The History of Now

by Daniel Klein

  * * *

  Only after residing at Austen Riggs for close to a month did Franny deVries finally ask her psychiatrist exactly what her diagnosis was.

  “The technical one?” Dr. Werner asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You had what we call a Major Depressive Episode.”

  “How major?”

  “I believe you are through the worst of it, don’t you?”

  Franny shrugged. “So what is the non-technical diagnosis?”

  “You had a nervous breakdown.”

  “That sounds less ominous.”

  “If that is what you like, I can tell you what they used to call it—‘a spell of the vapors.’ Sounds almost ladylike, doesn’t it?”

  Franny shrugged again. “If the worst is over, I suppose I should go home,” she said.

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think we can wait a bit longer, Franny,” the doctor said. “We want to be sure you never have to suffer through something like that again.”

  “Like setting a fire, you mean.”

  “No, like the psychological state you were in when you set the fire.”

  “It’s all about me, isn’t it?”

  “In here, yes,” Dr. Werner said. “Out there, no. And that is one reason for you to stay here a while longer.”

  “To protect the people out there from me.”

  “No, to protect you from them.”

  “So they don’t put me in jail for arson.”

  “You know that is not an issue. No one holds you responsible. We have gone over this before, Franny.”

  “The insanity defense.”

  “If you like.”

  “Me, me, me.”

  “Okay, you are guilty. Is that what you want? Endless guilt?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t feel that guilty, just tired. Very tired. I want to sleep my self away.”

  “You sleep too much, Franny.”

  “It’s better than anything else you have to offer,” Franny said. And that was all she had to say in this session. It was already much more than she had said in most of them.

  Awakening in her room, Franny’s first thoughts are how she can make the time pass quickly until she can sleep again. Certain daily events seem to take an eternity, particularly group therapy. In her estimation, those regular after-breakfast gatherings in the upstairs ‘Round Room’ have only one beneficial effect: For one hour she hates other people more than she hates herself. This, in its way, is a relief, although not one with any lasting benefits; leaving the Round Room, her rage lingers but instantly turns inward.

  In every session, her fellow groupers relentlessly blame Mother or Father, Sister or Brother, the Government, Society, or the one that makes Franny cringe every time a group member venomously spits it out, ‘The System.’ The System is what has fucked them up, gotten in their way, tricked them up, conspired to make them stumble, tremble, whimper, and fail. The System, for Christ’s sake! Well, idiots, the name of that System is Life! Not being an idiot herself, Franny is quick to realize that she is only blaming these poor souls in her group for her feeling of emptiness, and that this, her own form of pettiness, is ultimately no different from theirs.

  Dance therapy passes the time more quickly, in part because Franny is not required to interact with anyone. She dances solo, rarely looking at the others as, at the therapist’s instruction, they choreograph their inner demons. As a rule, these demons appear to be intent on making the people they possess look like spastics.

  Franny, on the other hand, dedicates this hour to trying to recall what it once felt like to live in a state of expectancy. And what in the name of God that ever did for her. She dances dimly-remembered routines from as far back as Mrs. Hampton’s dance class, but also from her college workshop in modern interpretive dance where their inspiration was presumed to be more celestial than demonic. Unlike those classes of yore, there are no mirrors on the walls of the Austen Riggs dance room, just as there are few in the facility at large; in general, the institution’s residents are demoralized or, in some cases, bewildered by images of themselves. In any event, Franny is trying to recall what expectancy felt like, not how she looks seeking it. But it eludes her. Most often she ends up standing immobile in the center of the dance floor, unable to even conjure what it is she is searching for.

  Lunch is easy enough to get through, considering that Franny picks at her food for only a few minutes before leaving the dining room. And the craft period that follows five days a week offers an occasional consolation when, say, cutting out a paper snowman, Franny is momentarily transported back to kindergarten in the Lenox-Stockbridge Montessori school that still occupies the basement of the Congregational Church just down the street from Riggs.

  But on Tuesdays and Thursdays, lunchtime is filled with dread as the minutes tick away until Visiting Hour. Franny was spared this ordeal her first four weeks at the sanitarium, but then Dr. Werner authorized it as a much-needed strategy for putting his patient in touch with her emotions. Franny, he believed, had gone directly from feeling too much to feeling too little—to being utterly numb most of her waking hours. This, he explained, was a common compensatory reaction for people recovering from a Major Depressive Episode, and contact with significant people in her life could help her ‘re-animate.’ But most importantly, it could give Franny and the psychiatrist something to work with in their thus-far unproductive therapy sessions. Werner’s strategy, however, has had the opposite effect: Franny’s visitors make her retreat even more into auto-anesthesia. The visits feel like punishments.

