The Long Journey Home (29 page)

Later Father Gray came in and reported that John was holding his own in intensive care, but they still didn’t know what he’d taken to bring about the bleeding in his stomach.
John in the ICU? Did I know that? Who’d told me? When?
Well, I’d done my best. I really had, no matter how inadequate my best might have been. After all the years of therapy, the fighting and talking, after all the negotiating, maybe John could live without me. But whether or not he could, I couldn’t live with him again.

I tried to block Chris’s screaming from my mind.

Dr. Turcotte and Father Gray went outside. Ethel got up and sat in the doctor’s chair. Overcome with a desperate need for sleep, I took my shoes off and crawled under the covers. I lost consciousness almost immediately.

I must have slept for hours.

When I awoke, several people were in the room talking. Without opening my eyes, I recognized Jim’s voice. Then Ellie, a young student at the university, June, Jim, and a new patient whose name I couldn’t recall. Eyes closed, I listened with fascination. Supposedly they were talking about me—sometimes agreeing, sometimes arguing—about my condition and how they could help me through my crisis. But in the context of focusing on me, it was clear to me that they were in fact working on their relationships with themselves and one another.

In my mind I saw a great wheel of clay, hands reaching out to partially formed faces and bodies all around the wheel, each individual shaping the one in front of her or him, molding fingers and thumbs, noses and mouths, and eyes that could take in the whole night sky with its galaxies filling the domes of their magnificent emerging heads.
The Great Wheel of Creation at work in this ordinary motel
, I thought, and felt humility at the earnestness of that group of young people focusing on me while becoming themselves.

Then I lost consciousness again.

It was dark when I woke up. I opened my eyes. Suzanne was sitting on top of the dresser at the foot of my bed.

I shut my eyes again. I felt exposed and defenseless. “How did you find me here?” I asked, puzzled.

“I was worried when I didn’t hear from you and got no answer when I tried to phone you. I called the house, and John Elder answered and he said you were here. He said it would be okay for me to come to see you.”

Then I realized Dee was sitting in a chair across the room.

“Hi, Dee.”

“Hi, Margaret. How do you feel?”

“Drugged. Drugged and hungry.”

I got up and went to the bathroom. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and ran my fingers through my hair. Then I came out of the
bathroom, got a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table, lit it, and sat staring at patterns in the smoke. I called my attention back to Dee and Suzanne.

“Let’s go to Howard Johnson’s and get something to eat,” I said.

Suzanne jumped up from the dresser. “Dr. Turcotte told me that you weren’t to go anywhere.”

“I’m certain he didn’t mean I wasn’t to go out to eat,” I said impatiently, walking toward the door.

Suzanne stood in front of the door, her feet spread apart, her hands on her hips. The two of us faced each other, our eyes locked in a defiant glare. It took every ounce of self-discipline I could muster to refrain from forcibly pushing her aside. She stood, stubborn, and solid as stone. She wasn’t about to relent without a physical confrontation.

I took several deep breaths. Then I sat down on the bed. “Suzanne,” I said through clenched teeth but in what I hoped was a calm voice, “would you please phone Dr. Turcotte and ask him if I can go to the restaurant to get dinner.”

She made the call. Then she put the receiver back in its cradle.

“He said it would be okay for you to go get some dinner.”

“I expected him to say that,” I responded sharply. I took my purse from the bedside table, put my cigarettes in it, and snapped it shut. “Let’s go.”

I don’t remember now if it was because of our confrontation at the door, or if it was something I said in the restaurant, but Suzanne rushed off to the bathroom in tears shortly after we got to the restaurant. I followed her, apologizing for whatever I’d done. We hugged each other and went back to the table. I felt more comfortable being with Dee. We’d known each other for years, and she’d supported me through the 1971 psychotic episode. Suzanne was new in my life and—in spite of our intense feelings for each other—I didn’t feel altogether comfortable with her.

