The Morning and the Evening (17 page)

“I see, that's fine,” the doctor said. He patted Jake's arm. “We'll all get assigned to our rooms now, and then get cleaned up and have some supper.” He herded them toward the stairs. A tall good-looking blond boy came down to them at that moment and began picking up the luggage. “Well, you look like somebody I've seen before,” he said to Charlie. “How're you doing? You owe me two dollars from way back on the Yankees.”

“Boy, you wouldn't take money from a old crazy man, would you?” Charlie said. He picked up his own suitcase and the two went up the stairs together. At the top Charlie opened the door, turned and said, “Come on in, everybody.”

The driver shook his head and said, “Every time I see that blond kid I just can't get over it. He looks and acts just like every kid his age I know hanging around the drugstore at home.”

“He's as disturbed as they come, though,” the doctor said. “Violent sometimes. But he'll get better.”

“I swear it beats all,” the man said. “You never can tell.” The two men got back into the car and one said, “Well, so long, Doc. See you in another few days.” They drove away.

Jake watched the two little red lights disappear into the darkness and then the man next to him said kindly, “Come inside, sir.”

A colored woman came down the steps past them. She picked up the rest of the luggage and carried it upstairs. “That's Addie,” Charlie said, from the doorway. “She's been here since nineteen and thirty-five.”

“We couldn't get along without Addie,” the doctor said. He turned to her. “Could we, Addie?” To the others he said, “She cleans our laboratory as clean as any hospital's. It's her special job, and she takes pride in it.”

Addie smiled and put down the luggage and went away. A receptionist checked their names against some cards in her hand and pinned little tags on them with their names and room numbers. “Are you Mister Darby?” she said. Jake looked down into eyes as brown as any dog's, with specks of yellow in them like sunlight.

“He ain't said a word the whole way,” one of the men said.

“Well, it must be Mister Darby,” she said, and pinned the cardboard to him.

Charlie came up close, squinted, and read. “Dad burn it,” he said. “You're in the new building. I'm not.”

“Am I, am I?” the woman said, jumping up and down with little hops, clapping her hands.

Charlie came close and said, “Yep.” No one else was. Charlie said to himself aloud, “Oh, well. Better luck next time.”

They took the others away. Charlie called back to the woman and Jake, “See you later.”

The woman said, “Perry Como's on tomorrow. Watch and see what he sings to me.”

The receptionist smiled and said, “He's very good-looking.”

“
Yes, he is
,” the woman said.

The doctor said, “Come along, Miss Turley, Mister Darby. We have to go outside and across the way to the new building.” As they went out the door he said, “You're really the envy of the other patients. We just finished our new building this year. A one-million-dollar building. I bet there's not another finer in any part of the country. I'm sure others think we southern backwoods folks are way behind the times. But we're coming along, I'm here to tell you. We're making progress. There is fine work going on here. You'll see. You'll be like Charlie. You'll want to keep coming back to see us, everything is so nice.”

“Oh, no,” Miss Turley said. “I have to go to New York next week to meet somebody very special.”

“Oh, I see,” the doctor said. “What about you, Mister Darby? Do you think you're going to like it here with us?”

“He ain't said a word this whole day,” Miss Turley said. She lowered her voice and whispered, “Personally, I don't think he can talk.”

“Oh,” the doctor said. “I see.”

They took Miss Turley into a room full of glass where a nurse sat at a desk. Beyond the room of glass was another room of glass, with night at the windows. Great leafy plants in large white pots were set about on the floor. There was a television set, and comfortable wicker lounge chairs were drawn up before it. And there were several wheel chairs into which old women were tied by bedsheets about their waists.

“Television!” Miss Turley said.

“Mrs. Brown, this is Miss Turley,” the doctor said to the nurse.

Mrs. Brown got up and walked over and smoothed back a wisp of hair from Miss Turley's forehead. “We're so glad to see you, Miss Turley,” she said. “We've got your room all ready. A nice pink one. Do you like pink?”

“I love it,” Miss Turley said. “But I'm not staying long. I have to go to New York.”

“I always have wanted to go to New York,” Mrs. Brown said. She took Miss Turley's suitcase from the doctor and said, “Come along and I'll show you your room. Almost everybody is at a magician's show and they'll go straight from there to supper.”

The old women, from their chairs, darted sidelong secretive glances after them. Then they bent their noses to their work again—they were all doing some kind of handiwork: knitting, crocheting, darning. Occasionally they peeped out from beneath their eyebrows at the television program, as if it were a forbidden pleasure. Or perhaps as if they wished that it were: something covert; something of their own.

One old woman began to claw after her long cotton stockings, which looked as if they had deflated; they had fallen below her knees. A young woman got up from a soft ottoman she had been sitting on, knelt before the woman and rolled the stockings back up. She smiled up at the old woman gently then, and returned to her seat. The old woman looked down at her work and crocheted viciously, smiling in a pleased way.

“I don't know what we'd do if the younger patients didn't help out with the older ones, Mister Darby,” said the doctor, who was watching. “We're so understaffed, that's the whole problem, we're so understaffed. Well, come along, we'll go to the men's ward.”

They went out of the glass room and into the narrow hall that led between the oblong little rooms all painted pretty pastels: pink, blue, yellow, green. Each had a small bed, bedside table and chest of drawers; the rooms were bare but neat, livened by the colors; each had a small window too high to see out of. In one room Miss Turley was hanging up her dresses, talking excitedly to the nurse. The nurse waved as the doctor and Jake passed.

They passed another room where a pretty young woman sat, her hair nicely waved, her mouth and cheeks nicely rouged. The doctor stood in the door and said, “Didn't you want to see the magic show, Betty Ruth? Or TV?”

“I'm too nervous,” the young woman said. “I'm just too nervous, and my eyes hurt me so. That's when my husband knew something was happening to me again, when I got so nervous, and he brought me back here.”

“Well, you'll get better again,” the doctor said. “And maybe this time you can go home and stay.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I have two little children, you know. It's so hard to leave them.”

“I know it is,” the doctor said. “I'll talk to you about it tomorrow.”

Outside their rooms two other young women sat slump-shouldered in straight little cane chairs, hands folded in their laps, eyes staring at nothing, not seeming to need to. The doctor stopped by the first, put his hand on her shoulder a moment, and said, “Don't you want to see TV, Miss Davis?”

She looked up at him in an apologetic sort of way and shook her head. “I'm just too nervous, Doc Rutledge,” she said. “I just can't look at anything too long.”

They passed on to the next girl and the doctor asked her the same question. She looked down into her lap and shook her head from side to side. “No,” she said quietly, “my eyes just hurt me too bad. They just jump all over. I can't do anything.”

Whenever the doctor had stopped, Jake had stopped, and when he went on, Jake did. Now they passed out between swinging doors into the pink-marble corridor that circled the entire building. On one side the corridor was entirely glass, broken at intervals by closed doors, and looked out onto a grassy patio. The corridor was bare except at intervals where there were recesses with a group of chairs; here patients might see their visitors. As they passed one closed door, the doctor indicated it and said, “That's where you'll have your haircut Monday, Mister Darby. We have a complete barber shop. Three chairs.”

Jake looked after his finger and saw a door. Attached to it was something, swirling with color, going around and around.

Outside the door to the men's ward, the doctor suddenly stopped and said, “Mister Darby. Can you talk?”

Talk
, Jake heard. He brought his hand to his throat and held it there. He felt tears inside him, and then on his cheeks.

“Never mind,” the doctor said. He patted Jake's arm. “If you can't talk, you don't belong here and you won't have to stay.”

He pushed open swinging doors. They went into a room like the one they had left except that it was a young man who sat at the desk. He wore a starched white jacket, stiff as a board, and white pants. He stood up and said, “How you, Doc?”

“Sam, this is Mister Darby,” the doctor said. “Another ringer, I believe, Sam.”

“Is that right?” Sam said. He looked closely at Jake and shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to tell yet.”

