“Oh . . . books,” Karen had said vaguely. The sweet, purposeful evasion of her eyes was familiar: Celine recognized it and felt relief. Karen smiled at them. “He has mystery books in his office. I began with them. Then some medical books, the simpler kind, and books on psychology—favorite reading for the insane.” She smiled but, seeing they were alarmed, she went on quickly: “But they are interesting. You know, in a morbid way. Most of them have case studies about people, other people. Then Mr. Harlan, who was going to college—he’s a short, thin boy, about my age or older, with glasses—has some of his textbooks that I’ve borrowed, and other books about history. Mr. Broussard—that old man with the hearing aid—has some books on philology, but I don’t know enough to read them; they don’t make any sense.” Albert and Celine, who did not know what philology meant, gravely approved this. “I’m getting better, I suppose,” Karen said, shrugging her shoulders. She caught sight of herself in a mirror somewhere and stared across the crowded room with an embarrassed, guilty look, as if she had encountered someone she did not want to meet. “The doctor will tell you about that. Being allowed to come down here for church has made a difference to me,” she said with weak enthusiasm.
On the next visit Celine brought along two of Karen’s suitcases, and on the next—and final—visit Karen was ready to come home.
KAREN PACKED HER CLOTHES AND stripped her bed early in the morning, evicting herself from the narrow, colorless room so that she spent most of the time waiting on the sun porch or talking with the nurses in the halls. The building was damp and dark and everyone shivered. The doctor, back from his serious cases, strolled with Karen through the sun porch and talked of his student days—for some reason he had taken to associating Karen with his youth. He was a short, soft, serious man, of an age lost somewhere between forty and sixty. He wore plaid wool hunting shirts around the hospital and was given to taking deep, profound breaths, expanding his narrow chest, sucking in his prominent little stomach. There were many attendants in the hospital, a dozen or so actual nurses, but only one doctor—for some two hundred patients. Many of the attendants were local people, married women with grown children or sensitive young men who seemed incapable of doing anything else, and some of the attendants were even patients—older people who were not mentally disturbed but who could not, for various reasons, return to their former lives or to any lives in the real world. As the center of the hospital, the final authority on local emergencies, the doctor had seized his role with despair and humor. “I will miss you!” he said frankly. “So very few people we send out of here—rarely anyone like you, self-cured. A magnificent will power you have. Beautiful. The others—they are imprisoned, waiting to die. You saw the psychiatrists the other day?” He lit a cigar, grinning bitterly. Karen nodded. At regular intervals a group of private psychiatrists, hired by the state, came to the hospital for amazing fees, but spent most of their time playing cards in one corner of the sun porch and drinking discreetly. “They say it is hopeless, everything is hopeless, the only cure is death. I wish I could think they were wrong.”
Karen thought it best to change the subject. The doctor complained about this to everyone who would listen, ending all his objections with a cynical, mock affirmation of what the psychiatrists did. “We may see each other again,” she said.
The doctor laughed. “Certainly not! I don’t want you to come back.” They sat in lawn chairs and looked out into the park and at the sky. “May be the first snow of the year today,” the doctor said.
The sky above the red brick wing was a hard, brittle gray, like chopped ice. Karen looked at it politely. “Yes,” she said.
When the doctor excused himself and left, Karen remained, staring out at the empty park. She had noticed in herself a peculiar susceptibility to the feelings of others, to their moods—so, in the company of the doctor, she felt herself weary and disillusioned, and she took care not to jar the doctor’s sentiments. With the nurses on their coffee breaks she was an interested, smiling listener who had earned their liking by pretending interest in their boy friends and husbands. With several of the other patients she was sorrowfully optimistic about herself—a pose they appreciated, since all at this stage of recovery were jealous of their own advancements and liked to use their wits to build up confidence in Karen. The sick, nervous boy who lent her books and stared at her secretly, whose mental trouble had been partially the result of a strict religious childhood, talked liberally of Catholicism to Karen, who expressed fear of communion and confession and shame because of her fear. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he had urged. “I know how you feel, that you’re not worthy. But it’s wrong to feel that way. I was taught that—it was a heresy in the Church, actually. It’s wrong to feel that way.” But neither he nor Karen went to communion, nor did they go to confession at the church in town. By a silent mutual agreement they did not even sit together.
