The Storm at the Door (8 page)

Enter stage left: Frederick in the change of costume that marked the opening of the evening’s final act, one that would close with him in a mental hospital, away from Katharine, away from his daughters, for months and months. Frederick, robed in George Carlyle’s raincoat. He entered the room primly upright, his lips pursed, in mockery of what he perceived to be the puritanical self-righteousness of the others.

Should anyone care to join me
, Frederick said,
I’m going out to do the Lord’s work
.

Is that my coat?

Frederick pulled the coat open, just a fraction of an inch, to reveal a vertical sample of six and a half feet of his naked self.

For God’s sake, Frederick!

Leave him be
.

It’s the middle of the woods. Where could he go?

With remarkable swiftness, they would find out. Frederick proceeded to climb Providence Road to Route 109, where vacationing Bostonians piloted chrome and steel behemoths between lakeside retreats. At the intersection of Providence Road and Route 109, Frederick greeted each passing car with a display of either his genitals or his bare ass.

After only ten minutes of Frederick’s performance, an ancient Ford happened to approach Providence Road. On their way back from a potluck dinner in town, the two widows watched their headlights illuminate the familiar trunks of birch and pine trees, the handcrafted road signs, the scurrying wildlife. And then the twin beams lit up Frederick, his manhood springing from the
folds of a raincoat like an aquatic mammal rising for air. As soon as they arrived home, the widows phoned the police, and within minutes the naked drunkard was safely in their custody.

It had been so simple.

George and Herman suggested the idea to Katharine, presented her with a simple solution,
best for everyone
, they said.
It’s either this or jail, I’m sure we can convince the police. This is what needs to happen, and it has needed to happen for some time
.

Katharine nodded.

Just explain
, the men told her.
Explain that he has been having these issues for a long while. Explain that he needs help. Finally, Katharine, he will get the help he needs. Something good will come of this. George says Mayflower is the best place in the country, for people like Frederick
.

Still, Katharine cannot know why, exactly, she agreed. Had she actually thought George and Herman were right? Had their semiprofessional judgments—George a Dartmouth-educated family physician, Herman a Harvard-educated lawyer—been enough to sway her? Or, more darkly, had she not truly agreed but, in her fury at Frederick, wanted a kind of revenge? Or had it merely been the appeal of a respite, time away from her implacable husband?

When the police brought Frederick back to the cottage, Katharine and the men of the party convinced them easily. After the police consented, with the condition that they see to his admission to Mayflower themselves, Katharine explained to Frederick what he must do.

She had then spoken to the other Frederick, the one their friends and relatives didn’t know: sober, shattered, and scared. She had explained to him that this was best for everyone.

They’ll take you to see some doctors
, she’d said,
and then all this will go away
.

Frederick had then nodded as a child nods. Brilliant, grandiose Frederick was reduced to her judgment, like a child.

He had trusted her.

In the following weeks, as the notion of his short stay began to disintegrate into the inscrutable opinions of Mayflower’s doctors, all of those party guests tried to reassure Katharine that still this had been the best decision.
There is a reason they want to keep him there so long
, they told her. They had seen what Frederick had put her through, they said.
The man needs help
.

Even if these were encouragements made only from the obligations of friendship and family, Katharine tried to believe them: his hospital is the best in the country, maybe in the world; the opinions of the men and women there are the opinions of professionals, who have studied, diagnosed, and treated mental illness for decades. They must be right.

They must be right
, Katharine thinks now, as she observes the afternoon from the chaise.
They are right
, she thinks, perhaps even says out loud.
He is sick
.

With the spastic logic of a flock of birds, Katharine’s three younger daughters all suddenly run for the house, as one. From her room upstairs, Rebecca calls them children, as an accusation.

Perhaps Katharine could be many things, and perhaps things could have happened in many other ways. But history has happened; Katharine must now be what she claims to be. For her daughters’ sake, if for no one else’s. She must hold apart their fights, make them lunch, quell their angers, reassure them in their fears. She must make them believe entirely in her singularity. She can do this, it is this that will keep her sanity and redeem her, the needs of her children.

Katharine asks her daughters what they want and pulls from the cabinet and fridge the array of jars, meats, cheeses, and fruits required. Since Frederick first went to the hospital, she has tried to accommodate, as best she can, each girl’s requests for simple pleasures: records, movies, books, food. When her relatives criticize Katharine for these indulgences, she offers justifications, which always begin with the sympathy-absorbent clause
Since Frederick has been gone
.

Since Frederick has been gone
, Katharine says,
I have trouble saying no. Since Frederick has been gone, I always feel a need to make things up to them somehow
. She justifies, to others, her indulging her children as a compensation, but there is a vindicating pleasure in it as well. Yes, Katharine questions her decision. Yes, she
sometimes panics with a guilt that is as plain as hunger. But still there is an undeniable gratification in her response to all that has befallen her. Still she is proud of her survival, of her family, which still thrives, still finds pleasure, in this summer without Frederick. And when he comes home—when? By the end of this month, early September at the very latest—they will be stronger, she will be stronger for what she has learned herself capable of.

You’re making me a fluffernutter, right?
my mother asks my grandmother.

Katharine displays the jar of whipped marshmallows. Susie, aware of how happy her happiness seems to make her mother, performs a celebratory jig at the prospect of fluffernutter. They all must make an effort, Susie knows. They must work to fix what her father has broken.

