There was no present you could give. She had always derived a good feeling from the act of giving, but she knew, really, that the act was twofold. A gift had to be received. Hands had to stretch out and take it, fumble with the ribbons and wrapping. Everyone was waiting for her now. She tossed a shovelful of earth down onto the coffin. It thudded and lightly dusted the surface.
The summer Lucy Ascher stopped talking, the summer the words wouldn’t come, she loved the crying and whispering of children in the night. She listened closely, the way an operagoer listens to a difficult aria: awed by those odd throat sounds she herself could not make. All around her there was noise—children choking on the bones of bad dreams, the girl a wall away who shouted “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” long into the night. In the background, like an accompaniment, there was the soft squeak of nurses’ rubber heels on the aqua tiled floor, the clicking on of lights, the rush of tap water in a dented tin basin. It was all these noises, moving skyward like the smoke from many small fires and fusing together, that lullabied her nightly.
At the private psychiatric hospital where Lucy Ascher stayed one summer of her childhood, the grounds were tended as carefully as any historical tourist attraction—like the kind of
mansion third graders are taken to on class trips, she wrote in her notebook. It was like the kind of place that rents out tiny tape recorders and earplugs so that you can wander around and hear a deep voice tell you about how Mrs. Roosevelt picked out the hummingbird wallpaper pattern herself, the kind of place where a curator leaves the train sets and chipped porcelain dolls of the President’s children scattered randomly about the nursery as though the children had just abandoned their toys when called to the table for lunch. While her classmates, Lucy wrote, would be impressed by the high, lumpy beds and the heads of moose and deer that seemed to poke through the walls, she would be looking at Mrs. Roosevelt’s wallpaper and realizing how yellow it had turned over the decades, like milk gone sour. “I would focus on decay rather than history,” Lucy explained.
The hospital had a sweeping half-moon drive crunchy with gravel, and it was set far back from the road, “nestled in pine,” as the catalogue read. Her parents sent away for hospital brochures as if they were looking into summer camps, and in the end this famous place was picked, right in the heart of the Berkshires. Her parents would go to Tanglewood in the evenings of their visits, stretching out side by side, defeated, on her father’s old army blanket.
She had lost her ability to speak; it was as simple as that. Ten years later she went out with a man named Richard whose mother had had a stroke and would say, whenever her telephone rang, “Would somebody please answer the steeple?” “Telephone” was lost somewhere in the collapsed portion of her thinking—lost forever, a mitten, a shoe. Lost, but
inexplicably replaced, and that was the difference between them. Lucy could not replace her words. “There was a seashell pressed indefinitely to my ear, and the sea-static terrified me. I was twelve years old, and one morning my mother found me curled in my room, late for school, trembling. ‘Lucy,’ she said, drying her hands on a dishtowel, ‘are you sick, sweetie?’ But I could not answer her; the rushing was too loud. I opened my mouth like a pathetic, newly hatched bird—opened and closed it, opened and closed it, gasping for air, gasping for words.”
There should have been a drowning—one of her parents going under during a family boat outing. Maybe that would have been a reasonable excuse for the silence that was knitted so closely around her. There should have been a death of some kind, or at the very least a trauma. Perhaps her parents got angry and hit her sometimes, the young male psychologist suggested, leaning forward in his chair, springs straining. But she was clean—no suggestive purple bruises, no burn marks rippling up on her arms or the backs of her legs. There was no obvious explanation; her family life was intact. Her parents were very married. Her father sometimes stood behind her mother in the kitchen, placing his broad hands over her hips while she prepared dinner. “Ray,” she would hiss, “stop it,” but as she lifted the lid of a tureen of soup Lucy could still glimpse the quick light of her smile behind the rising steam.
Someone had led her out into the sun and placed an old
Richie Rich
comic book on her lap. She was sitting there by herself, her thoughts going nowhere, encircling her like a stupid dog in yipping pursuit of its tail, when she first met Levin. He walked slowly across the wide expanse of grass and pulled
up a chair next to her. She guessed that he must have been close to thirty-five then, and she remembered that he was as thin and graceful as a praying mantis, and that he wore Italian leather sandals with black ankle socks.
