Psychology and Other Stories (21 page)

Singleton's belief, that he had been brought here by a competitor to make some business deal, had never had much more substance than a dream recalled a few minutes after waking. The strange gift-giving ceremony of the fat man in the shower cap could not be reconciled with that belief—and so the dream faded. No alternative hypothesis came to mind, however, for this scene was quite unlike any other in his experience.

“This is the only towel you get,” said the clothes-room attendant, shaking a swatch of cloth the length of his forearm in Singleton's face like a penalty flag. Singleton tried to snatch it from him, but the man had more to say. “So don't
lose
it,” he concluded. Then he relinquished the prize with a huff of resignation, as if he knew for
a fact that his warning had fallen on deaf ears, that Singleton was going to burn or tear or bury the towel as soon as he was out of sight. “Well, let's see what you have in your pockets.”

This struck Singleton as a good idea. By showing his tickets, he could perhaps figure out what train he was on.

The clothes-room attendant took his job seriously. Because it was his duty to confiscate all potentially dangerous items, he felt that the safety of the hospital depended on him. Because the safety of the hospital depended on him, he felt entitled to more than the starvation wage the hospital paid its attendants. To bring his salary more in line with his responsibility, he confiscated each week a few items that would, perhaps, have made dubious weapons (although, to be sure, a watch chain can, in a pinch, be used as a garrote; some cigarette cases have rather sharp corners; and even a cufflink would not feel so nice stabbed into your eye). Because he stole from the patients, he felt tenderly and paternal towards them. Because he felt a little guilty, he did his job well.

So he applied himself to the matter of Singleton's eyeglasses and hearing aid with the same fastidious deliberation he brought to more dangerous or profitable items. It was his general policy to let anyone who came in the front door wearing glasses keep them—reasoning that, if they had managed to get around in the world without losing or breaking them, they could probably be trusted to preserve them in the more circumscribed world of the hospital. Singleton, however, kept putting his glasses on and taking them off, so the clothes-room attendant did not know if the general policy pertained. Finally, recalling that three of his intakes had smashed their glasses already that month, he decided, somewhat vindictively, to commandeer these. To avoid a dispute, he reassured Singleton that he would not miss them because nothing visibly interesting ever happened here anyway. He kept the hearing aid too, because
it was fragile and presumably expensive (though not, he thought, pawnable), and because he could not imagine where the old man would get replacement batteries for it. Yes, it would be better to save the hearing aid for special occasions, such as visits, or Christmas. In any case, Singleton apparently had one good ear, and that was more than some people could say. He also took Singleton's sport coat, tie, shoes, and suspenders. He let him keep the comb.

Singleton was too bemused to protest. He had found in his left front trousers pocket not his wallet, but a wad of newspaper folded to look like a wallet.

When her brother called, Katherine was either having a midlife crisis or an affair.

The man she was in love with (if she was in love with him) was nearly young enough to be half her age. He also was obnoxious and emotionally fragile, already had a girlfriend, and happened to be one of her husband's graduate students.

But it had been such a long time since any man had given her the unambiguous compliment of his desire; and the reminder that she was still a sexual being, a bundle of nerves still capable of becoming excited and exciting other bundles of nerves, had been as poignant as a glimpse of a forgotten self in an old high school photo.

Her heart had only started thudding after Elroy left the bathroom that night of the party, but it had not stopped thudding since. She was a wreck; anything was possible. She was going to smash everything, throw everything away, for a fuck. Was she?

Yesterday she had finally called him. He hadn't even given her a chance to offer the pathetic, flimsy cover story she had prepared (shopping, errands, lunch?). He had cut her off, affably enough, saying that he was “with people” and would see her soon. (The affability was somehow worse than curtness, which would at least have
acknowledged the impropriety of her call, and what it signified.) To the interpretation of those two minutes of words she brought all the flailing, anguished creativity she had brought to her reading of Restoration poetry, twenty years earlier, when she'd needed to churn out another essay. For twenty-four hours she churned out brilliant hypotheses, each of which, in the moment she considered it, was absolutely convincing. He wanted her—yes. He loathed her—correct. He had been drunk that night, didn't remember groping her in the bathroom—unquestionably. Everything was possible.

She was still producing hypotheses when Doug called to tell her about Jerome.

The incongruity struck her like an affront. She felt as if, on page 500 of an 800-page novel that she was engrossed in, the author had suddenly embarked on a completely new story or introduced a completely new character without even so much as a paragraph break to announce the divagation.

She agreed (too readily) that their father was crazy, but scoffed at Doug's claim that she was his favorite, and denied that she could do anything to help. She wanted nothing to do with any scheme to clap anyone in a nuthouse—not even J. Jerome.

(Years later, long after Elroy had vanished from her self-story, this was the version of events she clung to: she told herself that she had told her brother that she washed her hands of the whole matter.)

But that night she was ruffled. Three hours later, when the phone rang again, she did not even pick up. She was thinking about her father.

The words “manic-depressive” sank into her like a stain setting into a tablecloth. Disparate parts of herself came together; old beliefs and memories reorganized themselves around this magical phrase like iron filings around a magnet. Before now, she had had to rely, when telling the story of her father, on homely psychologisms like
“abrasive,” “unreliable,” “arrogant,” “obnoxious,” “inconsiderate,” “sexist,” “self-absorbed,” “hard to get along with.” Now she saw how all these traits could be—in fact,
had been
all along—subsumed under the one precise, unemotional, clinical term. The reason no one had ever been able to get along with goddamn J. Jerome Singleton was that he was crazy—really, honestly crazy.

