Victory Over Japan (15 page)

“I've just come home from Mandeville,” she said. She was laughing, holding my hand. “You
know, the Loony Bin.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. Of course I had not known. I had never known anyone who had been locked
up for being crazy.

“It's wonderful,” she said. “I never wanted to leave. I made a lot of friends.”

“We have to be going, Lilly,” Duncan said. “Mother wants us to go to the Durnings' with them.”

“Come back,” Fanny said, still holding on to my hand. “Promise you'll come. Promise you'll visit me
every
New Year's Eve of your life.”

I promised. How could I stay away?

That was the
year she painted the room, the famous, much talked about room, her “madness museum,” as she called it.

“Crazy,
Crazy, Now Showing Everywhere,” it said on the door in two-inch letters.

Below that, in God forgive me,
my
handwriting, “Lilly says, spit in one hand and worry in the other and see which one fills up the fastest.” She
made
me write it
there. At that time, the first year I knew her, the year she was painting the room, you had to be very careful what you said around her as she might
seize on
anything
and make you write it on the wall.

From the door the mural spread inward onto the four walls of the
high-ceilinged, rectangular room. Water colors, crayons, oils, acrylics, long sections marked “Conspiracies” and “Swindles,”
names and dates and anecdotes from her fifty years' war with the wealthy Jewish world into which she was born.

There were
crossword puzzles made of jargon cut from newspapers. WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY was glued to a chair. There were quotations from thick books on
psychiatry. The east wall was devoted to R. D. Laing. The floor was littered with paintbrushes and jars of paint and hundreds of Marks-A-Lot pens.

All this frightened me, but I could not stay away. Fanny's room was the most exciting place in Alexandria. Anyone was likely to be
there, a museum director, a painter, a journalist, a poet, one of her former inmates from Mandeville, visitors from New Orleans.

Sometimes I would not see her for weeks. Then, suddenly, there would be her voice on the phone, soft, conspiratorial.
“Hurry,” she would say. “Come as soon as he leaves for work. I have a present for you. Please come. I need you.”

I would go. It was impossible to stay away. She would be waiting, propped up in bed cutting words and slogans from magazines and
newspapers. “My work,” she called it. “I have to find the words, when I find the right words I will expose them. You'll see. I
will have it all out in the open where everyone can see. Then they will not be able to deny it. Then everyone will know.”

She
would be working away, a music box playing her favorite song over and over. “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” that was the one she liked
that year.

“Look,” she said one morning, taking a jeweler's box out from underneath a pillow, putting it into my
hand. “Keep this. In case you need to call me.”

I opened it and found a beautiful pearl and diamond earring, just one.
She showed me how to twist the pearl that hung like a drop from a diamond stem. “Just turn it,” she said. “Like this. I'll hear
you. No matter where I am I'll hear you.”

“Sure,” I said, going along with the joke.

“Tell me what's going on,” she said. “What are those Kase people doing to you?”

“Oh, nothing. Everything's fine. I'm going to take some classes this fall, maybe go into the real estate business with
Duncan's cousin. I'm fine. I'm getting used to being here. It's fine. I'm starting to like it here.”

“You're going to be the scapegoat,” she said. “They are going to use you for the scapegoat. They can't
forgive you for being pretty. You know that, don't you?”

“Oh, it's not like that. I knew what I was getting
into. I met them before I married him. I knew what it was going to be like.”

“Be careful, Lilly, they are going to eat
you alive.”

“It's not like that. It isn't that bad. When I get worried I just go to the park and run as
fast as I can.”

“Write it down,” she said, handing me a pen. “Here, take this. Write it on the wall.”

“Oh, no, I don't want to write it.”

“Write, ‘When I worry I run as fast as I
can.' Please write it. Please write it down for me.” I took the pen and wrote it on the wall beside the door. It seemed like a perfectly
reasonable thing to say until she made me write it down.

That spring, that April, that May, were bad times in both our lives. I
played tennis all day long. She worked on the room.

