Well, you’re getting the general idea, little buddy, he wanted to say. Part of it’s bright and part of it’s dark, and those big things over there are trees, and there’s nothing here that can ever hurt you. All you have to remember is not to go out beyond the edges of it, because everything is slippery rocks and mud and brambles out there, and you might see a snake and it might scare the shit out of you.
“Do you suppose kids of this age are scared of snakes?” he asked Sarah.
“No, I wouldn’t think so; I don’t think they’re scared of anything until older people tell them what to be scared of.” Then after a moment she said “Why snakes?”
“Oh, because I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t scared of snakes, I guess. Also because snakes have something to do with a kind of big, complicated idea I’ve been trying to work out.”
And he thoughtfully plucked and inspected a blade of grass. Talking over his ideas with Sarah had been profitable in the past – the clarity of her questions and comments could sometimes cut through muddled parts of his thinking – but he wasn’t sure if this particular idea would lend itself to discussion. It might be too big and too complicated; besides, he knew he might be sorry if he gave it away: it was the material for his most ambitious and encouraging poem since “Coming Clean.”
Still, Sarah was here and ready to listen; the sky was a deeply satisfying shade of blue and the beer was excellent, and so he didn’t hesitate very long.
“The thing is, I want to write about Bellevue,” he said, “and I want to have it connect with a lot of other events in my life both before and after the time I spent there. Some of the connections will be easy to make; others are going to be subtler and more difficult, but I think I’ll be able to work them all into the pattern.”
Then he began to tell her about daily life in a psychiatric ward – crowds of barefoot, half-clad men made to walk to the wall and turn, walk to the opposite wall and turn again – but he kept it brief because he knew he’d described it to her before.
“And whenever you make a disturbance, you see, the orderlies grab you and give you a forced injection of some knockout sedative and throw you into a padded cell and lock it, and they leave you alone in there for hours.”
He had told her this part too, but it seemed important now to go over it and make it as vivid as possible.
“You have to imagine one of those cells, if you can. There’s no air in there; you’re entirely enclosed in canvas mats, and they’re very bouncy, and you don’t even have much sense of gravity: you can’t tell up from down.
“So I’d come very slowly back to consciousness with my face pressed into a floor mat – oh, and they’re dirty as shit, those mats, because they haven’t been changed for years – and that’s when I’d think snakes were crawling all over me. Or other times I’d think a string of anti-aircraft shells had just exploded up close and I’d been killed but didn’t know yet.”
Sarah was chewing the last of a sandwich, looking attentive but turned partly away to watch the baby.
“And then after I got out of Bellevue,” he said, “I was afraid all the time. Afraid to walk around street corners. There weren’t any more snakes, but the fear of anti-aircraft fire was persistent as hell. I used to think if I went more than a few blocks up Seventh Avenue I’d walk into the flak, right into the exploding shells, and that would be the end. Either I’d be dead, or cops would come and take me back to Bellevue – and I couldn’t have said which would be worse.
“Well, of course all this is only part of it; there’s a great deal more. But the central idea, you see, is the inseparability of fear and madness. Being afraid drives you crazy; going crazy makes you afraid. Oh, and there has to be a third element in there, if I want to get the most out of the other two.”
He paused to let Sarah ask what the third element was; then, when she didn’t ask, he told her anyway.
“The third element is impotence. Not being able to get laid. And I’ve had a little – personal experience along that line, too.”
“You have?” she said. “When?”
“Oh, a long time ago. Years ago.”
“Well, that’s supposed to be fairly common among men, isn’t it?”
“I guess it may be about as common as fear,” he said, “or as common as madness. I’ll be dealing with three fairly common conditions, you see, showing how all three work together, suggesting that maybe they all amount to the same thing.”
He knew then that he wanted very much to tell her about Mary Fontana; that was probably why he’d brought up the third element in the first place. It had always been easy and pleasurable to tell Sarah about other girls – he had made a tidy little comedy for her out of the Jane Pringle story, and he’d done well with lesser stories too – but Mary Fontana had remained his secret, all this time. And there wasn’t any reason why that miserable week on Leroy Street couldn’t be openly discussed here, now, in the Kansas sunshine: Sarah might even provide the necessary words to make it settle down and recede in his memory at last.
But Sarah was busy at the moment. She had gathered the paper plates and put them into a paper bag; she had gotten up and shaken all the crumbs from the blanket; now she was neatly folding the blanket in half and into quarters, for carrying.
“Well, I’m afraid I wasn’t listening very carefully to any of that, Michael,” she said, “because it all sounded morbid to me. You’ve been talking about ‘madness’ and ‘going crazy’ as long as I’ve known you, and of course it was understandable at first because we both wanted so much to tell each other everything about ourselves; but that was years ago, and you’ve never stopped. You didn’t even let up on it when Laura was with us, and that was certainly a time when it might’ve been a mercy if you had. So you see I’ve come to think this whole line of talk is just a self-indulgence of yours. In a curious way it’s both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing, and I don’t see how you can ever make it attractive, even in a poem.”