Her early days in the hospital, in a locked room, Karen had spent in a delirium of prayer and sexual excitement, murmuring prayer after prayer until her frenzy turned to thoughts about Shar—she would cry aloud at the memory of his body, his muscles and sweating back, his clenched teeth, his strong thighs. She could talk of nothing else to the nurses, who pretended professional disapproval. During the first month—which she remembered, now, as strangely dark, sunless, and stifling with stale air—Karen had refused to go outside, refused to leave her room except when forced (when she would turn sweetly and viciously abject), refused to talk coherently to the doctor in the hopes that he would decide she was hopelessly insane. Somehow she knew about the ward in the other wing and had begged to be taken there. “I’m insane, completely insane,” she had screamed at the doctor, “why don’t you believe me? What do I have to do? What do I have to do?” Later, allowed to come shyly onto the sun porch in the company of an attendant, a girl her own age, Karen had pretended fear and excitement and had rattled the pages of a newspaper so that everyone looked up at her. She had smiled naively at them. In the days that followed, dissatisfied with them, angry because they did not stare at her continuously, Karen had squirmed to show off her body, had talked softly to one of the men—a harried-looking salesman about to be released—and had ended by upsetting him so that he fled. She had gone to another man, pushing the attendant away, and told him she wanted him—she wanted him to make love to her. Before she could be persuaded to leave she had cried hysterically, “You don’t want me! None of you want me! You won’t let me make you happy!”
Karen remembered these incidents with discomfort, but not really with shame; they seemed to have happened in a dream. She understood, too, that as soon as she forgot them, or seemed to forget them, everyone else forgot too. The boy looked at her sometimes with hard, unmistakable, and unconscious lust, but even he did not seem to remember what she had said. On her eighteenth birthday the dining hall had sung to her, and Karen, laughing in surprise and embarrassment, began to feel, for the first time, that the recognition of a birthday, the conclusion of a year of one’s life, did have a meaningful and real function.
When Celine and Albert arrived Karen went to them and allowed herself to be embraced by Celine. She felt tears coming to her eyes—she brushed them away, trying to laugh. Albert stood a little apart, in a new overcoat buttoned importantly across his chest, carrying a hat. Karen’s heart went out to him: his serious expression, his slightly nervous fingers, his tentative smile. But most of all she felt love for him because he had married her sister. “You look so nice!” Karen said to Celine. They smiled at each other, they laughed; Celine said, “But you’re the one—you’re the one to say it to.” “You do look nice, very wonderful,” Karen said. Her sister did look younger. Her hair was shining and soft about her face, her eyes were bright in a way Karen had never before seen them. She wanted to rush to Albert and embrace him and whisper thanks to him for what he had done; yet at the same time she realized that Albert, too, must be grateful—that he too had become a different person, nourished by the discovery o
f love. “I’m so happy for you,” Karen stammered. She felt older than either of them—older even than Albert. The strange space that separated them from her did not diminish her happiness for them.
