Cool's Ridge

by Perrin, Ursula;

  VII

  ASYLUM

  1.

  Alone. I was alone. I lay in bed watching the cool morning light filter through the sheer Swiss curtains. John was safe and I was safe, too. I wasn’t responsible, a glorious free feeling. And Skip, I wasn’t responsible for Skip either. I didn’t have to worry about how he felt, whether I was making him feel cross or glum, irritable or angry. Alone! I reveled in it, as if I lay floating in a wide pool of the bluest, clearest water.

  I got up and took a bath. I washed my hair. I threw the clothes I’d worn the day before into the washer. I had no clothes with me. They were all at the Ridge. My mother’s house was a shell, empty of important artifacts—I’d packed most things up: the books, the records, the good china and silver, her clothes and jewelry. These “affects” were in boxes in the basement or up at the Ridge. The house was as tidy and impersonal as a Holiday Inn.

  I put on my clean clothes and made coffee in a battered little perc pot I found on a back shelf. I planned my day. I would drive to another town where no one knew me. There, I would stroll down the main street, completely alone. I would buy new clothes. I would buy some books. I couldn’t live in a house without books. I wouldn’t think about John today—I’d have a day off. I wouldn’t call anyone or talk to anyone. I wouldn’t play the TV or the radio. I would be quiet and by myself.

  I sat in the kitchen at the formica table drinking coffee. I felt perfectly content. It occurred to me that for a year I hadn’t been alone. Of course at the Ridge you never were. Well no. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t just life at the Ridge. It was marriage of course. Marriage meant you were never alone. On the other hand, in the past year I’d often felt more alone than ever before. Puzzling. I couldn’t figure it out. I’d been married, I’d lived with a group of people, and it had just felt … lonely. Was I lonely now? I heard the sound of my own voice. I was laughing.

  They had taken John to Greystone—Greystone Park—and the next day I went to see him there. He was in the Admitting Ward. The ward was crowded, the worst I had ever seen. The cots had been pushed together until they were only two feet apart, and a bad smell had developed, a combination of ordinary body odor, unclean clothing, and the smell of psychic terror. I kept wondering if they weren’t violating some kind of sanitary statutes, but I couldn’t imagine complaining. Who would you complain to?

  But John was doing better. He was in his right mind again, only he was depressed. This in itself showed me that he was back to some sort of reality, for the ward—noisy, crowded, dirty, dimly but continuously lit, with patients mumbling or crying or constantly walking—was a version of hell, a place without even the pretense of privacy, and where, lying on your cot, you were prey to the whim of anyone passing by. John sat on his cot with his head in his hands.

  “John?” I said.

  He looked up. His dark eyes looked bad but not ill, only sleepy and heavy-lidded from the Haldol. “Hey, Liz,” he said.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Oh,” he said, speaking slowly and faintly, as if submerged, “you know.” He smiled briefly and then shrugged. He had on a green cotton shirt, like the top of the scrub suit that surgeons wear. They had taken away his belt and shoelaces, his jeans hung down on his hips, his sneakers gaped, dejectedly showing their tongues. I sat down next to him. He smelled bad and I wanted to move away but I didn’t. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. The system doesn’t encourage cleanliness. The patients get taken to the showers in groups, but it’s not every day. If they’re asleep or too distracted, they don’t get to go until the next time.

  I said, “Have you seen a doctor?”

  He wrinkled up his face. “I don’t know. I can’t remember if I have or not.” The man on the next cot sighed—he was less than a foot away—and then he farted, a ripping roaring noise like a cannonball hitting a brick wall. Next came the smell, a smell as lethal as poison gas, sulphurous and sick.

  “Ole, José,” John said. “You dirty pig. Why don’t you go to the bathroom? If you make me throw up I’ll aim at you.”

  The man said nothing. He was long and thick, with flabby jaundiced skin, long black greasy hair and a thin mustache. He was picking his nose and contemplatively wiping his hands on his shirt, they way you’d wipe them on a dinner napkin. He sighed, linked his hands across his chest and closed his eyes. Then he farted again, a gentler one this time, a mere punctuation mark.

