Maurice, her godfather, had driven down from Bucks County and taken her to La Terrasse for lunch, as he always did, dutiful, good—or, well, okay, godfather-guardian—that he was, on his monthly visits during her past half year in The Institute.
She had to admit that he had been good about arranging for that, getting her out of boarding school at Barton and onto The Institute’s Adolescent Psych Ward. Saving her life, as they say. No privacy, of course, and people—nutritionists, aides, shrinks—trying to get her to eat, to talk, to remember things. Group therapy. Psychodrama in the evenings, meetings she often skipped, all that hysterical role-playing—“James,” the therapist would say, “you be Esther’s mother. Now scream at her! Really scream. Yes, that’s it, scream at her like it like you mean it. Now, Esther, how does it make you feel when James says she never wanted you to be born?” But Marlise found it much like school, a low level of protection, intrusion, and neglect, occasional cruelty, her own body in revolt.
Marlise had not been ready for Barton when, at the end of seventh grade, the time had come for her to switch schools. It was Sylvie who chose the place—recently co-ed, a tier below Choate and Phillips Exeter and those places, but respectable enough. And far enough away from Bucks County to make it appealing to a woman who didn’t particularly want to share any more of her already vexed domestic sphere with the bookish, spectral daughter of her husband’s long-dead friend Beatrice Schade. His former lover, probably. Surely that was clear to everyone, though no one spoke of it?
Thinking back on the year she spent at Barton, Marlise realized that probably nothing especially unusual or even wrong had happened to her there amongst the other precocious, privileged, confused young people left largely to their own devices—some dope smoking, brief experimental sexual encounters, secret trips into the city and back before dawn and the start of field hockey practice or chapel or classes. Except for some pot-smoking, Marlise didn’t participate. She watched and hid and listened. The problem was her body. The palms of her hands, her shins, hurting at night, breasts like welts, the blood that started, a private surprise of thrill and confusion, in the school’s basement art room, her period coming on later for her than for other girls she knew—that was the difficulty, all of this helpless change, and all that it seemed to invite. In others, not herself. Her mother, beautiful Beatrice, squinting into the sun. Here is my body, gazing at yours. Feast.
Marlise, studious, quiet, still a girl in many ways, wanted to shut it all down but didn’t know how—how to say no, how to balance the pull into smoky rooms smelling of jam and bong water with the lure of her school books and the art room with its drawing paper, calligraphy inks, dark-room privacy. And perhaps most of all, what to do about her erupting body and her own loneliness begging for attention?
Was it an accident, then, the fall she took, high one early summer night, under a crush of stars and someone’s stereo playing, tumbling like an abject angel out a lower story window into a hedge, concussing, breaking an ankle? On crutches for the better part of the next two months, hobbling in the heat of the mostly empty Barton campus, Marlise, already thin, had, from the exertion, dropped ten, then twenty pounds. At first she didn’t notice, but in time she came to love the secret of it, the control, for once, that she could exert by skipping meals, watching as her knee and pelvic bones sharpened into view. Most of the other students were on family vacations; the staff was adjunct and reduced. Nobody paid much attention to her. It gave her a private high to be so light, so unburdened. Her breasts stopped burning. The monthly bleeding stopped.
By the time school was about to start up again in late August, and the headmaster phoned Maurice, Marlise—billeted in the school infirmary—was under 70 pounds, so lethargic she had to be transported to Philadelphia prone in the backseat of Maurice’s Volvo station wagon. What had begun within her control had veered. She was burning off her body’s protein. Her kidneys were about to fail.
So, yes, godfather Maurice had, in many ways, saved her. For two weeks at the end of August 1970, Marlise, whisked away from Barton at death’s door, was in the regular hospital in Center City, on an IV, getting “recalibrated,” as Maurice put it. Once she was stabilized they moved her over to the adolescent wing of The Institute, a modern tall-rise adjacent to the much older, original Hospital for the Insane in another part of Philadelphia, a residential hospital, one of the best adolescent facilities anywhere, Maurice had said. “I hear they play a lot of volleyball over there,” one of the Center City hospital nurses had said, trying to prepare her for the transition.
It was true. Lots of volleyball. Lots of OT. Lots of walking. Talking. Daily therapy. Locks to anything outside. No completely closed rooms. No sharps.
But the money was running, had run out, Maurice was explaining, settling into his chair and ordering them both omelets and himself a bottle of 1960 Père Anselme Châteauneuf-du-Pape. What money, whose, Marlise had wondered as he continued, saying he was on his way that very evening to Las Vegas via Atlantic City. Maurice rubbed his eyes. Then on to San Francisco.
