Guests on Earth: A Novel

  “All thanks to the Carrolls,” I murmured almost to myself, wondering how Billy Ray felt about that, for I harbored conflicting emotions of my own when I contemplated the overwhelming debt of gratitude I owed them.

  But Mrs. Hodges glared at me. “Indeed not!” She snipped off the yarn with a huge pair of scissors. “All thanks to Gerhardt Otto, to be sure.”

  This part had never been in the papers. But as soon as the “caged boy” Billy Ray was introduced to the greenhouse and let loose upon the grounds, he abandoned the studies the Carrolls had set out for him. (“You might say he was stubborn, as a student,” Claudia Overholser told me, smiling. “Intractable!” pronounced her husband.) Billy Ray loved the out-of-doors and took to the work, following old Gerhard Otto everywhere. No task was too long or too hard. Dr. Carroll took to calling the boy “Pan” ironically, in jest, and the name stuck. Old Gerhardt built him a little partitioned room off the greenhouse itself, and gave him his first puppy, a stray they found in the woods. The boy became more expressive, evidencing pleasure and sometimes mirth. He began to work in groups with the others upon occasion.

  When old Gerhardt was diagnosed with lung cancer, he officially adopted the boy, whose last name was then changed to Otto. Upon the old man’s death, a small inheritance was settled upon him, in a trust he himself would control upon reaching the age of twenty-one.

  “And that, I’d say, has been the making of him,” Mrs. Hodges concluded.

  When Highland Hospital changed hands and Mrs. Morris arrived to head up the Hortitherapy program, she kept him on. “I have never known anyone so tuned to plants and animals—and sometimes people,” she said, surprising me.

  “People?” I repeated.

  “Oh yes, our most psychotic patients respond to him in a way that they do not respond to the rest of us, a way that we cannot understand. He knows more than you think. In fact, sometimes I feel that he may know more than we know. Just watch—you’ll see.”

  •••

  MRS. MORRIS’S PREDICTION turned out to be true, I learned, as I found myself spending more and more time down at the greenhouse or out on the grounds with Pan Otto and his crews whenever possible, despite the encroaching cold weather. I enjoyed the work, quite simply. I liked the cold on my cheeks and the ache in my muscles at the end of a task. I felt that I was getting my body back, my strength, after whatever had happened to me. Apparently Dr. Schwartz agreed, for the rest of my insulin shock treatments were abruptly cancelled. I began to play the piano for several of Phoebe Dean’s groups and programs, too, but it was Hortitherapy I took to.

  I don’t recall that I was ever actually introduced to Pan Otto, not formally. I just seemed to know him after a while, spending as much time in his presence as I could, for he made me comfortable in the world in a way I cannot explain. I felt at home with Pan Otto—I, Evalina—who had never had a home of my own on earth.

  But here, let me try to describe him for you exactly as he was that autumn afternoon when we met.

  He is not particularly tall, due perhaps to all those years in the root cellar, though they say he grew rapidly, once released—eighteen inches, Mrs. Hodges claimed, in the first year alone. We can stand shoulder to shoulder, and our eyes meet instantly when we face one another. Pan’s eyes are a light, light blue—almost the color of his dog’s eyes. This dog is named Roy Rogers, for Pan delights in Westerns, sitting in the front row whenever they are shown at Movie Night in the Assembly Hall. Roy Rogers follows Pan everywhere, always watchful and polite, though he does not play. I have never seen him fetch a stick, for instance, or jump up on anybody. He just watches, patiently. He is not waiting for anything. Nor is Pan. Pan has no plans, beyond the demands of the season. Instead he is simply living in the present time, all the time, rather like an animal himself.

