The Storm at the Door (20 page)

Tell us where he is!

Who?
the Crew Crew reply.

Fucking Marvin, you dingbat! Marvin Foulds. Marvin!

The Crew Crew boys deny any knowledge, refuse any question, as they witness a name metamorphose into a rallying cry.

A mental hospital
, Canon had told his new orderlies and nurses in their courses of orientation,
is a live wire. Staff unity is the grounding. Think of psychosis as a great charge, at all times running, even if the cables appear still. If we do not act as one, the cable snaps free and shoots that electricity everywhere
.

And then
, Canon had always said with the theatrical flourish
he had learned to affect over a career of touring academic conventions,
there’s fire
.

And then there’s fire
, he had said, exactly in those words, not knowing their prophecy.

Poor, overwhelmed, scholarly Canon. Well-intentioned, ambitious Canon, only months after his ascension to the high office, already providing another case study to support his hypothesis. For it was Canon himself, the great unifier, who did not report to work the morning after Marvin’s fiery act. His wife simply phoned the hospital, cited her husband’s illness, and accepted no more of the staff’s feverish calls. Could Canon, the staff (and soon the patients) wondered, possibly have been broken so simply?

Whatever Canon’s reasons, in his absence, the psychotic current surged indeed.

•   •   •

Frederick writes,
AN OBSERVATION: So often a thing makes more of itself. Love begets love, and cruelty engenders more cruelty. Chaos, once opened, births chaos
.

•   •   •

Just after the patients sat down to dinner this evening, a proper food fight broke out among the girls of South House, cottage cheese splattering over suicide scars, green beans tangling in the mess of schizophrenic hair, chocolate-covered borderlines. The Crew Crew, of course, intervened. They intervened, but—perhaps just faintly—they too seemed, for the first time, receptive to the revelry of rebellion. They intervened, but slowly. The Crew Crew broke the girls apart, but did not bother to stifle
their own laughter. More than once, they stood back and watched an anorexic take a pudding to the face.

Later, in the calm that followed this gastronomical conflagration, the men and women lined up, as every night, for the evening’s medication, some literally itching with anticipation, some, like Frederick, attempting the normal evasions.

Frederick Merrill
, the dispensary nurse said in her stenographer voice. To the nurse, the exchange appeared unremarkable: Frederick extending his hand, the nurse extending the little paper cup containing the tablets, Frederick turning to the two Crew Crew boys responsible for ensuring that each patient swallowed, as instructed.

C’mon, fellas. How about one night off? I just need to get my head straight
.

What are you whining about?
one of the boys said.
You know how much those blue ones go for on the street?

The street
, Frederick thought. These boys, he knew, had gone straight from their prefabricated suburban comforts to their fraternity houses.
What street would that be?
he wanted to ask.
Shady Elm?
But then Frederick relinquished his unspoken contempt as he sensed an opening. And why not try?

Frederick did not make the offer, at least not in words. If spoken, he knew they would refuse it. He simply pressed the cup’s lip in with his thumb and raised the cup to his mouth, the pills catching on the indentation. Then he crumpled the cup, handed it back to the Crew Crew boys, who inspected Frederick’s empty mouth. As Frederick walked away, he could hear the beginning of the Crew Crew’s protest that did not materialize. In the end, the boys played it sly, as did their new man on the inside.

As he dashes off his thoughts, my grandfather, for the first time in months, receives the warm radiance of himself. The truer form of himself, both much older and much younger than the middle-aged Frederick in his pajamas, who so often just dawdles there, thoughtlessly obstructing the true Frederick’s way into the world. The truer Frederick now speaks from someplace outside the ordinary Frederick’s familiar self-silencing iteration of burdensome effort answered with burdensome scrutiny. Before he knows it, Frederick is even performing that rare act, attempting to converse with his roommate.

I feel a bit like you tonight
, Frederick says.
I feel like I can finally focus
.

It’s the trick you pull with the pills
, Schultz replies.

How do you know?

This is the only explanation
, Schultz says.
I see it in your eyes, yes? Simple as the color
.

Ha, I suppose
—Frederick begins.
But those pills never seem to have any effect on you
.

Of course not
, Schultz replies with a grin.
A Jew knows how to conceal
.

Really? But how?

Just before the war, toothpaste we couldn’t so easily get. Oy, to tell you the pain in my gums
.

Schultz then performs a vaguely revolting trick. He widens his mouth, as if to make way for the passage of a mighty vowel, and shoves his fingers into his palate, freeing the false teeth Frederick never knew he had.

When hinally we come to America, all my top teesh shey pull
, Schultz says, the words muddled without the sonic contribution of upper teeth.
Harhfard buysh me denturesh hhit for a king
.

Here Schultz smiles broadly. Frederick now considers that this aspect of his face—his linear, eggshell teeth—is perhaps what lends him a half-credibility denied the other schizophrenics. Toothless, Schultz seems a madman indeed.

Only, shere wash one flaw. Or, better to shay, one idioshyncrashy. Usually I wait until you leaf or shleep to remofe it, but now we are broshersh is shecretsh, nu?

Now Schultz flips his false teeth, revealing a small cavity within, just perfectly cradling two pills. Schultz taps the dentures, and the pills tumble into his palm. He looks at them quizzically.

Wish theesh pillsh, never can I hhocus. And to hhocus, hish ish she mosht important shing of all
.

But what do you do with them all?

Ah, much eashier shish wash in she old howsh. Here, I haff had to improfishe, yesh?

Schultz restores his upper teeth and smiles a sane, proud smile. He makes a mock-shushing gesture and presses one palm to the leg of his desk, the other to the surface, and the two pieces separate, just a few inches, enough to reveal the hollow shaft of one of the table’s steel legs.

