Cool's Ridge

by Perrin, Ursula;

  That morning at seven the village fire horn went off. I had had two cups of coffee and read most of the previous day’s New York Times when it started. It went on for a long while, stopped, and then started again, its high-pitched wail ominous and maddening.

  I sat at the trestle table with my hands over my ears looking out. A sky the color of wadding hung above the dripping treetops and seemed to be slowly moving from west to east. The air should have smelled fresh and sweet, full of the rain, but it had an acrid quality, a kind of foulness that I associated with subways in New York City—it smelled of urine and cinders.

  I heard someone in the kitchen and then Skip came out to the porch with a mug of coffee. He had shaved, showered, dressed, but his eyes looked puffy and he was plainly irritable. He stood in the doorway sipping coffee and then asked how my brother was. I said that he was all right, but someone had beaten him up.

  He said, “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “He needs to be in a hospital.”

  “So does the person who beat him up.”

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  “Take him down to Comstock. Try and get a doctor who’ll see him.”

  “S’ppose you can’t?”

  “Then I’ll take him to an emergency room.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “No he’s not okay, he needs his medication.”

  Skip grunted and then smiled at me one-sidedly. He said, “You’re a good sister.” I turned my head away. A few minutes later I saw his gray sedan go bumping down the driveway. He seemed in a hurry. Five minutes later the fire horn started again.

  And now from quite close by I heard a patchwork of sounds, shouts and the rumble of heavy trucks and a metallic clanking. Outside, the sodden gray sky was lifting, and fresh-bleached clouds scudded along and here and there between the clouds you caught bright glimpses of blue. The western edge of the sky was intensely blue, but from the direction of the Knackers’ farm a dense black plume of smoke writhed upwards like an enormous cobra preparing to strike. The air was now clearly acrid, bitter with char.

  “What’s going on?” Shauna asked from the door.

  “It’s the Knackers,” I said. “Something’s on fire.”

  “Again? I thought lightning never strikes twice.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t,” I said.

  Leonard appeared just behind Shauna. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Knackers seems to be on fire again,” Shauna said.

  “Great,” Leonard said briskly. “Can you cover it?”

  “Me?” Shauna said. “Why doesn’t Liz do it?”

  “She’s got to take her brother to a doctor,” Leonard said. “How about it, Shauna? Think you can get some more great pictures?”

  “I’m wondering what they’ve got left to burn,” Shauna said.

  I got dressed and went down to wake up John. He was lying curled up on his side as if he hurt. When I touched him, his dark eyes opened wide and then narrowed. He would not speak but he ate some breakfast and got into the car willingly enough.

  On the long drive to Comstock he sat silent and tipped back in the passenger’s seat. He was rigid, as if overnight his bones had petrified. When we rolled to a stop at the first red light in downtown Comstock, an old grade-school friend of John’s crossed in front of us. I said, “Look, there’s Larry Finnegan.” In response, John slowly raised his hands to the top of his head. They stayed there as if welded into place. His left elbow protruded into a corner of my vision. When I asked him to put his hands down, he did so; but after a moment, as if by some automatic internal mechanism, his hands rose to his head again.

  A few minutes later I pulled into the driveway of our mother’s house. I opened the car door for him and he eased himself out at an angle, never once releasing the grip of his hands on his head. He followed me to the side door in this posture. As I fumbled in my bag for the housekeys, I noticed an old woman standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, staring at us. She was bent and leaned on a cane, and she was what you might call expressively dressed in a full-skirted purple print dress, tennis sneakers, long white gloves and a straw hat with a wide brim. She was simply planted there. I had no idea who she was—some neighbor my mother had adopted? A litigious patient of my father’s? I turned the key in the lock. The door stuck and I pressed my knee and shoulder against it and shoved until it gave way.

  Immediately, I was struck by the deadness of the house, the vaguely chemical odorless odors of the dead air, the lurking quiet. John must have felt it too. In his loud, painfully clear enunciation he asked, “Where has Mother gone?”

