Desperate Asylum

by Fletcher Flora

  They were very angry, my father’s with a quality of measured fury, my mother’s with a kind of icy and studied contempt. I had never heard them speak like that to each other, or to anyone else, and it made me afraid of the night and the familiar things that the night made unfamiliar, and I wished that I had gone to sleep as I was supposed to and had not heard them come in and begin talking behind their closed door. I tried to quit listening, to ignore the disturbing flow of sound from the other room, and I looked out again at this moonlit crest and tried to picture again the moonlit river that could not be seen, but the angry voices could not be rejected, and now it was my father who was doing most of the talking, and his voice had risen, and this was exceedingly strange and frightening, because he was a man who ordinarily said very little and said that softly. I had never consciously acknowledged a preference for either of my parents, but now I began to have a feeling of resentment toward my father and of alliance with my mother, because she was gay and golden and beautiful beyond description, and if there was something wrong between them, it was surely my father’s fault. I thought that it was not right for him to talk to her that way, with his voice rising on a cadence of fury, and then I began to think that he would certainly stop if I were to go down and open their door, because it was an accepted rule among all people who amounted to anything that parents should not make scenes before their children, and so I got out of bed and went out into the hall on my bare feet and down to the door of their room.

  I put a hand on the knob of the door and stood there with the fear in me suddenly rising, afraid of the consequences of intruding on two people who were all at once strangers, and after a silence, his voice resuming its deadly modulation, my father said, “I think that I should kill you, and perhaps I shall,” and my mother laughed and said, “You won’t kill me, and you won’t even divorce me, and you will do nothing at all, in fact, because anything you might do would cause a scandal, and it is unthinkable that there should ever be a scandal in the family of Lawes, which is the first family in Corinth, which is God’s chosen town.” Then I turned the knob and the door swung into the room away from me.

  My mother was sitting at her dressing table with her back to me, and she was holding a brush behind her head as if she had just finished a stroke down the length of her shining hair, and I could picture her sitting there brushing her hair all the time my father was saying all those angry things to her and answering him back with the cold contempt in her voice, and I had to admit in justice to him that it was something that would probably make anyone furious. I could see the reflection of her face in the mirror, and she could see me in the mirror too, and her eyes widened and she slowly laid the brush or, the glass top of the dressing table and reached up automatically with the other hand to clutch the top of her robe. She turned on the bench to look at me directly, and my father turned also in his position between us, and the two of them looked at me together.

  Finally my mother said in a normal voice, “What are you doing up, darling? I thought you were asleep hours ago?”

  “I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t,” I said. “I was watching out the window, how the moonlight was and everything.”

  “That’s very nice, but perhaps you could have gone to sleep if you had closed your eyes and tried a little harder. Did we disturb you when we came in?”

  “You didn’t exactly disturb me, but I could hear you talking.”

  “Why did you get up? Are you frightened?”

  “You sounded angry. I thought maybe you would stop being angry if I came down and opened the door.”

  My father came over and put a hand on my head. “We were talking about something that caused us to lose our tempers with each other. That was pretty foolish, wasn’t it?”

  “Why did you say you might kill Mother?”

  “Did I say that? I certainly didn’t mean it. It shows you how foolish it is to become angry.”

  “Why did Mother say you wouldn’t divorce her? Did you say you would do it?”

  “Your mother said things she didn’t mean, just as I did. You mustn’t think about it any more or let it bother you in the least. Now you had better go back to bed.”

  “I would like for Mother to come with me.”

  “Is that necessary?”

  My mother stood up and walked over to us. I could see the shadow of her body under her thin robe, and she was wearing a scent that I have never forgotten and can still smell, even at this moment, though I have not wanted to remember it, and she put an arm around my shoulders and said, “Of course I will come with you. Come along, darling.”

  We went to my room together, and I got into bed again, and she sat on the edge of the bed beside me, and it was then still a great pleasure to look at her and touch her and smell the scent of her.

  “It’s lovely,” she said. “The moonlight on the ridge, I mean. I can understand why you stayed awake to look at it.”

  “I didn’t stay awake on purpose,” I said. “It just happened.”

  She sat there looking out the window with a soft light on her face that seemed like it was coming through from the inside, and I lay there thinking that it was more beautiful by far than the moonlight on the ridge, or even on the river, and after a while I went to sleep, and she went away.

  That was the beginning of awareness, but not yet of knowing, and my mother and father lived in a cold compromise that lasted for months, and whatever was wrong between them that night went right on being wrong, and it looked like it was going on forever, and then it changed. Something happened, and I don’t know what it was, but there was certainly something, because they were gay with each other again, and went out together at night, and came home talking and laughing, and slept in the same room and all that. It was late in the summer of that year that we went to Mexico City, and I remember Chapultepec Park as clearly as if it were yesterday but nothing else, and everything was fine until the Mexican musician. (Oh, God, that reminds me of the other night in Em Page’s bar, and at home later, and what a thundering, bloody bore I must have made of myself! I must send Em a card and apologize, but I suppose he hopes devoutly that I never enter his place again, and I can’t blame him if he does.)

