The Long Journey Home (25 page)

I remember little of what I wrote in my hospital journal. I do remember that the writing gave me strength and—by degrees—clarity. My journal gave me reason to wake in the mornings. But later, when I went through periods of feeling shame over my episodes of madness, I took my scissors to the journal and, over time, mutilated it. What remains is a faded green construction-paper cover. On the upper left side is a dirty piece of adhesive tape with my name misspelled on it and some faded identifying numbers. Upside down under this is the partial question “look at this painting?” Under it in smaller letters is: “Think about it for a moment,” followed by “how much do you see,” and the single word “how.” All of the letters have been cut from magazines. In the lower right corner a portrait of Van Gogh stares out in all his red-bearded intensity. The back of the cover is a piece of less faded red construction paper. These words, also cut from a magazine and glued to paper, instruct the reader: “Now look at the painting again.” On the lower right side is a brilliant sun painted by Van Gogh. To me, the message on the cover meant that I’d gone through a near-suicidal struggle and—through writing the journal—had come out on the other side. I had learned how not to paint blackbirds. What follows is the little that remains of that hospital journal after shame and scissors censored it:

But surely not this abominable place
, I thought, and looked around me. Sitting at the table next to me, staring blankly at the blank TV across the room, was the young woman who had tried to electrocute herself by poking a fork into a toaster after her parents insisted that she break up with her boyfriend because he was a Jew. At an old upright piano a woman stumbled over notes to a hymn familiar from my Southern Baptist childhood. “Stay away from her,” a nurse had hissed in my ear earlier. “We’re almost certain she’s a lesbian.”

Beneath the barred window next to me stood an old rattan table, someone’s sad, worn castaway. On it sat one of those tall, sharp-speared plants that teachers so often had on their desks when I was a child, those mottled green-leafed plants that seemed to thrive on neglect and dust. One of the patients was kneeling her thin, bent body before the table, scrub rag in hand and a bucket of suds beside her. All morning she knelt before the table and rubbed the rag up and down first one, then another of the table legs, working hard to wash away the dirt and grime accumulated over the years. Around and around the table she moved. Each time she approached a leg as
if for the first time, settling in patiently, giving each the same meticulous care she’d given it just minutes before. Even with her thin, stringy hair and state-supplied cotton housedress she had a monumental quality about her. I thought of Lady Macbeth washing and washing her hands.

At the far end of the hall a nurse and two orderlies were dragging a resistant woman across the floor. “Come, cooperate with us, Mary,” the nurse whined, but the woman only stiffened her body, her shoes scraping the floor. “Mary!”

“Mistress Mary, quite contrary,”
I thought, surprised at the eruption of that old nursery rhyme in my mind. I was surprised also at my pleasure over the woman’s defiance, and how I enjoyed her stubbornness until the nurse and aides succeeded in getting her into the dreaded room and slamming the door. At that point the woman let out such a desperate scream that I could hardly stand it. But it was over my heart, not my ears, that I wanted to clamp my hands.

I wanted to enjoy the idea of being contrary. I had never been “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary” as a child. Fueled by fear, I’d always been a good girl. In an elementary school play I’d been Little Miss Muffet sitting quietly on her tuffet and eating from a large blue bowl until a cardboard spider came onto the stage with chubby little-boy legs walking beneath the thin spider legs. In mock fear I dropped my spoon and bowl to the floor and ran off stage left.

Now that cardboard spider and the mock fear collided with my memory of being locked in a padded cell just days ago—cold clotted oatmeal shrinking from the sides of its pale blue plastic bowl, congealed blob of rancid butter on top—while a solitary spider made its way up the cracked plaster wall.

“Please, someone come and take me to the bathroom,” I pleaded from the cell. “Please.” But no one came. I sat in a pool of menstrual blood while passersby gawked at me through the small square window in the door. In the new ward, I bent over my journal recording my fear and humiliation.

“What a good girl you are.” Mother’s words came back to me.

Being a good girl meant living a lie.

Sitting at a table, my journal open before me, I picked my pen up with an unfamiliar firmness and, feeling anger rising as if from within the bowels of the earth herself and up through me, grinding my teeth, I wrote, “Mother, you must be glad.” Then—deeply shaken and overwhelmed by intense and confusing emotion—I stopped writing and closed the book.

“This place is driving me crazy!”

The words burst from my mouth in an explosion of frustration when the Pineapple Doctor stopped me in the corridor and asked how I felt.

“To tell you the truth, there are days when I feel like it will drive me crazy, too,” he responded, smiling, and then continued on his way.

What I’d said was true. Something had shifted inside me. I’d awoken that morning with the conviction that any more time in the hospital would hurt me beyond hope of recovery, that it would push me into a pit of madness too dark and deep for me to ever find my way to the light again. I felt frantic to get out.

I went to my room and got pen and paper from the bureau. Then I went to one of the tables in the corridor, sat down, and wrote a letter:

I folded the letter, put it into an envelope, sealed it, and wrote Ethel Swift’s name on it. Under her name I wrote, “Please get this to Dr. Turcotte today. Thank you, Margaret.” Then I persuaded a nurse to take it to Ethel.

