The Storm at the Door

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Uncontrollable: the word lingers putridly after the consultants finally go. How long can he hold Merrill from the board’s investigators? Or should he simply let him talk? But undoubtedly Merrill would try to blame Canon and his approach, would try to link Schultz’s suicide to what had transpired in Canon’s group therapy session the day before. But, Canon asks himself, what does he have to hide? All the empirical scrutiny, his careful study of failure in mental hospitals shows …

  Higgins knocks at Canon’s door and enters to deliver the news of another bleeding of Canon’s authority. That morning, Higgins tells Canon, Robert Lowell woke with the others, dressed for the day, waited for the morning orderly’s next round of checks, and informed him that today he would be leaving.

  I’ll bring him here, Higgins says. Before he goes.

  Canon shrugs. It is a great effort even to reply to Higgins, but Canon can see his subordinate is nonplussed to the threshold of vertigo, and so he manages, If he wants to ruin all he has accomplished, leave him be. We have to focus on controlling what we can.

  Really? Higgins says.

  Canon will see Lowell just once more, as a taxi comes to bear the great poet back into the city. Canon will watch the scene from his office, assuming Lowell cannot see him behind the bright reflections of daylight on his window. Just before crouching into the car, Lowell will turn to Canon in Upshire and offer what at first appears a salute. But then, Canon will see, it is a salute made only with the middle finger.

  5

  The next morning, Rita and a Crew Crew boy named Pete relieve the evening shift, and then conduct checks. When the two reconvene in the office, Pete starts in with the only conversation on the staff’s lips that week: Schultz’s suicide and its aftermath. This is how Rita learns where Canon has put Frederick.

  Rita considers confronting Canon, but she knows better than to try to argue with him. Even now, Canon would never allow Rita to persuade him to her own notions of how he ought to handle his patients. Instead, Rita concocts a plan of her own.

  At the end of her shift, Rita, fearless of Canon’s censure, goes directly to room 108 of the solitary ward, through the window of which she can see Frederick, half of him on the room’s single thin mattress, half of him splayed on the linoleum floor. When Rita first opens the door, Frederick hardly raises his head from the mat to greet her; a long line of saliva is drawn from the corner of his mouth.

  Frederick, she says.

  He doesn’t reply. And so Rita enters the room, crouches next to him, and lays down her offering, paper and a soft charcoal pencil (she fears what he might do with a pen). Frederick looks at the objects strangely, as if deciphering their purpose, and turns, closes his eyes, retreats back into the corner, into the Miltown.

  When Rita touches him, gently at the back of his scalp, he turns to her and his eyes elucidate. Write, she tells him.

  Write? he asks, as if the word were not English.

  To your wife, she says. I’ll send it. Tell her what happened.

  Frederick thinks, What happened?

  • • •

  The solitary ward is staffed with one orderly for every two patients, and even Rita, Mayflower’s de facto number two, cannot offer the company, the touch, the conversation she senses might help restore Frederick to some semblance of reality. But by stealthily altering Frederick’s prescriptions, Rita is able to whittle down his Miltown to levels lower than when he was on Ingersoll. She is also able, twice a day, to replace the pencils he breaks or crushes against the wall, the paper he tears and crumples. It reminds her of newsreels she has seen of researchers administering a new medicine, for which they hold the highest hopes, to diseased primates in their laboratory cages. For two days, she passes the little window to his door, hoping for the best. For two days, he seems simply to belong in the place where he is.

  And then, on Wednesday evening, she looks into Frederick’s room to find him seated on his mattress, crouched over the floor, applying pencil to page. When she enters the room, he tells her that he is going to need more paper.

  Frederick does not sleep that night, or the next. It seems to Rita as if he has stored up on sleep, in these last days, for the purpose of this output.

  Only for a moment, when Frederick asks about sounds in his silent room, does she doubt her project.

  • • •

  When Rita arrives at Frederick’s room that Friday evening, she finds him sleeping on his mattress, the pages nowhere to be seen. She unlocks the door and enters.

