The Long Journey Home (33 page)

No one came. No one came just as no one had come when I was a baby and screamed for hours, stopping only after my whole body was sweat-drenched, my nose running with mucus, my hands sticky with it, my breath coming in shallow gasps, and I had no energy left for screaming.

“Your screams still haunt me. I should never have left you alone crying so much. I only did what the books said for me to do,” my mother told me in her old age, her voice heavy with years of remorse.

But I was no longer in that crib in my grandfather’s house with its slanted floors and dark rooms. Now I was in a mental hospital in a small cold room that my friend will tell me did not exist. I don’t know how long I waited, or why. Hour after hour I lay on the cot, staring at the door. I didn’t know if it was night or day. The only sound was that of occasional footsteps in the hall. I was numb with the cold.

I don’t know what made me turn my eyes away from the blank wall across the room to stare at the door, but when I did, I saw a flicker of motion beginning in the wood’s grain, then another. As I watched, flames seemed to move through the locked door as if it had no substance. The flames hovered several feet above the floor, and inside them I saw Joan of Arc, her young face radiant with her own burning.

“I, Joan the Maid, the Lily Maid of France, am bound in chains,”
I had recited in a high school monologue. Memorizing the words, I had repeated them over and over until they had moved through my mind and body, and out through my mouth as if they were mine. “Try it once more, Margaret,” my drama coach would say, suggesting a pause, correcting the prolongation of a vowel. But high school was over, and college, and graduate school. Marriage was over, too, and I was in a locked room that my friend told me never existed. I was looking into the face of Joan of Arc, and nothing felt real and everything felt more real than I could bear. My own face felt the flames’ heat, while her face was consumed by fire. And then there was no face at all, just the door, and in front of it, the flames in which my sister’s clenched fists emerged, then her face with her blue eyes, blond hair blazing. And I thought that she had been waiting all these years for me to take her in my arms again and walk with her the way I did when she was a baby with pressure on the brain, and screaming. A part of me escaped my skin and moved out of my body toward her. Molecules of me were leaving their home of flesh and blood, tendon and bone, moving through the skin and out into the air toward her. But my sister’s flesh was becoming flame even as I approached, no face now, no body, no clenched fists rising. I saw only her burned bones. I thought:
How many years have they been burning? Burning. And begging for skin
.

This is a memory: It was 1951 and my sister was four years old and had pneumonia. Mother stayed at the hospital with her most of the time. She sat in a straight chair beside my sister’s crib. Sometimes she lay down and rested on the adult hospital bed that stood by the crib. After school I went to the hospital to keep Mother company.

I dreaded the walk down the hall to my sister’s room. It meant I had to walk past the room of the burned boy. I didn’t know his name or how old he was. Always he was screaming. And the stench coming from his room was human and terrible. Passing his room, I tried not to imagine what it must feel like to have the skin burned off your body. I was glad I didn’t know his name. I thought it was easier for
me not to know his name. I didn’t know that his scream and smell would be with me all of my life.

I wish I knew his name.

“They locked me in solitary confinement, and no one came,” I told Helen later. “I’m certain they did.” Still later, I drove north again to the hospital, that time alone. I spent a long time parked in the hospital parking lot looking up at the windows, trying to remember the floor plan of the ward, trying to imagine where the locked room might have been, wanting to know what of the experience of that room was dream, what, if anything, was waking reality.

Psychotic visions and dreams were intruded on by aides bringing meals on trays, or nurses with their carts full of medications. Or by frequent and welcome visits from my friends June, Amy, and Helen. Or by Chris, who had already learned to mask his own pain with a blazing intelligence and a searing wit.

That day June brought me a bag full of yarn in many colors. Awkwardly she handed it to me. She had witnessed my psychotic episodes before. Or “growth experiences,” as Dr. Turcotte had labeled them. I’d known June since I had begun to see her father in 1971, and she often kept Chris for me when I had to be away from home for one reason or another.

“Thank you,” I said, moved by her thoughtfulness. I didn’t tell her that I’d been waiting for a visit from Margaret Mead, who was coming from the land of the dead to visit me. All morning I’d sat waiting for her to arrive. I believed we had much to share with each other.

