Madness: Frederick has never, in fact, seen his roommate asleep or in any advanced state of undress. There have been times at night when the scratching of the professor’s pen on journal ceases and he crawls into bed, but Frederick can then still hear Schultz mumbling, the static of his garble not quite tuned to human frequencies. When the moonlight slips between the gaps in the cage over their high single window and illuminates Schultz’s face dimly, Frederick tries not to startle to find Schultz’s eyes open and alert.
Before Canon, lunch was optional. Before Canon, evacuating bowels and bladder was a private matter, undocumented, unless for a specific medical reason. But now this intake and output is closely scrutinized. Any deviation from clean, healthy transference at either end can earn one stricter oversight, force-feeding, a world of misery, delivered by one of the interchangeable boys with crew haircuts. The boys with crew cuts have been objects of the patients’ antipathy, rage, and compensating humor since they arrived and immediately began berating patients for failing to meet their demands with militant avidity. Two weeks after their appearance, Lowell offhandedly referred to these new boys as the Crew Crew. All laughed; the name has stuck.
A Crew Crew boy enters the room, and tells Frederick and Schultz it is time for lunch. Frederick stands to make his apathetic, compliant march to the cafeteria. Schultz, focused as ever upon his work, fails to hear the orderly’s announcement, and so the kid goes to Schultz, nudges him, and repeats himself. Schultz turns, smiles warmly.
So kind of you, Schultz says, but I’m not hungry.
Lunch isn’t optional.
No, lunch is sandwiches, nu? Haha!
Come on, Professor.
Schultz nods, as if the Crew Crew boy were a loved one reminding him that a disciplined mind requires nourishment; Schultz nods as if to say, yes, well, of course you are right.
The change of air, from room to hall, irritates Frederick. The way the Crew Crew boy cleans his ear with his pinkie finger irritates Frederick. The other patients lining up in the hall irritate Frederick, especially the new fat old one, Bobbie, who forever scratches his genitals when faced with others, as if he has invented a new crotch-oriented salute. At least today he has come from his room with gray slacks covering what he scratches—just two days ago, Bobbie darted from his room, like a toddler escapee from Mother’s bath, bleating yee-has as he mounted a common room chair like a horse, his mass Jell-Oing as he bucked up and down. Some moments, like the present, Frederick is irritated by nearly every aspect of the totalitarian stupidity of this place.
Ingersoll, like the rest of Mayflower, has been given fresh linoleum and paint. But, in the hallway, Frederick stands before the only door Canon’s renovation has neglected, a cracking wooden slab with no knob and a rusting lock, nearly fuzzy with oxidation. The furnace? An electrical closet? Frederick can’t know what is behind it, but it almost seems as if this is the point. It almost seems Canon has left it here deliberately, this one unopenable, ancient door, as if to say: this is where the past belongs.
As they cross the Depression toward the cafeteria, Frederick is confronted with the image that irritates him most: the convergence of so many others, from their own wards, with the sluggish phalanx of Ingersoll men. Frederick watches his feet walk.
When they reach the cafeteria, the line to receive the lunch’s six compartments of scooped food is notably extended from its previous length: a result of Canon’s great pride, a ballooning admission to the homes for troubled young women and young men.
One of the few legitimate pleasures, at least at first, of the Coming of Canon has been the opportunity it has afforded the Ingersoll men to at last glimpse Marvin Foulds as Marvin Foulds, stripped of costumes. What was once a right has now become a privilege, and Canon has taken a radical approach to Marvin’s condition, forcing him to wear hospital gowns until he can put aside his other selves and speak with his own true voice.
Pills always come at the end of lunch, not a patient or milligram is missed, but Marvin, as they sit at the table, frets for when the time of his sedation will come. Marvin asks the others whether they should already begin lining up. Frederick pities him. Mango Diablo, the Admiral, Guy DeVille: these people were tangible to Marvin, friends, family. When Canon denied his access to costumes and makeup, Canon murdered Marvin’s closest relations. Or perhaps that is not precisely the reason for Marvin’s present abject state. Perhaps, once he was put into hospital gowns, once denied his other selves, Marvin’s posture shifted inward, his gaze darkened, his hair began to spring in the frizzy curls to which it naturally tends, as Marvin became someone else, a madman character, a mental patient named Marvin Foulds.
