An Arrangement of Skin

by Anna Journey

  “We open the successive doors in Bluebeard’s castle because ‘they are there,’” writes cultural critic George Steiner in his treatise on the decline of classical humanism In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971). “[E]ach leads to the next,” he continues:

  by a logic of intensification which is that of the mind’s own awareness of being. To leave one door closed would be not only cowardice but a betrayal—radical, self-mutilating—of the inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species. We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead.

  To find out whether she wanted to become a psychiatrist, like her father, my mother worked in Seven East, the psychiatric wing of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, during the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of college. My grandfather, Dr. L. C. Hanes, taught and practiced psychiatry in Jackson from 1959 until his death in 1987. He worked at the Medical Center during a number of those years. My mother’s main duties as a psychiatric aide involved socializing with the patients in Seven East—chatting with them and playing bridge. One of the patients, my mother learned, was on suicide watch and required special protocol. My mother was supposed to “01 her,” which meant she was to carefully shadow the patient, whom I’ll call Ruth. Ruth was in her early twenties, shorthaired, slight, and wiry. Her father had often left her alone as a child with her depressed mother while he went away on business, and, during one trip, Ruth’s mother killed herself. Until her own suicide attempt during her first year of college, Ruth had been a student at Millsaps College. She had an IQ of 160 and a scornful nickname for my mother—“Turd”—a word that wasn’t yet part of my sheltered mother’s vocabulary. One day, my mother peered into Ruth’s room through the door’s small observational window, but the space looked empty. As soon as my mother opened the door and stepped inside, Ruth quickly slipped out of the room, slamming the door behind her, which locked automatically. Although my mother wasn’t stuck in the “01” room for long and staff members soon located Ruth in another part of the hospital, my mom decided not to pursue a career in psychiatry. Ruth finally learned upon her return that Dr. Hanes was my mother’s father. “You’re Father Hanes’s daughter,” Ruth said reverentially, figuring my grandfather as a priest, her confessor. From then on, she called my mother “Father Hanes’s Daughter” instead of “Turd.”

  The expression “skeleton in the closet” arose in the early nineteenth century. In an article published in the UK monthly periodical the Eclectic Review, the minister and editor William Hendry Stowell employs the metaphor as a description of the urge to keep hidden from family members the knowledge of hereditary diseases. “The dread of being the cause of misery to posterity,” Stowell writes, “has prevailed over men to conceal the skeleton in the closet.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definitions of the expression: “a private and concealed trouble in one’s house or circumstances, ever present, and ever liable to come into view” and “a secret source of shame or pain to a family or person.” The phrase’s exact origins remain mysterious. Although Perrault’s chamber of corpses in “Bluebeard” suggests one plausible source, a number of people have surmised that the image of the hidden skeleton refers to the clandestine use of anatomy skeletons by physicians or artists who had not received legal permission to dissect corpses. Thus, people interested in directly exploring the human body—or academics who wished to use cadavers as teaching tools—kept their black-market materials discreetly tucked away, locked in wardrobes, cupboards, or closets.

  For years, my grandfather kept a secret in his closet.

  My grandfather saved a fragment of the skull of his medical school skeleton. Throughout his studies at UT Austin, he’d used the yellow, bowl-shaped hunk of parietal bone as an ashtray, finally deciding that doing so was in poor taste and retiring the object to a cardboard box in the attic. Most of the patients he treated at the University of Mississippi Medical Center were female neurotics or gay adolescent males. Although my grandfather never shared privileged information about patients with his family, my mother suspected that he urged his gay patients to accept themselves rather than seek some dubious “cure” for their sexuality. He actively steered the teenagers away from a particular colleague of his at the Medical Center who specialized in an insidious form of “behavior modification therapy” for gay men, which involved attaching electrodes to the patients’ testicles, projecting slides of nude men and women on a screen, and shocking the patients’ genitals each time a picture of a naked man materialized. “He got apoplectic about that doctor,” my mom said. Throughout his career, my grandfather remained skeptical about treatments that aimed to change a person’s fundamental character, including electroconvulsive therapy. His own mother, depressed since her oldest daughter Joyce died from strep throat, suffered severe brain damage from early electroshock treatments. Before the final round of shock therapy launched her into a permanent vegetative state, she experienced a psychotic break and chased my grandfather’s other sister, seven-year-old Jeannette, into the backyard waving a BB gun. Jeanette shimmied up a chinaberry as her mother fired at her, pacing back and forth in the grass below. The little girl stayed in the tree until her father returned from the barbershop to steer his wife back inside.

