The guard said you had a mean mouth on you and I apologized profusely, explained to you what “impertinence” was. How could you be so rude on Christmas Day? Then my voice softened. “I know it hasn’t been easy, sweetie. We’ll have a tea party at our new table tonight.”
I pointed out the Mills Building as we drove along. You stared at the patients in bathrobes, some with coats thrown over their pajamas, walking back and forth across the lawn or sitting on park benches. You said they looked asleep, or real tired. That they all looked sorta lazy, like they didn’t have anywhere to go.
“Johnny says some people locked up on Bull Street who’re walking around are really dead.”
“That’s an unkind thing to say. Johnny shouldn’t make up such stories. These are people who’ve been sick. Lots of people have had—nervous breakdowns.” Though I knew no one who had besides William.
I braked at Babcock and you stared at the massive brick building. Endless barred windows. “Johnny says my daddy’s in jail.”
Isn’t it bad enough without the meanness of children?
“This is a hospital,” I snapped. “Come on, honey, let’s go see your daddy. He’s going to stand at the window and wave to you.”
I gave you the everything-will-be-fine smile—by now I could patent it. I looked at my watch, took your hand, and we walked closer to the building. “Look up, Daddy’s in that window on the fourth floor. Count eight windows from the end of the building. He’s waving at you.”
“That’s a little midget like at the State Fair. My daddy’s big.”
“That’s because he’s so far away. See him? Wave to your daddy.”
You really didn’t see your father in that barred window, did you? Didn’t realize it was him. But you waved. Probably to make me happy. I looked at you hopefully, put you back in the car, and went in the building.
Babcock had two rows of rooms divided by a corridor on each ward, a nineteenth-century asylum design that allowed too little ventilation in our humid climate. I was shocked to see empty beds running like a train down one side of the hall: did some patients have to sleep here? I passed dozens of aimlessly wandering men in dirty bathrobes. I tried not to notice the cockroaches and filthy floors, tried not to notice the smell of dirty clothes, bedpans, mildew. Tried not to notice the man, unshaven and unkempt, who yelled that he’d give me fifty dollars if I’d take him home. Tried not to notice a white-uniformed attendant—thankfully they weren’t called “keepers” anymore—shoving a red-faced, screaming patient down the hall. As I passed tiny rooms left and right, someone was shouting inside one, someone else was crying. Another man, pacing the hall terribly fast, stopped when he saw me and hissed, “Get out of here while you can.” I shrank back, clutched the picnic basket, and hurried on.
I turned, with relief, into William’s room. He was stretched out on his bed, wearing his standard white shirt, khaki pants, leather bedroom slippers.
“Merry Christmas, darling,” I called, my voice unnaturally high, straining too hard for cheerfulness. William stared at me as I set the basket down. I embraced him and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m so happy to finally see you. We miss you so much.”
He did not respond to my touch but said hello, regarding me warily as I set out his dinner. “I didn’t make a turkey this year,” I said, “just a roast chicken. I’ll make a big turkey next year when we’re all together.”
I gazed around the room—just enough space for a single bed and a wooden desk and chair. Gone were the Dorothy Dix days when someone would have put pictures on the walls. A metal portable closet, paint peeling, held William’s clothes. On his desk, some books and writing paper. The walls were a dirty green, the ceiling light bulb swinging naked, and his window—he was lucky he had a large window—had two cracked panes and one missing. Beyond the glass was a network of rusted iron bars placed so close together not even a hand could get through them.
William sat at the desk to eat. He murmured something about the dinner being good but other than that he was quiet and didn’t look at me as I told him about our day, omitting the table. He stared out of the window often—it was a warmish December day and the room was stuffy. I said maybe I could bring him a fan but he said they weren’t allowed, some patients might try to cut themselves with the blades. I fell silent, then I asked if he’d been going to the dayroom to listen to the radio. They had a television there, didn’t they? I’d seen one in a store downtown and they were amazing, people said that sooner or later everyone in the country would have one. I couldn’t imagine how, they cost $1,300, who could afford that? I asked if he’d gone to the Christmas Eve church service—I’d heard the chapel here was lovely—and he said no, he didn’t feel like it. I asked if he’d seen the doctor this week and he said he thought so. I asked if he needed anything and he said some cigarettes. I said surely there was something else, but he said no, he didn’t need a thing.
