Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  At one o’clock we ate again. Then more baths—tonic baths, rain baths, and showers with forceful nozzles. We would be washed clean, if nothing else. The soul? No one knew how to fix it once broken, but its flimsy case could be managed.

  We were walked back to Norris Cottage, where we rested. Then we were up. We walked the grounds. If people shifted to the solarium, I followed. Flowers bloomed there, even though it was turning cool. Exotic ferns, a tiled floor, a cane rocker, stained glass, all reminding me of the sunporch at home—the outdoors that could grow so green and steamy, and love, love, always the association. Eppitt in the laundry. My mother, a hothouse flower.

  There were no newspapers; we needed a break from war and pestilence. I itched for the ink smeared on my fingers, the small scissors (my ivory-handled bird scissors had been left behind), and my tub of paste, the light-headedness of breathing it in deeply. But I walked the library stacks, my hand bumping along the rhythm of bindings. I liked the quiet dust of books.

  We played cribbage and gin rummy, and fit together intricate puzzles. Dinner arrived at 6 p.m. We were observed again, clinically. Again, we were sent to the lawn for an hour, followed by fifteen minutes on the ward.

  And then night.

  Night was the hardest. We feared the dark. Grief—melancholia—tells the brain, Too much, enough of this world. The brain is ticking all day, keeping up with the noise and images of daily life, but once you close your eyes at night, the brain lights the skull and asserts itself without the interruption of vision and sound. It’s stronger than you can imagine, the lit skull at work on its own. Its will is tougher and you’re tired. You must bend to it.

  And what did it show me?

  I don’t need to go over this—we all know loss. We know longing. I see Ruthie and Tilton filled with powerful longing. I’ve told you this, Eleanor, and you’ve responded sharply, “I’ll monitor their longing—thank you for the tip!” As if longing can be monitored.

  The truth is, I felt dead and lost, but I didn’t stay dead. First of all, there was the world all around me. It’s insistent. When the lit skull works at night ranting about loss, there’s always day again. This fact is unrelenting. It’s the true insanity of life.

  My food glittered with salt like a fresh snow. My letters puffed my shirtsleeves and were pinched by the bottom springs of my mattress—my aviary of origami cranes. They were trapped beneath my bed, but breeding. I had much to say.

  And there was existence. I ran my hands across the clipped grass of the putting green, wet with dew. The bowling ball—a solid weight—I heaved it from myself again and again, to feel lightness, the thunder roll, the popping pins. A bath reminds your body that it has skin. I opened books, the creak of them, the smell. I let my eyes settle on words. My mouth moved. Words lifted from ink and became a taste and then an object held in the brain. John Donne, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge. My cheeks burned. The solarium breathed. The playing cards were slick; the puzzle pieces could be wedged into place, snug.

  The Armistice was signed in November. We made banners, sang songs, ate tea cakes, and danced on the lawn. The archduke and his wife belonged to history now.

  Slowly, I returned to this relentless world. And what did I find? Dr. Wolff. Two f’s at the end of his name, no relation to me and my Wolfs, or to the various other Woolfs and wolves, for that matter.

  His bow tie bobbed at his throat when he spoke, very gently. He had a ruddy complexion—a strong jaw, black hair, closely cropped. He had beautiful eyebrows, tilted with just the right amount of sympathy. His eyes were large and brown. He had full lips, a small nose. He was broad, and unlike Eppitt when I last saw him—behind the paned glass of King’s Cottage—Dr. Wolff was a grown man. His chest was powerful. He breathed beneath his thin white dress shirt as if his lungs and heart were giant pumping machinery. And I watched his hands—strong hands. He was jovial, with a quick smile, but he was also shy. He was thirty-two.

  I sat in a leather chair, fidgeted with a button at my wrist.

  “So.” He looked at the chart on his desk. “Harriet, how are you?”

  I’m a murderess, I wanted to say, but instead I whispered, “I’m fine.”

  “We hope you’re feeling better.”

  “I have a lingering malaise, maybe.”

