November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  Although there were no more violent outbursts, things got steadily worse. Carl’s job was due to end in June, and he had to start looking all over again. He had several promising interviews, only to be told later that he was overqualified or that the position had been eliminated. In the middle of May, Carl’s brother called to say that he had just accepted a good position in the research department of a large corporation. Carl congratulated him but within half an hour of hanging up he was in a panic of self-loathing, muttering, “I’m worthless, I’m worthless,” over and over. His face was drained of color, and his skin looked drawn and taut. Merryl was terrified; she hardly recognized him. This time when she insisted he get help, Carl agreed. Next day, Carl met with a psychiatrist, who said he couldn’t take on new patients until the end of the summer, but if Carl was ever in crisis, he would fit him in.

  Merryl never knew what kind of mood to expect when she came home from work. Night after night she and Carl lingered at the table, dishes undone, trying to unravel what was happening. Carl ruthlessly criticized decisions he had made over the years. Merryl had had no idea how deeply Carl’s self-hatred ran. She told him that she still felt he was the greatest. As far as this job search was concerned, she said, he was a square peg where there were only round holes. But someday there would be a square hole. Carl seemed to take heart. One evening he got a call from Temple University. He had been recommended for a good job. “It’s finally working,” said Carl, hugging Merryl. “It’s all going to pay off.” On Merryl’s thirty-third birthday, Carl flew to Philadelphia for his interview at Temple. He left a card for Merryl on the dining room table. To Merryl the printed words seemed absolutely perfect:

  Everyone needs someone

  to understand and care

  Someone to depend on

  and count on to be there . . .

  Everyone needs someone

  to make a dream come true

  And I’m so glad my someone

  is someone special—you!

  Underneath the ornately scripted “Happy Birthday,” Carl had written, “Dearest Merryl, You’ve been so supportive and so tender to me. I’ll always love you for it. Happy Birthday! I’ll hurry home to help celebrate it. Love, Your Carl.”

  And Carl seemed buoyed. He had an interview at Manhattanville College the following week, there was a possible job at a Boston VA hospital, and he was one of the top two candidates for the position at Temple. The chances of his getting the kind of position he wanted seemed better than they’d ever been.

  Then one day in early June, Carl announced that a problem in his dissertation was more serious than he had thought. He believed he had asked the children a question in which the pronouns had not been clarified. If this was true, he said, the research was contaminated. Merryl assured him it didn’t sound as drastic as he thought, and Carl seemed soothed. But over the following week his doubts escalated, and on June 10 he told her he was certain his dissertation was ruined. Merryl reasoned with him: even if one question was flawed, he could still salvage most of the project. She persuaded him to call his dissertation adviser in Chicago, who told him it didn’t sound like a major problem. But Carl spent every spare moment in his study, chair pulled tight against the desk, flipping through his vast files.

  On Sunday, June 13, Merryl woke to find Carl in a white-faced panic. “My life is over,” he kept saying in a thin voice, staring straight ahead. “My life is over.” Merryl reached for him, but he shrugged her off, saying, “Don’t touch me—the pain is too great.” All day Merryl sat with him, coaxing, cajoling, reasoning. She reminded him of his triumphs at Tufts: the biology prize, Sword and Shield, the highest GPA. Carl snorted; he wasn’t smart, he said—if he’d been smart, he would have stayed premed, but he hadn’t because he was a loser, he was worthless. Merryl reminded him of all the people who’d looked up to him, but Carl dismissed her. He’d always been the manager, not the player, always the odd man out, the second-class citizen, the chump ferrying vials for the people he should be. No matter how she tried, Merryl couldn’t reach him—it was like attempting to penetrate a plastic shield—and even if she made some headway, he’d soon fade further into his own world. “How do people do it?” he said at one point. “How do they kill themselves?” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s a good sign that I’m talking about it. Isn’t it true that when people talk about suicide, they don’t do it?” Merryl told him she didn’t think that was true.

