The line of attendants behind the matron grew. They’d had a sameness before, but as I got control of myself, I could begin to tell them apart: a giant of a man, burly as a stevedore, with fingers like sausages; a wide-hipped young nurse with bright-blue eyes whose uniform skirt was in desperate need of a good ironing; a motherly woman whose mouth was grim and tight but whose flickering fingers betrayed nervousness, perhaps, or impatience; an older nurse with iron-gray hair as smooth and tight as a helmet.
“A doctor will examine you,” said the matron to the madwomen and me in her firm, dry voice. “He will evaluate your mental and physical health, and based on that evaluation, he will assign you to one of our nine wards. Once there, your nurses will see to you, with help from our attendants. See that you obey them.”
The guttural mumbling of the woman on my left grew louder. I couldn’t understand her words, but the anger in her tone was unmistakable. She took two steps forward and broke from the line, brandishing a pointed finger.
She was on the floor before I was even aware that the matron had beckoned to the giant. Kneeling, he held her against the tile with one hand on her neck. The hand covered her from the chin to the hollow of her throat, his thick fingers spreading across her sharp collarbones. She struggled but could not rise.
“Thank you, Gus,” said the matron, her voice unchanged.
The woman on the floor spewed a string of sharp syllables in her language, furious, challenging. I saw a look pass between the giant and the matron. The giant’s hand moved to the woman’s mouth. The shouting could no longer be heard. At first, we could still hear the heels of her boots striking the tile floor, then silence fell as she gave up the fight. The giant’s hand still remained in place.
Lifting her gaze from the woman on the floor to eye the whole line of us, the matron went on, “Violence will not be tolerated. Disobedience will not be tolerated. You are here to heal. Godspeed.”
I nearly swooned again as the line of attendants broke apart and each individual headed for one of us as if drawn by a string. The older nurse with the helmet of iron-gray hair made a beeline for me. I did as she bid without protest. She steered me by the elbow down yet another featureless hall.
There was something unnatural, unsettling about the bareness of the halls in this place. Granted, my mother had stuffed our home chockablock with console tables, plant stands, and ginger jars, but it wasn’t just that these halls had very little furnishing—they had none at all. Only walls and floors and women were here, and the white figures who surrounded and controlled us.
The iron-haired nurse took me to a door and opened it. I learned her name when the nurse inside, a younger woman with close-set eyes and honey-blond hair, said, “Thank you, Nurse Watson.”
I entered and sat on the examining table shown to me. My head was pounding again after the exertion of walking. I only wanted to rest or eat, the two things it seemed I was not allowed, and it was all I could do to remain mostly upright.
A small mirror flashed light into my eyes, and I lost my sight for a moment, so I felt the doctor before I saw him, his fingers lightly pressing against the worst of the sore spot on my head. This time, the pain felt like a shimmering curtain, drawing itself across my vision, parting only when he took his fingers away.
“No blood,” I heard him say, “though it’ll be sorely bruised. She may be concussed. For now, it might have to be Thalia.”
“They’re short a few in Melpomene. She’s clearly indigent, so no family to complain.”
He folded his arms, taking an instructor’s tone. “Must I remind you of what Dr. Sidwell always said? Diseases of the mind know no class.”
“And Dr. Nelson says,” came the nurse’s voice, “he wants more patients for the water cure.”
“Cure,” spat the doctor with surprising vehemence. “I’ve got half a mind to march up there and. . .” But the doctor didn’t finish his sentence, nor did the nurse ask him to. The poking resumed in silence.
I was finally able to focus, and I fixed my eyes upon the doctor as he wrapped his fingers around my wrist for my pulse. He had sad eyes and salt-and-pepper hair, close cut. I supposed he was almost as old as my father, perhaps a few years shy.
He measured me, examining my skin, my tongue, my eyes, my color. He asked questions a true lunatic would be in no shape to answer, so I made sure not to answer them. I had made it this far, and I didn’t intend to get unmasked today. For now, I could learn far more by listening than speaking.
