CHRISTMAS MARKED THE END of something, and the beginning of something else. I could feel it running through my body like my blood. Time itself seemed to change in nature, both speeding up and slowing down simultaneously. The remainder of my life at Highland would be very brief, though the snow made it seem like forever.
And at a mental institution, snow changes everything. Of course, patients are already cut off from the rest of the world, but now they really felt like it; now they knew it. Mail didn’t come; buses didn’t run; frequently, staff members couldn’t make it into work. Visitors couldn’t get there either. The kitchen ran out of eggs, bread, and once—horrors!—coffee! There was no more required hiking every day in the fresh air. Now everyone must participate in supervised exercise classes in the gymnasium, which didn’t go too well, with whistles frequently blown, and patients stalking angrily off the floor. I didn’t blame them. The all-important routine was broken, producing anxiety, at the very least, and often more serious disturbances. January and February are the worst months for depression anyway, as everyone knows. All the rooms on the top floor of the Central Building were taken, it was whispered, with extra beds placed up and down the halls.
Yet somehow—perhaps because I was living at Graystone now—I didn’t mind the snow. In fact, I liked it. For once, the inexorable kaleidoscope had stopped turning, so that I could catch my breath. Now we all lived inside the snow globe that was wintertime at Highland, 1948. This was our whole world. Yet it was also infinite, the open landscape of our dreams and desires. For the very terrain was changed. Familiar hills and dips and stone benches and even ravines disappeared, to be replaced by the shining topography of the snow. The unbroken surface of a new world stretched out before us, a world where anything was possible.
Soon after Christmas, I was awakened in the middle of the night by an ambulance pulling up in front of Graystone with its red lights blinking in my window; two uniformed crewmen jumped out and opened up the back to haul out a stretcher. They were met on the icy sidewalk by Suzy Caldwell and Dr. Schwartz, suddenly materializing out of nowhere. Beneath the streetlight, Dr. Schwartz’s hair surrounded her face like a frizzy dark halo; Suzy’s plaid wool pajama pants hung down below her winter coat. I ran down the steps to hold the front door open, while Suzy and Dr. Schwartz followed the men with the stretcher, which contained a prone, tightly-wrapped female figure, hands folded, eyes closed. They set her down in the hall while taking care of the paperwork.
I knelt beside the stretcher. “Amanda?” I asked.
She opened her eyes, then gave me a wink. “Tampa was terrible,” she said.
The minute the emergency crew left, Amanda jumped up to hug Dr. Schwartz. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she cried. “I can never thank you enough!” Dr. Schwartz put a finger to her lips, and Amanda continued in a whisper. Not only was the Judge a sex fiend, she said; he was also crazy. Amanda understood this now. She had pretended to be catatonic until he finally sent her back to Asheville.
“I swear, it was the only way I could get out of there alive,” she said. “He would have killed me if I tried to leave him.”
“I said I’ll help you, and I will,” Dr. Schwartz promised, “but you’ve got to be sick for a while, you understand. I could lose my job over this.”
Immediately, Amanda’s whole pretty face went slack, and her head dropped forward in a parody of depression. “How’s this?”
“That’s good,” Dr. Schwartz said, “but you don’t want to overdo it, either. Now Suzy, and Evalina, I don’t have to tell you that this is a very sensitive, confidential matter.”
“You can count on me, Doc.” Suzy sounded exactly like George Fayne in my beloved Nancy Drew books.
“Me, too,” I said immediately.
“I know I can, Evalina.” She smiled at me. “And you are very, very good at keeping secrets.” Thin, small Dr. Schwartz was a moral giant, I realized, a woman of uncommon principle. I respected her immensely.
Amanda was assigned the other corner room upstairs. Her story made me worry about Dixie. Why hadn’t I heard from her yet?
A Christmas visit back home with Mama had been entirely too much for Myra, also, who returned to us disheveled and weepy. And Ruth had been “bored out of her skull” she announced, immediately setting off through the snow on foot to help with inventory at her beloved job in town. Very soon, she’d move into her own apartment and work there full-time, Highland Hospital behind her so long as she took her medications. We were all more or less on our own at Graystone those days, with Suzy Caldwell’s visits very infrequent because of the snow.
JINX CERTAINLY MADE the most of this situation. We all liked her—you couldn’t help liking Jinx—that ready grin so full of life, totally undiminished by everything that had happened to her, the bright green eyes darting everywhere, missing nothing. Everyone was drawn to Jinx as if to a flame; when she was present, it was like she was the only person in the room. You couldn’t stop looking at her. Yet we were wary of her, too, instinctively I suppose, for we never discussed this among ourselves. It was not so much that Jinx was younger, but that she was so different from the rest of us, different in kind, in a way we soon came to understand. For Jinx had no moral sensibility at all; she believed that the rules didn’t apply to her, so they didn’t. Boys were often involved, though who knows how or where she met some of them—a grease monkey from town; a Western Union delivery boy in a uniform; another who appeared in a big truck wearing a cowboy hat, grinning from ear to ear. I liked that one.
