When they entered the dining room, they were met by the smells of so many different kinds of food, it was as if it were one smell of something unnamable. There were no women in the room, only men, and they sat at long tables, side by side, with attendants at the head. As soon as they sat down someone put plates of food in front of them, and Jake ate what was before him, as the others were doing. When he had finished, the plate was taken away. Then he had ice cream, one round scoop of vanilla, and he ate that. Across from him a man with a day’s growth of beard and eyes as pink as a rabbit’s leaned forward and said, “Did you know all the waiters are patients too? I hope to be one someday.”
“He don’t understand,” Sam said. “I don’t think.”
“Oh?” the man said. He turned to the others and said, “Shall we see television after supper?”
“Sure,” Sam said, scraping back his chair. “Everybody finished? Let’s go.”
All around the room was the same sound, the scraping back of chairs; as the men filed out of the room, two by two, ushered by the attendants, there was the clatter of silverware being thrown onto trays and the clunking sound of heavy plates and mugs being stacked. No one could talk above the noise and the men moved silently until they were some distance down the hall. Then the man walking along beside Jake said, “Did you see him make that long row of scarves come out of that hat when all we had seen him put in it was that little bitty Confederate flag?”
When Jake did not answer or even look at him, he looked at Sam, nodded his head toward Jake, and said, “What’s with him?”
Sam shrugged and said, “Cat’s got his tongue.”
They went back into the ward, and Sam led Jake to a chair in front of the television. When the program had been agreed upon and the machine turned on, he watched to see what Jake did. He merely stared. Presently he began to rub his eyes, fighting their closing. Then as he began to remember sleep, he let himself find it again. He remembered it: the quiet, and the gentle breathing, the dark and then the light. Sam took him by the arm gently and led him away to bed. He helped him to undress. He turned off the light and said from the door, “I’ll look in in a little while. If you aren’t asleep, I’ll give you something.”
He lay straight and flat and watched where the light had been. He scratched after the fleas that had been hopping on him ever since he had been in the jail. He listened to the faraway faint sound of a man’s voice calling, “Help. Help. Help.” It went on for a long time, without urgency.
The box was on a chair beside the bed. Slowly, into the dark, his hand went out until he was touching it. His other socks were still there; he felt them, rolled together. His fingers continued to seek and finally touched the little piece of crumpled paper; he curled his fingers about it and brought it up to himself. He thought how it would be if he could read it. Wilroy, the man had said, looking at it: Mary Margaret. Jake held it to himself a long time smelling only its paper smell; then he put the paper under his pillow and thought of sleep again and let it come again as once he had known it, trusting it, believing in it, believing that tomorrow everything would be the same again.
Chapter Ten
The bus stop for Lee was also a grocery store. Alighting from the bus, Wilroy and Mary Margaret went inside and asked directions to the hospital. The owner’s wife sat by the front window on a raised platform at a very high old wooden desk and kept grocery accounts, gave out information about the bus schedule and sold tickets. She looked down and said, “You passed it coming in. You could have rung and got off there.”
“Oh, well, we didn’t know,” Wilroy said. “How we going to get back there?”
“You can take a taxi is all,” the woman said, pointing her pencil. “There’s the stand right over there.”
Looking through the window, Wilroy and Mary Margaret saw the current prices of vegetables backwards, painted on the window in blue poster paint, and across the street to a one-room wooden shed with a sign on the roof: TAXI. Beside the shed an old Plymouth and an old Chevrolet were drawn up. On a bench two men sat talking in the late October sun.
“I told you I thought all those buildings we passed must have been the hospital,” Mary Margaret said.
“I didn’t see no sign,” Wilroy said.
“There was one,” the woman said.
“What’s the chances on us gettin’ back to Marigold this evening?” Wilroy said.
The woman consulted a schedule. “Bus at four o’clock will get you in at ten. Otherwise you’re going to arrive back in the middle of the night.”
“We’ll have to make that one, then.” Wilroy looked at Mary Margaret, and she nodded.
