The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book)

by Robert Hough

"Yes," said Joan, "the operation."

  "So just do what they tell you. Act pleasant. Make your purses. Don't go scrambling on walk days. Don't talk back or be ornery. And whatever you do, don't hit anyone or you'll go to the violent ward where they chain people to walls. There are padded cells down there too and orderlies with the self-control of goats. So toe the line is my advice, and you'll get out in one piece."

  We talked for maybe an hour. After chatting about our husbands (bastards, all three) they filled me in on ways to get by: which nurses not to mess with and which inmates were dangerous and how to stay on the good side of the cafeteria servers, who'd starve you if they decided they didn't like the look of you.

  "One other thing," Linda said. "There's a doctor here who's better than the others. Younger, with newer ideas. His name's Levine. Dr. Levine. Get close to him if you can."

  I repeated the name five times quickly to myself so I wouldn't forget. See, my mind was spinning, as a mind'l! do when desperate to land on anything it might mould a plan out of. That was how I first saw him-by taking a look at the picture in my head. What I saw was young. New ideas. Soft-spoken. Perhaps handsome, perhaps not. Probably a do-gooder, out to change the world, desperate for someone to prove his way of thinking.

  With any luck, likes blond curls.

  For the next two weeks, I took my walks and sewed my purses and ate my rubbery overcooked pancakes (no butter or syrup, only blocks of salt you chipped off with a thumbnail) and generally fought the urge to sock Dimitri in the mouth when he came around looking for his weekly forgivenesses. Wasn't easy, I tell you.

  On the morning of day fifteen, Miss Galt fetched me. She led me to an examination room down the hall from the top end of our ward. Then she gave the little finger waggle that meant I was supposed to take off my clothes, something I'd by now gotten used to doing in front of others.

  I sat naked on a table, covered with a white sheet. It was a little cold in the room, though not quite enough to raise goosebumps. I chewed my bottom lip and wrapped my arms around myself. After a few minutes a man wearing a white doctor's coat came in. He was middle-aged and homely, with plump twisted lips that looked a little like Jewish bread.

  "Hello," he said, not looking at me, "My name is Dr. Sights."

  "I'm Mary Aganosticus."

  He nodded, again without looking at me, though he did raise his eyes to the level of my teeth and say, "Open." He peered down my throat, checked under my tongue, thumped my back, shone a light in my eyes and tested my reflexes. Throughout, he looked grim. Then he listened to my chest, flattening a thick grey ear against my left breast and then my right breast and then my left breast once more for good measure, which I knew from my nursing days was not in any way, shape or form how to check a heartbeat. Finally, he pulled away and wrote something on a clipboard and handed that something to Miss Gait.

  "She'll be fine" was all he said.

  That afternoon, Miss Galt came yet again and found me in the day room, where I was reading a four-week-old Louisville Examiner. All smiles, she was, though in a place like Hopkinsville it's amazing how things like smiles start to take on meanings different from those in the outside world. I stood, and she took me through the medium-crazy ward and the full-blown ward and into the front foyer where the receptionist had taken my bag fifteen days earlier. Here we took a left and walked down a hallway heading in a direction opposite from the women's wing; it was long and brightly lit and with doors every few feet. After we'd passed about a half-dozen, Miss Gait stopped and unlocked one, using a key from the hoop-shaped ring she always carried in her right hand. Inside was dark, though when she opened the door a bolt of light fanned over a goodly part of the room, enough I could see the walls were grey and the floors concrete and in the middle was a large, elevated tub. Miss Gait closed the door and opened the gaslight. She approached the tub, beckoning me to do so as well. She finger-stirred, and after I stripped, she folded my robe and put it on the floor next to the bath.

  There was a leather sheet covering the tub, and running down the middle of the sheet was a heavy, metal zipper that looked like a bottle opener. She pulled down the zipper, steam puffing into the air. Then she took my hand, not so much for support but to direct me up the three steps leading to a small platform near the tub rim. From here I did what I imagined I was supposed to do, which was to put one leg, and then the other, through the slit in the leather. Soon I was sitting in a bath of hot water and salt. Miss Galt cradled my head until it rested on the back of the tub. Then she pulled the zipper to the top, where it formed a low tight collar around my neck.

