But one thing troubled Latha, and one day she said to Susie, “Pinch me.” She had to repeat it and try to explain to Susie that she needed to find out if Susie was “real,” and that was the only way she could think of to accomplish such. So Susie very timidly took Latha’s arm between her thumb and forefinger and gave a squeeze. It was a gentle pinch, but it was palpable enough to convince Latha that Susie wasn’t a figment. Latha realized that if she just wanted to figment her, she would have figmented someone with enough brains to describe her dreams and hopes, if any.
She was telling Susie a bedtime fairy tale one night when Dr. Kaplan showed up. “They told me you were here,” he said. He put his hand on her brow. “How’re you feeling?”
Latha whispered to Susie, “Tell him I’ve been better.”
Susie said to the doctor, “She’s been better.”
Dr. Kaplan laughed. “Do you mean you were better a year ago, or that you’re better now than you were a year ago?”
Susie said, “She was better before she came here.”
“Susie, I’m not talking to you,” Dr. Kaplan said. “Why don’t you run along?”
Susie said, “But she’s telling me a story.”
“She can finish it tomorrow,” Dr. Kaplan said. “Be a good little girl, and let me have a chat with Latha.”
Susie pouted but got off the floor and went away. Dr. Kaplan gave Latha a pad of paper and a pencil. Latha wrote, “Is she real enough to suit you?”
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Kaplan said. “We’re all very fond of Susie McGrew.”
“So you’ll let me keep her?” Latha wrote.
Dr. Kaplan laughed again. “I wouldn’t become too attached to her, because it’s time you left the infirmary and went back to your ward. We have matters to discuss.”
“I like it here better,” Latha wrote.
“So does everyone else,” Dr. Kaplan said. “That’s why it’s so crowded in here. It’s unhealthy. The air is full of contagious germs.”
“Well, I have to finish the story,” she wrote.
It took him a moment to realize what story she was talking about. Then he said, “Very well, but I’m ordering your discharge next week. I want you to come to my office as soon as you’re able.”
She stayed a few more days in the infirmary, finishing the story she had been telling Susie, and telling her several others besides. After telling her one of her favorites, “The Good Girl and the Ornery Girl,” which Susie seemed to appreciate very much, Latha said, “They’re making me leave, so I’ll have to say goodbye.”
Susie yelped, “No!” and gave Latha a hug and wouldn’t let go. A nurse and one of the other imbeciles had to pry Susie off of Latha before she could leave. Susie was screaming when Latha made her departure, and Latha’s own mouth was choked with sobs.
Not too long after that, during one of her visits to Dr. Kaplan, he informed her that Susie had caught a disease in the infirmary—“Not from you,” he said—and after a week of confinement had died.
Latha greatly grieved, but wondered which was worse, to lose a wonderful bright friend like Rachel who was just your imagination, or to lose a devoted imbecile who was very real. She pondered this dichotomy for a very long time. A hideously long time. She decided finally she would just have to flip a coin. But she had no coins, and nobody else did either. She had the great nagging sense of guilt that we all feel when there is something we should have done which we did not do. She decided to resort to a superstition: she went to one of the barred windows and looked out at the landscape. If the first bird she saw was a red bird, then the worse thing is to lose someone you’ve figmented. If the first bird she saw was a blue bird, then the worse thing is to lose someone who was flesh and blood. The red bird would be Rachel, the blue bird would be Susie. She waited and waited, noticing a number of brown birds, black birds, gray birds, and pigeons. But she saw no red bird or blue bird. The day nurse who had replaced Nurse Richter and whose name was Nurse Bertram came and took her by the arm and returned her to her cot. The next day she returned to the window and stood there until Nurse Bertram came and returned her to her cot. And the next day. And the next. One day Nurse Bertram asked, “Who are you watching for?”
Because Nurse Bertram was nice, unlike Nurse Auel, Latha was able to speak. “A red bird or a blue bird,” Latha said.
“A cardinal or a bluejay?” Nurse Bertram asked, and Latha nodded. Nurse Bertram stepped to the window and looked out, and just stood there looking out for a long time. “That’s odd,” she said. “There’s usually some cardinals or some bluejays flying around, but I don’t see any. Why do you need them?”
