilkins, enters Ingersoll, white coat flapping, retractable pen clicking, assisting nurse in tow. The nurse holds a bright orange wastebasket and a fresh roll of gauze.
Wilkins lowers himself to Marvin’s ear, and speaks to Marvin in the megaphonic way that the young often address the old. It’s time to change your bandages, Mr. Foulds! he says, loud enough that the words faintly echo off the far end of the corridor.
A hardly audible whimper rises from Marvin, as the nurse begins at his feet, unraveling. At the first glimpse of his exposed shin, burned now to a strawberry’s porous red, Frederick surprises himself by speaking.
Why on earth would he be here? Shouldn’t he be in the infirmary?
Dr. Canon felt he was well enough to return, Wilkins replies. The important thing is that nothing distracts from Mr. Foulds’s psychiatric treatment, especially now.
Frederick, like many of the others, suspects Canon’s true purpose for this display. Even still, in this moment, Canon succeeds. As the incendiary Marvin, the martyr rebel, had irresistibly compelled the other men, the extinguished Marvin seems equally to repel them. For the rest of that day, and the night that follows, the men confine themselves to their rooms, while the common room remains empty, except for a babbling television and a psychotic burn victim, alone on his bed.
7
It is so simple, Frederick writes in his journal. A leap, a slash, a squeezed trigger. This is what the doctors fail to grasp. The ridiculous simplicity. Its elegance.
8
Robert Lowell’s eyes have regained their focus. Just descended from a week of up days, Lowell has restored his gaze to the things set before him. It is Lowell who devises the plan.
The next afternoon, a Crew Crew boy pushes open Lowell’s door, checks, and then startles to find more than half the Ingersoll men crammed into the narrow space.
Poetry seminar, Lowell explains.
Oh? Are you reading anything new? the boy asks earnestly. The power of Lowell’s celebrity, even here.
Sorry, Lowell says. Patients only.
The Ingersoll men, for the first time in days, laugh en masse. Even Frederick, leaning against the corner like a catatonic, receives the pleasure of this, the laughing, the whispering, the conspiring.
• • •
As with every detail of their daily routine, there is a protocol for what foods patients are allowed to carry back with them from the dining hall. Fort
unately for Lowell’s scheme, fruit is included on this list of permitted snacks: three items per man, but the staff must first inspect and confirm that the skin of each piece is unbroken, to make sure the fruit isn’t used as crafty conveyance for contraband. And so, this night, each man takes his permitted three, the kitchen staff only mildly suspicious of the Ingersoll men’s sudden passion for produce.
When they are assembled again later in Lowell’s room, the poet devises a way to achieve the desired effect with a collection of pencils, the crimson blanket his wife brought for him, and the large seashells Stanley has been allowed to keep in his room as mementos of the time his nephew took him for a weekend trip to Cape Cod, six years ago.
They wait until the middle of the night, when the orderlies will least expect it, when the scene will have its greatest poignancy. At precisely 3:00 A.M., as the two Crew Crew boys read in the administrative office, nearly every door inside Ingersoll opens, the men emptying into the corridor. The Crew Crew kids startle at the beguiling scene, their madmen risen like nocturnal apparitions.
9
One of the boys grasps Frederick by the arm. What’s going on?
You’re welcome to come and see, Frederick replies. The boys share a dubious gaze and set down their books to follow behind.
Soundlessly—except for a few stray giggles—the men gather around the cot, making an enclosure of themselves. Lowell stands just before the head of Marvin’s bed, stoops and whispers into Marvin’s ear.
Ms. Diablo, Lowell says. Ms. Mango Diablo, it’s time to go onstage.
Marvin wakes with the semblance of a startle that his scorched body can manage. Only the fingertips of Marvin’s right hand, the whole of his left hand, and his right eye are free from bandages. His eye widens with the discovery of the men assembled before him.
What? What’s going on?
Lowell turns his gaze to the expectant, grinning faces.
We have a surprise for you, Lowell says.
A surprise?
Sure.
I must look like a monster. Like a mummy, Marvin mutters. A living dead thing.
Frederick considers the perfect precision of these words. Living dead.
It’s not so bad, he manages.
Then Marvin closes his eye and speaks.
Whatever it is you’re planning, he says. Will you do me a favor first?
Of course, Lowell says.
I want you to see. Under the bandages. I haven’t seen yet. But I want you to look so I can know by how you look at me. The doctors only look at me like a patient.
