THUS I FOUND MYSELF in the place I had perhaps been heading all along, the top floor of the Central Building of Highland Hospital, being administered a course of insulin shock treatments, which I did not resist. How could I? for during that time, I was nobody—a husk of a person, the shape and shell of a person, the skin of a salamander girl—all emptied out. Nobody home. Shock treatments do that, they rob you of your immediate memory, and in my case, this was a blessing.
I knew Dr. Carroll immediately, though now I am not certain how long I had been back in the hospital when he arrived; perhaps it was hours, perhaps days. I was in a little cubicle of a room, coming out of a treatment, when I heard the deep, familiar voice rolling in from a great distance somewhere above me, like thunder.
“Evalina, Evalina, can you hear me?”
I fought to open my eyes, which seemed to be glued together, and tried to raise my hand, but this I could not accomplish either, even though the restraints had been removed.
“Evalina, this is Dr. Carroll.”
I know it, I thought furiously, heart pounding. I know you—with a curious mixture of dread and relief as I struggled to come back to myself. I tried but could not control the muscles of my mouth.
He laid his hand, dry as paper, lightly on my forehead.
“Now, now,” Dr. Carroll said. “Your job here is to relax, Evalina. To rest. You may leave everything else to us. You have been very ill, but you are safe now. You are here, you are home.” His voice came down to me through shifting layers of fog. “We do not intend to let you go again. We do not intend to lose you.” Threat or promise, the words sank in.
Suddenly my eyes popped open and there he was above me, blocking the light, his head a dark shape I would have recognized anywhere—those big ears sticking out! I could not see his face. Was it day or night? I could never tell, in that place. I struggled to gain a slight purchase on one elbow and tried to speak to him, but only horrible sounds would issue forth from my mouth.
“Never mind.” His words floated like clouds above me, out of reach. “Trust me, Evalina. It is better this way.”
What way? What is better? What did he mean? But I could not speak.
The door closed. I heard steps and voices outside in the hall, then nothing. I lay exhausted in utter darkness and finally slept, to wake much later upon a cold wet sheet, humiliated. Yet somewhat restored—now I could open my eyes, sit up, even get up and stagger to the door to call the night attendant, who came running. She was a strong, bouncy Negro girl who clucked and cajoled and went to work on me immediately: “Why my goodness, look a here at you, poor thing, ain’t nobody put you to bed proper nor took you to the toilet neither one. I tell you what, you come along with me now. Just come on—” half carrying me down the hall to the communal bathroom, though it was still pitch black outside the windows.
This girl, whose name was Gloria, ran the big, old-fashioned claw-footed tub in the corner full of hot water and put me in it, then ducked out briefly to reappear with a little blue bottle of Evening in Paris bath salts, which she sprinkled liberally all about me, so that soon I was surrounded by iridescent bubbles up to my chin. “Now just lay back,” she commanded, and I did so, each cell of my body letting go. “Ain’t that better now?”
It felt wonderful. I had never seen this tub in use before. Usually we were led into the washroom by the nurses, who sometimes had to assist—or force—those in the worst conditions into the showers. Often I had to look away. Now I reveled in the luxury and warmth of my bubble bath, with time to notice the pink and maroon tile rosettes on the floor, repeated on the border running around the pink tile walls, halfway up. Out the barred window, I saw the first light fall upon the autumn foliage outside.
“Where in the world did you get this bubble bath stuff?” I asked Gloria.
“Kress’s,” she said, “on Patton Avenue, you know?”
I did know, as suddenly Asheville itself came flooding back to me—Pack Square, with the Vance Monument in the center of it, the lunch counter at Woolworth’s on Haywood Street where they made the vanilla cokes, the Grove Park Inn up on its mountain, and us up on our own, at the end of Montford Avenue, at Highland Hospital. Highland Hospital. I remembered the crenellated roofline of Homewood, the greenhouse gardens behind Brushwood. I knew exactly where I was.
I lay back in my bubbles and swore not to tell as Gloria opened one of the windows and lit an illegal cigarette, blowing smoke out into the rosy dawn. She ran some more hot water into my tub and left me again while she raced over to escort an older woman into one of the toilet stalls, a thin, gray woman bent into the shape of a question mark, who shuffled along looking down all the while and mumbled to herself and did not notice me. By then I would have been glad to get out of the tub, but as my soiled gown had disappeared, thank goodness, and there was not a towel within reach, I resisted the idea of walking naked and dripping down the hall past all those others who were undoubtedly waking up now, too.
So I was still there when a truly frightening woman stomped in. Wild, red-gray hair stuck out in clumps all over her head, huge breasts swung to her waist beneath her hospital-issue gown. She wore big, dirty, untied men’s brogans, shoelaces flapping on the white tile floor. Her eyes darted everywhere, fastening upon me. She approached my tub, hands on hips, then began jabbing at the air with a fat, pointing finger.
“Get out! Get out!” she screamed. “Who do you think you are?”
I shrank back, alarmed—for she was strong, this woman, I could tell, and suddenly Gloria was nowhere in sight. But then the woman made a disgusting sound with her mouth and rushed out, the open back of the hospital gown exposing her huge red buttocks, such a sight that I couldn’t help laughing.
“Good grief!”
For the first time, I noticed the pretty, dark-haired woman about my own age standing before one of the stalls. She was laughing, too, though gingerly, as if it hurt her.
“What are you doing in that tub, anyway?” she asked. “How’d you rate that bubble bath? You’d better get out of there, or we’ll have an insurrection.”
“I’d love to get out,” I said, “if I had a towel. Do you see one anyplace?”
Bath towels were always in short supply, given out carefully by a nurse or attendant when one entered the bathroom for a shower, then taken up again afterward. Apparently they feared that we might somehow hang ourselves with them.
