*
The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Outcault. Between the entry hall and the theater, at the far end of a long series of alternating left and right turns through one of the hospital’s lightning bolt–shaped wings, she punctuated the void of my mother’s silence with bursts of hospital history and lore. She had a sixteen-year-old daughter of her own, she said. She knew the type of thing a girl my mother’s age most wanted to hear about. If they passed a patient with an interesting biography or symptomology—narcolepsy, a pathological fear of hats, an inability to recognize danger, the folksinger Mr. Guthrie—she divulged it.
She told my mother that the hospital had a theater because of the opinions of a wealthy man named Adolf Hill, a manufacturer of necktie silk from Paterson. It was Mr. Hill’s belief that the ancient Greeks had been the sanest men who ever lived. This was due, Hill further believed, to the greatness of Greek drama, which allowed audiences and actors alike to face the frightful things inside and outside their skulls. When, in time, Hill’s wife was committed to Greystone, Hill had endowed construction of the Adolf and Millicent Hill Theater. It was not true, Mrs. Outcault said, that Hill deliberately arranged to have his wife committed in order to put his theories about drama therapy to the test, but it was possible that Mr. Hill’s theorizing was the thing that had driven poor Millicent insane. Around 1927 she had hanged herself in her room—not in the theater, thank goodness—by stringing together three neckties made from Empire Silk Company’s finest stock.
Outside the theater doors on a settee of tufted leather sat an old man in a green three-piece suit cut from a coarse-textured fabric the color of lederhosen and piped at the lapels and buttonholes in a paler shade of artichoke heart. He was sitting very erect with his hands on his knees. The lily of a pocket square peeped from the breast pocket of his jacket. He seemed to be studying the opposite wall with surprising intensity, given the fact that it was a blank expanse of beige. He did not look over or break off his study of the blank wall until Mrs. Outcault reached out to touch his shoulder. “Author! Author!”
He started, flinched, and cried out in a voice like a rusty pump.
“Oh, I always spook him,” Mrs. Outcault said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Casamonaca.” She clasped her hands together at her breast and looked deeply sorry. “Mr. Casamonaca wrote the play.”
Mr. Casamonaca lurched to his feet and made another sound that did not form itself into a word or words. He smiled. He was long-shanked and, before gravity had bent him to its purpose, might have been tall once. Inside the green suit he was mostly skeleton. His palm against my mother’s was powdery and cool.
“How are you?” Mrs. Outcault said very loudly.
Mr. Casamonaca nodded genially and made a looping benedictory gesture in the air, just in front of his face, more ornate than a cross, as if he were a priest in a sect whose symbol was the holy coat hanger of God.
“Sign language,” Mrs. Outcault explained. “Poor thing’s deaf as a boot. I heard he was struck by lightning, though I can’t say for sure.”
With his long pallid fingers and his nails manicured to a moonlike luster, Mr. Casamonaca continued to draw things across the space between him and my mother. The regular rippling of a corrugated roof. The outline of a jellyfish. The downward spiral of water in a toilet bowl.
Mrs. Outcault nodded emphatically. “Oh yes,” she said. “I know. You’re so right.”
“What’s he saying?”
“I have no idea,” Mrs. Outcault said through a tight smile. She kept on nodding. “It isn’t real sign language at all. Just something he made up. He never learned to speak English very well, and in the past few years he’s lost the ability to read and write in Italian.”
“He— Then how did he write a play?”
“He dictated it to your mother, which is why she has been so involved in all this. Using those crazy signs of his.”
“My mom doesn’t know any sign language.”
“Apparently, she is fluent in Mr. Casamonaca’s.”
My mother watched Mr. Casamonaca’s hands and fingers explain the behavior of skyrockets, the opening of a can of beer, and the proper means for setting a golf ball on a tee.
“It looks like he’s just making it up as he goes along,” she said.
“That is a popular theory,” said Mrs. Outcault.
*
Dr. Medved’s head was a thumb upthrust from his shirt collar. Blue ink stain of chin stubble, white lab coat worn open over a summer suit the color of a manila folder. Purple bow tie. Barrel-chested with a heavy gut, the body of a dockworker belied or redeemed by framed diplomas from NYU and the Tulane School of Medicine. He winced as he belayed himself into the swivel chair behind his desk. His face suggested gas pain, a hemorrhoid, maybe both. The chair’s steel joints creaked. Its spring uncoiled with a clang of metal fatigue.
“As I told you, there has been marked improvement,” Dr. Medved said.
As in the course of their brief phone conversation, there was something off in the doctor’s tone, a hint of hedging or doubt. Or maybe it was only chronic heartburn. Medved set down the paper cup of water he had stopped to fill from the cooler outside his office. He yanked open a drawer in his desk and found a bottle of Bromo-Seltzer. He unscrewed the bottle, dropped two tablets into the cup of water, and unbent a paperclip before he seemed to notice that my grandfather had yet to reply. He stirred the cup with the paperclip, looking up at my grandfather from under his wide-nib eyebrows. “Anything you want to say to that?”
Ordinarily, my grandfather distrusted Jews who wore bow ties, but something about Medved—probably the paperclip—inclined him to make an exception. “Naturally, I’m relieved to hear it,” my grandfather said.
“But you’ve been relieved before. Of course. I understand. I have to tell you, though. A future setback. A relapse, should one occur. It won’t in any way invalidate your present feelings of relief.”
“In my experience, Doc, with all due respect, I beg to differ.”
Dr. Medved nodded. The tablets hissed and chuckled in the cup. He picked it up and glugged it down. He held up a finger, begging my grandfather’s indulgence for one minute, then curled the hand into a fist that he pressed against his abdomen under the rib cage. His expression grew thoughtful, searching. He let out a belch that was low and resonant, a sustained note drawn across the strings of a cello. He ducked his head shyly and smiled an embarrassed little smile. “Hoo boy.”
“Mazel tov.”
“Forgive me,” he said. “Lunch was rather heavy. Now, listen. You hear me say improvement, I understand you may have some reason to be skeptical. Improvement is measured at a scale so much finer, more incremental, than calamity, isn’t it? And it’s perfectly normal to feel apprehension about a loved one’s return to so-called civilization. As a general rule, when it comes to the families, I encourage efforts to keep expectations low, to minimize the impact of the inevitable disappointment.”
This was more or less a précis of my grandfather’s approach to existence itself. Hearing Medved formulate it, and in this particular context, undid a string long knotted inside him.
“I think I can do that,” he said.
31