I knew I should have turned her in the day I came back after work to hear honkytonk radio music the minute I opened the door and found Jinx and Horace, one of the black boys from the kitchen, drinking from a paper cup and jitterbugging like crazy on the flowered parlor rug. “Hey Evalina! Woo woo!” she called out as Horace swung her around, rolling his eyes at me. The beat was rapid, hard. Horace appeared to be double-jointed as he twisted down to the floor. I took off my coat and sat down to watch, soon joined by Myra who whispered to me in a disconsolate way, “You know, I will never have that much fun in my whole life. Never.” A true statement if I ever heard one.
But I never turned Jinx in for anything. I knew that she was only passing through—a phenomenon, like a comet. And only once was I truly upset by her behavior at Graystone.
I HAD RUN back in the middle of the day to get something I’d forgotten, and was at first amused to hear the bumping of the bed against her wall, along with masculine laughter and Jinx’s own flat little voice. But I soon became uneasy—not only because I feared someone else might come in, too, and then we’d be compelled to act—but also because these sounds brought back certain memories. I sank to the steps, clinging to the newel post at the bottom. Then came Jinx’s high-pitched animal cry, followed by heavy footsteps on the floor, the slamming door, and suddenly he bolted down the staircase right past me, taking the steps two at a time as he put on his jacket.
But it was a man, not a boy—and I was very surprised to realize that it was Charles Winston, the shell-shocked veteran who had collapsed in Dr. Sledge’s therapy group, the one who had shot the little girl during the war. He was almost ready to be released, I knew, back to his family in Winston-Salem and the giant tobacco business that awaited him. Luckily he didn’t even notice me, charging right past as he adjusted his cap and pulled on his gloves against the cold. I could hear Jinx running water and singing in the bathroom when I finally crept up to my room and retrieved the music I had come for, then walked swiftly back to the hospital, telling no one.
I FOUND MYSELF haunting Hortitherapy whenever I could, especially in the afternoon when my work was finished, always on the lookout for Pan, though he was seldom present, most often out working with the grounds crew as they struggled to keep the roads and walkways cleared. I also looked for him as I walked to and from Graystone, and watched for him from the hospital windows throughout the day, but he was hard to see. He was always hard to see.
Mrs. Morris kept a fire in her woodstove and a pot of spice tea going on top of it, trying to maintain the sense of homeyness she strove for, I believe, trying to create a little oasis of life in all that snow. Actually there was not much real work to be done in the dead of winter, though she was endlessly inventive. Each resident had one or two African violets to take care of, snipping back, watering, and feeding, all of them placed on the long shelf in front of the picture window where they produced a truly breathtaking array of blooms, like a cheerful little crowd with their brightly clustered blossoms. Beyond them, through the picture window, the glistening snow swept up toward the dark tree line.
Jinx refused to grow an African violet. “Oh, I hate these!” she had announced immediately. “They’re too weird, like fuzzy little animals.” Yet she painstakingly produced a small lopsided basket in Mrs. Morris’s basket-weaving workshop, concentrating so hard that she bit her tongue until it bled. Whatever Jinx did, she did too much, I had noticed.
I stuck with the plants, as always, which meant, at this time of year, starting seedlings from scratch in the flats. I planted one tray of pansies and later, another of snapdragons, sharing space with Mrs. Fitzgerald, who showed up to work silently and methodically beside me.
She must be getting better, I thought, for she had obviously been issued a day pass from the top floor, though she did not look much better, face flat and pasty, eyes down. She carried her tray over to the light table carefully, positioning it just so beneath the hanging fluorescent tubes, then wiped her dirty hands right down her pale gray skirt—she wore no smock—and left immediately, speaking to no one, though Mrs. Morris paused in another conversation to look up. I watched Mrs. Fitzgerald go, too, remembering how much she had always loved flowers—flowers both in the ground and on the canvas, huge and phantasmagorical—and hoping that this joy might come back to her. She always got better at Highland, didn’t she? Miss Malone had said so.
“Gotcha!” a voice behind me, a poke in the back. I whirled around and it was Pan in his usual motley, stamping his boots, red-faced and grinning at me beneath a wool cap, though he wore no overcoat, as usual, never seeming to mind the cold or even to feel it.
“Hello,” I said, while from across the room, Mrs. Morris gestured to him. But he shook his head, waving to her with brick-red hands—where were his gloves, in this weather? Then he headed back to the utility room with me following involuntarily. He leapt up to grab a big pair of clippers off the wall, then turned to see me standing there. That rare, wide smile spread all the way across his face; though snaggletoothed, he had the whitest teeth, the biggest grin.
“Come on,” he said, or I thought he said. Half the time when I was with him, I wasn’t sure what he said, or if I was making up what he said, right out of my own head. He turned to go.
