“Good morning, Mrs. Beasely.” I smile at the hard woman with a bird face and thinning hair who has not so much as grinned in the last quarter of a year.
“Good morning.” She doesn’t smile.
“We’ve come to collect my son.” I smile. She looks rather surprised. “Cage Malone Rutledge.”
“What’s his number?”
I have it memorized. “R. O. O. O. Three. Five. B.”
“Take a seat.”
“Thank you.” I smile.
Mrs. Beasely leaves the desk.
Harper says, “That woman is a real bitch.”
“She must have a very hard life, son,” I say. “Imagine the legion of angry, desperate relatives passing through her office every day.”
After half an hour Harper glances at me and goes up to the desk.
“Beg your pardon,” he calls out. My boys are all—both— polite.
Mrs. Beasely comes to the desk.
“Do you have any idea how long this will take?”
“No.” She spins on her heel and walks off.
Harper tries to read an old, tattered
Islands
. I only read waiting room magazines with gloves and it’s too warm for gloves. I fret about Franklin in Memphis, the pressures on him from so many people, then I see a picture of a beach in the magazine that looks like Pawley’s Island, where Harper fell through a rotten screen on a front porch headfirst ten feet down into sand when he was four. That was the summer when Nick insisted on spending most of his time in the shade of water oaks with a young Cherokee wood-carver, learning to sculpt tiny owls and dogs. Cage spent all day in his little metal fishing boat on the ocean, a boat built for a lake that had no business out on the open sea. Instead of motoring around the island to the calm water of the inlet, he started coming in through the breakers to the beach in front of the house. I can still see him in the stern as a wave spins the boat broadside to the shore and rolls it, see his dark, skinny body diving through the spray. How many times did Cage nearly give me a heart attack? And Nick. Once I was reading the evening paper on the porch of the house in Bristol. It was my favorite of all the rectories. Nick was pedaling fast down the steep road at the foot of our yard, the day he put on high-rise handlebars and a banana seat, the new fashion amongst the kids at the time. I had told him to wait until Franklin got home but he didn’t. I watched the handlebars swing forward and Nick catapult over the front wheel and hit the road with his face, his mouth open. I thought he’d cracked his head but he only chipped his teeth. Then Harper. Harper was an angry child. Once, driving him home from school on the freeway going seventy miles an hour, Harper just opened the door wide open and threatened to jump out. For a moment I thought he was going to do it. That was only five or six years ago. Boys. My Lord. How often have I wished that I’d had girls?
“It’s been two hours, Mom,” Harper says. “What can be taking so long?”
“I don’t know, honey.” I pat his leg. “They told me to come here today when they opened. The wheels of this bureaucracy obviously need oiling.”
The reception room has filled up with a whole spectrum of people from various socioeconomic brackets, from couples dressed up as if they are going to church to an unshaven man in coveralls to a filthy man who may very well be homeless. Mental illness is very democratic.
“Maybe Cage doesn’t want to leave.” Harper’s smile is strained.
“Maybe your father will be consecrated the archbishop of Canterbury.” I think of how my grandmother always made light of grave situations, which was never easy for me. I have a tendency to obsess.
“Everyone who has registered please proceed to your numbered table,” Mrs. Beasely announces from behind the desk, and the crowd files into the visiting room, leaving us alone again. I try to make eye contact with Mrs. Beasely and she looks right through me, then disappears into her office. “Thank goodness for Dr. Plauche. Without his intervention I think Cage would have languished here for years.”
“I thought you said it was prayer.” Harper yawns.
“How do you think I happened to bump into the good doctor as Frank and I were leaving last month? What made me decide to talk to him?”
“Happenstance.” Harper smiles.
“Providence.” I pat his leg again.
“I wish Providence would speed up the bureaucrats.”
“Patience.”
“Patience is a virtue,” Harper says, “but I don’t have the time.”
“Humor and grace. Those are Cage’s favorite virtues.”
“That’s what he says.”
“He was quoting your father’s favorite saint, Francis of Assisi.”
“The nature boy. Talked to animals. Birds landed in his hands. I remember the statues. Mythology, Mama. That’s all that is.”
“Doubt is the companion to faith.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Harper goes back to his magazine. The waiting room starts filling up with visitors for the next session. Harper keeps glancing at a very pretty brunet who looks like a young Audrey Hepburn. I don’t think he noticed her wedding ring. He asks, “Who do you think she’s visiting?”
