The Storm at the Door

by Stefan Merrill Block

Genres: Biographical; Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

The past is not past for Katharine Merrill. Even after two decades of volatile marriage, Katharine still believes she can have the life that she felt promised to her by those first exhilarating days with her husband, Frederick. For two months, just before Frederick left to fight in World War II, Katharine received his total attentiveness, his limitless charms, his astonishing range of intellect and wit. Over the years, however, as Frederick’s behavior and moods have darkened, Katharine has covered for him, trying to rein in his great manic passions and bridge his deep wells of sadness: an unending project of keeping up appearances and hoping for the best. But the project is failing. Increasingly, Frederick’s erratic behavior, amplified by alcohol, distresses Katharine and their four daughters and gives his friends and family cause to worry for his sanity. When, in the summer of 1962, a cocktail party ends with her husband in handcuffs, Katharine makes a fateful decision: She commits Frederick to Mayflower Home, America’s most revered mental asylum.

There, on the grounds of the opulent hospital populated by great poets, intellectuals, and madmen, Frederick tries to transform his incarceration into a creative exercise, to take each meaningless passing moment and find the art within it. But as he lies on his room’s single mattress, Frederick wonders how he ever managed to be all that he once was: a father, a husband, a business executive. Under the faltering guidance of a self-obsessed psychiatrist, Frederick and his fellow patients must try to navigate their way through a gray zone of depression, addiction, and insanity.

Meanwhile, as she struggles to raise four young daughters, Katharine tries to find her way back to Frederick through her own ambiguities, delusions, and the damages done by her rose-colored belief in a life she no longer lives.

Inspired by elements of the lives of the author’s grandparents, this haunting love story shifts through time and reaches across generations. Along the way, Stefan Merrill Block stunningly illuminates an age-old truth: even if one’s daily life appears ordinary, one can still wage a silent, secret, extraordinary war.

Release date: June 21, 2011

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 368

Sample

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 she 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.