“Oh Lord.” Now she was giggling, for all the world as if this were a dormitory at Peabody instead of the locked floor of a mental institution. Was she a patient, too? This seemed highly unlikely, especially as she wore a pretty two-piece “sleep set,” a lavender gown and matching robe sprigged with violets, instead of a hospital gown. “Just a minute.” She darted around the maroon and pink tile wall divider into the shower area and came back with a damp bath towel, which she handed me none too soon, as the heavy door opened again. I wrapped myself up in it entirely, easy to do since I was very thin.
“Thanks so much,” I said.
“It’s okay, it was nothing.” She had a soft, Southern voice.
Then she smiled and I could see it, what was wrong with her. Beneath the perfect, arched brows, her wide violet eyes were flat and dead. Nobody home there, either.
Her eyes were like the eyes of the fish laid out in rows on ice in the French Market in New Orleans, down by the river, where I went with my mother in the past, some time ago. In the past. My who? My mother, in the past, some time ago. My mind wavered, then stilled.
“What’s your name?” she was asking.
“Evalina Toussaint,” I said automatically, though I didn’t feel I owned it anymore. I didn’t feel connected to it in any way. It could have been something I’d just picked up from the basket of toiletries by the door, like a little green bar of soap.
“What a pretty name,” the woman said. “My name is Mary Margaret Stovall.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “No. Mary Margaret Stovall Calhoun. Dixie, for short. My name is Dixie Calhoun.”
Then she smiled, and I realized how beautiful she was, really beautiful. Even that morning, in a hospital where she was undergoing a course of shock treatments, Dixie looked like a lingerie model who had just stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine, with her jet-black hair curling naturally all around her heart-shaped face. Perfect skin. Though it wasn’t quite adequate, just like mine. Dixie, too, needed a carapace. A what? A carapace. This word, straight out of Robert’s vocabulary, came into my head from no place. Nowhere. Who knew what else was out there?
“Now girls, really! This is not a gab session.” An older attendant, all business, had taken over for Gloria. The new shift—morning in the asylum.
“Bye,” Dixie said, with a fluttery little wave of the hand. Instinctively I knew that she had learned that wave from riding on floats, in parades. I could hear a parade in my head, with a Dixieland brass band. A krewe. At Mardi Gras. Glancing back toward my claw-foot tub, I saw day stealing in though the bathroom windows—pink clouds in the sky and golden sunshine on the mountaintops, reflected in the iridescent bubbles fast disappearing in the tub. Only a few were left. Now I could smell breakfast—and I was starving.
GRADUALLY, OVER THE next few weeks, the world kept coming back to me in halting, unrelated images or words or even sudden overwhelming feelings for which I had neither name nor cause. The sweet taste of a sugary doughnut in my mouth, for instance; or a vision of white dogwood blossoms all around me as I sat in the open somewhere, in some city; the majestic swell of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on a cathedral organ, filling me with exaltation and then shame as I woke in orgasm to find the young lady physician, Dr. Gail Schwartz, patting my arm.
“It’s all right, Evalina,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed. This is all right—this is normal. You are beginning to recover.”
But the next morning I woke up racked by sobs and could not stop weeping for hours, though I did not know the source of my sorrow. If this was recovery, I wanted no part of it. Why couldn’t I just simply remember?
“Because the insulin shock treatments cause coma and convulsions, which are scrambling the connections in your brain, Evalina,” Dr. Schwartz told me. “This is how they work. Nobody knows exactly why they work—and any of these doctors who tell you they do is lying—but they do work. They are working now. You are better. You were sent to us in a virtually catatonic state, the result of severe trauma, injury, illness—who knows? We don’t know exactly what happened—we have only a few pieces of your story. Our first task has been to jolt you out of the condition in which we found you. Next, we may be able to help you form new connections and ways of thinking that are not so painful for you, not overwhelming. So don’t worry, you will remember when you are ready to remember. The brain is an astonishing organism in which nothing is ever lost. Nothing! Not even you.”
I liked Dr. Schwartz’s calm, quiet manner, the little gold glasses perched down on the end of her long, thin nose, her tidy bun of dark, frizzy hair, even her practical, let’s-get-down-to-business Northern accent. She seemed very young to be a doctor.
“This may take some time, but what else do you have on your calendar right now?” She smiled at me, and I smiled ruefully back, knowing already that this was so; for in the world of the mad, time is not a continuum but a fluid, shifting place, relative to nothing.
“Don’t try to remember,” Dr. Schwartz said. “Concentrate on the day at hand. Just do what we tell you.” She flashed me a quick grin, and I imagined being her friend, her chum, in other circumstances.
Dr. Schwartz vanished, carrying her clipboard, to be succeeded by a host of others, each with an agenda. Thus I found myself walking up and down the long halls several times a day with a fresh-faced young man wearing a whistle who said, “How ya doin’ now, honey? How ya doin’?” unnervingly, at every lap; making bead necklaces with an art group in the day room; tossing a large red medicine ball about a room in which one woman screamed and dived for the floor whenever the ball came in her direction; and singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” lustily in a music therapy group led by Phoebe Dean, who was still on the staff, wider in the hips but just as enthusiastic as ever.
“Why, Evalina!” she cried in her ridiculously cheery way. “I’m so glad to see you. Now let’s do it again, everybody, but this time as a round—Evalina, will you lead the second group, please? Here, come on up here to do it.”
I stood up and went forward to face the group.
“Okay. Now, let’s go!” Phoebe struck her tuning fork to get the key. I led my group lustily in song, remembering every word, to my surprise. Clearly, Phoebe’s high expectations of me had a therapeutic value. We did “Dona Nobis Pacem”and “Music Alone Shall Live” in rounds, too, with Phoebe mugging as our groups competed against each other. My friend Dixie, in Phoebe’s group, could scarcely sing for laughing.
“Hurry up and get well,” Phoebe said to me when the others had left and she was gathering up her songbooks. “I could really use you to play piano for me. My assistant is going on maternity leave the first of the month.”
What month? What month was it now, for that matter? I wasn’t even sure. But indeed, my fingers had been moving against my skirt as we sang; my fingers still knew every note of the songs.