Lunch passes with a few perfunctory words, and then there are pills, and the Crew Crew’s checking of sublingual and gingival hiding places. And then time, once again, has begun to slow.
3
Frederick is privately impressed by the swiftness and precision with which the new protocols have been enacted. It has been only two months since Canon took office, and already there is a lockstep efficiency in Mayflower.
It helps that, for the most part, the patients have been uncommonly compliant. In the wake of Marshall’s suicide, the men of Ingersoll were, in truth, grateful for the promise of new order, grateful that the powers that be had recognized the magnitude of what Marshall’s death had opened. It wasn’t merely that the men mourned their lost friend—and they had, the depressives darkening for days, the manics ascending, the ravers escalating their angry babble. No, the greater terror was what Marshall’s death suggested. Amid their imprisonment—in the walls of Mayflower, but also in their own skulls—here was a gelid, exhilarating promise of liberation. Amid the cacophony of internal chaos, the promise of silence. Amid confinement, the possibility of release. Amid an abject, pitiable existence, the possibility of transformation. In the history of mental hospitals, suicide attempts rarely occur in the singular; the notion of suicide, once devised, can catch as simply as a yawn. Thoughts blackened with fearsome new considerations. Even Frederick had become delirious with that dark concoction of dread and exhilaration. And so, when Wallace announced his expedited retirement and his successor—the famous scholar Albert Canon—the drama of the change, the possibility of a compensation for that horror, was a welcomed rebuttal to Thanatos.
In the temporary confusion that came with the passing of power, with the release of much of the old staff, the meticulousness of patient privileges was briefly relinquished. For the first time since his admission, Frederick had been permitted to speak with Katharine.
Of course he had rehearsed it. Often, an hour of thought would coalesce into a simple sentence that he would transcribe into his notebook for later use when finally he was able to speak to his wife. Frederick knew well how arguments with Katharine, born in coherence and certainty, could quickly drift into a desultory and bitter dumbness, both of them trying to transform the truer fight—one of disappointment, of fading love, of failed expectations, of thwarted need—into rational, accusatory statements of the small thing that was the argument’s ostensible object, more often than not financial. Frederick knew how these fights could sometimes render him mute, feeling absolutely the rightness of his position but lacking language to describe it. And so he worked diligently to prepare his case. He had even rehearsed various forms of argumentation: the Socratic, for example, in which he had devised a carefully worded litany of questions that could only lead their recipient, like a bowling ball down a bumpered lane, to a singular conclusion: he did not belong at Mayflower and, for her part in placing him there, Katharine had failed him. Other times, he would scribble off something as saccharine and desperate as the letters he had written to Katharine after they first met, when he was off at sea: a form of appeal that he thought perhaps persuaded her more than any other.
Soon after the news of Wallace’s retirement, Frederick easily talked the cavalier, about-to-be-unemployed night nurse into one-time phone privileges. Before he dialed, Frederick sat on the woo
den bench in the antique phone both—gone now, with most of the other late Victorian bric-a-brac—and consulted his notes, memorizing what he could, tagging particularly cogent language for later reference. And then he dialed.
Katharine.
Frederick.
And then there was her voice, instantly muting his argument and his certainty.
I need to come home.
These were not words as most words were words. This was an utterance produced in some fundamental place, bypassing the usual gates of language.
Frederick.
It was a strange argument, if that’s even what it could be called, one that alternated forms of discourse. It was also punctuated with pregnant pauses, Katharine beginning sentences then stopping herself. While Frederick had been composing volumes on what to say, Katharine, apparently, had been practicing what not to say, knowing well her husband’s ability to burrow into conversational fissures, to force apart, through logic or sentiment, any weakness she demonstrated, leaving her outwardly complaisant and inwardly furious. This time she would not allow that victory. Katharine reminded herself that she was the sane one. Manic-depressives can present a persuasive logic, Dr. Wallace had told her, which is why it’s best not to speak to him until we feel he is better. No one had yet told Katharine that her husband was better.
