He was wearing trousers, a pressed shirt, a jacket, socks, and loafers. The ambulance people had to pull him out feet-first, which mussed his hair. One guy took the note out of Arthur’s fist and handed it to her. She unfolded it. It read, “Don’t call the office unless I’m dead.”
She said, “Is he—?” shaking her head and starting to cry. As they rolled him onto the stretcher, the medic said, “Not yet.” She didn’t call the office. She got into the back of the ambulance with him, and stared at him as they careened toward the hospital, maybe a twenty-minute trip. Every so often, the medic took his pulse and listened to his heart and nodded. Lillian herself kept her hand on his chest. His breathing was shallow, but he kept breathing. It was cold. The landscape was white and the sky was gray, and she knew that he had planned it and had intended to succeed. The unhappy ending, as far as Arthur Manning was concerned, was life.
When the doctor came to her in the waiting room, she was shivering in spite of still having her coat on, and she shook the whole time he talked. It was Seconal, was your husband suffering from insomnia, did he have a prescription for barbiturates, was he showing strange signs of drowsiness or disorientation, could he have fallen down and rolled under the bed. Lillian said, “Didn’t they tell you about the note?”
“No. No note.” He licked his lips and said, “Has Mr. Manning been treated for depression, or manic-depressive illness? Has he shown—”
“Our son was killed in Vietnam.”
The doctor for the first time looked into her eyes, said, “I am sorry. May I ask—”
“Almost a year and a half ago.”
“Has your husband shown signs…”
It went on.
He was to stay in the hospital for three days, for observation. Lillian said, “May I see him?”
“It’s going to take a couple of hours for him to wake up. I guess he’ll be surprised to find himself here.”
“Very disappointed.”
“Oh, maybe not. Second thoughts—”
Lillian shook her head.
It wasn’t until she was home to get the car that she threw the bedspread back onto the bed and saw the other note, the one written in a neat hand folded into Tina’s Christmas card. It read:
Dear Lily Pons—
I am doing a bad thing to you, my darling. I know even more clearly than you do that this is the ultimate betrayal, and the only way on earth that I could or would betray you is exactly this way. But you know I’ve been waiting for the chance. You know I’ve been putting my affairs in order — not my financial affairs, but my domestic affairs. I have been waiting for each of you to recover somehow from Tim’s death, and now we have reached the crossroads where everyone has a path to the future. I saw all the paths at Christmas. Even Debbie is in good hands. You are the only one. Why can’t I take you with me? I ask myself that. And I ask myself that again, feeling you beside me in the night, feeling your hand in mine, hearing you breathe. But I can’t do it, nor can I stay. Why is that? Because I literally and truly see no future. Blank. Empty. Nothing. At last. And I am glad of it. You are perfect. I love you.
Arthur
The first thing he asked her when she saw him in his room, and he was groggy when he asked it, was whether she had told anyone at the office. She said no, and it was true — she had not told anyone at the office. Who had she told? Minnie. She had to talk to someone; she had called the farthest-away person that she could think of, in her office at the high school, and cried to her for ten minutes. Minnie might or might not tell Rosanna, but Minnie did want to tell Joe — Joe wouldn’t say anything. Arthur swallowed several times, closed his eyes, and patted her hand as best he could. Finally, he said, “Well, I guess we’ll soon find out once and for all.”
“What?” said Lillian.
“Whether the phone is tapped.”
It was.
Wilbur and Finn appeared after dinner. They took Lillian into the living room, turned on the lights, and offered her a drink from her own liquor cabinet. No, not even one sip of the Rémy Martin. Wilbur poured himself a Scotch and soda. Finn, a shot of crème de menthe over ice. Sheppard Pratt was where he would be going, up in Towson; men like Arthur had walked its halls for years; nervous breakdowns were part of the job, Arthur knew that. Arthur had always taken everything very seriously. That had its good and bad aspects. Electroshock was of course a possibility.
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.