“Bus station closes up at one o’clock Sundays,” the woman said. “Just flag the bus down outside the hospital. You want a ticket now?”
“Got one! Round trip.” Wilroy slapped his breast pocket proudly, took Mary Margaret’s arm and guided her away from the bin full of sale items, out of the store and across the street. “They don’t sell nothing on Sundays. The store’s just open for the bus station.”
“Well, I wondered. I never had heard even of a grocery in Memphis being open on Sunday.”
Approaching the men, Wilroy said, “We’d like to go out to the hospital, please, sir.”
One man, his mouth widening like a yawning animal’s, shouted, “Ag—nes!”
When his wife appeared wearing an old sea captain’s hat, he said, “These folks want to go out to the hospital.”
Without a word Agnes got into the Plymouth; Wilroy and Mary Margaret got into the back. Mary Margaret put her hand on Wilroy’s knee a moment. They felt quite romantic, quite excited about this little trip. It was the first they had ever taken that Wilroy did not do the driving. But they had been won over by the bus company’s television commercial: You’ll see more from a bus be-cause the dri-ving’s up to us! De, da, the tune went through Mary Margaret’s head still, quite catchy.
But their bus had not been the luxurious two-decker with the glass bubble dome that on television rolled smoothly past the Grand Canyon and the giant redwoods of California. It had been the same old carbon-monoxide kind, with one level of two rows of double seats, that they had always known. Their disappointment had not dampened their spirits; they gazed about eagerly at everything. To tell the truth, Mary Margaret did not find Lee as pretty as Senatobia despite rolling hills in the distance, though she would not have said so for fear of offending the woman.
“How’re you folks?” Agnes said.
“Doing all right,” Wilroy said. “How you doing?”
“Fine.” Agnes drove the car on rapidly and suddenly swerved to the side of the road and stopped. “Hey, Billy! You got some greens?”
On the opposite side of the road an old man in khaki work clothes and a red-plaid hunting cap was walking, head bent, toward town. He looked up in surprise. “Yes ’um. Can you use some?”
“I been looking all over for some.”
Billy crossed the road and handed her through the window a stuffed paper grocery sack.
“How much you want for ’em?”
“Quarter do?”
Agnes gave him a quarter and drove off rapidly, blaring the horn at an incautious chicken.
“Did he sell all those greens for a quarter!” Mary Margaret said.
“Oh, he’s one of the patients out to the hospital. He thinks a quarter’s a lot of money.”
“One of the patients! They let them run free like that?”
“When they been there a long time. Billy’s been there thirty years. He was going in to sell his greens. He’d sell ’em for the same in town. He might as well sell ’em to me.”
“Where’d he get the greens?” Wilroy said.
“They give ’em a little garden. And the patients take care of the hospital’s garden. That’s most likely where he got ’em. They had a big to-do for a while. The superintendent said he was going to stop ’em all taking things and selling ’em in town. But he never did anything.”
She turne
d in abruptly between two brick posts. “Which building you want?”
“Administration, I believe,” Wilroy said.
When Agnes stopped, he paid her the dollar she asked for, and they all said goodbye. Then he and Mary Margaret stood beneath the great stone archway and looked at each other in surprise. “I declare to my soul, Wilroy,” Mary Margaret said. “I never expected anything like this. I thought it would be all dark and drab and dingy, like a prison, you know.”
Surprised himself, Wilroy said nothing. He took Mary Margaret’s arm, and they went inside the building. It was an old mansion. Overhead on a fine chain a crystal chandelier hung with its prisms reflecting one another, sparkling, glistening, full of a rainbow’s colors, like raindrops after the sun has come out. On either side of the room a staircase curved up gracefully to form one suspended overhead, shutting out most of the light from a large stained-glass window close to the ceiling. The gloom gave a hush to the room. Wilroy spoke softly when he asked directions to Jake’s doctor. The receptionist smiled and directed them to the new building, on their left as they came in.
When they went out again, Mary Margaret glanced about self-consciously, wondering if anyone would think they were new patients. It was hard to tell who belonged and who didn’t; somehow she had thought the people would look different.
