The Drowning Tree (25 page)

I look past Dr. Horace toward the river and the darkening hills to the west. The river bends before it reaches the sharp curve that marks World’s End—the deepest spot in the river and the most dangerous, and I can almost feel the confluence of river currents and ocean tide and whirlwinds that sweep down from the highlands pulling the broad calm river into its maw. It’s the spot Neil rowed to that day—where he capsized our boat.

“But you said—fourteen years ago you said there was very little chance of him ever leading a normal life. I believe the term you used to describe his prognosis was ‘career mental patient.’ ”

If Dr. Horace registers the anger in my voice he doesn’t show it. I suppose he’s used to patients using stronger language than I’ve just employed.

“Yes, well, arriving at an accurate diagnosis is always a bit more art than science. Neil’s case was always a complex one. In addition to his depressive and manic episodes he exhibited borderline personality traits. His idealization of you, for instance, and then his devaluation of you when you failed to live up to his expectations was classic borderline behavior. We saw the same pattern in his relationships with his father, professors at Columbia, and doctors here on staff. However, a few years after his admittance here those symptoms became progressively less evident.”

“You mean they went away?”

“Not entirely. Neil still has a tendency to idealize caregivers and entertain unrealistic expectations of behavior, but he’s done a lot of work toward integrating his concepts of good and evil. At this point I would not diagnose him as a borderline.”

“So you were wrong fourteen years ago?”

Dr. Horace smiles and taps his index fingers together. “Adolescent identity problems often present as borderline personality disorder.”

“So you mean he grew out of it. What about the manic depression?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Neil is suffering from bipolar
disorder—what we used to call manic-depressive illness—but fortunately we’ve been able to control it with medication.”

“He was on lithium when I saw him thirteen years ago. If you got the manic—the bipolar disorder—under control with lithium why has it taken this long to release him?”

Dr. Horace leans forward in his chair but at the same time looks away from me, sideways toward the river. As if he were simultaneously trying to confront and avoid me. For the first time since I came into his office I have the sense that he’s unsure of himself.

“There were problems with the lithium—side effects Neil didn’t tolerate well—and like many bipolars he fought taking it. He felt it deadened him and made it impossible for him to paint. Unfortunately, Esther Buchwald supported him in his
experiments
with going off the medication. I’m afraid she was of that generation that believes mental patients can get better as an act of will. The results were always disastrous, though. Every time Neil went off his lithium he accelerated into a manic state. He would start out painting a few hours a day, but soon he would spend all day painting and then all night. We always knew he was reaching a crisis point when he started painting mythological and allegorical scenes.”

Dr. Horace pauses, perhaps expecting me to exhibit surprise at this unusual detail, but I don’t. I had firsthand knowledge of Neil’s obsession with Romantic and classical mythology. I’d practically introduced him to it.

“He was fascinated with figures from Greek mythology and Romantic poetry,” I say, “especially stories of doomed lovers who die together. I’m surprised he was still painting those subjects, though. He told me when I visited him the last time here that figurative art was dead.” And then he’d added
As long as your face is dead to me, Juno, I won’t paint another face
.

“Yes, that was one of the peculiarities of his manias. You’d expect his painting to become more abstract as he became more manic, but instead they became clearer, more ordered, classical in their composition, the figures he painted radiant—” Dr. Horace smiles at his own enthusiasm. “—if you couldn’t see what a wreck the painter was you’d say they were the work of a man seeing clearly for the very first time.”

I look away from the doctor’s rapt expression toward the window.
It’s grown so dark outside by now that the glass blurrily reflects the shape of the room and the people in it. Dr. Horace and I appear only as blobs of color. What I see in my mind, though, is Neil standing in front of a canvas touching paint to the lips of a beautiful woman who bends down to embrace her drowned husband, both figures shining like gods. Neil, though, is barefoot in paint-spattered jeans and torn T-shirt, dark rings under his eyes, his hair so dirty it’s no longer blond, his skin milk white as frosted glass, all the color leached out of him and soaked into the figures in the painting. Like Dorian Gray in reverse, all his beauty went into his paintings, leaving him a dried-out shell.

“You could understand,” Dr. Horace is saying, “why it was so hard for him to give that up.”

“But he did finally—is that what you’re saying? He’s staying on his medication and that’s why he’s well enough to be out?”

“Sort of.” Dr. Horace is grinning. “He’s on a new medication—one that’s still in trial stage—that evens out the manias and depressions but leaves him lucid enough to paint. Not that his paintings have quite the same intensity of his past work, but they’re arresting in their own right. Here, I’ll show you.” Dr. Horace gets up from his chair and comes around the desk holding an arm out toward the door as I get up. “I can show you what he was working on last year. He’s taken away most of his recent work for the show next week—”

“A gallery show?”

Dr. Horace screws up his face, as if sorry for letting out that information. “Yes, in New Paltz. I can show you the opening notice before you leave today but I suppose we should talk about whether or not you should attend.”

I nod, too stunned to think of any other response. The idea of Neil preparing for a show chills me to the bone. His worst episodes always preceded openings. I want to ask Dr. Horace how he can possibly think this is a good thing, but I don’t want to sound as if I begrudge Neil some good luck after all he’s been through. So instead I search for a safer question. “This new drug,” I say, “would I have heard of it?”

“Not yet, but you will soon. As I said it’s still in trials, but our preliminary results have been so favorable that the
Times
is mentioning it in
an article they’re running on new drugs for mood disorders next month.” Dr. Horace has lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “When the FDA approves it, Pieridine will become as common a household name as Prozac.”

“Pieridine? Why …?”

