After Aldridge left, it was quiet in the room. Finally, I said, “It looks like you’ll get better.”
“So they say.”
“It’s time for you to rest. I’ll be on my way.”
“I wonder if you might think of stopping again.”
I looked down suddenly. “Yes,” I said, “I’d like to.”
At least once a week, my travels took me past the old strip mall where my parents’ Pentecostal church formerly met. It was now a Radio Shack outlet, and the electronics buffs and various tech weenies going in and out the door obviously felt no residual vibrations from its Holy Roller days. But I did: I painfully remembered when my mother began taking her raptures to the street, accosting pedestrians in tongues. My mother was a small woman, unthreatening in physical presence or demeanor, so she was no more than a curiosity at these passionate displays, with my father, abashed and meek, trailing at a safe distance. I, too, was influenced by my mother’s activity at this time: I started to look for signs of craziness in myself, and I found plenty. People with a crazy parent will be unsure of their own mental health all their lives. My grade school classmate Roscoe Tate often remarked when my mother made a public nuisance of herself that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Facing such things definitely budged me out of a childhood in many ways pleasantly prolonged by my mother’s peculiarities. It also occasioned the deepening of my friendship with our family doctor, Eldon Olsson.
We met in his chaotic office, bird dog sleeping on an old and overstuffed armchair, a well-worn sixteen-gauge pump gun standing in the corner. Dr. Olsson leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. I thought that it must have seemed unlucky to Dr. Olsson to have stumbled on Wiley and Gladys in his partridge-hunting forays and ending up with my family as his patients. I suppose he realized we didn’t have the money for a more regular arrangement.
“Your mother needs some help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Inpatient psychiatric help.”
“Because of her religion?”
“I don’t know because of what. I only know that Health and Human Services won’t allow her to do what she does much longer without stepping in.”
I was growing up fast. “What can we do?”
“We can head it off through a voluntary commitment, which would allow us to specify the date of release. That way we hold the cards. But you’re going to have to sell it. She’s got your father under her thumb, and he may be a nut too.” This hurt, but I withheld reaction. “Your task is to make your mother see the light on this one. Good luck.”
I sold it, and on a winter day we drove my mother to the Warm Springs State Mental Hospital, old buildings under bare trees by the Clark Fork River. She hardly seemed defeated by her situation, and dressed in her wool coat with the rabbit fur collar and unbuckled galoshes, she strode into her room, looked around, and pronounced it wonderful to see that Jesus was there too. I could hear the cold river through the window. It was clear that in her odd kindheartedness she was doing this to make my father and me feel better.
My mother’s spirits helped me a bit with the guilt I felt at talking her into this arrangement. As we drove home my father found much to marvel at in the winter landscape, especially the colossal statue of Our Lady of the Rockies outside Butte, a ninety-footer sitting atop the Continental Divide; the vast mine diggings around the city which I found such an assault on nature, he saw as a tribute to the determination of men. “That Berkeley Pit filled a lot of lunch pails. Crying shame it got so big they had to tear down the Columbia Gardens, but people got to eat.” As we passed the great wheat farms west of Three Forks, he averred that Americans fed the world. I may have been a bit offended on my mother’s behalf at his very high spirits. I was brooding over the fact, which I recalled from publicity at the time it was raised, that Our Lady of the Rockies was dedicated to all the mothers in the world. The Army National Guard supplied a sky crane to install the Virgin’s head. I don’t know what I had supplied on behalf of motherhood. Not much.
We followed a snowplow into Bozeman Pass, spewing a great falling wing of snow on the roadside. My father turned to me to give me another boost out of my youth. “There’s something I’d like to tell you,” he said. I glanced quickly his way, fearful of taking my eyes off the slippery road. “I became an atheist the first time I saw a German tank and I’ve been one ever since. So never think I’m not devoted to your mother.”
