Bailey

By Joan Hawkins

A moving and often harrowing account of one young woman's struggle against her childhood demons, Bailey explores the idea of self, and how the psyche can lose its way in a labyrinth of memory, fear and desire. Confined in an asylum, Bailey seeks to emerge from a hazy, tormented existence in which the only solid entity is Jim, her fellow inmate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Landon Books
• Release date: Aug 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9780983734819

Joan Hawkins

Joan Hawkins is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.

Book preview

BAILEY

a novel

JOAN HAWKINS

Landon Books

NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Published by

Landon Books, New York, 2012

Second Edition (electronic)

ISBN 978-0-9837348-1-9

Copyright Joan Hawkins, 2012

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

www.JoanHawkins.net

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, forwarded, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations for review purposes.

Book and cover design by www.Cyberscribe.eu

Other books by the author:

Underwater (1974 and 2014)

Trespass (2013)

Rematch (2021)

Family Money (2022)

Chapter 1

She said that Bailey was her name, her only name. Never had the medical staff at Stockbridge known a patient to dry out so uncomplainingly.

Although at fourteen years old she was the youngest alcoholic ever admitted to the exclusive sanitarium, Bailey looked like a matron with a rough-skinned, red fleshy face and a portly body. From the morning she arrived, she appeared to accept Stockbridge as an unloved child does camp. Often melancholy, but always stoical, she made herself at home as quickly as she could. She remarked at once that the buildings and the grounds reminded her of a country club, which was considered astute, because between the two world wars, Stockbridge had been a luxurious resort for golfers at the edge of the State’s western hills.

Bailey loved the food at Stockbridge. She chatted with the waitresses and walked into the kitchen to compliment the cook on the spaghetti. She loved her corner room with two windows on the third floor; and the carpentry shop, where she set about making a model of her childhood home. She walked about with a shy smile and a quick, light step. She greeted the other patients with a slide of her hand, palm out; moving between them as though to erase their general irritation. At this, the hostility of Jim Peabody, the sanitarium’s youngest male patient disappeared as though her sliding palm were a magic wand.

Suck shit, man. Bailey’s cheerful tone challenged the twenty-two-year-old’s frigid composure. On the spot they became the sanitarium’s famous young couple. Snobbish, reclusive, Jim Peabody accepted the girl’s foul-mouthed adoration as though it were his fate. That they were drawn together by the symmetry of their delusions became the staff’s favorite witticism. The girl thought she’d castrated her father while the boy was convinced that his father had castrated him.

Jim Peabody’s pretensions to grandeur angered the Stockbridge medical staff. Ignoring the psychiatrist in his mandatory therapy sessions, he read books on military history. His father had been the youngest captain in the American Army before becoming a famous doctor, and it was his mission at Stockbridge to prepare himself for the day his father died. As the future head of a distinguished family and the custodian of his father’s fame, he had no time for the soft knowledge of introspection and memory.

His decade of alcoholism, the cause of his Stockbridge stay, he repudiated with lordly aplomb. Drinking was a hazard of the socially powerful – not a disgrace. Always it had been the cover for impossible crimes that could not be exposed. It was obvious, wasn’t it, what the facts on his admission chart must be?

Bailey, however, with her shy courtesy and democratic respect, her graceful heft and fine eyes, was immediately the sympathetic focus of opinion and anecdote. Her devotion to Jim Peabody, and her submission to his schedule of self-improvement, combined with her explosive prurience in his presence, were thought to point to a reality that reversed the current of aggression, making her its victim. The child of alcoholic parents, neglected by her mother, by her father abused, Bailey endured her load of unconscious agony with the same strong grace with which she bore her fat.

If an intern were idealistic and vigorous, Stockbridge Sanatorium was the most depressing residency one could pull. Since the owners had no intention of coping with the acutely disturbed, only the alcoholics and the senile paid the enormous bills.

In this swamp of decadence the friendship of the oddly aged youngsters provided relief to the underused staff, who named their process The Volcano. Under the pressure of Bailey’s pornography, it was at first thought that the terrible weight of their repression would blow sky-high, leaving them supple, hopeful and bound for the world.

Then it was circulated that the meeting of the two strangers was only apparent: the young man’s famous father was paying the shocking bill for them both. A sinister contrivance was felt to be at work.

At table, walking in martial unison through the halls, and especially when they stepped out of the thick woods at the edge of the golf course, at the end of their afternoon walk, they looked to be escaping some great fright, as Hansel and Gretel had fled the witch. But the powerful figure that controlled them both could only be killed by the truth and not by the phantoms of a grandiose egotism that only the wealthy and the insane could sustain.

Not one of the idealistic interns leaving Stockbridge at the end of their term kept the young people in mind. It was too depressing.

Bailey lost the last point with a casual lunge of her racket and jogged smiling to the net. Suck my ten-incher, girl – you pussy player.

Returning the yellow tennis balls to the can, Jim looked at his unique friend with imperturbable eyes.

