The Storm at the Door (3 page)

C’mon, Mum. What are those anyway? Love letters?

Katharine thinks for a moment now about how to answer. A line she does not know she has memorized, a line from one of the pages in her hands, suddenly exposes itself in some internal, nearly forgotten place, some attic door thrown open. It comes to her, word after word.
I tried
, she thinks.
I tried to make sense
.

Please don’t do that
, her daughter says.
What if someone wants to read them later?

Katharine wishes she could explain it. She wishes she could explain all the ways she has let herself be deceived, and the resolution she has finally come to. But, then, maybe what has proved true for her is not true for everyone. Maybe if she had loved differently, or if she had been able to think differently, or if she had been more faithful to her own visions, or if she hadn’t allowed herself to get so damned down, so damned angry, her life might have been something else entirely.

All right, you’re right
, she says evenly, stands from the fire, and slips the bundle of her husband’s papers onto the bookshelf. Instead of Frederick’s words, she places two logs on the fire, and then helps unpack the groceries. Later, while her daughter and her grandsons go for a swim, Katharine reclaims her spot on the chaise.

And then. When the embers have nearly burned through the logs, she rises again; again, she enters the living room, holds her husband’s letters, sits down to the fire. This time, she burns them all.

For minutes, she watches the fire articulating Frederick’s words into something else, a plume of white, sucking upward. The transformation is both simple and impossible. A moment ago they were words, considered and set; now they are a rising whiteness. Now they could have been anything.

There is my grandfather. My grandfather, Frederick Francis Merrill, at the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, in July 1962.

Frederick awakes in the pale blue of himself, as he has awoken every day since his arrival here, the stupor of last night’s dosage of Miltown worn thin at dawn. He will grow agitated and mystified with the day, as he invariably does, but at least for this moment, when he is scheduled to sleep but is awake, Frederick feels nearly lucid. He reminds himself of where he is; the truth of his present still seems ridiculous, impossible. He is a patient in a mental hospital, he tells himself. This is what has happened.

He is a patient in a mental hospital, and so he resolves, as he now resolves nearly every morning, to be what the hospital and its deluded staff require of him. They are deluded, and he is lucid. And so he will play their games and convince them, easily. Frederick tells himself it will be simple: he will be the model of sanity, or at least their model of sanity, for a few days, a few weeks, a month, and then he will be free. He will be free from these halls, these rooms, these pills, and then he will decide for himself whether he is sane; he will figure out on his own the causes of the abject existence that has so rapidly assembled around him.

The nurses—terse, attentive ladies, many long ago inherited
from New England’s defunct Victorian orphanages—are down the hall, opening doors and announcing breakfast. When they knock at the door four down from Frederick’s, they release that daily scream, that morning bugle blare of terror, as James Marshall awakes. James Marshall, the one-limbed war hero, awakes to find himself deprived of three appendages, and screams, as he screams nearly every morning, at the horror of his present. As the day grows, there will be many men who scream at similar realizations. In the moments just before the midday sedative dosing, there will nearly be a dreadful cacophonous chorus echoing through these peeling, gilded halls. My grandfather pulls his pack of Pall Malls out of the bedside drawer, lights one, sits upright in his bed. He cannot know how, by the next morning, things will have changed.

Out his window, the high leaves of the summery green sycamores receive the first morning light. From Frederick’s place on the bed, these trees, the azure sky, and the intervening cage on the window are all he can see. But beyond are more trees, in admirable variety, each planted and arranged sixty-five years before by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted for their placating, transcendent beauty. Beyond Olmsted’s masterpiece perched atop Madhouse Hill in Belmont, the city of Boston spreads incandescently, as it receives the morning sun. A single edifice, a massive, nearly completed office tower, rises luminously over the convoluted streets, cluttered with their Colonial row houses. Beyond the city, the last sign of human enterprise, the Boston Harbor Lighthouse, is half-invisible in the cling of morning fog. And beyond, the sea is calm and expansive, as placid and precise as Frederick’s mind, at least for this moment. Any sign of what will befall Boston that evening lies much farther still, nearly all the way to Bermuda, where the waves suddenly
rise, exultant and choppy, buffeted by the periphery of a late summer system. There, fish, whales, sea turtles either attempt to flee westward or else go downward, to protective depths.

•   •   •

Half an hour later, Frederick is on his feet, enjoying the only nondrugged walk of his day. In July, the miasma that spends half a year in the American South shifts northward to Boston, and often the air is isotonic with the body, every bit as moist and warm, one’s clothes soaking from osmosis. But today is perversely beautiful, almost an insult to Frederick that even here, even on this ancient, rusting Madhouse Hill, such irrepressible beauty is possible.

Frederick pulls in air, testing the phlegmy constraints of his smoker’s lungs, as he passes through the courtyard outside Ingersoll House. It is here that a sentence suddenly materializes in his mind. The words come in such an unconsidered, instant way, the way Frederick imagines that language must come to great poets, that he repeats the words to himself several times, believing they might be valuable, might be a vital sentence in one of the many literary projects he has told himself he will execute while at Mayflower. Frederick thinks:
The sadness of always being at a distance from things, either above or else beneath
.

There in the courtyard outside Ingersoll, Frederick finds Marshall, who seems already to have forgotten his waking horror. At the flagpole, Marshall carries out his morning ritual. Dressed in his military uniform, as ever, Marshall performs a daily raising of the flag with his one remaining arm. For years, under the permissive administration of Mayflower that will fall this very night, Marshall has been allowed every morning and evening—rain, snow, or sun—to raise and lower his flag.

