The Storm at the Door (10 page)

Frederick
.

It was a strange argument, if that’s even what it could be called, one that alternated forms of discourse. It was also punctuated with pregnant pauses, Katharine beginning sentences then stopping herself. While Frederick had been composing volumes on what to say, Katharine, apparently, had been practicing what not to say, knowing well her husband’s ability to burrow into conversational fissures, to force apart, through logic or sentiment, any weakness she demonstrated, leaving her outwardly complaisant and inwardly furious. This time she would not allow that victory. Katharine reminded herself that she was the sane one.
Manic-depressives can present a persuasive logic
, Dr. Wallace had told her,
which is why it’s best not to speak to him until we feel he is better
. No one had yet told Katharine that her husband was better.

I’ve already spoken with Dr. Wallace
, Katharine said.
He doesn’t think you are ready
.

What else can I say?

Silence.

What else can I say? I don’t belong here
.

These people are professionals
, Katharine said.
Don’t you think they might know better than you?

Might know what better?

Whether or not you are well?

Is that what you think? You think that I’m crazy?

I didn’t say crazy. But you know that things have been a little—

Goddamn it, Katharine. Now you too? It’s the world that’s gone crazy. The whole world that has gone goddamned nutso!

Frederick knows well Katharine’s sensitivity to anger. An accommodating woman, Katharine can be inordinately overwhelmed by any display of aggression. Such anger is so far beyond the range of what she is capable, it can make her feel that she must have done wrong, must be in the wrong. But, after nearly twenty years of marriage, Katharine also knows that Frederick knows this. Katharine then remembered—in a way she likely would not if Frederick were there, in the room with her—that this was merely one of his tactics. She was proud of what she said next, remained proud of it for days.

This is what I’m talking about. Most people don’t need to resort to rage just because someone disagrees with them. That is what children do
.

Children?
Frederick yelled, or at least whispered with the intensity of a yell, careful not to alert the matronly orderly, who had already, during Frederick’s last tirade, given him a skeptical glance.

Frederick’s anger was not then a tactic, as it often had been in the past. Often, as he berates, he feels paradoxically calmed. In those moments, as he assaults with hurricane fury, his mind is as calm and resolved as a storm’s eye. But just then, as he spoke to Katharine, his rage projected both outward and inward. He was shaking now, had to press the phone to his cheek to keep the receiver at his ear.
Whether or not you are well
.

Many times, both privately and in conversations with the other men of Ingersoll, Frederick has repeated that common madman’s refrain:
it is the world that is crazy
. Perhaps. And yet, why deny it now? There was something else. Something that, at certain moments, suddenly opened and unleashed terror. Within him, in some space he tries never to perceive, there is something vast and nameless, something he knows he can never quite comprehend. Perhaps the world is crazy; perhaps this vast, unnameable
chaos he perceives is the truth. Perhaps others feel it as well, the true unreckonable entropy of things, and those who are called mad only receive it more acutely.

The vast unknowable something: it is a consumptive, obliterating fathomlessness, but also a place of radiance, of astonishment, and of eternal complexity. And it is what Frederick senses is to blame for all of his failures. Into the vacuum of itself, it has drawn everything that once seemed so simple and complicated it irreversibly. Occasionally, in moments like this, he glimpses it in its stunning largeness, its incontrovertible demands. But Frederick knows he must not look at it, must not contemplate it, for it is beyond words and beyond reckoning. To keep himself from it, Frederick has done all the terrible things he has done: yelled, fought, starved himself to nothing, taken other women, drunk himself to stupor, night after night. Conversely, all the good that he has ever felt has, in some way, borne a relation to it. All he has accomplished in his career, the birth of his daughters, the people he has tried to love: all have seemed to promise respite, something good and knowable to obstruct the vast dark thing.

He wanted, then, to say this to Katharine. He wanted to find a way to say that it was only once, only with her that he sensed something else, the promise of something as vastly good, as vastly knowable as the terror of the unknowable thing. Something that might, at last, throw light into that darkness. But now, the dark something had consumed that promise too.

