The Storm at the Door (27 page)

They can’t lie to themselves anymore, as her mother says.

But what if her father never gets better? Or what if he comes home and does something even worse? What if he is truly sick and only getting sicker?

Maybe they can’t lie to themselves anymore, but what else can they do? It is the Skunk Hour of their family, and Susie wants to say to her mother,
what else can we do but keep on as we have?

In history class last week, Susie watched a newsreel of Mahatma Gandhi.
We must be the change we wish to see
, Gandhi said. Susie knows others, her father more than any, can think her mother naïve and simple, but now Susie is thirteen, practically a young woman, and so she knows she must help her mother, convince her to find reasons to hope.

It’s all about how you see it, Susie thinks. That’s what makes a thing true or not. Her father is no madman in a nuthouse, he is only an exhausted man in a quiet place called Mayflower. He has treated them terribly, but he was so exhausted. Susie knows that she herself, when exhausted, is capable of much she would not believe herself capable: rage, pettiness, teary fits. And they must remember that her father is not only the problem he has become. He is also the famous party thrower, the famous adventure seeker, a water-skier extraordinaire, a gourmet of the grotesquely thrilling: whole suckling pigs, flocks of stuffed pigeons. In the past, Susie’s friends and her cousins often told her of their jealousy that Susie gets to live each day with the great entertainer.

Her father has made his family tremendously happy, no matter what people think or say about him now. Others may see it
as childish, but she knows belief requires much more of us than does despair.

Yes, Susie thinks, that’s all she can do, all they can do. Her mother once believed this, she knows; her mother once explained herself in almost exactly those words. Susie must make her mother believe it again. And should her father never come back, or should he come back only to tear everything apart again, still Susie must keep on believing and believing.

My mother is only thirteen now, but she knows things are not as simple as they might appear. Adulthood might seem a plain and bountiful field from the distance, finally to offer no harvestable crop, only a labyrinthine maize maze, carved by some ancient, vanished prankster. But, then, maybe Susie’s naïveté is an asset. Maybe, uncomplicated, she can see how simple things ought to be, how simple they can be, if only her family could insist on a better life.

I will not be born for another twenty years, but my mother is now already thinking of her corrections, how she will do things differently, when it is her family, when it is us.

Hoping her resolutions will quiet her thoughts, Susie climbs back into bed and tries to will herself to sleep. Failing that, she watches the sky out her window. The snow has stopped, and as the sky lightens to a sidewalk gray, she tries to see whether or not the clouds have cleared.

High above Belmont, sullen clouds unburden themselves of hail, which falls upon Madhouse Hill, assaulting the Upshire windows in discordant percussion. In the surrounding trees, squirrels dash about their late autumn needs: mating, stockpiling acorns, collecting bedding for the season to come. In the tunnels beneath Upshire, gas burns to force vapors through the iron ribs of the radiator that clangs in the psychiatrist in chief’s office, a demanding small presence in the room, like a restive puppy. My grandfather sits before his psychiatrist, who is also his judge and jailer. Frederick’s journal is in Canon’s hands.

The hail, the autumn, the squirrels, everything else continues, and here is Frederick, a balding man in rumpled slacks and shirtsleeves, in a mahogany office filled with Victorian knickknacks, a tacit prisoner held for the crime of attempted truthfulness.

Would not the world and I suffer immeasurable loss for my capitulation to “sanity”?
Canon reads from Frederick’s journal.

Canon, upon learning that his plan to display Marvin as a dire cautionary example had backfired, upon learning of the reappearance of Mango Diablo and of Lowell’s reading, issued the order he immediately understood he should have issued long before. Yes, he knows that writing therapy can be helpful; it is true that the written word can allow powerful revelations to
emerge from the otherwise illegible depths of the subconscious. But, equally, writing can be—as Canon now sees that it is for so many men in Ingersoll—an escape, an indulgence to distract from the truth that therapy seeks to address. And so, the day after Lowell shared his poem, Canon had directed the orderlies to seize all the men’s journals and papers. Canon knew the men would object; he could predict their rage. And, exactly as expected, they had risen in protest, with fists as well as words, when the Crew Crew conducted the literary plunder. But Canon will explain that even this he has done only to achieve his highest aim: for the patients under his care to see the truth clearly. To see the truth with no imaginative act, no metaphor, to obscure it. To see the scarred fact of a burned body, not the abstruse transcendence of Lowell’s poetry.