“Whom,” I correct. “A friend, I hope, and not a sibling or her husband.”
Harper nods silently. The adjacent room exhales the first round of visitors, who look more defeated now than they did going in, then it inhales the newcomers. After a few minutes Harper gets up and peers in the small glass window in the door. Sitting back down, he says, “She’s visiting her husband, I think. Wonder what he did.”
“I don’t want to know. I don’t think I can bear any more despair. Where on earth is your brother?”
Harper squeezes my shoulder and walks up to the counter. “Mrs. Beasely? Please excuse me. We’ve been waiting for over three hours. We were told to pick up my brother first thing this morning.”
I can’t hear or see her from my seat.
“What?” Harper glances over his shoulder at me with an expression of horror and incredulity. “You’re kidding, right?”
My God, I think. They’re not going to release him after all. He got into a fight. Every day on the phone he said how the guards were provoking him so that they wouldn’t have to release him. Or he’s injured. The guards beat him up and his body is so bruised that they can’t show him to us. Oh my Lord, maybe he’s dead. Some murderer could have killed him, jealous that he was going to be transferred. The air leaves my body like a punctured balloon and I can’t catch my breath. The room is suddenly fuzzy, my head light as a feather, the air feels a hundred degrees.
“They can’t find him.” Harper is at my side, his voice sounding far away. “Mom, are you all right?”
I nod and breathe in through my nose, slowly pouring air down deep to my abdomen, recalling Mrs. Swinivasha, my yoga teacher for a year in Baton Rouge. I wish that I had kept up my yoga, found a teacher in Memphis. It certainly would help me deal with the stress. Through my nostrils I breathe out calmly. Harper is saying, “It’s okay, Mom.”
“They can’t find him?”
“That’s what she says.” Harper shakes his head. “They’re looking for him.”
Somewhere
in there
, those massive wings, the place as big as the Pentagon. “They lost him?” I stand up, smooth my skirt, and cross the room with Harper at my elbow. I raise my voice and keep it calm. “Mrs. Beasely!”
She turns from a filing cabinet ten feet behind the counter and looks at me.
I do not smile. “Do you mean to say that we have been waiting half of the day while you looked for my son?”
“We’re a big institution. We’re understaffed. Takes time to process people. If you would—”
“Where is my son?” I cut her off.
“They’re looking for him. His unit thought he was in protective custody but he wasn’t. He may be in one of the recreational areas. We’ll find him.”
Behind us a number of people have arrived to register for the next visiting session. I turn to them, smile. “Pardon me for one more minute. They’ve kept me waiting for hours and now they say that they’ve lost my son.” Looking back at Mrs. Beasely, who has come to the counter now, I say, “Mrs. Beasely, I wish to see the director.” I pull an envelope from my handbag. “This is the judicial order for the transfer of my son from this negligent disorganization. I want my son.”
“We’re looking for him, lady.” Mrs. Beasely is looking through me again. “Just take a seat and we’ll find him.”
“When?” Harper looks as if he is enjoying my performance. “Tomorrow?”
“Very soon.” Mrs. Beasely looks at Harper, then the growing crowd behind us.
I turn around and smile. “I’m very, very sorry. What would you say if they lost
your
son?”
“Lady—”
“Mrs. Rutledge.” I cut her off again.
“Why don’t you come back after lunch?”
“Why don’t you put out an all-points bulletin? Why don’t you call the director for me? Why don’t you do something to find my son? I want my son!” I no longer give a damn about politeness, scream as loud as I can, “
I want my son! I want my son!
”
“Okay, okay, Mrs. Rutledge.” Mrs. Beasely crosses to her desk and speaks into a phone, then comes back to the counter. “I’m sorry for the delay. A supervisor is going back to his unit.”
I step aside for the visitors to register, stay by the counter. Harper looks at me with a proud smile. Mrs. Beasely gives cards to a young couple and an elderly woman, who smiles at me and says, “I know just how you feel.” Mrs. Beasely answers the phone, then looks at me and says, “They’re bringing your son up now.”
The young couple starts to clap and in a few seconds all of the visitors, about a dozen of them, are applauding, strangers, bound together in despair, cheering each other on.
