The Other (39 page)

John William stayed in and sat at his desk reading
Silent Spring.
Can you imagine a second-grader reading
Silent Spring
? I went about my business, and he called my name. “Miss Grant,” he said, “it says here that a lot of people my age will probably die when they are older of environment-related health problems.” I urged him not to worry. I assured him that Rachel Carson didn’t mean to frighten anyone. I suggested that
Silent Spring
might be a good book to read when he was older and in a better position to understand it. I was going about my business once more when again he called for me. “Pollution is causing a lot of kids to be retarded,” he said. “It’s bad for birds, too. I read in another chapter where the insects are dying. And the frogs and stuff. Because of DDT in the surface water. Do you think this is real?” he asked me.

I said I didn’t know. I suppose it was the wrong answer. Looking back, and now having read about John William in the
Seattle Times,
I feel it was indeed the wrong answer. I want to tell you that two things strike me, knowing what I know today. The first is that
Silent Spring
makes a kind of sense it didn’t before. I hope that my snippet about
Silent Spring
gives you a measure of insight into your friend—that it is new information. The second is to mention his very distraught tears when I said I didn’t know if Carson was accurate. Poor little John William was completely inconsolable. He buried his face in his hands and wouldn’t remove them. I had to call the school nurse for a sedative.

T
HE
Seattle Weekly
put John William on its cover: a mugshot, post-arrest, in Seaside, 1974, in which he looks like Charles Manson with a lower hairline. Stamped across John William’s face, in a font eliciting a Bureau of Prisons stencil, is THE WORLD SUCKS, and underneath, much smaller,
THE HERMIT, SANS PROZAC
. The
Weekly
’s reporter, it’s quickly apparent, views the “interlude at Reed” as the crux of the matter (“Not that Reed is Granola University, because its curriculum is as conservative as any in the country—you don’t graduate from this school without reading prodigiously from a lot of tried and true Greeks and Romans”) and there dug up a former mental-health counselor named Gayle Griffin, who’d seen John William for “symptoms of anxiety and for the evaluation and treatment of a stress-related psychological disorder.” John William had come to see her with “pain behind his eyeballs, sleeplessness, palpitations, weight loss, incessant weeping, and generalized hysteria.” (These symptoms came on the heels of John William’s estrangement from Cindy Houghton, but he seems not to have divulged this crisis of
amour
to Griffin, who, absent this information, speculates that his malady stemmed from “a well-advanced oedipalism, with extreme hostility toward authority figures and with delusions of grandeur.”) Griffin had Valium in her repertoire—other Reed students used it, and she knew a doctor who would prescribe—but she couldn’t convince her patient of its efficacy. Engaging John William in talk therapy, she’d noted “an unusually keen intelligence coupled with a striking degree of megalomania.” The
Weekly
quotes liberally from her psychiatric reports: “Patient exhibits symptoms of intellectual obsessiveness…drives counseling toward the theater of ideas and away from psychological investigation…highly prone to emotiveness…Arrives on time for sessions but without shoes…Patient queries me about contact with parents; I’m repetitively asked to assure him of the privacy of our proceedings…Patient shows concern for the integrity and security of his counseling files…Patient is an only child with subsequent egocentrism and exhibits difficulty neutralizing aggression toward parents…I am now experiencing a well-developed and highly negative transference…Patient has apparently left Reed College 3/12/75.”

The
Weekly
also dug up Reed professors of the era—Marvin Leedy in philosophy and Howard Jaffe in religion and humanities—who stressed that John William, despite his strangeness, was an excellent student. The
Weekly
’s focus, though, was on a Ronald Metzger, decribed in its pages as “a roving professor and ecopsychologist now retired and living near Arcata, California,” who remembered John William as “a highly politicized radical and, just briefly, a personal friend.” Metzger had taught at Sierra and Skidmore before Reed, and at Humboldt State afterward; in his photo for the
Weekly
(caption: “Metzger at Vulture Valley Hojo”) he appears as a robust and handsome man of seventy with a rich crop of silver hair, a silver goatee, and a prominently strong neck showing at the throat of his chambray shirt; he looks earthy, tousled, sun-burnished, and agrarian. “We hung out,” Metzger told the
Weekly.
“John William had read my books and was eager to talk ecology. And talk we did, which I enjoyed.” (The books Meztger refers to, according to the
Weekly,
are
Entropy and the Post-Industrial State
—“an accessible critique of modernity”—
Cosmology and Ecology
—“musings on transcendence, animism, and mythos”—and
Mind, Soul, and Nature
—“Metzger’s argument for ecopsychology.”) Metzger also reported getting postcards from John William in ’75 and ’76 (they were signed, in the absurdist vein John William employed when he was feeling comically effusive, “Mother Enitharmon,” “Zosimos the Panopolitan,” “Moloch’s Pawn,” and “Simon Magus”). “I question the questioning of his sanity,” says Metzger. “To me, he was simply passionate about the right things. He had a valid critique of the world and made it. If that’s insanity, something’s wrong. Personally, I think there’s something wrong. With the world and not with John William.”

