Forty-five minutes later, Mrs. Barrows left the president’s office and went into her own, shutting the door. It wasn’t until half an hour later that Mr. Fitweiler sent for Mr. Martin. The head of the filing department, neat, quiet, attentive, stood in front of the old man’s desk. Mr. Fitweiler was pale and nervous. He took his glasses off and twiddled them. He made a small, bruffing sound in his throat. “Martin,” he said, “you have been with us more than twenty years.” “Twenty-two, sir,” said Mr. Martin. “In that time,” pursued the president, “your work and your—uh—manner have been exemplary.” “I trust so, sir,” said Mr. Martin. “I have understood, Martin,” said Mr. Fitweiler, “that you have never taken a drink or smoked.” “That is correct, sir,” said Mr. Martin. “Ah, yes.” Mr. Fitweiler polished his glasses. “You may describe what you did after leaving the office yesterday, Martin,” he said. Mr. Martin allowed less than a second for his bewildered pause. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “I walked home. Then I went to Schrafft’s for dinner. Afterward I walked home again. I went to bed early, sir, and read a magazine for a while. I was asleep before eleven.” “Ah, yes,” said Mr. Fitweiler again. He was silent for a moment, searching for the proper words to say to the head of the filing department. “Mrs. Barrows,” he said finally, “Mrs. Barrows has worked hard, Martin, very hard. It grieves me to report that she has suffered a severe breakdown. It has taken the form of a persecution complex accompanied by distressing hallucinations.” “I am very sorry, sir,” said Mr. Martin. “Mrs. Barrows is under the delusion,” continued Mr. Fitweiler, “that you visited her last evening and behaved yourself in an—uh—unseemly manner.” He raised his hand to silence Mr. Martin’s little pained outcry. “It is the nature of these psychological diseases,” Mr. Fitweiler said, “to fix upon the least likely and most innocent party as the—uh—source of persecution. These matters are not for the lay mind to grasp, Martin. I’ve just had my psychiatrist, Dr. Fitch, on the phone. He would not, of course, commit himself, but he made enough generalizations to substantiate my suspicions. I suggested to Mrs. Barrows when she had completed her—uh—story to me this morning, that she visit Dr. Fitch, for I suspected a condition at once. She flew, I regret to say, into a rage, and demanded—uh—requested that I call you on the carpet. You may not know, Martin, but Mrs. Barrows had planned a reorganization of your department—subject to my approval, of course, subject to my approval. This brought you, rather than anyone else, to her mind—but again that is a phenomenon for Dr. Fitch and not for us. So, Martin, I am afraid Mrs. Barrows’ usefulness here is at an end.” “I am dreadfully sorry, sir,” said Mr. Martin.
It was at this point that the door to the office blew open with the suddenness of a gas-main explosion and Mrs. Barrows catapulted through it. “Is the little rat denying it?” she screamed. “He can’t get away with that!” Mr. Martin got up and moved discreetly to a point beside Mr. Fitweiler’s chair. “You drank and smoked at my apartment,” she bawled at Mr. Martin, “and you know it! You called Mr. Fitweiler an old windbag and said you were going to blow him up when you got coked to the gills on your heroin!” She stopped yelling to catch her breath and a new glint came into her popping eyes. “If you weren’t such a drab, ordinary little man,” she said, “I’d think you’d planned it all. Sticking your tongue out, saying you were sitting in the catbird seat, because you thought no one would believe me when I told it! My God, it’s really too perfect!” She brayed loudly and hysterically, and the fury was on her again. She glared at Mr. Fitweiler. “Can’t you see how he has tricked us, you old fool? Can’t you see his little game?” But Mr. Fitweiler had been surreptitiously pressing all the buttons under the top of his desk and employees of F & S began pouring into the room. “Stockton,” said Mr. Fitweiler, “you and Fishbein will take Mrs. Barrows to her home. Mrs. Powell, you will go with them.” Stockton, who had played a little football in high school, blocked Mrs. Barrows as she made for Mr. Martin. It took him and Fishbein together to force her out of the door into the hall, crowded with stenographers and office boys. She was still screaming imprecations at Mr. Martin, tangled and contradictory imprecations. The hubbub finally died out down the corridor.
