The Storm at the Door (4 page)

This is the morning of the day that will change everything, but the men and women of the Mayflower Home cannot yet know this. One, however, will later claim to have sensed a foreboding. At the top of the far side of the Depression, Professor Shlomi
Schultz sits at his mahogany desk in Upshire Hall, the grand old mad mansion. Years before, Upshire was dubbed the Harvard Club, and though it has never exactly been official hospital policy, the four corner rooms on the first floor, each ornate with the trappings of Victorian-era prosperity, each with soothing pastoral views, have been occupied by mad men who have attended the illustrious university, after which the Georgian colonial grandeur of Mayflower is modeled. In keeping with tradition, Professor Schultz is former Harvard faculty, once the P. A. McIyre Professor of Linguistics, before his schizophrenic condition intensified to the point that his colleagues concluded Schultz’s work had tilted past visionary, into the realm of the insane.

Initially, when Professor Schultz cryptically claimed to have discovered an unknown language, his colleagues had responded with an amalgam of curiosity, skepticism, jealousy, and worry. When, however, it became clear that this language was derived from sounds that only Schultz heard, they referred him to Mayflower, where he has remained for decades. But Schultz, having lost his family many years ago, does not mind his current position, does not perceive its indignity. For here, far from the demands of students and curricula, deans and symposia, he can focus singularly on his work. And the work couldn’t be going better. These days, nearly everything makes a sound, and each sound is composed of a variety of subsounds, all the way down to the screaming clouds of electrons around their nuclei.

Usually, Schultz tries to ignore that static always coming out of the upper atmosphere; he has grown accustomed to its fluctuating whine and muffled babble, just as the men of Ingersoll have grown accustomed to ignoring the television always chattering in the common area. But today there is a new sound, distant but insistent, which he cannot ignore.

Is your stomach readied to receive that gruel?

From a distance behind him, Frederick hears that famous voice, with its inescapable gravity. Frederick turns to face Robert Lowell.

Before Lowell, Frederick’s few encounters with the famous had invariably left him disappointed. Jerry Lewis at a USO show in Boston, an airplane ride shared with Mickey Mantle, Billy Wilder lecturing at Harvard. It had always been impossible to reconcile that which had so moved him, abstractly and at a distance, with the human-size person before him. But Lowell has proved rather the opposite of Frederick’s previous brushes with fame; he is grander in person than even his grand poetry. Lowell’s face is carved with a severity simultaneously biblical and Hollywood, not unlike that of Kirk Douglas. Even in Lowell’s overt madness, not a word or a gesture seems undetermined; his every movement can still appear guided by some nameless furious brilliance within. Even when Lowell is delusional, believing himself Christ, Milton, or Shakespeare, it can all seem part of his poetry, his poetry bursting beyond the language that cannot quite contain it, becoming his life itself. Even now, in this simple exchange, Frederick—the generative, the imposing, the brilliant Frederick—feels reduced to his childhood gangliness. Frederick glimpses himself as the sick boy he once was, withering to skeletal on his bed, trying to explain himself to his mother and the doctors, shamed to find himself without words.

Part of Frederick’s anxiety around Lowell, Frederick knows, derives from the unpredictable nature of Lowell’s attentions,
from Lowell’s imperviousness to Frederick’s charisma. Near Lowell, Frederick is struck with the troubling realization that, set in relief against Lowell’s true, recognized genius, his own minor genius is insufficient, perhaps not genius at all. Frederick wants to be taken into Lowell’s private machinations, to be the object of Lowell’s creative exertions, as he has been only once, on his first day at Mayflower.

Do you see the sign?
Lowell had approached Frederick that first morning with his arm extended, pointing to an empty white space near the entrance to Ingersoll.

Sign?
Frederick asked.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate
.

Excuse me?

Abandon all hope, ye who enter. Dante’s
Inferno.

Ah
, Frederick said.

Lowell took a step back from the new patient, his eyes traveling Frederick’s length, not so much in judgment, but as if to limn Frederick’s psychic affliction. Eventually, Lowell stated his conclusion in Latin.

Arma virumque cano
.

Frederick scrutinized the man before him for a moment before the recognition came. He had heard of the famous poet’s frequent sojourns at Mayflower but had not until this moment, not during all the vertiginous confusion of his admission, considered he would find Lowell here like this, simply another man on the ward. That first day had been one of Lowell’s
up days
, his arms flailing in his French sailor’s jersey, his eyes unfocused, his pupils occasionally disappearing into his skull, his hair jutting from his scalp in electrified tufts, as if charged by the profound wattage within.

I sing of arms and a man at war
, Frederick said.
Virgil
.

Lowell flashed Frederick a sly smile, leaned to his ear, and whispered,
I wrote that
.

Excuse me?

For the following two hours, Lowell had not let Frederick stray far beyond the span of his arms. In his unbrushed breath, Lowell spoke rapid Latin and Italian into Frederick’s ears, occasionally muttering to Frederick how grateful he was Frederick had come, how he recognized Frederick’s rare form of intelligence, how Frederick was just the sort of man he had been waiting for, to assist in his escape into a place that was his own, where he could begin his true poetry.

Lowell, the other men later told Frederick, has reacted similarly to a number of new patients, their newness their true appeal. Their newness, which implies a chance at revision. This, Frederick senses, is part of Lowell’s affliction and also his poetry, forever seeking exit from the chaos he carries through new forms, new friends, new lovers. Lowell can go to sleep fizzled, cracked, too worn to raise a brush to his leonine mane, then wake in a manic awareness, entirely other, believing himself the true author of
Paradise Lost
or
Hamlet
or the
Inferno
, all of which he seems to have memorized in entirety, all of which he believes in need of revision.

