Lilith (14 page)
We passed a tall, dark-eyed boy with the sallow, gaunt, ascetic face of a Talmudic scholar, standing under a sycamore tree and touching gently with long sensitive fingers the ragged mottled bark, peering closely and wistfully, as if it awakened in him some bewildering memory. He murmured, “Good morning, Miss Brice,” turning to stare at us with humble, haunted eyes; and I felt a sudden passionate yet strangely selfish impulse to bless his misfortune, because it ended mine.
“He was a great language scholar,” Bea said. “He knew Arabic, Sanskrit and Persian before he was sixteen. He can quote the Upanishads for an hour without pausing. He’s only twenty-two now.”
In the shop the converted barn and loft which I had seen sometimes from the street—she introduced me to the foreman, a handsome Scandinavian-looking young man named Lindquist, under whose charge ten or twelve patients, some with personal attendants, were working with quiet absorption. He took me, with a most engaging enthusiasm, around the whole shop, demonstrating its machinery—electric drills, potter’s wheels, looms and kilns—and showing me the tools and materials of all the arts and crafts that were practiced there.
“It’s a good shop,” he said. “We’ve got good equipment and material, but we need more room, as you can see. I want to have the kilns put downstairs; they’re too heavy for these old floors, anyway. There are lots of things that need to be done, but they get a great deal of pleasure out of it as it is, and we’ve had some wonderful results.”
I watched a fierce-eyed man with a stubble of red beard molding a clay vase on the potter’s wheel. He had blunt, strong hands with which he shaped firmly and surely the moist, spinning clay, his feet plying the treadle, humming to himself.
“Are you a new patient?” he asked, raising his eyes briefly.
“No. I may be going to work here. I’m just visiting.”
“Ah. Do you read Dostoevski?”
“I’ve read
Crime and Punishment
and
The Brothers Karamazov
.”
“Have you?” he asked intensely, stilling his feet on the treadle and looking up at me. “Do you believe it? That if there is no God, there can be no such thing as virtue?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it seems to me that if there is no God, then virtue is even more remarkable.”
“Because it’s voluntary, you mean?”
“Yes, and because it’s its own reward. If you don’t expect any reward in heaven, and probably not on earth, either, then the only reason for practicing virtue is out of respect and sympathy for your fellow men. And that seems more virtuous to me than simply obeying a commandment.”
“An idealist!” he cried. “This is delightful! I hope you will come to work here. You have a philosophic mind. We shall be great friends!”
“I hope so,” I said.
“You made a great hit with Mr. Palakis,” Bea said when we had left the shop. “It was exactly the right way to speak to him. We put a great emphasis on that here—not talking down to patients, not indulging or coddling them. The more you can persuade them into mature and responsible conversations and relationships—as long as you don’t demand too much from them—the better it is. You did that very well.”
I had spoken, as a matter of fact, entirely without calculation and was somewhat surprised by the spontaneity of my own reply; but I was nevertheless much pleased by the success of this first contact with a patient.
“It’s very hard at first,” she went on, “not to be self-conscious or patronizing, and this is a feeling that many workers never get over. I think you have to have a certain talent for dealing with these people, and I don’t know that it can ever be learned. Of course that doesn’t mean that you can enter into perfectly normal and enthusiastic relationships with them—thinking that you can is one of the chief pitfalls of this kind of work. So many of the patients are intellectually equal or superior to us that we sort of automatically assume they are emotionally equal as well; but that isn’t true, of course, or they wouldn’t be here. And we have to remind ourselves of it constantly.
“We try to maintain a level of perfect candor with them in everything. If we didn’t, it would create an oppressive atmosphere for them—a feeling that they were being manipulated or persecuted, that things were being concealed from them, that there was duplicity on our part—an atmosphere that would only nourish the paranoid feelings that most of them have already. But, as I say, this doesn’t mean that we can enter into wholehearted relationships. There has to be a certain amount of professional reserve, the worker has to keep himself emotionally detached and intact. Which can be more difficult than it sounds, offhand, because some of these people have very subtle, very powerful personalities.”
