On the River Styx (12 page)

“Drive on! Drive on!” cried Horace, gaze averted.

I assured him that there were colors, shapes, and sizes for even the most spiritual taste, all wearing the most angelic smiles imaginable. A few now rose and sashayed forward, as Hassid flared his nostrils in anticipation. “Whore-ass, you have come to the right place,” he gloated, poking the forefinger of one hand through the fist of the other.

“Drive on!” Horace implored him. “
Please
. Drive on!”

Just then, a girlish voice rose above the dulcet clamor. “Hey, Joe!” the siren called, “I yam a virgin!”—an unpardonable
donable insult to the Turk’s intelligence, it appeared, since he immediately frowned and turned away. Yet what he had heeded, I realized later, was the anguished yelp of a soul about to be cast down into perdition—was it that, or was it Horace’s use of his first name?

“Please, Hassid,” Horace had whispered, leaning forward and pressing his brow to the back of the front seat.

Hassid stared straight ahead and did not speak. Then, shrugging his shoulders in apology, he asked me gently, “All right, my friend? What is a day, a week, a month, after all …?” And to our astonishment, he folded his arms on his chest and sat back with a lordly sigh.

“Drive on,” he said.

Poor Pierre, half-turned in the front seat, shook his bony skull in unashamed grief. Failing to avail ourselves of these young women, his expression said, might prove a mortal blow to his poor children. As for Charlie, he gave vent to his outrage in a furious burst of speed that nearly wrecked his car in the deep ruts. Pursued by a large and savage dog—nowhere to be seen as we drove up—we hastened away to the coast road and the harbor, our entire sojourn having occupied less than a minute.

Horace, by his own fervent statement, had never had carnal knowledge of a woman other than her to whom he had cleaved in holy matrimony. To his dismay, the wicked Turk, regretting, perhaps, his kindly gesture, spoke lightly of a carnal caper in the morgue. These revelations, which came to light in the high excitement that followed our departure from the private club, engaged our attention all the way back to the ship.

Under hard lights, in the steaming air, soft sacks of meal tumbled by stevedores raised a fine dust from the freighter’s
hold. The day aboard ship, the Chief confided, had been uneventful save for one thrilling event: The First, intoxicated, had attempted to descend a rope boarding-ladder without troubling to secure it properly beforehand, and had descended farther than he might have wished, into the bay.

D
OMINICA
, S
AINT
L
UCIA
, Barbados, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad. Horace no longer went ashore except to mail letters to his wife and pay calls on the local missionaries. He had produced a thin mustache which did not suit him, and a pair of shorts which suited him still less, and perhaps these accoutrements dissuaded his peers from offering him the opportunity to preach that his heart desired. The nearer he drew to wife and children, the more he gave way to abject homesickness. Try as we would to tease him out of it by promising him young girls at Port of Spain, he did not rise up to denounce us, as he once had, but only complained disspiritedly of the smell of fish, which had escaped its unknown source and trailed him everywhere. And still he wrote daily to his wife, even when our journey was so advanced that no letter would reach her before he did.

“
What
do you tell?” Hassid would yell, tearing his hair. “Excuse me, I don’t get it! You reveal how many pieces of meat you ate up at your dinner, or what is it? What happened to you on this stinking ship between yesterday and now? What can you possibly be
saying
to her?
What?
”

“You would know that, Hassid, if you’d ever found a wife,” Horace said pityingly. He winked at me, but Hassid did too. I felt an unexpected twinge of isolation.

We left the Windwards in our wake, cleared Port of Spain. Day after day, down the long and empty coast of the
wild continent, the freighter rolled southeastward through an olive sea, against the might of the equatorial current. The long meals were purgatorial, the white sun mute; the cargo gave off a sweet reek, the warm air thickened. Once again Hassid was seasick and depressed, and took such comfort as he could from reviling Horace. In the iron bow, hands fluttering like birds, they shrieked their love song to the wind, stick figures lifted toward the far light of heaven, plummeting again, on the oily clouds of the vast tropic horizon.

1959

O
nce, when approaching the hospital by the side road through the woods, she knew she would round the final bend to find it gone—not gone, precisely, but sunk back into that coarse New England hillside like a great crushed anthill, its denizens so many mad black dots darting in and out and over the dead earth. Earlier she had imagined that the season here was always autumn, and she struggled still with an idea that the inmates, in some essential way, did not exist at all.

