Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  “And, oh, how it gnaws at you! You can’t cure her!”

  “No one can!”

  “But especially you.”

  No one could cure Dee-dee. I knew that. It was helplessness, not failure. I had accepted that long ago. “And you’re angry and bitter,” I replied, “because there’s nobody you can sue!”

  She flung her blouse aside and it landed in a wad in the corner. “Maybe,” she said through clenched teeth, “Maybe I’ll take that partnership offer, after all.”

  ***

  It was not until much later that evening, as I lay awake in bed, Brenda a thousand miles away on the other side, that I remembered Consuela’s remark. It’s not right for a little girl to grow up without a mother. I wondered. Had she been making a comment, or making an offer?

  I don’t want to play in your yard.

  I don’t like you anymore.

  You’ll be sorry when you see me

  Sliding down our cellar door.

  ***

  The next time I saw Mae Holloway, we quarreled.

  Perhaps it was her own constant sourness coming to the fore; or perhaps it was her fear of insanity returning. But it may have been a bad humor that I carried with me from Brenda’s homecoming. We had smoothed things out, Brenda and I, but it was a fragile repair, the cracks plastered over with I-was-tired and I-didn’t-mean-it, and we both feared to press too hard, lest it buckle on us. At dinner, she had told me about the case she had helped argue, and I told her about Mae Holloway and we both pretended to care. But it was all monologue. Listening holds fewer risks than response; and an attentive smile, less peril than engagement.

  Mae wouldn’t look at me when I greeted her. She stared resolutely at the floor, at the medicine cabinet, out the window. Sometimes, she stared into another world. I noticed how she gnawed on her lips.

  “We have a couple of days to catch up on, Mrs. Holloway,” I said. “I hope you’ve been making notes, like I asked.”

  She shook her head slowly, but in a distracted way. She was not responding to my statement, but to some inner reality. “I just keep remembering and remembering, doc. There’s music all the time, and that double vision—”

  “Consciousness doubling.”

  “It’s like I’m in two places at once. Sometimes, I forget which is which and I try to step around things only I cain’t, because they’re only ghosts, only ghosts. And sometimes, I recollect things that couldn’t have…”

  The “dreamy states” of Jackson patients often grow deeper and more frequent. In one woman, they had occupied nearly her entire day; and, in the end, they had crowded out her normal consciousness entirely. “I could prescribe something, if you like,” I said. “These spells of yours are similar to epileptic seizures. So, there are drugs that…”

  She shook her head again. “No. I won’t take drugs.” She looked directly at me at last. “Don’t you understand? I’ve got to know. It’s always been bits and pieces. Just flashes. A jimble-jamble that never made sense. Now…” She paused and took a deep breath. “Now, at least, I’ll know.”

  “Know what, Mrs. Holloway.”

  “About…Everything.” She looked away again. Talking with her today was like pulling teeth.

  “What about the songs, Mae? We didn’t get anything useful on Wednesday and I wasn’t here Tuesday or yesterday, so that’s three days we have to catch up on.”

  Mae turned and studied me with lips as thin as broth. “You don’t care about any of this, do you? It’s all professional; not like you and I are friends. You don’t care if’n I live or die; and I don’t care if’n you do.”

  “Mrs. Holloway, I…”

  “Good.” She gave a sharp nod of her head. “That’s jake with me. Because I don’t like having friends,” she said. “I decided a long time ago if’n I don’t have ’em, I won’t miss ’em when they cut out. So let’s just keep this doc and old lady.” Her stare was half admonition, half challenge, as if she dared me to leap the barriers she had set down around her.

  I shrugged. Keep things professional. That was fine with me, too. A crabby old lady like her, it was no wonder they all ran out on her.

