Too Close to the Falls (14 page)

Mother Agnese felt the quake one floor below as Anthony hit the floor. In fact, even the windows shook, and the purple construction-paper Easter bunny cut-outs whose ears were wedged between the frame and the glass fluttered to the floor. Mother Agnese came thundering upstairs and charged into our grade-three room.

As the ambulance siren whined to a halt, and we all heard the clatter of the stretcher as the fold-down wheels hit the cold tile, I felt eyes burning into my back as I swung large, carefree arcs on my graph paper. The volunteer ambulance driver was Brian Muller, who worked at the gas station. I heard Brian bark, “Let's get a tourniquet on him.” Roger, the bartender from the Riverside Inn, who doubled as the volunteer ambulance sidekick, opened the huge red metal first-aid box, but added in his usual steady voice, “Probably fainted from the sight of the blood, and he hit his head.” Sister Immaculata was now totally ignoring the prostrate Anthony and was whispering with Mother Agnese in the corner. Linda Low, with a never-ending flair for the obvious, took it upon herself yet again to tell Brian, “Catherine McClure stabbed Anthony McDougall. He was just sitting there minding his own
business.
She did it for no reason at all.
” Brian just shook his head as though I were too much of a bad seed even to comment on. As he approached the exit, he nodded his head toward me and asked, “Mother Agnese, do you need help with
her
? Want me to get the compass away?” Mother Agnese assumed the beatific smile matched by the voice of chilling calm she appropriated when she was in her “I'm but a vessel of the Lord” mode: “No thank you, Brian, I'll handle this.”

And “handle” it she did. My mother picked me up from school in the car since I was too dangerous to be loose on the streets of Lewiston walking, maybe stalking on my own. As I sat in Mother Agnese's office counting the blood flecks on my royal-blue spring uniform pleats, she chose to chide me with the following words: “Well, Catherine, when a person's soul is empty, there is plenty of room for the Devil.”

The next morning when I tiptoed barefoot across the freezing floor on my way downstairs to pick up my underpants, undershirt, and navy knee socks off the radiator where they were warming in the cold dawn, my mother poked her pink sponge-rollered head out of her bedroom, saying I might as well get some more sleep as I wasn't going back to school until I had seen a psychiatrist and he had pronounced me sane. I had no idea what a psychiatrist was, although I could tell by my mother's expression, the same one she wore when they called the priest to bless my dying grandmother, that seeing a psychiatrist must be worse than a venial sin. It might be mortal. I heard the word
psychiatry
referred to as a department when we dropped off medicine at the Niagara Falls hospital, and thought it must be something like
mental extreme unction, the last hope before passing on to “another world.” When I asked her what a psychiatrist was, Mother said it was the kind of doctor that Mrs. Poole and old Mad Bear saw. Now, I knew that Mrs. Poole thought people were trying to open her head with a hairbrush so she refused to stroke her hair until they took her with all her snarls to the loony bin. And old Mad Bear hadn't said one word or moved in years since he had his big attack or, as Dolores, our cleaning lady, said, “went on his last warpath.” What my father referred to as Forest Avenue Sanatorium on his prescriptions, Dolores called “the laughing academy.” This whole psychiatrist episode was shaping up to be a lot scarier than the work of the devil, in my possibly insane opinion.

My mother told me I must be “troubled” and that all I had to do was tell her the truth and everything would be alright. I was beginning to discern that all these understanding and kind words meant that I might be crazy. My mother asked me to sit down. She said in slow, measured tones that Mother Agnese was “surprised” that not only would I
plan
to hurt Anthony, but that I showed no “remorse.” I wondered what remorse was; I certainly wished I had some. Maybe “
re
-Morse” was Morse code for retards. My mother saw my bewilderment, and asked me if I was sorry that I had stabbed Anthony. I was so relieved that all I had to do was to tell the truth that I quickly jumped in, assuring her with complete candour that I wasn't the least bit sorry I'd hurt Anthony. I could tell by her face this wasn't the truth she wanted to hear.

When she asked if I had planned it ahead, I was really disgusted by her naïveté and couldn't resist saying, with only a smidgen of the annoyance I felt, “Did Sugar Ray Robinson
plan
to fight Rocky Graziano or did they just run into one another in the
ring?” When my mother asked, “Are those boys from school?” I shook my head and quickly switched metaphors, asking, “Did David
plan
to shoot a pebble at Goliath? After all, he was fighting a
giant
for his
life
.” My mother's question was in the same league as her suggestion to have Anthony to lunch to befriend him. Anthony McDougall could bend the metal swings when he was mad. He was much older than me and twice my size. Of
course
I planned it ahead or I wouldn't be alive to tell the tale! No, I hadn't planned for him to go to the hospital with a concussion, I just wanted to draw blood.

