The Storm at the Door (31 page)

To quiet him, Rita puts her mouth on his.

Neither Rita nor Albert acknowledges it, at least not in words, but there is a bloodless awareness of departure to the final attempt that follows, like the handshake that the high generals of warring armies must make to seal their truce. Her body is not receptive, his not giving, and after five minutes of awkward attempts, Albert pulls away and apologizes, citing a stomachache. They will never try again.

That afternoon, Canon shuts his office blinds and removes his emergency pack of Pall Malls from the desk drawer. He lights one, the little glow in the darkened room both a slight comfort and a sad metaphor. Canon does not allow himself to reflect on his situation at large, does not count his failures, with Rita or with his patients. Instead, he thinks of what Frederick Merrill wrote in his journal.

It is so simple
. As the failure mounts on all sides, as he sits there in the shadow of his shameful valley, Canon perhaps allows new considerations. One could scale those walls, one could scrape and climb to the light far above, where others seem to live so
simply, and perhaps never make it. One could spend a lifetime climbing that faltering climb, Canon thinks, or else simply open the fearsome door that presents itself at the valley’s nadir. But it would take great courage to do either: the resolute constant courage of the climb or the sudden drastic boldness of opening that door. Canon thinks of Professor Schultz.

And my grandfather? There he is, as he knew he would be if apprehended, returned to solitary. Nearly accounted for now is that void in my family’s history, that absence that stretches between Frederick’s naked romp on Route 109 and the pages that my grandmother received, the pages she would keep in the attic for years, until, one day when I was seven, I would find her sitting before the fire, contemplating their incineration.

The gap is nearly accounted for, but not just yet. For now, my grandfather paces his small cell in the solitary ward, banging at the door to ask to speak with Canon and, failing that, to be let out to the bathroom.

Frederick has spent three days in solitary, but he is yet to be provided the fateful paper and pencil. In his little room at this moment, instead of letters and words, there is only the wordless horror that Schultz’s death unbound. When he is allowed the occasional trip to the bathroom, Frederick tries to speak with the orderlies, at least to speak with someone.

I had no idea. He told me his son was there. How could I have known? There will never be anything as horrible. How could I have?

But, after a tiresome afternoon and evening of Frederick’s frantic pleas, which the Crew Crew boys in the solitary ward could no more tune out than they could ignore a baby’s urgent crying, they yell at him to shut up until he finally does.

And so there my grandfather is now, left to silence. Or not silence exactly, but the calls of the other men and women in the solitary ward, echoing. The muffled noises of other patients, and a faint ringing in his room that may or may not be produced by the single lightbulb caged to the ceiling.

He’s in such a fragile state. He could be a great danger to the other patients. Not to mention a major distraction
.

The next afternoon, Canon attempts to explain his reasoning to the two investigators hired by Mayflower’s board of directors (in institutional euphemistic terminology, the board calls them
consultants
, these two bearded, balding men whom Canon knows well from their reputation in the academic literature). The two men look at each other, and then the one with the mole asks how long, then, will they have to wait to talk with Frederick. When Canon again explains that Frederick is in a very troubled state, and that reliving the incident at this moment could be catastrophic, the two men look at each other again.

Canon provides the men answers as best he can, deferring to minor staff failings, the unforeseeable way in which his patients escaped, the statistical fact that almost no mental hospital is entirely free from suicide. That, despite all the planning and order in the world, some things are simply uncontrollable.

Uncontrollable:
the word lingers putridly after the
consultants
finally go. How long can he hold Merrill from the board’s investigators? Or should he simply let him talk? But undoubtedly Merrill would try to blame Canon and his approach, would try to link Schultz’s suicide to what had transpired in Canon’s group therapy session the day before. But, Canon asks himself, what does he have to hide? All the empirical scrutiny, his careful study of failure in mental hospitals shows …

Higgins knocks at Canon’s door and enters to deliver the news of another bleeding of Canon’s authority. That morning, Higgins tells Canon, Robert Lowell woke with the others, dressed for the day, waited for the morning orderly’s next round of checks, and informed him that today he would be leaving.

I’ll bring him here
, Higgins says.
Before he goes
.

Canon shrugs. It is a great effort even to reply to Higgins, but Canon can see his subordinate is nonplussed to the threshold of vertigo, and so he manages,
If he wants to ruin all he has accomplished, leave him be. We have to focus on controlling what we can
.

Really?
Higgins says.

Canon will see Lowell just once more, as a taxi comes to bear the great poet back into the city. Canon will watch the scene from his office, assuming Lowell cannot see him behind the bright reflections of daylight on his window. Just before crouching into the car, Lowell will turn to Canon in Upshire and offer what at first appears a salute. But then, Canon will see, it is a salute made only with the middle finger.

The next morning, Rita and a Crew Crew boy named Pete relieve the evening shift, and then conduct checks. When the two reconvene in the office, Pete starts in with the only conversation on the staff’s lips that week: Schultz’s suicide and its aftermath. This is how Rita learns where Canon has put Frederick.

Rita considers confronting Canon, but she knows better than to try to argue with him. Even now, Canon would never allow Rita to persuade him to her own notions of how he ought to handle his patients. Instead, Rita concocts a plan of her own.

At the end of her shift, Rita, fearless of Canon’s censure, goes directly to room 108 of the solitary ward, through the window of which she can see Frederick, half of him on the room’s single thin mattress, half of him splayed on the linoleum floor. When Rita first opens the door, Frederick hardly raises his head from the mat to greet her; a long line of saliva is drawn from the corner of his mouth.

