Against the Ruins

by Linda Lightsey Rice

  Often I felt as though my husband had died. But there was no way to grieve—I’d become a widow in secret. I visited your father every weekend and often on Wednesdays during my free period. I’d put on an optimistic face—which used to be so natural—as I walked to Bull Street, wondering if anyone I knew would see me entering the grounds. My shame covered a continent. At least William wasn’t blaming me. He never said much during my visits except to ask about the car or bills; he did remember the farm now. But the flatness in his voice remained, and my optimistic mask always fell off as I walked home. I’d look down at the sidewalk and there would be the face I used to have.

  Uta made us go to the movies once a month, which suited you just fine though I protested that I should stay home and do my housework. One afternoon Uta kept you and sent me out to “breathe without care for a few hours.” I went downtown but couldn’t get interested in store windows, so I went to a see a new picture—Joan Crawford’s Autumn Leaves, having no idea it was about a woman who commits her deranged husband to a mental hospital. I almost got up and walked out. Joan is also married to a younger man who has electric shock; I averted my eyes when the doctor put electrodes to Cliff Robertson’s head. But what relief at the movie’s end—after he’s released, he’s well and the couple lives happily ever after.

  Once in a while I went to Uta’s house to play the piano, hoping music would soothe me. Occasionally it did. I let you visit at Johnny’s house now, and Rosa volunteered two “men friends” to clean up the debris in our yard after the ice storm. I watched from a window as they sawed up what was left of the dogwood tree. Once a month I met with William’s social worker; once a month I asked when he could come home. Once a month the social worker said the staff doctor felt William was too listless and depressed. Perhaps he’d be allowed a trial visit later. He’d started going to the library, which was a good sign. Now he also walked over to the canteen every afternoon. He was improving, was more alert. It was just a matter of time.

  During Laidlaw’s second semester, I prepared my classes for the following year’s integration. I played the South Pacific soundtrack, had them dissect the song “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.” I waxed at length on Porgy and Bess, explaining that a white South Carolinian was the first novelist to portray blacks positively, but half the room never got beyond Porgy’s plan to travel from Charleston to New York in a goat cart. I found myself faltering as I spoke of believing in a dream, however impossible. On my way home that day I stopped by my fellow teacher Clarice’s house, which I did frequently now. She invariably asked, “How are you really?” But I never talked about William. “I’ll just break down,” I always said. I was truly afraid I would.

  It got worse.

  One Saturday morning someone knocks on the door. I don a sweater and find a man in his early twenties on the porch. Tousled black hair, somber brown eyes. He’s holding a paper bag and introduces himself as Jack McHenry, William’s seminary classmate.

  I shake his hand, invite him in out of the cold.

  “Thank you, but I can’t. I’ve got a heap of studying to do today.” He nods at the bag. “These are William’s books. We had a lot of the same classes. I cleaned out his locker. I hope he’s going to be all right.”

  “Oh, he’ll be fine. He’ll be back at those books in no time.”

  “He plans to reapply?”

  I pull my sweater around me. “He’ll be back by next semester.”

  “He’s reapplied and they’ve accepted him?” When I look confused, Jack McHenry hesitates. “Oh no—you haven’t got the letter, have you?”

  “What letter?”

  “I thought surely—I hate to be the one. I’m really sorry. I thought you knew.” He looks away. “You should call Dr. Estes.”

  “Why? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Copeland, but William’s been expelled.”

  I gape at him. “I went over there before Christmas and explained, and Dr. Estes said he could come back.”

  Jack McHenry shifts from one foot to the other. “I’m so sorry. The scuttlebutt, nobody’s saying this directly or course, is that it’s because of the state hospital.”

  I shrink back against the front door, hands shaking. “But he’ll be fine in no time,” I insist loudly. “Dr. Estes said William could come back next semester.”

