Brian Friel Plays 2 (60 page)

And as usual Rita was wonderful. She let me off work early every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And I’d dress up in this new coat I’d bought – a mad splurge to keep the spirits up – brilliant scarlet with a matching beret – Rita said I could be seen from miles away, like a distress signal – anyhow in all my new style I’d walk to the hospital on those three afternoons – without my cane! – and sometimes that was scary, I can tell you. And Mr Rice would examine me and say, ‘Splendid, Molly! Splendid!’ And then he’d pass me on to a psychotherapist, Mrs Wallace, a beautiful looking young woman according to Frank, and I’d do all sorts of tests with her. And then she’d pass me on to George, her husband, for more tests – he was a behavioural psychologist, if you don’t mind, a real genius apparently – the pair of them were writing a book on me. And then I’d go back to Mr Rice again and he’d say ‘Splendid!’ again. And then I’d walk home – still no cane! – and have Frank’s tea waiting for him when he’d get back from the library.

I can’t tell you how kind Frank was to me, how patient he was. As soon as tea was over, he’d sit at the top of the table and he’d put me at the bottom and he’d begin my lesson.

He’d put something in front of me – maybe a bowl of fruit – and he’d say,

‘What have I got in my hand?’

‘A piece of fruit.’

‘What sort of fruit?’

‘An orange, Frank. I know the colour, don’t I?’

‘Very clever. Now, what’s this?’

‘It’s a pear.’

‘You’re guessing.’

‘Let me touch it.’

‘Not allowed. You already have your tactical engrams. We’ve got to build up a repertory of visual engrams to connect with them.’

And I’d say, ‘For God’s sake stop showing off your posh new words, Frank. It’s a banana.’

‘Sorry. Try again.’

‘It’s a peach. Right?’

‘Splendid!’ he’d say in Mr Rice’s accent. ‘It certainly is a peach. Now, what’s this?’

And he’d move on to knives and forks, or shoes and slippers, or all the bits and pieces on the mantelpiece for maybe another hour or more. Every night. Seven nights a week.

Oh, yes, Frank couldn’t have been kinder to me.

Rita, too. Even kinder. Even more patient.

And all my customers at the health club, the ones who had massages regularly, they sent me a huge bouquet of pink-and-white tulips. And the club I used to swim with, they sent me a beautiful gardening book. God knows what they thought – that I’d now be able to pick it up and read it? But everyone was great, just great.

Oh, yes, I lived in a very exciting world for those first
weeks after the operation. Not at all like that silly world I wanted to visit and devour – none of that nonsense.

No, the world that I now saw – half-saw, peered at really – it was a world of wonder and surprise and delight. Oh, yes; wonderful, surprising, delightful. And joy – such joy, small unexpected joys that came in such profusion and passed so quickly that there was never enough time to savour them.

But it was a very foreign world, too. And disquieting; even alarming. Every shape an apparition, a spectre that appeared suddenly from nowhere and challenged you. And all that movement – nothing ever still – everything in motion all the time; and every movement unexpected, somehow threatening. Even the sudden sparrows in the garden, they seemed aggressive, dangerous.

So that after a time the mind could absorb no more sensation. Just one more colour – light – movement – ghostly shape – and suddenly the head imploded and the hands shook and the heart melted with panic. And the only escape – the only way to live – was to sit absolutely still; and shut the eyes tight; and immerse yourself in darkness; and wait. Then when the hands were still and the heart quiet, slowly open the eyes again. And emerge. And try to find the courage to face it all once more.

I tried to explain to Frank once how – I suppose how
terrifying
it all was. But naturally, naturally he was far more concerned with teaching me practical things. And one day when I mentioned to Mr Rice that I didn’t think I’d find things as unnerving as I did, he said in a very icy voice,

‘And what sort of world did you expect, Mrs Sweeney?’

Yes, it was a strange time. An exciting time, too – oh, yes, exciting. But so strange. And during those weeks after the operation I found myself thinking more and more about my mother and father, but especially about my mother and what it must have been like for her living in that huge, echoing house.