Frederick understands this in a way he would be too timid to admit to Lowell. With his eyes spinning in his skull, his manic mannerisms, could Lowell comprehend him anyway? Frederick, too, has taken new women, for no reason, he often realizes in retrospect, other than the newness they promise. There have been a shameful number, but Frederick never lets himself count. Perhaps, if he allowed himself to focus, he could remember what it was, those bourbon-stained nights, that each seemed to offer him. But when Frederick thinks of them now, all those women
and the sad, anarchic acts that began at lonesome, emptied bars, he generally remembers them as one, a single smear of exhilaration and failure, a collective otherness, moaning sullenly beneath him, the newness they had promised quickly disintegrating into the old familiar shame. He is sorry for Katharine, of course, but the memory of other women is most shameful not for his betrayal of his vows, but for the betrayal of a singular, knowable life that had once, with Katharine, seemed so possible.

Lowell does not wait for Frederick to respond. He surges ahead toward the dining hall, with its World War I bunker mode of drabness. Frederick follows, and, in the vacuous, scrubbed room, with its anachronistic long oak tables (seemingly borrowed from a nineteenth-century German beer garden), Frederick encounters the scene that never fails to remind him of the Eloi answering the Morlocks’ call in
The Time Machine
. Here, men and women, fearful of censure, drugged into compliance, line up for their morning servings. Invariably, some will protest the scene. Some will grow fearful, or suspicious, or simply rebellious. They will hurl food, cry out, smear pudding, beat a fellow patient or an orderly with a spoon. These patients, the others know, have signed their papers for a morning, if not a whole day, in the solitary ward, that squat concrete structure Frederick is grateful never to have entered, from which screams can echo all the way across the Depression. At meals, more than any other time, Frederick thinks of Mayflower’s success in rendering people into numbers.

Perhaps others receive this scene similarly. Pushed up to the table at which Frederick sits with his tray of dandelion yellow eggs and dry corned beef hash, Marshall gazes down at his food as if it were an illegible text. Marshall then lifts his head, looking about the cafeteria, as if trying to decipher its meaning. Then he
makes that gesture, common as a shrug in Mayflower: with his one arm, he clutches his skull and begins to cry. Later, Frederick will not have the energy for such social efforts. As soon as his stomach metabolizes the pills that wait for him at the end of breakfast, it will be difficult to muster a sentence. But, now, Frederick tries to cajole Marshall into a laugh.

This garbage isn’t even food
, Frederick says.
It’s simply prefecal matter
.

Marshall raises his face, and gives Frederick a look that is not quite sane, something unspeakable caught in his throat.

A half-catatonic named Stanley, sitting at the table’s far end, breakfasting on the only sustenance he allows, orange sherbet and ginger ale, barks a sound, like an engine turning, but failing to catch.

Trays are cleared. Pills are announced. The Eloi gather. Frederick, who has sworn to himself at least to try to avoid the dosage, panics at the face of the severe woman in the dispensary, and the large orderly who stands by the window, inspecting gums and mouth to make sure all prescriptions have been ingested. Frederick reminds himself that if he is to have any hope of freedom, then he must appear to obey, and sometimes that means he must actually obey. He capitulates, swallows. Already, it seems, he can feel it. He has already begun to submerge.

Frederick scrutinizes the words he has written into his journal. He still is not sure whether this is a part of a letter to Katharine, or something else. The incipit of a book, maybe. Frederick tries to write more, expecting another sentence to materialize, but none does. The Miltown is a warm, calm front pushing away the bracing bluster of his mind. Frederick rises from his bed, paces around the room, in a small fit, trying to will the medicine out of his awareness. But his words are trapped. Even his body feels trapped. An invisible molecular net has descended. And now, again, the ever-present question: how, drugged, left to long empty days, is one supposed to get better in such a place, when the omnipresence of the sedatives never admits clarity?

Dr. Wallace repeats what Frederick has just told him.

Arma virumque cano
, says Dr. Wallace.

Looking upon the old doctor sometimes reminds Frederick of reading the early Sherlock Holmes novels, or seeing Jimmy Cagney’s first gangster movies replayed on television: one’s first impulse is to laugh out loud at this perfect cultivation of cliché, but then consider the cliché’s origin, how the seemingly absurd character before him is in fact a progenitor of an archetype that has only recently, through countless imitations, come to seem absurd. Dr. Wallace possesses all the accoutrements of his illustrious, plush office: from elbow patches to tweed to mustache wax.

I sing of arms and a man at war
, Frederick says.
Virgil
.

Quite
, the doctor says.
Care to elaborate?

It’s just something Lowell said. I don’t know why it just came to me. It doesn’t mean anything
.

No?

Nope. Just trying to fill the time, like you
.

A man at war
, the doctor repeats thoughtfully.
Is that how it felt? How what felt?

Your life with Katharine and your daughters. All the responsibility. All the fighting. Did it feel like you were at war?

Frederick shrugs. In the past, in the first week or two here, he would have argued with Dr. Wallace, or at least managed a pithy, cutting reply. But this combativeness of his, justified though it may be, certainly got him no closer to release. Still, it is not as if he is capitulating now, not exactly. He has merely adjusted to the lethargy of this place, the futility of his words and actions. Frederick, almost antithetical to his character, lets certain things pass now, unremarked upon. Is this ennui, this distance from life, the sanity to which others want to force him? When he feels nothing, will he be released?

Diagonal ghosts, moted afternoon light through the flaking green slats of the venetian blinds, hover lazily behind Wallace.
Such light, it seems now, has come with Wallace every morning to this office in Upshire Hall since the late Victorian era, may hold the apparitions of all those mad Boston Brahmins who have hanged themselves, poisoned themselves, or simply faded on these bucolic grounds.