Americana (21 page)

ST. DYMPHNA

(pronounced dimf-nah)

PATRONESS OF THOSE AFFLICTED

WITH NERVOUS DISORDERS

AND MENTAL ILLNESS

“The Nervous Breakdown Saint”

It turned out that St. Dymphna had been born in Ireland, the only child of the pagan king of Oriel. When her mother
died, Dymphna’s father decided to seek a second wife. Ultimately he concluded there was only one female worthy enough—his own daughter. Dymphna, who had been baptized by a priest of the church, was fourteen years old. With all the persuasiveness he could muster, the king outlined his scheme to his trembling daughter. Dymphna sought safety in flight, settling finally in Belgium along with her confessor. Spies, however, traced the exiles’ route and it all ended when the king drew his sword and struck off the head of his only child. In time, many people with mental problems were cured due to the intercession of St. Dymphna, whose fame as the nervous breakdown saint gradually spread from Belgium to Ireland and thence to almost every corner of the globe.

The story fascinated me. I felt much the same way I would months later when Jane would read her YWCA notes on the primitive religions of the world. All those magnificently demented people made me feel small and well-dressed. I even liked St. Dymphna’s father. I pictured him with a red beard, drinking mead from a ram’s horn and secretly worrying about his masculinity. I went to Brad Dennis’ room to return the leaflet and hopefully to engage in a fiery conversation about science, religion and eternity. Miles Warren was in there with Brad. Miles, fresh from two weeks of atheism, was the most brilliant student at St. Dymphna’s. When I gave Brad the leaflet and told him how much I had liked the story of St. Dymphna, he said he had given me the wrong material. This is a childish piece of whimsy, he said. With that, he handed me a booklet titled
Some Preliminary Concepts of Metaphysical Psychology.

“The Little Sisters of the Poor are the only people who believe that kid stuff about virgin saints,” he said. “The modern Catholic is a hard-nosed kind of guy who asks piercing questions. The whole thing can be brought down to a question of metaphysics and first principles. Whatever is, is.”

“What about the Inquisition?” Miles said.

“The modern Catholic isn’t afraid of that question anymore.”

“What about all those popes who had wives and mistresses?” Miles said.

“Speaking retroactively, we can say they weren’t truly part of the mystical body of Christ in the doctrinal sense. It’s like the lying and cheating General Motors does. You still need cars.”

“If a tree falls in the forest,” Miles said, “and there’s no one around to hear it fall, does that tree in fact make a sound when it hits earth or is the phenomenon of sound contingent on the presence of someone or something which possesses the faculty of hearing? Is the absolute dependent on an agent who can interpret it? Or is the absolute what the word itself implies? The question is as old as Plato.”

“Whatever is, is,” Brad said.

The best part of prep school was suiting up for a baseball or basketball game. I loved that phrase—
suiting up.
We would sit around the locker room mentally preparing ourselves for the game. We had all read about pro football players who become so tense prior to kickoff that they get sick to the stomach. There was a kid on our basketball team named Rich Higgins who would always go into the small toilet just off the locker room and try to throw up. He never got any further than the dry heaves but it made us feel good to know that one of our teammates was so affected by the impending contest that he was in the toilet with his finger down his throat. As soon as Rich Higgins returned, drained of emotion if nothing else, Coach Emery would say: “This is it! Let’s suit up!” And we would all suit up. It was more fun to suit up for baseball games because there was more to wear. Brad Dennis was the shortstop on the baseball team. He never blessed himself, as he did in basketball, but with his bat he used to make the sign of the cross in the dirt just outside the batter’s box before he stepped in to hit. He batted eighth in the order, which brought about a mild complaint from his mother.

* * *

America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. We did what we could to make them well. Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there was a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who made them and cared for them. We needed them badly; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we were able to conceal doubt. Numbers rendered the present day endurable, heralded the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they were, of the past. We were all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrived on the body-count.

