Clear Springs (22 page)

The doctors ordered shock treatments to blast Granny’s self-involvement into oblivion and uncoil her nerves. She pleaded with them not to do it, but they insisted. The following Sunday, the family went to visit her, carrying food to her because the meals at the hospital were unpalatable. Children weren’t allowed in the building, so Daddy brought Granny outside to visit with Don and LaNelle. The family sat with her on benches on the lawn while she ate biscuits and some cold fried chicken and vegetables Mama had cooked. She was calmer after her first treatment, and she was glad to see faces from home.

The place spooked Don and LaNelle. Don, a mischievous and hyperactive child, gamboled across a flower bed and peeked in a barred window on the side of the building. He jumped back, screaming.

“What did you see?” Daddy said, but Don could not stop bawling. He was trembling. Daddy peered through the window and saw a naked woman tied to a chair, howling.

“Don’t look in there again,” Daddy told Don. “You oughtn’t to see that.”

“What was it?” Mama asked, as she held Don close to her.

“A crazy woman tied to a chair,” Daddy said. “Not in her right mind.”

“One night I woke up and saw a mean fat woman standing over me,” Granny said. “It liked to scared me to death.”

“But they told us they put people like that in quarantine,” said Mama. “They don’t let them out.”

“I ain’t crazy,” said Granny, gazing at her lap.

“Nobody said you were,” Mama said.

“I’ve got to go home. The chickens need to be fed, and I need to do my washing.”

She was frightened by the sensations assaulting her. The unfamiliar and the unbalanced were the same to her. But the doctors, one of them a woman, insisted to my parents that the environment—the erratic behavior of the patients, the noise, the misplaced identities—would shake Granny out of herself.

The next time the family visited her, they found her more placid and open, but forgetful. She repeated herself and seemed not to remember that they had been to see her before. Again, they went outside, sitting in lawn chairs.

“These young people that are locked up here,” Granny said sadly. “It’s such a waste.” She was almost seventy-five years old.

Seeing the young people tore at her heart. She saw wild-headed, suicidal, babbling teenagers thrashing and flailing in straitjackets. She saw them herded into holding chambers and electric-shock rooms. She said they were tied up in their beds and could not get out to relieve themselves. She knew that people like that had once been kept in people’s attics, chained. She said it was better to have them at home, even in the attic, where they could be with their people, than in a public place, among strangers. She could not bear the pitiful sight of those raggedy-haired young people, thrust out of their homes, away from their parents and their brothers and sisters. She begged to go home. The shock treatments were so dreadful, she refused to complete the full course. Finally, she contrived to come home a few weeks earlier than recommended by insisting on having her cataract operation.

“She came home a different person,” my mother wrote me. Mama worked closely with her to bring back her mind, just as she had done in 1950. Trying to stimulate her memory, Granddaddy talked with Granny endlessly about their life together when they were young. “Now, Ettie,” he would say. “Think back to that buggy ride down to Spence Chapel when we were late to the singing that time. It commenced to rain. And Old Peg eat up that ground like a twister.”

The literary life began to wink at me through the clouds. At the start of 1963, while I was still in the city, my creative-writing teacher from the University of Kentucky, Robert Hazel, accepted a teaching job at New York University. He had lived in New York during the forties, and now he returned with the fanfare of a homecoming. He summoned his Kentucky pals, inviting us to hang out at his “pad” on MacDougal Street, the center of Village bohemian life. At the San Remo Bar, he introduced us to noted poets and artists we’d never heard of. They talked over my head, while I sat mute and bewildered but eager to be in the scene. The allure of the literary life was as delicious as the rum-raisin ice cream at the Figaro. Bob Hazel had hobnobbed with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, names that sailed luxuriously through the air like winged maple seeds. “You can’t be a writer unless you work among, and associate with, other writers of your time,” Bob told me.

He was disdainful of my movie magazine work. He sneered at my journalism background—fatal for a writer, he said, as if my writing for the college newspaper had already caused permanent damage. But I told him I was grateful not to be sewing labels in Tony Martin jackets or canning tomatoes in a hot kitchen with brats underfoot.

