“Kate,” she said once.
Priscilla leaned forward.
“She would like Amanda and Connecticut.”
“We’re taking care of Kate for you, dear,” Priscilla said.
Penny seemed puzzled. “Can’t you send her to Amanda?”
“I... I don’t know if Amanda would... would want her, Penelope. She’s pregnant, you know. Your sister is pregnant.”
“Oh, don’t tell me about being pregnant,” Penny said, and laughed. “Kate would like Connecticut.”
“My dear, you’ll be coming home soon,” Priscilla said. “You can care for your daughter yourself.”
“My daughter, yes,” Penny said, and she nodded. “And the sewing machine.”
“What, darling?”
“What?” Penny said, smiling at her mother.
“Did you say...?”
“I said Kate would like Connecticut.”
“Perhaps,” Priscilla said. “But, dear, when you come home...”
“I think it’s sad,” Penny said.
Her mother stared at her wordlessly.
“Don’t you think so?”
“What, darling? What is?”
“About Kate.”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Well, it’s a nice day,” Penny said. She seemed very thoughtful for a moment. Then she turned to her father and asked, “Do you still have the black hat?”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Wear it when you come. It makes me laugh.”
Martin Soames wore his black hat the next time they went to visit Penny, and she laughed and told him it would be good to come home again, had they heard from Amanda? She giggled.
“I wish I were a lobster,” she said suddenly.
Four weeks after the lobotomy was performed, Penny attacked the nurse who was making her rounds with evening sedations. She hit the woman from behind, striking her at the base of her neck, and then catching her throat between her fingers and attempting to strangle her. A startled patient in the next bed pushed the alarm button, and three attendants subdued Penny and placed her under restraint once more. The next day, she wet the bed repeatedly and had to be removed from it forcibly when they wanted to change the sheets. She kicked over a night table and rushed with her head bent at the stomach of a burly attendant, slamming him against the wall and almost fracturing his arm. They thought it was the end. They sighed and glanced at each other with the utter despair of men who have tried everything they know, men who are fighting a terrible enemy, retreating constantly, weaponless now, utterly routed.
And then suddenly, the next morning, Penny smiled cheerfully and said, “Hello, Dr. Donato, how are you this morning?” and she asked when they would send her home, and she asked how her mother was, and how her daughter Kate was, and she said again, “It would be nice for her in Connecticut.”
They took off the jacket.
She tried to hang herself with the bed sheet that night. The next day, she refused to eat. Her eyes had glazed over, and a look of constant and indescribable horror was on her face, a tortured persistent look, the look of a woman trapped in a burning room with no escape. She began to soil herself again. She sang bawdy lyrics at the top of her lungs, she swore, she spat, she reviled God and the universe, she trembled with fear and screamed in rage. In ten days’ time, her intellectual and emotional deterioration was almost total; she had become again the patient they had first admitted to the hospital, silent, uncommunicative, lost.
The director called Priscilla and asked her to come. He told her what had happened and then he shook his head sadly and said, “There is nothing more we can do. Nothing.” He spread his hands helplessly. “Nothing. Your daughter will probably remain hospitalized for the rest of her life.”
They drove home in silence that night, the Reverend Martial Soames and his wife Priscilla.
After a long while, Priscilla said, “It is God’s will.”
Martin did not answer.
She went into the house and took off her hat. She paid the baby sitter and then she went upstairs to look at the child Kate asleep in her bed. She almost reached out to touch her hair, but her hand would not move. She went downstairs again and sat at the drop-leaf desk for a long time. In the church, Martin was playing the organ. Priscilla nodded, picked up a pen, and began writing the most difficult letter she had ever had to write in her life:
April 13, 1949
DAUGHTER,
Your father and I have just returned from Sandstone State Hospital where we were told that the results of the operation they performed on your sister, though they seemed encouraging at first, have not been at all what was hoped for, there is no hope.
Amanda dear, there is no hope.
We are getting old, your father and I. The child is not yet seven. It was Penny’s wish that she come to live with you in Connecticut. She is not a burden, daughter. She is a lovely child and well-mannered, and she needs young people who can give her love. We are getting old.
I would take it very kindly, my daughter, if you would give her a home and the love she needs. I would take it very kindly.
God love you.
Your mother,
The scene was a particularly difficult one, and David’s absence wasn’t making it any easier. Gillian kept alternating her attention between the open script in her lap and the clock on the wall. He’ll call, she told herself. As soon as he knows anything, he’ll call. Now think of the girl in the play.
She looked at the clock, and then turned her attention back to the script, gathering the shreds of her concentration, seeking in herself a key to the girl’s character. She loves her husband, Gillian thought, that much we know. All right, so why did Igor ask me to work with an actor I despise? Just because of that, I suppose. The effectiveness of the scene depends entirely on how convincing the girl’s love is. Igor’s given me something that will be especially difficult for me. All right, I’ll be deeply in love with my husband. I’ll be charming and warm and sympathetic to him from the moment we step onto that stage. Oh brother, she thought.
She looked again at the clock, and then turned back to the script and began drumming an attitude into her mind. She told herself she liked him, no, better than that, she absolutely adored this simple, untalented jerk, she worshiped the ground he walked on, the last thing she wanted from him was an argument. The girl she was playing had been raised strictly, and on the premise that marriage was a sacrament, that marriage and obedience, and duty to one’s husband, the bearing and raising of children, were a woman’s only real goals. She was somewhat shy and reticent, a good wife and a good mother. In the scene, she was supposed to discover that her husband had been unfaithful to her, had indeed withdrawn a thousand dollars from their joint bank account and given the money to his paramour. Faced with this moment of truth, the girl was supposed to explode in a complete reversal of character, expressing whatever hostilities had been repressed during the years of her childhood and the eight years of her even-keeled marriage. Gillian made a face. She found the scene and the character difficult to believe, but she supposed this meant only that the character was someone beyond the scope of her own personality. Nonetheless, a good actress was supposed to create believable experience in terms of related, if seemingly obscure, experiences of her own, wasn’t she? Gillian sighed heavily, closed her eyes against the clock, and began to probe.
She could understand the girl’s upbringing because it was faintly reminiscent of her own, possibly reminiscent of every girl’s upbringing, but the similarity ended right there. As any of the embryo actors in Igor’s class might have put it, Gillian had “never done the marriage bit.” But she had certainly been subjected to the interminable pounding of a marriage-oriented mother, perhaps even a marriage-oriented society. Her own training was not unique. She recognized that possibly every son and daughter in the world were exposed to a childhood of propaganda, the word-of-mouth advertising passed from generation to generation, the key words of which were “when you get married.” She thought it interesting that this was the transmitted prophecy, an allegation that left no real room for choice. She could not imagine any mother, except in the novels of Colette, saying to her daughter, “When you grow up and become someone’s mistress,” no, she could not imagine it. Nor would anyone say to her son, “When you grow up and become a bachelor.” The word came down with unflinching adult authority, camouflaged in various guises, but always essentially the same: