Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

IT TOOK ME four hours to drive to Manhattan. I double-parked on 113th, and at a very sloppy angle, effectively sealing off the street, I later saw. She sat on the floor, leaning against a wall. The telephone was on the floor beside her. Her legs were crossed at the ankle, and her arms were folded on her chest. She looked as if she were sleeping, but then her eyes opened undramatically, and she said, “How was the drive?” We took her purse and Barry’s attaché case filled with law books, I grabbed what mail I could find, and her address book, and she put some clothing in a bag with a carrying strap. She moved slowly, as if her joints were very sore. She was pale and skinny and vacant of expression. Then she seemed to grow angry with me for having come, angry at my insisting she leave.

“Don’t blame me if I flunk out,” she said, walking down the single flight in front of me. Her bag rasped along the wall of the staircase, and the case clunked on the wrought-iron banister. “They don’t make excuses here, understand? A little fruitcake is not an excuse, and anyway no one makes them. Can’t you just leave me alone?”

We emerged to the sound of eight kinds of car horn. I set the baggage on the backseat, fastened her belt as if she were very little or very old, and I think that she was both, and I drove us away, pursued by the outraged driver of a yellow cab.

We were on the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge when I thought to say, “Alec? Have you got Coriander?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mommy! Can’t you think of something else besides a doll? ”

“But have you got her?”

“Yes.”

We saw a psychologist in the area, and she was worried. She said the word I expected, “depression.” She used another word, “psychotic,” and I chewed at the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. She referred Alec to a psychiatrist, who referred her to another one, in Cooperstown, and this one, a tall man whose hair was almost the color of Alec’s hair, persuaded her to be signed into the psychiatric center. He used the word “medicate,” and he said “stabilize.” Alec used the word “okay,” but I couldn’t find one.

Then Alec used the word “no,” and we went home. The doctor telephoned her, and then spoke to me, and we struck an agreement: I would bring Alec the next morning to the psychiatric unit of the Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, New York, and she would receive “medication” and “stability” and “tests.” Alec slept the rest of that day. I didn’t. I looked at photographs in our albums, avoiding Barry’s face when I could because I missed him when I saw him because when I looked up from the pictures I could never see him again unless I once again looked down. I was trying to find, in photos of Alec as an infant and child and young adult, a clue, in the droop of an eyelid or the tone of her skin, to what all these new words—“depression,” “psychosis,” “medication”—were about. I saw how often in her pictures she looked serious, or worried, or alert as if to a threat.

So we ought to have known, right?

I had asked this of the doctor, and he’d said, “No, ma’am. No. Forget any words like ‘should’ and ‘ought.’ I have astonishing news for you. I want you to memorize what I say. You did not cause this disease and — you ready? — you can’t cure it. Didn’t cause, can’t cure. Hug her when she lets you, and don’t get mad at her. It isn’t her fault, either. Well, you will get mad, but try and not show it.”

I said, “But how can you have a problem and it isn’t someone’s fault .”

He laughed. “I’m Jewish, too,” he said, “but you can get used to it. No-fault disease.”

I MADE COFFEE in the early morning, put the photo albums away, found my stomach too upset for coffee, and went upstairs to wake Alec for the drive to Cooperstown. She sat on her bed, her back against the wall, the covers wrapped around her as if she had just been rescued from a wreck at sea. Her face looked almost yellow, and the shadows under her eyes looked brown. She hadn’t slept a lot of the night. She had wakened and, sitting before the mirror on her dressing table, she had cut off her hair. It lay on the floor around her chair. She had given herself a crew cut.

“Interesting hair,” I said.

“Hair today,” she answered, “gone tomorrow. It’s tomorrow.”

“We need to leave as soon as you shower,” I said.

“I’m not going.” Her eyes were dark with anger. Looking into them was like looking into the upstairs window of a high, old house. Someone, you suddenly realize with fright, is looking out of the window at you, and their expression has to do with disgust and with mockery.

I tried to say it to myself: I didn’t… I can’t … But I forgot the doctor’s words.

“Sure, Alec. Yes. Absolutely. We have to go.”

“Why do we have to go?”

“So you can get better.”

“Better,” she said.

“It’s your life , Al. You need to do this.”

“Need,” she said.

“Al.” I remembered his injunction against anger. I thought: Hey, you use your tranquility when it’s your kid. “Goddamn it, Alec. This is for your health .”

She said, as I knew she would, “Health.”

Then I realized what I had seen. I went to her dressing table and got down on my hands and knees. Coriander lay among the long, looped shafts and shorter curls of hair, and she lay down there in two pieces. Using her shears, Alec had severed the stuffed head from its stuffed body.

I squatted there, then turned to face her. The terrible face appeared in the window and looked down the length of the room to me.

“Oh, Alec,” I said.

She said, “Oh, Mommy. It’s only a household pet.”

The doctor had given me one more set of instructions, and I remembered them quite well.

I said, “I’m going to call the state police. They’ll force you to the hospital, Alec. It’ll, I don’t know, go on your record. You’ll be a lawyer with a note on your record: ‘State Police,’ it’ll say.”

“They can’t,” she said, “and don’t pretend they can. You think you can put the whammy over on a law student? And what record, you Jew-mother jerk.”

“I’m going to tell them I feel threatened. They’ll do it.”

“Threatened,” she said. “Only if you’re a household pet,” she said, “or if you’re named Petrekis.”

“What about him?”

“You heard me.”

“Alec, did you do something to Petrekis?”

“Who?”

“To punish him?”

“For hit-and-run foreplay? It is a punishable offense. For hit-and-run soixante-neuf compounded by simply yet absolutely Not. Being. A. Stand. Up. Guy.”

“Alec, what? What happened?”

“When?”

“Okay. I’m calling the police. Have a happy morning.” I went to the foot of the stairs and found the number in the phone book and dialed it. My hand was shaking, and my voice, when I spoke to a woman who called herself sergeant something, wobbled and wavered. I said, “I’m calling from outside of… no, it’s really in the township… Hell. I’m a little nervous. Sorry.” Take a breath, ma’am, take your time, are you all right, etc. And I was saying, “My daughter has had what I guess you’d call a nervous breakdown. I need to…”

Alec walked downstairs, wearing flannel pajama bottoms, a dirty white T-shirt, and slippers without socks. She shook a blanket out like a cape and wrapped it around her shoulders. She went around the corner into the living room, and I heard noises but closed my eyes and took a breath so I could tell the sergeant what I needed.

Alec reappeared. She was red-faced, and I was grateful for any relief of her pallor, even though she was the color of her anger at me.