Spokane: A Triptych

Paul Willis

I Should Have Talked

In his book Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey refers offhandedly to American evangelicalism as a form of mental illness. I am hoping he is wrong. And it seems to me that Abbey himself, in his many barbs directed at his childhood faith, cannot quite turn his eyes away from it. In this, I think, he is like Mark Twain—both of them Christ-haunted in twisted and peculiar ways. If there is a mental illness of faith, there may also be a mental illness of lost faith. But Abbey’s comment invites agreement, even from evangelicals. At the very least, evangelicalism seems to encourage strange forms of delusional, masochistic behavior. This literally came home to me some years ago, during the time my wife and I were still in school, when a sadly afflicted man spent the night with us in Spokane. Sharon and I picked him up on a grimy winter afternoon at the bus station. He had come from Pullman, eighty miles south. His wife, Jill, an acquaintance of Sharon’s, had asked if Jerry could stay overnight before flying out to Toronto. I had met Jerry the month before, just before we had moved north to Spokane. He had been witnessing door-to-door with booklets from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and had knocked on our door as well. One look at his weak eyes and childlike face and I knew he was a little off. Sharon told me she didn’t know all the details, but Jill had told her that Jerry was now mentally ill and hadn’t held a job for the last two years. They lived on unemployment.

Jerry stepped off the bus carrying a bulging suitcase with broken clasps; it was held together with knotted twine. He spoke softly, ending almost every sentence with you know. “I appreciate this, you know.” We drove to our apartment, where he sat on the couch and said little. “That’s what I do most, you know,” he said during dinner. “Just sit on the couch. Don’t seem to have the energy.” While helping me to wash the dishes, he confided that he planned to enter the ministry. It was hard to know how to reply.

When we finished the dishes, he said, “I’d like to join you in your family worship later this evening, you know.”

“Well,” I replied, “we were just planning to study tonight, actually.”

“We have family worship every night,” he said. “We sing some familiar choruses and the kids say their memory verses, you know. Jamie, he can usually say his, but Jay can usually only recognize his verse. Jay’s just two, you know. You and Sharon could just pick out some familiar choruses for later on this evening, you know.”

As I think about it now, I realize how little it would have cost us to read some scripture and sing some songs with Jerry that night. I’d like to think that today I would have done so. But on that night, out of pure stubbornness, I suppose, not to mention several poems I had to read for my seminar in the pastoral, I ignored his request. At some level, I felt a kind of creeping revulsion. The idea of family worship felt tainted by his mental illness.

When Jerry saw that Sharon and I were intent on our schoolwork, he left to go witnessing in the neighborhood. I cringed as the door closed behind him. What had we unleashed on our block? Earlier in the evening he had told me about a man on the bus with whom he had shared the gospel. “I offered him the booklet and he took it,” he said with a hopeful look.

Over Christmas Jerry had been in the hospital for tests. He had spent several hours lying in a room with a tube all the way down his throat. Next to him had been a man about to go into surgery. A month later Jerry heard fourth-hand about a man who had died at the hospital. Jerry was sure it was the man he had lain next to for those few hours.

“I should have talked to him,” he said. “I’ve learned my lesson now—I should have talked to him.”

“How could you have talked to him with a tube down your throat?” I asked.

“I should have talked to him,” Jerry said.

When Jerry got back from witnessing, he returned a call from his wife. “I love you, honey,” he said, and then laughed a three-beat, quiet, crazy, embarrassed laugh: “Hee-hee-hee.” A minute later he said, “I love you, honey. Hee-hee-hee.” He said it exactly the same way.

Then Jerry went out to run for exercise. He wore his winter coat, checked slacks, and leather street shoes. He wouldn’t borrow my tennis shoes and sweat pants. Soon enough he came back and took a shower and padded around in his pajamas. Just before going to bed, he settled down for a little while and read a book called The Christian Father. The next day he would fly to Canada to stay with his parents for a month. I hoped that when I drove him to the airport in the morning we could have some kind of friendly talk. I think I felt ashamed of myself for not warming up to him.

In the morning, however, the streets were thick with fresh snow. Getting Jerry to the airport was suddenly going to be a challenge. As best I could I put on our ancient chains. We drove through fishtailing traffic on the interstate, my arms rigid, and a loose set of links on the left rear tire mercilessly flogged the fender. The whole way there, I didn’t say a word.

Just this morning, twenty years later, I happened to have breakfast with a couple who have taken care of five mentally handicapped adults in their home for the last fifteen years. What manner of love is this? I thought. Other friends have done this kind of thing as well—even an English professor friend—and my wife has worked off and on in group homes for the retarded. And of course there is the famous example of Henri Nouwen, the Catholic theologian who devoted the last years of his life to serving the mentally disabled. Perhaps it is true that

evangelicalism in its more extreme forms offers a ready means of expression for the unhinged among us. But perhaps it is more true that the mentally ill offer to us the plainest picture of ourselves, our deepest longing for a love we hope both to know and to share. If so, I hope I get another try.

