I asked, trying to be as pleasant as possible, “What place is it?”
“A place to make women well. And for those who will never be well, if that is their fate, it is a place to protect them.”
I weighed my options and said, “I want to be well.”
“All right, then. I think that’s progress. Now let me see.” He consulted his chart. “You jumped in the Bay. Were you trying to end your life?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Distraught, then? Depressed?”
“Yes.”
“Over something or nothing?”
“Something.”
“Can you tell me what?”
I remained silent.
“Our neurasthenic patients have many reasons they give up. Some think they’re possessed by a devil, for example. Some, upon becoming mothers, lose all energy and enthusiasm, can’t feed or dress their babies, give up hope. Are you a mother?”
“No.”
He made a note. “You were on the streets, I believe. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“A gracious young lady has no good choices in such dire straits. You wouldn’t be the first to run from a situation where the only way to protect your virtue would be to take your life. So which is it? What drove you to your unsuccessful suicide?”
None of the answers he offered me to choose from were satisfactory, and even some version of my truth would ill suit the situation. I finally said, when I felt I could remain silent no longer, “Love.”
“I see,” he said and made a note. “Well, we’ll leave it at that for now. You seem a sad girl but a mindful one; we may find a cure for you yet. I’ll assign you to Terpsichore Ward. More exercise. No benches.”
It sounded like heaven, comparatively.
Dr. Concord ended our time together with a firm handshake, which surprised me and made me feel almost human for a moment.
“We’ll meet again soon,” he said.
I noted it. I didn’t know how long it would be until I saw the doctor again, but at least I would have the chance to prepare myself for another bite of the apple. And perhaps by then I would have an idea of how to get more information from him on the rest of the wards and which ward might hide my sister. I wouldn’t tell him the truth about my identity or my mission until I’d located Phoebe, but in the meantime, I still hoped he might prove useful. He was useful already, as I would now get the chance to see a second ward. With any luck, Terpsichore Ward might hold my sister, and we’d be gone before the day was out.
* * *
While I joined Terpsichore with optimism, my very first activity as a resident was the baths, and I thought I would die.
I tried to pretend; I really did. I wanted them to think I was insane, and what could be more insane than baring your naked body in front of complete strangers? Immodesty was not a strong enough word. Phoebe and I had once been punished for letting our calves show in a ballroom. She’d pulled her skirts up to demonstrate a reel, and I’d followed suit, mimicking her steps until our mother took notice and pinched my arm, hissing, “Stop this instant.” I had stopped, but the damage was already done. Afterward, we’d both been denied our dinner and turned in our chairs to sit motionless, facing a blank wall, for an hour. It seemed laughable now that I could be punished for showing mere inches of skin, when I was about to be punished for refusing to show all of it. The world within these walls was truly upside down. My stomach knotted at the mere thought.
So when I was herded into the white tile room with my new wardmates and saw half a dozen there already in the process of stripping off their rough-spun shifts, I gave it my best effort.
“Off with everything,” bellowed a large nurse, brown-haired and red-faced, whose name I had not yet learned.
My fingers would not obey. I simply couldn’t force myself to do something I’d been trained all my life against. Even on my wedding night, my mother had told me after my engagement, it would not do to be completely bare. So I tried my best to be insane. I began to unbutton the top of my dress as if I did this daily, as if it were nothing. But as soon as I tried to slip the fabric off my shoulder, my hands froze. My will was there, and I had full intent, but nothing happened.
Do it, I told myself, realizing as I heard the words in my head that I’d actually spoken them aloud.
Perhaps I was insane after all. And still, I could not make myself remove the shift.
“If you’re not smart enough to do it yourself, we’ll do it for you, fool,” said the largest nurse and gripped a handful of the shift, yanking it down.
I heard a scream. It was mine.
Then I was on the floor, and there must have been someone besides the largest nurse—I could have sworn I felt at least four hands, maybe more—and I was crying and writhing, and at the end of it all, however long or short a time it took, I was naked to the world.