“I regret that this has happened,” said Mr. Fitweiler. “I shall ask you to dismiss it from your mind, Martin.” “Yes, sir,” said Mr. Martin, anticipating his chief’s “That will be all” by moving to the door. “I will dismiss it.” He went out and shut the door, and his step was light and quick in the hall. When he entered his department he had slowed down to his customary gait, and he walked quietly across the room to the W20 file, wearing a look of studious concentration.
The Cane in the Corridor
FUNNY THING about post-operative mental states,” said Joe Fletcher, rocking the big brandy glass between the palms of his hands and studying the brown tides reflectively. “They take all kinds of curious turns.”
George Minturn moved restlessly in his chair, making a new pattern of his long legs. “Let’s go to Barney’s,” he said. “Let’s go to Barney’s now.”
Mrs. Minturn walked over and emptied an ashtray into the fireplace as eloquently as if she were winding the clock. “It’s much too late,” she said. “I’m sure everybody we’d want to see has left there and gone home to bed.”
Minturn finished his brandy and poured out some more.
“You remember Reginald Gardiner’s imitation of wallpaper,” continued Fletcher, “in which he presented a visual design as making a pattern of sound? Many post-operative cases make those interesting transferences. I know one man who kept drawing on a piece of paper what the ringing of a telephone looks like.”
“I don’t want to hear about him,” said Minturn.
Fletcher drank the last of his brandy and held up his glass; after a moment his host walked over and poured in a little more.
Mrs. Minturn found herself finishing her own drink and getting another one, although she seldom touched anything after dinner. “Here’s to the Washington Bridge,” she said. “Here’s to some big dam or other. Let’s talk about some big dam. After all, you’re an engineer, Joe.”
Fletcher lighted a cigarette, holding his brandy glass between his knees. “Which brings up an interesting point,” he said. “I mean, if occupational experience gives a special shape and color to the patient’s perceptions, then the theory that it is not really a hallucination but a deeper insight into reality probably falls down. For instance, if the number eighteen clangs for one patient and whistles for another—say for George here—”
Minturn spilled ashes on the lapel of his dinner coat and rubbed them into it. “I don’t want to hear any numbers,” he said thickly. “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
His wife, who had been trying to get Fletcher’s eye but couldn’t, since he continued to study his brandy, spoke up sharply. “George is just getting over a frightful cold,” she said, “and he’s pretty easily shaken. He would worry frightfully about people, but he doesn’t dare think about them. They upset him so.” Fletcher did look at her now, and smiled. She realized she had not said what she had meant to say. Something oblique but cleverly phrased and nicely pointed had got lost on its way to her tongue. “You think you’re so darn smart,” she said.
Minturn got up and began to pace. The brandy had run out. He sat down and lighted a cigarette.
“Of course, the people that doctors refer to as squashes,” pursued Fletcher, “the invertebrates, you might say, just lie there like vegetables. It is the high-strung cases that manifest the interesting—manifestations. As you just said, Nancy, you think you’re so darn smart. I mean, hospitalization moves the mind toward a false simplification. A man gets the idea that he can hold processes in his hand, the way I’m holding this glass. He lies there, you might say, pulling the easy little meanings out of life as simply as if they were daisy petals.”
“Daisy petals,” said Minturn. “Where’s brandy? Why isn’t there any more brandy?”
“He gets the idea,” Fletcher
went on, “that he knows as much about life as Alfred North Whitehead or Carson McCullers.”
Minturn said, “Oh, God.”
“Carson McCullers makes George nervous,” said Mrs. Minturn, “and you know it.”
“I ask you to remember I have scarcely seen you people since Carson McCullers began to write,” said Fletcher stiffly. “I know ‘Sanctuary’ upset George so he had to go away to the mountains. I do know that.”
