A Trip To Hell
I am old now, feeble and infirm. When I think to be-cry this I recall a peculiar visit to an old age hell I made when I was 25.
Before my mother died she firmly stipulated that my blind father was never to go live with my brother Alan and his wife Barbara. Alan was the sweetest of men, Barbara was evil. I had not believed in evil until I met her. I have believed in it ever since. The rational for Barbara’s blatant and nuanced subtleties of cruelty where that she was schizophrenic, had been in at least one psychiatric ward, and that she purportedly had the IQ of a genius. I have never accepted excuses.
She could charm, beguile and then in a moment flash a viper’s tongue of thoughts that should never have been spoken. Barbara had power and she gloried in it. She could and did reduce people either to tears or into her fearing slaves.
She hated my parents. This perhaps because of their intelligence, good manners and high degree of what can be called culture. All the books and music in our house were a Rome to be sacked. My father was a special target. After all he wore a suit and tie every day and unlike any preacher she’d met in Oklahoma never proselytized. This in particular aroused her wrath, I suppose because it didn’t fit any of her various zeitgeist scenarios.
When her nasty behavior awoke she would quickly turn off her cackling blue jay laugh, her attempts at what I now term crowd hypnosis, and assume command. Then she turned turned our parsonage into a battle field. When her canine toothed exegesis of our family and home broke his resolve, made on behalf of Alan, the poor man showed he knew her game and trained his own extremely sharp wit on her. He’d march about the house quoting Hamlet repetitively, loud enough to drown her out, “Mad as the sea and the wind.”
That he saw through her from their first ever meeting and knew her for what she was made them enemies for life.
My mother disturbed her in equal measure because no matter what mischief Barbara sowed and what satanic utterances flew from her mouth like Hieronymus Bosch beasts from the rectums of the damned, Barbara couldn’t break Mother’s placid half smile and imperturbable moon face mask. Despite all her eccentricities, mother after all was still the daughter of Verna Cane Little—a lady true blessed without airs.
Mother had no doubt of what Father’s life would be like with Barbara after her impending death. Slowly but surely she was dying of cancer. So she made Steve and me promise to keep father away from her. To make sure of this mother herself called The Kansas Methodist Home in Topeka to register him for a single room, to be ready for him as soon as her funeral had passed. In quick order that came and went leaving her three sons dumbstruck, and her husband roaming the dark house at night looking for her.
We sought alternatives for him but then immediately as if mother were nodding at us knowingly Barbara began to wheedle at Alan for father to come and live with them.
Straight away we moved him from Abilene to Topeka with a writ of legal guardianship in hand.
The ‘Home’ –what a wicked misnomer–was a very badly managed dump, a reality that slowly became clear as the months passed. One stormy May when I was visiting for a few days with Steve and Georgia, home from New York where I lived then, Steve and I decided to drive the 100 miles over to Topeka to talk with father. Talks with him were unlike talks with anyone else we knew. The only dread in it was leaving him alone when it came time to leave. That was a terrific hurt that I recall too well all these years on.
The closer we moved to Topeka the more it looked like a tornado afternoon in Kansas, tumultuous clouds from horizon to horizon, the telltale ghoulish green light and the change in pressure that made the human heart heavy with anxiety. Steve drove faster and faster. In the flint Hills we could see spikes of black clouds moving up towards us from the southwest any of them a likely nascent tornado.
We entered Topeka in the aftermath of a twister. Humidity like walls about us. We were experienced enough with tornados to know that this one had just swept through town. Trees and tree limbs cluttered like burned skeleton bones on roofs, across lawns, in the streets. Power lines sizzled like burning steaks on the ground. Residents were out standing still in place as if afraid to move, bewildered by the Twilight Zone landscape.
We went zigzagging through the semi blocked streets, exasperatingly slow, both knowing the other feared what might be waiting for us. Topeka was no stranger to the wrath of tornadoes, a big bad one had hit in 1966, 20 years back, killing 57 and leveling whole neighborhoods. Wind then so strong it knocked out an entire panel of the so grand capitol building dome that stands 16 feet taller than the one in Washington.
We found the Methodist Home, an old brick structure, intact, but the large park around it had lost some 50 old trees that had given it one lonely and only touch of grace. Without them there was no description for the place except institutional. A naked grimness that the green storm light made ghastly.
Inside there was no one in the lobby. Power out it was a glowing expanse of dirty white walls, nothing but a prison-like discipline to the long unadorned halls. Alone on the walls, behind the unattended information counter and beside the gaping doorway to the deserted Director’s office, was a large Victorian etching. One of a too handsome young Jesus, a jail-bait shepherd carrying a lamb under his arm the spitting image of a stuffed animal won at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson.
Both elevators were dead, doors open. They were dark as tombs. From one came a low voice, an old lady backed up into a corner in a bath robe supported by a walker talking to an invisible audience about Pearl Harbor. On a gurney in the other elevator, Steve shined in his flashlight for us to see, lay an unattended stiff, a corpse under a sheet. We knew the staff had fled their charges for the safety of the basement and were now probably down there having an illicit smoke break.
Father’s room was on the third floor. The higher they put you the worse off you were. People called to us for help from their blitz-dark rooms of doom. We flinched but could do nothing but pass along our way leaving those wretches entombed in tombs before their time. The corridor reminded me of one I’d once walked in the catacombs in Rome.
Trays had been dropped the floor, bedpans were scattered. The place stank of excrement and leeks.
An elderly gentleman had managed to crawl out into the hall where he lay in a heap. As we went by he stretch a naked Dachau arm to beg us for assistance. We went on assuring him we’d be back. We never saw him again.
At last we found father sitting in his room with Eunice, his girl friend, in her very late 70s. They were holding hands in the gloom. The staff of the home, those now hiding in the maze of pipes far below had already intimated their disapproval of this to us with self righteous innuendo. Father was playing a Charles Wesley hymn, one of the 6,500 he wrote, “O for a thousand tongues to sing,” on his harmonica. Eunice at fifth-grade level Alzheimer’s was a bit too happy in his company.
At the age of 62 father was by far the youngest resident of the hopeless Third Floor. This because he had occult hydro cephalous, the cause of his blindness. Every so often the signs of confusion began to show and another brain operation was required to return him to his old self, which it did with the lightning flash of a burning bush. Fatty tissue had again begun clogging the cerebral fluid pump they had implanted inside his skull. And that would slowly reduce this brilliant man to an idiot.
That tornado evening in the Kansas Methodist Home he was slip sliding fast. Before we left he said, “That bullfrog is back under my bed would you mind looking for him and shoo him away. He’s quite loud.”
I was too emotional with father, but Steve could handle him fairly well. Steve faithfully kneeled to train his flashlight scrutinized into the dark nether world under the bed.
“You know father there’s nary a sign of him now. He’s gone away.”
At this father bellowed angrily, just as the lights came back on and Eunice’s hand leapt away from his lap,
“You see. He was there before!”
With the power the warning bell blared again.