The Storm at the Door (11 page)

Marvin has passed the first half of the meeting in a dejected silence, but the rage of Frederick’s protest appears to unlatch something within him. Marvin cries out, such a shock to hear his voice with any measure of passion that it has the effect of a gun fired into the air above a mob.

I want my clothes!
Marvin screams.
I want my clothes! I want my old house! Now! Now! Now!

We’ll get to your concerns when it is your turn
, Canon says, concealing his fluster poorly.

Now! Now! Now! Now!

Nownownownownow
, the baritone catatonic repeats.

Canon has observed, many times in his studies, the importance of not engaging with the passions of patients, the importance of maintaining a calm, even tone. Though few, if any, could discern his words under the noise, Canon says,
Mr. Foulds, if you can’t be civil, you won’t be able to continue this session with us, which, as you know, will result in further loss of privileges
.

I said now! I want my clothes now!
Marvin yells, lifting his hospital gown over his head and displaying his considerable manhood to the group.

Canon gestures to the eager Crew Crew, who quickly descend to extract Marvin by the armpits. Marvin won’t be seen again until late that night. When he will return to Ingersoll from
solitary, he will be restored to his silence, appearing in a fresh hospital gown.

But what will not ambition and revenge / Descend to? Who aspires must down as low / As high he soar’d
. Lowell fills the following silence with Milton.

Oh, Professor Lowell, could you contextualize the quote for us?

Who overcomes / By force, hath overcome but half his foe
.

The final Friday of the summer of 1962. On Monday, at the end of the holiday weekend, the Merrills will return to Graveton for the start of the school year. After Frederick’s stay at Mayflower vaulted all of Katharine’s previous imagined deadlines, this weekend, which so recently seemed so impossibly far, had been the date she had told her family to expect his return. It had a kind of logic, at least to Katharine: she and the girls would spend the summer at Echo Cottage, Frederick would spend the summer at Mayflower, but of course they would reconvene for the fall. It would almost be as if they had only taken separate vacations. Back in Graveton, in the autumn, things would be as they had been before, but also, Katharine tried to assure herself, better. Frederick would return with them to Graveton, and he would be better. But now it is the Friday before Labor Day, and her husband is still gone.

One in the afternoon, and the day over Lake Winnipesaukee is faultless again, placid enough to delight the few remaining mosquitoes, warm enough to allow sleeping without blankets. Katharine sits in the living room recliner, considering the day’s perfection through the cinematically proportioned window overlooking the lake. Her daughters, preparing for the fall in their own way, have set out with a summer’s accumulation of their excessive allowance—a part of Katharine’s reparations for
the loss of their father—to stock up on chocolates and taffies at the Hansel and Gretel Candy Shoppe on the far side of Barvel Bay.

It has been over two months since Frederick opened the raincoat on Route 109, and when last Katharine spoke with her husband’s psychiatrist, he seemed to suggest the work had just begun.
Your husband has finally gotten the rest he so badly needed
, Frederick’s new doctor, Canon, told her.
But we have yet to address the major psychic underpinnings of his condition
.

Katharine wants, as ever, to be amenable. She wants to believe, with the faith of Frederick’s doctors, that the time and will of those professionals can repair Frederick, as if her husband’s mind were simply some faulty intricate machinery, which only the best technicians can render operative. Still, Canon’s prognosis, his schematic approach to Frederick’s chaos, often strikes Katharine as absurd.

And yet, when finally Frederick phoned her from the hospital, Katharine for once had not accommodated, not placated. She had made a decision to remain firm, to echo her relatives’ faith in Mayflower without attenuating that confidence with her skepticism. She had resolved to remain firm, and that is how she had remained. Her sustained conviction in their short conversation was perhaps a small victory, but suggestive of greater powers. She had made a decision, and—at least for a moment—she had changed.

In the dimmed daylight of the living room at Echo Cottage, Katharine thinks of the impossibility of the immediate future. Here, they are still plainly blessed for this house, their prosperous history that has gifted them all this, but in a few weeks, she will be a single mother of four in a sleeted town on the far side of
Mount Washington. She thinks of Nero, fiddling away, with his back to the fires. She rises from the chair.

Katharine must talk with someone else, someone who can consider her uncertainty. All of Katharine’s relatives only reiterate their blind faith in Frederick’s doctors, doctors who diffuse into jargon whenever Katharine pins them to a single cogent question. She must talk to someone else, someone other than her daughters, to whom she knows she has to parrot the doctors’ institutional-vague certainty.

The morning after the night that Frederick exposed himself on Route 109, Katharine woke the girls early. Her eyelids had burned with exhaustion then, her voice had thickened from a dozen anxious cigarettes, and her body had turned clumsy, as if she had spent hours hefting suitcases. But when she gathered the girls around the warped plank table on the eating porch, she produced a piece of psycho-script that perfectly resembled what Frederick’s doctors would later tell her. Like Frederick’s doctors, Katharine then spoke in a tone of infallibly official judgment, easily slipping into some bearded armchair character Freud scripted a half century ago, a costume to disguise herself from uncertainty. But maybe there is a reason that such language comes so easily to both Katharine and the psychiatrists? Perhaps it is simply the obvious truth?

Assembled on the eating porch that morning, the girls, pajamaed and groggy, mustered the kind of attention her daughters usually delight in refusing her. Katharine tried to offer the performance they clearly needed.

