The Storm at the Door (28 page)

It is 1945, but it is also 1962 and 1935. The kittens cry across the Depression; the widow Abrams makes her whistling sound. His roommate’s name resonates from down the hall; the obliterated town of Bolbirosok still chants its name.
Choogama! Choogama!
The atmosphere above chimes its sharp
ah
, the stars beyond,
Om
.

And then, at this moment, all sounds converge into the voice that spoke on the day of James Marshall’s suicide, on the night of the Phoenix. The death-voice speaks, louder and louder, as if in anticipation, as if a crowd eager for a famous musician’s first song. And then there is silence, and they are there.

Ookalay. Belooka
.

They are transformed in some way, but it is unmistakably them.
Ookalay
. Irit. And
Belooka
. At last, for the first time, Schultz sees his son. His boy is here, with him, in Boston.

Belooka
. His Isaiah.

Ookalay! Belooka!
Here they are, but only for a moment. He speaks their names, and they return for the moment of speaking, but then they fade along with the words’ echoes.
Ookalay! Belooka!
Schultz’s vocabulary may be near complete, he may now have all the words he requires, but to complete his project, he now knows, will require the leap his Irit made unquestioningly, so simply, at all times. It is not enough to know; he must also believe.

It’s 1962, but it’s also 1935. Schultz sits with Irit and Reb Mendelsohn in that seemingly indestructible wooden study. Reb Mendelsohn reads to his daughter and his future son-in-law the story of Babel from the Torah.
And G-d came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men had built. And G-d said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do
. Schultz is decided.

Frederick, wanting to give his roommate time to himself, spends the balance of the afternoon in the Quiet Room at the far end of the corridor, a room not unlike the solitary one in which he spent three days, but without cushioning on the walls or a lock on the door. But perhaps he has sequestered himself here not only for his roommate’s sake; perhaps Frederick simply craves the silence and the solitude of these close walls. How, he wonders as he lies on the room’s single mattress, has he ever managed to be all that he once had been? A father, a husband, a businessman. Restoring himself to any of that seems, at this moment, as unlikely as tethering himself to a stone, jumping off a bridge, and expecting not to drown. Even the walls of this asylum and the absurd protocols of Canon and his Crew Crew could never be a prison as absolute, as inescapable, as the airless cell of himself. Maybe it is for the best that Canon took his journal, so he can finally give up the false notion that he might explain himself. For the best that now he is not allowed to write; words too are only false shelters, shoddy lean-tos, blowing apart in the measureless desert.

Frederick is surprised to find himself waking, twilight in the hallway windows. He must have slept for at least four hours.

Before the door to his room, Frederick pauses. He hears no sound coming from within, and so he expects to find Schultz either in a rare state of sleep or, more likely, returned to his chipper work, making his notes mentally, now denied his journals.

Instead, Frederick turns in to his room to find the professor in an avid state, bounding toward the door. When Schultz’s eyes
meet Frederick’s with urgency, when Schultz’s hands clutch Frederick’s arms, it seems as much of a surprise to Frederick as witnessing a paraplegic simply rise from his chair to go take a leak.

It is time for me to say what happened. You will listen to me, nu?

Frederick does not want to risk disrupting the rare moment with any reply. He nods.

It is true, what he says, of my Irit. It is true she is gone. But there is something he does not know, something no one knows, and I will tell it to you now. A secret, yes?

Schultz walks to his desk, and removes from the lap drawer a framed sepia photograph of a comely, dusky young woman smiling in Harvard Square.

This is my Irit, yes?
he says, tapping his fissured fingernail against the glass.
A beauty
.

Very beautiful
, Frederick says earnestly.

May her name be a blessing, it has been almost twenty years
.

Wow
, Frederick says, then chastises himself for this reply, but still can think of nothing sufficient to say. Before, the mere mention of Irit’s name has driven Schultz to maniacal paroxysms; how, now, can he speak of her so simply?

Schultz, grasping with both hands the image by its frame, locks his elbows and projects the photo toward Frederick’s face.

You must look very closely at my Irit’s belly, yes? One might mistake it for too many sweets, but I’m telling you, Irit had the body of pencils
.

