IT WOULD BE TWO years before I saw her again. I was walking down the path toward Brushwood on a changeable, windy August day. I was almost seventeen, and had already been accepted into the Peabody Institute of Music, in Baltimore. I was to leave in a few weeks’ time.
“Black is the color of my true love’s hair . . .” Suddenly Ella Jean Bascomb’s high, unearthly voice floated out on the fragrant breeze. Nobody else in the world sang like that. I stopped walking and shaded my eyes as I looked all around. Groups of patients and staff were walking up and down the paths, as always. “The prettiest face, and the neatest hands, I love the ground whereon he stands . . .” I got chill bumps on my arms, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Then I noticed the long lines of flapping sheets on the hillside out behind the Central Building, where the hospital laundry was located. I left the path and ran across the grass. “Ella Jean!” I called. “Ella Jean!” I couldn’t see her yet. The sun was in my eyes, and all I could see was the sheets, like a company of cheerful dancing ghosts.
“Evalina?” Here she came, running out barefooted between the rows, wearing a long white utility apron over her dress. “Lord, have mercy! Why, you have growed, girl! I wouldn’t have hardly knowed you.”
“Well, I would have known you anywhere,” I said, which was true, though her thick black hair was pulled back now into a ponytail, and she had grown considerably taller and sturdier, with breasts. But her big dark eyes and wide grin were just the same. “Why didn’t you come find me?” I asked her. “Are you just working over here for the summer? When did your school get out?”
She frowned, digging her toe in the grass. “I ain’t in school no more,” she said. “Mama had us some twins, and then she took real sick, and she liked to never got back up on her feet. So I stayed home to help out, and hit’s been just one thing after another. You know.”
I didn’t, having no such family experience of my own to draw upon. But I felt embarrassed to realize that I hadn’t even noticed that Ella Jean’s mother was gone from her place at the stove. Living now at Homewood, I scarcely ever got over to the cafeteria in the Central Building anymore. “So, your mother must have gotten well, then?” I asked. “Or you wouldn’t be over here working now, I mean.” I had never been able to understand Ella Jean’s family situation very well.
“I reckon,” she said noncommittally, flashing that big quick grin.
“Ella Jean, why didn’t you come find me?” I asked again.
“Lord, I figured you’d be too fancy for the likes of me, now,” she said. “You being a town girl and all.”
Am I a town girl? I wondered. Sometimes I feel like a town girl, and sometimes I feel like an impostor, I wanted to say.
“Hey, what was that song you were singing just a minute ago?” I asked her instead. “That was pretty.” I hummed the lines back to her.
“Oh, hit’s just one of them mournful old songs from up on Sodom, one of them old tunes that Granny sings,” Ella Jean said. “Hit’s a girl what loves this man with black hair, but he’s dead and buried in the ground. Somebody is always dead, and somebody else is always singing about it.”
Just like opera, I thought. Recently, Mrs. Carroll and I had been studying Aida. I was very glad to see Ella Jean again, who stood out there in the sunshine grinning at me just like old times, her big apron pocket filled with wooden clothespins.
“I got me a banjer now,” she announced. I was struck by her mountain accent, especially after talking to all those girls at Mrs. Grady’s, where we were given “elocution” lessons as a matter of course.
“Ooh, I’d love to hear you play it!” I clapped my hands.
“Ella Jean? Ella Jean Bascomb!” the short fat woman in charge of the laundry called from the back of the building. She stepped out the door and peered over at us. “Oh, I’m sorry! You take your time then, honey,” she yelled, seeing who I was, for everyone at Highland knew my special status.
“I’ve got to go,” Ella Jean said to me. “Coming!” she hollered as she started back up the hill.
I couldn’t stand to see her leave. “When do you get off?” I called after her. “Can’t you come over to Homewood sometime and we can sing some more? Nobody is ever in the music room after about four thirty or so.”
“Tomorrow,” she yelled back down to me. “They can’t pick me up till real late tomorrow anyhow, so I reckon I could come then.”
I did a quick calculation: I would have to cancel a shopping trip with Stephanie Patterson and her mother. I would say I had cramps, I decided. “Okay. I’ll see you over there.” I waved and Ella Jean waved back before she vanished into the billowing sheets.
THE NEXT DAY she had the banjo. This was a primitive-looking long-necked thing with a rawhide face and a leather strap on it. I took my seat at the grand piano at Homewood while Ella Jean stood behind me, tuning the banjo and plucking at it.
“Slow or fast?” I asked.
“Fast,” she said. “You know me!”
I started right in on Camptown Races, which we had done together years before. “Camptown racetrack’s five miles long, doo-dah, doo-dah,” we sang as one. Other people suddenly began to appear from everywhere—the art room, the practice rooms, the open door from outside, drawn by the music—especially the banjo, I believe, for a banjo has a naturally happy sound that no other instrument possesses. Everybody joined in lustily on “Oh, doo-dah day!”
A WEEK LATER, Ella Jean held the banjo carefully between her knees as we jounced about on a pile of old tobacco sacks in the back of the most beat-up truck I had ever seen, heading toward Sodom Laurel, Ella Jean’s hometown up in Madison County, north of Asheville. Finally, after much pleading and bargaining on my part, Mrs. Hodges had agreed to this overnight visit, so that I might “hear Granny sing” myself. I am sure she would not have done so had Dr. and Mrs. Carroll not been off on one of their “jaunts”—this one to Chicago, where he was to address a worldwide conference of psychiatrists, as I recall.