Latha attempted to explain the superstition, but Nurse Bertram, although she was nice, was not terribly smart, and couldn’t grasp the idea of why Latha needed to know whether it is worse to lose a truly good imaginary friend or to lose a defective real friend.
Dr. Kaplan said to her, “Superstition is the harmless but invalid attempt of the individual to cope with unknowns and intangibles and the factors in fate and environment over which one has no control. Superstitions vanish as the person becomes more civilized and develops more sense of control over one’s fate and environment.”
He waited for her to write something in response to that, but she could not. Not only could she not speak to him but she could no longer write to him. He waited and waited. Finally he said, “I am thinking that you would be better suited to dwell in E Ward.”
There was nothing she could say or write to that.
Chapter twenty-two
If D is for Demented, then what is E for? Before they came and took her there, she became obsessed with possible meanings. Eccentric? Extreme? Eliminated? Egomaniac? Effaced? They came and took her there, a building of five floors like all the rest but with its windows iron-barred. As soon as she was taken inside, she became aware of what E means: the constant sound, high-pitched, screeching down every corridor: “Eeeee! Eeeee! Eeeeeeee!”
There was a major difference from the other wards: no dormitory, just individual cells. The day nurse, who assumed that because Latha was mute she was also deaf, shouted her name into Latha’s ear: “EDNA BREWER!” Nurse Brewer took her up to the third floor, whose halls were lined with doors, each with a barred window in it, each large enough to accommodate two people. “EVER HAD A ROOMMATE BEFORE?” Nurse Brewer yelled. Latha did not bother to shake her head. “WELL, WE FIGURE IF YOU CAN GET ALONG WITH A ROOMMATE YOU CAN GET ALONG WITH YOURSELF. SOME COMPLAIN IT MAKES IT LOOK LIKE A PRISON, BUT MYSELF, I’D RATHER LIVE IN A ROOM WITH A ROOMMATE THAN IN THOSE DORMITORIES THEY HAVE IN A, B, C, AND D. CAN YOU HEAR ME?” Latha at least attempted to nod her head but found that she was totally unable to do so. “YOU OUGHT TO GET ALONG JUST FINE WITH YOUR ROOMMATE BECAUSE SHE’S DEAF AND DUMB TOO. MATTER A FACT, SHE’S ALSO DEAD. OR THAT’S WHAT SHE THINKS SHE IS. YOU GALS WILL HAVE A LOT OF FUN TRYING TO TALK TO EACH OTHER!” For some reason Nurse Brewer found this hilarious and broke down with laughter. Her laughter almost drowned out all the other sounds in the cell block, weird noises, yelps, squeals, obscene utterances, loud prayers, sobbing, and that constant screech of “E!” “AND HERE WE ARE, YOUR LUXURY ACCOMMODATIONS.” Nurse Brewer took a key ring from her belt, found the key she wanted, put it in the door lock, and opened the door. There was nothing in the room but two cots, one of them inhabited by a very old white-haired woman, whom Nurse Brewer yelled at in even higher volume than she had been hollering at Latha. “JESS, SAY HELLO TO YOUR NEW ROOMMATE. MISS JESSICA TOLIVER, MEET MISS LATHA BOURNE. DON’T YOU GALS STAY UP TOO LATE TALKING!” This too struck Nurse Brewer as hilarious, and she staggered against the wall with laughter, and then went away, locking the door behind her.
Jessica Toliver did not rise up from the cot on which she lay with her hands clasped over her stomach as if holding a white lily. Latha stared at her for a long time. In the light coming from the barred window at the end of the room, Jessica Toliver turned out to be not an old woman at all, but possibly the same age as Lat
ha. Yet her hair was snow white, and so were her eyebrows, which were delicately arched over eyes which were pink. Latha had heard of people who had suffered a bad fright which caused their hair to turn gray, but this girl’s hair was completely colorless. Latha felt desperate to say something, but could not, so she simply sat on her cot and waited to see if Jessica Toliver would at least look at her, but she did not.
