“Lymon?” Mr. Peters asked, as if he had several. “What’s he done?”
“Tried to commit suicide,” the voice said. “Can you hear me now?”
Mr. Peters tried to answer but his throat seemed frozen and no sound came out of it.
“He’s in the hospital,” the voice said. “They took him there shortly after daylight this morning. And I’ve taken the liberty of hiring both a day and a night nurse. I hope that meets with your approval. Not that the floor nurse wouldn’t do everything that’s necessary, probably. But with cases of this kind, there is always a chance that they’ll try again. So it’s not safe to—”
“No,” Mr. Peters said thickly. “I’m sure that’s right, what you’ve done.”
“I’ve looked up the train schedules for you,” the voice said, “and I find there’s one that leaves at…”
From the train Mr. Peters went to the hotel, registered, fortified himself with a shot of whisky, and then took a cab out to the university hospital. The dean had neglected to prepare him for the bandages around Lymie’s throat and wrists, and at the sight of them the young man in Mr. Peters took his derby hat and departed.
Lymie was asleep. The doctor had given him a hypo and he had not even moved for nearly eight hours. Mr. Peters went over and stood beside the bed and looked down at Lymie’s face. It was a dreadful waxy white, the thin skin drawn tight over the bones by exhaustion and revealing the secret shape of the skull All the strength went out of Mr. Peters’ legs, and he put his hand against the foot of the bed. There’s only one thing to be thankful for, he thought, swaying slightly. And that is that the boy’s mother isn’t alive. It would have been too much for her. She couldn’t have stood it…. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose quietly. Then he turned to the nurse and said, “I don’t suppose there is any use of my staying here. I have a room at the hotel, in case you need to get in touch with me. And I’ll be back in the morning.”
He had never been on the university campus before and what he saw, going from the hospital to the dean’s office, wasn’t very real to him. The sunshine and the big trees hanging far out over the street, and the sidewalks crowded with boys and girls Lymie’s age, walking along with books under their arms, and all of them unconcerned, acting as if nothing were wrong anywhere in the world. But then the whole day was unreal to him.
The dean kept Mr. Peters waiting a full ten minutes before he was shown into the inner office, where the dean sat, at a heavy walnut desk, under a portrait of himself by a distinguished American painter. The money for this portrait had been raised partly by undergraduate subscription, partly by well-to-do alumni. The dean rose, walked around the desk, and offered his hand. His handshake, like that of most public men, was limp and impersonal, but the expression on his face seemed to Mr. Peters to be genuine sympathy.
“I’m very happy to meet you,” the dean said, “though I regret the—er—circumstances under which we—Won’t you sit down?” He regretted even more the alcohol which he detected on Mr. Peters’ breath…. The dean was a teetotaler.
Mr. Peters settled himself in a chair beside the desk and waited for the dean to produce a letter addressed to him in Lymie’s handwriting.
“It’s not the first case of this kind we’ve had to contend with,” the dean said. “At nineteen, you know, life often seems unbearable. I could show you statistics that prove—but you’re not interested in statistics, I feel sure. Your son is in excellent hands, Mr. Peters. We have reason to be proud of our medical men. Dr. Hart is not my own doctor but I know him well and wouldn’t hesitate to use him, if I were taken sick. He’s both conscientious and thorough. I’m sure when you talk to him—”
“What did he do it with?” Mr. Peters interrupted.
“With a straight-edged razor,” the dean said. There was a slight pause and then he added, “This must be very hard on you. I know how I’d feel in your place.”
Mr. Peters looked at him and saw that the dean hadn’t the faintest idea how he felt; that if anything, the dean was enjoying it, like the people in the outer office.
“I’ve talked to several of the boys in the rooming house where your son has been living, and to several of his teachers, and his two best friends—a boy named Charles Latham and a boy named Geraghty. You know both of them, probably?”