  I’d been waiting to tell him—waiting until he was better, waiting until the clinic had made him rational—so now I said, “She’s away, John,” but I wondered if that time would ever come, when John would be clear in the head and I could say to him, knowing he could take it in: “Mom’s dead.”

  I glanced out of a kitchen window and saw that the woman was still there. She was so bent and there was something so hard and spiny about her that in my head I labelled her “The Crab,” an insult to those ugly, bumbling but utterly innocent creatures who wash in at North Atlantic beaches in the summer months. I was pretty sure there was nothing innocuous about this creature. She seemed to me one of those people who elsewhere in the world might be labelled “busybody” and met with a jaundiced grimace or a helpless roll of the eyes. But Comstock was one of those suburban New Jersey towns wherein every rickety cottage commanded the asking price of a Taj Mahal, and citizens fretted about “maintaining real estate values.” Consequently, paranoia had been elevated to a civic virtue. The entire town was pasted up with blue and white signs, each one showing a wide-open eye with the menacing words: “Not On Our Watch!” printed underneath. I suspected that the old babe’s position of “town snoop” had lately been formalized into something socially relevant and economically useful.

  John and I settled down for the afternoon in the living room of the cool dusty house which seemed to me, without my mother there, as dead and lifeless as any tomb. I had taken my mother’s clothes and personal belongings out of the house but the furniture remained, the phone was on, the utilities worked, I’d even left some frozen foods in the freezer. I was able to fix John’s favorite lunch—hot dogs split and grilled in a pan and stuffed into a slice of white bread topped with salsa and chunks of cheddar cheese.

  After lunch, while John sat bolt upright on the living room sofa with his chin pointed at the ceiling (and with the TV on, blinking and gibbering), I went into the kitchen and riffled through the pages of the address book that hung from a shoelace next to the wall telephone.

  The last three pages had a list of the various psychiatrists John had seen and I started with the final name, Dr. Avery Phillips, figuring that maybe he was John’s most recent physician. Dr. Phillips’ answering service told me that he was vacationing in Nova Scotia, and his patients were being seen by Dr. Norris. I called Dr. Norris, whose secretary interviewed me in a tone that indicated either acid indigestion or congenital rudeness. “Just one moment,” she said in that pompous voice universally used by pea-brained, power-mad secretaries, and the telephone got dropped into what sounded like a month’s rustling supply of the National Inquirer. When she came back on she said that Dr. Norris was all jammed up, couldn’t see John for three weeks, by which time Dr. Phillips would be back from Nova Scotia, so why didn’t I just wait for him? I explained that John needed medication immediately and she icily responded (before hanging up) that Dr. Norris never “just gave out” medication.

  I went on to Dr. Raymond McGuire, who remembered John. He had seen John two years ago but, he said, “I don’t think there’s any point in my seeing John.” I asked, “Why not?” He said, “John doesn’t like me.” This made me give a laugh which I suppressed and engineered into a cough. I cleared my throat. I said, “When John’s off his medication he doesn’t like anybody.” “I’m sorry,�
�� Dr. McGuire said sternly. “If there’s no therapeutic rapport, there’s simply no point.”

  I went on to Dr. Ingeborg Edelstein, whose secretary said she could give John an hour—in October; Dr. Malcolm Murray, who only had space for one in a Wednesday night group (“he doesn’t need a group, he needs …”); Dr. Helena Winograd, who couldn’t see him herself but thought she could get him into the Carrier Clinic (“sorry—our insurance is used up”).

  At one o’clock I took a break. I wandered out to the living room. John was still sitting on the sofa, but his head hung back so far that his eyes were upside down. He was missing the TV program. I snapped the set off.

  “Hey, John.” I said. He hadn’t shaved this morning and the black eye was a deep polished purple. The scratch on his cheek made a long jeweled line, and a blue and yellow bruise had bloomed on his forehead. I touched his cheek with my finger.