“The black apes are on their way,” she told me one morning on the
phone. “They leave messages on my easel. I have put my paints away. Now it must all be in words. You have to help me, Lilly. You have to bring me
words.”

“Are you spitting out the pills?” I said. At that time I believed they were good for her.
“Don't spit out the pills. Please don't spit out the pills.”

“I have to,” she said. “Gabe
is after me to sign papers again. They are bringing me papers to sign. Will you come to me? Will you come this morning?”

“I don't know. I have to play tennis. I have to play tennis every day this week.”

“Please
come,” she said. “And bring me words. I need more words. I need all the words I can get.”

She was too crazy for
me that summer. I stayed away. I was trying to make my marriage work. I decorated the house, studied recipe books, had dinner parties, worked on my
body. I had recurrent dreams about Fanny. I dreamed we were on a sailboat in the islands, sailing through clear blue Caribbean waters. I was at the
tiller and Fanny was tied to the mast so she couldn't fall overboard. We sailed and sailed, laughing and talking, drinking endless cups of coffee.
The journey was pleasant and I was happy at the tiller, but
I did not know where we were going
.

There was a destination,
someplace I was supposed to deliver her to but she could not tell me where it was. I sailed to port after port but no one was waiting on the piers or
they would not let us disembark. At the end of the dream I thought I saw our harbor in the distance and I set the sails and started for it through an
open sea.

Then slowly, terribly, great whales began to surface before the prow. Great, brown whales rising up like uncharted shoals
all around us. They wore harnesses around their bellies. They had riders. The black apes of Fanny's terrors were riding them. I would wake covered
with sweat, shaking and terrified, determined to stay away from her.

***

Duncan and I went off to the real
Caribbean in July. While I was gone Fanny finished the room and moved out into the hall and bathroom.

“Oh, did you ever see
the bathroom?” she said to me later. “Oh, I could never make it again. I painted on the bathtub, on the toilet, on the washstand, on the
floor. ‘Oh, dear, we have to lock Mother up again,' I heard Gloria saying.

“You should have seen the tub. They could
not deny it now. Now they knew what they were doing. I had dumped the whole thing in their laps. They bought off Clark. They bought off Treadway. But I
showed them. They had no way of not knowing anymore. ‘Oh, dear, we have to lock poor old Mother up again,' Gloria said. ‘Oh, dear, oh
dear.'”

The day before they came to get her she wrote MURDER over the bed in three-foot letters.

“Gibberish,” Doctor Treadway said when he saw it.

“Generalities,” Gabe added. And as soon as
Fanny was safely back in Mandeville he called the painters. They painted the room light blue with white trim. How could I have stopped them? I was
sailing from Petit Saint Vincent to Mustique, locked up on a fifty-foot sailboat watching Duncan drink beer and brood over the unions and the government
coming to take his money away.

“Oh, I could never make the room again,” she said the other day, safe at home once
more, safe in the arms of her wonderful keepers, Stelazine and lithium and Elavil. The little bottles standing guard beside her bed, the little maids.
The room is so clean and cheerful, there is a blue silk quilt on the bed, a clean rug on the floor. The paintings are hanging on the wall, the dresser
drawers are shut, the books are on the shelves.

“I would have photographed it. If I had been here I would have stopped him.
I can't believe he let them paint it all away.”

“Here,” she said, taking a sketch pad from a drawer beside
the bed. “This is what I'm doing now. I'm going to play their game. I'm going to put them on paper and have them framed and nail
nails into the wall and hang them up. That's what they told me at the Loony Bin. You have to play their game. That's the new idea. So I
played their game. And now I'm home. Here, look at what I'm doing.” She opened the pad. It was a scale drawing of her house,
everything very precise like an architect's sketch. In front of the house were seven garbage cans, all in a row with the tops down nice and tight.
“I'm going to do a series of these drawings,” she said. “Won't they love it when they see it? Won't Gabe be
surprised?”

