The Drowning Tree

  Dr. Horace had been quick to disabuse me of my misunderstanding.

  “I’m afraid that borderline personality disorder doesn’t refer to that kind of border,” he said, not unkindly. I could imagine him, though, storing away my misunderstanding of the word for an anecdote with which to open up a paper at a conference. “It’s not like he’s in Germany and we can yank him over into Switzerland. Borderline, in this case, refers to an inherent instability—a condition that manifests itself in self-destructive behaviors like substance abuse and suicide. I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of success with borderlines. We can try treating the manic-depressive illness with lithium—although even that has varying levels of success—but I’m afraid that borderlines often require long-term hospitalizations—many times becoming career mental patients.”

  I’d seen, then, that it wasn’t that Neil was on one side of a line or another, but that he was inside the line—in a sort of limbo like the one Dante describes at the gates of hell.

  Dr. Horace probably thought he was doing me a favor by being so blunt, but I’ve often thought I could have done without the phrase “career mental patient” seared into my brain. I wonder what he might have said to Christine about her father, about her own chances for inheriting the blackness that had driven him to suicide.

  “Do you think Dr. Horace would talk to me?” I ask Amy, who’s moved off the bed and is kneeling at a dresser, pulling out old faded clothes—gauzy Indian shirts and flowing tie-dyed tunics that I recognize as the shirts Christine wore her first year of college before she’d developed prep-pier, more subdued tastes—and stuffing them into a black garbage bag.

  “I don’t know if he’d be so keen on talking to you about Christine—what with the police investigating her death,” Amy says without turning around. “But I think he’d see you if you said it was about Neil. I’ll call, if you like, and set it up. He’s probably not too busy on a Saturday to see you.”

  Of course, I realize, Amy hadn’t forgotten for a minute that Neil was at Briarwood; she’d only been too kind to bring it up. But she’d known what all this talk about Briarwood would lead back to.

  I glance around at the pictures on the walls, at the pale girls rising from dark water, holding their arms out as if welcoming me back, and wonder what Christine made of them when she came home. Although she’d dismissed them as sentimental Victorian art she’d kept them and eventually thrown over medieval art to write her thesis on one of their sisters—the Lady in the Window. I notice for the first time a hint of triumph in their smiles—as if these lascivious water nymphs and amorous water gods have had their way at last. They’ve finally dragged Christine down into their watery lairs.

  FOR THE SECOND TIME TODAY I ENTER THE GROUNDS OF THE BRIARWOOD INSTITUTE for Mental Health—formerly known as the Briarwood Insane Asylum. Driving through the stone-pillared gate and up the wide curving drive under the dappled shade of stately sycamores is quite different, though, from slipping in the back on the bridle path. And even though I know that the landscape here has been designed to be soothing (the paths graded to slope gently, the trees planted at regular intervals to give a sense of natural order) its effect on me is quite the opposite. The serpentine turnings and low grade of the drive create that sensation I’ve had in dreams of running in place and not getting anywhere.

  Even so, I’ve driven around the building and reached the river-facing front entrance far quicker than I’d like. When Amy made the call I thought it was unlikely that Dr. Horace would agree to see me on such short notice, but according to Amy he’d agreed immediately. I could have still backed out, but it seemed rude after putting Amy to the trouble. Besides, I’d promised Bea I would find out how her father was doing and I wanted to be able to report, when she called this week, that I’d made some progress in that direction. And so I’d thanked Amy—and made her promise to call me when she went down to Christine’s apartment in the city to clean it out so I could help—and driven to Briarwood.

  I park my car in the visitor’s parking lot to the left of the circular drive, turn off the engine, and sit for a moment looking up at the redbrick six-story building with its green-patinaed mansard roof and gothic crenelated towers. If not for the metal grates over the windows it could be an expensive hotel or college. The sun, setting over the Catskills on the other side of the river, sets the old bricks to glowing, and glances off the copper roof and glass windows, saturating the whole building in vibrant, almost surreal, color. The effect of all that color, though, isn’t cheerful. It reminds me of the Technicolor hues of a 1950s movie. There’s something flat about it and I have the uneasy sensation that when I walk around the circular flower bed—planted with huge dahlias in shades of burnt orange and coral pink—and knock on the front door I’ll find that there’s nothing there but a two-dimensional facade.