Mr. Peters nodded. He knew that Lymie had spent a good deal of time with a boy named Latham, when he was in high school, and that they had roomed together for a while when Lymie first came down here. “I’ve met Latham but not the other boy,” he said.
“There is also a girl in the case,” the dean said. “Her father is one of the prominent men here in the university. I couldn’t get much out of the Latham boy. I found him sullen and distrustful. But Geraghty told me a good deal and so did the girl, without knowing it. She’s a very open honest youngster. I’ve known her all her life. She says she didn’t realize the situation, but it’s obvious that your son was in love with her and tried to kill himself when he found out that she was in love with this Latham boy. I’ve been dealing with young people for thirty-five years now, and I’ve gradually come around to the belief that although they seem like children to us—to their parents especially—their problems, their emotional disturbances are not essentially different from the emotional disturbances of older people. The girl was rather distressed by our conversation this morning. She was crying when she left here, and she went to the hospital and tried to force her way in. We have a rule against mixed visiting at the university hospital, for reasons that I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you. And in any case, the doctor doesn’t want Lymie to have visitors for a day or so—that doesn’t mean you, naturally. There are a couple of people that I have to talk to still—the president of Charles Latham’s fraternity, a boy named Armstrong; and also the man who keeps the rooming house where your son has been living. I don’t expect to find out anything from them that we don’t know already.”
Mr. Peters glanced uneasily at the pile of papers on the desk. “Did Lymie leave any word for me?” he asked.
The dean shook his head. “No word for anybody.”
54
The statistics that the dean refrained from quoting show that there are more suicides in spring than in any other season of the year, that more single persons take their lives than married ones, that suicide is more frequent in peacetime than during a war, more common among Protestants than among Catholics.
Considering the whole of human misery, it is not unreasonable that now and then some unhappy person should want to take his own life. But certain customs and practices now fallen into disuse—the confiscation of the suicide’s property, the brutal punishment inflicted on his corpse, the refusal of a Christian burial, and that strange practice of burying a suicide at a crossroads with a stake driven through his heart—testify to the horror aroused by this act. The horror may be due to the fact that all people share, in some degree, the impulse toward self-destruction; and when some one person actually gives way to it, all are exposed to the common danger. Or perhaps the horror stems from something else, something much less complicated: The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him.
During the middle of the last century a French soldier hanged himself from the lintel of a doorway in the Hotel des Invalides in Paris. For two years there had been no suicides there, and during the next fourteen days, five men were found hanging from the same beam. The passageway was closed off and there were no more suicides for a time at that institution, though men and women continued to jump from the Waterloo Bridge (also Highgate Archway and the Clifton Suspension Bridge), to swallow arsenic, to hold revolvers to their foreheads, and to throw themselves in front of trains.
The morning that Lymie was taken to the hospital, quiet descended on the second floor of the rooming house, and for nearly a week there were no fights, no wrestling matches at the head of the stairs. In one way or another each of the boys was affected. No one crossed the threshold of Lymie’s room. The terrible
expression that Freeman and Fred Howard remembered seeing in Lymie’s face that night when they passed through this room was, of course, the work of their own excited imaginations. Colter remembered how Lymie had turned around and watched him ransack the closet—and was ashamed. Pownell had come home about one-thirty that same night and heard someone being sick in the bathroom. He decided that it must be Reinhart, who had left him an hour before, good and drunk. He started to go in and hold Reinhart’s head for him. But then he remembered that Reinhart owed him three dollars and had been asked for it repeatedly, so he went up the stairs to bed. For two days he kept from telling anyone about this, but finally he broke down and confessed that he was entirely responsible for Lymie’s doing what he did, and there was no arguing Pownell out of it.