  Frederick darts upright with a sudden, wide-eyed awareness, as if ready to overtake a predator.

  Sorry, she says. Sorry to wake you. I wanted to know—

  The pages, Frederick says.

  Yeah.

  I was afraid someone might take them, he explains, reaching under the mattress and producing a considerable stack.

  Will you read them for me first? he asks.

  But they’re for her.

  I don’t know if they make sense. I tried to make sense. I can’t tell anymore. If they make sense, send them. If not, throw them away.

  I’m sure they—

  Please, he says.

  Rita doesn’t say anything more, and so Frederick says thank you.

  That evening, as dusk gives way to proper twilight, Rita sits on a bench on the edge of the Depression, and reads in the orange glow cast by one of the Victorian lampposts.

  6

  When Rita has finished reading, she walks up the opposite side of the Depression, enters Upshire, slides the key that only three people possess into the door of Canon’s office, and copies Frederick’s home address from his file onto a stamped envelope addressed to Katharine Merrill. Then she returns all of Frederick’s charts and clinical jargon, walks to her car, and drives into town. Rita slips the envelope into the first mailbox she passes

  Poetry, Rita thinks, is not the result of some divine madness, some awareness gifted from the gods. Poetry is what makes madness, for a time, vanish. Love, language: for a time, another place.

  1

  As Katharine turns her Ford Country Squire into the place Lars and she have agreed upon, the darkened lot behind Graveton High School, she finds Lars already there, leaning against his car, waiting to receive her. He wears a leather jacket; his thinning hair is Brylcreemed, his face freshly shaven. Now in his forties, he looks like a shoddy imitation of himself at his prime. Like a cheap bouquet of silk roses, Katharine thinks. If Katharine were to pass by him in the market, she likely would not recognize him. His face might strike her as a sad implication of time’s passage, similar as it is to a greatly aged version of the face of a boy she had once known.

  Katharine, he says, more to himself than to her, as if savoring the word’s flavor.

  Lars, she says, extending her arm mechanically into the charged space between them. So nice to see you.

  Lars scrutinizes Katharine, finds neither intent nor apprehension, only her placid, unreadable face. But she was always so inscrutable, wasn’t she? And, after all, she has shown up here, hasn’t she? Mustn’t that be an expression of intent?

  Let’s go somewhere, Lars says. C’mon.

  Katharine nods and climbs into his Oldsmobile, with its traces of Lars’s children—petrified french fries, crushed aluminum toys—littering the backseat.

  Lars’s weathered face, the detritus of his children; here she is, a married woman with four children, in a car with a middle-aged man, with two children of his own, the two of them linked only by a teenage romance, abandoned half a lifetime ago. What is she doing?

  Katharine watches the trees erupt and then vanish from the headlights and tells herself to stop thinking. That the whole point of this, of tonight, is not to think, not of Frederick, or of his pages waiting for her on the table, or of her children and what they require of her. As they cruise in fourth gear, Lars rests his hand on Katharine’s leg, and she doesn’t usher it away.

  Katharine wants not to think, wants—only for a moment, just once—to transcend
her endless cycling considerations and reconsiderations, but she also knows that it wouldn’t take much. Just a simple capitulation. All she would need to do now is give in just a little. Katharine’s father has already cleared Lars’s way (could her father possibly also be responsible for Lars’s suspiciously convenient reappearance?). If only, just now, she accepted his hands, his mouth, his body, Lars and her father would take care of the rest. She could earn permanent residence in that rosier land of Lars’s Norman Rockwell existence. And Frederick would be sent where her father wants, the state hospital with its frugal enthusiasm for the lobotomy. She may feel only a lonely woman grateful for an evening with this nervous, affectionate man, but Frederick’s fate is held in the space between her hand and Lars’s.

  The Oldsmobile’s tires sing on the country roads, bound north. Eventually, thirty miles from town, they approach the Squaw Lake Diner. Lars steers into the parking lot.

