The Storm at the Door (23 page)

Katharine sits with her first book of S & H Green Stamps open on the table before her. Later, she will spend dull hours trying to fit her expenses to the government allowance, she who, as a child, rang a bell for servants to come. How is she expected to know how to navigate times like these? Sleet has begun to give way to snow; the window next to her is quickly becoming a fuzzy opaque rectangle.

Katharine and her father remain silent. The green refrigerator drones; the lightbulbs buzz in a stained-glass lamp on the serving
table; the radiators groan and hack. Outside, a branch dislodges and passes the window as shadow play.

Katharine knows that only a hundred miles to the south, where her parents live on the coast, the weather differs drastically. She must endure winter’s dreadful clamp, while her parents receive only its tinge, blown inland by sea breezes.

But, still, what right has Katharine to expect them to suffer as she suffers? It is an irrational requirement, she knows, to feel that our parents must share and then redeem our suffering. It is irrational, Katharine tries to tell herself, to perceive her parents’ well-being as a slight to her. Truly, why should she expect her father to abandon the comforts and securities he has built through a lifetime of hard work for the seemingly boundless project of containing Frederick’s chaos? After all, Frederick, in his various ambitions and failings, must have already sapped nearly a third of her parents’ savings. Hasn’t her father already been tremendously generous? Shouldn’t she be grateful for what her father has already paid, not resentful of what he now denies her?

Well, that’s not exactly true
, she says.

Yes, Katharine
, her father replies.
Presently we have enough to support ourselves. What would you have us be, homeless?

Tears catch in her throat. Katharine rarely cries, but there are certain notions, certain people, that seem to bypass the normal ways she receives the world, entering her sinuses directly.

For a moment, Katharine’s anger flares but shifts. She is furious, not only with her father, but with Frederick. Genius, tortured Frederick! He is allowed to fall apart, and still he commands awe. Still Katharine’s cousins describe her husband’s tormented brilliance. What would happen if Katharine allowed herself such indulgences? For she also has thoughts that are not entirely rational; she also, at times, finds the life she has unbearable.

Look
, her father says.
This is not a hopeless situation. I would never let anything happen to you and the girls. But he just isn’t getting better, at least not in that cushy hotel
.

There is literal red in Katharine’s eyes now. She briefly imagines slapping her father’s face. The morning after Frederick was first hospitalized, when she called her parents, had her father not delighted in rising so nobly, declaring that he would make sure Frederick got the best treatment, that he would make sure Katharine and his grandchildren were safe and cared for?

This
, he had said,
is what money is for
.

Just such a catastrophe had, in that moment, validated his years of prudence and denied pleasures. Had there not been a barely suppressed delight in his tone when he called Katharine to discuss the paperwork sent to him by Mayflower, paperwork that would ensure—should his money keep coming—that his daughter would remain separated from that mistake of a husband?

It’s no hotel, Daddy
.

Your husband is ill
, her father declares.
But maybe what he needs is not the comfort of Mayflower, but the harsh reality of a public hospital. A hospital that, I might add, we wouldn’t have to pay for
.

At the mention of the state hospital, which her father now invariably brings up in these discussions, the face again materializes: the face of Oakey, the face of—let’s call a spade a spade—the village idiot. As a child, Oakey was the placid town’s one spot of mayhem, positively supervillainous by tranquil Graveton’s standards, with a short criminal career that included two bridges set on fire, a dozen dead rabbits hanged from the school yard trees, and one schoolteacher’s calf permanently disfigured by hotfoot. At seventeen, Oakey had been taken to the Kirkbride State Hospital following his expression, via fifteen
stones hurled through a bedroom window, of his dissatisfaction that Molly Mitchell, a Graveton High sophomore, had not returned his affections. Three weeks later, Oakey returned to Graveton, the adolescent slumping of his shoulders straightened, his beatnik black outfits exchanged for khakis and collars, his formerly devious face slackened into the sack of features that will now forever hang from his skull. The state of New Hampshire, in balancing the costs and benefits of long-term psychotherapy against the simple application of an ice pick to his frontal lobe, chose lobotomy.

It is worse than death
, Katharine thinks. In ways, what the state does to those it cannot fathom is worse than murder.

Do you know what they do in those places? If you become too much of a burden? They stick a pick in your brain
.

I don’t think that’s so. Not always, certainly. And, anyway, from what I’ve read, those procedures can have remarkable success. There was a story in the
Globe
about one young man—

I’m not going to argue with you the merits of a lobotomy. I’m just asking for you to help me
.

And now the fire passes and flares in my great-grandfather. A fury so immaculate that it cannot, for ten, fifteen seconds, catch to language. He stutters angrily for a long moment before finding the words:
Help? Help? Do I need to remind you of all I have—

When they hang up soon thereafter, agreeing they both need to calm, again nothing has been decided. Will he simply stop paying the bills? And then what? Frederick was checked in by the state police; he can come home only when his doctors decide he is ready. Without her father’s money, Katharine knows the only possibility is that he will end up in state care, the ice pick poised. His failures and her burdens aside, doesn’t Frederick at least deserve her defense?

Mustn’t there be another possibility? Couldn’t they all—all those doctors, and nurses and psychiatrists and police—be convinced they are wrong? Who says their understanding of sanity is sane?

These are the kinds of thoughts that Dr. Canon, among many others, has told Katharine can be greatly detrimental to a loved one’s progress. But isn’t this how indoctrination always works, an entire deferral of your own judgment to a higher authority, whom you are instructed not to question?

But surely
, Katharine tells herself. Surely they must be right in some degree. The minds in that hospital are some of the country’s greatest. The poet Robert Lowell and the mathematician John Nash, among many others, choose Mayflower for their breakdowns.