  On Monday night when Carl was no better, Merryl pleaded with him to let her call the psychiatrist. Carl said no, and Merryl couldn’t bear the thought of going against his will, of treating him like a child. At 11 p.m. she finally coaxed Carl into letting her call. The therapist wasn’t home; Merryl left her name with his answering service. By the time the psychiatrist called back the next day, Carl seemed stronger. Merryl, who had stayed home from work to be with him, heard him tell the doctor that he was okay, and they made an appointment for Thursday. But Merryl couldn’t get the previous day out of her mind. For a moment she wanted to grab the phone and tell the psychiatrist he didn’t understand how serious this was. But she didn’t; it wasn’t right, she thought, and Carl did sound better. That afternoon he took a long nap. Merryl looked in on him from time to time and was relieved to see him sleeping peacefully. It was going to be okay. The worst had passed.

  But Carl was up and down all week. One moment he’d be in his white-faced panic, calling himself “worthless.” He wasn’t eating right; he would push away his plate halfway through the meal. Sometimes he would get up suddenly and go for long walks. Merryl, worried, would ask to go along, but he always said no. One night she asked him whether he was going to come back, and a look flickered over his face as if she’d recognized his deepest fear, but then it disappeared and he said of course he was coming back. Carl spoke often of death. Once, he came in from a walk and said he’d seen a hearse going by and imagined he was in it. Another time, when Merryl killed an ant, he grimaced and said he felt that life was squashing him, like that ant. Merryl told him that if he ever killed himself, he’d be killing her, too. Once, in desperation, she suggested they simply walk off into the woods together. “Do you really mean it?” Carl said. Then he reflected on her suggestion and seemed disappointed. “People can live for forty days in the woods without food.” Merryl talked to him about hospitalization, and he said no, it would gall him that the people taking care of him would be the doctors he should have been. At times Carl seemed like a stranger to Merryl—he had night sweats and even smelled different to her. At other times she’d walk into the house and the Carl she knew was cooking dinner, commenting on some event in the outside world. Merryl fought to keep in touch with that Carl, but he always ebbed. Merryl began to have a recurring dream: She was standing on a dock while a vast steamship was pulling away in a dense fog, leaving her alone. It seemed as if Carl was on the ship. The night was too hazy for her to be certain. But in the dream and after she woke, Merryl felt utterly abandoned.

  On Thursday, Merryl picked up her parents for dinner. Merryl’s mother, who had cancer, had just learned that it had spread. As Merryl drove, the whole world seemed on edge; the traffic loomed dangerously, and shapes that seemed to be people were shadows. She nearly hit a bicyclist, and the rest of the way home she squeezed the wheel tightly. When they walked into the house, Carl was in the kitchen making salad. He looked up, and Merryl could see he was in that white state, but it was concealed by a polite mask because her parents were there. When Merryl and Carl had a moment alone, she asked him if he was all right. As he stirred the salad dressing, he looked up at her slowly and, in that thin voice that chilled her to the bone, said, “No.” Her mother came into the room, and Carl went back to his stirring.

  After dinner Carl said he was going for a walk. Merryl hurried into the kitchen after him and asked if he was sure he was okay. He was sure, he said. He just had to get out. After he left, Merryl’s parents asked her what was wrong, and she told them Carl had been under a lot of strain lately. She
didn’t go into details—she felt it was her and Carl’s business. They talked about her mother’s illness, and Merryl felt pinned between the two problems. She felt guilty she hadn’t had time to comfort her mother; at the same time she was anxious to find out what had happened at Carl’s appointment with his therapist that day. Merryl herself had spoken with her gynecologist that morning about her difficulties getting pregnant, and with her own therapist that afternoon all she had talked about was Carl’s depression. Yet life spun crazily through these tragedies—her mother, ever practical, pruning the philodendron that Carl, the gardener in the house, had neglected for months; her father noticing that the rug had been cleaned. When Carl came back after half an hour, he went straight into his study and shut the door.