I still wasn’t exactly sure who our driver, Earl, was—relative or neighbor, I supposed. He had not yet spoken. A little old man in a shapeless black hat, Earl hunched so low in the seat that whenever I looked ahead through the cab’s cracked window, it appeared unnervingly as though no one was even driving. The smoke from his cigarette floated out the window of the truck past my face, almost sweet, and somehow intoxicating. The wind blew my hair into my eyes. I had to give Ella Jean credit, because somehow she had had the sense to get Earl to park down by the gate, out of sight. Mrs. Hodges would never have let me get into that truck if she had seen it. The last thing I saw as we left was Mrs. Hodges standing out in the middle of the road in front of Homewood with arms akimbo, a worried frown on her face, as the two of us raced down the hill. Ella Jean grabbed my overnight case and hoisted it up over the side of the truck, then the sack she’d been carrying, then finally the banjo, before jumping up herself and leaning back down with hand extended to pull me up. I had clambered over the top to land sprawling among the sacks and straw and old cans and boxes and trash that filled the back of the truck.
“Lord!” Ella Jean exclaimed. “I never thought I’d see this day come, did you?”
“No,” I said honestly, trying gingerly to make myself a little nest, for I feared we’d go flying out once the truck picked up speed.
“You ever been in the back of a truck before?” Evalina asked me over the rattling.
“No,” I said.
She grinned her jack-o’-lantern grin at me as Earl turned out of the Highland grounds and into regular Asheville traffic. We headed north, out of town.
“You wanna dope?” Ella Jean rummaged around in her sack.
“What?”
She held up a strawberry Nehi pop. ”Hand me that there church key then,” she directed, at my nod.
“What?” I asked.
She pointed at a kind of bottle opener hung on a screw at the back of the truck with twine; I grabbed it and passed it over. That sweet hot soda was the best thing I had ever tasted, the carbonation going straight to my brain.
“Here, now.” Ella Jean was down in the bag again.
Next came saltine crackers in little cellophane packages, filched from the dining hall. They were delicious, too, and we ate them up ravenously. Ella Jean still had that special quality about her; she was simply more alive than anybody else. We rumbled on through Asheville past tall office buildings, then houses with yards, then farms and open road.
Up and up we went, into that far countryside I had only seen as framed by the windows of Highland Hospital and the literal frames of the landscape paintings in the Art Room, where several of my favorites were watercolors by Mrs. Fitzgerald. First we came to the little farms and pastures and churches on knolls, each with its own graveyard, then the piney foothills, and finally those high, solemn blue mountains themselves, traveling up and up on roads so twisting they took my breath away and caused the truck’s engine to sputter until I thought it would surely die. Earl turned off the main road into a forest so thick and dark it was like a tunnel, then steered us back out into the sunshine, where the gravel road narrowed to a scary ribbon as it hugged a cliff side. The drop on our right was perpendicular. I could not even see what lay beyond the miles of empty air below. I shut my eyes and clutched Ella Jean’s brown arm.
“Aren’t we almost there?” I asked.
“No we ain’t,” she said, with evident satisfaction. “You just hold your horses.”
I shut my eyes. The truck climbed to the top of that mountain, then another, and crossed a creek on a rickety wooden bridge with no guardrails.
“Now?” I asked.
“Yep.” We had come to a high narrow valley—or “holler,” as Ella Jean called it, looking out upon yet another range of rolling blue peaks. A dirt road ran up the holler, where several cabins were visible back in the trees, with their outbuildings.
“But where’s the town?” I said.
“Ain’t none.”
I smiled to imagine Mrs. Hodges’s reaction to this news.
The truck turned, forded a smaller creek, and made the last steep, short drive up into a clearing, where stood a large misshapen boy—or was he a man?—leaning against a kind of small barn to watch our approach without any emotion at all on his wide, flat face. Several little dogs were playing at his feet.
“That’s Wilmer, he’s real sweet,” Ella Jean said. “He lives in that there barn.”
“Hey Wilmer,” she called. A smile broke over his whole face. Earl stopped the truck and people came running out of the log house like the figures in Mrs. Carroll’s Austrian cuckoo clock. In addition to Wilmer, there were two little blond twins named Billy Ed and Mister. “He’s the one that was so sickly when he was borned,” Ella Jean explained, “so we just called him Mister instead of give him a name, that’s what we always do, in case they up and die on you, but he didn’t, and this time it stuck.”
“Sissie, Sissie!” the twins ran to Ella Jean and hugged her legs.
“Now this here is Evalina,” she said. “Can you say that? Eva-li-na.”
“Ev-a-li-na!” they chorused, and I had to kneel right down and kiss them. I was very startled by their presence somehow, though I’d been told there would be children up here. They were wriggly and dirty and very real, like Ella Jean was—certainly more real, I felt suddenly, than my own life at the hospital. I knelt and hugged them tight, along with an older girl, maybe seven or eight, named Baby Doll, though she certainly did not look like a baby doll, dish-faced and sallow. Nobody here looked anything at all like Ella Jean.
“Y’all come on.”
I glanced up to see a tall, long-faced woman standing at the open door, holding a pie pan. She crossed the porch and threw the contents of the pan out into the bare “yard” below, where the dogs began yapping and fighting over it.
“Them’s little fice dogs,” Ella Jean said. It seemed they would tear each other to bits over this food, which did not look all that good to me anyway, mostly bones. Why were they fed like this? Where were their dog bowls? The woman threw the pan itself out in the yard and they fought over it, too, and licked it clean.
“This is Aunt Roe,” Ella Jean said of the woman, who did not look any too pleased to see us. Probably because I am one more mouth to feed, I realized, resolving to eat as little as possible.
“Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” I said.
She nodded at me curtly but said nothing. Her nose was sharp, her eyes too close together.
We trooped up onto the porch, where I was surprised to find that the pile of quilts in the corner actually contained Ella Jean’s Granny, the one she was always talking about. “Granny has got the sight,” she had said. Surely this was the oldest person I had ever seen, the oldest person in the whole world.
