At the top of a bookshelf in Echo Cottage, there is a picture of my grandfather, at about my age, dressed in his naval uniform, ready for the war. A few times this summer, I’ve held his portrait next to me in the mirror, and then considered our similarities. At the far side of my mother’s life, far behind this sunny summer with a family of her own, there is something dark but obscured, which I clearly resemble in superficial ways—and also, I know at twenty-five, in other ways too. One night, over sixty years ago, on the deck of a ship in the South Pacific, something in Frederick shifted and he could no longer eat. One night, four years ago, in my crumbling university apartment, something shifted in me, and I couldn’t sleep for four days straight. When I spoke with a doctor, just once, about my strange, objectless insomnia, her tentative diagnosis stunned me, as if she had just named a relative of mine she couldn’t have possibly known. Bipolar disorder, she said. Manic depression. My grandfather’s supposed affliction.
Frederick and I are at a great distance but we are also profoundly intimate, on opposite sides of my mother’s willful decisions and best efforts. Frederick presented my mother with the problems; my mother has tried to give her corrections to me.
My mother has told me that one night, when she was thirteen, she made a resolution, one of many in her life. I know not to underestimate my mother’s resolve. Now in her fifties, she still possesses a formidable gift to come to decisions and then to remain faithful to them. Three years ago, for example, she decided to prohibit all gluten from her diet, and no trespassing gluten has entered her mouth since. When I was nine, she decided she could provide a better education than my oversize, work-sheet-papered elementary school, and she spent the next five years homeschooling me. And decades ago, during her father’s hospitalization, my mother decided that if she were to have a family of her own it would be different, clarified of her parents’ confusion. And, as ever, my mother kept to her resolutions; she and my father raised us far from her history, in a bright Texas house in which we would always be visible to one another.
But maybe resolutions and plans can never be shelter enough from the unforecastable meteorology with which chaos and history assail the present moment. I’ve also thought that through deliberate will and close consideration I could bring order to that discordant history. That, with enough effort, I could finally write our family’s story, the one I’d heard only in attenuated echoes. I’ve interviewed Frederick’s surviving acquaintances; I’ve read everything I can find to read about my grandfather, his hospital, and the affliction I may or may not share with him, a nebulous condition he himself may or may not have had. I still don’t know if whatever it is within us that flares and fizzles is an illness or just the way we are.
I scrawl the names Frederick and Katharine, and underline both twice. My inheritance? It sometimes seems there is only this: only the poor passing facts of what happened; only two people, Frederick and Katharine, who succeeded and failed, who found love and lost love, who woke and slept, who lived their lives. Beyond the facts of a few books and conversations, I cannot know what my grandfather suffered in his hospital, or what my grandmother endured as she waited for him, what their stories could explain about my family and also about me. I can know only the letdown of a few weighty facts, and the coarse, loosely spun theories we weave to net that fall. The same is true of my family’s other side: the Blocks are from a Jewish shtetl called Bolbirosok, which the Nazis destroyed. Nothing and no one can unburn our history.
I look at the page for a while, and then I look up to the shore beyond Echo Cottage.
Having spent twenty-five summers at Echo, I’ve mythologized every inch of it. The water shed behind the house that is home to a witch, who, if you listen carefully and are under the age of ten, you can hear whispering for you to enter; the spot over the staircase that chimes when thumped, which could only mean that somewhere behind the ceiling my great-grandparents stashed a small treasure of jewelry; the L-shaped room in which my mother developed polio one night when she was three and which therefore is thought to be haunted by an evil spirit. Echo Cottage is only a common thing, a humble house on a lake’s bay, a dense forest just behind. But it is also like a living library, common things holding other places we know are not quite true, and yet, for moments, seem truer than the drab and hushed room.
Here is the simple fact of this place, Echo Cottage, a creaky, musty house, in which I sit uncomfortably in a chair at the edge of a government-protected forest, many of its animals tagged and inventoried. But here is also another place. Here is another house, in a wilderness.
The sun slips behind one of the clouds skittering across the sky. The sleeping porch, which had just begun to orange with the late afternoon, is suddenly the pale blue of the room at dawn. From the bed behind me, I pull off one of the blankets my grandfather invented, rendered from paper by-product, and I draw its abrasive stiffness over my shoulders.
Maybe, sometimes, when my younger cousins run down the path outside, the particles of what were once my grandfather’s words are stirred, and I inhale them. Once the words were held in soil, which birthed trees, which were felled and incinerated for the charcoal in which my grandfather wrote; to soil they have returned.
And yet. Now burned and gone, the words can become whatever we need them to be: another place, not quite real, outside or within what happened. Another place, in which we can all be together, all be present to explain ourselves to one another as we cannot in all other places.
There are the words my grandfather writes, the words my grandmother reads. In the end, they will not be enough, but for a moment they are.