They passed a waist-high red brick wall and looked over it at a formal garden. Espaliered against the wall were ivy and pyracantha in designs intricate as a spider’s web. In each corner stood concrete urns, goblet-shaped, full of rich dark earth and the last of miniature roses and violets. Into the garden, stepping on slabs of marble shiny as ice, came an old man wearing a hat squashed onto his head like a saucer. He bent to the chrysanthemums, mumbling to himself, then straightened and throwing his arms heavenward cried, “In the beginning …!”
Embarrassed, Wilroy and Mary Margaret tiptoed away. They looked back only once, and the old man was still delivering his sermon. The sidewalk led past barred windows, and women standing behind dark screens looked out at them silently. In the men’s wing a faceless voice said, “Hello, honey.”
Taking Mary Margaret’s arm, Wilroy hurried them on faster. Mary Margaret felt herself flush in a funny way, as if it were her fault the man called out. Perhaps it was that she felt guilty: she was on the outside, and he was not.
“Did you hear a man calling ‘help’?” she said, in a whisper.
“I thought I did, but then I decided it couldn’t have been.”
“It was. But it was as if he didn’t really mean it.”
“You reckon there’s going to be a place here where we can eat?” Wilroy said. “I’m starving.”
“Lord, I hope so.” Mary Margaret, on a diet, had eaten only cottage cheese for breakfast. An irrepressible desire for something sweet had overtaken her. Unable to suppress it, she had gone on, actually, to deciding between a milk shake and a sundae.
Wilroy pushed open glass doors, and they entered a foyer of pink marble. At its opposite end a glass wall looked onto a patio where patients sat at small round tables gay with beach umbrellas. A receptionist showed them down the hall to Doctor Rutledge’s door.
He rose when they entered, a short, somewhat round man who peered at them closely. Then Mary Margaret noticed his glasses swinging in his hand; on either side of his nose was a depressed red mark. They introduced themselves and sat down. Wilroy said, “Well, how’s our boy?”
“To tell the truth, we’ve had some trouble with him,” the doctor said. “In the barbershop mainly. I looked at his record and believe his behavior must be about the same as when you decided to commit him here.”
“It wasn’t none of us,” Wilroy said, quickly. “It was some folks in the town that never had taken a particular tuck to Jake anyhow.”
“He’s never been to a barbershop,” Mary Margaret said. “If you took him to town to a real one.”
“Well, the barbershop’s here. But it’s real.” The doctor smiled. “I’ll tell you. Mr. Darby’s at lunch and until he finishes we could take a little walk around. I’d like to show you our building and tell you something of our work here. And I’d like to talk to you about Mr. Darby.”
They rose and went into the hall. The doctor pointed to the patio as they passed it. “Notice our building is built in an unbroken circle around that patio. The patients can sit there with a feeling of complete freedom. Yet no one can leave it without being seen.”
“Well, I declare. I call that smart,” Wilroy said.
“How did Mr. Darby get his hair cut?” the doctor said.
“Wilroy did it, or a colored woman that use to come help him out, and a friend of mine, Miss May,” Mary Margaret said. “But they just used scissors.”
“He was probably afraid of the electric clippers,” the doctor said. “Of course that’s what’s been so hard. Not knowing what he knows and what he doesn’t.”
“Well, that’s always been the case,” Mary Margaret said. “But some friends of mine and I—Loma and Ruth Edna, Wilroy—believe sometimes he knows more than we do.”
“If it was anybody but you three women I’d take issue with that.” Wilroy winked at the doctor.
“Now, Wilroy—,” Mary Margaret said.
The doctor said, “Look here.” They stopped outside the barbershop, which was locked because it was Sunday. The doctor unlocked the door and they stepped inside.
“Well now, this ain’t no bad apples,” Wilroy said.
When they had inspected everything, they went again into the hall. The doctor stopped outside a pink door and said to Mary Margaret, “This is for you.” He unlocked the door and she went past him. “Why, Doctor Rutledge, I declare to my soul. If this isn’t something to tell them back home, Wilroy. A beauty parlor, and better than anything we got between home and Memphis, too.” She studied the aqua walls and the pale-pink chairs and the coffee table laden with fashion and movie and homemaking magazines.
