Concrete Angel (11 page)

“There’s no disgrace in needing a rest, Eve,” Daddy said, calmer suddenly. “I hope you’ve kept some kind of record of the gifts so we can thank the folks who remembered you.”

“It’s nothing worth writing a thank you card for. Cans of Planter’s Peanuts—like you can buy at the A & P, small jars of Pennsylvania Dutch stuff.”

“Chow-chow?” the nurse said. “Apple butter?”

“See what I mean,” Mother said.

“And a few boxes of out-of-season clothing and accessories went to her parents’ house,” the nurse added. “I spoke with Mrs. Hobart before sending them. She said it was quite all right.” Her voice had tapered off to a whisper. “She had some extra space. Not much but a bit…”

“Of course, it’s all right. I told you not to bother asking her.” Mother’s voice was a whiplash, and the nurse’s neck jerked accordingly. “I’ve always stored things there. Items I wasn’t using. Off-season goods.”

Her husband was already marching back to the elevator, preparing to confront her doctors on their decision to look the other way, getting ready to remind them what fees were being handed over to The Terraces each month, asking how Eve’s enterprise fit in with the therapy they’d discussed.

Mother didn’t feel guilty. That was the thing about her—the characteristic it was difficult to understand. If she’d felt guilty, how would it change things? She’d still have made her purchases but perhaps not enjoyed them as much.

“Do you get it?” she asked me. “Does anyone understand?”

E
ve Moran was released from The Terraces three months later. Once the ability to shop was taken away, she bore down and did what was needed, talking to the therapists, seeking out groups who’d help her appear compliant, involved, sane. There were so many women like Mother there—the bored wives of rich men, the aging wives of rich men, the drug-addicted wives of rich men.

The rich men themselves saw their therapists after work in the city. Few men were guests at The Terraces because they needed to earn the money necessary to keep their wives, or sometimes children, inside, out of harm’s way they might’ve said.

The lack of such males at The Terraces was a contributing factor in Mother’s rush toward release. Women rarely found her charming and, second only to the shopping, she needed the boost being found charming and desirable gave her. She hadn’t gone without sex since her early teens. She could sense herself dehydrating, day by day.

Mother saw what was needed to escape from The Terraces. There was no reason for her to remain there once her room returned to the dull four walls the institution and her husband deemed acceptable. No reason to hang around the billiards table, the screening room, the indoor bowling alley. She didn’t dance, paint, write poetry, or act in skits. She only liked to shop.

So she came home. She came home to shop.

T
hings weren’t the same for a long time between Mother and Daddy after her vigil at The Terraces. He was embarrassed their problems had become town gossip in Doylestown despite his precautions, spreading well beyond the tight circle of the Moran clan.

If her parents’ little enclave in Philly knew about her breakdown, so be it. But if someone Hank played golf or did business with found out, it was another issue. Nervous breakdowns, compulsions, or whatever it was Eve suffered from, were not publicly spoken of in 1962. Her absence had already got him strange looks at the country club, and the family doctor probed more than his throat when he went in with a fever.

“Eve seeing another doctor?”

“Of course not. She’s the picture of health this spring. Put on a pound or two.” A large harrumph followed this statement, leading Daddy to believe someone advised the doctor otherwise.

“Doylestown’s a small town. The idea your mother’s months in a sanitarium would go unnoticed was foolish,” Daddy admitted later.

Mother continued to be bitter about her incarceration. Aside from the curtailment of her shopping, not one family member visited her after the first two weeks. Her father hadn’t come to see her at all.

“You know your father,” my grandmother tried to explain to her. “A place like that—well, you know.”

Eve came home to find Hank’s sister, Linda, waiting on the front porch when they pulled up, waving limply at the couple with a lace handkerchief.

“Welcome, home,” Linda said, stationed in the rocking chair with the best view. Her voice was high-pitched, reminding me when I came along later, of Helen Keller.

“What am I supposed to do with her around all day?” Eve asked as soon as it was clear Linda was ensconced for an undetermined period of time in their spare bedroom. She stood at the door of the room, looking menacingly at the homey touches Linda had already made: crocheted quilts, lace doilies, a large porcelain doll that hid her nightgown under its profuse skirt on the bed.

“The plaid bedspread has to go. I can’t bear to pass the room.” She took Linda’s vase of plastic flowers and overturned it into the wastepaper basket, letting the cheap dime store vase fall in, too. “She’ll have to keep the door closed. It disrupts the entire décor.”

“None of this is permanent,” Hank said. “You have to expect Linda to make herself comfortable. She’s doing us a favor.”

“Ha! Doing you a favor.”

He retrieved the flowers and vase from the wastepaper basket and reinstalled them on the bureau top. “Is this handful of silk daisies so offensive? You have crates of stuff like this, don’t you?”

“Which goes to show how much attention you pay to my taste.”

The boxes filled with this sort of accessories—remnants of earlier days—were taped shut in the Hobart basement; she hadn’t opened them in months. Eve moved with the times. Her taste was not immutable.

“Yes, but this is Linda’s room for now.”

“Temporary houseguests don’t usually get to redecorate.” Eve flung open the closet door, doubtlessly wincing at both the number and choice of clothes inside. “You can hardly close the door.” The closet already reeked of some flowery scent. She held her nose. “She wears the same perfume as your mother.”