He hadn’t looked at me at all. “Remember our first Christmas in Summerville?” I said. “That wonderful silk dress you gave me, I still love it. I let it out and wore it to Christmas dinner at Mrs. Moazen’s house.”
“What silk dress?”
“You know, the year we had Christmas dinner with those people from the academy.”
He looked blank. I thought, He doesn’t remember. The shock treatments?
Outside the window the chapel bells began ringing. I waited for him to say something about them, but he didn’t. I asked how the hospital food was; he said it wasn’t very good. No word differed from any other in tone, none carried inflection, the signature of personality. The speech of someone who was very far away. He was calm, all right. So calm maybe I should check his pulse.
I talked about how much Lyra missed her daddy, assured William that everything at home was fine, that I’d paid the bills on time. I’d get the car oil changed after New Year’s. Did he want me to go check on the farm? “I could clean the cemetery down there if you like.”
“What cemetery are you talking about?”
“On the farm. Your family’s farm.”
He looked perplexed, turned and gazed out the barred window. Did he not remember it? How can he not remember a place he loves so much?
I didn’t know what to do so I began cleaning up. I’d leave the iced tea in case he wanted some later. I’d brought a pound cake to leave too. He nodded a vague thanks. I said I’d better go because Lyra was in the car—it’d been a long day for a six-year-old. I went over and laid a hand on William’s arm. “We missed you so much today, darling. It wasn’t the same. But you’re getting better. I can see that. It’ll be just a little while. I’ll talk to the social worker this week and see when you can come home. You’re going to be fine. We love you very very much.”
I kissed him. He thanked me for coming and watched as I picked up the basket and opened the door into the hall. I made it to the first floor before I collapsed on a hallway bench near the administrative office and covered my face with my hands. A nurse passed by and asked if I needed help; I smiled wearily and said no. After she left, I leaned back against the cold wall.
How long will he be this way? As though he does not exist?
I closed my eyes and wished I didn’t exist anymore. Then the strangest thing happened—in my head I heard the music of my youth, music I didn’t want to hear anymore—“I was building a dream,” which was banned from the radio when 18 million were jobless, songs of struggle and hopelessness that spoke to what everyone felt then. Songs about being together and surviving. I remembered singing Gershwin’s “One of these mornings, you gonna rise up singing,” and after a while I felt like maybe I could get up again and go out to that car this Christmas Day and sing to my child. A country had survived. In time we would be all right too. We had to be.
Then I heard the guttural, labored voice of Ethel Waters—when I first heard “Suppertime” on the radio I’d had to s
it down—and the pain of that grieving song settled over me, that woman with a broken heart, whose husband has been murdered and won’t be coming home that evening or any other. That woman will be eating alone forever. Will I as well? A table but no family?
It took me a half hour to drag myself up from that bench.
When I come out of Babcock and rejoin you, I don’t say much—I’ve run out of energy to try to fool us both. After the drive home, you play with your new toys. I turn on the radio’s Christmas carols and then turn them off, finally settle down in the living room with a novel. After a while we both go to bed—I’ve been having you sleep with me since William was committed.
I lie awake a long time. How could this happen to us?
A few hours later I wake to you screaming. You’re under the blankets shaking, crying, “Go away, go away.”
I pull you out and take you into my arms. “Sweetheart, you’re dreaming.”
Half-crying, clearly terrified, you babble—“There’s somebody in the corner, a man, but he’s little, he’s not right, not like he’s supposed to be. He’s littler than Mr. Max who died, he’s staring at me, he’s mad cause he’s all little. It’s Daddy.”