And yet it was Frederick, who knew Canon’s secret, whose journal Canon read first, and frantically. As he had feared and also expected, there it was, in plain words: the secret he had done so much, for two years, to conceal.
Could Rita actually lust after that flabby blowhard? Could she love Canon?
Frederick had written.
But then why else would she touch him?
Plain words written in a journal that anyone might have read.

I don’t know
, Frederick says.
I wrote that a long time ago
.

Our words define us, do they not? By giving words to something, we can make it so
.

Frederick slumps in the sheeny leather chair; he tries to close in on himself once more. He tries to gather around himself his depressive, obliterating blackness, the nihilism that makes Canon’s judgments—and the months and months of imprisonment and ongoing financial burden to his family they promise—bearable, merely another example of the meaningless absurdity of all things. The hail beating at the window, a squirrel slipping
from his copulative act and falling to his death, a man indefinitely imprisoned in a madhouse for glimpsing an act of sex—none of it, at its base, explainable. All of it is simply what happens. Frederick feels that it might require the strength of the Crew Crew to restore him to Ingersoll.

In Lowell, Canon’s theft of the journals stokes hellfire. It is nearly enough finally to drive Lowell from the hospital altogether. Lowell is, after all, one of the voluntaries, who still has that power Canon cannot take away. But Lowell is eager for the fight, to confront the chief’s plain and absolute wrong, to use his eloquence and reputation and rage to earn back for his fellow patients all that has ever made Lowell able to endure his eely electric blackness.

Schultz surprises the others by seeming to be unmoved by the loss of his journals. But, for Schultz, all he has written amounts merely to study. The journals themselves are unimportant; what is important are the words they have allowed him to acquire. His journals are like a Berlitz language guide, abandoned now that he has arrived in the foreign place to find himself speaking almost fluently. What remains to be learned, he will learn through direct experience. With or without his journals, his work still nears completion.

•   •   •

When Canon appears for the afternoon group therapy session in his standard self-satisfied calm, the protest flares, immediately.

Where are our books?
Lowell asks in a voice straining with mock civility, the fires rising.
We have a right to write
.

Write to right!
squeals Bobbie in pleasure, either at the protest or at the homophony.

Then, before the circle of his Mayflower Screwballs—all picking, scratching, muttering at the objects of their psychoses and neuroses—Lowell delivers his protest, occasionally lifting a straight, firm hand before him, striking an image that looks to Frederick like a vaguely demented variation on a Norman Rockwell painting.

I have sat by and accepted all of your deluded stratagems
, Lowell says.
But this, well, it is no simple dumb tyranny like the rest. This, I hope you can see, is simply dangerous. Without our journals, what will we have? The blood will be on your hands
.

Lowell continues, enumerating famous writers (Hemingway, Woolf, Zweig) who have ended their lives when they became unable to write, quoting several poets on the absolute imperative of writing (
If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad—
Byron). Canon receives all of this like an attentive, purely rational academic, betraying nothing beyond curiosity. Eventually, as Lowell’s voice drops with the gravity of his Puritan patrimony—
and all that will happen will be yours to take to the grave. You will see what you have done—
Canon interrupts, speaking in the tone of merely a colleague engaged in simple rational discourse.

Your knowledge of literature is extraordinary
, Canon says.
It’s no wonder that universities hire you to share your knowledge. But I hope you can understand that I was hired because of my expertise, my knowledge. If you can’t trust my judgments, then I don’t see how you are ever going to make any progress
.

