Jane Smiley - Early Warning

She told the children he was in the hospital with pneumonia. He would be fine; but, no, they couldn’t go see him, it was too dangerous. She should have said something else, but Arthur hadn’t told her what to say. The two doctors met her as soon as she arrived at Sheppard Pratt the next morning: Dr. Rockford, who was tall and impatient, and Dr. Kristal, who was younger, shorter, and more charming. What had Arthur been doing and saying for the last few months, for the last year, whatever stood out in her mind? Dr. Rockford sat to her left and Dr. Kristal sat to her right. Dr. Rockford would ask a question: Has Mr. Manning shown signs of depression? And then Dr. Kristal would translate it: Did he seem to have a disrupted sleep pattern? Was he eating sufficiently and with enjoyment? Had his drinking habits changed? In half an hour they had elicited most of what she remembered about Arthur staring out the window of his office, about Arthur wandering the house, about Arthur pushing his food around his plate. Yes, he did drink a little, still, but he’d stopped drinking as much as he had been.

Then it was on to his history — the death of his first wife and child in childbirth, his proposal to Lillian not a year after that, the immediate pregnancy, his “manic” (Dr. Rockford’s word) reaction to fatherhood, his “excessive sexual importunities” (Dr. Kristal). His habits of secrecy. “He has to keep secrets,” said Lillian. “That’s part of his job.” They both nodded. Finally, feeling that she had been led step by step into this but not knowing any way out, she told the story of his mother, the death of the older sister in the flu epidemic, the hanging. Dr. Kristal wrote industriously on his clipboard, and Dr. Rockford nodded as if he had expected as much. Lillian at once had the sensation that there was nothing about her marriage or Arthur that was at all unusual or admirable. Everything she cherished was, if not a symptom of pathology, then an item of utter triviality. She fell silent.

Well, they would keep him up there for a few months. The staff was highly competent and extremely effective; she would be amazed at the change; best she not visit very often, if at all; a whole new scene, a whole, in some sense, reassessment of oneself, of life itself; in many cases, the effects were amazing, even when the condition was chronic, as it seemed to be in this case. Utter privacy worked wonders, no television or newspapers, concentration on the here and now.

Then they took her to Arthur’s room. He had been given something. When he took Lillian’s hand, he did so from deep inside a pharmaceutical distance. Dr. Rockford explained what would be done, in no way asking permission or seeking agreement. Arthur stared at the ceiling, and Lillian signed the papers that Dr. Kristal set before her. When she had finished and handed back the pen, he whispered in her ear, “Just wait! He’ll be a new man! These things are always hard!” She kissed Arthur on the lips. As she drove home, she wondered if he would ever forgive her.

—

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Charlie to make out the thing on his chest in the mirror. It was a piece of paper with writing on it, which read:

It was pinned to his shirt with two large safety pins. He could not go outside without this piece of paper. Every day, Mommy knelt down beside him several times and said, “Stay with me, Charlie. You know what that means. Right beside me. And if I call your name, I expect you to answer.” Charlie nodded and said yes, that he would stay with Mommy, that he would answer to the sound of his name, that he would not ever run away again so that the police had to be called and find him after dark and bring him home. The police were tall and wore blue and did not like looking for lost children.

Nursery school was at the gray church on the corner, and it was a long walk, but by the time Charlie got there each morning, his legs weren’t jiggling and jumping anymore, the way they did at breakfast. For the first part of nursery school, where they sat in a circle on the red rug and Miss Ellery read a story, Charlie could be quiet and not move if they had walked, though not if they drove. Mommy put his hand right into Miss Ellery’s hand and said, “Goodbye, Charlie. Be a cooperative boy.” Charlie nodded and put his finger on the paper. “That’s your sign,” said Miss Ellery. Charlie Wickett. “You’re a lucky boy to have a sign, so don’t touch it, okay?”

The book today was about a fox who wore sox. On the cover, the fox was bright red. Charlie sat quietly and stared at the book, sometimes at the red fox and sometimes at the SOX and the FOX. He wondered if they could be XOS and XOF, and touched his sign. It wasn’t until Miss Ellery came to ticks and tocks that Charlie stood up and started running around the red rug — first one way, as fast as he could go, and then the other way. Miss Ellery didn’t say anything. She kept reading. Charlie was careful not to step on anyone’s fingers or to fall over anyone. The room was very bright when he was running, and the colors swam around him.

Miss Ellery put the book down and said; “Charlie, do you think you can sit down and listen?”

Charlie came to a halt and stared at Miss Ellery; then he sat down for one more page. When he stood up again, Miss Plesch came into the room and took his hand. They went outside to the playground, and Charlie ran around the swings and the jungle gym. When he was tired and sat down, Miss Plesch said, “A.”

Charlie said, “Antenna. B.”

“Banana. C.”

“Corvette. D.”

Miss Plesch grinned. She said, “Dog. E.”

Charlie was stumped, so he jumped up and ran the other way around the swing set, then said, “Ethyl. F.”

“Flower. G.”

“Gas. H.”

Now the door opened and the other kids came running into the playground. The girls went one way, and the boys — Davie, Herbie, Barry, and Petey — came toward Charlie. Charlie put his hand on Miss Plesch’s knee and said, “Herbie.”

“Very good,” said Miss Plesch. Charlie took off, and Herbie and Barry ran after him. They ran and ran. It was a sunny day. When Mommy picked him up for lunch, Miss Ellery said, “He knows every car word.”

“His first sentence was ‘Dere go a Muttang.’ He was almost two. Before that we never heard him say a word.”

“Sometimes adopted children are a little late talking. That is my experience. But they catch up.” She bent down and said, “Charlie, do you still have your sign?”

Charlie touched his sign with his finger.

They walked home the long way, down Greeley. When he got home, he sat quietly and ate his peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich. Mommy said he was a good boy.

—

FRANK WAS SUPPOSED TO be in Palm Springs, looking at the renovations Rubino had authorized at the hotel, but he had stayed late in Malibu, at Hughes, so he was driving along Wilshire, past the Ambassador Hotel, about nine. The traffic was a nightmare, and Frank could feel his temper rising, but then he remembered Jim Upjohn’s stories about going to the Cocoanut Grove there in the forties, with Howard Hughes. Hughes was on his mind even though he, Frank, would never meet him (wasn’t the guy holed up in Las Vegas somewhere now?). He turned off Wilshire onto Mariposa, drove up two blocks, and walked back. The hotel was seething with people, and almost as soon as he walked through the door, Frank felt himself get edgy. As a man with nothing to lose, Frank was almost never edgy. What offended him was not the crowd, but some acoustic quality of the hotel lobby. The chaos was not of a uniform loudness and incomprehensibility — words popped out of the noise and impressed themselves upon his consciousness: “red,” “fountain,” “hola,” “I said,” “Nixon,” “Pittsburgh.” He went into the bar, but he got the same feeling there — he could not hear the man standing next to him saying to the bartender, “Gimme a highball,” but he could hear an unknown female voice saying very clearly, “Don’t touch that.” The word that rose on the din was “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.”