The Long Journey Home (20 page)

“Yes, John,” I acknowledged. “It is.”

W
HEN
I
TRY TO REMEMBER EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED AROUND THE TIME
I left John and was eventually committed to Northampton State Hospital, I find many things lost in the blaze of tumultuous feelings. What was clear to me was that, after being with him almost seventeen years, I was leaving him.

After I’d told John, he’d phoned a fellow professor in Amherst, asking him to come out and bring his gun. He was drunk and threatening to shoot himself. I took Chris to Paula’s. John Elder was away with friends. From Paula’s, I called John’s closest friend, Ed Gettier, and told him that I was leaving John and asked him to please come to the house.

When I got home from Paula’s, I found John in the bedroom. He announced that he was going to go out and kill himself by crashing the car as Matthew had done. I wrestled the car keys from his hands, and he collapsed onto the bed. Ed arrived a few minutes later. John calmed himself in Ed’s presence.

“I hope you can find help for him,” I said. “I hope to God you can.”

Ed helped John get his clothes and toiletries together. Then he
walked with him to the car, steadying him as they walked. He told me he’d get John to a motel and then call for help from there.

Later Ed told me that he’d called Dr. Loescher, our family doctor, who suggested that he call Dr. Roseman, a well-known psychiatrist in the area, but Dr. Roseman was on one of his frequent trips to his guru in India. He had left a Dr. Turcotte on call. Dr. Turcotte called me early the next morning.

“Mrs. Robison?”

“This is Margaret Robison.”

“This is Dr. Rodolph Turcotte,” he announced. “Do you love your husband?”

“Yes,” I replied without thinking.

Then I remembered when, years ago in Philadelphia, John’s therapist had told me: “If I were your therapist, I would tell you to run like hell. But I’m his therapist, and I say to you that his life depends on your staying.”

My mind snapped back to the present. “But I can no longer live with him,” I said.

Dr. Turcotte asked if I’d be willing to meet him at the Howard Johnson’s Restaurant by the Town House Motor Lodge out from Northampton on Route 5.

I thought it was odd to meet a doctor in a restaurant.

“I believe this meeting is important to you as well as to your husband.” He paused. “This separation has to be handled safely.”

At least he was talking about separation, not reconciliation.

“Your husband could well be homicidal,” he said.

I was impressed that he actually saw the potential for violence with John that so many others were blind to, and I agreed to meet him.

The cashier at the restaurant pointed Dr. Turcotte out to me. He was seated alone in a booth by the front window, papers scattered on the table in front of him. He hadn’t shaved in at least a couple of days, and his clothes were as rumpled as if he’d slept in them, if he’d
slept at all. His hair was straight, thick, and almost completely white. When he got up to greet me I was surprised to see that he wasn’t the tall man I’d imagined him to be, but short and stocky, with a long torso.

“Mrs. Robison?” He extended his hand.

I took it. Then I sat down opposite him. He began to talk rapidly, without pause. He talked about how his wife didn’t understand him and about how she undermined rather than supported him.
Why is he telling me these things?
I thought. Still, I listened. He told me about being unfairly fired from various positions, and how he’d become a scapegoat everyplace he’d lived. He told me about his friendship with Father Gray, a prominent and respected Catholic priest, and about how the priest had investigated the various charges against him and discovered that all were unfounded.

He told me that the Clarke School for the Deaf was being put up for sale and that he intended to buy it. No, he didn’t have the money, but he was sure he could find financial backing from other people who believed in miracles, and who believed in him.

He talked with more enthusiastic determination than I’d ever witnessed. He would create his own hospital, where things could be done his way, where people would be cured, not crippled. He talked about how essential the expression of anger was to the healing process, and how important it was for the patient to talk. In his hospital, people would be paid to listen to the patients talk—talk about any and everything, but to talk. He told me a great deal about his beliefs concerning mental health, but what I remember most vividly now is his contagious enthusiasm. Many rooms of the Town House Motor Lodge, he explained, were filled with his patients—all people in extreme crisis—and he and his staff were working almost around the clock.