  Remember this place? he says, his words slightly hollow of sentiment, coming from a carefully considered script. We came here on our first date all those years ago. I don’t think I’ll ever be as happy as when you held my hand that night. Come on, we’re going to order the same thing. Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches, remember?

  What is she doing? Does she really think that Lars’s former love for her, now mutated into his private mythology, could persuade her?

  I don’t know, she says.

  Lars has imagined the evening so often that he is prepared with just what to say if any possibility comes to pass: hesitancy, ambivalence, passion. But when Lars now delivers his reluctance rhetoric, it comes out not precisely as he has practiced. The words all rush at once and clog up on escape; the speech, by its middle, reduced to a slow drip that just barely manages to trickle through the dumb orifice in the center of his face. But by the end of his monologue, Katharine has reddened as Lars sputters, we—can—find—the—courage—in—each other.

  Katharine doesn’t want his speeches or plans. What she wants from tonight, from Lars, is the opposite of plans. Here she is, trying to act on impulse, agreeing to this evening with Lars because of its imprudence. She wants, just once, what Frederick has allowed himself so many times: thoughtless movement into a night; a willfully cavalier confrontation with chance; the possibility of being, for the night at least, foreign to herself and her commitments. But already she is something else; already she is made into a character in Lars’s story of how he will be remade. She will later wonder if, at a younger age, she might have been able to muster belief in Lars’s visions for her. Romance, after all, had once seemed this way; a kiss had once seemed an opening to an utterly transformed future.

  I won’t be part of some fantasy of yours. You’re a married man. I’m a married woman. This is ridiculous.

  As Katharine watches Lars’s face recalibrate to her new judgment, she does not regret what she has said, nor does she pity him. Instead she slumps with a friend’s feeling, a weighty empathy. His quivering, the compensatory bolding of the righteousness in his gaze: this ancient pain, which Katharine now inflicts upon Lars, as Frederick has so many times wounded her. Likely, Lars will argue with her. He will denounce her faulty reasoning and her misrepresented intentions. But the real sadness Katharine receives, which she wishes she could describe to Lars, is that no one has done wrong. It would be so much simpler if one were right, one wrong. But Katharine, like Lars, has only done what felt right for the moment, and in doing so passes to Lars a fire that Frederick has many times ignited in her, as others have set to Frederick. An ancient flame, a super-Olympic torch relay with a fire we have passed back and forth among one another, ever since some togaed ancient first invented heartbreak and kindled this ever-burning.

  Lars is at least comforted to find he has language even for this, the darkest of the evening’s possible outcomes.

  Ridiculous? I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous. Denying our true selves. How we live, that is what is ridiculous.

  You sound like you’re sixteen years old.

  Well, maybe a part of me has stayed at the age that I loved you.

  Could he actually mean this? In a way, she realizes, yes. Yes, at least in this present moment. Katharine, too, has known moments like this, in which all time is compressed into a simple story of thwarted love. Never mind what Lars must have felt when proposing to his wife; never mind his love for his children. And never mind the other women he might have loved. For this moment, here in his Oldsmobile, Katharine is to Lars as vast as all things. If only it were as simple as that. If only we could remain that vast, capable of delivering what we seem, in these compressed moments, to offer one another.

  I don’t think I’m hungry, Katharine says.

  Pitiable, deflated, the words that come from Lars when they return to the school parking lot finally come unrehearsed.

  There’s no way I can convince you?

  I’m sorry. I know I might have led you on. But it’s not as easy as you think.

  Lars searches his mind for other speeches, contingency plans he must have scripted and is now forgetting. But the truth, he sees, is that they are only what they are: two sad middle-aged parents, falsely hoping the fantasy that they had concocted at the origin of their adulthood could somehow mend them now.

  Is it the sadness of this realization in Lars’s face? Or is it only her own desperation? Katharine plunges her fingers beneath the surface of what remains of Lars’s hair, and soon they are kissing.

