Chapter Seventeen
Had I found Phoebe silent and unresponsive in the first week of Goldengrove, I might have been discouraged. I might have given up. I might have fled back to the safety of my parents’ home, even knowing the devil’s bargain of a marriage that awaited me there.
But now, there was no part of me left that would let that happen.
I had learned how whispers and bribes and arrangements could be currency, and I used exactly as many of them as I needed to. A promise of a future favor to Nora, a pinched lemon for Damaris, tidbits of gossip for Mouse. Whatever it took. By trading favors, I managed to accomplish two goals: convincing the forewoman in the soapmaking operation that I’d been reassigned to the kitchen crew for a week, while communicating to the kitchen manager that I would be coming to help with the jams and jellies only in the mornings. After the midday meal, I slipped away. Every day, I was free for three hours. And every day, I retraced my path up the stairs and into the closet to don the nurse’s uniform, then slipped down the hall to the superintendent’s office.
The first day, I found him seated behind the desk with the empty tumbler waiting on the flat leather in front of him, his fingers tapping a nervous rhythm. He wore the same brown tweed suit as the day before, looking just as rumpled but at least no worse, and I had an odd sense that I had stumbled into a stage play, with an actor rehearsing the same scene over and over, steady on his mark until another player stepped onstage to give his cue.
“Fair Nurse, welcome!” he cried, moving the glass aside as if he’d just noticed it. “I was hoping to see you again. I need to apologize for my behavior yesterday. It was unfair of me to take advantage of you.”
“You didn’t take advantage,” I said gratefully.
“Kind of you to say. Nevertheless, I’m sorry. I enjoyed the willing ear. You haven’t shared with anyone what I told you, have you? It would be. . .detrimental to my reputation.”
“Of course I haven’t. Anything you say is safe with me.”
His eyes brightened. “We all need someone we can tell the truth to. It’s like a valve in a boiler. If you don’t let some steam out, it’ll come bursting out on its own and not when you want it to.”
“You’re under a great deal of pressure, after all,” I said. If he wanted me to be a confidante, I would make it easy for him.
“I am! More so now than before. The money, you know.”
“Yes, I had a question about that. Why are the investors so focused on the money? Surely, if they’re anything like the Sidwells, they have enough.”
He tapped a ledger on his desk and said, “Excellent question. We get payments from the state for each indigent patient to pay for their care. The paid patients, of course, we get payments from their families.”
“I understand.”
“And if we can show that we are good stewards of funds, while turning a healthy profit, all the better.”
“Of course. But this is just one asylum. Not quite two hundred women. Surely, that amount isn’t enough to quibble over, for the rich?”
“Ah, right, that’s the rub. We’re in the running to secure a statewide contract. If we win that, it won’t be just one asylum. It’ll be dozens. Maybe more than a hundred, if we convert all the state hospitals—like the one in Napa—to this mix of public and private. And if we show good work in California, there might even be a nationwide contract.” He slapped the desk. “There’s your money.”
It took all my effort to keep the mounting horror off my face. The sharp expression of Mrs. Dunstable sprang into my head, and I heard her crisp, accented mantra: Conceal your feelings. Keep your goal in mind.
Then he said, with an air clearly meant to be casual, “But enough lecturing. Since you’re here anyway, and you were so kind about it yesterday, I would appreciate it if you’d pour for me. If you don’t mind.”
I immediately leapt to and sloshed the gin into his tumbler.
When he took a deep, grateful gulp, I said, “What about Mnemosyne?”
“Asleep,” he said. “It’s not what you think. I didn’t bring her here, I don’t keep her here, just to pour my gin. I’m not a monster.”
“Of course you’re not,” I said. Now that the subject had turned to Phoebe, my chest was tight with the fear of what he might do to her, might already have done, awake or asleep or otherwise. I fought down my revulsion as I put my hand on the bottle, waiting to see how long it took for him to ask for the next drink. “And do you want to tell me why she’s here?”