“He didn’t go away to the mountains at all,” said Mrs. Minturn. “So you don’t know that.”
“I want to go away to the mountains now,” said Minturn. He began pacing around again, picking up things.
“There’s more brandy in the kitchen, darling,” said Mrs. Minturn. “In the kitchen,” she repeated as he started upstairs.
“Oh,” said Minturn. He went out to the kitchen.
Mrs. Minturn went over to Fletcher and stood looking down at him. “It’s very sweet of you, Joe, to keep harping on hospitals and sick people and mental states,” she said. “I know why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because George didn’t come to see you when you were in the hospital. You know very well that George is too sensitive to visit people in the hospital.”
Fletcher stood up, too. “Is that why you didn’t come to see me?” he asked. She was taller than he was. He sat down again.
“Yes, it was, if you want to know so much,” she said. “George would have sensed it and he would have worried about you all the time. As it was, he did worry about you all the time. But he can’t stand things the way you can. You know how sensitive he’s always been.”
Fletcher tried to drink out of his empty glass. “He wasn’t so goddam sensitive when we were both with the Cleveland Telephone Company. He wasn’t so goddam sensitive then. No, he was practically a regular guy.”
Mrs. Minturn drew herself up a little higher. “It is just quite possible, perhaps,” she said, “that you were just not quite perceptious at that time.” She went slowly back to her chair and sat down as Minturn came in with a bottle of brandy and a corkscrew.
“Here,” he said, handing them to Fletcher. Fletcher put down his glass, inserted the corkscrew accurately into the center of the cork, twisted it competently, and pulled out the cork. “Wonderful thing, technology,” said Minturn, “wonderful thing, wonderful thing. I want a drink.” Fletcher poured a great splash of brandy into his host’s glass and another into his own.
“He doesn’t happen to mean he believes in it,” said Mrs. Minturn. “The trouble with you is you can’t tell when a person is allusive even.”
“You’re thinking of Technocracy,” Fletcher told her, taking her glass and pouring a small quantity of brandy into it with studious precision.
“Maybe,” said Mrs. Minturn, darkly, “and just maybe not.”
“Why can’t we go home now? Why can’t we go home now, Nancy?” said Minturn from deep down in his chair.
“We are home, dear,” said Mrs. Minturn. She turned to Fletcher. “Anybody that thinks I can’t appreciate a game that two can play at is definitely,” said Mrs. Minturn, hiccuping, “crazy.” She held her breath and tried counting ten slowly.
“Why don’t you try bending over and drinking out of the opposite side of your glass?” asked Fletcher.
Minturn sat up a little in his chair.
“Don’t have to say things like that,” he said, severely.
To compensate for her hiccups, Mrs. Minturn assumed a posture of strained dignity. Minturn slid farther down into his chair. They both watched Fletcher, who had set the brandy revolving in his glass and was studying it. He took a sip of his drink. “It is a common misconception,” he said, “that postoperative mental states disappear on the patient’s advent from the hospital. Out of the hospital, they might recur at any time, and some pretty strange phenomena could happen—as in the case of the hospitalization of a friend.”
“If you’re just trying to get George down, it’s not going to be of the least consequence. I can assure you of that,” said Mrs. Minturn. “He’s stronger than you are in lots of more important ways.”
“Phenomena,” said Minturn.
“I’m talking of what I might do, not of what George might do,” said Fletcher, “in case you consider the manifestation what you choose to call weakness.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Minturn, “I certainly do—that and meanness.”
“I want to see Mrs. Trimingham,” said Minturn. “I want to go to Bermuda.”
“I suppose it would be too much to say that you can’t very well disprove what I’m saying till I say it,” said Fletcher.
“No, it wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Minturn. “I don’t see why we can’t talk about the Grand Coolidge Dam, or something.” She laughed. “That’s really frightfully funny. It really is.” She laughed again.
Minturn had closed his eyes, but he opened them again. “Can’t say I do,” he said. “Can’t say I do.”