The only thing that I lied about was the issue of planning it alone. I don't know why I lied about that but I had an unsettling idea that some people, like Constable Lombardy and Irene, the cosmetician at the drugstore, didn't fully approve of Roy. I didn't know why but I felt it. I thought maybe it was because he lived in Niagara Falls instead of Lewiston, which made him a bit of a foreigner. Truthfully I didn't know the reason, but I'd learned long ago not to share everything about my relationship with Roy with my parents. Besides, he was the only one who really tried to help me. If it hadn't been for him I'd have been bald by the time
they
stopped Anthony.

My father never once in my entire life alluded to what would eventually be referred to as “the Anthony episode.” All he said on the following morning was that I should dress for work since there was no reason “to make idle hands the devil's workshop.” He said I would work from 6:00 a.m. until the store closed at 9:00 p.m. and he cashed out at ten. Then I could come home with him. He said only one thing which chilled me: “This will be your schedule from now on
unless you return to school
.”

The second I got to work I tore down the narrow stairs to Roy's makeshift office located in a nook under the sidewalk grate, separated from the rest of the storage room by orange crates. By this time I'd become rather frantic, and pictured myself sharing a couch with elder Mad Bear, and a hairdresser with Mrs. Poole. I'd be referred to as the girl with the third-grade education. Now I'd never get a chance to grow up and enter the Franciscan convent and become a scientist in the Congo like the sister in
The Nun's Story
. (I actually had no idea that was my life's ambition until I was sure that I was deprived of it.) I could see myself at Forest Lawn where we dropped off medicine to the guard with all the keys. I'd be their youngest patient and they'd have to shorten a little straitjacket especially for me.

Roy leaned back in his swivel chair, put his arms behind his head, and laughed his belly laugh when I told him what had happened. He hit his desk with his huge hand in actual fits of hysterics when I told him about the ambulance, and how I had to be driven home, and he was virtually doubled over when I got to the part about the psychiatrist. Actually, when Roy found the whole thing so funny I began to see the humour in the episode. We were laughing so hard I had tears running down my face before long. I did the whole imitation of Linda Low's tattle-tale speech and Brian Muller's bad imitation of
Dragnet
.

I acknowledged that I was fairly worried about the psychiatrist, and Roy assured me that most of them were just little guys, and a lot of them weren't even Americans. He told me that of course I was sane and that any psychiatrist would see that in about one minute. “I seen them headshrinkers and them places.” (I should have known this — Roy had been everywhere and seen
everything.) “They goin' to ask you the days a the week and if you be gettin' messages from other planets — stuff like that. You'll be home in an hour. It's like poppin' in to see Dr. Laughton, only it's for your head.” Roy got out of his swivel chair with its leaking stuffing and jostled me by punching my shoulder. He hunkered down so we were eye to eye and said, “They just be jivin' you, girl. I know ya better than that psychiatrist be knowing ya and I knowed some psychos in the army and I can tell ya you ain't one. If
I
knows that then some head shrinker'll figure it on out.” I sank into my chair in relief as he continued. “The upside is ya got a break from grade three. You already know how to read and write and do your figures and, what's more, I guarantee that Anthony McDougall will never mess with ya again. When he sees ya coming he goin' to roll out
the red carpet
.” Roy acted out much of his speech and he began rolling out the dust cloth on his desk and laughing.

I felt the balm of reassurance, and for the first time realized how nervous I had been over the last twenty-four hours. I remember noting that Roy never asked me if I'd mentioned his name at any point when I was grilled during the Anthony interrogation. We both put our feet on the desk and ate a Nestlé's Crunch bar and sang one of our favourites. “N-E-S-T-L-E-S, Nestlé's makes the very best —
chocolate
.”

Getting declared sane was not quite as easy or quick as Roy had predicted. First of all, it took three weeks to get an appointment. I was out of school until after I'd seen the doctor, so word travelled. As I sat on a bench outside Helms's Dry Goods Store one spring day, smelling the dew-soaked honeysuckle and licking my
popsicle, I heard Mrs. Helms say to the butcher, who happened to be Mr. Helms, “Poor Janet and Jim McClure. Cathy can't go back to school until her nervous breakdown is over.” Mrs. Johnson, who managed the shoe department which sold only overshoes in the winter, rubbers in the spring, and Keds sneakers in the summer (navy or white), piped in, “I always said she was too clever by half.” Mr. Helms, not a man of many words, but one who only spoke to cap off others' statements, giving them a certain irrefutable finality, said, “They had her too late. Never a good thing.” I decided at that moment that they had seen my last imitation of Ed Sullivan, to say nothing of Mr. Ed, Lucy and Desi having a fight, or bacon frying. Let them find someone else to entertain them, someone who wasn't born too late.

To compound the wait, my father wanted me to go to a Buffalo psychiatrist, presumably so I wouldn't be insane in front of any of the referring physicians from Niagara Falls that he knew, because he filled their prescriptions and ate breakfast with them. I suspected that finding a “child psychiatrist” wasn't easy since, as Roy said, they were little guys and mostly from other countries. I wondered how a child got the job — after all, it sounded as interesting as working in the store — but my mother assured me it wasn't a
child
psychiatrist, but an
adult
who studied children.