Guests on Earth (16 page)

“Oooh, what’s this?” Dixie grabbed at my package as we set off up Zillicoa Avenue.

I shrugged and shook my head.

“Well, let’s open it up, then!” she exclaimed.

I pulled the parcel back, sticking it firmly under my arm. “Not yet,” I said. I knew it contained my postcards. A vision of Joey Nero came to me then as real as the very flesh, Joey with his sad dark eyes and sloppy grin hanging onto one of these holiday streetlights, arm flung out in a grand gesture. Dixie and I walked back up the hill through cone after cone of falling light.

T
HAT AFTERNOON MARKED
t
he real beginning of my recovery. My sense of welcome release continued into the next day, and the next, and the next, as I followed my appointed schedule. Plus the required walking and gardening, everyone had to take at least two kinds of occupational therapy. Several new sorts were available at Highland now: hairdressing, for instance, which doubled as a free beauty salon where “students” could practice on other patients, sometimes with hilarious results, all under the supervision of a wise-cracking, gum-chewing beautician named Brenda Ray. Dixie loved working at the Beauty Box and had become Brenda’s unofficial assistant; she was a “natural,” Brenda said. Most of the men took Woodworking, where they hammered, sawed, planed, and polished away earnestly in the big basement workroom under the low-hanging lights and close supervision of old Cal Green, who had been at Highland for years, working as a caretaker. Cooking classes took place three afternoons a week in a workroom next to the big industrial kitchen in the Central Building. This class was very popular, for the cooks got to sit down and gobble up the results of their labor, or sometimes serve it publicly.

“Let’s sign up for cooking,” I suggested to Dixie, as squares of gingerbread still warm from the oven were passed out to us all at the afternoon “social” on Halloween.

“Not me.” To my surprise, Dixie shook her head so vigorously that I could see the bluish shaved spots at each temple where they affixed the electrodes for her still-ongoing electroshock treatments—which had never been a part of my own prescribed regimen, though electroconvulsive therapy was usually alternated with insulin therapy for long-term patients. Dixie always arranged her pretty curls very carefully to hide those shaved spots. By now I was getting a sense that my own “case” was not deemed as serious as many others, though no one had actually told me this.

“Why not?” I was surprised by Dixie’s vehemence. I polished off the rest of my gingerbread, which was delicious, and took a dark chocolate “black cat” cookie with orange icing.

“Are you kidding? I had to cook all the time when I was a little girl, and that was enough. I swore I would never do it again, and I haven’t. Our Lilybelle does it all now, out at the farm. It’s her kitchen, really, not mine.”

I tried to pick through this information, which seemed to contradict itself. “Why didn’t your mother cook?” I asked finally.

“Never mind,” Dixie said, flushing. “Let’s just stick with Art.” Which we did, though my own personal favorite was Horticulture, as it had been called before, when old Gerhardt Otto was in charge. Now it was “Hortitherapy,” which Dixie avoided at all costs, save for the requisite two hours per week of grounds care required of all, which she could not get out of. “Who wants to muck around in the dirt?” she asked. “And ruin a perfectly good manicure?”

Yet she didn’t mind covering her hands in clay or paint as we worked at those familiar tables in Homewood under the calm tutelage of Rowena Malone, whose long braid was white now, her face softened by age but even more beautiful, with its strong features.

“And not one bit of makeup!” Dixie marveled. “Can you imagine?”

Dixie pooh-poohed her own artistic talent, which seemed remarkable to me as she turned out realistic rural landscapes of wide fields and fencerows, with towering thunderclouds in the distance, or still lifes, bowls of peaches and vase after vase of flowers. “They’re not original,” she said. “Now that is original!” She pointed her brush at Miss Malone’s ever-changing “gallery” wall, where the patients’ work was displayed. ”Look at those. My goodness!” A new exhibit had just gone up.

“All by Zelda Fitzgerald,” Miss Malone said proudly. “I have saved them over the years, everything I could, for her and her daughter. But this is just a tiny fraction of what she’s done. Most of it is gone now, sent off to art shows or taken by friends and relatives or destroyed by Zelda herself when the mood hit her. That’s the worst of it. Of course we at Highland have no right to any of these, but while they are in my keeping, I will keep them safe. I take it as a sacred trust.”

