Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

The Silence of Mrs. ILN

Her children found it impossible to understand old Mrs. Iln now. They were forced to call her senile. But if they had paused a moment from their wild activities and tried to imagine her state of mind, they would have known that this was not the case.

Decades before, when her recent marriage had cast a pleasant light over her otherwise homely features, she had been as articulate as any other woman, perhaps even more articulate than was necessary. If her husband asked her where his cufflinks were, she might answer, “I think they are in the top drawer of your bureau, though it could be that you took them off in the dining room and they are still there, on the table, or perhaps they have fallen onto the floor by now, in all this confusion; if they got stepped on I don’t know what I would do, I just don’t know…” When she had had a little wine and felt moved to give her opinion of the political situation, she would burst out with “You know what I think? I think it’s a case of collective madness: I think they’re all insane, we’re all insane, but it isn’t our fault, and it isn’t the fault of our parents, and it isn’t the fault of our parents’ parents. I don’t know whose fault it is, but I would like to know…”

A few years later, she and her husband understood one another too well to need long explanations. Her opinions did not change over time, but hardened into obsessive and monotonous responses, and remained thoroughly familiar to her husband. She began to curtail her sentences, and her meaning was always clear to her husband and to her children, as they grew up. When her children left home, one by one, Mrs. Iln was gradually overcome by the feeling that she had no purpose in the world and no reason to be alive. She lost sight of herself completely. Her husband had grown into her until she hardly distinguished him from herself, and now her sentences were reduced to a few words: “Dresser drawer in your bedroom,” she would say, or “completely insane.” Since her husband knew what she was going to say before she said it, even those few words were unnecessary and in time were left unspoken. “I wonder where my cufflinks are,” her husband would say softly, more to himself than to her. And even before she wagged her head toward the bureau, he would be there rummaging among his handkerchiefs and foreign coins. Or when he read aloud to her from the morning paper she would purse her lips and give him a certain stormy look and he would hear the “insane” of a few years before echoing in the air. He too might have stopped speaking, if he had not grown to like the constant murmur from his own lips.

Since nothing happened in her house that had not happened before, since her children, who found her silence unnerving after the din of their own homes, rarely visited her, Mrs. Iln no longer had any reason to speak, and silence became a deeply rooted habit. When her husband fell gravely ill, she tended him silently; when he died, she had no words for her grief; when her oldest children asked her to live with them, she shook her head and went home.

Sometimes she felt the need to give a word or two of explanation especially to her grandchildren, as she watched them from beyond her wall of silence; sometimes her children begged her to speak, as though it would prove something to them. And at these times she struggled as though in a nightmare to bring out one sound, and could not. It was as if by speaking she would have damaged something inside herself.

More and more often in her loneliness, thoughts would come to her as they had never come before, not even in her youth. They were thoughts more complex than “insanity,” and she would hear the words mounting in turmoil within her. But when her children came at the weekend to sit with her for an hour or two, it was hard to find the right moment to begin speaking of all she had thought, and if the moment came, when their restless chatter stopped and their eyes fell on her old pitted face, then she could rarely summon the words that had flown hither and thither in her head all week. And if she managed to summon the words to her mind, then she could never, never break through the last barrier and free herself from the constriction of her speechlessness.

At last she stopped trying, and when her children came they saw an expression on her face that had not been there before — a stiff, dead look, a look of blankness and defeat that reflected her hopelessness. They immediately seized upon this expression as evidence of senility. She was astonished and hurt by their reaction. If they had been more patient with her, if they had stayed with her for longer periods of time, they would have seen something in her that was not senility. Yet they clung to the idea of senility and registered her name in a nursing home.

At first she was horrified, and everything in her cried out against the coming change. With renewed vigor she frowned at them and sent them a look that her husband had well understood. But they were not moved. In their eyes, her every gesture could now be called senile. Even quite normal behavior seemed mad to them, and nothing she did could reach them.

But once she was actually living in the nursing home, she made peace with her surroundings. During the day she sat in the library reading and thinking. She read very slowly and spent many more hours staring at the wall than at the book. She tested her mind against what she read and it grew stronger. Only the nurses were not quite real to her and puzzled her: she thought their brittle good humor was not honest. They did not like her, because her lucid eye made them uneasy. But she moved comfortably among her bloodless, wrinkled companions, more comfortably than she had ever moved among the vigorous people of her former life. She found the silence in the crowded dining room appropriate. She understood very well the morose men and women who struggled along the garden paths in the afternoon or sat staring through the porch railings at the street during the long summer twilight. Tentatively at first, and with growing wonder, she realized that she had been nearly dead among the living. Among the nearly dead, she was at last beginning to live.