He smiled sadly at their waitress, dark nipples, braless beneath a gauzy white shirt. Black skirt. Marlise also studied her, a University of Pennsylvania student maybe, then scanned the brick floor. Winter sunlight touched everything, the white plates, silver forks. She liked this part, the feeling on the glassed-in patio of belonging neither to room nor to world entirely. Sometimes she wished she were a bird. But not so she could fly away.
Maurice was probably only 40-something, maybe closer to 50, and he was, or had been, a handsome man in a blue-blood way, but that afternoon his eyes were puffy, and he coughed as he chain-smoked. His nose and cheeks were blotchy. Marlise let him talk, his voice fading in and out of her attention, which was how things had been for her lately. Sylvie, the third wife, had finally moved back to London, and well, good riddance, he said. She’d milked him. He twisted a substantial gold pinky ring. He was flat out broke. Well, not flat out, but almost. “All relevant,” he said. “I mean all relative. Relative. And fixable, sure.” His grown sons by his first wife were still both gallivanting up and down the West Coast, one in a commune of some sort, wearing bells, passing out leaflets in parking lots, squandering his Princeton education ommming at airports in saffron robes; they rarely called except for money. “So you see, honey, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to be away for a while, and for now it appears,” he said, suppressing a cough, “that there’s not enough left for school either. At least not for the tuition at Barton.”
Maurice reached across the white tablecloth, its hamlet of glassware, to touch her plate, folded slab of omelet, fretted brown with bits of garlic, thyme, three spears of asparagus on the side. Cigarette between his fingers, he pushed the plate toward her a little. “Doctors say you’re not quite ready to go back, anyway.” Marlise held her napkin to her mouth. Into it she slipped an unswallowed bite of egg. Rush of chemicals in her brain, the suggestion of butter, fat. A contact high. Her pelvis clenched.
“I wrote your Uncle Cole, you know, he’s off somewhere down south now, a hermit, lives in an abandoned restaurant or something, up along the Blue Ridge. And his secretary, Hilde it was for a long time, or someone else, maybe it was just him pretending to have a secretary, or it could have been one of his, ah, associates, anyway somebody wrote to say that you could, you know, stay on your mother’s, his, the old farm over in Jersey, just until things get straightened out.” Then, “It shouldn’t be for too long.” After a pause, “I’d heard he was going to sell the Close. Nobody left there, and he must need the money. But Cole just can’t let go of—well, he’s always been strange. Strange that way.”
More silence, during which Marlise wondered if by “money” Maurice meant her alleged trust fund, set up by whom? Her Uncle Cole, she supposed, after her parents died, to be used for her care and education until she became “of age.” And whether that money was now all gone.
Marlise found it hard to form thoughts lately, to glean meaning, especially regarding matters pertaining to her family, herself, any kind of future, things they were always asking her to think about, back at The Institute. Sitting beside Silas sometimes, on the floor of the OT room, she’d marveled as he spun out to her exuberant concepts he had on his mind—“What does ‘now’ mean in a different place from here?” and “Do you think Time is something we live inside, or is it trapped inside us?” or “How is it that we only know the past but not the future?”—and she could feel his mind actually working, shaping these questions, whereas most of the time she felt that she could only react to things. If that. Had this always been true? How could she know, if she could not remember?
Maurice was still talking, low, apologetic. Usually he didn’t talk this much. Marlise lifted her eyes from her plate. “Okay, look,” he said. “I am sorry. Very, very sorry. Very. But you won’t be on your own exactly. There are some people around there still, not him, don’t worry, I might be worried if it were Cole, just because he’s such a, a weirdo, but there are other people, old people, looking after, living on the place. They know you’re coming. You’ll be okay for a while, until I get back.” More coughing. “Then we’ll get you some therapy and into a public school, back at the books, eh, Brontë? Once you’re better?”
Maurice sometimes called her Brontë because since girlhood she’d always had “her nose in a book,” an interest that seemed both to puzzle and impress him. Finally, “Your mother, God, you have to know I loved her. We all did. She was terrible, I mean it was terrible. What happened. Of course she was terribly beautiful. Tragic, what happened. And I do think, uh, I do think she would want you to know, she would want me to tell you, that women—girls, I mean—can stop um, menstruating”—at this word, he stumbled, and Marlise looked down at the table again, “they stop, they stop doing it forever. If they don’t, well, you know, eat?”