Then she started back for the house, and there was nothing for him to do but hold his warm, empty beer can and watch her go. On her way across the grass she stopped, reached down, picked up her son and settled him on her hip, and the two of them looked completely self-sufficient.
According to several national magazines, the idea of being a single mother had become a new American romance. Single mothers were brave and proud and resourceful; they had “needs” and “goals” that might set them apart in a strictly conventional society, but today, with changing times, they could find refreshingly open communities. Marin County, California, for example, had now become well known as a lively and inviting sanctuary for recently divorced young women, many of them mothers – and for swinging, stomping, surprisingly nice young men.
While he sat alone on one of the orange chairs in the waiting area outside Dr. McHale’s consulting room, Michael found that the palms of his hands were damp. He blotted and dried them on his pants, but the moisture came quickly back.
“Mr. Davenport?”
And as he got up to go in, Michael was able to confirm that his first impression hadn’t been wrong: McHale was still courteous and dignified, still very settled and very much the family man.
“Well, this isn’t about my daughter, Doctor,” he said when they were seated behind the closed door. “My daughter’s fine now, or at least I think she is. Hope she is. This is something else. It’s about myself.”
“Oh?”
“And before we begin I want to tell you that I’ve never believed in your profession. I think Sigmund Freud was a fool and a bore, and I think what you people call ‘therapy’ is usually a pernicious racket. I’m only here because I have to talk to somebody, and because it has to be somebody who can be trusted to keep his mouth shut.”
“Well, then.” The doctor’s face conveyed a calm and expert willingness to listen. “What’s the problem?”
And Michael felt as if he were stepping off into a void. “The problem,” he said, “is that I think my wife is going
to leave me, and I think it’s going to drive me crazy.”
Chapter Seven
Getting out of Kansas and going home – that had become the dominant idea in Michael’s mind, and in his talk, by the time he was fifty-two. And his visions of “home” had nothing to do with New York; he was always clear and emphatic about that. He wanted to go back to Boston and Cambridge, where everything had come alive for him after the war, and he felt he couldn’t wait much longer for the break that would make it possible.
Sarah often said she thought Boston would be “interesting,” and he took heart from that, though she sometimes said it in what sounded like an absentminded way.
“And I mean it doesn’t necessarily have to be Harvard,” he explained to her, several times. “I’ve got applications in at other places all over those towns; something certainly ought to come through.
“Oh, and it’s not as if I were asking for more than I deserve, do you see? I’ve earned this move. I’ve done well here, I’m ready for a better job, and I’m old enough to know where I belong.”
Paul Maitland might allow his life and talent to seep away in Middle Western mediocrity, but that, like the willful blandness implicit in his staying off the sauce, was something only Paul Maitland could account for. Other lives and talents would always need a bracing environment – and one of the ways Michael could tell he needed a bracing environment was that for a very long time now, ever since Sarah had dampened his interest in the Bellevue poem, he hadn’t written anything.
Still, in his heart, he knew the real reason for all this urgency: whether it made sense or not, he felt that if he could get Sarah to Boston he might have a better chance of keeping her.
Every day he held his breath when he approached the big tin mailbox at the base of the driveway; then one morning he found a letter there that seemed to make all the difference.
It was from the chairman of the English department at Boston University, and it was a clear and definite offer of employment. The final sentence of it, though, was what sent Michael loping up to the house and into the kitchen, where Sarah stood washing the breakfast dishes – this was the sentence that weakened his knees and strengthened his back as he thrust the trembling letter a little too close to her startled face:
Apart from the business at hand, let me say that I have always considered “Coming Clean” to be among the finest poems written in this country since the Second World War.
“Well,” she said. “That’s really very – really very nice, isn’t it?”
It was nice, all right. He had to read it three more times, walking around the living room, before he could believe it.
Then Sarah came to stand in the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel.
“So I guess it’s all settled then, about Boston,” she said. “Right?”
Right; all settled.
But this was the girl whose very skin had once been made “all gooseflesh, all over,” and who’d been made to cry, too, by the concluding lines of that poem; now she looked as calm and plain as any other housewife considering the practical aspects of moving to a new place, and he didn’t know what to make of the transformation.
“Well, good,” Dr. McHale said. “Sometimes a change of scene can be very helpful. You may find it gives you a new perspective on your – domestic situation.”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “A new perspective; that’s what I’m hoping for. Maybe a sense of new beginnings, too.”
“Exactly.”
But Michael had long grown impatient with these weekly sessions. They were always embarrassing and always fruitless. You always knew the doctor didn’t really give a shit about you; how, then, could you be expected to give a shit about him?