1
On a morning in late November 1962, Katharine looks at her clock. It is only ten. The girls won’t be home from school for six hours.
She hefts the garage door, and then settles into the vinyl seat of the station wagon. She is so certain now that it takes several miles before she recognizes the rareness of this certainty.
Perhaps she could be happier in many other ways. She could be happier as any of the other people in the Fords and Chryslers and Chevrolets passing by; she could live in one of these austere farmhouses, with their sated, milk-fed families. But chance and her decisions have fixed her to this: a woman navigating a wintry, windswept morning to a mental hospital, where she will demand her husband’s release. Katharine passes through the foothills of Mount Washington.
Minutes and then hours pass; sleet gives way to rain, then to tranquil clouds, and finally to sun. Katharine tells herself to remain focused and purposeful, despite the somniferous drive. But she finds she does not need to discipline her purpose: thinking of her husband and his pages she has read, purpose, irrepressible as sickness, rises inside her. As the sleepy simplicity of the Spaulding Turnpike convolutes with Boston’s mad visions for its motorways, Katharine tells herself not to panic.
• • •
She has never seen it, not in person. But there it is, much as she has imagined it, if even a bit more idyllic. The Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, perched atop its hill, with its paradoxical grandiose beauty.
The station wagon rattles to a stop in the parking lot behind Ingersoll. Katharine steadies herself, knows from years with Frederick how her purposefulness can dissolve so easily into more solvent wills. Katharine has not considered her appearance until this moment, but now she thinks of the importance of projecting her argument without stray hairs or smeared makeup to undermine her assuredness, her lucidity. She twists the rearview mirror and tries to divide her face into the parts that might require a reapplication of cosmetics, but she can see only her eyes. Her argument is valid; her anger is warranted; her certainty, for once, is untainted. From the passenger seat, she clutches the envelope holding Frederick’s papers and pushes open the car door.
Katharine comes to a green, where the land dips, forming a wide bowl in the center of the campus. On the bowl’s lip, she receives a clear view of the city beyond, the urban geometry just slightly smeared with smog from this di
stance. She does not allow herself to pause and consider the wistfulness this provokes, the city of her youth before her now.
There, at the far side of the green, is the campus’s most imposing building, a Georgian mansion. The ornate building seems clearly to house the administrative offices. She tries to decide whether she can plead her case there, or if she should look for another building, in which visitors are received. The decision, however, is soon made for her, because there, jogging to greet her in the center of the green, is campus security, a thick, grave boy with a crew haircut.
Madam? Excuse me, madam?
Katharine does not know why, exactly, but she at first ignores the boy, simply keeps on, toward the mansion. But he soon reaches her and walks alongside, up the far slope.
Madam? Do you have grounds privileges?
Excuse me?
Let’s get you back to your room, he says, leading her by her upper arm. South Webster?
Oh, no, no, she says, and knows that she should laugh, that the show of humor would prove her sanity, but she can’t summon it.
I’m here to see my husband.
Your husband?
He’s a patient. Frederick Merrill?
Look, if you’re a visitor, you’re supposed to have registered at reception, he says and guides her, his hand on her shoulder, his fingers just slightly pressing into her armpit. Katharine feels that if she acts out now, if she says a word out of place, she could end up in one of these wards, as simply as had Frederick.
The boy takes her through the mansion’s three sets of doors, and eventually they approach a dowdy receptionist, to whom Katharine begins to explain she has come to see her husband. The receptionist looks dubiously to the boy, who nods, as if in confirmation of Katharine’s sanity. The receptionist interrupts Katharine’s speech—I have a right to speak with my husband, and I demand—as she presses a buzzer and speaks Katharine’s request in an affectless tone to whoever might be on the other end of the intercom.
And, within moments, there he is. Dr. Albert Canon. Katharine requires a moment of adjustment; this man, standing now before her, seems to bear no relation to his looming largeness in her thoughts. Here is only an aging man, his features, from flaccid belly to sagging expression, appearing to experience, more acutely than others’, the pull of gravity. It seems even an effort for Canon to raise his eyes to meet hers.
• • •
When the suicides came, after Schultz’s death, they came both rapidly and seemingly without reason, patients whom Canon had never even considered to have suicidal tendencies making their swift and decisive ends. Taking care with each step, a boy in North Webster managed to succeed where the other boy in his ward had failed. He slipped away on a walk to breakfast, and was found minutes later, dangling from one of Olmsted’s handsome elms, his nervous system still sputtering out in his legs.
Two days later, a woman in South House revealed her months of Miltown pilfering. Perhaps she had been planning it all along, perhaps not. Either way, a possibility, displayed by others, suddenly came to her, and she had all the pills that she required.
But the most horrific of the suicides was Stanley’s, employing three belts to tether his head into a toilet seat. On his knees, he pulled the belts as tightly as he could and locked them in place, drowning himself in the shallow pool.