  “Sometimes that can be a state of mind. What’s on your mind these days?” He leaned forward, one elbow on his desk. He was hunched slightly. My mother had wanted me to have good posture. “Stand tall,” she told me once at the Swinging Lantern. “You don’t need to hide anymore.”

  “My father hasn’t delivered anything for me, has he?” I wanted my ivory-handled scissors, paste, and books of clippings.

  “Just your clothes, which, by looking at you, appear to have arrived. Tell me something about yourself.”

  “I like Chinese food,” I told him.

  “That’s very nice,” he said.

  “There’s a very good restaurant my mother and I went to on our birthdays.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Well, there was a tragedy there too. The Lings’ niece drowned.”

  “In the restaurant?” Dr. Wolff said. “How did she drown in a restaurant?”

  “The usual way. Under water,” I explained. “There was a fishpond.”

  “Is that what’s on your mind?”

  Now it was. The Ling girl’s swirling hair, her limp body, the goldfish circling stupidly. “Death is part of life.” The guards repeated this banality at the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children whenever one of us died. Some arrived so sickly that they lived only a few short weeks.

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about death. You’re young and healthy.”

  “The Ling girl was just four.” Afraid that I might cry, I stared at the ceiling.

  “Why do you think you’re here?” Dr. Wolff asked.

  “My mother died and I didn’t take it well. I loved her.” This caused a fit inside my chest. I didn’t have the energy for fits anymore, but these versions—maybe aftershocks—still existed in miniature. They didn’t last long, but they were internally violent.

  “That kind of loss can be traumatic.”

  “She broke a pact too.”

  “And what was that?”

  “For us to never separate again. But I don’t want to talk about death.”

  “You’ve brought it up. Twice.”

  “Have I?”

  “The girl dying in the fishpond and your mother. Are the two linked?”

  “It’s just that death can happen at any time. And then we would miss out on all of this.”

  “All of what, Harriet?”

  For the first time in my life, I was supposed to explain what it was like to exist. “Well, you know, Dr. Wolff, of course.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said. “Not the way you do. Tell me.”

  I had the doctor’s full attention, and was realizing that my way of existing was not necessarily everyone’s way of existing, and moreover, perhaps each of us had our own existence. This was overwhelming. Imagine Daisy at the convent school, after her gaping sleeve has caught fire in the chapel, how she whirls, aflame, knowing for the first time that she is locked inside herself.

  “What, Harriet? What would we miss?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This!” I waved my hand around the room, meaning Everything!

  “List for me a few things that you would miss.”

  And this was maybe the first, infinitesimal moment when I started to become a writer. This is the writer’s first job: to list what’s worth listing. “Well, the world is beautiful and ugly too, and sometimes it’s even beautiful when it’s ugly. Like the Ling girl—I can imagine her head surrounded by fat orange gliding fish. And there were these children I knew once, sickly, ill fit. They were stunted. They would never grow old. But they were aired on porches and sunned too. They were angels to me. They were warped. Some had twisted spines, uneven legs. Their faces were open—gaping—a
face that’s more like a window than a face. Do you know what I mean?”

  He nodded. “Go on.”

  “And those are the ones you don’t expect to find beautiful. Then there are the ones you do expect to find beautiful. And there they are—hands, mouth.” I indicated his hands, his mouth.

  He looked at me, and I stopped. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go on.”

  “It’s just beauty, that’s all, like the view from my window. People moving on the lawn, the way trees sway, the way…It’s all beautiful.” I couldn’t stop speaking. “I kept things before I got here, clippings from newspapers. I want to keep it all. Proof.”

  “Of what?”

  “Proof that lives are being lived.” I whispered, “I have a life within myself, an inward life that can’t be expressed. It’s sad that it can’t be expressed. Maybe one of the saddest things I can think of right now. And you’re saying that everyone has these lives, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I think we do. Ways of perceiving, a life experience that is unique to that individual.”

