The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Latha and Flora became good friends, although Flora cautioned Latha that occasionally she should be prepared to see Flora subjected to either hypo or hydro. Whenever Flora’s craving for something to drink got out of hand, and she started raving, a nurse would inject her with a sedative or take her to the hydrotherapy room, where she would be packed up in cold, wet sheets until she quit raving. Flora never knew, when she began to rave, whether she would get the hypo or the hydro. Naturally she preferred the former, because it brought on a state that was almost like that of a booze binge, whereas the hydro made her thirstier than ever because she couldn’t drink any of the water that she was surrounded with. “It’s enough to drive a body nuts,” Flora said.

  After dinner, which nearly everybody called “lunch” except Latha and Flora, and which consisted of some inferior parts of chicken, boiled—wings or neck or feet—served with a boiled potato and boiled turnips, everyone was “free” for the rest of the day. There was nothing to do. B Ward patients who had been on good behavior might be allowed to join the A Ward patients in strolling the grounds of the courtyard, an area enclosed by the conjoined buildings of the asylum, so there was no access to “on the outside.” C Ward patients did not have that privilege, and most of them simply remained in or on their cots throughout the afternoon. Flora and Latha spent a while trying to find out if they knew any Ozark folks in common, but although Flora knew Caleb McWhorter, who had been Latha’s teacher in the primary, they discovered that Madison County and Newton County, while being side by side and nearly identical in size and topography and in the fact that the settlers of both had come from the same parts of Tennessee and Kentucky and North Carolina, were worlds apart, and thus Flora and Latha, who sounded alike, had no other common ground.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Flora revealed that if Latha petitioned Nurse Shedd, she could get library privileges. The only book Flora was interested in was the Bible. “They took my Bible away from me when they locked me up in here,” Flora said, “and damned if I aim to go to the library just to see another’un.”

  So Latha went up to the library by herself. It wasn’t very big, consisting of a few hundred books that had been donated to the asylum by people on the outside who didn’t have any further use for them. Latha found an interesting looking volume by David Grayson, called Adventures in Contentment. If there was anything Latha needed, it was contentment. The book was illustrated with nice pen and ink drawings of country scenes. But when Latha asked the attendant to check it out, the attendant looked at her as if she were a lunatic, and said books could only be read in the library. So Latha sat at a table and read the first three or four chapters. It was a story about a nice man named David Grayson who leaves the city and buys a farm in search of a simple life, and he has all kinds of friendly encounters with neighbors and strangers in which he learns as much from them as they learn from him, in terms of a philosophy of life that leaves one satisfied if not contented. The people and their ideas and way of talking reminded Latha very much of Stay More and Stay Morons, and she was excruciatingly homesick, and had to stop reading.

  She returned to the dormitory and tried to take a nap, which most of the occupants were doing, but it was too noisy, because several of the occupants were talking loudly, not necessarily to each other but to themselves or to the walls. One of them was saying to Nurse Shedd, over and over, “It’s time for me to go home.” Nurse Shedd tried to get her to believe that if she didn’t shut up, she would be transferred to D Ward. Nurse Shedd’s constant repetition of the threat was more monotonous than the woman’s constant talk of going home. Latha’s friend Mary Jane Hines rose up from her cot and stood upon it and shouted, “NOBODY IS EVER GOING HOME, SO BUTTON YOUR TRAP!” Then Mary Jane lay back down to brood deeply on the import of her words, and covered her head with the blanket. Her words had stopped all of the talking from every corner but had also awakened all the nappers, who started talking steadily with more noise than those who had stopped. Latha reflected upon the possible truth of Mary Jane’s words. Was it not possible ever to get out of here?