“Wait for me outside then. Down by the well,” I had the presence of mind to whisper, for I had to get my coat and I knew I could not be seen leaving with him. He disappeared without my knowing if he had understood me or not. Heart in my throat, I said good-bye to Mrs. Morris, refusing her customary offer of tea, which I usually accepted. I buttoned up my coat and put on my gloves and my hat and wound my matching muffler—all knitted by Mrs. Hodges, of course—around my neck, then paused at the door to look back once again at this place I loved so much—filled with light and green things growing, flowers all in their rows, the scent of cinnamon and cloves, the productive bustle of activity. Warmth.
But I was headed outside, into the heart of winter.
By then, it was close to four o’clock, on one of the coldest days yet. The last of the sun shot over the snow at a brilliant, blinding slant. In fact, I couldn’t see Pan at all as I tried to peer down the hillside; but when I reached the old covered well, there he was sitting on top of it, feet dangling, as if he had been there forever. Roy Rogers sat below, immobile and alert.
“Here I am,” I said unnecessarily, moving to the side so that I could actually see him in the sun’s last glare.
“ ’Bout time.” His whole face was open and ruddy, that big grin. I started smiling, too, and couldn’t stop, though my mouth didn’t seem to work right in this extreme cold. He slid off the well and stood very close to me, looking straight into my eyes. His own eyes were tawny, golden, one of them slightly darker than the other. It was a little like being hypnotized.
“Why aren’t you working?” I asked. “Don’t you have to cut something down?” I pointed to the clippers.
“Naw,” he said, or maybe it was “now,” for then he whistled sharply to his dog, who leapt up and stood quivering. “Going home.” He jerked his head toward the forest below and started off down the cleared pathway with me struggling to keep up behind him, though he didn’t actually know I’d be following—how did he know? The kids on the crews used to say that Pan had eyes in the back of his head. He never once looked back, nor did I. I couldn’t even see them in front of me—Pan and his dog—as we walked straight into the setting sun. Then he plunged abruptly off the cleared walkway into the open snow and then I could see them, and I could see each tree’s long purple shadow lying out behind it as I followed him into the forest. It was such hard going in the deep snow that finally I began to step into his footsteps, which was easier.
And where was the path? I had thought there would be a path. But no, on we went down the hill past great outcroppings of rock and clumps of rhododendron as big as a house—what Ella Jean used to call a “laurel hell.” Once Pan held up his hand and stopped dead in his tracks, so I did, too—and so did Roy Rogers, to my amazement. For five deer were crossing a little clearing ahead of us, picking their delicate way on spindly legs. We didn’t move a muscle until they were gone. The deeper we went into the forest, the darker it got, though the snow itself took on a pale blue radiance that seemed to rise up from the ground. I wasn’t even cold—or tired—when suddenly we were there, Pan’s hut, or cave, or whatever it was—I could never decide what to call it, set right into the side of a cliff covered in rhododendrons. Now I saw why he needed the clippers. Weighed down by snow, a great limb from one of the huge evergreen trees above had fallen across the entrance. Working in that blue half-light, Pan quickly cut and pulled branches and brush back from a simple plank door, then lifted up the latch to let me in.
It was much warmer inside, though the darkness was total. A match flared, then the yellow light of a lantern. Roy barked once, and was fed. Pan put something from his pack into Roy’s waiting bowl; whatever it was, it disappeared in an instant. Then Pan crossed to the small fireplace and lit a fire that caught instantly, too.
I had a moment to look around. It was like being in a fairytale, or a children’s book, or an animal’s house. A house like a hole in the ground, with no windows, its dirt floor deep in pine straw packed down into a sort of mat. Rudimentary wooden furniture made by Pan himself—for I had often seen him over at Brushwood building things for Mrs. Morris, chests and benches and such, sanding them and rubbing them with linseed oil until the wood gleamed. Pan had a little square table with the lamp on it, one chair, a couple of wooden chests, for clothes and supplies, I guessed, and a shelf that held a number of small wooden animals that he had obviously carved himself. The raised bed tick was covered by old blankets and quilts more of which also hung on the walls, such as they were. The space was so tiny that it seemed entirely natural to me when Pan dusted off his hands and helped me take off my coat, hanging it from a peg before leading me over to the bed, as there was no place else for both of us to sit and be comfortable. He took off his boots and put on some moccasins that he had made from some kind of animal skin. I took off my high-topped shoes and my damp socks. He gave me two of his own socks to put on, one orange, one brown. To be in this strange dwelling was like being in the hold of a boat, I decided, deep inside a sailing ship upon the high seas, crossing the ocean.