June sat in a straight chair across from me in the ward lounge, knees together, back rigid, hands clasped on her lap.

Helen was with her. She bent down and kissed me on the cheek. Then she put a stack of my favorite phonograph records from home on the table beside me: the musical
Milk and Honey
, Helen Reddy’s
Long Hard Climb, Odetta at Carnegie Hall
, the operas
Tosca, La Bohème
, and
La Traviata
. “Did you sleep last night?” Helen asked.

“Yes,” I answered. I didn’t tell her about the locked room. The experience was still too close to me; I couldn’t bear to put words to it yet. “Yes, I slept.” She sat down beside me.

I spilled the yarn into my lap and began to twist and knot it, a personal kind of macramé that I can only do when I’m in a state of madness, and then with a strange sense of confidence as if I’d spent whole lifetimes making things of yarn. “What beautiful colors!”

I can see that my working at the yarn was a comfort to June. She wanted the old Margaret back, the Margaret with whom she shared her poems and stories, the Margaret who was friend and inspiration to her. Knowing that she’d done something that pleased me comforted her.

“I’ve kept the plants watered,” Helen said. “You didn’t get any mail worth bringing.”

The three of us talked while my fingers twisted and knotted the yarn in a frenzy of motion. At each change in the mass of yarn I searched it with my fingertips as if I were a blind woman trying desperately to identify a shape.
There
.

Finally, my heart relaxed in my chest. I took a long breath. Then another. Reverently my fingers caressed the shape in my hand, the sculpture of yarn, the end of my search, even though I’d not known what I was searching for or why. But there—finally—in my hand was a tiny replica of the face of Jesus. It was not the Jesus of the Mexican straw crucifixes with their open and sometimes almost smiling mouths. It was not the face of the stained-glass Jesus in the Baptist church of my childhood. The Jesus face of many colors was very long and thin, and its eyes were closed. Feeling his shape, I thought of the Shroud of Turin. It felt most like that image of Jesus. In knots and twists of yarn in my hand I had found Jesus and was comforted. My eyes filled with tears, and I took several deep breaths before I spoke again.

“Thank you so much for bringing the yarn,” I said to June. “That
was such a thoughtful thing for you to do.” I didn’t tell her how deeply grateful I was for the comforting Jesus of many colors. “Thank you so much for the yarn,” I said.

“You’re welcome, Margaret. I wish I could do more to ease your pain.” Her dark hair glistened in the sunlight.

“And thanks to me, too, Margaret,” Helen said indignantly.

“Always thanks to you, Helen.”

Then my tears began again and I looked down at the peaceful Jesus resting in my palm.

Helen said something to June, and June responded. I was relieved to not have to talk now. Looking at the Jesus was making me remember how when rocking with pain the previous night, I had seen that the veil between the living and the dead was thinner than gauze. It was nothing at all but a veil in our minds. We are all here now, I knew, the living and the dead. You just had to have enough pain or need—or what?—and the mind’s veil falls away and there you are with whomever you most need at the moment.

As I had sat on the side of my bed in the locked room, shaking with a deep, inner sobbing, my old friend Joan of Arc was suddenly there beside me, her strong arms around me. I recognized her immediately, though she looked nothing at all like the Joan of Arc that the tall and aristocratic Ingrid Bergman played in the forties movie. She was a short peasant woman with a plain, cleared-eyed face. Still I recognized her and felt her essence. Bernadette of Lourdes was there also, both women capable and compassionate, calm and accepting. Then Saint Francis of Assisi came and knelt before us. He placed his weathered hands on ours while smiling his generous smile, wit and wisdom shining in his eyes. When my own pain was so great I thought I’d be unable to bear it, I was suddenly among those who’d accepted the pain and the unfathomable sorrow so completely that they had grown beyond all human boundaries. I was being comforted by those who had developed compassion and love like nothing I’d experienced in my sane mind. Strengthened by the saints, I no
longer found my pain unbearable. What mattered was that I—so flawed and broken a woman, so exhausted and depleted—rested then in the arms of saints.

I say I saw them, but I saw no one at all with my eyes. I saw with an inner vision, but a vision just as real. After I had accepted what was happening to me, the majesty and the mystery of it, I looked up and around me. As far as I could see were suffering human beings ministered to by saints devoted to the duties of love.

