The Storm at the Door (9 page)

Two hundred yards away in Ingersoll House my grandfather lies propped up in his bed. The light angles through the caged windows to illuminate the journal in which he wants to write. But Frederick still feels the breakfast’s tranquilizer in his hand, as if the tranquilizer has oppositely magnetized pen from paper. He pulls at what remains of his hairline. Hour by hour, moment
by moment, he feels himself breaking the promise he perpetually makes to himself: to transform his incarceration into a creative exercise, to take each meaninglessly passing moment and find the art within it.

The shame we have brought we have brought. The injury we have caused, we have caused
, Lowell once told him.
Why not try to turn that history to art? Why not say what happened?

At this moment, the bedside clock ticks with its grumpy persistence, the fluorescent tubes above buzz, his left foot itches between the toes, a squirrel makes some devious sounds on the opposite side of the wall. How to find a story in this, the moments, which just continue to pass? How to make all of these meaningless facts add up to something meaningful?

Frederick stretches his six feet, six inches, shifts on the bed, his pajamas sticking to him with their unpleasant dampness, a result of how warm they now insist upon keeping it at night. At the far corner of the room, just beyond the foot of the second bed—empty, until Canon—his new roommate experiences none of Frederick’s writerly frustration. As he sits curled over his steel-legged desk, Professor Schultz’s concentration is unremitting, his output ceaseless. Whereas the sound of a pigeon cooing at the windowsill can throw Frederick into an entirely other mode of consideration, Schultz, apparently, does not mind any distraction. He responds to Frederick’s occasional questions, or the inquiries and demands of the staff, and then returns, immediately, to writing. Even the change in location, from his ornate room in the Harvard Club to his present Spartan dwelling, seems to impose no discernible stress upon Schultz, no distraction to his attention.

When Dr. Higgins informed the Ingersoll men that most would now be forced to have roommates, Frederick had risen in
a fit of indignation, had almost talked the other men into something close to mutiny. But when Schultz first came to the door, escorted by two of the new orderlies, Frederick’s animosity instantly dissolved in the professor’s affability.

Shlomi Schultz
, he said, extending a hand.
Might I say what a marvelous skull you have
.

Frederick laughed then, and so did Schultz.

You should see Jones, ’fifty-six, on the correlation of the frontal region with intelligence
, Schultz continued, his Yiddish childhood giving each syllable a phlegmy consistency.
That slight, might I say, bulge, not to mention the wide plane of your brow, yes? I can see you are a man who understands things. It will be a pleasure to share this office
.

Frederick knew better, from his months in Mayflower, than to correct the professor
(office?)
. Instead, Frederick shook his new roommate’s hand and left the room for Schultz to make himself comfortable.

Frederick couldn’t help but feel a bit flattered that the doctors had decided Professor Schultz and he would be fitting roommates, these two men of fierce intelligence. For the first few days, Frederick had devised and rehearsed clever observations, pithy witticisms about the ineptitude of the staff, the logical fallacies of the new protocols, with which he later tried to charm Schultz.

But Schultz has hardly said a word to Frederick. He has responded to simple questions of whether he is hungry (always in the negative), and he has congenially replied to Frederick’s rehearsed insights by meeting his eyes, nodding amenably, and saying,
Quite right, yes, yes
. But then Schultz has immediately turned back to his work, his focus neither manic nor fitful, just simple, pure concentration.

And the work itself? Frederick has yet to decipher its purpose.
Some days, Schultz has piled on his desk a selection of books from the hospital’s library. Books with no obvious similarities:
Wuthering Heights
, a guide to cribbage,
The Yearling
. Schultz opens these books seemingly at random, leans down close to them as if he were investigating the ink rather than the words, mutters to himself, and hurriedly scribbles a note in his journal. Other days, Schultz sits in his chair, closes his eyes, tilts his face to the ceiling, as if transfixed by a private, internal concert, and then—struck by some notion—immediately jots it down.

