Mrs. Bannister helped me sit up.
"You"ll be better now. You"ll be better in no time. Would you like some hot milk?"
"Yes."
And when Mrs. Bannister held the cup to my lips, I fanned the hot milk out on my tongue as it went down, tasting it luxuriously, the way a baby tastes its mother.
"Mrs. Bannister tells me you had a reaction." Doctor Nolan seated herself in the armchair by the window and took out a tiny box of matches. The box looked exactly like the one I had hidden in the hem of my bathrobe, and for a moment I wondered if a nurse had discovered it there and given it back to Doctor Nolan on the quiet.
Doctor Nolan sc.r.a.ped a match on the side of the box. A hot yellow flame jumped into life, and I watched her suck it up into the cigarette.
"Mrs. B. says you felt better."
"I did for a while. Now I"m the same again."
"I"ve news for you."
I waited. Every day now, for I didn"t know how many days, I had spent the mornings and afternoons and evenings wrapped up in my white blanket on the deck chair in the alcove, pretending to read. I had a dim notion that Doctor Nolan was allowing me a certain number of days and then she would say just what Doctor Gordon had said: "I"m sorry, you don"t seem to have improved, I think you"d better have some shock treatments...."
"Well, don"t you want to hear what it is?"
"What?" I said dully, and braced myself.
"You"re not to have any more visitors for a while."
I stared at Doctor Nolan in surprise. "Why that"s wonderful."
"I thought you"d be pleased." She smiled.
Then I looked, and Doctor Nolan looked, at the wastebasket beside my bureau. Out of the wastebasket poked the bloodred buds of a dozen long-stemmed roses.
That afternoon my mother had come to visit me.
My mother was only one in a long stream of visitors--my former employer, the lady Christian Scientist, who walked on the lawn with me and talked about the mist going up from the earth in the Bible, and the mist being error, and my whole trouble being that I believed in the mist, and the minute I stopped believing in it, it would disappear and I would see I had always been well, and the English teacher I had in high school who came and tried to teach me how to play Scrabble, because he thought it might revive my old interest in words, and Philomena Guinea herself, who wasn"t at all satisfied with what the doctors were doing and kept telling them so.
I hated these visits.
I would be sitting in my alcove or in my room, and a smiling nurse would pop in and announce one or another of the visitors. Once they"d even brought the minister of the Unitarian church, whom I"d never really liked at all. He was terribly nervous the whole time, and I could tell he thought I was crazy as a loon, because I told him I believed in h.e.l.l, and that certain people, like me, had to live in h.e.l.l before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn"t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.
I thought if they left me alone I might have some peace.
My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong. She said she was sure the doctors thought she had done something wrong because they asked her a lot of questions about my toilet training, and I had been perfectly trained at a very early age and given her no trouble whatsoever.
That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I"d said.
My mother"s face puckered, and she looked ready to cry.
"But Esther, don"t you remember what day it is today?"
"No."
I thought it might be Saint Valentine"s day.
"It"s your birth birthday."
And that was when I had dumped the roses in the wastebasket.
"That was a silly thing for her to do," I said to Doctor Nolan.
Doctor Nolan nodded. She seemed to know what I meant.
"I hate her," I said, and waited for the blow to fall.
But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much, and said, "I suppose you do."
17.
"You"re a lucky girl today."
The young nurse cleared my breakfast tray away and left me wrapped in my white blanket like a pa.s.senger taking the sea air on the deck of a ship. The young nurse cleared my breakfast tray away and left me wrapped in my white blanket like a pa.s.senger taking the sea air on the deck of a ship.
"Why am I lucky?"
"Well, I"m not sure if you"re supposed to know yet, but today you"re moving to Belsize." The nurse looked at me expectantly.
"Belsize," I said. "I can"t go there."
"Why not?"
"I"m not ready. I"m not well enough."
"Of course, you"re well enough. Don"t worry, they wouldn"t be moving you if you weren"t well enough."
After the nurse left, I tried to puzzle out this new move on Doctor Nolan"s part. What was she trying to prove? I hadn"t changed. Nothing had changed. And Belsize was the best house of all. From Belsize people went back to work and back to school and back to their homes.
Joan would be at Belsize. Joan with her physics books and her golf clubs and her badminton rackets and her breathy voice. Joan, marking the gulf between me and the nearly well ones. Ever since Joan left Caplan I"d followed her progress through the asylum grapevine.
Joan had walk privileges, Joan had shopping privileges, Joan had town privileges. I gathered all my news of Joan into a little bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me.
Perhaps Joan would be gone when I got to Belsize.
At least at Belsize I could forget about shock treatments. At Caplan a lot of the women had shock treatments. I could tell which ones they were, because they didn"t get their breakfast trays with the rest of us. They had their shock treatments while we breakfasted in our rooms, and then they came into the lounge, quiet and extinguished, led like children by the nurses, and ate their breakfasts there.
Each morning, when I heard the nurse knock with my tray, an immense relief flooded through me, because I knew r was out of danger for that day. I didn"t see how Doctor Nolan could tell you went to sleep during a shock treatment if she"d never had a shock treatment herself. How did she know the person didn"t just look look as if he was asleep, while all the time, inside, he was feeling the blue volts and the noise? as if he was asleep, while all the time, inside, he was feeling the blue volts and the noise?
Piano music sounded from the end of the hall.
At supper I sat quietly, listening to the chatter of the Belsize women. They were all fashionably dressed and carefully made up, and several of them were married. Some of them had been shopping downtown, and others had been out visiting with friends, and all during supper they kept tossing back and forth these private jokes.
"I"d call Jack," a woman named DeeDee said, "only I"m afraid he wouldn"t be home. I know just where I could call him, though, and he"d be in, all right."
