I walk to the ruins, sit on the broken brick wall to watch you. You look so much like your father, same fair hair and coloring, those startling blue eyes. I think about the day we brought you home from the hospital. William had run off that afternoon to an insurance office but when he returned we bundled you up and drove you home in the Chevy we’d just bought. William was nervous handling you, left most of that to me. You’d been a bit of a surprise for us—which is irrelevant since I had been simply dying for you to show up. A surprise also lay in the Summerville living room. A handmade cradle, burnished oak, beautiful. William was beaming with pride.
“My father was right good with a hammer and saw and taught me a thing or two. Seemed like she should sleep in a good strong tree.”
Tears filled my eyes that day. Nothing makes a man more appealing than his love for his child.
That was love, wasn’t it?
As I watch you dig around the ruins with a toy spade, I wish you could remember that father. Is William different since the hospital? He’s more alert now, more interested in the world. He asks about you occasionally, always asks about the house. Sometimes asks about my weight—have I “fallen off” any? I have, I’ve been dieting again. However, when I recently told him how much help Uta and Rosa had been, he said I shouldn’t “bother” the neighbors; I assured him I never spoke of his illness to anyone.
He never seems upset or worried. He seems—polite.
What happens when I finally tell him about the seminary? When he’s stronger, when he comes home—that’s when I’ll show him the letter. When we can sit down and make new plans.
You’re digging with sudden intensity, dirt flying over your shoulder. I call to you, “What are you trying to find?”
“Treasure.”
“What kind of treasure?”
“Gold dublins.”
“I think you mean doubloons.”
You stop digging; I watch you skip from one end of the ruins to the other. It’s going to be all right. It won’t be the same. We’ll have to turn in a new direction. There are many things William can do. He’d love teaching history, he certainly knows enough about the Civil War. He could run a small business. He could go back to working with forests. I gaze up at the sunlight, feel its warmth on my face.
You run into the pine forest, arms flailing, hands reaching out to touch each tree you pass. William and I are truly blessed—such a sweet child. Independent, fearless. So—normal.
No one knows what causes mental problems. Not even the doctors.
What if it does run in families?
Stop thinking that.
“Don’t go far,” I call out. Don’t go too far away from me.
Carrying a flowerpot, I trail you into the woods where sunlight sprinkles light-stars between the tall pines. The trees were planted at uniform distances, row after symmetrical row. I love the cozy interior, the maze created by the rows, gossamer filaments of light raining down. But the symmetrical spacing is disorienting—hope I’ll be able to find the way out. I scan the ground, find a foot-tall loblolly sapling and dig it up. I’ll be able to tell William that the farm is fine, the graveyard clean, and I’ll have a young tree from his family’s soil to put in his room. Maybe someday we’ll plant it in the yard where the dogwood once stood.
I look around for you. “Lyra, it’s time to go home.”
No answer. I head deeper into the woods. “Lyra—honey—come on.”
The forest is still—silent sunlight, silent trees.
“Come on, Lyra. Now.”
When there’s still no answer, I drop the pot, begin running, call your name over and over again. Where is she? What if I lost her too?
“I’m over here.”
Relieved, I walk in the direction of your voice, passing through rows of trees into a sudden clearing. You’re standing atop a four-foot-high mound of wood chips and sawdust; golden sunlight cascades across it like a mystical, ethereal waterfall. Hacked-off pine branches are scattered below, a striking reality. Someone has chopped down a dozen tall pines, must have dragged in a mulching machine. Poachers. You run down the hill, wood chips flying. I’m still staring at the downed trees, the inert hill of wood pellets, the pall of sawdust. Another kind of ruins. You ask can you take some sticks home and I say you have enough sticks in your own yard. Perhaps you intuit the future—you slip a wood chip into your pocket anyway.
Retrieving the sapling, we return to the car, where I water the tree from a Mason jar. You hold the tree as we ride along, and I say that maybe soon you’ll have a brother or sister to play with at the farm. You clap your hands—you want a sibling so much—and upend the sapling, but catch it in time. All three of us make it back to Columbia safely.
Chapter Fourteen
William is coming home!
Some days that was all I could think about.
I stared out the living-room window at the oak trees just hinting of color. We’ll be a family again. He had improved so much since he’d begun working in the hospital library, cataloging books, annotating the card catalog, spending long hours reading. He wasn’t as silent now. The library was more restful than Babcock. What he was reading was a little unnerving—everything he could find about the hospital. When I visited him now, we met in Babcock’s visiting area, a long reception hall of ceiling fans, huge arched windows covered with wire grilles, folding chairs set in small groups. William usually leaned against a window—milk glass, which blocked any view outside. The air was always filmy from cigarette smoke: sometimes he seemed ghostly as he stood smoking and talking. One day he told me that Babcock was named for the hospital superintendent who ignored horrible conditions there, when clogged toilets, bedbugs, lice, and dirty bathwater were common. The Columbia hospital had always used more mechanical restraints than other mental institutions, he added.
I suggested we walk over to the canteen.
