The Long Journey Home (22 page)

“I surely would like a cup of coffee,” I commented, lighting another cigarette.

Claire responded agreeably, not even appearing to take note of the late hour.

It must have been around that time that I began to grow more confused, for as well as I knew Northampton, I had no idea of the location of the diner that Claire finally found open. We pulled into the parking lot, and the three of us got out of the car and walked into the diner. Small stones ground themselves into the broken blisters on my bare feet. I could hardly walk. After sitting down in a booth, I saw that I’d left bloody smears across the floor.

How long did we stay there, talking? When trying to remember this episode, the closer I get to the period of my incarceration in the state hospital, the more blank spaces I experience in my memory. At some point Claire left the diner and a man named Al, who was on the
doctor’s staff, took her place. Al was a middle-aged bachelor with dark hair and clear blue eyes. A man who’d been sitting on a stool at the counter came over and began a conversation with him.

My next memory is of walking down the street with Jim and two young men who’d also been at the diner. I still remember the intensity of the conversation, but not a word of content. Then we were in someone’s basement furnished with a shabby couch and a bare mattress on the floor. Jim and one of the young men were sitting on the couch talking. I slipped out of the basement with the other man. I’ll call him Bob, though I’ve no idea what his real name was. I do know that with his red hair and beard, I thought he looked like a young Vincent Van Gogh.

We walked for miles through unfamiliar neighborhoods. Like a faithful dog, Bob followed me up and down the streets. Everything felt like a maze, reflecting the confusion in my mind, confusion so great that it negated awareness of the pain in the soles of my feet. A gray dawn began to define details of neighborhoods—gingerbread trimming on an old Victorian house, a cluster of clay pots of geraniums on a front porch, an old-fashioned porch swing on another.

As the sky turned a delicate peach color, we found ourselves in a field, the sunrise casting a warm glow on the dew-covered grasses. We sat down on the damp ground and smoked. I was convinced that Vincent Van Gogh was communicating—or trying to communicate—with me through Bob’s voice. I kept insisting that he listen to the voice straining to come through him and tell me what he heard. God knows what he thought of me, a woman with her passionate crazy talk, long dress, and blistered and bleeding feet.

I remember my acute surprise when I stood and saw that the field in which we’d been sitting was directly across the highway from the Town House Motor Lodge. I felt enormous relief and wonder at the fact that, with all the seemingly meaningless meandering through one strange neighborhood after another, I’d ended up exactly where I needed to be.

Walking across the highway, I was also relieved to see Al leaving a
patient’s room and heading for the Howard Johnson’s. He saw me almost as soon as I saw him, and came to meet me. I told him I had no money or shoes and was in desperate need of cigarettes. He cursed loudly at Bob, as if he’d been responsible for my disappearance, and demanded that Bob leave. Then he took me to a room at the motel, where I waited until he came back with cigarettes and coffee.

The day passed in a blur of faces as one person after another came to be with me. For two months I’d visited John at that motel. Now—at least momentarily—
I
was staying there as a patient. I felt as much at home there as any place I’d been since I’d left John and our house in the Shutesbury woods.

I spent a restless night, the last night before my incarceration in Northampton State Hospital.

The next morning Al arrived early, bringing a suitcase full of my clothes that Mother must have packed. “Dr. Turcotte wants to see you. He sent me over to drive you to his office.”

I put my cigarettes and matches into my purse and eased my feet into the loafers my mother had packed.

Ethel, the doctor’s part-time assistant, sat at the desk in his waiting room, bent over what looked like accounting books. Jim was sitting on one of the couches with a patient who was playing “Puff, the Magic Dragon” on his guitar. They acknowledged me. Then the patient began playing and singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

I sat down on the other couch, but before I could say anything, Dr. Turcotte opened the door to his office and walked out with a patient who left the room quickly. The doctor looked at me. “Margaret,” he said, ushering me into his office. He sat down in his chair. I sat down in the chair opposite him.

“Do you know what day this is?” he began his questioning. He asked me about the month and year, and who was president of the country.