  She handed over a crumpled, yellow sheet of lined paper, which I flattened out on my desk. She had written in a soft pencil, so I smeared some of the writing and smudged my palm. I set a stack of fresh index cards by and began to copy the song titles for later research. Where Did You Get That Hat? Comrades. The Fountain in the Park. Love’s Old Sweet Song. While I worked, I could hear Mae humming to herself. I knew without looking that she had her eyes closed, that she was living more and more in another world, gradually leaving this one behind. White Wings. Walking for That Cake. My Grandfather’s Clock. In the Gloaming. Silver Threads Among the Gold. The Mulligan Guard. Mae was her own Hit Parade. Though if the music did play continually, as she said, this list could only be a sample of what she had heard over the last three days. The Man on the Flying Trapeze. Sweet Genevieve. Champagne Charlie. You Naughty, Naughty Men. When You and I Were Young, Maggie. Beautiful Dreamer. Three days’ worth of unclaimed memories.

  I noticed that she had recorded no doubling episodes, this time. Because she had not had any? It seemed doubtful, considering. But one entry had been crossed out; rubbed over with the pencil until there was nothing but a black smear and a small hole in the paper where the pencil point had worn through. I held it up to the light, but could make out nothing.

  I heard Mae draw in her breath and looked up in time to see a mien on her face almost of ecstasy. “What is it?”

  “I’m standing out in a meadow. There’s a sparkling stream meandering through it, and great, grey, rocky mountains rearing all around. Yellow flowers shivering in the breeze and I think how awful purty and peaceful it is.” She sighed. “Oh, doc, sometimes, just for a second, we can be so happy.”

  Jackson had often described his patients’ “dreamy states” as being accompanied by intense feelings of euphoria; sudden bursts of child-like joy. No doubt some endorphin released in the brain.

  “There’s a fellow coming up toward me from the ranch,” she continued, trepidation edging into her voice. “My age, maybe a little older. Might be Mister’s younger brother, because he favors him some. He’s a-weeping something awful. I reach out to him and he puts his head on my shoulder and says…” Mae stopped and winced in pain. She sucked in her breath and held it. Then she let it out slowly. “And he says how Sweet Annie is dead and the baby, too; and there was nothing the sawbones could do. Nothing at all. And I think, Thank you, Goodman Lord. Thank you, that she won’t suffer the way that Ma did. And then a mockingbird takes wing from the aspen tree right in front of me and I think how awful peaceful the meadow is now that the screaming has stopped.”

  She wiped at her nose with her sleeve. “Listen to it. Can you hear it, doc? There ain’t a sound but for the breeze and that old mockingbird.” The look on her face changed somehow, changed subtly. “Listen to the mockingbird,” she croaked. “Listen to the mockingbird. Oh, the mockingbird still singing o’er her grave…”

  Then she looked about in sudden surprise. “Land’s sake! Now, how did I get here? Why, everybody’s so happy; singing the mockingbird song and dancing all over the lawn and a-hugging each other.” A smile slowly came over her face. She had apparently tripped from one doubling episode directly into another, due to some association with the song, and the imprinted emotions were playing back with it, overwriting the melancholy of the first episode. Or else she had seized on the remembered joy herself, and had wrapped herself in it against the cold.

  “I’m a-wearing my Sanitary Commission uniform,” she went on, preening her shabby, faded gown. She shot her cuffs, straightened something at her throat that wasn’t there. “I was a nurse, you know; and when the news come that the war was finally over we all hied over to the White House and had ourselves a party on the lawn, the whole kit ’n boodle of us. Then the President his-self come out and joined us.” She turned in her seat and pointed toward the med
icine cabinet. “Here he comes now!”

  And in that instant, her joy became absolute terror. “Him?” Her smile stretched to a ghastly rictus and she cowered into her chair, covering her eyes with her hand. But you can’t close your eyes to memory. You can’t. “No! I kin still see him!” she said.

  What was so terrifying about seeing president Wilson close up? “What’s wrong, Mrs. Holloway?”

  “They shot him.”

  “What, on the White House lawn? No president has been shot there…” And certainly not Wilson.

  She took her hands away from her eyes, glanced warily left, then right. Slowly, she relaxed, though her hands continued to tremble. Then, she looked at me. “No, the shooting happened later,” she snapped, anger blossoming from her fear. Then she closed up and her eyes took on a haunted look. “I’m taking up too much of your time, doc,” she said, creaking to her feet.

  “No, you’re not. Really,” I told her.

