“I TOLD YOU SHE’D be back,” Miss Malone remarked one dark afternoon in November as we were cleaning up the Art Room. I was the only group member yet remaining.
“You mean Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said. It was not even a question. I stopped picking up my little mosaic tiles to look at her.
She nodded. “Arriving next week, I’m told. For another rehabilitation and reeducational program”—Miss Malone’s expression told what she thought of this—“plus deep-shock insulin, of course.”
“I imagine she’ll be in here painting again?” I ventured.
Miss Malone shook her head, the long gray ponytail swinging. “Not immediately. Not till they’ve got her well under way up there on the top floor. Though it would do her more good than any of that other. Her husband may have stolen her words—and her life, for that matter—but he can’t steal her art. She’s safe here. We’ll see her soon enough, I imagine.”
I couldn’t wait to tell Dixie.
THE TWO OF us were headed for lunch on a freezing though sunny morning. I had just had a session at the Beauty Box with Dixie and Brenda Ray, who were still working on my unruly hair, now growing out wispy but curly.
“Wait. Slow down.” Dixie put her newly manicured hand on my arm.
Sure enough, a sort of assemblage, with everyone in winter coats, was gathered there before the grand entrance to Highland Hall, and a car driven by Mrs. Morris’s husband was just pulling away from the curb. I stopped walking, along with Dixie.
“It’s her,” Dixie whispered in my ear. “Isn’t it? It’s her. She’s back.”
For now we could see the woman who was being escorted into the building with Dr. Pine on one side of her and Dr. Sledge on the other. Between the two of them she appeared as small and frail as a child, in a long, nondescript gray coat that was clearly too large for her, and a funny brown knit hat that nearly hid her hair, dull and graying now. Mrs. Fitzgerald looked neither left nor right but kept her eyes down, mouth moving all the while, as they passed through the group on the sidewalk and entered the building. The door shut behind them.
“Oh, my goodness, she looks so old!” Dixie remarked. “She’s only forty-eight—I remember because she was born in 1900—but she could be seventy, I swear! She doesn’t look anything like her pictures.”
“She’s really sick right now,” I said. “But she looks different all the time anyway, and she’ll look different the next time you see her, too. You’ll see.”
Except Dixie wouldn’t see her again, I remembered suddenly, biting my lip. For Dixie was going home to stay, at the plantation out from Thomasville, Georgia, if everything went as smoothly during Christmas as was hoped.
The group was dispersing as Dr. Schwartz came over to hug both of us. “Sad, isn’t it?” she said. “But she’ll be much better soon.”
Tall, shy Dr. Sledge emerged from the entrance hall, shaking his head but smiling to see us. “Ladies, let’s get some lunch,” he said in that old-fashioned way he had.
“Hold your horses, now! Just hold your horses!” Suddenly Mrs. Hodges had lumbered in amongst us, out of breath, wearing a huge red hat. “Where’s that Dr. Pine? Where’s he got to? I’ve got an important message for him. From Minnie Sayre herself,” she snorted with emphasis, her breath making puffs in the air as she spoke.
“Who’s that?” Dixie asked me, just as Dr. Schwartz said, “Oh dear, he’s not here right now. I imagine he is still escorting Mrs. Fitzgerald up to her room.”
“Mrs. Sayre is her mother,” I told Dixie. “Mrs. Fitzgerald’s mother. The one she lives with when she’s in Montgomery.”
“Lord, she must be a hundred then,” Dixie whispered back.
“Well, Minnie Sayre called me up on the long-distance tel-e-phone just as I was finishing up my breakfast this morning,” Mrs. Hodges announced loudly and importantly to any who might be listening, “with some important information, and so you’d best give him this message, Miss—” which was what she always called Dr. Schwartz.
Dr. Schwartz hid a smile, nodding. “I’m all ears, Mrs. Hodges, please do go on.”
Mrs. Hodges put a gloved hand to her heaving breast as she continued dramatically: “Well, Minnie Sayre wanted me to know that Zelda—Mrs. Fitzgerald—had suffered a pre-mo-nition just as she was leaving Montgomery, and she wanted us all to know the circumstances of it, and what it was exactly.”
“Yes?” Dr. Schwartz said as we all drew around, Dr. Sledge leaning in, too.
“Apparently they were all gathered together on the porch of Rabbit Run—now that’s Minnie Sayre’s little house down there in Montgomery, that’s what they call it, don’t you know, on account of it’s so small, all those little rooms right in a row. Well they were all gathered there on the porch to wait for the taxicab to come for Miss Zelda—now this is Mrs. Minnie Sayre herself, and Miss Marjorie, she’s the other daughter, Miss Zelda’s sister, don’t you know, and yet another one of their friends down there, a lady named Livvie Hart, I believe it was.” She stopped to catch her breath.
