Next to Love (22 page)

“I’m fine,” she insists.

“Well, if you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am, you don’t look fine. And you didn’t sound fine out in the yard a minute ago. How ’bout if I call Mr. Gooding?”

“Mr. Gooding is dead.” It comes out as a shriek. Now he’ll never let her alone.

“I meant Mr. King Gooding.”

“He’s out of town,” she almost shrieks again. Thank God he and Dorothy have gone to Maine. She is shamed enough without King’s knowing.

“Is there someone else I can call, someone to stay with you for a while?”

“I’m fine,” she insists.

“With all due respect, ma’am, I can’t leave you like this. Let me call a friend to come stay with you.”

She does not want anyone to know, but she has to get rid of him. She thinks of Millie. You’d never find Millie standing on the front lawn screaming obscenities. You wouldn’t find Babe either, but you might find Claude. She gives him Babe’s number.

“Do you mind if I use your phone?” he asks, but he has already moved to the small telephone table and picked up the receiver. The other policeman is standing in the doorway.

“Mommy.” The voice comes from the top of the stairs.

Grace looks up. Amy stands in her pink-and-white nightgown, her fist kneading her eye.

“Go back to bed, sweetheart. Everything is all right.”

“Is this Mr. Huggins?” the policeman says into the phone.

“Mommy!” Amy’s voice is more insistent.

“Go back to bed.” So is Grace’s. She can feel the hysteria mounting again.

The policeman on the phone turns to the one standing in the doorway and tilts his head toward the top of the stairs. The other policeman steps into the hall and looks up at Amy. “Hi,” he says.

She stands staring down at him.

“What’s your name?”

She goes on staring.

He moves to the foot of the stairs. “Want me to guess?”

She still does not answer, but she comes down a step. He isn’t as nice as Uncle Claude, but she likes the way he smiles at her. And she likes his voice. His talk sounds like singing.

“I have a little girl just about your age.”

She takes a step back up. Who cares about his little girl?

“That’s how I know little girls like to be read to. Would you like me to read you a story?”

“I’m too old to be read to.”

“Then would you like me to sing you back to sleep? Everyone says I have a fine voice. ‘Danny boy …’ ” He sings the last two words.

“Do you know ‘You’re not the only oyster in the stew’?”

“If you sing it for me, I bet I can learn it.” He starts up the stairs. Amy stands at the top, waiting for him.

“I’m calling from Mrs. Gooding’s house,” the other policeman says into the phone. “She’s fine, but I think somebody ought to be with her.”

Grace goes into the sunporch. She does not want to hear the rest.

As soon as she sees Babe, she starts to cry.

“Did the policeman tell you what happened?”

“Some of it,” Claude says, and Grace knows from the way he says it that the policeman has told them everything, including the dirty words and the fact that she was screaming them at Charlie.

It takes until dawn, but she finally agrees to let them call Mac.

“He’ll understand,” Babe insists. “He’s a doctor. And there was that business of walking out of his office.”

Claude goes into the hall to place the long-distance call, though there is a phone in the kitchen. A few minutes later, he comes back. “He wants to talk to you,” he says, as he picks up the extension and hands it to her.

“You need a rest,” Mac says. “There’s a sanitarium outside Boston.”

“You mean a crazy house?”

“I mean a sanitarium.”

“What will people say?” She is ashamed for herself, but she is also worried about Amy. She does not want her to become known as the daughter of a crazy woman.

“No one will know. We’ll say you’re on a long cruise or visiting friends in California.”

“Are you sure they won’t know?”

“You didn’t know I was there, did you? After I walked out of my office and couldn’t go back.”

OCTOBER
1950

Grace sits in her room on the third floor of the sanitarium, waiting. They are her oldest and dearest friends. But that was before.

Dr. Gold says there is nothing to be ashamed of, but there is plenty to be ashamed of, and she is not thinking only of standing on the front lawn screaming obscenities at Charlie. She is ashamed of her existence. She is ashamed of being a woman alone in the world without a man, unclaimed, unvalued, a reproach to the laws of society and nature. When she found Charlie, she thought she had taken care of all that for life.

