On the River Styx (13 page)

Thus she was grateful for Ernest Hamlin.

Ernest had come the previous Tuesday at the hour of the weekly square dance, which was for Anne the most upsetting occasion of her week. Though eliciting a forlorn gaiety in the patients, it was grotesque in its laughter without merriment, in the heavy aimless prancing, in the pairing off of illness and of age. Here a wan old woman clutched a dreaming black man; there a smiling student nurse propped up a bashful moron. Beyond, a lank-haired catatonic in a knee-length twenties frock performed wild stumbling pirouettes all by herself. Along the walls the others watched, despairing, giggling, excited by the din, some clapping vaguely out of time with the piano.

“Don’t you want to dance?” Anne cried.

“No, thank you, miss,” said a big fair boyish man poised for escape by the door to the room where some played shuffleboard, and for a moment Anne imagined him a visitor.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” she ventured. He faced her then and smiled.

“Oh, I’m a patient all right, miss,” he said.

“I see,” she said and, ineffectual, flushed. “My name is Anne.”

“Mine’s Ernest Hamlin.” He enclosed her outstretched hand in his. “I come down to do something with my hands”—he held them out and gazed at them—“so’s I wouldn’t go nuts.” He smiled again at her involuntary start, then sat down carefully on the edge of a folding chair.

She seated herself beside him.

“I ain’t really nuts, you see, miss, not yet, anyways.” He glanced pointedly at the dancers. “I guess these poor dopes claim that quite a lot.”

“Nobody here is really ‘nuts,’ Mr. Hamlin,” she blurted dutifully. “They only—”

“You know what I mean, Miss,” Ernest told her. “Mentally ill. I ain’t really mentally ill, not yet, anyways.” Again he observed the dancers, wincing. “I’ll make the grade, though, one of these fine days.”

“You mustn’t feel sorry for yourself,” Anne said. “You mustn’t—”

“No?” he said. His heavy face turned to her once again. It was an intelligent face, rueful, perceptive, alight with quiet humor, quite different from the gallery of faces in the room. He was not yet dead in the way that people died here, their hair first, then the mouth and eyes, all but the hands. At Lime Rock the hands, like infants’ hands, or those of the old man frozen in his chair beside them, clung to life, whether clenched or groping. “No, maybe I shouldn’t,” Ernest said and, frowning, changed the subject.

“Do most of these folks know why they’re here?” he said.

“The ones aware of anything do. They don’t believe it, most of them.” She waited for him.

“Oh, I
believe
it, all right,” he told her quickly. “There
ain’t no doubt about what
I
got. I got a piece of shrapnel sitting too close in to my brain to operate, understand? They can’t operate. And every once in a while this shrapnel sort of acts up, like, and drives me nuts with pain—mentally ill with pain,” he corrected himself. “I get so’s I don’t know what I’m doing even. I get destructive. I’m supposed to be dangerous, miss, because I don’t know what’s going on. So this vets hospital, they give up on that piece of shrapnel after a while, they classify me a mental case, they got no provisions for guys like me, they send me here. I didn’t even get no chance to go on home and see my folks, or the boys in my shop, or nothing. And I got a mother waiting home, and sisters, and I got a part interest in this machine shop home. I’m a machinist.” He gazed at his hands again, big useful hands sitting idle on his knees. “A damn good one, too,” he muttered angrily. “I worked for them there at the hospital sometimes, and the guy running the shop, the super there, he said he never seen better work.” He shook his head. “Which is why I come down here this afternoon, I thought maybe you had some tools and stuff, a lathe, maybe, but there ain’t nothing here but shuffleboard, and knitting needles, and games for kids.”

She nodded, mute.

“So that’s about it: they sent me up here, and I ain’t mentally ill. My fiancée wrote me a letter already. She said it would be better to make a clean break. She said it hurt her worse’n it did me.” Ernest Hamlin almost smiled. “But I’m just a young guy, I got a long life ahead of me, and guess where it looks like I’m going to spend it—” He stopped short, as if shocked anew by the realization. “Jesus,” he whispered, “I can’t believe it.”

He set back gently upon her feet a fat, loose-lipped girl
in baggy dungarees who had square-danced into him and fallen. The girl put her hands on her hips and swaggered with gross coyness away from him. Her dancing partner was a scraggy female who carried her head shot forward like a turkey and seemed on the point of tears.