“Well, no wonder.” Dixie got up and walked slowly along the display of perhaps ten pictures. “These are just remarkable,” she said.

“Ah yes.” Miss Malone nodded. “She has real talent for art, a lucky thing, since her husband stole all her stories. Quite an original style, too, though of course her illness gets in the way. But then perhaps it contributes as well.”

I joined Dixie in perusing the exhibition. Most of the paintings were gouache or watercolor on paper, rather small. Hospital Slope, one was named, though I could not recognize the actual slope or location of the subject, two blowing apple trees loaded with fruit, approached by a dirt road that disappeared into a fanciful, cloud-filled sky. All the shapes were fluid, filled with wind and life. A vibrant blue and green watercolor entitled Mountain Landscape featured that same dirt road again, now running straight up a green mountain into the distant blue peaks and the sky beyond.

“Very impressionistic,” Dixie remarked. “Does she paint quickly?”

“Why, yes,” Miss Malone said, looking at her.

Several of the paintings of flowers reminded me of how much Mrs. Fitzgerald had liked gardening, way beyond Dr. Carroll’s requirements. I remembered her kneeling in the dirt for hours with old Gerhardt Otto, weeding or planting, tan and strong. The flowers in these paintings were close-up, pastel and glowing—blue morning glories, pale lilies on a salmon background, yellow roses.

“Would you call these still lifes?” I asked. “Because they are anything but still.” In fact, there was a great deal of movement in all of the paintings, a kind of rushing upward, out of the frame.

I paused before a fanciful pink watercolor of Paris at dusk, which appeared to be actually happy, I thought, in contrast to all the others. It gave me the strangest feeling to look at it.

“She did a whole series of these soon after her husband died,” Miss Malone told us. “Mainly European scenes, to remember all the traveling she did with him back in better times.”

I still hated the way Mrs. Fitzgerald drew people, especially these ballerinas, so tall and weird, with such large, ugly, muscular feet and legs. But everybody’s feet and legs were too big—even the characters in the fairy-tale pictures, such as Old Mother Hubbard or the Three Little Pigs. And all the figures were looking up, often with their eyes closed, and no ground at all beneath their feet.

“Why, they’re dancing,” Dixie said. “You can tell she was a dancer, can’t you?”

“Ah, that was her big dream,” Miss Malone said. “Yet she started too late and worked too hard and it broke her health.”

“I just read Save Me the Waltz, or tried to read it, I should say,” Dixie announced. “It’s impossible to buy it now, Tony told me at the bookstore. So I borrowed it from him. It’s obviously autobiographical, all about a girl who is training for the ballet.”

“And?” Miss Malone was looking at Dixie with great interest now.

“Well, it’s heartbreaking at the end. And very hard to follow because of the way she writes. The language is so unusual, the way she mixes everything up—flowers might think, for instance, or have emotions—but it’s wonderful, too. Finally it’s about obsession, which I envy.” Dixie sat back down with a grim face and resumed her own painting, and did not explain herself. Both Miss Malone and I stared at her, but she spoke no more until the end of the hour, when she laughed and tossed her head and said in the old way, “Oooh, I wish I could have met Zelda Fitzgerald, all the same!”

“You probably will,” Miss Malone said. “They often come back after the holidays, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

I was not artistic. But Miss Malone had introduced me to the making of mosaic pottery using tiny brilliant glass tiles, which I enjoyed, as I have always enjoyed completing jigsaw puzzles. In general, I have always liked to fit things into things, to create a pleasing order. Not for me the huge blank canvas, the tubes of oily brilliance. Working carefully, I finished a little bowl in shaded circles of red, ochre, and gold tiles, which Miss Malone placed upon a wooden stand. Everyone admired it.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked an intense skinny woman at my table.

“Maybe I’ll give it to somebody for Christmas.” I was thinking of Claudia and Richard Overholser, who had been very kind to me since my return.

“Ah yes,” Miss Malone said, “Bye and bye we shall turn into Santa’s workshop here, so that anyone who wants to make a gift can do so. I have ordered beads for necklaces already—and maybe we shall make some funny sock dolls for children? Tell me your ideas, everyone, please. And now it is time for us to put away our supplies for today—”

But Dixie was already gone, overturning her easel, running out the door without her coat, flashing past the window, leaving a half-done vase of roses on her canvas and her paints in a mess behind her, one jar overturned to make a vivid red spreading stain on the wooden floor. Miss Malone ignored it all, helping the rest of us to put our things away, bidding us all her customary calm, fond adieu. Nothing ever seemed to surprise the quietly smiling Miss Malone as she padded about in her great smock like some sort of nun or priestess.

