The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (6 page)

"Hello," he said, not looking at me, "My name is Dr. Sights."

"I'm Mary Aganosticus."

He nodded, again without looking at me, though he did raise his
eyes to the level of my teeth and say, "Open." He peered down my
throat, checked under my tongue, thumped my back, shone a light in
my eyes and tested my reflexes. Throughout, he looked grim. Then
he listened to my chest, flattening a thick grey ear against my left breast and then my right breast and then my left breast once more for
good measure, which I knew from my nursing days was not in any
way, shape or form how to check a heartbeat. Finally, he pulled away
and wrote something on a clipboard and handed that something to
Miss Gait.

"She'll be fine" was all he said.

That afternoon, Miss Galt came yet again and found me in the
day room, where I was reading a four-week-old Louisville Examiner.
All smiles, she was, though in a place like Hopkinsville it's amazing
how things like smiles start to take on meanings different from those in
the outside world. I stood, and she took me through the medium-crazy
ward and the full-blown ward and into the front foyer where the receptionist had taken my bag fifteen days earlier. Here we took a left and
walked down a hallway heading in a direction opposite from the
women's wing; it was long and brightly lit and with doors every few
feet. After we'd passed about a half-dozen, Miss Gait stopped and
unlocked one, using a key from the hoop-shaped ring she always carried in her right hand. Inside was dark, though when she opened the
door a bolt of light fanned over a goodly part of the room, enough I
could see the walls were grey and the floors concrete and in the middle
was a large, elevated tub. Miss Gait closed the door and opened the
gaslight. She approached the tub, beckoning me to do so as well. She
finger-stirred, and after I stripped, she folded my robe and put it on the
floor next to the bath.

There was a leather sheet covering the tub, and running down the
middle of the sheet was a heavy, metal zipper that looked like a bottle
opener. She pulled down the zipper, steam puffing into the air. Then
she took my hand, not so much for support but to direct me up the three
steps leading to a small platform near the tub rim. From here I did what
I imagined I was supposed to do, which was to put one leg, and then the
other, through the slit in the leather. Soon I was sitting in a bath of hot
water and salt. Miss Galt cradled my head until it rested on the back of the tub. Then she pulled the zipper to the top, where it formed a low
tight collar around my neck.

Around this time it dawned on me the zipper handle was on the
outside of the leather sheet, while my arms, and more particularly my
hands, were under the leather sheet, meaning if the zipper was going to
be pulled down it wasn't going to be pulled down by me. To make matters worse, it was equipped with a little latch fitting into eyelets on
either side of the part, so I couldn't even thrash around with the hope
the damn thing might lower on its own.

Now trapped is trapped, no matter how comfortable you are, plus
the tub was coffin shaped and that can start a mind to racing. My heart
picked up the pace, and I looked up at Miss Gait with what could
only've been horror on my face. This made her smile even more broadly and say, "There. A nice hot bath. I wish I had time for one. I'll be
back to get you in four hours."

With that, she patted the leather cover, turned and abandoned
me; the last thing she did was close the light and cast the room into
darkness. Course, the minute the door shut I began twisting and kicking and flailing and generally doing everything I could to get myself
free short of hollering for help, which would've branded me as ornery
and therefore suffering from hysteria. After a few seconds of this uselessness, I took a rest. Then I thrashed some more, took another rest
and whaled my arms and legs one last time, though in a much less
enthused manner: I was starting to figure the leather sheet was there
to stay, and no amount of wriggling or commotion was about to
change that.

This triggered a worse sort of panic. I could hear my blood pressure surfing in my ears and I could see angry jags of colour knifing
through the darkness and I had to fight the inclination to vomit. And
my heart-oh, how I called for Jesus's help. Whereas before it'd been
speeding, now it was speeding and pounding, something a heart can't
sustain, so every few seconds it'd up and miss a beat. Every time this happened I thought I was dying from fear, though at the same time
staying alive to dwell on the process. A cruel set of dance partners this
was, for the moment I started accepting my death as a mercy there'd be
a collision in my chest, so hard it'd rattle my ribs and quake my stomach, and my heart would start charging along again until it missed the
next beat, the whole thing repeating itself over and over and over.