  “I don’t know how everybody walks around just like normal,” I said, “as if everything is not beautiful and hideous and dangerous. I used to know laundry steam. I knew how it billowed. I was caged then like I am now.”

  “We’re here to help.”

  “I forgot to say that I like the putting green and the solarium and the little salt spoons. I do,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Well, I’ll pass along your gratitude.”

  “My mother wore powder that smelled like a field of flowers! She would wring out a sponge and the water made its way down my back.”

  Dr. Wolff was staring beyond me now. He took a quick breath and sat back. He pressed tears from his eyes, rubbing them into his sideburns. He jotted a note, something diligent and professional. I decided that Dr. Wolff had a very full inner life as inner lives went. Maybe he was a fellow sufferer, pained by the glory in the everyday, affected by simple, ugly, gorgeous, glowing details of life.

  He whispered, “Harriet, by God. I swear the right opera could kill you.”

  “What was that?” I asked. I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to see the soft workings of his lips saying my name.

  But it was something he wasn’t supposed to utter aloud. “Sorry,” he said. “Let’s go on.”

  I hid the fact that I was thriving. If I got too healthy, where would I go? My mother was gone, and all I had was the click of billiard balls, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the nurses’ white skirts gliding on air—and Wolff himself.

  Of course, there was deep madness at Sheppard Pratt—two escapes while I was there: one drowned in a nearby pond and the other swallowed bichloride of mercury tablets purchased at a drugstore. This madness only made it all the more clear that I wanted to live—and I did want to, fiercely.

  I missed Eppitt—the weight of his body under the Duck Porch. I was losing faith that I’d ever see him again. He was eighteen too. Perhaps he’d enlisted or was drafted and was finally home again—but changed forever. Would they let him serve? Had he outgrown his wheeze? Did he die a soldier? Was he struck down by the Spanish flu, like my mother, and did he bleed to death? And if he did bleed out, did that make him think of me, the bleeder, in the end? Dead, alive, in love with someone else? Did he ever think of me?

  My origami crane letters to him tucked into my mattress springs had nowhere to go.

  In my sessions with Wolff, I sometimes went silent. I pretended to have tics. I tried on Eppitt’s habit of compressing words. One time I said “doomy” instead of “dark” and “gloomy.” I corrected myself, but then kept doing it purposefully. I picked at the waistband of my dress, and whenever I coughed, I stared at my hands.

  I could tell Wolff anything. I explained the Owl and the Good Wheel and even my heated moments under the Duck Porch with Eppitt.

  Dr. Wolff nodded serenely, a slow singular bob of his head. He smiled sometimes too, and he jotted.

  Sometimes he would make a small comment, like “You must have loved your mother very much.”

  And this simple fact, said aloud, made my body feel like it was suddenly filled with air and light. “Yes,” I would say, suddenly crying. “Yes, I did.”

  In April of 1919, when I’d been at Sheppard Pratt for six months, Dr. Wolff told me that it was time for me to go home.

  “I don’t have a home.”

  “We have people in the community prepared to take in our patients. Mrs. Oblatt runs a quiet boarding house. Some of the girls work in the mills. She provides breakfast and dinner.”

  I tried to think of two words that I could smear together as Eppitt would to express how I felt, but none came. I picked at my waistband, coughed into my hands, then looked at my palms and, for the first time, knew what I was looking for: blood, death. “I can’t go.”

  “You need to be out in the world, Harriet.”

  “The world doesn’t need me.”

  “It doesn’t need any of us. We need it. I wish you didn’t have to, but you’re ready. You’re well, Harriet. You are.”

  “It’s crazy what can pass for not crazy these days,” I said.

  He handed me a piece of paper with the address of Mrs. Oblatt’s boarding house. “Your father’s been informed and has paid Mrs. Oblatt for the first three months.”

  I folded the piece of paper, the way I folded all of Eppitt’s unsent letters—a long neck, a beak, wings.

  Within days, I was standing in the lobby awaiting a taxi.