Dixie vanished for a week, her room locked. She returned a bit paler, a bit thinner, and never mentioned this perplexing incident again, nor did I ask her about it.

CHAPTER 7

T
HOUGH AT FIRST
I
m
issed old Gerhardt Otto’s gruff presence terribly, I still loved “Hortitherapy” where there was more going on than ever, even in late autumn. It seemed that it had taken half a dozen people to replace Doc Otto! I had been watching them out my window for weeks. Under the direction of several experienced groundskeepers, teams of three or four patients were cutting back and mulching the perennials and roses; dividing and transplanting irises, daylilies, and the like; and planting the bulbs for spring. The greenhouse itself had been expanded, with a multipurpose activity building adjoining it.

I had wandered over there shyly the first time, early for my appointment. Sunlight flowed in through a row of big new windows looking out upon the kitchen gardens and across to the woods beyond. Sturdy rough-hewn ceiling beams held swags of flowers, hung to dry: purple statis, golden yarrow, delicate white baby’s breath, those lavender asters that grew in great drifts on the bank behind the Central Building. All their names came flooding back to me. They looked beautiful hanging there. A man came in stomping his feet with the smell of the woods about him and an armful of bright-berried holly and evergreens; he placed them carefully on a wide shelf. Several people were working around a big potting table with a pile of dirt in the middle of it.

“Evalina?” An older woman detached herself from the group at the potting table and came toward me, stripping off her gardening gloves to hold out her arms. “Welcome. I am Mrs. Morris. I have been looking forward so much to meeting you—I can use your help.” She surprised me with a hug, instead of a handshake. Though Mrs. Morris actually held a doctorate in psychology, she did not look or act like a doctor at all, but like a grandmother, or someone’s ideal of a grandmother, with her gray curls, dimply wrinkled face, and plump figure—even her fingers were pudgy, and stained with dirt. Nor did she ever dress like a doctor, always wearing slacks and a smock or a big green apron with pockets containing the tools of her trade. “Here, put this on.” She handed me a man’s soft old shirt. “And come, sit down—” She led me toward a group of comfortable wicker chairs set in a circle. “Today we shall all start a project together. Come, have a seat. Let’s wait for the others . . .” Oh no, I thought. A group! Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in Horticulture with old man Otto in charge. He had just put us all to work.

But they soon arrived, all women in our group of six: three who seemed to know each other well, falling into instant conversation. The spinsterish one named Myra was a bore who began all her remarks with “Mama always says . . .” while Amanda and Susan, younger, might possibly be belles, I thought, newly aware of this category. Helen, also new to the group, was older, thin and downcast; while black-haired Ruth was an angry, fidgety woman about my own age who said she didn’t see why she had to come here at all, she was a city girl and this wasn’t what she had expected at this hospital, this wasn’t what she had signed up for, plus she had never had a green thumb, she had the opposite of a green thumb, she had a black thumb, so there!

Mrs. Morris laughed merrily. “Oh honey,” she said, “Don’t worry—no one else has a green thumb either. In fact there is no such thing as a green thumb.” She sat smiling at us all. “Plants and people have a lot in common,” she suggested. “Both need a harmony of society and environment within the natural laws of biology and chemistry. They need care and food. There are certain things they must have, such as water and sunlight, and certain things they must not have—”

“Oh, I see what you’re up to!” dark-haired Ruthie spat out furiously. “Jesus Christ, how dumb do you think we are?”

“Mama always said that cursing shows a weakness of vocabulary,” Myra said primly.

Mrs. Morris continued, unfazed. “Both plants and people make their way through a life cycle as single individuals, yet both are actually dependent upon their relationships with other plants and animals for survival. These interactions and associations between individuals vary from the casual or superficial to ties that are so close that the death of one partner may threaten the existence of others.”

Helen, the downcast woman, began to cry at that moment, soundlessly and hopelessly. I wondered if perhaps she had just lost her husband.