“You won’t tell Nelson, will you?”
“Of course not.” It was a promise I would have kept even if I knew who Nelson was. Only Phoebe mattered now: so close, so far.
“I don’t like his methods. The water cure. It only works in very particular cases; it’s barbarism to use it the way he does, almost at random, binding one part or another to observe them like experiments. She was bound up like a dead Egyptian, convulsing from the cold. It was clearly doing her no good.”
“Remind me, what ward?”
“He put her in Melpomene.”
A doctor, then, if he’d assigned her to a ward, and a doctor I should steer clear of, if he performed the water cure. Dr. Nelson. I filed the information away.
I said, “And he didn’t notice when you took her away?”
“He doesn’t care who he mummifies, and no one else knows. He has a different girl now. I taught her to say the right name.”
A heavy marble dropped into the pit of my stomach. I knew the woman he was talking about. It had to be the Russian. She’d done nothing to deserve such treatment. But who here had, even the truly insane among the inmates? Was it even possible to earn such suffering?
He went on, “Dr. Sidwell never would have stood for it.”
I started at the name, but then remembered—he was talking about John, the eldest brother who had died, the founding superintendent. “You knew him?”
He tapped his glass briskly with one finger; I poured with a heavy hand while he continued. “He hired me. Such a good man, John Sidwell. Designed all the treatments, and so diligent about seeing them applied. He’d even play the piano for the women in Euterpe in the evening, soothing them with music. He never tired, never flagged. I am not such a man.”
I tried to channel Martha, to channel Nora, to be the kind of woman who won a man’s confidence.
“But aren’t you the one in charge?” I asked. “Can’t you make the doctors do things differently if you don’t like them?”
“You’d think so!” He scowled like a petulant child and even kicked at the base of the desk nearest his feet. “You promised you wouldn’t tell, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Some of the doctors are good, but it’s hard to find enough men willing to work out here.”
He held out his tumbler, empty already. I filled it.
“This isn’t a plum appointment,” he went on. “We can’t be choosy. And sometimes, we don’t find out that they’re butchers until they’re already here, and the worst ones always seem to have the most powerful friends. So we make do.”
“But her.” I flicked my eyes toward the closed door. “You didn’t make her make do.”
“I was planning ahead for the committee’s visit, walking through every ward to note what needed to be addressed before they came, and I saw her then. Her whole body bound, just her face showing. She looked at me, and she asked me to save her. So I switched the files and changed them, so no one could follow the trail. I thought. . . I thought I could rescue just one.”
I didn’t tell him that if anyone tried to track her down, following the trail wouldn’t be hard. If I could do it, so could anyone else: a nurse, a patient, the matron. What had saved him so far was that no one cared enough to try. The doctor who treated the Russian surely knew she was not the true Phoebe, as did the Russian herself, but he didn’t care, and she was powerless, or perhaps she’d been promised a reward to play along. Writing Mnemosyne in the file had also been a fooli
sh error. A joke to himself, and if anyone else found it, clear evidence he’d tampered. It seemed this had been the first time he’d tried to secret an inmate away. If he’d done it before, I had no doubt he’d be better at it.
Instead of telling him this, as he drained his glass of gin once again, I swallowed hard and asked the question I both wanted and feared the answer to. “And that’s it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What have you asked her to do?”
“Pour,” he said, “and paint.”
“And that’s all?”
“My God,” he said. “What do you take me for?”
I told him, “I don’t rightly know. But on your honor, I am asking you to swear you haven’t touched her.”
“I took her by the hand,” he said, his face wounded, “to bring her here. I’ve done no wrong by her. I swear it on my eternal soul.”
Finally, I allowed my true feelings to creep into my voice, saying, “She’s special.”
He beamed, his face alight. “I felt it. When she asked me to save her. And you saw what she can do, didn’t you? You saw the painting?”