  “Moron,” John muttered. The man opened his eyes and glanced mildly at John. “No hablo español,” he said.

  John shrugged and looked at me. “That’s all he’s said since he came in.”

  We went to the reception room at the end of the floor, a vast gloomy space with tall windows that possibly overlooked trees, grass, fields—who could tell? The windows were covered with a yellowish film as if years of cigarette smoke had congealed on the glass. I touched a pane. Sure enough, it was gummy. At the other end of the room, a large-screen TV hung in midair, flickering and babbling. A coffee-colored vinyl-covered sofa was ranged in front of it and a couple of people sat there, but none of them watched the TV. They sat with their heads in their hands, or dozed or looked at the floor. As soon as we sat down, a thin pretty black girl in jeans and cowboy boots came over to us.

  “Hi, Sandra,” John said. “This is my sister, Liz.”

  “You got a cigarette?” she asked me, ignoring John.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “You got a cigarette, honey?” she asked John.

  “Not right now,” John said. She went away. John said, “Next time you come, could you bring some cigarettes?”

  “I thought you quit.”

  “There’s nothing else to do here. Everybody smokes.”

  “What brand do you want?”

  “I don’t care. Get a couple of packs.”

  “You look better. Do you feel better?”

  “I don’t know,” John said slowly, in his muffled voice. “I don’t know what better is. I want to get out of here, but I’m scared I’m in for life now. Is it true they think I killed some guy?” He screwed up his face anxiously.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I don’t even know who they’re talking about. All I know is, I was having a beer at a bar. When I went outside, this guy followed me, a guy with a hook for an arm. He asked me if I’d been in the army, had I been to Vietnam? He started shoving me. I didn’t want to hit him—a guy with one arm. Then he started in with the hook.”

  “Did you tell the police that?”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t believe me.”

  “You don’t know that. They never let on what they think. Anyway, we’ll get you a lawyer.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “I mean, when I talk to Dad.”

  “Dad?” John’s brown eyes lit up. “God, that’s funny … Dad. I haven’t seen him in a long time, have I?”

  “He’s been away.”

  “Where’s he been? Maine?”

  “Oh …” I stumbled. “Just away. You know. On a honeymoon, sort of.”

  “How about Mom?

  “What?”

  “I haven’t seen Mom since June. Is she mad at me? No, wait, she’s really sick, isn’t she? Last time I saw her she looked terrible.”

  Eventually, a bell rang. Visiting hours were over. With the other visitors, I was let out through the blue-painted steel double doors of the Admitting Ward. I walked down the long high-ceilinged hall with its pea green walls and then turned left toward the main entrance. A few feet away from the doors, two black women were having a fight. They were screaming at each other, “Damn nigger!” “Black bitch! Nigger cunt!”

  I walked slowly toward them so that I could get the gist of the argument. It seemed to be over a man—they both had the same boyfriend and had come to visit him, inconveniently at the same time. I had to pass within a few feet of them and I went along hugging the wall—they were spitting at each other, arching all the way back like baseball pitchers doing the wind-up
, and then flinging themselves forward from the waist, letting the spittle fly. One of the women was pretty, the other not.

  I got into my car and drove out of Greystone Park. I thought about the women, and wondered which of the patients had been the boyfriend. Was it the one called “Handsome” who was six feet four and depressed, or the little talkative guy who was manic and funny? Whichever, I thought, He must be some guy. But maybe not. Look at Skip, and Alice and me.

  There was a lake on the Greystone property, hidden behind some trees. When I saw it glimmering there, I thought of the pond at the Farm, and Skip and Alice. Skip and Alice and me. Where had that come from? It was such a clear thought, like a carefully printed message that appears in a bobbing glass bottle.

  Still, clear didn’t necessarily mean true: one didn’t accept all the debris that rose to the surface from the psychic depths, any more than you conjured the future with tea leaves or chicken feet.