The doctor asked where I’d come from, what I suffered, whether I’d been committed before, whether I was under a doctor’s care. Although I made no response to any of his questions, he wrote a lot of things down while humming under his breath. At last, he said to the nurse, “To Thalia, then.”
“Yes, Dr. Concord.”
A rap on the door, and Nurse Watson returned for me and whisked me off down another blank hallway.
When she handed me a new dress made of thin cotton, coral in color, I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or relieved. The dress of Matilda’s was repellent now, soaked with perspiration, grime, and the salt of the Bay, and I would be glad to shuck it. But it was also one of my last links to my real life. The new dress was flimsy and rough, making Matilda’s worst seem sturdy by comparison. I had hardly a moment to consider it. The nurse was shorter than me but stronger, and her grip on my elbow was firm.
As we walked, I tried my best to be vigilant, searching every hall and door for a glimpse of Phoebe. But my body rebelled. When I turned too quickly, trying to look over my shoulder at a room we’d just passed, I felt a warm, swimming dizziness. It had been more than a day since I’d left home for the train station. My steps began to drag. The nurse tightened her grip on my elbow to a pinch and slowed me down.
She hailed another nurse who appeared in front of us from a staircase and said without preamble, “He any better?”
“Not in the least. Pickled to his brim more often than not. Murphy said she found him the other day trying to unlock his own door with no luck.”
“And?”
“Wasn’t locked.”
Watson guffawed. “Useless as a prick on a priest, that one.”
I was tempted to see what would happen if I moved forward. She seemed barely to be touching me; could I get away, run down this hall, before she could catch up? But running down these blank halls searching for one woman, who could be anywhere, seemed unwise. I stayed still.
There was a shuffling noise that started softly and grew louder, and dozens of women moved past us in near silence. They were passing me before I even knew they were there, and I started. Their faces were all different but somehow the same: resigned and blank. Was Phoebe among them? I searched for her pale hair in vain. They moved past me so quickly, their faces were gone by the time I swiveled my head. The bobbing, nodding heads blurred together. I watched the back of the last one retreating as if the whole vision were something from a dream.
Another figure floated toward me in the other direction, and I turned, wondering at the flash of white. A lone attendant was lighting the gas jets for the evening, a flicker of flame and a soft glow, then footsteps moving on.
Nearer to me, the nurses shared a final harrumph of disapproval, then we were off again.
When we finally paused in front of a broad door painted the same faint beige as the wall, I both heard and felt the growl in my stomach and was surprised my nurse couldn’t hear it as well. I tugged on her sleeve.
Watson turned toward me with a look of clear annoyance, but at least she turned. I clasped an invisible bowl in front of me, shoveled its invisible contents toward my mouth with an invisible spoon.
“Supper? Just ended,” she said. The time she’d spent chattering in the hallway was gone now, and I hadn’t known I needed it. I tried again to indicate my hunger, raising an invisible roll to my mouth and biting in.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
I couldn’t remember ever having been this hungry before, and it
made me desperate. I reached out for her sleeve again and grabbed hold. She plucked my fingers from her arm with a look of distaste and held up a hand in warning, then reached to open the beige door. It creaked on its hinges and swung wide.
Before I had a chance to take in the room—there were cots, many but not all occupied, and stale air that carried the smell of sweat, flesh, cotton—I felt her shove me through it, and the door closed behind me.
In here, there were no gas jets, only oil lamps, and then only two for the whole large room. My eyes adjusted to the dimness. I still clutched the dress and shoes I’d been handed. But there were two dozen women here, and they all wore nightgowns, long shapeless shifts in a pale, spent gray. Each empty cot had an empty nightgown lying on it.
