The End of the Point (21 page)

When he left the infirmary, he started going to classes again and felt, toward his piles of books and lecturing professors and—especially—the algorithms in his calculus class, something new, strange and deeply grateful, akin to love. He could, he realized as the weeks wore on, appear almost entirely normal to the outside world, especially since that world hardly noticed him at all. Sometimes, in the middle of class, the floor would fall out from beneath him. Other times, as he walked along the sidewalk, a panic attack would overtake him, his legs losing any but the most formal relationship to his body. Eventually, the attack would pass. He’d feel fine, almost totally fine, except for two things: the constant press of knowledge that another attack lay in waiting, and the fear that he’d forever lost his sense of self and, with it, all ability to feel a part of the outside world. Only one thing he had left—his mind, his thinking power (his mother thought him a genius, and while Charlie had tried for years to escape her definitions, he’d also secretly come to think of himself as, if not a genius, then at least extremely smart). Now the world was a movie that he, bloodless and implacable, was watching. A few times he tried to go to an actual movie. On the screen, a man struck down by gunshot, a car chase, a funeral, a garden in Italy, a couple having sex. Or a baby had died, its mother-actress pretending to be hysterical with grief. Charlie watched himself watching, moved only by his inability to be moved.

His parents never came to Cleveland. The Midwest wasn’t on their map, nor was a son in his particular condition. They sent money, called with names of prominent doctors (could any doctor in Ohio really be prominent in their eyes?). His father wrote letters detailing financial and practical arrangements and ending, always, with
I hope you feel better. Love, Dad. We’ve had five days of rain here when I’d so prefer snow,
his mother wrote in her oddly girlish hand, like a pen pal from a foreign country. And, in the same round handwriting, in the same letter:
Is it over yet? It must be over by now,
promise
me, you’ll never do it again! I won’t do it again,
he wrote a few days later, easy enough to say since it was true. Days would pass before he managed to put a stamp on the letter (his mother sent the stamps and envelopes), days again before he found a mailbox and dropped the letter in. For a few seconds he’d stand there, envying the letter’s passage, terror-struck at having let it go.

On the phone, sometimes, if his mother caught him at the wrong moment, he was more honest: I can’t explain it, Mom, okay? I’m pretty messed up still, but I can’t really explain. His siblings still called her Mummy, but he’d stopped once he’d realized how out-of-step it was, how high-WASP. He said tom
ay
to now, and
fridge
instead of icebox. He told people he was from Massachusetts, not New Jersey, but left out the part about the summer house. Now and then, his mother reiterated that they would visit or told him to come home when school got out. “I feel sure you’ll soon be yourself!” she’d say. And, “What dreadful times we live in!” And once, with surprising candor and sympathy, “You remind me of myself after I found out my brother died. There was no language for it, not even in my most inward thoughts. For months I didn’t even keep my diary. It was the most alone I’ve ever been.”

Briefly, then, he saw how selfish he was, for he’d suffered no untimely loss (though his grandfather’s death the year before had felt like one); he’d lost only, through his own stupidity, his Self. He might have said he was sorry then, but for what—the death of his mother’s brother years before he was born? For bearing his uncle’s name (hardly his own choice) and being, like him, a blue-eyed firstborn son, but lacking his mother’s brother’s upbeat, charismatic nature, along with—so far, anyway—his tragic fate? For the fact that he’d turned his own mind to cottage cheese while boys his age, boys he could have been but for flukes of birth and circumstance, were coming home in body bags? He
was
sorry, for all of it, but his mother would take any apology wrong, twist it her way: I’m sorry for being a disappointment, for not going to Harvard or not becoming a war hero like your brother, though by now, she, like most everyone else he knew, thought this war—this
conflict—
was a mistake (still, she did enjoy her heroes, until they let her down).