“So what happened, ma’am?”Dr. Sledge asked gently.
“I’m telling you, don’t rush me, I’m getting to it in my own sweet time. Just kindly remember that you wouldn’t know one thing about it if it wasn’t me telling you, for she never would have called the rest of ye, Minnie Sayre would not, what with the Carrolls gone off to Florida and all of the rest of ye perfect strangers to her, of course. So! Of course it is me she’d call, Mrs. Hodges, that she has known all these years. She knew she could depend upon me. So! It seems that they was all gathered on the little porch there, and the taxi pulls up, and Miss Zelda she begins walking down the walk toward the taxi and she was almost in it when suddenly she runs back and throws her arms around Minnie and says, very composed, ‘Don’t worry, Mama, I’m not afraid to die.’ Just like that. ‘Don’t worry, Mama, I’m not afraid to die.’ ”
The color drained right out of Dr. Schwartz’s cheeks, and Dixie’s hand on my arm suddenly felt like a claw.
“And then? What happened next, ma’am?” from Dr. Sledge.
“Well, then, she turned around and composed herself like the fine lady she is, and walked back down the walk and got in the taxi and thence the train, and here she is. A trip she has made a hundred times. But her mother wanted you to know this, don’t you see, Miss Zelda’s pre-mo-nition and all the circumstances of it.”
“Yes, I can see that. We thank you so much, Mrs. Hodges,” Dr. Schwartz said. “But now, won’t you come and join us for lunch? Our new Dr. Sledge will be your escort.”
Dr. Sledge smiled and nodded, extending his arm like a dance partner.
“Well, he’s a big un, ain’t he? But ah, no, I’ve got God’s own amount of work to do over at the Grove Park. They cannot exist for long without me, don’t you know. My daughter is a-waiting for me right now, she drove me in the car there.”
“Oh yes, I see her now,” Dr. Schwartz said.
I turned and waved at redheaded Ruthie, who waved back.
“We certainly do appreciate your making this visit, then, and I will be sure that Dr. Pine receives the information,” Dr. Schwartz called out to Mrs. Hodges as Dr. Sledge walked her over to Ruthie’s car and put her in it.
“My goodness!” he said, coming back. “And that was—?”
“Mrs. Hodges!” we chorused, laughing, and then all went in to lunch except for me. Pleading ill health, I excused myself and went to my own room instead. I sat on my bed, unable to get this odd little scene out of my mind, where it has remained as clear as if I had seen it myself. My palm itched fiercely and I remembered what Ella Jean’s granny had told me about “the sight.” Perhaps it is true that I have always had “too much i-mag-i-nation for my own good,” as Mrs. Hodges once claimed, but her report unsettled me, all the same.
And it was the oddest thing—not only we few, but everyone at Highland Hospital seemed to know that Mrs. Fitzgerald had returned, in that indefinable yet immediate way that knowledge travels in even the most carefully guarded of institutions. And somehow, this knowledge was exciting—even gratifying—to the rest of us. I know there is something wrong with this—and I am stating it badly—yet it is a fact, an uncomfortable truth. Mrs. Fitzgerald completed us, perhaps. And now she was back, one of us again.
I DREADED GROUP therapy, even with the very popular Dr. Sledge. Perhaps due to the solitary, almost secretive nature of my own childhood, I have always been uncomfortable speaking about personal matters, especially in groups. I’d rather listen to others. I do not wish to have the spotlight focused upon me; I really do prefer to be the accompanist. It was not that I could not remember—many things, as time went on—it was simply that I did not wish to divulge these things to perfect strangers whom I would not see again, I knew, once the kaleidoscope had made another quarter turn. I had a longer perspective on this process than the others.
I tried to explain all this to Dr. Sledge when he characterized me as “resistant to therapy.” He said he understood my feelings, and I felt he did, for he seemed shy himself, smiling hesitantly in his gentle way behind his thick glasses. He was a very large young man, nonathletic, with curly brown hair. (“Mama’s boy,” Jinx pronounced scornfully, and “pansy”—though even she liked him.) But for a psychiatrist, Dr. Sledge seemed oddly lacking in communication skills, a failing that was almost a technique. Often he seemed at a loss for words, letting a silence fall and extend itself if no one volunteered an immediate answer. These long silences settled upon us like snow, producing sudden, explosive, surprising results.
I remember one session when the announced topic was “home.” No one spoke. Blushing determinedly, Dr. Sledge did not push us; instead he got comfortable, stretching out his long legs, crossing his ankles and putting his hands behind his head, looking out the window toward the snowy peaks. The moment grew, expanding.
