On the River Styx: And Other Stories

  “This isn’t like you,” Anne said, thinking to shame him. She knew her concern was partly selfish, since his self-control, and the companionship it guaranteed, were essential to her as well.

  “No, it isn’t,” Ernie admitted. He glanced at her, as if to inquire how she knew. “I guess it’s because you’re kind of a doctor, like.” He frowned. “You ain’t, though, right? You’re just a kid trying to help these people. Well, you’re helping me, whether you know it or not.” He blushed and stood up. “Forget, it, okay, Anne? I ain’t going to bother you no more.”

  “You haven’t bothered me,” Anne told him truthfully. “I like to talk to you.”

  “Sure, sure.” He had his back to her, hands in pockets. “So what do you want me to do to help you out?” he said, after a moment. “Shall I break that old woman’s neck?”

  They laughed together, disheartened.

  “Just talk to people, Ernie. Help me talk to people. I run out of words after a while.”

  “I ought to be good at that. I never run out of words in my life, as I guess you found out.” He grimaced, dismissing her protest with a gesture of his hand. “Okay. What’ll I talk to them about?”

  “Ernie,” she said.

  He paused, then turned to her, waiting.

  “Look, you mustn’t feel badly about telling me everything,” she started. “If I were in your shoes, they’d have to drag me around screaming.”

  Still he waited.

  “Only I guess you’ll have to make the best of it. I hope you’ll talk to me whenever you want.” As always when she was ill at ease, she talked faster and faster. “And I admire your courage, and I’m going to try to help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Yes. I don’t think you belong in here. I think it’s unfair,” Anne said, and regretted the impulse, afraid. “There probably isn’t much I can do.” She backed down before his breathless gaze, which hardened, then softened again. He was gentle enough to pretend she had not raised his hopes.

  “There’s nothing you can do about it, Anne, thanks, anyway.” He turned away again. “See you later,” he said. Across the room, the old woman observed his approach with suspicion. She drew her heels up on the rung of her chair and clutched at her skirt, as if there was water on the floor.

  Anne went to Harry Marvin for advice.

  “You’ve been too protected,” he said, answering her question. “You have no real knowledge of life, I mean. Why did you volunteer to work at Lime Rock? Why are you suddenly so concerned about Hamlin? Because you are interested medically in the patients? Or sociologically, even? Because you really want to help them? No. You came because your college education in the fine arts is worthless in any job which wouldn’t bore you, and because you don’t need a salary, and because a young girl ought to ‘do something’ while waiting to get married. People like you contribute nothing to society and therefore have an inner need for a cause. That’s why you want to help him, Anne. You need a cause.”

  Satisfied with his diagnosis, he had walked away, as if nothing further need be said, as if her inquiry about Ernest Hamlin had not been of the slightest consequence. She wanted to run after him and boot him in the behind, having perceived that he resented the subject of Ernest Hamlin after her interruption of his speech this morning, and was sulking. Yet she was much less angry than hurt, for perhaps, in his cruelty, he had been right.

  But was it so wrong, she thought, to want a cause? Or had he meant that her cause was selfish, false?

  Unlike Mac and Sobel and the others, yes, and even Harry Marvin, she could not quite accept the patients as sick human beings. Before her talks with Ernest Hamlin, they had been unreal to her, and her pity—which, until Harry intruded, she imagined had led her to volunteer—had remained intellectual. She had constantly to persuade herself that these people were not prisoners committed for the crime of lunacy. Weren’t there bars on all the windows? And even the patients permitted out of doors were supervised and could not leave the grounds. In the afternoons they wandered about the hillside picking at things, like chickens. Or they sat immobile, hands clenched, on the benches, staring.