  None more so than her mother’s, starting with the fact that Beatrice dresses for the occasions in her Saks finery and comes through the glass-paneled, inner front door of Austen Riggs all aflutter, as if arriving late for a tea party at the Lenox Garden Club. In case no one had mentioned it (Beatrice mentioned on her first visit), she was paying for Franny’s stay at the pricey institution, and it was Beatrice’s husband, Barclay, who had arranged for her swift entrance into it. ‘Entrance’ is the operative word here, as Beatrice considers getting into Austen Riggs, the crème de la crème of mental hospitals, equivalent to getting into an Ivy League college. She can recite Riggs’s illustrious alumni, starting with that most gentlemanly of pop stars, James Taylor, and working through the sons and daughters of various eminent Harvard theologians and Yale bankers. To her, the neuroses and psychoses of Riggs patients are simply the thwarted artistic expressions of the elite.

  It was not that long ago when Franny would have recoiled in despair at her mother’s perspective on Riggs, reflexively feeling inadequate—that she was even unqualified for admission to this nut house. But in her current state, Franny just stares at her mother as if observing a stock character in an amateur production of a comedy of manners. The strongest emotion Franny feels is detached amusement, although after her mother departs she feels even more benumbed than usual.

  Franny’s reaction to Babs Dowd’s single and mercifully brief visit was much the same. Babs began by looking into Franny’s eyes with Stanislavski-esque intensity and announcing in what appeared to be a prepared statement that she bore Franny no resentment for the fire ‘thing’ because—her exact words—”I can feel your turmoil as if it was my own.” From there Babs had rattled on about the progress being made in renovating the Phoenix and everybody’s hope that Franny would be ready to jump right in when the Grandville Players mounted their first production in the refurbished theater.

  Listening, Franny was struck by her realization that plays, theater, even the Phoenix itself, no longer meant a thing to her. She could not understand why they ever had. If life itself was so hollow, what possible value could there be in depicting it on a stage? It was as if in her unstable condition Franny was channeling her all-too-stable grandmother, Sally: “Why in heaven’s name does one need to dramatize life? Isn’t life ridiculous enough just as it is?”

  For once, Franny had g
ained an insight worthy of discussion at her next session with Dr. Werner, but she quickly lost interest in it, bored with her perception that one more aspect of her former life bored her.

  Her father’s visits are the most awful for Franny. His first time at Riggs, the big man began to cry the moment he saw his daughter. Wendell reached for her, drew her to his barrel chest and bulging belly in a bear hug. Franny wanted to cry too. She longed to. But no tears came, nor that blend of sweet sadness and sanctuary that had always accompanied weeping in her father’s arms. This is the most dreadful part of Franny’s condition: wanting to feel an emotion, but the wanting itself being the only emotion she can feel.

  Lila has come with Wendell a couple of times and these are torturous. Franny can plainly see her daughter’s isolation and wants desperately to console her, but with what? Franny is bereft of reassurances. Yet these occasions do awaken some semblance of feeling in Franny: Isolated herself, Franny feels a paradoxical empathy with her isolated child.

  The last time Lila visited, she sat blank-faced on the Visiting Room couch, tearing at her cuticles with her teeth. Franny summoned what strength she had to breach the barricade between them and said, “I know this must be hard for you, Lila.”

  Lila’s expression did not alter in the least. “You don’t seem that different to me,” she replied, and Franny, more than ever, wanted to cry, but again all she could summon was the desire to be a person—a wounded mother—who could cry.

  Dr. Werner deemed this a significant breakthrough. “Do you see yourself in Lila?” he asked.

  “I guess so. The detached part.”

  “Do you think she got that from you?”

  “Who knows? She pretty much came into the world that way.”

  “And you?”

  “I used to be more, you know, outgoing. Social.”

  “You enjoyed other people.”

  “I thought so. Now, I don’t really think I did. I was just acting that way. It’s a distraction. People are a convenient distraction.”

  “From what?”

  Franny shook her head back and forth. “Exactly. From what?”

  Werner waited for her to go on, but Franny had nothing more to say.

  Franny lies on her bed staring at the ceiling. She is hoping that if she falls asleep, the social worker will leave her alone instead of summoning her to the Visiting Room. No such luck.

  Slowly making her way down the corridor to the Visiting Room, Franny realizes it is the day her mother comes. She stops and leans her head against the wall. She closes her eyes. She could sleep right here, on her feet.

  “Hi, Franny.” A man’s voice.

  She opens her eyes. Herbert Blitzstein’s face pokes out from the Visiting Room door.

  “I thought you were my mother,” Franny says.

  “People are always mistaking me for somebody else,” Herb replies with a crooked smile. “I heard your mother cancelled, so I finally got in here.”

  Franny walks into the room and sits in the reclining chair that is usually reserved for elderly visitors. Looking at Herbert’s face, she realizes she has not thought about the vigil group since her breakdown. Herbert is sitting on the couch, a pile of papers and a couple of books beside him, a Navy pea jacket thrown over the back of the couch.

  “I’ve got some work to do if you don’t mind,” Herb says.

  Franny stares at him quizzically.

  “Correcting papers,” Herb says. “One thousand words on irony. Socrates via Kierkegaard. Way too hard for them. Hell, it’s way too hard for me.” He dons a pair of reading glasses, picks up the topmost paper, and begins to read, the pen in his right hand poised in the air.