Amsler, who hadn’t been home or allowed his mother to come and see him for over a month, sat down and wrote her a post card; she could expect him, he said, sometime late Friday. Mr. Dehner’s reactions were perhaps the most peculiar, and made the least sense. When the telephone rang and he found himself talking to the dean at last, he was so confused he couldn’t decide which boys, out of the dozen who lived in his house, were Lymie’s friends. He saw Geraghty coming down the stairs at that moment and gave the dean his name. Mr. Dehner had been through a good deal. He had stood by while the plumber and his assistant had made the bathtub and the washbowl usable again, an experience that could easily have shattered a less nervous man. When he turned away from the telephone he went into his bedroom, locked the door, and lay face down on his four-poster bed, and wept; not for Lymie but for himself, because everything went wrong for him. No matter what he did or tried to do, the result was always the same.
After Geraghty left the dean’s office he shut himself in a phone booth and called his old girl and they met in the Ship’s Lantern and patched things up. Geraghty discovered that he was much fonder of her than he had realized. And he had not lied to the dean about his friendship with Lymie. He had always liked Lymie very much and had meant to be friends with Lymie, only he hadn’t got around to it. What he told the dean was merely a statement of his intentions for the future—if Lymie survived. On the way home from the Ship’s Lantern he stopped in to see his new girl, intending to tell her that it was all off between them. But for the first time in nearly a month she seemed really glad to see him and when she was like that, he didn’t have the heart to tell her that he wasn’t going to see her any more.
The only person in the rooming house who remained himself, calm and unexcited, was Reinhart, although it was he who had found Lymie at five o’clock in the morning, when he came home from a visit to the house on South Maple Street. He made Lymie lie down on the floor of his room, covered him with an overcoat, and then ran downstairs and called a doctor who lived in the next block. The ambulance came, twenty minutes later. Two interns brought a stretcher up the stairs. It was just getting light when they carried Lymie out of the house. The interns rode in the front of the ambulance and Reinhart rode in back with Lymie, who was conscious of everything that was going on but made no effort to talk. He didn’t seem worried about himself or embarrassed about what he had done. Ordinary anxieties, the fear of what people might think, seemed to have dropped away from him. Reinhart took Lymie’s hand and held it all the way to the hospital. At the door of the operating room the interns motioned Reinhart away but Lymie asked them to let him stay and so they put a sterile gown on him and a mask, and he stood near the door while the doctors questioned Lymie about the iodine he had swallowed and tried to find out whether he had cut his windpipe. Apparently he hadn’t. The doctor took a long time cleaning and sewing up and dressing the wounds, and then he gave Lymie an injection for tetanus. The needles were inserted into his abdomen and they were an inch and a half long. Reinhart had to turn his eyes away when the needles went in. His body felt alternately hot and cold, and he thought he was going to faint.
When Lymie was wheeled off, Reinhart left the hospital and went to find Spud. It was six-thirty by that time and Spud was in his room getting dressed.
“Lymie?” Spud said. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure’” Reinhart said.
“But why?” Spud said. “What made him do a thing like that?”
“I didn’t ask him,” Reinhart said, “and he didn’t tell me.”
They both avoided each other’s eyes.
Spud said, “I didn’t think people—I mean, I thought he—”
Shorty Stevenson came into the room, in his pajamas, rubbing his eyes and yawning. They waited in silence while he put on his glasses, looked at them cheerfully, and stood scratching himself. “Did I interrupt something?” he asked, and when they still did not answer, he pulled his pajama coat off over his head, picked up a towel, and went off down the hall to the bathroom.
“Where’s he now?” Spud asked.
“In the hospital. I just came from there.”
“I guess I don’t understand anything,” Spud said, “but I thought—Tell me what happened.”
He listened carefully with his eyes on the floor the whole time that Reinhart was talking. It was almost as if he suspected some trick, an April Fool’s joke of some kind, and was on guard against it. But when Reinhart was finished, Spud said, “Wait a minute.” While Reinhart stood there watching him, he finished dressing, picked up a couple of books and put them down again, looked around the room as if he were seeing it for the last time, then said, “Let’s go.”
