The Ocean Liner

Beacon

The sanatorium was not an easy place for a visitor to get into. It had helped greatly that Cubby was in uniform, and that there were ribbons on his breast. A Navy uniform and a Silver Star got you into most places these days without too many questions asked.

The mansion was Victorian Gothic, red brick and stone, with spires and mullioned windows. Ivy hugged the walls. The grounds were all rolling lawns and woods, more reminiscent of a country club than a psychiatric hospital. There was a golf course and a swimming pool and charming views of the Hudson River, like a nineteenth-century oil painting.

The talkative nurse, who made no attempt to hide the fact that Cubby was the most interesting visitor she’d had in a long time, told him that there was a gymnasium for the patients, not to mention rooms for painting or other creative endeavours, and a large library. She also confided that there were a lot of famous patients here. You had to be very wealthy to get your relations into Craig House. The fees ran to over a thousand dollars a month, a staggering amount, especially in wartime. Henry Fonda and F. Scott Fitzgerald had both brought their crazy wives here, although the story of Mrs Fonda had ended badly. Nurse Olsen, lowering her voice to a whisper, had pointed out the turret where Mrs Fonda had cut her throat with a razor.

And then, of course, there was Rosemary Kennedy.

‘She’ll be so glad to see you,’ Nurse Olsen assured Cubby. ‘She gets very lonely. She needs stimulation. The family don’t come for months at a time, and they’ve given strict orders that nobody else is to see her either. That’s not really fair, is it?’

‘No,’ Cubby replied, ‘it’s not.’

‘But you’re not really family, are you?’ The question was half-flirtatious, half-professional.

‘Miss Kennedy and I were engaged to be married. It didn’t work out.’

‘Is that right? That’s too bad.’ She eyed him speculatively, but didn’t ask why it hadn’t worked out. ‘How long are you on leave, Lieutenant?’

‘I have just forty-eight hours. Then I have to re-join my ship.’

‘What ship is that?’

Cubby smiled. ‘I’m not supposed to say. Loose lips sink ships, as they say.’

‘Do I look like a Nazi spy?’

‘You’re pretty enough to be one,’ he said gallantly.

Nurse Olsen giggled. She was a freckled redhead with a buoyant bust which her starched pinafore could not quite subdue. ‘You never know, do you?’

‘Well, I guess I can trust you. She’s the Saratoga.’

Her eyes opened very wide. ‘The Saratoga! Wasn’t she torpedoed?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That must have been terrible.’

‘It was interesting.’

She laid a stubby finger on his Silver Star ribbon. ‘Was that when you got this?’

‘Kind of.’ He was impatient to see Rosemary, but the nurse was hesitating, and he needed her good graces to get to Rosemary. ‘We all had to look out for each other. I don’t know why they gave me this. I accepted it for all the other guys.’

She seemed to make up her mind at last. ‘I’ll give you a private room. It’ll be quieter.’

‘That’s great. Thank you.’

She led him to a room overlooking a rose garden. It was a masculine sort of den, the furniture upholstered in tobacco-coloured leather and the panelled bookcases holding rows of bound medical journals with dates in the eighteen-hundreds. ‘This is Dr Slocum’s study, but he’s delivering a lecture in Baltimore today. Take a seat. I’ll bring Rosemary down.’

Cubby sat in a hard armchair to wait. It was getting to be late in the year. Through the diamond-paned window, he watched the heavy yellow heads of the autumn roses nodding in the breeze outside. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say to Rosemary. It was four years since he had last seen her, and in all that time he had not received a single letter from her, though he had written – in spite of Mrs Kennedy’s warning – many times.

When he looked back on that Cubby of four years ago, he hardly recognised himself. He had been a different person then, untouched by life, though he’d fancied that his heart had been broken.

In the years of war that had followed his enlisting in the Navy, he had been through fire and blood. He had witnessed the death of friends, the loss of innocence, all the terror and boredom and fury of war. He knew he would never play music again.

He looked now upon his earlier self as a man might look upon a younger brother, pitying his naiveté, wanting to protect him from harm, yet knowing that nothing could protect anyone from harm in this life. Sometimes the gulf that separated this Lieutenant Hubbard from that earlier Cubby was so deep and wide that he felt he must inevitably fall into two pieces, fractured beyond repair. Those moments usually happened when he was ashore, and he survived them by going into a kind of somnambulistic trance, sleepwalking his way through everything he was asked to do with eyes wide open, yet feeling nothing.

He heard a footstep outside the door and rose to his feet. Nurse Olsen came into the study, leading a woman; but to Cubby’s acute disappointment, it was not Rosemary. It was someone much older, someone who had evidently suffered a terrible accident, for she walked with painful slowness, her head hanging down to one side, her shoulders crooked, with one arm twisted awkwardly in front of her.

‘Here she is,’ Nurse Olsen said cheerfully. ‘She’s been quite perky today. Haven’t you, Rosemary? Look who’s come to see you. Isn’t that a lovely surprise?’

Cubby felt as though he had been plunged into an ice bath. He could not speak. As Nurse Olsen steered the shuffling figure to a chair, he saw that this human wreck was indeed Rosemary – or rather, what was left of her, because Rosemary had departed the twisted body, leaving it empty. The dull eyes that met his from under the crudely cropped hair were incurious and did not linger on him. Although the lips were moving, they did not frame any words of greeting. It was no more than a tremor.