Riding back home on the long, frozen roads, Karen’s enthusiasm waned; thoughts of home were sobering to her, and she understood the nervousness of Celine and Albert. She wondered what people thought of her in Pools Brook. She wondered how her father awaited her—what had happened to him. Most of all she wondered how the home of her childhood would jar her, unsettle in her the strict, precarious equilibrium between contentment and despair she had disciplined in herself. To reward herself for a day of sanity Karen allowed her thoughts to return sometimes to Shar, and most of the trip home was passed with her dreaming about him, recalling words he had said to her, actions he had done. She was able now to think of him calmly, though often at night her dreams would frighten her awake: violent, ghostly dreams, haunted by accusations of betrayal, that left her stunned and ashamed. But as they climbed through the foothills to the town of Pools Brook, as the ragged fields of old corn gave way to woods and rocky slopes, Karen had the strange feeling that it was into a dream she was moving, or returning, and that the nightmares that so vexed her, claiming her guilt, and the daydreams about Shar, were very real compared to this snow-locked land. How much more real the memory of Shar’s breath than the look of that icy sky, a sea of ice! A hint of the Eden River, frosted even and white, rocks bare and cold in the colorless light, trees shorn of leaves, twigs and branches shocked into rigidity: an unreal land. As they turned onto the road leading home the sensation of unreality deepened. Karen felt intoxicated with the cold brittle look of things. Impossible that she was returning! Impossible she could return to it as herself, see it as she had once seen it—for in spite of what she had endured, this land had not changed, even to her vision. There was the ruin of the water mill on the old shallow creek; and the Harnacks’ farmhouse with an old wreck of an automobile under an apple tree in the yard—the rope swing, limp and rotten, the Harnack children played with in summer; there was the beginning of her father’s land, a big spread of woods with NO TRESPASSING signs like slaps across the mouth. Empty woods, black trees, no hint of life. There were pastures with stiffened grass, and old creek beds gone dry, meandered away from water; there were lonely, abandoned shanties back in fields, and now the big old bridge up ahead with the board floor that would seem to jump up at cars that passed, rattling and grumbling. Karen stared in fascination at the bridge as it loomed up above them. From that high rusted beam Shar and her brothers had jumped, holding their noses, falling straight as stones, afraid even to kick their skinny white legs. And there was the scarred grass beside the road and the twisted guard rails—still not fixed—where Shar’s fancy automobile had skidded off the road while Karen screamed in hysteria. The car was gone; grass had recovered, grown up straight again and now frozen with the cold, as if nothing had ever happened.
“Now I am home,” Karen said. They got out of the car. Albert, grateful for Karen’s suitcases, busied himself with them. “Now I am back.” The big house looked exactly like something in a dream. Yet it could not have been a dream, for Karen knew every room inside it, the look of every ceiling, every corner, and especially the look of her own room with its windows facing east. “We’ve done a little something to your room,” Celine said. “I hope you’ll like it. Albert did the painting and I thought that something bright—your old curtains were a little faded—”
“Thank you,” Karen murmured. They climbed the steps to the house. Behind, the big trees listened, stiff as if frozen out of their life, limbs outspread in caution. The sky was hard and white. Because it was nearly winter Karen could see far, through leafless trees and skeletal bushes, to the abrupt horizon a few miles away; and to her right, rearing out of the quiet ground, was the cemetery with its secluded gravestones. The unreality of the land perplexed Karen. Was it a betrayal? No ground is holy, no land divine, but that we make it so by an exhausting, a deadly straining of our hearts.
At the top of the steps they paused, as if needing rest. Karen’s heart had begun to pound hard. Absurd to be frightened of her own home, her own childhood—absurd to be cold with terror when it was only her father who awaited her, whose command she had so well fulfilled. But Karen gripped Celine’s arm and cried, with such anguish that Albert had to look away. “Help me. Please help me. Please don’t leave me.”
22
The first day was spent by Karen in her room, unpacking her suitcases, putting away clothes, while Celine talked to her cheerfully. Nothing was said of her father; Karen supposed she would see him at dinner. She listened for him in the house, but had heard nothing. “And what about Jack?” Karen said. “Jack?” Celine said hurriedly. “He’s down at the capitol. He’s in the legislature.” “I’m glad to hear he’s done well,” said Karen. “He was married,” Celine said hesitantly, “after the election, I think. . . . It’s no one we know.”
She waited for Karen to reply, or to indicate something by her expression, but Karen felt nothing. She had not thought of Jack until that moment—their long good-bys, their walks, their staring at each other meant nothing; Karen did not think she could even recall his face. “He was over around Eastertime, to talk to Pa,” Celine said, as if leading Karen on.
But Karen’s mind skipped past. “Tell me everything about the family,” she said. Celine looked up in surprise, for Karen had never cared anything about the family—it had been one of her cute, unforgivable tricks to pretend not to know the names of her little nephews and nieces. “I want to know everything,” she said. She sat on the edge of her bed and clasped her arms around her legs. A thin, mild-featured girl, Celine thought, and in the abrupt light from the window it was only from time to time—a certain slanting of her eyes, a turn of her head—that Karen’s supposed beauty showed itself. “I want to know it all, as if I had never been gone,” she said.