  Around this time it dawned on me the zipper handle was on the outside of the leather sheet, while my arms, and more particularly my hands, were under the leather sheet, meaning if the zipper was going to be pulled down it wasn't going to be pulled down by me. To make matters worse, it was equipped with a little latch fitting into eyelets on either side of the part, so I couldn't even thrash around with the hope the damn thing might lower on its own.

  Now trapped is trapped, no matter how comfortable you are, plus the tub was coffin shaped and that can start a mind to racing. My heart picked up the pace, and I looked up at Miss Gait with what could only've been horror on my face. This made her smile even more broadly and say, "There. A nice hot bath. I wish I had time for one. I'll be back to get you in four hours."

  With that, she patted the leather cover, turned and abandoned me; the last thing she did was close the light and cast the room into darkness. Course, the minute the door shut I began twisting and kicking and flailing and generally doing everything I could to get myself free short of hollering for help, which would've branded me as ornery and therefore suffering from hysteria. After a few seconds of this uselessness, I took a rest. Then I thrashed some more, took another rest and whaled my arms and legs one last time, though in a much less enthused manner: I was starting to figure the leather sheet was there to stay, and no amount of wriggling or commotion was about to change that.

  This triggered a worse sort of panic. I could hear my blood pressure surfing in my ears and I could see angry jags of colour knifing through the darkness and I had to fight the inclination to vomit. And my heart-oh, how I called for Jesus's help. Whereas before it'd been speeding, now it was speeding and pounding, something a heart can't sustain, so every few seconds it'd up and miss a beat. Every time this happened I thought I was dying from fear, though at the same time staying alive to dwell on the process. A cruel set of dance partners this was, for the moment I started accepting my death as a mercy there'd be a collision in my chest, so hard it'd rattle my ribs and quake my stomach, and my heart would start charging along again until it missed the next beat, the whole thing repeating itself over and over and over.

  It's hard to say how long this torture went on. Inside a completely dark place, time has a habit of looping around and doubling in on itself and playing tricks. So I can't say. Maybe it was ten minutes, maybe it was longer. Felt like longer. Felt like forever, if you must know, and that's a traumatic thing: finding out what an eternity feels like. What happens is the body exhausts itself, and you go completely still, and you feel cold and your fingers tingle and your bladder drains and your mind goes blank. Lying there, I reckoned this was the calming effect Miss Galt had promised, though it was the sort of calm you get nightmares about later on.

  So I lay there, vegetabilized and chilled, maybe dead, maybe not, having completely stopped considering the possibility I might ever get out of that tub. The door to the room opened. Miss Galt opened the gaslight. I clamped my eyes against the glare.

  "How are we feeling?"

  I, defenceless as an old woman, weakly muttered, "Good." She let me out and I tried to dress, though I was so shaky she had to help me. We went back down the hydrotherapy wing, her walking and me shuffling, past the front desk and through the wards strung along women's wing A. She led me to my bed, and it seemed to me the ward was quieter than usual. Perhaps some of the women were having their tubbings, I don'
t know. Linda and Joan were there, and they hustled over and sat beside me, though neither one of them touched me.

  Linda said, "Don't worry, Mary-first time's the worst."

  Joan added in a softer voice, "Yes ... first time ... the worst," and all I could do was sit, nerves firing, glad they were there with me.

  I had tubbings the following day, three days after that, and then the day after that, the scheduling of our hydrotherapy being something understood by the staff and the staff only .

  The day after that I met my psychiatrist.

  He came by late on a walk morning, just after we'd been led back in. I was in the day room attached to the ward, wishing I could knit something, feeling low and a little jumpy.

  "Good morning," he said, "I'm Dr. Levine."

  I smiled shyly, sizing him up.

  "I thought maybe we should meet. Is that all right, Mrs. Aganosticus?"