Mrs. Morris leaned forward to take her hand, and went on. “Today you will each pick a bulb to plant and nurture throughout this winter season. We shall begin the process of forcing bulbs now, so that each of you will have a potful of beautiful blooming plants in the darkest, coldest part of the winter when the snow comes to cover our mountains all about.” Mrs. Morris had an almost Biblical way of speaking, though her Southern voice was so soft that we all had to pull our chairs forward and lean toward her a bit to hear. “Of course it is unnatural, forcing bulbs to grow out of their season. This is a special project to bring us cheer for the upcoming holidays. In reality, plants, like people, need room in order to spread and grow and sink their roots—in order to thrive.”

“And now, look!” She opened the huge old book upon her lap, turning it upside down so that we could all see the botanical prints marching in full color across the pages: cheerful orange and red tulips; lacy spikes of blue, violet, and pink hyacinths.

“Those always smell so good,” I said involuntarily, pointing to the hyacinths. I was rewarded with a smile.

“Yes they do, Evalina, and so does this paperwhite narcissus and also the freesia—it’s heavenly, just like perfume, does anybody know it?” Mrs. Morris indicated the extravagant lavender and white blooms. “And then, of course, our most dependable and sturdy flowers of all—daffodils! Does anybody know the Wordsworth poem?”

I wandered lonely as a cloud popped into my mind, from the little book of poems that Mr. Graves gave me.

“Jonquils,” Helen said. “Mama always called them jonquils.”

“Oh, who cares what anybody calls them?” Ruth snapped. She jumped up and went to stand at the big window, jiggling her foot.

Mrs. Morris stood and smoothed her apron down over her stomach. “Now you must each one be deciding upon the flower you would most like to grow, as we proceed over to the potting table where I shall introduce you to your bulbs.” We moved as one to line up on either side of the table. “Now look at this.” Dr. Morris held aloft a big, lumpy, dirty clod as if it were a jewel. “Can you believe it? This”—pointing at the bulb—“will turn into this.”—pointing at the picture of a giant red amaryllis. She looked at us carefully one by one. “But it will happen only with your care.”

“Oh brother,” Ruth muttered. Nobody took any notice of her as she stepped tentatively toward us, then retreated, then finally rejoined our group as we all chose bulbs and pots and began—gingerly, in most cases—to break up the soil and put several inches of it into our clay pots, then place the bulbs just so upon it (“No, this way,” Mrs. Morris said gently, upending several, “so they can reach straight up for the sun. We must all reach for the sun.”) Then more soil, then sphagnum moss to hold in moisture. We crammed several bulbs into each pot. I picked daffodils for my pot. Ruth picked the showy amaryllis; I knew she would.

A
FTERWARD
I
FOUND
m
yself walking back up the long, grassy hill between Amanda and Susan; both would be leaving Highland soon, I gathered from their conversation. Susan, recovering from a broken heart, was looking forward to the holidays, but Amanda dreaded her return to an older, domineering husband whom she referred to as “The Judge” and described as a “sex fiend.”

A sudden gust of cold air brought us a shower of brittle leaves.

“Oh well, at least it’ll be warm down there,” Amanda said. “I don’t think I could stand a winter at this place.”

“Where do you live?” I asked, and she said, “Tampa.”

“That sounds nice,” I offered.

“You don’t know anything,” Amanda said.

The sound of sudden cries and exclamations erupted from the edge of the woods to our left, where a teenage grounds crew was working on beds at the tree line—cutting back the ever-encroaching forest, pruning and separating the perennials, I imagined, for I had worked on these borders myself in the old days.

“Oh man, you ought to see that thing!” a tall, skinny redheaded boy tossed his hoe high in the air as he burst out onto the grassy lawn, followed by a shrieking blonde girl. But the others gathered closer to the tree line, jabbering excitedly, as a man appeared in the forest’s mysterious opening and then stepped forward carrying something in his arms.

“Kill it! Kill it!” The redheaded boy started the chant.

We stopped on the path to watch, but couldn’t see what it was due to the excited clot of jumping teenagers.

I found myself transfixed—as my companions appeared to be, too—by the scene and the man himself—dark, small, yet finely made, with handsome features—utterly calm in the midst of all the uproar and consternation. A white dog followed at his heels. He smiled broadly, sweetly, as he walked forward into the group with arms outstretched, as if with an offering.

“Lord, it’s a snake!” Susan whispered, seizing my arm.

