This was the only mental hospital she’d ever been in where doctors actually saw patients. She had no idea what went on. The first time she’d been committed, when she belived herself truly sick, she had expected treatment. A kindly gray doctor, a sort of Marcus Welby of the mind, would sit behind a desk asking her questions in a learned but soothing voice, explaining to her exactly how she had gone wrong. She would weep and understand. Confessional. Priests that healed. But all the doctor asked in the five minutes granted her had been the name of the President, the date, why she thought she was there. Then he had told her to count backward from one hundred by sevens.
That counting backward gave her trouble. Somehow, in changing schools from Texas to Chicago, she had missed some arithmetic. Never could she figure a tip or catch the cashier at the superette cheating her, even though she would count over her change, squinting at her palm to con the cashier into thinking she knew what was going on. Let’s see—one hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine, seventy-two … A pang of fear tweaked her. Shouldn’t it have been seventy? She’d done it wrong again. Seven tens were seventy; she knew that. She had gone wrong again … .
If she could get through the locked ward door, she was convinced she could escape the hospital. A guard stood on duty in the lobby, but he hardly ever stopped people. Many outpatients came and went, and furloughs for inpatients were common. She knew she could make it, once past that ward door. But because she had run away, they watched her even more closely than the others. Whenever she loitered near the door, the attendants or the nurse would ask what she thought she was doing. She ran out of excuses. Sometimes she would hang around the nursing station making conversation with staff in order to keep an eye on the door, trying to shape a plan for getting through it, but if she looked at the door too much they got suspicious. Then she would try to redeem herself by offering to make coffee for them. The doctors had their own fancy automatic coffee machine in an alcove outside the conference room. Redding drank ten to fourteen cups a day, and the secretary Patty
or one of the aides or attendants made it fresh every couple of hours. The lower staff sometimes drank the doctors’ coffee, but mostly used an electric percolator in the little kitchen. Sometimes patients were allowed to used the percolator or to drink an occasional cup of coffee in the afternoon. For Connie that made a big difference, keeping her awake enough to plot and think.
“I’m sorry you didn’t make it out,” she said to Tina as they got ready for bed.
Tina did not answer for a while. Then she said in a soft, remote voice, “My man, the only man I ever loved all the way through and through. Down to the pit of my stomach. They sent him up for thirty years. It might as well be life. Twice a year I get up to see him. Fifteen minutes through a grille. He’s getting old fast there. His hair’s coming out and his teeth … It might as well be for life!”
At bedtime, as Connie was sloshing in the murk of drugged sleep, Skip walked lightly through the rooms of the ward and paused at the foot of her bed. In death his hair had grown out and he had regained his loose-limbed grace. “Come along,” he called to her over the sleeping Tina. “Aren’t you coming? Shuffle off with me, my dearie-o! Don’t let them steal the best of you.”
What was it, her Catholic upbringing that kept her from thinking about suicide? Just as contraception had always felt more of a sin than falling into bed. Somehow it was not in her. “I have my own way,” she told Skip, muttering on the drafty back porch of sleep in the wind that blew through the sepia screens from the cold world’s end where they piled the corpses. In the bleak moonlight she whispered to Skip. “I’m fighting too. Even now, when like you I bow, I lick their feet, I crawl and beg, I am biding my time. Wait and see what I do.”
At lunch of macaroni and a little cheese she said to Sybil, “No trust? After all this time you don’t know me?”
“How can I know my friend when I see her kowtowing to the Inquisition?” Sybil sipped her milk as if it were wine, looking down her arched and bony nose.
“We’re at war, Sybil, don’t you see that?”
“Some war! More like a massacre.” Sybil snorted. “Soon to
be burned at the stake—the small stake. More cost-effective, as the grand master says.”
“It’s a
war,
Sybil … . If I could get out on furlough, I know I could run for it. The city’s so close here. Once off this ward, we’d have it made! People come in and out of this building all day, outpatients, volunteers. If only I could make it to the elevators!”
“There’s a lot more coming and going, yes,” Sybil said thoughtfully, “but also more personnel. I have not yet seen the nursing station empty.”
“You’ve been watching too.”
Sybil smiled. “The volunteers, some are college girls. The hippie one who comes in Thursdays, Mary Ellen? Nurse Roditis told her that, quote, I
think
I’m a witch and go around hexing people, unquote. Mary Ellen came and asked me, quote, if I was into herbs.”