“Yes. It’s beautiful.” I poured again; he drank again.
He said, “She brought the sky inside. We all need more sky.”
Three more drinks and a mumbled apology and he was on his couch again, this time with his face angled downward, no snoring. I felt a twinge of guilt at feeding his habit, but I brushed it aside. A man who wanted to drink himself into nothingness would always succeed. If it happened on my timetable, I wouldn’t shrink from helping him on the way. He’d been well enough, sober enough, six weeks ago to bring Phoebe out of danger. Perhaps, like hers, his illness had a rhythm to it. Perhaps next week, he would be sober enough to send us both home. He had the power, didn’t he? But I needed her to be well enough to go.
I tried to find something soft to cushion his head but decided I couldn’t spare the time, and besides, comfort didn’t seem to be his priority. If he hadn’t touched her, he’d been sleeping on his couch since he brought her here, and I thought he could be believed. I would have to trust someone, sometime.
Into the bedroom I went. There, again, still, was my sister.
He’d said she was sleeping. If she had been, she wasn’t now, though it took a practiced eye to tell the difference. Only a sister’s eye would see. She was in the darkest part of her cycle of moods, the time when her sadness weighed too heavily for her to rise and join the world. I had been through this with her many times before; I only hadn’t recognized it because everything around us was so different. It wasn’t a hallucination, and it wasn’t chemical restraints. Phoebe restrained herself.
I knelt next to her again, as closely as I dared, looking without chancing a touch. Her lids were heavy and her arms limp. Her shallow breaths barely lifted her chest. The bowl of grapes still rested on the nightstand next to her, their spheres pale and tempting, and I noticed several had been plucked.
There was reason to hope now, and I rejoiced inwardly. I remembered her cycles intimately from the repeated pattern over so many years. The darkest part was not so far from the approach of the dawn. Only a day or two from now, she would be closer to herself again. Just like when Mother would call her to breakfast, day after day, and one day, she would answer the call, hesitant but at least present. She would begin to find her way out.
When she did, I would be here.
And then, at long last, we could go home.
* * *
The next day, I repeated my gambit—pretending to head for the soapmaking shop, sneaking away and up the stairs, yanking on the uniform in the darkened closet and tucking my hair under the cap, then putting my hand confidently on the door of the superintendent’s office, turning the knob, and walking inside.
Only this time, things were different.
The superintendent was sitting at his desk, yes, but not with paperwork or an empty, waiting tumbler. Instead, he had five playing cards fanned out facedown in front of him, and as I watched, he picked them up and held them close, peeking down at their faces. He had changed his suit this time, though the blue serge was in no better shape than the tweed, his right cuff visibly frayed pale. I barely had time to register the cards and a tumbler of gin—not empty—at his left hand before the real shock set in.
There was someone else in the room, someone else sitting across from him, someone else with a tumbler and a hand of five cards.
I stopped short when I saw who. I almost, almost ran.
It was Gus, the giant, the matron’s lackey. His thick fingers dwarfed the cards, which nearly disappeared behind the hand he held them in. He wore his usual white uniform, impeccably kept. He seemed so wrong in this space. He was too large for the glass he drank from, too large for the chair, too large for the room.
The superintendent looked up, his nimble face reflecting only an innocent, friendly sort of pleasure, and he said, “Hello! Join our game, won’t you? Five-card draw. Let us scandalize you.”
Gus and I looked at each other.
“Do you know Nurse. . .? What was your name again?” said the superintendent, genial, oblivious.
“White,” I said, looking down at my uniform, hoping I hadn’t paused too long. “Nurse White.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Gus said. Now that I heard more of it, his voice didn’t seem to match his giant form. It was quiet, rounded, with a faint accent I couldn’t place.
“The pleasure’s mine.” After a moment, I added, “I’m sorry, your name?”
“He’s Gus,” said the superintendent, the very beginnings of a soft slur of drunkenness creeping into his syllables. They must not have been at it long. “Pull up a chair now, Nurse White.”