It's hard to say how long this torture went on. Inside a completely dark place, time has a habit of looping around and doubling in on
itself and playing tricks. So I can't say. Maybe it was ten minutes,
maybe it was longer. Felt like longer. Felt like forever, if you must
know, and that's a traumatic thing: finding out what an eternity feels
like. What happens is the body exhausts itself, and you go completely
still, and you feel cold and your fingers tingle and your bladder drains
and your mind goes blank. Lying there, I reckoned this was the calming
effect Miss Galt had promised, though it was the sort of calm you get
nightmares about later on.

So I lay there, vegetabilized and chilled, maybe dead, maybe not,
having completely stopped considering the possibility I might ever get
out of that tub. The door to the room opened. Miss Galt opened the
gaslight. I clamped my eyes against the glare.

"How are we feeling?"

I, defenceless as an old woman, weakly muttered, "Good." She
let me out and I tried to dress, though I was so shaky she had to help
me. We went back down the hydrotherapy wing, her walking and me
shuffling, past the front desk and through the wards strung along
women's wing A. She led me to my bed, and it seemed to me the ward
was quieter than usual. Perhaps some of the women were having their
tubbings, I don't know. Linda and Joan were there, and they hustled
over and sat beside me, though neither one of them touched me.

Linda said, "Don't worry, Mary-first time's the worst."

Joan added in a softer voice, "Yes ... first time ... the worst," and
all I could do was sit, nerves firing, glad they were there with me.

I had tubbings the following day, three days after that, and then
the day after that, the scheduling of our hydrotherapy being something
understood by the staff and the staff only .

The day after that I met my psychiatrist.

He came by late on a walk morning, just after we'd been led back in. I
was in the day room attached to the ward, wishing I could knit something, feeling low and a little jumpy.

"Good morning," he said, "I'm Dr. Levine."

I smiled shyly, sizing him up.

"I thought maybe we should meet. Is that all right, Mrs.
Aganosticus?"

He was a short, doughy young man, just shy of thirty, with thin
dark hair pushed to one side of his forehead. As for his face, the nose
was the primary liability, for it was oddly bulbous in shape and it flared
at the sides, like a radish cut open to garnish a salad. As he was not the
most attractive of men, he made up for it by projecting warmth and
sympathy and a general all-round niceness. Immediately I figured him
for being lonely, niceness being something women don't generally care
for in men, and the thought in my head was, Good.

"Yes," I told him, "that'd be fine."

He sat looking at me. I wasn't sure whether this meeting would
take place in the future, or whether we were having it now. As Dr.
Levine was just sitting there, I figured the latter was the case, and that
I better say something interesting to get it going. Problem was, I'd
trained myself to be so cautious I couldn't think of anything to say. The
pause lasted long enough I worried he might get bored and leave, so
finally I figured I might as well up and out with it.

"I don't like being tubbed."

He smiled slightly, and I worried I'd made a mistake by complaining. My concern disappeared when he said, "Is it the darkness?
The feeling of being trapped? The boredom? Yours is a common complaint, Mrs. Aganosticus. Sometimes I question the value of
hydrotherapy myself. Particularly in light of some of the more progressive treatments coming out of Europe. Perhaps I can ask around,
and see what I can do. Would that be all right?"

I was stunned.

"Yes," I peeped, "that'd be fine."

We talked a little bit more that day, mostly about the hospital and
how I was getting along with the other patients. He left shortly after,
though not before promising to see what could be done about my problem. I tried not to get my hopes up.

I had my fifth tubbing that afternoon; like Linda and Joan had
promised, it was getting easier, though it was still miles from being
easy. I now spent the four hours in a state of quivery boredom, not panicking exactly but feeling as though any moment I might. Linda had
suggested I make up mental games to help pass the time; apparently,
she'd pretend the tub was a magic carpet and she was soaring through
space, visiting places she'd been and could conjure up in her head, like
New York City or the ocean or the body of the man she should've married. I tried it too but didn't have much luck, imagination never having
been my strong suit. Instead, I exercised my arms and legs, swishing
them about in the water, flexing my wrists and ankles, for I didn't want
my muscles going soft in case I was to need them.

After I'd spent a half-hour or so of arm and leg swishing, the
door to the tubbing room opened and I got scared, for the orderlies had
a reputation for sneaking in during a tubbing and unzipping the leather
covers and taking their pleasures. Squinting against the light flooding
the room, I was relieved to see it was Levine. He said hello and opened
the gaslight enough to cast a dim, soft light over the room.