Katharine
, Frederick eventually said,
I don’t think this place could ever give me—
and then his voice faltered.

Give you what?

Frederick did not know exactly how to describe it. What exactly he requires is perhaps as unnameable as the thing itself. Maybe the word
clarification
is closest, but it seems entirely insufficient,
a laughably shabby symbol of that measureless need, the little word—
clarity
—like a battered church advertisement on a country road, falsely promising redemption. And, anyway, exactly what clarification did he think anyone could provide? Did he really believe that others progressed through life as singular characters in some story they knew would reach meaningful conclusion?

Maybe. Certainly, a few individuals he had known seemed to possess this gift of confidence. George Carlyle, the eldest of his daughters, his mother: he did not understand how, at all times, these people remained so entirely themselves. Frederick, at any moment, could be one or more of many things: malevolent, loving, brilliant, drunk, visionary. The opening of potential selves like first kisses that soon fail to deliver what they seemed to promise.

I want to make love to you
, he said, the last word coming with a chuckle.

More silence. Non sequiturs, particularly of a lascivious nature, had always been a part of the charm he cultivated. Until recently, Katharine had been excited at these random proclamations of desire, perhaps even saw his spontaneity as evidence of brilliance. Had this hospitalization changed all that? Instead of brilliance and vitality, did she now see only symptoms of the illness the doctors had convinced her that he possessed? Or was she simply angry?

Susie wants to say hi
.

And then his daughters took their turns with the phone, each effusive, ebullient, gabbing. Each voice lanced Frederick with a new wound. They all echoed back his sentiments of missing them, loving them, but this sadness was different than with
Katharine, not a sadness of schism and misapprehension, but a sadness of lost time. When each picked up the phone, he instantly entered their lives in medias res, as they narrated the triumphs and frustrations of the last hours, as if he had simply come home from work and sat down at the table for dinner.

Mary Catherine kissed Brad on the mouth Mrs. Garrett won’t let us have snacks anymore my armpits smell like chicken soup, but Mum thinks I’m too young for deodorant Mum won’t make lasagna but she makes everybody else’s favorites Ooo ooo Daddy Daddy I have to show you the turtle I drew my tummy hurts can you tell Mum that I can’t go to school Brad thinks it’s weird that my dad is in a nuthouse but then I tell him that his dad is a drunk and sleeping with his secretary when are you coming home?

Time, stories, information passing like all unaccounted moments, like the squirrel in his business, the light tube’s glowing gases, the careless lazy sunlight. Everything beyond continues in its immeasurable vastness; Frederick is still confined here, in a mental hospital.

It is one o’clock now. Outside, the clouds keep drifting, the grass continues to blanch and die, the squirrels persist in their scurrying rodent dramas. Inside, in the common room of Ingersoll House at the Mayflower Home, time has been partitioned into schedules. The next sixty minutes will be given to a group therapy
session, every man required to attend. Canon, naturally, will helm the session himself.

The assembly of Ingersoll men before Canon can be parsed like a family sitting nightly at the table: power, alliances, needs suggested by where men place themselves. Bobbie sits at the very front by himself, raising hand from crotch, if ever Canon asks who would like to speak. Arranged in a circle around and just behind Bobbie are the marginally mad, seven or eight men, including Schultz, Marvin, Frederick, and sometimes, as today, Lowell. The others, the catatonics and the ravers and the geriatrics, the men who ornament the halls with their frozen bodies and provide the howling ambience one expects in a madhouse, stand and sit at the periphery in their Greek choral way. Canon’s progress with these catatonics has been, as Canon himself admits in his notes, sluggish. Many of them simply sit where they are placed, no more or less a part of the meeting than they are on the third moon of Neptune.

All right
, Canon says.
Last time, we were talking about Stanley’s mother, and her abusive tendencies
.

