Guests on Earth (21 page)

On this and subsequent rides, I learned all about this family, consisting of Mrs. Sledge, the mother whom he adored, his three older sisters, and his identical twin brother, Rupert. Two key facts drove this narrative. The first was that Mr. Sledge, a businessman, had dropped dead from a heart attack soon after the twins were born. The second was that Dr. Sledge’s twin had turned out to be schizophrenic, though “the sweetest and gentlest of men,” thus determining Dr. Sledge’s own story—his empathy, his gravity, his eventual vocation. Dr. Sledge postponed college and took a job at home in order to help his mother take care of Rupert, until Rupert killed himself at twenty. Then Dr. Sledge enrolled at Ball State, followed by medical school at the university, and an internship at the Mayo Clinic. This story also explained Dr. Sledge’s somewhat princelike aura, for he was not only loved but virtually worshipped by his mother and all those sisters back in Indiana. This was of course a burden, though a gift. It explained everything. If ever a man were trustworthy, it would be Dr. Sledge.

I took him to see the Biltmore House; the French Broad River; Thomas Wolfe’s grave at Riverside cemetery, which has a regular tombstone, not the angel everybody expects; and the Old Kentucky Home, his mother’s boardinghouse downtown, which Wolfe had made famous in Look Homeward, Angel. The following Sunday we went for a drive along the breath-taking Blue Ridge Parkway, built by the WPA. We stopped at an overlook to look out at the dreamy, quiltlike landscape below, then stopped again at Mabry Mill to watch dried corn being ground up into meal by the giant turning stone water wheels. It was a very cold day, I remember. Dr. Sledge’s red muffler exactly matched the red spots on his cheeks. He bought a cloth bag of the freshly ground cornmeal to send to his mother, Dorothy—called “Dot”—back in Indiana. While he paid the mountain girl at the counter, I checked my watch. “Too late,” I announced, for I had been planning to take him by Fat Daddy’s for a barbecue sandwich before our return to Highland, where I had to play for the glee club concert late that afternoon.

“You know, you weren’t kidding, were you?” Dr. Sledge said when we got back into the station wagon. “Asheville actually is home for you, isn’t it? I certainly picked the right tour guide.”

“Oh, I was just talking, I guess. But I’ve certainly lived here a long while, off and on—exactly like Mrs. Fitzgerald.” I realized this only as I said it. “We even arrived at Highland about the same time, a little over ten years ago. Of course I was scarcely more than a child myself, and she was a grown woman . . .”

“Only in a manner of speaking, from what I understand,” Dr. Sledge said. “Remember that she was still in her teens, no real education, when she married Scott Fitzgerald and fell into that fast world of constant drinking and parties and travel—perhaps she never had a chance to grow up any further than that, emotionally. Alcoholism is an illness in itself, you know, and it’s amazing how much they drank, the two of them. I’ve been researching this since I got here and met her. But I think Mrs. Fitzgerald may have been misdiagnosed, too.” Dr. Sledge was warming to his topic. “Actually I think she may have had lupus, early on—there’s all that eczema in the records. I don’t think she was ever truly schizophrenic, though. With lifelong schizophrenia, there’s permanent damage from every big break. Brain lesions. Loss of affect, loss of IQ, what we call blank mind. Mrs. Fitzgerald has ‘come back’ too far, too often. Look at all her writing. Look at her art. It’s very impressive. Why, she’s still painting. I’m pretty sure it has always been manic-depressive illness, not that it matters now.” He bit his lip; I realized he was telling me too much.

“But Mrs. Fitzgerald improves every time she comes back to Highland,” I said, and he nodded. “And she’s kept coming back, all these years. So maybe she thinks of it as home, too, like me. Just a little bit, anyway.”

“Why don’t you ask her? She likes you.” Dr. Sledge was navigating his way so slowly around the hairpin curves down the mountain road that the cars behind us were all blowing their horns, which didn’t appear to bother him in the least, if he even noticed. I didn’t mention it. These Blue Ridge mountain roads were still new to him, of course.

“Oh, she’d say Montgomery.” I was sure of it. “Because the house is still there, remember? Rabbit Run. With her mother still alive, still in it. So Mrs. Fitzgerald is stuck in Alabama, really, don’t you think? Still in the past. No matter how much she and Mr. Fitzgerald traveled the globe.”

