Early Warning

The doctor for the first time looked into her eyes, said, “I am sorry. May I ask—”

“Almost a year and a half ago.”

“Has your husband shown signs…”

It went on.

He was to stay in the hospital for three days, for observation. Lillian said, “May I see him?”

“It’s going to take a couple of hours for him to wake up. I guess he’ll be surprised to find himself here.”

“Very disappointed.”

“Oh, maybe not. Second thoughts—”

Lillian shook her head.

It wasn’t until she was home to get the car that she threw the bedspread back onto the bed and saw the other note, the one written in a neat hand folded into Tina’s Christmas card. It read:

Dear Lily Pons—

I am doing a bad thing to you, my darling. I know even more clearly than you do that this is the ultimate betrayal, and the only way on earth that I could or would betray you is exactly this way. But you know I’ve been waiting for the chance. You know I’ve been putting my affairs in order — not my financial affairs, but my domestic affairs. I have been waiting for each of you to recover somehow from Tim’s death, and now we have reached the crossroads where everyone has a path to the future. I saw all the paths at Christmas. Even Debbie is in good hands. You are the only one. Why can’t I take you with me? I ask myself that. And I ask myself that again, feeling you beside me in the night, feeling your hand in mine, hearing you breathe. But I can’t do it, nor can I stay. Why is that? Because I literally and truly see no future. Blank. Empty. Nothing. At last. And I am glad of it. You are perfect. I love you.

Arthur

The first thing he asked her when she saw him in his room, and he was groggy when he asked it, was whether she had told anyone at the office. She said no, and it was true — she had not told anyone at the office. Who had she told? Minnie. She had to talk to someone; she had called the farthest-away person that she could think of, in her office at the high school, and cried to her for ten minutes. Minnie might or might not tell Rosanna, but Minnie did want to tell Joe — Joe wouldn’t say anything. Arthur swallowed several times, closed his eyes, and patted her hand as best he could. Finally, he said, “Well, I guess we’ll soon find out once and for all.”

“What?” said Lillian.

“Whether the phone is tapped.”

It was.

Wilbur and Finn appeared after dinner. They took Lillian into the living room, turned on the lights, and offered her a drink from her own liquor cabinet. No, not even one sip of the Rémy Martin. Wilbur poured himself a Scotch and soda. Finn, a shot of crème de menthe over ice. Sheppard Pratt was where he would be going, up in Towson; men like Arthur had walked its halls for years; nervous breakdowns were part of the job, Arthur knew that. Arthur had always taken everything very seriously. That had its good and bad aspects. Electroshock was of course a possibility.

She told the children he was in the hospital with pneumonia. He would be fine; but, no, they couldn’t go see him, it was too dangerous. She should have said something else, but Arthur hadn’t told her what to say. The two doctors met her as soon as she arrived at Sheppard Pratt the next morning: Dr. Rockford, who was tall and impatient, and Dr. Kristal, who was younger, shorter, and more charming. What had Arthur been doing and saying for the last few months, for the last year, whatever stood out in her mind? Dr. Rockford sat to her left and Dr. Kristal sat to her right. Dr. Rockford would ask a question: Has Mr. Manning shown signs of depression? And then Dr. Kristal would translate it: Did he seem to have a disrupted sleep pattern? Was he eating sufficiently and with enjoyment? Had his drinking habits changed? In half an hour they had elicited most of what she remembered about Arthur staring out the window of his office, about Arthur wandering the house, about Arthur pushing his food around his plate. Yes, he did drink a little, still, but he’d stopped drinking as much as he had been.

Then it was on to his history — the death of his first wife and child in childbirth, his proposal to Lillian not a year after that, the immediate pregnancy, his “manic” (Dr. Rockford’s word) reaction to fatherhood, his “excessive sexual importunities” (Dr. Kristal). His habits of secrecy. “He has to keep secrets,” said Lillian. “That’s part of his job.” They both nodded. Finally, feeling that she had been led step by step into this but not knowing any way out, she told the story of his mother, the death of the older sister in the flu epidemic, the hanging. Dr. Kristal wrote industriously on his clipboard, and Dr. Rockford nodded as if he had expected as much. Lillian at once had the sensation that there was nothing about her marriage or Arthur that was at all unusual or admirable. Everything she cherished was, if not a symptom of pathology, then an item of utter triviality. She fell silent.