I Had Missed a Perfectly Good Chance. the River Water Passed Me by Like An

Chapter 15

I had missed a perfectly good chance. The river water passed me by like an

untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I

would have made no move to jump.

When I enrolled in the main building of the hospital, a slim young woman had

come and introduced herself. "My name is Doctor Nolan. I am to be Esther's doctor."

I was surprised to have a woman. I didn't think they had woman psychiatrists.

This woman was a cross between Myrna Loy and my mother. She wore a white blouse

and a full skirt gathered at the waist by a wide leather belt, and stylish, crescent-shaped

spectacles.

But after a nurse had led me across the lawn to the gloomy brick building called

Caplan, where I would live, Doctor Nolan didn't come to see me, a whole lot of strange

men came instead…

…"Do you mind if I smoke?" Doctor Nolan leaned back in the armchair next to my

bed.

I said no, I liked the smell of smoke. I thought if Doctor Nolan smoked, she might

stay longer. This was the first time she had come to talk with me. When she left I would

simply lapse into the old blankness.

"Tell me about Doctor Gordon," Doctor Nolan said suddenly. "Did you like him?"

I gave Doctor Nolan a wary look. I thought the doctors must all be in it together,

and that somewhere in this hospital, in a hidden corner, there reposed a machine exactly

like Doctor Gordon's, ready to jolt me out of my skin.

"No," I said. "I didn't like him at all."

"That's interesting. Why?"

"I didn't like what he did to me."

"Did to you?"

I told Doctor Nolan about the machine, and the blue flashes, and the jolting and

the noise. While I was telling her she went very still.

"That was a mistake," she said then. "It's not supposed to be like that."

I stared at her.

"If it's done properly," Doctor Nolan said, "it's like going to sleep."

"If anyone does that to me again I'll kill myself."

Doctor Nolan said firmly, "You won't have any shock treatments here. Or if you

do," she amended, "I'll tell you about it beforehand, and I promise you it won't be

anything like what you had before. Why," she finished, "some people even like them."

After Doctor Nolan had gone I found a box of matches on the windowsill. It

wasn't an ordinary-size box, but an extremely tiny box. I opened it and exposed a row of

little white sticks with pink tips. I tried to light one, and it crumpled in my hand.

I couldn't think why Doctor Nolan would have left me such a stupid thing.

Perhaps she wanted to see if I would give it back. Carefully I stored the toy matches in

the hem of my new wool bathrobe. If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would

say I'd thought they were made of candy and had eaten them…

Chapter 16

"Mrs. Bannister tells me you had a reaction." Doctor Nolan seated herself in the

armchair by the window and took out a tiny box of matches. The box looked exactly like

the one I had hidden in the hem of my bathrobe, and for a moment I wondered if a nurse

had discovered it there and given it back to Doctor Nolan on the quiet.

Doctor Nolan scraped a match on the side of the box. A hot yellow flame jumped

into life, and I watched her suck it up into the cigarette.

"Mrs. B. says you felt better."

"I did for a while. Now I'm the same again."

"I've news for you."

I waited. Every day now, for I didn't know how many days, I had spent the

mornings and afternoons and evenings wrapped up in my white blanket on the deck chair

in the alcove, pretending to read. I had a dim notion that Doctor Nolan was allowing me a

certain number of days and then she would say just what Doctor Gordon had said: "I'm

sorry, you don't seem to have improved, I think you'd better have some shock treatment. .

."

"Well, don't you want to hear what it is?"

"What?" I said dully, and braced myself.

"You're not to have any more visitors for a while."

I stared at Doctor Nolan in surprise. "Why that's wonderful."

"I thought you'd be pleased." She smiled.

Then I looked, and Doctor Nolan looked, at the wastebasket beside my bureau.

Out of the wastebasket poked the blood-red buds of a dozen long-stemmed roses.

That afternoon my mother had come to visit me.

My mother was only one in a long stream of visitors -- my former employer, the

lady Christian Scientist, who walked on the lawn with me and talked about the mist going

up from the earth in the Bible, and the mist being error, and my whole trouble being that I

believed in the mist, and the minute I stopped believing in it, it would disappear and I

would see I had always been well, and the English teacher I had in high school who came

and tried to teach me how to play Scrabble, because he thought it might revive my old

interest in words, and Philomena Guinea herself, who wasn't at all satisfied with what the

doctors were doing and kept telling them so.

I hated these visits.

I would be sitting in my alcove or in my room, and a smiling nurse would pop in

and announce one or another of the visitors. Once they'd even brought the minister of thef

Unitarian church, whom I'd never really liked at all. He was terribly nervous the whole

time, and I could tell he thought I was crazy as a loon, because I told him I believed in

hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for

missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each

person believed happened to him when he died.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and

stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they

went away utterly confounded.