As Frederick scrutinizes the photograph, he discerns the unmistakable nascent swell. He thinks then of the time, making love to Katharine, he felt the first undeniable fact of their future family, the firm and rising evidence of what their love had made.

A child?

My son
, Schultz replies, nodding.

Your son?

My Isaiah
, Schultz says, and then both men fall silent.

My Isaiah. He survived
.

Isaiah. A third presence seems now to have entered, one larger than either of them, larger than the room. Or maybe not a presence, but a void. Not only the void of Schultz’s lost wife and son, but the void of all that has been lost, a void that also holds Katharine, Jillian, Louise, Susie, Rebecca. All that is necessary but gone.

I have told no one. When he comes back to Boston, I do not see him, because I am in this place. I am here, and I do not know what to say to him. Years pass. What to say? I was ashamed. I am ashamed
.

Silence.

My boy
, Schultz says.
He wants to see me. But never can I let him see me here. In this place
.

Frederick and Schultz share a gaze; their eyes widen with the recklessness of the thought. A possibility, one that Frederick has not allowed himself to consider, suddenly presents itself.
Katharine
, he thinks.
My girls
. It is a crazy idea, he knows. Likely it will resolve terribly, with a de facto sentence measured in years. But after Canon’s reading of his journals, his time here is now interminable anyway, and this idea, at least, is something other than that nothingness. Really, what choice is there?

My grandfather nods.

Do you ever wonder what is behind the locked door?
Marvin asks.

Frederick, in a chair pulled up to his cot, has told Marvin, and only Marvin, of what Schultz and he have begun to discuss.

It surprises Frederick that Marvin should mention it, that anyone else has considered it, the knobless door near the end of the hall, with its rusting lock.

A long, long time ago, when I was still a boy
, Marvin says,
I don’t know why they stopped, but they used to take us down there. Below this whole place there are tunnels. Every building has one, connecting to the others. It was how we used to get from place to place in the winter. It’s funny. I remember that the winters were more severe then. I don’t see how that can be true
.

Tunnels?
Frederick asks. Before Canon, Frederick remembers, the older orderlies, among themselves, would sometimes make vaguely mischievous references to the Tunnels. The Tunnels, he had assumed, was either the name of a nearby pub or else some subterranean crawl space, in which the orderlies and nurses sometimes shared a surreptitious cocktail between shifts.

Tunnels
, Marvin repeats.
They connect everything. This building to South Webster. My old house to the cafeteria. The cafeteria to a door beyond the front gates
.

Huh
.

Once, this was years ago, I lived alone in that house. This was before they had checks all the time, when we could still roam about as we pleased. They used to give us our own keys!

Ha! Really?

I don’t think you understand. Keys. I had my own keys
, Marvin says.
When they kicked me out of my house, I buried a box
.

Frederick is smiling now.

I can’t guarantee anything, but the lock on that door looks pretty old, huh?

Frederick nearly yelps a giddy laugh.

It sure does look old
, he agrees.

To get to the box was a simple thing, far simpler than Frederick had expected. Canon may have issued his revised protocols, but he has not stanched the spread of dereliction that had opened in his absence. Daily, the patients now manage a thousand tiny transgressions: pills slipped down shirtsleeves, unapproved food brought back to the halls in exchange for a few pilfered Miltowns, even—it is rumored—a couple of conjugal visits in South Webster, purchased with who knows what. When Frederick learned of Marvin’s buried box, his mind had run over the texture of his daily schedule, feeling it for weaknesses. Perhaps he could ask for special permission to take a walk, but at best he would be allowed the walk only if another patient also wanted to go, and then only under the direct supervision of a chaperone. His greatest chance, he reasoned, would come when he passed Marvin’s old cottage—presently in the slow process of conversion into a building for arts and craft therapy—on the march
back from dinner. On the way to dinner, the Crew Crew were always alert, vigilant for potential outbursts of their patients, irritable with hunger. But after dinner, the walk was often a placid stroll, the men sated and drugged. Typically, in the last weeks, the Crew Crew shared cigarettes and laughed on these walks. Once, Frederick had witnessed them pass a flask among themselves.