After dinner we walked back toward my room. Dee stopped at her
car and said she had to go home to her family. We hugged goodbye. Then Suzanne and I went into my room, which was still filled with stale cigarette smoke.

“I told Dr. Turcotte I’d spend the night if it’s okay with you,” she said. “He doesn’t want you left alone.”

“Thanks,” I responded, and we got undressed and ready for bed.

I got into my rumpled, unmade bed.

“Would you like me to rub your back?” Suzanne asked.

“That would be wonderful.”

I turned over on my stomach. She lay down beside me and began to massage my right shoulder. After a while, she got up and knelt over me, her strong hands massaging my back.

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

To this day I can’t remember which of us said that.

The next morning Dr. Turcotte said he was going to have me committed to the Brattleboro Retreat.

Jim, sitting in a chair beside the doctor, leaned toward him. “No,” he protested. “I’ll stay with her every minute. I’ll take speed to stay awake. I’ll do anything. Anything. I won’t let you put Margaret in a hospital again.”

Suzanne interrupted, saying that she wanted to take me home with her. Dr. Turcotte said he thought that would be a good idea. He would come to Suzanne’s to work with me.

“Here,” Suzanne said to me. “I’ll help you gather your things together.”

In the meantime, John had passed his crisis.
Three times in the ICU for taking overdoses of one thing or another, and he’s still here
, I thought.
Well, he will live after all, but never again with me
.

I’d just gotten out of the car after sitting and talking with John. Suzanne stood at her door, watching me walk toward her. John got
out of the car and began to yell. “The cars are mine!” he yelled. “The house is mine! The land is mine! The furniture is mine!”

When I reached the door and turned around, I saw that his face was red and his hands were trembling.

“What’s Margaret’s, John?” Suzanne shouted angrily.

I was stunned by her question. I hadn’t thought of cars, house, or furniture. I hadn’t thought of the land with its thick woods and stream.

“What’s Margaret’s, John?”

The words thundered through me. Then my hands were trembling.

A question emerged from the core of my being. It was one of the most important questions I’d ever asked myself, and it reverberated through me until I was filled with a great and sober calm.
Is the story of my life mine?

Ever since I was a girl I’d felt a strong need to tell the story of my life. When I was a freshman in college I wrote a short autobiography for my English class, for which I received an A. But when I went home to Cairo I destroyed it because I didn’t want Mother to read what I’d written.

After I was married and living in Philadelphia in the late 1950s, I told bits and pieces of my stories to friends. In the early 1970s—after my first psychotic episode—I found relief by telling stories about my Georgia family. But under the telling, under all the separate stories, was the question
What is the story of my life?
Finding the answer had seemed crucial. Certainly the story of my life wasn’t just the collection of the stories I’d written and told over the years.

The stories were just that—stories. They were attempts to make sense of my life as I examined it—one thing happened as a result of another thing that happened before it, and so on. What I had really been looking for was the answer to the question
Who am I?

I hadn’t been able to find that answer. But that day in front of Suzanne’s house, I had another important question to consider:
Is the story of my life mine?

Was the story of my life mine if to tell that story meant to tell things about other people’s lives that they preferred to keep private? Was what I wrote truly the story of my life if I changed names and circumstances to protect the privacy of friends, if I did the best I could to grasp and hold the essence of what I saw as my story?

And John?

The memory of his trembling hands and his useless claiming of material things broke my heart. Whether he was conscious of it or not, he wasn’t talking about things at all. He was fighting to hold on to things because he was losing his family and was desperate. Looking back, I feel more compassion for John than I can bear.

John has been dead for years now, and we’ve been divorced for more than thirty years. He married again shortly after our divorce and lived with his second wife until his death. In all these years I’ve not yet stopped dreaming at night that we are still together. Sometimes in my dreams he divides his time between his wife and me. Other times he and I are together alone. Often I’m upset to see that he’s built a much more beautiful house for her than he ever built for me. Or, if he and I are living in the same house together, he’s built an incredibly beautiful and extravagant study for himself. His is always the most beautiful room in the house.