Then the cold water was on me.
They sprayed us—no, blasted us—with a hose. The part of my conscious brain that remained realized I should have known it as soon as I saw the tiled room. It was like the sink Matilda used for the small laundry, built on the largest scale. We were all inside the sink. There was nowhere to escape the hose, and everything washed off us would spiral down the room’s central drain.
I heard an imperious soprano voice call “Clean bodies, clean spirits!” I couldn’t see her outline, but I recognized the sound of her voice instantly, and the faint jangle of her ring of keys. It was the matron. I felt a welling urge to hurl myself in her direction, naked and shaken as I was, and force her into the same position we found ourselves. But I lay there like a slug, gooseflesh rising all over my stripped limbs. The nurses hosed down madwoman after madwoman until no dignity remained.
“To your feet,” whispered a voice, not unkindly but firmly, and I worried that again I’d spoken without intending to, but I felt someone at my side, so I chanced a look. It was a tall woman with dark hair and pale skin, her eyes large and round, her lips an unusually deep pink, like Rose Red in our nursery storybook. Her eyes were warm, I decided.
She muttered under her breath, “Get up. Now. Or they’ll wash you twice.”
I had never seen her face before, but I knew to take her seriously. My limbs trembling with cold, my head woozy and loose, I stood.
Was the matron still there? I couldn’t see her, but I couldn’t see much, not more than a few feet ahead of me. I readied myself for another blast of icy water, but that was not what came next. Instead, a nurse with ruddy skin and deep hollows under her eyes arrived in front of me and began briskly rubbing my body with a bar of rough carbolic soap. I didn’t mean to react, but I couldn’t help it. I flinched and pulled away.
No emotion showed on her face, but she locked my wrist in a steely grip and scrubbed the other arm just as hard, if not harder. She scrubbed my whole body, including places not even my own mother had touched, and my hair as well with the rough, waxy bar.
I closed my eyes and stayed as still as I could, but I was crying. There was nothing I could do to stop it, and after a while, I stopped wanting to. I simply let the tears flow. If the nurse noticed, she chose to say nothing. I supposed it didn’t matter to her, as long as I was not violent. But I was more ashamed than I’d ever been in my life, and nothing I thought or did made it any better. I suffered, naked, scrubbed raw. I prayed for the torture to end.
It did, at last. Afterward, a nurse—the same one or different, it didn’t matter—shoved me back into my clothes without even the courtesy of a rough towel to dry my skin. I recognized the high-cheekboned waif who’d arrived with me. Before she struggled into her dress, I glimpsed a livid, recently stitched red wound low on her belly from hip to hip. It bore a gruesome resemblance to a smile. None of the other inmates looked familiar. Rose Red had vanished, and with a wave of nausea, I worried whether I had merely imagined her. My muscles ached from the tension, the cramping against the cold.
The memory of it lingered with me, even as I lay on my bed that night, my cold, we
t hair soaking the pillow. Telling myself I would be dry and warm by morning didn’t help. I wasn’t even sure that it was true.
The large nurse and the smaller one walked the rows before bedtime, as my previous nurses had done, and I had a moment of fear. But they extinguished the lights without offering us the night medicine, and I was relieved again.
And at least I no longer reeked of the journey here. As hellish as my freezing bath had been, it had succeeded in washing off the stink. I could smell my own skin again and my clean wet hair. I could almost, for a moment, forget where I was. I was cold, but I had been cold before, and if my reverie were complete enough, my body would not be reminded of our condition.
I shut my eyes tight, breathed in deeply, and lost myself in memory.
* * *
High above us, the trees of the forest formed a lacy, green canopy. The blue of the sky was only intermittently visible between branches and darker than it had been half an hour before. Phoebe and I had searched the forest, ruining our shoes on the muddy path, finding the perfect tree to sit under as the sun set.