And You Visited Me

When I showed up for my two-o’clock tutorial with Dr. Jordan, I found he was gone. A note on the door said he was ill. So I went across the street to the university library to ask his wife, a librarian, how he was doing. Not well, she said, and gave me the name of a hospital near Spokane, eighty or ninety miles away. I knew he was not a healthy man, but she wasn’t very clear about the details of his illness. Would he like a visitor? Since I lived in Spokane, it would not be difficult for me to see him. His wife said a visit might be just the thing. But she didn’t look me in the eye.

So three days later, after I had returned home from my weekly stint of tutorials and seminars, I drove out to the named hospital. It rested on the north shore of a quiet lake among ponderosas, spreading lawns, and mossy granite outcroppings. I parked the car and walked past a brown-brick wing behind a row of cedar trees. At the visitor registration desk I gave my name and asked to see Rath Jordan. The receptionist looked through her papers and said, “I’m sorry, but there is no Rath Jordan here.” I asked her to check again.

“No, sorry. No one by that name.”

“There must be some mistake,” I said.

“No mistake,” she said less pleasantly.

But I didn’t leave, and eventually she left her desk and disappeared into another room behind her.

When I had proposed a tutorial in the short story in January, Dr. Jordan had responded to me with a similarly abrupt no. He was too busy trying to complete a freshman introduction to literature text for Random House, which, he informed me, two other professors in the department had dropped in his lap because they were too damn lazy to keep up their end of the work. “In two years, neither of them ever wrote a single word.” He said a single word with slowed, staccato emphasis.

Furthermore, he was too ill to do a study with me. His pancreas and adrenal glands did not function properly, and as a result his body chemistry was precarious. Periodically he would lose all “higher cognitive function.” As it was, his mind did not work properly until noon. So there would be no tutorial. That was clear.

Could he recommend other professors, key readings? He went down the list of names carefully: “Too limited in his reading; no real penetration of thought; more of a writer than a critic.” No, he couldn’t fully recommend anyone. Then he pulled out one book, another, and another, warmed to his most favorite of subjects, waxed eloquent, gained in his face a glow of passion. I excused myself to turn in a paper and then returned. He looked up like a boy who has just decided to play hooky.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

And so we met for an hour and a half, every Tuesday afternoon. By March we had read Chekhov, Crane, Verga, Fitzgerald. Chekhov was his love.

“‘The Lady with the Pet Dog,’” he liked to say, “was Chekhov’s way of telling Tolstoy how life really worked. You can’t impose a smug moral order the way Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina.”

“Yes,” I liked to reply, “but what if Chekhov has subtracted something that Tolstoy did not impose, but merely recognized as inherent?”

After a long wait, the receptionist returned from the back room with surprising evidence of the existence of Rath Jordan. She gave me directions to his ward, where I met him in an old, dirty hallway. He was fully clothed, thin, and pale, and shook my hand warmly. Odd-looking people sauntered about, also dressed in street clothes. They wore strange gazes and expressions. It very belatedly dawned on me what kind of hospital this was. Dr. Jordan ushered me into a dusty lounge, and we sat down on some grimy rubber furniture in playschool blues and greens and yellows. An AM radio blared, and several men played billiards on a battered table.

“Sorry I missed my appointment on Tuesday,” he said, “but my body chemistry went completely topsy-turvy. When that happens, I become unavoidably suicidal.”

I started inside, but tried not to show it.

“I’ve just been released from seventy-two hours of intensive observation—along with some pretty hard-core people. I talked to a guy this morning who wired a shotgun under a store manager’s throat. He connected the trigger to his own hand with an electrical cord. When the police gunned him down, he automatically set off the shotgun.”

I wondered why he was telling me this. Was it to show that he himself was not so deranged as that—or to show that we all were?

“We line up for medication here,” he said. “Just like in the Cuckoo’s Nest. I feel like I’m in that movie sometimes.”

I had brought a volume of Fitzgerald, just in case he wanted to talk literature. He did—very badly. We arranged for a small, dingy coffee room to ourselves. It had one, tall, narrow window of many small panes; I wondered if the lattice work was an iron grill. We managed a discussion about one Fitzgerald story, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and then he wandered onto the turf of other writers. Clearly, he enjoyed talking. Every once in a while I would interject an observation apropos to the subject he had happened upon. He would stop and say, “Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Very good!” I suppose that this return to the role of caretaker felt reassuring to him. The spell was broken only once, by an attendant with a paper cup of water and a pair of pills. He took them obediently. Soon afterward our time ended. He put his hand to his head and said, “You’d better leave. I’m getting tired. I can handle being intellectually tired—that’s one thing. Or being physically tired—that’s almost pleasant. It’s being emotionally wiped out that gets me.”