Suddenly Dixie burst out. “I didn’t have a home at all, it was just a shell, a doll’s house, and I was Mama’s doll, that’s all, just a pretty doll to dress up and sew for . . .” Dr. Sledge continued to lean back, nodding, listening.
Charles Winston, a young veteran, spoke about the cruelty of his father, a tobacco magnate who had shot the family dog to death right in front of the children when it misbehaved, and then in the next breath announced that this was nothing, because he himself had shot a child during the war, a girl about eight years old, as she ran from a barn in France. “She fell over and crumpled up like a rag doll and her blood made the snow red all around her.” Charles choked it out. “They were shooting at us from the farmhouse.” He put his head down between his knees, rocking and sobbing.
Jinx told about the little drawers in the tinker truck, then went on, “You can give me a truck anytime, over a house, I mean. I ain’t kidding. Once somebody gets you in a house, they can lock you up in there and do all kinds of things to you, and nobody knows it. You can just forget about home. I don’t want no home.” For once, I felt she was telling the truth. But her outburst caused a kind of eruption in the entire group. When we had quieted down, Dr. Sledge turned to me.
“Evalina?” he asked gently, and I was amazed to find my own face wet with tears.
“This is my home,” I said.
“It is not, either,” Jinx said. “It’s a mental institution, in case you ain’t noticed.”
Everybody laughed.
“I’M SORRY.” I went to Dr. Sledge’s office later that day to apologize. “I just can’t talk about these things in the group, that’s all. But Dr. Carroll put my entire childhood in the record, I’m sure. You can look me up if you want to. My mother was an exotic dancer in New Orleans, a courtesan, and my father was a rich man who sent me here after her death. That’s all.”
Dr. Sledge put a large, soft hand on each of my shoulders, and looked me in the eye. “Thank you, Evalina,” he said gravely. “Thank you.” He acted as if I had given him a gift, and I felt, oddly, as if I had, though it turned out to be a gift for me, too, as that very afternoon I took the bus downtown to Woolworth’s, where I purchased the first of these notebooks and began jotting down all the details that suddenly came into my mind—the big bed, the mirror, the beignets, and the neon GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS sign outside the window, for instance.
I took a deep breath. “Dr. Schwartz says you play clarinet. Would you like to play with us sometime? We have a little jazz group here—me, and Phoebe Dean, and Mr. Pugh, and whoever else wants to play, really. Sometimes we have Louis Lagrande on drums—when he’s well enough, that is. He’s a patient here.”
Dr. Sledge turned bright red, like a child. “I’d like that very much,” he said.
He turned out to be good, too, adding a great deal to our group, which got together every Wednesday evening in the great room at Homewood, something I always looked forward to. Often, as I played, I’d feel Dr. Sledge’s eyes upon me; several times I turned abruptly and found him staring at me.
“He likes you,” Dixie said after attending one of these sessions. “He’s going to ask you out, just wait and see.”
“Oh, he is not,” I said, “They’re not allowed to get involved with the patients, anyhow. He’s just being friendly.” But when Dr. Sledge stopped me in the hall and said, “Evalina, you know you’re right, you’ve been here longer than anybody. I wonder if you’d like to be my tour guide around Asheville one afternoon?” I was quick to accept, to the subsequent crowing delight of my roommates at Graystone, who hid behind the curtains to watch us leave, exactly as if we were all thirteen. Illness infantilizes everybody, even if it doesn’t paralyze or wreck us forever. It holds us back, it keeps us from being adults. I believe this is especially true when children are ill, or have been damaged during their childhood or adolescence—all those crucial stages of development are missed. But I am thinking aloud now, thinking of us all upon our snowy mountain, and wandering from the moment of my story.
Doctor Sledge is picking me up. He parks at the curb in front of Graystone and gets out wearing a red muffler, a huge tweed coat, and a plaid cap with earflaps. He’s driving a blue station wagon, the kind with wood along the sides. It is meticulously cared for, scrupulously clean. It looks like the family car of some family in the Midwest, the kind of family you see in advertisements. This is not far from the truth, actually.
