The Storm at the Door (25 page)

Why on earth would he be here? Shouldn’t he be in the infirmary?

Dr. Canon felt he was well enough to return
, Wilkins replies.
The important thing is that nothing distracts from Mr. Foulds’s psychiatric treatment, especially now
.

Frederick, like many of the others, suspects Canon’s true purpose for this display. Even still, in this moment, Canon succeeds. As the incendiary Marvin, the martyr rebel, had irresistibly compelled the other men, the extinguished Marvin seems equally to repel them. For the rest of that day, and the night that follows, the men confine themselves to their rooms, while the common room remains empty, except for a babbling television and a psychotic burn victim, alone on his bed.

It is so simple
, Frederick writes in his journal.
A leap, a slash, a squeezed trigger. This is what the doctors fail to grasp. The ridiculous simplicity. Its elegance
.

Robert Lowell’s eyes have regained their focus. Just descended from a week of
up days
, Lowell has restored his gaze to the things set before him. It is Lowell who devises the plan.

The next afternoon, a Crew Crew boy pushes open Lowell’s door,
checks
, and then startles to find more than half the Ingersoll men crammed into the narrow space.

Poetry seminar
, Lowell explains.

Oh? Are you reading anything new?
the boy asks earnestly. The power of Lowell’s celebrity, even here.

Sorry
, Lowell says.
Patients only
.

The Ingersoll men, for the first time in days, laugh en masse. Even Frederick, leaning against the corner like a catatonic, receives the pleasure of this, the laughing, the whispering, the conspiring.

•   •   •

As with every detail of their daily routine, there is a protocol for what foods patients are allowed to carry back with them from the dining hall. Fortunately for Lowell’s scheme, fruit is included on this list of permitted snacks: three items per man, but the staff must first inspect and confirm that the skin of each piece is unbroken, to make sure the fruit isn’t used as crafty conveyance for contraband. And so, this night, each man takes his permitted three, the kitchen staff only mildly suspicious of the Ingersoll men’s sudden passion for produce.

When they are assembled again later in Lowell’s room, the poet devises a way to achieve the desired effect with a collection
of pencils, the crimson blanket his wife brought for him, and the large seashells Stanley has been allowed to keep in his room as mementos of the time his nephew took him for a weekend trip to Cape Cod, six years ago.

They wait until the middle of the night, when the orderlies will least expect it, when the scene will have its greatest poignancy. At precisely 3:00
A.M.
, as the two Crew Crew boys read in the administrative office, nearly every door inside Ingersoll opens, the men emptying into the corridor. The Crew Crew kids startle at the beguiling scene, their madmen risen like nocturnal apparitions.

One of the boys grasps Frederick by the arm.
What’s going on?

You’re welcome to come and see
, Frederick replies. The boys share a dubious gaze and set down their books to follow behind.

Soundlessly—except for a few stray giggles—the men gather around the cot, making an enclosure of themselves. Lowell stands just before the head of Marvin’s bed, stoops and whispers into Marvin’s ear.

Ms. Diablo
, Lowell says.
Ms. Mango Diablo, it’s time to go onstage
.

Marvin wakes with the semblance of a startle that his scorched body can manage. Only the fingertips of Marvin’s right hand, the whole of his left hand, and his right eye are free from bandages. His eye widens with the discovery of the men assembled before him.

What? What’s going on?

Lowell turns his gaze to the expectant, grinning faces.

We have a surprise for you
, Lowell says.

A surprise?

Sure
.

I must look like a monster. Like a mummy
, Marvin mutters.
A living dead thing
.

Frederick considers the perfect precision of these words.
Living dead
.

It’s not so bad
, he manages.

Then Marvin closes his eye and speaks.

Whatever it is you’re planning
, he says.
Will you do me a favor first?

Of course
, Lowell says.

I want you to see. Under the bandages. I haven’t seen yet. But I want you to look so I can know by how you look at me. The doctors only look at me like a patient
.

Frederick, like all the men assembled, has not been able to stop his imagination from filling in, hideously, what the white bandages conceal. He almost begs Marvin to reconsider, but then he looks to Lowell, who nods knowingly. As Marvin reaches his unburned left hand to the bandage’s end near his temple, Bobbie cries out.

Wait! I mean, wait. Isn’t it bad for the burns? I mean, couldn’t they get infected or something?

I’m scared too
, Marvin says, and then begins the unraveling.

It takes a long while, his hand slowly orbiting, which only adds to the horror. With a fearsome yelp, he peels away a final panel of gauze, revealing the wound his face has become. Is any sight as horrible as a burned face? The features boiled and congealed into a cooled red-black porridge. It seems impossible at first, like a Hollywood monster’s makeup. A monster’s mask, but
made more hideous than anything Hollywood could conjure, with the reality of the single human eye, adrift in that mess. The men either do or do not gasp, they either cry out or are silent: it doesn’t matter to Marvin, receiving their horror, which mutes the moment.