Fletcher went over and splashed some more brandy into Minturn’s glass. “Let us say that George is lying in the hospital,” he said. “Now, because of a recurring phenomena, I call on him every day.”
“That’s cheap,” said Mrs. Minturn, “and that’s pompous.”
“It’s no more pompous than it is predictable,” said Fletcher, sharply. “It’s a condition. It just so happens that it might take the turn of me calling on George every day, from the time he goes in until he gets out.”
“You can’t do that,” said George. “There’s such a thing as the law.”
“Of course he can’t,” said Mrs. Minturn. “Besides, George is not going to the hospital.”
“I’m not going to the hospital,” said Minturn.
“Everybody goes to the hospital sooner or later,” said Fletcher. His voice was rising.
“Nine hundred million people don’t,” said Mrs. Minturn, “all the time.”
“I’m stating a pathological case!” shouted Fletcher. “Hypothetical. George has been lying there in that bed for six weeks!”
“No,” said Minturn.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Mrs. Minturn.
“Why?” asked Fletcher. “I’m not saying there is anything the matter with him. He’s convalescing, but he can’t get up.”
“Why can’t I get up?” asked Minturn.
“Because you’re too weak. You have no more strength than a house mouse. You feel as if you were coming apart like a cheap croquet mallet. If you tried to stand, your knees would bend the wrong way, like a flamingo’s.”
“I want to go home,” mumbled Minturn.
“You are home,” said his wife.
“He means from the hospital,” Fletcher told her, “in the corridors of which, by the way, you hear my cane tapping practically all the time.”
“What are you doing there?” said Minturn thickly.
“I come to see you every day,” said Fletcher. “I have been to see you every day since you got there.” He had been moving around the room, and now he went back and sat down.
“Can’t stand you calling on me every day,” said Minturn. He finished his drink and poured a new one with some effort.
“Don’t worry about it, George,” said Mrs. Minturn. “We’ll take you to the Mayo brothers or someplace and he’ll never find out about it.”
“I don’t want to go to the Mayo brothers,” said Minturn.
Fletcher sat forward in his chair. “And what’s more,” he said, “I bring you very strange things. That’s part of it. That’s part of the phenomena. I bring you puzzles that won’t work, linked nails that won’t come apart, pigs in clover in which the little balls are glued to the bottom of the box. I bring you mystery novels in Yiddish, and artificial flowers made of wire and beads, and horehound candy.”
“Terrible, terrible rat,” said Mrs. Minturn, “terrible rat Fletcher.”
“Police find something to do about that,” said Minturn. “Such a thing as law and order. Such a thing as malpractice.”
“And
licorice whips,” continued Fletcher, “and the complete files of Physical Culture for 1931, and matchboxes that go broo-oo-oo, broo-oo-oo.”
“Broo,” said Minturn. “I want to go to Twenty-One.”
“Terrible, terrible, terrible rat,” said Mrs. Minturn.
“I see,” said Fletcher. “You don’t even feel sorry for poor old tap-tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.”
“What’s that?” said Minturn.
“That’s my cane in the corridor,” said Fletcher. “You are lying there, trying to unwrassle something I have brought you, when, tap, tap, tap, here I come again.”
“Terrible rat, go home,” said Mrs. Minturn.
Fletcher bowed to her gravely. “I’m going,” he said. “It constitutes the first occasion on which I have ever been ejected from this or any other house, but that is as it should be, I presume.”
“Don’t throw anybody out,” said Minturn. “Tap, tap, tap,” he added.
Halfway to the hall door, Fletcher turned. “That’s right, laugh,” he said. “Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, then.”
“Tap, tap, tap,” said Minturn from far down near the floor. A new attack of hiccups kept Mrs. Minturn speechless, but she stood up as her guest went out into the hall. Minturn was still saying “Tap, tap,” and Mrs. Minturn was hiccuping, as Fletcher found his hat and coat and went out the front door into the melting snow, looking for a taxi.
FROM
THE BEAST IN ME
AND OTHER ANIMALS
Writings and Drawings Page 41