Instead he said nothing. His breath was speeding up, the sweats starting. His mother’s brother Charlie had jumped from the plane he was copiloting on his twenty-fourth combat mission. They’d been on their way to bomb some railway lines, having recklessly set off without the normal fighter escort, and were attacked before they hit the target. Charlie—a family myth by now, an Icarus—had done a swan dive from the plane. His parachute had opened. He had unwrapped a hard candy and put it in his mouth before an enemy gunman broke the rules of engagement and shot him down. Everyone else in the family seemed to find the detail of the hard candy reassuring, even whimsical—for how it showed the young man’s spirit of adventure, his calm in the face of danger, his
joie de vivre
until the very end. Didn’t anyone see how bizarre it was that the Italian priest who came across the body had pried open the dead boy’s mouth and rummaged for a peppermint half-sucked? Or that in the priest’s flowery letter to Gaga and Grampa, he’d lamented the poverty of his village church, so that his missive was, among other things, a plea for money (duly sent) to a family that he’d deduced, from a corpse’s uniform and gold wristwatch, to be of means? And the letter, along with another from the copilot, coming years after the death, and the hard candy like a pill, diminishing in size, enlarging in effect, and the soldier (brother, uncle, son) with Charlie’s name, one war joining with another except that back then it was all patriotism, victory gardens, joining up, and now it was all slash and burn and duck and hide and shout and spew.

The psych ward at the university-affiliated hospital was not a bad place to spend the night when the panic attacks came on. People were nice there—the nurses, especially. Especially the pretty ones. No one made you talk. He was not the first in his family to check into such a place. His aunt Dossy had stayed at a more upscale one, Four Winds, for more than a year when Holly was ten, and had gone back for shorter stays since then. Dossy has hepatitis, they used to tell the children, or Dossy is resting, the place both peaceful and disturbing in Charlie’s memory (his mother took them to visit a few times), long, green lawns, birds in cages, giant jigsaw puzzles, distant screams, his sweet, drugged aunt turning to him—Charlie!—as if it were was a happy coincidence that she’d chanced upon him on this other planet, far from home.

By day, now, he still sometimes went to classes—because they distracted him, and because it turned out that away from the masters at St. Marks and the trembling eye and ego of his mother, he loved to study and learn. He loved, he discovered, Ancient Greek, and physics, and poetry, especially Wallace Stevens:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. . . .

From the outside, he knew it might seem peculiar that he could attend class, do his homework and spend every third night or so in the loony bin. But these were not normal times. There was a war going on. His friends and cousins had not been drafted, hiding out at their Ivy League schools, but in the current climate they had still learned, faster than seemed possible, to flick a switch: Carry a protest sign, fuck your girlfriend, take your exam, eat your dinner, smoke some grass, watch the splotch and splatter on the evening news (
Hell no, we won’t go
). His split was just a little different: Panic attacks and hospital versus beige desks, round clocks and the lucid, gearlike workings of the mind. The psych ward let him come and go, as long as there was an open bed. One night, when he showed up to find the place full, an Irish nurse with a soft spot for him set up a cot in the linen closet, where Charlie slept beautifully, starched and clean.

His family was all on the East Coast. He needed the distance and hated it, missed his mother and hated her. He missed, most of all, Ashaunt. All winter, landlocked in Ohio, he dreamed of it.

In spring the lottery was drawn, and he lucked out, his number 218, though the loony bin might have been enough. Then in May, the shootings at Kent State, just a few miles down the road. At his own college, classes became teach-ins, finals were canceled, grades turned to pass/fail. Charlie carried a few signs, marched in some demonstrations. Everyone was chanting so he chanted too, but in a thin voice from a distant land piled with jammed machinery:
Onetwothreefourwedontwantyourfuckingwar.
He did not decide to drop out of his college, any more than he had decided, in a way involving all his faculties, to attend. One sticky, humid midwestern morning, he hauled his mattress and milk crates to the curb, flushed all his medication except the Valium down the toilet and left the key in an empty Navane bottle (before, he’d had a beautiful sense of humor, and it still struggled, cockeyed, to emerge). Outside, he left a stack of books next to a sleeping homeless man, stuffed a garbage bag of clothes and his grandfather’s lamp into his car, felt in his pocket for the Valium. Drove east.