Sore loser, kid. I just played your backhand.

You played shit, sister.

As Jim turned his back to her, Bailey raced around the net and stood at his side, timid and afraid. As always, her nervous contrition induced in Jim the sensations of a person he’d never before felt himself to be. Intellectually brilliant, of compelling moral influence, he apparently inspired in Bailey an almost helpless worship. To costume this person in proper attire, three weeks previously he’d written his mother, asking her to send up his father’s riding boots and the short khaki captain’s jacket that he’d worn in the previous war. The feeling of the jacket and boots, their image in reflecting surfaces, confirmed the girl’s admiration in glorious reality.

My mouth just opens, Jim. I never know what I’m going to say. I never feel mad at you.

Bailey’s keen, constant and uncritical appreciation was the furthest from hostility that Jim could imagine. An eruption of her unfortunate social background was the only way he could explain these profane geysers. No soap in her mouth as a youngster, he supposed; never been whipped as he had, or locked in a room. While it was probably too late to introduce physical punishment as a curb to her hysteria, he was determined to eradicate her vulgar accent.

Flat and blunt, the harsh tone of Bailey’s speech would alone encourage mental depravity, but Jim understood the brain. Accommodating different sounds, Bailey’s brain would develop different pathways. The old ones, tormented to near epilepsy by ugliness, would dissolve, and with them the filth of her helpless tongue.

I never see any anger, Bailey, Jim smiled at her. I never feel any, but what I hear has got to stop. It will be stopped! We’re working on the problem. In fact, he glanced at his watch, we have an hour and a half before dinner. I’ll shower, dress and bring the tape recorder to your room in twenty minutes. What’s this? Do I see mutiny in your eyes?

Jim laughed at his extravagance – could a kitten be a lion? Then pushed Bailey forward. Accustomed to the girl’s alacrity, he stopped at her grudging weight. Bailey looked down at her sneakers.

It makes me sick talking different.

Talking correctly.

Talking like mother, talking like you – it makes me sick.

I know it’s a strain at the moment. But you know our way, Bailey. An hour a day and very soon no one at Stockbridge will believe you ever sounded like a guttersnipe.

Fuck you! Bailey shouted and for the first time her straight-on eyes were grim.

I beg your pardon.

I like doing math and reading and learning about history, but it makes me feel awful. Bailey peered up at the sky as though to drain the ache in her throat. It made her miserable that Jim hated the way she’d spoken since birth. She pitied her father, whose accent had offended squadrons of aristocratic ears.

How do you think I feel when you talk filth? Do you think I can live with that indefinitely? Do you think you’re tolerable if you’re not working to rectify the situation?

Fuck me! It’s not my accent that swears.

Your mindless obscenity is a habit, Bailey. When you learn to speak the King’s English, you’ll be relieved as well as me.

My ass!

Your future. Jim marked his humor with a stiff smile. I want you out of the shower, dressed for dinner and seated at your desk in twenty minutes. You will learn to speak like a lady, Bailey. Walking off, Jim waved his hand over his shoulder, twenty minutes.

Don’t leave me! Help me!

Chapter 2

Out of Jim’s presence Bailey was frightened at Stockbridge, especially in the halls and dining room of the sanitarium where the patients looked like dead fish as she passed their erasing eyes.

Back home Bailey had had her vodka to dull the pain of her family’s dislike – and a day-long slide of television shows to pass the time. But at Stockbridge the same programs pushed her out of her corner room to the winter woods where she first saw Jim Peabody, a wintry tree himself with his numb, serious tolerance.

Your father sucks shit, she’d been quick to inform him.

Looking up from his fly, Jim observed the blush of her ferocious shame with bleak, quiet eyes. Worse than that.

Jim acknowledged her anxiety and terrible tongue with total indifference to their cause.

All the Stockbridge patients are dead fish, he allowed with a frosty smile. But he and Bailey would not drown in the past, as other patients had, but work every minute of every day to survive in the future.

As Jim’s schedule and sarcastic patience blocked off the past – she’d learned tons in a year – Bailey was just as happy as she’d been at home when locked in her bedroom and enthralled by the truth and beauty of the television dramas. But this year she wasn’t drinking. Fear stepped back while Jim worked with her. She was horribly obscene. Out of nowhere, waves of filth smashed against Jim’s rocky composure. Oh, the deep lines in this boy’s face, as though age had made a mistake and drawn itself too soon. His patience and glancing humor, like ice shining in the sun, had saved her from a fear that had kept her on her feet in aimless wandering, that had made her eat too much and turned sleep into the goal of her days.

Jim was a god with his feet in her life. Like a dog, she’d allow herself to be trained, but she was deeply ashamed when she heard her acceptable voice on the tape recorder. A dog putting on the dog.

Brick building turning black. Twenty minutes, Jim commanded, still in sight as he walked through the evening shadows. There were snakes in the ivy patch and doves cooing as if