“There are six days left,” she said.
“Well, okay, six. But the thing is, Irene, I’m really going to need your help.”
There was a significant pause before she said “In what way?” And both the pause and the timorous, guarded tone of the question let him know at once that he’d taken too much for granted with this girl. Except that they’d writhed and humped together here for a week they were almost strangers. She might have romanticized him sane, but that was no reason to suppose she would ever know what to do with him crazy. If “help” was needed, she would first have to be very sure she understood what kind of help he had in mind.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know, baby,” he said. “I shouldn’t have put it like that. All I mean is I’d like you to stick around. I’d like you to sort of be my girl, or pretend to be my girl, until this whole thing is over. Then later we’ll have a better time; I promise.”
But that wasn’t right, either. When the thing was over she’d be going back to graduate school at Johns Hopkins, too far from New York for frequent visits even if frequent visits were what she might wish to have. And he should never have said “pretend to be my girl” because no girl in the world would want to consider a plan like that.
“Why don’t you just try and get some sleep now,” she told him.
“Okay,” he said. “Only first come a little closer so I can – there. There. Oh, Christ, you’re a pretty girl. Oh, don’t go away. Don’t go away, Irene.…”
He was walking unsteadily toward the lecture hall the next morning when Charles Tobin fell into step with him and took him by the arm and said “This won’t be necessary, Mike.”
“How do you mean?”
“I just mean you don’t have to face that crowd again today; somebody else can fill in for you.” Tobin stopped walking, obliging Michael to stop too, and they stood looking at each other in the dazzling sunshine. “As a matter of fact,” Tobin said, “I’ve already arranged for somebody else to fill in.”
“Oh. So I’ve been fired.”
“Oh, come on, Mike; nobody gets ‘fired’ from a place like this. I’m concerned about you, that’s all, and I—”
“Where do you get ‘concerned’? You think I’m going crazy?”
“I think you’ve pushed yourself too hard up here, and I think you’re exhausted. I probably should’ve spotted it sooner, but then after what happened in the Cottage last night I—”
“What happened in the Cottage last night?”
Tobin appeared to be scrutinizing Michael’s face. “You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, listen, let’s go back to your room to talk, okay? There’re a few too many – onlookers out here.”
And that was true, though Michael hadn’t noticed it: any number of people, from college kids to ladies with powder-blue hair, had stopped in their tracks on the bright grass, or on the road, in order to witness this confrontation.
Michael had begun to tremble badly when they got to his room; it was a relief to sit on the bed. Then Charles Tobin sat facing him, hunched in the only chair, and told him what had happened last night.
“… And you kept pouring drinks for yourself out of Fletcher Clark’s bottle. I don’t think you knew what you were doing, but the trouble was you went on doing it even after he’d asked you to stop. Then when he did get mad you called him a cocksucker and took a swing at him, and it took about four of us to pull you apart, and the big table got broken. You don’t remember any of that?”
“No, I – oh, Jesus. Oh, my God.”
“Well, it’s over now, Mike; there’s no point in torturing yourself. Afterwards Bill Brodigan and I brought you back here, and you were very calm by then. You said you didn’t want us coming into the room because it would upset Irene, and that seemed reasonable, so we stayed at the end of the hall and watched you go inside, and that was it.”
“Where is she now? Where’s Irene?”
“Well, it’s almost lunchtime, so I expect she’s busy in the dining room. Don’t worry about Irene. Irene’ll be fine. I think the best thing would be to get undressed and under the covers, don’t you? I’ll stop back to see you in a while.”
And Michael would never know how little or long a while it was before Charles Tobin came into the room again, followed this time by a smaller, younger man in a cheap summer suit.
“Mike, this is Dr. Brenner,” he said. “Dr. Brenner’s going to give you an injection and then you’ll have a good rest.”