On this and subsequent rides, I learned all about this family, consisting of Mrs. Sledge, the mother whom he adored, his three older sisters, and his identical twin brother, Rupert. Two key facts drove this narrative. The first was that Mr. Sledge, a businessman, had dropped dead from a heart attack soon after the twins were born. The second was that Dr. Sledge’s twin had turned out to be schizophrenic, though “the sweetest and gentlest of men,” thus determining Dr. Sledge’s own story—his empathy, his gravity, his eventual vocation. Dr. Sledge postponed college and took a job at home in order to help his mother take care of Rupert, until Rupert killed himself at twenty. Then Dr. Sledge enrolled at Ball State, followed by medical school at the university, and an internship at the Mayo Clinic. This story also explained Dr. Sledge’s somewhat princelike aura, for he was not only loved but virtually worshipped by his mother and all those sisters back in Indiana. This was of course a burden, though a gift. It explained everything. If ever a man were trustworthy, it would be Dr. Sledge.
I took him to see the Biltmore House; the French Broad River; Thomas Wolfe’s grave at Riverside cemetery, which has a regular tombstone, not the angel everybody expects; and the Old Kentucky Home, his mother’s boardinghouse downtown, which Wolfe had made famous in Look Homeward, Angel. The following Sunday we went for a drive along the breath-taking Blue Ridge Parkway, built by the WPA. We stopped at an overlook to look out at the dreamy, quiltlike landscape below, then stopped again at Mabry Mill to watch dried corn being ground up into meal by the giant turning stone water wheels. It was a very cold day, I remember. Dr. Sledge’s red muffler exactly matched the red spots on his cheeks. He bought a cloth bag of the freshly ground cornmeal to send to his mother, Dorothy—called “Dot”—back in Indiana. While he paid the mountain girl at the counter, I checked my watch. “Too late,” I announced, for I had been planning to take him by Fat Daddy’s for a barbecue sandwich before our return to Highland, where I had to play for the glee club concert late that afternoon.
“You know, you weren’t kidding, were you?” Dr. Sledge said when we got back into the station wagon. “Asheville actually is home for you, isn’t it? I certainly picked the right tour guide.”
“Oh, I was just talking, I guess. But I’ve certainly lived here a long while, off and on—exactly like Mrs. Fitzgerald.” I realized this only as I said it. “We even arrived at Highland about the same time, a little over ten years ago. Of course I was scarcely more than a child myself, and she was a grown woman . . .”
“Only in a manner of speaking, from what I understand,” Dr. Sledge said. “Remember that she was still in her teens, no real education, when she married Scott Fitzgerald and fell into that fast world of constant drinking and parties and travel—perhaps she never had a chance to grow up any further than that, emotionally. Alcoholism is an illness in itself, you know, and it’s amazing how much they drank, the two of them. I’ve been researching this since I got here and met her. But I think Mrs. Fitzgerald may have been misdiagnosed, too.” Dr. Sledge was warming to his topic. “Actually I think she may have had lupus, early on—there’s all that eczema in the records. I don’t think she was ever truly schizophrenic, though. With lifelong schizophrenia, there’s permanent damage from every big break. Brain lesions. Loss of affect, loss of IQ, what we call blank mind. Mrs. Fitzgerald has ‘come back’ too far, too often. Look at all her writing. Look at her art. It’s very impressive. Why, she’s still painting. I’m pretty sure it has always been manic-depressive illness, not that it matters now.” He bit his lip; I realized he was telling me too much.
“But Mrs. Fitzgerald improves every time she comes back to Highland,” I said, and he nodded. “And she’s kept coming back, all these years. So maybe she thinks of it as home, too, like me. Just a little bit, anyway.”
“Why don’t you ask her? She likes you.” Dr. Sledge was navigating his way so slowly around the hairpin curves down the mountain road that the cars behind us were all blowing their horns, which didn’t appear to bother him in the least, if he even noticed. I didn’t mention it. These Blue Ridge mountain roads were still new to him, of course.
“Oh, she’d say Montgomery.” I was sure of it. “Because the house is still there, remember? Rabbit Run. With her mother still alive, still in it. So Mrs. Fitzgerald is stuck in Alabama, really, don’t you think? Still in the past. No matter how much she and Mr. Fitzgerald traveled the globe.”
“Well, Mrs. Fitzgerald is a special case by now, of course,” Dr. Sledge said gently. “So many, many treatments at so many different clinics have undoubtedly harmed her as much as they have helped her, at this point. So much medication, so many different kinds of shock treatments. I think she’s suffered some serious brain damage. But it’s not that her earlier doctors were negligent, you understand. There’s a lot of new thinking on this now.” Sometimes I forgot that Dr. Sledge was part of the new regime. “Psychoanalysis would be wasted on Mrs. Fitzgerald now, of course. But for the rest of us,” he went on with some emphasis, “we must go back into the past, we must try to process the trauma of our earlier lives, if we are to move forward at all.”
