Then I felt the rap of a stick across my shoulders and another one behind my knees. I opened my mouth to yelp, and a tiny sound came out. All that earned me was another rap, this one on the side of my head, from Nurse Dexter. I bit the inside of my cheek to quash another incipient yelp and dropped onto the bench immediately, landing hard. Dexter stared at me for another moment, then let her gaze sweep down the bench over half a dozen of us. She nodded once and stepped back, watching.
The pain of being struck faded, and I felt, in its place, joy; I was sitting on a different bench, next to a different woman. Perhaps this was the first step in finding myself again. Fighting my way free of the dark thoughts that threatened to smother me.
I tried to look at the woman on my right. I hadn’t noticed her before. Her hair was jet-black and thick, neater than most, drawn back into some kind of smooth, glossy knot. Except for the woman with the short-cropped hair, all the other inmates wore a single long plait, frayed and flattened by sleep, seemingly uncombed for days. None of us was allowed so much as a single hairpin.
I stared out the corner of my eye—Nurse Dexter was too close for me to turn my head—trying to catch a sense of her face. There was something striking about it, something strong. I couldn’t quite tell the color of her eyes without moving more, and I didn’t yet want to chance it. The nurses were most vigilant in the first half hour of each shift. I spent the time trying to imagine what the woman looked like and why she was here. Society woman overfond of drink? Professional wanton plucked from the streets? Wayward daughter prone to fits? At last, I’d found a topic that didn’t fill me with terror.
Once the nurse relaxed her guard, I took a closer look at my neighbor. As I’d thought from my glimpse of her, she was indeed beautiful. Not in the popular way, like Phoebe and I were said to be, with rosy round cheeks and almost translucent flesh, but with a savage strength. She intrigued me. I dared to lean back just an inch; her number was 125.
I made a decision. I tapped my fingers against my own thigh lightly, as if trilling a note on the piano, to catch her attention.
She turned her face fully toward mine, and my mouth fell open in shock.
While the left side of her face was smooth and pale, the right side had been ravaged by fire. It shone an angry pink, pocked and veined with red. I couldn’t help but cringe.
To her credit, the woman did not turn away at my reaction. With the hand in her lap, she pointed toward herself discreetly and whispered, “Celia.”
I wasn’t sure if my voice would work. It was worth trying. My name came out in a low rasp, but it came out. “Charlotte.”
Her gaze met mine. She had only one eye, blue. On the burned side, her lid was fused shut, either by the fire or the surgeon. I had no idea how long ago she had been injured, but the gleaming, tight skin seemed angry and fresh, whatever time had passed.
Then she reached out her hand to cover mine. The hand, like the right side of her face, had been burned. Both her hands were red, mottled, gleaming. It looked like the skin had reformed over the bones in a branching pattern, almost like she was part tree. The warmth of her hands flowed into mine, and for a moment, I felt strong.
She spoke again, soft and low. “Don’t drink.”
Before I could ask what she meant, she returned her hands neatly to her lap again and stared straight forward. I opened my mouth to speak, but then I felt the shadow of Nurse Dexter brushing past us, and I knew she’d turned away on purpose. Perhaps attuned to our misbehavior, Dexter stationed herself at the end of our row and didn’t move again until we shuffled out to the dining hall, stunned and starving, after hours of mind-numbing stillness.
That night, as we inmates donned our shifts and readied ourselves for bed, Celia’s words came back to me. I scanned the room for her, now that I knew who she was, and caught sight of her dark head two rows over. Nurse Edmonds handed her the cup of water, and she tilted her head back neatly, then returned the cup. Perhaps I’d been mistaken. Perhaps Don’t drink was related to something else entirely. She was insane, after all, and why should zealots for temperance be any more immune to insanity than the rest of us?
But then, after both nurses passed her by, I caught her motion. She turned and spat the liquid from her mouth onto the foot of her cot. In the dim room, the nurses wouldn’t see the dark patch unless they were standing right next to it. Her eye met mine.
