Enduring (28 page)

Remembering, Latha laughed. And when she laughed, the first sound she had been able to produce since coming here, Jessica Toliver turned her head and looked at her, the first look she had given Latha. Jessica smiled, a really sweet smile, and Latha smiled back, wishing she could say something.

Imbeciles brought their meals on trays. The food was somewhat better than in the other wards, maybe simply to justify the effort of delivering it to the individual cells. A basin for washing was occasionally brought and filled with water so they could at least wash their hands and faces. Jessica was not dead when she ate and when she washed. Every once in a while, Nurse Brewer would take their temperatures and listen to their lungs and hearts with a stethoscope. If there was a doctor, Latha never met him. She assumed that she was deemed beyond the help of a mental healthcare professional. Watching Jessica being dead, sometimes, Latha wondered if she also might be dead, and this perceived world was therefore a purgatory or a perception from beyond the grave. And yet, she reflected, the very fact that she was able to create such thoughts in her head was proof to her that she did in fact exist. The dead do not think.

The time came when the silence itself was beginning to remove what little remained of Latha’s sanity, so as further proof of her existence, she began to hum. One night, lying sleepless on her cot, she remembered the tune of Stephen Collins Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” and she began to hum it. She did not need to think of the lyrics, just the melody. Latha had never had a notable singing voice, but she had a fine soprano humming voice, enriched by the passions she had bottled up and by her inability to speak. Her “Beautiful Dreamer” was so heartfelt and elegant that it put her to sleep.

Every night she hummed something. If it was bothering Jessica, there was no way to tell. She hummed other Foster tunes, “Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” and “Old Black Joe.” She hummed some hymns, although she was not religious. Her rendition of “Amazing Grace” was unimaginably moving. She especially hummed “Farther Along,” which was not so much a hymn as an anthem for Stay More. She hummed its lilt with a fervor that roused her civic pride and her hope and her zeal.

She hummed all four stanzas of it, each with the chorus, and as she began the fourth stanza she was astounded to discover that Jessica was humming along with her, or rather Jessica was humming in alto harmony to her soprano. Their hums merged smoothly and fluently, without a false note anywhere.

The two girls had found a way to communicate. That first night they were so excited at the discovery that they went without sleep, and had a humfest. They waltzed through some of Victor Herbert’s melodies like “Kiss Me Again,” unspeakably romantic and uplifting. They tried some of the popular songs of the day, “Wonderland of Dreams,” “Waltz of Long Ago,” “Cielito Lindo,” “Out There In the Sunshine With You,” and “Wildflower,” until they were too thirsty to keep their humming mechanisms functioning.

But every night they would hum together for hours. Their musical duets had the peculiar effect of silencing the discordant noises on their floor of E Ward, so that even Nurse Pritchard, the night nurse, could not complain. She simply stopped by their door between numbers to praise and encourage them. In her honor, they performed the “Humming Chorus” from
Madame Butterfly
, by Puccini, who was destined to die later that same year.

Ironically, they set to humming a number of fugue concepts. Both girls had been diagnosed as being in a “fugue state,” which psychologically means a dissociative disorder akin to amnesia or impaired consciousness, but which musically means a contrapuntal composition for two (or more) voices (or instruments). Neither Latha nor Jessica had the merest notion of what counterpoint is, and yet they discovered that this was the most exciting way to bring their hums together.

They eventually exhausted their memories of all the hymns, popular songs, operatic arias, circus music, ballroom music, ragtime, lullabies, Christmas carols, and spirituals, the latter including the poignant spiritual-like theme of the Largo of Symphony No. 9, “From the New World” by Anton Dvorak, as set a few years earlier to “Going Home” by the American black composer Harry Burleigh. The same tune was destined to be employed in several popular and classical variations and backgrounds, notably the 1948 movie, “The Snake Pit,” about a young woman in a mental hospital, who will be played by Olivia de Havilland, who will look remarkably like Latha and will be nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. Latha and Jessica, humming “Going Home” with their hearts more than their gums, realized that it was able to express their yearnings for home more clearly than any words could do, and that it was, in fact, a key to their amazing discovery that they could actually converse without spoken words.

