“I don’t think you belong here, David,” she whispered. “I never thought you did. It’s a damn outrage and you’re absolutely right to be angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m dying. And I want to get out.”
“I never thought you deserved it. That’s why I came, to tell you. My plane leaves at three but I had to chance missing it to tell you and to see you. If there’s anything…” She swallowed a sob, covered her eyes for a moment. “That sounds so false. I’m sorry. But it’s so. If there’s anything I can do, any way I can stand up in your behalf, I will. It’s not a matter of family anymore. It’s a question of right and wrong and it’s plainly wrong for you to be punished any longer.” She started to get up but I held on to her arm.
“How did you know I was here?”
“Your father told me. Weeks ago. I called.”
“That must have been weird. Was it all right?”
“Your mother got on the line. She started to scream at me. Your father hung up and then I did. It was weird. I have to go. I want you to take care of yourself. You—”
“Does Jade have a baby yet? Is she all right?”
“She’s OK. Her husband was transferred to Brussels. She doesn’t much care for it. And no, they don’t have children.”
“Yet.”
“I don’t think she’s anxious to. I think I’ve queered her on motherhood.”
“What’s your book about?”
“Hugh. I’ll send you a copy.”
“Hugh?”
“You’re in it, too. But not as you. It’s not what you think. It’s about before. Falling in love with him. The beginning.” She stood up.
“It was very nice of you…” My head was dropping. I covered my eyes and then I was afraid to uncover them and find her already gone. I felt her hand on my shoulder. I stood.
“Don’t lose faith in yourself, David,” she said. We were standing very close; I could smell her perfume. I breathed deeply, drawing the scent into my blood.
“I don’t have any faith in myself.”
“Yes you do. You’ve just got to find it. It’s no wonder you can’t here. You’ve got to get out. You don’t belong here.” She reached up, put her hand against my face. She held me in her eyes for a moment; I wanted to hug her but something told me not to. I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. Ann stepped back, looked at me in the way you do when you want to commit someone to memory, and then she turned.
I watched her walk across the visitors’ room, toward the glass doors. Her shoulders were back and she was trying not to walk fast. In a moment she’d be gone.
“Thank you,” I called out to her, cupping my hands over my mouth like a man at sea.
She raised her hand without looking round. She waved goodbye with her fingers, lowering them one at a time, as if counting down. Five, four, three, two, one.
The next September my father died, at home, in his sleep. A massive heart attack, though I don’t know if it would have taken a huge shove to loosen his grip on life. As soon as he was gone, it was clear to me that he’d been preparing his own death since Barbara Sherwood’s. Rose came to Fox Run to break the news. We were alone in the visitors’ room, on a Wednesday. Her face looked utterly white, as if she were hovering in a state of semi- shock: there are windows in the wall separating life from death and when you peer through one of them it changes you. I knew something was wrong as soon as I sat next to Rose, and when she laid her cold, small hand on my wrist I was ready for the worst. It was already three days after the fact: Arthur died at eleven thirty Sunday night; his body, as per his promise, was already in the University of Chicago Medical School, “donated to science.” I felt too neglected, too behind the roll of events to cry. I felt only a deep soreness within, as might be caused by a disease.
A month later I was given a round of psychological tests. Nothing new. Adding columns of numbers. Who was the first President of the United States? What is the sun? Questions to see if my brains were addled, if my hold on reality was at all sequential and ordinary. Inkblot tests, complete-the-story tests, spatial perception tests, memory exercises, and finally a kind of Ph.D. oral in front of a panel of three psychiatrists, in which I spoke of myself and answered their questions. If you could have any job in the whole wide world, what would it be? If you loved a gal and she didn’t love you, what would you do? I was weak from the effort to appear normal, and I had even forced myself up toward a level of acuity in which I recognized that if my efforts were too apparent—or too successful—then I would be defeating myself. It was important to remain at all times vulnerable to their judgments of me; confidence and determination would be interpreted as symptoms of disassociation.
Two weeks after my round of tests, I was informed by Dr. Donner, who was supposed to be my psychiatrist, though I only saw him an hour and a half weekly, that I was fit to “take a crack” at being in the world again. He gave me several words of friendly advice, said I should “think seriously” about seeing a psychiatrist once I was released, that I should “feel free” to call on him if I had a problem I wanted to discuss, and that he hoped I’d learned about myself and how to deal with my problems while I was at Fox Run. “Especially with the hospital under constant attack by intolerant community people and opportunistic budget-cutters, it feels fine to be sending someone home with the feeling that we’ve done him a measure of good.”
And so I was released. I left Fox Run, walking across a bridge made of your marriage and Arthur’s death. I returned to the old apartment on Ellis, to recover from my long hospitalization and adjust to my freedom. I’d been through it all before, but what made it different was now I hadn’t the slightest illusion that everything might be transformed suddenly by the huge unreasonable magic of Reunion. I never once expected to see you from my window, even as I got out of the bed I’d slept in when I first joined my heart to you, the bed I had lain in in agony, waiting to rejoin you. When the phone rang I never thought it was you and the sight of the mailman shouldering his big leather pouch of letters and cards never tempted me to even wish. Arthur’s small estate had gone to Rose, but she divided it in half and so I was, for the first time in my life, solvent. Now, I could move out whenever I was ready, but I wasn’t ready. I needed to be home and Rose needed me there, too.
Jade. I don’t want to say it, I truly don’t…
It was difficult to find a job. I had a criminal record and it was worse for me to have been punished in a hospital than in a prison, in terms of how other people looked at me. I had very little education and not much of a work history. I was close to twenty-eight years old. I wanted a job in a large company, something to put me in contact with many people. Friends of the family tried to help but no one had anything for me; everyone was retired or simply too old to have much influence. I lived on my small legacy and took courses at Roosevelt University. It doesn’t matter what I took, though it wasn’t astronomy. I needed something that I was sure would help me find work and everyone told me that astronomers were having a very hard time of it.
On the good days, I felt like a shipwrecked man spotting the signs of some nearing but still invisible shore: a taste in the wind, a softness in the light, a sudden passage of gulls.
I hope this day finds you well. You don’t have to read a word of this, you know. I don’t want to make your husband nervous, or to embarrass you, or to make you remember things you’ve decided are best forgotten. I’ve come to the end, finally. Not of love. But of my power to say another word. I’ve no more need. My life is taking shape. I’m living with a woman and maybe someday we will marry, though I doubt it. She paints, too, by the way. Even better than you used to. She teaches at a university and is a full inch taller than I am. I won’t bother to tell you where I’m living now; it makes a more perfect sense for you not to know.