He asked if I could come back every other day—he’d have to be here two weeks. “We’d get a lot done that way,” he said. Then he apologized for not having reviewed the stories. He wasn’t allowed any books.

“I’ll let you borrow this one,” I offered.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I can keep it locked up safe.”

Before I left he took me by the arm and said how good it was that I had come. He held my gaze, and his eyes were weak and watery. “If anyone asks about me,” he said less certainly, “tell them I’m getting much better and hope to be back soon.”

Amo, Amas, Amat

In those student years that we lived in Spokane, Sharon and I eventually moved to a blonde-brick apartment house just west of downtown. Just across the hall from us lived an elderly couple from Plentywood, Montana. Henry Raaen was a Norwegian bachelor farmer until the age of forty-nine, when he married Minnie, a schoolteacher. She had played the organ at the Lutheran church where he had sung in the choir. They celebrated their fiftieth anniversary the summer after we met them. Then Mr. Raaen turned one-hundred, and Mrs. Raaen a spry eighty-seven.

One evening they invited us over for dessert, and by request I brought along my textbook for the Latin I was starting to learn. Mrs. Raaen had been a passionate teacher of Latin, and she often complained, or gloated rather, that young people these days were no longer interested in the Latin tongue. When I handed her my text, she found a line in the preface that she read to us with sad glee: “It is notorious that every year increasing numbers of students enter college without Latin.”

She turned the pages slowly, looking up to tell us about a former teacher of her acquaintance who could not speak of the death of Julius Caesar without breaking into tears. “Sometimes,” said Mrs. Raaen, “I lay awake at night reviewing my conjugations.”

Then she got to the first set of verbs in the book. “Oh, yes,” she said approvingly. Then, “Henry, do you remember the first conjugation?” Up to this point, Henry had held a rigid silence. Part-blind, part-deaf, chockfull of arthritis, he sat erect in a red sweater and tie. Even the tops of his ears held deep, pale wrinkles. I wondered how his hundred-year-old mind worked. He answered his wife like a cannon shot: “Amo-amas-amat-amamus-amatis amant!” Mrs. Raaen paged through the text for another five minutes, fondly absorbed.

“Yes,” she said, “I recognize most of the words on every page. But it would be too hard to get it all back. Too hard now to get it all back.” Her face and voice were sadly resigned.

“May I make a motion,” croaked Mr. Raaen, “that we put the Latin aside and proceed with dessert?”

Mrs. Raaen agreed, but then she happened upon the vocabulary index in the back, and the keyed exercises that go with every lesson. Dessert did not come for some time.

A few weeks later we invited the Raaens to our apartment to listen to A Prairie Home Companion on the radio. We thought they would be the perfect audience. For two hours they sat with us politely in our living room, the volume turned up very high, while Garrison Keillor said droll things about Lutherans and Norwegian bachelor farmers. Mr. and Mrs. Raaen gave the program their complete and stolid attention. They never laughed. They never smiled. When Garrison Keillor at last said, “Good night, everybody. Good night, now,” Henry and Minnie rose to their feet with a kind of puzzled dignity and thanked us for having them. Then they left. Exeunt ambo.

We later moved just upstairs from them, and from time to time we would hear a crash from below, indicating that Mr. Raaen had fallen off the toilet or out of bed. I would hurry downstairs and recollect Mr. Raaen into something like tranquility, and life would go on. Occasionally an ambulance would come to the door, an occasion that Mrs. Raaen always met with sureness and solemnity. She would follow the stretcher out the door with head held high, arm in arm with the paramedic. This was it, she was thinking. After all these years, the final act, and she would march out like royalty. The fact that she got to repeat this performance several times in no way lessened the effect. She only improved with practice.

A few weeks before Mr. Raaen turned 103, just before Christmas, Sharon gave birth to our first child, a baby boy. Soon after we had brought him home, we took Jonathan down to the Raaens’s apartment and into their bedroom, where Mr. Raaen lay cadaverously beneath the covers. With some effort he propped himself up and stretched out a hand of blessing upon the head of our little son. I have forgotten to say that Mr. Raaen was a giant man, well over six feet in length, with huge, horny, spreading hands. Could Simeon in the Temple, when he met with the holy infant, have looked or acted any other way? Then Mr. Raaen held out a five-dollar bill that he had hidden in the blankets. “From the oldest man in the building to the youngest!” he shouted.

That next year, of course, he died.

Nunc dimittis servum tuum Domine,
Secundum verbum tuum in pace.

Lord, now let your servant depart,
According to your word, in peace.

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Issue #39• Summer 2003