She paused to nod toward a middle-aged man with stiff gray hair, hoeing furiously in a small kitchen garden at the end of the narrow lane down which we had walked behind the shop. “That’s Mr. Levitz,” she said, smiling. “He is one of my favorite patients. He supplies us with fresh corn and lettuce all summer and writes epic poetry on brown paper bags. He’s very kind and dignified and will tell you that the only way to keep really healthy is to drink a glassful of human blood every morning.”
I was perhaps a bit disconcerted by the traditional gentle wryness of her tone in referring to these eccentricities of a “crazy” person, but it was belied by the sympathy and experience out of which it was spoken and was, as I came to learn, a common manner of workers at the Lodge—a kind of mild, unmalicious, professional license against oversolemnity. As if to distinguish this attitude from the one of patronization against which she had just enjoined me, she smiled and said, “On the other hand, you mustn’t ever lose your sense of humor. You probably need it more here than anywhere in the world.”
The grounds of the Lodge, I saw as Bea escorted me about them, were far more extensive than I had ever realized in looking in at the old mansion from the street. Behind it they ran on to include several acres of the fields of the surrounding countryside, a huge old farmhouse in which several of the resident doctors lived, a dormitory for nurses and attendants, and, in the near distance, half a mile beyond the slope of an interceding hill, a large modern brick building, which she called Hillcrest.
“That’s where our old people stay,” she said. “We have a few senile patients here who only receive custodial care. It’s very different from the Lodge. Also, the clinic and hospital are over there, where Lodge patients are taken when they’re ill. Do you see the water beyond?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the pond. It has a dock and a rowboat. Patients with ground privileges can swim and go boating there, as long as there’s an attendant on duty. We own that old barn on the other side of it, too. The fields are planted every year with market crops. Patients who want to can work in them, and they’re paid a percentage of the profits for their work. We had a wonderful yield of wheat last year, which they raised and harvested almost entirely by themselves. I want to just show you Field House now, and then we can have some lunch.”
This was an old brick cottage on the main grounds, a few hundred feet to the rear of the mansion and lying adjacent to the tennis courts and playing greens. It had a large screened porch, furnished with more of the wicker furniture and a ping-pong table, and a huge old-fashioned sunlit living room with a grand piano in one corner, overstuffed furniture, glass-paned bookcases lined with leather-bound classics, a phonograph and a record library. There was a kitchen, as well, on the ground floor, and the upper story had been divided into separate rooms to accommodate seven patients. The door of one of these was open, and, glancing into it, I saw an unmade bed, its sheets trailing on the floor, and a bedside table littered with fragments of a broken mirror, an empty paper cup and scattered pencils, coins and wads of crumpled foil. Above the bed was a print of Delacroix’s “Hamlet,” which had been disfigured by a bold encirclement, in red ink, of the prince’s head.
“This is Warren Evshevsky’s room,” Bea said. “The boy we saw outside just now.” She frowned at the disorder and closed the door gently. “He isn’t doing awfully well lately; it’s that business with Lilith Arthur.” She stood brooding privately for a moment, her hand on the doorknob, and then said more matter-of-factly, “Field House is a sort of weaning place. When patients have had ground privileges for a while and have been able to manage them responsibly, they’re transferred over here from the main building. They live here entirely without supervision, as if they were in a small guest home. There’s an attendant on duty in the kitchen, but he is there really only in case of emergency. The patients look after themselves, cook simple meals if they like, and do their own housekeeping. They play chess and bridge together, read, organize parties, listen to music, and gradually adjust themselves to a community life. It’s a difficult period for them; very often they aren’t up to it and have to be returned to the main lodge. But if they do well here for a few months, then they’re given town privileges, which means that they can take a room in Stonemont, even do part-time work occasionally, and report to the Lodge only for treatment and conferences. For some of them it’s the last stage before final rehabilitation; they spend less and less time here, become gradually independent, and finally ask to be discharged. Field House is really the first big step in their social recovery, and it’s very exciting to see them transferred over here—they’re always so proud and happy, and rather frightened at the same time. It gives us a feeling of real personal triumph when someone we’re particularly interested in is moved over here; and it’s always a very sad day if they have to be moved back again.”