I need you to kill me
, Marvin says.
I need to die. How? How? How? How am I supposed to be this thing? This monster? I don’t even know how to be myself
.

Marvin’s one open eye begins to water, oozing its salty secretion into his burns. And then Marvin screams out, a fundamental sound, which, if Schultz is to be believed, is perhaps a word taken from the true language. It is the true name of anguish, and it opens pure anguish, its measureless fathoms. The men are there together, in some silent unreckonable space, as endless as their conditions. Their conditions, given names, but immeasurable. They are immeasurable, indecipherable, unfit for this world. Perhaps, my grandfather thinks, they are where they belong.

But Frederick tries to remind himself that they have come here for a purpose that is good. They will do what they have come for, and right now, in this moment, that is enough. Frederick looks back to Marvin, who delicately restores the bandages to his ruined face.

We brought something for you
, Frederick says and gestures to Lowell, who reaches into the laundry sack at his feet, removing their communal creation: a seashell bra bound with shoelaces, Lowell’s blanket fashioned into a passable skirt, and, the masterpiece, a towering fruit headdress.

Behind his bandages, Marvin’s face seems to shift. The men work gingerly, dressing him in this ersatz rendition of the costume Canon took from him.

Oh, boys
, he mutters and grunts as he draws his breath to
muster a respectable line or two of “Bananas Is My Business,” before losing his breath. The men applaud.

And when the applause subsides, the Crew Crew attempt to intervene.
All right
, they say, sensing Canon’s displeasure at the scene.
Everyone back to their rooms
.

Oh, not just yet
, Lowell says. The men turn to Lowell, curious about this unexpected component to the scene he has plotted.
Gentlemen. If you would be so kind. I’d like to read something I’ve written
.

The Crew Crew boys begin to object, but Frederick has come prepared. He shoves his fingers into his pockets and reaches out to shake the hands of the two increasingly irate boys, depositing into their palms balled-up napkins containing twenty-five of Schultz’s pilfered Miltowns apiece. Fueled with institutional power, the Crew Crew boys sometimes seem an inhuman force. Pure, dumb, masculine will. But sometimes, Frederick remembers, they are only boys. They both look at what Frederick has left in their hands, and widen their eyes at each other like children awarded candy, who cannot quite believe their luck. Then they remember themselves, they try to restore their glare at Lowell, at the others, but quickly retreat to their office.

And so, just after 3:00
A.M
. in the common room of a mental asylum, to an audience of schizophrenics, borderlines, and manic-depressives, Robert Lowell reads a poem from his
Life Studies
.

At his desk down the hall, Schultz turns his attention toward the men. For once, Schultz stops scrutinizing his sonic universe, and simply listens to Lowell speak.

—Robert Lowell

Is it her worry or just exhaustion? It seems that every time Katharine so much as blinks, another dream state is suddenly available to her, suggestions of color and faces and sound, advertisements for potential dreams. The membrane between conscious and unconscious has suddenly become porous. Maybe, Katharine thinks, madness is only exhaustion at its extremes.

Katharine is in her dim Graveton living room, sitting in Frederick’s armchair, just as he would sit: cigarette in hand, the house hushed and still, the chaos only in her own skull. But, unlike with Frederick, her own dread is reasonable.

The clock ticks on the mantel; Katharine doesn’t let herself look at the time. She will keep herself from looking at the time for as long as possible, but she knows the terrible truth: it must already be well after midnight. Upstairs, three of her four girls are in bed, but Susie is still not home.

As Katharine has taken Frederick’s place in the armchair, so have the girls taken his place as purveyors of family crises. Last week, Rebecca did not return home until morning from a date with Jeremy (she is grounded, but, with only Katharine to enforce, grounded in the way twine could anchor a jetliner). Yesterday, Louise, trying to bolster an argument that she did not need to study for her math exam, underlined her point by kicking in the bedroom door. Even little Jillian, last week, hid in the
coat closet and did to a box of chocolate chips what a junkie would do to a fresh score. And now Susie, Katharine’s vice placater, her partner in rosy assessments, is more than two hours late for curfew. Could Susie possibly just be flaunting Katharine’s rules as her sisters have begun to? Or must it be something worse?

Katharine takes a long pull of a Lucky Strike, holds the fumes, releases. The only light in the living room enters sloppily through the impressionistic poured-glass windows. Katharine watches the snowfall, the weather rendering the streetlight a creamy orange. The snow is early season snow, loose and heavy, and only switched over from rain at eight this evening, but already the window’s base is pillowed white. Where is her daughter?