The Long Journey Home (34 page)

Then I felt her strong, confident hands pressing firmly against my back, causing me to stand upright and tall. She was no longer only a presence. She was a physical force. I felt my dignity return.

Again without words, Mrs. Clemons reminded me that she would always be with me. “Remember the touch of my hands on your back. When you feel weak, my hands will be there to remind you of your own inner strength. Walk with dignity, my dear. No matter what anyone ever says, remember that the most important thing you can do is to solidly and forevermore
be
, to simply and profoundly
be
Margaret.”

The river could have been the creation of Hieronymus Bosch. As I looked into it, I saw that the dark, choppy water was filled with pieces of human beings—streams of bloody entrails, a heart throbbing rapidly in a cold current, a leg, an arm, a wild-eyed head bobbing in the murky water, and many hands and feet propelled frantically by the innate impulse to reunite.

I watched the reunion of parts of people as they struggled to find ways to fit together again. Others required the services of doctors and their attendants from the enormous hospital on the riverbank. The doctors and associates went about their awful, miraculous work with calm, intelligent dedication.

Piece by piece the parts of me found one another.

An aide set my lunch tray on the table before me, a low table stacked with old magazines and boxes of games, not a regular dining table like the patients permitted to leave the locked ward ate at in the dining room. I poked at my food but ate nothing. Looking at it made me feel as sick as looking into the river.

“You’ve not eaten your lunch,” the aide said when she came back to remove the tray. “Do you want to keep it for a while longer?”

“No,” I replied. “But thank you for asking.” I did not tell her that I couldn’t eat because each bite felt like taking a bite out of a human being. All life felt like human life. Or maybe all life was God, and everything had consciousness. Then it seemed to me that I was groping for something too vast for my brain to comprehend. When I
tried to grasp it, to articulate it, my thoughts felt like only a snarl of confusion, like the snarl of yarn I’d knotted. But what about the many-colored face of Jesus in the yarn?
Focus
, I told myself,
on the many-colored face of Jesus
.

Experiences in dreams and experiences while awake were beginning to differentiate themselves. My shattered self was starting to come together once more. But I still had a distance to go before I had the clarity and strength necessary to face the doctors and demand that I be released, even against their orders.

D
R
. T
URCOTTE USHERED ME INTO HIS OFFICE, WHERE
I
SAT IN MY USUAL
chair across from him. The coffee table, with its clutter of old magazines, books, candles, papers, and boxes of Kleenex, stood between us.

Before taking his seat, the doctor went to the door and called Helen to join us. She came in and sat in the chair next to mine. Dr. Turcotte sat down in his usual chair and reached to pick up a burgundy-colored candle from the floor. He handed it across the table to Helen while looking at me.

“I’ve given Helen a gift, but I have nothing for you. Are you jealous?”

Why was he trying to provoke me? I remembered how a person who knew him well once told me that she believed he had always wanted to orchestrate a crime of passion. Maybe she was right. He certainly was trying to upset me.

Helen looked at the candle.

“A gift for Helen and nothing for you. What do you think about that?” he asked.

“I suppose it depends on where she lights it.”

I understood his game then, his intent to upset me by showing me that he had gained firm control over Helen; that he had wiped out
any loyalty she might have had toward me. Even before it happened, I knew the outcome.

He reached across the table and handed Helen a star-shaped candleholder. “Light the candle here, Helen,” he said in the same commanding tone he’d used with me in Newport when he’d gestured with his arm and ordered me to come to his bed.

Without hesitation Helen put the candle in the holder, picked up a book of matches from the table, tore one off, struck it, and lit the candle.

“I see, Dr. Turcotte,” I said, knowing that he knew that I’d seen through his manipulations, that the veil of denial had finally dropped from my eyes. I crushed my cigarette in an ashtray and got up. Glancing briefly at his self-satisfied face, I left the office.

I knew my relationship with Helen was over. Driving back to Amherst, I thought about it. When Helen had come to stay with me in 1980, shortly after Chris and I moved to the apartment on Dickinson Street, she’d complained constantly of being cold. Even in the warm apartment she wore a wool scarf around her neck.