  I didn’t know at the time that it was because of the Mexican that we came home so soon, of course, and didn’t know it until years later, after my mother was dead and my father told me about that and other things so that I would understand why everything in our life had gone sour, but I knew that it was because of something bad, something wrong between them again, and by the time my father finally got around to telling me I already knew how my mother had been, that she liked to sleep around, and a lousy Mexican musician more or less didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference one way or another.

  The cold compromise, following Mexico City, was resumed and was complete and was never afterward violated, and the compromise seemed to be that they would maintain the appearance of marriage without the substance, and for a long time, because I was very young and knew nothing, I was sure that my mother was good and right for no other reason than that she was incredibly beautiful, and that the wrong between them, whatever it was, was his. Later, after the day I saw her with the man who cut the grass and took care of the flowers, I assumed the other extreme and thought that that fault was all hers, and I hated her and was sickened by her and could not stand her near me. My revulsion was something I could neither hide nor explain, and it is possible that it contributed to the sum of factors that caused her to kill herself, and if it did, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it. Now, looking back, I can see that it was either the fault of both or the fault of neither, and I believe really that the latter is true, that she could no more help what was in her blood or brain or glands, or wherever it was, than he could help the peculiar social cowardice that made it easier to suffer a life-long private degradation rather than to suffer even briefly a public one. The creed of the
Laweses, the God-damn cowardly creed of the Laweses, and I suppose that I am as faithful a subscriber to it as any of the others before me, and as great a coward.

  This man who cut the grass and took care of the flowers. I can’t even remember his name, and this is probably one of the things that I’ve repressed and deliberately refused to remember. But I can still see him quite clearly in my mind as he was when he worked for us, his tall strong body burned brown by the sun, his white teeth flashing in his dark face with a bold arrogance that seemed to remind you that he might be only a kind of handyman in the yard and gardens, but that he had his own points of superiority if you cared to notice. He worked for us in the spring and summer and early autumn of two years, and it was in the summer of the second year that I saw my mother with him in the arbor by the bluff above the river, and it is now time to think about it clearly, long past time. Here in this warm sunshine, on this bright terrace, it is time to bring it out of the dark into the light and to see it for what it was and nothing more, illicit and wanton and a breach of fidelity but basically normal just the same, nothing at all to sicken a life for more than two decades.

  There was this garden swing in the deep back yard, and I liked to sit there in the summer and look down into the bottoms at the gray ribbon of river that had come a thousand miles to this place, and beyond the river was the rich bottom land running east to the ridge. I liked to sit there in the swing and look at the ridge and river and think about how it must have been when there were Indians here, and Conestoga wagons crossing the river on rafts on the way west, and my father said that this hadn’t actually been so long ago, but it seemed to me that it surely must have been ages and that he only thought otherwise because he was himself so old. At that time he must have been all of forty, give a year or two either way, but there was already in him a chill grayness that made him seem much more.

  It was this hot summer afternoon, one of these summer afternoons when all time and motion seem suspended and there is the softest, sleepiest kind of drone in the air that must come from thousands of small things that can’t be located, and I thought it would be pleasant to sit in the garden swing by the bluff, and I went down there. I sat in the swing and felt very drowsy, and after a while I was conscious of the sounds from the arbor over to my right, and the sounds seemed to be a kind of rustling and heavy breathing. I listened and looked over at the little house, which had lattice walls with very narrow cracks that you couldn’t see through from a distance, and after a minute or two I got up and went over close enough to see inside, and there they were on the floor. I wanted to move, but I couldn’t, and I stood there until it was all over, and then I turned and walked away very quietly, and I have thought later that that must be the way the world will end, not in noise and fire and physical pain, but with everything disintegrating in an instant in utter silence.

  And now, remembering deliberately after all this time, I am still sick and not cured. I am sick with the thought of gasping passion and the cruel hunger. Catharsis futile.

  She was sick too, of course, in her own way, and in the end she found her own cure. One balm for many fevers; who wrote that? Someone wrote it, and the balm of death, and it was the balm and the cure she found. It should have been anticipated; it was forecast in the quality of her personality in her last years, which should have been among her early years, in the intensity of an overt gayety possessing the shading of despair and in the fierce activity that was like the product of delirium And I have wondered if my father did not actually expect it and look forward to it and consciously do nothing to prevent it. However that may have been; she came home one night and went into her room and took something and lay down to die. She was dead in the morning, and my father found her there and locked the door and went downstairs to call the doctor. The doctor came, and he was a friend of the family, of course, and it was all hushed up, the way she had done it, just as unpleasant things were always hushed up when they happened to a Lawes. I didn’t see her myself until the funeral, when the warm, hungry flesh was bloodless and cold, and we buried her; and in the cemetery my father stood at the edge of her grave with no grief or relief or regret apparent in his face, as if nothing had ever begun or ended.

