The Storm at the Door (5 page)

Frederick, wanting to relinquish this line of conversation, turns his attention to Wallace’s mahogany bookcase. On the penultimate shelf are twenty or so copies of the same text, written by the good doctor Wallace.
Fugue: The Remarkable Story of a Man with Fifteen Personalities
. This book, a copy of which Wallace has many times denied Frederick, describes, if not Mayflower’s most famous patient, then Mayflower’s most famous case study.

Frederick has witnessed this book’s subject, Marvin Foulds, few times; typically the famous madman remains in his little cabin in the woods behind Upshire. But on the rare occasions that Marvin does emerge, he immediately draws the focused scrutiny of all those ethereal, delusional men and women, who turn into impromptu paparazzi, glimpsing what they can, gossiping about whatever strange persona Marvin has donned that day. Marvin’s myriad selves may range from a French poet to a naval admiral, but like the disparate voices of, say, a Shakespeare play, all seem to Frederick to share the aesthetic mark of a singular creator’s sensibilities, each a hyperbolic identity, each engaged in hysterical congress with the Absurd. Frederick has often wondered if Marvin receives a share of the royalties from Wallace’s book, or if his payment for being one of the world’s most famous psychotics is simply the exalted court jestership he holds within this mad kingdom.

The point is that even if one’s daily life may appear quotidian
, Wallace says,
one can still wage a silent and extraordinary war
.

Wallace took this office nearly two decades ago, and has ushered
Mayflower through a time of quiet and comfort: qualities well appreciated by the board of directors in the aftermath of his predecessor, an ambitious modernizer who—like so many in the history of mental health care—was apparently drawn to the treatment of the mentally ill for deeply personal motives, ending his own life while still holding the office of psychiatrist in chief. The board of Mayflower, seeking to contain the spread of a thanatotic contagion, had moved quickly to install Wallace, whose approach has never been overly dynamic, whose touch is arguably too light, whose greatest failing is a nearly pathological avuncularity. For almost twenty years the hospital has been nearly what the well-heeled residents of Boston like to imagine it to be when they deposit their inconvenient loved ones at its gates: a quiet, idyllic place of rest. The last twelve years, Wallace is proud to proclaim as he nears retirement, have marked the longest period that Mayflower has ever gone without a single suicide.

The balance of Frederick’s session passes in the familiar platitudes until scheduled time ticks to its end. No great progress, but also no great distress.

All right
, Wallace concludes, as he often concludes.
I know it’s hard not to get frustrated, week after week. But try to be patient. Try to stay confident. I’ve seen men like you do quite well in this place. A month or two, and I’m sure you’ll be feeling back to your old self. What you need is a good rest. And there is no better place than this
.

A good rest
, Frederick echoes.

Precisely
, Wallace says.
My prescription is a warm bed, a chat with me three times a week, two hundred fifty cc’s of hot cocoa, twice a day, and, of course, your medication
.

Wallace hands Frederick the two tablets in a paper cup and waits for him to swallow.

Professor Schultz did not always hear the sounds that he now catalogs in his room at the Harvard Club: his daily work, his life’s great labor. As a child, like any, he assumed his parents’ tongue was the only way to speak. Perhaps he heard fragments of things, just faint whisperings. Perhaps he turned his head to a sound he thought he had heard, but on second thought realized he had not. In his whole, happy childhood in Bolbirosok, Lithuania (or Poland or Germany, depending on the year, or one’s perspective), Schultz perhaps discerned just the faintest rumblings of this hidden language at the edges of his perception. But it was not until his mother’s death that, for the first time, Schultz perceived a tongue unlike any other, the sounds that things made to him directly, unobscured by human speech.

When he was a boy, Schultz and his mother had a closeness that other mothers envied and other boys ridiculed. Schultz and his mother had been as two parallel lobes of a single functioning mind, until, one June day, the half that was his mother vanished. That afternoon, on a walk back from the well in the rain, Schultz’s mother had carelessly crossed the Milavetz Road, a dirt path primarily used by farmers and their horses. She had crossed the road, oblivious to the motorist from Vilnius, out for a weekend joyride with his girlfriend, exploring the back roads with teenage velocity. It had been as simple and stupid as that: she was struck. She was killed.

