Yesterday, it snowed, of all things.
It's not very cold. The air was never below freezing at ground level. The big, fat flakes melted on contact, and there were times when they fell more quickly than snow can, the day edging over into sleet. I don't think any of the growing plants were damaged. And yet it was all quite pretty.
I had a Dar Williams song about a blizzard in April stuck in my head all day, and while it had nothing to do with anything, except a tenuous connection to our weather (which wasn't anywhere close to being a blizzard), I can't now remember the day without thinking of that song, which rather intrusively formed my sound-track.
June and I slept late, it being Sunday, and then after she got up to go to do some work (she's begun preparing for the summer camp), I lazed about in bed reading for a while. When I finally dressed and came downstairs, the Mansion seemed all but empty, a surprise, because there's usually not all that much to do on a Sunday around here. Maybe they were all out playing in the snow?
No, not all. Steve bees was sitting in the Bird Room by the window, giving his baby a bottle. In that darkly Victorian room, against the bright spring snow, they looked like a male Madonna and Child.
"Too bad you don't have actual milk," I commented, approaching them. That kind of comment doesn't sound weird here. Men don't mind being compared to women in this place.
"Oh, but I do," said Steve. "Sarah pumps and freezes."
As he spoke, Sean finished his meal. Steve put the bottle down and then lifted the baby to his shoulder to help him burp. Baby burps often have a liquid component, and Steve had a dish towel over his shoulder, just in case. The amount of laundry associated with such tiny people is amazing. Burp accomplished, Sean drifted off to sleep and Steve laid the boy on a towel on a nearby chair. A few minutes went by.
I became aware that he was fussing with the baby and associated equipment in order to avoid talking to me.
"Well?" I said.
"Well," he answered.
"Look, you don't need to talk to me," I said, and, oddly, those words seemed to be the ones that freed him to talk.
"It's Sarah," he said, still reluctant. "She's...in the hospital." He paused, and I was about to asked what she was in the hospital for, when he clarified. "It's a mental hospital."
"Why?" She'd never seemed crazy to me.
"She's been diagnosed with schizophrenia."
"What? Wait, just diagnosed with, or does she actually have schizophrenia?"
"Who the hell knows," said Steve, shouting at a whisper so as to avoid waking the baby. "There's no consensus on what schizophrenia even is. Who gets diagnosed is a judgment call."
"What does Allen say?" I was imagining an injustice thwarted by the wisdom of alternative mental healthcare. Surely Allen would say everything was alright and he'd fix it somehow.
"Allen says exactly what I just told you, about diagnosis, but he also says she's really sick. He's the one who said she needed to go in."
"What's going to happen?" I asked. "What's her prognosis?"
"Damned if I know. Her doctors say schizophrenia is incurable and she'll need to be on drugs the rest of her life. She might never work again. Allen says none of that is true, but he doesn't have any specific advice and I don't know what to think."
I didn't know what to say.
"Why didn't you want to tell me?" I asked, after a while.
"It's not personal," he said "I don't like telling anybody. Every time I talk about it, it seems more real."
"Do you want me to tell everybody?" I asked. "On campus, I mean. So they don't have to ask you?"
He considered for a moment. While he was considering, the baby either pooped or farted, because the room filled with stink. We both ignored it.
"Do it when I'm not here," he said at last.
And the baby woke and started to cry. Steve set about changing Sean's diaper. The disruption of being unclothed and wiped down made Sean cry louder. After he was all cleaned-up and comfortably swaddled (young babies like being wrapped tightly), he calmed down and fell asleep again. A silence settled. Once again, Steve was avoiding talking to me. The Dar Williams song about the blizzard repeated itself in my mind.
"There's not anything that studying natural history with me can do about any of this, is there?" I ventured.
Steve shook his head.
"There's not anything that not studying it can do, either, is there?" I ventured further.
Steve looked up into the middle distance. This was a new one on him, clearly.
"Come with me," I said.
He settled Sean in his sling and pulled on an extra shirt over himself and his baby, and we both got our cloaks from the hanger on our way out. We walked around in silence together for a while and the snow, falling heavily just then, settled on our hair and shoulders and turned us white.
"I've heard that the last snow of the year is called the onion snow," I said. "Because it smells like onions. I don't know. What do you think? Does the snow smell like onions to you?"
And, as intended, Steve stopped mulling things over and directed his attention to something other than the inside of his own head. He sniffed the air.
"I don't smell onions," he said. "It just smells like snow."
"How exactly does snow smell?"
And he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, concentrating on his senses, and he began to weep.
I didn't try to comfort him. I figured, Steve has reason to weep, and should be allowed to do it. I also figured maybe tears were what happened whenever he relaxed enough to not resist them. So we just stood there for a while, breathing, inhaling scent, while Steve cried quietly in the falling snow.
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