I dimly remember answering his questions with metaphors that had nothing to do with what he’d asked. What I remember clearly about the meeting is that Dr. Turcotte’s gray pants were worn around
the cuffs, and that he was wearing black shoes that came to points at the toes. I was staring at his shoes when he got up, went to his desk, and called Northampton State Hospital, telling the person on the other end of the line that he was sending a patient for admission.

I agreed to sign myself in. Dr. Turcotte had no privileges at the hospital. He had been kicked off the staff some years before because, he said, of clashes with the chief doctor on staff who, he claimed, was schizophrenic. But he explained that he would be able to come to the hospital to help me because Ethel still held a position in administration there.

E
THEL DROVE ME TO THE HOSPITAL IN HER PALE BLUE
O
LDSMOBILE
.

From what I’d heard over the years, Northampton State Hospital for the Insane was more a place of torment and abuse than one of healing. In my mind, I associated it with the movie
The Snake Pit
, starring Olivia de Havilland. I saw the movie at a drive-in theater with my parents and brothers when I was a girl, and it frightened me terribly. I can still see de Havilland as the fragile and confused Virginia looking up at the inmates behind walls of bars, thinking they must be animals in a zoo. At some point in the movie someone explains that long ago they used to throw insane people into pits full of snakes, thinking that what would drive a sane person crazy might drive a crazy person sane.

Riding with Ethel, I was remembering the images of the insane people in the movie, the camera moving farther and farther away until I was looking down into the earth at the mass of tormented humanity and writhing snakes.

I felt like vomiting.

Ethel turned into the driveway of the administration building, pulled the car up in front, and snapped off the ignition. “Let’s go,” she said, dragging her heavy purse across the seat and slamming the
door. I opened my door and got out. Ethel was already at the entrance.

She was a practical, down-to-earth woman, with a large, strong body and a commanding presence. I followed her into the admissions office, where I was told to sit in a straight chair across the desk from a small, dark-haired nurse. Ethel sat in a chair by the door.

The nurse asked for my wallet, watch, and ring.

“May I keep my cigarettes?” I asked, twisting my wedding band off my finger and placing it on the desk next to my wallet.

“Yes, but not the matches.”

I unfastened my watchband and laid my watch beside my ring and wallet.

She asked me a lot of questions, recording the answers on the admissions form: name, age, marital status, number of children, home address.

Then she took me into a small room with an examination table and a pair of scales. She weighed me: 130 pounds. Then she measured my height: five feet, seven and a half inches. She had me sit on the examination table while she took my blood pressure. She recorded all of this information on the paper on her clipboard.

“So you’re suicidal,” she said.

“Suicidal?” I responded, shocked.

“That’s what it says on the papers Mrs. Swift brought from your doctor.”

“Suicidal?” I repeated, incredulous. I stretched my arms out before me, wrists up, exposing the veins. “But look,” I said. “I have no scars.”

She ignored my statement and without giving me a chance for a backward look at Ethel escorted me across a large, high-ceilinged room crowded with inmates milling about, lost and dazed expressions in their eyes, resignation in their posture. Most of them looked like people who’d been abandoned here for so long that they’d forgotten who they were, if they’d ever known. There were skinny, bent old men shuffling along, muttering; women with ravaged faces, full
lower lips hanging loose over chins sprouting long hairs, bellies grown large and soft from years of eating instant mashed potatoes and white bread; a tall, thin young woman with pale frightened and frightening eyes. The room felt like Penn Station as Goya might have painted it in his last years when he was old, sick, and deaf, and his inner darkness and fear had become almost palpable in the coarse strokes of the thick, dark paint.

As I followed the nurse, Goya’s most horrible images filled my mind. Then I again focused on the image of Penn Station. Then on the trains there. For a few seconds, I could imagine the steam and hiss of engines as if all the tormented human beings in their churning confusion were actually about to embark on a journey. But where were they going?
Auschwitz
, I thought.
Buchenwald. Treblinka
.

Where were
we
going?