The sidewalks were crowded—nurses in white, orderlies in blue or white, patients in twos or threes but more often alone. Some with the vacant stare William had had right after shock treatment. Others shuffled along awkwardly, clearly drug-induced woozy.
“Being dazed is better than getting knocked unconscious or strapped to your bed,” William said.
Over the past few months he’d “seen a lot.” He recited the list of drugs used in the hospital over the years: iron, quinine, alcohol, potassium bromide, chloral hydrate, strychnine, sulphonal, potassium iodide, calomel, opium, morphine, digitalis. Increasingly uncomfortable, I asked how he knew all this. He said the library’s disorganization made the hospital records easy prey. Did I know that John C. Calhoun’s family incarcerated the famous man’s brother here? Around 1838. The man got out okay. Soon afterward, though, one-fourth of the patients had pellagra because the food was so bad. In 1891, one patient murdered another.
Was he telling me this to make me feel guilty? Sometimes, mercifully, he talked of other things. Of going fishing with his father. How his brother, on his first day of running a gas station, accidentally left the pump running all night, dumping the entire week’s gas onto the ground. I learned that in her early life his mother had been a milliner, and this tickled me, given that you were always putting something on your head, especially kitchen pots.
When I met with William’s social worker about his release, she said he might not recall much about the first days of his breakdown.
“And unless he asks you, I wouldn’t bring it up—it’s best to let him lead any discussion of his illness. He’s had a counseling session about dealing with the outside again; we advise that he never reveal his hospital stay on a job application unless directly asked. Unfortunately, that’s the state of the world.”
“What can I do to help him?”
“Be patient, don’t expect too much at the beginning. Be optimistic, don’t bring up problematic subjects, anything likely to
elicit internal conflict.”
How long, I wondered, can I wait before showing him the seminary letter?
Alicia Ravenel added, “If things don’t work out, William can be recalled with just your signature or Dr. Dumaine’s.”
I begged her not to tell William the hospital could recall him that easily. No matter what happened, I would never send him back.
When you were in your thirties, I realized you believed your father had been “away” for four years. You were certain he’d missed your entire childhood—in a way, that was true. A father who never shows his child affection is pretty much an absent parent. You were shocked to learn he was hospitalized for less than a year.
How long didn’t matter. I knew from my own experience what I couldn’t say out loud: Childhood loss is a giant, and giants have their own large truth.
William’s coming home! Soon!
I’d been scrubbing the floors for days. I’d made new bedroom curtains and bought a television set—I found a cheap one in a store going out of business and, despite your protests, was waiting until William came home to try it out. I talked excitedly about going to the mountains to see the fall leaves. Did you remember the trip to the Smoky Mountains when you were four? You said you didn’t, though I believe you did. You were sitting on the living-room floor drawing; your drawings were beginning to look quite professional. I went to my closet and came out with a shoebox of old photos and showed you a picture of yourself and your father in a mountain stream. William was smiling, kneeling beside a younger you wearing a ruffled bathing suit. You stared at the photo impassively.
You left off drawing to help me clean and polish—Uta said our house looked like it had been run through a washing machine. Entertaining you many afternoons while I sewed a new dress for your father’s arrival, she regaled you with Irish stories. Your favorite was the legend about the handsome young man who fell in love with a beautiful girl and went with her to her country but got homesick for his own. The girl gave him a white horse for the trip home but told him he had to stay on it, he must not get off. He did anyway, to pick up a stone, and he turned into an ugly old man. He was one thing, then he was another, you explained to me, giving me pause.
Rosa interrupted us, bringing a vase of flowers. She also proffered a small bottle of “love elixir.” I blushed and stammered out a thank-you, ignoring your question about what it was for.
After Rosa left, you asked, “When my daddy gets home, will he be old now? Will he be crying again?”
I picked you up. “No, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be wonderful now.”
A slant of soft titanium light. A long night sighing its contentment, phantom lovers’ whispers in the breeze outside the window, old houses and old memories of young women on a carousel, laughing. Midnight. Moonlight. I get up and go to the kitchen for a glass of water, water on the tongue feels cold and sweet. I was dreaming of making love. I walk back into the bedroom in my filmy cotton nightgown with white eyelet embroidery, and stop and gaze at our bed, moonlight filtering through the new dotted swiss curtains, blue like his eyes, aquamarine melted to cobalt by fire. We’ve not been together in so long, what will it be like? I yearn for the touch that is like dancing, or swimming, the body moving without intent, like singing, running through a field of flowers, that’s what love can be. I touch my breast timidly, so full of longing, for William, for another baby, for life to fill me with new history, new hope. Whispers and wind, soft cotton and songs of a new baby, a husband who loves me again, all that blond hair falling into his eyes, slender limbs, the way he would smile in Summerville coming up the sidewalk when I least expected it.
That man will walk in the front door in just a few days. Not the same man, exactly. I’m not the same woman. But we’ll get to start over.
I laugh and whirl myself around the bed.