“I’d like that,” I said.
Passing by in the hallway, Dr. Schwartz turned back to wink at me, amused.
DR. SCHWARTZ WAS part of the new management that had gradually taken over Highland Hospital since Dr. Carroll had deeded it to Duke in 1939. Evidently this was the reason Dr. Carroll had not come to see me again while I was on the top floor; though still involved with the hospital, he no longer took an active role in patient care. A Dr. Basil T. Bennett was the medical director now. I studied his photograph on the cover of The Highland Fling, our weekly newspaper. Clearly, things had changed. I could not imagine this Dr. Bennett, with his cropped hair and upright, military bearing, ever donning tights and doublet, for instance, and acting in a play! The article about him said that since he had come to Highland directly from the army, Dr. Bennett was an expert at dealing with the many men who had suffered mental breakdowns as a result of their war experiences. I had already noted a number of such veterans receiving shock treatments along with me.
Another article in The Highland Fling profiled Dr. Billig, who had replaced Dr. Terhune as the new clinical director of the shock treatment unit in complete charge of the top floor. He had worked with the great Dr. Sakel himself, the physician who had originated this “miraculous” new treatment in Vienna. Dr. Billig dealt directly with us all in a calm, businesslike fashion, asking quiet questions, monitoring us constantly as we went into and out of insulin shock, taking measurements and making notations and calculations in a series of numbered gray notebooks, rather like we were test tubes instead of human beings. Oddly enough, such minute documentation actually produced a comforting effect, for it made our bizarre, grotesque treatments seem scientific—more like common, everyday hospital procedure. Electroshock treatments were conducted on this floor as well, in another locked area, which I had never entered.
And we were getting better, many of us. It is a funny thing but you can actually see improved mental health in the eyes, the face, the very gait and bearing. Even I could tell. Dixie, several weeks ahead of me, was moved out of our locked ward and onto the floor below, where patients were given more privileges, such as personal items in the rooms, permission to see visitors, and eventually a pass for the rest of the campus or even a trip into town—while finishing up our prescribed number of treatments, of course. We still had to spend one night on the top floor following each session.
But it was heaven when I, too, was finally moved down to the next floor, to find myself in a lemon-yellow room with a lace-curtained window that had no bars—and a view! And even a painting of buttercups in a blue vase. I scarcely recognized myself in the bathroom mirror, the insulin had made me gain so much weight. I knew I had been too thin, but still . . . I peered at my round cheeks.
“In the pink, I’d say!” crowed Mrs. Hodges, my first visitor.
First there’d been a commotion out in the hall, as Mrs. Hodges had not signed in properly at the office below. “Oh bother!” Her accent was unmistakable. “Oh, rubbish!”
I stuck my head out the door to watch in delight as she padded her way past two of the younger aides, swatting them aside like flies. Mrs. Hodges, too, had grown much larger in the intervening years. With the addition of a mammoth purple coat, she filled the whole corridor, wall to wall. But of course she was carrying several large, bulky bags as well.
“There you are, God love you!” she exclaimed, dropping everything to surround me in a stifling hug. “My little Evalina, all grown up, but whatever did they do to you, child? And what’s become of your hair?” She made that familiar tsk-tsking sound as she took my face in her hands, turning my head side to side for a proper examination.
“But you’re recovering nicely all the same, aren’t you, dear?” she went on. “Just look at these roses in your cheeks!” She pinched my cheeks, hard. “Where there’s life, there’s hope, as the good fellow said.”
“Who was this good fellow?” I had never had the nerve to ask her before.
“Never you mind!” She plopped down on the bed and set to unwrapping her scarves, then removing her voluminous coat.
The supervising nurse appeared at my door with two aides right behind her. “Twenty minutes!” she said sternly, then smiled at me and disappeared.
Mrs. Hodges ignored her entirely. “Here now,” she said to me. “Made you a African, I have!” drawing an enormous knitted afghan from one of her bags.
I burst into laughter. “Oh, it’s just lovely!” I cried. “And so warm! How did you ever remember that blue is my favorite color, Mrs. Hodges? Thanks so much.”
“Well, you sound all right, too,” she announced somewhat grudgingly. “We’ve been that worried, I’ll tell you. Me and the girls, such a drama when they brought you in, hospital transport and whatnot. It gave us a turn, I will tell you. Last we heard, you had up and married a opera star and gone traipsing all over Europe. Where’s he now? This famous husband of yours?”
“He’s gone,” I said quietly.
She peered at me. “I see. Well, Mr. Hodges is gone, too, dead and buried, bless his soul, though I must say it’s simpler without him, no more ‘What would you like for supper, Dear?’ nor hairs in the sink nor listening to all those baseball games so loud on the radio.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Well, life does go on!” She slapped her thighs. “I’m still here, and so are you. Might as well make the best of it!”
The longer she stayed, the better I felt. “I am just so glad to see you,” I told her sincerely. “I wish you had come sooner.”
She snorted. “Ah, no chance of that around here these days, dearie. They run this hospital like the army, they do. Gates and badges, rules and regulations, patient plans and whatnot. You have never seen so much red tape! I’m well out of it, I’ll tell you.”
“Out of it—what do you mean?”
“Oh, they sacked me first chance they got, them of the new regime. Said I don’t have the required degree, the proper credentials. Credentials!” She spat out the word. “As if working here for a quarter century added up to nothing! Why, the minute Himself stepped down, I was out the door before you could say ‘jack sprat.’ And he did nothing to contradict them, nothing to save me—nothing! Of course now, she may have been the one behind it, the culprit; she’s been jealous of me all along, she has . . . but we’ll never know the truth of it, will we? It’s a mystery, as the good fellow said. Oh, they held a little reception in my honor, gave me a silver bowl and a steam iron. A silver bowl and a steam iron, for twenty-five years of service! It’s an uncaring bunch, I’ll tell you, a gang of accountants. I’m well out of it, I expect, Missy, if the truth be told, yet there’s times I miss it, too—the old days, I mean.”