The doctor explained that she was so cold because she’d been denied affection from her parents. He encouraged me to put my arms around her and hold her as much as possible. Which I did. Eventually she began to sleep in my bed with me. After sleeping with me for over a year, she began to try to seduce me. One night, during a brief psychotic episode, I gave in to her. I can’t say whether or not I would have given in to her had I not been psychotic. I can say that, looking back, I sometimes struggle with deep feelings of regret, though I am well aware that regret is a not helpful feeling to nurture.

At the time, our age difference wasn’t a problem for me. I was a fan of Charlie Chaplin, who had married Oona O’Neill when she was eighteen and he was fifty-four. And when I was fifteen my boyfriend was nearly twice my age. Then there were Chris and Jim.

I had grown to love Helen, though not in the way I’d loved and still loved Suzanne. The doctor told me that Helen had seduced me
into a sexual relationship as an act of revenge toward Suzanne. They had known each other before I had met either, and Helen harbored hurt feelings toward Suzanne, who hadn’t given her the support she’d needed when Helen was in high school.

I sat at the dining room table and worked on a large watercolor I was painting from sketches I’d done from the roof garden of the hotel where Chris and I had stayed in Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico, in 1969. I still remember the exquisite pleasure of mixing the paints, pigment and water pooling on the white enamel palette of my paint box. The skyline of the city is filled with domes of churches, most of which are topped by crosses. At least my painting is filled with them, and after all these years, the painting is more real to me than any image of the city I might hold someplace in my memory. In my painting, the volcano Popocatépetl rises in the distance, while inside the volcano lies a sleeping woman with long hair made of flames. In a pale purple and indigo sky stands a transparent cross with a transparent angel blowing its trumpet toward the woman as if to wake her.

I no longer remember which of us began to destroy my things first. I only remember the night as the end of our lives together in Amherst.

Helen and I were both psychotic.

There was shattered glass everywhere. I pushed the living Christmas tree in its redwood planter out the door, tumbling it down the back steps onto the snow. Helen picked up the TV from the kitchen counter, lugged it to the back door, and heaved it out, shattering its screen. I took the expensive vase that Chris and Dr. Turcotte’s daughter Amy had given me for Christmas and hurled it out the door, sending it skidding across the ice-encrusted snow to rest unbroken against the hedge that marked the end of the backyard.

Then Helen and I stood facing each other in the kitchen. Looking into my eyes, she said that she saw vision after vision unrolling. “My life!” she screamed. “My whole life is in your eyes!”

Not only was Helen psychotic, she was also sick of my depression as well as of me. Now that she had the relationship with Dr. Turcotte that she wanted, I no longer mattered.

Woman in a volcano
, I thought, looking at my painting. My head spun, the pressure mounting until I thought that mere bone was not strong enough to keep my brain from exploding and spewing itself all over my dining room.

I picked up a large stone from my collection in a wooden bowl on the dining table. I hurled it at my pen-and-ink drawing of Emily Dickinson that hung over the dining table. The glass over it shattered to small jagged shards, which scattered on the table and floor. I took another stone and slung it at a framed etching of my father, done by the artist who did the drawings for my first book. Another stone shattered the glass covering an O’Keeffe print of an iris.

When Chris walked into the room and looked at me with disgust, I took one of the Wedgwood cups that my beloved Aunt Curtis had given me and threw it against the wall next to him—not
at
him—with all the strength of my adrenaline-flooded body.

Did Helen or I rip the painting of the woman in a volcano down the middle and throw it on the dining room floor with all my other ripped and shattered possessions?

I wasn’t aware when Chris and Amy had left the house to call Dr. Turcotte, who made out the papers to have me committed to the state hospital. He called the Amherst police to take me there. I was too absorbed in shattering glass and destroying my paintings and drawings.

Shortly the police arrived.

A policeman put handcuffs on me, while a policewoman silently watched. The doctor had evidently asked June to come with them. She stood beside me in the living room. When the policeman tried to get me out the door and into his car, my body went rigid as a steel
rod. He dragged me across the street and tried to force me into the car. I struggled against him as hard as I could.