“Lyra, it was just a dream.”
“Why is he so little? He looks all hurt and mad ’cause he’s locked up, and he’s coming to get me.”
“Sweetie, no. Your daddy’s not there.”
“Yes he is!” You pull away from me and scramble under the covers again. “The little man, my daddy’s got blood on him.”
I didn’t realize that taking you to see William locked up behind bars was a terrible decision. I didn’t realize it until you began having that nightmare, which you had for years. Perhaps I didn’t realize it because I was still in shock myself.
Sometimes a shock—lightning hitting a chimney, or war, or the loss of a dream—damages the foundation of a house forever. Despite the decades of change, I’ve never been able to enter the present world where mental illness shows up in everyday parlance. During these years that I’ve not talked about what happened to us, I’ve sometimes given money to people on street corners who’re obviously ill. Other times I’ve hurried away from them as fast as I could.
I’ve had a nightmare from those days all my life too. In it, I’ve gone somewhere and when I come back, our house has disappeared. I’m homeless.
I can still see him on the front porch. Definitely not a dream. The Lincoln Street landlord who wouldn’t let you have a dog. I don’t remember when he came. Big leering man, cheap shiny suit—I never liked him—puffing his cigar smoke in my face.
“Mrs. Copeland, see here—this is a fact—decent people can’t live where there’s a deranged man. Lots of folks saw your husband running up and down the street half naked. People are afraid he’ll come back and do even worse.”
I was too exhausted to point out that anyone locked up in the state hospital wasn’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon.
“Y’all been good tenants but people are scared of you now. Neighbors want you to move and I have to keep in good with them. I don’t know as I can afford to let you stay.”
“Please,” I begged. “We can’t move right now, we just can’t.”
“I’m sorry, but you got kin in that place it makes folks nervous and they cain’t sleep at night.” More smoke in my face. “Having tenants like y’all are now, well, that means I’m taking a big risk. Could cost me.”
Finally I comprehended the opportunistic gleam in his narrow eyes. I wanted to scream that he was a coarse, unprincipled oaf. Instead, I asked him to wait, and as though sleepwalking, I went back to the dining room and crossed to the oak sideboard. I leaned over it for a moment, steeling myself. I didn’t have anything else. I took out the rectangular box of my mother’s silver.
Chapter Thirteen
Sometimes in this hospital I imagine I hear bells ringing. I suppose that’s a holdover from your father’s obsession with them. Or from my childhood when each farm in the country had its own bell with a distinctive tone, so that if one rang in the middle of the night neighbors would know which family needed help. I even read once that in an American foundry in 1953, a large bell was cast from the metal restraints used in US mental hospitals. Craftsmen threw iron handcuffs, steel leg irons, heavy lead chains with neck rings into a large square oven. Chink-chink of steel and iron hitting the oven’s sides, then the gurgle of metal bubbling at nine hundred degrees. This bell, when rung, would symbolize hope for the mentally ill. The music of survival, as it were.
I’ve often wondered what happened to that bell, but I’ve never tried to find out. The fact is, given its limited diatonic scale and the difficulty of accurate tuning, a bell is not really a musical instrument at all.
I still think about it sometimes—what happened to William in the state hospital, how bad was it? I was terrified for him of course, partially because the lobotomy had just come into vogue—thousands were performed in the 1950s, proponents calling it a “merciful euthanasia of the mind.” It didn’t seem “merciful” in Tennessee Williams’ play about it. Electric-shock treatment was also fairly new and at that time equally primitive; I’m glad I didn’t know then that it was discovered when butchers applied electrically wired pincers to a pig’s head, convulsions and subsequent coma enabling them to cut the animal’s throat more easily. Not a reassuring genesis for a medical treatment administered to someone you love. Not too long after your father’s breakdown, a famous writer would shoot himself because he believed shocks given him for depression had destroyed his memory, thus his creative source.