IT WAS MID-MAY WHEN HE
got there, Ashaunt empty except for the Ballards, who farmed the land at the foot of it, and the occasional squadron of cleaners, mowers or gardeners, and Joe Olivera, the caretaker (the summer before, he and Charlie had gone fishing, Joe’s son and stepson both in Vietnam), who was turning on the water in the houses, painting the gate, launching the Whalers and Beetle Cats. Charlie’s parents had wanted him home in Bernardsville, and his cousin Holly had invited him to crash in the living room of her Cambridge apartment, and Dr. Miller had suggested that he stay in Cleveland for their sessions, then said (so kindly, in words that would stay with him for the rest of his life) that these past few months had been the hardest Charlie would ever know and life would only get better from here. He drove barefoot for some twelve hours in his VW, the windows open, his eyes on the horizon. When he got to Padanaram, the Village Market had just opened and he said hello to Rich, stocked up on food and cigarettes and drove on, over the bridge across the harbor, down Gooseneck Road, past Salvador’s until the road dead-ended at the two points with their gates and Private signs: Windy Point, with its tightly clustered houses, other people’s; Ashaunt Point, his.

If it was not peace he felt as he parked in front of the Red House and got out of the car, if it was not a settling, a solace, then it was the closest thing he’d come to peace since the night the drugs had pithed his mind. It was early afternoon and foggy, and the lawn smelled of wild thyme and his stone wall was just where he’d built it, hauling the rocks up from the beach in a wheelbarrow, and around back, the shadbush was in bloom and the honeysuckle rising in greening, acquisitive humps, and beyond it all, the sea. And as Charlie stood barefoot before it all, among it all, he could finally feel (if it was not a solution, might it be a start?) the ground beneath his feet.

II

I
N A WORLD
both rattled by and rattling with change, what had changed in Forfar? Not much. If anything, the town seemed quieter, more tucked into the past, than it had been on Bea’s last visit eighteen years prior. She took great pleasure in seeing it again: the stone buildings squared with the sidewalks; the Green where laundry still hung, though a self-serve Laundromat had opened on High Street and Pearl Laundry had closed, council housing gone up in its place. Still, look (Bea pointed ahead, but she might have pointed anywhere): the same bridie pastries lined up in the tea shop window, the same sewing notions store where her mum used to take her on her birthday for a cross-stitch kit. A charity shop had taken over the spot where a beauty shop used to be, and there was graffiti on some walls, and several shuttered factories, and a few long-haired hippie boys, but not near as many as in America. Forfar was still civilized; people took pride. Shopkeepers wet and swept their bit of sidewalk. Schoolgirls wore their blue skirts and ironed blouses, toting satchels, and the boys in blue britches, chalky-kneed. And Castle Hill. Shall we go up? Agnes asked, but of course they should—even being there together felt as if it had always been this way, both knowing about the key, both knowing how to get around. At the chemist’s, they borrowed the key. On top of the hill, the patch of grass was smaller than before, a chips wrapper caught in a bush. Still, you could see over the rooftops to the edge of town and beyond, the same hills, the sheep and lambs, Bea’s favorite time of year, though she had forgotten about the rain, which came often and without warning. Even this she welcomed, raising her face to it, struck, suddenly, by how far they were from the sea, which they’d seen appear and disappear from the plane, Caroline gripping her hand each time they hit an air pocket,
speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
(Bea had hummed the girl through the turbulence)
over the sea to Skye
.

Louisa and Caroline were both fifteen, one girl (Jane’s) sunny and open, the other (guess whose?) edgier and sensitive, quite unlike the placid baby she’d been when Bea had cared for her in Grace Park while Helen, having birthed her, abandoned her for Japan. Mrs. P. liked to take her grandchildren places, show them the world, especially the girls, especially now that Mr. P. was gone and she was “free” (but why keep
saying
it?). Janie had agreed to Louisa’s coming on the trip right away. Helen, forever jealous of Bea’s bond with Caroline, had hemmed and hawed but said yes in the end. Bea and Agnes had been presented with the trip by Mrs. P: Ladies, how would you like to go to Scotland in June, after Louisa and Caroline get out of school? It wouldn’t have occurred to them to say no, any more than it would have occurred to them—though they had, by now, sufficient funds and leisure time—to plan such a trip themselves. They would all stay in Glasgow for five nights, said Mrs. P., then split up, with Bea and Agnes taking the train to Forfar and Mrs. P. and the girls going to the Isle of Skye to stay with Suky, Charlie’s wartime widow, who had married and divorced an Englishman but remained living in London, with a holiday cottage in Skye.