We’d never been out alone in the woods. I couldn’t believe my mother had given permission. Phoebe had gone alone to ask her, telling me that having me there would just remind my mother how young I was, and didn’t I think our chances of success would be better without? Yes, I agreed. Phoebe had returned with a bagful of red-skinned apples from the larder and a grin on her face, and we’d set off together.
I was nine years old; she, eleven. We were young enough to dream of being princesses and old enough to realize it was a dream. So we didn’t pretend to build a castle in the woods, but we did hold hands as we walked, both for company and to help us keep our balance on the path.
As we searched for our tree, I tripped over a root in the path and dislodged my shoe. We halted so I could bend to fix it. I slipped my fingers under my heel to grasp the leather and pull it back into place. While I was looking down, Phoebe spotted something, and she hissed quietly under her breath, “Shh. Don’t move.”
I couldn’t help looking up, but I kept the rest of my body still as she asked and was glad I did. Not ten feet off was a spotted fawn. I’d never seen one before in the flesh. Her delicate ears pointed straight up, as did her small black tail. There was a spot of white on her throat and dapples of the same white all along her back. I wanted to tell her we wouldn’t hurt her but was afraid even my voice might scare her away.
Slowly, with a smooth motion, Phoebe reached into the sack slung over her shoulder and withdrew one of the red-skinned apples she’d brought along. She produced a knife as well, which I hadn’t seen before. Moving her body as little as possible, she cut a wedge from the apple and held it between her fingers. I held my breath.
I expected her to hold the apple wedge out toward the fawn, but instead, she reached for my free hand and placed the fruit in it.
I looked at her, questioning. She tilted her head just an inch or two toward the fawn, who was watching us with great interest and concern, her upturned ears flicking this way and that.
Without lifting my feet, without making a sound, I held the apple on my open palm and extended it toward the fawn. I lowered myself to my knees on the forest floor, heedless of my dress, in order to make myself smaller. I didn’t let go of Phoebe’s hand. She sank down with me. Everything was still for a long moment.
Then both of us watched, barely breathing, as the young fawn took four halting steps toward us on her spindly limbs and lowered her head to eat the apple from my hand. Her ears came forward as she nibbled it gently, taking dainty bites. I could hardly believe what was happening.
As the fawn finished the last bite of apple, Phoebe giggled with delight, and the animal’s large brown eyes blinked in surprise. One more heartbeat, and she was nothing but a dappled blur, racing past us into the deeper forest, where the path didn’t go.
Phoebe squeezed my hand more tightly, then let go so she could cut the remaining apple to divide between us. She split it with a swift, decisive motion, examined both halves, and handed me the one that looked slightly smaller. She didn’t look in the direction the fawn had gone.
“Wonder” was all she said.
By the time we’d made it out of the forest and back to our house on Powell Street, it was almost full dark. Even having granted permission, I knew Mother would object to our late return. So we slipped into the house through the servants’ entrance, discarded our muddy shoes by the door, and headed up the back stairs in our stocking feet.
“Girls!” shouted our housekeeper, Mrs. Gibson, who had spotted us before we had made it to the first turn of the stair. We came back down slowly. I should have realized then, from the look on Phoebe’s face at our discovery, that getting caught was much more dire than I’d expected it to be.
As it turned out, she hadn’t asked permission at all. Not from our mother, not from anyone. They’d had no idea where we were, for hours. Phoebe didn’t apologize for lying to me; she admitted she knew I wouldn’t go otherwise. And we were in the biggest trouble of our young lives.
Fletcher had still been alive then, at home between voyages, and while the servants combed the house from pantry to roof, he’d been sent to inquire for us at neighbors’ houses. Mother was furious at the embarrassment of losing track of her own children. She covered it well with others, of course. She laughed off the mishap with fluttering fingers, apologizing to each neighbor in turn, saying she hadn’t realized we were in the house the whole time and swearing us to secrecy about where we’d really been. It took a while for her to forgive Phoebe, and though Mother admitted that I wasn’t at fault since I’d been deceived, we were both punished together.