I followed the nurse through the maze of humanity crazed by life, dulled by genetics, or both. Coming to a closed door, I waited while she unlocked it with one of the many keys on the ring that hung from her belt by a chain. My mind was spinning. Another image from
The Snake Pit
rose to my consciousness—an enormous lock and key. All the years of my growing up and marriage, that image had been stored in my mind. Waiting.

But this must be some sort of special opportunity
, I thought.
Soon Dr. Turcotte will appear, and together we will save all these tormented souls. Yes
, I assured myself,
soon Dr. Turcotte will arrive and everything will be all right
.

The nurse told me to sit on one of the straight chairs lined up against the wall in the corridor. Then she gave my papers to the nurse at the nurses’ station, unlocked the door, and disappeared.

What we were waiting for?

Two policemen brought in a middle-aged woman and placed her on the chair next to mine. The woman was tall and bony, with frizzy hair dyed a garish red, a slash of matching lipstick on her thin lips. She wore open-toed, black sling-backed pumps that revealed red nail gloss on her toenails like that on her long fingernails. She tugged at the sleeve of one of the policemen, pleading, “What will happen to
my cats? I tell you, there’s no one else to feed them. Dear God, there’s no one to feed them but me.” The tears streaming down her face were black from mascara.

“Calm down, lady, those cats will be just fine. Just fine,” he said. He disentangled himself from her grip. “Here are her papers,” he said, handing them to the nurse. Then he hurriedly left through the door that the nurse unlocked for him.

Another nurse pulled a chair up to the woman, took one of her hands, and, with a pair of nail clippers, began to clip the nails off—
snap, snap, snap
. One after another, small, red, crescent-moon shapes fell to the floor while the woman continued to weep her black tears. “Oh, no,” she wept. “Oh, no.” But it was clear that she expected nothing now. Her words were only incredulous utterances of grief.

I stared down at the scattering of fingernails on the floor. How meticulously she must have shaped and polished those nails, taking care to avoid breaking them. And her cats, what of her cats?

It was as if my skin had been stripped away and I was nothing except raw nerves exposed to any and all of the horrors that came my way. There were no boundaries between the woman and me. Her pain was my pain, her isolation mine. Her despair drove itself deep into my own heart. My vision began to change, colors intensifying like nothing I’d ever imagined. For a few minutes I was diverted from my emotional pain by my fascination with the change in my vision.
This must be like some sort of drug trip
, I thought, excited by the colors’ intensity.
The colors—how beautiful they are!

Then a young woman was seated to my left.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” she responded, looking down at her lap.

“Are you from Northampton?” I asked, reaching for a human connection in that alien environment.

Even as I asked the question, my eyes were drawn to the thick scars that followed one another from her left wrist to her shoulder. I’d never seen anything like it. How could she have slashed herself with such determined violence? And so deeply so many times?

“I have no home,” she responded flatly. She paused. “My name is Margaret. What’s yours?”

“Margaret,” I replied. Then I saw myself as that young woman facing me. Which was I? Or was I both? My mind swam with confusion.

“I have no home either,” I told her, though in reality I had a very nice apartment. An apartment, but not a home. At least not my own home. It had become more Mother’s than mine. Mother, who had done her very best to help me.

The other Margaret ran the fingers of her right hand up and down over her scars. I sat, fascinated by the tenderness expressed by the same hand that had done such violence to her arm.

I felt my eyes brim with tears. I longed for such tenderness to console me.

A nurse came and took the other Margaret away, and I was alone, two empty chairs beside me.

Then I was admitted to a ward for people in extreme crisis.

It has been many years since I was in that hospital, and I still struggle to claim those experiences as mine. Yes, I tell myself, I was the young woman who sat on the floor, embracing an old woman who wailed and wrung her hands while frantically muttering what sounded like some strange foreign language. I was the young woman who thought that the newscaster on the TV in the lounge was speaking directly to me. I was that young woman with the desperate belief that I could do something to save the whole world—someone had to! I was that young woman with wires of connection in my brain blasted apart by pain, the blaze and spark of energy gone haywire.