  Although I’m attached to my grandparents’ copy of Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” I prefer the early nineteenth-century version of the story retold by the Brothers Grimm, titled “Fitcher’s Bird.” The Grimms’ revision of “Bluebeard” remains similar in plot to Perrault’s, although it contains a number of supernatural elements, which makes their story a true fairy tale rather than a cautionary one. In “Fitcher’s Bird,” the Bluebeard figure isn’t a rich man in a castle; he’s a wizard in a dark forest. The wizard dresses up as a beggar, lugging on his back a magical wicker basket into which he compels women to jump. During one outing, he arrives at the home of a family with three daughters, makes the oldest sibling hop into his basket, and carries her to his house in the woods. In addition to giving his kidnapped bride-to-be the key to the forbidden room, he hands her an egg, which she must carry at all times. Like Fatima in “Bluebeard,” the oldest sister unlocks the wizard’s forbidden room and discovers the bodies of murdered women. The Grimms’ macabre vision of the carnage surpasses Perrault’s in its violence: the wizard had dismembered his victims and dumped the hacked-up parts into a bloody basin in the center of the chamber. Instead of dropping the key, she lets go of the egg, staining its shell with blood. The wizard returns, slaughters the oldest sister, returns to the family’s house, and snatches the middle sister, with whom he repeats the murderous scenario. The youngest sister, however, outsmarts the wizard after she’s kidnapped, tucking away the egg for safekeeping before she enters the forbidden room. She notices her sisters’ corpses among the bodies, and, horrified, reaches into the bloody basin to recover their severed limbs, arranging them in order, like human puzzle pieces: “head, body, arms and legs.” “And when nothing further was lacking,” the Brothers Grimm recount, “the limbs began to move and unite themselves together, and both the maidens opened their eyes and were once more alive. Then they rejoiced and kissed and caressed each other.”

  Unlike Fatima in Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” who remains passive as she relies on her siblings to devise her rescue, the youngest sister in “Fitcher’s Bird” brings about her own salvation. When the wizard returns, he finds the egg pristine. “He now had no longer any power over her,” the Brothers Grimm write, “and was forced to do whatsoever she desired.” The young woman hides her resurrected sisters in the wizard’s basket, covers them with a layer of gold, and forces him to deliver the load to her parents while she pretends to prepare the wedding feast. She invites the wizard’s friends. She invents a double for herself: a grinning skull wreathed in flowers, which she places in an upstairs window. Next, “she got into a barrel of honey, and then cut the feather-bed open and rolled herself in it, until she looked like a wondrous bird, and no one could recognize her.” She flees the house and slip
s past wedding guests on their way to the celebration, answering their questions with her savvy birdlike song:

  “O, Fitcher’s bird, how com’st thou here?”

  “I come from Fitcher’s house quite near.”

  “And what may the young bride be doing?”

  “From cellar to garret she’s swept all clean,

  And now from the window she’s peeping I ween.”

  She meets the wizard on his way back to the house, fooling him, too. The fairy tale ends when the family of the bride arrives at the feast, locks the wizard and his friends in the house, and burns the place to the ground.

  I prefer “Fitcher’s Bird” to “Bluebeard” for its unstable, shifting power dynamics and for the central female character’s agency and resourcefulness. She doesn’t just quiver in terror, hoping Bluebeard won’t notice her betrayal. She restores her sisters’ bodies to wholeness and transforms herself into a golden bird, making for herself a magical skin from honey and feathers.

  In his classic phenomenological text The Poetics of Space (1958), the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explores the spaces—cellars, attics, corners, and more—that comprise a home. In the chapter “Drawers, Chests, and Wardrobes,” Bachelard describes these “hiding-places in which human beings, great dreamers of locks, keep or hide their secrets.” Elsewhere, he writes:

  Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these “objects” and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy.

  Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does not respond to the word wardrobe? . . . . .

  And to fine words correspond fine things, to grave-sounding words, an entity of depth. Every poet of furniture—even if he be a poet in a garret, and therefore has no furniture—knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep. A wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.

  C. S. Lewis famously employed the intimate space of a wardrobe as a fantastical portal into the land of Narnia, filled with marvelous talking animals, mythological creatures, and a fearsome White Witch. Most “poets of furniture,” however, evoke more ambivalent and haunting figurations of the secret space. In Bill Knott’s poem “The Closet,” a young speaker opens his mother’s wardrobe (after she had died in childbirth) to find “the hangers are sharper, knife-’n’-slice, I jump / Helplessly to catch them to twist them clear . . . .” In Saeed Jones’s “Closet of Red,” a baroque cascade of foliage blooms within a space that would contain or control queer desire: “In place of no, my leaking mouth spills foxgloves. / Trumpets of tongued blossoms litter the locked closet.”

  Once, a tattoo artist who had to break his lease gave me a tour of his apartment. I’d responded to the ad he’d posted online about the rental. As I admired a hardcover art book on his coffee table that featured a collection of Alberto Vargas’s vintage illustrations of midcentury pinups, he said he often used Vargas’s nude women as templates for “naked lady” designs on clients’ biceps. I imagined the women would resurrect, like the sisters in “Fitcher’s Bird,” each time muscles flexed and twitched the tattoos to life. Before I left, he showed me an armoire that came with the apartment since it was solid walnut and too heavy to move. He said he wanted to show me a secret, and lifted the false bottom of the armoire to reveal a hidden compartment lined in purple velvet. Later, after I had moved in, I peeked into the secret drawer and found that he’d left the Vargas book there for me as a gift. The real gift, though, we both knew, was our sharing the intimacy of a secret.