Frederick
, she says.

He doesn’t reply. And so Rita enters the room, crouches next to him, and lays down her offering, paper and a soft charcoal pencil (she fears what he might do with a pen). Frederick looks at the objects strangely, as if deciphering their purpose, and turns, closes his eyes, retreats back into the corner, into the Miltown.

When Rita touches him, gently at the back of his scalp, he turns to her and his eyes elucidate.
Write
, she tells him.

Write?
he asks, as if the word were not English.

To your wife
, she says.
I’ll send it. Tell her what happened
.

Frederick thinks,
What happened?

•   •   •

The solitary ward is staffed with one orderly for every two patients, and even Rita, Mayflower’s de facto number two, cannot offer the company, the touch, the conversation she senses might help restore Frederick to some semblance of reality. But by stealthily altering Frederick’s prescriptions, Rita is able to whittle down his Miltown to levels lower than when he was on Ingersoll. She is also able, twice a day, to replace the pencils he breaks or crushes against the wall, the paper he tears and crumples. It reminds her of newsreels she has seen of researchers administering a new medicine, for which they hold the highest hopes, to diseased primates in their laboratory cages. For two days, she passes the little window to his door, hoping for the best. For two days, he seems simply to belong in the place where he is.

And then, on Wednesday evening, she looks into Frederick’s room to find him seated on his mattress, crouched over the floor, applying pencil to page. When she enters the room, he tells her that he is going to need more paper.

Frederick does not sleep that night, or the next. It seems to Rita as if he has stored up on sleep, in these last days, for the purpose of this output.

Only for a moment, when Frederick asks about sounds in his silent room, does she doubt her project.

•   •   •

When Rita arrives at Frederick’s room that Friday evening, she finds him sleeping on his mattress, the pages nowhere to be seen. She unlocks the door and enters.

Frederick darts upright with a sudden, wide-eyed awareness, as if ready to overtake a predator.

Sorry
, she says.
Sorry to wake you. I wanted to know—

The pages
, Frederick says.

Yeah
.

I was afraid someone might take them
, he explains, reaching under the mattress and producing a considerable stack.

Will you read them for me first?
he asks.

But they’re for her
.

I don’t know if they make sense. I tried to make sense. I can’t tell anymore. If they make sense, send them. If not, throw them away
.

I’m sure they—

Please
, he says.

Rita doesn’t say anything more, and so Frederick says
thank you
.

That evening, as dusk gives way to proper twilight, Rita sits on a bench on the edge of the Depression, and reads in the orange glow cast by one of the Victorian lampposts.

When Rita has finished reading, she walks up the opposite side of the Depression, enters Upshire, slides the key that only three people possess into the door of Canon’s office, and copies Frederick’s home address from his file onto a stamped envelope addressed to Katharine Merrill. Then she returns all of Frederick’s charts and clinical jargon, walks to her car, and
drives into town. Rita slips the envelope into the first mailbox she passes

Poetry, Rita thinks, is not the result of some divine madness, some awareness gifted from the gods. Poetry is what makes madness, for a time, vanish. Love, language: for a time, another place.

As Katharine turns her Ford Country Squire into the place Lars and she have agreed upon, the darkened lot behind Graveton High School, she finds Lars already there, leaning against his car, waiting to receive her. He wears a leather jacket; his thinning hair is Brylcreemed, his face freshly shaven. Now in his forties, he looks like a shoddy imitation of himself at his prime. Like a cheap bouquet of silk roses, Katharine thinks. If Katharine were to pass by him in the market, she likely would not recognize him. His face might strike her as a sad implication of time’s passage, similar as it is to a greatly aged version of the face of a boy she had once known.

Katharine
, he says, more to himself than to her, as if savoring the word’s flavor.

Lars
, she says, extending her arm mechanically into the charged space between them.
So nice to see you
.

Lars scrutinizes Katharine, finds neither intent nor apprehension, only her placid, unreadable face. But she was always so inscrutable, wasn’t she? And, after all, she has shown up here, hasn’t she? Mustn’t that be an expression of intent?

Let’s go somewhere
, Lars says.
C’mon
.

Katharine nods and climbs into his Oldsmobile, with its traces of Lars’s children—petrified french fries, crushed aluminum toys—littering the backseat.

Lars’s weathered face, the detritus of his children; here she is, a married woman with four children, in a car with a middle-aged man, with two children of his own, the two of them linked only by a teenage romance, abandoned half a lifetime ago. What is she doing?

Katharine watches the trees erupt and then vanish from the headlights and tells herself to stop thinking. That the whole point of this, of tonight, is not to think, not of Frederick, or of his pages waiting for her on the table, or of her children and what they require of her. As they cruise in fourth gear, Lars rests his hand on Katharine’s leg, and she doesn’t usher it away.

Katharine wants not to think, wants—only for a moment, just once—to transcend her endless cycling considerations and reconsiderations, but she also knows that it wouldn’t take much. Just a simple capitulation. All she would need to do now is give in just a little. Katharine’s father has already cleared Lars’s way (could her father possibly also be responsible for Lars’s suspiciously convenient reappearance?). If only, just now, she accepted his hands, his mouth, his body, Lars and her father would take care of the rest. She could earn permanent residence in that rosier land of Lars’s Norman Rockwell existence. And Frederick would be sent where her father wants, the state hospital with its frugal enthusiasm for the lobotomy. She may feel only a lonely woman grateful for an evening with this nervous, affectionate man, but Frederick’s fate is held in the space between her hand and Lars’s.