But Lime Rock State Mental Hospital surged out from behind the corner of the wood, awaiting her. Her heart quickened: if the sun shines here, she thought irrationally, it must shine everywhere.

She was relieved to see the buildings. There were always figures on the woods road, figures whose status or intent
was never certain. And patients, as one of the nurses had once warned her, tried now and then to get away. In her caution, Anne Pryor perceived in all strange faces on the grounds a certain secretive sly sickness, and was glad each morning of the protection of the buildings, where the ill, organized like livestock, were dealt with by the duly authorized.

The wings of each building extended toward the recesses of others, in a pattern like a puzzle pulled apart, and unless one knew one’s way—as Anne, though three weeks here, was certain she did not—the puzzle seemed malevolent and confusing. The roofs of these buildings were slate and steep, overhanging dark grilled porches set into the ends, like caves, and the windows, hollow-eyed and barred, crouched back in brick of a rufous earthen color. This color pervaded the place, even to the lifeless ground from which it rose.

For though Lime Rock Hospital had stood for thirty years, it had never been absorbed by the countryside. Rather than creep forward to camouflage its outline, the growth on this New England hill had seemed to shrink away, leaving it more and more exposed. The grass was thin, and the earth maintained its excavated look. It had a violent iron smell, like blood.

This morning the smell was muted by the new November cold. Leaving the car in the yard behind the Administration Building, Anne took a last deep breath before entering its basement by the fire door. In the converted boiler room Dr. Sobel and Mrs. McKittredge and Harry Marvin were having coffee. Dr. Sobel put down his cup as Anne entered the room and said good morning to her as he left. Every day Dr. Sobel, an odd soft little man with a Phi Beta Kappa key, moved a little more quickly, more intensely, toward
the wards. He called them the Augean Stables. The term was facetious, and Dr. Sobel was not a facetious man. He used it only because he did not want people to tell him—as Mrs. McKittredge, or Mac, as she was called, had long since told him—that, for his own sake, he ought to recognize the element of hopelessness in his task.

“He’s going to die here, old Doc Sobel, and he may be a patient by the time he does.” Harry Marvin, twenty-eight, was sallow and dark, with a long cropped head and a manner which was not Harvard, as he imagined, but only faintly effeminate. He had been, in the war, a pharmacist’s mate, and on this slim medical background based his opinion, shared by Anne, six years his junior, that she had neither the experience nor the temperament to work here.

“Mental hospitals,” Mac remarked, “must settle for what they can get.” In saying this, she implied no criticism of Dr. Sobel but was simply stating for the first time that day her favorite fact. Mac was a social worker and, unlike Sobel, was less concerned with the patients than with their treatment at the hands of the state. “And what do they get?” she demanded. “They get the Sobels, who are too starry-eyed to see that two thirds of what their salaries should be go for the mushrooms on those politicians’ steaks. They get the Harry Marvins, whose medical training wouldn’t qualify them for a job in an Old Dogs’ Home. And they fill in with little student nurses and nice kids like Anne, who are overworked for nothing!”

“Well, they have
you
anyway, Mac,” Anne said, her tentative laugh defeating the remark.

“That’s true,” Mac said, and grinned obligingly. Between her fingers a permanent cigarette, goaded by a mannish
thumb, flicked up and down like the tail of a nervous bird.

“I’ve got to get over to the Monkey House,” Harry Marvin said. Harry worked in the children’s wards and, like Dr. Sobel, had given his task a name. Anne had once thought that the term referred to the usual clamor of children, or that it bore, perhaps, a cute-as-monkeys context. But on her first visit there, her senses explained it far more harshly. And its aptness breached a strict staff code by which all inmates were thought of, and referred to, as “patients,” though the majority were beyond all aid and went untreated, even by Dr. Sobel.