The doctor said, “Of course, all of our patients are poor. They’ve seldom been to barbers or beauty shops. But then, a lot of them have never slept in a bed to themselves or had indoor toilets or enough good food before, either. That’s why a lot of them had rather be here than at home.”
“I can imagine,” Mary Margaret said.
The doctor closed the door. They continued down the hall. “A lot of our women patients are just housewives who can’t handle all their responsibilities. They don’t have enough money and too many kids. The father might be unable to provide, or unwilling, or perhaps drinks. Given a whole set of other circumstances, they probably would never have had any trouble. What’s done for them in the beauty parlor probably helps as much as what we doctors do.”
He and Wilroy had gotten ahead. Now Wilroy was asking about a place to eat lunch. Lagging behind, Mary Margaret could not stop thinking about those women, poor souls. She sometimes had thought she wasn’t going to get through any given day, what with the housework and the gardening and the kids when they were small. If you didn’t have a strong man beside you, as she had Wilroy, what would you do? She’d never realized before it was nervous breakdowns that sent folks here. She’d always thought that when you got locked up you were just plain nuts, off forever. Though here you didn’t feel you were locked up. That’s what the doctor had said they were striving for. Two years ago they had torn down the high brick fence that once enclosed the place. She wondered what the women thought about under the dryer when they couldn’t talk to anybody, and nobody could talk to them, and there was nothing else for your mind to run to but thinking? The idea that the women in this place were concerned with how to get their hair fixed brought a lump to her throat.
When she reached Wilroy and the doctor, the doctor said, “I was going to show you the swimming pool and the gym, but the time’s getting short. And your husband says you folks want a bite, so I’ll show you to the snack shop. Afterward you can pick Mr. Darby up in his ward and visit in one of the recesses we’ve passed in the hall, where there are nice com
fortable chairs and couches.”
“I hate to miss the pool,” Wilroy said. “But my stomach’s just a-growling. I smell food.”
The doctor laughed. “It’s right around the corner. Perhaps you can see the pool later. It’s beautiful. Almost Olympic size. The water blue as a robin’s egg. The gym has a basketball court, and the patients play the town team. We’ve got every kind of exercising thing you can think of. Tumbling mats, boxing gloves, stationary bicycles. And there’s a crafts shop, too. The patients can do metalwork, quilting, painting, carpentry, and there’s even a loom.”
“I hope we can see some of those things later,” Wilroy said. “Though we got to get a four o’clock bus.”
“Remember where I told you you could pick up Mr. Darby?” the doctor said. He put out his hand and met Wilroy’s. They shook hard, then let go. “I just want to tell you one more thing, then I’ll let you eat. That is, I don’t believe Mr. Darby belongs here.”
“Oh?” Mary Margaret said. “Then is he coming home?”
“Most likely. But not before a month is up. We have to keep everybody committed here a month for observation.”
“That seems too bad,” Wilroy said, “if you don’t think they belong.”
“It is, because it fosters our worst problem, overcrowding. We get many people who don’t belong here. Alcoholics mainly. Families who can’t afford to send them to private institutions, or don’t want to bother with them, send them here. Then they get a rest from them for a month, and the patient gets a free cure.”
“How do they get ’em in?” Wilroy said.
“Same way your friend was gotten in. The family goes to court and swears them to be insane. There aren’t enough caseworkers to go into the cases thoroughly. It’s a very underpaid job. The courts don’t pay enough attention either, and there are always doctors who are friends of the family or who’ll take a fee for signing the petition. After all, if the person’s going to be released in a month, what’s the harm—except to the state. The caseworkers don’t have the right facilities either. It’s common practice to keep people in jail waiting to be committed. Sometimes that can be a week or two. You can imagine the influences they come under there.” He smiled a little. “Mr. Darby was covered with fleas.”
The Morning and the Evening Page 14