  At supper, which consisted of a bowl of gruel of some sort, she asked her new friend Flora if it was true that no one ever left. “Why, never the week goes by,” Flora replied, “that somebody or other don’t figger out a way to escape. I just wish they’d tell me how before they leave, because it’s no good afterwards.” Flora counted off on her ten fingers the various inmates of her acquaintance who were no longer here. “’Course they never tell you when it happens, or where they went. For all I know, some of them died and was taken off to the cemetery. Or maybe they got transferred to A Ward for being real good or transferred to D Ward for being real bad.” One reason that B and C Wards were combined together was that it saved the problem, and the paperwork, of transferring an inmate from one to the other. Latha wanted to know which of the two wards Flora was in, and Flora said she had started out in B Ward but was now officially in C Ward. What was the difference? Flora said that each morning the doctor—the patients called him Doc Meddlesome—would ask her what she had dreamed about the night before. If she just dreamed about ordinary things—baking a cake or shopping for groceries—she was B Ward. But if she dreamed something shocking or terrible, like sleeping with her father, then she would be C Ward. “I never even had to dream it,” Flora said, laughing, “because I really did sleep with my Paw. But that’s why I’m in C instead of B.” Flora claimed it was possible to tell just by looking at somebody whether they were B or C. “Now you,” she said, “are pure-dee A, ’ceptin for the fack you can’t talk to meanies like the docs or the nurses, which is why you wound up in B. Maybe if you was to try real hard to talk to the docs, they’d promote you to A.” To demonstrate her claim, Flora proceeded to classify all the inmates within their field of vision, particularly at their table. “That lady on your left, Clara McGrew is her name, is obviously C, a clear-cut psycho, and a arsonist besides. She burnt down the whole town she lived in. This here ole gal on my left is a B. Ask her what she dreams about, and she’ll recite ‘The Child’s Garden of Verses.’ Over yonder at the end of that table is Betty Betty Chapman. I aint stammering; her middle name is also Betty. I reckon her folks just didn’t have any imagination. Which ward would you put her in?” Latha studied the woman, who, like many of the others, seemed perfectly normal, and she guessed perhaps B Ward. “Wrong!” said Flora. “That witch is a schizomaniac, which means that you caint never tell when she might up and start screaming the awfullest words you ever heard. She’s the opposite of you. You caint tell Doc Meddlesome the time of day. She tells Doc Meddlesome what a sorry stinking prick he is, and what a whore his mother was, and what awful things he does to his wife at night. But the joke’s on her, cause Doc Meddlesome aint got no wife!”

  The B Ward, Latha managed to determine, was filled with the anxious, the disheartened, the confused, the nostalgic, and the disgruntled, whereas the C Ward, according to Flora’s categories, was made up of schizomaniacs, moonstruck-cholics, dipsomaniacs (like Flora), heebeejeebics (an advanced form of dipsomania that includes DTs) borderline loonies, and monomaniacs. Flora pointed out examples of each surrounding them. None of them were really crazy. The curable crazies were in D Ward. The incurable crazies were in E Ward. Those not even worth attempting to cure were in F Ward.

  Latha brooded upon the presence of so many different girls and women with so many different mental or emotional maladies, and she felt both ashamed of her own malady, slight as it was, and proud that her malady was as slight as it was. She wondered if she might be able to produce the power of speech in the presence of the doctor and nurses, and thus get herself promoted to A Ward, the first step toward discharge. She decided that the next time she saw Dr. Meddler she would make a concentrated effort to speak. She spent most of the insomniac night rehearsing what she would say to him, until she had it down perfect.

  Promptly at five A.M., he appeared with Nurse Shedd. “Ah, I see you’re already awake,” he observed. To Nurse Shedd,
he dictated, “Marked progress toward acclimatization.”

  “Thank you,” Latha tried to say, but realized that no sound had left her mouth. She grunted and bore down and tried harder, but couldn’t get the words out.

  “What did you dream about last night?” he asked.

  “A vegetable garden,” she tried to say, which wasn’t true, because she hadn’t had any dreams, having not slept. But she wasn’t able to say that.

  The doctor was prepared, with a tablet of blank paper, and handed it to her with his pen. “I keep forgetting that you are aphasic,” he said. “You may simply write down your answers.”

  Again she tried to speak, but realized it was hopeless. She wrote that she had had no dreams because she hadn’t slept. The doctor read it and said to the nurse, “Tell Nurse Turner to put her on laudanum.” Then he asked Latha, “Do you feel any pain?” She shook her head. “Did you finish your supper?” she nodded her head. “Did you evacuate?” It was one of those big words, but unlike masturbate, she hadn’t heard it before. She gave him a quizzical look, shrugging her shoulders and spreading her hands, and he said, “Did you have a bowel movement? Have you been to the potty?”