  He was a short, doughy young man, just shy of thirty, with thin dark hair pushed to one side of his forehead. As for his face, the nose was the primary liability, for it was oddly bulbous in shape and it flared at the sides, like a radish cut open to garnish a salad. As he was not the most attractive of men, he made up for it by projecting warmth and sympathy and a general all-round niceness. Immediately I figured him for being lonely, niceness being something women don't generally care for in men, and the thought in my head was, Good.

  "Yes," I told him, "that'd be fine."

  He sat looking at me. I wasn't sure whether this meeting would take place in the future, or whether we were having it now. As Dr. Levine was just sitting there, I figured the latter was the case, and that I better say something interesting to get it going. Problem was, I'd trained myself to be so cautious I couldn't think of anything to say. The pause lasted long enough I worried he might get bored and leave, so finally I figured I might as well up and out with it.

  "I don't like being tubbed."

  He smiled slightly, and I worried I'd made a mistake by complaining. My concern disappeared when he said, "Is it the darkness? The feeling of being trapped? The boredom? Yours is a common complaint, Mrs. Aganosticus. Sometimes I question the value of hydrotherapy myself. Particularly in light of some of the more progressive treatments coming out of Europe. Perhaps I can ask around, and see what I can do. Would that be all right?"

  I was stunned.

  "Yes," I peeped, "that'd be fine."

  We talked a little bit more that day, mostly about the hospital and how I was getting along with the other patients. He left shortly after, though not before promising to see what could be done about my problem. I tried not to get my hopes up.

  I had my fifth tubbing that afternoon; like Linda and Joan had promised, it was getting easier, though it was still miles from being easy. I now spent the four hours in a state of quivery boredom, not panicking exactly but feeling as though any moment I might. Linda had suggested I make up mental games to help pass the time; apparently, she'd pretend the tub was a magic carpet and she was soaring through space, visiting places she'd been and could conjure up in her head, like New York City or the ocean or the body of the man she should've married. I tried it too but didn't have much luck, imagination never having been my strong suit. Instead, I exercised my arms and legs, swishing them about in the water, flexing my wrists and ankles, for I didn't want my muscles going soft in case I was to need them.

  After I'd spent a half-hour or so of arm and leg swishing, the door to the tubbing room opened and I got scared, for the orderlies had a reputation for sneaking in during a tubbing and unzipping the leather covers and taking their pleasures. Squinting against the light flooding the room, I was relieved to see it was Levine. He said hello and opened the gaslight enough to cast a dim, soft light over the room.

  "Is that better?"

  I told him it was. He asked if I'd like it lighter, saying he could do that too, and I told him it was a fine restful light if restful's a thing that's possible in a tubbing room. This made him smile, thank God. He took a stool and placed it behind the tub. In his other hand he held a notebook and pen.

  "I'm afraid there is nothing I can do about the restraints," he said. "Hospital policy. However, I was thinking you might not be so bored if you had someone to talk to. Do you think that would help?"

  I said I thought it would. He sat on the stool and, after a few seconds of rustling, said, all of sudden, straight out of the blue and without a moment's notice, "How did your parents die, Mrs. Aganosticus?"

  Now, this question caught me off guard, my first reaction being, That's personal, Mister. But seeing as how he'd helped me a little already and it was something I did want off my chest I figured I might as well play along. So I told him how the TB scare of 1902 had gotten my father-how over a four-month period the air had seeped out of him, his face thinner and paler each day, the area beneath his eyes growing darker and more sack-like as the ailment progressed. How when he coughed you could hear it coming from deep down inside him, rumbling like the slow, distant thunder you get when the weather turns hot. How he died on a Sunday morning, a fitting day since he was a man who believed in God; I remember listening at the door of his room and hearing the doctor say to my mother, "He picked a good day to go, Lela. Heaven's got him now." How after the doctor left I cried and my mother just sat there, quiet as a log, which is the English way of handling strong emotion.

