The Storm at the Door Read online

  ALSO BY STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK

  The Story of Forgetting

  The Storm at the Door is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Stefan Merrill Block

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

  LLC for permission to reprint “Waking in the Blue,” “Epilogue,”

  and seven lines from “Dolphin” from Collected Poems by Robert Lowell,

  copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell.

  Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Block, Stefan Merrill.

  The storm at the door: a novel / by Stefan Merrill Block.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60510-2

  1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Psychiatric hospitals—Fiction.

  3. Self-realization—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.L643S75 2011

  813′.6—dc22

  2010026777

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Lynn Buckley

  Jacket images: © David E. Scherman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images (couple), Mary Evans Picture Library (foliage)

  v3.1

  For my grandparents

  Listen,

  How quickly your heart is beating in me.

  —from “Any Case” by Wisława Szymborska

  I have sat and listened to too many

  words of the collaborating muse,

  and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

  not avoiding injury to others,

  not avoiding injury to myself—

  to ask compassion … this book, half fiction,

  an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting.

  —Robert Lowell, from “Dolphin”

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  We Must Always Be Vigilant

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  The Sadness of Distance

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  It Had Been Her Decision Hadn’t It?

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  The Vast Unknowable

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  The Stronger Will

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Order to All Things

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Everyone Knows

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Horrorland

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  That was Katharine

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Near Visions and Half-Whispers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Another Possibility

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  The Language the Dead Speak

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Exhaustion or Fear?

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Nothing Will Be Restrained

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  The Weight of It

  Chapter 1

  Silence and Sounds

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  As Vast as All Things

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  The Words

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Someplace Else Entirely

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Epilogue

  What Happened

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  And Yet, for Moments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction inspired by my grandparents’ true history. This story does not depict my grandparents’ actual lives, but it does incorporate some of their real letters and pictures, a few of my memories and the memories of those who knew them, and historical details from a number of books and articles. I use this documented history as a point of departure into the story I imagine. For your patience, generosity, and openness in my interviews, and also for your gift of the freedom to diffract your stories through the prism of myself, thank you Roberta Gatehouse, Melissa Waldie, Lyn Waldie, Betty Hall, Betty Campbell, Sydney Hall Jr., Joanie Singer, and Carol Avery.

  In my attempt to comprehend what my grandfather’s life inside of a psychiatric institution in the 1960s might have been like, I found the following works particularly useful and inspiring: Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital by Alex Beam; Under Observation: Life Inside the McLean Psychiatric Hospital by Lisa Berger and Alexander Vuckovic, M.D.; Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen; Life Studies by Robert Lowell; Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell by Paul Mariani; Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook; A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar; The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath; and The Mental Hospital by Alfred Stanton and Morris Schwartz.

  The Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill is my fictional rendition of McLean Hospital, the real institution in which my grandfather resided. Today, McLean Hospital is one of America’s leading mental health facilities and its invaluable work has helped many people and saved many lives. My depiction of the treatment of patients at the Mayflower Home in the 1960s does not describe actual conditions at McLean. The poet Robert Lowell was a patient at McLean Hospital, but the Robert Lowell of this novel is a fictional character, and—with the exception of his poems reprinted here—the actions, thoughts, and language I ascribe to him are products of my imagination. The other patients, staff, and administrators who populate the Mayflower Home are entirely fictional and they do not represent any real people.

&nb
sp; I wrote part of this book as a Fellow at the idyllic Santa Maddalena Foundation; thanks to the generosity and support of the great Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori.

  Bill Clegg, David Ebershoff, and Lee Brackstone: once again, your insightful, creative, and diligent work has gladdened every page. If not for your passion, kindness, and guidance, this book would not exist. Thank you.

  For springing me from self-imposed solitary confinement, thank you, thank you, thank you, my brilliant friends, readers, teachers, and publishers.

  Mom, Dad, and Aaron: to say how much I owe to you would require a whole new vocabulary.

  1

  There is the house in the wilderness. The house, Echo Cottage, with the lake spread before it, a quivering lattice of light in the late afternoon. Beneath the mossy portico, a placard displays Echo’s flaking name.

