“No. It’s impossible,” I say. Yet I too have difficulty bringing light to the past, let alone coaxing from it a reasonable explanation for Sally’s madness. Nothing seems directly connected to it; there is no event or even series of events I can point to that might have definitively forewarned us, no obvious cause other than the most obvious one that Sally, like Steve, has always been what she has become, that it was inside her from the beginning, incubating, waiting to mature.
“But it might have been what did it,” says Robin. “How can you be sure?”
“I just don’t think it happens that way. Millions of babies cry without growing up to be psychotic. Look, Rob, I’m just as tempted as you are to torment myself with every little mistake we made. Aaron is too. He wondered if he had teased Sally into madness.”
Our conversation ends.
Pat is still studying Piranesi, her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea. I marvel at her concentration—can she really be so thoroughly involved in her work? She seems wary of me, almost supercilious. She is so scrupulous about keeping her thoughts from me that I’ve given up trying to figure out what goes on inside her.
Hoping to find some relief from the heat, I carry a sleeping bag up to the roof, spread it over the welted tar, and lie down. Closing my eyes, I feel as if I’ve misplaced something that I mustn’t lose, and jerkily sit up as if to assure myself it’s still there.
At around two in the morning I come back downstairs and turn on the television. TWA flight 800, bound for Paris from JFK Airport in New York, broke apart in the air twelve minutes after taking off. “We saw a huge red orange sphere just erupt,” says a private pilot who was on a pleasure flight when he saw the explosion. “It went straight down like a rock.” A C-130 transport plane circles over the wreckage, dropping parachute flares to illuminate the scene for the Coast Guard search units in the water. “You think you can be hardened if you do this enough,” says an Emergency Medical Service technician, “but you stay the way you are. Only more so.”
On the psych ward I am lulled into the belief that this will be the routine of my life indefinitely—from Bank Street to the hospital on a continuous hypnotized track. My tense encouraging smile is a fixture in the dayroom. “Father, you are farther away than yesterday,” remarks Sally.
At around three, I take a break from my visiting duties and go out to the Recovery Room, a bar near First Avenue. It is a meeting place for operating room nurses who go there to get sloshed after long mornings at work, trading battle stories and railing against the ineptitude of surgeons. They’re a promiscuous, riotous bunch, on shouting terms with death, and I enjoy listening to them from my stool at the other end of the bar. I drink two glasses of bourbon, and though my stomach is empty, the alcohol has practically no effect on me. I’m in the grip of an unshakable sobriety, compensation perhaps for the psychic drunkenness of Sally. It is as if her crack-up has made me saner than I wish to be, and I am holding on to her sober self, her other self, which she has temporarily misplaced or left behind. When she is ready I will hand it back to her, I imagine, and she will come out from under her ruinous sun and be the girl I knew again, and we will resume our pre-manic conversation. In the meantime, I am prohibited from letting go.
On the television above the bar comes news from the presidential campaign trail, candidates Bob Dole and Bill Clinton crossing the country to appear at staged events that seem, in Dole’s case, to be agonizing and surreal. Dole’s wry stillborn smile has a soothing effect on me that I don’t fully understand. In his flawless Brooks Brothers suit, with his dyed-black 1940s-style hair, he is a man from an earlier time. In his right hand, which is maimed from a war wound, he grips a plastic pen, to keep the hand from splaying open in front of the cameras and revealing its uselessness to the world. Dole was hit by a German machine gunner in Italy in 1945, three weeks before the Nazis surrendered, during a battle that had no effect whatever on the outcome of the war. The senselessness of his wound seems connected to the futility of his presidential campaign: every day he plunges further in the polls. I picture him at the age of eighteen, returning home from the front to his small Midwestern prairie town, like the character Krebs in Hemingway’s story “Soldier’s Home.” “People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late,” after the greeting of heroes was over, Hemingway wrote. “His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities.”