Numbers matter less now that the adding machines, the super-calculators, the numerical systems and sub-systems have been uninvented. However, thinking back, I recall how important it was for me, personally, to define a situation, or a period of time, with as many numbers as I could assemble. They seemed the very valets of clarity. If I were on my deathbed today, and did not know the date, my cells would probably refuse to surrender. Without a calendar, a stopwatch, a measuring cup on the night table, I couldn’t possibly know how to die.

It was in the winter of my fifteenth year that Mary met Arondella. This means that Mary was nineteen at the time. It also means that Jane was eighteen, that my best friend Tommy was sixteen, that Kathy Lovell was fourteen, that my father was forty-two and my mother thirty-seven. That was the winter in which Tommy and I first took Kathy to the yacht club and it was the winter before the summer in which, age sixteen, I sat through two showings of
From Here to Eternity
starring Burt Lancaster. That same summer was the summer of the party.

Excepting Mary, no one in the family ever referred to Arondella by anything but his last name, and that only rarely. The second time they saw each other was on Christmas Eve. After she’d left to meet him somewhere, the rest of us sat in the living room looking at the tree.

“I wonder how old he is,” Jane said. “She won’t tell me a thing so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a lot older than she is.”

“It’s not his age I’m worried about as much as what he does for a living,” my father said.

“Mary says he’s in the rackets,” I said.

“Yeah, well, you never know when Mary’s telling the truth and when she’s playing games. If he is in the rackets, all hell is going to break loose around here. No daughter of mine is going to be seen dead with any two-bit racky. I’ll break both his arms for him. Wait and see if I don’t.”

“Clinton, your bark has always been worse than your bite. Now tell the truth, dear, hasn’t it? You’re forever threatening to dismember someone. But when the time comes I look around and where’s Clinton? Oh, he’s in the den, mother, polishing his saddles. Jane, I swear to you if fire ever breaks out in this house, you just head straight for the den and there will be your daddy, polishing his saddles. Fire, plague or famine, there you’ll be, Clinton, far from the madding crowd.”

“Let’s unwrap the presents and get it over with,” Jane said.

“I think we should wait for Mary to come home. That’s always been the tradition in this house and I don’t see why we should alter it now simply because she’s taken leave of her senses temporarily. We’ll wait for Mary.”

“What if he comes back with her?” I said.

“Your father will suggest that he leave. There are diplomatic ways of handling such things. I see no reason to hurt the man’s feelings.”

“What if he won’t go? If he’s in the rackets, he’s probably
not used to getting pushed around. Did you see
Cry of the City
, Jane? Victor Mature and Richard Conte. Richard Conte plays a gangster and Victor Mature is his old buddy from the same neighborhood who became a detective instead.”

“Is that what you do up in New Hampshire?” my father said. “Go to the movies every night? It’s costing me a small fortune to send you to that school.”

Mary was not a pretty girl. But there was an animation to her face, an intelligence, which nullified her plainness. She read her favorite authors in curiously appropriate ways—Proust supinely, Faulkner with bourbon, O’Casey wearing my father’s turtleneck. She was a fine swimmer and tennis player, although at times there seemed a touch of condescension in her attitude toward sport; it was all so easy, so predictable in outcome. She treated the family almost the same way she might treat her tennis racket, with rough affection and a charming lighthearted contempt. The latter did not extend to me, however. Her kid brother. I think she loved me very much. Almost everything my father said was received by Mary in a spirit of high delight. “Daddy,” she used to say, “you’re almost as funny as Eisenhower.” But he was not delighted by her as much as bewildered. I think she made my father question the structure of his own nature, for to him it was surely apparent that only the rebel mischief of his seed could have produced this stray comedienne.

Mary and I were playing checkers in the attic. A cold rain was falling. She was drinking rum, neat, from a beer glass, and smoking a cigarette like Lauren Bacall, the cool appeal of those sleepy rhythms. Although it was late afternoon she was still in pajamas.

“How did you meet him?” I said.