  An overcast-pale porch rings Echo Cottage, and at its far corner is an aging chaise lounge, rusted aluminum supporting an avocado vinyl cushion. Sticking to the vinyl, my grandmother dozes beneath the brown-gray nest of her hair.

  The air along the shoreline is dense with an insectival mist, the gnats hovering. From time to time, my cousins pierce the droning quiet with their yelps, as they tackle one another in the water. Thirty years before, my great-grandmother rested on Echo’s chaise; years later, my mother will ascend to the recumbent throne. But it is 1989, and the chair belongs to my grandmother.

  My grandmother’s calves unsuction from the cushion as she wakes. Her stalwart New England face tightens, the fine wrinkles drawn taut. The translucent shells of her eyelids part to reveal her eyes, which can hold light in a nearly impossible way, as if her irises were twin concavities, blue geodes. My grandmother’s eyes look out to the lake; her gaze is as inscrutable as ever.

  There is my grandmother, Katharine Mead Merrill. What do I know of her? That she was so often in that chair. That in the afternoons, she often slept. That, one afternoon, in the summer of 1989, she woke from a nap to make the vexing decision that she made.

  2

  Katharine has been dreaming. Of what? Of her husband, of Frederick. Though the specifics of the dream recede into the static of wakefulness, a feeling of certainty remains. Not one of anger or sadness, but perhaps born of both. A simple knowledge of what must be done.

  Katharine knows, suddenly, the rightness of what she must do.

  Still, she takes her time. She rises slowly, pauses to receive the diffracting late afternoon light as she enters the house. Katharine passes through the musty, tenebrous living room, which always seems resentful of sunlight, seems to be the place nighttime gathers to hide out from the summer’s unblinking sun stare. As she enters the kitchen, the smell of stale coffee prompts her to empty the filter into the trash. She pulls a box of Lorna Doones from the cabinet, slips one whole into her mouth, as she used to as a child, letting it dissolve on her tongue. Increasingly, in these last months, she performs such behaviors that, if not exactly childlike, are not quite as prim, quite as austere in her familiar matronly ways. On this summer day of 1989, Katharine is sixty-nine; the early traces of Alzheimer’s have begun to fray the edges of her attention and intention. For a moment, pausing at the kitchen sink to observe my cousins diving off the dock, she remembers her certainty but forgets its object; for a moment, she thinks she woke, simply, resolved to swim. But, no, no. It was something else; the idea of a swim does not fill the space opened by her resolve.

  Katharine reminds herself that forgotten notions can sometimes be found where they were first conjured, and crosses halfway back to the porch. Just before the screen door, Katharine remembers her determination, and its actual object. The actual object is lodged like a repressed memory, like a Freudian scene of childhood trauma, behind and within all the clutter of the years, somewhere deep inside the attic. The actual object she has not held for a decade or more, but she often still finds it holding her. The actual object, or the idea of it, sometimes rises in her thoughts against her will, threatening to ruin all the progress she has made in converting her memories of Frederick to the stories she tells. When she speaks with her daughters and her relatives about her husband, all accept her characterization, without a flinch of doubt. Frederick was an alcoholic, a philanderer, a madman who once exposed himself on the road leading into town. He was insane, and she was sane. He was selfish, and she sacrificed.

  Frederick was a man of manic passions. He wrote a great many letters to her, just as he also wrote stories, ideas for inventions, patents, politics, and philosophy. He also wrote poetry, some good, most dreadful romantic boilerplate that leaned heavily into Elizabethan English in a sentimentalizing, embarrassing way. She can keep all of these pages in boxes in her closet, as she usually can keep the memory of him near her in her orderly way. But the actual object, that bundle of papers, is a telltale heart. She buried it long ago, and still it thumps its maddening beat. Katharine finds an ancient, paint-splattered stepladder in the laundry room, and carries it upstairs.

  At the top of the cottage’s staircase, the entrance to the attic is a heavy door, carved from the ceiling. The heft of the door, along with the dexterous, near-acrobatic maneuver one must perform to pass through it, makes entering the attic an act as burdensome as the mental act that it accompanies. At sixty-nine, Katharine is lightly stooped, her gait stunted with osteoporosis, but her arms are strong from the water, from canoeing and swimming. She hoists herself, tries not to look down.