“Is everything changed, then? What about the gardening, and the walking, and the recitals?”
“Oh, they go on right enough, now we’ve got famous for them. This new gang can’t change his program through and through. He’s still around, you know, still right here in Asheville with Mrs. Carroll, when they’re not sashaying off to Florida, that is. Oh, they like the sunny sands these days, the tropical breezes, they do. She’s got a hat with a red hibiscus on it, still putting on airs, same as ever. You watch yourself, Missy, when you go over there. She’s put out with you something terrible.”
“She is?”
“Just you be careful,” Mrs. Hodges intoned. “Watch yourself.”
Something clicked in my foggy mind; I knew she was right.
“You’re retired, then?” I asked.
“Heavens no, child.” She drew herself up on the bed. “On the contrary, I have become in-dis-pen-sa-ble!” She stretched the syllables out one by one. “At the Grove Park Inn, no less,” she added, enjoying my surprise. “Oh yes! It was Moira’s idea, but I must say they pounced upon it, the management, popped me right into Housekeeping where I run a tight ship, I’ll tell you. A ton of laundry we do every day. A ton! And that’s not counting holidays, mind you. ‘I don’t know how we ever got along without you, Evelyn!’ That’s what Mr. Potts, the Manager himself, said to me just last week. He’s a prince, I will tell you! And Moira’s admirer, as well.”
I BEGAN TO see how all this had transpired. I remembered my first lunch at the Grove Park years before, that lengthy lunch in the grand dining room where I had seen Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald sitting together at the banquette against the wall, like dolls in a store window. Suddenly my mind filled with questions.
“What about Mrs. Fitzgerald?” I asked. “She was moving back to Montgomery, I believe, about the time I left for Baltimore.”
“Ah, now there’s a sad story!” Mrs. Hodges announced. “A regular trag-e-dy!” She made the tsk-tsk sound with her mouth.
“Why, what do you mean?”
“He died, you know.”
I leaned forward in my chair. “Who?”
“Mr. Scott Fitzgerald, the drunkard himself. The whore-monger, the adulterer, the seducer of rich young wives. The famous writer.” Her scorn for him contorted her face. “Oh, it was in all the newspapers, very prominent, I’m surprised you missed it.”
“But when did this happen?” My heart was racing now.
“1940,” Dixie said from the doorway.
Her clear voice surprised me so much that I nearly tumbled from my chair. Caught up as I had been in this terrible news, I did not know how long she had been standing there, listening.
Now Dixie moved swiftly and gracefully across the room, offering her hand to Mrs. Hodges in a practiced gesture, with a little bow. “I am Dixie Calhoun,” she said, “from Thomasville, Georgia. I am a patient here as well. In the short time I have known her, Evalina and I have become great friends.”
“You don’t say! Pleased to meet you then, I’m sure!” Always impressed by any display of manners or class, Mrs. Hodges grasped Dixie’s slim, elegant hand.
“And I just love F. Scott Fitzgerald. I am his biggest fan!” Dixie seated herself right next to Mrs. Hodges on my bed. “So now you have to start over, right from the beginning, and tell me all about him. You didn’t like him much, did you? I can tell by your voice. Oh, I know he was a drinker, everybody knows that. But everybody is a drinker, aren’t they? I mean, everybody Southern, everybody smart. They all drank and drank, Zelda and Scott and all their friends. I’ve read all about them. And I knew that Zelda was insane. But I certainly didn’t know that she’d ever been here, at Highland, my goodness! I just can’t believe it.” Dixie clapped her hands and scooted closer to Mrs. Hodges. “Now, tell. Tell, Evalina.” She turned to look at me. “ I can’t believe you didn’t even know about his death.” Dixie took my hand and held it, as if we were little school friends. “It was 1940,” she prompted Mrs. Hodges.
Mrs. Hodges opened and closed her mouth several times, but finally she couldn’t resist Dixie; nobody ever could. “Oh yes, well, he’d been out there in California for some time, not a penny to his name, living in sin with a chorus girl, a real low-life, a Brit she was—”
“A journalist,” Dixie added primly.
“A gossip columnist,” Mrs. Hodges corrected her, “who looked exactly like our own Zelda when she was a young girl. I’ve seen the photos, mind you, exactly like poor little Zelda when he appeared in that uniform and plucked her up from the bosom of her family and married her. Oh quite dashing, he was! Why Zelda never even had the benefit of an education, poor thing! Plucked her up and married her and dragged her off to New York City and got her on the bottle just like himself. She didn’t know what hit her, is what I think. Fast company and no fixed address. Receiving friends in the bath and swimming in the nude. She never had a chance.”
Dixie raised her perfect eyebrows. “Now wait just a cotton-picking minute. I’ll bet Zelda didn’t want to go to college. Belles don’t go to college, everybody knows that being a belle is a fulltime job. First she was the wildest girl in Montgomery, and then she was a belle—and this is something I know something about, believe me!—being a belle alone is enough to kill you . . . or ruin you, if you survive, which I’m trying to do right now.”
We both stared at her.
She blushed and went on. “And then he appeared, Scott Fitzgerald, like a lover from a dream, like the answer to a question, and that was it. That was just it. They were a pair, like this.” She held up two fingers, pressed together.
Mrs. Hodges snorted. “I’d say he ruint her. He ruint them all. Criminal, it was. Just criminal.”
“But he was a wonderful writer, you must admit,” Dixie said. She turned to me. “Didn’t you just love The Great Gatsby?”
“Actually I’ve never read it,” I said. Somehow—in Canada, perhaps?—I had lost my early habit of reading, enslaved by my love for Joey and exhausted by my jobs. Suddenly I was filled with longing for books again. “But I will read it,” I said. “Right away.” At that very moment, a part of myself flew back to me, landing as gently as a butterfly on my head. I touched my hair, short as a boy’s.