“Oh, we'll have to keep him the month for observation,” the doctor said. “Did Smitty leave today?”

“Yeah, thank God,” Sam said. “I can take anything else as long as no more alcoholics get slipped in. They're the worst.”

“Everybody go to the magic show?” the doctor said.

“Just about,” Sam said. “A few wouldn't go. I'll take this one along and get him ready for supper. That all his things in that box?”

“Yes,” the doctor said.

“Jesus,” Sam said.

He tried to take the box, but Jake held onto it. Sam let it go. He took Jake by the arm and led him down the hall. The doctor followed to the door of Jake's room. Out of the doorway opposite came an old man, spry as a cricket, who said, “I'm going home today, Doc.”

“Is that right?” the doctor said. He looked into the old man's room at the neat piles of his clothes set out on the bed. A suit on a coat hanger was hooked onto a chair. The doctor glanced at Sam and Sam shook his head.

“Well, that's fine,” the doctor said. He turned back to Jake. “Have a good supper and a good night's sleep, Mister Darby,” he said, “Sam, give him something if he doesn't sleep. He looks tired.”

Sam had opened the shoe box and he said, “Here's a note in the box. Can he read?”

“Oh, I doubt it,” the doctor said.

“It says to tell him Wilroy and Mary Margaret will be up to see him first time they can,” Sam said. “That makes it a week from tomorrow. Visiting day's the first Sunday of every month. It don't seem to be making no big impression on him.”

“I told you, I think they slipped one in on us,” the doctor said. “I don't believe he can understand even as much as half of what's said to him. We'll see. Whew, I'm tired.” He turned away, back down the hall.

“I got some reports up here I'd like you to see a minute if you got time,” Sam said.

Then he was gone too. Jake sat down on the bed and looked at his other pair of socks in the shoe box. Gradually he took everything out: a shirt, a change of underwear, a toothbrush and paste, a razor and shaving cream. He took out a little package wrapped in waxed paper and opened it. There was a fried chicken leg, a stuffed egg, and a piece of marble cake. He ate them all. He was licking his fingers when Sam came back. “Uh-oh,” Sam said. “You can't have that.” He took the razor.

He took Jake into the bathroom and helped him to wash. When they came again into the hall, he called, “Supper, Mister O'Brien!”

Mr. O'Brien popped out of his room on his little bowed cricket legs, rubbing a round place on his stomach, and said, “It's about time.”

They passed a room in which an old man lay sprawled on his bed, one leg trailing on the floor, as if he had lunged at sleep and caught it before he had meant to. Sam shook him hard and woke him, but he came awake reluctantly and grumbled all the way to the dining room.

When they entered the dining room, they were met by the smells of so many different kinds of food, it was as if it were one smell of something unnamable. There were no women in the room, only men, and they sat at long tables, side by side, with attendants at the head. As soon as they sat down someone put plates of food in front of them, and Jake ate what was before him, as the others were doing. When he had finished, the plate was taken away. Then he had ice cream, one round scoop of vanilla, and he ate that. Across from him a man with a day's growth of beard and eyes as pink as a rabbit's leaned forward and said, “Did you know all the waiters are patients too? I hope to be one someday.”

“He don't understand,” Sam said. “I don't think.”

“Oh?” the man said. He turned to the others and said, “Shall we see television after supper?”

“Sure,” Sam said, scraping back his chair. “Everybody finished? Let's go.”

All around the room was the same sound, the scraping back of chairs; as the men filed out of the room, two by two, ushered by the attendants, there was the clatter of silverware being thrown onto trays and the clunking sound of heavy plates and mugs being stacked. No one could talk above the noise and the men moved silently until they were some distance down the hall. Then the man walking along beside Jake said, “Did you see him make that long row of scarves come out of that hat when all we had seen him put in it was that little bitty Confederate flag?”

When Jake did not answer or even look at him, he looked at Sam, nodded his head toward Jake, and said, “What's with him?”

Sam shrugged and said, “Cat's got his tongue.”