  When he is in the woods, you cannot see him—you really can’t, for he is camouflage itself, wearing old, nondescript clothes that blend right in with the forest and look like they came straight out of a Salvation Army box someplace—perhaps they did! His skin is more brown than white, whether from natural pigmentation or the effects of the sun, I do not know. His hair is dark and thick. Mrs. Morris cuts it with shears as he sits in a straight-back chair, I have seen her do this many times, putting a towel around his shoulders and letting the hair fall around him onto the cement floor, to be swept up later. I have swept it up myself, saving several locks of it, thick and wiry. Pan must shower and shave in the greenhouse bathroom, after hours—I find his razor there, in the medicine cabinet, and hold it up against my own face as I look in the mirror hanging above the sink. I cannot say why I do these things. But in any case I deduce that there is no running water in his own living facility, the hut which he is reputed to have built for himself in a “laurel hell” of the deepest woods, moving there after Gerhardt Otto’s death. Oh, how I would love to see it! To go there, where he lives, myself . . .

  AS OFTEN AS possible, I joined expeditions of one sort or another where Pan would be present, such as the memorable occasion when I went along on one of the teenagers’ “nature hikes,” obviously designed to wear them out as well as show them the various flora and fauna. Old Mr. Pugh identified the plants and trees and animal droppings and pontificated upon the ecosystem, but it was Pan we followed single file on a trail across a high sere meadow with its rustling weeds and dried wildflowers rattling in the wind that swept unceasingly across the long curve of the earth. Perhaps that unceasing wind is what made the boy so nervous; wind has that effect upon me, too. In any case, one of the teenagers toward the back of the line—Randall Cunningham, a big boy, a troublemaker—suddenly spat out a curse and grabbed one of his fellow hikers from behind, throwing him down upon the ground and slamming his head again and again upon a rock outcropping while the boy screamed. Now everyone else was screaming or yelling, too, as they closed in—but the attacker jumped up and zigzagged across the meadow toward the cliff beyond.

  Instantly Pan was after him, not seeming to run so much as flow through the waist-high weeds, effortlessly and silently, like the wind itself. He caught the boy a good way before the mountain’s edge, tackling him, and then both were lost to us for a time, down on the ground in the weeds but finally emerging—wonder of wonders!—with their arms around each others’ shoulders. Pan kept his arms around the boy’s waist from behind as Randall stumbled, sobbing, back to the rest of us, then sat with his head in his hands next to the injured one, who was still unconscious though moaning.

  Mr. Pugh directed the making of a kind of litter from several long saplings crisscrossed by brush tied with twine from his pack. They lifted the hurt boy onto it; I looked away from the pool of blood on the rock where his head had been. Then Pan touched Randall Cunningham on the shoulder just once, lightly, jerking his head toward the stretcher; without a word, Randall stood up and grasped a limb and helped to carry the stretcher all the way down, though the rest of us took turns. I shall not forget our slow progress back across the mountain as the sun began its colorful descent behind us. I remember having the sensation, which I had had before at Highland, of being in a painting.

  This incident, interestingly enough, was the making of Randall Cunningham, who became a model patient on the spot. He was released at Christmastime, and returned to his own school in January. Maybe he had just needed to hit somebody . . . or maybe he had finally scared himself, gotten his own attention.

  When I asked Dr. Schwartz later what she thought about all this, she threw up her hands and laughed. “Who knows? Pills are not everything,” she said. “Spontaneous remission can certainly happen, especially with young people. Sometimes their symptoms are situational, a reaction to certain stress, but not internalized, not real illness. It’s impossible to predict.”

  It was impossible to predict anything; I was realizing this more and more.

  CHAPTER 8

  I HAD TROUBLE BELIEVING that Dixie had never been to college, for she seemed to know everything about everything, not only painting but
books, too. She and Richard Overholser fell into long literary conversations whenever we went over to their house for dinner. I especially remember one Saturday night when I was helping Claudia clear the dishes while he and Dixie discussed existentialism, “a philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of each individual in a universe that doesn’t give a damn,” as Richard explained it to me. I had never heard of it. “So each person is solely responsible for giving his own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely,” he finished up.

  “But what about God?” asked I, the product of all those nuns.

  “He doesn’t exist,” Richard proclaimed. “It’s all up to you girls.”

  “That’s sort of what Hemingway is saying, isn’t he?” Dixie said.

  “Well, yes. An even better reading choice would be Albert Camus.”

  “Albert who?” Dixie had her pencil out.