  She could not regard them as the others did. The others astonished her. She had read somewhere, once long ago, that the staffs of mental hospitals were little more rational than the inmates, and were largely composed of sadists, perverts, misfits of all kinds. And in a way, this nonsensical idea struck her as more plausible than the selflessness she had come upon at Lime Rock Hospital. Yes, they were an ill-assorted lot, eccentric, even, some of them, but weren’t the saints eccentric? It required a sort of saint, she thought, to work in a place like this for next to nothing, to rise above repulsion and sometimes fear, to love these mismade, badly broken creatures.

  For in their separate ways, however tough or cynical or morbid, these people loved the patients. No other word described their attitude. Even the student nurses, younger than Anne and giggling, were finally seized by the same devotion, though chronic sufferers from nervous strain. As Mac had once remarked to Anne, “Even the veteran people here need a good, long weekend off now and again, but they come back.”

  I’d never come back, Anne had thought at the time. If I were weak enough to quit, I’d never find strength to return. But now, through Ernest Hamlin, she was nearing involvement in her work, and with it the dedication which sustained the others. She refused to be frightened off by Harry Marvin.

  Anne sought out Dr. Sobel, who glanced over Hamlin’s record. “What the patient has told you is true,” Dr. Sobel started. “It’s also true that he recognizes certain symptoms in advance, and reports them, so that these attacks can be to a certain extent controlled. But it isn’t only a matter of recurrent pain, as he believes—”

  “He’s rational, then, Dr. Sobel, he’s perfectly sane.”

  “Legally, perhaps. But apart from the pain he suffers—”

  She didn’t want to hear it. She said, “Then I think you should recommend that he be released in the custody of his doctor.”

  Dr. Sobel raised his eyebrows in alarm, clearly as surprised as she by her new candor. “I haven’t the authority, Anne. And even if I had, I wouldn’t use it.”

  “But you’ve just finished saying—”

  “You won’t let me finish,” he said to her, smiling, and when she sat back in her chair, continued gently, “The fact remains that he has scraps of metal in the neural tissue. An operation is virtually out of the question. And that tissue may deteriorate.”

  “Well, until it does, I think he ought to be an outpatient. You say yourself that he reports the symptoms, and therefore isn’t dangerous. You say—”

  “He reports them today. But tomorrow? He’s unpredictable, you see, and therefore must be regarded as mentally ill. He might get a crucial knock on the head, or his personality might change entirely. The possibilities extend from idiocy to death. We just can’t tell as yet.”

  “Does he know this?”

  “Yes. I took his word for it that he wanted to know. He’s a courageous man. But he can’t believe it yet, poor fellow, and perhaps that’s just as well.”

  Anne stared at him, still struggling with his previous remark. “I can’t believe it myself,” she whispered. “He’s so normal, so healthy. He’s healthier than I am.”

  Dr. Sobel parried her gaze with the shield of official jargon. “The hospital couldn’t accept responsibility for his release,” he said, and fingered his Phi Beta Kappa key.

  Rising, she said, as if in afterthought, “And isn’t it a more serious responsibility not to take a chance but to keep a patient here unfairly?”

  “Half the patients here are here unfairly, Anne. You yourself must know a dozen people now at large who might replace those in your ward. Some of our eccentric old people, some of the children, some of the retarded—there’d be places for all of them in secure or unselfish homes. There’s no place for Hamlin in any home.”

  She ran into Harry Marvin outside. It was almost as if he had d
etermined to follow her around, to badger her. He apologized for his rudeness, however, and displayed concern about what Dr. Sobel had had to say.

  “That’s right,” he said, when she had finished. “This is a state hospital, and state appointees must place their responsibilities to the public, the voting public, that is, above the fate of this individual, this unimportant individual. Mental hospitals are a bum investment, they don’t pay off politically, as Mac says.”