“Well. As I was saying—” Mrs. Hodges wanted to get on with it; she wanted to be the expert. “We did hear all about it here, of course—the details of Mr. Fitzgerald’s death, you know. And it is sad, I suppose, though no more than what you’d expect, a man like that. The facts are these. He was out there writing movies, and books, and whatnot, and then he had his first heart attack in a drugstore, Schwab’s, I think they said it was, fell out in the floor like a tree. But they doctored him up after that until he was all right for a time, though dizzy, mind you. That’s when he moved in with the floozy, in a first-floor flat, so that she could take care of him. And it wasn’t long before he suffered the next attack, after taking her to see a film. I don’t know what the film was, mind you. But the very next day he was just sitting calmly in a green armchair eating a chocolate bar and waiting for the doctor to come when suddenly he jerked up, staggered across the floor, and grabbed at the mantelpiece, then fell flat down in the floor, looking elegant as always. Wearing a gentleman’s cashmere sweater and the customary bowtie. Forty-four years old, dead as a doorknob.”
“Doornail,” Dixie said.
Mrs. Hodges peered at her.
“The expression is, ‘dead as a doornail,’ ” Dixie said.
“You’re a pert one, you are!” Mrs. Hodges said to Dixie. “Smart, too. Wouldn’t think it to look at you neither,” she said as if to herself.
Because you’re so pretty, she did not say, but I already knew this. Smart girls didn’t look like Dixie; they looked like me, big-eyed and thin and pale.
Dixie flushed a deep pink, which made her look even prettier. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“What about Mrs. Fitzgerald?” I asked. “Wasn’t she in Alabama? How did she take it? “
“Ah yes, there she was down there in the hot Deep South with that mother, reading her Bible, painting her paintings, working with the Red Cross and digging in the dirt—oh, she still loves her gardening, mind you, her flowers, always has, always will. She got onto it here with old man Otto and never did give it up. ’Tis a great source of strength for her somehow. Himself was correct about that. Camellias and roses in Alabama, peonies here—peonies big as plates! Bone meal, this is her secret. That bed of peonies out by the entrance, that’s all due to her.”
“Wait a minute! She’s still here? Still? After all this time?” Dixie asked.
“Oh, she’s been in and out, back and forth, of course, poor thing. She will never leave this hospital entirely, not that one. She was back here in 1943, as I recall, after her daughter got married. Now that was just too much for her, a quiet lady by then, New York City and all that, and who can blame her? A city is hard on the nerves. She stayed with us till February of 1944, that time, and was back again in 1946. I remember the date for she was here when her first grandchild was born, Tim, it was, ah, she was that excited. I remember it well. I knitted him a little yellow robe and a cap with a tassel on it and took it to her and she said, ‘God loves you, Mrs. Hodges, and I do, too.’ ”
“My goodness,” Dixie said. “She’d gotten very religious, then?”
“And is to this day, I’d expect. They all do, after a while, the mentals. It overtakes them all.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“I couldn’t rightly say, Miss,” she answered. “It’s a good question, mind you.”
“You like her, don’t you?” Dixie said. “You like her a lot better than you liked him. But I have a question for you. Let’s put her husband aside for a minute. Don’t you think Zelda was sick, then, I mean really sick? You make her sound like she wasn’t sick. “
“Oh, she was sick, all right,” Mrs. Hodges said darkly, “and she’s still sick, I’ll wager. She’ll be back, mark my words. But I don’t think she was schizophrenic, not for one bloody moment, pardon my French, I don’t. I think she didn’t fit in, that’s all, and they didn’t know what to do with her. Not her family, and not Mr. Fitzgerald either. None of them knew what to do with her. She was too smart, too or-i-gin-al. She was too wild and she drank too much and she didn’t fit in. That’s the bare bones of it. And that’s enough. That’s the case with half of them, the women that comes here. They’re too privileged, too smart . . .”
The color disappeared from Dixie’s face.
Mrs. Hodges stood up, groaning and heaving. “But you will be out of here right enough, both of you, not to worry. I can tell. I can always tell.”
“How’s that?” Dixie asked.
“Ex-per-i-ence!” she hooted. “There’s no substitute for experience, a thing they do not know, them with the little clipboards and memos and such.” She put on layer after layer of her wraps. We stood up, too.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” Dixie said, recovering herself and her perfect manners. “I hope I will see you again.”
“Oh, you will, Miss. There’s no doubt about it. And in the meantime . . . the in-ter-im, mind you, why don’t you see what you can do with our poor little Evalina’s hair?”
Dixie smiled. “I’ll do my best,” she said.
“Good-bye, then.” Mrs. Hodges half smothered me in her woolen hug. “I’d best be on my way. I’ve got my duties waiting at the Grove Park Inn—you’d better believe it—with two big weddings coming right up this weekend!”
“WHAT DID YOU mean, exactly?” I asked Dixie the very next afternoon as we made our way down the sidewalk along Zillicoa Avenue to the bus stop, arms linked for balance, bundled up against the cold. I was not sure where my own coat had come from, a green wool loden that I rather liked.
She glanced sideways at me, a question on her pretty face beneath her fur-lined hood.
“What did you mean when you said that being a belle is enough to kill you, or ruin you if you survive?”
Dixie laughed her tinkly, self-deprecating laugh. “Why, I was more of a belle than anybody!” she said. “Don’t you know it? I made my debut at the Gone with the Wind Ball in Atlanta when the movie came out. They had this great big premiere.”
I stopped dead still to peer at her. “You’re kidding!” Even caught up in my own world as I had been then, I had seen the famous film; a whole gang of us from Peabody had gone down to New York on the train for it, then ended up sleeping in the station overnight because it had lasted so long—four hours!—and we had missed the last train back that evening.
“Oh yes,” Dixie went on. “I won a contest. Well, I almost won it.” She was smiling. “I was the first runner-up in the Scarlett O’Hara look-alike contest. This girl named Margaret Palmer won first place, so she got to lead the Grand March—escorted by Clark Gable and wearing one of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett costumes from the film—but I walked right behind her.”