It was only a couple of hours before Ethel came up to the ward to tell me that I’d be released from the hospital that day. She brought several cardboard boxes with her, and we worked together packing my things into them. First, we packed my clothes from the bureau. Then we packed the other things that I’d accumulated during my three-week incarceration—books, notebooks, postcards and letters, pens and pencils, paint and paintbrushes, and many sheets of heavy handmade French watercolor paper. There was also a small portable typewriter borrowed from Al.

After we finished packing, Ethel asked an orderly to help her carry the boxes and load them into her car. It took them two trips.

When she returned from the last trip, Dr. Turcotte was with her, as well as John, there to sign me out against doctors’ orders. I was only beginning to comprehend that I was really going to leave the hospital. When I saw John, I collapsed against his chest and sobbed aloud while he held me.

Then we pulled apart.

The four of us walked down to the end of the corridor, where we waited while a nurse unlocked the door, then stepped aside to let us leave. Without looking back, I walked down the hall to the elevator. Ethel pushed the button, and we waited in silence. Then we filed through the open door.

When we got out at the main floor Dr. Turcotte shook my hand and said that he and John would be leaving. Ethel would drive me to the motel, where he wanted me to stay for a few days before returning
to my apartment. Ethel and I stopped by the admission desk, where I got my wallet, watch, and ring. Then we too left the hospital.

The trees were green and the sky blue. Sunlight spilled its blessing on my face. Once more my life was my own.

I was out of the hospital now and staying in Town House Motor Lodge in Northampton. There were several other patients there. An old, alcoholic priest slipped out at night to dispose of his vodka bottles in a public trash container. There was the wife of a professor from one of the colleges who was tired of playing faculty wife. A young woman who studied astrology had visions of a Renoir-like child visiting her at night with her arms full of flowers.

But before going to the motel, Ethel had taken me to Dr. Turcotte’s office, where he had questioned me.

“Why do you want to go home?” he asked.

“To take care of the boys.”

“And?”

“To pay the bills.”

“And?”

“To water the plants.”

I thought of the huge pots of banana trees and aspidistra leaves and how kind Dee had been to keep them watered all this time.

“And?”

“To do the laundry.”

“And?”

“To paint and write.”

He looked at me with clear blue eyes that so often seemed to see through me and beyond to someplace altogether invisible to me. Chris and John Elder had been staying with my in-laws in Georgia for six weeks and were still there. Carolyn and Jack wanted to keep them and adopt them legally, and told Dr. Turcotte of their intention.
I was terrified that I would lose my sons forever. The arrangement made before my hospitalization had been for Chris to live with me while John Elder, at fourteen, would be free to move between the family house where his father lived and my apartment.

Two weeks later I was sitting in a straight chair, smoking a cigarette. My right leg was crossed over my left, and I was shaking my foot in an agitated frenzy while Dr. Turcotte leaned against his desk, dialing the phone. My father-in-law answered. He wanted to know if I was sane enough to take care of the boys.

Dr. Turcotte cleared his throat. “I’ve examined Margaret, and I see no reason that the boys can’t return.”

The two men talked for a few minutes longer, while I sat stunned with relief. My sons were coming home. I began to cry. I’d spent twenty-one agonized days in a nightmarish state institution, strapped to the bed, locked in solitary confinement, and then confined to a locked ward. I’d been condescended to, manipulated, ignored, humiliated. Now, after gradually reclaiming myself in the motel, I was going to be able to go home. And I would not lose my sons.

I reached for a tissue from the box on Dr. Turcotte’s table and blew my nose. Then I covered my face with my hands to muffle my sobs, my whole body shaking.

Dr. Turcotte asked Jim Clark to drive me back to my room at the motel. On the drive over, Jim talked and talked about Carl Jung, about whom I, at the time, knew little. Dr. Turcotte appeared to harbor animosity toward Jung. At one point I shared with him what was to me an important dream. I no longer remember anything about the dream except that the circle was a prominent image in it. I was interpreting the dream in the context of what I’d been reading in Jung’s book
Man and His Symbols
. Dr. Turcotte waved my interpretation away without consideration. “You had circular images in your dream because you have a round face. It’s as simple as that.”

I accepted his dismissal without protest. By that time I had given him authority over much of my mind and life. I—after all—was the
mental patient, the one who’d thought the moored boats in a painting in the lounge were really rocking in the water, had seen them knocking gently against the dock. And such intense colors! Nothing a sane mind could see. Of course I accepted Dr. Turcotte’s dismissal without protest. I was the one who had been locked up and medicated, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I the flawed child grown into the flawed woman?

How do you live when you can’t believe what your own mind tells you?

You find someone else’s mind to believe in.

It wasn’t altogether different from my childhood when, between three and four years of age, I began to block my own perceptions because they weren’t like those of my parents, and I wanted my parents and other adults in my life to accept me. I’d lived in constant fear of abandonment.

Turning into the motel parking lot, Jim was still talking about Carl Jung, and I was listening with fascination. Jim was introducing me to a world that would enrich my life. But that would come later. Now I had been freed from the locked ward and would soon be going home. That was more than enough for now.

By the time Ruth returned from Italy and I got out of the hospital, everything had changed. She had strongly disagreed with the way Dr. Turcotte had encouraged me to put a firm emotional distance between John and myself when John was begging me to come back to him, and threatening again to kill himself if I didn’t.