Ella Jean pulled me over there. “Granny?” she shouted. “Granny? This here is Evalina, the one I’ve been telling you about.”
The old eyes opened, bright as buttons. She reached out a skinny claw to grab me. Her hand was warm, and as she stroked my own, I felt a warm sense of well-being flow throughout me.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” I said sincerely.
“ ’Bout time,” she said in a voice surprisingly clear. She continued to look straight at me while holding my hand, now smoothing my palm again and again with her light, papery touch. Ella Jean stood uncharacteristically still, watching intently. I found myself closing my eyes for a minute, completely at peace. I opened them just in time to see a change come over Granny’s face, a grave sort of settling as she leaned back among her quilts. “Honey, honey,” she whispered fiercely then, balling my hand up into a fist and squeezing it so hard that I almost cried out in pain before she released me. Ella Jean grabbed me and pulled me back. I felt relieved, and a little scared.
“Is she your grandmother or your great-grandmother?” I asked, jealous because I had neither, but Ella Jean just laughed at me. “One or t’other,” she said. “I don’t reckon it matters, does it?”
“I don’t reckon it does,” I said.
Inside, the log house was a jumble, with no regular furniture in the front room save for a giant handmade wooden wardrobe and Granny’s iron bed, pulled right up to the only window. Homemade mattresses—bedticks, they called them—were scattered across the floor beyond, along with several wooden chairs, trunks, and haphazard piles of clothing. A calendar from a funeral home and a long rifle hung on pegs above Granny’s bed. I could see why Wilmer might prefer to live in the barn! We threaded our way through the clutter, following Aunt Roe’s summons into the added-on “kitchen,” such as it was. She stood at the black cookstove dishing out food from two black pots and a skillet; Baby Doll already sat at the big wooden table, reading a comic book while she ate from a battered tin plate before her, along with the little boys, Billy Ed and Mister, who perched together on a sort of high homemade bench and ate their beans and cornbread with their hands from a single plate, literally shoveling it in. Longhaired, sweet-faced Wilmer appeared at the back door to receive a heaping plate of steaming food, then stumbled back out with it. Or at least I thought he stumbled—later on, I would realize that this was the way he walked.
“Isn’t he going to eat with us?” I asked Ella Jean.
“He don’t never eat with nobody,” she said.
Aunt Roe did not even look at us as she handed Ella Jean and me our plates of green beans, cornbread cut from the skillet, and something mysterious from the other pot. I had a special plate—blue and white china. Ella Jean grabbed us two dishrags for napkins and we took our seats at the bare wooden table just as Baby Doll got up. Aunt Roe gave her a plate to take out for Granny.
“She won’t eat hardly a thing, though,” Ella Jean remarked to me. “Lives on music and air.”
I, on the other hand, found that I had turned into a glutton; this was the best food I had ever put into my mouth, and suddenly I was ravenous. Ham and onions had been cooked along with the beans, for hours it seemed, by their smoky, salty taste. The cornbread was crisp and crusty outside, chewy and moist within. “And what’s this, exactly?” I asked, eating the other dish, a piece of something with thick gravy on it.
“Meat,” Aunt Roe said.
I did not pursue this topic, but ate every bite.
“It really is good, Roe,” Ella Jean said, confirming for me that this was indeed a special supper.
“Everything is just delicious!” I added sincerely, and Aunt Roe nodded, once. She herself ate standing up, though there were chairs at the table. I sensed that she preferred to take her meals this way.
Suddenly we were joined by a barefooted girl in a flowing sort of nightgown, I believe, and a fringed, flowered shawl that dangled almost into my plate as she stood behind me and stretched her arms out over the table. She was very pale and very beautiful. Her eyes were shut; her silvery hair cascaded all down her back.
“Mama, Mama!” the little boys chanted, pulling at her gown. Without her kitchen uniform and hairnet, I would never have recognized her.
Never opening her eyes, their mother began, “May the Lord bless this food before us, may He bless and keep us every one, especially these sweet little children, and make His face to shine upon us all the days of our lives, so that we may go forth and do His bidding in the wide world, and live each day in such a way that we may enter into His kingdom, where we shall all be blessed to eat His heavenly food forever, and sing with His heavenly angels and say with them this heavenly prayer, ‘Our Father, who are in heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .’ ”
I joined in the Lord’s prayer, as did Ella Jean. Aunt Roe did not.
“In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen,” we said loudly, and Ella Jean got up to pull out a chair for her mother, who was hugely pregnant again, I realized. Aunt Roe gave her a plate of food as she reached over to take my hand.
“Now, I’m Trula,” she said. “Ella Jean has been talking about you coming up here for the longest time, and I love you, and God loves you.” Her eyes were as simple and blue as the sky.
“I love you, too,” I said, surprising myself. This remark seemed to please her, and she began to eat. I looked at Ella Jean but she was looking down, not looking at me on purpose, I felt. Clearly, there was a lot she had not told me. The little boys tumbled off their bench and out the door, leaving a mess behind. The dogs were barking in the yard.
“Where is Mister Bascomb?” I asked, for I was dying to know.
“Why, he’s off doing the Lord’s work,” Trula said sweetly, in unison with Ella Jean, who said he was playing music at a honkytonk in Tennessee. Finally Ella Jean looked at me, and we both burst out laughing, Trula along with us, her laugh like little bells ringing. I got it, all right. I wondered if she had always been like this, or if it was more recent, the result of too many babies, or too much Jesus. I got up and cleared off the table and washed the tin plates in a basin of water that Aunt Roe had heated up on the woodstove so hot that it almost scalded me. I didn’t mind. I wanted it to scald me, the same way I wanted to eat what they did and do what they did.