  After her parents left, Merryl asked Carl about his appointment with the therapist. Had he talked to the therapist about suicide? Yes, said Carl, he had. But he had said he didn’t have the courage to do it, and the doctor had replied that he wasn’t worried. Merryl felt a breeze of relief. But it was short-lived. That night Carl talked wildly. He spoke of giving up the dissertation; he was sure it would be exposed as a failure. He had to finish it, he said, but he couldn’t. “If I give up the dissertation, I’m giving up my life.” His life was much more than the dissertation, Merryl assured him. Carl looked up from his work and said, “What would happen if I didn’t finish it? What would you do?” Merryl told him she would still love him, that she would never leave him. Carl managed a tight smile and for a moment seemed calmed, but then he was back inside himself, going back and forth about whether he could finish it. “This is the living out of my worst nightmare,” he said. “I always knew I’d be a failure, and now I am.” Eight or ten times he got up from his chair to pace, then sat back down, pulling his chair right up to the desk, his face scouring the quilt of papers; then he would push his chair back abruptly, wood screeching on wood, and pace once more. Once he stared at Merryl and said, “You know, today I looked at that portrait of me that you say has such sensitive eyes.” Merryl broke in and said, “They are, Carl.” Carl leaped up, went into the living room, came back, and said, “They’re not the eyes of a sensitive person, they’re the eyes of a weak person.” He stared at her. “I’m frightened of life.”

  When Merryl woke on Friday morning, Carl was already at his desk poring over his dissertation. Merryl went off to work carrying a pamphlet on infertility. At noon Carl called to say that he had been offered the VA job. Merryl was flooded with relief. He and Merryl talked about his sudden change of luck, and Carl said that he would pick her up at work at six. When they said good-bye, Merryl’s last word was “Congratulations!”

  That afternoon Merryl felt as if she and Carl had been pulled back from a precipice. She was able to free her mind from worry for the first time in weeks. She could also devote some thought to the upcoming weekend. Carl’s brother’s son had been born the week before. The baby had been named Carl, and the christening was to be that Sunday. Afterward Merryl and Carl were going to host a small party. Merryl knew Carl wasn’t looking forward to it, but maybe now that he had a job offer, he would be less edgy. A woman at work had baked a cake in the shape of baby blocks, with the name Carl written across the top. The cake sat on Merryl’s desk that evening as she waited for Carl to arrive.

  At six o’clock there was no sign of Carl. At six-fifteen Merryl called home. No answer. Maybe he was on his way. She waited ten minutes and called again. No answer. She called their landlord, who said his son had seen Carl leave at six. Carl had seemed agitated. By seven Merryl was frantic. At seven-twenty she left a note on her desk: “Where are you, Carl? What happened?” With the cake melting in her arms she went outside and hailed a cab.

  When she got home, she left the cake on the porch and ran inside. The first thing she noticed was a clothes hanger on their bed. She ran to the closet. One of Carl’s suits was missing. For a moment she hoped maybe Carl was going to surprise her with a dress-up dinner out because he’d gotten the job. But then she saw that a second suit was missing, and her stomach went sour. She ran into the bathroom; his toothbrush was gone. She ran to the front closet; the suitcases were gone. Carl was gone; something had gone bad. Merryl fell sobbing to the floor.

  She called her parents. They called her brother, who hurried over. She called Carl’s therapist, and when Merryl told him Carl had packed suitcases, he said that didn’t sound like a man who was going to kill himself. Merryl and her brother explored every possibility. Maybe he was in a hotel in Boston mulling things over, said Merryl. Maybe he was in his car, parked somewhere in confusion, said her brother; maybe he was even on some nearby street. Merryl half-hoped he’d gone to Atlanta or to the sun belt, places he’d talked about where there might be jobs. She and her brother got out maps and traced possible routes to possible destinations. She waited for the phone to ring, and she imagined Carl’s familiar voice saying he was in Atlanta, he’d been looking for work, but he was on his way home. Or maybe she’d get a letter with a Texas postmark telling her he’d gotten a job in Dallas. That night while her brother slept on a mattress in Carl’s study, Merryl sat up on her bed with the light on. Every five or ten minutes she’d hear a scratch or a whirr and run to the back door, thinking it might be Carl. But it was always a branch creaking or the wind blowing or a car driving down another street. She pressed herself against the door so hard that months later marks from her forehead and fingers lingered on the glass.