  She took the pad and wrote on it, “Have you seen our potty?”

  He shook his head. “No, in fact, I haven’t.”

  “Go look at it,” she wrote.

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that. It’s a ladies’ room.”

  “It’s nobody’s room,” she wrote. “I wouldn’t turn pigs loose in that place.”

  The doctor showed what Latha had written to Nurse Shedd, and the nurse nodded her head and said, “Yeah, it’s not fit for man nor beast. Nor women neither.”

  The doctor changed the subject. “Weren’t you supposed to make an appointment to see me in my office today?” Latha gave him a blank look. He turned to his nurse. “Nurse Shedd, see to it that she has an appointment pee dee cue.”

  Nurse Shedd said to Latha, “Right after lunch, I’ll come and get you.”

  “Lunch” as they called it consisted of a sandwich made of a thin slice of bologna between two thin slices of light bread, and a glass of water. Latha listened to Flora and Betty Betty Chapman arguing about religion; Flora was a “foot-warshing Babtist” while Betty Betty was a “hardshell Baptist.” They each believed the other was going to hell, and they gave each other lengthy descriptions of the hell that was waiting for them. Betty Betty got so agitated in her description of hell that she lapsed into dirty words. Latha had heard Betty Betty say most of these words before, or she had heard them in school, but some of Betty Betty’s words, as she became more worked up, were new to Latha; she had not heard these before: clit, wong, berries, twat, poontang, member, hand job, head job, beaver, toss off, wad, and sixty-nine. These were so loud that Nurse Shedd came running with a hypo to shut her up. “Shame on you,” she said to Flora, as if it had been Flora’s fault. Latha tried to shut sexual matters out of her mind, because they were hopeless, but Betty Betty’s recital left her aroused and frustrated. Nurse Shedd said to her, “Okay, let’s not keep the doctor waiting.” She took Latha’s arm and led her out of the dining hall up some stairs to a hallway of offices. “You’re lucky,” Nurse Shedd said to her. “Most patients don’t ever get personal handling from the doctor.”

  Latha was required to wait in a waiting room for a long time before the inner door opened and the doctor appeared, saying, “Ah! Miss Bourne. You kept your word. Come in and have a comfy chair. Or would you rather lie on this chaise?” This was a sort of sofa, curved up at one end, but Latha was afraid that if she stretched out on that, she’d fall right to sleep, with what little sleep she’d been getting lately. So she sat in a straight chair beside the doctor’s desk. He looked through her folder. Then he leaned back in his chair with his fingertips making a gable roof, the first rafters against his lips. He just sat like that for a while, looking at her, before he said, “It really is remarkable that someone so pulchritudinous would wind up in a place like this.” She didn’t know that word, but it didn’t sound as bad as the ones Betty Betty had been using. “How long ago did you lose your voice?”

  He seemed to be trying to be nice, even flirty, and she thought she could answer him, but when she pronounced “Just since the baby was born,” no sound came out of her mouth. He shoved a pad of paper and a pencil toward her, and she wrote these words on the paper for him.

  “Was it a difficult delivery?” he asked. She nodded vigorously. “It could be that the trauma of the experience paralyzed your vocal chords.” She didn’t think that was the reason, but she nodded. “So our job is to help you find your voice again. Now I must ask you some questions, and you must try to answer as truthfully as possible.” She nodded, and he gave her the first question, “Do you recall the sexual encounter which resulted in your pregnancy?” She nodded her head. “Could you describe it to me?” he said, his fingers lightly tapping the notepad.

  She wrote, “It was against my will.”

  “Ah ha! See? We’re making progress! Did you know the person?” She nodded. “Had you ever had sex with him previously?” She nodded. “But those were not against your will?” She shook her head. “Then perhaps he was led to believe that because you had been willing before, you would be willing this time, so he did not know it was against your will.”