  For the next hour, Herbert goes through the papers, here and there turning one sideways so he can write a comment in the margin. Once in a while he sighs or rolls his eyes or looks over at Franny and offers her an ironic, pained smile. He finishes just as visiting hour is over. He stands and pulls on his jacket.

  “You look like you could use some sleep,” he says. Then, before Franny can take in what he is up to, he comes over and kisses the top of her head. “Hang in there, Franny,” he says and he leaves.

  After he is gone, Franny finds herself almost, but not quite, smiling.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Half-dozing in American history class on her first day back at Grandville High after Christmas vacation, Lila heard her name called on the PA system. She gathered up her books, stuffed them in her backpack, and left the classroom without a word to the teacher or a glance at her classmates, then sluggishly made her way to the guidance office. Mr. Cyzinski’s secretary instructed her to take a seat until Cyzinski could see her, but Lila remained standing, idly wondering what brand of bullshit he had in store for her this time.

  She glanced at a bulletin board covered with glossy fliers promoting colleges she never heard of—Barstow, Cedar Crest, Fullerton, Saddleback, Orange Coast. Each displayed vivid, full-color panoramas of sunny campuses that looked like botanical gardens. Smaller photographs showed the colleges’ apparently deliriously happy students walking in twos and threes under arbor-ways. Invariably, one of these blissful scholars was non-white, Asian or Black, but at Orange Coast College in Southern California, Latino—a bit of niche advertising. The very thought of spending a single day at any one of these places—undoubtedly the only tier of institutions that would admit Lila other than Grandville Community College, which was required to admit anyone who graduated from Grandville High School—was utterly repulsive.

  If high school was a lie, college was a massive hoax. Its only purpose was to bleed hard-earned money from families who actually bought the preposterous idea that courses in French and anthropology and macroeconomics prepared their children for success. Never mind that ninety-nine percent of their children ended up with insufferable jobs at insurance companies and retail chains and, God pity them, as teachers in public schools—the fix was in. And none conspired more industriously in the fix than high school guidance counselors like Mr. Cyzinski.

  Cyzinski opened the door to his office with an expression of dramatic concern on his florid face, a sure sign that he had concocted another whopping lie for Lila’s consumption. Lila considered simply turning around and walking down the hall and out of the school, but a scene would follow and Wendell would probably be phoned, so she marched into the office. If there was anything in her life that still had any significance to Lila, it was her grandfather.

  After they both were seated, Cyzinski looked across his desk at Lila, that over-the-top expression of deep concern still on his brow.

  “I know this must be a difficult time for you,” he said, gravely.

  Hanging on the wall behind Cyzinski’s desk were his diplomas, a B.A. from Canisius College and an M.A. in Career Counseling from North Adams State, plus a half-dozen certificates proclaiming that Terrance R. Cyzinski had satisfactorily completed seminars or workshops in ‘The College Application Process,’ ‘Vocational Guidance—Automobile Trades,’ ‘Student Motivation,’ ‘Visions and Values,’ and, the one that Lila’s eyes lit upon as Cyzinski waited for her reply, ‘Empathetic Dialogue.’

  Lila grinned back at him manically. She simply could not help herself. There was not a doubt in her mind that Mr. Cyzinski had practiced his current facial contortion in Empathetic Dialogue Workshop.

  “Did I say something funny?” Cyzinski said, his empathy momentarily slipping.

  “No, I’m just thinking of happier times,” Lila said back, not having any idea what she meant by it. But it did steer the guidance counselor back to mellower ground.

  “I had an idea for you, Lila,” Cyzinski went on. “You have room on your schedule for an elective and I thought you might like to try ‘Communications.’ Mr. Allen teaches it and it’s very popular, as I’m sure you know. But I’ve already talked to him and he promised me he could fit you in.”

  Lila did know about the course. It was a fairly free-form class of photography, videography, and computer stuff. Ab
out half the students were artsy types and nerds, the other half ‘at risk’ kids who somebody in the school administration— undoubtedly someone who had taken a workshop in student motivation—believed could benefit from expressing themselves. Mr. Allen was known as a bit of a goof by Grandville High faculty standards; he was also reputed to be liberal to the point of not giving much of a shit what his students did in his classroom.

  But Lila was not interested. She had a different program in mind for expressing her personality: Staying stoned 24/7. During Christmas vacation when she worked ten consecutive days at Nakota waiting on second-homers and skiers, she had had a taste of what it felt like to be high all the time, and she had concluded that it overwhelmingly beat the alternative. Wendell, a connoisseur of the graffiti he used to scrub off the walls of the Phoenix’s bathrooms, said that the best were inscribed in the ’60s and ’70s, his all-time favorite being, ‘Reality is a Crutch.’ That one said it all. Settling for the life that Grandville had to offer would be an act of cowardice, so Lila felt almost heroic committing herself to a life of unreality. And Pato, the Colombian busboy, was more than happy to sell her all the unreality she wanted.