  Or, hey, was this just Liz being super-rational to avoid the obvious?

  Oh, yeah, typical. A couple of days away from Skip and already a part of me was saying: Skip’s right, you’re paranoid. You were wrong to leave. You can work things out.

  2.

  All July I stayed in my mother’s house, but a week after I left the Ridge I got a letter from Skip. It said, “Liz. This is wrong. Hopelessly wrong. What shall we do?”

  I couldn’t think of what to do and so I did nothing. Did not call Skip, did not write. It was hot and I had no energy. Every day the thermometer read in the nineties. Mornings, I got up early and took my coffee out to the patio. I would sit in my mother’s chaise in the shade of her table umbrella and I would read. Whenever I looked up from my book I saw my mother’s plants in their clay pots and boxes, withered, brown and dead. The delphiniums had fallen over against their stakes as if they’d been shot by a firing squad. The tomato plants were stunted and yellow. The miniature rose looked like a cactus. I ignored the plants and went on reading. Except for making coffee, I did not cook. I ate Triscuits and cheese and fruit: peaches, plums, cherries, melon.

  One humid July day I thought of Maine. How happy we had been there. Now I was less happy in my mother’s house than I’d been at first. Perhaps I was bored.

  Thinking of Maine reminded me of To the Lighthouse, a book I’d never understood. What was the lighthouse supposed to symbolize? Perhaps it was only what you thought it was, something misty, indistinct, and beckoning on the horizon, or something very clear, a glaring black and white structure projected against a burning blue sky. A matter of perception, one’s goal as one saw it. But the lighthouse wasn’t even so very interesting once you’d arrived there, it was the anticipation, the journey, the going toward that was important, just as life is always a going toward, but toward what and what for? How did I see my life? Goal-less. I was lost in a white space like a seaside fog, there wasn’t any movement and the sounds around me echoed so that I was disoriented.

  I had gotten a lawyer for John, a young man named Doug Treibler who worked for my mother’s old law firm. Doug asked me out to dinner one night and we went to the Spanish Tavern on Route 22. It’s always crowded there—the food is good, people go for the paella. I must have been hungry after days of fruit—I ate and ate. After a while, Doug slowed down and then he stopped eating altogether. I felt him watching me, stupified.

  I looked up. “What’s wrong?” I had a strand of lobster meat lodged in the back of a tooth and was dying to yank it out.

  He said, ponderous with solicitude, “Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right,” I said. “I’m just hungry.”

  “I can see that,” he said.

  I shrugged and went on eating. He took me home and came inside. I was offhand, indifferent. He didn’t interest me. I looked in the kitchen cabinet and called out to him because I thought he was in the living room, “All I have is Diet Coke. Is that okay?” And there he was, behind me. He put his hands on my hipbones. “Look,” I began. The telephone rang. Saved by the bell.

  Doug looked at his watch. I put my hand over the mouthpiece. I asked him to leave. I said it was my stepmother—important family business. I thanked him for dinner. I said I’d call him in the morning. He looked at me quizzically. I said, “About John, okay?”

  He said, “Look. They really don’t have a case. But unfortunately, it’s always possible to manufacture one. What you really need is a witness, okay? You need a witness to John’s beating.” In a moment I heard his car start and then he drove away. He was very handsome. I simply didn’t like him. No, that’s not accurate—I didn’t care about liking him. He was all right. I just wasn’t interested.

  That night, Dolores, my father’s new wife, called me from Minnesota. She knew nothing about John; she was calling because they’d just heard about my mother’s death. She was upset and seemed to be irritated with my mother for dying “so suddenly.” They hadn’t expected her to die.

  I said, “Strange. Her doctors expected her to die.”

  She said, “Liz, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant—we thought she had more time. I’m sorry. I’m making a mess out of this.” She was, too. She had such a flat, nasal voice. Her voice lacked affect. I realized this in the middle of my telephone conversation with her and it gave me an insight into my father, into myself. This lack of affect. Were we both drawn to affectless people?

  I said, “Where have you been? You’ve been away for weeks. I didn’t know where to find you.”