I thought if they left me alone I might have some peace.

My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a

sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong. She said she was sure the doctors

thought she had done something wrong because they asked her a lot of questions about

my toilet training, and I had been perfectly trained at a very early age and given her no

trouble whatsoever.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.

"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

My mother's face puckered, and she looked ready to cry.

"But Esther, don't you remember what day it is today?"

"No."

I thought it might be Saint Valentine's day. "It's your birthday."

And that was when I had dumped the roses in the waste-basket.

"That was a silly thing for her to do," I said to Doctor Nolan.

Doctor Nolan nodded. She seemed to know what I meant. "I hate her," I said, and

waited for the blow to fall.

But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very

much, and said, "I suppose you do."

Chapter 17

I curled up in the far corner of the alcove with the blanket over my head. It wasn't

the shock treatment that struck me, so much as the bare-faced treachery of Doctor Nolan.

I liked Doctor Nolan, I loved her, I had given her my trust on a platter and told her

everything, and she had promised, faithfully, to warn me ahead of time if ever I had to

have another shock treatment.

If she had told me the night before I would have lain awake all night, of course,

full of dread and foreboding, but by morning I would have been composed and ready. I

would have gone down the hall between two nurses, past DeeDee and Loubelle and Mrs.

Savage and Joan, with dignity, like a person coolly resigned to execution.

The nurse bent over me and called my name.

I pulled away and crouched farther into the corner. The nurse disappeared. I knew

she would return, in a minute, with two burly men attendants, and they would bear me,

howling and hitting, past the smiling audience now gathered in the lounge.

Doctor Nolan put her arm around me and hugged me like a mother.

"You said you'd tell me!" I shouted at her through the disheveled blanket.

"But I am telling you," Doctor Nolan said. "I've come specially early to tell you,

and I'm taking you over myself."

I peered at her through swollen lids. "Why didn't you tell me last night?"

"I only thought it would keep you awake. If I'd known. . ."

"You said you'd tell me."

"Listen, Esther," Doctor Nolan said. "I'm going over with you. I'll be there the

whole time, so everything will happen right, the way I promised. I'll be there when you

wake up, and I'll bring you back again."

I looked at her. She seemed very upset

I waited a minute. Then I said, "Promise you'll be there."

"I promise."

Doctor Nolan took out a white handkerchief and wiped my face. Then she hooked

her arm in my arm, like an old friend, and helped me up, and we started down the hall.

My blanket tangled about my feet, so I let it drop, but Doctor Nolan didn't seem to notice.

We passed Joan, coming out of her room, and I gave her a meaning, disdainful smile and

she ducked back and waited until we had gone by.

Then Doctor Nolan unlocked a door at the end of the hall and led me down a

flight of stairs into the mysterious basement corridors that linked, in an elaborate network

of tunnels and burrows, all the various buildings of the hospital.

The walls were bright, white lavatory tile with bald bulbs set at intervals in the

black ceiling. Stretchers and wheelchairs were beached here and there against the hissing,

knocking pipes that ran and branched in an intricate nervous system along the glittering

walls. I hung on to Doctor Nolan's arm like death, and every so often she gave me an

encouraging squeeze.

Finally, we stopped at a green door with Electrotherapy printed on it in black

letters. I held back, and Doctor Nolan waited. Then I said, "Let's get it over with," and we

went in.

Chapter 18

"ESTHER."

I woke out of a deep, drenched sleep, and the first thing I saw was Doctor Nolan's

face swimming in front of me and saying, "Esther, Esther."

I rubbed my eyes with an awkward hand. Behind Doctor Nolan I could see the

body of a woman wearing a rumpled black-and-white checked robe and flung out on a

cot as if dropped from a great height. But before I could take in any more, Doctor Nolan

led me through a door into a fresh, blue-skied air.

All the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung,

suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

"It was like I told you it would be, wasn't it?" said Doctor Nolan, as we walked

back to Belsize together through the crunch of brown leaves.

"Yes."

"Well, it will always be like that," she said firmly. "You will be having shock

treatments three times a week -- Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday."

I gulped in a long draught of air.

"For how long?"

"That depends," Doctor Nolan said, "on you and me."

…"I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my

interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?"

Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness."

That shut me up.

Chapter 20 (end of novel)

But I wasn't getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born

twice -- patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an

appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the

shoulder.

"All right, Esther."

I rose and followed her to the open door.

Pausing, for a brief breath, on the threshold, I saw the silver-haired doctor who

had told me about the rivers and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the pocked, cadaverous

face of Miss Huey, and eyes I thought I had recognized over white masks.

The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by

them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.