  “Then you’re taking up too much of mine.” I thought her blackthorn stick would punch holes in the floor tiles as she left.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I followed. She had recalled her father’s death. She had remembered that her birth had killed her mother and that her father had blamed her for it. She had remembered her husband going off to war, never to return. Sad memories, sorrowful memories; but there was something about this new recollection that terrified her.

  She thought she was going crazy.

  It was easy to track her through the garden. Deep holes punched into the sod marked her trail among the flower beds. When I caught up with her, she was leaning over a plot of gold and crimson marigolds. “You know, I remember exactly where I was when President Kennedy was shot,” I said by way of easing her into conversation.

  Mae Holloway scowled and bent over the flower bed. “Don’t make no difference no-how,” she said. “He’s dead either way, ain’t he?” She turned her back on me.

  “No particular reason.” I had figured it out. She had seen McKinley, not Wilson; and her husband had fought in the Spanish-American War, not World War I.

  She turned her dried-out old face to me. “Think I’m getting senile, doc? Why aren’t you back in your office reading on your books? You might have a patient to ignore.”

  “They’ll find me if they need me.”

  “I tol’ you the songs I been remembering. Why did you follow me out here, anyway?”

  I had better things to do than have a bitter old woman berate me. “If you feel in a friendlier mood later,” I said, “you know where to find me.”

  Back in my office, I began checking the latest tunes against the song encyclopedia. The mindless transcription kept me busy, so that I did not dwell on Mae’s intransigence. Let her stew in her own sour juices.

  But I soon noticed a disturbing trend in the data. Champagne Charlie was written in 1868. You Naughty, Naughty Men (“When married how you treat us and of each fond hope defeat us, and there’s some will even beat us…”) had created a scandal at Niblo’s Gardens in 1866. And Beautiful Dreamer dated from 1864. Mae could not have heard those songs when they were new. Born in the early seventies at best, tucked away back in the hills of Tennessee—“So far back in the hollers,” she had said one time, “that they had to pipe in the daylight.”—She must have heard them later.

  And if a little bit later, why not a whole lot later?

  And there went the whole rationale for my book.

  The problem with assigning dates to Mae’s neurological hootenanny was that she could have heard the songs at any time. A melody written in the Twenties, like The Red, Red Robin, is heard and sung by millions of children today. Scott Joplin created his piano rags at the turn of the century; yet most people knew them from The Sting, a movie made in the Seventies and set in the Thirties, an era when ragtime had been long out of fashion.

  (The telescoping effect of distance. From this far down the river of years, who can distinguish the Mauve Decade from the Thirties? Henry James and Upton Sinclair and Ernest Hemingway came of age in very different worlds; but they seem alike to us because they are just dead people in funny clothing, singing quaint, antique songs. “Old-fashioned” is enough to blur them together.)

  Face it. Many of those old songs were still being sung and recorded when I was young. Lawrence Welk. Mitch Miller. Preservation Hall. Leon Redbone had warbled Champagne Charlie on the Tonight Show in front of God and everybody. Wasn’t it far more likely that Mae had heard it then, than that she had heard it in 1868?

  A Hundred and Twentysomething. I had deduced a remarkable age for Mae from the dates of the songs she remembered. If that was a will-o’-the wisp, what was the point? There was no teleology to interest the professionals; no hook to grab the public. How many people would care about an old woman’s recollections? Not enough to make a best seller.

  And what right had that old bat, what right had anyone, to live so long when children were dying? What use were a few extra years remembering the past when there were others who would never have a future?

  Damn! I saw that I had torn the index card. I rummaged in the drawer for tape, found none, and wondered if it made any sense to bother recopying the information. The whole effort was a waste of time. I picked up the deck of index cards and threw them. I missed the wastebasket and they fluttered like dead leaves across the room.

  Oh, how old is she, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

  Oh, how old is she, charming Billy?

  She’s twice six and she’s twice seven,

  Forty-eight and eleven.

  She’s a young thing that cannot leave her mother.

  I could have gone home, instead, and gotten an early start on the weekend.