His curiosity an irresistible force, Frederick is not above peeking at Schultz’s notebooks. However, other than for mandatory reasons—meals, group therapy, requisite bathroom breaks—Schultz either sits with his notebooks or else carries them under his arm. The few glimpses Frederick has just barely managed have only deepened the mystery. The words he has seen look familiar, but are not quite English. Or at least not recognizably English. Is it a shorthand? Is it Yiddish? Schultz was a linguistics scholar; is this some obscure language he simply prefers? Or is Schultz’s work simple nonsense? True madness?

Madness: Frederick has never, in fact, seen his roommate asleep or in any advanced state of undress. There have been times at night when the scratching of the professor’s pen on journal ceases and he crawls into bed, but Frederick can then still hear Schultz mumbling, the static of his garble not quite tuned to human frequencies. When the moonlight slips between the gaps in the cage over their high single window and illuminates Schultz’s face dimly, Frederick tries not to startle to find Schultz’s eyes open and alert.

Before Canon, lunch was optional. Before Canon, evacuating bowels and bladder was a private matter, undocumented, unless for a specific medical reason. But now this intake and output is
closely scrutinized. Any deviation from clean, healthy transference at either end can earn one stricter oversight, force-feeding, a world of misery, delivered by one of the interchangeable boys with crew haircuts. The boys with crew cuts have been objects of the patients’ antipathy, rage, and compensating humor since they arrived and immediately began berating patients for failing to meet their demands with militant avidity. Two weeks after their appearance, Lowell offhandedly referred to these new boys as the Crew Crew. All laughed; the name has stuck.

A Crew Crew boy enters the room, and tells Frederick and Schultz it is time for lunch. Frederick stands to make his apathetic, compliant march to the cafeteria. Schultz, focused as ever upon his work, fails to hear the orderly’s announcement, and so the kid goes to Schultz, nudges him, and repeats himself. Schultz turns, smiles warmly.

So kind of you
, Schultz says,
but I’m not hungry
.

Lunch isn’t optional
.

No, lunch is sandwiches, nu? Haha!

Come on, Professor
.

Schultz nods, as if the Crew Crew boy were a loved one reminding him that a disciplined mind requires nourishment; Schultz nods as if to say,
yes, well, of course you are right
.

The change of air, from room to hall, irritates Frederick. The way the Crew Crew boy cleans his ear with his pinkie finger irritates Frederick. The other patients lining up in the hall irritate Frederick, especially the new fat old one, Bobbie, who forever scratches his genitals when faced with others, as if he has invented a new crotch-oriented salute. At least today he has come from his room with gray slacks covering what he scratches—just two days ago, Bobbie darted from his room, like a toddler escapee
from Mother’s bath, bleating
yee-ha
s as he mounted a common room chair like a horse, his mass Jell-Oing as he bucked up and down. Some moments, like the present, Frederick is irritated by nearly every aspect of the totalitarian stupidity of this place.

Ingersoll, like the rest of Mayflower, has been given fresh linoleum and paint. But, in the hallway, Frederick stands before the only door Canon’s renovation has neglected, a cracking wooden slab with no knob and a rusting lock, nearly fuzzy with oxidation. The furnace? An electrical closet? Frederick can’t know what is behind it, but it almost seems as if this is the point. It almost seems Canon has left it here deliberately, this one unopenable, ancient door, as if to say:
this is where the past belongs
.

As they cross the Depression toward the cafeteria, Frederick is confronted with the image that irritates him most: the convergence of so many others, from their own wards, with the sluggish phalanx of Ingersoll men. Frederick watches his feet walk.

When they reach the cafeteria, the line to receive the lunch’s six compartments of scooped food is notably extended from its previous length: a result of Canon’s great pride, a ballooning admission to the homes for troubled young women and young men.

One of the few legitimate pleasures, at least at first, of the Coming of Canon has been the opportunity it has afforded the Ingersoll men to at last glimpse Marvin Foulds as Marvin Foulds, stripped of costumes. What was once a right has now become a privilege, and Canon has taken a radical approach to Marvin’s condition, forcing him to wear hospital gowns until he can put aside his other selves and speak with his own true voice.

