Guests on Earth: A Novel Read online

  But what about me? I wondered and wondered. Didn’t Matilda love me, as I had thought? How could she leave me, to go away with mean old Mr. Graves?

  Yet I could not ask Mamma, who was beyond such conversation then, and later seemed not to care, as if our episode in Metairie had never happened at all. Even when I mentioned Michael, there was not a flicker of interest in her eyes.

  Some things are irrevocable; I know that now. Mamma and I were never to be the same again, though we did move back to the Quarter, this time to a ground-floor apartment with a courtyard just off Bourbon, paid for with the allowance provided by Mr. Graves. In my view now, his generosity (or guilt, or whatever it was) was unfortunate, for Mamma did not have to work, and she never worked again. Perhaps she was not able to, dependent upon the drugs.

  I went to the nuns as before, but now there were bad people in and out of our apartment, people we had not known before, and when I came home from school, I had to do everything, even wash Mamma off sometimes, and clean up certain messes. I never told the nuns any of this; at school, my marks were exemplary.

  On January 20, 1937, I came home from school to find that Mamma had slit her wrists with the silver penknife that had the fleur-de-lis handle, which she had used to open billets-doux. Blood was everywhere, soaking her legs and the pretty afghan. It had a certain smell, like copper pennies, I will never forget it. I put down my books and took off my coat and climbed up beside her on the great divan and curled into her back the way we used to sleep sometimes, two girls together, and made believe that we were on a ship indeed, sailing down the narrow streets of the Quarter out into the great Mississippi River and far, far away.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT is perhaps the strangest and most implausible chapter of my life.

  I had been placed at the Catholic orphanage on the rue Ursulines but had spent only a few days there when a great commotion commenced out in the courtyard where stood the famous statue of the Virgin Mary with her welcoming arms outstretched. Upon my arrival, I had found her comforting. For I had always liked the nuns, as I have told you, and I felt that I might grow to like the shy little red-haired girl from Mandeville with whom I shared my room. But no. Into the quiet courtyard came Mr. Graves like a conquering army. Apparently he had undergone some sort of religious conversion accompanied by grand remorse and a change of heart.

  He had come for me; he would take me now. He would give me every advantage: an education, a home, a family. “What family?” asked the nuns. Why, his, of course. His? I had never met any of his family, not one. In fact, he had never mentioned them. I remembered the pink mansion with the high wall around it. The house took up an entire block of the Garden District. It even had a name: “Bellefleur.” Mamma and I had ridden past it once in a carriage, just to look. I did not want to go there. I wanted to stay right here with the nuns, yet I could not seem to speak. Mr. Graves was so huge, bigger than the statue of the Virgin Mary, he filled up the whole courtyard. The nuns began twittering about rules and state regulations. Mr. Graves smiled; he was charming. Had he really hit my mother across the face? A charitable donation was made.

  Thus I found myself inside that mansion within an hour’s time, meeting Mrs. Graves, a tall, thin woman drawn tight as the string of a bow, and a row of children, three round-eyed boys and a girl who looked like her mother—two older boys were already away at college. This was to be my “new family.” They glared at me, and dispersed.

  The house itself was ancient, its vast public rooms on the scale of a government building, filled with sculpture and tapestries and silver. Marble columns stood everywhere. I was shown to a fancy little blue bedroom on the third floor, with a puffy bed filled with embroidered pillows and a curvy painted desk in the corner—all my life, I had wanted my own desk. I had dreamed of it. A young Negro maid came into the room to “help me put away my things,” which somebody had tied up in an old sheet, as I had no suitcase.

  Immediately I lay down upon the pretty bed and fell into a profound sleep that lasted until dinnertime, when the Graveses’ daughter, Alicia, was sent to bring me down. She knocked on the door; I opened it.

  “It’s time for supper,” she said in a high, thin voice.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You are welcome,” she said.

  We were like the doll girls I had seen in the windows of the antique stores in the rue Royal.

  “How old are you?” I asked as we walked down the forever stairs of the three-story spiral staircase. “And where do you go to school?” for I had been visited suddenly by manners, perching like a bird on my shoulder. I had read, of course, any number of English children’s books.