“So what did you say?” She felt close to her friend.
“I said I was into this ward, although unwillingly. But I’m interested in herbs and have done some healing with them.”
“Was she making fun of you?”
Sybil shook her head. “She told me lots of college students are interested in herbs. We discussed valerian, thyme, rosemary, comfrey. Finally she asked if I really was a witch, and when I assured her, she seemed quite pleased. She said several of her friends are ‘into’ witchcraft. She said she’s trying to secure permission for one of her friends to meet me.”
“You don’t think she was … laughing inside the way they do?”
“No, Consuelo. She’d read an herbal and cured a leg infection with lovage compresses. We had the most civilized conversation I’ve had in ages. Except for yourself, of course. I was worried about you when they had that device in your head.”
“Ah, I don’t know herbs from weeds.” She thought of Luciente feeding her that wild greenery and her mouth opened to tell Sybil. She shut it, then after a moment said, “My grandmother knew weeds to heal with. But even my parents made fun of that. It wasn’t modern and scientific—like going in the hospital and dying of an infection!”
“Imagine, college girls studying witchcraft. She said there was a class in a women’s school. I never heard of such a thing.
If only I could have attended college, Consuelo … I am self-educated. I wanted to go to school, wanted it a great deal.”
“Me too. I went for almost two years.”
“I started part time. In night school. But it was expensive. I’d have to come home quite late at night, and then get up early to go to work … . I should have continued, Consuelo. I should have had the discipline!”
“It takes more than discipline. It takes money. It takes good public transportation.”
“I wonder who teaches them witchcraft. Imagine”—Sybil’s voice caressed her ear, tickling like a warm tongue—“a secret network of covens all over New York! Imagine the bars crumbling on the windows. Imagine the doctors fainting in the halls! The locks melting and running like thin soup to the floor!”
“Don’t dawdle over your lunch, girls. Come on, make it snappy.” The orderly Tony urged them along, swinging the keys in time to his transistor. He wrapped himself in music all day to insulate himself from the hospital, the patients, the boredom. “Turn ditum, you just march it along.”
“We can imagine all we like. But we got to do something real,” Connie said plaintively. “I’m just trying to create some space by kissing up to them.”
Sybil shook her head at the expression. “If we can figure out a way, I’m willing.”
Dolly buzzed in, all in yellow. “Hi, Connie doll. Listen, I talked to Daddy. He says maybe he’ll let you visit. How about that?” She kissed Connie, wrapping her in a cloud of perfume. “He says for sure him and Adele are going to visit you here.”
“What, they need him to sign another permission?”
“He says he wants to see you. The hospital told him you’re better. Look, I brought you a real chic wig. Black, the way you said you wanted. Pues, Tía? Give me a smile.”
Valente and Sybil and Miss Green and even Tina, nodding out a little on the bed’s edge, gathered around Dolly and her. Most of Dolly’s precious visit got wasted on the wig. The wig was put on and she was commanded, among oohing and ahing, to stare at herself. Her bleary bloodshot eyes, her chapped and bitten lips, her hospital ashiness looked out from under sleek
hair curled and combed just so, black and elegant. The wig felt heavy and she sat bearing it up on her short neck like a crown.
“Dolly, please!” She clutched her niece’s arm. “Get me out of here. Let me come home to visit you. I don’t want to spend Thanksgiving here. Please talk to them about letting me come home to you for Thanksgiving. I’ll cook for you, hermana mía. Remember how I used to? We’ll get Nita and have a real Thanksgiving!”
“Maybe, Connie. I got a convention coming up. I need the green stuff.”
“On Thanksgiving itself? I wouldn’t get in your way. I could sit in the library. I could take Nita to the movies. Or the zoo. I could take Nita to Central Park Zoo and we could give the monkeys peanuts.”
“Not to worry, Connie. Daddy says maybe you can visit him. You talk to Daddy. I wish I didn’t have to work the holidays, but that’s business. But now you look ten years younger!”
When Tina was taken off for testing, Sybil sat on her bed and sighed. “Good try with your niece. But it’s true, that wig has some use. It covers the funny hole. You wouldn’t get far without someone noticing that.”