“Well, Mrs. Fitzgerald is a special case by now, of course,” Dr. Sledge said gently. “So many, many treatments at so many different clinics have undoubtedly harmed her as much as they have helped her, at this point. So much medication, so many different kinds of shock treatments. I think she’s suffered some serious brain damage. But it’s not that her earlier doctors were negligent, you understand. There’s a lot of new thinking on this now.” Sometimes I forgot that Dr. Sledge was part of the new regime. “Psychoanalysis would be wasted on Mrs. Fitzgerald now, of course. But for the rest of us,” he went on with some emphasis, “we must go back into the past, we must try to process the trauma of our earlier lives, if we are to move forward at all.”

I made a face at him. “Dr. Carroll didn’t even believe in therapy, except for gardening and walking. And remember what Thomas Wolfe said, ‘You can’t go home again.’ I’m with him. Because it’s all gone the minute you leave, even if it ever existed at all. Like New Orleans, or Montgomery, or wherever. It’s just the past. It’s all different. And we’re different, too,” I said almost to myself. “There’s no going back.”

“Spoken like Thomas Wolfe’s dark angel, my brilliant Evalina,” Dr. Sledge said, reaching over suddenly to take my hand, which lay on the bag of cornmeal between us.

The station wagon swerved suddenly to the right, almost hitting the vertical cliff, then rocked from side to side down the mountain as both of us burst into sudden laughter. I am still not sure why. But I’ll bet that Freddy Sledge was as astonished as I, though he did not relinquish my hand.

M
ORE AND MORE,
w
henever I could get the time, I found myself haunting Hortitherapy, where Mrs. Morris was coming to depend upon me, too. One cold, bright morning in December, I went on the annual expedition to gather greenery for holiday decorating. A light frost lay on everything, for all the world like the silver spray we were using in Art to make Christmas ornaments. Fences and branches and weeds glistened in the sun as we walked back into the woods with our clippers, following Pan and old Cal, who carried a shotgun to shoot down mistletoe, if we encountered any. We were all encouraged to look for it, high in the tops of the hardwoods, as we walked along. Our breath made silver puffs in the air, like characters’ speech in the cartoons that Pan adored, which the Morrises saved for him (though it was somewhat unclear to me whether he could really read them, or just liked the pictures). In any case, here we all went, a goodly group of us, down into a ravine where fir and hemlock hung over the icy rushing waters of Balsam Creek; its song filled the glittering air. Soon we held armfuls of the fragrant greenery, including holly, two or three kinds of it, galax and grapevine, and a real find, the bright orange bittersweet berries on their long, bare stalks, almost Asian in appearance, which Mrs. Carroll loved. She used to keep a Chinese urn filled with bittersweet on her piano for the holidays.

The piano! Suddenly I felt like playing “Deck the Halls,” “Away in the Manger,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and all the carols of the season. As we trudged back up the hill toward the hospital, I could hardly wait to get my hands on the keys.

But we all stopped obediently when Pan held up his hand. Some of us put our heavy branches down; I did, shading my eyes as several of the men pointed up into the highest branches of the huge old oaks and sycamores we stood among. Mistletoe! Round clouds of it hovered in the highest branches, against the deep blue sky.

“Okay, here goes,” Cal said, raising his gun; yet still it was a shock when the shots rang out in the cold, clear, quivering air—one, two, three, four of them. Three bunches of mistletoe fell to the ground.

Yet so did the nice-looking man just ahead of me, crying out incoherently, drawn up into a ball, rolling this way and that like a crazy person—which he was, I suddenly remembered; it was so easy to forget, him in his tailored tweed jacket with the leather patches on the sleeves. His checked wool hat rolled off down the hill and then I could see the blue bald spots on his head, too, where they attached the electrodes. Though Dr. Pine arrived first at his side, it was Pan who was suddenly all over him, covering him up like a bear, rolling with him until he stopped and there they lay together, panting, like one huge animal.

“My God, how stupid of us!” Dr. Pine said, almost to himself, slapping his own thigh.

For of course this man was one of the shell-shocked veterans, though he’d been a very high-ranking officer, it was said.

Somehow we got him back to the hospital, along with the rest of us, and our greenery.