  She said, “We’ve been right here, in Minnesota. At the Mayo Clinic. Liz, your father’s had a heart operation, a triple bypass. There were some complications afterward, and we decided to stay put until he felt stronger.”

  I said, “Incredible. You didn’t tell anyone? You couldn’t tell me? Suppose he’d died?”

  She said, “I would have called.”

  This made me laugh, and in response I felt an offended silence coming over the telephone wires. She didn’t get it. She was a straightforward person but she lacked a sense of humor. She said, stiffly, “Cal insisted we not tell anyone. He didn’t want any fuss. I think it embarrassed him.”

  Okay, I thought. I’ll buy it. When my father, the doctor, is sick—seriously ill—he feels vitally threatened and gets angry. He can’t handle it. After all, he’s supposed to be the doughty doc, the mighty healer out there slaying dragons. I smiled to myself, imagining him at the Mayo Clinic, lying there snarling orders at the nurses. Down but not out. I said, “Is he all right now? How’s he doing?”

  She said, “He’s doing well now. For a while it was difficult, but he’s enormously improved so we’re flying home tomorrow. But this thing with your mother! Does anyone know what happened?”

  I didn’t reply. Into the precise center of this conversation I dropped a silence as full of light and cold as a cube of ice.

  She said, hesitating, “You don’t think …?”

  I said, “I do think. But don’t you worry about it. There is no proof. There was no note.”

  She said hurriedly, stubbornly forging ahead and invoking her blunted affect, “And how are you getting on?”

  I said, “Well, something’s happened.”

  She said, “What is it? Is it John?”

  “Yes. He left the clinic. He turned up in Homer Township. Now he’s been accused of murder. The charges are ridiculous, but I have no idea what to do.”

  “Murder? My God, what happened?”

  “It’s a long story. He got beaten up. We think our neighbor did it—the murder, the beating—but we can’t prove it. We need a witness to the beating.”

  “Where is John now?”

  “He’s in Greystone.”

  “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Doug Treibler. He’s with my mother’s old firm. I’ve just talked to him. He says if we had a witness there would be no case.”

  She sighed. She said, “Liz, we’ll be home late tomorrow. Give us the evening to get unpacked and then we’ll talk. Meanwhile, take
care of yourself. Will you do that?”

  My stomach had begun churning—two Margaritas, two glasses of Chardonnay, a rising tide of half digested seafood all mixed up with a whopping dose of anxiety. Her voice was very firm and clear, the voice of a good therapist, and I heard myself gratefully saying, Thank you, yes, I would.

  She was blunt and lacked affect, she had almost no sense of humor, but she was realistic, willing and strong, and I thought she might help my father so that he’d be able at last to help me help John.

  3.

  At the end of July the heat wave broke and we had several days of temperatures in the seventies. I was still in my mother’s house, but now every morning I ran two miles. The TV and radio crept back into my life. I took lots of walks. I read.

  On Tuesdays and Fridays I went to see John at Greystone. Because of the criminal charges, he’d been transferred to another building which had higher security. The implications of the move terrified him and me, too. I worried about suicide until one day when I went to see him I noticed that he was wearing a new t-shirt.

  “Snappy,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Dolores,” he said and smiled. “She said that I’m not going to jail for life. What do you think?”

  “You’re not!” I said, although privately I wasn’t so sure. It seemed that everything hinged on a witness. Doug Treibler had hired a detective, but so far the detective had had no luck. “It seems,” Doug said wryly, “that in Homer Township, ‘nobody knows nuthin.’”

  Daily now I talked to my father and Dolores. We all knew what the dangers here were—that John would be indicted, that his case would go to trial, that John might be scared into pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, that a “compassionate” judge and jury might send John to the Trenton State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where the commitment proceedings are monitored by a board not totally removed from political pressures—translation: John could end up being at Trenton for life.

  Then there was the other option, that a jury (mean, ignorant, or misled) might prove “fed up” with the insanity defense, find John just plain guilty and send him to jail.