Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Smith, Lee

  “My wife would like to welcome you, too,“ he said to me. “Come in—” He opened the ornate door and led me through the wide entrance hall with its stained glass windows to the panelled drawing room on the right, where a beautiful blonde woman sat in a cozy chair by the fireplace, reading a book.

  She looked up and smiled. “Evalina.” She rose gracefully, closing the book. She was very tall. “It is such a pleasure to have you here. I, too, am a pianist.” In fact, a gleaming spinet piano stood in the corner of that room.

  “Allow me to introduce my wife, the world-renowned concert pianist Grace Potter Carroll,” he said with a smile.

  “You exaggerate, my dear.” She smiled at him, and winked at me. “But I am a piano teacher as well, and I am hoping that we may work together, you and I, after a bit, when you are settled. Would you like that?”

  “No,” I said, for I did not deserve this good fortune, which seemed to me like a dream come true. I deserved punishment, disaster, death. “Anyway,” I said, “I thought this was a mental institution.”

  “It is,” Mrs. Carroll said. “It is also our home.”

  At that moment I realized that I had no home at all, no place to go back to in New Orleans or anywhere else in the world. Would I have to live in this fancy mental institution forever? “I am not crazy!” I screamed at Mrs. Carroll, my loud, angry words immediately absorbed into the drawing room’s thick rug and soft furniture.

  “Why are you here, then?” Dr. Carroll asked with interest, while his wife continued to smile as if my behavior were completely normal.

  “Because I killed my mother,” I said.

  At this, Mrs. Carroll knelt suddenly, unexpectedly, before me, taking my chin firmly in her fingers. She looked into my eyes. “I’m sure that is not true,” she said. “Now, can you read music?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Ah,” she said, standing back up. “We have a starting point.”

  MRS. HODGES SAT waiting for me on a bench in the entrance hall. “Quite the pet, aren’t you?” she said acidly after Dr. Carroll shook my hand and turned to leave. She put away her knitting and stood up.

  “Am I?” I felt dazed, and dizzy again.

  “Now, now, pay no attention to me,” she said. “It’s high time you had some care, if I am any judge, so come along, this way. Let’s go round back, where your dormitory is.”

  The sun seemed too strong for me suddenly, the grass too green, the blooming forsythia too bright. Yet I followed obediently, or tried to. People streamed down the hill behind Highland Hall toward a wooded area where I could barely see a rustic building set deep in the forest, and then a long, sunny stretch of bare ground. “Brushwood.” Mrs. Hodges jerked her thumb in that gesture I had grown accustomed to. “This is where they do all the gardening, hours of it, every day, all year round, mind you. You’ll see. That there’s the greenhouse, back in there. Oh, he’s nuts about it, Himself is, digging in the earth, mind you.”

  Now I could tell that there was, indeed, something wrong with many of these people. Several spoke to themselves as they came up the path, while others hung their heads, looking neither left nor right. Harsh words of argument came from behind a boxwood hedge; we reached the end of it in time to see an athletic-looking man, whom I took to be a staff member, walk away from a woman seated on a boulder, smoking a cigarette and swinging her foot disgustedly against the rock. Oddly—for it was still winter—she wore black tights and ballet slippers.

  At that time, Mrs. Fitzgerald was quite mad. She had been a patient at Highland Hospital for almost a year, Mr. Fitzgerald having moved her there in desperation from Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore, following stays at other clinics in Europe. My first view of her is as clear to me today as it was then—etched in my brain as if by acid.

  I could not move, transfixed by her ferocious gaze and weakened, I suppose, by hunger. I had a vivid, intense impression of bright flowers and blue sky, sunlight and piney air, before my own vision grew dark as hers and I fell to the ground insensible.