Pan grabbed up an old guitar and played me a tune. “Oh Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me,” I sang along with him. “The first time I saw you, it wounded my heart.” I had not known he could play guitar. And I was fascinated to realize that he had no hesitation with words when he sang, though his regular speech was sparse and halting at best. I lay back on the blankets to listen, but then he put the guitar aside and began matter-of-factly to unbutton my dress, as if it were a job of work to be done. And indeed, it took him forever, with all those little bone buttons up the front so difficult for his hard, thick fingers, biting his lip and saying “pretty girl, pretty girl” over and over until it was almost a song, too. Then he pulled my dress off and took off his own shirt and undershirt and I could see all the springy brown hair on his muscled chest and his white arms like sculpture in a museum. Pan had a particular smell about him, earthy and somehow familiar. I unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and he came to me finally, which was what I wanted, I knew it then, everything I wanted then or ever. The bed tick smelled piney and musty, like nothing else in the world, and the yellow firelight leapt all over the colors and patterns of the quilts on the wall, fans and flowers, diamonds and interlocking rings.
“AIN’T YOU HUNGRY?” Suddenly Pan sat up, his thick hair touseled and sticking out every whichaway, which made me laugh, and I started tickling him which made him roll over on me again.
“Now I am really hungry!” I announced after that, and sat wrapped in a blanket to watch him get up and pull his pants on and disappear behind the quilt at the back where the cave grew narrower and deeper, as I would learn. He came back with a big piece of raw meat and some potatoes, which he cut up on a smooth rock by the fire and then fried in a long-handled iron skillet right there, sprinkling the food with salt and pepper, those familiar little paper packets from the dining hall. Had Flossie given these to him? And what about the old guitar? I remembered all the instruments on the porch that night we “sang the moon up” at the Bascomb homestead in Madison County.
Pan brought the whole skillet over to me, right there in the middle of the bed. “Can I have a fork?” I asked, and he brought that, too, and we ate sitting in the bed with the old black skillet on a pallet on our crossed knees, facing each other and sometimes feeding each other, too, Pan eating with his hands, though carefully, with his customary precision, me half naked and not even caring, though I did put my coat and my shoes on eventually to slip outside and pee, amazed at the brightness of the moon and all the sounds of night creatures in the forest. When I opened the plank door to come back in, I heard music again, the most beautiful, plaintive song, which he was playing on his harmonica. There is nothing like a harmonica to express yearning, I think. Pan just shrugged when I asked him what the melody was, then nodded when I asked him if he’d made it up.
He reached into the chest that doubled as a table by the bed, came up with a bottle, then screwed off the top and took a big drink of it before handing it over to me. “Brandy,” I said. I took a long swallow that burned all the way down but went straight to my head as I went on talking and talking, telling all those secrets I’d been so good at keeping. Though his eyes stayed right on me, bright as a bird’s, I knew he didn’t understand most of what I was talking about, but it didn’t matter. It never mattered. I was more myself with Pan in his lair than I had ever been before, or ever have been since. I talked until we finished the brandy and he reached for me, and then I slept like a stone until sometime later in the night when I woke up in a panic and started shaking him.
“Oh Lord,” I cried, “I’ve got to get back. You’ve got to take me back right now.” For with no windows, I couldn’t tell what time it was—it could have been noon, for all I knew! And I had morning music groups with Phoebe Dean.
“Okay, it’s okay.” Pan was dressed instantly, though it took me a few more minutes.
It turned out to be that magical time just before dawn, a time that I had never experienced out in nature before, the pearly sky lightening to the palest pink then deepening to salmon, winter trees like black lace against it, scratchy little tracks everywhere visible now in the snow, a rabbit jumping across our path, a nearby owl still to be heard.
“Looky there.” Pan pointed up and there was the owl himself in the crook of a massive tree; his huge head with its unblinking eyes swiveled all the way around to watch us as we left. “Too—tooo—whooo?” he called after us. “Me!” I felt like screaming out the answer. “Me, Evalina, that’s who!” As before, Pan went ahead, with me stepping in his footsteps where it was easier to walk. Now it seemed like no time at all until the forest opened upon the long white slope of the Highland Hospital grounds yet at a different place, I believed, from where we had entered. I could not be sure. Pan came to a stop, me beside him. Looking back at our single track, I wondered, was I even there? Now I could see the gracious buildings clustered on top of the hill, two hawks swooping figure eights against the gorgeous sky. The melody from “Morgen” ran through my mind. “And all around us will sing the muted silence of happiness.” A gray van drove slowly up the main driveway with its lights on, then the red and white grocery truck. Once again, I was starving. I turned to kiss Pan good-bye, but he was already gone.
“FREDDY’S BACK!” THE girls chorused later that day when I returned to Graystone after work, bone-tired yet still exhilarated. Our sitting room looked fussy and foreign to me now, like a room in an old French novel. Amanda and Myra had made brownies, which smelled wonderful baking.
“He is?” I hung up my coat and sank down upon the couch, scarcely able to comprehend this news.