  I close my eyes and wonder, not for the first time, if they didn’t lock up the wrong person fourteen years ago. What scared me most about Neil’s breakdown was that up until the very last moment before he capsized our boat on the river, his manias didn’t seem so very different from my own. Even when I read the American Psychiatric Association’s official criteria for Neil’s mood disorder, the symptoms seemed different from my own in degree rather than kind. I’d often envied the way Neil could paint for days without sleep or food. I’d sampled tastes of that absorption when hours would pass in front of the easel like minutes and I’d feel as if something outside of myself was guiding my brush. I’d even felt, at times, that the forms and colors were already there on the canvas like in one of those watercoloring books my mother used to buy that had invisible dye in the paper so all you had to do was stroke your wet brush across the paper to release the hidden color.

  When I open my eyes the sun has sunk below the mountains across the river, releasing the building from its spell of light and me from my inertia. It’s not as if insanity were catching, I reassure myself as I get out of the car and walk up to the front door.

  DR. HORACE’S OFFICE IS, AS I REMEMBER IT, IN THE CENTER OF THE BUILDING ON THE second floor, a large well-lit room facing southwest, its windows perfectly aligned to frame the curving river and the Hudson Highlands to the south. Because Briarwood faces southwest and the glass factory where I live faces northwest the view from this window takes in, albeit from a different angle, the same shoreline I see from my loft. It’s far and away the best view from either location because it includes the grounds of Astolat. Dr. Horace, when he rises and comes out from behind his desk to shake hands, is also much as I remember him: tall, slim, and silver-haired. He’s wearing a seersucker suit and a pink bow tie that matches the pink flush in his cheeks, an outfit very much like the one he wore to our meeting fourteen years ago and that I found, then as now, somewhat aggressively cheerful for the director of a psychiatric hospital.

  “Juno McKay, I’m so glad to see you. You’re looking very fit.”

  I suppose very fit is a high compliment from the head doctor of a psychiatric hospital. I just wish I could dismiss the idea from my mind that he’s taking my pulse while grasping my hand and measuring the dilation of my pupils as he gazes intently into my eyes.

  “So are you, Dr. Horace. You look great.”

  Dr. Horace pats his perfectly flat waistline as he sits back down. “I’ve got the best job in the world. I jog the carriage trails to work every morning and go out rowing every day at lunch. We put in a new state-of-the-art exercise facility last year and suicide rates have dropped by 28 percent. Some of our worst bipolars have been able to cut their lithium doses by half.”

  “Wow,” I say, “just from exercise. Who knew?” I remember, though, that when Neil was in one of his manic phases he’d run for miles at the Penrose track in the middle of the night or bicycle to Albany and back in a day. No amount of physical exertion could put a dent in his energy level. But when he crashed he could lie in bed for days not moving, so tired, he once told me, the sheets felt too heavy to lift off his body.

  “And you,” Dr
. Penrose says, “I hear you’ve got a studio in the old glass factory down in Rosedale—” I think he’s going to ask me about my stained-glass business and I straighten up in my chair, preparing to tell him about the Penrose window restoration and my plans for converting the glass factory into gallery and studio space, but apparently my riverfront locale has other significance to him. “—I’m friendly with the guy who runs the kayaking outfit at the park across from there—Kyle Swanson? We’ve gone kayaking together a number of times.”

  I open my mouth to tell him that I know Kyle Swanson but he’s swiveled his desk chair so that he’s facing the river, and he’s looking at the opposite shore so wistfully I feel guilty for keeping him landlocked on this beautiful summer evening. In fact, even though I swore off kayaking forever after finding Christine, I find myself longing to be on the river, skimming over the water’s purple-blue skin in a fast, low boat, riding the current seaward. I’d like, at any rate, to be anyplace but here when Dr. Horace drags his gaze back to mine and says, “Well, I suppose you’re here to ask about Neil’s progress, not listen to my boating plans.”