Lowell opens his mouth, but no more words come. Fury silences the poet, and he lunges for the doctor. Two Crew Crew boys intervene, of course, restoring Lowell to his chair, pressing the poet into Canon’s audience with palms on Lowell’s shoulders. The others cry out, in protest, in solidarity, in fear, or in defiance. Canon allows a moment for the welter to untangle. He knows better than to attempt to answer his patients in their tones, knows better than to attempt to speak over them. Eventually, with the assistance of the two additional Crew Crew he has brought to this predictably contentious meeting, order is restored, as is a semblance of quiet—with the exception of the catatonics still bickering with whatever it is within themselves they bicker with.

Don’t you see, Professor Lowell
, Canon says,
that it is selfish of you to disrupt the work that all of these men have to do here?

Canon is proud of himself for this bit of improvisation, the success of which is measured by Lowell’s silence. In the wake of this reprimand, however, is the silence not only of the one problematic patient but of the group. The outrage their silence transmits pushes upon Canon, is hot against his face.

Canon, determined yet to make a cautionary display of Marvin’s self-imposed injuries, has insisted the burned man’s cot be placed within the therapy circle. Until this moment, Marvin has not spoken; he has been discounted as likely unconscious. But then, from this tensed silence comes a voice, raspy and searing, like the hiss a match makes when extinguished in water.

Don’t you see
, Marvin says from his cot,
that escape is all that makes any of this bearable?

For a beat, Canon is as silent as the rest. Of all the protests and the accusations, it is this, the half-whisper of a burn victim, that at last seems to sway the moment to the patients’ favor.
Reframe
,
Canon tells himself, mentally quoting
The Mental Asylum. And if that fails, shift the subject
.

And how are you feeling today, Professor Schultz?

Schultz, with the serene smile of a bodhisattva contemplating a butterfly, turns his attention to Canon.

Me?

I’ve taken a look at your journals, Professor. And frankly there is a lot I don’t understand. A lot that concerns me. But sometimes, I see, you mention your wife who has passed away. Irit?

Had Canon, Frederick wonders, believed Schultz would react at all differently? Or had this been the point, another of Canon’s dumb displays? At the utterance of her name, Schultz’s face fills with something uncontainable; an irrepressible sound erupts from his mouth.

Discount Professor Schultz. Believe him psychotic. Believe all of his theories no more than schizophrenia. But, as when Marvin bellowed his anguish the night that the men of Ingersoll came to him, when Schultz now screams in his found, fundamental language, he speaks into collective being what is within him. Stanley begins to weep; even Frederick, obscured in nihilism, perceives the coming of tears. Schultz speaks the true name of mourning, a mourning for not only what Schultz has lost but what all the men of Ingersoll have lost: the old Mayflower, onto which this dystopia has been superimposed; the men’s other lives, from which they have been exiled.

Schultz is not conscious of the Crew Crew lifting him and pulling him to his room; he is not conscious of the passage of time for over an hour. Time, for the time being, is as fragmented as memory.

The hospital is the same and it is also different. It’s 1962 and it’s also 1945. A friend from Harvard, an anthropologist, has come to take Schultz to the symbolic funeral that Dr. Wallace believes might help bring Schultz a measure of closure. The anthropologist drives him to a dim, incensed room, where his friends have hung what pictures of Irit they have found in Schultz’s office. People try to speak with Schultz, but he cannot hear their voices, not above that other language. He does not try, as he once tried, to ignore the words that speak only to him. Instead, he is searching the other language for her true name, but there is still only her human name. Irit. At a gravestone in Temple Israel’s cemetery in Wakefield, a gravestone on which his wife’s name is written, a gravestone that marks nothing but earth, a rabbi delivers the Mourner’s Kaddish. But Schultz cannot hear the Kaddish. To the chagrin of the rabbi, Schultz cannot recite the Kaddish. All of this death, opening more and more of that other language. Schultz has lost everything, and in its place another language rushes in. His mother, his father.
Kokowa, Seekowa
. Irit’s parents.
Hakenda. Makoola
. Their names rise up together, chanting with the name of their lost town of Bolbirosok,
Choogama! Choogama!