“Yep,” Jinx said matter-of-factly. She stood in the middle of the floor holding the blue mixing bowl and licking chocolate off the spatula. “Freddy’s already been here twice. He’s after you, Evalina. He wants to jump your bones.”
Everybody giggled.
“Oh, he does not!” I said.
But just at that moment, Freddy himself burst in the door with a whoosh of cold air and his red cheeks redder than ever, wearing that silly hat with the earflaps, crossing over to the sofa to grab me up in the biggest hug. “Here you are! Man, I’ve been missing you!” he cried.
And Reader, I confess: My heart did not sink but soared to see him again, to hear him say, “my girl,” and to watch him fill up our whole parlor with goodness and vigor. I found myself smiling foolishly along with the others when he produced a cloth bag filled with gifts “from home”—which I began opening one by one, as everyone else tactfully disappeared—except for Jinx, of course, who recognized no social cues. Jinx had no more manners than a goat.
One by one, I opened the sweetest gifts:
—A needlepoint purse made by Freddy’s sister Elaine, with a repeating pattern of roses and hearts;
—A dainty gold locket which had belonged to some great-aunt or other, long deceased. Her initials were E.M.M.;
—A carefully wrapped package of divinity fudge, which I had never heard of, though apparently it is considered a great treat in Indiana;
—A loaf of his mother’s prize Nut Bread (“Very appropriate!” I had to say)—plus the family recipe written out in her spidery hand along with the notation, “How to keep Freddy happy”;
—Two mysterious hand-sewn items made of red-and-white-checked gingham cloth gathered up by elastic, with ruffles all around their bottoms.
“What do you think these are?” One in each hand, I held them aloft.
“Damned if I know.” Even the gift-giver looked perplexed.
“I know,” Amanda announced, gliding through. “They’re for the kitchen. You put one over your toaster and the other over your Mixmaster.”
“But why?” I asked.
“So nobody has to look at them, I guess,” Amanda said. “You know, to beautify your kitchen. I used to have some of those myself, back in the Dark Ages.”
“Or you could just wear them, I reckon,” Jinx suggested, grabbing one to pull it down over my head like a dustcap. Immediately, Freddy put on the other. Then we couldn’t even look at each other without going off into fits of laughter, while Jinx got so tickled that she had to lie down and bang her heels on the floor like a little girl. Suddenly Freddy stopped laughing and stared at me, very serious beneath his ruffled hat, until I had to turn away. From that day forward I was his girl for real, and we both knew it.
But this had nothing at all to do with Pan.
JANUARY 25, 1948. How well I remember this afternoon! Like one of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s arresting paintings hung in permanent exhibition on the wall of my memory . . .
A canceled music group had given me a free hour to duck into the Art Room, where I sat chatting with Miss Malone as I attempted to shape a little clay animal for Pan’s collection of “critters,” as he called them. This was to be an elephant, for Pan had no African or exotic animals at all, only realistic depictions of the creatures in his own forest. But I was finding this simple project harder going than I had expected, as my elephant kept tipping forward, to Miss Malone’s amusement and my annoyance. “His head’s too big,” she said, which gave me a sharp pang as I thought of Robert.
To change the subject, I pointed at the exhibit wall before us, where several of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s latest paintings were on display, all very different from her pastel scenes of travel in Europe, or the amusing, magical renderings of fairy-tales and Alice in Wonderland. The new paintings obviously reflected the more withdrawn, serious Mrs. Fitzgerald who had come back to us now—incomprehensible scenes done in glaring colors—blood red, royal blue. Each was crowded with human figures in attitudes of tragedy, torpor, or even death. Some were clearly women, with round, high breasts exposed; others were probably men, though it was impossible to distinguish the sex of many, much less decipher the meaning of these pictures.
“What’s going on?” I asked Miss Malone. “What do these mean?”
“Well, she’s very preoccupied with religion,” Miss Malone began.
“But wait—Mrs. Hodges told me she was in love with a Russian general,” I said.
“Oh, that!” Miss Malone smiled. “That’s just an idée fixe, it comes and goes, it’s been going on for years now. I guess the religious fixation has, too, but it’s gotten more intense recently. Much more intense. Notice the crosses everywhere—and there are Bible verses printed out on the back of all the canvases, too. Each one is a specific scene from the Bible, though I admit, it’s sometimes hard to tell—”
“Rowena!” It was Mrs. Fitzgerald herself, rushing across the room. “Rowena, you won’t believe it!” she cried, as somewhat taken aback, Miss Malone stood to hug her. “She’s here, she’s here, she’s already here! Oh Rowena—they just called me from the hospital.”
“That’s wonderful, Zelda.” Indeed, Miss Malone looked overjoyed herself, both for her favorite patient and because she and Karen were genuinely fond of children; they adored them, in fact, arranging games and activities for them at every staff picnic and event. I had always thought it a great pity that they would never have one of their own.
“This is a new grandchild?” I ventured.