  I’d like actually, at this point, to talk about anything but Neil, but I launch into the subject gamely. “My—our—daughter, Beatrice, has been asking questions about her father. It’s only normal at her age—she’s fifteen now—when she’s wrestling with her own identity issues to wonder about her father’s mental instability. I feel I owe it to her to find out more about Neil’s … status.”

  Although everything I’ve just said is true I sound to myself like a parody of a mother on some made-for-TV movie. It’s how I often feel at PTA meetings and teacher conferences. Maybe it’s because I had Bea so young that being a mother in public often feels like a charade even when there’s nothing false about my feelings for Bea.

  “Of course, of course,” Dr. Horace murmurs. He leans back in his chair, his back firmly to the window now as if shutting off the temptation to look outside, and presses the tips of his fingers together. “I’d have thought Neil’s family would have kept you informed.”

  “His mother, Esther, kept in touch but she never liked to tell me too many details. She always acted embarrassed around me—as if it were her fault Neil had gotten sick. I suppose she thought it was. People of her generation always blamed the mother when something went wrong with the kids.”

  Dr. Horace continues looking at me but says nothing. I recognize his silence as a therapeutic technique and resent it immediately.

  “But as far as I could tell, Esther was a wonderful mother,” I go on. “She was generous to me and Bea and it’s because of the trust she set up that Bea will be able to go to college. But since she died the family’s been distant. I never got on with Neil’s sister.”

  I pause, expecting Dr. Horace to fill in the silence with some comment about Sarah Buchwald (now Cohen-Levy), but he merely lifts his chin a fraction of an inch and presses his fingertips together more tightly.

  “So, here I am,” I conclude, not willing to give him any more, “and I’d like to know how Neil is doing.”

  Dr. Horace is quiet for another few minutes and then, still without speaking, he swivels his chair around to face a filing cabinet to the right of his desk, opens a drawer, and begins leafing through the tightly packed manila folders. It seems to me that he could have retrieved this file before I got here—but then I calm myself by remembering that he took this appointment with very little advance notice. I’m surprised, though, at how irritated the delay makes me, the anger I feel bubbling just below the surface. I try taking long breaths—yoga breaths, Bea calls them—and tell myself that my nerves aren’t Dr. Horace’s fault. It’s waiting to hear what he’ll say. I know that if Neil had killed himself I’d have been told—at least I think I’d be—but he could have been catatonic for the last half a decade, tied to his bed and drooling, and I wouldn’t have known because I said thirteen years ago that I no longer wanted to know.

  Dr. Horace finds the folder, flips it open, barely looks at the first page, and then closes it. The whole process of retrieving the folder has been a delaying tactic.

  “You’ll be happy to know that Neil has made tremendous progress,” he says. “We don’t like to use the word recovery in bipolar illness. Instead we speak in terms of remission. He’s responded extremely well to a new medication and hasn’t had a manic episode for well over a year. In fact he’s done so well he’s been released to The Beeches—our outpatient facility across the river.”

  “Released? You mean, he’s free to come and go as he pleases?”

  “Patients at The Beeches are strongly encouraged to check in daily with their doctors and follow a routine of outside work and recreation approved by a supervisory board—but yes, essentially he’s as free as you or I am.”

  I look past Dr. Horace toward the river and the darkening hills to the west. The river bends before it reaches the sharp curve that marks World’s End—the deepest spot in the river and the most dangerous, and I can almost feel the confluence of river currents and ocean tide and whirlwinds that sweep down from the highlands pulling the broad calm river into its maw. It’s the spot Neil rowed to that day—where he capsized our boat.

  “But you said—fourteen years ago you said there was very little chance of him ever leading a normal life. I believe the term you used to describe his prognosis was ‘career mental patient.’ ”

  If Dr. Horace registers the anger in my voice he doesn’t show it. I suppose he’s used to patients using stronger language than I’ve just employed.

