The little man with the sunglasses breathed rapidly, like a rabbit. “I can’t get out,” he murmured to himself. “My car is out there. My car is out there.” The little girl, a pretty child with long red hair, a little tangled now, gasped and wheezed for breath. Her mother did not seem to know how to express fear or horror, but looked only bewildered, as if she were trying to remember the names of Ponzi and the little man but could not. She stood smartly in white high heels, back against the damp, defaced wall, as if she were waiting under shelter for the rain to stop. “The police will be here,” she said, petting her child’s hair. “They’re here now. I saw some coming.”
Another crash came from the front of the restaurant. An automobile horn sounded, as if someone were trying to drive a car into the building. There were shouts and scufflings and, from a distance, a siren. Ponzi’s hands were trembling and his knees were shaking so that he could see them, in spite of the thick dirty trousers he wore. He tried to cover them with his hands before anyone saw. “Did you see the race?” he cried. “A beautiful race! Beautiful day! That was a killer that got killed there today—his soul goes straight to hell! Down there in the frozen mud!” Only the little girl, blinking suspiciously, looked at Ponzi. “What am I doing here? Why did I come here?” Ponzi said, his big hands over his knees. “The sea is such a beautiful sight, and—and there was someone I wanted to see too—She’s out there somewhere.” Babbling, he took something out of his trouser pockets: his wallet, a dirty comb, loose change and dollar bills, and some crumpled color postcards. He picked up the postcards and stared at them, trying to read the small print. “Cherry River! Where the scenic Cherry River empties into the Ocean! A resort area! Amusements—a midway—night clubs! An annual motor racing event!”
He dropped one of the cards and picked it up again, trembling. He muttered to himself: “I’ve got to send these home. Or call home. They’re waiting for me.” Then, louder, he said: “The sea is such a beautiful sight! Beautiful to behold, beautiful to submerge yourself in! I could spend my life overlooking the sea! Miles and miles of waves, and they never stop—it wouldn’t freeze, I don’t think. What would happen to the fish then? A beautiful sight in summer! But you wouldn’t want to go too far out in it. Because of the fish.” The little man with the sunglasses was staring in terror at Ponzi. Ponzi absorbed his fright and began trembling all the more. His pants were wet with perspiration. He went on quickly, while he still had the attention of the man, and of the woman and her child, “Because of the fish! Certainly! Farther out, miles out where it’s truly deep, and all the way out—all so deep—there are these fish swimming all the time, sharks and all; and smaller fish made for them to eat, and smaller ones those eat, and other things—long things—like worms, all kinds of worms, thirty feet long! What do you think of that, little girl! Thirty feet long! Would you have thought so from looking at the top? But it’s fine to look at from shore. We live on shore. In the hallway between our living room and kitchen at home there’s an old painting of the ocean done by my grandfather himself—seventy years old when he did it, what do you think of that! White caps and blue waves and blue sky and white clouds! What do you think of that!”
Unaccountably, Ponzi began crying. The postcards slipped through his fingers and with them he felt his mind slip, falling to the dirty floor, lost with the crumpled-up hand towels of brown paper and bobby pins and used Kleenex and strands and balls of hair, most of it brown. He thought of the girl and saw her mobbed and torn apart, golden hair, fair, pale skin, innocence, beauty—all—and sympathy, moreover, and perhaps the beginning of love for him: “You have suffered,” she had told him. “No one saw that before!” Ponzi cried angrily, shaking his fists at the frightened people. “No one understood! I’m going to go out and save her—save her—I’ll go out and—” He muttered righteously, distorting his mouth to mimic the little girl’s widening, lengthening mouth. But he did not move. His plump body shoved up tight against the wall, his legs in the filthy trousers outspread, he looked as if he were ready to sit there for some time. “I’ll go out and save her from them!” he cried, angrily and helplessly.