“So I feel sorry for myself,” he concluded.

Anne nodded, overcome.

He cocked his head, alert to her emotion. “I didn’t want to trouble you, miss. You were just being nice listening to all that stuff, doing your job. A lot of the staff around here are pretty tough,” he added.

“They have to be tough,” Anne said. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not nice.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right. Like this guy they got in charge of the disturbed ward. This guy is out of this world. I mean, they put
me
in there at first, with all them foul balls. Maybe you ain’t never seen that ward. They got about fifteen nuts in there, the dangerous ones, except they ain’t dangerous all the time, not most of them. He’s got some beauties in there, this guy.

“The first day he takes me by the arm, like a priest or something, and he says, ‘C’mon, Ernest, I want you to meet the boys.’ The boys are sitting around a table shelling peas, all but one. ‘That’s Phil,’ the guy says. ‘Phil’s a nice fellow, but he bites. You let Phil get his teeth into you, and you’re in trouble. He has to be
pried
off. So you’d better keep a little distance when you talk to Phil.’ This Phil is sitting in the corner making a lot of racket, moaning and grunting and all. I didn’t feel much like talking to him, then or later, although I
did
give it a whirl one day. Some conversation! I don’t think he
could
talk, if you want to know the truth, he was in pretty bad shape. I mean, he
looked
bad, like some
loony in the movies or something, like the way I thought they
all
looked here before I come. Anyway, this superintendent or whatever you call him,
he
chats with Phil all the time. You’d think they was buddies from way back. And he talks to them other birds the same way. The others don’t look as bad as Phil, they can mostly talk and all. They gave me the creeps, though.

“When I was introduced, I said, ‘Hi, boys.’ Not a peep out of them, not one of them. They all just watch me, sitting at the table with them peas. The super acts like everything is hunky-dory. ‘Pull up a chair,’ he says to me, ‘and get acquainted.’ Then one of these guys picks up a pea and rolls it across the table at me. I catch it as it goes over the edge. ‘Thanks a lot, Bill,’ I says—I’d caught his name, see—and I eat the goddam pea. This Bill flashes me a kind of smile. Then another guy starts hollering that I’m eating up all his peas, he wants to know why he’s shelling in the first place, he pays his taxes, don’t he, he ain’t no lousy kitchen help. So this Bill gives me a big wink and knocks the other guy’s bowl of peas into his lap and all over the floor. Just like that. And winks again. He
likes
me, see. And this other guy—I expected all hell to break loose, but it didn’t—this other guy, he gets down on his knees and picks up all his peas one by one, and when he comes up for air he’s grinning. Not really grinning, but watching this Bill in kind of a crafty way, like, and humming and nodding his head, and you could tell he was going to fix Bill for keeps, later on, he had it all figured out, only he never did. And then—listen, do you want to hear about all this, or do you want me to shut up?”

“No, please go on, Mr. Hamlin. I’ve never been in that ward, it’s interesting.”

“Yeah, it is.” Ernest was pleased. “It’s interesting. But I appreciate you listening. I ain’t had much chance to talk to nobody I could talk to. I talked some to that super, though. What a guy. He spoke to me like I was the only one in there who could understand. That’s the way he talked to all of them, even Phil—as if they were the only normal ones in the outfit. I don’t know what he said to the others about me. He probably said, ‘Watch out for that goddam Ernest, boys, he’s mentally ill, he’ll break your back as quick as look at you!’ ”

Ernest burst out laughing, and the sound rose high and loud against the clamor of feet and music and broken voices. Anne stared at him, dismayed. He was laughing so violently that in the animal closeness of the room he had to loosen his collar. But now he coughed and stopped, as quickly as he had started. “No,” he murmured, “I ain’t the kind to hurt nobody if I can help it. Even in Korea, I didn’t like it.” He sat there for a moment in silence, then got to his feet. “Goodbye,” he said, and went through the door of the shuffleboard room before she could think to call him back.

When he appeared the following afternoon, Anne felt unaccountably relieved. He wore a tie this time, of a deep green cheap material which bulged and twisted the collar of his denim shirt. Though the tie flew in her honor, he did not approach until he saw she was unoccupied. Then he came immediately and said, “I been thinking about what you told me, about how I hadn’t ought to feel sorry for myself—”

And she wanted to say, Oh, I didn’t mean it, I was talking foolishly, you have every right …

“—and that’s true, what you said, but I still do.” He was
clearly ashamed but continued doggedly, as if making a compulsory address. “Why I feel sorry is, I’m so damned useless. I can’t
do
nothing, even for somebody else. I just got to sit here until I rot!”

