Guests on Earth (20 page)

“Oh, they did not!” I exclaimed at this part of the story, but Jinx swore they did, from their fat pink hands and arms right down to the hairs in his nose and ears and her aunt’s plump cheeks and rosy complexion, the diamond rings she always wore cutting into the flesh of her pudgy fingers.

“I would have known you anywhere, you poor little thing, you!” Jinx’s aunt Mary Ellen exclaimed, smothering Jinx in a hug, which Jinx hated, she said, even when Aunt Mary Ellen burst into tears and cried, “Oh Royster, she looks just like Catherine!”

“Well, that don’t sound too good to me,” Uncle Royster said, carrying Jinx’s bag into the house, where all the furniture looked like big dark crouching animals. Up they went, one, two, three flights of stairs to a stifling attic room with a fan in it at least. The bedside table held a Bible, which Aunt Mary Ellen picked up and presented to Jinx. “It is never too late,” she said, her cheeks quivering.

The Bible turned out to have a bookmark in it, open to the story of the prodigal son. Uncle Royster turned out to be a deacon in the church, as well as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Jinx found the box holding all his regalia in the crawl space at the back of the attic closet, along with several boxes of guns, carefully oiled and shiny.

They bought her some new clothes in Kinston and made her go to church on Sunday, Sunday night, and Wednesday. The minister’s son, Troy Merritt, had a big crush on her. They made her go to the consolidated school, too, but the kids made fun of her, how ignorant she was for her age, so soon she was skipping out and playing hooky with some of them, and then they all got caught and her uncle disciplined her by spanking her with a hairbrush on her thighs where no one could see the marks. “This is our duty,” Aunt Mary Ellen told Jinx. They knelt and prayed for her, making her kneel, too.

Then she ran away with Troy Merritt in his parents’ car, and all hell broke loose. They stayed gone for two days. Jinx was brought back to the farm by the sheriff himself. A sweet old man, he came into the parlor where he stood with his hat in his hands and surprised them by counseling kindness and mercy. “This girl has already been through a lot,” he said. “It’s time for this family to come together and make a new start.” Jinx hated for him to leave. She stood at a dining room window watching him drive off down the driveway, kicking up a plume of dust that grew smaller and smaller.

Her aunt went, too, out to the grocery store. Uncle Royster made her take off her panties and bend over the sofa while he whipped her with his belt, raising welts on her butt with the buckle which had his initials on it, REB. Her aunt came home and fixed chicken and biscuits, Jinx’s favorite dish, in honor of the brand-new start, the three of them holding hands for the blessing.

That night Uncle Royster came up to the attic and into her bed, and when she fought him, he said, “Why, you’re one little hellion, you are!” almost approvingly. “But how are you gonna like this?” holding the cold gun against her temple so that she would get down and do what he said. Such things happened many nights afterward, so long as Jinx stayed in that house, but she didn’t care anymore, or fight back, or react in any way, which made him “madder than fire,” she said. She made Fs at school, which Troy Merritt no longer attended, having been sent away to a military academy.

One day Jinx got off the bus and came in to find her aunt waiting for her, seated on the floral sofa with an even higher color in her cheeks. “Dear,” she said—this is how she had addressed Jinx ever since the new start—“in doing the laundry today, I noticed stains in several pairs of your panties. It looks to me like they are bloodstains, Annie, and I believe it’s time for you to tell me what is going on.”

“Nothing.” Jinx slung her bookbag onto the marbletop coffee table. “Not a goddamn thing.”

“Don’t you swear at me, young lady. I am trying to help you. This question is just between you and I, dear. Are you having menstrual problems? Or perhaps, er, relations?”

Jinx looked her in the eye. “Why, yes I am,” she said. “With your husband, my uncle Royster Earl Biggs. He pulls a gun on me to make me do it.”

Jinx’s aunt turned bright red, then white, then red again. She stood up and started screaming and pulling at her hair, which came loose from its ugly clamps and clips and stood out all over her head like snakes. “Liar!” she screamed. “Whore!” beating at her own face with a Guidepost magazine.

“I couldn’t believe she even knew those words!” Jinx told me, gigglng.

When her aunt stumbled off to lie down, claiming palpitations of the heart, Jinx stuck her few belongings into her pillowcase and grabbed a set of keys to the old green Ford from the secret drawer in the mudroom. For weeks now, she had been practicing on it. She picked up Orlando Dellinger in Greenville two hours later. He wore a maroon felt cap and carried his banjo and a valise that contained, among other things, several bottles of whisky and a .45.

Dear. Judge. Irven.

If you think you are doing me a faver to let me out of jail here at Carthage and send me back to Samarcand Manor I want to tell you Dear Judge you are NOT. The Moore County Jail is Heaven in my opinon. I will stay in this Jail a hunnerd years before I go back over there.

It is True I set my bed on fire, I am not sorry ether, I do not care. I will do it agin in a minit, anything to tare that place down to the ground so No One will ever go there agin. It is not fit for a soul. I have been chased by dogs over there, and bit in the leg, and made to lie down nekid on the dirty floor and beat with Whips until bloody, I have still got the scars on my legs to show for it, and been locked up for days in a filthy room to sleep with rats, and also with a girl that had the dipthery but I did not catch it ha ha. I am STILL ALIVE and I beg you do not send me back over there.

If you think it is a Reformatery it is NOT they do not reform any one over there but make us mean and sad and turn into Bad girls that do not give a dam, as I was before I landed in this nice jail where Sheruff Tate and his wife treats you good like a real Person and has give me a white Bible for my Own. This Bible is a humdinger with the words of Jesus wrote out in red. I love to read and the Bible above all, I want to be Good above all in fact I will be so good and cook or clean or help out in any way even slops I mean it. Do not send me back over there for the Love of God do not. O please Dear Judge I am a child of God like your own children if you have got any, do NOT send me back over there for the love of God do not, let me stay in the Moore County Jail I will be So Good I sware it.

SIGNED ANNIE JENKINS FEENEY JINX

I believed Jinx’s story, told to me over several baskets of popcorn during late nights sitting up before the electric grate at Graystone. And I read the letter she wrote to the judge, because Dr. Schwartz shared it with the staff, including Phoebe Dean. Yet I was never certain that this letter was completely sincere, though it had obviously been effective. For one thing, I never saw that precious white Bible. For another thing, I soon realized that Jinx lied constantly, almost reflexively, and often for no reason at all. She once told Suzy Caldwell that we had taken a bus to the neighboring town of Black Mountain, for instance, when we had not; she told Dr. Schwartz that I was sick when I was not; she told Phoebe Dean that I was mad at her, when I was not, and on and on. I began to wonder if Jinx could even tell the difference between the truth and a fib. I overheard her telling Mr. Pugh that she couldn’t do her homework because she had lost her history book, when I had seen her stick it in the garbage can myself, and later remonstrated with her about it, telling her how expensive textbooks are, to which she made a face, cutting her green eyes away from mine. “I don’t care,” she said.

This disturbed me, as did some pretty little pearl earrings that tumbled out of her book bag another day. It was hard to tell what Jinx did care about, if anything, other than getting out of Highland. But after all she had been through, who could blame her now for anything she said or did to save herself?

CHAPTER 10

“I
TOLD YOU SHE’D
b
e 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.

T
HE TWO OF
u
s 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
t
herapy, 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
w
ent 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.