Hearing the noise, Karen had left the room and crept slowly down the stairs, holding the railing. Her legs were weak and a buzzing had begun in her head. She was barefoot and held the robe tightly around her, as if she were cold; she stared straight before her at the high old-fashioned door, which had been left slightly ajar in Max’s haste at leaving. The rest of the boardinghouse seemed to be empty.
Karen opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. Men were running down the middle of the street: two Negro men. Karen thought she saw something flash about them, perhaps the blade of a knife. A pick-up truck turned the corner and raced down the street, but now the Negroes were gone, hidden behind buildings, and the men in the pick-up truck roared past. The horn was blowing steadily. In the back of the truck a small horde of people, young boys and men and a few girls, stood shouting at nothing. There were bricks on the floor of the truck. The horn blew until they were out of sight.
Karen came barefoot down to the sidewalk. Her mind was so empty and so hollow with buzzing that she thought the sun would burn right through it. She seemed to be on fire: her body stung, burned from the hot water, her feet stung on the hot pavement, the slow seeping of blood in her loins stung, red-hot, creeping down her legs. Karen went out to the street and stood looking around, as if she believed she might see something. Her hair was wild and matted about her face. She thought her body probably jerked and flinched with the beating of her heart, and yet she could not have said why she was frightened, or if she was frightened—she did not know what was wrong with her at all. She could not remember where she was. She could not remember who she was, to whom she belonged. Looking up at the hot white sun, she felt its light go through her, shine right through her brain.
Firecrackers were exploded somewhere. Karen jumped, frightened. Footsteps clattered up the street. Shamed into an awareness of herself, her brain still throbbing and confused, Karen sank to her knees in the street. Cracked pavement, lined with mud. She put her hands to it and pressed against it. The sun burned around her and for an instant she felt terror that she might be pulled off, away from the street, sucked up into the sun. She clasped her hands before her face in a childish gesture of prayer. “My God,” she said softly. Her legs were wet with blood. But instead of praying, she was tempted at once to think of something else: she thought of Shar. On that day he had given himself to her. She thought of the silver car and Shar’s face above it, his goggles, his tense grimace; she thought of his personal hatred for her beyond his impersonal infatuation. She thought of him driving—How the grandstand of people would dissolve before him, before the speed at which he moved, how the sky would melt out of its rigidity—its surface look—as he sped beneath it, and around, around, and he would think of her: he knew that she clung to him across whatever space separated them. And slowly, deliberately, she felt herself penetrating through to Shar, she felt herself calculating what he must have felt—he would have driven faster and faster, he would have prodded the speed up—she knew—and he would have thought, perhaps in the instant before he knew he could go no faster, he would have thought of—
Karen cried aloud. “I can’t do it,” she murmured. “I can’t do it.” She thought she heard something behind her, but she did not look around. Her own sobs confused her. She held her hands against her face. “My God, forgive me,” she said, “forgive me. Forgive me for what I did.” Then she turned suddenly—she saw some men behind her. There were three of them, in their early twenties, with cheap new clothes and wristwatches and sunglasses. They looked as if they were in a hurry, yet they had stopped to stare, one of them not even grinning, at Karen. She saw they carried knives and that all the knives looked alike. “And you too,” she said, turning to them, blinking, “because you are just like me, I am just like you. We are all killers. We have the same hearts. We did the same thing. We need help, we need forgiveness, we—”
>
One of the young men, a pimply-faced youth with black sideburns and the beginning of a mustache, laughed shortly and scratched his head. “Well, now, honey,” he said, scratching his head furiously and not knowing whether he should grin or not, “I mean, honey—What are you doing out here?”
“God forgive us,” Karen said, closing her eyes, “God help us—help us—”
“For Christ sake,” he said. They shuffled their feet as if they were about to break into a dance. “Honey, I mean, do you want some niggers to drag you off? I mean, is that what you want?” Their laughter was cut off at once, as if with the stroke of a knife, and they stood, scratching, on the sidewalk, staring at Karen. “For Christ sake,” someone said. “It’s a nut. A real nut. And she ain’t no more’n a kid either—that’s just a kid.”