Although the children’s wing was separate from the rest of the hospital, the front lawn was common ground, and that day she had been placed on one of the mildewed canvas lawn chairs, a white oval of sun block centered on her nose, the work of a thoughtful nurse’s aide. This was recreation hour, and all of the children sat unmoving on the lawn, as if in an extended game of Statues. Every day most of them drank little fluted cups of apple juice cloudy with Thorazine, and all their eyes were bright, their pupils huge. The taste of the apple juice stayed with her for years, “hitting me in the way that an old knee injury might ache during rainy season. I taste it at the back of my throat, the thick, phlegmy sweetness of it, and I also remember the nurse’s encouraging smile and nod as I swallowed it all.”
Being sedated, it turned out, did not loosen the roaring from her. All it did was make her less able to focus on it. Lucy still heard the roaring full-volume each day, the intangible sound of cars on a freeway, but she only had the energy to acknowledge its presence, and she became slowly used to it.
“Well,” the man said, lowering himself carefully onto the chair as if into steaming bathwater, “you seem to be enjoying the sun.” He took a pack of Kents from his shirt pocket and tapped out a single cigarette. “Smoke?” he asked, then laughed. “No, I guess you don’t.” He lit the cigarette with a narrow silver lighter and took several deep drags. Then he leaned back
in his chair, closing his eyes. After a while he said, “I’m Reuben Levin. You’re the one who doesn’t speak, aren’t you?” He laughed once more, gently. “That’s like those horrible puzzles that ask you to find out which man is the liar. ‘A’ says he’s not the liar, ‘B’ says ‘A’ is lying, et cetera. You have to figure out which man it is. So I guess if you don’t answer me it’s either because you just don’t want to or because you really are the one who won’t speak. I heard a few nurses talking about you, if it really is you.”
He finished his cigarette, dropping the stub lightly on the grass. “It’s supposed to grow into a cigarette tree now,” he said, “like in that song ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ We’ll have to come back and check in a couple of years.” He stood up suddenly, and she could see that his face had already begun to flush with sun. “It’s much too hot out here,” he said. “I’m going in.” He leaned over then and kissed her high on her forehead, right where the middle part scalloped down into a widow’s peak. “There,” he said in a low voice. “It’s been good talking with you.”
The next time Lucy saw him she was with her parents in the solarium. The room’s name was misleading; light came in modestly there, filtered through tinted glass. Everything was cool blue, like the diving section of a heavily chlorinated swimming pool. Her parents had brought along things she used to love to eat: long red licorice whips and packets of cocoa mix with tiny marshmallows that bloat when you pour in boiling water. “Look who’s over there,” her father said, poking her mother. He named an actor who had done a lot of specials for public television.
Her mother strained to see across the room, and after a moment she nodded. “Yes, I think you’re right,” she said. “I heard somewhere that he had a nervous breakdown, but I had no idea he was here.” The actor was talking and laughing with visitors, but they did not interest Lucy. A few feet away, though, sat Levin, the man from the lawn, flanked by a woman and a small boy. The woman and the boy were doing all the talking, “their hands flying up around their heads like propellers as they spoke.” Levin was sitting quietly, listening. Occasionally he said something, but for the most part he was silent. When visiting hours came to an end and the room shifted to a deeper blue, the woman threw her bangled arms around Levin’s neck and whispered into his ear. The small boy hooked onto one of Levin’s legs and stayed there, like an appendage.
In Occupational Therapy the children were stringing elbow macaroni into necklaces, and Lucy began to enjoy the rhythm of it, the clicking of piece upon piece. Someone was moaning across the table—a nine-year-old girl who had tried to hang herself with a jump rope in her bedroom at home. She sat helpless now, raw pasta and bits of glitter scattered in front of her, untouched. Lucy looked up and realized that Levin was standing in the doorway, watching her. Beverly, the occupational therapist, noticed him also.
“Hi, Mr. Levin,” she said. “Can I do something for you? Do you want some more lanyard?”
“No,” he said, an edge of sarcasm in his voice. “I still have yards to go. I came to talk to Lucy Ascher, if that’s okay.”