“Oh, God, you're so subtle,” I said. I gave her a kiss. “I have to get home now. I have
to go cook dinner. I'll see you soon. I'll talk to you later.”

“Bring me a present,” she said.
“Bring me words. I need some words. I want you to bring me words every day this week.”

What words would I take her?
What words could set her free? Could words undo the words that put her there?
Love is all you need
. I could tell her what the Beatles say.
Hey, Jude, don't be afraid. I want to hold your hand. Remember to let it out of your head
.

I could tear in there
some morning and drag her out of bed and put her into the car and start driving. I would drive northwest into the mountains. I would drive all night. I
would go up into the mountains until we were at fourteen thousand feet. I would make her get out and look at where she was.
Think how far she would
see. How far I would see
.

“You're crazy,” Duncan says. “You're as crazy as she is to even go
over there, Lilly. There's nothing anyone can do. She's a pain in the ass, that's what she is. A terrible embarrassment. No one makes
her stay in that room. No one makes her take those pills. Now quit worrying about it. Quit talking about it all the time.”

“You're wrong,” I say. “It's Gabe. It's his fault. He gives her the pills. He hands them to her.
He's the one that does it.”

“They do it together, Lilly. It's their life. It's what they do.
It's what they like to do. Mind your own business, would you? Stop driving me crazy with this nonsense.”

I go out and
sit on the front steps. It's a beautiful old neighborhood, especially this time of year, in early fall. It's almost dark now, first dark,
dusk some people call it. I like to sit here this time of day, watching the jays and nightjars fight above the city roofs, turning and swooping and
diving, calling, caw, caw, caw, calling good news, good news, good news, calling hunger, hunger, hunger.

This is not the first time I have written about Nora Jane Whittington. In 1978 I wrote a story about her called “The Famous Poll at Jody's Bar.” Here is how I introduced her in that story. “Nora Jane was nineteen years old, a self-taught anarchist and a quick change artist. She owned six Dynel wigs in different hair colors, a make-up kit she stole from Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carré while working as a volunteer stagehand and a small but versatile wardrobe. She could turn her graceful body into any character she saw in a movie or on TV…. She could also do wonderful tricks with her voice, which had a range of almost two octaves.”

All these attributes came in handy later in the story when Nora Jane, disguised as a Dominican nun, set out to rob a bar in the Irish Channel section of New Orleans. It was the quickest way she could think of to get enough money to go to California to join her young lover, Sandy Halter.

When the story ended Nora Jane had successfully completed the robbery and was on her way to California. I wish I could say that Sandy was waiting at the airport when she got there, sleepless and excited and true. I wish that dreams came true, that courage and tenderness were rewarded in the world as they should be. I wish I could tell you that Nora Jane and Sandy lived happily ever after in Sunny California. Alas, that is not the way it happened.

SHE had written to him, since neither of them had a phone.

I'll be there Sunday morning at four. It's called the Night Owl flight in case you forget the number. The number's 349. If you
can't come get me I'll get a taxi and come on over. I saw Johnny Vidocovitch last night. He's got a new bass player. He told Ron he
could afford to get married now that he'd found his bass player. Doesn't that sound just like him. I want to go to that chocolate place in
San Francisco the minute I get there. And lie down with you in the dark for a million years. Or in the daylight. I love you. Nora Jane

He wasn't there. He wasn't at the gate. Then he wasn't in the terminal. Then he
wasn't at the baggage carousel. Nora Jane stood by the carousel taking her hat on and off, watching a boy in cowboy boots kiss his girlfriend in
front of everyone at the airport. He would run his hands down her flowered skirt and then kiss her again.

Finally the bags came.
Nora Jane got her flat shoes out of her backpack and went on out to find a taxi. It's because I was too cheap to get a phone, she told herself. I
knew I should have had a phone.

She found a taxi and was driven off into the hazy early morning light of San Jose. The five hundred
and forty dollars she got from the robbery was rolled up in her bag. The hundred and twenty she saved from her job was in her bra. She had been awake
all night. And something was wrong. Something had gone wrong.