The Bell Jar (36 page)
Another tap woke me in the
frost-gray dawn.
This time I opened the door
myself.
Facing me was Doctor Quinn. She
stood at attention, like a frail drill sergeant, but her outlines seemed
curiously smudged.
“I thought you should know,”
Doctor Quinn said. “Joan has been found.”
Doctor Quinn’s use of the
passive slowed my blood.
“Where?”
“In the woods, by the frozen
ponds....”
I opened my mouth, but no words
came out.
“One of the orderlies found
her,” Doctor Quinn continued, “just now, coming to work....”
“She’s not...”
“Dead,” said Doctor Quinn. “I’m
afraid she’s hanged herself.”
A
fresh fall of snow blanketed the asylum grounds--not a Christmas
sprinkle, but a man-high January deluge, the sort that
snuffs out schools and offices and churches, and leaves, for a day or more, a
pure, blank sheet in place of memo pads, date books and calendars.
In a week, if I passed my
interview with the board of directors, Philomena Guinea’s large black car would
drive me west and deposit me at the wrought-iron gates of my college.
The heart of winter!
Massachusetts would be sunk in a
marble calm. I pictured the snowflaky, Grandma Moses villages, the reaches of
swampland rattling with dried cattails, the ponds where frog and hornpout
dreamed in a sheath of ice, and the shivering woods.
But under the deceptively clean
and level slate the topography was the same, and instead of San Francisco or
Europe or Mars I would be learning the old landscape, brook and hill and tree.
In one way it seemed a small thing, starting, after a six months’ lapse, where
I had so vehemently left off.
Everybody would know about me,
of course.
Doctor Nolan had said, quite
bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a
leper with a warning bell. My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale,
reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth
birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had
obviously decided to forgive me.
“We’ll take up where we left
off, Esther,” she had said, with her sweet, martyr’s smile. “We’ll act as if
all this were a bad dream.”
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar,
blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and
Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco’s diamond and the sailor on the
Common and Doctor Gordon’s wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the
Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and
the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind
snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They
were my landscape.
“A
man to see you!”
The smiling, snow-capped nurse
poked her head in through the door” and for a confused second I thought I
really was back in college and this spruce white furniture, this white view
over trees and hills, an improvement on my old room’s nicked chairs and desk
and outlook over the bald quad. “ A man to see you!” the girl on watch had
said, on the dormitory phone.
What was there about us, in
Belsize, so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying
in the college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars
of a sort.
“Come in!” I called, and Buddy
Willard, khaki cap in hand, stepped into the room.
“Well, Buddy,” I said.
“Well, Esther.”
We stood there, looking at each
other. I waited for a touch of emotion, the faintest glow. Nothing. Nothing but
a great, amiable boredom. Buddy’s khaki-jacketed shape seemed small and
unrelated to me as the brown posts he had stood against that day a year ago, at
the bottom of the ski run.
“How did you get here?” I asked
finally.
“Mother’s car.”
“In all this snow?”
“Well,” Buddy grinned, “I’m
stuck outside in a drift. The hill was too much for me. Is there anyplace I can
borrow a shovel?”
“We can get a shovel from one of
the groundsmen.”
“Good.” Buddy turned to go.
“Wait, I’ll come and help you.”
Buddy looked at me then, and in
his eyes I saw a flicker of strangeness--the same compound of curiosity and
wariness I had seen in the eyes of the Christian Scientist and my old English
teacher and the Unitarian minister who used to visit me.
“Oh, Buddy,” I laughed. “I’m all
right.”
“Oh, I know, I know, Esther,”
Buddy said hastily.
“It’s you who oughtn’t to dig
out cars, Buddy. Not me.”
And Buddy did let me do most of
the work.
The car had skidded on the
glassy hill up the asylum and backed, with one wheel over the rim of the drive,
into a steep drift.
The sun, emerged from its gray
shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes.
Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound
thrill it gives me to see trees and grassland waist-high under flood water--as
if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.