Under the cover of the dark, with the Crew Crew both relaxed and increasingly derelict, it was simple for Frederick—who managed to keep his faculties by furtively tucking his pills up his nostrils—to slide behind a tree when no one was looking.

And so, presently, the Crew Crew and the men of Ingersoll continue the slow procession onward, leaving Frederick behind. Frederick watches two security boys patrolling along the side of the Depression; he knows he does not have long.

Frederick approaches the spot Marvin described to him, the cottage’s southwestern cornerstone. He kneels down to it and shoves the block with his palm. And then there it is, within a hollow of the masonry: a tin lunch box, which—slightly breaking Frederick’s heart—displays a rusting image of Carmen Miranda. Frederick rests the box on his thighs and opens it to discover, as promised, the key chain, a considerable roll of twenty-dollar bills, and the third object, about which Marvin made Frederick swear promises.

There’s something else in the box
, Marvin told him.
My father brought it to me when I was a boy. What did he expect me to do with it? I can’t let myself think of that. Well, you’ll see. Just please leave it there, and put the box back when you’re done. Promise me
.

Okay
.

Promise me, or I won’t tell you where it is. You’re going to want to get rid of it, but you have to promise. Promise
.

I promise
, Frederick said, but already now he considers breaking
that promise. It is, as he should have suspected, a pistol. Frederick thinks of Marvin’s unburned left hand, what he could do with it, as soon as he is well enough to make his way back to his box.

Frederick examines the pistol, military-issued. He hasn’t held a firearm since his faltering naval service, and the sudden weight of it in his hand surprises him.

He’s never considered it, not really. Yes, he has starved himself to near death, has gotten himself so badly drunk, before driving home, that even a straight line was a tremendous effort. Still, whenever he has heard the news of a suicide, he has thought
Cowardice!
in the same instant, unthinking way that the sight of the inordinately beautiful spurs him to the word
vapid!
And perhaps, he thinks now, he has been right, perhaps everyone must walk the same tenuous bridge over the same rushing water, but most have the fortitude not to look down.

But, then, maybe he has been the cowardly one, so often prostrating himself before death, but hoping that it, not he, would swing the final blow. But now the gun is in his hand, and Frederick thinks again,
it is as simple as this
.

The traffic rumbles and hisses around the base of the hill. Autumn flowers still manage to bloom in the garden below the cottage’s bay windows. The moonlight, blue and vivid, casts the otherworldly shadows of a movie-bright night. The dying grass dampens his pants. These things are not on top of him now, pressing with the weight of their demands. Nor are they beneath him, seemingly assembled to allow him some revelation. Sitting here, gun in hand, for the first time, in a great while, he feels in between.

It is as simple as this. You put a pistol to your head and you squeeze. The static continues. Still there will be birth, life, death.
Still moonlight and flowers and girls and families. Still love and resentment. But a single squeeze and you enter it in a different and unknowable way.

He is not serious, not really. He wants only the closeness of it. To know he could have that power. He spins the revolver, until one of its three bullets disappears behind the barrel. Then he presses it to his temple with his palm, and feels the pressure of its metallic kiss. Something within him accelerates.

Words come to him, a common construction, but incontrovertibly true.
I have failed
, Frederick thinks. And then, there is the same foreign need as before, the need that is not quite for a sneeze, or for a kiss, or for a sob. He moves the barrel of the gun to where his face seems to crave it.

Even if he manages to escape, to make it all the way to Katharine and his girls, could he possibly convince his wife that he belongs there with her again? Could he possibly persuade her to convince whomever she must: Canon, the police, the board of Mayflower? How many times, already, has he convinced Katharine of his contrition, of his renascent ambitions, of his lucidity, and then failed again? Again and again, he has failed, in the average, boring ways. He has thought only of what her love promised him, what the love of his girls promised him. But the promise was reciprocal, and he has failed it. Not because of his thwarted ambitions, or even, directly, because of his infidelities; Frederick has failed because where others can sustain, can believe in something they spend their lives constructing, he cannot remain anything for long. He has never found a way for what is within him to coincide with what is beyond him.