  “You don’t need to know,” Alicia said, rounding the first great turn at the landing.

  “I beg your pardon?” I stopped and looked down at her.

  “We don’t have to get to know each other,” she explained. “My father has had a nervous breakdown, that’s all. Everyone says so. He has made some rash decisions and you are one of them. You won’t last.”

  “I see,” I said, though I doubt she heard me, as I disappeared down the stairs.

  I took my pencil out of my pocket and held it at a right angle to the exquisitely carved white banister posts, so that the lead made an unsightly black mark on each one as I ran down the rest of the way, taking sometimes two or three steps at a time. Mr. and Mrs. Graves stood waiting for me at the bottom, watching me do this. Her mouth was as thin as a razor’s edge, while he blinked back his copious tears—would this man never stop crying?

  “Evalina, Evalina,” he said. He picked me up and crushed me to his chest, the first time he had ever done such a thing in all the three years we had known him. He smelled like something baking—cinnamon or cloves. “I hope that you will forgive me, as God has forgiven me,” he said.

  I lost all respect for God in that very moment. Mrs. Graves rolled her eyes.

  Mysteriously, I was unable to eat a single bite at that immense table, though I was served many choices of wonderful food, which I pushed around on my plate with the heavy silverware and my new, perfect manners. I answered the questions asked me, mostly questions about school, and recited “The Spider and the Fly” in its entirety. Mrs. Graves rolled her eyes again at this, while Miss Ella, the maiden aunt, seated to my right, patted my hand kindly. She wore a ring on every fleshy finger, and lived at Bellefleur, too. After dinner we all went into the music room where I played the “Maple Leaf Rag” on the grand piano.

  Later, rice pudding was brought to my room, but I could not eat that either. I ate scarcely a bite the entire time I stayed in that house. I am still not quite sure why this was so, though Dr. Carroll and I were to have some interesting discussions about this phenomenon once I reached Highland Hospital. As I was already a child with no fat to spare, my condition soon became serious. I grew light-headed, and very tired.

  Matilda, who had been mostly avoiding me since my arrival at Bellefleur, I believe, appeared in my room with a bowl of gumbo, and sat on the side of my bed. “Here, now.” She propped my head up on the pillows. “You stop all this silly behavior right now, Evalina, and eat yourself some of this nice soup. I know you, honey. I know you are a smart girl, and you have got to realize, this is the chance of a lifetime here. Your mamma would want you to take it. She would want you to grab that brass ring that she never got ahold of herself. Why, the Graves will send you off to school, they will give you everything. Don’t you see? Don’t you know nothing, girl? You are cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

  I knew it, but I couldn’t help it. I soon became weak and confused. Once I awoke to see Mamma sitting in the wing chair by the window of my little blue room, holding my baby brother Michael on her knees. “Oh Mamma,” I said in a rush, “I am such a bad girl, I didn’t help you. It is all my fault.” The minute I said this, I knew it was true, and I believed it absolutely. I should have told somebody, anybody—the nuns, the police, anybody who would have come and taken Mamma out of that apartment and put h
er into a hospital. I could have saved her life, and did not. Mamma looked up at me and smiled, in the old way, before she and Michael began to fade. “Don’t go! Don’t go!” I guess I was screaming, for people ran into the room.

  “She’s got to eat.” I remember Mrs. Graves saying at one point. “She can’t do this to us.” Force-feeding was tried, disastrously, by a physician who came to the house, with a male assistant to help him. After they left, I burned my arm with matches I stole from the pantry.

  Before I knew it, they were packing up my few belongings again, this time into a small leather suitcase provided by Miss Ella, who was to accompany me on the train to Memphis, where I would be met by a trained nurse who would take me on to Highland Hospital, in Asheville, North Carolina. I remembered that the Graves owned a summer home somewhere in North Carolina. Perhaps this was how they had known about Highland; in any case, I am sure that Mrs. Graves wanted to send me as far away from New Orleans as possible.

  “Get well,” Mr. Graves implored me, “for the souls of your brother and your mother and for the love of God!”