Pills always come at the end of lunch, not a patient or milligram
is missed, but Marvin, as they sit at the table, frets for when the time of his sedation will come. Marvin asks the others whether they should already begin lining up. Frederick pities him. Mango Diablo, the Admiral, Guy DeVille: these people were tangible to Marvin, friends, family. When Canon denied his access to costumes and makeup, Canon murdered Marvin’s closest relations. Or perhaps that is not precisely the reason for Marvin’s present abject state. Perhaps, once he was put into hospital gowns, once denied his other selves, Marvin’s posture shifted inward, his gaze darkened, his hair began to spring in the frizzy curls to which it naturally tends, as Marvin became someone else, a madman character, a mental patient named Marvin Foulds.

Lunch passes with a few perfunctory words, and then there are pills, and the Crew Crew’s checking of sublingual and gingival hiding places. And then time, once again, has begun to slow.

Frederick is privately impressed by the swiftness and precision with which the new protocols have been enacted. It has been only two months since Canon took office, and already there is a lockstep efficiency in Mayflower.

It helps that, for the most part, the patients have been uncommonly compliant. In the wake of Marshall’s suicide, the men of Ingersoll were, in truth, grateful for the promise of new order,
grateful that the powers that be had recognized the magnitude of what Marshall’s death had opened. It wasn’t merely that the men mourned their lost friend—and they had, the depressives darkening for days, the manics ascending, the ravers escalating their angry babble. No, the greater terror was what Marshall’s death suggested. Amid their imprisonment—in the walls of Mayflower, but also in their own skulls—here was a gelid, exhilarating promise of liberation. Amid the cacophony of internal chaos, the promise of silence. Amid confinement, the possibility of release. Amid an abject, pitiable existence, the possibility of transformation. In the history of mental hospitals, suicide attempts rarely occur in the singular; the notion of suicide, once devised, can catch as simply as a yawn. Thoughts blackened with fearsome new considerations. Even Frederick had become delirious with that dark concoction of dread and exhilaration. And so, when Wallace announced his expedited retirement and his successor—the famous scholar Albert Canon—the drama of the change, the possibility of a compensation for that horror, was a welcomed rebuttal to Thanatos.

In the temporary confusion that came with the passing of power, with the release of much of the old staff, the meticulousness of patient privileges was briefly relinquished. For the first time since his admission, Frederick had been permitted to speak with Katharine.

Of course he had rehearsed it. Often, an hour of thought would coalesce into a simple sentence that he would transcribe into his notebook for later use when finally he was able to speak to his wife. Frederick knew well how arguments with Katharine, born in coherence and certainty, could quickly drift into a desultory and bitter dumbness, both of them trying to transform
the truer fight—one of disappointment, of fading love, of failed expectations, of thwarted need—into rational, accusatory statements of the small thing that was the argument’s ostensible object, more often than not financial. Frederick knew how these fights could sometimes render him mute, feeling absolutely the rightness of his position but lacking language to describe it. And so he worked diligently to prepare his case. He had even rehearsed various forms of argumentation: the Socratic, for example, in which he had devised a carefully worded litany of questions that could only lead their recipient, like a bowling ball down a bumpered lane, to a singular conclusion: he did not belong at Mayflower and, for her part in placing him there, Katharine had failed him. Other times, he would scribble off something as saccharine and desperate as the letters he had written to Katharine after they first met, when he was off at sea: a form of appeal that he thought perhaps persuaded her more than any other.

Soon after the news of Wallace’s retirement, Frederick easily talked the cavalier, about-to-be-unemployed night nurse into one-time phone privileges. Before he dialed, Frederick sat on the wooden bench in the antique phone both—gone now, with most of the other late Victorian bric-a-brac—and consulted his notes, memorizing what he could, tagging particularly cogent language for later reference. And then he dialed.

Katharine
.

Frederick
.

And then there was her voice, instantly muting his argument and his certainty.

I need to come home
.

These were not words as most words were words. This was an
utterance produced in some fundamental place, bypassing the usual gates of language.