“Show her the garden, then,” Aunt Roe said to Ella Jean, who took me out the back door through the pecking chickens, past the “back house,” and up a dirt road toward the great overhanging mountain, where darkness and mist were already gathering.
“There it is,” Ella Jean said, pointing at the large garden, which was as tidy as the house was messy, row on row of corn and glossy green plants such as squash and beans and potatoes, ripe red tomatoes neatly staked. “Aunt Roe got here just in time to help us put the garden in, thank God,” Ella Jean said. “Or else I don’t know what we would of done.”
“You mean she doesn’t live here all the time?” I was shocked.
“No, she don’t live noplace, I reckon, just goes where she’s needed. I was mighty glad when she showed up, I’ll tell you.”
A big stuffed scarecrow in jeans and a black frock coat stood in the midst of the pumpkin vines, presiding over all. “Who’s that?” I asked.
“That’s Daddy,” Ella Jean said, not laughing. “Leastways, that’s his old coat. Daddy is something else. I wouldn’t of let you come up here if he was home.”
“Why not?” I asked. “What would happen?”
“Well, that’s the thing of it,” Ella Jean said. “He might be sweet as pie, or he might take drunk and start sworping around. You just don’t never know.”
“Is he really a preacher, then? Like your mother said?”
“Well, more or less. He’s been known to preach, let’s just leave it at that.” Ella Jean‘s quick grin flashed white in the gathering darkness. “Up there’s the tobacco field,” she added, pointing out a patch of ghostly-looking little white tents that didn’t look like tobacco—or anything growing—to me, and I said so.
“That’s just how it gets when you go to cut it, all droopylike,” she said. “We’ll be getting it in the barn this week.”
“You’ll be getting it into the barn?” I stopped walking and looked at her.
“Yes mam.” She did not look back. “Along with a passel of otherunses. People around here are real good to help each other out when hit’s a job of work to do.”
“Then what?”
“Then we’ll hang it up, and let it get good and dry, and then we’ll take it to market. That’s good money and a good time,” she added. “Music and everything.” We turned back toward the house, where the sound of music already came drifting from the porch as if on cue. “Down there’s the privy,” she said. “We better go on down there and use it, fore it gets plumb dark,” and so we did, one after the other. There was a choice of dried corn cobs or old catalogue pages for toilet paper. When I came back out, Ella Jean took my hand and led me up the path to the front porch where several neighbors had gathered, including Earl, who was now playing a guitar almost as big as he was, while Granny strummed the “dulcimore” on her lap and Trula fiddled. Ella Jean grabbed up her banjo and there we stayed, all of us, singing the moon up, as lightning bugs rose from the brush into the trees and Wilmer came out to hunker down in front of his barn and listen.
At one point, Ella Jean and her mother put their instruments down and stood together at the porch rail, almost touching but not quite, as they flung back their heads and closed their eyes and sang “Barbry Allen” in the old way, with that flip of the voice at the end, their high tremolo voices quivering out over the holler. The last note still hung in the air when there came the sound of a loud car engine—with no muffler, it sounded like—and then it was there below us, with slamming doors and voices raised. The dogs started barking like crazy.
“Oh Lord,” Ella Jean said.
“Who is it?” I asked. “Is it your daddy?”
“Not hardly. And he ain’t my daddy, anyhow,” Ella Jean said, leaving me to ponder that as I watched the arrival of Ella Jean’s older sister, Flossie, who had not come back to stay, she told everybody at once, tossing her yellow ponytail. She just wanted her clothes, that was all, she was moving to Knoxville, and this was Doyle—the boyfriend who stood back by the treeline smoking a cigarette and wearing a snapbrim straw hat with a green feather in it.
“Oh no, honey—” Trula flew down the steps to envelop her oldest daughter in tears and recriminations, but Flossie said she didn’t care if she was going to hell or not, she was going to Knoxville first, if everybody would just get out of her way and let her get her stuff.
While Flossie made her way into the back house, trailed by all the rest, I decided to venture back down through the woods in the moonlight to the privy by myself. I found my way all right and was coming back up the path when suddenly I was grabbed from behind, one strong arm around my waist and another around my neck, a hard fist in my mouth.
“Now don’t be scared, honey. I don’t want nothing but a little kiss.” Flossie’s boyfriend had a deep, insinuating voice. “I’ve always had a hankering for a city girl.” The bristles of his beard scraped my neck, and I could smell his awful hair pomade. I could not speak, for now he was choking me as his other hand moved under my blouse. It was pitch dark, with that woodsy smell all around. I could not move or breathe. I tried to struggle, but lost my footing on the dark path.
“God damn it!” the man said, and suddenly I was thrown off to the side, into the bushes, as a dark furious struggle of some sort occurred, punctuated by the noise of blows and grunts, “Oof! Ugh! Ah!” like the balloons of speech in cartoons. Then it was over, and the man was gone, and Wilmer was leaning over me. He picked me up and set me on my feet. He smelled terrible.
“Thank you,” I said, clutching the back of his rough wool shirt as I followed him out to the clearing where the man, seeming not much the worse for wear, was piling Flossie’s bundles into the car, cursing all the while. Crying now, Flossie herself got in and slammed the door. Granny still sat in her corner, in her quilts, watching—or not watching—it all from her high perch. The car rattled off down the mountainside.
Trula picked up her fiddle again. She and Ella Jean sang “The Demon Lover,” and I soon joined in on the chorus. “Well met, well met, my own true love, Well met, well met,” says he. “I’ve just returned from the salt water sea, and it’s all for the sake of thee.” The demon lover talks the young wife into running off with him, leaving her husband, who is a “house-carpenter,” and a “tender little babe” behind. At the end of the song, both lovers drown in the “salt water sea” and then go to Hell. All the ballads ended tragically, and all the women died, or so it seemed to me, especially in the terrible “Omie Wise,” and yet I felt a pure, undeniable exhilaration upon learning these old tunes. Granny strummed her dulcimer in darkness with her eyes closed, yet she never missed a note or a single word when she sang solo on “The Wagoner’s Lad” in her strong old voice. That song seemed to go on forever, verse after verse in the night.