If only they were able to communicate, Latha would have liked to ask what had caused her hair to turn white. Latha would have liked to talk about Stay More and how she came to be an inmate of this asylum. She would be curious to know what mental problems Jessica had had. She would have liked to exchange impressions of the nurse, Edna Brewer. It would have been seemly if they could talk about the food, or the entertainment or lack thereof. Were they ever allowed out? Or to mingle with the other E-warders? There was a galvanized tin bucket in the corner meant to serve as a toilet stool, but there was no wash basin or water pitcher or anything else. Latha was very sad that she could not even open her mouth and say, “Hello.”
But the silence in the room was a fact of life, and there was nothing for Latha to do but accept the absence of words. For a few days she tried to divert her attention from her dead roommate by thinking thoughts of Stay More. She managed to remember, because it was impossible to forget, the town’s Fourth of July festivity held during the last year of the War, a kind of all-day feast with square dances, shooting matches, baseball games, and several booths and rides. People called it The Unforgettable Picnic, because they were still talking about it when Latha left Stay More. At the most popular of the booths, a canvas wagon cover was hung up with a hole slit in it; people took turns sticking their heads through the hole from one side while from the other side, fifty feet away, other people threw rotten eggs at them, three eggs for ten cents or to the highest bidder; people would gladly pay more for the privilege of throwing eggs at people they didn’t like, and it was understood that every person had to take his or her turn sticking his or her head through the canvas hole. When banker John Ingledew’s turn came, a man bid five dollars for three eggs, and hit John’s head with all three of them. When Latha’s turn came, Tearle “Tull” Ingledew, who had a secret crush on Latha since his brother Raymond had been declared missing in the War, outbid everybody else for the three eggs, so that he could deliberately miss her head with all three of the throws.
Remembering, Latha laughed. And when she laughed, the first sound she had been able to produce since coming here, Jessica Toliver turned her head and looked at her, the first look she had given Latha. Jessica smiled, a really sweet smile, and Latha smiled back, wishing she could say something.
Imbeciles brought their meals on trays. The food was somewhat better than in the other wards, maybe simply to justify the effort of delivering it to the individual cells. A basin for washing was occasionally brought and filled with water so they could at least wash their hands and faces. Jessica was not dead when she ate and when she washed. Every once in a while, Nurse Brewer would take their temperatures and listen to their lungs and hearts with a stethoscope. If there was a doctor, Latha never met him. She assumed that she was deemed beyond the help of a mental healthcare professional. Watching Jessica being dead, sometimes, Latha wondered if she also might be dead, and this perceived world was therefore a purgatory or a perception from beyond the grave. And yet, she reflected, the very fact that she was able to create such thoughts in her head was proof to her that she did in fact exist. The dead do not think.
The time came when the silence itself was beginning to remove what little remained of Latha’s sanity, so as further proof of her existence, she began to hum. One night, lying sleepless on her cot, she remembered the tune of Stephen Collins Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” and she began to hum it. She did not need to think of the lyrics, just the melody. Latha had never had a notable singing voice, but she had a fine soprano humming voice, enriched by the passions she had bottled up and by her inability to speak. Her “Beautiful Dreamer” was so heartfelt and elegant that it put her to sleep.
Every night she hummed something. If it was bothering Jessica, there was no way to tell. She hummed other Foster tunes, “Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” and “Old Black Joe.” She hummed some hymns, although she was not religious. Her rendition of “Amazing Grace” was unimaginably moving. She especially hummed “Farther Along,” which was not so much a hymn as an anthem for Stay More. She hummed its lilt with a fervor that roused her civic pride and her hope and her zeal.
She hummed all four stanzas of it, each with the chorus, and as she began the fourth stanza she was astounded to discover that Jessica was humming along with her, or rather Jessica was humming in alto harmony to her soprano. Their hums merged smoothly and fluently, without a false note anywhere.