• • •
Mrs. Merrill, Canon says.
Katharine was ready for a fight, was ready to remain resolved against his arguments, but she was not ready for this: to find herself inexplicably pitying this man.
Canon is exhausted. During last evening’s emergency meeting of the board of the Mayflower Home, he could not rise in argument, in his usual self-assured rant, against the reprimands as those eight dour men turned against him, teeth bared in that uniquely New England mode of self-righteousness. Much was said, and Canon at first tried to respond, but eventually he began to drift, to acquiesce.
We’ve begun to look for a replacement, Clarence Winthrop concluded.
A replacement? Canon said. For just a moment then, he felt the fight within him, a furious listing of his accomplishments. But then he paused.
Canon has tried to make something new from his years of close study, protocols crafted to hold all of these patients in a state where he could impose reality upon their delusions, and rescue them all. But patients have died; Rita has left him; his peers have turned against him. Over the last few days, Canon has begun to fantasize his return to his small windowless office at Harvard, a room in which he can fill papers and books with his notions, where the chaos of others will not betray his conclusions.
I’m here to see my husband, Mrs. Merrill tells him.
Mrs. Merrill—
I have a right to see Frederick. I’ve read his papers, she says, lifting the envelope before Canon. This place isn’t helping him.
His papers. Rita, Canon thinks. But then, now, what does it matter, this final betrayal? Give him his office, his research, and leave others to do as they will.
All right, he says. All right.
Later, after Canon returns to Harvard, he will present a paper summarizing his time at Mayflower, a quasi-successful attempt to restore at least part of his academic prestige. It is crucial for psychiatric professionals to remember, Canon will write, that, however clearly delusional they may seem to us, patients hold their idiosyncratic perspectives dearly. Even if patients are overtly paranoid or delusional, it is critical not to disturb their worldview too entirely or too quickly. For, once stripped of the defenses of their delusions, they are delivered to an immensely confusing world.
As Katharine and the orderly cross the campus toward the solitary ward, her clarity is submerged by something weightier, something profound that overtakes her. Her heart rises against her breastbone; she thinks she is afraid.
They reach the doors, then more doors, then the fluorescent-lit hallways of solitary. No, not afraid. That first night at the USO dance, Frederick leaned in to her, without warning. The thunderclap of a first touch; just when Katharine believes finally that noise has subsided, it again finds some new and distant obstruction to silence, some new object off which it echoes back to her.
The orderly opens a final door.
2
And then there is Frederick. He is suddenly reduced. Suddenly, he is magnified. She has thought of him in many ways, but there is the actual Frederick, only a man with his knees curled to his chest, his hair shooting out at angles, his eyes scrolling. He seems briefly not to recognize her. Frederick looks at her various parts—hands, then feet, then hair, finally her face—as if she were a sentence in a foreign language that he must parse before he can translate.
But then there is Katharine. It is like a door thrown shut to a storm; the sudden silence is dizzying. Katharine. She had nearly become something else, an abstraction, only a name for all he had lost, for all that had become impossible. Irreconcilable, that she should be separate from him now, only a person, standing in front of him.
My grandfather stands. My grandmother nearly begins a step toward him, and halts.
She says, Hi.
Hi, he says.
They are locked there for a moment, like two animals who have come upon each other in the wild, each trying to gauge the threat, each watching the other for movement. And then they do move, both at once.
Later, riding home from the hospital, Frederick and Katharine will try to think of what, exactly, to say. And someday soon they will fight again. Frederick will again be called off by some nameless calling; Katharine will spend years adrift in the baffling geography of her past, all the alternative routes she might have taken. And eventually they will vanish from us entirely, receding into our possible explanations that we can imagine but never know.
But let it last, for another moment. There they are, my grandfather and my grandmother, kissing.
EPILOGUE
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
&n
bsp; I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
—Robert Lowell
1
In the weeks after he left the Mayflower Home, Frederick craved quiet. He sequestered himself in his study in the days but would join the family for dinner, when he would carry on lucid conversation, his speech neither effusive nor grim, merely that of a father asking about his girls’ days.
That winter, as ever, the town of Graveton constructed an ice rink in the field just beyond the Merrills’ house, and the children of Graveton came to skate. As he had in winters before, Frederick turned the speakers of his stereo toward the ice and played records for the skaters. Traditionally, Frederick would have been the first on the rink; he would have made himself an arctic Pied Piper, would have hoisted one of his daughters onto his shoulders and sped about the periphery. Or else, if his mood dimmed, he would have pointed the speakers back inside and played a mournful sonata, shouting at the children whenever their noise overtook his stereo. But now, in that time after his release from the hospital, Frederick played only light and joyful albums, Broadway tunes and Christmas carols, as he sat at his desk, his gaze alternating between an open newspaper and the children outside.
The Storm at the Door Page 24