T
aunton. No walls. No dogs. No armed guards. Shady trees turning yellow and orange. Tall, gabled red-brick Victorian buildings laid out like a college campus. The most famous “mental health consumer” to matriculate here:
Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
The oldest wing, where she stayed, which has huge long glass conservatories and puts me in mind somehow of London’s Crystal Palace, is an alluring ruin, encircled by a high chain-link fence, a nest of rats and ravens. These days Lizzie wouldn’t be here but forty miles away in the women’s wing of Bridgewater, just one of many homicidal maniacs. I haven’t seen Nick in a while, but if he visits me here, I want to ask him if he can find Lizzie in the afterlife. Ask her if she did it.
I feel extremely lucky to be at this gloomy, peaceful haven, one of a few hundred residents out of thousands of indigent mental health consumers in the state of Massachusetts. I can see clearly now how I was out of control in May. Full-blown manic. Woke up in Nantucket and took off like a harpooned sperm whale, Moby-Dick, ramming speed right off the pillow. Woke up in Nantucket with a sense of endless possibility, gigantic optimism. It started off as simply feeling good for the first time in so long. After feeling sad for years, even before Nick’s crash, back to Grandfather Cage’s death and further, the anger Dad quietly carried around in him, the background melancholy of living in such a sad, fucked-up world. At first there was the elation that came with the decision to forget corporate America and become a boatbuilder. I would be a craftsman, an artisan. I could be happy doing that. It would take the family some time to accept it, after all the years of saving and borrowing to put me through Sewanee and Vanderbilt. But they would come to appreciate a quiet life on a beautiful island.
For the first time in eleven years I felt I had a purpose and a tempting destiny, since I was the Louisiana state champion miler and headed off to a Tennessee mountaintop to run and write poetry, wear a black gown at the pseudo-Oxford University of the South. The real darkness began on the cold Sewanee mountain the first winter, a few weeks of dark depression, which, the next winter, grew into two months of lassitude. I dropped off the cross-country team in November and in February failed to show up at track practice. The next winter, junior year, Meriwether, my housemate, had to pick me up and shake me sometimes to get me to the dining hall. I wasn’t suicidal. I was just paralyzed. The world seemed too sad and pointless.
My last winter was saved by a woman, Carlin Heather, a tall premed lacrosse player from Connecticut who could quote Yeats. If love can’t conquer depression, it can at least keep it at bay for a while. She was a year younger and I hung around Sewanee after graduating, working as a carpenter and studying for the LSAT. When Carlin graduated, we traveled through Central America, then came back to the States, stayed with Nick in San Francisco the spring of his first year of grad school. Carlin decided I was too unfocused on my future, which was true. I hadn’t a clue. Though everyone expected me to get an M.B.A. or a law degree, I knew that simply wasn’t me. Carlin went back East to med school at Yale and I stayed on in San Francisco, working as a carpenter. Nick kept telling me to buck up, that I’d find another Carlin. In the fall I went to Vanderbilt to appease my parents, who were exasperated at my aimlessness.
The first couple of years went okay; just the structure kept me occupied. I was building decks on the side to partly pay my way. Spent a fair amount of time visiting my grandmother outside Nashville. After Nick’s death I slowly came unglued. I was going through the motions but every day feeling more distant and alienated from my peers. I didn’t know then that my mind was already chemically unbalanced. I was deep in a clinical depression and I thought it was because of Nick’s death, my broken heart, the discontent with the course of my life. I had no idea that it was a built-in dysfunction, some cross-wired part of my own mind, something inherited, that was plunging me deeper and deeper into a black hole. No doubt it was both brain chemistry and experience.
The jagged pieces of the puzzle fall in place in Taunton in group. While Bridgewater is a rabid menagerie of wild dogs and feral cats, Taunton is a big warren of damaged hamsters so harmless and shy there is no need for cages. Veterans of many groups, everyone listens attentively, respectfully, and adds their considered remarks to the sad life story of the day. Seems like seventy percent of them were sexually abused by fathers, uncles, or neighbors, who were sexually abused by their daddies, granddads, or great-uncles, who were sexually abused by . . .
ad infinitum
. The meek victims of two thousand years of perversion. Surrounded by them in group, I feel like a member of the privileged minority of the undefiled.