Karen opened her eyes and looked at them. They wavered in and out of her vision, in and out of focus, as if she were staring at them through rippling water. One of the men, who wore a farmer’s straw hat, looked angry with her for some reason. He was chewing his lower lip as if he wanted to bite it off. Then the black-haired young man said again, scratching his scalp with five fingernails at once, “That’s a real nut. A real nut. Honey—”
“Let’s go,” the angry man said.
“But, Howie, this here is a—”
“Hell with it!” he said violently. “I don’t like it! Gives me creeps to see that—Let’s go! We got some bus’ness to do!”
“But what if some niggers come by and—”
“Hell with it!” the angry man said, shouting at Karen as if he were arguing with her. The other shrugged their shoulders and turned to leave, the man with the straw hat turned to follow them, and, at the last instant, turned back to Karen and said with an embarrassed, hateful snarl: “Oughtn’t to be out here dressed like that!” and, raising his black-booted foot thigh level, drawing his knee far back, he kicked out and struck her on the side of the head with a final, grunting, “Hell!” Then he ran to catch up with the other men as they walked fast down the street.
Fall
21
Before the massive, clay-colored building five miles north of Craig was appropriated into the state system of mental hospitals (there were twelve others, all, like this, in small towns or in the country), it had belonged to the widow of a railroad millionaire, and before this it had been one of the first convents in the country. The millionaire’s widow had bought it after a long search for an old, abandoned, expensive home; she had apparently retained from her childhood dreams of castles, for she had the old convent remodeled with certain towers and points of battlement that suggested the Middle Ages. The ruined little gardens with their statues of saints and the chapel in the very center of the convent were kept untouched. The widow, whose sons had moved to distant parts of the country, lived there alone with an aunt related by marriage and some maids, and waited for the sons to come and visit, bringing their wives (they never came), and for tourists to come, only a very few, refined tourists, who would be shown graciously through the house (they never came either).
After the building was bought by the state, expanded and divided into hundreds of rooms, the statues of the saints were removed and the gardens leveled. In place of the gardens there was one large lumpy park with a few shade trees at one end and many benches, arranged in spots as if in an auditorium. A long, narrow sun porch overlooking this park was only emptied of its damp, infested furniture and rugs and otherwise kept untouched, for it was thought that patients who were not seriously ill would enjoy sitting there. For some reason the chairs on the sun porch were canvas lawn chairs, in striped colors of lemon and green and red and orange, and suggested sunlight and gaiety; a few persons would sit on the porch, staring out in warm weather on the small groups of patients watched over in the park by attendants, sitting on benches or looking for four-leaf clovers or playing quiet games or exploring the grass with bare feet, and in rainy or cold weather staring at the dismal uneven lawn and the warped wooden benches and the gray streaming of rain or cloudy light on the new brick wing opposite—a wing inhabited by people never seen, secret people, whose screams sometimes carried across the park.
The building was a mixture of old-fashioned rooms and hallways with high ceilings and new, remodeled, or added rooms with smooth white walls not yet water-stained. The foyer floor was made of cracked marble that could never be washed clean, and the foyer itself was immense: it reached up two stories to an intricate ceiling, and in several places on the walls there were the indications of filled-in doorways to which ghostly staircases led. The towers at each corner of the roof had been taken down, and there were dull, erased-looking marks where they had been, as if horns had been cut off or were preparing to emerge. The front “grounds” of the hospital, in which patients sometimes strolled, consisted of a long rocky decline to the road, decorated in spots by patches of flourishing grass or weed flowers in season. There had been no wire fence between the road and the grounds until recently, when pressure was put on the state officials by the small town of Craig, or by a small group of its citizens, and a high twisted wire fence of bright metal was erected to protect motorists from the wandering old women or nervous-handed men who were allowed to spend sunny afternoons out front. Behind the hospital, stretching back for several acres, were the hospital gardens, where men were put to work with tractors or on foot; the gardens, property of the more aggressive, had always been securely fenced off.
