Love and Lament Read online

  “Daddy,” Mary Bet said in as calm and steady a voice as she could, “put the gun down now. It’s dangerous. You don’t want to hurt anybody. Put it down. Okay?”

  Cicero nodded, but he kept the barrel tight to his temple. “I won’t hurt anybody, just myself. I can’t stand it here anymore.”

  “It’s all right, Daddy.”

  “I’ll go get the doctor for you,” Cattie said. Mary Bet shook her head sternly, but kept her eyes on her father.

  “I’ll shoot him,” Cicero said.

  “He’s not coming,” Mary Bet assured him. “We just want you to put your gun down now. There’s no need to shoot anybody or anything.”

  “But I want to so badly,” he pleaded. “I really do.”

  “I know, Daddy, but you oughten. Put it down, please.”

  His lips moved, slowly as the second hand on a watch, and he said, “I have to.”

  “No,” she said, “you don’t.” The words seemed to echo off the walls of the foyer and the oval mirror and the ceiling and the turkey rug. He brought the gun away from his head, as though considering. And then he was turning away and hurrying out through the parlor to the side porch, and she and Cattie Jordan went right along behind him as though they were all heading outside to shoot a rattlesnake.

  He went down into the orchard and flopped beneath an apple tree, the gun in his lap. He let it slip from his grasp. Mary Bet reached down and pulled it away.

  “Make sure of the safety, child,” he said.

  “Give it to me,” Cattie said, “I’m going for the constable straightaway.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Aunt Cattie. Please.”

  “Don’t you know it’s a sin to shoot yourself, Cicero? Even if you’re … well it’s just not right. In front of your family that loves you?” She turned to Mary Bet. “I’m going to fetch the doctor, I don’t care what anybody says. Mary Bet, are you all right?”

  “I won’t let him in,” Cicero said. “I don’t want a doctor, I told you I’m fine, I just need to rest.”

  “He might be able to give you something for the pain in your head,” Mary Bet said. She nodded at her aunt, and Cattie Jordan headed to the carriage barn. “I’m going to sit with you until Dr. Slocum gets here, Daddy, and I want you to see him as a favor to me. Okay?”

  Cicero nodded.

  Mary Bet ejected the two cartridges from the gun and slipped them in the pocket of her skirt. She sat with him for a while, and then they went inside. She put the gun away and knelt to collect the loose cartridges and put them into their box. “Let’s go sit in the den for a spell, Daddy.” She crooked her arm for him and he took it, his face gone blank and pale, and Mary Bet wondered if he even knew what had just happened. What was it like inside such turbulence?

  She guided him over to his cushioned chair and sat him down. “This is a nice quiet place, Daddy,” she said. “I’ve always liked reading in here, it’s the coolest part of the house since it’s on the north side.” She kept talking this way, about things that required no comment, that only provided the music of her voice, familiar and as soothing as a mother. She thought she would never ever risk the unimaginable hardship of becoming a real mother—the life-draining labor, a forerunner to the years of hard work, and then if she were to lose a child, or have one that became ill—she could not endure it.

  Cicero leaned back and put his hands over his face, the thin light of winter trickling through the window so that, for a moment, he appeared to be a young man, burdened but still filled with energy. “It’s hard to see,” he said, looking out the window at the horse grazing in the near pasture. “I can’t see so good.”

  “I know, Daddy,” Mary Bet said, stroking his arm. “I know.”

  Presently Cattie Jordan returned, Dr. Slocum panting along behind her, his face red as a persimmon. You could at least count on her to persuade people to do what she wanted them to. The doctor plopped his bag onto the credenza and let Mary Bet help him off with his coat. “Now,” he said, “let’s have a look at your father.”

  They went into the den and found Cicero sitting there as relaxed and affable as ever. He stood and shook the doctor’s hand and said, “Good morning, Doctor, always glad to see a friend. I’m afraid you’ve missed breakfast, but we can scare you up something.”

  They talked quietly for a while, the doctor directing his questions to Cicero. But Cicero let his wife and daughter do most of the answering.