  “C-A-M-U-S. And look here, Dixie,” he added in his emphatic Northern way, “why not enroll in some college courses when you get back to Georgia? You’d enjoy them. Be damn good for you, too, I’ll wager.”

  “Now Richard, you know that’s not allowed, we’re not supposed to get involved here—” Claudia tossed over her shoulder as she headed back to the kitchen.

  “Well, why not?” He pounded on the table. “This is a brilliant woman, why shouldn’t she go to college? For God’s sake!”

  “Oh no,” Dixie said quickly. “Frank wouldn’t like it.” I perked up; she never, ever mentioned her husband’s name. “A, there’s no college back home, for miles and miles around. I’d have to drive all the way down to Tallahassee, a day’s trip. Assuming he’d let me drive at all. Assuming he’d let me spend the night. And B, you do know that’s not the purpose of therapy at Highland, don’t you? That’s not why he sent me up here. I am being ‘reeducated, retrained’ . . .” Though she used the mimicking voice, her smile was sweet and resigned.

  “Retrained for what?” Richard pushed back his chair.

  “For marriage, I guess,” she said. “I wasn’t very good at it before.”

  Richard picked up the serving plates and abruptly left the table. “You know what I think of all that,” he called back over his shoulder.

  “Well . . .” Dixie said calmly, vacantly, playing with her hair as she looked away, into some distance we couldn’t see.

  I sank down at the table beside her.

  Claudia came back in to join us. “Why not sign up for a correspondence course, then, honey? I know they have them at Goddard College, where I went to school—I can find out for you. You would enjoy it, and then perhaps you wouldn’t be so bored by the routine at home. I am sure that your husband wants you to be happy, doesn’t he?”

  “Lord! He’s such a busy man, that’s the furtherest thing from his mind!” Dixie laughed and shook her head no, vehemently. Again, the flash of skin, the bald patch at the temple. “He just wants me to shut up and quit being sick and do what I’m supposed to and quit bothering everybody. I don’t know what we would have done if it hadn’t been for his mother, that’s Big Mama, to take over for me. Now don’t get me wrong. Frank loves me, he really does, or he sure wouldn’t have put up with me all this time. He just wants me to calm down and be satisfied. That’s what I want, too. I’m sick of myself!” The rueful smile.

  Back in the kitchen Richard Overholser was washing the dishes, singing “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” at the top of his lungs.

  “But changes can be made in a marriage, you know,” Claudia suggested carefully, leaning across the table to take Dixie’s hand. “Old roles can change. Even little things can help a lot. How old are your children now?” she asked, completely jolting me, for Dixie had never once, in our month-long friendship, even mentioned their existence.

  “Margaret Ann is seven and Lissa is six.” Tears stood in the violet eyes. “I miss them so much,” she said.

  OVER THE FOLLOWING weeks, Dixie’s story came out in bursts and whispers, which I shall attempt to piece together here. I was very surprised to learn that she had not grown up in circumstances such as she clearly enjoyed today. In fact her mother, Daisy Belle, came from a family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia, and her own tragic past had determined the whole family’s life—in my opinion.

  “Oh, she never stopped telling it!” Dixie cried, stamping her foot. “She used to go on and on—it was like she just couldn’t stop.”

  “Well, what was it?” Of course I asked.

  “It really was awful,” Dixie said. “Mama was real good in school, and just beautiful, the most beautiful girl in the county”—this part was no surprise to me—“so she got picked to be Homecoming Queen, and then Miss Magnolia at a contest over in Waycross, and that’s when she started running around with a banker’s son named Lynwood Small, staying out all night drinking and whatnot. He even gave her his grandmother’s ring, right before he drove his car through the guardrail of a bridge over the Tar River. The car hit some kind of a big concrete post before it sank.