  Once, while cleaning out my grandfather’s house after his death, my mother discovered a stash of gay porn magazines hidden in a green canvas backpack in his closet.

  In addition to being a psychiatrist, my grandfather was an amateur painter, a classical guitar player, a fencer, a civil rights activist, an interfaith community leader, and a collector of newfangled technologies. He was the first person on the block to own a color TV. I grew up staring at a framed oil painting he made that hangs on the wall in my father’s home office. It’s a still life done in a heavy, impressionist impasto: three oranges in a wooden bowl beside a half-filled water pitcher placed on a white-and-blue plaid tablecloth, one end of the material folded back. The perspective is wrong—unintentionally and confusedly cubist. Due to the table’s angle, I shouldn’t be able to see the tops of the oranges. But I like that I can see them: their skins splotchy and bright, the white light coming in strong and from all directions.

  The expression “coming out of the closet” is a mixed metaphor. The phrase blends “coming out,” which evokes the celebratory “coming-out party” of a debutante, with “skeleton in the closet,” which connotes a shameful, hidden secret. So these sociolinguistic origins warp the metaphor’s vehicle as well as torque the tone. “Coming out,” before the 1950s, suggested an optimistic entrance into society, whereas “coming out of the closet,” after the Stonewall Riots, implied an exit from the oppression of a secret.

  Although my grandfather never came out of the closet during his lifetime, choosing to remain in a heteronormative marriage, my mother had suspected her father’s hidden identity for several decades. Every now and then, she told me, she’d “catch whiffs” of his secret. “Like what?” I’d asked.

  My mother, who belonged to a community theater troupe, developed a crush on a costume designer, Bob, who’d moved from New York to Jackson to work on a local play about the true identity of Shakespeare. (This was the play during which the lead actor—the guy who played Shakespeare—succumbed to his flu and threw up on my mother backstage.) She told her father how talented and funny Bob seemed, that he’d make “a nice marriage partner,” and that he was bisexual. When my grandfather advised her against pursuing a relationship with Bob, saying it “wasn’t a good thing for a woman to enter into,” my mother believed he spoke from his perspective as a shrink. She realized much later that he might have spoken from personal experience. Throughout his married life, my grandfather maintained a circle of openly gay friends and invited them over for dinner with his family. There was Leslie, the male choir director at the Episcopalian church at which my grandfather served as a lay reader. There was the interior designer, Hal. There was Jim, a fellow shrink he’d met at the University Medical Center and with whom he founded Riverside, the first psychiatric hospital in the vicinity of Jackson. (The other hospitals in the area offered only psychiatric wings.) My mother remembers Jim coming over for dinner many times with his younger boyfriend Skip, whom Jim was putting through college. They’d play duplicate bridge with my grandparents. After Skip graduated, he left Jim and eventually married a woman. My grandfather would get drunk and drive over, alone, to Jim’s house and stay for hours. My mother believes Jim was her father’s long-term partner, though she never asked either of them about it, even after her father’s death, even after she found the magazines, even after she saw—at the funeral—Jim’s anguished face.

  Part of me grieves for my grandfather’s secret: it must’ve been a harrowing burden to bear. And part of me shivers with the knowledge that his secret is why I’m alive, why my mother, aunt, and sister were born. Four people. I’m grateful. I’m horrified. Didn’t he know, as a shrink, that his sacrifice was destructive? How could he advise his patients to accept themselves when he couldn’t show that same generosity toward himself? He wore love beads in the sixties. He worked to advance integration policies in Mississippi. He welcomed the Summer of Love. Why didn’t he tell his family? My grandmother had to have known. Before they moved to Jackson, she’d threatened to leave him in New Orleans, even calling her former nursing supervisor in Austin and arranging to return to her old job. What did he have to promise her? When he couldn’t give up Jim, why didn’t he at least finally tell my mother? Why didn’
t he live with his lover and find happiness after my grandmother died?

  Before my grandmother died from terminal emphysema in 1985, she and my grandfather used the money they’d received from selling their stake in Riverside Psychiatric Hospital to travel the world. In 1981, they visited Paris and London. They flew to Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Nepal. They visited my parents and me in suburban Dhaka. Advised against the trip, my grandmother told her doctor that she’d rather die visiting her baby granddaughter in Bangladesh than live in fear in Jackson. She crammed a folder with a two-inch stack of her photocopied medical records and packed it in her suitcase.

  During a tour of the yellow, smoky streets of Old Dhaka clogged with rickshaws and ghastly traffic jams, my grandmother began wheezing. My parents took her back to the house while Susheel, their household staff manager, remained with my grandfather, who said he wanted to continue sightseeing. My grandfather returned after midnight, drunk, with a rambling, incoherent tale about how he and Susheel had gotten lost. My mother wonders whether he’d convinced Susheel to take him to a gay brothel.