My belief in the truth of my love for Jade as a higher and untouchable truth kept me from the despair that clawed at the hearts of many of the patients, but it also meant that after a full year in Rockville I was still very much there and had no immediate prospects of release. Ted Bowen (working without pay, refusing the money my parents tried to press on him, and neglecting to deposit the checks they mailed to his office on Oak Street) made a number of appeals to Judge Rogers, trying to get my so-called parole commuted, but it was clear (though Rose and Arthur tried to conceal this) that my leaving Rockville wasn’t being seriously considered.
A few days after the first anniversary of my institutionalization, Rose and Arthur appeared for their Saturday visit. It was mid-September. The first touches of slate were in the sky and though Rockville’s soft golf-coursey lawn was green, its best life was gone. I still lived with a student’s attentiveness to seasons—the first cool day always made me think of the crisp promise of blank notebooks, good intentions, new teachers, reunions with friends—and the panic and despair I felt at not being set free cut deeper because it was September. The world was changing and I was not.
Rose and Arthur always seemed ill at ease and a little pathetic when they came to Rockville. They did not, of course, believe in psychiatric cures. It would have been more to their way of thinking to send neurotic teenagers into a state forest to do a little conservation work, or perhaps a year on an assembly line to ground short-circuited emotions. And the high-priced Rockville with its necessarily privileged clientele might have been invented to stimulate my parents’ scorn. They also felt the ego tenderness of most parents whose child sees a psychiatrist: they were sure I said awful things about them. They feared that I talked about their long time in the Communist Party (which I did) and that I portrayed them as cruel and uncaring (which I did not). They walked the halls of Rockville with unnaturally soft footsteps, as thief-like as my own when I used to return home at six in the morning from Jade’s. They wore dark clothing and spoke barely above a whisper if anyone else was remotely near. Dr. Clark avoided them, which frightened them in one way, but was also a relief. They’d read Clark’s book, Adolescence and Agonia, and it disturbed them. It was a chatty, aphoristic book, which enjoyed a mild success. There were no copies of it in Rockville but I subsequently read it and could scarcely recognize in it the stern, skeptical man who treated me—it was faintly anarchist in tone and put forward such suggestions as parents giving their children complete control over them one day a week. (“He writes books?” I said, one visit. “Well, it can’t be for the dough. He makes a fortune right here.” This was just the kind of cheap remark my parents needed to hear and Rose gave me a little squeeze on the arm and said, “That’s the spirit.”)
This time, however, Rose and Arthur were more uneasy than usual. I thought at first that they shared my desperation over a full year’s passing, but something in their muffled voices, stiff gestures, and coolish, guilty eyes made me suspect that their unhappiness was rooted in something more specific than despair. They looked absolutely miserable. And then I knew in an icy, uncaring instant that their unhappiness had nothing to do with me, that it was between the two of them, and that it was connected to the death of feelings between them. Once, when Rose showed up alone for a visit, she hinted briefly that the story of my father being in bed with the flu wasn’t entirely true, and the one time Arthur appeared without Rose he said quite explicitly that without her he and I might be able to speak more freely, more meaningfully. (We didn’t; he took me to the town, fed me, and then took me to a deserted back road he’d “discovered” and let me drive the car—I tried to scare him by speeding into the sunset but he just leaned back and smiled: it was so odd.) Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own. I sat in the nautical-style desk chair in my little room and looked at Rose and Arthur seated on the edge of my single bed. Arthur plucked at the nubby spread and Rose poked about her purse for Sen-Sen, and I saw that my absence had robbed them of their last excuse to remain together.
“I’ve got an idea,” Arthur was saying. “Why don’t we go to that old farmhouse we pass on our way out here?” He was looking at Rose, but now he turned to me. “It’s been preserved, nothing changed since eighteen twenty-something. All the original furniture, everything. It might be interesting.”
“Sounds like it could be fun,” Rose said. She said it with a frown, as if to put us on notice: even if she enjoyed the antique farmhouse, her spirits would remain low.
“Why do we have to go anywhere?” I asked. “It’s always a drag. You two spend half the day driving down here and then as soon as you arrive we get in the car and drive some more.”
“We don’t have to go anywhere,” Arthur said. “It’s a beautiful day. We can walk around here.”
“I’d think you’d want to get out and see the world for a couple hours,” Rose said.
“It doesn’t make any difference to me. A guy who’s here has a pretty fair telescope back home and his parents are bringing it next week. There’s pretty good visibility here at night and as we all know I have a lot of time, especially at night. The nights are nice and long and we have supper at five thirty so that gives us even more time at night. You have no idea how much of it we have, time.”
“I hate when you get like this,” said Rose.
“Like what?”
She shook her head.
“Like what?” I repeated.
“You’re not the only one in the world who’s upset about this whole situation.”
“Drop it, you two,” said Arthur. Suddenly, his psychological politics seemed more clumsy and transparent than ever: how he loved to place himself between Rose and me, as if only he kept us from killing each other. It was true, he had stopped my mother and me from fighting countless times, yet he had never brought us closer and the distance he allowed us to maintain was as important as the truces. “I think we should get some fresh air. Before long, winter.” He pressed his lips together and swallowed; he hadn’t meant to suggest that another season lay in wait for me.
“Of course we couldn’t simply sit around,” I said. “We couldn’t talk. Tha’s what was so amazing to me about the…” I paused, letting my parents become anxious about the taboo that was about to be broken “…the Butterfields. To be with a family that actually talked to one another.”
“That’s a new one,” said Rose.
“It’s not a new one. You remember what you remember and I remember what really happened,” I said. “After all, I’ve had more of an occasion to talk about the past and remember it. Professional help, you know. The Butterfields were interested in each other and there was nothing you couldn’t say. You weren’t asked not to mention things and if you said something that maybe wasn’t so nice you weren’t told, ‘That’s not a nice thing to say.’ We always lost track of the time because I’d be talking or Ann would or one of the boys…or anyone else. Everyone talked and everyone listened and you had ideas and thoughts and feelings you never had anywhere else because there was nowhere else where anyone would care or would listen.”