Frederick waits for Marshall’s eyes to meet his own and offers a smile. In his fifties, Marshall is gifted with the rare sort of face in which time and the elements have only sharpened its rugged handsomeness. If looking at a photograph of Marshall from the neck up, one would assume the face was affixed to a commensurate body, muscles nearly ossified by will and trial. A wider perspective, however, reveals the sickening absences: his uniform safety-pinned to itself, folded cleanly around the stumps of both legs and one arm. The precise means by which Marshall lost each appendage are common topics of hushed gossip and speculation among the men of Ingersoll House. What seems certain is that not every limb was lost at war. On his first day at Mayflower, Frederick watched the fingers of Marshall’s remaining hand carry out a search and destroy mission across the bald plane of his head, hunting hairs and plucking them away. The general consensus is that only Marshall’s left leg was lost to the war. Normandy, or so the story went. The rest, supposedly, has been his own doing. Several fingers of his now missing left hand had been excised with a willful application of glass, or so the rumors went. The arm itself, an escape one night to the train tracks near South Station. No explanation of how Marshall lost his second leg seems plausible to Frederick.

Stay to salute, soldier?
Marshall asks Frederick.

Though the sight of Marshall, after three weeks at Mayflower, still stirs Frederick’s pity if no longer his revulsion, Frederick does take a kind of pride in this seemingly privileged relationship, that a war hero regards him as a comrade, a fellow soldier. On two or three occasions, Frederick and Marshall have reminisced about their military service, as if they were someplace else entirely, perhaps a saloon tucked in an alleyway of a rain-swept port town.

The tension was just unbearable
, Frederick told Marshall of his four months as an ensign aboard the USS
Wonder. And we never even saw any action. But I would be there on the deck all night, just waiting for the world to explode
.

Frederick has never told Marshall the truth of how his time with the Navy ended, nearly identical to how his time with the White Paper Company ended, nearly identical to how his early promise in the private academy he briefly attended as a child ended: with a bottomless desperation, with unmanageable, surging notions, with drastic physical transformations.

Correlation does not imply causation
, one of Frederick’s Harvard Business School professors would often remind his classes. Just because two things happen at the same time does not necessarily mean one causes the other. Yes, his breakdowns—if they even deserve so certain a word—have tended to come alongside heightened responsibilities, but that does not necessarily mean Frederick cannot be equal to the fortitude his challenges require of him. Sometimes, something within him flares or extinguishes, but it is separate from him, this cycling, a pattern that has its own unknowable logic.

Do do dee do do do do dee do doo
, Frederick sings the opening notes to reveille into his fist, mock-blowing on an imaginary horn. Frederick laughs, and usually Marshall laughs at this too. Today, strangely, Marshall does not laugh. Marshall only keeps his gaze upon the flag, as if the notes Frederick sings were more than some enlivening tune, as if they somehow carry a tremendous and mournful truth. Then an orderly comes, as every day, to wheel Marshall toward the cafeteria along the paved pathways.

As Frederick makes his way toward the Depression, that bowl-shaped green in the center of campus that the men must
cross on the way to and from the cafeteria, he negotiates through a cluster of cows, standing idly in the shade of an elm. Thirty years before, Frederick has been told, Mayflower had again aligned itself with the popular thinking of mental hospitals of the time. It had been the latest belief among the psychiatric professionals that those interred in mental hospitals required regular work, a daily structuring purpose. And so aristocratic Mayflower, like any state hospital of that era, had become a full-fledged funny farm, the mad Brahmins poorly tending to newly constructed chicken coops, gardens, milk cows. Predictably, the staff soon found itself in charge of both the insane and their livestock, and the project was largely abandoned. Still, the administration has allowed these cows to stay, to wander like holy Hindu bovines, as if in respectful credit to the failed notion, as if not to hurt the feelings of the ancient psychologists who dreamed it up. A few of the oldest orderlies and nurses, recruits from this bygone era, still feed them hay, clean their mess, and seem to take the cows’ continued presence as a personal respect.

Passing the Depression’s nadir, Frederick is planning. He tells himself that after breakfast he will finally write the letter to Katharine. He has been considering this letter for some time; he has already drafted many sentences in his notebook. Never mind that he is not allowed to send her any letter, just as he is not allowed to phone her, until his psychiatrist grants him those privileges. He will write the letter, and then he will begin to write for himself, something that his vaunted poet ward mate, Robert Lowell, has encouraged him to pursue. He will do these things, even with the Miltown. He will try, as he has tried and failed time and again, to avoid the pills. But even if he must capitulate to his prescriptions, he will do these things.

Frederick is in an asylum for the mentally ill, and he can agree that sometimes he gets confused and acts in ways that surprise even him. But he is lucid now, many call him brilliant, and he is only forty, practically a young man still. He is a youngish man of talent, of passions, enthusiasms, and intelligence. And he is attractive, if not exactly handsome: his hairline is rapidly recoiling from his face, his ears protrude at such angles that he likes to joke that, should he be pushed from a cliff, his ears would perform Bernoulli’s principle, and he could simply glide to safety. Frederick tells himself that he is only here temporarily, for the same reason that a number of similarly gifted men are here: too much intellect, too much passion appearing to ordinary men as madness. He will make the most of his time here. He will write, as he wishes he had time to write but never does amid the responsibilities of his life outside the hospital. It’s not that Frederick thinks he has wound up at Mayflower for these reasons. Frederick knows better than to believe, as his wife sometimes claims to, that all things happen for a reason. Things happen; it is up to us to invent for them purpose.