“I’m not much of a cardsharp,” I said. “But I’ll watch.”
“Suit yourself,” the superintendent said, adding a jovial chuckle, and I watched him sweep the cards away and began to deal another hand. He tapped the rim of his glass with one nail, and Gus picked up the gin bottle on command, sloshing another inch or two of liquid so it stood at the ready. On the table near their glasses, each man had a small bowl of nuts and another of oyster crackers, much like my father and his friends would’ve had at any similar game back home.
I desperately wanted to plunge my hand into the bowl of crackers and fill my mouth. Instead, I perched on the very edge of the fainting couch, my body rigid, trying desperately not to give anything away. I thought of the grapes next to Phoebe’s bed. I thought of Phoebe. I wondered if Gus knew she was there. I would not be the one to tell him.
They each won a few hands, trading good-natured jibes and a small pile of coins back and forth. I’d never played the game and couldn’t quite follow it, but there seemed to be some element of discarding unwanted cards in the hopes of receiving better ones and bluffing to convince your opponent that every hand you held was a sure winner. I wondered whether Gus was playing fair or allowing the superintendent to win even when he didn’t have better cards; considering the man’s power, it would be wise to humor him.
When at last Gus stood, saying, “I need to be back. My shift,” and the superintendent said, “Of course, of course,” I was still all nerves. I caught the giant stealing a look at me, but he said nothing. When he left, I breathed a sigh of relief.
The days before, I’d felt guilty for feeding the superintendent’s habit for my own ends. Today, I didn’t doubt myself one whit.
I picked up the bottle. “Another smile?”
He nodded, and the shot I poured him drained the bottle.
“Oh no!” I asked. “Have you any more?”
“Not here, more’s the pity,” he said. “But down in the storeroom. I’ll bring a few bottles back.”
And then he left, staggering unevenly through the doorway, and I exhaled my relief when the door closed behind him.
I was out of the anteroom and into the bedroom like a shot. Today was the day. I could feel it.
My sister was awake, sitting on the bed, paging
through a well-worn copy of Rose in Bloom, though I couldn’t tell at a glance whether she was truly reading it. In a flash, I crossed the space between us, sitting next to her.
“It’s me,” I said, my voice trembling with emotion. “I’m here.”
She looked dubious, but when I reached out tentatively, she remained still. When at last I placed my hand on hers, she relaxed visibly. Knowing I had a body as real as hers, it seemed, let her accept me.
The first word she said to me was “Why?”
“Why. . .?”
“Why are you here? You didn’t. . . Oh, Charlotte, tell me they didn’t send you here too.”
Clearly, she believed the worst of our parents: If they would commit one daughter to this misery, why not two? But I told her the truth. “They didn’t. I snuck in. Like Nellie Bly. I pretended, and I jumped off the wharf, and here I am. To get you.” The story was getting shorter every time I told it.
“Not insane,” she said, shaking her head, “but so foolish.”
“I owe you.”
“You didn’t owe me this.”
The conversation was not at all what I had expected. Doggedly, I pressed on. “We need to get you out.”
“Oh, sweet Charlotte. That won’t ever happen.”
“Why not? We can go to the doctors, tell them we’re sane.”
“They won’t listen.”
I didn’t agree, nor did I want to argue. I only wanted her to know we had every reason to hope. “Then we’ll get word to someone.”
“You can try, I suppose,” she said, her voice weary.
At that, my sympathy and care swelled into anger. My blood was boiling. After everything I’d done, everything I’d sacrificed to get in here, and she didn’t even want me to free her? Why had I done it, then?
“We can get word out.”
“To who?”
I said, “We could start with the Sidwells.”
She laughed then, the old laugh that had always terrified me, a pealing bell that rang and rang into hysteria. I did not believe the accommodations at Goldengrove had made her any worse, but it seemed clear they had not made her any better.
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