When I was handed the cup, I took the water into my mouth and nodded with my lips closed as I handed it back. Once the nurses were at the end of my row, I did as Celia had done. The wet spot on the mattress wasn’t pleasant, but I pulled my feet away from it, and it didn’t take long for the difference to come clear.
Both previous nights—I thought and hoped there’d been only two; this would be my third—mere moments after the room went dark, I had found sleep irresistible. As hard as I’d fought, it won. Tonight was different. Even as the women around me fell into heavy slumber, my eyes stayed open against the darkness. I’d thought my nighttime exhaustion and morning cloud-headedness was due to the asylum, but no—it was artificial, chemical, introduced by whatever had been in that cup. Not only water, to be sure. What would have happened if I’d kept drinking it blindly, pulled under its spell over and over, unable to break free of what I didn’t even know was chaining me?
Grabbing at the chance to bring my mind back under my command, I immediately began to tell myself stories. Stories I knew to be true. Stories of my life before. The reverie I sought to soothe myself might actually be within reach.
I stretched my body out, long and relaxed under the thin blanket, and tried. It took time. My mind was still skipping and running in directions I didn’t want to go, the asylum cot hard against my back. I pushed through the confusion to recall moments, hours, days that I had loved—and then, I found my peace.
* * *
Henry.
I don’t remember the first time I met Henry Sidwell. It seemed to me I had always known him. From the time we moved into the Powell Street mansion, there were always boys living next door. In the beginning, there had been three. Two were much older, roughly the same ages as my brothers Fletcher and William at the time, and then Henry, who was closer in age to me and Phoebe. I didn’t trace the progress of his body as he grew from a fragile, gangly boy into a solid, durable man. His older brothers had been nearly men already when we arrived, with no interest in the doings of children, especially girls. I had no reason to think Henry would be different.
Our families were neighbors, but the Sidwells moved in the most rarified of social circles, our status a step below theirs that sometimes seemed trivial, sometimes vast. They sent the largest funeral wreath when we lost William and again when we lost Fletcher, but when their middle son, George, was married, my mother was furious not to receive an invitation to the wedding breakfast. We were all welcome at the ceremony and the reception, which we attended, but the lack of inclusion in the more intimate event stuck in her craw. Still, she made it a point to catch Mrs. Sidwell’s eye after church every Sunday, as she did with Mrs. Stanford, Mrs. Hopkins, and Mrs. Crocker.
As far as I knew, Henry Sidwell was not a particularly charming boy, not possessed of any outstanding talent or wit. I only thought of him with a mild, idle curiosity, if I thought of him at all.
It wasn’t until 1884, only weeks before my sixteenth birthday, that things changed. All at once, like a clap of thunder.
The neighborhood families had organized a group outing to picnic on Telegraph Hill. By midmorning, the families had come to roost all over Pioneer Park like seagulls on the rocks that lined the Bay. Blankets lent bright spots of color to the scene. Our cooks had competed to outdo each other, and armfuls of baskets were piled high everywhere on the grass, showing off every delight from fried chicken to French madeleines. Our own food sat uneaten as Mother took us by the elbows, guiding us to the families she considered most important, making sure we presented ourselves while we were all at our freshest and most lovely.
Her bet was wise. The air was heavy with the threat of rain. After the first hour, we were all lightly damp. We could feel it on our skin, but no one relinquished the field. There was not enough rain to drive either the mothers or the cooks back indoors, and none of the rest of us got to choose.
Mother purred and clucked, gasped and smiled, gliding between blankets like a lean, tall-masted ship tacking into the wind. Phoebe and I followed in her wake and played our own parts: gracious, sparkling, feathers on the breeze. I only realized later that our performance had been the entire point of the gathering, which had been solely my mother’s idea. At the time, we thought it was simply for fun. As soon as we’d completed the first round of our social obligations, we spread our skirts out on our own plaid blankets and fell gratefully upon our picnic.