Beverly looked doubtful, but finally she agreed that he could come in for a little while. Levin sat down on one of the high,
spindly stools. He was wearing a dark maroon bathrobe, and Lucy could see how slender and long his legs were. “I never really introduced myself to you,” he said. “At least not formally. I only told you my name, nothing more. If we were in prison, I’d tell you what I was in for, like they did in that big prison movie. But this is almost the same thing, isn’t it? I mean, we’re all in here for
something
. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’m not paying for it. It turns out there’s all this money lying around the university where I teach—a fund that helps tenured faculty pay for hospitalization. The last person who got to use the money was somebody three years ago. Cancer of the colon. He only used five weeks’ worth, though, and you can pretty much guess the rest. So I’m doing time because I’m a wreck, because the counting man has gotten to me.” He paused. “I suppose that sounds a little odd. You’re young enough to know what I’m talking about—those cardboard figures that hold up their hands, and you learn how to subtract by breaking off their fingers at the knuckle, and you learn how to add by putting them back on. I’m sure you’ve seen them. As a kind of academic joke there’s a counting man in the math department faculty lounge. People put funny hats on it or dress it up like a woman and put a lampshade on its head and dance with it at the big Christmas party and everyone laughs.”
He continued speaking like this for almost half an hour, telling her how the presence of the counting man had given him the idea of counting things. He began counting squares of linoleum on the floor when he walked across a room, he counted the spines of books on every shelf he passed, he counted the moles, the beauty marks, that lightly dotted his
wife’s body. “Even you,” he said, “you’re wearing twenty buttons—twelve on your shirt including the pockets, and eight on your sweater. Useless information. See what I’m going through?”
His voice sounded good to her; it rose and fell in erratic slides like a calliope, and nobody had ever talked to Lucy at such length before. Levin stood up, looming over her. “You,” he said in a whisper, “are the only one I’ve met who just
sits
there. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is.”
Beverly came up behind them, her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “Lucy,” she said, “please start cleaning up your things. O.T. is just about over for today.”
Around the room, children were putting away their creations in designated cubbyholes or wiping the tabletops, or just sitting on their stools, feet hooked over the top rungs, rocking to a private music. One boy was eating paste from a gallon-sized jar. It was time to leave.
“Want to go out on the porch?” Levin asked. She deposited her macaroni necklace in the corner—her string of worry beads, her rosary—and they left the room together.
—
I
n my mute world even the dreams were voiceless,” Lucy wrote, “populated by characters who ran around as silent and frantic as Keystone Kops. A nurse flashed a circle of light in my eyes late one night, lurching me from one of these dreams. ‘You were shivering,’ she explained to me, drawing the blanket up around my shoulders.”
Summer was ending, and they were no longer taken outside
for recreation hour. Instead, everyone sat in the television room, old reruns blaring, the laughter of the children in front of the set strangely rapid and even, like machine-gun fire, after every gag line. Levin often came and sat with her, talking about his life, his teaching, his counting. He and his wife, Judith, lived in Connecticut and had one child. “I guess we have a pretty good life,” he said. “At least we did until recently. Jason loves kindergarten, and Judith seems fairly happy most of the time. That night when she called up my friend Lew from the math department to come over and talk to me, I think she knew what I was going through and was really scared. She and Lew came into my study, where I’d been for twelve hours agonizing over numbers, and Lew told me I was doing this to myself and that he would help me. He said he would cover my nine o’clock section in the morning, and wasn’t I teaching them eigenvalues now?”
Levin seemed to be building himself up to some kind of minor frenzy, and his words came out faster. “Judith asked if I wanted something to make me sleep, and I said yes, and she gave me something and then pulled out the Castro convertible in the study because I couldn’t leave the room that night. This is the horrible part: all of a sudden Jason poked his head out through the slats of the banister; I guess the talking woke him, and Judith called to him in this really controlled voice, ‘Go back to bed, baby. I’ll be in to sing you our song about the windmills.’ Then I realized that I didn’t know what song she was talking about, and that I had been a negligent father and husband, and that my wife and child had a camaraderie I knew nothing about. It was like an epiphany or something.”
Levin slumped on the couch after his monologue, his head drooping. Through the vacuum of her roaring Lucy suddenly felt what she later supposed could only have been compassion. She was no longer listening to the distant, abstract whimpering of children; this was a direct appeal. Her compassion was at once stronger and more demanding than the noise in her head, and she wanted to say something, anything. Her tongue clogged the words at first, stopped them in her throat. She tried again, opening her mouth slowly, as if it might stick. “Things will get better,” she said, and the words came out unevenly, huskily, grating against one another like the gears on a rusted bicycle.