The nurse comes to the door and tells her that her visitors are here. She goes to the mirror over the dresser, smooths her hair, which is pulled back in a French twist, then straightens the jacket of the new suit her mother brought her, because most of her clothes hang on her as if they’re still on hangers. At least she can say that for the sanitarium. She doesn’t know if she’s better, but she is thinner.

Going downstairs, she holds on to the banister. A carpet runs down the center of the stairs, but the wood on both sides of it is slippery, and she is afraid of falling. She is afraid of so much these days.

As she comes around the second-floor landing and starts down to the first, she hears their voices in the parlor. Millie’s is shrill. Even Babe’s sounds higher than usual. They are nervous. They are as nervous as she is.

Babe is sitting on the horsehair love seat. Millie is pacing among the Victorian chairs and tables and lamps. Grace stops in the entrance and strikes a pose with one hand on her hip and the other suspended in air. “Ta da.”

Millie comes running. Babe follows. Millie hugs her first, then Babe. They tell her how wonderful she looks. The silence that follows ticks like a clock. They all start talking at once. They stop and look at one another. No one can be normal around her. Her mother and mother-in-law came together, just as Millie and Babe have, as if they need moral support. King and her father have not come at all. They claim the demands of work, but she knows her father is afraid and King is disgusted. Only Mac, when he came to visit, behaved normally.

“Listen,” Grace begins, and her voice is quieter than theirs, “it’s really nice of you to come see me.” She hesitates, debating whether to go on. “And you don’t have to be afraid. I’m not crazy or anything. They wouldn’t let me go out with you if I was crazy.”

Babe and Millie shout her down with denials, but she notices they do not look at each other.

They drive to the restaurant where Mac took her for dinner on her first outing from the sanitarium, and by the time they finish lunch, they are easy with one another again. Then Babe and Millie insist on paying for her, and she remembers this is not an ordinary lunch.

“It’s not my birthday,” she says.

“And don’t think we won’t remind you of that when we don’t take you out for your birthday.” Babe picks up the check before Grace can get it.

“Oh, shoot,” Millie says, as she opens her handbag and takes out her wallet.

“What’s wrong?” Grace asks.

“I just remembered I paid the diaper service yesterday and forgot to ask Al for money this morning.”

“Then let me pay. Please.”

“Absolutely not,” Babe says. “I’ll pay, and Millie can pay me back.”

On the return to the sanitarium, the ease evaporates in half-finished sentences and broken conversations. Grace stares out at the trees burning like fire in the sun-shot afternoon. She does not want to go back, but she does not know what she does want.

They drive past the sign saying
THE WILLOWS
—as if it is a country inn—through the big wrought-iron gates, and on toward the sprawling Victorian heap of wraparound porch, fretwork, and turrets nestled in the raucously colored trees. To Grace it does not feel as if they are driving toward it. It feels as if it is bearing down on them.

Babe pulls the car up in front of the wide steps. Before she can turn off the engine, Grace tells them not to bother coming in with her. They do not argue. Grace climbs out of the car, and Millie gets out of the backseat and into the front.

“You’ll be home in no time,” Millie says.

“Hug Amy for me.” Grace takes a handkerchief out of her pocket and blows her nose.

“More than once,” Babe promises.

Grace stands at the bottom of the steps, watching the car grow smaller as it moves down the drive, turns onto the road, and disappears. She knows this feeling of being left behind. It has become the story of her life.

She climbs the steps and goes into the eerily still building. At this hour, patients are lying down, taking their prescribed walks, or having sessions with their doctors. And she is adrift, floating in the vastness of the silence, like the helium balloon Amy let go of at a fair a few years ago. They stood watching it soar, higher and higher, until it disappeared into the emptiness. She wishes she could forget the sight of that balloon.

She climbs the wide hall staircase to the second floor, then the narrower one to the third. Her room, halfway down the corridor, faces west. Honeyed light floods in the windows, illuminating the flowered chintz upholstery and draperies, the rose-patterned carpet, and the Victorian furniture with its curves and bevels and rounded edges. There are no sharp surfaces in this room, no dark corners. In this room, there is nothing to be afraid of. So why is she filled with dread?