  CHAPTER 2

  I WAS PLACED DIRECTLY into an upstairs hospital room in the Central Building, where several doctors and many nurses came and went, giving me pills that I later learned were barbiturates, poking me and prodding me, taking samples of blood and such as that. My tiny, rectangular room was like the interior of a shoebox, very white and very clean, with no pictures. Its one long window looked out upon the blue peak of a mountain, sometimes wreathed in clouds and sometimes shining in the sunlight so that I could still see high patches of sparkling snow. Or was it simply stone? But it was all I could do to merely notice this view; otherwise I lay totally still, exhausted, fingering the tiny balls on my pink chenille bedspread, often falling asleep even while the kindly nurses were still talking to me. I slept and ate; they seemed always to be feeding me, especially Cream of Wheat and oatmeal and applesauce, as if I were a baby. People came and went, their voices flying back and forth across my head like birds.

  “She is resting.” I remember Dr. Carroll’s calm voice in response to someone’s question. “This is her work now, her only work, and she is doing a good job of it, too. Yes, you are,” he said directly to me, patting my hand in that way he had. “You are a good girl, Evalina”—though even in my nearly vegetative state, I knew that I was not. “Never assume that they cannot hear you, even while in coma . . .” he went on to say to the nurses in training assembled by my bed. “We understand so little about human consciousness. Never, ever, underestimate the human brain . . .”

  Somehow, after several weeks, they had me sitting up and reading books, though I refused the first batch Mrs. Hodges brought me, as I had read them all. “Too babyfied, eh?” she said in surprise. “How old are you, then?” she asked, appearing dumbfounded when I answered thirteen, and doubly dumbfounded when I could not tell her what my birthday was, as no one had ever celebrated it. Mrs. Hodges reappeared with more books, including some Nancy Drew mysteries, which I had never heard of. Obviously, the nuns had not approved of them. I devoured book after book—The Secret of the Old Clock, The Mystery at Lilac Inn, The Secret of Shadow Ranch, The Hidden Staircase (my favorite!). I loved the way independent Nancy zipped around solving the mysteries in her blue roadster with her chums, boyish George Fayne and plump, easily frightened Bess Marvin. Another friend named Helen disappeared after the first few books, and I liked to imagine that perhaps she had been sent away to Highland Hospital in North Carolina and would soon appear as my chum.

  “You’re looking better now,” Mrs. Hodges observed at length, bringing me another stack. Was I? How should I know, since we were all denied mirrors at Highland.

  Though I resisted leaving my little white room in the clinic for a good while after Dr. C said I could go, it was finally the possibility of “chums” that coerced me into my dormitory room in the Annex of the Central Building at last. Here I found my poor belongings, such as they were, all unpacked and arranged and waiting for me, as well as six brand new Nancy Drew books along with an engraved note card from Grace Potter Carroll. “Ready for lessons?” she wrote in her elegant hand. This was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. I burst into tears and threw myself onto my now-beloved chenille spread, which they had allowed me to bring over from the clinic.

  Thus it began: my long tenure at Highland Hospital, my new life. And indeed I would have chums of my own, several of them, over the years I was to remain there, the first being the dark-haired girl whose room was just across the hall in the Annex from mine. Lily Ponder stared but did not speak; she had not spoken since the rest of her family was killed in an automobile accident in Mississippi almost a year earlier.

  “Severely de-pressed, and little wonder!” Mrs. Hodges announced as we passed right in front of her.

  “But she can hear,” I whispered to Mrs. Hodges fiercely, remembering what Dr. C had said. “Just because she doesn’t speak doesn’t mean she can’t hear.”

  Though that might be an advantage, I would realize soon enough, s
ince another occupant of our small annex talked constantly, unable to shut up for even an instant. Virginia Day talked when others were present and when we weren’t—it made no difference at all. This was a fat, excitable blonde girl who waved her hands and jabbed at the air to make her points. “There is nothing wrong with me, nothing, nothing, nothing,” she said over and over. “She sent me here! She hates me, that’s all, and she has bewitched him.”

  “Who?” I had to ask.

  “My father, the goddamn son of a bitch!”

  I was fearful yet exhilarated to hear this language.

  “Who has bewitched him? Your mother?”