Mr Rice
I operated on the second eye, the left eye, six weeks after the first operation. I had hoped it might have been a healthier eye. But when the cataract was removed, we found a retina much the same as in the right: traces of pigmentosa, scarred macula, areas atrophied. However, with both eyes functioning to some degree, her visual field was larger and she fixated better. She could now see from a medical point of view. From a psychological point of view she was still blind. In other words she now had to learn to see.

Frank
As we got closer to the end of that year, it was quite clear that Molly was changing – had changed. And one of the most fascinating insights into the state of her mind at that time was given to me by Jean Wallace, the psychotherapist; very interesting woman; brilliant actually; married to George, a behavioural psychologist, a second-rater if you ask me; and what a bore – what a bore! Do you know what that man did? Lectured me one day for over an hour on cheese-making if you don’t mind! Anyhow – anyhow – the two of them – the Wallaces – they were doing this book on Molly; a sort of documentation of her ‘case-history’ from early sight to life-long blindness to sight restored to … whatever. And the way Jean explained Molly’s condition to me was this.

All of us live on a swing, she said. And the swing normally moves smoothly and evenly across a narrow range of the usual emotions. Then we have a crisis in our life; so that instead of moving evenly from, say, feeling sort of happy to feeling sort of miserable, we now swing from elation to despair, from unimaginable delight to utter wretchedness.

The word she used was ‘delivered’ to show how passive we are in this terrifying game: We are delivered into one emotional state – snatched away from it – delivered into the opposite emotional state. And we can’t help ourselves.
We can’t escape. Until eventually we can endure no more abuse – become incapable of experiencing anything, feeling anything at all.

That’s how Jean Wallace explained Molly’s behaviour to me. Very interesting woman. Brilliant actually. And beautiful, too. Oh, yes, all the gifts. And what she said helped me to understand Molly’s extraordinary behaviour – difficult behaviour – yes, goddamit, very difficult behaviour over those weeks leading up to Christmas.

For example – for example. One day, out of the blue, a Friday evening in December, five o’clock, I’m about to go to the Hikers Club, and she says, ‘I feel like a swim, Frank. Let’s go for a swim now.’

At this stage I’m beginning to recognize the symptoms: the defiant smile, the excessive enthusiasm, some reckless, dangerous proposal. ‘Fine. Fine,’ I say. Even though it’s pitch dark and raining. So we’ll go to the swimming-pool? Oh, no. She wants to swim in the sea. And not only swim in the sea on a wet Friday night in December, but she wants to go out to the rocks at the far end of Tramore and she wants to climb up on top of Napoleon Rock as we call it locally – it’s the highest rock there, a cliff really – and I’m to tell her if the tide is in or out and how close are the small rocks in the sea below and how deep the water is because she’s going to dive – to dive for God’s sake – the eighty feet from the top of Napoleon down into the Atlantic ocean.

‘And why not, Frank? Why not for God’s sake?’

Oh, yes, an enormous change. Something extraordinary about all that.

Then there was the night I watched her through the bedroom door. She was sitting at her dressing-table, in front of the mirror, trying her hair in different ways. When she would have it in a certain way, she’d lean close to the mirror and peer into it and turn her head from side to side. But you knew she couldn’t read her reflection,
could scarcely even see it. Then she would try the hair in a different style and she’d lean into the mirror again until her face was almost touching it and again she’d turn first to one side and then the other. And you knew that all she saw was a blur.

Then after about half-a-dozen attempts she stood up and came to the door – it was then I could see she was crying – and she switched off the light. Then she went back to the dressing-table and sat down again; in the dark; for maybe an hour; sat there and gazed listlessly at the black mirror.

Yes, she did dive into the Atlantic from the top of Napoleon Rock; first time in her life. Difficult times. Oh, I can’t tell you. Difficult times for all of us.

Mr Rice
The dangerous period for Molly came – as it does for all patients – when the first delight and excitement at having vision have died away. The old world with its routines, all the consolations of work and the familiar, is gone for ever. A sighted world – a partially sighted world, for that is the best it will ever be – is available. But to compose it, to put it together, demands effort and concentration and patience that are almost superhuman.

So the question she had to ask herself was: How much do I want this world? And am I prepared to make that enormous effort to get it?

