My grandfather was still compiling an inventory of all the unwelcome changes in his daughter wrought during her thirteen months under his brother’s careless care. Sarcasm and smoking headed the list so far.
As they turned in to the hospital’s parking lot, the sun broke through the clouds and lent a confectionery splendor to the heaped-up arches and swags of Greystone Park. It was not a regular visiting day, and he found a spot close to the grand steps of the central building. He cut the engine. The clack of sprinklers filled the car. The wide empty lawns were veiled in shifting iridescence. One of the rivulets in the flow of his imaginings that morning had been the sight of my grandmother rising to her feet on the topmost step of the main building, in the belted navy blue dress she had been wearing the last time he’d seen her. She had lifted a tentative hand, then dropped it and come tearing down the steps toward him. He would burst from the Buick, leaving the engine running and the door open, and go to her. She would leap into his arms and scissor her legs around his waist. The contact of their mouths would be the fixed point around which the world, the day, and the state hospital would rotate.
The steps were empty. My mother lowered her chin and opened her eyes. She took a pack of Marlboro cigarettes from her handbag and put one between her lips. They were tipped with red paper to hide the print of a lady’s lipstick, but my grandfather had succeeded, by dint of pleading that rapidly turned abject, in persuading my mother to leave her face unpainted, just for today, until they had all had a chance to adjust. “I already adjusted,” she had said flatly.
Automatically, he took Aughenbaugh’s lighter from his pocket and lit my mother’s cigarette, then averted his face so he would not have to see how adeptly she handled the business of smoking it. She made a virtuous show of directing her smoke out the window of the Riviera. My grandfather saw that the cigarette was trembling in her fingers.
“How is she really?” my mother said. “Please don’t say, ‘We’ll have to see.’”
As repeated by my mother, the words hung from the hooks of ironizing quotation marks, but my grandfather could find no weak points in the assessment.
“Did they shock her?”
“Who told you that? Ray?”
She nodded. She was crying. He reached for her, but she pushed him away. She jabbed at the cigarette lighter, pulled it out, and before he could stop her, touched the heating element with the tip of her index finger.
“Real nice,” she said. She poked the lighter back into its slot. “They sold you a broken car.”
“They did not shock her,” he said. He was reasonably certain that this was the case. “As far as I can tell, the only thing they did is give her some hormones.”
Over the phone the doctor had said that a year ago my grandmother had gone into early menopause, with a consequent intensification of her symptoms. They had tried a new treatment, a drug just on the market called Premarin.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I mean, if she’s how she is because of the things that happened to her in her life, it seems like you would have to shock it out of her somehow.”
My grandfather said that he didn’t know much about electroshock therapy, but he didn’t really think that was how it worked.
“Look at that place,” my mother said, staring up through the windows at the battlements of Greystone. “Ugh. I can’t go in. I don’t want to see her in there. You go in, okay, and get her? And I’ll wait in the car? Please? Dad, I’m sorry I’ve been such a pill. I want to see Mama, but I don’t want to go in there.”
My grandfather reached for the dashboard lighter. He did not want to force my mother to have to see her mother in a madhouse, and he did not want my grandmother to walk out of the madhouse after eleven months and see him standing there alone. He could not decide which of the two would represent the bigger failure on his part. He brought his fingertip near the element and felt the heat of it well before he let it touch his skin. There was a hiss, and the car filled with a nauseous odor like the smell of a tooth under the drill.
“Fixed,” he said.
He moved the car to a shaded parking space and rolled the windows down. He got out of the car and slammed the door. He was almost to the steps leading up to the front doors of Greystone when he heard the scrape of her Topsiders against the pavement behind him. At the bottommost step, he turned and she was standing there. They looked up at the high oak doors entangled in vines of wrought iron and shared a moment of awe or dread or at the very least hesitation. He felt like he ought to take her hand—he felt that he wanted to—but he was afraid that when he reached for her, as on the day they first met, she would turn him down and leave him with his hand stuck out. He was still trying to decide if he could risk the disappointment when he felt the butterfly flutter of her fingers against his palm.
*
A woman wearing a white cardigan and white tennis shoes came out of the reception office on the far side of a sliding pane of glass. The glass was veined with wire mesh. She was not a nurse, but her short white hair had the upswept wings of a nurse’s hat. She asked my grandfather to wait in the lobby for the doctor, Medved, who had been treating my grandmother. Everything was fine in the way of my grandmother’s recovery, and not to worry; there was some aspect of her care that the doctor wanted to discuss.
“Come, dear,” she said to my mother. “I’ll take you along to the theater.”
Her kindly manner was lost on my mother, who, on entering the lobby of the hospital, had awakened like a sleepwalker on a roof to find herself one step shy of an abyss. She was afraid to move. She remembered a scene from a movie she had seen in which a soldier trod on a land mine that would detonate only if he lifted his foot. She was afraid to speak, listen, or breathe. The lobby was very grand. It was framed by a double stairway rising to a colonnaded mezzanine. It had a crystal chandelier, a chessboard of marble for a floor, and, masked by Pine-Sol and narcissi in pots, a bloom of human feces in the air.
“I don’t want to go to the theater. I’m just here to get my mom.”
“Your mother is in the theater, sweetie,” the woman said. “It’s dress rehearsal for the play. She has been very involved.”
“But we’re taking her home today,” my grandfather said.
“Oh yes. She knows that.”
My grandfather was hurt, and his face must have shown it; the pity on the woman’s face was plain to see.
“She only learned you were coming the other day, isn’t that right? Did she know what time you two would be arriving today?”
“I must have forgotten to tell her,” my grandfather said. He had sent a telegram, which might have gone astray, but he did not want this woman feeling sorry for him. He looked at his watch. The doctor had been promised in five and no more than ten minutes hence. He gave my mother a curt nod. “Go ahead.”
My mother failed to take the cue. She was staring at something with an expression of uneasiness. My grandfather put a hand on her shoulder and followed her gaze. Expecting some ruin of a patient, shuffling, head-down, fingernails like guitar picks. He knew one instant of raw panic that the thing she was staring at, frozen in place, eyebrows furrowed, was my grandmother. But when he turned, he saw that my mother appeared simply to be staring at the wall.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” my mother said unconvincingly.
“Come, dear,” the woman in the white cardigan said again. This time she took hold of my mother’s elbow and pulled her gently toward a wide doorway between the stairways. She told my grandfather, “Please, have a seat. Dr. Medved won’t be long.”
My grandfather sat down in a Harvard chair by the front door, watching as my mother was led away. He stood up again and called out, “Excuse me?”
The woman in the white cardigan stopped and looked back at him. “Yes?”
“What is the play?”
“I really couldn’t tell you that,” said the woman. “I can’t make head or tail out of any of it.”