The Storm at the Door Read Online Free

how Marshall lost his second leg seems plausible to Frederick.
    Stay to salute, soldier?
Marshall asks Frederick.
    Though the sight of Marshall, after three weeks at Mayflower, still stirs Frederick’s pity if no longer his revulsion, Frederick does take a kind of pride in this seemingly privileged relationship, that a war hero regards him as a comrade, a fellow soldier. On two or three occasions, Frederick and Marshall have reminisced about their military service, as if they were someplace else entirely, perhaps a saloon tucked in an alleyway of a rain-swept port town.
    The tension was just unbearable
, Frederick told Marshall of his four months as an ensign aboard the USS
Wonder. And we never even saw any action. But I would be there on the deck all night, just waiting for the world to explode
.
    Frederick has never told Marshall the truth of how his time with the Navy ended, nearly identical to how his time with the White Paper Company ended, nearly identical to how his early promise in the private academy he briefly attended as a child ended: with a bottomless desperation, with unmanageable, surging notions, with drastic physical transformations.
    Correlation does not imply causation
, one of Frederick’s Harvard Business School professors would often remind his classes. Just because two things happen at the same time does not necessarily mean one causes the other. Yes, his breakdowns—if they even deserve so certain a word—have tended to come alongside heightened responsibilities, but that does not necessarily mean Frederick cannot be equal to the fortitude his challenges require of him. Sometimes, something within him flares or extinguishes, but it is separate from him, this cycling, a pattern that has its own unknowable logic.
    Do do dee do do do do dee do doo
, Frederick sings the opening notes to reveille into his fist, mock-blowing on an imaginary horn. Frederick laughs, and usually Marshall laughs at this too. Today, strangely, Marshall does not laugh. Marshall only keeps his gaze upon the flag, as if the notes Frederick sings were more than some enlivening tune, as if they somehow carry a tremendous and mournful truth. Then an orderly comes, as every day, to wheel Marshall toward the cafeteria along the paved pathways.
    As Frederick makes his way toward the Depression, that bowl-shaped green in the center of campus that the men mustcross on the way to and from the cafeteria, he negotiates through a cluster of cows, standing idly in the shade of an elm. Thirty years before, Frederick has been told, Mayflower had again aligned itself with the popular thinking of mental hospitals of the time. It had been the latest belief among the psychiatric professionals that those interred in mental hospitals required regular work, a daily structuring purpose. And so aristocratic Mayflower, like any state hospital of that era, had become a full-fledged funny farm, the mad Brahmins poorly tending to newly constructed chicken coops, gardens, milk cows. Predictably, the staff soon found itself in charge of both the insane and their livestock, and the project was largely abandoned. Still, the administration has allowed these cows to stay, to wander like holy Hindu bovines, as if in respectful credit to the failed notion, as if not to hurt the feelings of the ancient psychologists who dreamed it up. A few of the oldest orderlies and nurses, recruits from this bygone era, still feed them hay, clean their mess, and seem to take the cows’ continued presence as a personal respect.
    Passing the Depression’s nadir, Frederick is planning. He tells himself that after breakfast he will finally write the letter to Katharine. He has been considering this letter for some time; he has already drafted many sentences in his notebook. Never mind that he is not allowed to send her any letter, just as he is not allowed to phone her, until his psychiatrist grants him those privileges. He will write the letter, and then he will begin to write for