On the way over to “302” they stopped at a dog-wagon and had breakfast. Reinhart lit a cigarette with his coffee and Spud asked him for one. Reinhart had never seen Spud smoke before, and as he lit a match and held it toward the end of Spud’s cigarette, he thought: this is the strangest part of all
Reinhart had an eight o’clock class, but his head seemed twice its natural size, from all the spiked beer that he had drunk the night before, and he knew there was no use trying to concentrate on anything. It would be better to get some sleep, if he could. He gave up that idea also when they started up the stairs at the rooming house and Spud looked at him suddenly with the face of a drowning man.
Reinhart stayed with Spud all morning, went to the dean’s office with him, and was waiting when Spud came out from his interview with the dean. It was after twelve o’clock then, so they started for the boarding club. Reinhart turned off suddenly, not wanting to expose Spud to the curiosity of the boys from “302,” and they ate in a drugstore. Spud seemed all right by that time. When they got to the rooming house, Reinhart went up to the dormitory and stretched out on his bed and fell asleep with all his clothes on.
It was late afternoon when he woke and came downstairs. His room was empty and he thought for a moment that Spud had gone back to the fraternity house. But then he heard someone moving about in the next room. He went to the door and looked in. Lymie’s desk and the one that had been Spud’s and the closet were in absolute order for the first time since Spud had moved out of “302.” It must have taken hours, Reinhart thought. He looked at Spud, who didn’t know that he was there. Spud was standing in front of Lymie’s dresser. Reinhart turned away without making a sound.
In the top drawer of Lymie’s dresser, among a welter of socks, ties, handkerchiefs, collar buttons, dried-up cookies and Christmas seals, he came upon Lymie’s bank book. He opened it and began to read the entries.
55
At two-thirty the next morning, Lymie opened his eyes in a bare hospital room. The light was on, shaded by a piece of yellow paper. Miss Vogel, the night nurse, saw that he was awake, came over to the bed, and took his temperature. She was a plump, middle-aged woman with dyed black hair and a black fuzz on her upper lip. She took the thermometer out from under Lymie’s tongue and read it. Then she wiped his forehead with a damp washcloth, and straightened the covers. These first threads of dependency having been established between them, she bent over the bed, so that her face was close to his, and said, “Why did you do it?”
Lymie’s eyelids closed of thei
r own accord.
I didn’t want to go on living in a world where the truth has no power to make itself be believed, he said, without moving his lips, without making a sound. There was a small bottle of iodine in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom on the second floor of Mr. Dehner’s rooming house. I took the cap off and drank all of it. The iodine burned the lining of my throat on the way down and formed a solid knot of burning in my stomach. The burning got worse and worse until suddenly I flung myself on my knees in front of the toilet and vomited the horrible yellow stuff into the bowl.
Someone came upstairs about this time and I was afraid they would come into the bathroom and find me but they didn’t. Whoever it was went on up to the dorm. The burning lasted for a while and then it went away. I got up then and opened the medicine cabinet again and took out Mr. Dehner’s straight-edged razor. With the warm water running slowly into the washbasin I began to cut my left wrist. The flesh parted with a stinging sensation and began to bleed. The blood turned pink in the lukewarm water and went down the drainpipe. I remember raising my eyes then, calmly, but with a wonderful kind of giddiness inside my head, and I looked at my face in the mirror. After a time the blood stopped flowing. The flow became single drops and the drops came slower and slower. I cut my wrist again, deeper. I made three separate incisions in my left wrist and each time the blood congealed, after a few minutes. So I transferred the razor to my other hand and cut wherever the veins showed through the skin.
There were moments when my strength failed and the light bulb dangling from the ceiling on a long cord seemed to grow much too bright. But these moments passed and I went on cutting. Finally (all this took a long time and I was very tired) I left the washbasin, knelt down beside the tub, and applied the edge of the razor to my throat. The blood flowed in a stream. The bottom of the tub was red with it almost immediately. The light dimmed and went out, and I remembered thinking then with surprise that this familiar thing, this comforting complete darkness that I had known every night of my life, was death.