Jonathan Dee - Palladio

“Where’s Richard, by the way?” she said suddenly. “Did he go straight to bed?”

Molly wished very strongly that Richard, or somebody, was in the house with them. “No, Mom,” she said gently. “Richard’s not coming. I think he told you that.”

“Well, of course he did,” Kay said.

That night Molly lay in her old bed, listening to the sounds of her mother moving around restlessly downstairs. When Molly saw her in the morning she was still in the same blue dress with the white stripe. Visiting hours at the hospital in Albany began at nine; it was nearly eight-thirty now.

“You go on,” Kay said. “I have a lot to do here.”

Molly stared. “I don’t know the way,” she said.

Kay’s mouth quivered a little bit, before she abruptly recovered her bright demeanor. “Okay, then,” she said. “Are you ready?”

The whole way there Kay narrated every turn they made. “Now a left on to Route 4,” she’d say. “Left off the exit on to Mortensen Road.” Molly realized that she was expected to pay attention to these remarks so that Kay wouldn’t have to make the trip with her a second time. Kay pulled up before the main entrance and put the car in park; but she did not turn the engine off. Molly put her hand on the door.

“You’re not coming in?” she said incredulously.

Kay smiled. “Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary,” she said. “Your father will be so happy to see you. And I have some errands to run. It’s not easy being left alone, you know. I have a lot to take care of.” She pushed the button that raised the power lock on Molly’s door.

Molly was too flustered to remember to ask Kay for her father’s room number. She gave his name to the woman behind the high front desk, who typed it into her computer.

“Room eighteen-oh-eight,” the woman said, her face lit from below by the computer screen. “Left off the elevator, then left again, then right through the double doors.”

“Right through, or straight through?” Molly asked.

The woman looked at her in confusion. “Just follow the signs marked Psychiatric Ward,” she said, in a softer voice.

That’s where he was. Molly went through a metal detector and was buzzed through a set of steel doors which locked behind her, electronically and loudly. By the time she had gone past the dayroom — where grown, sometimes elderly men in exam gowns sat in front of a TV or talked into the air or stood in a corner, touching the walls — she was ready to weep with terror, even though no one she saw so much as noticed her. At the nurses’ station, losing her nerve, she asked first to see her father’s doctor; Dr Kotlovitz, she was told, was with an emergent patient but was expected back within the half hour. In the meantime, she could see her father if she liked.

Molly waited just beyond his open door, breathing deeply and flexing her fingers, for a full minute before stepping into the doorway and knocking.

It was her father, sitting up in the motor-driven bed, reading a magazine with his glasses on. But he wore a hospital gown, the thickness of a paper towel, tied together loosely at the back, a garment of shocking immodesty; his hair, grayer than she remembered, bore the unkempt, angular shape of someone who had not been out of bed for a long time, days, even; and because of this, the familiar, untroubled, oh-there-you-are smile her father offered as he dropped the magazine and struggled to swing his legs off the edge of the bed was not only unreassuring — its very familiarity was profoundly frightening.

He remained seated as they hugged; she tried not to look at the pale alarming expanse of thigh he showed as he slid forward on the bed. In a scratchy but cheerful voice Roger suggested that they take a walk. “To the dayroom, anyway,” he said. “That’s as far as they’ll let me go.” He held out his arm, and it hung there for a few seconds until Molly understood that she was now to hold on to it, to support him as he struggled to stand and then walk without losing his balance. It wasn’t pride, exactly, that made him pretend this infirmity was something the two of them took for granted, as if she had helped him out of bed a thousand times before — more a fear of seeing her hurt or disappointed, a fear so extreme he would carry this pretense of infallibility to the most ridiculous and tragic length, which length, Molly realized, they had now arrived at.

The dayroom was a long drab rectangle, about one-third of it, at that hour, flooded uncomfortably by sunlight through the blindless windows. In one corner, eight feet or so above the floor on a kind of triangular shelf, sat the TV; a dozen black chrome-and-plastic chairs were ranged in front of it. At the moment no one paid attention to it, though the sound was turned up; the four or five patients in the dayroom sat or stood isolated from one another, not talking unless to themselves, having come here, Molly imagined, mostly out of an atavistic craving for some sense of space. She took her father to a padded easy chair at the end of the room furthest from the laughter of the television.

Roger seemed awfully thin, though this may only have been an impression produced by the clinging paper nightshirt. “So,” he said to her. “How was your flight?”

Molly wished desperately there was some third person there to tell her what not to do — a doctor, ideally, though she would have settled for her mother or her brother, which is to say that she would have been happy even with advice that was clearly wrong. For now, she let herself be lulled into her father’s construction that everything was fine, that the setting of their talk had no bearing on the talk itself. It masked the symptoms of their fear.

“Fine. Very smooth. Mom wired me money for the ticket.”

“Did you see a movie?”

Molly swallowed. “Yes. It was … it was called Sleepless in Seattle.”

“Never heard of it. What was it about?”

“I really don’t remember,” Molly said. “Dad, can I—”

“Not Sleeper? The Woody Allen movie? Because I remember that one. Lord, that was a funny movie! Gene Wilder with the sheep.” He shook his head, remembering, and with unfathomable abruptness his head fell forward and he began crying.

Molly looked all around the dayroom, afraid she was going to need help; but no one, not the other patients nor the one attendant in the room, so much as glanced in their direction as her father struggled noisily to catch his breath. She turned back and took his hand, took both his hands, even as she felt him trying to pull them away from her.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” The words meant nothing. She said them because they tended to produce a certain tone of voice, which she hoped was worth something, as if she were speaking to a horse.

Roger kept trying, with astonishing feebleness, to pull one hand away, until finally Molly understood that he only wanted to wipe his nose. She had no idea why she had been restraining him. When he finally looked up at her again, sniffling and smiling, she could see in his confident expression that he had no idea what he looked like. His gaze shifted past her, around the eggshell-colored walls of the dayroom.

“Would you look at all these lunatics?” he said.

When Molly had him back in bed she returned to the nurses’ station and asked again for Dr Kotlovitz. He was a fat doctor, genial and perspiring, and did not react at all to Molly’s angry tone of voice when she asked why her father was on the mental ward.

“Standard practice with all attempted suicides,” he said. “On top of which it worries me a bit that he still won’t talk about what happened.”

“He’s a very proud man.”

“Well, I don’t just mean he’s being reticent, or doesn’t like having his privacy violated. I mean he insists it never did happen at all. Didn’t you ask him about it?”