“You were pretty dumb in Kentucky, sitting on your ass in that journalism building,” he said. He had a way of delivering cutting remarks with a little dip of his head, eyes lifted, coquettishly assuming forgiveness. He dressed in brown—trench coat, twill pants, V-necked sweaters over plaid shirts. His brown hair had a flipped forelock like a horse’s. Back in Lexington, he had been dazzling—handsome, electric. But now he was beginning to fade, like a worn-out couch.

We attended lectures on French painting and Federico Garcí Lorca
at the New School. He took me to N.Y.U. to hear Lawrence Ferlinghetti rave repetitiously about death, to the beat of a jazz tune. I lumped him with the beatniks, which Bob told me was not exactly right. Distinctions were important to him. He could talk about “hip” and “cool” and “beat” in precise terms. He wasn’t beat himself, but he was exceedingly hip. In college, I had yearned to wear black tights and chant poetry at a coffeehouse. I owned some bongo drums. I didn’t drink coffee, but I liked jazz, which was essential to the beatnik scene. I was vague, though, about exactly what the beatniks were rebelling against.

I know Bob introduced me to Ferlinghetti after the reading because I jotted down the meeting in my diary, but evidently the poet wasn’t as impressive as Fabian because I have no memory of our encounter. To me, poetry was like layers of wet lace stuck together. But Bob was a serious poet and was recognized as a good one; he aspired to the mantle of Hart Crane. Bob was at the end of the twentieth-century wave of celebrating and romanticizing the alienated artist. He was a problematic figure, around whose center I wavered uncertainly. He had been fired from the University of Kentucky for a dalliance with a student (her father had complained to the dean). Earlier he had attempted such a dalliance with me. I recalled how he’d put the moves on me back when I was in his writing class my junior year. And here he was again. As soon as he turned up in New York, he began flirting with me again. I could have avoided him, but he was the nearest thing to
La Dolce Vita
I could find.

At U.K. in Professor Hazel’s class, unlike any other literature class I took, we read some works by writers who were still
alive
. We read
Goodbye
,
Columbus
and
Lie Down in Darkness
and Flannery O’Connor stories. From Professor Hazel we first learned of cocktail parties, European cafés, Greenwich Village, and the Brooklyn Bridge. He lectured the class against women’s magazines, melodrama, and Henry James. He eschewed bourgeois values. His poems juxtaposed the lyrical and the cynical, and he admired the brutally physical and sordid. His novels were lurid. In one of them, rats ate a baby’s face in a New York apartment. Authenticity was essential in that period. Everyone was reading
Nausea
and trying to use “existentialism” in a sentence.

He was an egregious flirt. At the time, I didn’t imagine that his come-ons were anything but normal, since his romantic vision of masculinity fit sweetly with all I knew of seduction from high school, songs, and the movies. I was in his class, and I was flattered and elated by his attentions, since he was a handsome, worldly man—a writer.

I had been in Professor Hazel’s class about two months when he invited me one Saturday to go out to the country to shoot mistletoe out of a tree. Mistletoe, an evergreen parasite with gummy white berries, grows so high up a tree you have to bring it down with a gun. In the South, it is traditional for a man to go out shooting mistletoe on Christmas Day. Professor Hazel had a .22 rifle. After he blasted down a couple of mistletoe bunches from a tall ash, the farm family who owned the land asked us in for some cornbread and beans. Professor Hazel said there was nothing he loved better than good cornbread and succulent beans. He seemed right at home with farmers, which seemed odd to me, as if this suave professor who had lived in New York secretly hankered to hitch up some mules.

With the mistletoe in the backseat of his car, he drove me to his place in Lexington. He was renting the downstairs of a brick antebellum manor house with a circular drive and Doric columns. An art professor and his wife lived upstairs, but they weren’t home. The house was dark and shabby, furnished with antiques. I noticed manuscripts lying around casually, worn books stuffed with papers, original artwork (by the upstairs professor) on the walls. Professor Hazel laid a jazz record on his turntable and pricked it with the needle. “Progressive jazz,” he said, and he told some story about New York and a jazz club and Gerry Mulligan. I took all of this in, heavy with the weight of its authority.

Holding the mistletoe above my head, Professor Hazel asked me to spend the night with him. He said something like “Your charms require you to stay here in my bower until morning.” Or something less lame, more acutely modernist.