I was grateful for the car and
the snowdrift. It kept Buddy from asking me what I knew he was going to ask,
and what he finally did ask, in a low, nervous voice, at the Belsize afternoon
tea. DeeDee was eyeing us like an envious cat over the rim of her teacup. After
Joan’s death, DeeDee had been moved to Wymark for a while, but now she was
among us once more.
“I’ve been wondering...” Buddy
set his cup in the saucer with an awkward clatter.
“What have you been wondering?”
“I’ve been wondering...I mean, I
thought you might be able to tell me something.” Buddy met my eyes and I saw,
for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that
flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer’s bulb, his face was grave,
even tentative--the face of a man who often does not get what he wants.
“I’ll tell you if I can, Buddy.”
“Do you think there’s something
in me that
drives
women crazy?”
I couldn’t help myself, I burst
out laughing--maybe because of the seriousness of Buddy’s face and the common
meaning of the word “crazy” in a sentence like that.
“I mean,” Buddy pushed on, “I
dated Joan, and then you, and first you...went, and then Joan...”
With one finger I nudged a cake
crumb into a drop of wet, brown tea.
“Of course you didn’t do it!” I
heard Doctor Nolan say. I had come to her about Joan, and it was the only time
I remember her sounding angry. “Nobody did it.
She
did it.” And then
Doctor Nolan told me how the best of psychiatrists have suicides among their
patients, and how they, if anybody, should be held responsible, but how they,
on the contrary, do not hold themselves responsible....
“You had nothing to do with us,
Buddy.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well,” Buddy breathed. “I’m
glad of that.”
And he drained his tea like a
tonic medicine.
“I
hear you’re leaving us.”
I fell into step beside Valerie
in the little, nurse-supervised group. “Only if the doctors say yes. I have my
interview tomorrow.”
The packed snow creaked
underfoot, and everywhere I could hear a musical trickle and drip as the noon
sun thawed icicles and snow crusts that would glaze again before nightfall.
The shadows of the massed black
pines were lavender in that bright light, and I walked with Valerie awhile,
down the familiar labyrinth of shoveled asylum paths. Doctors and nurses and
patients passing on adjoining paths seemed to be moving on casters, cut off at
the waist by the piled snow.
“Interviews!” Valerie snorted.
“They’re nothing! If they’re going to let you out, they let you out.”
“I hope so.”
In front of Caplan I said
good-bye to Valerie’s calm, snowmaiden face behind which so little, bad or
good, could happen, and walked on alone, my breath coming in white puffs even
in that sun-filled air. Valerie’s last, cheerful cry had been
“So
long!
Be seeing you.”
“Not if I know it,” I thought.
But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure
at all. How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere,
anywhere--the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
And hadn’t Buddy said, as if to
revenge himself for my digging out the car and his having to stand by, “I
wonder who you’ll marry now, Esther.”
“What?” I’d said, shoveling snow
up onto a mound and blinking against the stinging backshower of loose flakes.
“I wonder who you’ll marry now,
Esther. Now you’ve been,” and Buddy’s gesture encompassed the hill, the pines
and the severe, snow-gabled buildings breaking up the rolling landscape,
“here.”
And of course I didn’t know who
would marry me now that I’d been where I had been. I didn’t know at all.
“I
have a bill here, Irwin.”
I spoke quietly into the
mouthpiece of the asylum pay phone in the main hall of the administration
building. At first I suspected the operator, at her switchboard, might be
listening, but she just went on plugging and unplugging her little tubes
without batting an eye.
“Yes,” Irwin said.
“It’s a bill for twenty dollars
for emergency attention on a certain date in December and a checkup a week
thereafter.”
“Yes,” Irwin said.
“The hospital says they are
sending me the bill because there was no answer to the bill they sent you.”
“All right, all right, I’m
writing a check now. I’m writing them a blank check.” Irwin’s voice altered
subtly. “When am I going to see you?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Very much.”
“Never,” I said, and hung up
with a resolute click.
I wondered, briefly, if Irwin
would send his check to the hospital after that, and then I thought, “Of course
he will, he’s a mathematics professor--he won’t want to leave any loose ends.”
I felt unaccountably weak-kneed
and relieved.