I dislike Dole’s politics, yet watching him on the barroom television, I find myself increasingly drawn to him, with his lame arm and his noble effort to conceal it, his pinched expression of perpetually suppressed pain. The arm is like a side-kick—the ventriloquist’s puppet—stealing the show, mocking the unbearable repetitions of his stump speech. “Can he close the sale with the American people?” a newscaster asks. Another wonders about his “inner anger,” and his “deep sarcasm about existence.”
When Dole shares the stage with Clinton, my sympathy for him sharpens. Clinton’s unrelenting sunniness fills me with unease. His bright laughter, with his head thrown back, seems vaguely dangerous. Like Samuel Coates, the superintendent of America’s first lunatic asylum, I have come to distrust “the uncertainty of all human exaltation.”
The operating room nurses at the bar are talking loudly, fresh from a kidney transplant. “Who’s your daddy?” one of them asks me with a slightly cockeyed leer. She means: Who is the monkey on my back, the person I can’t throw off? Who has my number?
I search her face for signs of aberrance, the bent glow I have grown accustomed to seeing on the ward. After a brief exchange, she accuses me, with a hint of contempt, of being “a civilian,” and turns back to her friends.
On the screen above the bar, Bob Dole is now at a campaign rally, pursued by hired hecklers dressed in enormous foam-rubber cigarette costumes. “Tobacco is no worse for you than milk!” they chant, repeating one of the gaffes that have helped to derail his campaign. He holds his right arm tight to his body, bent at the elbow, just enough to give the illusion that it isn’t maimed. To me, it is the sum total of who he is, the source of what I have construed to be his brave comfortless control. He seems bitterly amused by the cigarette protest, as if he doesn’t care about the election anymore. He knows it is lost. “I’ve taken a vow of silence,” he says. “My handlers have muzzled me. They claim that every time I open my mouth I lose more votes for the Republican party.”
I return to the hospital to resume the wait for Sally’s monstrous ebullience to pass.
The following day my mother is at the ward, standing in the sweltering hall outside Sally’s room with Pat and me.
“Michael, why did you keep this from me?” she asks, squeezing my hand with punitive sympathy. “If Pat hadn’t phoned this morning I’d still be in the dark. This has to be some kind of mistake. That gorgeous girl. Tell me it’s a mistake.”
“I felt Helen should know,” explains Pat. “We’ve kept it to ourselves for too long.”
“You certainly have. Michael, I’ve never seen you like this. Your eyes look like Peter Lorre’s in that Fritz Lang movie, what was it called?”
“M,” I say, grateful to have her with us, with her worrying ways thinly disguised as humor—her comedy of pain.
“Yes!”
“Steve had a similar reaction to my appearance.”
“He’s a fine one to talk.”
She is perfectly turned out in a pair of white-and-caramel heels and a honey-colored linen suit with a small golden frog pinned to the lapel. Her blonded hair is freshly coiffed, her neck concealed under a weightless, diaphanous scarf with the names of Riviera resort towns floating on it: an American Catherine Deneuve.
When we enter her room, Sally effusively greets her “nanny,” spreading her arms to present her glorious self for inspection, looking for all the world like a cheerful teenage girl.
“I know why you’re here.”
“Of course you do. I’m here to see you, sweetheart.” And with a reproachfu
l glance at me, Helen says: “She looks wonderful, Michael.”
“I am wonderful, aren’t I. I was counting on you to see it, Nanny. Not like him.” Sally narrows her eyes at me: “Father, you’re the only one who is still in the dark.” And rising from her bed, she walks imperiously out into the hall.
As we follow her, past the nurse’s station and the bustling glass-walled staff room, Helen grips my arm.
“She’s just a little overwrought. It’s probably hormonal. Hyperthyroid, you know what I mean. Hayva buttel, your grandmother Yetta would have called it in Yiddish. Taking a breather.” And she resurrects the case of a childhood neighbor whose racing pituitary glands briefly caused her father to mistake her for a lunatic. “Who doesn’t lose it for a while at Sally’s age? Only the most frighteningly boring girls. You should have seen yourself at fifteen, Michael, you almost sent us all to the asylum.”