  “Either he didn’t tell you the truth, or he changed his mind. William’s a smart man but unusual—he hardly ever says anything in class but when he does it can be so original it confounds the professors. Made it easier that he hadn’t been coming to class lately. Rumor is that when the administration made him change programs, they discouraged him from continuing at all.”

  I drop into a webbed lawn chair on the porch, gaze at Jack McHenry. “They wanted him to withdraw before he got sick?”

  “I think everything went wrong after that first chapel service, when he was so nervous. He made Estes mad about something too, I don’t know what. William got a raw deal—a lot of us think so. Please tell him hello. Maybe I could stop by and see him sometime.”

  I gaze at the bag of books, a rectangular monument on the gray painted floorboards. Mechanically I stand up and thank Jack McHenry for coming by. Voice trembling, I ask if he wants some coffee before he goes, and he says no, asks me again to remember him to William. He turns and walks toward the bus stop.

  When I come back in the house, I ask you to go outside and play, and you say you don’t know anything to play, and I yell—“Go out and play, Lyra. Now.” You look frightened as you scurry out the back door. Your coat is still on a kitchen chair, and I carry it outside, hand it to you and say that I’m very tired and need to rest. You pull on your coat but don’t button it and I don’t care. I feel you watching me as I plod back up the steps. Even when it gets dark, I don’t come look for you, don’t call you in.

  Cold, no doubt frightened, you finally come back into the house. I haven’t turned on any lights. I’m sitting on the side of the bed, staring. I see myself walking across the room, the person I used to be is over there, the room is different too, as though someone has sneaked in and taken everything we own. If I could feel anything, I’d know that our dreams truly are over. The secure life, the house of our own, the garden I’d dreamed of.

  You run to my door, stand there shaking. I look up at you but I can’t get up, I’ve run out of courage. Drowning in the river of my own despair, I do not reach for the small figure left on shore. Unforgivably—though I love you more than breath—I leave you there alone.

  This river of despair—this year I lost my husband and our dream, this year you lost a father and a mother—this river will snake between us for life.

  The letter came.

  I stand at the kitchen table staring at the imprinted return address. At William’s name. I’ve never opened a letter addressed to him: I take all the mail to the hospital and he opens the bills and gives them back to me to pay. I sit down at the table, push the envelope back and forth. It’s wrong to open another person’s mail. Don’t I already know what the letter contains? I leave it on the kitchen table for days, untouched. I go to school, you go to school, I push it aside while we eat supper. It watches me every time I walk into the kitchen. Some days I come in the house and imagine it will have disappeared. But it’s always there, mocking me with white rectangular silence.

  Sunday comes and I drop you off at the church for Sunday school and drive to the hospital in a slow rain. I check in at the nurses’ station and walk down the hall, my Sunday heels clicking against the tile floor. William is lying on his bed wearing his pajamas, a half-opened book beside him. I smile brightly, kiss him, say I’m happy to see him, and put down the basket of food—fried chicken, lima beans, a corn casserole. He sits up straighter, thanks me, asks what the weather’s like outside.

  “Still chilly, raining a little.”

  He as
ks if the oil bill has come. I say no. The seminary letter is in my purse. I take a deep breath. Go on, give it to him. Get it over with.

  I go to his closet for his dirty clothes, ask what he’s been doing. The hospital library is a pretty good one, he says, though very disorganized. I say it’s wonderful he’s been reading so much and launch into a story about a student who’s having trouble reading. How lucky we are to have had good educations.

  William looks toward the window while I talk, as though studying the bars. I fall silent, don’t finish my story. “Darling, something’s come up.” I sit down in the one chair. “It may be—well, it’s—”

  There’s a scream in the hallway, the sound of rushing feet.

  William says, “There’s a fella who starts screaming the same time every day. They probably don’t give him his medication on time. One day they beat him up to keep him quiet.”

  The bells from the chapel toll in the distance, one two three four, and on until eleven. William says, “I went over there the other day to see what the chapel looked like, and as I was coming out the door a car stopped along the sidewalk and this big woman leaned out her window and asked me, ‘Where do they keep the patients?’”