‘I’ll just put this under her, in case of accidents.’ The nurse laid the folded towel on the chair, and then carefully helped Rosemary to lower her body down. When Rosemary was seated, the nurse propped a pillow under her head to keep her from sliding over. ‘Do you want me to stay?’ She smiled at Cubby. ‘Of course you don’t. You have a lot of private things to talk about. I’ll leave you in peace. There’s a buzzer on the desk. Just press that when you need me.’ She left the room.

Cubby couldn’t see Rosemary’s face clearly, since her chin was resting on her collarbone. He knelt on the carpet in front of her chair, looking up at her.

‘Rosemary,’ he whispered. ‘Do you know who I am?’

The dull eyes drifted across his face indifferently for a moment, then slid away. He studied her, hardly able to believe what he saw. The beauty of her face, so much of which had come from the vivacity of her expressions, was completely gone. What had once been plump was now drooping. The once-rounded cheeks were pouchy, the once-full lips thin and cracked. Her skin, which had bloomed with youth, was sallow. He saw that even her hands were prematurely aged, their grace gone, the nails cut short. They lay in her lap like two dead birds.

‘It’s me. Cubby. Don’t you remember me?’

He thought he saw her nodding at that, though it might have been just part of the tremors which now and then moved her body. He was appalled at the change in her.

‘Do you know why I came to see you today? Do you know what day it is?’

She was unresponsive.

‘Oh, Rosemary. What happened to you?’

He sat back in the hard armchair, and rested his head in his hands. He hadn’t known what to expect today. Perhaps Rosemary screaming, Rosemary raging, but at least Rosemary alive. Not this. Not Rosemary dead. Rosemary dead was not something he could accept or understand. He sat hunched over in misery for a long time, remembering the intense joy he had once held in his arms, now gone forever.

He heard a wet sound from her mouth, and took his hands away from his face. She had raised her head off her chest. The effort made her neck quiver. But she was looking at him. Her lips were moving, straining to form a word.

‘Ca…’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m Cubby. Do you remember me, darling?’

She peered at him searchingly for a while, as though trying to recall something. He was not sure whether she recognised him, or whether she remembered anything about him at all. Then he noticed the wetness that was darkening the brown fabric of her slacks, soaking into the towel she sat on. That was what the nurse had meant by ‘in case of accidents’.

He saw her expression change, showing the first emotion he’d seen in her – a rush of embarrassment or shame. Her head drooped down on to her breast again. He thought she might be crying.

Cubby turned away and pressed the buzzer. In a short while, Nurse Olsen came back.

‘Ah, I hoped that wouldn’t happen,’ she said regretfully. ‘I took her to the commode before I brought her down, but she didn’t do anything. I guess she was too excited to see you.’

‘Excited?’ he echoed incredulously. ‘What the hell have they done to her?’

She turned to look at him. ‘Didn’t you know about the operation?’

‘What operation?’

‘I thought you knew. You said you were her fiancé.’

‘I was. That was four years ago. I had no idea she was like this.’

Nurse Olsen parted the hair at the front of Rosemary’s head to show him the curved scars on her white scalp. ‘They lobotomised her.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘They took out part of her brain. It’s a very new medical procedure. It was supposed to make her calmer. It wasn’t a success.’

‘A success?’ Cubby was trembling. ‘They’ve destroyed her!’

Nurse Olsen took him to the window and lowered her voice. ‘Watch what you say in front of her, Lieutenant. You don’t know what she hears and understands.’

‘Whose idea was it to do this to her?’

‘Her parents took the decision.’

He felt sick to his heart. ‘What did she do that was so terribly wrong? What did she do to deserve this?’

‘They told us she was out of control. Sexually hyperactive.’

‘Sexually hyperactive?’

‘I guess this will upset you, having been engaged to her and all, but she was running around with a lot of men.’

‘Do you know how her brothers behave?’ Cubby demanded.

‘There’s one rule for men,’ Nurse Olsen replied primly, ‘and another for women.’

‘There certainly is in that family,’ he replied bitterly. ‘The men do as they please and the women do as they’re told.’

‘She was a danger to herself. There were incidents. And there was more than that. She had seizures, learning difficulties—’

‘You never knew her as she was,’ Cubby snapped. ‘Whatever problems she had, she’s a thousand times worse now!’

Nurse Olsen straightened her uniform. ‘Look, we didn’t do this to her. We just take care of her now. Okay? So there’s no use yelling at me. People bring their problems to us and dump them here, and we just make sure there’s no more scandal. I’m sorry you weren’t prepared for this. I would have explained if I’d known. I just assumed you were familiar with her condition.’

He couldn’t bear to look at Rosemary any longer. He was staring at the wind-battered yellow roses outside, which were drooping their heads like Rosemary. ‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Well, now you know.’

‘Today is her birthday.’

Nurse Olsen looked surprised. ‘Why, yes. Of course it is. I’d almost forgotten.’

‘She’s twenty-five.’

‘Well, she has the mental age of a two-year-old now.’ There was a silence after this brutal assessment. Then the nurse sighed. ‘You’ll have to excuse us, Lieutenant. I need to change her. I think it’s best if you leave.’

‘Yes.’ He was sleepwalking now, his feelings numbed. There was nothing more to be said or done.

Nurse Olsen’s expression softened. ‘She may make progress. Come back in a year.’

He wondered if she meant that to be consoling. He forced himself to look at the hunched figure of Rosemary, her head hanging down. ‘A year?’

‘It’s going to be slow. But you never know. Come back in a year.’