  No, not desperation. It is, instead, a curiosity. But Lars’s mouth on hers is just a mouth on hers. Katharine pulls away, and leaves.

  2

  Jillian and Louise are at full tilt when she returns home. They barely acknowledge her as they run laps through the rooms, chasing each other in a shrieking conflation of rage and delight. Katharine walks to the kitchen table, where her husband’s papers are still where she left them. She sits.

  Yes, the Frederick she loves perhaps exists only for moments at a time: an illusion, a false thing. But, sometimes, he has held her entirely. My grandmother pulls the pages out of the folder and reads.

  1

  In the soil of a New Hampshire forest, on a summer day of 2007, the words are no longer words, now only particles of ash. At a Massachusetts pencil factory, on a spring afternoon of 1959, the words are not yet words, only a few inches of charcoal in a rod. At the bottom of a milk crate in a cluttered attic, on a winter morning of 1976, the words fade slowly on yellowing paper. Inside the glow of a Franklin stove, on a July day in 1989, the words curl into one another, embrace one another with their sloping appendages, as they incinerate. Ascending the chimney of Echo Cottage in a plume of white, they could have been anything.

  2

  On a November night of 1962, in a solitary room at the Mayflower Home, my grandfather looks at the whiteness of the paper, on which he does not know what to write. For months, he has tried to worry out of his notebooks an intricate, irrefutable argument, a plea, poetry. But he has awoken to something else. He was in a false place, he thinks now, a false place of words and reasons, of cause and effect.

  But now he knows death. The things he has seen. He does not belong here, perhaps. Perhaps it is only Canon’s fear that keeps him here. But he also knows that he belongs here or doesn’t belong here, just as much as he belongs among the living or the dead. This is merely what has happened. So he now has no plea to Katharine. He does not now know if he is guilty or guiltless. He has tried to make sense of things, to make sense of himself. He has tried to conclude whether the electrified notions just beyond the edges of his excitement are true, or if the truth is only the common sounds, muted tones. He has tried to figure out if there is power thrumming in the walls, or if Rita is right that there is only silence. He has tried to accomplish what those in his hospital are supposed to accomplish. Again, as with Katharine, as with his daughters, he has failed.

  The whiteness of the room and of the paper. What else is there to say? This is how time passes now. The whiteness, the sounds of other pati
ents, and the droning of something electric in the walls. The uncounted hours passing, punctuated by meals and movements of bladder and bowel. And though he doesn’t know what to write to Katharine, what else is there? At least for a moment now there are words with him in the room.

  3

  Five days later, the words are in my grandmother’s hands. They articulate themselves within her, one after the other, for the first time. For her remaining decades she will be able to navigate these pages from memory, almost as surely as she navigates her bedroom in the dark. But now she simply reads them.

  Katharine has tried to convince herself that she is only a sane woman married to a sick man. She has tried to convince herself, again and again, but she has never been able to believe it, not really, not for more than a moment. The chaos of alternatives always overtakes her.

  And here now, in her hands, is another.

  My grandmother tries to remind herself of all she has suffered, and what she has learned. But, in this moment, with her husband’s strange and beautiful and desperate words, she can’t help herself.

  4

  The words, in the summer of 2007, are carbon in the soil outside Echo Cottage, just beyond where I sit on the upstairs sleeping porch, on which I have set up a portable table and a loose-legged wooden chair. It is the lake at its best hour, as the sun starts to settle. My parents are downstairs, visiting with relatives over sangria. Beyond the screen windows, the lake presents itself at a seemingly impossible angle, somehow canted toward me, like the floor of a ballet studio in a Degas painting. It is the second day of what, despite its squeamish connotations, my family persists in calling a three-day blow, seventy-two hours of ceaseless wind, the whitecaps heaving themselves in linear patterns, whipping the lake’s surface into a mad cursive, as if the waves might, at any moment, arrange into legible sentences. On the table in front of me is a blank page.