The moon rode high in the sky, so bright it cast shadows behind every tree, when everybody finally drifted off to bed. As Ella Jean and I made a final trip down the path to the privy, I could hardly believe what had happened there; I did not tell her about it, for some reason I did not understand. We slept up in Ella Jean’s little loft in the back house, where I found a number of my old Nancy Drew books—I did not mention this either. Ella Jean’s breathing instantly grew slow and regular, her warm heavy arm flung across my stomach; but as for me, I was too excited to sleep, lying awake far into the night breathing the cool, scented mountain air and gazing out through a pie-shaped chink at the starry sky.
IN THE MORNING we ate anything we could find and then sat out on the porch in the sunshine playing checkers and drinking black coffee out of tin cups while we waited for Earl to come back and get us. Granny sat in her corner as if she had never left it—maybe she hadn’t!—picking out a fast little tune on Earl’s guitar. The little boys wrestled in the dirt yard below while Trula sat on the steps painting her toenails pink. She could scarcely reach them over her big stomach. Up the hill, Aunt Roe was already out working in the garden. “I’ll fly away, oh Lordy, I’ll fly away,” Granny sang. “When I get to heaven by and by, I’ll fly away.” We joined her.
“Y’all sound good,” Trula said.
“King,” I said to Ella Jean, crowning the black disc. I had scarcely slept yet felt strangely rested and alert, with every nerve on edge. Mist still hung in the trees though the sun shone hot and bright already; the deep blue sky was cloudless.
“Don’t y’all want to do your nails too?” Trula asked, offering the little bottle of nail polish.
Ella Jean and I had just finished painting each others’ toenails when Earl’s old truck rumbled into the clearing. We grabbed up our shoes and bags and ran barefooted down the warm stairs and across the yard to jump in the back of the truck. “Bye! Bye!” the little boys cried, waving. Trula waved, too, and even Baby Doll, who came out to sit sullenly beside her mother. Granny dozed in the sun in her corner. We bounced down the hill past the barn where Wilmer suddenly appeared in the door with a big smile on his face, wearing his familiar overalls and wool shirt and that snap brim straw hat with the green feather on it. He touched the brim and nodded, once, as we rode past.
EARL DROPPED US at the stone gate and we set off up the hill, swinging our bags. The grounds of Highland Hospital had never looked more beautiful—the long green slopes of perfect grass punctuated by flowering oak-leaf hydrangeas and crape myrtles, stone benches and birdbaths placed here and there, the bright, orderly flower beds as we neared the top. Everyone we encountered waved or spoke to us, and we spoke back. But suddenly Ella Jean grabbed my arm, jerking me off the driveway with such force that I almost fell down.
“What are you . . .” I began, but stopped as I saw the Carrolls’ long, black, shiny Lincoln shoot past us like a bullet, with Johnson at the wheel.
“Something is wrong,” I said.
Instinctively we both slowed down as we continued on up the hill, achieving a literal snail’s pace as we neared the top in time to witness the Lincoln slide to a stop in front of Homewood. Its huge front door and the car doors sprang open at the same time. Out came Mrs. Hodges, almost falling down the stone steps as she rushed to envelop Mrs. Carroll in such a hug that Mrs. Carroll’s red pillbox hat went spiralling down along the pavement. “Ai-eee, ai—eee!” Mrs. Hodges wailed. Her hair stood out from her head in big clumps. Miss Malone and Mr. Axelrod appeared in the open door behind her with serious expressions on their faces.
“Come on,” I said.
But Ella Jean hung back, pulling me into the honeysuckle arbor. “Maybe we ought to wait awhile,” she said. “They ain’t seen us yet.”
Through the trellis we watched Dr. Carroll himself, tall and grave, climb out of the car and take off his navy blue suit coat and his hat and hand them carefully to Johnson. Then Dr. Carroll stood in the hot sun in his brilliant white shirt with his hands on his hips, surveying the two women as if they presented a job of work to be done—a familiar stance I had often witnessed as he surveyed a new garden plot to be put in or a flagstone walk to be laid. Mrs. Hodges kept on talking and waving her arms while Mrs. Carroll covered her face with her hands.
“She’s crying,” Ella Jean said.
Mr. Axelrod and Miss Malone moved forward awkwardly. Johnson carried the Carrolls’ suitcases inside. Ella Jean and I stood like statues in the arbor, watching through the vines. The smell of the honeysuckle was overpowering. Now Dr. Carroll had put his arms around Mrs. Carroll in a tight embrace while Mrs. Hodges stepped back, still speaking and wringing her hands.
“Look,” Ella Jean said, pointing. We were both transfixed by a sudden influx of yellow butterflies that fluttered down to land in a bed of orange day lilies just beyond our hiding place. They stayed for only a second before flying up again in a yellow cloud that rose erratically into the cloudless sky. I rushed out into the sunshine to see them go, shading my eyes with my hand.
“Well, you’ve gone and done it now,” Ella Jean said from the arbor.
“It’s Robert,” I screamed. “Something has happened to Robert. I know it has.” The minute the yellow cloud of butterflies disappeared over the brow of the hill, I set out toward Homewood, at a dead run.
But it took me forever to get up that hill, for the closer I got, the slower I seemed to go, running now as if in a dream. The Carrolls stood locked in their embrace like a statue, but Mrs. Hodges opened her arms wide to catch me up in a stifling hug.