Frederick approaches Schultz’s desk, peers into the hollow to discover a masterwork of concealment. In cheery pharmaceutical colors, the leg is filled nearly to the top. Hundreds of pills. Within Mayflower’s nascent anarchy, pills are already an appreciating currency, and here is an unwanted fortune.

Soon, I must find some way to dispose
, Schultz says with a laugh and knocks on the table.
Or else, how to get into these other legs
.

Generally, in the first months of the new administration, Canon’s staff has successfully concealed potentially disruptive news from the patients. Often, reports that would have been of no small interest—suicidal gestures, sexual congress, narcotics found in staff offices—were kept entirely from patients, even from most of the staff. Though two days have passed since Marvin Foulds’s suicide attempt, and the psychiatrist in chief has yet to return, the structures he established, though besieged, are still in place. Once more, Canon’s echelons, like Schultz with his desk, manage a major feat of concealment.

For there has been another suicide attempt, a fact that will be kept entirely from the men of Ingersoll, the women of South Webster, the girls of South House. But perhaps
suicide attempt
is too certain a term for what has occurred. It is perhaps the ineffectual nature of this particular gesture that makes it seem no compelling news to spread. Certainly, it seems to the few who
learn of the attempt that the boy—one of the new admissions to North Webster—had meant to fail with such a slapdash act. Either he meant to fail, they believe, or else he had resolved to make his quietus so suddenly that he had not time to devise a halfway decent scheme.

A passing motorist found the boy, apparently unconscious, in a tangle of bedsheets, with which he had attempted to hang himself from the high oak post of the elaborate road sign for the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, down on Mill Street. The boy had failed in his attempt, but his successful absconding down the hill, suicidal linens in hand, is perhaps the most salient portent yet of the dangerously accumulating chaos.

The boy had remained conscious for the entire episode. Perhaps wanting only to taste death’s flavorlessness, he simply lay there, beneath the sign, within the sheets, trying not to move or breathe.

He looked enviously up at the trees, displaying their modest late season brilliance against the pitiless late afternoon light.
I could be happy right here
, he thought.
I could be a tree, a shrub, a blade of grass. It might feel quite nice to have people walk through me, to watch them drive past, all day long. Maybe what I want is not to die. Maybe what I want is only not to be human
. He shut his eyes tightly and tried to will his flesh to grow roots.

The possibility of his dendriform future, however, was soon disrupted. Squad cars and ambulances, responding to the motorist’s call, split the grim quiet of the afternoon with their manic squawking, bearing the boy away, at emergency speed, denying him his wish of stillness.
Put me down
, the boy requested, repeatedly and to no avail.
Please. Just leave me at the side of the road
.

When Mass General phones Mayflower, the receptionist transfers the call to Higgins, who thanks the presiding emergency room doctor. Then Higgins places the phone on its receiver, leaves his office, swiftly traverses the campus, and passes through the three doors of South Webster to find Rita. Rita is standing in the common area of the women’s ward, discussing one of her new patients’ plans to write an opera. Rita excuses herself and walks outside with the doctor to hear his news.

As Higgins explains what has happened, Rita wonders what it might suggest that, in Canon’s absence, Higgins has sought her out first. Undoubtedly, the staff has seen Rita talking to Canon with an unrivaled intimacy and frequency. Is it simply that Higgins thinks she has the boss’s ear? By her proximity to the psychiatrist in chief, has she become the de facto number two, her response to a situation more determinative than that of Dr. Higgins, the de jure number two? And might this unspoken hierarchical arrangement imply that they know?

Maybe that would be for the best; the thought is dizzying and darkly thrilling. So many times, in the on-and-off two years—
how, my god, two years already?
—of their affair, Rita has imagined it, the freedom to at last relinquish the shameful secrecy that Canon and she have held tightly to themselves.

It is likely, she thinks, that there are whispers, whiffs of suspicion. She and Canon, hardly able to speak of their situation between themselves, have told no one. But there are other ways in which such knowledge transfers; lovers exude some hormonal
plume, received by others in a place before language. Something as felt as her affair with Canon cannot be contained endlessly, can it?

Rita tries to calm Higgins, but he continues to fidget, continues to clutch at his hair, seems to be beyond her words. A tide of red rises radially from the rosy protuberance of his nose, as if Higgins’s nose is a thing to which his face has become suddenly allergic. Rita senses, from her months spent overseeing similarly agitated men, that simply he needs to be touched. She lays one hand on the old doctor’s shoulder, rubs the soft flesh of what was once a bicep, tells Higgins that she has to go find Canon. And that, in the meanwhile, they must try to keep this news to themselves.

We can be many things
, Rita thinks. A twenty-four-year-old girl, with little faith in modern psychiatry, can suddenly become the chief authority at the nation’s premier mental hospital.

Perhaps, she has sometimes thought, she is capable in this hospital, in this position, because she does not want it, has never aspired to it. Unbothered by ambition or by possible censure, she is lucid.

But she isn’t just here for Albert, she thinks now, as she will still believe, years from now. Though, of course, it had been Albert Canon who first seduced her into the profession, flattering her with his inordinate attention in his abnormal psychology course, which she had signed up for simply to fulfill a curriculum requirement at Radcliffe. One day, in the third week of the semester, Albert had asked her to stay after class to discuss the first paper she had turned in. Rita had braced for his criticisms, but as soon as her classmates left, Albert spoke to her in an excited whisper, lauding her brilliance, asking her if she had considered
psychology as a career. As she warmed to his flattery, Albert’s compliments grew hyperbolic; he proclaimed the loss to the field of psychology should she choose a different career.

As that summer turned to fall, her after-class meetings with Albert became more frequent and more impassioned. She felt herself become pliable to his visions for her.