Mrs. Fitzgerald turned a beaming face upon me, radiant as a spotlight, and suddenly I saw her old self pictured there, and remembered how beautiful she had been when I first saw her. “This is a brand-new little girl who has most recently arrived upon the earth, a very little girl with a very large name.”—now Mrs. Fitzgerald was hugging me, too—“Her name is Eleanor Lanahan, isn’t it clever of such a little girl to have such an important, serious name as Eleanor? To balance out the Lanahan, don’t you see, so now it’s a seesaw name, with equal weight, three syllables, on each side. A felicitous name, a noteworthy name. Names are very important, you know. Furthermore, Eleanor Lanahan has beautiful manners as well, having already invited me to pay her a visit in six weeks’ time.” Mrs. Fitzgerald was practically babbling, her face alive and glowing.
“Congratulations,” I said sincerely. “This is wonderful news.”
Mrs. Fitzgerald nodded vigorously. “She will be an angel in the world, I am making sure of that. These are for her, and for little Tim, too”—indicating the pictures with a sweeping gesture—“that they may know the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, and walk in godliness all the days of their lives, and dwell in His house forever.”
“Why, what a lovely thing to do for them, such a thoughtful gift,” I heard myself say, while privately I thought that these paintings would terrify a child.
“And they are for you, too, Patricia Pie-face!” Mrs. Fitzgerald announced suddenly, “for you were once my little girl, too, weren’t you?” She hugged me fiercely, terrifyingly, and then was gone.
“I don’t have a clue what that was about,” I told Miss Malone honestly, in answer to her inquiring look. “Just nonsense.” Yet my voice caught in my throat.
“Ah, nonsense,” she mused slowly. “Non-sense. Non-sense often contains the most sense, and the deepest truths of all. I’ve been listening very closely to my guests for many years, you know. “
“Your guests?”
She smiled. “Well. The patients. It has been a privilege.” Miss Malone made a little bow then, to what deity I didn’t know. “And none more so than that one—” She indicated the way Mrs. Fitzgerald had gone, then followed slowly after.
I stayed alone to look at the paintings more closely.
“The Deposition” struck me as especially horrible, with the dead Jesus being taken down from the cross, apparently, amid a plethora of unaffected naked ladies stacked about the canvas. Another woman appeared dead or at least unconscious in “Do Not Steal,” and an actual fight was featured in the foreground of “The Parable of the Vineyard.” Only “Adam and Eve” held any appeal for me, though still I would never let a child see it, for it was disturbing in another way, with both Adam and Eve naked and vulnerable in the spiky, scary garden featuring large cats with hooves and the huge, vertical snake. Somehow—perhaps because they looked like paper dolls—these two young unmarked people seemed like Zelda and Scott to me, back when they were young and alone together with the whole world laid out before them tempting and beautiful, yet dangerous, too, with apples on every tree. I closed my eyes and wished—or prayed, I can never tell the difference—for a better life for those precious little children, Tim and Eleanor Lanahan, and I hope that they have experienced it.
Leaving, I turned off the lights and picked up a scrap of paper from the floor, which turned out to be part of a letter which Mrs. Fitzgerald must have been composing for Scottie, her daughter.
On Photography
Please send a photograph of little Eleanor Lanahan immediately, without fail, along with another of that handsome big boy Tim. Also it is well to impress him with a sense of responsibility for her even now, you know, for anything can happen to a girl, hence a big brother is a pearl beyond price, an edifice against disaster, which lurks everywhere.
On Baby Food
Do not buy the tinned baby food but boil up your own, whatever fruit or vegetables you have at hand until soft and mushy, then mush them up some more. Eschew salt! For salt is the enemy of the Liver. And children are like little puppies, you know, they will eat anything, so the responsibility is ours.
It was beyond me to imagine Mrs. Fitzgerald ever making any baby food herself; I thought perhaps she had read such advice in a ladies’ magazine, and had appropriated it.
Lacking the Cook
On the topic of Many Little Meals: Do not scorn paper napkins and plates au contraire invest in a goodly score of these and plastic utensils as well. Lacking that one necessity, the Cook, the modern household must needs make do. A countertop of dirty little dishes disheartens all. This includes the returning husband.
On Baby Talk
Though baby talk may prove irresistible to grown-ups, do not indulge yourselves in it too much, as all children love to learn real words, actually preferring, for instance, the word BEAR to “poo-ba,” and BELL to “ding dong,” and EATING AT A RESTAURANT to “gogo yumyum,” and GRANDMOTHER to “Googy ” though Googy herself would never complain, and will happily answer to anything.
On Yourself
You cannot imagine the beauty of your own little self as a child, those fat apple cheeks and round eyes, nor the joy we took always in your very being which seems to me a miracle even now. I know there are bad times which you must remember, for bad times stick in the mind while good times pass as a summer day, but our love for you never wavered, like that steady green light at the end of the pier in Daddy’s book. For you completed us, you were always the best of us, oh how we loved you with all our hearts
I smoothed out the sheet of wrinkled paper carefully and gave it back to Mrs. Fitzgerald the following day, though she scarcely glanced at it, sticking it into her notebook without comment.