  So she is dead, and my father is dead, but I am not. That’s the point. That is what it comes to. I am not dead and do not want to die. Not wanting to die, I must therefore arrange to live. It’s that simple. It is really very simple indeed. One must think it through logically, that’s all. It is quite clear, for instance, that I am sick and dying, though I wish to live, and that my sickness is abhorrence and rejection of women in the basic function of woman, and that this abhorrence and rejection has become, through a kind of psychic diffusion or something, an abhorrence and rejection of life itself. It follows that I must cure the one in order to cure the other. To reduce it to simplest terms, I must learn to love. Surely this is something that can be done.

  How warm the sun is. How softly it touches the body. It seems a long time from the gray days that get inside you and become part of you. It seems a long, long way from the cold and snow of Corinth. Was it only Saturday that I was there? Was it only a few days’ ago that Em Page drove me home with a load of Scotch? Oh, Christ, what a fool I made of myself! I wonder what in hell Em must think of me? I must remember to get that card off…

  SECTION 2

  The room’s ocean side was all glass. Accommodations at the hotel, she thought, even though it was not one of the extremely expensive places, were surely costing Carl quite a lot, and she considered it additional evidence of the remarkable depths of kindness and generosity in him that she had never suspected before. She stood in front of the wall of glass with her back to the room and looked out over terrace and sand and not-quite-naked bodies to the glittering blue water spreading out to the remote blue sky. She was very tired from her trip, and her bath had not refreshed her as she had hoped, and what she really wanted and needed was a very strong drink. Her eyes followed the line of junction of sky anti water, and she was not particularly depressed at that moment, in spite of the tiredness, but she wished that Carl would come for her and take her down to the bar.

  As if in answer to the wish, he knocked on the door. She knew that it was he, because there was no one else who could possibly have a reason for knocking, and so she turned and called across the room to him to enter. He came in and stopped and looked around and rubbed his hands together like a man coming upon something suddenly and finding it unexpectedly pleasing.

  “Very nice,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”

  “Comfortable is hardly the word for it. The room must be quite expensive.”

  “Oh, nonsense. I can afford it, you know. You’re looking lovely, Lisa.”

  “Do you think so? Thank you very much.”

  She was, as a matter of fact. After her bath, she had put on a thin black sheath dress that gave rather startling; emphasis to her pale skin and hair. With her small breasts and narrow hips, she looked much younger than she actually was, possessing an almost adolescent; charm.

  “You look about sixteen,” he said.

  “No, Carl, really. Don’t exaggerate so.”

  “Well, a slight exaggeration, maybe. But only slight. You never showed your age, Lisa. I remember that you always looked much younger than you were. I came to see if you would care to go down for a drink.”

  “Yes. I was just wishing that you would come and ask for me.

  “That’s good, then. Do you suppose I will have trouble getting you into the bar?”

  “Why should you?”

  “Because of your age, I mean. No minors allowed.”

  It was a joke and he laughed at it, his tired and ill-looking face creasing and opening around a soft expulsion of air. He was obviously determined to resume an earlier relationship, to proceed from this point in the pretense that it had never been interrupted, that there had been on her
part no betrayal, no desertion, no aberrance. She had again for a moment the feeling inside her of dry and silent weeping, all that apparently was left to her of the relief of tears, and she laughed with him at his joke, feeling no laughter at all within.

  “I’ll carry my birth certificate,” she said, and they went downstairs feeling quite at ease with one another, for the first time as if they were really beginning a holiday. The bar was not large and was crowded with patrons and humming with the subdued confusion of conversations against a background of muted music, but they found a table in a corner and sat down, and after a while a waiter came and stood beside the table.

  “What would you like?” Carl said.

  “A daiquiri, I think.”

  “Frozen?”

  “No, not frozen.”

  “Good. I could never see the sense in a frozen daiquiri.” He looked up at the waiter. “Two daiquiris,” he said.

  The waiter went away and returned pretty soon with the daiquiris. They were cold and tart and very good. Lisa drank some of hers and felt the rum begin to work. “When would you like to have dinner?” Carl asked.

  “I don’t know.” She listened for a moment to the voices and the music. “Not for quite a while, really. I’m not at all hungry.”

  “Do you want to eat here or somewhere else? Perhaps we should ask about the good places.”

  “I’d just as soon eat here. It’s very nice here.”

  “It is, isn’t it? It was recommended to me by a fellow in Midland City who was down a year ago. I should have come myself much sooner. Long ago.”