I had just bitten down on a buttery, rich brioche roll stuffed with farmer’s cheese and strawberry jam when I heard a voice from above me say, “A beautiful woman on a spring day is among the loveliest sights in the world, I believe.”
Hand across my mouth, I looked up. There stood a man with a dark beard, his dark-brown eyes appraising me, his own teeth showing in a smile.
I wouldn’t have known him, but my mother said, “Well, Henry Sidwell, what a polite young man you’ve grown up to be.”
“My mother will be delighted to hear that you said so, ma’am.” He touched the brim of his hat.
I gave a close-lipped smile, mouth still full, and could not reply. It suddenly became a trial to keep my hands in my lap. Concentrating on doing so took all my ability. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t react. Neither did Phoebe help. She just looked back and forth between the two of us and then reached for a piece of fried chicken, which she then held without eating.
The silence lasted nearly half a minute. My mother smiled. I chewed. Phoebe contemplated her drumstick. In the end, it fell to Henry to speak again.
“Well, I’ll take my leave. I do hope you ladies enjoy the rest of your afternoon.” He touched his hat again and was gone.
That night, falling asleep, I could think of nothing else but Henry, his beard in particular. The hair atop his head was an ordinary cedarwood brown, but his beard was a thicker, darker brown, like the pelt of a northern bear. It gave his face an air of mystery. I wasn’t a great investigator of mysteries like Phoebe, who had always had more of a sense of adventure. But the mystery of Henry’s adult face drew me in.
I’d been desperate to touch his beard the moment I saw it. I knew I couldn’t. Perhaps that was why I wanted to so much. I wanted to feel whether it was soft or wiry, whether it would spring up against my fingertips or yield readily under them. I’d never touched a man’s beard and could only imagine all the possible sensations. More than anything, I wanted to see how the look on Henry’s face would change when I reached out for him. When I touched him. Whether that cool confidence would fall away, whether his eyes would grow heavy-lidded with wanting.
Even thinking of that first moment years later, alone and desperate in the asylum where my sister and I were separately trapped, I couldn’t help doing what I’d done the night it had happened. I reached out, into the empty space above my bed, and I cupped my hand against the air, imagining Henry’s cheek in the curve of my palm.
I might never be able to fight my way back to Henry again, I told myself, but I could at least free my sister. I owed her that much and more. I closed my fist.
* * *
In the morning, I rose with the others, dressing as usual, joining the line as usual. Go, said the nurses. Stay. You. Now. They chalked on our numbers, and we moved from the ward as one.
Obedient on the outside, I shuffled along the same as I had before, though my feet—and indeed my whole body—felt lighter than they had since I’d arrived. I felt the difference so clearly. My mind was opening up like the summer’s first rose. I remembered my plan, the reason I’d come here, and how far I had yet to go to achieve my goal. I had only seen one ward, twenty women strong, and my sister was not in it. The matron had said there were nine wards, which had been the same number I’d seen in the literature—nine wards, named for the nine Muses of Greek antiquity, goddesses of inspiration. My search had barely begun.
When I drew abreast of Nurse Edmonds at the door, I halted. I liked her better than the other. She hadn’t hit me yet.
I said, in a clear, firm voice, “I’ll see the doctor now.”
To my surprise, she said, “All right.”
Chapter Five
The silence in the room was so present, it felt like a third person, heavy and awkward, sucking up all the air. Dr. Concord watched me for several long minutes. I assumed it was some kind of test. I was desperate for information, desperate to know my sister’s whereabouts, yet I could not show a trace of desperation.
I had to be just the right kind of mad, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. He could reassign me to another ward if he chose to. I had no idea what might happen if he made that choice. Other wards might be better, but they might just as easily be worse. There were nine wards in total. So far, I had only seen one. I needed to find out as much as I could about the other eight without giving anything important away. Given everything I was trying to balance, it was no wonder I chose to stay silent while the doctor regarded me, sitting quietly, my hands folded in my lap as I would in church.