You know that Daddy has had a very difficult year. I’m sure you know that he has not been himself. All his yelling, and all the late nights. We should have done something sooner. The truth is that he is just exhausted
,
and so we’ve decided the best thing for him is to take a nice long rest. There is a place your uncle George recommended. It’s called Mayflower, and it’s near Boston. It won’t be long, but Daddy can rest there—

Surprisingly, the girls asked few questions. They seemed eager to accept the nebulous reasons Katharine provided to explain why their family had imploded while they slept. Maybe Katharine’s performance had successfully softened the news, or maybe the news was not the shock Katharine had thought it would be. Maybe her girls had for years silently carried a feeling about their father that this news clarified, and promised to mend.

The girls had believed her then, but now it has been more than two months since that morning, and still Katharine must act as certain as she first claimed. She must; she knows that she alone is the bridge that conveys the adult world to her daughters, and her daughters to the adult world. And she must convey them perfectly, even if she perceives invisible foundational fissuring, the pilings shifting and snapping beneath her. Most adult failures, Katharine believes, can be attributed to the failure of that conveyance, adults marooned at the age at which their parents failed them.

When Katharine was only four, for example, her doctor diagnosed her with a heart murmur, and for a time the doctors believed she wouldn’t live to eighteen. No longer worried for their daughter’s adulthood, Katharine’s parents concerned themselves only with fulfilling her wants, making her siblings toughen in the way children ought to, while Katharine received only her family’s gifts and attention. Her heart’s syncopation eventually self-corrected, but her childhood has remained her childhood. And now she must imitate an adult, she who grew up never having to do a thing for herself. Conversely, Frederick has told Katharine how his own parents, fracturing under the pressures
of the Great Depression, made clear to Frederick, at twelve, that his boyhood was nearing its end, that the family’s future solvency would depend, in no small part, on him. As Katharine has, in ways that shame her, remained that needy sick girl, so has her husband remained petty, boisterous, subject to his megrims, possessing the emotional constitution of a twelve-year-old.

And so, what if Katharine allows herself to fail her daughters now? Jillian is only five; she could remain forever impetuous, always expecting others to receive and grant her demands. Louise’s common eight-year-old experiments with deception could proliferate into pathology. Susie, at thirteen, could never shake her yearling awkwardness, her aversion to others’ eyes, her uncertainty of the worth of her opinions. Rebecca’s fourteen-year-old irony could deepen, she could remain forever disaffected and defiant (Katharine cannot let herself think too clearly of what Rebecca might allow those boys she sees).

Doctors and relatives act so certain, and that is how Katharine must act as well. But if she could just clearly explain what has happened to someone not involved, perhaps she could understand it herself.
Teaching
, her math teacher once told her,
is the best way to learn
. Katharine lifts the phone and looks up the number in her address book.

She tells herself
Yes
once, then
No
three times, and then she dials the number anyway. Just after it begins to ring, the voice is in her ear.

Hello?

Hi, Tat. It’s Katharine.

Katharine?

Why has she called Tat? Tat is hardly a friend. She is only the closest to what Katharine might call a friend in Graveton. Does she really want to unburden herself to an acquaintance? But
maybe Katharine’s purpose is not only to seek commiseration. It is, more honestly, something else: a chance at explaining herself and the abject state in which her family has concluded the summer to someone in Graveton before she returns there, and the news becomes evident.

Yeah
, Katharine says, then adds,
Merrill?

Katharine Merrill? Is that you?

Tat affects the perfect tone so effortlessly. Her voice is just right, an enthusiasm that transmits only delight, making Katharine feel extraordinary while simultaneously forgiving her for not at all being the friend Tat would like her to be. Often, when Katharine agrees to attend Tat’s bridge nights, she panics at the last moment and grasps for the handiest excuse. But Katharine envies Tat and her friends. Together, as middle-aged women, they are in continuity with what they have always been. Just the girls, still laughing together at their stories. They laugh about their children as they once laughed about boys at school, teachers, lackluster report cards. These women raise children without becoming fundamentally different from the women they were before they had families. Katharine, by contrast, was once one thing, a young woman hungry for society, and then she became something entirely different, an anxious mother, the wife of a difficult man. No wonder she panics at Tat’s invitation; the ladies’ intimacy always displays to Katharine her failure.

How are you, Tat?

Katharine tries to imbue her greeting with Tat’s enthusiasm but succeeds only in amplifying her volume, as if she were speaking to a very old woman.

Couldn’t be better. Back from Paris, refueled for the fall
.

Paris?

It was Ron’s big birthday present. And what a gift! That whole city. My god, I feel like I spent the last three weeks inside a Fabergé egg
.

Katharine has phoned this mere acquaintance, this cheery woman whose friendship Katharine always fails, and what should she say now? Should she counter Tat’s Paris with her own desperate story? Katharine sees plainly: within her extended family camp along this stretch of Barvel Bay, the Merrills have sympathy, and Katharine is nearly heroic for taking the action she finally took; beyond Barvel Bay, they are simply a failed family. Katharine thinks about abandoning the call’s purpose. She could cheerily respond with a story of a pleasant summer spent by the lake, a vague plan for cocktails soon. But she has come this far already. And why not say what happened? She might as well say it, and at least practice the way she has thought to tell her story.

It’s been a rough summer for me
.

Oh? Please say it’s nothing serious
.

Katharine tries to think of an artful way to begin, but then other words escape.

Promise you won’t tell anyone?
she says, like a child.

Of course, Katharine
.

Katharine is surprised by the instantaneous empathy with which Tat accepts the secret, as if it weren’t at all unusual that an acquaintance should call and swear her to confidentiality. But, of course, Tat is so skillful in the ways Katharine never could be. Of course people must tell Tat their secrets all the time.