The first time Celine and her husband—they had been married in May, as soon as possible after the trouble—came to the hospital to see Karen, they had been ushered along a hallway and into a small, cell-like room, no doubt once the room of a nun, where Karen sat up in bed. She had been pale and remote, smiling and unsmiling, and kept pulling the covers up about her shoulders though they would not stay there. A nurse who accompanied Celine and Albert, and to whom they were grateful for not leaving, remarked that Karen believed she was not well that morning, but that perhaps she would decide she was better and would take them for a walk in the park. But Karen had protested, saying she was sick, and with childlike self-pity had begun to cry. “We drove two hundred miles to see her,” Albert had said hesitantly when the nurse ushered them out again. “Is this all? Is this all there is to it?”
The next time they came, about a month later, they met Karen on the sun porch. She awaited them, dressed in a dark wool suit and conspicuous high heels, with her hair pulled back from her face and twisted into a thick roll at the back and top of her head. They had noted her easy familiarity with the nurses and the other patients and the doctor himself. She was polite, smiling, charming. No mention was made of her father—she had written to him in the beginning, but he had not answered, a series of hysterical letters in a large childish scrawl that Celine had told the doctor had never been Karen’s, not even when she was a child. The doctor had seemed proud of Karen, whom he called, in a low voice so the other sunporch patients could not hear, his prettiest patient; Karen had flushed with pleasure, and there was something in her renewed vitality, something feverish about her smile, that made Celine think she was being introduced to a stranger. Later, in her room, Karen had told her in a whisper that she thought she was pregnant. While Celine stared in shock and dismay, Karen went on to talk about the friends she had made, the nurses, the doctor, the church she was taken to on Sundays, she and a young college student, a boy who had had a nervous breakdown. She talked back and forth to Celine and Albert and sometimes to the woman attendant, who smiled fixedly, as if on display. Then, suddenly, she had become tired; her face sagged, she could not keep her eyes open, she felt nervous and faint. After leaving Karen, Celine and Albert talked with the doctor, who discussed Karen in vague, abstract terms, dissatisfying them. They had been shocked to hear that Karen had begged him and some of the other men, patients and attendants, to make love to her, and more shocked to hear that the doctor did not consider this strange at all. “No, no,” the doctor had said confidently, “her lover was killed. You kno
w about that. We only gradually found out what had happened—the man killed, the miscarriage because of the shock, the involvement in that riot down in Cherry River. A very clear and external case, so far as I know—the most logical case I have had for some time.” And he had smiled at them as if he were thankful for the phenomenon of logic in an insane world.
The third visit was spent in Craig, where Celine and Albert took Karen to dinner to celebrate, belatedly, her eighteenth birthday. Karen had lost weight and the clothes that Celine had sent her fit loosely; Celine saw that Karen had drawn in the waist of her dress and fastened it from beneath with a pin, so that it fitted tightly about her. Karen had a fierce consciousness of her appearance as they walked through town and as they entered the restaurant, looking icily about her, meeting eyes, seeking out her reflection in mirrors and store windows. But as they talked she lost her polite, poised arrogance and began to smile more often and to inquire sweetly about the wedding she had missed. “And Father, too,” Karen had said, staring into her water glass. “I realize he is ashamed of me. I understand his not writing to me, or coming down to see me.”
“He had a stroke after the . . . the trouble,” Celine said hurriedly. “He doesn’t get around very much now.”
Karen had stared fixedly at the glass, or at her hands, and did not speak for some time. Albert, grown a little softer and plumper since his marriage and given confidence by Celine’s usual smile upon him, tried to draw her back into conversation. “Doctor Trantam tells me you’ve been reading a lot. What have you been reading?”