  I had planned to visit the National Archives today, but to continue the book project now seemed pointless. The whole rationale had collapsed; and Mae had withdrawn into that fearful isolation in which I had found her. There was no reason not to go home. Brenda had taken the day off to recuperate from her trip. She was probably waiting for me. So, I closed the clinic at noon and took the Transit to Newark’s Penn Station, where I transferred to the PATH train into the World Trade Center. From there a cab dropped me at Varick and Houston in lower Manhattan.

  If we did not meet, we could not quarrel.

  ***

  The young woman behind the information desk was a pixie: short, with serious bangs and serious, round glasses. Her name tag read Sara. “Green?” she said when I had explained my mission. “What an odd name. It might be a nickname. You know, like ‘Red.’ One of my grandfathers was called ‘Blackie’ because his family name was White. She took out a sheet of scratch paper and made some notes on it. “I’d suggest you start with the 1910 Census and look for Green Holloway in the Soundex.”

  “Soundex?” I said. “What is that?”

  “It’s like an Index, but it’s based on sounds, not spelling. Which is good, since the enumerators didn’t always spell the names right. Holloway might have been recorded as, oh, H-a-l-i-w-a-y, for example, or even H-a-l-l-w-a-y; but the Soundex code would be the same.”

  “I see. Clever.”

  She took out a brochure and jotted another note on the scratch pad. “Holloway would be…H. Then L is a 4, and the W and Y don’t count. That’s H400. There will be a lot of other names listed under H400, like Holly and Hall, but that should narrow your search.” She filled out a request voucher for me. “Even with the Soundex,” she said as she wrote, “there are no guarantees. There are all sorts of omissions, duplicates, wrong names, wrong ages. Dad missed his great-grandmother in the 1900 Census, because she was living with her son-in-law and the enumerator had listed her with the son-in-law’s family name. One of my great-great-grandfathers ‘aged’ fourteen years between the 1870 and 1880 censuses; and his wife-to-be was listed twice in 1860. People weren’t always home; so, the enumerator would try to get the information from a neighbor, who didn’t always know. So you should always cross-check your information.”

  She directed me to an empty
carrel, and shortly after, an older man delivered the 1910 Soundex for Blount County, Tennessee. I threaded the microfilm spool into the viewer and spun forward, looking for H400. Each frame was an index card with the head of household on top and everyone else listed below with their ages and relationships.

  I slowed when I started to see first names starting with G: Gary…George…Gerhard…Glenn…Granville…Gretchen…Gus…No Green. I backed up and checked each of the G’s, one by one, thinking Green might be out of sequence.

  Still, no luck. And I couldn’t think of any other way “Green” might be spelled. Unless it was a nickname, in which case, forget it. I scrolled ahead to the M’s. If the census taker had interviewed Mae, Green might be listed as “Mister.”

  But…No “Mister.” Then I checked the M’s again, this time searching for “Mae” or “May,” because if Mister had died in the Spanish-American War rather than World War I, Mae herself would have been listed as head-of-household in 1910.

  Still nothing. It was a fool’s errand, anyway. For all I knew, Mae was really Anna-Mae or Lulu-Mae or some other such Appalachianism, which would make finding her close to impossible.

  I tried the 1900 Soundex next. But I came up dry on that, too. No Green, no Mister, no Mae. Eventually, I gave up.

  I leaned back in the chair and stretched my arms over my head. Now what? We lived so far back in the hollers they had to pipe in the daylight. It could be that the census takers had flat out missed her. Or she had already left the hills by 1900. In which case, I did not know where to search. She had gone to Cincinnati, I remembered. And to California. At one time or another, she had mentioned San Francisco, and Chicago, and Wyoming, and even New York City. The old bag had a lot of travel stickers on her.

  I took a walk to stretch my legs. If I left now, and the trains were on time, and the traffic was light, I could still be home in time to tuck Dee-dee in. But a check of the sidewalk outside the building showed the crowds running thick. The Financial District was getting an early start on the weekend. Not a good time to be leaving the City. Not a good time at all. Traffic heading for the tunnels sat at a standstill. Tightly-packed herds of humans trampled the sidewalks. I would have likened them to sheep, but for the in-your-face single-mindedness with which they marched toward their parking lots and subway entrances.