The Storm at the Door (6 page)

The morning he had signed those forms, Frederick had seen his admission as a simple, if embarrassing, way to avoid police charges. It then seemed a choice between a stint at the local lockup or a few days in the nuthouse. He did not understand—no, not for another week, until Wallace, after Frederick’s repeated demands, finally put his questions about Frederick’s marriage and his mother on hold to answer him directly. Because the police had brought him there, Frederick had signed a modified version of the voluntary admission form. A modification that meant that his leaving Mayflower would require the approval of the psychiatrist in chief, who presently seemed to have no interest in his speedy exit. Frederick had given his freedom over to something far worse than the judicial system. Here, his psychiatrist
was judge and jury, the case on trial, his sanity. And what recourse? Other patients have told Frederick that he could attempt a plea for his release from the board of directors, a patrician-aloof set that mindlessly defers to the judgments of the psychiatrists they have hired. Frustrated with their legal obligation to attend these hearings, the board reportedly accomplishes nothing more than an ongoing demonstration of their annoyance: a nearly flawless record of denied appeals.

Frederick is drowsy again; the Miltown has settled into the crevices of his brain, and he shifts back to his bed, for the afternoon sequel to the morning’s Miltown paralysis. For a while, even with twenty milligrams of tranquilizer cycling through him, it is hard to drift to sleep. Every time his eyelids begin to descend, he is jolted back into grinding awareness by another scream.

It is night now. The men have had their final meal of the day. In an hour, during the final checks of their shift, the nurses will dispense the nightly dosing, sleeping pills for all, mixed with stronger sedatives for some. Most of the men in Ingersoll register this as merely another night, cannot know the horror that awaits them, a horror that will alter, in significant ways, the texture of their daily lives on the ward. The most observant, however, have noticed that the rain has begun, softly, to tick at the windows, beyond the cages that separate window from room.
But even they cannot know the storm’s magnitude or what it will deliver. The storm clouds, like surreptitious Trojans, have slipped in under the cover of night, no one suspicious after the gift of that complacently beautiful day. For the most part, the men are restful now, some even in a rare festive mood, plotting a small improvised party that will soon commence in Lowell’s room, marking the occasion of the four bottles of scotch a few visiting students brought him as a gift.

(Cocktails on the men’s ward of the mental hospital! This is how it is, in this era that now draws to a close.)

The first bolt of lightning to reach Belmont speaks its name. Stanley peals manic laughter. Lowell says something in a language the others cannot understand. A limb of an oak tree snaps near Upshire Hall, the Harvard Club, where Professor Schultz registers the sound with normal human perception, and also with his strange form of awareness, the sound cracking through both. The gabbing electricity in the clouds above, each raindrop a fading scream, the wind murmuring like Jews reading the Torah, but garbled and at much greater volumes. All of this, nearly deafening, will soon find echo in the normal human register. But this is not what concerns Schultz. The tumult is not what prompts Schultz to relinquish his pen, not what drives him to clutch his ears, forgetting it is not his ears that receive these sounds.

•   •   •

As every night, James Marshall carefully wheels himself toward the bureau drawer that contains his flag’s box, removes the box, sets it on his lap, and then, in deliberate vectors, points himself toward the door. He moves slowly, as he must, excited motion
making his wheelchair veer to the walls. He must be deliberate now. Something foreign and unbearable has claimed an essential part of him.

In Lowell’s room, the last of Mayflower’s patient cocktail parties is at full tilt. The rich brown contents of the four bottles of Glenfiddich 12 splash around in each of the room’s fifteen glasses. Marvin Foulds, now in the persona of Guy DeVille, a foppish (perhaps, judging from his behavior around the men, homosexual) French poet, spouts off Rimbaud to Lowell, who corrects his French. A rarity: there are even women at this party, a special privilege before their release. Ruth, a pyromaniac housewife from Wenham, and the beautiful Brenda Logan, whose father patented some crucial alloy used on high-speed airplanes, whose reason for hospitalization seems little more than avid late-adolescent sexuality. Dr. Wallace is not present to witness the irony of Brenda celebrating her pronounced recovery by drinking too much whiskey and placing her hands upon Frederick and Lowell and others as well, in her masterful, just vaguely lascivious way. Other than the occasional glower as Brenda moves her attention among the men of the room—that and Stanley’s unintelligible conversation with invisible guests—the spirit is convivial, the cocktails temporarily eclipsing the men’s interminable, listless days.

Outside: the bluster, summertime cracking and breaking. The rain is driven horizontally and at such speeds one might not even recognize it as rain, one might perceive only a particularly lashing wind and come in wet and know there must have been rain.

Marshall wheels past the open door of the party. None but a nurse notices him. The nurse, however, only admires his dedication,
seeing to the flag’s lowering in such hostile weather. She is glad to see he wears his poncho. She does not know that, underneath it, he conceals his folded bedsheet.

When Marshall cracks ajar the front door, it is an invitation for the wind, and the door slams open the rest of the way with a bang that makes the partygoers startle and giggle, would take the door clean from the hinges had it not been reinforced for the security of patients and staff. Marshall reaches the ramp, and descends.

As Marshall approaches the flagpole, rain glances off the curvature of his bald head. Marshall looks up: the flag at the pole’s top is nearly invisible in the storm.

Then, with the assistance of his mouth, Marshall pulls on the glove necessary to manipulate the thin, lacerating metal cable. Even though he is one-handed, the hospital must buy Marshall these gloves in pairs, and he has run through a considerable number, the wire having burned straight through and badly cut him several times.