The teenagers quieted down and gathered around him, blocking our view, then radiated outward to form a circle with the man in the center of it, kneeling.

Without a word, the four of us left the path and moved down the hill, closer, to see.

It was a thick-looking thing, like a snake but clearly not a snake, more primeval and misshapen than a snake, despite a recognizable head at one end, with sleepy eyes and a mouth that turned up curiously in a sort of smile. Its blackish-gray body was highlighted with yellow spots on the head which continued down its back toward the wedge-shaped tail. It was about a foot long. Now the man moved back from it a bit, still on his haunches, a position that seemed absolutely natural to him. We all watched in utter silence as the animal began to move very slowly—so slowly that it seemed to ooze across the grass and back into the brush at the edge of the forest. I stared in fascination until it was gone—then looked up to find that the man had disappeared as well, along with his dog.

The kids headed toward the greenhouse, carrying their tools and talking loudly, as if they had all been on a grand adventure.

“Mama always says, ‘Snakes are our friends,’ ” Myra announced as we joined the lunch line entering the dining hall in the Central Building.

“Oh for God’s sakes, who cares what your damn mother says?” Ruth snapped, and Myra’s mouth fell open, as if this were a brand new idea.

“I don’t think that was even a snake,” Susan said thoughtfully. “I grew up on a farm, and I never saw a snake that looked like that.”

“But who was the man?” I asked, trying to sound casual, surprised at the catch in my voice.

“Oh!” They turned to me. “Haven’t you heard the story? Don’t you know?”

T
HE ANIMAL WAS
a
spotted salamander, a mole species of amphibian native to the area but rarely seen except by foresters and gardeners digging in deeply wooded locations.

What a shame, I thought, that Robert had missed it.

The man was, indeed, another story, which I pieced together by diligently questioning Mrs. Hodges, Dr. Morris, Mr. Pugh, and the Overholsers, who had all worked with him ever since his arrival.

His name was Pan Otto, though this was a name he had acquired only since he had been brought to Highland Hospital eight years earlier. I had not missed him by much, actually, a fact which fascinated me, as well as the fact that we were about the same age, twenty-six or twenty-seven, so far as anyone could tell, in both cases. He had lived here continuously ever since, and was now a familiar and beloved figure about the grounds, seen usually in the company of his dog, Roy, a gentle though wolflike creature.

But I am getting ahead of myself! Mrs. Hodges told me the whole story.

He was born William Raymond Moss—called Billy Ray—over in the deep mountains west of Asheville. The family had lived up a long, rutted road in an old homestead on Crabtree Mountain that had always belonged to his mother’s family. Considered “slow,” his mother Lorena had seldom left the mountain, and then only for brief trips into town with her parents. Here she attracted some considerable attention, for she was beautiful, but no one came calling until her fearsome father’s death, which left Lorena up there on the mountain with her ailing mother to care for.

Now the neighbors and townsfolk ventured forth to bring what was needed, food and clothing and even wood. It was not long until they came up to tend the body and bury the old woman in the Crabtree cemetery at the top of the mountain.

This is when a no-account man named Dwane Moss first set eyes on Lorena, or so it was believed. He married her two months later over in Sylva, before a drunken magistrate. Lorena bore him child after child. Dwane Moss had no known profession other than selling off Crabtree land he had gained through marriage. Shameful, they all said in town, though no one could stop him so long as Lorena signed the papers. People were scared of him, for he was a violent man, hot-headed and alcoholic. But when he shot the wrong man in the groin at a roadhouse fight, the sheriff made him a deal. Since Dwane liked to fight so much, the sheriff sent him off to the army instead of prison.

Lorena kept chickens, and sometimes people left food in the shed down at the end of the rocky road for her and the children—a bag of cornmeal, perhaps, or potatoes—for some still remembered her and who her people were. In their father’s absence, the older boys ran away, hopping a freight out of Asheville, never to be seen or heard from again. (“And who could blame them?” Mrs. Hodges said, throwing up her hands as she told this part.) Dwane’s brother Roman showed up out of no place and moved in with Lorena to help out, though it is not clear exactly what he did, beyond taking her into town once a month to pick up the check from the army. The older girl, Ava, “smart in school” when she could get there, just didn’t come home one day, staying in town with a classmate’s family.