For two weeks, there were no dolls, no books, no trips to the park. We took our lessons, and we ate our meals. We were sent early to bed, before the sun even set, with nothing to do but lie in our beds with our eyes open or wear grooves into our carpets walking in circles. It was perhaps my first introduction to remembering happier times, calling up vivid memories of other, better days, just to give myself something to do.
We obeyed all these restrictions without complaint. We didn’t even try to sneak into each other’s rooms, as we commonly did, after bedtime. Somehow, I thought Mother would know, as if she might sit up all night just to make sure we stayed apart. What she actually did was probably nothing close to what I feared she might do. A stern talking-to was enough to keep me from repeating the experiment, but the punishment loomed large in my mind long after it was over.
But punishment had been worth it, I decided, for that moment. When my sister and I were the only people in the world, two Eves in Eden, among the wilds of nature. The feel of her familiar, reassuring hand in mine while the fawn shyly nibbled the apple from my other hand was not something I’d ever forget.
We’d been young then and foolish. Anything might have happened in those woods. Black-tailed deer weren’t the only creatures in the woods; we would hardly have enjoyed a similarly intimate encounter with the black bears or mountain lions known to roam the area. Nor were the local human beings more reliable. Anyone at all might have come along, stumbled across us, decided to do us harm.
But I understood why Phoebe had lied to both my mother and me. Because risk brought reward. Because the experiences our mother wanted us to have, the ones she thought it was safe to have, were not the only ones worth having. I pictured the smile on my sister’s face as she handed me that apple. Such pure joy. The punishment might or might not have fit the crime, but feeling that joy and sharing it had worth beyond measure.
Looking back, it might have been the first sign of Phoebe’s madness. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but I think Fletcher did. He made me promise that if Phoebe proposed anything wild or dangerous, I would tell him right away and not follow. He made me promise that although I was the younger sister, I would take responsibility. He died not two years later, and I had not thought of the promise since. I thought he was being overprotective. It had not occurred to
me until I was inside the asylum myself that the fierce, heedless spirit that had landed Phoebe here was the same fierce, heedless spirit I’d loved in her when we were young, the spirit that had led us both into the wilderness. That time, we had both come out unscathed. Would we this time?
As I came to myself again, the reality of the asylum returning as I felt the hard cot resurface beneath me, I had an unsettled feeling. In the previous ward, I’d been able to hear the other women breathing. Here, the sound was the same, except it felt much, much closer. Why did it sound so close?
I opened my eyes into the dark, expecting to see nothing but the far-off ceiling.
Three faces hovered above me, and a hand came down over my mouth, sealing it shut.
Chapter Six
Shh,” said one of the women surrounding me in the dark. It was the tall, pale Rose Red, the one who’d warned me how to behave in the baths. It was her hand silencing me. The other two I dimly remembered having seen there as well—a blond girl my age with a face warm and round as a fresh loaf of bread, and a thin, grayish girl, smaller than the rest. My eyes darted back and forth from one face to another, trying to read their intent.
Rose Red said, “It’s important that you don’t scream. You won’t scream, will you?”
Channeling Phoebe’s spirit to cover my fear, I mumbled into her palm, “Depends.”
She smiled at that. “We just want to talk. We have to be quiet, but once they lock the door, Salt hardly ever comes in again.”
I nodded, and she removed her hand. I asked, in a whisper, “Salt?”
“Our ward’s attendant. That’s not his name. He just stands there like a goddamn pillar of salt—”
“Nora!” interrupted the round-faced girl in a fierce whisper.
“Oh, all right. A goshdarn pillar of salt. So that’s what we call him.”
“To his face?”
“Of course not. His name is Scott. The big nurse is Winter, and the small one is Piper. Not hard to remember. Oh, and I should introduce myself. I’m Nora.” She pointed to the round-faced girl and then the other and said, “This is Damaris, and this is Mouse.”
Woman 99 Page 5