The sounds had begun almost immediately, at her funeral, the torn pockets of the grieving crying out with their own
sh-rook
, the rabbi’s beard emitting a
ffff
. Schultz had not been worried,
not for his sanity, and not for his hearing. Whatever these sounds were, they sutured, at least temporarily, the unbearable gap that had suddenly opened, with his mother’s death, between the world and him. The vast distance of his mourning, a vast silence that separated him from others.
Cococo
, the wooden slats of a floor called out to him.
Bleee
, a crow’s abandoned feather said. He had not yet begun to comprehend what he heard; he was simply glad for the sounds, the small compensation. Four months later, his father, Moshe, finding no equal compensation, one morning left for work at the bookshop he owned, bypassed the shop, and walked instead to the river, to the tree under which his wife and he had first kissed, and hanged himself from a wide, low branch.

Thereafter, when the people of Bolbirosok tried to speak with the seventeen-year-old orphan, they grew increasingly concerned as Schultz would either not answer them or answer them with words that were not quite words. But how could Schultz be expected to attend to conversation in that restrained language? The world had begun its own conversation with him; daily, more things revealed their sounds. With each step, his pants told him of their motion. Each sympathetic face spoke with something other than its human voice. The hair of Irit Mendelsohn, the girl he had always loved from afar, made a string of vowels, like wind passing through barley.

As fate or chance would have it, over the years that followed, Schultz lost a great many things, more than one might expect any person to bear. Each loss, however, seemed to allow more and more sounds. And it was not until he had lost everything—his parents, his wife, the town of his childhood, his career, his freedom—that he could begin to perceive the true names of all things. He has suffered greatly, he knows, but he also suspects
that this suffering was absolutely necessary, that if he still maintained all his human relations, with all those exchanges spinning out in their common words, noise would have obscured the other language he is now able to catalog.

The universe is a text
, Irit’s father once told him.
An unending text, in which all is written in living words
.

Schultz remains uncertain if the language he perceives is a part of a text authored by some higher mind, or if it is merely the true and natural sound of things; he does not know if it is fate or chance that has brought him this far. But he knows all that has happened to him has been essential for his revelation.

Schultz has focused his morning energy on the specific sounds emitted by each pen in his jar, tuning out, as much as he can, the sound rising from the east. But now he lets himself listen. It is like a single syllable screamed by a baby who is just learning the word for
want. WAWAWAWA
, the storm says.

Instead of circumnavigating the Depression’s lip, as the senescent and catatonic do, Frederick and his escort, one of the interchangeable old ladies, pass straight through the center, climbing the slope that ascends to Ingersoll. At the far side of the Depression, Frederick asks if they could pause for a cigarette, and the nurse agrees, but only if she can have one too. As Frederick leans over to offer her a light, he is careful to avoid the fresh dollop of
cow excrement deposited there, an offering from a sacred bovine.

At the far side of the Depression, Frederick glimpses Marvin Foulds, descending from his cabin. Today, it appears, Marvin has taken perhaps his most outrageous persona, a Carmen Miranda–inspired Latin singer, supposedly named Mango Diablo. Marvin has tied a bedsheet about his slouching fifty-year-old body, tethered coconut shells over his sagging breasts, and now makes his way toward his daily meeting with Wallace by leading an imagined conga line—his fourteen other personae, perhaps? Frederick turns to the nurse, who peers at Mango, scrutinizing without apparent judgment, as if he is a television melodrama set before her.

Frederick whistles, cigarette smoke corkscrewing from his lips.

Geez. Talk about setting the bar
, he says.
Next time I go nuts, I’ll have to get more creative about it
.

A fascinating case, isn’t it?
the nurse says evenly.

Mango Diablo disappears into Upshire, and Frederick turns his attention eastward. From that height, he can see beyond the treetops, beyond the squat, complacent buildings of Belmont to the sleepy, tweedy city of Boston. Frederick thinks of when his parents drove him into Boston for the first time. He will never forget his first glimpse of it. At that distance, similar to the distance from Mayflower, the city had appeared before him as metonymy for his entire adult future: a place of human industry and sophistication waiting to receive him. But here, from this canted, elevated angle, it seems a different city.

