Lilith (18 page)
Greta met these objections by saying that it need not be a matter of compulsory attendance and that, as only those who were genuinely interested in music would be present, one should be able to anticipate good order on their part. Bob supported the suggestion by adding that, in case of bad weather, the concert could always be postponed or moved into Field House lounge. Mandel, however, insisted that patients with a particular interest in music were all the more likely to be critical of an inexpert performance and to express their displeasure with proportionate vehemence. Other objections were that there was no one on the O. T. staff sufficiently trained in music to rehearse and direct such a project competently, the amount of time it would take to prepare, and difficulty of making up a program for the limited number of performers who could expect to be recruited.
I was disappointed but at the same time, I think, persuaded to a more realistic view of the matter by Bea’s opinion that it might, considering the capriciousness of the patients and their characteristic lack of ability to sustain interest or effort in anything, prove too ambitious an undertaking.
“It would take several weeks of concentrated rehearsal to bring a program up to concert level,” she said, “even acknowledging that we don’t expect a professional performance; and with all the ups and downs they go through, I don’t know if we ought to demand such an effort of them. If it were done at all, I think it ought to be done in a very leisurely way: an occasional ‘musical afternoon’ together, without the pressure of a schedule or any fixed date for the performance. Then, perhaps, after they had practiced a piece together for a number of sessions, ask if they would like to invite some of the other patients to hear them play. I think the anxiety and discipline of a formal concert would be too strenuous for them.”
She suggested that we postpone our decision and take it up, after everyone’s further consideration, at a later meeting. She asked me to wait again while she locked up the shop and said, smiling, “I hope you don’t have any hard feelings about my stepping on your idea.”
“No, of course not. You convinced me that it was a pretty foolish one.”
“It isn’t foolish at all. I’m delighted you brought it up. I had the feeling that you really cared about it.”
“Yes, I did. I feel as if I’d like to do something for Warren.”
“I know,” she said. “And I’m sure that you will. It’s a pity he had to be sent back to Second, but I was expecting it.”
“Yes.”
We were walking across the lawn toward the cafeteria and she stopped to pick up one of the fallen blossoms from the poplars, plucking the petals off it while she spoke.
“You see, we have to consider these things very thoroughly, because it’s so easy to make a disastrous mistake. I’m sure that Warren’s real idea is to make some kind of a permanent arrangement by which he can enjoy Lilith’s company; I think he hopes to persuade her to participate—his suggesting the flute concerto is a pretty good clue. After all, it’s pretty enterprising of him; but I’m not so sure that such a sustained exposure to Lilith would be good for him. Especially considering the shape he’s in right now. I want to talk to Dr. Lavrier about it first, anyway. By the way, what did you think of him—Dr. Lavrier, I mean?”
“I liked him very much. And I enjoyed his lecture tremendously.”
“Good. I think you made quite an impression on him,” she said. “He thinks you’ll get along very well here; and so do I.”
It is impossible to describe how pleased I was by these words.
This evening, on my way home from the Lodge, I met Laura. I had stopped at the library to take out some of the books that Dr. Lavrier had listed for me, and was glancing through one of them as I walked back up toward Frederick Avenue. When I looked up, at the corner, she was standing in front of me with a bag full of groceries, waiting for the light. My first impulse was to glance hastily away, but as she was looking directly at me from a distance of not more than five feet, this was impossible and would have been, at any rate—as I realized immediately—a childish thing to do. The realization did nothing, however, to improve the spontaneity of my conversation, for I stood smiling dumbly, leaving it to Laura to speak first.
“Hello, Vincent. How are you?” she said, with what seemed to be a certain amount of confusion.
“Hello. My goodness. I didn’t expect to see you, Laura.”
“I know. I thought you were going to walk right off the curb, you were so wrapped up in that book.”
She looked a little older and thinner, but also prettier than she used to be, and for the first time that I can ever remember she seemed a little embarrassed. She said she had heard that I was back and was very pleased about it.