Thereafter, all their humming was improvised, and although occasionally they hummed in harmony and counterpoint, lagging behind each other no more than a demisemiquaver, their humming was often solo, as they sought to swap the stories of their lives. Everything that we have learned so far about Latha’s childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood was converted into musical hums which she created for Jessica in exchange for Jessica’s biography. There is no way of knowing how long, how many days and weeks and months, they spent in this exchange, but it often brought tears to the eyes of each of them.

Jessica Toliver, Latha learned from her humming, was born in Lepanto, in flat northeastern Arkansas, near the sunken lands of the St. Francis River. Her father was a sharecropper. Nothing had happened to her to cause her hair to turn white. She was born that way. It is called albinism, and one of her aunts was also an albino. She was considered a freak in school, and in high school she dropped out because she was weary of being stared at, teased, taunted, mocked, and because her father wanted her at home to cook, to clean, and to give him sexual relief in as many different fashions as he could concoct and require. Jessica’s father had introduced her to “swamp root,” his own kind of homemade whiskey, in the belief that it would lessen her inhibitions, and she became practically addicted to the stuff, much more than Latha’s previous friend Flora Bohannon had been. Jessica at one time had imagined that her knight in shining armor was just down the road, coming her way, but he never showed up, and Jessica decided that even if he had, he would have found her freakish skin color and hair color repulsive, not to mention her pink eyes, which had often caused her to be quarantined from other students in fear that it was the highly contagious conjunctivitis. Jessica was not able to do any of the work that her father wanted her to do in the cotton fields, because exposure to sunlight caused her to sunburn very easily, and her father could not afford to buy any ointment for her. Her skin was scarred in several places where the sunburn had been severe.

Still, she might have been able to continue existing in this dreadful life for years, but she began to lose her ability to recognize people, places or things. She could not recall having met any of the persons who had been part of her life, or even her pet rabbit. She seemed to have lost her memory completely. Her father believed it was because of her consumption of his swamp root, and he tried to wean her from it, unsuccessfully. At length, he said, “You aint nothing but a vegetable,” and handed her over to the care of the county, who handed her over to the care of the state, who had her put up in the State Lunatic Asylum.

How does one person hum to another such narrative as “You aint nothing but a vegetable”? It sounds inconceivable, but if one tries, one can almost hear the harsh humming of those words as quoted by the man’s daughter and victim. One can also easily imagine how that girl would come to believe that she no longer existed, that her life had ended long before she was confined to this place.

For her part, Latha was able to reproduce for Jessica the feelings, the moods, the real meanings, without any verbal interference, of her rape and maternity and the theft of her baby by her evil sister and brother-in-law. Because they had nothing better to do, they would often hum back to each other whatever extemporaneous tunes they had hummed to narrate their stories. It is far better to acknowledge one’s receptivity of another’s import by repeating it exactly—not verbatim, because it wasn’t word for word, but hum for hum.

And in their quest for expressiveness they were inspired to imitate other instruments: Jessica could do a fine cello, Latha a flute, Jessica a dulcimer, Latha an English horn, Jessica a clarinet, Latha a harpsichord. They had long since discovered that sometimes the nose is more important than the gums for giving a special timbre to their humming. The landscape of their conversation was colored by harmonics; they did not know the meaning of but readily demonstrated
ritornello
,
cadenza
,
glissando
,
pizzicato
,
rubato
,
staccato
,
fermata
. If only somebody with access to a recording machine had made an attempt to preserve their creations!

Their music became their world, and they knew no other. If that is insanity, then both were totally beyond help and should have been moved on to F Ward.

Of course they were not able to keep humming night and day around the clock (although there was no clock anywhere), possibly because their lips and tongues and throats and gums and nasal passages inevitably became too dry to lubricate the sounds they made. Thus they spent many hours of each day simply lying on their cots. Sometimes one or the other of them would move to the window and look out at the world, which never changed.