  His eyes flew open and widened. “Kindly step to the back of the us,” he said.

  I politely stepped back. When John was this sick he needed a lot of space. “John? Can you tell me what happened yesterday? Who beat you up?”

  He closed his eyes and said in a deep rolling voice, “’Tis a far far better thing I do.”

  “You said you were at The Rainbow Room. Did you mean The Rainbow’s End?”

  “Some ha meat and can nae eat. Horsemeat. Some people eat horsemeat. People sell their saddle horses for horsemeat. I ask you, is that any way to treat someone you happen to love?”

  I went back into the kitchen to make another call. I was dialing when I heard a crash from the living room. I hung up fast and ran in. John was standing near a console table looking down at the splintered fragments of an old blue and yellow Chinese lamp. He pointed and intoned, “Evil begets evil.”

  “Okay,” I said, “Let’s go.”

  He smiled. “Where are we going?”

  “We’re going for a drive.”

  “No.”

  “John,” I said, “we’re going to the hospital. It’s either there or the police station. Take your choice.”

  So he went with me quite calmly. He was afraid of the police, afraid of handcuffs and billy clubs. He’d done time in local jails, for vagrancy or being a public nuisance. If he stopped taking his medicine he’d become confused, and then aggressive. Once my mother had to throw him out because he’d taken a hammer to all the pictures on the wall. She tried to get him committed, but they said he wasn’t crazy enough. He wasn’t a danger to himself or others, only to the household artifacts.

  When we got to the hospital parking garage, I felt tired and irritable, and I was angry at John for ruining my life. But when we got out of the car, for just a moment or two he looked the way he used to look before he got sick: handsome and intelligent, with a sweet and humorous expression. I took his arm. He smiled sadly and said, “Thanks, sis.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “For helping me,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything. Your life,” he shrugged and dropped his head, “my life.”

  I kept holding on to his arm, but as we walked down the ramp of the parking garage I could feel his arm grow rigid again. By the time we entered the hospital’s lobby, his hands were fixed on his head. People stared. I wanted to say, Look, it’s okay, he’s weaponless, he’s defenseless, he’s a prisoner of war. But of course it was his war and my war, not theirs.

  6.

  The hospital had added another new wing and had hired a New York decorator to devise the interior of the Emergency Waiting Room. The walls were a soothing light gray, there were tiny recessed lights twinkling like stars in a sooty sky, the gray carpeting was inches deep and you sank into chairs of the softest gray plush. There were no windows. It was all as hushed and expensive-looking as a corporate board room and I kept wondering, nervously, how, if they took John, I would manage to pay for it.

  John sat in a gray plush armchair with his long legs extended and his head hung back. People who walked by him had to navigate over his dirty white sneakers. Reactions were mixed. Some looked at him and studiously looked away; other were alarmed, offended, or angry. A dapper white-haired man in a seersucker suit paused in front of us with a benevolent smile. “Hello, son,” he said, in a soft voice. When John didn’t respond, he turned to me. “What’s the matter with him, sis?” I said John was ill. “Mental, eh?” he said. “Probably hereditary. Watch out who you marry.”

  We sat in the waiting room for three hours. Once when I went up to the desk to ask, again, when we would be seen, I heard the “triage” nurse say to another nurse, “I hate these nuts.” At first I thought she was talking about something in her candy bar, and then I saw from her quick glance up that she meant John.

  Finally John’s name was called out and we were led to one of the curtained-off cubicles. A tall cheerful-looking person came in and zipped the curtains closed. The plastic name-tag pinned to the pocket of her white coat said Dr. Honiger. Immediately, she started asking John questions in a brisk but reassuring voice. How long have you been sick? What kind of medication are you taking? When was the last time you took your medication? Do you know the diagnosis of your illness?

  Speaking in a more confidential tone, Dr. Honiger questioned me. Yes, John had been hospitalized several times. Yes, he’d lately been a patient in a clinic in Queens but had gone AWOL. He had been diagnosed as having schizophrenia, although once when he seemed to be having a remission a psychiatrist had diagnosed him as manic-depressive.