“Someone said that you’d been wounded, Vincent. I hope it wasn’t anything serious.”
“No, it wasn’t too serious,” I said.
“Oh, that’s good. You certainly look well.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You do too, Laura. I guess marriage must agree with you.”
“Well, I suppose it does.”
“How is your husband?”
“He’s very well, thank you. He’s working with the Electric Power Company right now. He’s hoping to be made office manager next fall.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” I said.
“What are you doing, Vincent? Are you going to college?”
“No, I’m working over at Poplar Lodge.”
“At the asylum?”
“Yes. Well, it’s not really an asylum; it’s a private mental hospital. I’m in the Occupational Therapy department.”
“Really? Do you like it?”
“Yes, I like it very much,” I said. “I think it’s turned out to be just the thing I’ve always wanted to do.”
“Oh, that’s fine. I’m sure you’ll do very well, if you feel that way about it.”
We lapsed into a strained silence, and it seemed as if the light would never change. I finally thought of asking how her mother was.
“She’s pretty well, but she’s aging, you know. Especially since Father died.”
“Yes, I guess she must be. Well, I hope you’ll say hello to her for me.”
“I will. We want you to come and visit us sometime, Vincent. I’d like you to meet Norman.”
“Yes, I certainly will, sometime,” I said. “It’s very nice to have seen you, Laura.”
“It’s nice to have seen you too, Vincent.”
The light had changed, finally, and I turned away, as if starting down Diamond Avenue, and then looked back for a moment to watch her cross the street. I remember Howie Elliot telling me once that girls walk differently after they have lost their virginity, and I could not help watching to see if I could distinguish any such difference in the way Laura walked. I could not, and I’m sure it’s just a schoolboy’s tale, anyway; but I wish I hadn’t done it. It’s one of those small, insignificant weaknesses that for some reason you can never quite get out of your mind and that rankle you for years.
THURS., APRIL 23:
When I heard Miss Arthur playing the flute the other day I
felt
there was something familiar about that music. I don’t mean about the tune itself—I had never heard it before—but about the
quality
of the music—as if by listening to it I had come in contact with something I had known or seen somewhere, however briefly, the way an odor or a scrap of conversation or the exact look of a landscape will suddenly remind you of something you can’t quite identify but which you are sure you have experienced before. This looks absurd when I write it down on paper, and it probably isn’t very important, anyway; but I think it’s rather interesting and exciting just the same, because after meeting her today I’m
sure
she’s the girl. I must have acted pretty strangely: I think I stared at her for a full ten seconds while I was trying to remember, but she said nothing. Was it because she recognized me, too? I’m almost sure of it! There was that look in her eyes when she turned around from the window—but I suppose I could have imagined that, as well, because it was four years ago and she saw me only for an instant. But then there was that remark she made about “breaking things.” A very faint allusion, perhaps, but possible.
And it
is
possible; because Bea told me earlier that she had been at the Lodge before—about four years ago! There was something intensely familiar, too, about the way she ran and danced. If only I had heard her laugh, I could be positive, I think; but she would not laugh all the while we were with her.
Should not have helped her to pick away those grass blades. Something not right about that, but what could I do? Remember Miss Behrendt making a similar request about burs in shoelaces, but how differently it was made! Tone of insolent command made it possible to refuse. But this was very different. What should I have said? “No, you’d better do it yourself”? Bob didn’t seem to feel there was anything unusual about it, though.
I can’t get down to this journal tonight. I think I’ll leave some blank space and fill it in later, when I feel more like it. Want to remember these:
The rain. Inscription on wall in her language. Spinning wheel. My story about Shelley—did not laugh. Running barefoot on the lawn. (Was she barefoot before? One thing I can’t remember. Feel less sure all the time that I ever saw her at all that day.) Dull meeting afterward. Bea cranky.