“But she’s suffering,” I say, and then immediately wonder if this is true or if it is our plight to suffer, while Sally barrels ahead without feeling, like a runaway train.
Helen catches up to Sally as she enters the dayroom. “Tell your father you’re not suffering.”
“The truth comes disguised as suffering. My father has been destroyed by fear.”
“Your father is worried about you, sweetheart. It’s only natural.”
“Hmmm. You’re trying to protect him. That’s to be expected. He’s your precious son, isn’t he, Nanny? Or are you trying to trick me, and you are afraid too?”
Helen looks like she’s been slapped in the face. She takes my hand, digging her nails into my flesh.
“She’ll get over it, Michael. As God is my witness, this will pass. In ten, fifteen years, when she’s married and working at a job that she loves, you’ll look back on this as a blip on the screen.”
A handsome man of about sixty in a rumpled suit approaches us—a man of culture by all appearances, with a rising Beethovenian forehead and flowing, thick, steel-gray hair.
“Are you visiting someone?” Helen politely asks.
“You mean, ‘Do you live here?’ Isn’t that what you’re asking? ‘Is this where you belong?’”
“Oh!” And with a sideways giggle, fiddling with her scarf, she says to Pat and me, “I didn’t realize he was one of the meshugah. He looks so…intelligent. I guess you can never be sure.”
Despite our protests—that she needn’t upset the rhythm of her life so thoroughly, much less subject herself to the discomforts of the ward—Helen shows up in Sally’s room every day at noon. She stays for at least four hours, brushing me off when I, knowing her widow’s calendar to be crammed with lunch dates and bridge games, suggest that at least she make her visits shorter. Her bright careful veneer calms us. Every day she arrives in a fresh outfit, stretching her wardrobe to the limit, not a hair out of place or a hint of summer wilt about her. She enters the ward as if she’s stepping onto a stage, but it seems less a display of vanity than a tribute to order, to effort, to the way we must will things to be in times of disaster. The harder the blow, the more polish is required, she seems to be saying, as if her suits and pleated skirts amount to an ethical rejection of chaos. Some of the female staffers seem flattered by the care she takes in her appearance, feeling it is for them as well. “You are one royal lady,” Cynthia Phillips tells her. And even Rufus treats her to a respectful nod of his head when he unlocks the door.
Sometimes I doubt whether Sally even notices our presence; at other times she tantalizes us with glimmers of coherence that dim as suddenly as they arise. False calls. On certain afternoons she is awake for no more than an hour, and the three of us—Pat, Helen, and I—fall into the almost pleasurable rhythm of the ward, its detained unchanging crawl. When I question why we’re sitting here without her, I tell myself: If we weren’t waiting for her to come back to us, she would lose the sense that there was a point of return.
Helen, for her part, seems determined to embrace our distress as her own. It occurs to me that this is precisely what she is here for, that she has turned herself over to this place—to us—as a way of reexperiencing in some way what she went through with Steve. She is here as Sally’s grandmother, of course, as a supporting presence in a time of familial crisis, but she is also making amends with herself, I think, as if, by passing all these hours with us, a harsh frozen fact from her past can be softened or thawed.
“What’s a five-letter word for a sacred Buddhist text that begins with the letter s?” Helen asks, folding the day’s crossword puzzle in her lap like a freshly ironed napkin.
“Sutra,” says Pat, earning a delighted grin from Helen.
We haven’t spent such concentrated amounts of time in each other’s company since I was a boy. As adults, our relationship has been uneasy—the lasting effect of a rupture that occurred between us when I was eleven or twelve, and that we have never managed fully to repair. And yet, shielded by Pat’s presence, and bolstered by the feeling of solidarity that Sally’s crack-up has inspired, we are able, provisionally at least, to overcome our awkwardness with each other. The three of us make interminable small talk, and take aimless arm-in-arm strolls up and down the halls. Helen recounts the plots of movies she has recently seen, Pat tells stories about her Irish grandmother who ran a numbers racket and rarely let her rosary out of her hands, and the two of them argue amicably about the relative merits of New York City Ballet’s principal dancers. Slowly, the air of solemnity lifts from our afternoons. The ward begins to feel more like a nursery than a prison, a refuge where one is removed from pressure, expectation, and, with the help of meds and electroshock, from memory as well. We plan luncheon picnics in the dayroom, where we hang out amid the hubbub of the patients and their families. “The piazza,” Helen calls it.