  When Dr. Slocum got up to leave, the women followed him out to the vestibule. “I don’t diagnose any particular psychiatric disturbance,” he said, “but this is really beyond my field of expertise.” He nodded toward the other room and lowered his voice. “He’s perfectly calm now. I’ve seen cases like this in which a delusional patient will convince himself that everybody else is in the wrong, that it was all a misunderstanding and no harm was intended.”

  “I can hear you fine,” Cicero said from the other room. “Go on, talk about me all you want, it doesn’t bother me atall.”

  Dr. Slocum paused, his eyes going from Mary Bet to Cattie Jordan. “The main issue here is whether you fear for your safety, or his. My advice in a case like this is to go ahead and take him up to the state hospital in Morganton. They can evaluate him better than I can.”

  “But will they keep him there?” Mary Bet wanted to know.

  “Only if they think it’s best, and not if you don’t want them to. I’ll go up there with you. I think the sooner we go the better.”

  “I don’t like thinking of leaving him in an asylum,” Mary Bet whispered. “What if they chain him up? We wouldn’t even know.”

  “They don’t do anything like that now. They use all the most modern techniques. No more blistering and dunking in cold water. If anything, they’ve gone too far in not treating at all, unless they absolutely have to. There’s less therapy, and more simple custodial care.”

  “But he’d be put in with all kinds of crazy people and welfare cases,” Mary Bet said, shaking her head.

  “The criminally insane,” Cattie Jordan added.

  Mary Bet glanced over. “I’ll never let him go to a place like that.”

  “There are separate wards from what I understand. You get what you pay for, and y’all are lucky enough to afford proper care. Let’s not get worked up about this right now. I’ll make some inquiries tomorrow, and we’ll see about going up there next week. In the meantime, give him a solution of calomel as a sedative.” He placed a little brown bottle on the credenza. “Put two drops in whatever he drinks, morning and night. It doesn’t taste like anything. If he has another episode, I’ll give him a spoonful of heroin.” The doctor passed a hand over his ruddy face and sighed. “And one more thing,” he said, getting to his feet, “get that gun out of this house. Any and every gun.”

  “That’s the only one,” Mary Bet said, her voice barely audible, “except for his service revolver, and I don’t know where he keeps that.”

  “Well, then, you’ll have to do some snooping,” Dr. Slocum said.

  A week later the four of them were in the train on their way to Morganton. As the farms flashed past and gave way to woods and blue hills, Mary Bet remembered standing at the station with her father waiting to take the train to the mountains to see Myrtle Emma. And here they were finally making their first train excursion. The turns life could take. Cicero sat opposite Mary Bet, looking out in the direction they’d been, a peaceful expression on his face, as though at last accepting that his work was done. Mary Bet told herself she would not come home without him.

  CHAPTER 17

  1906

  MARY BET AND Cattie Jordan slept in the Visiting Families wing the first night. Then, when the doctors said Cicero needed to stay on a few more days for a complete evaluation, they found a rooming house a few blocks away. The hospital was built a quarter century earlier to conform to the latest theories in treating the insane. It had a tall central portion, flanked by massive four-story wings—one for each sex, with milder cases house
d on the upper floors. The many windows provided plenty of light, and the placement of air ducts allowed for health-promoting ventilation. In all, the redbrick building and its pediments and striped awnings and peaked cupolas, set amid peaceful parklike grounds, were more reminiscent of an elegant hotel than a hospital, and so Mary Bet had fewer misgivings about leaving her father than she had thought she might.

  “It’s only for a few days,” she reassured him, as they were heading out.

  “All right,” he said, “but you’ll come back tomorrow?” He studied her face, his own looking so much more lined and sagging and mottled than she had ever noticed.

  She nodded and peered out the window so he couldn’t see her eyes. “You have a good view here,” she told him. “It looks like the lawn at Mount Jordan Springs, but bigger. There’s people walking on the path.” She watched as two men strolled along, followed by an attendant; one of the patients appeared to have his hands in a kind of muff. The trees were still bare, but there were some evergreens. She wondered what it would look like in the spring, but she kept this thought to herself. Off to the west she could see the courthouse with its fancy cupola, and beyond that the first ridges of the mountains. From the hallway at her back came the strong odor of ammonia, lemon, and resin.