“Oh honey,” she cried, “he’s gone and kilt himself.”
“Evelyn!” Mrs. Carroll said to her sharply.
But Mrs. Hodges could not stop herself from telling it, again and again, her jumbled recital punctuated by those odd cries, “Ai-eee, ai-eee!” The facts were these: Robert had been on vacation from Oxford, at home with his new family at the grand house his mother had bought for Dr. Jerome Livingston on the coast of Cornwall. There had been a nature hike that afternoon, led by Dr. Livingston, then croquet on the lawn, then a jolly dinner for everyone, including the three stepsisters and several of their friends, with two visiting uncles thrown in. Nothing unusual had occurred at this dinner, according to all. Lamb, potatoes, peas, and carrots had been served. Robert had been pleasant and talkative, excusing himself just before dessert.
“But he loved dessert,” I said.
“Ah yes, remember how he used to steal my sweeties? Ai-eee!” Mrs. Hodges had always kept cellophane-wrapped hard candy in her pocket for him.
No one had thought anything of it when Robert left the table, assuming of course that he had gone to “the necessary,” as Mrs. Hodges called it. Nor was Robert missed when he did not immediately return, for one of the uncles chose the interval between courses to perform a few magic tricks, and everyone was enthralled. Robert had simply folded his napkin, excused himself quietly, and walked down the hall and out the front door where he circled the house to take the “Cliff Walk” which ran through the woods to the great red cliffs above the sea, continuing in a circuitous fashion down to the “shingle” or stretch of sand where the family swam and sunned at low tide only. Robert did not take the lower path. He climbed out onto the rocks, into the sunset, then “cast himself into the sea,” as Mrs. Hodges told it. No one in the world could have shut her up at that moment.
The family might never have known what happened to him had not a kitchen boy, taking a smoke break on the lawn, seen him go. There was something about the way Robert was walking, the boy said later, something about the way he looked back before ducking into the woods on the cliff path, that bothered him. The boy ran in to sound the alarm, which took a moment, for he was a stutterer. When those at table realized what he was saying, the entire company threw down their napkins and leapt up to follow him down to the cliffs, where they found only Robert’s wristwatch, which he had left for some reason on the rocks, and the gorgeous sunset, and the huge waves crashing on the rocks below.
“But he couldn’t swim!” I cried, remembering Robert out by the hospital pool, fully dressed.
“Well, that was the point then, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Hodges snapped. “Suicide, it was, and now he’s gone straight to Hell in a hand basket, he has, there’s the pity of it, there’s the shame.”
“Evelyn, this is rubbish, and you know it. You are overwrought. Let’s step back to the office. I’m going to give you something for your nerves.” Dr. Carroll spoke firmly.
“And Evalina, you must come with me, dear. Let’s get out of this blinding sun.” Mrs. Carroll was disengaging me from the overheated Mrs. Hodges, trying to draw me away. “We have a lot to do,” she said, “and a lot to talk about.”
BUT I WAS unable to talk about Robert then, or for years to come. He had been my most precious friend, my most private memory, purely my own amidst my oddly public adolescence at Highland Hospital. He was the still point at the center of the kaleidoscope.
In only ten days, I would leave for Peabody. In the meantime, I was supposed to shop, pack, and practice—practice the piano above all—but I could not. I crumpled into a ball when I sat upon the piano bench. Nor could I eat any supper later. Finally I was allowed to go to bed, where I pretended to sleep so that they would let me alone while I watched the terrible film that played over and over in my mind, Robert’s body smashing against the rocks, his head broken apart in pieces like Humpty Dumpty, that huge head crammed too full, too full of dreams and facts and lore and bits of odd knowledge . . . and love, I thought, for Robert had loved the world, and all the facts and bits of it, every name and every living thing.
Finally I slept, waking later in the night to see a crack of unaccustomed light beneath my door and hear voices—Dr. Carroll’s, Mrs. Carroll’s, and another man’s voice which I did not immediately recognize. They had been checking on me. I was surprised by this, as the Carrolls normally retired to their own apartment unless they had an engagement. The voices continued, now coming from the sitting room down the short hall. Some instinct made me get up, open the door, and creep in darkness, shrinking against the wall, right down to the corner where I could hear them clearly. The other man was Dr. Raymond Levy, a young doctor newly arrived from Duke University.
“But the rest cure was successful before, darling.” Mrs. Carroll’s voice had an argumentative edge to it. “Don’t you remember what sort of shape she was in, the little waif, when she arrived?”
Me! They were talking about me.
“I’ve told you, Grace. There just isn’t time now for the rest cure.” Dr. Carroll spoke impatiently. “It takes several weeks, as you well know, at a minimum. Evalina has to go to Peabody, and she has to go now. Within a fortnight.”
“But surely her matriculation could be postponed,” ventured the young Dr. Levy, “under these circumstances. This kind of thing must happen with some frequency, I’d imagine, due to illness, or a death in the family. Schools have to make allowances. Evalina is very young, anyway. Can’t she go next year, or at the beginning of the winter term?”
“Yes, Robert.” Mrs. Carroll had a note of pleading in her voice. “Let’s keep her here with us, darling, until she is stronger.”
“No,” Dr. Carroll said. Instantly I could see his craggy face in my mind’s eye, the big nose, the jut of the chin. “Absolutely not. I am in the business of discouraging weakness, and encouraging strength. Banishing illness and enabling wellness, this is what we are about here at Highland Hospital.” Dr. Carroll spoke for the benefit of Dr. Levy, I could tell. “Coddling is not kind. Coddling fosters neurasthenia, hypochondriasis, hysteria, and paralysis of the will.”