The short, spry blonde woman at my table laughed. "I almost had Doctor Loring where I wanted him today." She widened her starey blue eyes like a little doll. "I wouldn"t mind trading old Percy in for a new model."
At the opposite end of the room, Joan was wolfing her Spam and broiled tomato with great appet.i.te. She seemed perfectly at home among these women and treated me coolly, with a slight sneer, like a dim and inferior acquaintance.
I had gone to bed right after supper, but then I heard the piano music and pictured Joan and DeeDee and Loubelle, the blonde woman, and the rest of them, laughing and gossiping about me in the living room behind my back. They would be saying how awful it was to have people like me in Belsize and that I should be in Wymark instead.
I decided to put a lid on their nasty talk.
Draping my blanket loosely around my shoulders, like a stole, I wandered down the hall toward the light and the gay noise.
For the rest of the evening I listened to DeeDee thump out some of her own songs on the grand piano, while the other women sat round playing bridge and chatting, just the way they would in a college dormitory, only most of them were ten years over college age.
One of them, a great, tall, gray-haired woman with a booming ba.s.s voice, named Mrs. Savage, had gone to Va.s.sar. I could tell right away she was a society woman, because she talked about nothing but debutantes. It seemed she had two or three daughters, and that year they were all going to be debutantes, only she had loused up their debutante party by signing herself into the asylum.
DeeDee had one song she called "The Milkman" and everybody kept saying she ought to get it published, it would be a hit. First her hands would clop out a little melody on the keys, like the hoofbeats of a slow pony, and next another melody came in, like the milkman whistling, and then the two melodies went on together.
"That"s very nice," I said in a conversational voice.
Joan was leaning on one corner of the piano and leafing through a new issue of some fashion magazine, and DeeDee smiled up at her as if the two of them shared a secret.
"Oh, Esther," Joan said then, holding the magazine, "isn"t this you?"
DeeDee stopped playing. "Let me see." She took the magazine, peered at the page Joan pointed to, and then glanced back at me.
"Oh no," DeeDee said. "Surely not." She looked at the magazine again, then at me. "Never!"
"Oh, but it is is Esther, isn"t it, Esther?" Joan said. Esther, isn"t it, Esther?" Joan said.
Loubelle and Mrs. Savage drifted over, and pretending I knew what it was all about, I moved to the piano with them.
The magazine photograph showed a girl in a strapless evening dress of fuzzy white stuff, grinning fit to split, with a whole lot of boys bending in around her. The girl was holding a gla.s.s full of a transparent drink and seemed to have her eyes fixed over my shoulder on something that stood behind me, a little to my left. A faint breath fanned the back of my neck. I wheeled round.
The night nurse had come in, unnoticed, on her soft rubber soles.
"No kidding," she said, "is that really you?"
"No, it"s not me. Joan"s quite mistaken. It"s somebody else."
"Oh, say it"s you!" DeeDee cried.
But I pretended I didn"t hear her and turned away.
Then Loubelle begged the nurse to make a fourth at bridge, and I drew up a chair to watch, although I didn"t know the first thing about bridge, because I hadn"t had time to pick it up at college, the way all the wealthy girls did.
I stared at the flat poker faces of the kings and jacks and queens and listened to the nurse talking about her hard life.
"You ladies don"t know what it is, holding down two jobs," she said. "Nights I"m over here, watching you...."
Loubelle giggled. "Oh, we"re good. We"re the best of the lot, and you know it."
"Oh, you"re you"re all right." The nurse pa.s.sed round a packet of spearmint gum, then unfolded a pink strap from its tinfoil wrapper herself. all right." The nurse pa.s.sed round a packet of spearmint gum, then unfolded a pink strap from its tinfoil wrapper herself. "You"re "You"re all right, it"s those b.o.o.bies at the state place that worry me off my feet." all right, it"s those b.o.o.bies at the state place that worry me off my feet."
"Do you work in both places then?" I asked with sudden interest.
"You bet." The nurse gave me a straight look, and I could see she thought I had no business in Belsize at all. "You wouldn"t like it over there one bit, Lady Jane."
I found it strange that the nurse should call me Lady Jane when she knew what my name was perfectly well.
"Why?" I persisted.
"Oh, it"s not a nice place, like this. This is a regular country club. Over there they"ve got nothing. No OT to talk of, no walks...."
"Why haven"t they got walks?"
"Not enough em-ploy-ees." The nurse scooped in a trick and Loubelle groaned. "Believe me, ladies, when I collect enough do-re-mi to buy me a car, I"m clearing out."
"Will you clear out of here, too?" Joan wanted to know.
"You bet. Only private cases from then on. When I feel like it...."
But I"d stopped listening.
I felt the nurse had been instructed to show me my alternatives. Either I got better, or I fell, down, down, like a burning, then burnt-out star, from Belsize, to Caplan, to Wymark and finally, after Doctor Nolan and Mrs. Guinea had given me up, to the state place next door.
I gathered my blanket round me and pushed back my chair.
"You cold?" the nurse demanded rudely.
"Yes," I said, moving off down the hall. "I"m frozen stiff."
I woke warm and placid in my white coc.o.o.n. A shaft of pale, wintry sunlight dazzled the mirror and the gla.s.ses on the bureau and the metal doork.n.o.bs. From across the hall came the early-morning clatter of the maids in the kitchen, preparing the breakfast trays.
I heard the nurse knock on the door next to mine, at the far end of the hall. Mrs. Savage"s sleepy voice boomed out, and the nurse went in to her with the jingling tray. I thought, with a mild stir of pleasure, of the steaming blue china coffee pitcher and the blue china breakfast cup and the fat blue china cream jug with the white daisies on it.
I was beginning to resign myself.
If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.