What did this particular Kansas family man do when he went home at night? Did he sink into the sofa facing the television set – flanked, perhaps, by whichever one or two of his adolescent children had nothing better to do than come and sit with him? Would his wife provide popcorn? Would he eat it greedily by the heaping handful? And when he became wholly absorbed in the show he was watching, would his mouth slacken and hang slightly open in the mottled blue light of the picture tube? And would there be a rivulet of melted butter down his chin?
“Well, in any case, Doctor, I’m grateful for your time and your help. I don’t think I’ll be needing any more of these appointments now, before I leave.”
“Good, then,” Dr. McHale said. “And good luck.”
At the airport, on the day of his flight, Sarah was in a hazy, dreamy mood. He had seen her like this before, on mornings after she’d had a few drinks; it was an agreeable kind of hangover that would always vanish with an afternoon’s sleep, but it didn’t seem quite appropriate for a time of saying goodbye.
She strolled far away from him across the enormous floor, with their son treading beside her and clutching her forefinger. She looked as interested in everything as if she’d never seen an airport before, and when she came back to where he stood with his ticket she said “It’s funny, you know? Distance doesn’t matter anymore. It’s almost as if geography didn’t exist. All you do is doze and float in a pressurized cabin for a while – and it doesn’t even matter how long, because time isn’t important, either – and before you know it you’re in Los Angeles, or London, or Tokyo. Then if you don’t happen to like wherever it is you find yourself, you can doze and float again until you find yourself somewhere else.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, look, I think they’re boarding over there. So take care, dear, okay? I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
“Okay.”
“Well, I think you’re going to find this is kind of a transitional book, Arnold,” Michael told his publisher at lunch in a New York restaurant. “Kind of a plateau performance, if you see what I mean.”
And Arnold Kaplan nodded over the brimming of his second martini in a way that suggested patience and understanding. His company had published all of Michael’s earlier books and lost money on them every time. But then, it wasn’t exactly the profit motive that impelled you to publish a poet; if anything, it was your knowledge that some other commercial house might be ready to pick him up and absorb his losses if you let him go. Well, it was a funny line of business; everybody knew that.
Michael was explaining now that he thought he could still do the big stuff, still take the big risks and bring them off, but Arnold Kaplan had begun to let the words flow past his hearing.
Years ago, when they were college classmates, Arnold Kaplan had been “literary” too. Arnold Kaplan had worked as hard as anyone else at finding a way to put his voice on the page and giving it something to say. Even today, on the floor of his basement in Stamford, Connecticut, there were three cardboard boxes full of old manuscripts: a collection of poems, a novel, and seven short stories.
And it wasn’t bad stuff. It was perfectly decent stuff. It was stuff that almost anybody might want to read and enjoy. How had it come about, then, that no words by Arnold Kaplan had ever been set into type for printing? What was the deal?
He was called a senior vice-president at the office now; he made more money than he could ever have imagined as a boy; but the price of it was that he had to spend too many hours like this – getting half smashed on his expense account and pretending to listen to a boring, rapidly aging striver like Davenport.
“… Oh, I wouldn’t want to give you the idea this is substandard work, Arnold,” Michael was saying. “I like all of it. If I didn’t like it I wouldn’t be submitting it. I think it’s very – sound. My wife likes it, too, and she’s a tough critic.”
“Good. And how is Lucy?”
“No,” Michael said, frowning. “Lucy and I’ve been divorced for years. I thought you knew that, Arnold.”
“Well, maybe it was a thing I knew and just forgot; that can happen sometimes. So you have another wife now.”
“Yeah. Yeah; she’s – very nice.”
Neither of them ate much – you weren’t expected to eat much at lunches l
ike this – and by the time their messy plates were cleared away they had both fallen silent except for dutiful exchanges of small talk.
“So how you getting up to Boston, Mike? The plane or the train?”
“Well, I think I’ll rent a car and drive up,” Michael said, “because I want to make a stop along the way, to see some old friends.”
The car he rented was big and yellow and took to the road so easily it seemed almost to be in control of itself, and in that unearthly way he found he was very soon in Putnam County.
“No, there’s nobody home but the two of us,” Pat Nelson had told him on the phone, “and we’d love to see you.”
“Pretty nice boat, Dad,” Tom Nelson said in the driveway, when Michael had brought the yellow car to a stop and climbed out of it. “Classy set of wheels.” And only after having that small joke did he come forward to shake hands.
He looked older, squinting and a little wizened, but this was a look he seemed to have been cultivating for years. Once long ago, before he was thirty, some admirer had taken a photograph of him outdoors, under a stormy sky, that had strangely caught that middle-aged quality in his youthful face, and Tom had kept an enlargement of the picture on his studio wall. “What’s this?” Michael had asked him. “What’s the deal on displaying pictures of yourself?” And Tom could only say he liked it; he liked having it there.
As they went into the house together Michael saw that Tom had acquired still another costume: an authentic old Army Air Force “flight jacket” that could only have been made and issued in the early nineteen-forties. He must have touched on every branch of the service by now.