A beautiful Saturday afternoon in October, colored leaves falling outside the window. I’m wearing my new dress—lustrous emerald green silk, with a lower neckline than usual. I stare in the mirror on the bedroom door. Lord, it looks like something Rosa would wear. Well, not really, Rosa would want it tighter. I have on my favorite piece of jewelry—my mother’s Victorian cameo. I finger it absently as I walk through the house. I’ve bought real cream for our coffee and a tin of the special pipe tobacco William likes. I linger beside the dining-room table, run my hand along the polished surface. What he’ll say about it, I don’t know, but we’ll have our first family dinner in here tonight. The whole house smells warm and inviting from the simmering pot roast. I cross into the living room, regard the fireplace—I’ll show him how I can build a fire and not burn the house down. If he insists, the oil stove is in the garage. No. By wintertime I’ll make him understand how important a real fire is to me.
What if it happens again?
It won’t. He won’t ever go back there. It’s over.
I walk to Uta’s to say good-bye to you. When she opens the door, she says, “My, my, Louise, aren’t you the picture today.”
“You’re beau-ti-ful,” you whisper. I pick you up and kiss you. You say, “Mama, you have perfume on.”
“That’s the Chanel your daddy gave me one Christmas before you were born. It’s a special day.”
I skip down Uta’s front steps and get in the car, you and Uta waving from her porch. I drive to Bull Street; at the gate, I tell the guard, “I won’t be back. My William is coming home today!”
I park in front of Babcock, glance at my watch. I’m too early so I walk around the building, through the passageway to the inner courtyard, an exercise space enclosed by barbed wire. The courtyard is empty, eerily quiet. Across from me loom four stories of barred windows. At one window a face appears—a silent staring face. What if it isn’t okay? What if I’m the world’s most foolish woman? I turn and stride to the front of the building, climb the stairs and sit, heart pounding, on a hallway bench.
When I enter William’s room, he’s sitting on the bed dressed in a suit, his suitcase beside him. I kiss him on the cheek, breathe in his aftershave.
“Oh darling, this is wonderful day for us.”
We walk down the stairs and stop at the admissions office, where we both sign his release form. I feel him watching as I scrawl my signature—in a trembling hand—beneath “Released to the Custody Of.” I hate that it reads like that. The admissions officer hands William his driver’s license and the money left on his hospital account. William looks off as though embarrassed.
After he stows his suitcase in the trunk, he walks around the car looking at the tires, says they need air. He slides behind the steering wheel and rests his hands on it, and for a terrible second I wonder if one can forget how to drive. Of course not, how ridiculous. He starts the car and backs up, but passes up the main drive for a service road circling the hospital complex. He pauses at the white-steepled church, then drives on and turns right at the Williams Building, goes down a hill that ends up behind Babcock. From here the massive building—its two wings of barred windows—looks even more the prison. The concrete sidewalk is cracked, weeds sprouting through it. The gracious cupola, seen up close, has broken windows.
He stops the car and stares at the building for a long time.
Eventually he takes the main drive, past the Mills Building, through the wrought-iron gate. What is he thinking?
“I cooked a roast, darling, I thought you might like that.”
He remains silent.
“How about we go to the mountains soon, remember how much fun we had there?”
William nods. This is the adjustment period, I remind myself.
As we drive down Lincoln Street, he says he’s hardly been aware it’s autumn, since most trees around the hospital are magnolias.
“It’s nice to see the oaks. Nice to be free again.”
How tired I feel. I can’t speak about the rest, Lyra, I just can
’t—I thought I could but I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m too tired to go on. There are things you’re better off not hearing. You know how our lives were later.
Just remember—you were always my dream.
Part VII: Lyra and Louise
2004
Chapter Fifteen: Lyra
One morning my father takes me aside at the hospital and says that perhaps we should make the necessary “plans.” On the way to the funeral home, he says it’s highway robbery that funerals now cost eight thousand dollars, and we argue about where my mother should be buried. Then we spend a surreal hour in a world of walnut furniture and subdued lighting and gold brocade drapes, including a tour of the “showroom” of top-of-the-line caskets. In the lobby, as we’re preparing to leave, my father and the funeral director talk about World War II.
“When we landed at Normandy,” my father tells the director, who’s deceased father was in the Invasion, “we had this life preserver, terribly heavy with all our gear tied to it, supposed to keep us from drowning but didn’t always. I didn’t take that life preserver off for four days. I was hoping it worked on land too.”
The funeral director laughs. My father tells him he almost lost his legs during the 1944–45 winter. “They were frozen solid from crawling around in the snow, and one morning I woke up in a medic tent and heard a doctor talking about whether to amputate or not.”
These are stories I’ve never heard before.
Genuine respect shows in the other man’s eyes as he teases my father, “Bet you didn’t have that mustache in the army.”
“You can say that again. Patton would have given me to the Germans.”
The funeral director claps my father on the shoulder as we leave. As we’re walking toward the car, I wonder who the pleasant man beside me is when he says, “He’s probably trying to cheat us.”
Against the Ruins Page 21