I’ve already spoken with Dr. Wallace, Katharine said. He doesn’t think you are ready.
What else can I say?
Silence.
What else can I say? I don’t belong here.
These people are professionals, Katharine said. Don’t you think they might know better than you?
Might know what better?
Whether or not you are well?
Is that what you think? You think that I’m crazy?
I didn’t say crazy. But you know that things have been a little—
Goddamn it, Katharine. Now you too? It’s the world that’s gone crazy. The whole world that has gone goddamned nutso!
Frederick knows well Katharine’s sensitivity to anger. An accommodating woman, Katharine can be inordinately overwhelmed by any display of aggression. Such anger is so far beyond the range of what she is capable, it can make her feel that she must have done wrong, must be in the wrong. But, after nearly twenty years of marriage, Katharine also knows that Frederick knows this. Katharine then remembered—in a way she likely would not if Frederick were there, in the room with her—that this was merely one of his tactics. She was proud of what she said next, remained proud of it for days.
This is what I’m talking about. Most people don’t need to resort to rage just because someone disagrees with them. That is what children do.
Children? Frederick yelled, or at least whispered with the intensity of a yell, careful not to alert the matronly orderly, who had already, during Frederick’s last tirade, given him a skeptical glance.
Frederick’s anger was not then a tactic, as it often had been in the past. Often, as he berates, he feels paradoxically calmed. In those moments, as he assaults with hurricane fury, his mind is as calm and resolved as a storm’s eye. But just then, as he spoke to Katharine, his rage projected both outward and inward. He was shaking now, had to press the phone to his cheek to keep the receiver at his ear. Whether or not you are well.
Many times, both privately and in conversations with the other men of Ingersoll, Frederick has repeated that common madman’s refrain: it is the world that is crazy. Perhaps. And yet, why deny it now? There was something else. Something that, at certain moments, suddenly opened and unleashed terror. Within him, in some space he tries never to perceive, there is something vast and nameless, something he knows he can never quite comprehend. Perhaps the world is crazy; perhaps this vast, unnameable chaos he perceives is the truth. Perhaps others feel it as well, the true unreckonable entropy of things, and those who are called mad only receive it more acutely.
The vast unknowable something: it is a consumptive, obliterating fathomlessness, but also a place of radiance, of astonishment, and of eternal complexity. And it is what Frederick senses is to blame for all of his failures. Into the vacuum of itself, it has drawn everything that once seemed so simple and complicated it irreversibly. Occasionally, in moments like this, he glimpses it in its stunning largeness, its incontrovertible demands. But Frederick knows he must not look at it, must not contemplate it, for it is beyond words and beyond reckoning. To keep himself from it, Frederick has done all the terrible things he has done: yelled, fought, starved himself to nothing, taken other women, drunk himself to stupor, night after night. Conversely, all the good that he has ever felt has, in some way, borne a relation to it. All he has accomplished in his career, the birth of his daughters, the people he has tried to love: all have seemed to promise respite, something good and knowable to obstruct the vast dark thing.
He wanted, then, to say this to Katharine. He wanted to find a way to say that it was only once, only with her that he sensed something else, the promise of something as vastly good, as vastly knowable as the terror of the unknowable thing. Something that might, at last, throw light into that darkness. But now, the dark something had consumed that promise too.
Katharine, Frederick eventually said, I don’t think this place could ever give me—and then his voice faltered.
Give you what?
Frederick did not know exactly how to describe it. What exactly he requires is perhaps as unnameable as the thing itself. Maybe the word clarification is closest, but it seems entirely insufficient, a laughably shabby symbol of that measureless need, the little word—clarity—like a battered church advertisement on a country road, falsely promising redemption. And, anyway, exactly what clarification did he think anyone could provide? Did he really believe that others progressed through life as singular characters in some story they knew would reach meaningful conclusion?