I must remember to buy a can of white enamel for my bed. It must be years since it was painted, because it’s turning brown and is all chipped off around the bottoms of the legs where the carpet sweeper has bumped into it. I hate sordid-looking beds.
Rain has stopped. Must get out and walk. Perhaps tomorrow I will make Lilith laugh.
This entry is followed by two blank pages which, my intentions notwithstanding, have never been filled in; and because of the importance of the day it is an omission which I feel I must amend in some detail. Fortunately, my delinquency as a journalist does not matter greatly here, as the events of that morning are fixed indelibly in my mind.
It was raining when I woke up—a very fine, cool rain that misted the kitchen windows and gave to objects outside, as I sat having coffee, a misshapen and somewhat mournful appearance. I remember particularly the look of an old small-wheeled sidewalk bicycle that had belonged to me when I was ten or twelve and which, in clearing out the storage shed at the back of the yard a few evenings before, I had left leaning against the cherry tree. It stood, dripping and ruined, under the dark tree, its handlebars warped mournfully by the wet pane, its saddle frayed and rotting and its wheels drawn out into the writhing oblates that one sees in fun-house mirrors, a deformed and derelict memento of my childhood. I remember that it made me feel quite sad. I walked to work through the rain, and as I never wear a hat my hair was soaked by the time I arrived at the Lodge. I sat rubbing it with brown-paper towels from the staff lavatory when Bea came up the outside steps into the shop.
“You ought to wear a hat,” she said.
“Yes, I guess I should.”
“You look very gloomy. Don’t you like the rain?”
“No, not since the war.”
“Because of flying in it?”
“Yes. The first thing we used to do when we woke up was to look at the sky; and when it’s raining now in the mornings I still feel sort of uneasy. About the only thing we used to pray for with real conviction was good weather.”
“We do, here, too,” Bea said. “Rainy days are hell, because they’ve all got to be kept indoors. The shop and floors are crowded and everyone’s in a nasty temper.” She stood her umbrella in the sink and, according to her daily custom, put a percolator on the little gas burner and measured several spoons of coffee into it; every morning, while the day’s schedule was discussed, we sprawled in the big leather armchairs and drank it out of paper cups. “It’s funny how rain affects many of these people,” she said, standing at the window when she had finished preparing the coffee and looking out at the wet grounds. “They’re so indifferent to external things, you wouldn’t expect it. The third and fourth floors are particularly restless on a day like this. I was going to send you up there this morning, but I think you’d better go to Second, instead. Bob’s going to work with Lilith Arthur this morning. You haven’t met her, have you?”
“No. The one with the flute?”
“Yes, I was telling you about her the other day. She’s a fascinating girl. She has one of the most perfectly constructed delusional systems of any patient on record here—or anywhere, I imagine. Usually a schizophrenic’s ‘other world’ is fragmentary, illogical and never very stable; but hers is astonishingly methodical and complete. She doesn’t just escape into a jumble of disorderly hallucinations; she’s constructed an entire universe for herself, with its own history, its own cosmology, its own laws and art, even its own language.” She nodded at my murmur of surprise and went on. “She’s literally invented a language of her own—a very good one, too, I understand, although I haven’t studied it—which she speaks and writes in most of the time. She’s even composed a literature in it for her private world—two or three novels, poems, stories, and a whole tradition of folk music, which she plays on her flute.”
“That must have been what I heard her playing the other day,” I said. “It was the strangest music I’ve ever heard.”
“Yes, it is strange. She’s made up a tonal system of her own, with quarter notes, something like the Oriental scale, I think. She makes her own clothes, too—even the cloth for some of them, on a loom in her room—paints remarkable pictures with vegetable colors which she extracts by hand, cooks when she’s allowed to—anything but meat, which she won’t touch—and practices a kind of private religion-magic. However mad it may sound, this is a tremendous creative achievement, and a wonderfully orderly and scientific one, which makes most of our own seem pretty trivial. I wonder sometimes if she shouldn’t just be allowed to enjoy it.”