Linda Moran, Hank’s younger sister, was short, squat, sedentary—a throwback in a family of tall, energetic people. When I came to know her a few years later, she’d already arrived at spinsterhood—feet first and with little resentment.

“We don’t have a damned thing to say to each other,” Mother said, continuing the discussion over the next few days. “And it’s not like she
does
anything to help. Linda can’t cook any better than me. She talks on the phone to your mother most of the day. Never-ending conferences about the most minute details of their lives. ‘What shall I wear to the ladies’ tea, Mother?’” Eve mimicked her sister-in-law’s voice. “Do you think my lavender shirtwaist will do? Shall I wear my pearls or the gold cross?”

Eve had her elbow propped on the window sill and was watching her sister-in-law on the porch below. Linda was gazing at the street traffic from the aqua glider, her foot making it move every few seconds, a glass of lemonade beside her. “Look at her, Hanky—already out there at eight-thirty in the morning. She’s twenty-eight years old and acts ninety.”

“She’s here to make sure your convalescence goes smoothly,” Hank said, trying to soothe his wife. “The sanitarium didn’t want to release you. I assured Dr. Doakes we’d have someone here with you. Would you rather spend another month or two at The Terraces?”

“You could’ve signed me out of the loony bin any time you wanted. Don’t try to pin it on them. Your role in my incarceration is considerable. Don’t think I’ll forget that.”

Nearly all of the residents at The Terraces had a story like Eve’s to tell—some husband or father or brother or mother who’d signed the commitment papers with impunity. Long evenings there had been whiled away listening to such stories. “Committal tales” someone had named them.

“I had to rely on the doctors’ evaluations, Eve,” Daddy said. “Isn’t it better coming home early, even if Linda has to stick around for a few weeks?”

“A close call,” Eve said, smiling slightly. “Doakes wanted to keep me there forever. Bleeding you dry while I did jigsaw puzzles with my drippy O.T. guy. Waiting on pins and needles to see how soon he’d slide his hand up my dress again.” She made a face.

“You invented that, Evelyn Moran.”

Ignoring him, she went on. “And using the word ‘companion’ implies Linda and I do things together. Me and Tubbylinda.” She sat on the bed, contemplating another hour of sleep. What else was there to do?

“Look, bear with me till things get straightened out. I have a lot on my plate.”

“But not as much as your sister has on hers.”

Hank was working a dab of Brill Cream into his hair. He raked both sides of his head a final time and wiped his hands.

“Don’t call her Tubbylinda again,” he said, choking back a laugh. “I’ll slip and call her that myself.” His face became a mask at he looked critically in the mirror. “I wonder how I’d look with a mustache.”

“Hideous. Only Clark Gable got away with a moustache when they were out of style.” She stretched.” Straightened out how?”

Mother was probably feeling headachy was, in fact, hung-over. Lately, they’d both been drinking too much. Hank had come home the night before with an orange liqueur a client gave him, and they put a good dent in it after the red wine they’d had with dinner and the martini still earlier. Since alcoholism was not deemed one of Eve’s problems, no prohibition had been placed on her social drinking
.

“Boredom drinking,” she often told me.

She only drank when Hank was home. Although if he worked late, she often began without him. And mostly, he did stay at the office fairly late. She’d discovered it was surprisingly easy to make your own cocktail and to drink it alone. Easy also to have a second one when Hank was out even later.

Linda had not joined them in their alcohol consumption the night before, of course, looking on with disapproval and a strawberry ice cream soda in her hand. Hank brought it home from the Doylestown soda shop, flourishing it like flowers. She actually blushed. “Oh Hank,” she started to say.

“You know those calories go right on your hips,” Eve said, jutting out a boney one.

Hank sighed loudly, and Linda walked into her bedroom. The sound of her blaring TV was a reminder of her presence though. She liked the sort of goofy shows my mother couldn’t tolerate.

“
The Beverly Hillbillies
,
McHale’s Navy.
You can imagine her favorites, Christine.”

Eve could sleep as long as she wanted. Eleven or twelve hours a night was not unheard of. Sleeping in became a habit in the nuthouse where rest was considered therapeutic. And it gave the staff time to put up their feet.

But if she returned to bed now, she remembered, she’d have to get up all over again, waking once more to the long and boring day ahead, the hours to wait until cocktails. An endless sentence of shopping-free days or else she’d be booted back from whence she came. I imagine none of this was particularly palatable to my mother.

“
Why do you have to be gone such long hours,” she’d asked her husband. “You’re the boss, right?”

“You know what I mean, Eve.” Hank’s voice now was low, and she turned to him with surprise. What he meant about what? Was she missing bits and pieces of what people said? Had the few times she’d taken Thorazine done some damage. She’d entirely forgotten the subject under discussion.

“She’ll stay until things are back on an even keel.”

He was still talking about Linda. Good grief! Maybe he was obsessed with his sister. This hadn’t occurred to her before. Obsessed with Tubbylinda? What had their childhood been like? Was she being crazy? Too much time spent with shrinks and you started thinking like them. Something sexual, a deviant act, explained everything. No one completed childhood unscathed according to them.

Hank began knotting his tie. “We became used to having things a certain way around here: Mrs. Murphy, Linda, and me. Our days went smoothly, and I’m not inclined to make any big changes right now. We’ll ease you in…”

“Linda stayed here while I was gone?” Eve was appalled, more suspicious now of some sort of incestuous liaison. “I thought she’d moved in right before I came home.”