  “What do you mean, unimportant individual? Didn’t he fight for his country? Isn’t that why he’s here? How can you say—”

  “You’re very young, Anne, and very naïve. Nobody in Lime Rock is important, politically or otherwise, or they wouldn’t be here. This man Hamlin of yours is an ex-machinist. If he was an ex-alderman, the son of an ex-alderman, or knew the son of an ex-alderman, or even an ex-policeman, he’d be at home, at least until he hurt somebody.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “I can’t help it if you don’t. But it’s the truth. There’s a kid in the Monkey House who’s only here because he was born here, how do you like that? To a schizo prostitute who died. Who’s going to speak up for him? I looked into it, and I got the story that the foundling homes are already overcrowded, and that he might as well be left here until he’s old enough to go to school. By that time he will probably be very well qualified to stay right where he is.”

  “You just looked into it, is that it? You didn’t try to do anything about it.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. But not too hard. I didn’t risk losing my job over it, and that’s because there are too few of us willing to work here. Trained people, that is,” he added, pointedly. “In other words, I’m no use to these people if I’m outside.”

  “I wish I had your self-confidence,” Anne snapped, outraged.

  “Oh, you’ll have it,” Harry said, “when you’ve been here a little while.” He glided effortlessly over her sarcasm. “And I’m glad to see you taking such an interest in a patient, by the way. Do you really care what happens to him?”

  “Yes, I do. I admire him. I told him I’d try to help him, and I will.”

  “You told him that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You’ve made a bad mistake.”

  “I know I have,” Anne said. She fled before the tears came.

  “Never mind Harry,” Mac told her later. “He’s fine with those children, and he works very hard, but he’s a little nervous about his importance here. That’s why he takes it out on you, I think. He’s possessive about the place, for some reason. In fact, just between you and me, he’s goddamned neurotic and no mistake.” She jammed her cigarette into her coffee cup. “We all are, I guess. The longer you work here the more clearly you recognize the very fine line between ourselves and the patients. Sometimes there’s no line at all, or rather, people cross it, back and forth, back and forth, from both sides. When you see that, and see that mental illness is largely a matter of degree, then you can identify yourself with the patients, and work with all your heart.”

  Anne nodded. “I think I know what you mean, now, after talking to Ernest Hamlin.”

  “Perhaps you do,” Mac said shortly. Her statement of faith of a moment before had made her uncomfortable. “The other thing that I wanted to say to you was that Harry was right—you have made a mistake. But we’ve all made that mistake here when our emotions got involved. It only happens to you once. It takes just once to learn. So just forget it.”

  Anne nodded again. “And you can’t help him either, Mac?”

  “I’ll give it a try,” Mac said.

  She went to see the director. “I tried,” she reported to Anne the following day. “Old Silvertongue said he understood the unhappy predicament of the patient, but that his own hands were tied. He said this Hamlin was committed through the Veterans Hospital, that it might be called a federal affair. He also said that, while of course he was grateful for my services, I might reflect on the fact that I have no medical training and am hardly in a position to contest the decision of qualified doctors. He set me straight, in short.” Mac shrugged her shoulders. “Give it up, kid. Life’s too short to get angry about injustice, in this place or out of it. Sobel’s Augean Stable is the world. I’ve been angry since I came here, fifteen years ago, and all I’ve got to show for it is ulcers.”

  ERNEST HAMLIN CAME every day to the occupational therapy unit and worked unceasingly with the other patients. If, at first, they resented what they considered to be presumption on the part of their fellow sufferer, they soon came to depend on him, and were cross and quarrelsome during two days when he did not appear. Anne did not ask him where he had been, nor did she have to, since his haggard face told her all she needed to know. And he only said, smiling, “That was kind of a bad one,” en route to a discussion of grandchildren with a hazy old woman who did not realize that these very grandchildren of whom she was so proud had seen to it that she would end her days at Lime Rock State Mental Hospital.

  Unlike Anne, Ernest could make these people laugh. She could not quite understand how he went about it, except that he made of himself a sort of gift, a plaything. He was their friend and confessor, but he was also their scapegoat, shuffleboard victim, and willing butt of their strange humor. The room rang with cries of “Ernie, Ernie!,” as if only he, like a big blond Peter Pan, could bring to life their makeshift games.