Even so, I’m almost always glad to be with him.

John is no longer here to tell his story even if he wanted to. I can only tell my story, and the story of us from my perspective, and I am well aware that this story is a mix of my personal observations and feelings, thoughts, memories, and whatever part imagination plays in calling back the past and translating it into words.

And my dreams? In my dreams John and I are together, no matter how difficult or rewarding the circumstances. Mornings I wake after being closer to John than we ever were when we slept together, his arm around me tightly, no matter what our day or night together had held.

When I try to remember my life just after leaving John and going home with Suzanne, I see fragments of memories like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered on a table, with no picture on the puzzle box to guide me. I have no memory of going to Suzanne’s. I have no idea when Chris and I moved into one of the student houses that her husband managed. When I try to remember images from that time, my mind is almost as blank as the snow-covered ground outside my window as I write.

My high school history teacher said: “Dates are hooks on which to hang history.”

I’ve never been good at remembering dates. I seem to remember my own history through the particular images that I associate with significant events: waking in the motel room to see Suzanne sitting on the dresser, looking at me. Me sitting on a stool in Suzanne’s kitchen, watching her stir the stew bubbling on her stove. Today’s snow falling and falling.

I have no idea how long Chris and I stayed in student housing. I have only a few memories of being there. In one, Chris and I are sitting at the table in the kitchen. We are drinking milk and eating thick slices of Suzanne’s homemade bread, spread with butter and strawberry jam. It’s very late and the house is quiet. Chris and I whisper to each other so we won’t wake anyone. We are alone together, but it feels like a secure aloneness, with all the sleeping people behind their closed doors.

In another memory, I’m lying on my bed looking at my life-sized poster of Charlie Chaplin hanging on the dark door of the old walnut wardrobe. I’ve lain here for so long looking at him that I feel almost as if I have become Chaplin. I reach for a cigarette, light it, and
look at the poster again, grateful for the image, and for the memory of his signature exit line: “Buck up—never say die. We’ll get along.” And the title of the poster: “Waiting for Inspiration.”

I have many memories of Suzanne rubbing my back. Her hands were strong from years of kneading bread, pulling weeds, digging in her garden. As long as Suzanne’s hands were on my back, I could relax and breathe deeply.

John wrote me a letter in which he explained why he should have the car, the house, the furniture, the dishes, the books, and so on. His words were as cold and logical as one of his papers for a logic class when he was a philosophy student. There wasn’t a hint of emotion, not a word of caring for Chris or me.

I decided to answer the same way he had written to me. Suzanne and I worked on the letter for hours one night, careful to use his format with all its As, Bs, and Cs, and references back to one letter of the alphabet or another. It was difficult to write such a cold, calm argument when I was feeling so much emotion. How could John not see that Chris needed his own home and school, especially at a time when so much of his life was changing? I controlled my emotions and worked on the letter.

The next day I mailed it. The following day John’s reply arrived. He wrote that my argument was logical and he had no choice except to agree to it—the house and station wagon were mine.

John moved into an apartment in Amherst, and Chris and I moved back into the house. It felt good to be in Shutesbury again, along
with John Elder, who, at twenty-one, had moved back into the house with his girlfriend and future wife, Mary, after by now having lived on his own for some time. Being with his brother was a comfort for thirteen-year-old Chris, but there were many desperate occasions with him when I felt helpless to ease his pain and could find no way to comfort or reassure him.

One night he answered the phone to John’s pleading to let him come home.

“Dad,” Chris begged, “please hang up the phone. Please stop pleading.” His father, who had begun to drink again once I left him, continued to plead.

Chris hung the phone up.

It rang again. Before I could reach the phone, Chris answered. Again it was John. I took the phone from Chris and asked John not to call back. As soon as I hung up, it began to ring again. I picked the receiver up and put the phone back in its cradle. Again John called. Chris answered and begged his father to hang up, but John continued his drunken pleading. Chris left the phone dangling from its cord on the wall.