Frederick, like all the men assembled, has not been able to stop his imagination from filling in, hideously, what the white bandages conceal. He almost begs Marvin to reconsider, but then he looks to Lowell, who nods knowingly. As Marvin reaches his unburned left hand to the bandage’s end near his temple, Bobbie cries out.
Wait! I mean, wait. Isn’t it bad for the burns? I mean, couldn’t they get infected or something?
I’m scared too, Marvin says, and then begins the unraveling.
It takes a long while, his hand slowly orbiting, which only adds to the horror. With a fearsome yelp, he peels away a final panel of gauze, revealing the wound his face has become. Is any sight as horrible as a burned face? The features boiled and congealed into a cooled red-black porridge. It seems impossible at first, like a Hollywood monster’s makeup. A monster’s mask, but made more hideous than anything Hollywood could conjure, with the reality of the single human eye, adrift in that mess. The men either do or do not gasp, they either cry out or are silent: it doesn’t matter to Marvin, receiving their horror, which mutes the moment.
I need you to kill me, Marvin says. I need to die. How? How? How? How am I supposed to be this thing? This monster? I don’t even know how to be myself.
Marvin’s one open eye begins to water, oozing its salty secretion into his burns. And then Marvin screams out, a fundamental sound, which, if Schultz is to be believed, is perhaps a word taken from the true language. It is the true name of anguish, and it opens pure anguish, its measureless fathoms. The men are there together, in some silent unreckonable space, as endless as their conditions. Their conditions, given names, but immeasurable. They are immeasurable, indecipherable, unfit for this world. Perhaps, my grandfather thinks, they are where they belong.
But Frederick tries to remind himself that they have come here for a purpose that is good. They will do what they have come for, and right now, in this moment, that is enough. Frederick looks back to Marvin, who delicately restores the bandages to his ruined face.
We brought something for you, Frederick says and gestures to Lowell, who reaches into the laundry sack at his feet, removing their communal creation: a seashell bra bound with shoelaces, Lowell’s blanket fashioned into a passable skirt, and, the masterpiece, a towering fruit headdress.
Behind his bandages, Marvin’s face seems to shift. The men work gingerly, dressing him in this ersatz rendition of the costume Canon took from him.
Oh, boys, he mutters and grunts as he draws his breath to muster a respectable line or two of “Bananas Is My Business,” before losing his breath. The men applaud.
And when the applause subsides, the Crew Crew attempt to intervene. All right, they say, sensing Canon’s displeasure at the scene. Everyone back to their rooms.
Oh, not just yet, Lowell says. The men turn to Lowell, curious about this unexpected component to the scene he has plotted. Gentlemen. If you would be so kind. I’d like to read something I’ve written.
The Crew Crew boys begin to object, but Frederick has come prepared. He shoves his fingers into his pockets and reaches out to shake the hands of the two increasingly irate boys, depositing into their palms balled-up napkins containing twenty-five of Schultz’s pilfered Miltowns apiece. Fueled with institutional power, the Crew Crew boys sometimes seem an inhuman force. Pure, dumb, masculine will. But sometimes, Frederick remembers, they are only boys. They both look at what Frederick has left in their hands, and widen their eyes at each other like children awarded candy, who cannot quite believe their luck. Then they remember themselves, they try to restore their glare at Lowell, at the others, but quickly retreat to their office.
And so, just after 3:00 A.M. in the common room of a mental asylum, to an audience of schizophrenics, borderlines, and manic-depressives, Robert Lowell reads a poem from his Life Studies.
At his desk down the hall, Schultz turns his attention toward the men. For once, Schultz stops scrutinizing his sonic universe, and simply listens to Lowell speak.
WAKING IN THE BLUE
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with the muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale—
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”
Porcellian ’29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig—
redolent
and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
—Robert Lowell
1
Is it her worry or just exhaustion? It seems that every time Katharine so much as blinks, another dream state is suddenly available to her, suggestions of color and faces and sound, advertisements for potential dreams. The membrane between conscious and unconscious has suddenly become porous. Maybe, Katharine thinks, madness is only exhaustion at its extremes.
Katharine is in her dim Graveton living room, sitting in Frederick’s armchair, just as he would sit: cigarette in hand, the house hushed and still, the chaos only in her own skull. But, unlike with Frederick, her own dread is reasonable.
The clock ticks on the mantel; Katharine doesn’t let herself look at the time. She will keep herself from looking at the time for as long as possible, but she knows the terrible truth: it must already be well after midnight. Upstairs, three of her four girls are in bed, but Susie is still not home.
The Storm at the Door Page 18