Maybe. Certainly, a few individuals he had known seemed to possess this gift of confidence. George Carlyle, the eldest of his daughters, his mother: he did not understand how, at all times, these people remained so entirely themselves. Frederick, at any moment, could be one or more of many things: malevolent, loving, brilliant, drunk, visionary. The opening of potential selves like first kisses that soon fail to deliver what they seemed to promise.
I want to make love to you, he said, the last word coming with a chuckle.
More silence. Non sequiturs, particularly of a lascivious nature, had always been a part of the charm he cultivated. Until recently, Katharine had been excited at these random proclamations of desire, perhaps even saw his spontaneity as evidence of brilliance. Had this hospitalization changed all that? Instead of brilliance and vitality, did she now see only symptoms of the illness the doctors had convinced her that he possessed? Or was she simply angry?
Susie wants to say hi.
And then his daughters took their turns with the phone, each effusive, ebullient, gabbing. Each voice lanced Frederick with a new wound. They all echoed back his sentiments of missing them, loving them, but this sadness was different than with Katharine, not a sadness of schism and misapprehension, but a sadness of lost time. When each picked up the phone, he instantly entered their lives in medias res, as they narrated the triumphs and frustrations of the last hours, as if he had simply come home from work and sat down at the table for dinner.
Mary Catherine kissed Brad on the mouth Mrs. Garrett won’t let us have snacks anymore my armpits smell like chicken soup, but Mum thinks I’m too young for deodorant Mum won’t make lasagna but she makes everybody else’s favorites Ooo ooo Daddy Daddy I have to show you the turtle I drew my tummy hurts can you tell Mum that I can’t go to school Brad thinks it’s weird that my dad is in a nuthouse but then I tell him that his dad is a drunk and sleeping with his secretary when are you coming home?
Time, stories, information passing like all unaccounted moments, like the squirrel in his business, the light tube’s glowing gases, the careless lazy sunlight. Everything beyond continues in its immeasurable vastness; Fred
erick is still confined here, in a mental hospital.
4
It is one o’clock now. Outside, the clouds keep drifting, the grass continues to blanch and die, the squirrels persist in their scurrying rodent dramas. Inside, in the common room of Ingersoll House at the Mayflower Home, time has been partitioned into schedules. The next sixty minutes will be given to a group therapy session, every man required to attend. Canon, naturally, will helm the session himself.
The assembly of Ingersoll men before Canon can be parsed like a family sitting nightly at the table: power, alliances, needs suggested by where men place themselves. Bobbie sits at the very front by himself, raising hand from crotch, if ever Canon asks who would like to speak. Arranged in a circle around and just behind Bobbie are the marginally mad, seven or eight men, including Schultz, Marvin, Frederick, and sometimes, as today, Lowell. The others, the catatonics and the ravers and the geriatrics, the men who ornament the halls with their frozen bodies and provide the howling ambience one expects in a madhouse, stand and sit at the periphery in their Greek choral way. Canon’s progress with these catatonics has been, as Canon himself admits in his notes, sluggish. Many of them simply sit where they are placed, no more or less a part of the meeting than they are on the third moon of Neptune.
All right, Canon says. Last time, we were talking about Stanley’s mother, and her abusive tendencies.
Among the catatonics, Stanley stands apart in his strange form of silence. Sixty-year-old Harvard alum Stanley, without explanation, rises every morning to attend fastidiously to his appearance: pomading his hair, donning an elaborate crimson and gold fedora, scenting his palms, carefully folding a handkerchief into the pocket of his blazer. And after all these morning exertions, he remains nearly motionless and silent for the balance of his day. Last session, Canon alone had discussed an absent man’s biography, while Stanley stared pensively into the middistance, haunted by some private phantasmagoria—who knows what? Perhaps an army of multicolor hedgehogs bent on his destruction.
The Storm at the Door Page 7