“Who was your escort?”
“I swear, I can’t even remember his name!” Again, the tinkly laugh. “He wasn’t a real date, I’d just met him five minutes before it started. He was the son of the lady who ran the Junior League, so it was all a put-up job. But you do see what I mean—it don’t get more belle than tha-yat!” She was using her fake, ironic Southern accent.
I had to laugh. “I guess not,” I said.
The chilly wind blew at our backs, pushing us along. Two men were up on ladders attaching Halloween decorations to the streetlights, a black cat or a witch on a broomstick beneath each globe. Holidays were taken seriously at Highland, where we celebrated everything we could.
“Good afternoon, girls!” one of the men called out. I knew he had noticed Dixie.
“Y’all be careful up there!” she called back, and we all laughed.
I envied Dixie her belle’s charm, a quality very useful in the world, I had noted, having none. In fact, this was the reason I had invited her—dragooned her, to be exact—to come along for tea with Mrs. Carroll this afternoon. I needed all the moral support I could get. The engraved notecard had been delivered to me two days ago, with its familiar handwriting, precise as calligraphy. I had been expecting it. I might as well get it over with, I knew, even though I was terrified, remembering Mrs. Hodges’s warning.
We ran for the bus and then enjoyed the long ride up Merriman Avenue past Beaver Lake to an exclusive-looking neighborhood. I was not surprised to find the Carrolls’ large home one of the most imposing, all glass and dark wood in the modern style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The huge door flew open just as I lifted the heavy brass knocker.
Mrs. Carroll had been waiting.
“Evalina! My little Evalina! My dear! I am so glad to see you. Come in, come in—” Here was a new tack; all her former coldness and disapproval seemed to have vanished overnight. Mrs. Carroll had dressed to the nines for this mandatory occasion, in a tailored midnight blue wool suit with a diamond brooch and earrings—and of course, the ever-present high heels, her legs still beautiful in sheer silk stockings. Her pale blonde hair was perfectly coiffed in a new, bobbed fashion; her makeup was flawless.
I should not have worried so, I realized then, nor expected less; for above all, Mrs. Carroll was a public person, as was Dr. Carroll himself. Appearances would be kept up, civility maintained.
“And I am so very glad to see you!” I had practiced saying this again and again in my room before leaving. “Please let me introduce my good friend, Dixie Calhoun, who is also a patient at Highland—”
“A guest,” Mrs. Carroll interjected.
“. . . a guest at Highland as well,” I concluded.
Dixie offered her hand and inclined her head in a little bow. “Oh Mrs. Carroll, I have seen you play the piano, and I have heard so much about you and Dr. Carroll, and I am just so happy to make your acquaintance at last. It is a real honor!” The hundred-watt smile, the widening of the violet eyes that said, Yes. You. You are special.
Mrs. Carroll narrowed her own eyes ever so slightly, registering Dixie, as she smiled back. “Well, my goodness, it is so lovely to have you both here on such a cold, dreary afternoon. Come in, come in, let’s just hang up your coats right here in the hall so that they can dry out, and you must come in and sit by the fire . . .” leading the way into the drawing room.
“Oh heavens, what gorgeous roses!” Dixie exclaimed, for there they were, the famous yellow roses, beautifully arranged on their round marble top table. Inadvertently I wondered what Robert’s tally would be now, after ten more years? How many roses, how many thousands of dollars . . . a fortune in roses. So many roses, so much love—or perhaps not. For if I had learned anything at Highland in my youth, it was how mysterious love is in all its ways, its guises and disguises. In fact, I had loved the Carrolls deeply, and I thought they had loved me . . . I had believed that they loved me . . . but perhaps not. In my mind’s eye, I saw the cast of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” disappearing into the forest, only to reemerge all changed and new, shining and smiling, each with a new partner.
The special drop-leaf table had been brought in and laid for tea, which Mrs. Carroll poured from a silver teapot into fragile rose china cups, meanwhile entranced by Dixie who oohed and ahhed over all the beautiful and unusual furnishings and art. Mrs. Carroll told about purchasing the carousel clock on their honeymoon in Italy forty years ago, and how the African masks had been presented to her, a gift, after a concert in Johannesburg. We sat before a leaping fire that crackled merrily behind a most unusual fire screen, a golden peacock spreading its wings. Now that was new, I believed, wondering where it had come from, and with what miraculous story attached. I glanced all about the spacious room searching for the crystal Viennese punchbowl, which had disappeared from its spot on the sideboard.
Noticing my silence Ms. Carroll turned to me. “And how are you, Evalina?” she inquired kindly. “Beginning to feel better, I trust?”
To my horror, I suddenly collapsed into wracking sobs. “Oh, Mrs. Carroll, I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry—” I upset my teacup onto the pink linen tablecloth. Dixie leapt up to rectify the damage with her own napkin, while Mrs. Carroll came over and knelt to hug me. I stiffened instinctively; she had not touched me in many years.
“Now then, dry those big eyes, dear.” Mrs. Carroll dabbed at them herself. “Your eyes have always been your best feature, you know.”
They had? I didn’t think I’d ever had a best feature.
Mrs. Carroll touched my cheek and gave my shoulders another squeeze before returning to her chair, where she crossed her legs at the ankle and composed herself again. She fixed her regard upon me directly. “It is not the end of the world, you know. You are not the first, my dear, nor shall you be the last, to have an adventure. Even I—even I—” but here she stopped herself, and poured the last of the tea all around. “Of course you must have been to Europe, as well,” she said, turning to Dixie, who launched into a description of her own art tour in France, with private sketching lessons and lectures at the Louvre.
I sat looking into the fire—an adventure, rather than a debacle?