Frederick looks to the horizon beyond Boston’s harbor. The regal day proceeds spectacularly, unaware of the wretched throngs
it passes. It was a day much like this one, every bit as obliviously flawless, three weeks before, that ended with this hospitalization. Dr. Wallace often tries to speak with Frederick of what may have led to that night: of his stresses, of his failures, of his frustrations in both marriage and career. Yes, Frederick acknowledges, perhaps they all played some role, all part of that invisible calculus of motive and explanation that we cannot ever entirely deduce. Wallace and the other men of Ingersoll have asked Frederick to recall that night many times, but the truth is that he has little to say about it. The truth is that his actions that night felt no more serious—perhaps even less serious—than those of the hundred nights that had preceded it. That night had culminated, as had so many nights, in an electric two or three hours, in which the bourbon he used to medicate his agitation conflated with the energy his agitation opened.

In the long history of his electric states, Frederick has been seized by many notions; much of what he has thought and done has felt to him—still feels to him, even in sober states—poetic, radiant. Some nights, he would insist Katharine put on a dress, and he would take her dancing. Other nights, he would gather the men from his office for an impromptu poker game, which rapidly transformed into an impromptu concert, with him singing to them all. That night, the one with which his present is so obsessed, was merely another notion that he persists—no matter what anyone says—in finding, in a profound way, hilarious. He had been bored, with all those dull and self-righteous relatives and friends, and he had wanted to scandalize them, entertain the few among them who thrilled to such transgressions. Once, such behavior had thrilled even Katharine, hadn’t it?

That night, drunk, he had remembered one of the most popular spectacles he’d performed for his friends in college: without
warning, one sophomore evening, he had stripped himself of all clothes and run a lap around fraternity row. Electric and seduced by this memory, Frederick had done it again, or something like it. Out he marched, from the cottage that night, wearing nothing but George Carlyle’s raincoat. And then up Providence Road to Route 109, where he opened the coat to each passing car, making of his body a carnal punch line.

He had done it again, assuming it would conclude as it had twenty years before: with hysterical laughter and a few comical expressions of disdain. Perhaps, at worst, the memory of the incident would earn a placement at the top of his regretful, hung-over inventory of misdeeds the next morning. Instead, as the next morning came, Frederick was bound, literally and figuratively, for the Mayflower Home, spending the final hour of the night and the first of the day in the backseat of a New Hampshire state police vehicle. But it was only after Frederick had sobered and arrived at Mayflower that every moment began to feel gravid with consequence. He had been perplexed then, wanted only to accommodate, to downplay, to be amenable. He had simply believed, even when they arrived at the Mayflower Home, even when he signed his own admission papers, that all could be and would be reversed. Frederick could not have imagined an act as inconsequential, as utterly frivolous, as flashing two old ladies on a small country road in New Hampshire would have a resonance measured in years (indeed, in generations). How could he have? A few inches of a raincoat’s material held one direction at one moment, it seems, has permanently altered his remaining years on this planet.

A cow walks before Frederick and the nurse, offers a skeptical gaze, and moves on. The nurse tells Frederick she needs to get back to help out with checks.

Frederick knows what awaits him in Ingersoll: another Miltown haze, men’s screams, and the smoky, greasy drabness, like a bowling alley in the midafternoon. When he is inside his room, when his mind has adjusted to his place, he will be able to bear it. But still, each time he returns, it is an only slightly dulled reenactment of the morning he was first led into Ingersoll. For there they are now, passing through the ward’s front doors, confronted with the same screams that greeted Frederick that first morning. The same catatonics clutching the common room’s corners, either silenced by or enraged at their private sounds and visions. The same airless corridor; to open a window a massive undertaking, given the cages, the locks. The same cigarette vapors, clinging to the men like their madness, always visible, harmful, emanating. Once back to his room, the same crush of solitude, loneliness not merely a concept or a feeling, but a palpable physical presence. It is all the same, except for the awareness he possesses now that he did not, somehow, when he was first admitted.