The two girls had found a way to communicate. That first night they were so excited at the discovery that they went without sleep, and had a humfest. They waltzed through some of Victor Herbert’s melodies like “Kiss Me Again,” unspeakably romantic and uplifting. They tried some of the popular songs of the day, “Wonderland of Dreams,” “Waltz of Long Ago,” “Cielito Lindo,” “Out There In the Sunshine With You,” and “Wildflower,” until they were too thirsty to keep their humming mechanisms functioning.
But every night they would hum together for hours. Their musical duets had the peculiar effect of silencing the discordant noises on their floor of E Ward, so that even Nurse Pritchard, the night nurse, could not complain. She simply stopped by their door between numbers to praise and encourage them. In her honor, they performed the “Humming Chorus” from Madame Butterfly, by Puccini, who was destined to die later that same year.
Ironically, they set to humming a number of fugue concepts. Both girls had been diagnosed as being in a “fugue state,” which psychologically means a dissociative disorder akin to amnesia or impaired consciousness, but which musically means a contrapuntal composition for two (or more) voices (or instruments). Neither Latha nor Jessica had the merest notion of what counterpoint is, and yet they discovered that this was the most exciting way to bring their hums together.
They eventually exhausted their memories of all the hymns, popular songs, operatic arias, circus music, ballroom music, ragtime, lullabies, Christmas carols, and spirituals, the latter including the poignant spiritual-like theme of the Largo of Symphony No. 9, “From the New World” by Anton Dvorak, as set a few years earlier to “Going Home” by the American black composer Harry Burleigh. The same tune was destined to be employed in several popular and classical variations and backgrounds, notably the 1948 movie, “The Snake Pit,” about a young woman in a mental hospital, who will be played by Olivia de Havilland, who will look remarkably like Latha and will be nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. Latha and Jessica, humming “Going Home” with their hearts more than their gums, realized that it was able to express their yearnings for home more clearly than any words could do, and that it was, in fact, a key to their amazing discovery that they could actually converse without spoken words.
Thereafter, all their humming was improvised, and although occasionally they hummed in harmony and counterpoint, lagging behind each other no more than a demisemiquaver, their humming was often solo, as they sought to swap the stories of their lives. Everything that we have learned so far about Latha’s childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood was converted into musical hums which she created for Jessica in exchange for Jessica’s biography. There is no way of knowing how long, how many days and weeks and months, they spent in this exchange, but it often brought tears to the eyes of each of them.
Jessica Toliver, Latha learned from her humming, was born in Lepanto, in flat northeastern Arkansas, near the sunken lands of the St. Francis River. Her father was a sharecropper. Nothing had happened to her to cause her hair to turn white. She was born that way. It is called albinism, and one of her aunts was also an albino. She was considered a freak in school, and in high school she
dropped out because she was weary of being stared at, teased, taunted, mocked, and because her father wanted her at home to cook, to clean, and to give him sexual relief in as many different fashions as he could concoct and require. Jessica’s father had introduced her to “swamp root,” his own kind of homemade whiskey, in the belief that it would lessen her inhibitions, and she became practically addicted to the stuff, much more than Latha’s previous friend Flora Bohannon had been. Jessica at one time had imagined that her knight in shining armor was just down the road, coming her way, but he never showed up, and Jessica decided that even if he had, he would have found her freakish skin color and hair color repulsive, not to mention her pink eyes, which had often caused her to be quarantined from other students in fear that it was the highly contagious conjunctivitis. Jessica was not able to do any of the work that her father wanted her to do in the cotton fields, because exposure to sunlight caused her to sunburn very easily, and her father could not afford to buy any ointment for her. Her skin was scarred in several places where the sunburn had been severe.
Still, she might have been able to continue existing in this dreadful life for years, but she began to lose her ability to recognize people, places or things. She could not recall having met any of the persons who had been part of her life, or even her pet rabbit. She seemed to have lost her memory completely. Her father believed it was because of her consumption of his swamp root, and he tried to wean her from it, unsuccessfully. At length, he said, “You aint nothing but a vegetable,” and handed her over to the care of the county, who handed her over to the care of the state, who had her put up in the State Lunatic Asylum.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 64