No, no, of course they are right
, she tells herself, pulling a box of Lorna Doones from the pantry, taking a bite. His drinking, his women, his tirades, the anorexic failed sailor in her bed. Katharine thinks,
He is sick
.

Katharine looks at the phone on its cradle and considers making the call she has told herself, many times today, that she will not make.

Over these last weeks, Katharine has spoken with Lars Jensen many times. Last time, she nearly wept and said things that still feel impossible to attribute to herself.

Lars again asked to see her.
I don’t have any intentions
, he swore.

She has denied his offers to meet four or five times over, but each time less assuredly. Lars, playing sensitive, is also persistent. Lars senses an opening, as does Katharine. They both sense that all it will take is one or two more sessions of Lars’s sweetened assertiveness.

For Katharine has begun to wonder exactly why she resists
Lars’s advances. Frederick has taken other women many times over; is it not simply pathetic, her fidelity to some notion that her husband clearly abandoned years ago? Just two and a half years into their marriage, when Katharine had discovered Frederick in the first of his affairs, she still had never considered the possibility she now considers. Lars never had Frederick’s charms, but she has begun to consider what else, more enduring, Lars might have given her in that now vanished, other life. Katharine knows Frederick has taken many other women, but she also knows that for her an affair would mean something entirely different. Frederick discarded women like scrap paper while brainstorming. Trying to rewrite himself, he wrote on them until inspiration dimmed, or another notion redirected his consideration. One kiss at a dance nearly twenty years ago, and Katharine has never kissed another man. She cannot lie to herself about what meeting Lars would mean.

This could still go away
, Katharine thinks as she climbs the steps of her house on the way to the bathroom upstairs. Simply, Frederick needs to come home.

She has no need for the toilet but sits on it anyway. She simply needs the smallness and the quiet of this room. She breathes in the smells of toothpaste and vague mildew; she wonders about a leak under the sink. She examines the tiny tiles of the floor; she thinks of the impossible patience required to lay them all there, one by one. Her marriage is failing; the possibility of another future is opening. But still, doesn’t their past—the one-time simplicity of it, the life that was, occasionally, what they wanted it to be—deserve at least one more fight?

Perhaps all the doctors are right. It is even likely that they are right. But she must see for herself. Frederick’s treatment, Dr.
Canon and Dr. Wallace have explained, requires complete removal from his normal life, absolutely no contact at all, until he is ready. But it has already been months since she had that single, terse conversation with Frederick. Shouldn’t she at last be allowed to speak with her husband once more?

Just this, just this
, Canon thinks.

Rita is wriggling against him on the psychoanalytic divan. Canon feels himself now joined with her, speaking a nonsense lascivious language with two tongues.

When the phone rings, Canon immediately decides to ignore it. Rita, beneath him, slows a bit, and on the fourth ring, she speaks in plain English.

Shouldn’t you?

Not now
, Canon says.

It could be important
.

If it is, they’ll call back
.

The phone silences, but only for a moment, then obstinately begins ringing again.

Christ
, Canon says.

You need to get that
.

As he crawls off and toward the phone, Rita grasps for her discarded uniform.
Shit
, Canon whispers.

It might be an emergency
, Rita says.

Yes?
Canon mutters into the phone, and turns to the window.
Katharine Merrill?

Of course Canon convinces Katharine. After her stubborn insistence with the operator and with Higgins, when Katharine finally succeeds in getting Canon on the line, she is no longer certain if she has called to plead for her husband’s release, if she has called to demand to speak with Frederick, or if she has called only to seek Canon’s reassurance.

Of course, I understand
, he tells her. Of course she is plagued by doubt. It is an element of Frederick’s illness that allows him to open this doubt in others.

Canon, in the persuasive, authoritative voice he has honed through years of study and months of practice, remains as vague and hopeful as a fortune cookie’s fortune.
Even I did not expect for him to need to stay here so long. Frederick’s condition is much more complex than I anticipated, but it shouldn’t be so much longer
, he says.
Not so long at all. I am quite confident
.

However, Canon’s success, in this moment, is not what matters. Or, rather, it is not what is important now, from my vantage, nearly five decades later. For the history of my family, the important moment is not this conversation, but what occurs just next to it. A simple awareness dawning upon the woman slipping into her underwear on the divan. From where she sits, Rita can discern the tones of Katharine’s desperation. Not the words themselves, but the way in which Katharine speaks them. The quality of Mrs. Merrill’s voice transmits that desperation into Rita’s receptive shame. Maybe, Rita had tried to convince herself, her inexplicable need for Albert was justification enough. But now Rita thinks of Frederick, and she turns her back to Albert.

Each man in the ward has his own name in the language that speaks only to Schultz. Unlike the failing languages, no two names are the same. Canon’s name is similar to the sounds produced by a hungry stomach. Frederick’s is a sharp sustained note, with bass beating beneath it, a sound Schultz has not yet been able to get his own tongue to replicate.

It is strange, how the names of random others suddenly come to him; Schultz has not yet entirely deciphered the system by which they are revealed. It makes some sense that the revelation of certain names is a result of their close physical proximity or of their constant, background presence. President Kennedy (a wistful grunt) or Khrushchev (like an elongated cough). Each of the patients in the neighboring boys’ ward contributes a whine to that kitten’s cry that the building always emits. But why do certain other seemingly random names—a grocer he has never met in Back Bay, a construction worker downtown, a lady selling gloves in a department store in Danvers—suddenly reach his perception? Why do these living names speak to him, suddenly revealing the entirety of these men and women he has never met? And also, why, recently, have the names of the dead begun to speak? Thomas Edison
(lalaaa)
, Lincoln
(ca-oola)
, the hospital’s namesake, the merchant John Mayflower
(haaaaahaaaa)
.