Mac’s wry wrinkled face winced openly at that name, but she said nothing. She was a practical woman, and clearly she knew that Harry Marvin did his work and, however flippant, did it very well. Nevertheless Mac disapproved. She seemed to sense a danger that Anne, too, had recognized already—that if, even for one moment, they were to acknowledge the degradation of their charges, to regard them openly as unworthy of respect and love, to regard them as subhuman, if once, in short, they succumbed to uneasy laughter, then all pretense would disappear, and the hospital would no longer be a hospital but a prison.

Harry Marvin knew this, too. Glancing at them, he frowned, discomfited. “Well, I’m off,” he said, after a moment. “You, too, Anne?”

“She hasn’t had her coffee,” Mac rebuked him.

“No, I don’t need it, Mac.” Anne’s tone of breathless apology, abetted by a startled, mournful look, was characteristic of her manner. Inviting protection, it drew people to her, yet she felt at times that she spoke too loudly, even bumptiously, and was conscious of a certain coarseness in
her stance and gait more becoming, her mother had told her pointedly, to a tall boy of thirteen. Though pretty in an impermanent way, she had not yet learned to show herself to best advantage.

Or so said Harry Marvin, the very first time she had spoken with him alone. Shyly, she had sought him out because he was her generation and might supply the friendship essential to her in this place. But Harry had no time for frivolity. His was the clinical approach, and during their second talk, he made a number of observations on her sexual patterns, or rather, the absence of them. Disguised in his white frock, his fingertips together, he had lured her into admission of inexperience. As a cure he prescribed his own caress, and when she refused it without quite meaning to, accused her of being neurotic. His astonishment suggested that any girl resisting him might well end her days as a patient in Lime Rock State Mental Hospital. He went on to discuss her appetites, sublimated, he assured her, because as an only child she needed to dominate her widowed mother. Anne sought for the missing link in his diagnosis, which seemed a rash
non sequitur
and was, besides, inaccurate. Her mother, poor but proud, clung to her good family name and had never been dominated by anybody. But Anne, embarrassed by his use of the word “appetites,” nodded meekly in agreement. Too insecure to spy insecurity in another, she was anxious only to change the subject.

Anne and Harry walked in silence up the stairs and out the front door and along the driveway toward Anne’s building. The driveway continued down the slope to the front gate, which hid in the maple trees off the highway. So as to draw less attention to the hospital and its unwelcome presence in the township, the staff and the rare visitors
were encouraged to use the back road through the woods. The precaution seemed foolish, since the mass of raw structures, like a glacial deposit on its hillside, was a landmark for miles around. Yet its approaches were obscure, there were few signs. Though bald and exposed on its terrain of broken, rocky fields, the hospital, as one came nearer, sank out of sight into the woods.

“I suppose Mac took offense at my reference to the Monkey House.” They had paused at the door of Anne’s occupational therapy unit, which formed part of the ground floor of one of the buildings.

“Oh, I don’t think so. She knows you were only joking.”

“Listen, if you don’t want to get like Sobel, you have to relax once in a while, that’s all. And the Monkey House is the most depressing ward in the place. I mean, you always
hope
in there, and you’re always disappointed. So many of those kids are basically sound, or would be if only—”

“I know!” Anne said. “Have you met Ernest Hamlin?”

Interrupted, Harry shook his head in irritation. “Who’s Ernest?” he said.

“Oh, he’s a patient. He comes to O.T. now. But I mean, he’s basically sound. I’ve
talked
to him,” Anne offered as proof, speaking faster and faster. “He says—”

“Maybe they all are,” Harry said, and turned his back on her.

“Ernest Hamlin really is, though,” Anne called after him.

She watched him go, then turned and entered the outside door, unhappy. The inner door required a key, and she paused to hunt for it in her purse. As usual, she was very nervous, and today, upset by Harry Marvin, she dropped the key upon the floor.

On her first visit to the occupational therapy unit—and
surely this unit was the least threatening in all of Lime Rock, since only patients in control of themselves were allowed here without special supervision—she had felt a revulsion based on fear which passed immediately to vertigo and nausea. She had had to sit down, perspiring and cold. It had frightened her, that revulsion, since it was so baseless. There was nothing fearsome about the patients at O.T. Perhaps if they hadn’t gazed at her in that wide-eyed way, perhaps if the ward hadn’t smelled of children, of crude clay bowls and varnish, paint, of balsa wood and cardboard games, of apples and faint urine in the makeshift clothes …