Katharine laughs and pats her daughter’s hair. There are still moments of happiness, when Katharine’s responsibilities and her needs are suddenly in perfect alignment. Perhaps she is even a hero, in her own dinky way. Katharine is married to a sick man, whose illness nearly spread to her, but she has kept it away. He is sick, still, and, still, she is well. Yes. She plunges the knife into the jar.

The wind buffets the treetops, fall’s first pronouncement denuding the higher limbs. Between tree trunks, the dying grass is clipped close to the earth, the first time anyone in Belmont remembers seeing the grounds of Mayflower properly mowed. Bulldozers plow old sheds, smooth earth to make way for new parking lots. The cows of Mayflower, no longer roaming Madhouse Hill, are presently mooing in a truck bound southward on Interstate 95, oblivious to their near future as hamburgers. Two months have passed, and now it is September 1962.

In the woods behind Upshire, the newly emptied cabins, buildings that were, until weeks before, the residences of the wealthiest mad, are being prepared to house programs unknown before on the campus: preprofessional training, occupational therapy. In their modest homes in Belmont and Newton, freshly laid-off orderlies and nurses—those kindly, terse old ladies—have been severed from their close proximity to madness and now drive their families to something similar, unable to stop serving lunch at the designated hours, unable to stop themselves from scrutinizing the schedules of others’ bowel movements.

The patients, many of them grown up and old in their private dwellings, are now forced, like university freshmen, to share rooms: a result of the new administration’s emphasis on the importance of the social milieu. And so, lining the ward halls are
confrontations and conspiracies, the discordant madnesses of the forced roommates often erupting in violence or, on rare occasions, aligning to engender friendship, but often birthing more madness.

High upon the far side of the Depression, the new conference rooms in Upshire Hall are cleared of their former Harvard Club inhabitants. In the place that was just weeks ago Professor Schultz’s quarters is now a linoleum-lined room, still sour-scented with construction chemicals, in which young men and women, aspiring orderlies, are taking the newly devised entrance exam. Down the hall, men in painters’ masks lay linoleum over rotten oak, apply baby blue paint over Victorian paisley paper. At the end of the corridor, in a room largely unchanged, sits the new psychiatrist in chief, the purveyor of all this modernization, Dr. Albert Canon.

A file is on Canon’s desk. An old patient, Stanley Fuller, for whom Canon’s subordinate, the meek Dr. Higgins, has suggested a course of shock therapy. Canon, as usual, will recommend other treatments.

Canon rehearses the speech that he will later enjoy making with a belabored sigh to Dr. Higgins.
I know they seem beyond language sometimes
, Canon will say of Mayflower’s catatonics.
But good old-fashioned words can be miraculous things
.

Canon, overly caffeinated to the far side of focus, lays the file upon the green cloth ledger and turns to his window to watch Robert Lowell stroll across the Depression, accompanied by one of the new orderlies he has recruited from Boston University. They look so similar, all these Irish boys with their crew haircuts, that even Canon sometimes has trouble differentiating them.

For the last three decades, Albert Canon has made a close study of the history of success and failure in psychiatric institutions,
research that culminated in his publication of the field’s essential text,
The Mental Asylum
. Canon has drawn many conclusions from his data, but none so important as the necessity of uniformity, the absolute imperative that the orderlies, nurses, doctors, and administration act as one. To this end, Canon has gathered a mostly new staff, hired by himself and thus loyal to him. Mostly, he has recruited and continues to train freshly graduated alumni from B.U., boys in need of money, eager to please, seduced by the dark allure of a job in a mental hospital, untainted by the independence of opinion that Canon has observed, time and again, older orderlies and nurses often exhibit.

Following the horrific suicide of the war hero James Marshall, both the board of directors and Canon’s predecessor—that docile dinosaur Wallace—decided that finally it was time for change, a systemic and dramatic modernization, an assurance that the Mayflower Home would retain its vaunted, preeminent repute. Canon was phoned at his office at Harvard on a Monday; by the following Friday, he had presented the majority of Mayflower’s staff with appreciative letters, which also communicated the end of their employment. A great blow, he knows, to all those families, and yet, for the sake of his patients, it would be only the first of many exorcisms, revisions, demolitions, and clearings.

Out the window, Robert Lowell, struggling against the autumnal tumult, seems to take the wind as a personal affront, a call to arms. He battles against the wind, feet and arms swinging.

Resentment of more powerful forces
, Canon will later write in Lowell’s file,
the denied love of a parent?

Like an MTA train making its scheduled stops, every six minutes, Canon’s thoughts arrive, again, to memories of last night’s sex. It seems to Canon that his particularly exemplary performance
can be credited to the recent surge of wellness that has come with this reformation. It comes back to him in aspects: an insertion, the way her breasts bulged when leaning back. The desk! Come to think of it, his tailbone has felt tender all day. Canon smiles. The buttoned leather chair groans beneath him.

Canon has been hired to revitalize the nation’s premier mental hospital. It is the greatest psychiatric hospital in the country, maybe in the world, and now he is its leader. He will oversee the mental health of great but troubled minds, his mind guiding theirs, a tremendous honor bestowed upon him through the transitive property, like defeating in arm wrestling someone who has defeated a great many others. The sun shifts; the papers before him are luminous. The intercom buzzes, reminds him of his eleven o’clock with the new class of orderlies. Canon stands, straightens himself in the mirror, exhales, and turns to the corridor. Dr. Albert Canon, newly ordained chief of Mayflower, walks the halls of his mansion. Birnam Wood has come to high Dunsinane Hill. Things are different now.