I made a face at him. “Dr. Carroll didn’t even believe in therapy, except for gardening and walking. And remember what Thomas Wolfe said, ‘You can’t go home again.’ I’m with him. Because it’s all gone the minute you leave, even if it ever existed at all. Like New Orleans, or Montgomery, or wherever. It’s just the past. It’s all different. And we’re different, too,” I said almost to myself. “There’s no going back.”
“Spoken like Thomas Wolfe’s dark angel, my brilliant Evalina,” Dr. Sledge said, reaching over suddenly to take my hand, which lay on the bag of cornmeal between us.
The station wagon swerved suddenly to the right, almost hitting the vertical cliff, then rocked from side to side down the mountain as both of us burst into sudden laughter. I am still not sure why. But I’ll bet that Freddy Sledge was as astonished as I, though he did not relinquish my hand.
MORE AND MORE, whenever I could get the time, I found myself haunting Hortitherapy, where Mrs. Morris was coming to depend upon me, too. One cold, bright morning in December, I went on the annual expedition to gather greenery for holiday decorating. A light frost lay on everything, for all the world like the silver spray we were using in Art to make Christmas ornaments. Fences and branches and weeds glistened in the sun as we walked back into the woods with our clippers, following Pan and old Cal, who carried a shotgun to shoot down mistletoe, if we encountered any. We were all encouraged to look for it, high in the tops of the hardwoods, as we walked along. Our breath made silver puffs in the air, like characters’ speech in the cartoons that Pan adored, which the Morrises saved for him (though it was somewhat unclear to me whether he could really read them, or just liked the pictures). In any case, here we all went, a goodly group of us, down into a ravine where fir and hemlock hung over the icy rushing waters of Balsam Creek; its song filled the glittering air. Soon we held armfuls of the fragrant greenery, including holly, two or three kinds of it, galax and grapevine, and a real find, the bright orange bittersweet berries on their long, bare stalks, almost Asian in appearance, which Mrs. Carroll loved. She used to keep a Chinese urn filled with bittersweet on her piano for the holidays.
The piano! Suddenly I felt like playing “Deck the Halls,” “Away in the Manger,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and all the carols of the season. As we trudged back up the hill toward the hospital, I could hardly wait to get my hands on the keys.
But we all stopped obediently when Pan held up his hand. Some of us put our heavy branches down; I did, shading my eyes as several of the men pointed up into the highest branches of the huge old oaks and sycamores we stood among. Mistletoe! Round clouds of it hovered in the highest branches, against the deep blue sky.
“Okay, here goes,” Cal said, raising his gun; yet still it was a shock when the shots rang out in the cold, clear, quivering air—one, two, three, four of them. Three bunches of mistletoe fell to the ground.
Yet so did the nice-looking man just ahead of me, crying out incoherently, drawn up into a ball, rolling this way and that like a crazy person—which he was, I suddenly remembered; it was so easy to forget, him in his tailored tweed jacket with the leather patches on the sleeves. His checked wool hat rolled off down the hill and then I could see the blue bald spots on his head, too, where they attached the electrodes. Though Dr. Pine arrived first at his side, it was Pan who was suddenly all over him, covering him up like a bear, rolling with him until he stopped and there they lay together, panting, like one huge animal.
“My God, how stupid of us!” Dr. Pine said, almost to himself, slapping his own thigh.
For of course this man was one of the shell-shocked veterans, though he’d been a very high-ranking officer, it was said.
Somehow we got him back to the hospital, along with the rest of us, and our greenery.
Later, festive wreaths hung on all the hospital doors, and fragrant evergreen bouquets filled all the vases. A garland lined the grand stairway, and a great ball of mistletoe hung from a red velvet ribbon in the fancy entrance of Highland Hall.
MY NEW PART-STAFF status allowed me to drive the Hortitherapy truck on errands about the grounds. This was a big help, I judged, from the number of times Mrs. Morris asked me to do it. I remember her riding with me one day as I drove to pick up a load of rocks from workmen on a road at the back of the property and deliver them to an area near the old swimming pool, where they would be used eventually to build some sort of little pavilion. Together Mrs. Morris and I stood at the side to watch two of the grounds crews swing into action, handing the rocks off from one to another in a relay line, piling them up where the new structure was to be located.
At the end, a number of the workers clambered into the truck bed for the ride back to Brushwood. I popped Pan a quick slap on the rear as he jumped up last, onto the bumper. Through the back window, he gave me a grin and a wave in response.
With difficulty, Mrs. Morris hauled herself back into the seat beside me; she leaned over to place her hand over mine on the gearshift, so that I was forced to pause before starting the truck.
I looked over at her.