There was a needle in one buttock, keener and swifter and less humiliating than any of the Bellevue needles; then he was fully if sloppily dressed again and walking down the hall between Tobin and the doctor, shrugging off their hands to prove he could walk alone, and they went out across a brilliant stretch of grass to where a cream-colored four-door sedan stood waiting in the road. A sturdy young man all in white got out of the back seat and held the door open, and they helped Michael into the car as carefully as if he were very old and frail. Nothing could have gone more smoothly. But he was rapidly losing consciousness as the car moved away through the vivid green and shade of the campus, and he either saw or dreamed a great gathering of oddly assorted people in summer clothes along the roadside, all their faces startled and embarrassed as they watched their favorite lecturer being taken into custody.
He spent a week in the psychiatric ward of a general hospital in Concord, New Hampshire; but the place was so clean and bright and quiet, and the personnel so unfailingly courteous, that it didn’t seem like a psychiatric ward at all.
He even had a room of his own – it took him a few days to realize that its door was always kept slightly ajar onto a murmurous corridor that was locked from the outside; but still, a room of his own – so there was never any need to meet and mingle with the other disturbed patients; and surprisingly succulent meals were brought to his bedside, always right on time.
“These medications you’re getting now should do the job for you, Mr. Davenport,” said a spruce young psychiatrist, “if you go on taking them at home. But I wouldn’t underestimate what happened to you up here at the whaddyacallit. The writers’ conference. You appear to have had a second psychotic episode, and it may suggest a continuing pattern of further episodes in the future, so if I were you I’d watch my step. I’d certainly go easy on the alcohol, for one thing, and I’d try to avoid any emotionally stressful situations in the course of my – you know – of my life. Your life.”
And when he was alone again he lay slowly trying to sort things out in his mind. Could he still divide the years into pre- and post-Bellevue periods, or not? Would this new thing require the establishment of a new historical era in its own right? Or would it, like the Korean War, serve mainly to show that history couldn’t be expected to make much sense?
Irene came to see him one afternoon. She sat on the bedside chair with her nice legs crossed at the knee and talked about her plans for the coming year at Johns Hopkins. She said more than once that it would be “fun” to “get together” with him in New York, and he said “Well, sure, Irene, we’ll be in touch,” but they said those things in the automatically graceful manner of promises never meant to be kept.
At the end of the visiting hour she rose and bent to kiss his mouth, and he could sense that she’d come here today not only to say goodbye but to have a brief sample, for curiosity’s sake, of how it would feel to pretend to be his girl.
One of the orderlies brought him a pad of paper and a pen, and he spent hours drafting a letter to Charles Tobin. It wouldn’t have to be a very long letter; the important thing was to find and sustain the right tone. It would have to convey humility and apology and gratitude without ever sinking into remorse, and it would be best if he could conclude it on the note of wry, self-effacing bravery that was characteristic of Tobin’s own style.
He was still working on the letter the day they released him from the hospital, and he continued to sound out certain phrases of it, just under his breath, on the pla
ne back to New York.
Everything in the Leroy Street place looked drab to the point of wretchedness when he first walked into it, carrying a suitcase full of dirty laundry, and it was smaller than he’d remembered. He got the Tobin letter finished and into the mail; then it was time to get back to work.
Work might not be all there was in the world, but it had come to be the only thing Michael Davenport could trust. If he eased up on it now, if he ever let his mind slide away from it, there might be a third episode – and the third one, here in New York, might easily take him back to Bellevue again.
One of the ways he could tell he was getting older, during the next few years, was that Laura looked different every time he met the train from Tonapac.
Until she was thirteen or so he had always been able to spot her at once in the crowd coming out through the gate at Track Ten because she was the girl he had known all her life: skinny and quick, with her best clothes worn a little awry and her white socks beginning to sink out of control into the heels of her shoes. Her face would always be bright with expectation as she ran the last of the distance into his arms – “Daddy!” – and he’d hold her close and tell her how good it was to see her again.