"Is that better?"

I told him it was. He asked if I'd like it lighter, saying he could do
that too, and I told him it was a fine restful light if restful's a thing that's
possible in a tubbing room. This made him smile, thank God. He took a stool and placed it behind the tub. In his other hand he held a notebook and pen.

"I'm afraid there is nothing I can do about the restraints," he said.
"Hospital policy. However, I was thinking you might not be so bored if
you had someone to talk to. Do you think that would help?"

I said I thought it would. He sat on the stool and, after a few seconds of rustling, said, all of sudden, straight out of the blue and without a moment's notice, "How did your parents die, Mrs. Aganosticus?"

Now, this question caught me off guard, my first reaction being,
That's personal, Mister. But seeing as how he'd helped me a little
already and it was something I did want off my chest I figured I might
as well play along. So I told him how the TB scare of 1902 had gotten
my father-how over a four-month period the air had seeped out of
him, his face thinner and paler each day, the area beneath his eyes growing darker and more sack-like as the ailment progressed. How when he
coughed you could hear it coming from deep down inside him, rumbling like the slow, distant thunder you get when the weather turns hot.
How he died on a Sunday morning, a fitting day since he was a man
who believed in God; I remember listening at the door of his room and
hearing the doctor say to my mother, "He picked a good day to go,
Lela. Heaven's got him now." How after the doctor left I cried and my
mother just sat there, quiet as a log, which is the English way of handling strong emotion.

Throughout my little story, Levine sat on his stool, scribbling
and saying, "Yes, yes, go on, go on," so I told him how a wagon pulled
up and two men dressed in dungarees and work shirts came in and carried my father out in a burlap bag. Afterwards my mother thanked
them and paid them, both of which seemed like crazy things to do considering what they were taking away. The news must've spread, for
the house soon filled with neighbours bearing food, some of them
coming from so far away they didn't pay taxes in the same county.
Course, many of them offered up their teenage sons to help out with the fieldwork, offers my mother turned down as she didn't like being
reliant on the kindnesses of non-relatives. As a consequence, she had
to spend more and more time out in the fields, tilling for next year's
tobacco, it becoming my job to entertain the visitors. A big job it was,
too; they kept coming and coming, loaded down with baskets and jugs
and jars, all determined to help out the family of the man who, upon
coming south from Quebec, had changed his last name to one that was
old-fashioned and American sounding and, believe it or not, inspired
by the sight of threshed hay. This went on for months, such that my
biggest recollection of mourning, aside from the pure dog misery of
it, was long awkward conversations had over cups of tea with people I
barely knew. (That, and having people treat me like a thirteen-yearold one day and a full-grown woman the next.) When we weren't eating jams, pickles and mincemeat pies the neighbours had brought over,
we ate root vegetables and cuts of meat preserved in clay urns filled
with duck fat.

"And your mother?" Levine asked. "What happened to her?"

Well.

Here I told how she grew addled with pent-up sorrow, how she'd
leave the house with only one shoe on or sometimes turn to me and you
could tell she was seeing someone other than yours truly before shaking her head and coming to her senses. How one day, when the two of
us had been alone for five months, she decided to buy an old dray cheap
from a guy who'd spent time ranching in the Appalachians. The horse's
name was Tom and he'd taken poorly to the wide-open spaces of west
Kentucky: always snorting and stamping the ground and trying to
manoeuvre his haunches so he could launch a hoof at your forehead,
which was presumably the reason he'd been sold at the price he'd been
sold at in the first place. A week after that, my mother decided she'd
use Tom to harrow the northwest field, figuring the horse's spunk
might come in handy at the end of a long day. Her second mistake came
when she stood between horse and harrow while linking the trace. Something spooked Tom, probably nothing more serious than a breeze
or a moth fluttering by, and he bolted, dragging the harrow over his
grief-witted owner. Course I was the one found the results. The sun
was lowering and the cooking was done and she hadn't yet come in
from the fields so I went out looking. Walked to the northwest field and
from a distance saw the horse buckled to the harrow, just standing there
chewing and thinking about whatever it is horses think about. Twenty
feet away was a dark heap I couldn't make out. As I got closer it became
pretty obvious what it was, though the mind's an optimistic thing, and
needs to be shown the worst has happened or it'll go on believing the
opposite. I got up close and took it all in. She looked like she'd been
torn apart by wild animals.