“But darling . . .” I could imagine Mrs. Carroll’s beautiful, pained face, how she would be leaning forward in her chair.
“Enough!” I knew Dr. Carroll had held up his hand in the familiar traffic-cop gesture. “Sometimes a physician must simply make a judgment call. I take full responsibility for my decision. Evalina is the most fortunate of children, for she has a true talent, and the capacity for real and important work. Thus, despite her unfortunate birth and the sorrows of her youth, Evalina possesses every capacity for achieving that highest of all our goals here at Highland, that which I refer to as the Victorious Self. But timing is all, as we are well aware.”
“Robert, I implore you. At this moment, Evalina is scarcely speaking. She can neither practice nor eat. Who knows whether or not we shall even get her out of bed in the morning?”
“This is precisely why I am prescribing a course of metrazol convulsion therapy for our Evalina, beginning as soon as possible. I shall speak with Wilfred Terhune about it first thing in the morning. One or two may do the trick.”
“Oh, I just don’t know, dear.” Now Mrs. Carroll sounded really worried.
“You need not know, dear, nor worry your pretty head about it. But your participation will be important—crucial, in fact. Do not allow the faintest shadow of doubt, or indecision, to cross your face or enter your voice as you discuss this with her. We must be in concert on this, Grace. We must act as one.”
“But what about Evelyn?”
“Don’t worry. I will put the fear of God into Evelyn Hodges,” Dr. Carroll said grimly. “She shall not scotch this project, I can promise you that. And she is not to tell anyone outside this hospital—anyone—about Evalina’s treatments. Mrs. Grady is not to know, nor are Evalina’s friends, nor their parents. This moment, too, will disappear into Evalina’s buried past, and she will go forward into the useful future which awaits her.”
“Well, if you are sure, then . . .”
I could tell by Mrs. Carroll’s voice that the conversation was over. She always did whatever Dr. Carroll suggested—or decreed. “Good night, then, dear,” she said. “Good night, Dr. Levy.”
Trembling, I pressed myself flat against the wall, but she took the other hallway, thank goodness.
“A point of information, Dr. Carroll,” Dr. Levy began seriously. “At Duke, the insulin coma treatment is currently preferred; I am wondering why you have chosen metrazol for your ward.”
Ward? I was thinking.
Dr. Carroll said, “Here at Highland, we administer the insulin treatments—usually for longterm schizophrenia and depression—over an extensive period of time. Thirty or forty comas would not be uncommon. But with a trauma-induced state such as Evalina’s, I have found metrazol to be quicker and more effective. Sometimes a sudden jolt or two is all that’s needed. I am hoping that this will be the case here.”
Dr. Levy went on to question Dr. Carroll about electroshock, a new treatment which “shows much promise,” as Dr. Carroll agreed.
But I had heard enough. I crept back to my room and lay down in darkness. Something Dr. Carroll had said kept coming back to me. What did he mean, my “unfortunate birth”? What could he possibly mean by that? Finally I closed my eyes and surrendered to my terrible waking sleep, watching the film of Robert’s suicide over and over. There was a part of me that did not want to take the metrazol, that did not want to get better, that wanted to stay here in this darkness with Robert, no matter how hard it was, so long as I could see him at all. Yet there was another part that did want to leave Highland, to go to Peabody, to fly away, fly away like the butterflies, like Granny’s song, I’ll fly away, oh Lordy, I’ll fly away. When I get to Heaven by and by, I’ll fly away.
IT WAS STILL early the following morning when I was awakened by one of my favorites, the pretty young nurse Dorothy Rich, and escorted up to the top floor of the Central Building, through double steel doors that clanged shut behind us, one after the other. “Oh, that’s for the patients’ safety,” she told me with her bright pink lipstick smile. “They are at first so disorienting, these treatments.”
“Then what?”
“Then they prove very helpful,” she said reassuringly, squeezing my shoulder as she led me into a tiny room where I was to take off my clothes and put on a terrycloth robe and some paper slippers and “rest” until my turn came.
Another young nurse came in with two tablets and a glass of water on a tray. “Here, honey, go ahead and take these now,” she said, putting the bag down on the little table by my bed. “Then you can take a nap, and when you wake up, you’ll feel a lot better.”
“Oh Diana, I tried to call you last night,” Dorothy said to her. “Some of us are going out to Lake Lure on Saturday, don’t you want to go with us? Bert is going,” she added, giggling.
“Really?” Diana said. “But . . .”
I turned my back and slipped the tablets into the pocket of my terrycloth robe, then faced them again, drained my glass of water, and lay down on the bed, surprising myself. I am still not sure exactly why I disobeyed. Hands at my sides, I lay flat on my back and closed my eyes. The two young nurses continued to whisper and giggle. I heard the words “big band.”
Then Dorothy came over and put her cool hand on my forehead. “She’s gone,” she said, and the two left my cubicle.
I sat up, possessed by nothing so much as a sudden terrific curiosity. I opened my door and went out into the narrow hallway to find the bathroom, where I flushed the tablets away immediately. Some of the doors along the long corridor were open, and some were closed; I knew that these rooms contained patients in varying stages of insulin and metrazol shock therapy, either drugged and waiting for their treatments to be administered, as I was supposed to be doing, or still “sleeping it off” from the day before. Nurses flitted in and out. The big door down at the end of the hall swung open as a patient, prone and still on his bed, was wheeled inside; the doors closed behind him. I ducked back into the bathroom as another gurney with a large sleeping man on it came down the hall past me, pushed by an intern I did not know. The metal doors clanged shut again behind the unconscious giant, then opened for yet another patient on a gurney. Soon they would come for me.
I looked both ways, then walked quickly (and calmly, I hoped, though my heart was beating fast) down the hall. I turned the large knob, then pulled it; the door swung open easily. Without even thinking, I slipped inside, to hover just there, by the back wall.