Her warm eyes, often puffy and rheumy, looked straight into mine, bright and intent. “He is a man, you know,” she said, squeezing my hand hard before she released it, before I started the engine.
PERHAPS I MOST enjoyed the unscheduled moments in the greenhouse when we were between groups or events—sprawled out on the wicker furniture drawn up around an old gas heater, absorbed in the newspapers, usually several days old by the time they made it to Hortitherapy—Mrs. Morris chewing on a pencil eraser as she did one of her beloved crossword puzzles, Pan chuckling over the comics, or fixing something—he was forever fixing something, often with the help of Carl Renz, a huge, slow-witted lobotomy casualty. Several of these unfortunates had ended up at Highland, where lobotomies were not performed, though they were very popular at that time. Currently lobotomy was being promoted nationwide by the famous Dr. Walter Freeman, who had simplified the procedure by using a home icepick through the eye socket and was now traveling the country in his “Lobotomobile,” as he called it, performing his “transorbital” lobotomies at mental hospitals and doctors’ offices everywhere. Thank goodness he was never invited to Highland! Our own Carl Renz was a familiar and even beloved part of Brushwood. He liked to stand rather than sit, pacing in the background as we all busied ourselves around the stove.
Often I took this time to scan the news, especially the news from Europe, which seemed impossibly far away to me now. “Look.” I held a crackling page out toward Pan. “Look at this.” It was a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
“That’s Paris,” I said, my heart pounding, holding my breath. “I lived there. In Paris”
He glanced at the picture and then at me, his gaze both alert and uncomprehending.
Mrs. Morris looked up from her puzzle. “Perhaps you should go and check on the poinsettias,” she said to Pan.
“Why, where are they?” I asked, as none were to be seen among the shelves of flowering plants and bulbs being forced into bloom.
Pan took off in answer, me following. He darted outside and over to the larger toolshed, which I had never entered, assuming it was merely a storage space, for there was no end of grounds equipment at Highland to be stored. He threw the latch and hoisted the big garage door up along its tracks and we ducked inside; I paused to get my bearings in the semidarkness. I couldn’t imagine what we were doing in there! But Pan turned back to pull at my sleeve, and I crept forward, though cautiously. It was not the first time I had had the sense that he could see in the dark. Beyond the tractors we came to a nondescript door, like a closet. He opened it, pushing me forward. I stumbled over the sill to stand amazed.
In the soft red light, I could barely make out the dozens and dozens of poinsettias, starting to bloom. It was beautiful, like being inside a heart.
“Oh my God!” I said involuntarily.
Behind me, in the darkness, Pan was laughing. Like a vine, his arm snuck around my waist, pulling me back against him; before I knew it, his warm breath was in my hair, his lips on the back of my neck. A feeling that I cannot describe swept over me, down to my very feet. I felt his lips on my neck, his tongue.
“Evalina, are you in here? Pan?” Mrs. Morris stood in the open space beyond the tractors, her voice sharp. Carl Renz loomed behind her. “Are you there? Answer me. Answer me!”
We stepped back, closing the secret door.
Later, the blooming poinsettias would be brought out and placed all over the hospital for Christmas. Every time I saw one, I thought of that moment with Pan.
FOR WEEKS I had been promising Freddy that I would show him the fabled Grove Park Inn, yet it was nearly Christmas when we finally got there. “Good God!” he exclaimed upon first glimpsing the hotel itself, banging his hand upon the steering wheel so that he inadvertently blew the horn, which tickled me. The better I got to know Freddy, the funnier he became—he was not at all the serious man he seemed at the hospital; and in some ways, after all my time in Europe, I was actually more sophisticated than he.
Initially he refused to relinquish his keys to the doorman at the Grove Park Inn, for instance—one of a bevy of such doormen who met all arriving and departing cars. “How do I know they won’t lose them? It’s my mother’s car, you know.”
I knew. “They never lose them,” I said, then enjoyed his reaction as we entered the cavernous lobby with huge fires burning in the fireplaces at either end. The tree stood at least thirty feet high, so bedecked with ornaments and lights that one could scarcely see its green needles. The rockers before the fireplaces and all the chairs in every group were taken. A holiday tea dance was in progress. Looking at these festive folk, I felt underdressed, even though I was wearing my good black dress and Ruth’s pearls for this occasion. A jazz version of “White Christmas” came from the grand piano, played by a tuxedo-clad old man, clearly a master. Couples were dancing on the shiny dance floor in front of the piano. Others sat at the little round tables, waiters and waitresses moving among them. I looked for Moira at the hostess station—or Mrs. Hodges—and felt oddly relieved to see neither on this occasion.