  “Not my mother.” Now Virginia was hugging herself, rocking back and forth. “They have killed my mother, he pushed her off the pier. It was not an accident, not at all. I saw it. I saw it all, yet no one will believe me.” Her diagnosis was dementia praecox, now called schizophrenia. But who was to say whether Virginia Day was telling the truth or not? Or telling, perhaps, a deeper truth? It was a mystery, beyond the skills of even Nancy Drew. I was to hear many such mystery stories at Highland; I shall spare you all the details. My new chums came and went, sometimes with such rapidity that I was tempted to try to gauge how long a promising new girl might stay before I went to the trouble of befriending her—rather like Alicia’s cold attitude toward me back at Bellefleur. Some of these girls got better; some got worse.

  But I loved school. I loved our castlelike building, our big, airy schoolroom, and especially our English teacher, who was named Miss Tippin and wore her long brown curls pulled back in an old-fashioned bun. She loved poetry and could recite hundreds of poems, it seemed, aloud. She would close her eyes and lift up her face when she did it, rocking back on her heels like a person in a trance. Miss Tippin was a remarkable teacher as she faced the formidable task of reaching us all at our differing levels; her individualized assignments, I realize now, were both imaginative and therapeutic.

  Dr. Broughton, our heavyset science and math teacher, looked rather like a monk with his bald head as round and shiny as a ball, and then the long fringe of red hair above his collar. While I had always been the smartest girl in all of my classes, here at Highland I was faced with a genius boy of my own age, Robert Liebnitz, so brilliant that he was already reading college texts; rather than classes, he simply engaged in “conversations” with Dr. Broughton and Dr. C and professors at the college in town. I couldn’t even try to compete, which turned out to be a relief. The head of physical education, Mr. Axelrod, generally wore shorts and knee socks and a cowboy hat. He was considered to be a real character. Our young music teacher, Miss Phoebe Dean, was a “flippertigibbet” in the words of Mrs. Hodges, but I liked her bobbed hair and her enthusiasm.

  I liked them all, in fact, but it was my piano lessons that I lived for, revering Mrs. Carroll above all others—for her kindness as well as her brilliance, of which I had soon enough ample proof, accompanying Mrs. Hodges to see Mrs. Carroll perform Rachmaninoff, then Chopin’s very dramatic “Grand Polonaise,” and then a big Brahms “Ballade” in concert at the Asheville City Auditorium downtown. Mrs. Carroll wore a red evening dress and a boa; I saved the program.

  My own classes with Mrs. Carroll were held at the grand piano in their private living quarters, filled with antiques, art, and oddities from their world travels—a Viennese crystal punchbowl containing postcards from every foreign country I had ever heard of, and several I had not, each with its exotic stamp; a life-size statue of a male dancer, miraculously balanced on one marble toe; six frightening African masks, lined up across one wall; a Tiffany lamp; a beautiful carousel clock, with moving horses, on the mantel, purchased on their honeymoon in Italy. I intended to have a honeymoon in Italy, just like Mrs. Carroll. In fact, I intended to be her.

  A red silk fringed scarf lay across the top of the gleaming black Steinway. She always jerked it off with a flourish before we began, and flung it across a chair. Every little thing had to be done correctly, following the Diller-Quaile method. She was very strict. A child prodigy herself, Mrs. Carroll had once studied piano in Vienna with “the great Busoni,” who had told her, “Music is freedom.” She told me this again and again.

  “Now you must sit just so, Evalina,” Mrs. Carroll said, demonstrating. “No more of that slouching.” She taught me to hold my arms straight between elbow and wrist, parallel to the floor, curving my hand as if I were holding a lemon, manipulating my fingers until they hurt. I was not to touch the pedals, nor to play by ear.

  Every lesson began with about fifteen minutes of scales, then arpeggios. Soon we had advanced to simple Bach inventions, which I must learn one hand at a time, right hand first; I was not allowed even to try the left hand until the right was mastered. Imagine my delight when Mrs. Carroll sat next to me on the bench and played the left hand herself while I played the right—a duet! I adored her musky perfume, her dark red lipstick, the longish dresses and high heels she wore regardless of the elements. I loved it all—the diamond-paned windows that threw the light in rainbow prisms around the room, the sternly beautiful lines of the elegant notes marching across the staves, the rustle as we turned the pages.