Frank
Then there was a new development – as if she hadn’t enough troubles already. A frightening new development. She began getting spells of dizziness when everything seemed in a thick fog, all external reality became just a haze. This would hit her for no reason at all – at work, or walking home, or in the house; and it would last for an hour, maybe several hours.

Rice had no explanation for it. But you could see he was concerned.

‘It’s called “gnosis”,’ he said.

‘How do you spell that?’

‘G-n-o-s-i-s.’

‘And what is it?’

‘It’s a condition of impaired vision, Mr Sweeney.’

He really was a right little bastard at times.

Anyhow, I looked it up in the library, and interestingly, interestingly I could find no reference at all to a medical condition called ‘gnosis’. But according to the dictionary the word meant a mystical knowledge, a knowledge of spiritual things! And my first thought was: Good old Molly! Molly’s full of mystical knowledge! God forgive me; I really didn’t mean to be so cheap.

I meant to tell Rice about
that
meaning of the word the next time I met him – just to bring him down a peg. But it slipped my mind. I suppose because the condition disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. And anyway she had so many troubles at that stage that my skirmishes with Rice didn’t matter any more.

Molly
Tests – tests – tests – tests – tests! Between Mr Rice and Jean Wallace and George Wallace and indeed Frank himself I must have spent months and months being analysed and answering questions and identifying drawings and making sketches. And, God, those damned tests with photographs and lights and objects – those endless tricks and illusions and distortions – the Zöllner illusion, the Ames distorting room, the Staircase illusion, the Müller-Lyer illusion. And they never told you if you had passed or failed so you always assumed you failed. Such peace – such peace when they were all finished.

I stopped at the florist one evening to get something for Tony and Betty from this side – what was this side; Molly’s father and mother. For their wedding anniversary. And I spotted this little pot of flowers, like large buttercups, about six inches tall, with blue petals and what
seemed to me a whitish centre. I thought I recognized them but I wasn’t quite sure. And I wouldn’t allow myself to touch them.

‘I’ll take these,’ I said to the man.

‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Just in from Holland this morning. And do you know what? – I can’t remember what they’re called. Do you know?’

‘They’re nemophila.’

‘Are they?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Feel the leaves. They should be dry and feathery.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘That’s what they are. They have another name, haven’t they?’

‘Baby Blue Eyes,’ I said.

‘That’s it! I’d forgotten that. Getting too old for this job.’

Yes, that gave me some pleasure. One silly little victory. And when I took them home and held them up to my face and looked closely at them, they weren’t nearly as pretty as buttercups. Weren’t pretty at all. Couldn’t give that as a present next door.

Frank
It was the clever Jean Wallace who spotted the distress signals first. She said to me: ‘We should be seeing a renaissance of personality at this point. Because if that doesn’t take place – and it’s not – then you can expect a withdrawal.’

And she was right. That’s what’s happened. Molly just … withdrew.

Then in the middle of February she lost her job in the health club. And now Rita was no longer a friend. And that was so unfair – Rita kept making allowances for her long after any other boss would have got rid of her; turning in late; leaving early; maybe not even making an appearance for two or three days. Just sitting alone in her bedroom with her eyes shut, maybe listening to the radio, maybe just sitting there in silence.

I made a last effort on the first of March. I took her new scarlet coat out of the wardrobe and I said, ‘Come on, girl! Enough of this. We’re going for a long walk on Tramore beach. Then we’ll have a drink in Moriarity’s. Then we’ll have dinner in that new Chinese place. Right? Right!’ And I left the coat at the foot of her bed.

And that’s where it lay for weeks. And weeks. In fact she never wore it out again.

And at that point I had come to the end of my tether. There seemed to be nothing more I could do.

Mr Rice
In those last few months a new condition appeared. She began showing symptoms of a condition known as blindsight. This is a physiological condition, not psychological. On those occasions she claimed she could see nothing, absolutely nothing at all. And indeed she was telling the truth. But even as she said this, she behaved as if she could see – reach for her purse, avoid a chair that was in her way, lift a book and hand it to you. She
was
indeed receiving visual signals and she
was
indeed responding to them. But because of a malfunction in part of the cerebral cortex none of this perception reached her consciousness. She was totally unconscious of seeing anything at all.