Later, festive wreaths hung on all the hospital doors, and fragrant evergreen bouquets filled all the vases. A garland lined the grand stairway, and a great ball of mistletoe hung from a red velvet ribbon in the fancy entrance of Highland Hall.

M
Y NEW PART-STAFF
s
tatus allowed me to drive the Hortitherapy truck on errands about the grounds. This was a big help, I judged, from the number of times Mrs. Morris asked me to do it. I remember her riding with me one day as I drove to pick up a load of rocks from workmen on a road at the back of the property and deliver them to an area near the old swimming pool, where they would be used eventually to build some sort of little pavilion. Together Mrs. Morris and I stood at the side to watch two of the grounds crews swing into action, handing the rocks off from one to another in a relay line, piling them up where the new structure was to be located.

At the end, a number of the workers clambered into the truck bed for the ride back to Brushwood. I popped Pan a quick slap on the rear as he jumped up last, onto the bumper. Through the back window, he gave me a grin and a wave in response.

With difficulty, Mrs. Morris hauled herself back into the seat beside me; she leaned over to place her hand over mine on the gearshift, so that I was forced to pause before starting the truck.

I looked over at her.

Her warm eyes, often puffy and rheumy, looked straight into mine, bright and intent. “He is a man, you know,” she said, squeezing my hand hard before she released it, before I started the engine.

P
ERHAPS
I
MOST
e
njoyed the unscheduled moments in the greenhouse when we were between groups or events—sprawled out on the wicker furniture drawn up around an old gas heater, absorbed in the newspapers, usually several days old by the time they made it to Hortitherapy—Mrs. Morris chewing on a pencil eraser as she did one of her beloved crossword puzzles, Pan chuckling over the comics, or fixing something—he was forever fixing something, often with the help of Carl Renz, a huge, slow-witted lobotomy casualty. Several of these unfortunates had ended up at Highland, where lobotomies were not performed, though they were very popular at that time. Currently lobotomy was being promoted nationwide by the famous Dr. Walter Freeman, who had simplified the procedure by using a home icepick through the eye socket and was now traveling the country in his “Lobotomobile,” as he called it, performing his “transorbital” lobotomies at mental hospitals and doctors’ offices everywhere. Thank goodness he was never invited to Highland! Our own Carl Renz was a familiar and even beloved part of Brushwood. He liked to stand rather than sit, pacing in the background as we all busied ourselves around the stove.

Often I took this time to scan the news, especially the news from Europe, which seemed impossibly far away to me now. “Look.” I held a crackling page out toward Pan. “Look at this.” It was a picture of the Eiffel Tower.

“That’s Paris,” I said, my heart pounding, holding my breath. “I lived there. In Paris”

He glanced at the picture and then at me, his gaze both alert and uncomprehending.

Mrs. Morris looked up from her puzzle. “Perhaps you should go and check on the poinsettias,” she said to Pan.

“Why, where are they?” I asked, as none were to be seen among the shelves of flowering plants and bulbs being forced into bloom.

Pan took off in answer, me following. He darted outside and over to the larger toolshed, which I had never entered, assuming it was merely a storage space, for there was no end of grounds equipment at Highland to be stored. He threw the latch and hoisted the big garage door up along its tracks and we ducked inside; I paused to get my bearings in the semidarkness. I couldn’t imagine what we were doing in there! But Pan turned back to pull at my sleeve, and I crept forward, though cautiously. It was not the first time I had had the sense that he could see in the dark. Beyond the tractors we came to a nondescript door, like a closet. He opened it, pushing me forward. I stumbled over the sill to stand amazed.

In the soft red light, I could barely make out the dozens and dozens of poinsettias, starting to bloom. It was beautiful, like being inside a heart.

“Oh my God!” I said involuntarily.

Behind me, in the darkness, Pan was laughing. Like a vine, his arm snuck around my waist, pulling me back against him; before I knew it, his warm breath was in my hair, his lips on the back of my neck. A feeling that I cannot describe swept over me, down to my very feet. I felt his lips on my neck, his tongue.

“Evalina, are you in here? Pan?” Mrs. Morris stood in the open space beyond the tractors, her voice sharp. Carl Renz loomed behind her. “Are you there? Answer me. Answer me!”

We stepped back, closing the secret door.

Later, the blooming poinsettias would be brought out and placed all over the hospital for Christmas. Every time I saw one, I thought of that moment with Pan.