REMEMBER WHEN I told you that I had gone back to Graystone to pick up some music I had forgotten? The time I encountered Charles Winston pounding down our stairs? There is more—much more—to this part of the story.
For that morning, Phoebe Dean had asked me, right out of the blue, if I knew anything about Mardi Gras, and whether it involved any particular sort of music. “The activities committee is planning a dance,” she’d said, “like we used to have, remember? I think it’s a great idea—it’ll get us all out of the winter doldrums. But the next holiday is Valentine’s Day which just makes a lot of people sad because they don’t have any romantic attachments right now, living here—and anyhow, Valentine’s Day is too soon. We’d never have time to get ready. So I looked at the calendar and what did I see coming right up? Mardi Gras, that’s what!” She slapped the table in her characteristic way. “So the dance is set for March tenth, and that’s our theme. If anything can pep us up around here this winter, that’ll be it. Now, I am hoping that the jazz group can perform—what do you think?”
“You mean our jazz group?” I smiled to think of nervous little Louis Lagrande and red-faced Freddy. “Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”
“Oh, good,” she said. “The biggest problem we’ve encountered is Dr. Bennett—you know how he is about money, or maybe you don’t, but he won’t spend a penny he doesn’t have to, and he says we can’t hire an orchestra. So our job, Evalina, will be to get hold of some typical Mardi Gras recordings to broadcast for the dancing, and perhaps some music for you to play as well—” She fixed me with her typical pop-eyed expectancy. “What do you say?”
“Phoebe, do you have any idea that I am actually from New Orleans?”
“Go on!” Now she slapped her big thighs in astonishment.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I grew up there.” I did not tell her anything else. “So yes, I can definitely help you. The music is wonderful—jazz, blues, Dixieland band, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong . . . You can get hold of plenty of recordings from people right around here, I’ll bet—for instance, Richard Overholser has got a huge collection of jazz. And I’ve already got some sheet music—” I had quite a lot of it, actually, which I had purchased at a local estate sale, tipped off by Mrs. Hodges.
“So you could play something suitable then, before the program begins?”
“Oh honey,” I said, “I can even play ragtime!” I was surprised by the sudden, deep excitement welling up inside me. “And we can start things off with a Mardi Gras parade. That’s the tradition, you know.”
Phoebe had clapped her hands, setting off a flurry of activity. As a result, ballroom dancing and parade marching were now being offered for Exercise in the gymnasium, along with the regular calisthenics. Word came that people were really enjoying it. It was funny to hear the strains of “When the Saints Come Marching In” or “Carnival Time” come wafting out from the big old building, over the snow.
NOW THAT I was indispensable—the Mardi Gras expert—I found myself attending my second committee meeting in the Art Room, where soon, Mardi Gras masks would be made. Miss Malone was showing us the big silly feathers and the tubes of glitter that had already come in. The only item that would be entirely “store-bought” would be the strands of Mardi Gras beads, which I had assured them all that we must have. No substitutes!
“Evalina, you’ll be glad to know that they’re already on the way,” Miss Malone announced. “And we ordered tons of them because they’re so incredibly cheap, too. I’m amazed!” For Dr. Bennett’s budget had turned out to be as draconian as feared, with no provision for live music at all except for such talent as we could summon up from our own midst. We were still hoping that Mrs. Carroll would be back in time, but oh, how I longed for Nina Simone, long gone, the toast of Europe. She would have been perfect.
“Anything else we need to take up today?” Phoebe Dean asked. A little late-afternoon silence descended upon our committee, there in the corner of the Art Room: Miss Malone, myself, Phoebe Dean, Mrs. Morris, and old Mr. Pugh, who had the final word on all such parties, outings, and public events. Beyond the round table where we sat, several of Miss Malone’s “guests” continued their work, including a small group who were piecing a quilt together, and Mrs. Fitzgerald at her easel, utterly absorbed, as usual. “All right then, thank you very much!” Phoebe Dean clapped her hands a final time and stood up. Now that I was more staff than patient, I realized that many of the Highland activities were held as much for the staff as for the patients.
I still don’t know what made me think of it. But as I put on my coat, I had a sudden inspiration.
“Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I called out softly to her. “Mrs. Fitzgerald?”
She looked up, emerging from whatever state or vision produced those paintings. She focused upon me. “Oh, Patricia,” she said. She smiled.
“Actually, this is Evalina—” Mr. Pugh began.
“It’s all right, Harry.” Miss Malone cut him off. “That’s just a nickname. They’re old friends.”