But along about the time her troublesome socks were replaced by nylon hose, other changes began. She grew slower and heavier and less openly glad to see him; her smiles became an effort at civility, and sometimes she seemed to be thinking Isn’t this dumb? Why am I supposed to visit my father when all we ever do is get on each other’s nerves?
When she gained forty pounds in what seemed no time at all, at fifteen, Michael almost wished he wasn’t expected to meet these trains anymore. Where was the pleasure in having a big high-shouldered lump of a girl come plodding at you with a sullen and evasive look?
“Hi, baby,” he would say.
“Hi.”
“That’s a nice dress.”
“Oh. Thanks. Mom bought it at Caldor’s.”
“Want to have lunch before we go downtown, or afterwards? We’ll do whichever you like.”
“I don’t care.”
But she lost nearly all that weight by the time she turned seventeen; that seemed to make her happier, and seemed to make her brighter, too. He couldn’t get used to the sight of her carrying a lighted cigarette when she walked out of the train gate, but it was good to have her talking again – and it was nice that not all of the things she said were commonplace.
One night when he was alone there was a phone call from Lucy – the first in years – and after a few shy preliminary courtesies she got down to business: she was worried about Laura.
“… Well, I know adolescence is a difficult time,” she said, “and I can certainly see that hers might be more difficult than most. Oh, and I’ve read as much as anybody else about how crazy everything’s supposed to be for kids these days, with all this ‘hippie’ stuff breaking out, so that’s not the point, either. It isn’t Laura’s interests or activities I mind, you see, it’s something worse: it’s her lying. She’s turned into a liar.
“Let me give you just one example. I had some people here for the weekend and their car was in my garage, and Laura sneaked it out and drove it away one night. I don’t know where she went or what she did before she put it back in the garage, but that’s secondary. The main thing is she lied about it. We found a fairly heavy scrape in one fender, you see, and when I asked Laura if she knew anything about it she made me ashamed for even asking. She said, ‘Oh, Mom. You really think I’d take somebody else’s car?’ But then when we opened the driver’s door we found Laura’s change purse there on the front seat.
“So do you see what I’m getting at, Michael? I don’t like the clouded, stupid look that comes into her face when she gets caught at something like that. It’s the look of a submissive criminal, and it’s frightening.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, well, I see what you mean.”
“Oh, and then there’s so much else I don’t understand about her anymore.” Here Lucy paused for breath, or perhaps in surprise at herself for talking so easily to a man from whom she’d been estranged for years. “You may not be aware of this, Michael, unless she’s let it slip, but the times you see her in New York are by no means the only times she’s there: She gets into the city quite a lot, and there isn’t any way I can control it. She did let it slip to me once, during one of the brainless talks we have about ‘values,’ that she knows a beautiful boy named Larry on Bleecker Street – oh, and needless to say, her ways of explaining what makes him so beautiful were enough to curl your hair; he has ‘a beautiful soul,’ and so on. So I said ‘Well, dear, why don’t you ask Larry out here some weekend? You think he might enjoy a few days in the country?’ And that surprised her, of course, but the funny part was she agreed to it. I could almost see her making up her mind: having Larry of Bleecker Street to show off, right here, in person, might turn out to be the social triumph of the year among the kids at Tonapac High.
“Then one day I looked out the window and there he was, standing around with her in the front yard: this kid with a ponytail down his back, wearing a dirty leather vest with no shirt under it. And I mean except that there weren’t any lights in his eyes he didn’t look sinister or anything; he just looked like a boy who needed a bath. So I went out in the yard and said ‘Hello; you must be Larry.’ And he took off running – up the road and out across the fields, heading for this rotten old abandoned barn about two hundred yards away.
“I said ‘What’s the matter with him?’
“And Laura said ‘He’s shy.’
“I said ‘How long has he been here?’
“And she said ‘Oh, about three days now. He’s staying in the barn. There’s a lot of old straw in there and we fixed up a nice little place.’
“I said ‘How does he eat?’