  Dr. Wolff was there to see me go. “One day,” he said, “a few years from now, I want you to come back and see me. I want to know about the wonderful life you’ve made.”

  But I shook my head. “I won’t come back. I need the world,” I said.

  “You,” he said. “Harriet Wolf.” He sighed. “The world might just need you after all. I think you’re destined for…”

  “What?”

  “Great things, Harriet. Truly great things.”

  Of course I didn’t believe him.

  The origami cranes I decided to leave behind so that at least some small part of me would remain. I imagined them pinched by the bedsprings, flightless and trembling.

  MRS. OBLATT’S BOARDING HOUSE FOR

  WAYWARD WOMEN

  Mrs. Oblatt was squat and powerful. She moved like a wrestler. And when she was still, she sat in an armchair and did needlepoint ferociously. The living room was so densely packed with needlepoint it was muffled. The rest of the house was loud, the women boisterous. Mrs. Oblatt ignored the noise. She was a childless widow, and during the long years that slipped by while I lived in her house, I watched her fade—hearing loss, light dementia, a palsy in her frenetic needlepoint.

  She appreciated that I didn’t complain. (When raised in an institution, you know better than to complain.) Occasionally there would be another boarder who, like me, was institutional in nature, posture, and bearing. We recognized each other. We wouldn’t say our hellos to each other. A nod would do. We knew, without saying a word.

  The shower pipes cried out, and my room smelled of pee in every corner. But much to my surprise, I started to prefer being on my own.

  Most of the women worked in cotton mills, which were plentiful. But I found work shelving books. One afternoon I wandered into a library, which, like Sheppard Pratt, was a gift from businessman Enoch Pratt. It had airy ceilings, monstrous stacks of books. It seemed as if God Himself were a clipster and this library his paste book. Holy. As broad and lit up as a cathedral! Unlike Mrs. Oblatt’s house, which needed the muffling of needlepoint, the library was hushed. The dust motes idled. The workers behind the checkout desk opened the wings of the books, piled them on their spines, and stamped them, like they were tagging birds.

  That first day I wandered in, I asked if they had an opening. A woman at the desk shuttled me to an office where I met the head librarian. He had angular shoulders, a droopy chin, and a flat pat of hair.

  Though I had no formal education, I told him I was l
earned, and quoted poetry from the library at Sheppard Pratt—without mentioning the asylum, of course.

  He told me that one of their shelvers had just perished. “Perished.” I loved the word. It didn’t sound like death at all. The Spanish flu was still going strong, but libraries were trying to keep their doors open to the public during limited hours despite the potential danger. “Are you sure you want the job?” he asked.

  “I’m not afraid of dying,” I told him. I had been born dead, after all, but was still here. “If you live long enough, you’ve already perished a little. Maybe life is a bit-by-bit death.”

  “Very poetic,” he said, and I got the job.

  I was alone during the days. I walked the stacks, ordered and reordered. My mind started alphabetizing all that I saw, even the women in Mrs. Oblatt’s house: Bartlett, Dresden, Inger, Martin. I avoided them as much as possible. They trilled about blouses, hats, hairdos—all foreign to me. Sometimes I tried to listen but heard only high-pitched squeaks. The conversation always returned to men—piggish, foul with desire, cursed by their hulking stature, their coursing arousal, their unruly pricks—and yet these same women groused endlessly that these sops had abandoned them. Those were the ones living at Mrs. Oblatt’s for the most part, the abandoned ones.

  I avoided the bawdy talk. I took my meals in my room, alone.

  Plus, I missed men: Eppitt Clapp, who I hoped wasn’t a dead soldier; Dr. George Wolff; even old Dr. Brumus and the guards, like Mr. Gillup. I didn’t miss my father, of course. But surprisingly, he sent letters. They were short and dry. Mainly, he wanted to have dinner together. He wanted to talk. He missed my mother. I looked like her, you know, and I decided that this was probably all he wanted, some link to her. At first, I responded only by asking for my books of clippings. These never arrived. And so, soon enough, I stopped responding at all.