“Should we try to get a table over there?” Freddy asked, but I said, “No, not yet, there’s more to see,” pulling him toward the grand arcade where all the photographs of famous guests were hung—presidents, movie stars, and kings, as well a photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald in evening dress, which we looked at for a long time.
We continued to an exhibit of gingerbread houses, a holiday contest in which the gingerbread constructions were truly works of art—not only the usual cottages from fairytale lore but also castles, mansions in the Newport style, and feats of whimsy, defying gravity. We wandered down the line slowly with the others, marveling.
“Speaking of Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said, suddenly remembering, “You know I made a dollhouse with her help once, in Art Class,” and then I told him all about it, in every detail.
Freddy was extremely interested. “Where is it now?” he asked.
“Lord, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s over at Homewood someplace. I can ask Mrs. Carroll, I guess, when they get back, though I doubt she’ll know either. Somebody probably threw it out.”
We moved on down the row. I enjoyed the gingerbread houses themselves and also the children who had been brought to see them, especially the little girls all dressed up in velvet and silk dresses, with their white stockings and patent-leather shoes. I remembered how my own mother used to dress me up in white organdie. In New Orleans it was so seldom cold that I had had only one fancy winter dress for church, gray velvet with a white lace collar.
Later, after we had ordered our tea, I leaned across the table toward Freddy, who sat there smiling in his nice navy jacket and a tie with little reindeer all over it, and said, “After my mother’s death I learned that I am the child of her and her father—her father was my father—and now I believe this is why she fled the parish and never went back. Someone came to our apartment for money, though, every week until we moved, and then they couldn’t find us, I suppose—it was a woman, I remember that much, I remember seeing her from the back, though I don’t know who she was—a cousin? A sister? Perhaps the money was for him, our father, or her mother, or perhaps it was blackmail money, for somebody else . . . what do you think?”
If he was stunned, Freddy did not betray it. Instead he simply reached across the embroidered tablecloth and took both my hands. “I think your mother must have loved you very much,” he said.
I can’t remember anything else about our tea, though afterward, as I nibbled the last macaroon, he said, “Let’s dance!” surprising me mightily.
“I don’t know how.” I remembered the French heel fiasco with Robert, the only time I had ever tried.
“It doesn’t matter,” said he with utter confidence. “I’ll show you. Come on”—leading me onto the shiny circular floor where a mirrored globe turned slowly. Freddy grasped me firmly and said, “Now just do what I do. Follow my lead. Right foot forward, that’s good, now left, now back . . .” and somehow, with his hand pressing firmly on the small of my back, I could do it—even twirling about beneath his arm held high in the air. For years, I had watched other girls performing this step. Freddy explained that his sisters, needing a partner to practice with for dances and dates, had pressed him into service as a child, with this result. He was a grand dancer, and I found that I had a knack for it myself, something I had never suspected, always having been the accompanist at every such occasion. I stepped and spun until I was dizzy and out of breath.
“Let’s get some air.” I led him past the piano to the long French doors that a doorman opened for us, and then we were out on the wide terrace facing the vast sweep of open air and the mountains beyond, on every side. We walked over to the low stone wall and stood looking out at Asheville below us in the bottom of the bowl of mountains. Somehow, it had gotten to be twilight already. Long shadows slanted across the wintry plain of the golf course. The weak sun was mostly caught now behind gray clouds massing at the horizon, the entire scene a darkening palette of somber hue. Lights came twinkling on like stars in Asheville below.
Someone opened the door for a minute so that we heard the music and the laughter inside. Then it cut off abruptly. Now I was freezing.
“I guess it’s time to go back,” I said.
“Just a minute.” Freddy put his arms around me as firmly as he had on the dance floor. “Evalina, you have told me something important today, and now I have something important to tell you.”
“What is it?”
“You cannot be in the therapy group any longer,” Freddy said, “because I am falling in love with you.”
But when I closed my eyes at the moment of our kiss, I was dismayed to see a clear vision of a princess peering over the battlements of a gingerbread castle, looking down a mountainside like the mountain we were on, still searching anxiously—for what? for whom? Nevertheless, I was not a fool. I kissed him back soundly.