  I liked the theory sessions as well, held in the schoolroom with two town girls and one boy, where Mrs. Carroll walked around and looked at our hands on piano boards while she told us about the lives of the composers. We learned that Mozart was a prodigy; that Chopin had died of TB in his thirties, hunched over and bleeding at his keyboard; and that Bach had had twenty children. That was too many children, I thought. That might be almost as bad as being an orphan. After I learned to play some of his simple waltzes, it became my sole aim to play the “Minute Waltz” in one minute (molto vivace!) as demonstrated by Mrs. Carroll. I practiced and practiced, using a metronome, and was proud when I got it down to three. I learned to play Bach’s “Little Prelude in C Major” and “Für Elise,” by Beethoven, which I loved. Who was Elise? I used to wonder, playing. Was she his girlfriend? His wife?

  A huge vase of fresh yellow roses always stood on the round marble top table at the center of the drawing room, the weekly gift of Dr. Carroll, we were all to learn, delivered like clockwork each Tuesday. He had met Grace Potter on a Tuesday and he had given her a dozen yellow roses every Tuesday since, for over thirty years. Robert Liebnitz did the math in his head and announced that this was 187,000 roses, which had cost at least $187,200 dollars. Dr. and Mrs. Carroll still called each other “darling” aloud, even in public, as if they were interchangeable, or a single organism. Robert said that their relationship was symbiotic.

  In love with my study of the piano and with my classes, I cherished especially those early morning hours at the old piano in the little practice room on the second floor of Homewood—virtually the only time I was ever allowed to be alone during my entire time at Highland Hospital. Otherwise I was forced into the many activities that were so much a part of the program here: games, hiking, gardening, art. We all had to do it. We all had to do everything, thus “combating the damaging tendency of most illness to foster introspection,” which was to be avoided at all costs. Dr C was adamant on this point.

  THUS I FOUND myself face to face with the woman in the black ballet slippers and tights again, in the art studio at Homewood, several months after our first encounter. I sat at a long table, dabbling half-heartedly in watercolors, attempting a still life of the fruit that the art teacher, Miss Malone, had piled up in a wooden bowl before us. Yellow pears, red apples, dusky grapes. Padding softly from person to person with quiet words of encouragement, her thick gray braid hanging down to her hips, Miss Malone was somehow different, in a way I could not define, from the rest of the staff. She was a real artist, I would realize later, and a freethinker whose ideas sometimes differed from Dr. C’s. Meanwhile a summer breeze blew through the studio, with its heavy leaded windows propped open, its doors ajar. I wanted only to be out of there, to be in the swimming pool, newly filled and opened, shimmering in the sunshine.

  Miss Malone
struck her hanging gong, the sign that the class was over. “Next time, we shall paint en plein air,” she announced.

  These French words caught me unawares, bringing me back to New Orleans, where suddenly I could see the dusty summer streets, hear the clip-clop of the horses and the buggies down by Jackson Square, taste the multicolored ices the old man sold from a cart at the corner. I bowed my head to hide my tears as I washed out my brushes and packed my supplies away.

  “There, there,” a kind voice said, and I looked up in surprise to see the fearsome Mrs. Fitzgerald now changed entirely. She wore a loose-fitting artistic smock; her brown hair swung to her shoulders. She looked younger and prettier than she had before. “Now let me see.” She smoothed out my “painting,” which was terrible. “Not bad at all—though it must be boring for you, such a fuddy-duddy old assignment.”

  It was boring, though I hadn’t thought of that. Determined to be a good girl, I did everything that I was told at Highland, as I had with the nuns, questioning nothing. I loved rules.

  “I had a little girl, too, once upon a time,” she told me gently, smiling. “A little pie-face girl like you. She was awfully cute.”

  “Where is she now?” Too late I realized that perhaps I should not have asked this question, but Mrs. Fitzgerald’s answer was calm.

  “Oh, she’s away, far, far away, away from here, at a boarding school named Ethel Walker. She likes it there, she’s better off.” Her tone was wistful.

  Better off than what? I wondered.

  Others were leaving now. Miss Malone had come up to hover behind us, listening to our conversation, though she did not interrupt—according Mrs. Fitzgerald, as did the others, a kind of special respect. At that time, Mrs. Fitzgerald was spending almost all her time in the art studio, as much as Dr. C would permit.