  “I’m sure it’ll be nice here in the summer,” Cattie Jordan said. She cleared her throat as though to take back the words.

  The high-ceilinged room had cream-colored walls, a yellow pine floor, a low narrow bed, one spindle-back chair, and a small deal table upon which sat a Bible. They’d asked for a private room, which Cicero could afford, but now Mary Bet wondered if he might be lonely here. It’s only for a few nights, she told herself. They left his brown canvas traveling bag on the luggage stand and said good-bye.

  They spent the next two days going back and forth from the hospital to the rooming house to the shops on Union Street, buying things Cicero might need for his room. “We’ll come back up at Easter,” Cattie Jordan told her niece. This was after Dr. Eastman, who had taken charge of Cicero’s case, informed them that Cicero had tried to get out and had threatened a nurse who attempted to stop him.

  “I told him we wouldn’t leave him here,” Mary Bet kept saying. “I promised him.”

  “Well you shouldn’t have. They seem awfully nice there. I think that Dr. Eastman is very competent, even if he is from New Jersey. If he had a little more hair and a smaller nose with less hair in it, he might even be attractive, the kind you might be interested in, Mary Bet.” She eyed her niece, but Mary Bet ignored her aunt and kept looking through the bins of socks and slippers. She wished she had time to go over and pay a visit to the deaf school, just so she could lay eyes on the last place her brother had lived.

  “Oh,” Cattie laughed. She squeezed Mary Bet’s hand and held up a pair of fuzzy rabbit-fur slippers. “Wouldn’t your father look something in these?”

  Mary Bet had to stifle a laugh, picturing her father wearing the slippers. She was annoyed with herself for being so amused by her aunt. She wondered if Cattie had any close friends back in Williamsboro, and for the first time she thought perhaps her aunt, besides wanting to marry her off, really did wish her some happiness.

  “Well, I’ll say one thing,” Cattie remarked, “that doctor’s no Joe Dorsett. Not that I blame you for that business—you were young and easily fooled. But you’d be a good catch for a doctor or a lawyer, I can assure you.” She brushed something from her niece’s shoulder and pulled back as though to regard her.

  Mary Bet did not look up, though she could feel her aunt’s gaze. Standing here with her, she suddenly missed Joe, missed having him to go on walks with and talk to. The weight and shape and light of his physical presence beside her she felt as an absence, and she dropped the rabbit fur slippers she was holding because they somehow reminded her of him and how she had banished him from her life and how sadness and longing had come to fill the space inside her. It struck her as strange that she should feel such sadness for a boy, a despairing heaviness of heart that was not the same as grief for her lost family members; it was a different species of sadness altogether—an unhappiness for the future, or what might have been the future. She had to move.

  Out on the wooden sidewalk she adjusted her bonnet and waited for her aunt. “I just needed some air,” she told Cattie Jordan.

  “Are you feeling faint dear? Do you need to go lie down?”

  “No, I’m better now. I think I want to go back to the hospital and then walk over to the deaf school and have a look around.” They began heading back up to their rooming house.

  “All right, it might do you some good to see where your brother was. I’ll go with you.” A cool wind swirled dust up from the road, and Cattie Jordan retied her hat ribbon tight against her chin.

  At the hospital, the day somehow got away from them. Cicero told Mary Bet that “that woman”—he pointed to his wife—was a nuisance, and so Cattie went to the solarium at the end of the ward, where a patient was playing the piano; after a while, she took herself back to the rooming house. But Cicero would not let Mary Bet out of his sight. When she tried to go out, even to relieve herself, he held her hand and said, “I don’t think this is the right place for me. Please don’t leave me here.”

  “I’ll be right back, Daddy,” she told him, then hurried from the room, biting her underlip to hold back the tears.