Marshall is untouched by fear as he lowers the flag. Is this the calm of a man who has been blown apart by Nazi ammunition and survived, or only the calm of a man who has claimed that final power? Even in the chilling winds, he does not waver as he reaches his one arm to unhook the flag. Soon it is folded into the box in his lap.

With the dexterity born from years of one-limbed existence, Marshall locates the clip that binds the line’s two ends and unfastens it. In the wind, the unbound line comes to sudden life, bucking against the pole like a cobra grasped by its tail. It nearly lashes his cheek but just misses.

James Marshall, the Amputation Artist of Mayflower, has now settled into the execution of his masterwork, and he is careful to
attend to all the details. With his one hand, he manages to pull the line through the loop at the pole’s summit and lets it fall next to him. He feeds the slack through the glove of his hand until again he locates, at its end, the two clips to which he has so devotedly fastened and unfastened his flag. He removes the folded bedsheet from beneath his poncho. With simple double knots—he pauses to wonder if he should spend the time on a knot more elaborate, then decides it is enough, it will hold—he ties the four corners of his sheet to the fasteners, two corners to each clip. And then what was a bedsheet and a slack flag line has become something between a kite and a sail.

Does he think now of Normandy? Does he think of the absurdity that he has survived as he has survived, plucking hairs, fingers, whole limbs to keep some poison, some evil he contracted that day from reaching his heart? Or does he think of his parents, his only family, and how they have never been able to look directly at him since that day, looking away for another boy, their boy, whom they lost moments after his boat capsized at Normandy? Or is it merely an act, symbolizing nothing or maybe a great deal, a gesture of the unconscious, like Pollock’s splatters? Marshall gathers the tail end of the line, and when he has enough slack, he wraps it around his neck four times. Already, he has begun to bleed.

Inside Ingersoll, the partygoers are singing songs from Frederick’s favorite record,
New Faces of 1952
. “Waltzing in Venice with you, isn’t so easy to do …” In the corridors, nurses pace beneath their cottony white hairdos.
Checks, checks, checks, checks
. High above the city of Boston, particles of moisture sing through the late summer storm. Just beyond Madhouse Hill in Belmont, a boy deduces an answer to a multiplication problem; a plump young woman half-tearfully gives up on waiting for last
night’s date to call; a widow on Beacon Hill sniffs her milk, decides its time has passed. Clocks tick, people sleep, kiss, fight, make love.

In Upshire Hall, Professor Schultz sits at his desk in the room from which he will soon be removed. He has been hearing strange sounds, as always, and he has been attempting to transliterate them. But there is that terrible sound now, something that cannot quite be transformed into letters, at least none that he knows. It is not unlike the ululation of Middle Eastern grief, but much, much deeper, and incomparably more horrible. One by one, this sound obliterates the unique sounds of each of those other things: the singing, the boy with his homework, the spurned young woman, every particle of rain.

The wind makes violent demands upon the sheet; Marshall’s wheelchair nearly topples. But now all that keeps the sheet from its airborne ambitions is the grip of Marshall’s one hand. It promises to be as swift and as certain as physics, and it is. The wind takes the sheet; Marshall lets go.

There is my grandmother, in the summer of 1962, twenty-seven years before she will climb into the attic, resolved to incinerate her husband’s words. Katharine sits in precisely the same spot—even the chaise lounge, with the avocado vinyl cushion, the same. The same lake spreads before her. Katharine looks at the lake with eyes that, in her early forties, have only just begun to blue with age.

On the raft tethered fifty yards from the shore, my mother (now only a thirteen-year-old girl named Susie) play-fights with her two younger sisters. It is already August. Today is unseasonably cool, a foreshadowing chill: school will be starting in a month; soon they will return to their house an hour to the north, and prepare for winter. But now, her younger girls, with children’s obliviousness to discomfort, bolstered by their desperate desire that the summer continue, swim as if it were fifteen degrees warmer. Upstairs, Katharine’s eldest daughter, fourteen-year-old Rebecca, listens to music as she writes of boys or to boys. The day is crisp and blustery. Whitecaps have been heaving themselves across the lake for three days straight.

Already August. Frederick has been gone for more than a month now. Several times, Katharine has had to abandon her unspoken beliefs about when to expect her husband’s return. And now, once again, she must reconsider the reset deadline. A
month longer? Two? Just a couple weeks ago, Katharine felt certain Frederick would be home by the end of July. Now Katharine knows she must learn to discipline her expectations.

To the left of the porch, two squirrels court manically, sprinting among the trees. A strong gust unleashes a battery of acorns, which thump against the roof. A loon, apparently complacent in the waves a hundred yards from shore, is suddenly seized by a notion and disappears into the water. Katharine thinks of how simple it seems it could be to become something else. Her cousin Joseph strolling contentedly up the path, her girls delirious with the sunshine, the new renter with her scandalously younger boyfriend in the Bristols’ place down the beach. Even the squirrels chasing each other in the woods. Why, Katharine wonders, must she be as she is? How did her life become this narrow and burdened? She wonders if anyone else has such thoughts, and wonders about Frederick, whether this notion would make sense to him.
Yes
, she thinks.

Katharine tries to correct herself.
This is the danger of his illness
, Frederick’s psychiatrist has warned her.
This is why you have to keep yourself and your daughters away from him, at least for the time being. Frederick is sick, and part of his affliction is to pull you into his confusion
. Frederick’s psychiatrist, Dr. Wallace, has sounded much like her father when making these pronouncements, has nearly sickened Katharine by lending her father’s notions professional credibility. Her father, however, carries this logic further than Frederick’s doctor. Her father told her, just yesterday, that the solution is obvious: simply, his illness should no longer be their burden, financial or otherwise.

This is charity money
, her father said.
My charity money! And I don’t see where it is getting us
.