  “He’s the one that ought to be going to that hospital if you ask me,” Miss Ella whispered unexpectedly into my ear. The last thing I saw at Bellefleur was Alicia Graves sticking her pink tongue out at me as the car pulled away. We soon arrived at the station where several of the Graves servants helped us onto the train, which reminded me of a giant stallion, stamping and snorting on the track. I was filled with excitement, never having been on a train before. In fact, I had never left New Orleans. I was wrapped in a shawl and settled into a seat by the window of our private compartment. The engine roared, the whistle blew, and we were under way.

  “There now,” Miss Ella said, lighting a cigarette—something I had never seen her do at Bellefleur.

  A porter came through the car to take our tickets and then another man came through with a tray of food.

  Suddenly I was ravenous. “Please, ma’am,” I said to Miss Ella, for of course I had no money. “Please ma’am, a muffuletta.”

  “What?” Her eyebrows shot up as she dashed out after the man, coming back with two of the big sandwiches, which we ate with delight right there in our compartment, each bite bringing back to me the tastes and smells and sounds of the Quarter. How I enjoyed that muffuletta! Though it was too much for me, as I was immediately sick afterward in our tiny toilet, to Miss Ella’s consternation. But I felt better. I tidied myself and settled down to watch the endless low-lying environs of the city at last give way to scrub pines and dark swamps, which rushed past us on either side, faster and faster, as we headed north.

  I could not get away from Bellefleur fast enough.

  Later, the curtain of our compartment was pulled shut; we slept. In the morning, we walked down the swaying train to the dining car for breakfast. There were linen tablecloths, and little pots of jam, and a cut glass vase of flowers on our table. I ordered toast, which “sat better” on my stomach. “And no wonder!” Miss Ella said. “I can’t believe I let you eat a muffaletta!”

  In Memphis we were met on the platform by a tall, thin, twinkly sort of man, with a gold watch and round gold eyeglasses. He thrust a bouquet of red roses into Miss Ella’s arms, and bowed to her.

  “Never tell,” she whispered into my ear, giggling.

  Who would I tell? I wondered, for I knew I would never go back. Immediately I had a fantasy that I would live in Memphis from that day forward with these two as parents, Miss Ella and her boyfriend, yet of course this was not to be.

  I was hugged and given over to Mrs. Hodges, a large Scottish nurse wearing a plaid cape. I expected I would like her, too. She looked just like a nurse in any number of those same English children’s books that I had enjoyed immensely.

  “Come right along, then,” she said, grabbing my bag. “We’ve just enough time to make it!”

  We flew down the platform through the grand, echoing station and then down another platform to board another steaming, clamorous train. I slept a great deal; it seemed as if I could not sleep enough. Mrs. Hodges kept a close, watchful eye upon me while knitting constantly, some mammoth thing large enough to fit a giant.

  “For my husband,” she announced at one point. “He’s a big one!” We changed trains in the middle of the night; stars were out, and the brisk wind was chilly.

  IT WAS COLD in Asheville, too, that early morning of our arrival, yet the air was sparkling, sharp and clean, shot through with sunshine and smelling of—what? Pine! Asheville was a city at the bottom of a bowl, a blue bowl of mountains. They encircled us on every side. Some of them were truly enormous, their tops obscured by clouds. We got into a waiting car, which bore us through the bustling downtown past large buildings and spacious parks, up a wide fancy street named Montford Avenue. We passed many big square houses with well-kept yards, inspiring confidence, though built in a style unfamiliar to me. A uniformed maid was out sweeping a spotless sidewalk.

  “Who lives here?” I asked.

  Mrs. Hodges said succinctly, “Rich people.”

  “Do they live here all the time or just in the summer?” I asked, thinking of Mrs. Graves. I was sure she was the one who had sent me on this long journey.

  “Depends.” She tied off a knot of yarn. “There’s many comes up in the summer for the climate, don’t you know, and others comes for the society, and still yet others that comes for their health. Oh, we are famous for it,” she amplified in answer to my glance. “They comes here for the tuberculosis, for the vapors, the rheumatism, the aches and pains, and the alcohol, don’t you know. Why there’s more clinics than you can shake a stick at, it’s a reg-u-lar industry.”