I searched first for my sister’s blond hair, hoping against hope I’d been delivered into her ward by chance, but I quickly realized it wasn’t so. I let my gaze sweep the room again, more critically this time. There were two more nurses, a redhead and a brunette, neither familiar. They walked the rows between the cots, swatting and poking where they found behavior they didn’t like. Next to the door, near me, stood a male attendant twice my size. He wasn’t as large as the giant we’d seen wrestle an inmate to the floor, but he had an ugly, twisting white scar across his jaw and down the side of his check, and he was plenty large enough to get the job done. I took a step into the room to get farther away and banged my shin on a metal bedpost. The sound that worked its way out of my mouth was no more than a hoarse gasp, too soft to be heard by anyone but me.
I moved toward an empty cot I spied not too far away. Next to it stood a young woman with the lovely face of a china doll but whose dirty blond hair had been chopped as short as a boy’s and stuck out in disarray like a messy, matted halo. She made a small motion pointing to the empty cot. Why not, I decided; her opinion was as good as anyone’s. I knelt next to it on the floor and hid myself best I could while pulling my old stinking dress down and my new flimsy night shift up, leaving no skin exposed between.
No one spoke to me as I settled the clean new clothes on one side of my bed and the dirty old ones on the other. In my exhaustion, I no longer cared. If I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, so be it; they could haul me off.
But no one did.
As all the women settled into their cots, the attendants took one last pass between the rows, handing out a cup of water to each woman in turn. I watched to see what my nearest neighbor did, and as she unhesitatingly drank it down and handed the empty cup back to the nurse, I did the same. After her drink, she lay down in her cot and pulled the thin sheet up to her chin. I followed suit.
Once all the inmates were abed, with no announcement or fanfare, each nurse grabbed an oil lamp, and the light left with them. The nurses went out the door, their shadows flickering back toward us, then drifting away. The attendant with the scar followed them. Only the light that glowed under the crack of the door parted the darkness. In the room itself, I could see nothing, but the air was alive with the noise of women breathing.
Then, another noise: a thud and a bang. And even never having heard it before, I knew what the sound was. They’d locked us in.
No one else reacted to the sound of the bolt sliding shut. I had begun to realize it was possible to grow accustomed to anything. Otherwise, these women would have been screaming, not sleeping.
Surrounded by madwomen. My heart raced. These were women ruled by their worst spirits, a far cry from the well-bred, well-educated young ladies of San Francisco society Mother was always sure to place us among. The minds of these women were bent, even broken. Who knew what they had done or what they might do?
I should never have come.
I’d planned to find Phoebe, then inform the doctors that we were both sane, there had been a mistake, and we were leaving. In my mind, I was righteous, imperious, triumphant. I’d pictured us striding together through that imposing front door into the sunshine, hand in hand. My parents would fuss and fume about the deception but still welcome us back, embrace us, as they always had before. I would save my sister the way she had saved me.
But I could see now that what I’d imagined was only one of many, many possibilities and far from the likeliest one. Like Nellie Bly, I’d found it relatively simple to get in; how hard would it prove, I now wondered, to get out?
Then my exhaustion became something else, a tide pulling me under. My eyes closed, though I fought their closing. I thought I saw a last image of the doll-faced woman smiling next to me, but I couldn’t be sure.
The darkness closed around me, persisting and pushing and pressing, until there was nothing left in me to resist it. I let it in.
Chapter Four
It took three days at Goldengrove for my head to stop aching and three days for me to recognize that the routine within these walls, meant as a cure, would surely drive me insane.
Each morning started out the same. Limbs heavy with sleep, I rose sluggishly, every movement an effort. I discarded my threadbare gray nightgown for my scratchy coral day dress. A line formed, and I joined it. A freckled woman with a dragging foot preceded me, and the shorthaired, doll-faced one followed me, always keeping to the same order.
I felt a nurse pin me in place with one hand on my shoulder, the other moving high on my back, applying a swift, hard pressure I couldn’t account for near my spine. Then she moved ahead to the next inmate. I saw then that she held a stub of white chalk in her right hand. She reached out to chalk a number on the freckled woman’s back—36—and then so on and so on, until every inmate’s back sported a number a handspan high, written in white chalk. No one could see her own number, but we all knew they were there.