Of course he won. I gave up and sat down on the backseat. June went around to the other side and got in beside me. She sat upright and silent, hands folded in her lap, eyes straight ahead.

On the tense ride to Northampton State Hospital, Dr. Turcotte’s words repeated themselves in my head. “Margaret, your anger is beautiful. Repeat after me: ‘Margaret, your anger is beautiful,’ Words he’d instructed John to repeat over and over, year after year. Words repeated like the click of the trigger of John’s gun night after night.

Then the words in my mind changed:
“Repeat after me: I’ll always love you. Repeat after me: I’ll always love
you.” Words from Gordon Jenkins’s
Manhattan Tower
, a record I’d cherished as a teenager dreaming of being an artist in Greenwich Village.
“Repeat after me: I’ll always love you,”
I heard in my mind, and I knew it was true that I would always love John. Not in the ways he wanted me to love him, just as he didn’t love me in the ways I wanted to be loved. But I knew that despite his faults and mine, despite the anger and the pain, I would always love John even if I never saw him again.

When we arrived at the hospital an orderly got a wheelchair because I refused to walk. Riding, I noticed blood on my right foot. I was barefooted, and the side of my foot was bleeding where it had been cut as I’d been dragged from my apartment and across the street to the police car.

I sat mesmerized by the long red slash as June checked me in to the hospital. Then she was gone and I was alone in that nightmare. The feeling of the ward was familiar—the stench of human bodies, pine oil, stale cigarette smoke. Then, for a flash, it wasn’t a ward at all. It was an underground cage where hundreds and hundreds of us had been crammed into that one small space. Hitler wasn’t dead at all but had escaped and was concealed someplace in South America from which he ruled this inferno.

Then it was the hospital again and an enraged woman rushed toward me. She grabbed me in her strong hands, shouting words I
couldn’t understand while she began ripping my clothes off. I yelled for help. Yelled again. Finally, two orderlies wrestled her from me. I went to my assigned bed and sat down, trembling with shock.

How easy it had been for Dr. Turcotte to simply call and have me committed. How easy to avoid facing me. I was filled with fury. I was no longer his patient. I didn’t know how I would get away, but I knew I had to. My life and sanity depended on it.

The next morning Helen came with a box of chocolates and a change of clothes. I told her that I wouldn’t tolerate being in that nightmare of a hospital again. I asked her to tell Dr. Turcotte I wanted out
now
. I sat on the bed cramming my mouth with chocolates, not bothering to say goodbye as she left.

In the afternoon Dr. Turcotte came with Chris, Amy, and Helen. I was released from the hospital and walked with the group to my car. Helen must have driven it to the office to pick up the doctor and Chris and Amy. Now she sat in the front seat with the doctor, while I sat in the back with the others. I didn’t even ask where we were going. I was just relieved to be out of the hospital. I was also in shock. Trees and cars rushed past us. We crossed the Connecticut border and kept going.

Was it in Hartford that we stopped? I have a sense of a city in my memory. Dr. Turcotte drove through a pair of tall gates and down a long drive. He was going to have me committed to a Connecticut hospital! I followed him into the hospital without protest. Chris, Helen, and Amy walked with us.

Dr. Turcotte talked briefly to the admitting psychiatrist, who asked me to come with him into an examination room. I sat on the edge of an exam table while he took my blood pressure, tested my reflexes, shone a light into my eyes, and looked closely into each. Then he pulled up a chair and asked me the predictable questions. Yes, I knew what day it was. Yes, I knew who was president of the United States. Then briefly we engaged in ordinary conversation. Afterward, he shook my hand and accompanied me to the waiting room, where he told Dr. Turcotte that he could see no reason to admit me.

We spent the night in a Connecticut motel. Helen, Amy, and I shared a room. I was quiet. My voice was slipping away from me like it had done after Newport and so many times when I was living with John, upset and afraid. Sometimes then I’d only been able to speak in a whisper for six weeks or more.