I wasn’t sure about my charms—or his, either. I was scared of a person so old. He was about eighteen years older than me, divorced, and he was my teacher. His marriage had fallen apart not long before. I wanted to please him, but I wasn’t sure what the rules were. I hadn’t expected such a bold advance from him.

“Will you do me the honor of spending the night?” he asked.

“I can’t,” I said. “I have curfew.”

He seemed genuinely disappointed, as if he were lonely and carried a sorrow that was too adult for me to understand. He returned me to my dormitory, but he wouldn’t get out of the car and walk me to the door—as etiquette required on a college date. He said he didn’t want to be seen.

After that, Professor Hazel’s overtures toward me cooled, which
disappointed me. A mystique hung over him like a purple wine haze, and I signed up for the second semester of his course. I loved the way he made his students feel privileged to get a glimpse of his literary domain. Commenting on our work, he would say “That scene puts me in mind of Hemingway” or “When I read your story I thought of what Dylan Thomas said on one occasion when I was with him in New York.” He made his students believe that writing was a calling; a writer was much like a preacher receiving his personal summons from the Lord. This was a notion his wide-eyed students found irresistible.

In the second semester, I wrote a story that featured Professor Hazel as a character—renamed Tom or Bud or something. It included some suggestive remarks that he had made to me at a party, lines such as “Where do we go from here, baby?” The day I was to read the story aloud in class, I became nervous and withdrew it. I had encountered him in the hallway just before class. He said he had read the story, and he handed it to me with a mock flourish.

I couldn’t look him in the eye. I stuffed the story between the covers of my notebook, as if to hide it. “I can’t read it in front of the class,” I mumbled.

He didn’t seem surprised. He nodded. “That story has
some
things going for it,” he said. “But there are others you may want to think about.” He gave me an enigmatic smile, which I loaded up with significance.

In confusion, I retreated. I had always got my lessons dutifully, but I did not write any more stories that semester. He gave me an A in the course anyway. No doubt he sensed my bewilderment, and perhaps he felt guilty about his part in it. By then he was in deep with the student whose father later got him fired.

He cultivated a coterie of young male followers. When these protégés visited his house, he fed them whiskey and steaks, and they brought their manuscripts and stayed for hours talking about writing. Four of these students—one right after the other—had won prestigious creative-writing fellowships to Stanford University. I wanted to apply to Stanford too, but I had not completed enough work to make a strong application, so I decided not to try that year. I had never before ended a class on a note of inertia. It surprised me, and I did not know what to do.

When Robert Hazel appeared in New York, we did a cautious little dance around each other. I safely distanced him, but he was still my guide, my foil to Miss Florence. He had a boozy complexion. I
didn’t know what cigarettes and hard liquor had to do with writing, but I inferred that a certain school of male writers—the romantic degenerates—depended on them. And there were rules about food. It had to be authentic, such as Spanish peasant fare, with wine. Writers like Bob found their European cuisine in cafés. I figured they just didn’t know how to cook. But Bob invited my roommate, Kyra, and me over once for fresh asparagus. He panfried it in cornmeal, the way Hemingway’s character Nick Adams might have fried up a fish over a campfire. Asparagus and Scotch were the entire meal. I didn’t like Scotch. I’d never had asparagus; it was all right, but not enough to fill up on. I was still hungry.

On another occasion, Bob invited me out to one of the cafés on MacDougal Street. He ordered veal scallopini marsala and wine.

“I have an offer to make to you,” he said, looking up at me with his familiar dreamy-eyed come-on gaze. “Let me seduce you, and I’ll make you happy. I’ll make you happy for the rest of your life if you’ll be my mistress.”

Mistress? What an adult word! And dirty sounding. In the Italian movies, mistresses were commonplace. Maybe the word occurred to him because we were in an Italian restaurant, I thought. I picked at my pasta.

“That doesn’t sound like me,” I said. Mistress of the house. I envisioned cooking and cleaning.

He had a little mean streak. After a while, he said, “Three things, if you’re going to be a serious writer.” He held up his fingers to tick off his list. “You’ve got to hold back youthful enthusiasm, and don’t emulate that mediocre sludge on television, and avoid sentimental shit about dear old grandparents.”