Dr. Gold says she needs something to hold on to. An anchor to ground her so she will not float off like that helium balloon. To put it simply, Mrs. Gooding, a husband. That is the cure for her illness.

JANUARY
1951

Amy is quiet going down the stairs. She does not want to wake her mother. She likes being alone in the house. Not really alone, she wants her mother there, but doing something else, something that has nothing to do with her. The trouble is, her mother doesn’t do much that doesn’t have to do with her. Her mother even admits it. You’re my whole life, she says. It’s just the two of us. What would I do without you? It makes Amy feel bad, because there’s plenty she likes to do without her mother. Now she wants to go downstairs and watch television in the sunporch. Her mother doesn’t let her do that in the morning, even on Saturday mornings like this, but if she keeps the sound real low, her mother won’t know.

She switches on the television and stands waiting for it to warm up. When it does, she moves the knob until Uncle Jim of
Acrobat Ranch
is whispering, then turns to go to the couch. That’s when she sees it. The pictures are gone. There is nothing but row after row of hooks.

She cannot believe it. The pictures were there last night. Her mother could not have taken them down. Her mother loves that wall. It’s her favorite thing in the whole house. As Amy goes on staring at it, she suddenly understands. Her mother is going crazy again. She will have to go back to the hospital.

HER MOTHER DOES NOT
go back to the hospital. Instead, a man arrives at the house, spreads big color-spattered cloths over the furniture and the floor, and paints the wall. When it’s dry, Aunt Millie comes to help her mother hang a new picture.

“Just one photograph,” her mother says. “One photograph can’t hurt.”

“One photograph on the end table,” Aunt Millie says. “We agreed a still life would look perfect on this wall.”

And a picture of a big bowl of flowers goes up.

THE CALL SURPRISES GRACE
. At first she does not recognize the name.

“Morris Banks,” he says a second time. “Mac Swallow introduced us. When we ran into you at lunch with your friends a few months ago.”

Now she remembers. He was wide-shouldered and thick-necked, with a big square face under brown hair that stood up like a recently mown lawn. But there was nothing brutal about him. He reminded her of one of those gentle giants in children’s stories. The only disconcerting thing about him was that he kept staring at her. That was how she knew he was a psychiatrist. He had spotted her as crazy right off. But why is he calling her now?

He is saying something about wanting to see South Downs, about living in Boston all his life and being tired of it, about looking for a small town where he can set up a practice.

“A psychiatrist here?”

“Pardon me?”

“I don’t think you’d have many patients. People here don’t go to psychiatrists.” Except me.

He laughs. “Where did you get the idea that I’m a psychiatrist? I’m a GP. What I’d like to be is a small-town GP. I was thinking you could show me around the area, and then we could have dinner.”

“I have a daughter.” She does not think of the statement as a non sequitur.

“I know. Amy. Mac told me all about her. I’d love to meet her. The three of us can have dinner. What do you say?”

She starts to say no. Even with Amy along, it is not a good idea. But she feels Dr. Gold standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders, pushing her forward. She says yes.

“NOW, THIS IS JUST
a ride around town and dinner,” her mother says. She is standing in front of the mirror over her dresser, screwing on an earring. “We don’t need some man coming in here, trying to take your daddy’s place.”

Yes, we do, Amy thinks, but keeps her mouth shut.

Then her mother says something really strange. “In the car, I want you to sit in the front seat, between us.”

“I’ll be all squooshed.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Why can’t I sit in back, like I do when you’re with Aunt Babe or Aunt Millie?”

“Because I asked you to sit in the front between us.”

Amy lets it go. She does not want to do anything to ruin this.

When the bell rings, her mother tells her to go down and open the door. She doesn’t argue about that either, though her mother is ready too. She goes down the stairs fast, stops at the bottom to smooth her dress, then crosses to the door and peers through one of the long windows on either side of it. He’s big, much taller than Uncle Claude, taller even than Uncle Al, and more solid. She can’t see what color his hair is, because he has his hat on. He wears glasses—all men wear glasses—and his mouth is pursed as if he’s whistling, but he must be doing it under his breath, because no sound is coming out.