No bells tolled for Mr. Hemingway.
Along with new drugs that caused a condition similar to Parkinson’s, fever therapy and histamine treatment were common when William was in the state hospital, as were injections of ether and malaria. It’s hard to imagine that a doctor would deliberately raise a patient’s body temperature to 106 degrees or try to infect him with a dangerous illness. Patients were regularly forced into tubs of freezing water, but there was no talk therapy. Did anyone ever say a kind word to William? I’ve no idea. But after being shocked, after he stopped trying to tear off his leather restraints with his teeth—Dr. Dumaine told me this much later—pretty much all your father did was lie there and stare. No doctor came to his room now because he was quiet. The bells of the hospital church—the Chapel of Hope—told him when one day ended and the next began. Sundays were when his wife came. An attendant shaved him every other day. Every two or three days, a nurse came by and asked how he was. He always said he was fine.
The New Year arrived with an unusually cold winter stuck to its heels. No more snow fell on Columbia, nor even in the Up Country foothills, yet the air crackled, the ground crunched, chapped lips blistered, the reddened hands of those who didn’t have proper gloves burned. Car batteries died and children stayed indoors even at school recess. A severe ice storm blew in and left us without electricity for five days. The city closed down. Everything simply stopped. A state I already knew well. A pecan tree in the backyard lost two large branches, and the blue hydrangeas seemed unlikely to survive. Rosa gave up her low-cut blouses for bulky warm sweaters, and Uta said she wasn’t coming out of her house until April. Eight people died in car accidents caused by black ice. Snow is gentle, but ice is sharp edges; its lacy beauty is cold and deadly.
The oil stoves huffed and puffed and during the days without electricity I was thankful for them. But their ugliness depressed me, so when the ice storm ended I asked Melvin Sweete to move the living-room stove into the garage. That fireplace was reopened and soon there was a wood fire. You clapped your hands and I smiled for the first time in weeks. Every night we lazed in firelight, you drawing the fire, me grading papers. Often I’d simply watch you—you were my reason to get up every morning. One evening I put my papers aside and sat beside you on the floor. You leaned against me and I put my arm around you. I
closed my eyes and imagined your father and me sitting on the couch watching our children play together on this warm hearth.
A local man delivered a supply of firewood, and many mornings before school I carried in aromatic cedar logs and laid them on the hearth so they’d be there when I got home. Creating something that made our lives warmer and brighter helped me. Isn’t this what women always do? In bad times we get up and fix something. I pictured my father and grandfather and brothers carrying logs into the house in Brantley. Marooned now from that family—for I’d still not told them the truth about William’s illness—it was strangely comforting to carry wood and stir embers.
I know I acted as though your father had simply gone on a trip. Others didn’t ignore the truth. One afternoon I heard Johnny Truesdale taunting you: “Your old man is down in the loony bin chained to a pole drooling and pissing on himself.”
You hit Johnny upside the head and got to stay in your room for an entire Saturday afternoon as a result, even though Rosa said, “Kids will be kids,” and Johnny wasn’t really hurt and he shouldn’t have been so mean. You said two girls at school asked you, giggling, if you were gonna go live in the nuthouse too. There were whispers at my school as well. Fellow teachers who were suddenly nicer to me or looked away when I came down the hall. Although no one mentioned William, I avoided the teacher’s lounge: who knew and who didn’t? The neighborhood was no better. As I was leaving Mrs. Flo’s store one afternoon, I heard a woman say to another, “I think that’s the lady who stuck her husband down on Bull Street. Not that I wouldn’t like to get rid of mine from time to time, but no decent woman does that.” Children still pointed at the house and sniggered. The milkman wouldn’t meet my eyes. One morning I found a note on the front door: “WHY DON’T ALL OF YOU GO TO THE CRAZY HOUSE? This is a decent neighborhood. GET OUT.”
I appreciated anew what black people had endured for generations.
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