  Anne, too, now enjoyed her work; she, too, depended on him. She took such pleasure in his company that at times she forgot or put aside the remembrance that he was waiting for her help. For though he never once mentioned her offer or alluded to it, she sensed that his happy efforts with the patients were in part inspired by the possibility of his own deliverance, a possibility held out by Anne and Anne alone, and that he had to struggle to keep from questioning her about her progress.

  And of course she had made no progress, had, in fact, given up. Once, in exasperation at her helplessness, she had tried to parcel out the burden of her blame. “What about your mother?” she had said to Ernie. “Does she come to visit you?”

  He had been uncomfortable. “No,” he said, and after a moment, “The trip is kind of hard for her. She’s kind of old and she ain’t got too much money, see.” He stopped. “I don’t know, to tell you the honest-to-God truth. I thought maybe she might make it up here once or twice, but she didn’t.”

  “But your fiancée—wouldn’t she come if you wrote to her? Or at least encourage your mother to come if she couldn’t come herself?”

  “No, not her. She’d do just the opposite, I guess. If Ma comes, she’s got to come, too, or else feel bad about not coming. She ain’t mean or nothing, only a little selfish, just between you and me.”

  “But I thought you were in love with her.”

  “No, I never said that. I kind of had to marry her, for old time’s sake, because of the way we were before I went to Korea.” He blushed and, blushing, added, “After knowing you, I couldn’t marry her no more anyway.”

  She had guessed already that he thought himself in love with her, and she in turn admired him, depended on him, yes, and “loved” him, if that were the same thing. So now they faced each other, breathless.

  “Thanks,” said her voice, too loudly, jauntily. “You’re not so bad yourself.” She had inherited her mother’s habit of turning beet red in the face. Later she told herself that she had flirted with him selfishly, thus compounding her earlier crime.

  “Ernie,” she said another day, determined to have it out with him, “there’s nothing I can do to help you. I’ve talked to people, and the director knows about it, even, and they all say the same thing-it has to be worked through the Veterans Hospital.”

  She could not bear to look at his face until he spoke. “Anne, I told you that before, I told you there ain’t nothing you can do.” His voice was unnaturally calm. She peered at him. He was trying to smile, but some vital element was dying in his face, shifting and fading like the bright colors of a fish. He st
ood transfixed before her, unaware of a shrill voice from across the room.

  “Ernie, Ernie! Shuffleboard! Ernie, Ernie!”

  She started to cry, and he came forward and took her hand.

  “Why am I crying?” she mumbled, enraged at herself. “I’m being so silly, Ernie. You just have to write that hospital and ask for a review of your case, that’s all …”

  “That’s all,” Ernie said.

  “… and it won’t be long before they develop some safe new operating technique, you’ll be out of here in no time.” She wiped her eyes and attempted a cheerful smile.

  “That’s right,” Ernie said.

  She had never seen such an expression in her life.

  She plunged onward, hopelessly. “And you’ve got to be careful in the meantime, Ernie, not to bump your head, you’ve got to have patience and courage.”

  “How did you know about my head?” Ernie said.

  “Dr. Sobel. You’ve got to be very careful, you’ve got to—”

  “Dr. Sobel. He’s okay, Doc Sobel.” Ernie nodded his head. “Thanks anyway. I’ll see you later.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Don’t you hear them calling to me? I’m going to play shuffleboard with the boys.”

  “Ernie!”

  He waited.

  “Ernie, everything’s going to work out fine! And afterwards, maybe you and I, we can celebrate together—”

  She saw that instant that she had made still another mistake. Instead of cheering him, she had made him face the facts, Dr. Sobel’s facts, and his face quivered on the point of tears. He turned and fled, and she did not talk to him again.

  Anne found a student nurse to take her place. She went for a walk between the rufous buildings, driven faster and faster until she found herself running, going nowhere. The day was cold, it was nearly December now, and the sharp air seared her lungs.