  Suddenly it hit me like a slap in the face: I was going to a mental institution. Highland Hospital was a mental institution. I would be a mental patient. Would they lock me up? Would they put me in a cage? I remembered the scary, wild-haired people high up behind the bars in the old Public Health Hospital on State Street in New Orleans. I was terrified.

  As if she could read my mind, Mrs. Hodges patted my hand. “Now, now,” she said. “You’ll be fine here. We’re a bit different.”

  “What do you mean, different?” I asked as we went through a handsome stone gate and passed the modest sign that read simply HIGHLAND HOSPITAL.

  “Like a family,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  I rolled the window down and hung my head out to breathe in the piney, crystal-cold air and get a better view of the beautiful grounds, which looked more like a park than anything else, the gentle slope giving way to a wild ravine on the right-hand side, while the grassy hill to the left was topped by a cluster of buildings that to my eye resembled a resort such as I had seen only in pictures. Though winter had scarcely released her grip upon these high mountains, here and there a blooming tree—redbud, dogwood—was already to be seen. Stone walls accentuated various features of the landscape, but there were no fences, no locked gates. Driving slowly along the paved road up the slope, we encountered several groups of vigorous-looking people; most of them waved at me, and I waved back.

  “Our Dr. C believes in exercise,” Mrs. Hodges said. “He gets them walking, all of them, five miles a day. This is the cornerstone of his philosophy.”

  “But what if they don’t want to walk?” I asked. I had never seen anyone walk for pleasure, or even exercise. I had thought walking was for poor people.

  “Oh, they change their tune soon enough! Exercise, diet, and keeping busy! That’s the ticket!” boomed Mrs. Hodges from inside the car. We were passing a huge and very unusual building on our left that featured turrets and towers and even a crenellated battlement, as in Jane Eyre. “That there is Homewood, the residence of Dr. and Mrs. Carroll themselves,” she announced.

  “It looks like a castle,” I said.

  “No, no, you’ll see—it’s also for music, and theatricals, and dances and games, and arts and crafts. You’ll have your classes there, too. They keep the children quite busy, you’ll see.”

  “But wh
ere are the children?” I asked. “I don’t see any other children.” I was panicking again.

  “In the schoolroom, I daresay,” Mrs. Hodges said cheerfully. “Dr. C always takes on a few, if he is interested in the case.”

  “Is he interested in my case, then?” I asked.

  “Well, he must be, wouldn’t you think? Or you wouldn’t be here, now would you?”

  I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to think, having no say in anything. Both these ideas—that anyone might be interested in me, and that I was a “case”—astonished me. But now we were approaching the grassy, open top of the mountain with its impressive buildings surrounded by gardens and shrubbery.

  “That’s Highland Hall.” Mrs. Hodges indicated a huge fancy building with many verandas. “Offices on the first floor, patients’ rooms upstairs. Next is Central Building, that’s where the women patients live, and the assembly hall, and more offices, and then the treatment rooms on the top floor, and, of course, the kitchen and the dining hall downstairs. The dining hall’s quite lovely, you’ll see. Oak Lodge over there, that’s for the men.” She pointed out other, smaller structures as we came to a rolling stop before Highland Hall, where a tall, well-dressed man stood under the portico, shading his eyes to watch our arrival.

  Instinctively I knew that this must be Dr. Carroll. He walked forward to open my door in a courtly manner. “So. Evalina,” Dr. Carroll said gravely. “Welcome to Highland Hospital. You have had a long journey.”

  “I am not crazy,” I said. “I am not a case.”

  “No,” he said. “But you have been through a lot. You are much too thin, and very troubled, and very sad. I believe we can help you. We shall give you a place to grow up a bit, and keep you safe. Soon you will feel better,” he promised.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “Well, we shall see. Let us try.” Dr. Carroll had a nice smile, though he was a homely, awkward man, with jug ears and a big nose and gold-rimmed glasses. He held out a hand that was surprisingly hard—more like a workingman’s hand than a doctor’s. He must participate in these physical programs himself, I thought. He held my hand a long time, patting it as if it were a small wild animal. This was oddly calming. “Wait a bit, Margaret,” he said to Mrs. Hodges.