“C’mon, you of all people should know your classical mythology. The Pierides?”

It only takes a moment for me to remember. The muses. The Pierides is an alternate name for the muses.

“I
T’S NOT SO ODD WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT
,” D
R
. H
ORACE TELLS ME AS WE RIDE
the elevator up to the sixth floor. “Psychologists and psychopharmacologists have always been fond of mythological references. After all, the name for our profession comes from the mythological personification of the soul, Psyche. Freud used figures from Greek literature to name his Oedipal and Electra complexes. Morphine was named for the Greek god of sleep and Halcion for the spell of calm induced by Poseidon upon the sea.”

The elevator doors open and we walk out onto a broad landing with windows facing the river. The landing is more dimly lit than Dr. Horace’s office so I can make out the dark shape of hills in the distance and the gleam of water. “It’s not Poseidon—” I say, but Dr. Horace is already striding
down the corridor. I can hear that he’s still talking as if I were by his side, no doubt listing more mythological references in the world of psychology but I’ve been becalmed here at the window as if touched by the hand of Aeolus, who’s the god—not Poseidon—who calms the seas during the halcyon days. From here the dark river looks as peaceful as those sedated seas, untouched by current or tide or the winds that come down from the steep hills on the opposite shore. Those winds were so treacherous that Dutch sailors gave the hills they came from names like Thunder Hill and Storm King. It strikes me that the Dutch were doing just what the Greeks did when they personified the unpredictable forces that swoop down and ransack our lives. We’re still doing it—classifying the emotions that derail our reason as psychiatric disorders. No wonder we name the drugs that counter these disorders after gods, because who else but a god could do battle with such unreasoning powers?

I walk to the end of the corridor without finding Dr. Horace or coming across any open doors so I turn right and head into the west wing. It’s unnerving to be alone in a psychiatric hospital. I imagine snarly-haired madwomen—like Bertha Rochester in
Jane Eyre
—leaping out of their attic aeries to scratch my face and pull my hair. Dr. Horace explained, though, that the sixth floor is reserved for patients who are considered trustworthy, low security risks. Hence the lack of bars on the windows. Neil, he said, lived here for the last four years before he was released a few months ago.

At the end of the corridor there’s an open door leading into what appears to be a spacious sitting room, but before I can reach it Dr. Horace pops his head out of an open doorway on the left side of the corridor.

“There you are,” he chirps. “I thought I lost you. Can’t afford to lose track of visitors. Come along, come along.”

I’m walking as fast as I can but still Dr. Horace taps his fingers against the doorframe as if hoping to speed my pace by setting a marching rhythm. It strikes me that Dr. Horace himself is rather manic.

“I’ve kept Neil’s paintings in his old suite.”

I approach the room with some trepidation, still expecting some specter from a B-movie version of a crazy hospital to jump out. “Is anyone living in it now?”

“Oh no, it’s … uh … vacant right now. Not that many patients qualify for the sixth floor and those who do are quickly released. Frankly, the drug companies will soon put us out of business.”

“And would that be such a bad thing?” I ask, walking past Dr. Horace into the spacious, well-appointed bedroom. The room is large enough for a king-sized bed on one end and a full-length couch and several club chairs at the other. There’s an easel set up near the window and original oil paintings on the walls. I walk over to one hanging above the mantel of a working fireplace. At least the basket of wood and iron poker and tongs would seem to indicate that it’s a working fireplace, although I’m amazed at the idea of allowing psychiatric patients, no matter how trustworthy, access to matches and dry tinder.

“If every one of my patients could be cured of mental illness forever I’d be happy to retire, buy a Swan sixty-footer, and spend the rest of my days sailing around the world. But the truth is that no drug will work one hundred percent of the time for one hundred percent of our patients, and no drug works at all if the patient is unwilling to take it. It’s taken years of therapy for Neil to accept the necessity of controlling his manic episodes.”

“Nearly drowning his wife and baby wasn’t reason enough?” I’m cowardly enough to keep my back to Dr. Horace as I say this. He doesn’t answer me right away so I study the painting above the mantelpiece. It’s a landscape of the Hudson River flowing between steep hills. Although the water is calm and sunlit, the sky in the right-hand corner of the canvas, above the jutting promontory on the west shore of the river, is darkening with rain clouds. The shadow of the storm has just reached the river, sending cat’s-paw ripples across the placid water.

I move to the next painting on the wall. It’s the same scene only the storm has moved farther into the river, darkening the water and combing the current into stiff-peaked whitecaps. The leaves on the trees along the eastern shore in the foreground have flipped over, showing their white underbellies. In the next picture the sky is black, the trees bent to the ground, the water churning into whirlpools. A small boat has appeared in the mouth of the channel between the mountains.

When I turn to face Dr. Horace he’s got his hands spread out, palms up, gesturing toward the paintings on the walls. Every painting in the
room depicts the same riverscape at some stage of a storm. “Nearly drowning his wife and child,” Dr. Horace begins, carefully echoing my words, “was reason enough for him to attempt suicide six times over the last fourteen years. I said he wouldn’t stay on his lithium because it made painting impossible, but that isn’t the whole truth. I don’t think he believed that he
deserved
to be well after what he did. When the lithium returned his reason he realized what he had done and he’d stop taking the lithium because he couldn’t face that guilt.”

“So how is this new drug any different?”

“As I said, it’s not just the drug, it’s the years of therapy helping Neil to understand that what he did out on the river wasn’t his fault. His pathology drove him to see you as a betrayer and the baby as a threat and something that took your attention away from him. His psychosis was so advanced at that point that he believed the three of you would drown only to be reborn in some other form.”