Among the catatonics, Stanley stands apart in his strange form of silence. Sixty-year-old Harvard alum Stanley, without explanation, rises every morning to attend fastidiously to his appearance: pomading his hair, donning an elaborate crimson and gold fedora, scenting his palms, carefully folding a handkerchief into the pocket of his blazer. And after all these morning exertions, he remains nearly motionless and silent for the balance of his day. Last session, Canon alone had discussed an absent man’s biography, while Stanley stared pensively into the middistance, haunted by some private phantasmagoria—who knows what? Perhaps an army of multicolor hedgehogs bent on his destruction.

Okay, then
, Canon says, finding Stanley as unreceptive as the session before.
Why don’t we move along to you, Professor Schultz?

Schultz looks up from his journal with a receptive smile.

One topic, Professor, we have yet to raise with the group I know will be a sensitive one. But I think it’s essential we all help you address it. So we can work on finally getting you back to Harvard, where I know you are still missed
.

Yes, yes
, agrees Schultz.

Lowell and Frederick narrow their eyes at each other. Both are already a little furious at Canon, with the anticipation of this intrusion, his airing of Schultz’s concealed history. Also, both are curious.

That topic, Professor, is your family
.

My family?
Schultz says.

His family?
Frederick thinks.

Already, Schultz has begun to metamorphose. Kindly, tranquil Schultz suddenly clutches himself. He binds his arms to his face, his tweed sleeves absorbing—what? Tears? Fury? Fear?

It is the past, Professor Schultz. Remember that. It cannot hurt you more than it already has. Now listen, your family is gone but—

At once, Schultz completes his transformation. In all the weeks Frederick has known him, the lines of Schultz’s body—his clavicles, his twin femurs, his elbows, the crook of his neck—have pointed inward, toward a spot near his heart. Schultz has been obsessed by his work, and has built of it a strange mind-grotto, a place in which he dwells. But now, with Canon’s mere reference to Schultz’s vanished family, Schultz suddenly inverts: arms, legs, chin flung outward; a posture of remarkable grandeur, which, in conjunction with the bizarre utterances that he then speaks, evokes, unmistakably, a wizard.

Acalama Maakala danud faluuk!
Schultz rages.

Bitoola Kistera!
he continues, before happening to fall into his chair. He instantly slackens with such abandon, like a marionette clipped from its strings, that he would have fallen right to the floor, had the chair not happened to intervene.

Or maybe not a wizard so much as a Pentecostal. Receiving holy fire from the heavens in a fit of babble, a temporary articulation in some nonsense language.

Soon, however, Schultz resumes a variation of his perpetual mutter.

You are truly an A-grade asshole
, Frederick, resolute, tells Canon.
It’s too bad for Germany that they didn’t have you in the forties. But I’m sure you’ll meet all those fellas someday
.

This, Frederick often thinks, is one of his true gifts. In moments of rage, where others falter, where voices waver and words fail, the right words often come to him.

Oh, Mr. Merrill, if you feel like participating—

Oh, let’s
, Frederick says.

Ohhhhh let’s. Ohhhh let’s
, echoes one of the catatonics in a baritone, like the bass section of a barbershop quartet.

What I’d like to discuss is what brought you to us in the first place
.

Absolutely
, Frederick replies.
A New Hampshire squad car, driven by an officer who looked as if he was not quite finished with high school, perhaps prepubescent
.

Some of the half-mad laugh, flattering and emboldening to Frederick that Lowell is among them. For a passing moment, perhaps indistinguishable from a cough, Canon also appears to laugh. But likely this is only a display to keep the group within his emotive grasp, to let them know that he understands this attempt at humor, but that there are more important things at stake than a good laugh.

I know that you use humor to mask your anxiety. It’s a very common defense mechanism. But what I’d like you to speak about are the events leading up to this incident in New Hampshire. The concerns of your friends and your family. Why, for example, your wife thought this was the best place for you
.

You goddamned—
Frederick begins.
And who are you? You’re a feebleminded paper pusher who has tricked—