I told him that I knew that while John did cruel and violent things, I believed the good in John was in exact proportion to the bad, that the behaviors were simply two sides of the same coin.

“You’re a very religious woman,” Dr. Turcotte responded.

I recoiled, my mind flooded with the many judgmental, hellfire-damnation sermons I’d endured in my life. “No, I’m not religious. This is just something I’ve found to be true of human nature. I’m sure as hell not going to jump on some church bandwagon,” I retorted.

He laughed. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“Now,” he said, “I belong to the Catholic Church, but I call myself a positive Catholic.” He poured cream into his coffee and stirred it.

That Dr. Turcotte was a “positive Catholic” seemed to be another of the unexpected connections that I was experiencing almost daily now.

I was raised a Southern Baptist, filled with guilt and a sense of not belonging. When I married John, I joined the Presbyterian Church. Both John and I eventually stopped attending church altogether. I didn’t miss what the church had to offer and for many years attended no church at all. After we moved to New England, I went to the Amherst Unitarian Church, not because I was a Unitarian—I wasn’t—but because of the minister, a black man who taught English at a college in Vermont. His use of literature as well as his large spirit and compassion fed my soul. But it wasn’t enough. As my marriage grew closer and closer to the crisis that would result in me leaving John, my spiritual hunger grew more insistent.

It was that hunger that had led me to go to Puebla de Los Angeles—the City of Angels—in Mexico the year before. I’d gone there purely because of the city’s name, and the fact that it had so many churches. All of my life I’ve thought in images. In Puebla de Los Angeles I drew strength from the statue of the Virgin Mary that stood in the sanctuary of every church, row upon row of candles burning at her feet. Hers was the first image I knew that suggested a connection with the female to the divine. I needed to see a woman venerated; I needed the images of Puebla de Los Angeles to connect more fully with myself.

Now I was sitting across the table from this extremely unconventional-looking man with his unconventional beliefs who had also found something grounding and nourishing in the Catholic Church. For all his strangeness, I felt a sense of familiarity. Perhaps the feeling had to do with a mirroring of our common—as yet unacknowledged—manic states. Whatever the reasons, I felt an immediate connection with this psychiatrist I met at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant because Dr. Jack Roseman was in India at the feet of his guru.

The waitress came and asked if I wanted to order.

“A cup of black coffee,” I said.

When she brought it, I lit a cigarette before taking my first sip. I sat back and listened to Dr. Turcotte as he explained something about the nature of men as he understood it. Especially, he talked about their aggressive and possessive behaviors. He said that it wouldn’t be safe for me to simply leave John. Because of Dr. Turcotte’s general belief system, or because of what he’d observed of John’s behavior, or both, he was convinced that John might kill me and possibly one or both of the boys before he would let me go.

A hard chill moved through me as recognition of that possibility registered in my body. I’d lived with my own private fear of John’s potential violence for many years, to say nothing of the actual physical violence. But to have someone else confirm that fear and put it into words made it more real. I felt cold. I also felt relieved. Alone, I’d been to therapists in Pittsburgh and one in Northampton. Of all the therapists John and John Elder and I had been to together, Dr. Turcotte was the first to recognize these things about John.

He said that he believed the wise thing for me to do would be to come to John’s room in the motel each day, and he would encourage John, under his supervision, to discharge his anger toward me. Which I did, beginning the next day.

Most of the anger John expressed was about my leaving him, breaking up the home he’d built, and destroying his life. I sat across from him and listened as he yelled at me, the doctor encouraging him to express more anger the moment he paused. There was no talk at all, just explosion after explosion of anger. One of the doctor’s helpers sat between us to protect me in case John became physically violent.

After most sessions, I went to the upstairs conference room with Dr. Turcotte to review what had happened and to bolster my shaky, unstable self. An hour of John’s anger left me feeling like one of those stuffed dolls with the rounded bases that carnivalgoers throw balls at and topple again and again.