Thus it came to pass that one afternoon when Jessica was at the window and Latha was lying on her cot, there came a voice from outside: “Do you know Latha Bourne?” It was a man’s voice, and of course Jessica did not answer it. After a while, the voice called, “Is Latha Bourne up there?” Jessica stuck out her tongue at whoever was asking.

Latha lay for a while, wondering if she had begun to hear voices, as most of the inmates did. But it was clearly her name, spoken twice. She began to rise up from her cot. She lifted a foot; she lifted an arm; she lifted another foot, another arm; she raised up her head, her shoulders; she sat up; she put her feet on the floor; she pushed down on the edge of the cot with her hands and rose up; she stood; she turned; she began to walk toward the window but realized it was too slow; she began to run; she ran and ran and ran and finally reached the window and stood beside Jessica, looking out.

There was nobody there. Jessica began to hum the story of a German girl named Rapunzel, and Latha especially liked the part about the witch cutting off Rapunzel’s hair, as Latha’s and Jessica’s hair was cut short, but she liked most of all the part about the king’s son, blinded, after years of miserable wandering, finding Rapunzel and her twin children in a deserted place, and how her tears of joy touched his eyes and healed his blindness.

Was it the night of that same day? Or a night later? Latha no longer had any sense of time at all, but late one night after she and Jessica had fallen asleep, she woke to the sound of something scratching at the door, as if many keys were being tried in search of one that fit. Then the door opened and a strange man came in. It was the first man she had seen in months, maybe years, and she knew he was a man, dressed in a suit, but he didn’t look like a doctor. He knelt beside her cot and gently gave her shoulder a shake, then whispered to her, “Latha, honey, it’s me. I’ve come to take you home. Wake up, sweetheart, and let’s get on back home.”

Latha knew that she was awake, but she had no reason to believe that she was not dreaming, or fantasizing, or gone to some kind of heaven where one’s Prince Charming becomes one’s hero. She asked herself if she truly knew who this man was, because there was distinctly something familiar about him, as if she had seen him in many, many dreams that had filled her nights before. But she could not speak his name to save her soul; she could not even speak it to herself. Still she was thrilled that she did indeed
know
him. He was the first non-stranger she had seen in a long, long time.

Without even trying, she smiled. He would have smiled back at her but his eyes were so close to hers that he couldn’t even see the smile down below.

“Howdy, Latha, honey,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home. Now, don’t you make a sound, sweetheart, because nobody knows I’m here. Now you just get your dress on and we will get out of this place and I will take you home, away from all these crazy people.”

Slowly she rose up out of her cot, not at all modest about the fact that she was naked. But he turned his face away as if the sight of her nakedness had shocked him. She could only stand there like a statue of Venus while she waited for him to turn his face back to her, and when he did he turned it abruptly away once more and began searching around for some garment to put on her. She had none. They were not even permitted the ugly gray gowns that were worn in the other wards. While he was searching the room for something in which to clothe her, Jessica woke and began to watch him. Jessica hummed to Latha a question asking who he was, but Latha was not able to hum his name in reply. He put his finger to his lips and said to Jessica, “Shhh.” Then he took the wool blanket off Latha’s cot and wrapped it around her, then said to her, “Come on.”

Jessica spoke, the first actual words Latha had ever heard her say. “Take me.”

These words were addressed to the man in such a way that Latha wondered if Jessica was asking to have sex with him. But maybe she just wanted to be rescued too.

The man said, “I caint. No time. Sorry.”

Jessica said, loudly, “Take me!”

“I’m sure sorry,” the man said, then he began pushing Latha out through the door.

Chapter twenty-three

T
he man closed the door and re-locked it, but even the door closed would not muffle the sounds of Jessica, who was sobbing, and then started loudly humming a message to Latha begging her to persuade the man to let her go along with them. There was nothing Latha could say, to her or to him. There was nothing Latha could hum to her.