I went over to stand in front of her easel. “We are going to have a dance,” I said, “like the dance we had before, with the nursery rhyme theme, don’t you remember? When you were Mary, Mary, and choreographed the performance with all the flowers—”
“The Waltz of the Flowers,” she said immediately. “From the Nutcracker.” She put her brush down.
“Exactly,” I said. “You choreographed the whole thing, and you had a garden full of dancing flowers, but you were the prima ballerina. The star.”
“That was a long time ago,” she murmured, looking down now.
Afraid that I was losing her, I came a bit closer. “Now it’s time for another dance,” I said. “For a Mardi Gras party. And we need you to choreograph it. What do you say?”
She twisted her hands in her lap, still looking down, saying nothing.
“Nobody else can do it,” I said.
“Oh no,” she murmured, shaking her head. “It’s too late, too late, my flowers are dead, and all those lovely boys gone off to war.”
“Evalina.” Miss Malone put a restraining hand on my arm.
I knew that Mrs. Fitzgerald was remembering the Beauty Ball back in Montgomery when she was sixteen, when she met Mr. Fitzgerald, then a soldier, the beginning of everything. “Please,” I said.
“No, no, no, no, no . . .” Mrs. Fitzgerald started saying until it was a chant, swinging her bowed head back and forth like a metronome.
I felt terrible.
Miss Malone was drawing me gently away when Jinx Feeney popped up suddenly out of nowhere, as was her wont.
“Oh, come on!” she cried. Her nasal voice sliced into the quiet afternoon and left it in pieces on the floor. “Do it! Do it for me! I want to be in the dance soooo much. They told me there would be parties, and dances here—you told me!” She pointed at me. “But you just lied—they haven’t had a one yet. Please do it! I’m a great dancer, I swear. You want to see the jitterbug? Look at this!” Jinx started throwing her skinny little body into contortions right there in the Art Room. “Oo Poo Pa Doo!” she sang at the top of her lungs.
Mrs. Fitzgerald was looking at her now. We were all looking at her.
“Wanna see the Charleston?” she cried, dropping down to do something very fast and complicated with her knees.
“Who are you?” Mrs. Fitzgerald asked.
“I’m Jinx, Zelda”—never even slowing down.
“But my name is Zelda, too.”
“Well, mine’s not. I’m Jinx! What about the Black Bottom?” She broke into a bump and grind that was as funny as it was lewd.
I started laughing and couldn’t stop.
“Or the Hootchie Cootchie?” This was even worse.
Now Mrs. Fitzgerald was laughing, too. “Oh, we can’t do that,” she said. “We’d never get away with it! It will have to be something more dignified—fun, you understand, but more dignified, more appropriate—” She turned to me. “Ponchielli,” she said.
“What?” I was taken aback.
“The air from La Giaconda, of course!” Mrs. Fitzgerald stood up and put her paint-splattered hands on her hips in a purposeful way. “ ‘The Dance of the Hours,’ it’s quite short. I shall begin immediately.” She grabbed up the black notebook.
“Oh, goody, I am soooo glad, thank you, thank you, thank you!” Jinx combined her little-girl quality with a final bump and grind as she exited the Art Room, soon followed by Mrs. Fitzgerald, her color heightened, mumbling to herself.
“Well, girls, you’ve certainly gone and done it now,” Mr. Pugh said.
“ ‘The Dance of the Hours’ is what Mrs. Fitzgerald performed on the night she met Mr. Fitzgerald,” I told them, “at the Beauty Ball in Montgomery, when they were young.”
“Jinx may remind her of the girl she was then, all those years ago. Zelda was pretty wild herself, you know.” Mrs. Morris smiled.
“That Jinx is a real force, isn’t she?” Mr. Pugh said.
“She’s terrifying—and wonderful,” said Dr. Schwartz. “I have absolutely no idea how things will turn out for her. She could do anything.”
“And she probably will,” Miss Malone agreed. “But Jinx is just biding her time with us. My real concern is for Zelda, of course. This supposed Mardi Gras dance will take place only a few days before she is scheduled to go New York to visit her daughter’s family and meet that new grandchild. I hope all the excitement won’t derail her.”
“I believe—I hope—it will be therapeutic,” Dr. Schwartz said.
“Can you play that music?” Phoebe asked me.
In the back of my mind I heard Mrs. Carroll saying, so long ago, Evalina can do anything. “Of course,” I said.
Thus it was decided.
Before heading back to Graystone, I ran up to the practice room for my things and found the bright spray of shiny green leaves and waxy white berries that had been placed across my keyboard. I knew what this meant. Everything else—Mrs. Fitzgerald, Jinx, the Mardi Gras dance—went completely out of my head. Stuffing all the day’s papers into the canvas pack I had started carrying, I wound an extra muffler around my neck and went out the side door, which looked down the hill toward the old well where Pan sat whittling, his dog at his feet. He vanished immediately. After a decorous pause, I set off down that walk myself, following him into the trees, where I knew he would be waiting.