Karen did not see her father that day—it turned out that he had dinner in his room. Karen was astonished, and Celine and Albert embarrassed. They ate in the old-fashioned dining room and from time to time Karen stared up at herself in the mirror of an old cabinet facing her. She remembered when her image had peeped up at itself over the top of the cabinet shelf, a child’s face peering with great interest at its chewing mouth. The cabinet was made of dark, rich mahogany, with many small windows of glass in it protecting the frail white glassware inside. Karen saw the cabinet for the first time: in the years she had sat at the table, in this exact position, she had never really seen it. A sudden wave of fear engulfed her, as if she had missed many things—she gripped the edge of the table, as she had gripped the hot dirty pavement of a street somewhere—she could not remember when—afraid of falling away, being sucked away. Celine and Albert talked cheerfully; Albert was describing a dance they had chaperoned at the high school only the week before. “Yes, yes, I’m going back to school,” Karen interrupted, as if this was what they were talking about. They looked at her in solemn perplexity. “I’ll go back to school next year,” Karen said. “That’s very fine,” Celine said without enthusiasm—thinking, no doubt, of rumors and whispers and Karen losing her mind, screaming, tearing off her clothes. “You can take my courses then,” Albert said. He went on to describe his method of teaching geometry, and Karen’s mind wandered. She felt a sly, grateful pleasure at having brought herself back so easily—merely talking to them, claiming her humanity, her kinship to these strangers: with their stares they reinstated her.
As if to aid in Karen’s redemption—her consciousness of herself as a human being—many eyes and mouths and gesturing hands appeared in the next several days. First the closer brothers and sisters. They happened over after dinner one night, as if by accident: Ed and his wife Penny and their baby Billy Ray and their two older boys, and Ed’s best friend among his brothers, Stewart, with his big-boned wife Sarah (as pregnant as she might be) and their five children—nameless, look-alike children. The next day the
re was the oldest sister, alone, and cousins from the neighborhood, and aunts and uncles; which were blood relations and which were not Karen could not recall. Their efforts to avoid hurting Karen and yet—yet—to insist upon her separateness, her oddity, were obvious to Karen, and though she responded at first with polite enthusiasm, she found herself as time went by reassuming her old role, staring at windows while they talked, dreaming of the land outside or of nothing at all. “You always were the queerest one of them,” someone had told her years ago. Now Karen remembered the remark with interest. Perhaps she had always been unbalanced, always weak mentally and emotionally. Certainly her stubborn strength might be no more than an indication of an underlying weakness: the fear of change, of losing faith, of losing herself. Karen had always thought that the lives of her sisters and brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles were unraveled and raveled back up, neatly, without fuss, whenever they got together—no secrets there, no shameful corners. When their lives lay on the old parlor rug like strands of yarn in danger of being entangled Karen had felt almost with terror that if she were to give herself to them, to release herself, she would be lost within them; when it came time to retrieve her life, identify herself, she would grope and come back with someone else’s life—that of her ever-pregnant sister-in-law, who was marveling now at how healthy she felt, “strong as a horse,” and how the baby would turn around in her, she was certain of it in spite of what the doctor said. “He turns around like you do in bed. Turns over and around, trying to get comfortable. Oh, he’ll be a devil!” she cried.
ON THE THIRD DAY KAREN’S father came down to dinner. Karen, who had thought him seriously ill, was surprised to hear his footsteps on the stairs—almost the same as before, heavy and arrogant. She was sitting by the fireplace being attended by some sisters and brothers, who talked mostly to one another, and when she heard her father coming, she turned cold. She looked around for Celine, but Celine was in the kitchen. “Father is coming,” Karen said. She had interrupted conversations. Since some of the talk had been about the farm—speculations about how it would be divided at Herz’s death—her brothers were grateful to her, and smiled and lit pipes and cigars and crossed their long legs.