The large ward was in semidarkness. Six or seven patients already lay in place on the gurneys to which they were virtually bound, I realized, by carefully folded sheets and raised rails, so that they would not roll out. But it was only later that I would fully understand everything I saw. A little table holding a glass of orange juice, a bottle of dextrose, and several syringes filled with different amounts of insulin on a clean white cloth had been placed next to each. Patients just commencing their course of treatment were given low doses of insulin, which would increase with time until the dose was quite high by the end of therapy. Usually the injections were given in the buttocks, though I saw two patients receiving injections in their arms instead. The insulin shock treatment was given five days a week, with the weekend off, and might go on for weeks and weeks. On a few tables there lay only one syringe, which was destined for the metrazol shock patients such as myself. We, too, would be thrown into a spontaneous convulsion, like an epileptic fit.
Some of the treatments were already in progress. They started early each morning, so that the patients could be carefully monitored all day long for any delayed reactions. Highland was a famous, progressive hospital, remember—this was the most effective and humane treatment for mental illness to be found in America at that time. While I watched, yet another patient—a woman I recognized from Art, a good sculptor—was wheeled in sound asleep and placed in an unoccupied space beside a table.
Now the reactions were beginning all around the dim room. Soon after their first shot, the patients began to perspire and drool; already, as I watched, the ones who had had the higher doses went into coma and began to toss and moan, their muscles twitching. Some grabbed at the air—hands were shooting up all around the room. Four or five nurses moved among them continuously now, like fish in an aquarium, checking pulse and respiration. Dr. Terhune and an intern monitored them minutely as well; only Dr. Terhune could decide, on an individual basis, how long each coma should last. This decision was the key to the success or failure of the treatment. The coma must be long enough to be effective; yet patients left in coma too long could suffer brain damage or even death. Usually a treatment lasted for several hours before being terminated by a drink of glucose or by a glucose injection.
I was not present long enough to witness the completion of any treatment, of course; for no sooner had the convulsions begun in earnest than Dr. Carroll himself stuck his head in the door, looking a great deal less calm than usual, and strode over to whisper something to one of the nurses, who went to speak to Dr. Terhune immediately. The large door closed.
Realizing that I must make my escape, I waited only a moment or so before opening it myself and slipping out, despite a nurse’s cry from behind me as the door shut soundlessly. I was in luck! Dr. Carroll had gone elsewhere.
I don’t know what I intended, really, as I ran blindly down the corridor toward, I hoped, freedom—only to collide with Mrs. Fitzgerald as she emerged from one of the rooms at the other end, dressed in regular clothes and carrying a little red leather overnight bag. I imagine that her course of treatment had been completed the day before, and she was then being released. In any case, I hit her head-on, pushing her up against the wall and knocking her bag to the floor where it fell open, spilling its contents at our feet.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I gasped.
“Why, Patricia Pie-Face!” she said immediately, her own face appearing puffier though prettier than I recalled, despite a large bruise on her cheekbone. Had she hit it on a guardrail, during a convulsion? She had a new haircut, too; I might not have recognized her. Mrs. Fitzgerald always looked different, and always younger than she was, as if caught back in some perpetual girlhood. It had been ages since I had seen her. And now suddenly here she was, hugging me tight, tight, sobbing into my hair.
“I heard about the salamander boy,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
I hugged her back.
“There she is. Evalina!” called Dr. Carroll as he came flying through the double doors with Dr. Levy in tow. “Hold on to her, Zelda,” he instructed, which was completely unnecessary, for I wasn’t going anywhere. I stood still while Mrs. Fitzgerald hugged me, an embrace I recall vividly to this day. Mrs. Fitzgerald felt soft and warm and mommy-ish.
Dr. Carroll halted, panting, a few feet from us.
“Leave her alone, Robert,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said to him in a quiet yet commanding voice, oddly intimate. “Just you leave her alone.” They were facing each other.
I raised my head to look at him, too. “I will go to Peabody,” I said. “I am ready to go now.” I bent to retrieve Mrs. Fitzgerald’s belongings—her black notebook, her colored pencils that had rolled everyplace, a few toiletries, and a fancy blue silk nightgown. I stuffed them all into her little red case and snapped it shut and handed it to her, and we walked down the hall together. Dr. Carroll shook his head as we went past him.
Back at Homewood, I found Mrs. Carroll and Mrs. Hodges in my room, already putting linens into into my trunk—the same steamer trunk, with stickers all over it, that Mrs. Carroll had taken to Vienna as a student herself. She squealed like a girl now as she stood up to hug me. I still wore the terrycloth robe from the top floor of the Central Building.
“What in the world has happened, then?” Mrs. Hodges asked, hands on her ample hips.
“Dr. C changed his mind, and I did, too. I’m going. I’m ready to go to Peabody.”
“Of course you are!” Mrs. Carroll clapped her hands. ”I knew you would not fail me, Evalina,” she said. “Go, go. Go—you must go, for me. Music is freedom, never forget it.” How many times had she repeated these words of “the great Busoni?” Yet she was not free, Mrs. Carroll, I realized, her grand career secondary to her famous husband’s. Nor was Ella Jean free, even with her own music, even up on her own wild mountaintop. Yet somehow, through nothing I had ever done to deserve it, I was being given this chance. Suddenly the voice of Matilda Bloom came into my mind clear as day, and the words she had said to me at Bellefleur years before: I know you, honey, and I know you are a smart girl, and you have gots to realize this is the chance of a lifetime here. Your mama would want you to take it. She would want you to grab that brass ring that she never got aholt of herself.
I hugged them both, hard. “I’ll write to you,” I promised. “I’ll send postcards for your collection.”