Mrs. Carroll seemed genuinely kind now, no longer jealous or competitive, perhaps because I had turned out to be such a failure. And who knew? Perhaps she had had a European adventure herself, perhaps Dr. C had saved her from something, too, perhaps even from herself. There must be some reason she had stayed at Highland with him instead of seeking out the fame and fortune that clearly could have been hers. For the first time I saw the battlements of Homewood as a fort instead of a castle, though I also remembered what Mrs. Fitzgerald had said about the princess in the tower. But now, at Dixie’s urging, Mrs. Carroll was enumerating the famous people in the framed photographs on the piano, including herself with the great Busoni, beside the Danube. Looking at the dark, polished Steinway, it seemed improbable to me that I had once played four-hand arrangements on it with her, “Mountain Tune” and Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.”
“And this is one of my own students, the jazz singer Nina Simone. She is making quite a name for herself.” Mrs. Carroll held up a framed photograph of the little girl I had played for, now all grown up and beautiful.
“Dixie made her debut at the Gone with the Wind Ball in Atlanta,” I blurted out.
“Really!” Mrs. Carroll focused her formidable attention upon Dixie. “And did you see Clark Gable?”
“I danced with him,” Dixie said. “But he couldn’t get very close to me because of my hoop skirts, nobody could—”
Mrs. Carroll put the picture of Nina Simone back on top off the piano, then drew Dixie down upon the curvy horsehair loveseat. “Describe your dress,” she breathed.
“Well, it was a rose taffeta evening gown with jet beading at the neckline. The skirt went over crinoline petticoats and hoops and it was trimmed with black velvet bows and black net lace and streamers all around. Oh, and I wore jet earrings, too, and a black velvet ribbon around my neck, this was all my idea. And I wore my flowers in my hair.”
“What kind of flowers?”
“Camellias. I didn’t want to wear a hat,” she added. “A lot of the girls wore big hats.”
Mrs. Carroll had her eyes closed. “No,” she said. “Quite right. Not for evening. And what did your mother wear?”
“My mother wasn’t there,” Dixie said simply.
We both stared at her.
“Oh, but there were fifty of us, the debutantes,” she said. “We sat up on stage before the dancing began, with our escorts standing behind us. We filled up the whole stage! And Vivian Leigh wore a special gown that the costume designer for the movie had created just for her to wear to the Gone with the Wind Ball, though I didn’t like it much. It had cap sleeves made of feathers, if you can imagine that! She looked as though she might just fly away.” Dixie rattled on, with all Mrs. Carroll’s attention trained upon her like a spotlight. I found this to be a relief, I realized, rather than a loss—perhaps I could get out of my role now, in this cast in this play that I had never auditioned for in the first place, for I had never, ever, wanted to be a star. While Mrs. Carroll and Dixie talked on—vividly, exaggeratedly—I looked around the room until I spotted the crystal Viennese punchbowl sitting at the foot of the petticoat mirror, filled with little hand puppets. From Czechoslovakia, I guessed.
AS WE WERE leaving, Mrs. Carroll pressed a packet into my hands, wrapped in newspaper, tied firmly with twine.
“What a character! What an old bat!” Dixie said the minute the door had closed behind us.
I started laughing and couldn’t stop as we ran down Merriman Avenue to catch the bus. It was already dark by the time we reached the Highland stop.
“Oooh, what’s this?” Dixie grabbed at my package as we set off up Zillicoa Avenue.
I shrugged and shook my head.
“Well, let’s open it up, then!” she exclaimed.
I pulled the parcel back, sticking it firmly under my arm. “Not yet,” I said. I knew it contained my postcards. A vision of Joey Nero came to me then as real as the very flesh, Joey with his sad dark eyes and sloppy grin hanging onto one of these holiday streetlights, arm flung out in a grand gesture. Dixie and I walked back up the hill through cone after cone of falling light.
THAT AFTERNOON MARKED the real beginning of my recovery. My sense of welcome release continued into the next day, and the next, and the next, as I followed my appointed schedule. Plus the required walking and gardening, everyone had to take at least two kinds of occupational therapy. Several new sorts were available at Highland now: hairdressing, for instance, which doubled as a free beauty salon where “students” could practice on other patients, sometimes with hilarious results, all under the supervision of a wise-cracking, gum-chewing beautician named Brenda Ray. Dixie loved working at the Beauty Box and had become Brenda’s unofficial assistant; she was a “natural,” Brenda said. Most of the men took Woodworking, where they hammered, sawed, planed, and polished away earnestly in the big basement workroom under the low-hanging lights and close supervision of old Cal Green, who had been at Highland for years, working as a caretaker. Cooking classes took place three afternoons a week in a workroom next to the big industrial kitchen in the Central Building. This class was very popular, for the cooks got to sit down and gobble up the results of their labor, or sometimes serve it publicly.
“Let’s sign up for cooking,” I suggested to Dixie, as squares of gingerbread still warm from the oven were passed out to us all at the afternoon “social” on Halloween.
“Not me.” To my surprise, Dixie shook her head so vigorously that I could see the bluish shaved spots at each temple where they affixed the electrodes for her still-ongoing electroshock treatments—which had never been a part of my own prescribed regimen, though electroconvulsive therapy was usually alternated with insulin therapy for long-term patients. Dixie always arranged her pretty curls very carefully to hide those shaved spots. By now I was getting a sense that my own “case” was not deemed as serious as many others, though no one had actually told me this.
“Why not?” I was surprised by Dixie’s vehemence. I polished off the rest of my gingerbread, which was delicious, and took a dark chocolate “black cat” cookie with orange icing.
“Are you kidding? I had to cook all the time when I was a little girl, and that was enough. I swore I would never do it again, and I haven’t. Our Lilybelle does it all now, out at the farm. It’s her kitchen, really, not mine.”
I tried to pick through this information, which seemed to contradict itself. “Why didn’t your mother cook?” I asked finally.
“Never mind,” Dixie said, flushing. “Let’s just stick with Art.” Which we did, though my own personal favorite was Horticulture, as it had been called before, when old Gerhardt Otto was in charge. Now it was “Hortitherapy,” which Dixie avoided at all costs, save for the requisite two hours per week of grounds care required of all, which she could not get out of. “Who wants to muck around in the dirt?” she asked. “And ruin a perfectly good manicure?”