“And she said ‘Oh, I’ve been bringing him stuff; that’s okay.’
“Well, I guess I’m making all this sound sort of funny,” Lucy said, “and I guess it was; but I’m getting away from the point. I think the question of her interests and activities will tend to resolve itself – and she might as well get all this bohemian nonsense out of her system now as later – but the lying is something else.”
And Michael said he agreed with that.
“She’s too old to be ‘punished,’ ” Lucy went on, “and how would you punish a child anyway when the offense is lying? One lie simply hooks into another until a whole fabric of lies comes into being, and then the child is living in a world devoid of substance.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I think you’re right to be concerned. I am, too.”
“So here’s the thing. This is why I called. The only therapist I know around here is Dr. Fine, and I’ve come to have decidedly mixed feelings about him; I suppose what I mean is I wouldn’t want to trust him with something like this. So I wondered if you might be – acquainted with someone you could recommend in New York. That’s really why I called, you see.”
“No, I’m not,” he told her. “And I don’t believe in that stuff anyway, Lucy; never have. I think the whole ‘therapy’ industry is a racket.” And he might have gone on at some length in that vein, saying things like “Sigmund fucking Freud,” but decided he’d better stop. It had been only reasonable for her to assume he’d be “acquainted” with some shrink, after two breakdowns; besides, if they had an argument now it would spoil this spontaneous and pleasant phone call. “So I guess I can’t help out there,” he said. “But look: she’ll be in college soon and she won’t be bored half to death all the time the way she is now. There’ll be things to challenge her mind and they’ll keep her busy. I think we’ll find that makes a difference.”
“Well, but college is still a year away,” Lucy said. “I was hoping we might get – you know – get something started now. Well, okay, then,” she said in a way that meant she was concluding the talk. She would probably arrange for Laura to visit Dr. Fine, despite her mixed feelings. “Oh, and speaking of college, M
ichael,” she said in an afterthought, “I’ve talked with the girl who’s the new whaddyacallit here, the new guidance counselor at the high school, and she says Laura can have her pick of quite a few good colleges. And she said she’ll be calling you in on this, too; that’s the policy.”
“The ‘policy’?”
“Well, you know: where there are divorced parents, the father is always consulted too. She’s nice – extremely young for a job like that, I’d think, but very capable.”
The guidance counselor did call him a few days later, wanting to know what afternoon he could come in for a two o’clock appointment. Her name was Sarah Garvey.
“Well, tomorrow’s not so good,” he said. “How about the day after that, Miss Garvey?”
“Okay,” she said. “Fine.”
He’d had to make it the day after tomorrow because it would take that long to get his only suit cleaned and pressed. Ever since the divorce he had cut back heavily in the assignments he took from Chain Store Age each month, to provide himself with as much time for his own work as possible. Lately, though, finding he was down to one suit and that all his other, mismatched clothes were ready to fall apart, he’d begun to wish he had a university job, like most other poets. He was tired as hell of living in the Village, too: it might be all right to be a ragged kid in the Village but not a ragged middle-aged man, and Michael was forty-three years old.
Still, when he was freshly shaved and everything he wore was freshly cleaned, he always knew he looked all right. It even struck him sometimes, when he caught his reflection in passing plate-glass windows, that he looked better now than he had ten or twenty years ago.
He felt okay riding out on the Tonapac train, and the good mood persisted even as he made his way through boisterous high-school corridors, though he’d always hated the thought of his daughter enrolled in a dumb, blue-collar school like this. Then he was at the door of Sarah Garvey’s office, and he knocked on it.
*
Mothers of Tonapac High School students might sit talking with Sarah Garvey in a businesslike way, asking courteous questions and getting courteous replies, careful not to overstay their appointed time – but the fathers must all have been stricken in this tiny room, helplessly imagining how Sarah Garvey would look naked and how she would feel in their hands, and how she would smell and taste, and how her voice would sound in the delirium of getting laid.