  William laughs: harsh, shrill, mirthless. “I asked her did she want the really crazy ones or the ones only half crazy?” He laughs again. “I told her she’d better be careful because we’re all over the place.”

  I walk over to the window. Stare down at the magnolias slicked with rain. “I wonder what we’d be doing if we hadn’t moved to Columbia.”

  “For starters, nobody would have put me in this place.”

  It’s the first time he’s mentioned the commitment. I’ve been waiting for his anger. I bite my lip, taste blood as I say, “Darling, I’d have given anything if it’d been me. You were ill, all the doctors said you needed to be where you could get better. If only there’d been room at the VA hospital. We thought a room would be available by now.”

  I wait for him to blow up. He looks away, asks if I’m going to church today.

  We might as well face the whole thing. I reach down and click open my purse. “You’re going to be released soon and we’re going to get our lives back like they were.” Or as close as we can.

  “I imagine the seminary is wondering when I’ll be back.”

  My heart jumps. “If anyone should understand a—a crisis like this, it should be a Christian seminary.” Why did I say that?

  I snap my purse closed and kiss William on the cheek. “I need to pick up Lyra. I love you, darling. We miss you terribly. But you’ll be home soon.”

  Speeding out of the room, I stop and lean against the wall to catch my breath and calm down. I start back down the hallway, pass awkwardly shuffling men (too much thorazine); another man is sitting on the floor rocking back and forth and cursing the blank wall. Ahead are two attendants in white uniforms. Sometimes I notice a contemptuous look in their eyes. I stop the unkempt attendant with greasy brown hair and ask if he cares for the patient in room 3219. When he nods, I cry desperately, “That man is a decorated war hero, he’s studying to be a minister.”

  “Is that a fact, lady? I bet he’s met the Queen of England too.”

  He laughs and heads down the hall.

  I will my legs to move. I pass the nurses’ station, walk through Babcock’s front door; from the portico, I stare down the main drive toward rain-slicked Elmwood Avenue. I can see the square outline of Laidlaw, the turnoff to Lincoln Street, even the shadow of Logan Grammar and Elmwood Cemetery, and beyond them that open and inviting ramp to the interstate highway. Then my eyes narrow and all I can see is the hospital’s ten-foot brick wall.

  The winter dragged on. Many alone hours of firelight for your mother during those days, after you’d gone to bed. Flames leaping as though to escape the slow blue burn beneath them. Strong oak logs gone to ash in a half hour.

  Firelight. Warms or destroys. A painting of a forest fire—what made my mother paint such a thing? Made her want to portray desolation? Firelight. Flames. Gives light, erases gloom, kills. Fire in the brain, mania. Possessed by fire. Fire in the brain. Fired up. Set on fire. Lightning bolt hit the house, could have caused fire. Should I have realized then? Lightning bolt, electric volt. Fight the fire in the brain with electric fire. Lightning bolt, doomed house. Electric volt, doomed memory.

  Firelight. Fire painting. Fire in the brain.

  Firelight making soft shadows and shapes, the room softer, warmer. The light made me feel better and sometimes I could barely stand to look at it.

  Spring came slowly, dragged its warm and soggy body onto Lincoln Street in late March. When the rains ceased, the red camellias—always the first-comers—bloomed in Max’s garden and along our front sidewalk, soon the jonquils too. Heartbreaking colors stole into the neighborhood overnight. The grass turned new green, was so light-filled the yard looked happy. Birds woke everyone at six a.m. Children played outside again. Rosa put all her rugs on her front banister and beat them with a broom. Uta, in her new short hairdo, began volunteering at a children’s hospital. Unlike them, I was not made lighter by the new season; despite the warmer temperatures, I kept having fires in the living room, sitting beside the hearth to read. It was too warm, and damp air often forced smoke back into the room. Finally, fearful of black furnishings again, I cleaned out the fireplace and read in your father’s chair by the living-room window. Outside, the world turned a shade brighter every day and eventually I smiled a little more, or suggested we go downtown and look in store windows and get a hamburger and a Coke.