  Inside, the shock of attic, the recognition of this alternate parallel space, always suspended here, above us: a silent, cobwebbed clutter of immutability, a dark antipode to the house below, forever blustery with motion and light, with cocktail parties and children chasing one another in swimsuits. Katharine eyes the piles nearest the door: the old records, the broken gramophone, a box of withered gloves. Up here, without our choosing, things simply persist. Katharine wonders at the mystery of what does and does not survive. There are a great many things she would have wanted to keep that are not here now; a great number of unwanted objects remain. Nearly all photographs from her two youthful, single years in Boston are gone, and yet here are the legs of a mildly pleasing doll she had as a girl. Katharine suspects that the truth of memory is that it works this way too: that if we do not decide to discard and rearrange, if we do not deliberately inventory and organize, unwanted things will simply persist. Memory can be a willful power, but we must always be vigilant. Always, we must choose.

  She walks carefully along the beams, knowing that the space between, which appears to be a floor, is in fact the thin cardboard paneling of the ceiling below. Once, while she was sleeping in her bedroom, Frederick, who would spend long afternoons excavating the attic’s recesses, fell from the beams and came plunging down, ricocheting off the side of her bed, landing on the floor. He then stood, holding a milk crate of antique Christmas ornaments from above. Ho, ho, ho, he said. Merry Christmas! That was Frederick.

  She knows precisely where to find it, back five yards or so, in the bottom of the crate that contains the things of Frederick she cannot quite bear to throw away, yet also cannot quite bear to live with: his naval uniform, a collection of pressed and dried flowers from their early courtship, the box that once held her engagement ring. It is strange to put her fingers on these things; at first they are only common objects in her hands. Yet, if she lingers too long on any of them, they become sentient and electric. Through her fingertips, they begin to transmit something; they begin to transfer their history, nearly bucking Katharine’s determination. And so she digs. She digs and hefts and shifts until, simply, there it is. For a brief moment, it too is diminished in its objectness. It is, after all, just ink and yellowed paper, just paper holding commonplace words, like the words in which she thinks, writes, speaks. It is strange that this particular arrangement of mere words, of letters of ink, could haunt her dreams.

  For a moment she thinks this whole enterprise, her resolve, is foolish, or worse. A disrespect, a betrayal. These are only the words of a man s
he has not seen for more than twenty years. A man she loved once in a life she no longer lives. She nearly puts the papers back, nearly leaves the attic to change into a swimsuit and enjoy the water at its best hour, as the sun starts to settle. And then, just for a moment, she lets herself read.

  And suddenly here, in her hands, is another place. She knows that she does not believe—not really—the stories she tells of Frederick. She knows she does not believe—not really—the opinions of Frederick’s psychiatrists, her relatives, her own family. She knows that she still does not believe it is as simple as others tell her it ought to be, as she tells herself it ought to be: that she was sane, while Frederick was mad; that she performed the heroic necessary work of saving her family, while, in his mental hospital, Frederick indulged in the escapist writing behavior (his psychiatrist’s words) that is now in Katharine’s hands. Sane, mad, heroic, dissolute, earnest, deluded: she knows she does not believe—not really—in those simple divisions into which she has spent the last twenty years organizing the past.

  Katharine’s determination returns to her.

  And still, as she carefully descends from the attic, papers in hand, Katharine wonders: why now? Why all these years later, when everything has turned out, more or less, well? When the fate of her family no longer hinges on the outcome of her marriage’s drama? Why now, this certainty?

  Frederick so often devised moments of dramatic catharsis, would drag himself bleeding from the night, into the living room, and demand reckoning. In those moments, with all his impassioned urgency, he was always more powerful than she, and she hated him for it. But here, now, is her reckoning, solitary and silent, the way she has always felt that such resolution actually comes. A private feeling; a quiet moment.

  Does guilt at all taint her certainty? Katharine tries to encourage herself. Likely, she thinks, these pages would be of no use to anyone. Likely, their power comes only from what they signify to her alone. To others, these pages would likely seem only the madness that perhaps they are. And, besides, hasn’t she earned this? After all she has suffered and survived, hasn’t she earned this final power?

  Katharine is in the downstairs living room now, stuffing newspaper into the Franklin stove, arranging the kindling.