I
ASKED
L
UCY
H
ATCH
-M
YERS
for Ginnie’s contact information. I tried the number Lucy gave me, got voice messaging, and, after three days, heard back from a Bill Worthington. He asked me to imagine a family tree. On one side is Ginnie’s father, Cyrus Worthington, and on the other is Cyrus’ brother, Stanford. I was to draw a line straight down from Stanford and insert the name of Stanford’s son, Stanford, Jr., and under that, of his grandson, Stanford III, and under that, the name of the guy I was talking to, Bill Worthington—“in other words, and I know it’s complicated, I’m the grandson of Ginnie’s first cousin.”

Bill Worthington’s tone, I thought, was more condescending than it needed to be. He spoke the way John William once spoke: as if he deserved to be listened to by definition. I said, “Grandson of Ginnie’s first cousin,” and he answered, “It’s a hassle to explain. All those Stans. Anyway, I’m returning your call.”

I said I thought I’d called Ginnie. Bill said I had. He said he had power of attorney on behalf of “Aunt Ginnie,” which meant he managed her affairs, since Ginnie had Alzheimer’s. “She’s eighty-five,” he explained. “We think it must be Alzheimer’s. I didn’t catch it from the message—tell me your name.”

“Neil Countryman.”

There was the pause I’d come to expect in recent weeks when I said that. I’d learned how to fill it. I said I was sorry to hear about Ginnie. I mentioned having seen her in good health at a poetry reading, and that I remembered her as lucid and vibrant at her gallery. I said, “Alzheimer’s is very hard on families.”

“Is it, now.”

He was being uncivil, so I said, “None of this was my doing, you know.”

“I don’t know that.”

“I didn’t call to argue.”

“Of course not. You’re rich.”

I said I wanted to see Ginnie. “Ginnie doesn’t know a knife from a fork,” Bill replied. “She can’t meet with you. No way.”

“It’s more for me than for her,” I said.

“Exactly,” Bill answered, and hung up.

I
CALLED
B
LEDSOE.
They advertised in the Yellow Pages as “Seattle’s Oldest and Finest Investigative Agency, with 43 years of service and results.” The next day, an investigator called to say that Ginnie was in Room 11 in “the dementia ward” at Harbor House, on Harbor Drive, in West Seattle. I asked what he meant by “dementia ward” and he answered, without sympathy, “The basement.” Dementia ward in a basement—it sounded medieval. But as it turned out, Harbor House had a wide view of Puget Sound, which on the summer afternoon I went to see Ginnie was sun-addled, shimmering, and stippled with sailboats. The institutional grounds, though small, were parklike, with some relatively tall Douglas firs and a grove of wind-bent alders. In the lobby, through tall windows, I saw a container ship pass closely by—the
Korea Maru,
forty-eight thousand tons—negotiating the last leg of its pan-Pacific trade voyage and looking pestered by pleasure craft. All this not far from Alki Point, where the twenty-two members of the Denny Party, including Ginnie’s great-grandfather, went ashore to found Seattle.

I gave them the truth—I was a friend of Ginnie’s son and wanted to visit her. I was pointed toward an elevator and told to push the “B” button. A number of residents basked in the wide hall, some in wheelchairs, some with walkers, some with canes, some in slippers. They made me feel more interesting than I was. Gawked at, I thought I could smell pablum. Mostly what I saw was my own possible fate, which left me defensive. In the elevator, going down, I heard the silence of doom.

An odd elevator arrival. I’d expected a reception, a greeting, a waiting area, or someone in charge, but instead the door opened on the sort of lonely cul-de-sac that makes a person think twice. Was I on the wrong floor? Maybe I’d used a service elevator in error. I appeared to be nowhere. But after scouting around two corners, I gained confidence. Room 1: Ruth Middleton. Room 2: Elizabeth Blair. At Room 3 I said “Hi” to Margaret Casey. She was parked in her doorway, monitoring the foot traffic, which at this point was me.

Virginia Worthington wasn’t in Room 11, but her door was open, so I could see the cot she slept on, and her television—which at the moment showed static—and I peeked into her private bath, which had a wheelchair-accessible shower and a floor drain. Since this was a daylight basement, she had windows, but they looked onto a service road at approximately the level of a truck’s axle. Ginnie’s room had none of the accoutrements of retirement—no books, knitting needles, crochet hooks, etc.—and that made me wonder what she did all day. There wasn’t even soap in the bathroom.

Farther along the hall was what I think is called a “station,” and here, at a long counter, sat a black woman in an orderly’s uniform—it looked like green crepe paper—and arrayed around her, leaning on the counter or standing nearby, were other orderlies, also black, also looking as if they were wearing crepe paper, and surrounding these orderlies were about two dozen old white people. They were variously immobile, and, as with the people upstairs, their interest in my presence seemed inordinate and, I have to add, in some cases aggressive. I was spoken to and yelled at. One woman, as if reciting a mantra, reeled off her name, her son’s name, and his phone number. I was also thought to be a doctor.

Ginnie was eating with a walker beside her in a dining area named for a donor. She was alone, and mostly bones now—bones and the garish makeup of a tart—and her hair had been cropped and moussed. No more chignon, leather pants, or bolero jacket; no more glorious art; no more fine poetry. Now she had a bib, and when I sat down across from her she looked up from her macaroni and steamed carrots and said, “You.”

“Me.”

“They told me you left.”

“Who told you that?”