  Out in the hall, the nurses gave her sympathetic looks, and later in the day Dr. Eastman assured her that she was doing the best thing for her father that she could possibly do. “Many aren’t as lucky. He has a nice room with a view. There are games and activities for him, and he can do all the reading he wants, as long as it’s not agitating. You said he likes to read?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mary Bet said. “I’ll send up a box of books for him. But when do you think he’ll be able to come home?”

  Dr. Eastman glanced at her, then down at the clipboard in his hand. His nose was unfortunately large, Mary Bet thought, and he was short and bald as well, and unlike Dr. Slocum his eyes were guarded and thoughtful. She only hoped that he was better with his patients. The whole place, with its smell of cleaned-over panic, was distressing in a way she had not anticipated. Every now and again she could hear a shout or moan from a ward down below, and even on her father’s hall, with its subdued colors and sunlit spaces, there were the odd noises of patients muttering insensibly to invisible people. She just wanted to get out, into the fresh air. How could anybody stand it here? “It’s hard to say,” Dr. Eastman said, his Yankee-edged voice grating on her. “A psychotic case at your father’s age—I have to honestly say, he may be here indefinitely.”

  “Can’t you cure him then?”

  “Miss Hartsoe, as I told Mrs. Hartsoe, we do what we can. Routine, exercise, and medication.” He ticked the three pillars of treatment off with his thumb and two first fingers. “That’s what we offer. A stable, predictable schedule, plenty of fresh air and outdoor exercise, if the patient is able to function outside, and a narrow array of drugs—mostly sulphonal, laudanum, potassium iodide, strychnine.” He ticked these off as well, his gaze over Mary Bet’s head, as though he were talking to himself, and she could not help but wonder if he were not to some degree affected by the lunatics who surrounded him.

  “My father’s not crazy,” she said. “He just needs some rest. He’s had a hard life, you see.”

  “Yes, I understand. But with his violent tendencies, he needs more than rest. We’ll try to keep him on this ward, which allows for some freedom of movement. If he improves, he may find that a light job in the laundry or cafeteria is beneficial. And we have art classes and reading classes and lectures and chapel services. He won’t be bored.”

  “And you won’t put him in restraints?”

  “It’s always a last resort, and it’s for the safety of the patients.”

  From the window, Mary Bet could just see, to the left of the treeline across the road, the brownstone top of the school for the deaf. And yet there
was no time to go over there. They were leaving on the train in the morning, but she would be back up to see her father in a few weeks. There would be time to explore the school and the town, to delve into the past. She owed it to Siler, she told herself, and she wasn’t afraid of what she might find. No, she thought, I’m not avoiding it.

  MARY BET AND Cattie Jordan went home and tried to find a way to live together under the same roof. Except for Clara, all of Mary Bet’s close friends were engaged or married, and so Clara and Mary Bet became regular guests at each other’s houses. Clara had never been a pretty girl, and as a young woman she was even less attractive. To Mary Bet, she had the most beautiful and expressive eyes she had ever seen in anybody, except for Myrtle Emma, but she knew that her tall, sturdy figure and heavy dark eyebrows were not features that men would find pleasing. When they were going somewhere together, Mary Bet was often embarrassed by how Clara would praise her as they put on their shawls and jackets.

  “Thank you, darling,” she would say to Clara’s compliment about her hair, “now if I just had your nose, I wouldn’t be half bad to look at.”

  Her own physicality, which had made her uncomfortable, she now took as a kind of power, yet she was unsure whether and how to use it. A few young swains about town, since discovering that Joe Dorsett was out of the picture, had asked her to church picnics and young people’s socials, and after she’d turned them all down—for none of them suited her quite right—she had developed a reputation as a snob, at least where men were concerned.

  It was, in fact, her refusal to attend a dance with a young law student, the son of Cattie Jordan’s only friend in Hartsoe City, that made her decide to move out of the only home she had ever known. When Cattie heard of Mary Bet’s refusal, she sat waiting for her in the parlor, ready to pounce.

  “You’re a young fool,” she snapped, rising as Mary Bet came in. “And I hope you’ll be happy living alone the rest of your life.”