  “Yes, well, arriving at an accurate diagnosis is always a bit more art than science. Neil’s case was always a complex one. In addition to his depressive and manic episodes he exhibited borderline personality traits. His idealization of you, for instance, and then his devaluation of you when you failed to live up to his expectations was classic borderline behavior. We saw the same pattern in his relationships with his father, professors at Columbia, and doctors here on staff. However, a few years after his admittance here those symptoms became progressively less evident.”

  “You mean they went away?”

  “Not entirely. Neil still has a tendency to idealize caregivers and entertain unrealistic expectations of behavior, but he’s done a lot of work toward integrating his concepts of good and evil. At this point I would not diagnose him as a borderline.”

  “So you were wrong fourteen years ago?”

  Dr. Horace smiles and taps his index fingers together. “Adolescent identity problems often present as borderline personality disorder.”

  “So you mean he grew out of it. What about the manic depression?”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind that Neil is suffering from bipolar disorder—what we used to call manic-depressive illness—but fortunately we’ve been able to control it with medication.”

  “He was on lithium when I saw him thirteen years ago. If you got the manic—the bipolar disorder—under control with lithium why has it taken this long to release him?”

  Dr. Horace leans forward in his chair but at the same time looks away from me, sideways toward the river. As if he were simultaneously trying to confront and avoid me. For the first time since I came into his office I have the sense that he’s unsure of himself.

  “There were problems with the lithium—side effects Neil didn’t tolerate well—and like many bipolars he fought taking it. He felt it deadened him and made it impossible for him to paint. Unfortunately, Esther Buchwald supported him in his experiments with going off the medication. I’m afraid she was of that generation that believes mental patients can get better as an act of will. The results were always disastrous, though. Every time Neil went off his lithium he accelerated into a manic state. He would start out painting a few hours a day, but soon he would spend all day painting and then all night. We always knew he was reaching a crisis point when he started painting mythological and allegorical scenes.”

  Dr. Horace pauses, perhaps expecting me to exhibit surprise at this unusual
detail, but I don’t. I had firsthand knowledge of Neil’s obsession with Romantic and classical mythology. I’d practically introduced him to it.

  “He was fascinated with figures from Greek mythology and Romantic poetry,” I say, “especially stories of doomed lovers who die together. I’m surprised he was still painting those subjects, though. He told me when I visited him the last time here that figurative art was dead.” And then he’d added As long as your face is dead to me, Juno, I won’t paint another face.

  “Yes, that was one of the peculiarities of his manias. You’d expect his painting to become more abstract as he became more manic, but instead they became clearer, more ordered, classical in their composition, the figures he painted radiant—” Dr. Horace smiles at his own enthusiasm. “—if you couldn’t see what a wreck the painter was you’d say they were the work of a man seeing clearly for the very first time.”

  I look away from the doctor’s rapt expression toward the window. It’s grown so dark outside by now that the glass blurrily reflects the shape of the room and the people in it. Dr. Horace and I appear only as blobs of color. What I see in my mind, though, is Neil standing in front of a canvas touching paint to the lips of a beautiful woman who bends down to embrace her drowned husband, both figures shining like gods. Neil, though, is barefoot in paint-spattered jeans and torn T-shirt, dark rings under his eyes, his hair so dirty it’s no longer blond, his skin milk white as frosted glass, all the color leached out of him and soaked into the figures in the painting. Like Dorian Gray in reverse, all his beauty went into his paintings, leaving him a dried-out shell.

  “You could understand,” Dr. Horace is saying, “why it was so hard for him to give that up.”

  “But he did finally—is that what you’re saying? He’s staying on his medication and that’s why he’s well enough to be out?”

  “Sort of.” Dr. Horace is grinning. “He’s on a new medication—one that’s still in trial stage—that evens out the manias and depressions but leaves him lucid enough to paint. Not that his paintings have quite the same intensity of his past work, but they’re arresting in their own right. Here, I’ll show you.” Dr. Horace gets up from his chair and comes around the desk holding an arm out toward the door as I get up. “I can show you what he was working on last year. He’s taken away most of his recent work for the show next week—”