  “Somehow he only broke his arm, but Mama’s beautiful face was completely destroyed. She ended up with one eye a whole lot lower than the other one, so she was always staring off to the side, and she got this big, jagged white scar which ran from her hairline down to her chin. She broke her back, too, so she always had a limp. Lynwood Small took back his grandmother’s ring, and then Mama’s reputation was completely ruined in that town, according to her. When she finally got out of the hospital, she was real different, real serious. She took a room in a boardinghouse in town and became a seamstress. She joined the Methodist Church, where she met my sweet daddy, Dudley Stovall, who was a lot older, and he married her. He worked for the power company.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “And then all they did was work, I reckon, with a little time out to have me and my little sister, Estelle. That’s when we moved into a bigger brick house with a patio and a garage. Mama used to say it was perfect in every way. She made all the draperies and the upholstery herself. She turned the front parlor into a sewing room, with her big Singer right there on its own table and swatches of material to choose from and this raised platform where her ladies turned around and around real slow, like ladies in a music box, while Mama knelt at their feet to pin up their skirts for hemming. She used to keep the straight pins in her mouth. I had to do the cooking while she worked. Daddy used to try to get her to stop working so hard, but she wouldn’t, because she said we had to have all the advantages. We had to take piano lessons and dance lessons, we had to have braces—I even had to take elocution! I think Mama got all these ideas from her ladies.

  “ ‘Look at them! My little dolls!’ she used to say when we ran out the door in our matching clothes, which she made, which were always perfect. I guess she was living vicariously through all this, but she never would go out to any kind of public meetings or events at our schools.”

  “But how did you and your sister feel about all this?” I asked her.

  Dixie grinned at me. “Estelle rebelled the minute she was old enough, but I kept on going. Maybe this is awful, but I was glad to get out of there! So I kept on going to everything. When they offered me a scholarship to Dover Academy in Atlanta, I took it and went, even though Daddy had a lot of misgivings about it. Then I won the scholarship to Agnes Scott, and that’s when I got invited —after a lot of interviews, I’ll tell you—to make my debut at the Gone With the Wind Ball. It was because of my girlfriends at Dover. Mama was tickled to death. She stayed up night after night sewing those ruffles onto the skirt of my ball gown. Finally Daddy just exploded. I remember him saying, ‘My God, Daisy, this thing has gone far enough. It will break us!’ ”

  But nothing could stop it by then, the great rolling ball of Mary Margaret’s social success, which left her jealous sister and her awestruck family behind. With her new nickname, “Dixie,” she traveled from debut to debut of her girlfriends, house party to house party, taken up by the girls and their families, courted by
their brothers and their friends. Now part of a vast network that seemed to cover the whole South, Dixie was way too busy for college.

  Nothing could stop it except for Dixie herself, who got unaccountably pregnant by somebody’s older brother in a boathouse while attending a wedding in Sea Island, Georgia. “I’m not sorry, either!” she insisted. “I’ve never been sorry. I swear, that was the most important night of my life. And it was the most magical, too. I was wearing this long baby-blue satin sheath dress with spaghetti straps and a little bolero jacket, made by Mama, of course, and a camellia in my hair. That camellia used to be my trademark. Two boys at this dance claimed to be in love with me, so I was dancing with first one, then the other. I remember they had this hot Negro band from Macon, it was all so much fun . . .”

  Finally Dixie had to slip outside and catch her breath. She walked down the crushed shell path into the garden, away from the white-columned mansion, and sat down on a wrought-iron bench looking back at it, the whole mansion fairly pulsing with music, each window lit, with the flitting forms of the dancers inside. Suddenly it seemed like a stage set to her, like the way they had decorated the outside of Loew’s Grand Theatre to make it look like a plantation for the Gone With the Wind Ball. It seemed fake, all of it, and suddenly Dixie felt fake, too, and very separate from the house and the party and everything else in the world, sitting on her curlicue bench in the moonlight. She had a headache from drinking Champagne, and her face hurt from smiling so much.

  “Smoke?” A thin boy with long black hair emerged from the shrubbery, not dressed for the occasion.

  “Sure,” Dixie said.

  In the flare of the match, Dixie saw his big beaky nose, his twitchy mouth, and the dark, serious eyes behind his gold-framed glasses, glasses like an old man would wear. “Thanks,” she said. Then she said, “I know who you are.” It was Genevieve’s older brother Duncan, the brilliant one, now attending graduate school at Harvard.