  Throughout my little story, Levine sat on his stool, scribbling and saying, "Yes, yes, go on, go on," so I told him how a wagon pulled up and two men dressed in dungarees and work shirts came in and carried my father out in a burlap bag. Afterwards my mother thanked them and paid them, both of which seemed like crazy things to do considering what they were taking away. The news must've spread, for the house soon filled with neighbours bearing food, some of them coming from so far away they didn't pay taxes in the same county. Course, many of them offered up their teenage sons to help out with the fieldwork, offers my mother turned down as she didn't like being reliant on the kindnesses of non-relatives. As a consequence, she had to spend more and more time out in the fields, tilling for next year's tobacco, it becoming my job to entertain the visitors. A big job it was, too; they kept coming and coming, loaded down with baskets and jugs and jars, all determined to help out the family of the man who, upon coming south from Quebec, had changed his last name to one that was old-fashioned and American sounding and, believe it or not, inspired by the sight of threshed hay. This went on for months, such that my biggest recollection of mourning, aside from the pure dog misery of it, was long awkward conversations had over cups of tea with people I barely knew. (That, and having people treat me like a thirteen-yearold one day and a full-grown woman the next.) When we weren't eating jams, pickles and mincemeat pies the neighbours had brought over, we ate root vegetables and cuts of meat preserved in clay urns filled with duck fat.

  "And your mother?" Levine asked. "What happened to her?"

  Well.

  Here I told how she grew addled with pent-up sorrow, how she'd leave the house with only one shoe on or sometimes turn to me and you could tell she was seeing someone other than yours truly before shaking her head and coming to her senses. How one day, when the two of us had been alone for five months, she decided to buy an old dray cheap from a guy who'd spent time ranching in the Appalachians. The horse's name was Tom and he'd taken poorly to the wide-open spaces of west Kentucky: always snorting and stamping the ground and trying to manoeuvre his haunches so he could launch a hoof at your forehead, which was presumably the reason he'd been sold at the price he'd been sold at in the first place. A week after that, my mother decided she'd use Tom to harrow the northwest field, figuring the horse's spunk might come in handy at the end of a long day. Her second mistake came when she stood between horse and harrow while linking the trace. Something spooked Tom, probably nothing more serious than a breeze or a moth fluttering by, and he bolted, dragging the harrow over his grief-witted owner. Course I was the one found the results. The sun was lowering and the co
oking was done and she hadn't yet come in from the fields so I went out looking. Walked to the northwest field and from a distance saw the horse buckled to the harrow, just standing there chewing and thinking about whatever it is horses think about. Twenty feet away was a dark heap I couldn't make out. As I got closer it became pretty obvious what it was, though the mind's an optimistic thing, and needs to be shown the worst has happened or it'll go on believing the opposite. I got up close and took it all in. She looked like she'd been torn apart by wild animals.

  Levine was still scribbling away, trying to get everything I'd said on paper, as though I'd recited the cure for smallpox instead of details I regarded as dreary and all my own. After a few seconds, the sound of his pencil scratching at paper stopped and he moved the chair around so he could look me in the face.

  "Mrs. Aganosticus, I'd like to try something I have been reading about. I was wondering if you'd like to talk some more tomorrow."

  "You mean like we did today?"

  "Yes, exactly."

  "Would it be during my tubbing?"

  "If you'd like."

  "Then sure, Doctor. Course."

  That's how I started the first talking cure ever performed in the state of Kentucky. I didn't know it was controversial, and I had no idea it was contrary to hospital procedure. I didn't even know it was treatment, for as far as I was concerned cures involved something you could lay your hands on, like pills or bathtubs or turn-handled Faradizers. I just figured Levine liked to talk, and ask questions starting with "Tell me about..."

  So I'd tell him. Not everything. But most things. Made up stuff too, just to keep the spice level high. To tell the truth, it did me good to get some of my mental goings-on into word form, particularly as regard to how much I missed having a mother. One day, after I'd been saying how cheesed off I was at her for about half an hour, Levine interrupted. "Why is it," he said, "you so rarely talk about your father, Mary? Obviously you were close to him too. Do you think that's significant, Mary?"