  She took the pad and wrote on it, “I didn’t want him that time. I wouldn’t even let him kiss me. I tried to tell him it was the wrong time of month for me, but he gagged me so I couldn’t speak.”

  “AH HA!” Dr. Meddler exclaimed so loudly she jumped. “That’s it, don’t you see? That’s the origin of your aphasia, his gagging you.” The doctor wore an expression as if he had just discovered the secret of life, and he began scribbling furiously in his notebook. “Now tell me this. Although it was theoretically an act of rape, did you enjoy it?”

  Latha thought back and recreated in her memory, as she had done several times before, every moment of the experience. She had genuinely desired him. She had wanted to hold him and be held, but she had to resist. His tenderness had turned to anger when she had threatened to holler for her Paw. But even the rape itself was not completely a rape, because after a point she began to move her body in a rhythm to match his thrusting. And from that point on, until the mountain loomed before her, she relished every second of it.

  “I guess so,” she wrote for Dr. Meddler.

  “So even though it was against your will, it was not against your wish.”

  In the act of nodding her head she lowered her head in modesty and in memory.

  “So you really do get considerable pleasure from the act of sex?” he said. It was less a question than a statement.

  She didn’t like having her private life pried into and examined, and she had made up her mind that she was not going to give him any details or even tell him about the mountain and her loss of consciousness. But it was very true, what he had just said, and their talking about the subject had made her very lustful. She didn’t mind nodding her head yet again.

  “Let’s you and I go out for a stroll on the grounds,” he suggested.

  Chapter nineteen

  He forgot to take the pad and pencil with him, so there was no way she could reply to anything he said, but he did all of the talking anyhow, so she didn’t need to do anything other than nodding her head or shaking it, and before the stroll was over she had done plenty of the latter.

  It was so exciting just to get out of the building. The May sunshine was wonderful, and there were flowers all over the place, as if bright colors could cure or at least counteract all the gray and black that existed within the buildings. He gave her a tour all around the campus, which consisted of many buildings of red brick, each five stories in height and some with pointy towers on top. The buildings were all joined together, except for those of the men, which were separate, and those of the Negroes, which were older and smaller and off to themselves. Dr. Meddler pointed out the A Ward, where she saw smiling faces at the open second-s
tory windows, and some of them waved at her, so she waved back. Up at a window of the combined B and C Wards she saw Mary Jane Hines, who yelled, “Just look at you! Sucking up to the big man! Will you kiss his ass?”

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” Dr. Meddler said. “She’s in one of her manic moods. Cyclothymia is an incurable affective disorder, and you never know when she’ll be elevated or depressed.” He shook his head, then added, “But here, I’m not supposed to discuss other patients with you. I let my guard down because you don’t seem like a patient and I like you and want to get to know you better.”

  All the windows were open to let in the warm May air, and as they passed D Ward, she noticed women at the windows who were ranting and gesticulating wildly. One of them called out,

  Goosey goosey gander,

  Who’s comin yander?

  Little Mabel Tucker,

  Who’s a’-goin to fuck her?

  Little Jimmy Green

  Nowhere to be seen,

  Big Tommy Stout

  Pull his pecker out!

  “I’m not familiar with D Ward,” he said. “But I don’t believe her name is Mabel Tucker.”

  Two of the buildings, in the back corner of the campus, had barred windows, like a jail. Dr. Meddler pointed out that one was E Ward, where, he said, there was some hope, if not for recovery, of being “graduated” to D Ward. The other, F Ward, was for the hopeless incurables. There were few faces in the windows of either building; those visible in the former were not speaking but keening. “The main difference,” explained Dr. Meddler, “is that those in E Ward firmly believe that they have a chance to get well even if they don’t, whereas those in F Ward do not give it a thought, because they have no thoughts to give.” He smiled and laughed lightly, waiting to see if Latha might laugh too, but she did not. “You know,” he said, “many aphasic persons retain the ability to produce sounds, like laughter.” If she’d had that pad and pencil, she could have told him that she didn’t see anything funny about this whole damned place. But she was getting tired, having gone two nights without sleep, and was ready to get back to her dormitory. He studied her and seemed to detect her weariness.