Yet she didn’t mind covering her hands in clay or paint as we worked at those familiar tables in Homewood under the calm tutelage of Rowena Malone, whose long braid was white now, her face softened by age but even more beautiful, with its strong features.
“And not one bit of makeup!” Dixie marveled. “Can you imagine?”
Dixie pooh-poohed her own artistic talent, which seemed remarkable to me as she turned out realistic rural landscapes of wide fields and fencerows, with towering thunderclouds in the distance, or still lifes, bowls of peaches and vase after vase of flowers. “They’re not original,” she said. “Now that is original!” She pointed her brush at Miss Malone’s ever-changing “gallery” wall, where the patients’ work was displayed. ”Look at those. My goodness!” A new exhibit had just gone up.
“All by Zelda Fitzgerald,” Miss Malone said proudly. “I have saved them over the years, everything I could, for her and her daughter. But this is just a tiny fraction of what she’s done. Most of it is gone now, sent off to art shows or taken by friends and relatives or destroyed by Zelda herself when the mood hit her. That’s the worst of it. Of course we at Highland have no right to any of these, but while they are in my keeping, I will keep them safe. I take it as a sacred trust.”
“Well, no wonder.” Dixie got up and walked slowly along the display of perhaps ten pictures. “These are just remarkable,” she said.
“Ah yes.” Miss Malone nodded. “She has real talent for art, a lucky thing, since her husband stole all her stories. Quite an original style, too, though of course her illness gets in the way. But then perhaps it contributes as well.”
I joined Dixie in perusing the exhibition. Most of the paintings were gouache or watercolor on paper, rather small. Hospital Slope, one was named, though I could not recognize the actual slope or location of the subject, two blowing apple trees loaded with fruit, approached by a dirt road that disappeared into a fanciful, cloud-filled sky. All the shapes were fluid, filled with wind and life. A vibrant blue and green watercolor entitled Mountain Landscape featured that same dirt road again, now running straight up a green mountain into the distant blue peaks and the sky beyond.
“Very impressionistic,” Dixie remarked. “Does she paint quickly?”
“Why, yes,” Miss Malone said, looking at her.
Several of the paintings of flowers reminded me of how much Mrs. Fitzgerald had liked gardening, way beyond Dr. Carroll’s requirements. I remembered her kneeling in the dirt for hours with old Gerhardt Otto, weeding or planting, tan and strong. The flowers in these paintings were close-up, pastel and glowing—blue morning glories, pale lilies on a salmon background, yellow roses.
“Would you call these still lifes?” I asked. “Because they are anything but still.” In fact, there was a great deal of movement in all of the paintings, a kind of rushing upward, out of the frame.
I paused before a fanciful pink watercolor of Paris at dusk, which appeared to be actually happy, I thought, in contrast to all the others. It gave me the strangest feeling to look at it.
“She did a whole series of these soon after her husband died,” Miss Malone told us. “Mainly European scenes, to remember all the traveling she did with him back in better times.”
I still hated the way Mrs. Fitzgerald drew people, especially these ballerinas, so tall and weird, with such large, ugly, muscular feet and legs. But everybody’s feet and legs were too big—even the characters in the fairy-tale pictures, such as Old Mother Hubbard or the Three Little Pigs. And all the figures were looking up, often with their eyes closed, and no ground at all beneath their feet.
“Why, they’re dancing,” Dixie said. “You can tell she was a dancer, can’t you?”
“Ah, that was her big dream,” Miss Malone said. “Yet she started too late and worked too hard and it broke her health.”
“I just read Save Me the Waltz, or tried to read it, I should say,” Dixie announced. “It’s impossible to buy it now, Tony told me at the bookstore. So I borrowed it from him. It’s obviously autobiographical, all about a girl who is training for the ballet.”
“And?” Miss Malone was looking at Dixie with great interest now.
“Well, it’s heartbreaking at the end. And very hard to follow because of the way she writes. The language is so unusual, the way she mixes everything up—flowers might think, for instance, or have emotions—but it’s wonderful, too. Finally it’s about obsession, which I envy.” Dixie sat back down with a grim face and resumed her own painting, and did not explain herself. Both Miss Malone and I stared at her, but she spoke no more until the end of the hour, when she laughed and tossed her head and said in the old way, “Oooh, I wish I could have met Zelda Fitzgerald, all the same!”
“You probably will,” Miss Malone said. “They often come back after the holidays, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I was not artistic. But Miss Malone had introduced me to the making of mosaic pottery using tiny brilliant glass tiles, which I enjoyed, as I have always enjoyed completing jigsaw puzzles. In general, I have always liked to fit things into things, to create a pleasing order. Not for me the huge blank canvas, the tubes of oily brilliance. Working carefully, I finished a little bowl in shaded circles of red, ochre, and gold tiles, which Miss Malone placed upon a wooden stand. Everyone admired it.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked an intense skinny woman at my table.
“Maybe I’ll give it to somebody for Christmas.” I was thinking of Claudia and Richard Overholser, who had been very kind to me since my return.
“Ah yes,” Miss Malone said, “Bye and bye we shall turn into Santa’s workshop here, so that anyone who wants to make a gift can do so. I have ordered beads for necklaces already—and maybe we shall make some funny sock dolls for children? Tell me your ideas, everyone, please. And now it is time for us to put away our supplies for today—”
But Dixie was already gone, overturning her easel, running out the door without her coat, flashing past the window, leaving a half-done vase of roses on her canvas and her paints in a mess behind her, one jar overturned to make a vivid red spreading stain on the wooden floor. Miss Malone ignored it all, helping the rest of us to put our things away, bidding us all her customary calm, fond adieu. Nothing ever seemed to surprise the quietly smiling Miss Malone as she padded about in her great smock like some sort of nun or priestess.
Dixie vanished for a week, her room locked. She returned a bit paler, a bit thinner, and never mentioned this perplexing incident again, nor did I ask her about it.