I passed the time by examining him while he examined me. The salt-and-pepper hair I remembered, and the sad eyes. I couldn’t say exactly what was sad about them, yet I had no doubt whatsoever there was sadness in him. Each of his movements was slow, deliberate, nothing wasted. He didn’t fidget or fuss.
At the end of a few minutes, he reached for something on the table next to him and knocked a scalpel to the floor. It fell and rolled toward my feet, and he didn’t try to catch it. It came to rest a handbreadth from my worn, grimy shoes. I watched him reach for the sharp blade and decided this was part of the test, to see what I’d do. Captivity so far had made me paranoid. Yet who wouldn’t be? This man had the power to ruin my life or save it.
“Did you know they call you the Siren?” he began.
It was so inappropriate that I laughed. The laughter blasted its way out of me, and I felt light-headed. It was a good way to continue the illusion of madness, but at the same time, it sent a shiver of worry running up my spine.
“Why is that amusing?”
I gave him a slight smile, my mouth curling up at one corner, hoping to appear mysterious. The truth was that it was stunningly inapt, but I couldn’t confess that without revealing something about myself, which I was not at all ready to do.
“Should you like us to call you something else?”
I shrugged.
“Mary?”
I shook my head.
“Jane?”
Again.
“Perhaps we can go forward without a name for now.” He tapped his pen thoughtfully against his logbook.
I thought about asking him what number I’d been assigned, but I had to conserve my questions. I was nervous, but there was nothing threatening about his demeanor. In other circumstances, I might have liked him. He really did remind me of my father.
Then he cocked his head and asked, “I’ve been thinking of you as a Miss, but perhaps I’m wrong. Are you a married woman?”
“No,” I said. He didn’t ask about an engagement, so I could avoid adding another lie to my conscience. Having a fiancé was not the same as having a husband. Especially in my case, I thought, considering my feelings about the fiancé in question. I buried those feelings deep. Right now, they would only distract me. I needed all my wits.
“So, young lady. When you came, you couldn’t speak, and we thought you might belong in Thalia Ward. The women there, as I’m sure you noticed, are quiet ones. Yet your nurse told me you asked for me this morning. Why?”
I said hesitantly, my voice raspy from disuse, “I didn’t belong there.”
“That may be. But where do you belong? That is what we must discover.”
Reading nothing on his face, I looked instead at his hands. They looked strong but not large. Nimble, as anyone would hope a doctor’s hands would be. On the fourth finger of his left hand was a thick gold ring, worn with age. He never turned or worried at it, as I’d seen many married men do. From this, I assumed he’d been wearing it quite a long time.
“Let me ask you an important question, then. Should you like me to cure you?”
I shrugged.
“There are many cures, many schools of thought. You’re familiar with the benches, of course. Still body, still mind. Have you found that helpful?”
I shook my head slowly from side to side, holding his gaze.
“I see. Well, not everyone does. What do you think of bodily exercise? Should you like to try it?”
What was the right answer? How could I know? At length, I said, “Perhaps.”
He drummed his fingers on the table next to him. “There are other things to try, of course. More specialized. The water cure, for a weak limb. Do you have a part of your body that aches or burns?”
“No.”
“Not for you, then. Another idea. You may have seen Magda Orvieto on your ward? She was treated by a doctor in New York who believes that the root of most insanity is in the mouth. Caused by decay in the teeth, because it’s so close to the brain, you know. So he removed them.”
I recoiled in horror, and from the way his eyes flicked upward to my face, I could tell he had been waiting for exactly that reaction. Had I made a mistake? Would an insane woman have shown no fear when such a terrible thing was threatened? I couldn’t let myself imagine all the possible effects of every answer I did or didn’t give. I couldn’t trust the doctor, but neither could I let my fear of him dictate all my decisions. I needed to pay attention and learn what there was to be learned.
“Be calm. I’m not that kind of doctor,” he said. “This is not that kind of place.”
Woman 99 Page 4