  She nodded and said, “I’d like to admit him to our psychiatric ward for observation. Does he have insurance?”

  “It’s used up.”

  “Hmm. We do have a special fund that might cover a couple of days. Do you think he’ll sign himself in? Our ward’s voluntary.”

  “I don’t know. He just walked out of the other place. You know what, what I really need now is a prescription. If I can get some medicine into him I can talk to him. Otherwise …”

  “Well I can’t just write a prescription, it’s against hospital policy. He’ll have to be seen by somebody upstairs.”

  “But what’s the point of that? I know what’s wrong with him. What he needs is his medicine.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have come here. You should have called a private physician, a psychiatrist.”

  “I called seven of them.”

  She looked at me with raised brows. “Oh,” she said. She turned to John and addressed him calmly. He was sitting on the edge of the paper-covered examining table supported by his rigid arms, his gaze fastened upon the acoustic ceiling tiles. “John, do you want to come upstairs with me?”

  John’s brown eyes rolled forward and took in Dr. Honiger. He smiled. He said, “No offense, but you’re a little on the hefty side.” Then his eyes rolled backward again.

  Dr. Honiger laughed. She had messy curly brown hair, a fat nose, and glasses, but behind the glinting gold frames her eyes registered humor and warmth. “Let me put it slightly differently. You know and I know that you’re not awfully well right now. It would be good for you to go upstairs, have a rest and be taken care of. Wouldn’t you like to do that?”

  “Thank you, no,” John said, his voice muffled from the backward strain on his voice box. “I am not tired, nor am I particularly in need of care.”

  “Look,” Dr. Honiger said to me, “if he won’t sign himself in there’s nothing I can do. I can’t admit him against his will and with the current wonderful situation, you won’t get him committed anywhere. I don’t know what to tell you. You live all alone?”

  “I’m alone right now, yes.”

  “You have a job?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nobody else in your family?”

  “My father’s away.”

  She glanced down at the chart. “John Stillwell. You’re not related to Dr. Stillwell?”

  “He’s my father.”

  “You can’t call him? I mean, even if it’s his
vacation …”

  “I don’t know where he is.” I must have sounded tired—tired and desperate.

  Her face tightened into a frown; she tapped the edge of her clipboard with a ballpoint pen. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got the picture.” She took a prescription pad out of the breast pocket of her white coat. “This will be an emergency supply until you get him to a private physician. Haldol, five milligrams daily. What’s your pharmacy?”

  “Brunning’s.”

  She looked at her wristwatch. It was a Mickey Mouse watch. She noticed me looking at it and said, “We get a lot of kids.” She tore the prescription off the pad, folded it neatly in half, and handed it to me. “Good luck,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She turned to John, who had slipped down from the table and was standing at attention next to it with his feet apart and his head back and his arms stiff, looking like the Son of Frankenstein. “John?” she said. “Listen to me. Your sister’s going to get you some medicine. I want you to take it, okay? Will you do that? Because if you don’t do that you’ll probably have to go back to Greystone. So promise me you’ll take the medicine, John.”

  “I shall consider the options,” John said loftily.

  “Listen, John,” Dr. Honiger said. “There are no options. You can take the medicine and get better, or not take it and go to Greystone. Is that clear?”

  “’Tis a far far better thing I do,” John said.

  “You bet,” Dr. Honiger said.

  We left. I put the prescription into a zippered compartment of my purse. As we walked along on the thick gray carpeting, John’s hands rose to grip his head.

  I was tired and cranky and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. “John,” I said, “for Pete’s sake, take your hands off your head.”

  We had stopped in front of the glass entrance doors that open and slide closed automatically. Two men in business suits, doctors probably, were coming in, and they swung around us and glared. “Why?” John asked.

  “Because,” I said cruelly, “it makes you look stupid.”