When she’s feeling up to it, Sally joins us. “I tried calling Mom,” she says. “I dialed 1-802. One ate oh too,” she says, miming the words. “Do you see why I couldn’t go on?”
One afternoon Pat leaves the ward early, to go to a rehearsal of her dance company, and Helen and I find ourselves alone. Immediately our customary awkwardness returns. With Sally knocked out and nothing to distract us, our conversation deteriorates into an excruciating series of false starts. This tense embarrassed shyness can be traced back to the fall of 1964, when I destroyed the close bond between Helen and me that was the envy of my older brothers, who retaliated with covert acts of revenge that left me terror-struck and in constant miserable expectation of a fresh attack. My status as Helen’s favorite even incited a certain grumpiness in my father. I had become a pariah, a mama’s boy. Only Steve left me alone, as he left everyone alone; yet without saying a word he seemed to reproach me more severely than the others for the special attentions I enjoyed. He needed them more. I had her all for myself, “staying home” on the basis of some “flu” or invented fever (while Bernie was at his scrap metal yard and my brothers at their desks in school) so Helen could take me to matinee movies and then to a soda fountain on Flatbush Avenue for grilled cheese sandwiches and cantaloupe halves. I don’t remember the details of my rejection of her, only the violent feeling, and the verbal cruelty I unleashed upon her without warning or the slightest regard for the blow that I was forcing her to absorb. I ordered her to steer clear of me. I tore her apart with a barrage of furious riffs that poured out of my eleven-year-old mouth in a sudden shocking eloquence of meanness—an eloquence that I was just discovering in myself and that Helen was completely unprepared for. Things were said that were hardhearted and final. What I most remember was the demonic driven feeling, and then our retreat from each other for good. For a long time I’ve wanted to apologize for my behavior that year, but I’m not sure how or even if it would be sincere. How does the man apologize for the boy?
At the close of visiting hours, Helen suggests that we go out to dinner. We enter the first restaurant we pass, a bar with a small dining room in the back where a few vacant tables are arranged under a murky green-tinted skylight that makes us feel as if we ar
e sitting underwater. I order a bourbon, and Helen, who usually doesn’t drink, asks for a gin and tonic. Around her neck hangs a small gold medallion engraved with the names of her five sons—a gift from our father—which she fidgets with nervously, raising her eyes to me as if she’s about to speak and then turning away without muttering more than a couple of stilted words.
Our drinks arrive, two brimming cocktail glasses still warm from their rinsing at the bar sink, the ice cubes thinning fast.
“How’s Steve?” she asks.
I fill her in on the latest. “I don’t know what to do about him right now.”
“What can be done at this point? He’s a grown man. Your father and I wore ourselves out trying. You’ve been wonderful with him, Michael. If I haven’t thanked you properly it’s not because I’m not grateful.”
“I know.”
I have the powerful sense that she has thought through what she wants to say to me, and I am anxiously searching for a way to help her along, when her hands tighten around her drink and in a rising voice she says: “Sally is nothing like Steve. As God is my witness. I saw that boy grow up. I saw everything. And I swear to you, Sally is nothing like him.”
She waves a hand at her finely spun hair, as if to say, No need to utter another word about this. But then, after sipping her drink through a red cocktail straw, and removing the straw and twisting it around her finger, she goes on.
“If what I say ends up sounding like a complaint, then I’m saying it wrong.” And she launches into a complicated family history that seems to come out of nowhere at first, but that I soon realize is inextricably connected to Steve and Sally and me. I’ve heard some of these stories of course, they’re part of our family lore, but never told to me like this, from Helen, and so startlingly meant for my ears alone.
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