  Over the past months I’d learned how to take care of us—I knew the men at the auto garage, knew how much the light bill should be, knew how to mend a screen door. But somehow that didn’t translate into more confidence. Either I didn’t have the self-confidence gene or I’d used it up chasing your father before we were married. Or it was destroyed by that mental hospital. I wished I were as bold as Rosa or as no-nonsense as Uta. If so, and I thought of doing this many times, I’d march over to that seminary, that Christian seminary, and give them a piece of my mind. I’d make a scene, embarrass the people who threw William out on the street like old furniture. But it wasn’t in my character to do that. Instead, from that year on, I focused myself on turning you into someone who could be bold. It was shortsighted of a teacher not to realize that example is also instruction, though I think you’ve managed fine—you haven’t shied away from giving me a piece of your mind from time to time.

  You now knew, from overhearing me mumbling in my sleep, that your father had been, as you put it, “electrifried.” I endeavored to put this into a better context but there was simply no way to. I told you that difficult things can happen in life, it was best not to discuss Daddy’s illness with anyone. That if anyone mentioned it, or said anything unkind, you should hold your ground and say that your father was simply ill and that it wasn’t nice to talk about sick people behind their back. Sometimes when I felt sad, I hugged you so hard you said it hurt. “You’re everything in the world to me,” I’d say. When I looked more lost than usual, you’d draw something to show me or ask me to sing, though often my songs were sad—I favored a hymn that ended with “There’s no sorrow on earth that heaven cannot heal.” Other times I’d sing “Songs My Mother Taught Me” or “Only God Can Make a Tree,” or belt out happy tunes from my college days, but they always sounded hollow. One day, after you’d read the novel in a classic comic book, you said, disturbingly, that we were now “Robinson Crusoe people.”

  One day when I couldn’t stand the crushing weight of helplessness another minute, I stopped by Ed Hindeman’s office and said, “Ed, give me something you need done. Anything. Something I can help out with.”

  He looked at me soberly and I thought—Maybe he doesn’t want anyone with mental illness in the family to be too visible at school.

  Then he smiled. “Louise, d
o sit down. I’ve got tons for you to do.”

  Spring passed and early summer arrived and the school year ended on an upbeat note. I’d arranged to have the Laidlaw art teacher give you private lessons; I paid for them by giving her daughter voice lessons. For six weeks, while the music teacher was on maternity leave, I directed the school choir. I organized faculty and student discussion groups about desegregation; the school board asked me to organize them at other city schools. But no matter what I tried, what good came about, I felt remote and removed. As if I didn’t quite exist.

  Your father remained in the hospital, though he could pretty much do as he pleased. Sometimes he seemed his old self, though quieter.

  “Your husband is prone to depression,” the staff doctor treating William explained in a three-minute conference in June, the only time I ever met with him. “He may still be subject to paranoid delusions. He says rather odd things.”

  I explained that William had always had an unusual way of expressing himself. The doctor said, “Well, let’s wait a month and see where he is then.”

  A day at the farm helped. With my hair tied up in a scarf, I push the lawnmower around the cemetery’s gravestones and feel lighter—maybe because it’s summer vacation, having so much time to relax, to play with my precious daughter, who’s getting taller and smarter. Yet how sad your seventh birthday seemed without your father. I lean back and wipe perspiration from my face; I never realized mowing was such hard work. When the grass is cut, I plant azalea cuttings along the wrought-iron fence. It’s a lovely day, not as hot as usual, a slight breeze wafting through the loblolly pines as they lean against each other and clack like old friends talking. You’re down at the ruins, where you go to make up stories. There are always dogs in your stories, never any adults. I think of the bullying, dog-hating landlord and my mother’s sterling and swear under my breath.