We shuffled down the hall to the dining room for a half-filled bowl of porridge, the same temperature as the air around us, and tea that tasted so strongly of copper, it was like licking a penny. Five minutes to consume them, and we shuffled away again.
Our nurses, Dexter and Edmonds, and our scarred attendant, known as Alfie, flanked us at every step. They watched us come and go, and if they didn’t like how we came and went, they corrected us. Go. Stay. No. There. Here. Now. Now. Now.
Then the benches.
I dreaded the benches terribly. They were long, backless wooden planks in a room bare of any decoration, any windows, any comfort. There was only enough room between them so that your knees didn’t quite press against the back of the woman sitting on the bench in front of you, unless one of you was tall. Someone had sanded the wood with enough care that we only sometimes found splinters in our skirts. That was the nicest thing that could be said. The benches themselves were bolted to the floor so they could not be moved, and there was nothing else in the room for your gaze to fall upon. The gas jets by the door were lit but left low as perpetual twilight, and the air was stale. Immediately upon entering the room, you longed to leave it. It was our fate to remain for hours.
The nurse’s bark resounding behind me, I followed the herd. The first two days on the benches had been monotonous beyond belief. I knew the thinking behind it, though no one bothered to explain it to me; stillness of the body was supposed to bring peace to the mind. Instead, I thought I might explode. Nellie Bly had written “People in the world can never imagine the length of days to those in asylums.” There was an immense distance between knowing this and living it.
For the first hour of the day, my mind was always fogged, always sour and slow. But what happened once the fog cleared away was worse. Once we were on the benches, my mind soared and dipped and settled into terrible grooves where I could not stop thinking about the most awful things. Dead gulls in a pile on the wharf, stinking, and the swelling hum of the flies who came to feast on them. The seaman I once saw tumble from the crow’s nest of a ship in the harbor, how his hands clawed the empty air all the way down. Any attempts at reverie only took me into dark, terrible places where my good memories went bad—my father sipping from a coffee cup, but a broken one, blood running down his chin—so I stopped
trying. Then, at least, the dark thoughts would not involve those I loved.
I tried to spin stories about the women around me. After all, I loved stories. I spent my hours imagining who they’d been, how they had come here, instead of the dark, ugly thoughts that otherwise obsessed me. A slip of a girl with the grace of a dancer whose labored breaths could be heard from yards away. An olive-skinned woman who reminded me of my least favorite piano instructor, but without a single tooth in her head. A softly plump brunette whose eyes seemed to hold deep secrets but whose fingers never stopped plucking, plucking, plucking at the fabric of her skirt until she tore a hole in it, which I saw the observing nurse notice, then ignore. Imagining all their possible yesterdays was better than seeing the falling, dying sailor yet again, but none of the stories I spun for them ended happily. No story could, if it brought someone to this bench.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what a pretty little fool I’d been. I had never realized it, and now I couldn’t get it out of my mind. All those lessons, those tutors: embroidery, etiquette, dancing, music, conversation. I’d been so proud. I’d thought it mattered. It hadn’t. It was all shallow, ornamental. I’d been an empty-headed doll, to be dressed and displayed and, eventually, traded away to ornament a different shelf. I’d been my mother’s doll, not her daughter. She only had two of us, petting and bejeweling us both but never forgetting to keep a weather eye on our potential value. Well, I was on a shelf now, and no mistake. A long, low shelf lined with other dolls, all broken. I could feel the bare wood of the shelf beneath my haunches, which ached at being left so long in one place with not even a crinoline to cushion them.
All this was in my mind as I shuffled forward on the third day. I could not sit here again, in this same spot, for hours. Instead of following the freckled woman into my assigned slot on the bench, I took three steps to the side, selecting a different bench. A surge of pride ran through me. I was my own woman after all. I could make my own decisions.
Woman 99 Page 3