In arranging my mother’s voluntary commitment, the hospital required us to accept that she could be held for five days after the requested release. On the occasion of her emptying a tub of Tuna Surprise on the dietician’s head, the facility exercised this option and used the time to request that the court convert her deal to an involuntary commitment. Thanks to what I would long view as my betrayal, my mother was often institutionalized until she died. Since going somewhat AWOL from the clinic, I have been trying to forgive myself for this sin, and several others. That’s right, sins. What else could I have called them? On one long drunken night in February I found myself at 8,500 feet gazing up at the illuminated Our Lady of the Rockies towering over the forlorn town of Butte, waiting for something that would lift the weight of my mother’s life from my shoulders.
14
I HEARD THAT IN YEARS PAST, pigs were drawn into the slaughterhouse of the Chicago Stockyards by hooks attached to their noses. A pig is a smart animal, but this placed the decision elsewhere. It was in this spirit that I headed once more to White Sulphur Springs to pay a call on Jocelyn Boyce. Wasn’t I in a sense a first responder at the scene of the accident? Naturally I had an interest in the outcome. But it was as if a tiny animal living in the corner of my mind, smaller than a mouse, smaller than an ant, and unobtrusive even considering its size, was saying, “Bullshit.” Anyway, it was a nice drive and the 88 seemed to like it as we coursed along a well-kept highway not too wide for its passage across sandstone bluffs, juniper savannahs, and dashing spate streams. A pickup passed me heading south, a dead elk in the bed and small American flags attached to each elevated leg. The sun was just over my left shoulder, warming my neck, and every few miles I glimpsed a herd of antelope in the distance, its movement syncopated with its shadow’s. The dashboard, with its discolored plastics and deep layer of dust, radiated the pleasant warmth it had absorbed from the sun. A small cloudburst darkened the road ahead of me, then vanished. This daydreaming interlude was soon succeeded by anxiety about the visit. What business was this of mine? Was her asking me to come back a pleasantry which acted upon would arouse annoyed surprise? What if she said, “Can’t you see I don’t feel well? I thought you were a doctor!” And was that the risk? Back to the corridor for a squirming session, fuel up, drive home? If so, I decided to accept the risk. Unfortunately, I went off the rails imagining how I might describe myself to someone like Miss Boyce should they wish to know me as I am: irritable, hypercritical, obsessively orderly, claustrophobic, impatient, antisocial, and agoraphobic, filled with objectless dread, pessimistic, and faultfinding. This led to more general reflections of my current state: my dreams at night were populated by strangers ordering me to pay up and threatening to “discard my application,” and the recurrent “Why can’t you remember your password?” A phantom gate agent haunted my dreams as well. He holds my boarding pass to his eyes and says: “Someone has folded this, or has begun to fold it and has had a change of heart. I’m afraid you’ve run out of luck.” In one genuinely appalling dream, which also recurred, I am at a dinner and have selected the wrong condiment, causing my tongue to swell; it overfills my mouth until I can see it, red and horrible, at the edge of my vision. Breathing mulishly through my nose, I begin to smother. This was poor preparation for my visit, and the thoughts fell upon my mood like a ton of bricks. Once at a fund-raiser for our clinic and hospital I had been charged with babysitting a major donor and had somehow thought it wise to have a candid conversation about where I believed the country was headed; we lost the donation. I recall the donor all too well and how I’d misjudged him for an open-minded souclass="underline" an old man dressed in a mixture of styles — tight hip-huggers, a blue Oriental silk shirt, and a corncob pipe. He had long hinted, as his own medical needs increased, that he was contemplating coughing up part of his cheese ball, but in the end it was given to the Elks, B.P.O.E. He was hard of hearing and had the TV turned up so loud I couldn’t understand him when he talked. When I quietly reached to lower the volume, he barked, “Don’t fool with that TV!” Somehow I went off on the state of the nation, based on earlier fund-raising experiences that a rising cloud of amiable generalizations was great preparation for the kill. It was an improvement over Jinx’s sardonic suggestion that I begin by saying, “Stand by for the ram.” I think I said something about the military-industrial complex, or something equally well-worn from the lips of Eisenhower, when I first heard the words I feared again now: “Get out.” For him the military-industrial complex was the last hope of mankind. How was I to know? I can still see him, teeth bared around the stem of his pipe, eyes blazing as I backed out of the room with its roaring TV.