We had left Field House and were approaching the main lodge from the rear. Looking up at it, I saw for the first time that the entire back of the building had been fitted with a three-tiered structure of concrete porches, each entirely enclosed by the heavy diagonal steel wire which barred all of the Lodge windows, set one upon another, like a stack of cages. On the first of these, a floor above the ground, a grinning dark-haired girl in a torn yellow dress stood clutching the wire with curled fingers and calling down to us in a foolish mechanical voice, as if reciting by rote a list of memorized civilities, “Hi, Miss Brice. Are you going to have lunch now? It’s a nice day, isn’t it, Miss Brice? I hope you have a nice lunch, Miss Brice. You have a very nice-looking friend. It certainly is a nice day, isn’t it?”
“It’s a lovely day,” Bea said, smiling up at her. “How are you today, Miss Glassman?” She unlocked a large metal door at the rear of the building which opened directly into a self-operated elevator, and as we entered it the endless mild torrent of inanities still floated down from the girl above. We rode the elevator down one level to the basement and walked along a tiled corridor to the staff dining room, a bright and noisy cafeteria, full of the pleasant clatter of steel cutlery and thick commercial china and the cheerful garrulous chatter of the diners, who, after the tension of their work, appeared to relieve themselves with a particularly informal, even boisterous, behavior at luncheon. We sat apart at a small table and Bea smiled at me over a salad of cottage cheese. I felt quite inexplicably happy.
“I don’t think I’ll take you up to the floors today,” she said. “I have a pretty busy afternoon, and I think you’ve had quite a session for one day already. What do you think of it?”
“I think it’s extremely interesting. I’d like to work here very much.”
“Really? You don’t feel there’s anything . . . depressing or frightening about it?”
“No. It appeals to me very much. As a matter of fact, it seems like the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do.”
“Well, think about it this evening. Then, if you like, you can come back in the morning and I’ll take you up on the floors.”
“What do you think about me?” I asked after a moment. “Do you think I could do the work all right?”
“Yes. I think you might make a very good O. T. I’d like you to start, if you feel quite sure about it.”
“I do. Very sure.”
“All right. Then I’ll expect you in the morning. The O. T. staff meets at eight-thirty every morning in the craft shop, and we make up a schedule for the day. I’ll assign you to one of the other workers tomorrow, and you can accompany him for a week or so, until you get to know your way. Can you plan to spend the whole day tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll talk about it in the evening. We meet again every night at five o’clock to go over the whole day and make out reports.”
“All right, fine.” I lifted my glass of water and could not help smiling into it.
“You seem quite pleased,” Bea said.
“Yes. It means a good deal to me. I’m very anxious to do well at it.”
“Yes, I can see that,” she said.
I left the Lodge full of a strangely agitated and yet pacific feeling which I find it impossible to remember accurately, much less to describe. For how is one to describe that wholesome sense of merriment and gravity uniquely merged which is fulfillment? Perhaps as the sudden illumination and warming of cold, sealed cellars of the spirit by the delightful opening of doors. I clutched a handful of leaves from a privet hedge as I passed and lifted them to my nostrils, blowing them from my hand in a little glittering shower of green. The streets and houses of the village where I had been born seemed to possess, as I felt myself to possess, a new dimension. The town seemed more beautiful to me, for I was to serve it and to see it whole. I was to participate, at last, in one of its mysteries.
I believe my grandfather was disappointed at my news, although he pretended not to be, and offered me, by way of congratulation, a small glass of apple brandy. My grandmother smiled and said softly when I kissed her temple before I went upstairs to bed, “Your poor mother would be very happy, Sonny.”
“I know she would, Grandma,” I said.