It was in the same conference room many weeks later that I met with Dr. Turcotte, John’s father, Jack, and his only brother, Bob. Dr. Turcotte had called Jack to tell him that he’d committed John to the state mental hospital, and Jack and Bob had flown up from Atlanta. We sat around the table while the doctor explained what he was doing for treatment besides keeping him confined in the hospital until he recovered from his psychotic episode. John’s drinking had gotten completely out of control, and he’d been threatening suicide. He’d smashed every piece of glass he could get his hands on—drinking glasses shattered on the bathroom floor, the water pitcher hurled against the tile wall above the tub. He’d broken Coke bottles into chunky shards in the tub. And intending to hit me, John had slammed his fist into a car’s fender. Psychotic, he was also trying to call people in the office of Georgia’s governor to help him get out of the country and to someplace in Africa. It was at that point that the doctor had him committed to Northampton State Hospital. Until his brief interlude there, John had spent most of the summer in the motel, while his colleagues in the philosophy department were taking turns teaching his classes.

“We’re defusing a bomb,” Dr. Turcotte explained to Jack and Bob.

Jack lit a cigarette and flipped the match into the ashtray.

“You see, Margaret comes here every day and under my supervision John gets his anger out at her by degrees. It wouldn’t be safe for her to just leave him. He’d most likely track her down and kill her.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and exhaled a cloud of smoke that hovered above the table around which the four of us sat. “Hell yeah,” he agreed. “If Carolyn left me I’d find her and kill her too.”

Dr. Turcotte accepted Jack’s statement without comment. “Well, we’re trying to defuse this bomb. John is homicidal right now, and we want to help him get rid of that anger. The flip side of homicide is suicide.”

Jack crushed his cigarette, shook another from the pack. “I don’t understand why you don’t just take the liquor away from him,” he said.

“Alcohol is a tranquilizer to John right now,” Dr. Turcotte said. “We have to work with him on his other problems before dealing with his drinking. He’s much too upset to deal with the drinking yet. Besides, he’d just go and buy more liquor.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, “I see.” But his tone was doubtful. As if John could or would do what Jack had done with the help of an expensive rehabilitation center and a wife who wasn’t about to leave him no matter what.

Jack had been sober for almost a year. Sitting across from me at the round table in the motel’s conference room, Jack smiled with a self-satisfied expression. “Hell,” he said in a tone of proud disbelief, his Southern drawl thicker than ever, each syllable pronounced slowly, savored. “Daddy died, Margaret left John, and John went crazy all in the same month, and I’m still sober.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled. “I must be cured.”

John was in the hospital only a few days before Dr. Turcotte had him released to go back to the motel until he felt it was safe to let him go
home to Shutesbury. Over the weeks I’d grown more and more manic under the pressure of John’s anger. My mind was racing; thoughts tripped over one another, becoming entangled and confusing me so that my brain raced even faster. I was so emotionally exhausted that I could barely function. Instead of getting away from John, I felt myself moving closer to him in a union of anger and resentment. “Do you love your husband?” Dr. Turcotte had asked. Someplace in the complex of emotions, I was certain that I loved John. But more than love, now what I felt was anger.

Without discussing it with me, Ruth had called Mother, who’d immediately flown up from Georgia. Having Mother with me was a mixed blessing. I was in desperate need of help, especially with taking care of Chris, but Mother’s emotional neediness was a constant drain on me. And the relationship that we’d created was one constructed with careful censorship. Clothed in Southern manners and restraint, it was like a large and brittle clay container covered with cracks. Filled to the brim with all our unspoken feelings, it was bound to break apart.

I was worn down. Not only had I been meeting with the doctor and John most days, I was also taking three courses at the university to become certified as a public school art teacher. I’d taken an apartment on Hallock Street in Amherst and rode my bicycle to classes, awkwardly balancing my paint box and canvas in the baskets on the back. John Elder, who must have been around fourteen at this time, had a bicycle, too, and rode it to Amherst, where he had a bedroom in the apartment. But he often preferred to stay with his father in the Shutesbury house, where he had his workroom and equipment in the basement, and his room filled with other projects. I was dividing the care of Chris with Mother, taking him to the public swimming pool or to the playground when I was not in meetings or classes. I was growing more and more manic, my unrelenting thoughts racing faster and faster, exhausting my brain and body.