PROMPTLY AT NOON on December 20, Brenda from the Beauty Box, the Overholsers, Dr. Schwartz, and I joined Dixie to stand under the Highland Hall portico and wait for her husband Frank to arrive. He had driven all the way from Georgia to pick her up himself. His mother, Big Mama, was at home with the children, who were said to be very excited about their mother’s return. So was Frank Calhoun, apparently; he had planned two nights in a big Atlanta hotel—plus a shopping trip! to Dixie’s delight—on the way back home, a sort of “second honeymoon,” he’d called it. Dixie was all ready: every dark hair curling perfectly in place, wearing a sky blue wool coat and matching blue beret that I had never seen before. She had pulled the beret down rakishly on one side, just so. Dixie was literally sparkling, herself—her white teeth, her bright blue eyes, her shiny red lipstick, “Fire and Ice,” I knew, for she had bought me some, though I had not had the nerve to wear it. In fact I knew that a lot of Dixie’s total effect was caused by makeup, but she was good at it, and it didn’t look like makeup. She was the most beautiful living person I had ever actually known, or even seen. Her matching red luggage was lined up along the curb like some small, uniformed army standing at attention.
Back inside the hospital, papers had been signed and good-byes had been said. Perhaps because of her “missing carapace,” everybody who knew Dixie or had worked with her seemed to love her, not only me. Even Dr. Bennett started to shake her hand, then unexpectedly embraced her, wiping his eyes as he went back inside his office. I had been witnessing such phenomena for days. Truly, it was as though Dixie really was a princess, or some kind of royalty, a special person. Everyone had to touch her as they told her good-bye. All were sad, but I was devastated.
Suddenly a ripple ran through our group—here he came! Dixie stepped forward, putting up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
“Don’t forget,” Richard Overholser blurted out, “college!”
“Hush, Richard,” Claudia said.
“Lord God, would you look at that big old car!” Brenda cried as Frank Calhoun came into view driving the longest, whitest, shiniest automobile I had ever seen, like a vision from another life.
“Oh, that’s Frank!” Dixie cried. “Here he is—” running lightly down the steps and straight out into the road to greet him. If there had been another car, she’d have been hit.
Brakes squealed as her husband slammed them on, not parking but just stopping dead in the middle of the street. He leapt out, leaving his door wide open—we all got a glimpse of the red leather interior with wrapped gifts piled high in the backseat. Frank Calhoun was a big, vigorous man with a rugged, deeply tanned, and beaming face beneath his wide-brimmed leather hat, the hat of an outdoorsman.
“Missy!” He swept her up in his arms and twirled her around and around until they looked like a spinning top. Then he set her down and gave her a big, long kiss. “Are you ready?” he asked, pulling back to look at her, and she said “Yes,” laughing, adjusting her beret.
“Let’s do it then,” he said, bowing in the most courteous way to the rest of us, whom she introduced one by one as he moved among us shaking hands and thanking everyone for “taking such good care of my girl.” He gave Brenda and me special hugs. When he said, ”Oh, you are Evalina! I know all about Evalina,” I could feel myself blushing.
“All right, boys,” he said to Bernard and Marcus, two hospital workers who hovered at the edge of our group, “Let’s load her up.” They put all of Dixie’s red luggage into the trunk, then brought the wrapped gifts from the backseat and placed them carefully on the steps of Highland Hall. “Now a few of these have got a tag on them,” Frank said, winking at me, “but as for the rest, y’all can just give ’em out however you want, to everybody that’s been nice to my baby.”
“That’s everybody,” Dixie said, twinkling.
“There’s some fudge and some fried pies in those two baskets.” Frank pointed at them. “So y’all had better get right on with it. Honey?” He opened the passenger side door.
But first, Dixie ran over to whisper her parting advice in my ear. “You hang on to the doctor, now, you hear? And just forget all about that retarded yard boy!” Then she jumped in the car.
Frank Calhoun got behind the wheel and slammed the door, tipping his hat to all.
“Good-bye, good-bye!” we chorused as the car pulled out; he blew the horn in response, several long, musical blasts as they drove down the hill and out of sight.
“My goodness!” Claudia Overholser said.
“Well, what did you expect?” her husband asked peevishly.
“But he’s so genuine, so much charm and goodwill, so generous . . .” Dr. Schwartz mused as if to herself.
“And she absolutely loves him, doesn’t she?” I said. I had known this, but hadn’t understood it. Now I did.
“Yes, and that’s the main thing, that’s the kind of thing we can never understand about a patient’s real life, those of us who only see them for one short hour here and there during what is just a short and removed period of time in their actual lives, an interlude—”
“Intermezzo,” I interrupted.
“Yes,” Dr. Schwartz said, glancing at me. “An intermezzo. How can we ever expect to understand a whole life? Or to influence it in any way? How arrogant of us, really . . . This is an absurd enterprise.” Dr. Schwartz caught her breath sharply as she turned away.
Bernard, one of the hospital workers, looked at the rolled bill that Frank had apparently slipped him, then grinned as he pocketed it again, saying, “Now that man, he somebody, ain’t he? And ain’t he got a great big car?”