Take for instance that preposterous family myth that she had been his favorite. All her brothers remembered were the times he had shown an interest in her, the times he called her from the road, the times he inveigled her into coming to Chicago, Boston, New York on the train to visit him. What they forgot, or had never seen, was how quickly Jerome's fatherly moods passed, how often she would find herself alone on some empty station platform or cooling her heels in some extravagant hotel room, a thirteen-year-old girl left to her own devices in a huge alien city. If he never invited Doug or Aaron or Tom, he also never abandoned them.

She had never understood these sudden inexplicable changes of heart of his. So many years she had wasted trying to figure out if her father loved her, hated her, or was simply indifferent. Now at last she saw that all of these had been true—in succession. “Manic depression” suggested to her exactly this changeability, this oscillation between extremes. It made sense. Her father was a manic-depressive. She heard herself saying it, wryly or matter-of-factly, but always without self-pity:
My father was a manic-depressive. He hugged me and pushed me away. He called me to him, then ran off. He gave me a piano but left the lessons to me; and he never came to the recitals. (He bought Tom a car, but only after he'd enrolled Tom in a mechanic's course!) When I wanted to build a kite, he ordered the kit, lent me his tools and his workshop (which the boys weren't allowed to use—too dangerous!); then, on the day we were supposed to launch it, he disappeared. That is how I see him: encouraging me, even running alongside me;
then, suddenly, gone. And I am alone, left holding the string. I was his favorite, and he didn't give a damn about me. He was fickle. He was flighty. He was manic-depressive.

The ringing phone brought her out of her reverie, but she did not pick up. Instead she went for a walk. On West 68th she saw an old man in a bright green sport coat coming towards her, rubbing his hands and grimacing with self-importance, his tongue between his teeth—and she was thrown back thirty years to the day she'd crossed the street to avoid him.

She was on her way to school; she didn't know he was back in town; he hadn't been home in months. For some reason, she pretended she didn't see him. She crossed the street. She was twelve and she had snubbed her own father.

At least, she'd always assumed she had. Now she saw another possibility: she had been scared of him. And she had been right to be scared. For he was crazy. He had always been crazy.

But the man on West 68th Street was not her father. In fact, he was not even holding his tongue between his teeth; he just had large lips.

When she got home she took the phone off the hook. Elroy seemed as trivial as a nightmare on waking. Subsumed by her past, she could not remember how any part of him connected to any part of her.

But the next morning, with two days before Carl was due to return, she put the receiver back on the cradle, telling herself that she was not committing herself to anything.

Singleton did not know where he was or who these people were, but he could see that they were only doing their jobs. He understood that he had been gripped by the cogs of some vast machine, that he was passing through the works of some immense bureaucracy; and
his admiration for large, inexorable organizations (which reminded him of his factories), coupled with his dread of having his memory lapses detected, persuaded him to keep quiet for the time being. For about twenty-four hours he let himself be carried along like a cracker on a conveyer belt. Then character reasserted itself.

Identity is memory; and if we believe the latest theories of the psychologists, memory is stored in the connections between brain cells. Thus, for a memory to become established, to become part of ourselves, it must find connections to other parts of ourselves. New thoughts, new experiences, new ideas must find echoes already in us, if they are to be entertained, felt, or believed. This takes time. New memories establish themselves slowly, like spreading stains—or like strangers settling in to a new town.

This is why, as we age and our minds deteriorate, new experience loses its capacity to impress itself on us, and why our distant youth begins to seem more vivid than what we did yesterday, last week, or last year. Old memories are like tomato plants: they have many roots.

Sometimes this trend is more pronounced; sometimes it is quite catastrophic. Sometimes the last year, or the last five or ten or twenty years of our lives, evaporate altogether, while the rain of new experience, of present day-to-day existence, dwindles to a faint drizzle, which scarcely dimples the face of the water; and, with so little downward force to oppose them, the deepest currents rise to the surface. Then the past grips us, while the present becomes shadowy and unreal. When today's events do manage to pierce the bubbling upsurge of ages past, they reach us faintly, as if from a great distance, and often in isolation, untethered to other memories—just the way, in fact, that memories of our distant childhood reach most of us in midlife. This curious inversion sometimes leads to the mistaken belief that the recent past is ancient history, and vice versa.

This explains, for example, why Singleton wrongly placed the memory of his missing wallet in the distant past, when in fact it had occurred only a few days earlier. But it also explains why, fifteen years after Singleton had returned home to his family, fifteen years after he had retired from the active life of a manufacturing magnate, he began suddenly to revert to his former self. As he forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be doing, he could only remind himself
who
he was. That information was stored deep.

J. Jerome Singleton was a great man, a rich man, a powerful man, a captain of industry. He was a force to be reckoned with. His name was known. He was somebody, goddamn it. Events depended on him. People were waiting for him. He was needed elsewhere. He did not belong here.

Alvin had caught sunstroke on the beach and wandered into a well-to-do neighborhood where his odd behavior was interpreted as ravening drunkenness probably compounded by insanity. He had fully recovered within twenty-four hours, but within twenty-four hours he was in the asylum. Now he had to wait the minimum ninety days to get out, like everyone else.

Scott's wife had caught him masturbating. Without a word, she'd left the house for a week; when she came back, she suggested, in her clear unabashed schoolteacher's voice, that it was her opinion and the opinion of her closest friends that he was mortally oversexed, and that what was obviously called for was a long rest far away from everyone who knew him, and her. He had been too embarrassed to argue; secretly he agreed; his mother had caught him masturbating once, too, and had whipped him, and wept.