Then I saw my own mind as a blossom forever opening. Then I saw a Christ being taken from a cross, comforted and caressed by saints. And through this scene of Christ—a transparency like a slide—I could see another Christ being taken from a cross, and through the transparency of that image was another, then another. For as far as I could see, Christ after Christ was being taken off a cross and comforted. And still the blossom of my mind was opening.

Waking or sleeping? Dream or vision? When I tried to pull it into full consciousness, it floated just beyond my grasp. Vaporous. Tantalizing. In it, we were all words—our entire lives, past, present, and future, were contained in the letters of our names and in the spaces between them. Each name was a living entity. But our names had been shattered, had exploded into millions of letters flung out into the universe like the stars that light the night sky. There were millions of As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Es, Fs, and every other letter of the alphabet. And all alphabets. Each letter had the pulse of an individual, and all the letters of that individual pulsated together. All were filled with the sole purpose of reuniting.

My eyes were dazzled by light from stars strewn across the deep blue-black sky, an enormous net to hold the letters of our names,
each star a knot in that net. I stretched my arm, my fingers, as far as muscle, bone, and sinew allowed, but couldn’t reach even one letter of my name.

“Margaret!” a nurse called sharply. “Margaret! Keep your mind on what you’re doing. You almost spilled your milk. Eat up now before the aide comes to take the trays away.”

I looked down at my plate with its boiled potatoes and gravy, slices of baked chicken, carrots, and peas. I thought of all the human beings who’d died and rotted in the earth, feeding the earthworms, the searching roots of trees and grasses. I remembered the painting by Diego Rivera in which you can see a corpse under the earth and the roots of the corn plants searching that corpse for sustenance. Life from death. My head was spinning. I could no longer tell life from death or death from life, plant from person. I could no longer tell human flesh from that of the chicken on my plate, or the boiled potatoes from boiled bones of martyrs.

“I can’t eat,” I told the nurse. “I feel sick to my stomach.”

I pushed the tray aside.

I felt vertigo. My mind was spinning like a kaleidoscope spins before the eye until the hand stops it and a new pattern emerges. But no new pattern had yet appeared. There was only the confusion, the tumbling chaos of my mind.

What was I doing to make the nurse look at me with such contempt? Perhaps I was arranging things on the table in some ritualistic way like the artist Joseph Cornell arranged objects in boxes. Or like Carl Jung arranged stones in the sand. Whatever creative thing I was doing, I was doing it in order to guide my mind in its journey back to sanity.

But the nurse knew nothing of my mental, emotional, and creative
processes. “Stop your foolishness,” she snarled, “and clean up this mess. I’ve got better things to do than deal with the likes of you.”

“Crazy bitch,” she muttered under her breath.

I knew that it wasn’t what I was doing that made her speak to me with such contempt. She spoke to me that way because to her I was a crazy woman acting crazy. I was crazy and therefore worthless.

My guts churned. I felt that I was about to lose my footing and be swept into a sea of what felt like sheer hatred. How could I endure any more of her belittling behavior and maintain any feeling of self-confidence and self-respect? After days of relating to her I had reached the limits of my endurance.

It was then that I suddenly felt the presence of Grace Clemons. Memories of her came rushing back, filling my mind and heart. I remembered her black satin slippers and her large-knuckled hands. I remembered the many stories of her life she had told me when I was a child. I’d sat in her apartment in Mrs. Forbes’s house across the street from Paradise Park in Thomasville, Georgia, eating cookies and listening to her during breaks from drawing and painting with Mrs. Forbes. But in the psychiatric hospital I was no longer a child. I was a woman who, like Grace Clemons, had faced loss and betrayal, and loss again.

There was no time for the old drama, nothing of the theatrical. The woman beside me was straightforward, strong, and capable. She was there because I needed her. Without words, but clearly—mind speaking to mind—she told me that I could not afford the luxury of self-pity or self-condemnation. I could not afford the waste of guilt, the destructive power of shame. She told me that I must be strong, that no matter the obstacles in my way, no matter the losses and the grief, there was life and I must be about the business and privilege of living it.