“What good does it do if I can’t get out of here?”
She was standing in line at the nursing station the next night. “Nurse, please can I call my brother? I got the change right here.”
“Where do you want to call?”
“Bound Brook, New Jersey.”
“Calling out of state, you can’t do that.”
“But I got the change. Just to my brother. Look, see, please, he’s on my visiting list.”
“Has he been around?”
“No, but he promised.”
“Why do you want to call him?”
Your life was everybody’s business to rummage through. “I just want to talk about how his family is. To tell him I’m better. Maybe to talk about if they won’t come and see me at Thanksgiving.”
“Okay. But no trouble. I don’t want you pestering your family from here.”
There was a terrible line by the phone, nine people ahead of her. Talking to Luis was no pleasure anytime, but she had to work on him about Thanksgiving. They had to let her out for the holiday, they just had to. She didn’t give a wink for a stuffed bird; they could stuff it with dollar bills and eat it with a sauce of Arpege. But she had to grasp the chance to run, before they operated on her. That one chance skinnier than a hair, than one of her own lost black hairs.
For an hour and twenty minutes she stood on one foot and then the other, waiting for the telephone. She was sweating with fear it would be time to line up for evening meds before she ever got her hands on the telephone. Finally she dialed. Don’t let it be busy, she begged. Santa María, please let them be home and don’t let it be busy and make Luis answer in a good mood, I beg of you, please!
“Hello?”
Carefully she pronounced the name the Anglo way, the way he liked it. “Loo-is? Hello, is this Lewis?”
“Yeah, who’s this? Who am I talking to?”
“It’s Connie. Your sister.”
“Yeah?” A nice heavy silence like an avalanche of mud slid through the phone.
Desperately she forged on. “I’m calling from the hospital. They say I’m much better. Lewis, they say I’m much better and I feel really good.”
“That’s nice. You got in a good hospital now, you know that? It’s a first-rate hospital. If they were making you pay for it, you couldn’t walk in the front door, you know that?”
“Sure, Lewis. How’s the family? How’s Adele? How’s Mike and Susan?” For an awful minute she thought she had the name of the new baby wrong. She had only been to Luis’s home once since the baby was born. Maybe it wasn’t Susan at all?
“Mike’s fine, he’s talking all the time now, give me this, give me that! He’s his mother’s kid, all right. Susan’s teething, so she squawks all the time, but she’s pretty as a picture. She’s a real blond, yellow hair straight as a ruler. She’s going to be a winner, this one.”
“That’s good, Lewis, that’s wonderful. I wish I could see Susan. I wish I could see you. How’s Adele?”
“She’s fine. She got a new foxtail coat. Good-looking. She wanted mink but she’s going to want that for a long time, if business doesn’t pick up. It’s a bad time for the nursery business, all over. People aren’t spending money the way they did two, three years ago, construction is way down. Except for fruit trees. Lot of people are putting fruit trees in their yards in the suburbs. We’ve tripled our business in fruit trees. But that’s like a one-time thing. People don’t buy a new apple tree every year.”
“Dolly came in to see me, she said maybe you might come?”
“Sure, Connie. Just it’s hard to get the time. Weekends are the only time and the traffic is miserable.”
“Maybe I could come to you, then … Lewis.” She almost slipped and said Luis in her excitement. “Maybe for Thanksgiving I could visit you? I wouldn’t be any work. I could help Adele. I’d love to see the babies.”
“Yeah?” He didn’t add anything, till the operator interrupted. She stuck in more coins. She had saved a good supply.
“At least maybe for a day, Lewis, for Thanksgiving, just overnight? It’s so lonely in the hospital at holiday time. A real family holiday. Everybody goes home. The doctor says I’m much better. You could talk to him, Dr. Redding. Please, Lewis?”
“We’ll see. You’d have to go back Saturday morning because Saturday night we’re giving a party. But you could help around some. We’ll have enough food to feed an army, we always do … .”
“I could help Adele cook and clean. You know I can cook real well, Lewis, remember? I can help you get ready for the party. It’s a lot of work for Adele.”
“Oh, she has a woman in once a week.”
“But for the holidays, it’s a lot of work. I can help and I wouldn’t mind going back Saturday. I wouldn’t mind at all. That would just be so lovely, to come and see you all Thanksgiving.”