“Thereby hangs a tale, brother. But I may as well let you in on it, if only to forestall another trouncing by the checker king of Westchester. After I made my controversial decision to leave school, one little thing kept nagging at me. What would I do next? I didn’t want to come back here, as we all
know by now, but I wasn’t very anxious to get an apartment in the city and pursue a career in stenography either. The thought alone made my knees buckle. All I knew was that I had to get out of college. Massachusetts is no place to get educated, despite all the raving about intellectual ferment. My most vivid memory is of earnest young men banging their pipes into ashtrays, a sight that depresses me more than I can say. I was sick of the whole thing. I was sick of hearing the same expressions over and over. Just constantly. The same phrases, sentences, paragraphs. I’m hypersensitive, I know, but I was under the impression that up there, if nowhere else, my petty talent for finding fault might be allowed to dwindle and die. It was a false impression. The whole place was too inbred for me. The whole educational complex and the particular lollipop factory I was privileged to attend. The passion for ritual was overpowering. And of course nobody learned anything. One nice and bitchy memory I’ll keep. Our democratic little sorority had a sort of informal initiation process. About one-fifth of us were in on it. The others thought it much too unladylike. It was simple. Whenever a new girl sat down to her first dinner in the house, one of us would say to another: Pass the motherfucking carrots, please. Or words to that effect. The response would be in a similar vein and we’d usually keep it up all through the meal, tossing off the worst obscenities imaginable and doing it with a certain politesse, as if we were discussing sisal-growing in the Bahamas. By the time dessert arrived, the newcomer was in an advanced state of shock. I’m getting way off the mark, aren’t I?”

“Arondella,” I said.

“Want a sip of rum?”

“Okay.”

“I finally packed it in,” Mary said. “I took a cab to town and got on the first bus to Boston. Then I took another cab to the railroad station. I paid the driver, stepped onto the sidewalk and there he was. Sitting in that blue whale of his. Combing his hair. It was forty degrees but he had the top
down. He was wearing a light windbreaker with the sleeves rolled all the way up. He was sitting on the passenger’s side of the front seat. He put the comb away and placed his right arm out over the top of the door. The arm was flexed and his bicep was pressing against the door so that it would look enormous. I was trying to carry two heavy suitcases, an overnight bag and a purse. And I knew he was watching me. He said hey. I stopped and looked at him—he obviously thought he was God’s gift to the virgins of Boston—and he said I’ll take you wherever you want to go. Anywhere in the continental United States. I said New York. He said hey, that was the one place I really meant. And we both smiled. Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman. Later I found out he had been sent to Boston to kill a man.”

“Did he do it?”

“The man had been arrested the night before. Some kind of narcotics charge. Eventually he was killed in prison.”

“Last week daddy said if Arondella’s in the rackets you won’t be allowed to see him anymore.”

“David, I won’t be living here much longer.”

“Are you going away with him?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s got a wife and three children. It’s a delicate situation to say the least. All sorts of relatives are applying all sorts of pressures.”

“What exactly does he do in the rackets?”

“He goes places. He’s in Syracuse now. He makes business trips. That’s what he calls them. His territory seems to be upstate and New England.”

“Does he kill people?”

“I imagine so. He as much as told me. I don’t think the Boston trip was an isolated instance. But there are different kinds of death, David. And I prefer that kind, his kind, to the death I’ve been fighting all my life.”

“Give me some more rum,” I said.

“Don’t you love it when it rains like this? So gray and dark. I love dark chill days. We’re doing just the right thing for a day like this. Sitting in the attic drinking rum. It’s nice up here, isn’t it? Those skinny gray trees outside and the sound of the rain. We should have some music. Organ music would be perfect.”

“I’ll go get the radio.”

“Leave this house,” she said. “As soon as you can, get out of here. Run like hell, David. This place is haunted and everybody in it is haunted. Mother is terribly ill. And if she goes, if she slides all the way out, she’ll try to take you with her. I know her, David. I’m the only one who knows her.”