  When the sun came up, the fullness of the fact hit her: It was Saturday morning and Carl wasn’t there. Merryl ran to the mirror and screamed, “Where are you? Where are you?”

  At noon Merryl called the police to report that Carl was missing. When a patrolman arrived, he told her that everything was going to be okay, that it happened all the time, that her husband was probably sitting in the car somewhere, just thinking things through. But as he stood in her living room filling out a missing persons report, and she told him Carl’s height, weight, and date of birth, Merryl realized that the world she had tried to contain was yawning wide.

  On Saturday night Carl’s parents arrived from New Hampshire. They had been packing to drive down for their grandson Carl’s christening when Merryl had called. They drove to Merryl and Carl’s apartment instead. Saturday night became Sunday, and still no word. Merryl and her in-laws scoured the house for notes but found no hints. Carl had left everything neat. He’d taken out the garbage. He’d opened the windows to let in the breeze.

  At nine on Sunday night there was a knock on the door. Merryl sprang up to open it. A policeman wearing sunglasses handed her a slip of paper with a number on it and said, “Somebody’s been trying to reach you all day.” Merryl’s mother-in-law told him they’d been in the house all day. “I don’t know,” said the policeman. “All I know is just call this number.” He turned and left.

  Merryl went into the kitchen and dialed the number, which had a New York area code. It rang once. A deep, heavy voice answered, “Medical.” In the back of her mind Merryl knew from some TV show that this meant “medical examiner,” but still hoping she said, “Is this a hospital?” There was a pause and the voice said, “Lady, this is the morgue.”

  Merryl dropped the phone and screamed. She ran through the kitchen, out of the house, and leaped off the back porch to the gravel driveway, a six-foot drop. She hurled herself repeatedly onto the space in the driveway where Carl’s car should have been. Then she crawled under her landlord’s car and lay there screaming, wedged between the carburetor and the gravel.

  Merryl could see her mother-in-law’s face trying to tell her something as she knelt by the car. She could see legs and feet multiplying. She could hear her name occasionally surface from the blur of voices. And still she screamed. Her head felt as if it were on fire. Her face, her arms, and her legs were scratched and bloody. Her shirt was torn. She’d lost her glasses. She felt she couldn’t be in a normal space; the world suddenly seemed so unnatural and misshapen and wrong and dangerous that the only pla
ce she could be comfortable was between the car and the gravel. If she had had her way, she would have stayed there forever, screaming.

  II

  THE MARK OF CAIN

  IN AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY French engraving called The Desecration of the Corpse, the naked body of a young man is dragged through the streets of Paris by a spirited white horse. He lies facedown on a wooden sledge, his ankles roped together, his arms outstretched behind him, his fingers scraping the cobblestones. A crowd surrounds the body. One woman shrinks from the scene in horror, covering her face with her hand. A curly-haired child on hands and knees watches in openmouthed terror. A bearded man, his fingers in his mouth, cringes in disbelief, and a dog gingerly sniffs the corpse. Even the horse seems to rear back in shock at his load, but a hand at his bridle pulls him on.

  The young man has been “convicted” of suicide. We do not know why he took his life, but we know some of the consequences of his act. After he is dragged by his heels through the streets of the city, he will be hanged head down in the public square as an example to all who might contemplate such a crime. His body will be thrown into the common sewer or tossed in the town dump. If he had been a nobleman, he will be declared a commoner. His forests will be razed, his castle demolished, his goods and property forfeited to the king.

  In the foreground of the engraving there is a young woman. She is the only member of the crowd who moves toward the body rather than recoiling from it. The bearded man has put his hand on her back as if to draw her away, and a part of her seems to respond to his touch. But her sorrow is stronger than her dread, and her left leg bends toward the sledge as if she were about to kneel. She is the dead man’s wife. Behind her, on a balcony overlooking the street, two small children reach for their father. We do not know what will become of this woman and her children. They own nothing but the clothes they wear. And although they cannot afford to leave the city, they cannot afford to stay because they would forever be shamed by the suicide in their family. Most likely the woman will wander until she finds a town where news of the suicide has not spread, where she and her children may live cautiously, telling people her husband died of a disease, praying no one will ever discover her secret.