“No, listen, Mr. Hamlin—”

“Jesus, call me Ernie, will you, Anne!” he cried, throwing his big hands into the air in a gesture of pain. Sheepish, he followed her to a seat at the side of the room.

“Listen, Ernie, maybe you can help us here. The staff needs help, it’s much too small. Look, I’m in O.T. with one nurse today, and two wards coming in. We can’t handle everybody properly. If you could—”

“Sure, sure, I know. I already talked to that super in the disturbed ward, before he got me transferred. I asked him if there wasn’t something around for me to do, and he said, no, they couldn’t pay me nothing, there wasn’t enough salary to go around as it was. Can you beat that? For a job like that, locked up twelve months a year with those foul balls? Knowing they might jump him every time he turns his back? And that ain’t why he’s nice to them, either, he’s just nice, that guy, and he’s got guts!” Ernie, excited in his admiration, had forgotten momentarily about himself. “If I ever get out of here, I’m going to talk to somebody about that pay he gets! He ain’t complaining, but he says himself he wouldn’t do it only he’s leery what kind of a creep would replace him for that kind of money. So he keeps on doing it, year after lousy year!”

Anne nodded, watching him. He was pounding his fist into his palm, beside himself. After a moment, she murmured, “Ernie, I wasn’t thinking about a salaried job. I just thought you might be interested in helping out when you felt like it. It would keep you busy, and be a real contribution.”

“Oh, sure. I mean, I’d be glad to help, Anne. I was thinking about a
job
, though, maybe outside, mowing lawns or something. That way, if I got a little money I could send it home. That way, I could kid myself I was helping to support my mother or something, see?” He turned to her, his big face pale. “Because another thing I figured out last night was that the best thing that could happen to me if I’m going to have to stay in this place”—and his tone suggested that he had yet to face this fact—“is that I go nuts. I mean, really honest-to-God mentally ill. Then maybe I won’t care no more, and get a big bang out of square dancing with all my buddies.”

“Ernie, please listen.”

He shook his head, masochistic now, determined to have it out with himself. “It wouldn’t be so hard,” he muttered. “If people ain’t nuts when they come in to this place, they sure as hell must be by the time they get out. You can’t keep company like this and not have some of it rub off.” He nodded bitterly at an old woman across the room who was remarking at the top of her voice upon the fact that staff members had no right to occupy themselves with just one patient, when other patients such as herself needed their pillows straightened behind their heads. “See that,” he said. “She knows I like to talk to you, need to talk to you just to keep from going under, and she’s going to do her best to pull me down there with the rest of them. Well, she’ll make it yet.”

“This isn’t like you,” Anne said, thinking to shame him. She knew her concern was partly selfish, since his self-control, and the companionship it guaranteed, were essential to her as well.

“No, it isn’t,” Ernie admitted. He glanced at her, as if to inquire how she knew. “I guess it’s because you’re kind
of a doctor, like.” He frowned. “You ain’t, though, right? You’re just a kid trying to help these people. Well, you’re helping me, whether you know it or not.” He blushed and stood up. “Forget, it, okay, Anne? I ain’t going to bother you no more.”

“You haven’t bothered me,” Anne told him truthfully. “I like to talk to you.”

“Sure, sure.” He had his back to her, hands in pockets. “So what do you want me to do to help you out?” he said, after a moment. “Shall I break that old woman’s neck?”

They laughed together, disheartened.

“Just talk to people, Ernie. Help me talk to people. I run out of words after a while.”

“I ought to be good at that. I never run out of words in my life, as I guess you found out.” He grimaced, dismissing her protest with a gesture of his hand. “Okay. What’ll I talk to them about?”

“Ernie,” she said.

He paused, then turned to her, waiting.

“Look, you mustn’t feel badly about telling me everything,” she started. “If I were in your shoes, they’d have to drag me around screaming.”

Still he waited.

“Only I guess you’ll have to make the best of it. I hope you’ll talk to me whenever you want.” As always when she was ill at ease, she talked faster and faster. “And I admire your courage, and I’m going to try to help you.”